Fishing for Stars

by Bryce Courtenay

Fukkatsu no hi

  ****

  Gojo Muru has on this day 31st May 1970 been reinstated as the living son of Gojo Aki and Gojo Asa in the village of Hakuba.

  This recognition meets the approval of the council and the Soncho – honourable Suyuki-san.

  ****

  This is also to testify that Gojo Mura was born in this village on 20th January 1922.

  He remains a worthy son of his honourable parents and of Japan.

  The official wax seals of the village and of the headman appeared on the bottom left side of the scroll to authenticate it.

  Fuchida-san gestured for Gojo Mura to rise to his feet, something he did with some difficulty, for his frail body shook. His nervousness was such that he was swallowing convulsively and attempting to moisten his dry mouth.

  The oyabun handed him the certificate.

  Trembling he accepted it and we all clapped again.

  It then became apparent that Fuchida-san expected the little artist to respond. But it was equally apparent that this was beyond him. Sudden tears welled in Gojo Mura’s eyes and ran down his hollow cheeks and chin, and he trembled so much that he dropped the scroll. Stooping to pick it up he fumbled and the scroll fell open once more, though upside down. He was sniffing and trying to regain some self-control but was unable to wipe his tears because, desperate not to drop the scroll again, he now held it upside down in both hands. Despite his best attempts he began to sob, gulping and sniffing then howling, his face crumpled like that of a distraught child. At last he managed to wail, ‘Why? Why do you mock me? I have done nothing to harm you!’

  I glanced quickly at Anna who was close to tears herself as she jumped up and put her arm around Gojo Mura’s shoulders. ‘We are not mocking you, precious Gojo, we have come to honour you, to restore your self-respect,’ she cried. ‘The bad days are over; it is time to begin your life again and we are here to help you.’

  Gojo Mura’s distress increased. ‘But I am dead. How can I begin my life again?’

  ‘As a painter of butterflies,’ I said. ‘Gojo, I didn’t spare your life in the jungle for this to happen. I was ordered to shoot you but I saw immediately that you were a good man. A painter of butterflies is a gentle person with a great soul.’ I smiled. ‘You were a lousy soldier but a very good painter. It is the soldier who is dead and the painter who has been resurrected.’

  ‘Listen to Nicholas,’ Anna urged, ‘and you will soon paint butterflies again.’

  ‘I have not seen a butterfly for a long time,’ Gojo Mura said. ‘My eyes are not meant to see small beautiful things anymore.’

  ‘Hai!’ Fuchida-san announced, missing the poignancy. ‘I have thousands! You can take your pick and paint any one you like free of charge!’

  Naturally we cancelled our flight and remained in Tokyo another three days, mostly to attempt to get to know Gojo Mura and to help him to become accustomed to his new circumstances.

  Fuchida-san allowed Gojo-san the permanent use of a tiny apartment rent-free, one of several the yakuza owned to accommodate members from out of town. We paid for a place in an art course so that he could regain his painting skills, as he had entirely lost his confidence in the use of a fine brush. Then we took him to an optometrist to discover he was in need of spectacles, which seemed the major reason for his difficulty with fine detail.

  He absolutely refused to enter a menswear shop to buy new clothes, explaining that while he had been officially dead he had bought his clothes from the flea market. He could not afford the usual Japanese resistance to anything second-hand which might have belonged to a dead person.

  Anna tried to reason that now he wasn’t officially dead anymore he was entitled to new clothes.

  ‘You are very kind, Anna-san, but I have learned that the dead wear very comfortable clothes that people can’t see, whereas people are always looking at those who wear smart new clothes.’ I guess it was his way of saying that he wanted to maintain his anonymity. And so we took him to the best flea market we could find and outfitted him there.

  The next stop was an art-supply shop. We had decided not to hang around with him while he made his purchases, hoping that he would be encouraged to buy anything he wanted. So when we reached the art supplier I said, ‘Go inside on your own, Gojo-san. Anna and I know nothing about these things. We will go to a tea-house and be back in an hour, but you must make us a promise to buy everything you could possibly need.’

  ‘Nick-san, I am not permitted. A person like me going into a shop like this . . . they will know.’

