One Morning Like a Bird (16 page)

    ‘Anyway,’ she says, ‘might it be better if you left before Grandmother arrives?’

    He nods, hands her the tea tray. ‘It was nice to meet you today,’ he says.

    ‘I am glad you are well,’ she says. ‘Please have good luck with your new work.’

    He thanks her again and leaves. He does not look back. He is afraid he will see a boy in a high-collared uniform, white gloves on his hands, crouching at the warriors’ sandalled feet. He is afraid that if he turns the boy will leap down and pursue him through the park, enraged, swift as a fox.

23

As the embarrassment of doing the piece is now outweighed by the shame that would follow from not doing it, from being discovered as a liar, a fantasist, a person who should immediately be sent to dig shelters beneath the streets of Tokyo, he calls Makiyama’s office and leaves a message with Kiyooka that he would, if it is still possible, if he has not left it too late, be grateful to accept Mr Makiyama’s generous suggestion of a study of Kaoru Ishihara.

    ‘By the way,’ drawls Kiyooka, ‘we have one of your socks here. Perhaps you would like to collect it?’

24

At the dining table in the Western room he reads an account of the German Army’s capture of Copenhagen. This time there is no attempt to claim that the action was intended to protect the inhabitants from an aggressor. The Danes have simply been absorbed into the Reich. The audaciousness of the attack, the speed with which both the city and the country have been conquered by small forces of determined soldiers, is a lesson, so the author of the article suggests, the Japanese military will surely wish to profit from.

    He folds the paper (which today has a special supplement on patriotic recipes) and looks into the garden at Miyo crouching on the path beside the bamboo. What is she doing there? The door onto the verandah is open. He goes outside and crouches beside her. She points into the heart of the bamboo, the little depression where the cat made its nest. He cannot see anything at first – the ground there is densely striped with shadow. Then he notices the death-shrunken form of a kitten, and nearby, partly buried under the pale leaves, a second.

    ‘Did none survive?’ he asks.

    She puts a finger to her lips.

25

The day before the Emperor’s birthday, Yuji cycles to the Kanda bookstalls to buy second-hand editions of Ishihara’s novels. In warm streets under a faultless sky even Yuji with his old habits of self-care, his sick-boy’s caution, is dressed for the good weather – open-neck shirt, flannel trousers, canvas shoes.

    To find Ishihara’s books will be easy enough. The people who read him are not collectors. When the story has been read the book is empty, used up. Those who can be bothered dispose of them for a few sen at the stalls. The rest leave them under their seats in the subway or on the luggage racks of trains, where they become part of the city’s unofficial circulating library.

    On Ooka’s stall half a dozen of the books are on prominent display, but Yuji does not want to explain himself to Ooka, who will certainly try to make a joke about this new and unexpected interest. He slides past to Shinkichi’s stall. Shinkichi is a sullen man who does not enter into conversation with his customers. He buys
Song of Death
,
The Last Assault, Tears of a Hero, Blood and Beauty, Mother Behind My Eyes
. Each of them has some wild illustration on the cover. A pair of schoolboys splashed in their own gore, gazing at each other passionately in the moment of death. A pair of samurai with gaping wounds, gazing at each other admiringly in the moment of death. A grieving mother kneeling under a rain of blood  . . .

    Shinkichi makes a parcel of the books. Yuji hangs the parcel from his handlebars. He has what he came for but cannot quite resist going the ten yards to Yoshimasu’s stall to look there (under the guise of general browsing, of an idle and utterly carefree examination of the stock) for that unloved edition of
Electric Dragonfly
.

    Has someone bought it? Has the pretty girl Ooka laughed about taken it home with her, where even now she is lying on the mats of her room reading it aloud to herself while a drop of tea slides from the rim of her cup to leave a perfectly neat little splash on the page? He rests the bicycle’s crossbar against his belly, starts to flick through the piles. There are volumes here, armfuls of them by people he has never heard of, young poets who, no doubt, considered themselves on the cusp of a brilliant career, then found they could not fly again. What became of them? Where have they gone? What becomes of those who have ceased to promise?

    Around him the day suddenly darkens, as if at the passing of some large and unpalatable truth, but the moment is fleeting, the sunlight falls on the back of his neck again, and when he finds
Electric Dragonfly
in its pristine cover (a line-drawn dragonfly, a lily pad) he silently greets it, lifts it deftly to the top of the pile, and turns away, wheeling his bicycle through the crooked corridor between the stalls.

    At the end of the street, he hesitates, looks in both directions, then climbs into the saddle and rides towards the Russian Cathedral. It is not the way home, certainly not the most direct way, but the route will lead him past Feneon’s house. The unwisdom of this, the untimeliness, is perfectly evident to him, but makes no difference. He brakes as the house comes into view, freewheels past the shut front door, his heart like a stone in his throat. What did he expect? That Feneon would be sitting on the doorstep looking out for him? Or Hanako waiting with a message – ‘Everything is understood, everything is excused. Please come back’?

    He stops outside the fan shop, looks over his shoulder. Should he ride past again, keep riding up and down until at last someone comes out? At his side, in the shade of the shop’s awning, a little girl is playing with a doll. She tells Yuji the doll’s name, holds it out to him, the grubby wood of its limbs, the painted blue eyes. He nods to her and rides away.

That night he has another fire dream, unforeseen, unseasonable. In the dream he finds Dr Kushida cross-legged on a pile of corpses, his skin flaking from him like the skin of a grilled fish. Miss Feneon, says the doctor, has a message for him. She is out there somewhere (he waves a ruined hand). Yuji must search for her before it is too late. ‘Look at your watch,’ says the doctor, then sighs and settles back on the corpses as the flames creep over him like red and blue vermin.

