A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding (10 page)

Yamato-nadeshiko: Though very few young Japanese today use the word, it used to be very often employed as a synonym for a Japanese woman. It was the case especially when emphasis was put on her traditional virtues of modesty, obedience, patience and, moreover, bravery and determinedness when she was faced with difficulties. Yamato is another term for Japan; nadeshiko
is a plant well known for its lovely flower and slender yet rather
strong stalk.

I did not go with Yuko to meet the engineer but sent the matchmaker in my place. The introduction would be awkward enough without my presence. My daughter's resentment of me would cloud her judgement of Watanabe. I left her outside the baths and watched her take careful steps in her wooden sandals along the flagstones. She wrote that she found Mrs Kogi waiting for her at the bottom of the Dutch Slope. Mist clung to the path and covered the old woman's kimono up to her knees. The matchmaker's hair was dotted with frost when they greeted one another. Five minutes or so passed until Mrs Kogi looked up the hill and waved as a man made his way toward them. Shige Watanabe grew larger and larger until he was standing next to them.

‘There he was, the engineer from Iō
j
ima, dressed in a suit and overcoat. He is a foot taller than me, broad-shouldered with a square
face made up of flat, wide planes. He bowed and his cheeks were flushed when he raised his head. He introduced himself and I replied, “Well, who else would you be?” Mrs Kogi giggled and blamed my impoliteness on nerves. Watanabe said my reaction was understandable given the unusual circumstances. Nonsense, the matchmaker replied, this was quite the norm for her. He glanced at me. “But perhaps
not for Yuko? Certainly, this is my first meeting of this nature. I'm
not used to such self-scrutiny. What to wear? What to say? What not to say? A minefield.” Mrs Kogi's eyebrows moved up and down in confusion as he spoke. I tried not to laugh at the sight but I think he caught my amusement because he smiled too.'

They headed up the steep path of stone slabs and Shige tried his best to make small talk. He was concerned Yuko was cold; she told him she was fine. He hesitated before telling her in a rush of words, ‘Your kimono is most becoming.' Embarrassed perhaps by his forwardness, he turned to look behind them. ‘We appear to have lost Mrs Kogi.' Yuko glanced around. The matchmaker was one hundred feet behind, bent at the hips with her hands on her knees. Yuko's smile was mischievous, if cautious. ‘I hope we haven't incapacitated her.'

‘Watanabe laughed and said, “You're right. No one would marry in Nagasaki again.” He must have noted my unease at those words. He looked annoyed, not at me, but himself. He tipped his head down, as if in confession. “You know what I told myself? This is just a walk with a friend you haven't seen for a long while. A school friend. We lost touch many years ago, perhaps?” I asked, “Wouldn't that make us still strangers?” He considered this. “OK. How about acquaintances in need of reacquaintance?” I felt relieved that he too felt the circumstances odd. “So, Mr Watanabe . . .” He held up his hand. I must call him Shige; we were old friends after
all. “So, Shige . . .” The intimacy of his name on my lips made me blush.'

Yuko enquired after his health and he in turn asked how she was. She could think of nothing to say other than ‘Passably well' and this amused him as they stopped by one of the Western-style clapboard homes painted olive-green. He turned to her. ‘We're so fortunate, don't you think, to live here in Nagasaki? We've come so far. Think of it, Japan shut off for more than two hundred years, and then in 1859 our port was one of those chosen to open to the world. Can you imagine? All those young men from Britain, France, America, coming here, trading our tea, silks and seaweed, making lots of money, yes, selling us weapons and ships, yes, playing fast and loose with our politics, maybe, but helping Japan become what it is today. The end of the shogunate, our navy, the railroads, the lighthouses, our heavy engineering, it's extraordinary, Yuko, but our city helped start all that. We are so lucky to be here.'

She couldn't help but smile at his enthusiasm. He asked if she was laughing at him. ‘No, but you make it sound as if we couldn't have done it on our own.'

He shook his head. ‘I didn't mean to suggest that. But can you imagine, Yuko, doing what they did? When you see all those ships down by the docks, could you imagine one day, leaving all you had known, going to a strange country, building something out of nothing?'

His exuberance after so many days of misery was intoxicating. Yuko gazed at the sea and beyond to the horizon. She could not imagine a life beyond Nagasaki. Hers had been contained to her island of Kyushu, to visits
to her aunt in Fukuoka north of Nagasaki, eating smoked eel and caramelised pork in Kagoshima to the south, day trips to fishing villages to the east and west, and Iōjima. The rest of the world remained a flat map on her father's study wall. Kenzo would point out the Japanese footprint on other lands: Korea, Taiwan, Port Arthur, Tsingtao in China, the Marshall, Caroline and Mariana Islands and Manchuria, but that was different. She understood the world was more than naval bases and the stamp of soldiers' boots on foreign soil. If she were to leave, she asked Shige, where would he suggest she go? He spoke of Asia and Europe and America. ‘Think of all those Japanese already living in Hawaii or the west coast of America. The Wild Wild West? Would you come, Yuko?'

