Fishing for Stars

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘Well, what a very nice thing for him to do. Surely allowing her to take care of me was his way of apologising?’

  Anna was slowly wearing me down. If I agreed, it would constitute an apology in her mind and I’d have no reason not to call Fuchida-san, whereupon he’d promptly make a damn fool of me by refusing to take the call. ‘Well not really, as I said, it was her own decision to come.’

  ‘And you sent her home?’

  ‘Yes, of course. I was here to take care of you. She wasn’t necessary.’

  ‘That will really help to patch things up between Fuchida-san and you, Nicholas.’

  ‘Does it matter?’ I said defiantly. ‘We’re getting out of this place anyway!’

  Anna’s right eyebrow shot up. ‘Oh, are we?’

  I caught myself in time. I realised my next remark was crucial or we’d be back where we’d been in the taxi coming home from the park. ‘She came to see me to ask if it was okay to see you. It was perfectly amicable – the Japanese way. I didn’t flatly refuse. I simply said I’d like to think about it. I didn’t want you to wake up with a strange Japanese woman at your bedside.’

  ‘Oh, by thinking about it, you mean you were going to ask me. See how I felt. Was that it?’ Anna suggested, smiling sweetly, knowing she was on to something.

  ‘Well, yes . . . I suppose.’

  ‘All right then, yes, I’d like to meet Miss Sparkle. I’m fed up with the whole damn business of the yakuza. It’s been a one-way street, you and Fuchida-san making decisions about my welfare. The whole thing has turned out to be a monumental mess!’

  ‘Hey, wait on! We got you out. Rescued you. Shit! Is that the gratitude you show?’ I cried.

  ‘Look at you, Nick. You’re cut to ribbons, you’ve been tortured, spent two days in a police cell. Three men have been brutally murdered in front of my eyes, two more I am told at the gate!’

  ‘But you’re safe!’ I interjected.

  Anna laughed bitterly. ‘Bravo! If you’d stayed in the hotel to arrange the ransom rather than galloping off on your white charger to rescue me, I could have bought my way out unharmed in a couple of hours. Christ, Nick, I make my living negotiating. The Shield Society was simply a bunch of opportunists.’

  ‘Rightwing fanatics!’ I cried. ‘They are capable of anything.’

  ‘What? Even killing the golden goose? Don’t be ridiculous! Fanatics maybe, but not bloody stupid.’

  ‘Well, I offered to pay your ransom,’ I said self-righteously.

  ‘When? After you’d kidnapped Konoe Akira’s aged mother, broke into his home, held a gun to his head to teach him not to cross the great war hero, Nick Duncan, and ended arse-up in a thousand-year-old vase and ultimately in police custody?’

  ‘Ouch! You know about that part?’

  ‘Yes, your gangster friend told me with some alacrity in the car from the heliport . . . the whole sense-defying fiasco from start to finish.’

  Anna was only confirming what I myself had come to think. Defending my actions any further seemed pointless. ‘Anna, you’re right. I was stupid; things got out of hand. But you’re safe and I’ll mend.’ I hesitated then reached out and put my hand over hers. ‘Darling, can we kiss and make up and get the hell out of here? Please!’

  ‘Stupid boy!’ Anna cried out now, seemingly more frustrated than angry. Then she sighed and seemed to relax and when she spoke again it was in her normal quiet voice. ‘Nicholas, it was entirely my fault. I got us into this jam. I wanted to see Konoe Akira alone initially and I refused to allow your involvement. But, just as I was responsible for getting myself kidnapped, I was also responsible for my own welfare, and able, I felt sure, to have myself freed. You simply acted too quickly and, may I say, without thinking it through, so I was unable to contact you to arrange things.’

  Anna paused for a moment. ‘The art of negotiation is patience and the ability to win your point with reason, although you can usually rely on good old-fashioned greed. Money solves most things and, as the saying goes, “revenge is a dish best eaten cold”.’ Anna appeared to be thinking. ‘Had it all gone to plan and I’d paid my own ransom, I daresay I would have licked my wounds, kicked myself for acting stupidly in the first instance and decided to go home with my mission unaccomplished.’ She paused again. ‘But not now. Now I want to face him, to see him.’

  ‘I don’t understand. Why? What can you possibly gain?’

  She frowned. ‘Self-respect.’

