One Morning Like a Bird (6 page)

    ‘Any business?’

    ‘
J’ai vu
Alissa,’ begins Junzo, ‘in Kyobashi with one of her piano students. She said her father has agreed to a film evening, the first Sunday of next month. She asked me to suggest a film.’

    ‘You?’

    ‘Why not?’

    ‘I hope you didn’t ask for
Cyrano de Bergerac
again,’ says Taro. ‘Why don’t we have
The Thief of Baghdad
or
Iron Horse
?’

    ‘My vote,’ says Yuji, ‘is for
The Blue Angel
. Or maybe
Flesh and the Devil
.’

    ‘It doesn’t matter what you want,’ says Junzo. ‘She asked me and I said we’d be happy with anything by Chaplin. Any objections?’

    There are no objections.

    ‘That’s enough French,’ says Taro, flicking his eyes towards another bather, a sharp-featured man, who, nursing his beer, has, perhaps, been taking an interest in them, this foreign babble between them. They lean away from each other, sit on their heels again.

    ‘But you’re really making progress,’ says Yuji, softly, in Japanese, to Junzo, and though he says no more, not wanting to cause embarrassment or a swollen head, he considers Junzo’s progress in the language to be nothing less than remarkable. For himself, for Taro, there were the years with Professor Komada. They could even count Monsieur Feneon as one of their teachers, for everyone made good progress once the professor persuaded him to take the short walk from his house each month in order that the senior class might come to know for the first time an actual Frenchman. The other members of the club, Shozo and Oki, have all the resources of the language school at Keio. Only Junzo (who in his first term at Imperial successfully pestered his brother to show him this club where Japanese and foreigners mingled so informally) has had to rely on his own efforts, on the occasional class from Taro, some prompting from Yuji. Alissa, of course, is always patient with him, untangling his grammar, making him study her lips as she pronounces some phrase the Japanese mouth seems hardly framed for.

    Across the room, the mah-jong ends with shouts, accusations. Two of the players walk out, the other two growl like street dogs. Mr Watanabe, with an expression of high disdain, totters away to the kitchen and the rattan armchair beside the hot-air flue, a snug corner for drinking shochu and smoking homemade cigarettes, and where, once or twice a year, sleep hitting him like a wave, he sets fire to himself and wakes to the sound of his own shrieking.

    Hungry, suddenly bored of the old bathhouse, the three friends put on still-damp shoes and coats and march through the cold to eat sushi at Kawashima’s. They arrive as three others are leaving and take their places along the counter on three warmed stools. Behind them, the tables have their usual mix of diners, the casual, and those of a more serious character, for though the most dedicated of the
tsu
will not eat sushi later than midday, fearing for its freshness, even at night there are men who lean over their food like scholars, who eat without speaking, who know everything . . .

    Yuji has squid and tuna belly, mackerel, kuruma prawn. The little plates mount up. He becomes morose at the thought of the expense. Kawashima’s is far from cheap, and once he has paid Taro what he owes him, he will have spent a week’s money in an evening – a perfect example of the recklessness he can no longer afford. But as his mood blackens so his appetite grows perversely sharper. He tries the blue-fin, the scallop, the Pacific saury.

    ‘I thought you were out of cash,’ says Junzo. ‘The allowance?’

    ‘Exactly,’ says Yuji.

    ‘That’s tough,’ says Taro.

    ‘On the positive side,’ says Junzo, dipping the tip of a little finger into the Murasaki sauce, ‘perhaps your need will inspire you.’

    ‘To leap into the Sumida?’

    ‘Ah, but are you the type?’

    ‘Seriously,’ asks Taro, ‘what will you do now?’

    ‘Shave my head and squat in the subway with a begging bowl.’

    ‘You could still take the Civil Service exams  . . .’

    ‘I’m too old. It would look odd. Like I had failed at something else.’

    ‘There’s always school teaching,’ says Junzo. ‘Couldn’t you bear it for a year or two?’

    ‘Just the smell of a classroom makes me want to throw up.’

    ‘Well, there’ll be something for you,’ says Taro. ‘A man of your talent.
Something
will come along.’

    Yuji thanks him, but in that moment all three fall silent as if struck by the same thought, the same vision of what, one day soon, might come along for them. Their silence catches the sushi-master’s attention. He glances up – three young men scowling at the polished wood of the counter – but his hands go on with their work. There is no discernible pause in the movement of his blade.

8

Out of the throng at the Kanda bookstalls, boss-eyed Ooka taps the shoulder of Yuji’s greatcoat and tells him he’s seen a copy of
Electric Dragonfly
on sale, good as new, not a crease or a thumbprint, nothing, in fact, to suggest that anyone has even held it, yet alone read it. It was on Yoshimasu’s stall but maybe it’s gone now.

    ‘I expect some pretty girl has bought it. Pretty girls like poetry, don’t they?’ He laughs, and Yuji laughs, too, then comes straight home and shuts himself in his room.

    How many others are there out there, untouched, unread, not even a crease or a thumbprint, no tea ring, no ink splash? Is there anything sadder or more useless in the world than a book of poems nobody wants?

9

Though Grandfather’s home lies within the thirty-five wards of the city, reaching it is like going on a trip to the country. Tram, subway, train, then a forty-minute walk past new homes, building plots, fields of tea, rice paddies, even a pair of thatched farmhouses like Uncle Kensuke’s.

