The Snow Kimono (19 page)

Katsuo was right. Once I had nurtured ambitions to be a writer. But that space was
already taken. By Katsuo. In some mysterious way, he seemed to suck the light out
of things. There was nothing left for anyone else. All of us came, in one way or
another, to experience this. Ironically, however, in Katsuo’s company, we also felt
privileged. Things happened. You
never
knew what, or where things would go. But afterwards,
when we returned home, we all felt like lesser beings. We knew that we’d been used,
made fools of. But it didn’t matter. We still waited, until next time. When Katsuo
would crank the world up for us again.

Part V

SACHIKO

Chapter 18

TALK to me, he says.

I’m so cold, Katsuo, so cold…

Talk, Sachiko. Just talk. It will help.

And so she starts to tell him once again what he already knows. Later, he will write
it all down, so as not to forget.

In the spring, just after my sixteenth birthday, my father takes me down to Osaka
for the first time.

It is still dark when my grandmother comes to wake me. She doesn’t know that I have
been lying in my bed for hours waiting for her. Waiting, and listening. Until, at
last, I hear her door slide open, hear the scuff of her slippered feet on the floor,
like a dog panting, and I know that my great adventure is about to begin.

I hear her strike the match and, suddenly, there on the wall above me is her shadow,
liquid in the toppling light. It leaps against the descending glass. Then steadies.

There is a small blue water bowl beside my lamp. I hear the match tip’s extinguished
hiss.

Then—silence.

I know my grandmother is standing there, looking down at me. Moments later she puts
her hand on my shoulder. Her untried voice is husked with tenderness.

Sachiko, Sachiko, she is saying.

Later, on the verandah, my grandmother brings me breakfast for the journey, a small
feast she says will sustain me—chicken broth, rice cakes, fish, vegetables, things
I don’t even know the names of, things I have never tasted before—steaming in the
cool morning air.

Behind me, the mountain peaks blaze like white teeth in the first rays of the sun.
Darkness seeps back into the earth. The grey-tiled rooftops of the village, clustered
together like sleeping cattle, begin to surface. Here and there, pale columns of
smoke rise from chimneys. On the outskirts of the village, a solitary lantern, like
a tiny stranded star, appears and disappears in the creviced streets.

Beyond the village, the valleys, still and undisclosed, lie waiting.

I hear my mother’s shrill voice coming from inside the house. She is arguing with
my father. Only fragments of what they say reach me.

But it’s nothing, Hideo. You can barely see it. You must convince him.

I think they are talking about the kimono my mother and grandmother make, which,
each spring, my father takes down to Osaka to sell. But they are not. They are talking
about me.

Then we are waiting outside our house. My friend Kimiko, who had gone the previous
year to work in one of the Takaragawa houses, is there. She gives me a beautiful
pearl hairpin. To remember her by. She puts it into my hair. She smiles. Write to
me, she says. We hug each other. I feel her warm tears on my cheek.

The kimono have been folded, packed. Sealed into chests. Two men are loading them
onto a hand cart. We are ready. My grandmother stands there silent. Her hands struggle
to free themselves from each other. She comes to embrace me.

My mother does not. Instead, she says: Be careful, Sachiko. But she says it coldly,
as if admonishing me for some wrong I have already committed. Kimiko and I embrace
one last time. I say goodbye.

These trips are always fraught. Will my father sell all that my mother and grandmother
have made? If he doesn’t, we
will not survive until the next year, my mother, my
father, my grandmother and me.

Each year now, when my father returns, he returns exhausted. It was not always like
this. He used to be proud to take what my grandmother and mother had made to Osaka
to sell. But now, when he comes home, it is someone else who arrives on our doorstep.
Someone I don’t know. Someone who is withdrawn, defeated, unreachable. He will not
speak to me. Or my mother. I never know why. For two or three days afterwards, he
will go down to the village. To drink. To not come home. Eventually, one of his friends
will bring him back to us, drunk, half-dead, muttering to himself: Forgive me, forgive
me. But we never find out what it is that we have to forgive him for.

And then the storm abates. The memory of Osaka fades. My father begins to return
to himself again. Until next year.

My father and I are walking down the steep, winding path to the village, silently
following the two men balancing on the cart in front of us.

The ancient bus is already waiting in the marketplace. It belongs to Mr Nakagawa,
one of my father’s friends. The engine covers are missing. The wheel arches are full
of dirt. There are men scrambling around on top of it, as busy as ants. They are
securing pieces of luggage, crates, lengths of timber, to the roof. I watch as our
chests full of kimono are hauled up
to them. My father paces up and down beside the
bus, giving them instructions. Which the men ignore.

Hiroshi, the bus driver’s son, is sitting in one of the front seats. Rocking. He
is tethered there. Our eyes meet. He grins his idiot grin. I turn away. Hiroshi is
a giant. He brims with slow-witted malevolence. No one trusts him. He is big, unpredictable.

The year before, I had had my own reason to fear him. The path behind our house leads
to one of the springs above our village. It is famous for its huge red boulders poking
out of the earth along its length. Each stone is like an enormous skull, round, perfectly
smooth. When I was little, my grandmother told me how bald-headed giants had come
down the mountain one day to take revenge on the village. When the villagers heard
them coming, they prayed to the gods to save them. And the earth swallowed the giants
up, leaving only the tops of their heads exposed.

At certain points along the path, it is possible to jump from one head to another.
I used to run along them as quickly as I could, remaining on each for only an instant,
fearing that if I lingered too long a giant pair of hands would reach up out of the
earth and seize me. Even now, I have a vague sense of terror just thinking about
them.

On either side of the path, there are bamboo thickets. In places they are twenty
metres tall. The surface of the bamboo is hard, polished, as green as insects’ legs.
When there is a breeze, the bamboo sways back and forth in long, slow arcs. High
up, two shafts sometimes rub against each other, producing an
unearthly, melancholy
sound, like a child crying. I sometimes lie in bed at night listening to this sound,
wondering if in some way it is connected with these giants drowned in the earth.

The incident I remember with Hiroshi has nothing to do with the path. Or the crying
bamboo. It has to do with children laughing. At least at first.

I have been running. I am out of breath. Perhaps I have been jumping from skull to
skull, trying to see how many I can jump in a row. Each year I can add another one,
or two, or three.

I am almost at the pool when I stop. It is summer. The sun filters through the trees.
I hear a child’s shout, then a splash. Then another. There is more laughter. High-pitched,
piercing, intoxicated. I crouch down, slip out of my sandals. The stones beneath
my feet are cool. I reach out to steady myself against a shaft of bamboo.

Even when most of the pool, and the smooth rock face at its far end, is visible,
I can’t see them. Then, high up, on one of the boulders, something moves. It is a
child. A boy of about five or six. He is crouching, his hands on his knees. He looks
into the water. I recognise him. His name is Ichiro. His father owns a trinket shop
in the village. He is naked. He stands and runs back and forth on top of the boulder.
Gestures. Yells. I can see his tiny sex bouncing as he runs. His wet hair lies flat
against his forehead. A thin spray of water falls sparkling through the sunlight.
Then he is gesturing again, to someone, an invisible companion, somewhere in the
water below him.