One Morning Like a Bird (15 page)

    One of the pages he pulls from a magazine, then pauses to read, is an account of a tour of Manchuria by a group of ‘notable authors’ invited to see first-hand the great strides made by the new administration in transforming such an antique place into a showcase of Asian modernity. At the bottom of the page, the authors are depicted standing in a line with certain representatives of the military. The most senior authors, the most notable, are in the middle of the line flanked by the highest-ranking officers. Ishihara is there (not in the centre but not at either extreme), dressed in a long leather coat like the one air ace von Rauffenstein wears in
La Grande Illusion
.

    The faces of the writers are mostly smiling, as though the tour was a welcome break from the rigours of composition, the confines of their studies, but the officers’ expressions, shadowed under the peaks of their caps, are set and somehow unamused. Below the picture the caption reads, ‘Forward as one! The pen and the sword link arms.’

    ‘You want the weevils to beat us?’ asks Grandfather. He takes the page from Yuji’s hand, tears it in two and dips his brush into the paste. ‘Sonoko,’ he says, ‘it seems that Grandson wants the weevils to beat us!’

21

At home, the doors of the Japanese room are opened wide to the garden, the first time since the previous October. The mats and the woodwork are beaten and wiped. In a corner of the room where the air is touched by sunlight, an insect becomes a fleck of gold.

    On the radio, daily bulletins plot the northward progress of the cherry blossom – Fukuoka, Hiroshima, Kyoto, Nagoya. There are also reports of the German advance into Norway, an action intended to protect the Norwegian people from the aggression of the British. Miyo, her hair tied up in a cloth, a duster in her hand, asks Yuji if Norway is close to Japan or as far away as Russia. He shows her the map in the morning paper. She stares at it, then laughs. She cannot explain why. ‘Because  . . .’ she says, and shrugs and goes on with her work. Is she frightened? Or do the movements of armies, the fall of nations, genuinely amuse her?

22

A bright Saturday, the second week in April, he goes to the blossom viewing in Ueno Park. He has arranged to meet Junzo, Taro and Shozo under the clock at the subway terminus, but when he arrives there with Miyo, only Taro and Shozo are waiting.

    ‘Little brother’s sulking about something,’ says Taro. ‘His mystery girlfriend, I suppose.’

    The park at ten o’clock is already crowded and it takes them half an hour to find a place for themselves, two yards of unoccupied grass between a group of middle-aged office workers and a circle of young mothers, drowsy, with drowsy babies on their knees. They spread their blankets. Above them, the blossom is so dense that when a breeze blows, the whole head of the tree moves like a single flower. Miyo opens the
bento
boxes. They eat, picking the food from the little wooden pockets. They have sake with them but after the first cup no one bothers to pour. They watch the passers-by, are watched in turn. Somewhere in the park a van with loudspeakers is broadcasting speeches. Miyo takes out her sewing. Shozo pulls his cap over his eyes. In a quiet voice to Yuji, Taro says, ‘You’ve heard the rumours?’

    ‘Rumours?’ Yuji’s heart begins to pound. ‘What rumours?’

    ‘Spies, saboteurs, traitors in high places  . . . At the ministry it’s all anyone talks about.’

    ‘I’ve heard nothing,’ says Yuji, hiding his relief in a frown. ‘Is any of it true?’

    ‘Some, I suppose. I don’t know how much. Anyway, it’s best to be watchful.’

    ‘Of course.’ Yuji picks a blade of grass. ‘Though what is it exactly we should watch for?’

    ‘Whatever is out of the ordinary. People who seem to have something to hide. Foreigners  . . .’

    ‘Foreigners? Like the Feneons?’

    ‘Well, the Feneons, that’s different.’

    ‘If necessary,’ says Yuji, ‘we could speak up for them.’

    ‘It would be more sensible,’ says Taro, ‘to be discreet.’

    ‘Then we could speak up for them discreetly?’

    ‘And who would we speak to? The
Tokko
?’

    ‘Why not?’

    ‘Now you’re being stupid.’

    ‘Monsieur Feneon’s been here for ten years.’

    ‘I know all that. But these days it’s not how something
is
, it’s how it
looks
. Think of your father’s situation.’

    ‘Father?’

    ‘Even an important man like him was not protected.’

    ‘I am aware of it.’

    ‘And you are his son.’

    ‘So?’

    ‘Nobody is invisible.’

    ‘It almost sounds like you’re warning me.’

    ‘I’m saying you should use your head.’

    ‘And you?’

    ‘Yes,’ says Taro, nodding slowly. ‘More than you perhaps.’

    They sit together, silently, as though on the brink of some sharp exchange neither is quite ready for, not today, not here in the open. Yuji flicks the rolled blade of grass away and gets to his feet. ‘I’m going to walk,’ he says. ‘You want to come?’

    Taro shakes his head. ‘I’ll stay,’ he says. ‘Shut my eyes for a while.’