    From the garden gates a gravel pathway curves between persimmon and plum trees, jujube, maples. Then after a hundred steps the ground on one side is suddenly clear, and there, beneath a dreaming pine, is the old rickshaw, its leather hood bright with moss, its painted spokes woven with long grasses. It is not
the
rickshaw, of course, the one in which, in the time of the Meiji Emperor (or so the story is told), the eighteen-year-old grandfather – already known among his fellow runners as ‘Iron Thighs’ – pulled some eccentric actor the 230 miles from Tokyo to Kyoto to attend a moon-viewing party in a villa above the Daisen Temple. This one, used now by the hens as a roost, is only a souvenir bought for a few yen from a scrap merchant in Honjo, but each time Yuji passes, he is tempted to lift its shafts out of the grass, to lean his weight against the chest bar, to rock it a little. Has he inherited any of the old man’s skill or strength? How far would he get, even with hens for passengers? As far as the station? As far as the road?

    Another hundred steps and the house appears, low and weathered under a heavy roof of blue tiles. Grandfather’s housekeeper, Sonoko, is outside, leaning over a starching board she has propped against one of the verandah corner posts. Hearing Yuji, she straightens and wipes her brow with the back of her hand, like a countrywoman looking up from harvesting. She’s forty, forty-five. Dark-skinned, a few freckles across her cheeks, broad hips swelling the lines of her kimono. Pretty in a rustic, old-world way, and with some unusual quality of stillness, of inner poise, that makes Yuji think how pleasant it would be to lie with his head on her lap and sleep for an hour, as he assumes – as everyone assumes – Grandfather sometimes does.

    ‘He’s in the model room,’ she says.

    He thanks her, though he would have looked nowhere else on a winter’s day at such an hour, just as, arriving on a summer’s morning, he would look first in the vegetable garden, or in autumn, in the shade of the trellis outside the kitchen where the pickling barrels are kept.

    He pulls off his boots, crosses the eight-mat room, and announces himself at the doors to the twelve-mat, the model room. After a few moments he receives an invitation to enter.

    ‘I need your young eyes,’ says Grandfather, who is kneeling at the far end of the room, his head almost touching the mat as he peers under the shin-high table that carries the model. ‘There’s a boat down here somewhere. I must have caught it on my sleeve.’

    Yuji kneels beside him. After half a minute he finds the boat in the shadow of a table leg. He lifts it, carefully, as though lifting a little singing insect, a
kusa-hibari
, perhaps, and places it in the palm of Grandfather’s hand.

    ‘I need stronger lights in here,’ says Grandfather. ‘Or,’ tapping an arm of his glasses, ‘a stronger pair of these.’

    The boat, he explains, is a sweet-seller’s boat, the kind that used to be common enough on summer evenings in the old days, advertising its presence with the beating of a drum and carrying such delights as ‘moss in a stream’ and ‘the beautiful Bay of Tango’. He smiles to himself, smiles at his modern, half-Westernised grandson (a creature he should, perhaps, disapprove of, but never has, treating him always with a shrewd generosity of judgement which the boy’s father – the professor, the travelled man! – seems incapable of), then he takes a pair of bamboo tweezers and sets the boat down on the Sumida, that length of curving blue satin he cut from one of his wife’s obi the year she died, the year the model began.

    ‘So,’ he says, brushing a hand over the stubble on his skull, ‘I told you I had some interesting new pieces. Think you can find them?’

    Pausing now and then to crouch and look more keenly, Yuji, in a sideways shuffle, slowly moves the length of the room where, on a table that leaves only the narrowest of corridors, the Low City, from Tsukiji to Umaya Bridge, has been rebuilt out of paper and pins, out of memory and street maps and stories. Hundreds of cardboard roofs, bicycles made from fuse wire, trees whose foliage is skeins of coloured wool. The sides of trams are cut from tins of soya oil. Utility wires are black thread from Sonoko’s sewing box. Those dogs coupling outside the fish market are chewed paper and Chinese ink, their tails a pair of bristles from a writing brush. The Low City, as it might have appeared the last day of August 1923. Still hours to go before anyone will notice a light bulb start to swing or see ripples in the surface of his tea.

    ‘These are new, I think,’ says Yuji, pointing to two geisha, tall as thimbles outside a tea house in the Yanagibashi district.

    ‘Shall we see where they’re going?’ asks Grandfather. He holds back the sleeve of his kimono and lifts off the roof of the tea house. Below – and Yuji half expects to see their faces turned up in horror – the tea-house guests are gathered in matted, discreetly screened rooms, while maids and brightly painted geisha dance attendance. Some twelve or fifteen of Grandfather’s buildings have been treated this way, including, below its roof garden, the top floor of the old Mitsukoshi, where Mother was shopping with Mrs Hatanaka when the first shocks hit the city, and where, escaping over the glass of the shattered display cases, she cut her feet so badly.

    At midday, Sonoko calls them to eat. They sit around the table-stove. An iron pot is simmering on a stone tile. Sonoko, her hand wrapped in a piece of scorched linen, takes off the lid. Steam pours out, a scent of braised onions, the earthy scent of turnips and something else, something ripe and sweet and bloody.

    ‘Mountain whale?’ asks Yuji, using Grandfather’s name for the wild boar.

    ‘I thought we would have something special today,’ says Grandfather, ‘as your visits are rather infrequent.’

    ‘I apologise,’ says Yuji, ‘I would come more  . . .’

    ‘Have I,’ says Grandfather, ‘told you how, one winter, when I was out at Shizuoka, we hunted the young boars?’

    ‘Hunting  . . .’ says Yuji, who has heard the story many times. ‘At Shizuoka?’

    ‘All they could find to eat at such a season was yam. They dug them up, ate them until they were stuffed. As soon as we had shot one, we opened its belly, hauled out the guts. Ready-made yam sausages! Cooked them over the embers of a fire. Ate them with the snow falling on our shoulders  . . . Ah, a feast like that and you’re ready for the Mongol hordes!’