The Devil of Nanking (6 page)

I don’t argue with her village superstitions, I am helpless in the face of her vehemence. ‘Don’t ever try to change her,’ my mother said, before she died. ‘The tusks of an elephant will never grow out of a dog’s mouth. You know that.’

But malleable though I have become, I am not an entire fool. While it is true that there is no need to change her, neither is there any call to encourage this hysterical nature of hers. No need, for example, to rouse her now from bed and bring her here to my study, where I sit on my day-bed looking fearfully out at the sun.

It is hovering there even now, like a giant eyeing the city, terrible and red. Shujin would call it an omen. She would do something ridiculous if she saw it, she would run screaming round the house maybe. And so I will keep it to myself. I will tell no one that today I have witnessed the Chinese sun rising in the shape and colour of the
Hi No Maru
– the red disc on the Imperial Japanese Army flag.

So! It is done! I should throw down the book and cover my face with shame. I have broken my vow. How odd, after all these years, to have given up quite suddenly and unexpectedly on an unremarkable summer morning much like any other, how odd to have succumbed. Now, as I run my fingers down the pages of the book, I wonder if I have learned anything. The paper is old, the ink faded, and my
kaishu
script looks rather quaint. But – and how funny this is, to discover that the important things remain the same – the dread is no different. The dread I felt on that morning more than fifty years ago is something I recognize well. It is the same feeling I have now, when I pull back the blinds and look out of the window at the sun beating down on Tokyo.

That day was so interminably hot that the pavements were gooey underfoot. Condensed sweat dripped out of the air-conditioners on to the pedestrians below and Tokyo seemed ready to slide off the continental plate and slip sizzling into the ocean. I found a kiosk selling magazines and bought a can of cold green tea and some Lotte coconut chocolate that melted on my tongue. I ate and drank as I limped along the road, and soon I was feeling a little better. I got on to the subway and travelled packed in with all the sparkling clean commuters, my dirty cardigan rubbing against their laundered shirts. I noticed that in Tokyo people didn’t smell. It was funny. I couldn’t smell them, and they didn’t say very much: the trains were packed but it was quite silent, like being jammed into a carriage with a thousand shop-window mannequins.

Jason’s house was in an area called Takadanobaba, ‘the high-up horse field’. When the train stopped and I had to get out, I did it very cautiously, stepping on to the platform and staring curiously up and down at the machines and the energy-drink posters. Someone bumped into me, and there was a moment of confusion as the rest of the crowd hopped and skipped and tried not to fall over.
Remember – there are rules in society that you’ll always have to consider
.

Outside the station the streets were crammed with students from Waseda University. At the top of the road, next to a Citibank, I turned off the main road, and suddenly everything changed. I found myself in a scrap of old Tokyo. Away from the electronic roar of commerce there were silent, cool alleys: a warren of cranky little streets jammed into the crevices behind the skyscrapers, a dark, breathing patch like a jungle floor. I held my breath and looked around in wonder: it was just like the pictures in my books! Crooked wooden houses leaned wearily against each other, rotting and broken – exhausted survivors of decades of earthquakes, fires, bombing. In the cracks between the houses lush, carnivorous-looking plants crowded together.

Jason’s house was the biggest, the oldest and the most decrepit I had seen in Tokyo so far. Forming the corner of two small streets, all its ground-floor windows were boarded up, nailed over, padlocked, and tropical creepers had broken through the pavement, coiling up round it like
Sleeping Beauty
thorns. Tacked to the side of the house, protected from the elements by a corrugated-plastic roof, a staircase led to the first floor, guarded by a little wooden door and a grimy old doorbell.

I remember exactly what Jason was wearing when he opened the door. He had on an olive green shirt, shorts and a pair of battered old desert boots, unlaced, his feet crammed into them so that the backs were squashed down. On his wrist was a woven bracelet and he was holding a silver can of beer, Asahi written on the side, condensation running down it. I had a brief chance to study him in the sunlight – he had a clean, unlined skin that looked as if he spent a lot of time outdoors. The words ‘He is beautiful’ flashed briefly in my mind.

‘Hey,’ he said, surprised to see me. ‘Hi, weirdo. You changed your mind? About the room?’

I looked up at the house. ‘Who else lives here?’

