The Heat of the Sun (32 page)

Sorrow filled me and I gazed at Trouble. I felt as if a wall had descended between us. Then I knew: Trouble was Trouble, and I was Woodley Sharpless. Hemispheres divided us and always had.

We stood at the foot of the garden, looking down to the harbour where the
Abraham Lincoln
had docked so long ago. A lifetime later, the ships still came, drawn as if by strange
enchantments from the many corners of the world. I raised my eyes to the blue, distant hills that hovered above the city and its busy waterfront. I said to Trouble, ‘Do you think Nirvana
might be a place like this – the perfect lookout?’

He said, ‘I think Nirvana’s got no lookout at all.’

‘Perhaps you’re right,’ I said, and turned away.

We were walking back up the garden when Trouble asked me, ‘You were there when the senator died, weren’t you?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘And Mama,’ he said. ‘Poor Mama. I didn’t let her see me in San Diego. I’ve regretted that. I believed we’d meet again. I thought she’d always be
there.’

‘She loved you,’ I said. ‘They both loved you.’

Trouble ran a hand through a spray of blossoms. ‘I remembered too much. That was my problem all along, wasn’t it? For years I had an image of a face that loomed in front of me, eyes
wide and tearful. More has come back since. Even now. This house. This garden.’ He gestured around him, as if a frail Japanese woman might linger nearby, a ghost among the trees. ‘The
wind blows, and she whispers in my ear. Sometimes she plays the samisen or we peer together through holes in a shoji screen. I remember once, perhaps the night before she died, she made me stay by
her all night until dawn, waiting for my father to come. We waited and waited. And then he came. In the end, he came.’

Lightly, I touched Trouble’s sleeve; it was the first time I had touched him that afternoon. I smiled and said it was time I was going. My cab was waiting.

He said, ‘There’s an expression here in Japan:
Shikata ga nai
.’

‘I’ve heard it,’ I said. ‘It can’t be helped. Too bad.’

‘It was all bound to happen. Somehow or other, it was all bound to happen.’

‘You’ll thank Isamu for me, won’t you?’ I said.

‘He’d rather be thanking you. He’s always been grateful to you, Sharpless. If there’s a hero of this story, he thinks it’s you. After all, I wouldn’t be here
if it weren’t for you.’

‘Oh, you’d have found a way – a rascal like you!’

By the cab, Trouble hugged me, and I gripped him more tightly than perhaps I should have done. I never wanted to let him go; but all I could do, all I could ever do, was let him go.

‘You’ll be at the memorial service tomorrow, I suppose?’ he said.

I asked him, too eagerly, ‘Will I see you there?’

‘All those Americans? I’d better lie low.’

‘You flatter yourself, Mr Glover. Who’d know you now?’

‘You did. Has your life been happy, Sharpless?’

What a thing to ask! I thought of my books. My students. My travels. Of Wobblewood West, of Aunt Toolie and Le Vol, waiting for my return. What was my life? Our three dogs, our Sunday drives,
our friendly squabbles over the dinner table. None of it could last. Aunt Toolie would die soon – glad, perhaps, to join Uncle Grover; Le Vol, for all I knew, would die before me. Once we had
been young. Now we were old and our world was ending. Dear Trouble! Even now he was an enigma, an essence perpetually escaping me, as I looked at him and said, almost meaning it, ‘I’m
happier than I ever believed I could be.’

‘Me too.’ His eyes held mine and I studied him intently, as if I might understand him, might understand myself, if only I could fix his image in my mind.

As I climbed back into the cab, he called after me, ‘Sharpless, wait! Where’s your ashplant?’

‘The walking stick? Oh, I lost it years ago,’ I said. ‘I always meant to get another. Then I learned to walk without it. That stick had just been keeping my leg weak, all those
years.’

I waved from the window as the cab drove away.

The memorial service was early the next morning, but there was a final ceremony still to come. In the evening I gathered with many others by the river, where I lit a candle
and set it drifting in a paper boat towards the harbour. Afterwards, I stepped back, anonymous in the crowd. There were thousands of candles, but not so many, not nearly so many, as the dead that
they remembered.

Silently, I watched the little flaming pillar, tremulous in the wind, drifting away from me in its precarious vessel, until I could no longer be sure which one was mine. Darkness gathered; the
waters, defiantly, were a sea of flame, but within a short time the paper boats were sinking, some taking on water, some burned through already by the candles that they carried.

Acknowledgements

Without Puccini’s
Madama Butterfly
(1904), this book would not exist. As well as the opera and its libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, I have drawn on
earlier incarnations of the story: David Belasco’s one-act play
Madame Butterfly
(1900), which inspired Puccini; John Luther Long’s short story ‘Madame Butterfly’
(1898), on which Belasco’s play was based; and Pierre Loti’s novel
Madame Chrysanthème
(1888), which appears to have furnished Long with many details and was itself the
basis of an 1894 opera by André Messager. Jan van Rij’s
Madame Butterfly: Japonisme, Puccini, and the Search for the Real Cho-Cho-San
(2001) taught me much, and I recommend it
to those wishing to explore further the origins, meanings, and permutations of the Butterfly story.

Many other sources leave traces in this novel. Several are of particular note: Ronald Takaki’s
Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the Atomic Bomb
(1995) and J. Samuel Walker’s
Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of Atomic Bombs Against Japan
(1997) offer brief and compelling investigations of why the bombings happened; Gar Alperovtiz’s massive
study
The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb
(1995) is, I suspect, the definitive account. David C. Cassidy’s
J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American Century
(2005) and Peter
Goodchild’s
J. Robert Oppenheimer: ‘Shatterer of Worlds’
(1980) depict in detail the development of the bomb.
Doctor Atomic,
the 2005 opera about Oppenheimer by John
Adams, helped me imagine the Trinity test.

Accounts of the bombings from the point of view of the victims include that classic of reportage, John Hersey’s
Hiroshima
(1946; rev. ed. 1985), Takashi Nagai’s memoir
The
Bells of Nagasaki
(1949), and Masuji Ibuse’s novel
Black Rain
(1969).
The Rise and Fall of Imperial Japan
, ed. S. L. Meyer (1976), proved of great value to me, not least
because of the pictures. Ian Whitcomb’s
After the Ball
(1972), a favourite book of mine for years, fuelled my interest in old (very old) pop music. Sir Hubert Parry’s setting of
‘Fear No More...’ appears in Charles Vincent’s anthology
Fifty Shakspere Songs
(1906).
Tartarin de Tarascon
(1872) by Alphonse Daudet was a novel Puccini planned to
adapt as an opera, before scrapping the project in favour of
Madama Butterfly.

Antony Heaven gave me the idea for this book. Roz Kaveney read it at just the right time. The London Library was, as ever, my best resource. I am grateful to Ravi Mirchandani, Margaret Stead,
Orlando Whitfield, Richard Evans, and all at Atlantic Books in London, and Steve Rubin, Barbara Jones, Kenn Russell, Kathleen Lord, Rebecca Seltzer, Joanna Levine, and all at Henry Holt in New
York. Thanks to Ian Pindar, Charlotte Webb, and Colin Tate. Special thanks to my agent, Sara Menguc, for her patience, persistence, and belief.