    Alone, relieved to be alone, Yuji thinks first of heading towards the pond (‘In the dream of a city poet, electric dragonflies over Shinobazu Pond.’), then finds it easier to simply fall in with the movement of those around him, the aimless swirling of boots and wooden sandals, silken sleeves, epaulettes, piled hair, cigarettes, parasols. Only a man in tattered leggings hunkered in the shade of a stripped windbreak, one of the hundred or more who sleep in the park, who scavenge in the bins and grow beards like Chinese sages, seems to Yuji independent of the crowd and the crowd’s enormous slack mind. He watches him, admires the steadfast gaze, the immobility, then sees on the rising grass beyond him a woman’s back wrapped tightly in unpatterned water-green silk. He grins, almost calls out to her, but stops himself and circles cautiously until he is sure the old woman is not about to descend.

    ‘I hope you haven’t been following me,’ she says, as he walks up to her.

    ‘How could I? I had no idea you were coming today.’ He points to the tea tray in her hands, the two cups. ‘Have you lost her?’

    ‘I’m sure this is where I left her, though now it seems she has vanished.’

    ‘She will have met a friend,’ says Yuji, ‘and the friend has taken her to meet another friend.’

    ‘Someone with a lot of grandchildren, perhaps?’

    ‘Lots of grandchildren and lots of interesting ailments.’

    ‘So now I’m waiting for her like a servant,’ says Kyoko, turning her smile into a pout. ‘What a nice way to spend my day off.’

    ‘Did you arrange a meeting place?’

    ‘The usual,’ she says.

    ‘The statue? I could carry the tea for you.’

    She bites her lip, throws him a hard glance, but lets him take the tray from her hands and follows him as he steps into the current of the crowd again. Soon he’s making her laugh with his muttered commentary on the blossom-viewing parties, the over-ripe wives, the shrunken husbands, the red-faced children chasing each other bawdily between the trees. A holiday crowd more akin to the big-thighed clay manikins unearthed from Yayoi sites (grainy pictures of them in Father’s books) than the race of ‘warrior gods’ the vans with the loudspeakers are shouting about in the distance, though this last thought, mindful of his talk with Taro, mindful too that he is in the company of the wife of an acting corporal in the Kwangtung Army, he keeps to himself.

    ‘I heard you were ill,’ she says.

    ‘Who told you that?’

    ‘Who do you think?’

    ‘Who told her?’

    ‘Who do you think?’

    He nods. He would like to know what else Haruyo tells the old woman. That she heard him make arrangements to go to the
kabuki
with the foreign girl? That she heard the front door slide open at six the following morning?

    ‘I’m well now,’ he says.

    ‘That’s good.’

    ‘Any news from over the water?’

    ‘A photograph.’

    ‘Another new coat?’

    ‘A coat? No,’ she says. ‘It’s not that sort of photograph.’

    He waits for her to explain what kind it is but she doesn’t. He has heard of soldiers sending pictures home of prisoners or even of the enemy dead. Some girls, it was said, carried such pictures as love tokens.

    ‘What will you do now?’ she asks.

    ‘Now that I’m well?’

    ‘Yes.’

    ‘I have lots to do,’ he says.

    ‘You’ve found a job?’

    ‘Not exactly a
job
.’

    ‘Grandmother says that soon everyone will be forced to work. In factories, digging shelters  . . .’

    ‘Shelters? In Tokyo?’

    ‘It might be good for you to do some digging. That kind of work can soothe the nerves.’

    He glances across at her. Is that what she would like to see? Him wielding a mattock, excavating some great hole under the city, choking on the dust?

    ‘As I told you,’ he says, ‘I’ve got plenty to do. You’ve heard of Kaoru Ishihara, I suppose?’

    ‘
Mother Behind my Eyes
?’

    ‘Yes.
Blood of Honour
,
The Last Stand
. I’ve been commissioned to write a piece on him. A critical essay for
Young Japan
.’

    ‘On the train,’ she says, ‘I’ve seen some of the junior officers – the more serious ones – reading
Young Japan
.’

    ‘It will be quite an important piece. Literary but also political. Different dimensions and so on.’

    ‘You must be pleased,’ she says. ‘You could really make a name for yourself.’

    ‘It’s the sort of thing,’ says Yuji, ‘I’ll be doing a lot more of now. I’m afraid the shelters will have to wait.’

    ‘Of course.’

    At the statue of Saigo Takamori there is, happily, no sign of Grandma Kitamura, though a dozen others are stood there, women and children mostly, looking out expectantly for some familiar face to blossom suddenly among the ranks of strangers.

    ‘The tea will be cold,’ says Yuji.

    ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she says.

    He turns and gazes up at the bronze samurai and his faithful dog. ‘Did you know,’ he says, ‘that after the Great Earthquake people used this statue as a noticeboard? It was covered with the names of the missing. A name, the last known location, the address of the family, sometimes a photograph or a sketch. It was the same with the statue of Kusunoki Mosashige outside the palace.’

    ‘I hadn’t heard that,’ she says, and he can see, as she joins her gaze to his, that she’s imagining it, the way it must have looked with hundreds of little pieces of paper fluttering on its sides. He, too, of course, must imagine it, for by the time he returned from Uncle Kensuke’s most of the notices were gone, though some, yellowing and torn, stayed up stubbornly for a month or more, until the autumn winds released them. Where Father posted Ryuichi’s name he has no idea, but he points to a spot halfway up the plinth and tells her it was there.

    ‘If it troubles you to wait here  . . .’ she says, a voice more tender, more intimate than any he has heard from her before.

    ‘Thank you for your thoughtfulness,’ he says, ‘but I have been here many times. It no longer  . . .’