  ‘But he won’t agree to see you. Not now, after all that’s happened. Besides, he’s had his comeuppance, it’s cost him twenty-five thousand dollars.’

  ‘You’re not listening, Nicholas!’ She looked at me knowingly. ‘Self-respect, not just for myself.’

  I shook my head. ‘I’ve made a complete dickhead of myself. Sometimes you can’t believe your own stupidity.’

  ‘We all know that feeling,’ Anna said softly.

  ‘And how do you propose to get to him? Impossible, I should think.’

  ‘You’ve just helped me to do that, Nicholas.’

  ‘Oh, how?’

  Anna gave a cryptic little smile. ‘Now it’s my turn to use the yakuza. I will invite Miss Sparkle over for afternoon tea. You will formally introduce us and then you will be kind enough to leave us alone.’

  ‘You already know her,’ I replied, realising I was utterly defeated.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Her name is Korin-san. She is, or was, the seventh okami-san in the Nest of the Swallows.’

  Anna looked at me, her expression almost beyond amazement. ‘Oh my God!’

  I wasn’t privy to the meeting Anna had with Miss Sparkle, but when she returned she announced that she would be spending the next several days at the Jade House. This provoked yet another row. When I objected to her returning to the scene of her kidnapping, she replied, ‘Nicholas, please don’t ask. I’m working at the Jade House, that’s all.’

  ‘So who do I call if you don’t come back to the hotel?’ I asked, feeling helpless.

  ‘Korin-san . . . er, Miss Sparkle.’

  ‘The yakuza! I thought you said you’d had a gutful of them?’

  ‘It’s not the same. We’re old friends. This is strictly girls’ stuff.’

  ‘So what do I do? Sit on my arse all day waiting for your instructions?’ I asked, repaying her for her reproaches over my leaving the hotel when she’d been kidnapped.

  Anna didn’t bite. ‘You said Mitsubishi called, didn’t you, and wanted approval for the modifications to the freighters you requested?’

  ‘Well yes, but it isn’t strictly necessary, and then we decided to leave Japan immediately.’

  ‘No, Nicholas, you decided to leave Japan. I need a few days, so why don’t you spend them checking your freighters?’

  ‘Like I said, it really isn’t necessary. I’ve seen the drawings, that’s all that’s needed,’ I replied sulkily.

  ‘Nicholas, stop it!’ Anna yelled impatiently. ‘What’s got into you?’ She sighed deeply. ‘We were always going to visit the World Expo at Osaka. Why don’t you spend three or four days there? You’ll be better on your own looking at things that interest men. Besides, the break will be good for us both.’ She gave me a look that clearly suggested I should get out of her goddamn hair.

  I sometimes think I must be a weak bastard. A man ought’a take her and put her over his knee and give her a bloody good spanking. Then, despite myself, I was forced to grin. I’d tried that once, with surprising results. Between the two of them, Anna and Marg, even the biblical Job with his Old Testament patience would have been forced to throw in the towel. ‘Expo? Okay, good idea,’ I said, accepting defeat. ‘I’ll go today.’

  ‘Call me in the early evenings when you can. I won’t leave until 8 p.m.,’ Anna said.

  ‘Just because I fucked up the kidnapping! I get the message, I’m not needed,’ I joked.

  Anna came over and hugged me, then kissed me properly, deeply, meaningfully, lovingly, knowingly and insincerely on the
mouth, then pulling back she grinned wickedly. ‘Sometimes a woman’s gotta do what a woman’s gotta do!’ she said. ‘Trust me, Nicholas.’

  But I wasn’t fooled for a moment. If Anna was preparing to restore her self-respect, then I almost felt sorry for the poor bugger. Konoe Akira was in for a bumpy ride.

  I called Anna from Osaka the next evening, and knowing she wasn’t going to talk about the Jade House I jabbered on about the Expo and in particular the American pavilion where, after the recent Apollo 13 moon mission abort and rescue, the space exhibition was by far the most popular exhibit. The model of the Apollo 11 spacecraft could be seen towering against the skyline a kilometre away, which was also the length of the queue to enter the pavilion to see samples of moon rock gathered by the Armstrong-led first moon landing. A guide informed me that people slept in the line at night.