Mrs Kogi was upon them before she could respond. ‘You young things, so much energy,' she wheezed. Shige smiled at both women. ‘I have a suggestion. Why don't we walk up to Thomas Glover's house?' The Scottish trader's bungalow had been built above the waterfronts of Oura and Sagarimatsu. The house, with its wooden veranda, a roof shaped like a four-leaf clover and the demon heads on red tiles, had a fine view across the bay to the Mitsubishi shipyard. Yuko thought of climbing to that high spot, the brief freedom she might feel seeing an expanse of water to those unknown lands. ‘I'd like that.' He nodded, pleased. ‘I hear a performance of
Madama Butterfly
is coming here in summer.' He blushed, perhaps embarrassed his remark sounded like an invitation. A rumoured love affair between Glover and a Japanese woman was thought to be the inspiration behind the opera's story of the young pregnant girl
Cio-cio, abandoned by an American husband and later driven to suicide. The matchmaker lifted a fluttering hand to her gold locket. ‘Poor Cio-cio, such tragedy.'

‘The name caught me. I was back in Chinatown in the mildewed room, Jomei's hand on my shoulder, whispering the name in my ear. Surely, the name was a coincidence, or was Mother right? Had Jomei only seen me as some plaything to use for a while? What would have happened if Father had not come that day? Had I expected Jomei to leave his wife and marry me? What if, like Cio-Cio, I'd fallen pregnant? What would have happened to me, the child? The distraction that Shige might have been, if only for some moments, was broken. Mrs Kogi filled the void with her chirrup but after a while Shige must have realised my silence was more than a bout of shyness.'

He asked if Yuko was feeling unwell. She hated the weak lie but could think of no other: she had slept badly but she had enjoyed their day. ‘I apologise, Mrs Kogi, I'll be unable to eat cake with you.'

The matchmaker forced a tight smile. ‘I'm sorry you're feeling unwell, Yuko.' There was an awkward pause, while Shige seemed to assess what had happened.

‘He glanced at me and asked, “Might we do this again?” I looked at him, this engineer. He was not as unpleasant as I had feared,
handsome even. Still, the thought of marriage is preposterous. The
fever of Jomei will never leave; I will carry him forever. This Shige can never compete. He is some distant satellite to Jomei's sun, but the doctor is gone, I have heard nothing from him. No word. The cruelty of such disregard. What remains? Mother says marriage is not about love but practicalities, and that true lasting love is built over time. Maybe she is right, and even if she is wrong, I need to be allowed more time. Maybe a life exists beyond Jomei, beyond this engineer,
a life just for me, bound by no others. So I told this Shige Watanabe that I would agree to see him again. He smiled and said another meeting would be passable for him too.'

Ai-ai-gasa: In feudal times, men and women in intimate relations were not supposed to be close together in public, to say nothing of linking arms or holding hands. One of the rare occasions this was permissible was a rainy day when they could enjoy intimacy by sharing an umbrella. Therefore, if a man offered one to a woman, it was often interpreted as an implicit expression of his love for her. Since then a man and a woman in love have been described as sharing an umbrella.

That is how Shige and Yuko began, on the Dutch Slope. If Sato was Iōjima and Chinatown, Shige was Nagasaki. Yuko and he would meet at some landmark, find ways to distract Mrs Kogi with cake at a cafe and retreat to a sheltered spot. He would tell her the history of her own city and she would marvel at how little she knew, so ignorant of such a familiar place.
‘I have walked the cobbles, and passed the buildings, and watched the ships arrive and
know
nothing.'
Shige brought the place to life. They passed shops selling lanterns, spectacles or parasols and he conjured up those foreigners drawn here by trade and industry and adventure. Christians from the West and Chinese from the East marked the city's architecture and their bones filled the ground. Yuko would listen to his stories and beneath the wood and metal and stone she began to appreciate the human foundations that
lay among the physical structures. Shige spoke of the Portuguese traders in the sixteenth century, the rise and then suppression of Christianity, the Dutch and Chinese traders allowed entry to Nagasaki. They lived within designated areas to suppress smuggling, the spread of the Bible, the debasement of public morals. Little remained of the houses built for the Chinese in Juzenji-Go in 1689 save for a few stones, a ditch, some lattice doors. Yuko tried to understand what it must have been like to be one of those inhabitants kept in isolation. Shige read from a history book, ‘Tenkohodo was built for the sea goddess, Maso.' He drew a circle with his arm. ‘All the buildings were surrounded by three rings of containment: a six-foot fence, an empty moat and another bamboo fence.'