    Yuji wakes. He gropes his way off the mattress, reaches up for the light. His watch is lying as a bookmark inside
Tears of a Hero
. He takes it out and squints at it. Ten to four! Ten minutes to find the boy. Ten minutes before the fire falls. Ten minutes to be ready.

    And what message could she possibly have that should delay him?

PART 2

The Drunken Boat

I drifted on a river I could not control,

No longer guided by the bargeman’s ropes.

                                               Arthur Rimbaud

1

Ishihara’s house is in the southern suburb of Azabu. It is not easy to reach and for the last part of his journey Yuji has been forced to the expense of a taxi, the young driver taking several wrong turns before arriving on a tree-lined street, a place half rustic, half genteel, with nothing to disturb the singing of birds and insects except a small party of children playing soberly in the care of a servant.

    Outside the gate, in the partial shade of a tree, is a large, brilliantly polished car, an Armstrong Siddeley (the new six-cylinder Merton model) with tan leather seats, walnut dashboard, headlights under peaks of chromed steel. Yuji tidies his hair in the glass of the car’s rear window, then tries the garden gate. It’s locked. He looks for a bell but finds instead a cabinet at the side of the gate with the end of a speaking tube inside. How does one begin with a speaking tube? He utters his name into the mouthpiece, listens to the hissing of air, closes the cabinet and waits. After several minutes a bolt is drawn and a man two or three years Yuji’s senior stands in the gateway, the expression on his face suggesting he has been needlessly disturbed from important work. He is dressed in a finely cut lightweight suit. His hair is cropped like a soldier’s and there’s a small scar by his right eye but he’s as pretty as an
onnagata
. In reply to Yuji’s bow he says he is Ota, Ishihara’s personal secretary, then, saying nothing more, he shuts the gate and leads Yuji around the side of the house – a two-storey building in a style not quite indigenous, not quite not – to the garden at the back. Here, the land slopes gently down to a pavilion in the shade of a purple-flowering sandalwood tree. All the pavilion’s screens are open, and on the far verandah a man, stripped to the waist, is vigorously wiping his chest with a cloth. On the wood by his feet is a set of barbells.

    ‘
Sensei!
’ calls Ota. ‘The journalist is here.’

    ‘Who? Oh, he’s not really a journalist,’ says Ishihara, crossing the mats towards them and smiling at Yuji. ‘I’m not sure I would have invited a mere journalist to join us today. Mr Takano is more of a  . . . literary gentleman.’ He laughs, still rubbing himself with the cloth. ‘Won’t you come inside?’ To Ota he gives orders for tea to be brought out. ‘I only drink Ceylon tea,’ he says to Yuji, ‘and in the English way, with lemon and a little sugar. I hope that suits you? I find it helps my concentration.’

    Yuji takes off his shoes and steps into the pavilion. Ishihara picks up a silk shirt the colour of persimmon leaves, puts it on and begins, with slender fingers, to button it. He apologises for not being ready to receive a guest. Yuji apologises for disturbing him.

    ‘You’ll be staying for lunch, of course?’ asks Ishihara.

    ‘Lunch?’

    ‘Just a few of us – Major Yamazaki from the War Ministry; Dick Amazawa, a director with the Shochiku film company; Ota; and you. And you needn’t worry. I haven’t invited our mutual friend, though he speaks rather highly of you. He was quite excited at the thought of your writing a really in-depth piece, quite persuasive.’ His shirt is buttoned now. He lights a cigarette, exhales slowly. ‘So, how shall we begin?’

    ‘However you prefer,’ says Yuji, who, as he crossed the city, had nothing more precise in mind than that he would scribble frantically into the pad he has in his pocket while Ishihara made some sort of speech about himself.

    There is a playful grin on Ishihara’s face. ‘You’re a writer,’ he says. ‘I’m sure you can read a man’s character in the objects he surrounds himself with. This is where I work. It’s what the Americans would call a “den”. Feel free to explore. I shan’t disturb you.’ He turns and goes again to the far verandah with its view across the ample roofs of neighbouring houses, the heads of trees luminous in their fresh May foliage. For a few seconds Yuji stands regarding the other’s back and wondering what exactly he is being tested on. His skill as a writer (if that is what he is)? Or something else, something less obvious?

    He starts to look. The pavilion – the
den
– seems more a place for relaxation, for pleasure, than for the hard, anxious business of writing. At one end, there is a desk of glass and tubular steel, a chair of steel and leather, but the typewriter on the desk seems as ornamental as the vase of white lilacs beside it. There is not, in fact, any paper to be seen.

    At the other end of the room, under a raised and tied mosquito net, is a divan upholstered in peach silk, and on the mats beside it a scattering of magazines –
Vogue
,
Jardin des Modes.

    Bookshelves (coloured glass) hold mainly copies of Ishihara’s own works, though with some unexpected additions: volumes of history and economics, like Shigeo Iwanami’s
Lectures on the Historical Development of Japanese Capitalism
, the same edition Father keeps in the garden study. On the wall between the shelves is a large photograph of Ishihara with an older man, the pair of them muffled in winter coats and standing in front of a monument Yuji has seen before but cannot quite identify.

    ‘The Brandenburg Gate,’ says Ishihara, who has stepped quietly in from the verandah, ‘Berlin. That’s Kyushi Hiraizumi. It was my thirty-fifth birthday. I am, as you should know, almost exactly as old as the century.’

    ‘So you’ve been to Europe?’