One Morning Like a Bird (23 page)

    ‘By the way,’ asks Shozo, as the young men gather by the street entrance, buttoning coats and tying mufflers, ‘is the French Club still going, or is that all over now?’

    ‘Over?’

    ‘I was just wondering. You know . . . With things as they are.’

    Outside, they separate with hasty waves. Yuji, his trouser cuffs snapping at his ankles, wheels his bicycle into the teeth of the wind. The sky is turquoise, orange, bruise yellow. A warm rain begins, a swirling downpour that seems to fall from all sides at once. In less than a minute Yuji is as wet as when he sat in the baths. A man beckons to him from a doorway. Yuji shakes his head. There is not far to go, and this sudden violence – all of summer being torn to pieces – is exhilarating. He shouts out scraps of poetry: ‘
Cette idole, yeux noirs et crin jaune, sans parents ni cour!
’ The wind smears the words across his face, the rain dashes them away. A pot of flowers (the kind of big ceramic tub he would struggle to lift on his own) sails from a roof garden and explodes in a halo of earth and petals against the manically creaking sign of a leather-goods store. When he reaches home he’ll carry the sake bottle up to the platform and stand there, captain of a doomed ship, reciting the whole of ‘
Le Bateau Ivre
’ to the thrashing gingko tree. What does it matter if it’s bad for his health? With
things as they are
, isn’t good health more of a threat to him than sickness? Good health could be the death of him.

    By the time he arrives at the end of his own street the air stinks of sea wrack and flooded drains. He pauses beside the telegraph pole outside Otaki’s to wipe the water from his face. Then shielding his eyes with his hands, he watches an umbrella of lacquered paper (some kind of dark flower painted on its top) weaving up the middle of the road towards him. It’s hard at first to tell what’s going on. There seem to be three, perhaps four people beneath it, and with the wind behind them they are having to fight hard to keep the umbrella from being snatched away and flung over the singing radio aerials. What a subject for a Hiroshige print! The driving rain, the gloom, the jumbled legs, the shimmering umbrella held so low it hides their faces completely. It looks like a crab, or some strange blind cuttlefish labouring across the bottom of the ocean. He would laugh if he didn’t think the wind would scoop the air from his lungs. Could this be in the screenplay? An opening shot, comic-pathetic, an image redolent of struggle, absurdity  . . .

    As they come closer – now accelerating a little, now trying to anchor themselves against the force of the storm – he begins to make it out. A woman on one side, a woman the other and between them, rocking between them, a figure, a dark figure, a man, a three-legged man, a man with a crutch  . . .

    A
crutch
!

    Dragging the bicycle with him, he presses himself against the pole. The umbrella comes to a halt fifteen yards away. A head appears – the old woman. She shoulders open her gate, then turns, and like some aged flunky from the court of Pu Yi, starts to shuffle backwards up the path, the umbrella gripped in both fists over the stooping man’s head. Kyoko is left behind to shut the gate. She glances into the street, looks both ways, her hair whipping about her face, but if she sees Yuji, if she picks out his ragged shadow from all this shifting, melting world, she gives no sign of it, and in another moment, hauling the gate against the wind, she is gone.

    It blows all night, and in his dreams the sound of the wind becomes the noise of the firestorms twisting over the surface of the Sumida. It is blowing still when, at first light, he wakes (who was that woman with her hair on fire, her hair burning up like grass?), but the wind’s hard edge has gone and the rain has become a fine mist, a haze of saturated air. Cautiously, stealthily, he kneels on the wood of the platform and peers into the neighbours’ garden. The surface of the pond is thick with leaves but there is no one out there, and the house, what he can see of it through the dripping trees, looks as hushed and empty as a house abandoned.

    He dresses, goes downstairs, drinks tea with Miyo (though tells her nothing), then puts on a beetle-coloured coat of oiled silk, puts on his old student cap, and taking the long way round, not passing the old woman’s house, sets off for Setagaya. Beads of rain drizzle from the peak of his cap. Before he has finished the walk from the station, past the building plots and the tea fields to the gates of Grandfather’s garden, the damp has permeated the silk of the coat and covered his skin with a blood-warm slick of atomised Pacific. The concertina roof of the old rickshaw is a vivid green slime. Between the wheels, a cockerel, its feathers dark with water, shifts its weight from foot to foot, and with a single hostile eye, watches Yuji on the path.

    Grandfather greets him with a shout of laughter. ‘Look what the wind blew in!’

    Fortunately, the bath is still hot from Grandfather’s morning ablutions. Yuji wallows in it, safe here, and almost sung to sleep by the mosquitoes in the coiling steam above him. Afterwards, he dresses in one of Grandfather’s
yukatas
and drinks tea with him, Sonoko sitting behind them with her sewing.

    ‘The neighbour’s back,’ says Yuji. ‘The old woman’s grandson.’

    Grandfather nods. ‘I always thought he was half-witted.’

    ‘Perhaps.’

    Later, there is the usual tour of the model (‘That temple bell comes from a child’s rattle. The real one, iron, and high as a man, melted like wax.’), then a lunch of bean curd and baked seaweed.

    In the afternoon the sun appears, and with the help of a neighbour – the genial Mr Fujitomi – they disentangle an old pine tree from where it has fallen across the canes and netting of the fruit garden. Yuji is back in his dried clothes. He offers to start sawing the tree up, and for two hours, until his fingers blister, he cuts clumsily through the pale wood while seeing, from the corner of his eye, Grandfather and Sonoko repairing the beds, bending and straightening like a pair of wading birds on the mudflats.