Yuko thought of those traders handing over rent to live like this, cut off from the world, and yet a conduit between countries as they sent and received goods. The fan-shaped man-made island of Dejima was built for the Dutch in 1636 and stretched two hundred feet from east to west and two hundred yards on the north and south side. To enter over the bridge a ticket was required. Shige skipped on to a list of the exports that poured through this place to Holland. Yuko imagined the ships as they sailed past the circular stone arc built into the sea. She saw the shine of copper, silver and gold; she felt the textures of the ceramics and lacquerware, the raw silk, shark skin and wood. She smelled the spices and tasted the strange new food: the sweet biscuits, the chocolate, beer, sour coffee, ham and vinegar.

The weeks passed but still she could not extricate
herself from the siege of Sato. Summer and autumn played on a constant loop in her head, a cinema reel of sand and sea and Chinatown and that last afternoon. No matter how much she raged against her weakness, she still thought of him.
‘Stupid, stupid, forget, forget.'
She wrote prayers on paper and burned incense and visited the temples accompanied by Mrs Goto and her wishes were the same: exorcise this man from my body and mind. But he remained.
‘My imagination is my enemy. Thoughts of where he is and who he is with torment me. I see other women, giving themselves to him as I have. I fill my head with Mother's words. He did not love me. He saw how weak I was and he left with no afterthought or regret. Mother says Jomei does not grieve for me. I was a distraction, some toy with which to play. Forget him.'

On those afternoons with Shige, she looked for Sato in the faces of men in the street, in the bodies emerging from restaurants or bars, and she saw him everywhere and nowhere.

As she fought this contagion of Sato, Shige would tease her. ‘The Children's Society of Jesus, let's see, well, the building used to be Maria-en.' He stopped reading. ‘Daydreaming again?'

‘Just thinking.'

‘Of what?'

‘What you were saying. All these people here in the city, all their stories, all their joy, all their pain.'

Did he see the longing for a man other than him? She worried that she was snaring Shige in some lie. She did not think of love, or its more reckless relative, passion; she thought only of Shige's kindness and attention and
the way he said her name as if it were a pleasure on his lips. His company was a comfort and they had the common currency of Nagasaki. These were not nothing. She began to catch the details of him, the way he rubbed his right eyebrow when preoccupied, the slight bruising around his knuckles from the boxing he practised to keep fit, the strength of his hands, different from Sato's slim, surgical fingers.

One day as bloated clouds carried the weight of rain, they went to Kajiya-machi and walked around the Sofukuji temple, which had been built for Chinese residents. More than three hundred years later, two stone lions still guarded the red entrance. They stood beside a robed gold Buddha statue in the main hall when Shige turned to her, aware once more that Yuko seemed distracted. ‘You seem not yourself?'

She felt a surge of irritation. ‘How would you know? We do not know one another.'

Shige said nothing but instead walked up to an inscription written in gold on a blue wooden banner above their heads. ‘If one should some merit make, do it then again, again. One should wish for it anew, for merit grows to joy.' He smiled. ‘I like the sentiment. Happiness must be earned by good deeds.' Shige looped his umbrella on his arm and pulled out a brown package from his suit pocket. ‘I have a present for you.'

He watched as she unwrapped the paper to reveal a tin of pencils and a sketch pad bound in cream calfskin. ‘Your mother mentioned you like to draw. I thought you could sketch on our excursions.'

Yuko had not drawn since Iōjima but she thanked
him, touched if also saddened by the gift. She walked up to a tree covered with hundreds of prayers written on folded pieces of white paper. These handwritten blessings for love, or children, or prosperity were knotted onto branches, which hung low with the weight of all those desires. Early-morning rain had turned some of the handwritten notes to ink smudges, but those underneath the top layer were protected and dry. Yuko touched one of the prayers. ‘Have you ever felt your life is out of your own control?'

He was gentle with her. ‘Of course.'

‘Really?'

‘Of course, right now, for a start. I wouldn't wish for you to be here if it were against your will.'

‘And if I were?'

‘Are you?'

‘Of course not.' They walked past red and yellow lanterns and stood next to a giant cauldron made to feed victims of famine hundreds of years ago.

‘Marriage is –'

‘Perhaps we should not speak of that yet?'

He nodded his agreement. ‘Shall we go somewhere else? If you have time we could go to the cathedral? Maybe you could draw?'

Their footsteps were silent on the flagstones as they made their way from the red temple. Shige looked up and even though the rain was yet to fall he opened up his umbrella and Yuko walked beside him, the closest they had been in each other's company.
‘He gave me enough space and only our elbows touched but he is drawing nearer, working up to the question. I know the moment is coming when
I will have to choose between the kind, living man who stands in front of me, or the ghost of the doctor. As the first drops came I could think of only one question: does Shige represent the three rings of fence, moat and bamboo, or could he be the world beyond them?'