He shrugged. ‘Me. Two of the girls from the nightclub. Some ghosts. Don’t know how many of them, to be honest.’

‘Ghosts?’

‘That’s what everyone says.’

I was silent for a while, looking up at the tiled roofs, the upturned eaves crested with chipped dragons and dolphins. The house did seem bigger and darker than its neighbours. ‘Okay,’ I said eventually, picking up my bag. ‘I don’t mind about the ghosts. I want to live here.’

He didn’t offer to carry my bag and, anyway, I wouldn’t have known what to say if he had. I followed him up the staircase, our footsteps echoing on the cast iron.

‘The bottom floor’s closed off,’ he said, waving the beer can in the direction of the boarded windows. ‘No way into it. We live upstairs and you’ve got to come and go this way.’

At the top of the stairs we stopped. We stood at the corner of the house in a gloomy, shuttered gallery, which led away at right angles to our right and left. I could see about fifteen feet in both directions, then the long dusty corridors seemed to dwindle, as if they ended in the distance, in cool, shaded parts of Tokyo that I could only guess at. It was gone midday, and the house was silent.

‘Most of it’s closed off. The land deals in Tokyo’ve gone toes up since the bubble burst, but the landlord’s still trying to push through a deal with a developer. If it works they’re going to knock the whole thing down and build another high-rise, so the rent’s like nearly
nada
.’ Jason kicked off his boots. ‘Course, you’ve got to put up with the place falling down around your ears.’ He gestured vaguely down the right-hand corridor. ‘The girls sleep down there – down that wing. They spend the whole day in bed. They’re Russian. You’ll notice that here – now that someone left the kennel door open the Russians’re running all over the planet. Message hasn’t got to them that Japan’s face down in a recession. Here—’ He pushed a pair of battered hessian slippers at me and watched as I changed into them, taking off my hard little lace-up shoes and sliding the slippers over my stockinged feet. ‘Don’t they hurt?’ He pointed to the shoes. ‘They look painful.’

‘Yes. I’ve got blisters.’

‘Haven’t you got anything else to wear?’

‘No.’

‘What’s in your bag? It looks heavy.’

‘Books,’ I said.

‘Books?’

‘That’s right.’

‘What sort of books?’

‘Books with pictures.’

Jason laughed. He lit a cigarette and watched in amusement as I got the slippers on. I pulled my cardigan straight, pressed my hands down on my hair and stood up in front of him, and that made him laugh again. ‘So,’ he said, ‘what’s your name?’

‘Grey.’

‘Grey? What sort of a name is that?’

I hesitated. It was so strange to be in a place where no one knew me. I took a breath and tried to sound casual. ‘It’s my surname. Everyone always calls me by my surname.’

Jason took me down the right-hand corridor, stopping to point things out as we went. The house was curiously soft and organic-feeling – the floors were covered in straw
tatami
matting and each movement released the secret smell of insect cocoons. Rooms led off from one side of the corridor; on the other, battered wooden screens concealed the facing walls, from waist height up.

‘The bathroom’s traditional so you squat. Think you can do that?’ He looked me up and down. ‘Squat? Wash out of a bucket? You know that’s the point of living in Japan – to do things differently.’ Before I could answer he turned away, to the other side of the corridor, and slid back a shutter. Sunlight flooded in through grimy glass. ‘The air-conditioner’s fucked so in the summer you gotta keep these closed all day.’

We stood at the window and looked down at an enclosed garden. It was deep and lush like a jungle, overgrown to above the height of the ground-floor windows, packed with dark persimmon and heavy leaves that cracked the walls and stole the sunlight. I put my hands on the pane, my nose up to the glass, and stared out. At the foot of the garden was the rear of a white skyscraper.

‘The Salt Building,’ Jason said. ‘Don’t know why it’s called that, just got handed on, I s’pose, like the rooms, from one hostess to another.’

I was about to turn away when I noticed, almost a hundred feet away across the tops of the trees, a red-tiled roof basking in the heat.

‘What’s that?’

‘That?’ He pressed his nose against the window. ‘That’s the third wing. Closed off too.’

‘Part of this house?’

‘I know. We inhabit a zip code. The Forbidden Palace. There are maybe twenty rooms in this place that I know exist for sure, another twenty you only get to hear about in rumours.’