  ‘Know what?’ Anna asked.

  ‘That I am one of those . . . a dead person.’

  ‘Gojo-san, you have nice clean clothes, new spectacles, your hair is cut and neat.’ She turned to me. ‘Nicholas, give me your watch. The Japanese judge people by the value of the watch they wear.’

  Anna had given me an 18-carat gold Rolex which I only wore when I was with her because it somewhat embarrassed me. I definitely felt I wasn’t a gold Rolex person, though at a pinch, I might have been a stainless steel one, or so I imagined. Everyone I’d noticed wearing a gold Rolex seemed to possess an aura that I didn’t wish to emulate. In fact, with Anna’s watch on my wrist and Fuchida-san’s diamond on my pinkie I was getting into the habit of keeping my left hand permanently hidden within my trouser pocket. I removed the heavy watch and handed it to her. But, of course, Gojo-san could have worn it as a collar. Three of his wrists would have fitted nicely within the band. Anna handed it back. ‘Here, take mine,’ she instructed Gojo-san.

  I laughed and Gojo-san very nearly burst into tears again. While it fitted better, a diamond-encrusted ladies’ wristwatch on an emaciated and rather strange-looking Japanese man wasn’t likely to inspire confidence in Gojo-san’s honest intentions. ‘Not one of your better ideas, darling,’ I suggested.

  Anna gave an impatient shrug and promptly marched into the shop to return a short while later. ‘Gojo-san, they are expecting you inside. I have left my wristwatch as security and they have been informed to let you have anything you want. Now, we’ll be back in an hour with a taxi to carry all your equipment.’ Anna was sounding rather more like Marg, but I think she felt it might be necessary to snap the little artist out of his trembles.

  It kind of worked. Gojo-san reluctantly entered the premises, looking terrified and glancing back twice to see if we were still outside, perhaps thinking to make his escape the moment our backs were turned.

  We duly returned in a taxi within an hour and Anna went in to pay for Gojo’s purchases and to retrieve her watch. The proprietor shrugged, returning the watch. ‘He is at the back and has bought nothing,’ she said.

  Anna found him in a dark corner of the shop quietly weeping. Faced with the prospect of being able to purchase everything he’d ever wanted he’d become confused and helpless.

  ‘What’s the matter, Gojo-san? Are you okay?’ Anna asked, alarmed.

  ‘Yes,’ he sniffed tearfully, nodding his head.

  ‘What is it then?’

  The tiny man reached out and touched Anna lightly on the shoulder. ‘It is you, Anna-san?’ he asked ingenuously, seeming surprised that she appeared to be made of flesh and blood.

  ‘Well, yes, it is,’ Anna agreed smiling.

  ‘Then I am still alive?’

  Anna was tempted to laugh but it was at once obvious from Gojo-san’s tremulous demeanour that he wasn’t joking. ‘Yes, Gojo-san, you are alive and will be for a long time to come, I should hope.’

  Judging from his expression he seemed profoundly relieved. Anna realised that finding himself surrounded by art materials of every description he had panicked and thought he must be hallucinating.

  ‘Thank you,’ Gojo-san said quietly. Whereupon, not having made a single purchase, Anna led him from the shop, clinging to her arm.

  We then realised that in our own anxiety to leave Japan we were moving too fast, battering Gojo-san’s mind with too many stimuli. In a psychological sense it was no different from givin
g a starving man too much rich food – he simply couldn’t mentally digest the impact of our clumsy albeit eager generosity.

  He was due to start art lessons in two days so we phoned the art school and they offered to give us a list of his requirements. ‘Make it a generous list, please,’ I requested. ‘One that will provide him with sufficient art supplies for a couple of years.’

  Armed with an officially sanctioned list Gojo-san and Anna returned to the original shop, much to the joy of the proprietor who thought she’d lost the sale of the season.

  Finally we decided the best way to provide Gojo-san with what he needed was to open a bank account in his name, explaining carefully to him how he could access it, as well as writing down the instructions in case he panicked at the thought of possessing not only more funds than he needed to survive for one day, but more than he had ever dreamed of. We ensured the amount was sufficient for him to attend school and eat well for the next year, during which time it was hoped he would start to paint selections from Fuchida-san’s butterfly collection.