  I decided to give it a miss, instead visiting the near-deserted Russian stand to see the Sputnik. I recall yakking on to Anna in a somewhat disparaging tone. ‘Despite Yuri Gagarin being the first man in space in 1961, the Russians have been left out in the cold. I now know why it’s called the Cold War! As far as space is concerned the fighting for superiority is over. The Sputnik is a tin humpy and the Apollo, a Hilton Hotel. Believe you me,’ I said with some conviction, ‘the Ruskies are not in the race, space or otherwise!’

  So much for Nick Duncan’s sagacity. As I write this, the Russians in their cramped Soyuz TMA spacecraft and padded silver spacesuits have for several years been, and still largely are, the leaders in space science and technology. As an aside, I recently heard a story, whether apocryphal or not I can’t say, regarding the Americans boasting about their space pen at an international space conference. It had taken a great deal of money and years of research, but they had finally cracked the technology required to create a ballpoint pen that would write in space. A Russian space scientist in the audience stood up and asked, ‘Why didn’t you simply use a pencil, comrade?’

  Anyway, we chatted on, talking about nothing very much, the subject of Konoe Akira and the Jade House studiously avoided. Anna told me how Miss Sparkle had taken the afternoon off so that they could visit several small markets together, which she found fascinating, and how, at the crack of dawn tomorrow, she was being picked up by a wakagashira to visit the Tsukiji Fish Market, the largest in Tokyo.

  ‘Since when have you been remotely interested in fish?’ I asked.

  ‘Nicholas, did you realise that the Japanese constitute two per cent of the world’s population and eat ten per cent of its fish?’

  ‘Never was a great fish eater,’ I replied. ‘Though I’m not surprised. Have you ever seen a bento box without a lump of fish?’

  ‘It’s a commodity and the seas are full of the stuff,’ Anna said in an equally off-hand manner. Then, laughing, she said, ‘I recall you saying once that bricks sit in one place and grow old. I didn’t agree, still don’t, but maybe I should think beyond bricks and mortar to commodities like fish, tuna, shark fins . . . who knows?’

  ‘Shark fins!’

  ‘There are a billion Chinese in the world and they make a lot of soup.’ Anna laughed.

  ‘Is that why you’re going to the fish market tomorrow?’

  ‘Well, no, but it should be fun. Why not?’

  How stupid was I. Anna never did anything in her life unless she had a good reason. She was a planner, a long-term thinker, but not a gambler. She was up to something but it was pointless asking, so instead I said, ‘Glad you’re enjoying Miss Sparkle’s company. I’m surprised Fuchida-san lets her onto the street with that small fortune dangling from her ears. Who’ll answer the phone?’

  ‘She’s an enterprising woman.’ Anna laughed, then changed the subject. ‘How are the cuts and bruises?’ she asked.

  ‘Itchy, but the good news in the bruise department is that I woke up this morning feeling reunited with my libido.’

  ‘Good, you’ll get the attention you deserve when you return,’ she promised, a smile in her voice. ‘Have you seen a doctor, had the cuts dressed?’

  ‘Yeah, there’s a clinic around the corner from the hotel. I had to wait an hour. The place was full of people wearing cotton masks. You wouldn’t know it was spring – everyone’s got the sniffles. We’d call it Asian flu, but here they’re blaming it on all the gaijin visiting Expo, calling it Australian flu. Lots of Australians here. The stitches are due to come out in four days, but I’ll wait until we get back to Australia.’ The small talk was intended to tell her I understood she wasn’t ready to talk about Konoe Akira.

  ‘Four days, that’s good,’ she said abstractedly, then there was a short silence and a deep breath. ‘Nicholas, I need at least another week, probably ten days here.’

  I could tell she was waiting for the explosion to follow. In fact, it took some restraint on my part not to react. I’d allowed her the four days she wanted and now she was demanding even more. ‘What’s another week when you’re trying to reverse twenty-five years of psychological damage?’ I answered coolly.

  Anna wasn’t fooled. ‘Please, Nicholas, don’t be angry,’ she begged.

  ‘I’m not angry!’ I protested, because of course I was.

  ‘It’s not what you think, Nicholas,’ she said, her voice on the edge of tears.

  ‘Think? You asked me for four days more in Japan and I agreed. Now you want another week after that? What am I supposed to think? You haven’t told me what you’re doing at the Jade House and you haven’t mentioned the dreaded you-know-who!’

