One Morning Like a Bird (12 page)

    ‘I’ve been selfish,’ she says. ‘You are not well yet.’

    ‘No,’ he says. ‘It’s nothing serious.’

    ‘Should we turn back?’

    ‘There is really no need.’

    ‘You’re sure?’

    ‘Quite sure.’

    ‘It’s not far now,’ she says. ‘You’ll feel much better out in the air again.’

    The theatre is on the corner of a street by the Tsukiji Canal, close enough to the market for a breeze from the bay to carry with it a small stink of fish and fish guts. Yuji, to give himself more time to recover, insists on paying the driver, then walks beside Alissa to the entrance of the theatre. It is not, despite the brightly painted banners over the doors, a place of any great promise, but once they have left their shoes with the attendant and stepped inside, he sees that it is larger than he had imagined, and has, with its scattering of old posters, the age-darkened wood of its beams, the slight confusion of its architecture, something homely and authentic which, despite himself, his mood, the sense of dislocation it has brought with it, touches him with its charm.

    They find Mrs Yamaguchi surrounded by her students. She is wearing a kimono of Omeshi silk, and over it a formal coat marked with the crests of the school. To Yuji, though he is certainly no expert, she has the look of a retired geisha, a former Oka-san, perhaps, from one of the older, stricter houses in Shimbashi or the Yoshiwara. Her eyebrows are razored, her hairline neat as if she still wore a wig, though her hair, with its delicate chain of red coral, is, as far as he can tell, her own. Alissa introduces him. The teacher smiles and says, ‘So you are the poet? How wonderful.’ If she laughed, he would not be surprised to find she had blackened her teeth, like the beauties of Grandmother’s day.

    The rhythmic wooden clapping of the
Ki
begins. The inner doors swing wide. They wish each other a pleasant experience, then join the queues filing into the auditorium. The only illumination comes from the pulsing of a half-dozen naked gas flares along the edge of the stage, an uncertain light that leaves large areas draped in shadow, but it does not take long for Yuji to realise that all the seating is in traditional matted stalls and that there is not a single Western-style chair in the whole room. Was Alissa warned of this? How could such a mistake have been made? He turns, stares back to where Mrs Yamaguchi and her students are already settling onto their knees, adjusting their collars, batting their fans. Are some of them watching him, slyly, waiting to see how the ‘poet’ will manage his little difficulty?

    The flares are dimmed. The clapping builds to its crescendo. He leans towards Alissa, clears his throat – there is nothing for it but to guide her, as swiftly as possible, out to the foyer again – but she is speaking to him, saying, ‘Here, in here,’ and they shuffle sideways into an unoccupied stall between the aisle and the raised walkway of the
hanamichi
. She passes him the stick, then, without the slightest visible difficulty, gracefully even, as though easing herself into a hot bath, she kneels. He takes his place beside her. He is still holding her stick, the warm handle. After a moment he lays it carefully on the mat between them.

    The last lights gutter, go out. For quarter of a minute the hall is in perfect darkness, then Yuji hears the sound of bodies turning (silk on skin) and turns himself to see, at the back of the auditorium, a candle flame moving in hesitant rhythms along the
hanamichi
towards the stage, and carrying on its tip the long white oval of an actor’s face. It is not until the flame is almost level with where he is kneeling that Yuji sees how the candle is attached to a long pole and the pole carried by a figure in black who moves in the shadow beyond the candle’s soft bloom of light, stepping back as the actor steps forwards, stopping when he stops. They reach the stage. The
shamisen
begins to play, a single string plucked with a kind of violence, a sound so sharp, so heavy with nostalgia, the audience lets go a soft collective sigh of grief and pleasure. And in that instant Yuji understands what it was that wrung his heart in the taxi – that his journey with Alissa has unburied the memory of another journey, eighteen, nineteen years ago, when he went with Mother to the Kabuki-za Theatre, just the two of them (Ryuichi must have been with Father or at one of his many school clubs) riding in a rickshaw over the pitted roads of the Low City, crossing Sakura Bridge, crossing Kamei Bridge. He cannot remember the tea house they stopped at. The Kikuoka? He cannot remember which of her kimonos Mother was wearing. He cannot even remember what plays they saw, but what has stayed, what has lain inert all these years waiting for the precise circumstance that would allow it to burn again, is the ecstasy of being pressed against her shoulder, the scent of her, the warmth, the rich serenity of being in exactly the place he wished, above all places, to be. So meagre is his store of such memories – material from the
time before
– he almost laughs out loud at the luck of coming across it like this on an evening he expected nothing from. It is a victory of sorts. A small defeat for that darkness time drags in its wake.

    And in this state he starts attending to the play. He doesn’t care that the theatre is chilly or that his knees are beginning to ache. How skilled the young actors are! How wise of Mrs Yamaguchi to assist them! The shrieks, the bursts of drumming, the sudden stillness, the buffoonery are no longer quaintly antique but a language profound and perfectly evolved. He gives himself up to it – Takao’s murder, Tanizo’s love for Kasane, her transformation into a limping monster – and when the
onnagata
playing poor Kasane strikes the gesture for pointing to the moon, Yuji is as excited as anyone, and had he known the actor’s name, would have shouted it out along with the others.

    It lasts an hour. The next act, following an interval, will be a dance piece, the one which Mrs Yamaguchi presumably has been helping with, but as Alissa stands, Yuji sees her face contort. She leans heavily on the stick, then, after a few seconds, straightens and smiles at him, an apologetic smile that is also sad and somehow coquettish.

    ‘We could leave now,’ he says.

    ‘Don’t you want to see the dancing?’

    ‘Perhaps,’ he says, ‘I’ve had enough for today.’