  As it turned out, the oyabun was genuinely excited about the prospect of his collection being immortalised in a book, thus allowing him to contribute to the entomology of Japan.

  As one of the top figures in Japan’s major criminal organisation he seemed to yearn for legitimacy. Of course, he insisted that he would take care of all the artist’s expenses. But as Anna pointed out, it was going to be tough enough for Gojo-san to be accepted as a legitimate member of society without being totally beholden to the oyabun and the yakuza, yet another fringe organisation. Our small financial contribution would give him a sense of independence as a member of the larger community, and because we would be absent, he wouldn’t feel that he must account to us for every coin he spent.

  I guess it’s easy to use money as an excuse to simply walk away from responsibility, especially when Gojo-san was going to need time, encouragement and friendship to become used to the idea of being treated as an equal in Japanese society. But frankly, there wasn’t much more we could do except to promise that we would have him visit the islands when he felt ready to do so and, of course, if he felt inclined, to stay and paint every creepy-crawly or flying insect he could lay his hands on in the surrounding jungle.

  Anna had taken a tremendous liking to him, and her liaison with Konoe Akira’s zaibatsu meant she would need to come to Japan a couple of times a year, so she could check on Gojo Mura’s progress and welfare then.

  With the extra three days in Japan she managed to arrange a formal letter of appointment for herself as the representative of Konoe Akira’s zaibatsu in the South-west Pacific. Anna also appointed Miss Sparkle as her Japanese agent with the right to sit in on the quarterly meetings the contract specified, concerning the fishing operations in the territorial waters of those island states Anna represented.

  While this may not have seemed a significant appointment to someone of Miss Sparkle’s stature, it was precisely what the oyabun required, the opportunity she needed to learn a business that had been in the same tightly held hands for centuries.

  The yakuza, while having fishing interests of their own in the Southern Kuril Islands, were not the big player in the city fish markets they hoped to become, in fact did become, and still are today.

  Miss Sparkle was now in a position to learn how the centuries-old system worked within the big city fish markets, and Anna had given her an entree which allowed her to sit in on the quarterly meetings of Konoe Akira’s zaibatsu. In this way Miss Sparkle had the means of ultimately gaining valuable insights into the Japanese fishing industry. It was only a toe in the door, but one Miss Sparkle needed, and it served to pay back the considerable debt we owed for the help the yakuza had afforded us, a debt I had incurred because of my rashness.

  In fact so much had happened between Anna and Konoe Akira in so short a time that I was somewhat bewildered. We’d come looking for the key to Anna’s problems, which had damaged and ruled her life for a quarter of a century, although even here there were contradictions – both her failure as a woman and her success in business could be laid at Konoe Akira’s feet. We had fondly hoped that she would be cured of the former while maintaining the latter, and Anna believed with absolute certainty that if she surrendered her virginity, she would immediately lose her mental acuity and her power. Of course, this was palpable nonsense and she had openly admitted as much on a hundred occasions, and yet it still held her in its sway.

  During one such discussion I’d said, ‘Okay, this fear you have that sexual normalcy will only come at the expense of your brilliant mind, let me ask you, in money terms what are you worth?’

  ‘Nicholas, I don’t like to discuss wealth as an aggregation,’ she said quite sharply.

  ‘Yeah, okay, well let me put it a different way. If you never earned another penny in your life, do you have sufficient to live the rest of your life in your present more than comfortable manner?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Anna said dismissively.

  ‘Okay, then if you elected to have normal sexual relations and as a consequence found yourself unable to make any more money, then so what?’

  Anna appeared to be profoundly shocked by this notion. ‘Then I would be a sexual zombie!’ she cried.

  ‘But just maybe you would conquer your fear and we would manage to make love normally and successfully and afterwards you would be as brilliant as ever. What then? Isn’t it worth taking the chance?’

  ‘Nick! Ja, you are now ridiculous!’ Anna was plainly upset, her grammar and syntax immediately falling apart, something that almost never happened these days. ‘Ja, also, would you jump into the water in the middle of a deep river only because you have read some instructions in a book how you can swim?’