  ‘Please, Nicholas, I can’t say. Please trust me, darling, this is for both of us!’ she cried.

  ‘Well thank you very much! Leave me out of it! If you can’t trust me with ten . . . eleven days of your life, I don’t want to know!’

  ‘Oh, Nicholas, you simply don’t understand, do you?’ and she promptly burst into tears.

  I sighed loudly, fairly confident that the tears were not entirely genuine. The problem with fights on the phone is that you’re on automatic pilot. You can’t read the body language, an essential guide when quarrelling with a woman – well, with Anna and Marg, anyway. I’m not saying Anna couldn’t conceal her feelings, because she was a master at doing so in a business context, but up close and personal she was less successful. A voice choked with tears is auditory manipulation, but I needed to be able to see her to know how upset she really was and what thoughts she imagined she was hiding from me. After spending much of my adult life with two difficult and complex women, I’d picked up most of the flicks, ticks, clucks, sighs, gestures and signals that indicated what was really going on. Now I heard Anna’s lachrymose gulp, then the shift down to more serious tears, then a moment’s pause before the double declutch as she shifted emotional gears. ‘You bastard, Nick! Piss off! Go home! Leave me alone! Bugger off! I hate you, I hate you!’ Then there was the crunch of rough gear changes ending in a roar of sobbing.

  I was flying blind. ‘Right then! I’m on tomorrow’s flight home,’ I said, my voice crisp. I was calling Anna’s bluff, taking the chance that I was reading her correctly, that this wasn’t the same as the panic attack at the Imperial.

  Bang! Down went the receiver. I lay back on the bed in my hotel room and began to count. At one hundred and fifty-three the bedside phone rang. I let it ring six times before reaching for it. ‘Hello?’ I said, my voice icy calm.

  ‘Nicholas, I want to apologise. Can we start again? Please . . . don’t go home, darling. I love you! It’s just . . . it’s been such a stressful day.’ All of this was delivered in a carefully modulated and deeply sincere voice, punctuated with one or two nice little half-tearful gulps.

  I confess I was tempted to ask what was so stressful about visiting a series of traditional markets with Miss Sparkle, but I thought better of it and then capitulated as usual. ‘I’ve been here one and a half days, which is enough Expo for any man, but I’ve always wanted to cycle through the Japanese countryside, stay in the traditional inns, eat the regional food, get out of the urba
n sprawl and have a good look around in the countryside. Might even buy a butterfly net . . . why not? Should take around ten days . . .’

  ‘Oh, darling Nicholas, thank you, thank you!’ Anna cried, as I well knew she would. Weak bastard! I thought. Moreover, I wasn’t at all sure Anna hadn’t orchestrated the whole thing, or at least extemporised brilliantly and assumed control early on in the argument. So much for my perspicacity; I was armed only with a penknife, fencing with a master swordswoman. Besides, I’ve never been much good on the phone – one of the reasons Marg works me over so efficiently on her morning calls to Beautiful Bay.

  As it turned out the ten days that followed proved to be personally rewarding. Anna and I were not able to stay in touch by phone, which was probably a good thing.

  The fondly imagined dreamscapes of Japanese paintings – festoons of pink cherry blossom, temple eaves and red-painted wooden torii [gates], a solitary geisha shuffling in wooden clogs along a cobbled lane – don’t exist except in Kyoto, where at festival times the dream delivers, and tradition and the old ways somehow endure.

  I was to learn that there are two Japans and that this dichotomy isn’t, as might be expected, between city and country, urban and rural, but rather between mountains and bumpy valleys. Japan is chock-full of people. Seemingly countless villages are strung together by rice paddies and small green fields, the whole landscape dominated by the exigencies of human life.

  To be fair, where I cycled the country could only be described as semi-rural. One was more likely to come across a pachinko hall than a temple. Every village seemed to have one of these glitzy gambling parlours, flashing gaudy musk-pink, blue, mauve and green neon. Gambling, so long forbidden in Japan, had reached epidemic proportions. God had been replaced by greed, atmosphere by avarice, temples by pachinko parlours, the white-robed Shinto priests by the black suits and sunglasses of the yakuza, the tattooed thugs who own or control these ubiquitous gambling joints.