    In the foyer, they find Mrs Yamaguchi again, explain to her how, most unfortunately, they are unable to stay. The teacher nods, turns her eyes from Yuji to Alissa, back to Yuji. She and her students, she says, will be going to the new Chinese restaurant in Shimbashi, once the dancing has finished. Would Alissa and Yuji care to join them? Yuji opens his mouth to answer but Alissa, bowing swiftly, excuses them both. The girls, her fellow students, wave their neat goodbyes. ‘How nice,’ says Mrs Yamaguchi, smiling at Yuji from a face as stiff and white as those on the stage, ‘to meet a friend of Miss Feneon’s.’

    They collect their shoes, step into the street. Yuji offers to find a taxi but Alissa says she needs to walk off the stiffness. ‘You’re sure you didn’t mind leaving so soon?’ she asks.

    ‘I was ready to go.’

    ‘I think I’ve converted you a little.’

    ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘a little.’

    It’s a night more like mid-May than March. They walk beneath a half-moon, its light in shallow silver pools on the roof tiles of the houses. From the corner of his eye he watches her, wondering if she is still in pain. If she is, she hides it well. She is walking easily now, and with no more than the usual small adjustment to each stride, that slight roll as she settles onto her left foot. A block from the Matsuya, as though by unspoken agreement, they slow, then stop. She adjusts her obi; he glances at his watch.

    ‘Do you have to go home now?’ she asks. ‘Are you hungry at all?’

    He suggests one of the neighbourhood noodle bars, places he has been to at the end of an evening’s drinking with Junzo and Taro, and where a dish of
yakisoba
costs no more than a tram ride.

    ‘Or,’ she says, speaking quickly, ‘we could go to the Snow Goose.’

    ‘The Snow Goose? But isn’t that  . . .’

    ‘I have a new pupil,’ she says, ‘a financier of some kind who has fallen in love with Beethoven. He’s twice as old as my other students and at least twice as rich so I charge him twice as much.’

    ‘You’re good at business,’ says Yuji.

    ‘I mean,’ she says, ‘it could be my treat. A way of apologising for making you sit through an hour of
kabuki
.’

    Has someone spoken to her about the allowance? Is this financier of hers a fiction, a way of saving his blushes? Should he be offended? He must refuse her offer, of course, that seems clear, though he would, very much, like to go to the Snow Goose, a proper restaurant, an authentic Western-style restaurant he has passed by a hundred times without ever having stepped inside. And if he leaves now, brings the evening to an end, he will have to go and eat in Otaki’s on his own, or take the risk of some icy encounter in the kitchen at home with Haruyo. He studies the toes of his shoes, frowns at the moon, performs in his head the tiresome mathematics of obligation and counter-obligation – though with a foreigner (even one in a rose kimono) the rules are surely different. More lax, more agreeable perhaps  . . .

    ‘It seems  .   .   .’ he mutters. ‘I mean, I wonder if  . . .’

    ‘Good,’ she says, turning from him and starting to walk again. ‘That’s settled, then.’

    The Snow Goose is on the Ginza, opposite the billiard parlour where they celebrated Junzo’s twenty-first birthday. On the front of the restaurant, on the frosted window, a flight of geese are picked out with pieces of golden glass. The doors are open. A doorman pulls back a curtain of red plush. It’s noisy inside, and busy. They have to sit for half an hour on a velvet sofa, then a waiter – a waiter with a blond moustache! – escorts them to a small round table by the wall. He pulls out the table for Alissa, pulls back Yuji’s chair. On the starched linen the cutlery glitters. In the skins of the wine glasses twenty different lights are trembling.

    ‘I already know what I’m having,’ says Alissa. ‘Its called a Wiener schnitzel. Have you ever had it?’

    ‘Is it new?’

    ‘It’s the speciality here. A bit like
tonkatsu
, though made with veal instead of pork. You should try it. It’s delicious. And we should have a bottle of wine, too – unless you would rather drink something else?’ She picks up the wine list, runs a varnished but unpainted fingernail down the page. ‘I think  . . . I think Papa might choose this one. A white from Alsace.’

    ‘Alsace?’

    ‘They sometimes think they’re German but they’re French really. We don’t have to worry.’

    ‘Your father said that drinking wine was his duty now. His patriotic duty.’

    She nods. ‘He fought the last time,’ she says. ‘He was wounded twice, the second time’ – she touches her breast – ‘a piece of shrapnel just missed his heart. Anyway, there’s no one to fight yet. I mean, they haven’t actually invaded or anything.’

    ‘Perhaps it will stay like that.’

    ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I suppose it might. The truth is, I mean, between you and me.  I worry more about what’s happening on this side of the world.’ She throws a glance to the end of the room where a dozen young officers are drinking together, a party Yuji has already noted, then carefully ignored, not wishing to lock eyes with some drunken lieutenant fresh from Shanghai or the Mongolian border. Other than the waiters the only men in the restaurant not in uniform are at least twenty years older than him.

    Alissa orders the wine, the food. She is quite at ease in the Snow Goose, the elaborate etiquette of the place, and when the waiter pours a splash of golden wine into Yuji’s glass she prompts him with her eyes.

    ‘Oh, yes,’ he says, hurriedly swallowing, ‘it’s quite nice’ though he is perturbed that the wine does not really taste of grapes at all but has, instead, a somewhat surprising flavour of stones.

    The waiter fills their glasses, sinks the bottle into an ice bucket, puts the bucket on a tripod next to the table, and with a nod of his blond head, withdraws.

    ‘What shall we speak now,’ asks Alissa, ‘French, or Japanese?’

    ‘Why not French for the first half of the bottle, then Japanese for the rest?’

    She smiles, agrees, but having chosen a language, they sit in silence, looking at the points of their cutlery.