  ‘If my life depended on it, yes, I suppose,’ I said, knowing that no amount of logic was going to make any difference, and that I’d needlessly upset Anna.

  ‘Nicholas, I wouldn’t jump in the river,’ Anna said firmly, recovering her poise, and I knew that she meant it. She had convinced herself beyond any logic that the chance of drowning was too great, that dying as she was, intact and yet damaged, would be preferable.

  ‘Oh, I see,’ I said ruefully.

  ‘It has nothing to do with money or success,’ she said.

  ‘What then?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe he will tell me.’

  ‘He? Konoe Akira?’ Anna didn’t reply and in a sudden fit of pique I said, ‘Go on, say his name. Say it out loud! Shout it! Shout out, scream, KONOE AKIRA!’

  ‘No.’

  What was the use? Like her heroin addiction, she’d long since given up seeking psychiatric help, so we had hoped, perhaps forlornly, that coming to Japan and confronting her nemesis might be the solution. But it hadn’t worked. Sexually, nothing had changed, although I sensed that something was different. What was it that had changed? I felt I needed to know before we left Japan. I knew I loved Anna and I didn’t want to lose her. Now I tried to put all the pieces together, if only to explain things to myself.

  Anna had offered no explanation, and yet, despite her kidnapping and the obvious trauma she’d suffered, she seemed curiously happy, even contented. Can one seriously suffer a major trauma and at the same time find contentment? Wasn’t this a contradiction in terms? Yet it seemed to be the pattern for Anna’s whole life. Trauma = Success = Contentment. I asked myself, was this possible? It was pointless trying to analyse her, or use logic to solve the riddle, which in effect meant that further discussion between us was a waste of time.

  Konoe Akira had cruelly kidnapped Anna. She’d brilliantly avenged herself. More than this, she’d shown him how easily she could have been his nemesis if she’d wished. She’d effectively turned the tables, and now it was she who possessed power over him. Why then wasn’t she on the way to being cured? If it wasn’t about money or success, then what the hell was happening? She’d become involved with him again in quite a different way, and now they were partners in a new adventure.r />
  That was it! I’d cracked it! What’s more, she’d tied me into it as if we were an essential threesome, Joe and Kevin included simply because they were inextricably connected to me. And why? There could only be one reason. My inclusion made this new adventure with Konoe Akira both permissible and respectable in Anna’s mind. She could maintain her psychological status quo; the threesome she depended on for her life hadn’t been destroyed but had simply been reconfigured. Anna needed Konoe Akira’s presence in her life as much as she needed mine. I decided to put this theory to her, expecting a denial, if only because I suspected it was a subconscious need which she could not have articulated or even acknowledged. Therefore I suggested we have our final night in Japan alone, so we could talk.

  I had booked a secluded table at La Brasserie, the newly opened French restaurant on the mezzanine floor of the hotel, and now I was waiting in the living room to go to dinner. Anna emerged from the bedroom dressed in a magnificent formal kimono with her hair done in the correct manner, and while she hadn’t attempted to look like a geisha by whitening her face, she wore kohl to darken the area around her always astonishingly beautiful eyes and bright scarlet lipstick. On her feet were formal tabi and wooden toe-sandals.

  ‘You look beautiful, very beautiful,’ I said, delighted, beautiful being an understatement in this case. Anna seemed to have the knack of taking on the character of the clothes she wore – a pretty evening dress and all you could think to do was laugh and dance, feeling uninhibitedly joyous in her presence; a business suit and you wanted to sit down and listen respectfully; shorts and a T-shirt and you could smell the ocean and feel the slap of the waves. Now she looked serenely poised and perfectly Japanese.

  ‘I thought just for tonight, our last in Japan, it would be appropriate, don’t you think?’

  ‘Brilliant!’ I replied, almost lost for words. It was just like Anna. The formal kimono would have cost her thousands but she’d wanted to surprise me, and while most people might think it an atrocious waste of money for an occasion of no significance, I was overjoyed that she had dressed to please me. Had she worn this kimono to Konoe Akira’s lunch, he would have been deeply gratified at the compliment, but she hadn’t attempted to please him; it had been a formal business lunch and she’d dressed in a beautifully tailored business suit, entirely appropriate and signifying nothing personal.