    He is invited to stay the night. He telephones Father. ‘Saburo’s back,’ says Father.

    ‘Yes,’ says Yuji.

    ‘You knew?’

    ‘Yes.’

    ‘It might,’ says Father, ‘be wise to pay a call when you come home.’

    Grandfather goes to bed at ten. Yuji has a mattress in the eight-mat room. He has hoped that his work with the saw, the good air he has breathed, might bring him an early sleep, but he sits up on his own by the light of a Blanchard lamp, a bowl of tea cooling on the mat beside him, and looks past the part-open screens to where beams of blue moonlight are falling through the darker blue of the trees. For a while he is troubled by visions of the umbrella lurching towards him through the storm, of that stooped figure probing the ground with his crutch. Then – some effect of the moonlight, the stillness, the hour – his mind quietens, his thoughts descend like water into the earth, and when it seems he is quite empty (his body a presence loosely wrapped around his breath), he feels it again – distinctly, though less intensely – the same sweet unhappiness he knew that evening in the taxi beside Alissa. What is it this time? Another memory? Of what? Mother again? No, not Mother. Who, then? He stares at the weave of the matting by his knees, brings before his mental gaze a dozen different faces, Momoyo to Junzo, tests them, then gives it up, sips his tea, and immediately, in its fragrance, the faint bitterness of its savour, finds the answer  . . .

    Love. A love of
this
. The room, the light, the shadows, the singing of the insects, the tea, the rain-scoured air. A love of his country. Or if not that exactly – the phrase is too often in the mouths of the worst people – then love for a place he has always known, always, even in its convulsions, understood perfectly, a place he could never abandon without ceasing, in some way, to be Yuji Takano. Yet tonight it is almost as though he is experiencing it for the last time, gazing back at it from the stern of a boat, the line of the coast melting into the horizon . . .

    Is he, at twenty-six, falling into that cast of mind – regretful, elegiac – better suited to a man twice or three times his age, a man of Grandfather’s years? It is easy to affect such things, to wear them insincerely. But tonight he
does
feel old, as old as one of those broken pots Father pores over illustrations of in the garden study. Hiroshi in his airman’s uniform, Junzo no longer like himself, Taro bent with anxious labour, Oki, Shozo  . . . How many of them will see thirty? How many will be left when it’s over? Next month, by government decree, all the dance halls in Japan will close their doors for the duration of the struggle. The Harlem, The Tokyo Follies, The Big Ben, The Eastern Empire  . . . Piece by piece, life is being put away. To make more room for death? So that death can tour Japan in a black Mercedes, waving a gloved hand to the people lining the streets, their necks stretched out in readiness?

    And what if he refuses it? What if he is the nail that cannot be hammered in? How, in this world he has been given but never asked for, does one make plans to survive?

For a week he manages to avoid paying his visit to the Kitamura house, and might, had he not sat so unguardedly on the verandah for half an hour flicking through his latest find at the Kanda bookstalls (a tattered but serviceable copy of
Ciné-Journal
, Sarah Bernhardt on the cover), have put off the meeting a few days more. He is reading a review of Pathé’s
Le Coupable
when he hears a whistle – short, low, and of such shocking familiarity he immediately feels a violent contraction of his heart that for two seconds dims the daylight around him. He closes the magazine, rolls it, and goes to the gap in the fence. Saburo – a face-wide strip of him – is waiting there, one hand holding a young black cat against his chest. The other hand, though not in view, is presumably clenched round the cross-strut of a crutch.

    ‘Welcome home,’ says Yuji. ‘I am sorry you have suffered a misfortune.’

    ‘Misfortune? I’ve lost half my foot, but now I can lie back and watch the others sweat. I’m going to enjoy it.’ He is smiling, an eager, open smile, but the face is no longer the one in the picture the old woman sighed over. Something has happened to Saburo, something that cannot be explained by the mutilation of a foot.

    ‘I was coming to see you,’ says Yuji.

    ‘Everybody else has already been.’

    ‘I was at Grandfather’s, and then  . . .’

    ‘Granny says your father’s friends are keeping you out of the army.’

    ‘My chest  . . .’

    ‘Ah! The famous chest!’

    ‘It’s probably only a matter of time.’

    ‘Probably? I’d say definitely.’

    ‘You made it to corporal, then?’

    ‘You know, I’ve only been back a week and already I’m sick of the prattling of women. Though sometimes Granny has interesting things to say. Surprising things, in fact.’

    ‘You heard about Ozono?’

    ‘No one to take over the brush business now.’

    ‘No.’

    ‘I bet the box they got back was empty. They usually are.’

    ‘The box?’

    ‘Of ashes. Most of them are empty.’

    ‘I didn’t know.’

    ‘What were you reading? Show me.’

    Yuji, unrolling the magazine, holds it up. Saburo frowns at it. ‘You could get into trouble with something like that,’ he says.

    ‘It’s just about films.’

    ‘It’s not Japanese, though, is it?’

    ‘No.’

    ‘You’ve got your father’s disease.’

    ‘Father doesn’t have a disease.’

    ‘I don’t mean a real disease.’

    ‘I know what you mean.’

    ‘How touchy you are!’

    ‘I’m sorry.’

    ‘Would it surprise you to know I often thought of you over there?’

    ‘You did?’

    ‘We could have had some fun, you and me. I could have shown you things.’

    ‘What sort of things?’

    ‘Oh, I’d have to whisper them to you. You’d have to push your head through the fence.’