Now I could see how much ground the house took up. It covered most of a city block and was arranged round the garden, on three sides of a square. From above, it would look like a bridge with the Salt Building blocking the fourth side. The house was decaying; rot had started in the far wing and Jason said he didn’t like to think what was in the closed-off rooms downstairs. ‘That’s where the ghosts hang out,’ he said, rolling his eyes. ‘According to the
baba yaga
twins.’

We passed countless sliding
shoji
doors, some locked, some open. I got glimpses of belongings in the gloom, piled-up furniture, dusty and forgotten – a teak butsudan, an ancestor’s shrine, empty except for a stack of dusty glass jars. My slippers slapped in the silence. Out of the gloom ahead of us appeared the door to the closed wing, padlocked and braced with an iron bar. Jason stopped at the barricade. ‘This is no go.’ He put his nose to the door and sniffed. ‘And,
Jesus
, in the hot weather the
stink
.’ He wiped his face and turned back, tapping the last door on the corridor. ‘Don’t worry, you’re cool here – this would be yours.’

He slid back the door. Sunshine poured through grimy sheets tacked over two windows at right angles. The walls had once been covered in pale brown silk and the remains of it hung down, disintegrating in long, vertical slashes, as if a huge clawed animal had been kept locked in here. The
tatami
mats were fraying, there were dead flies on the windowsill and spiders’ webs in the light fitting.

‘What do you think?’

I stepped inside and stood in the centre of the room, slowly turning round and round. On the near wall there was a
tokonoma
alcove, with a battered rattan rocking-chair pushed against the wall where the seasonal scroll should hang.

‘You could do anything you wanted to it. The landlord doesn’t give a shit. Even forgets to collect the rent most times.’

I closed my eyes and held out my hands, feeling the softness of the air, the dusty sunlight on my back. It was twice the size of my bedroom in London and it seemed to me so welcoming. There was a soft smell in there, of decaying silk and straw.

‘Well?’

‘It’s . . .’ I said, opening my eyes and fingering the silk on the walls ‘. . . it’s beautiful.’

Jason pulled back the sheet covering the window and opened it, letting some of the hot air into the room. ‘There,’ he said, pointing out of the window. ‘Godzilla’s playpen.’

Coming here, dwarfed by all the skyscrapers, I hadn’t realized how high Takadanobaba was. It was only now that I saw the land dropped away from this vantage-point. The tops of buildings stood level with my window and everywhere faces shouted from video screens hung up high. A vast advertising hoarding, only fifty feet away, filled most of the view. It was a huge sepia photograph of a movie star smiling a crooked smile, holding a glass up, as if he was toasting the whole of Takadanobaba. The glass had the words ‘Suntory Reserve’ etched on it.

‘Mickey Rourke,’ said Jason. ‘Babe magnet, evidently.’

‘Mickey Rourke,’ I echoed. I’d never heard of him, but I liked his face. I liked the way he was smiling down at us. I held the window frame and leaned out a little. ‘Which way is Hongo?’

‘Hongo? I don’t know – I think it’s . . . that way, maybe.’

I stood on tiptoe, looking sideways, out over the distant roofs and the neon signs and the TV aerials painted gold by the sun. We must be miles away. I’d never be able to see Shi Chongming’s office among all those other buildings. But it made me feel better to think that it was there, somewhere out there. I tipped back on to my heels.

‘How much is it?’

‘Two hundred dollars a month.’

‘I only need it for a week.’

‘Fifty dollars, then. It’s a steal.’

‘I can’t afford it.’

‘You can’t afford fifty dollars? How much d’you think it costs to live in Tokyo? Fifty dollars is so outrageously
not
expensive.’

‘I haven’t got any money.’

Jason sighed. He finished his cigarette, chucked it out on to the street and pointed at the skyline. ‘Look,’ he said leaning out. ‘Look there, to the south-east. Those tall buildings are Kabuki Cho. And see beyond them?’

In the distance, black against the sky, a behemoth of tinted glass supported by eight massive black columns, rocketed up above all the other skyscrapers. Four gigantic black marble gargoyles crouched on each corner of the roof, gas streams in their mouths blowing fire jets fifty feet out until the sky seemed to be on fire.