The Nicholas Linnear Novels (123 page)

She spent all of the third day contemplating this, taking a little food now when it was offered to her but still wanting to see no one. And at the end of that time, after she had lit incense and prayed to the Amida Buddha for guidance, she asked to see her baby.

“There is no name as yet for this little one, lady,” the old woman who cooked for them and took care of them when they were ill said as she transferred the tiny bundle into Ikan’s trembling arms. “It is bad luck,” she added needlessly.

Ikan dropped her gaze to the tiny face of her daughter, still wrinkly and red skinned.

“Reiko, one of the
kamuro
who failed her examination, has been nursing her,” the old woman said softly as she gazed up into the troubled face of her lady. “This is a hungry little one.” The old woman giggled, hoping to break through the oppressive atmosphere she had sensed when she entered this chamber.

Ikan nodded absently. It did not really matter who nursed the baby; she would not be allowed to.

“I have lit many sticks of incense,” the old woman went on. “I have done what I could to protect this innocent from bad
karma.
But, lady, forgive me, she must have a name.”

Ikan heard, but it was impossible to say what was going on in her mind. She felt enwrapped by her guilt. And now, face to face with the tiny creature she had borne, knowing what kind of a life her unthinking actions had condemned it to, she felt sick at heart.

Her pale lips opened and she whispered, “Yes, old one. A name. I will give you a name.” There was a sighing in the room as if the autumn wind outside had somehow crept through a crack in the window sash and now swirled around them.

Ikan’s eyes were filled with tears so that the tiny face blurred and became indistinct. Her whisper could barely be heard. “Call her Akiko.”

She was an exceptionally healthy child, strong and fully as robust as a boy. She was up and walking early, as if somehow even at that early age she suspected she would need to rely on her own resources to survive. And for all that Ikan grew to love the child, she showed very little overt emotion. Rather she left the supervision of the infant to the old cook and the other girls, all of whom were enchanted with the new baby.

She hung back as if she were afraid of the child, especially during those times when those who ran
Fuyajo
congregated in the infant’s room, leaving their gifts near the sleeping form.

Often Shimada would come to the Castle That Knew No Night and, as before, he would spend the long, languorous nights with Ikan. But the one request she continually denied him was to look at his daughter, to hold her, to speak his first words to her so that she would know that he was her father.

She took exceptional pleasure in keeping Akiko from him. Outwardly she would be attentive, responsive to his every wish, often without his having to utter a word of direction—that was a courtesan’s greatest skill, after all. But all the while she would be gloating inwardly at the unique kind of pain she brought him, and like sadist and masochist, this became a kind of bond between them that somehow brought them closer together—or at least afforded them a more intimate understanding of the essence of one another.

Akiko recalled meeting her father only once, and that was on an unseasonably warm spring day when she was midway between her third and fourth birthdays. She had been playing with Yumi, the old cook, and had returned to her mother’s room as she always did at this time of the day. But instead of her mother waiting for her to comb her hair, she found a man in a chocolate brown suit. He had slightly stooped shoulders, thick features, a grayish mustache no thicker than a pencil, thick, tufty eyebrows like clouds. He smiled when he saw her and she saw his slightly yellowed teeth.

“Akiko-chan,” he said, bowing.

She returned the gesture. She was close enough to smell the halo of cigarette smoke that seemed to envelop him. She wrinkled up her nose and rubbed it with her finger.

“I’ve brought you a present, Akiko-chan.” He bent toward her and held out his hand. Nestled within his palm was an exquisitely carved
netsuke
of a horse with its head down, its forelegs raised as if set for flight or to ward off some unseen advance. It was made of tulipwood.

Akiko stared at it but made no move to take it.

“It’s for you. Don’t you want it?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

So he reached out and, taking her hand, deposited the
netsuke
into her small fist, curling up the fingers around its cool girth. “Now this is just from me to you. Our secret.”

She nodded.
“Domo arigato.”

He smiled down at her and took her other hand. “Now we have the entire afternoon to ourselves.”

It was the time of
hanami
and he took her by train to a small park on the outskirts of the city with gently sloping contours dressed with lines of old cherry trees.

She remembered the smell of the train, an agglomeration of luncheon foods, and could still feel after all those years the tightly packed claustrophobic sensation of being pressed in with so many people. Shimada held her hand tightly but still she was uncomfortable and began to weep silent tears until he picked her up in his arms and held her rocking gently with the motion of the train against his chest.

In the park they stopped in front of a cart selling sweet jellied tofu and he purchased small paper cones filled with the confection for both of them.

The sky was clear and sparkling, so hard seeming that it reminded Akiko of a piece of green glass she had found by the seashore, its edges rounded and smoothed by the constant immersion at the verge of the tidal pull.

Shimada pointed upward, showing her the orange and green box kite with a fierce tiger’s head. Akiko laughed as it dipped and swooped in the wind.

She ate her tofu hungrily and Shimada wiped her cheeks with his snow-white handkerchief. It felt very soft against her skin.

But most of all she remembered the cherry blossoms. It was so quiet here that Akiko thought she could hear the drift of the light pink petals through the clear air and they seemed suspended in time, all motion attenuated, all the world attuned to their drift.

Lifting up her head, she laughed out loud with delight, skipping away from Shimada and back again, grabbing onto his trousers’ leg, pulling him forward, wanting in her own inarticulate way for him to dance too.

She never saw Shimada again, and it was a long time before she understood why. During her time with him she had no inkling that he was her father. Certainly he had never even broached the subject. But yet when she thought back on it through the prism of time, she saw that she had known immediately that he was unlike all the other men she had met in her short life and would meet in the passing years. Shimada was special, just as that memory, piercing the veil of time with such pristine clarity, was special.

What she had not been able to understand was why he had taken his life not more than twenty-four hours after he had watched her, smiling, as she capered through the last hours of the cherry blossoms. She thought she could never forgive him for that and then, upon learning the terrible truth, thought she could never forgive herself.

As for Ikan, she was never the same after Shimada’s death. Like a blossom at
hanami
she had reached her peak of beauty and, having slid past it, could never go back. An intense form of melancholia stole over her like a shroud, etching lines into a face that had been filled with perfection. She drank copious quantities of sakē, often passing out insensate in the middle of an assignation as if the mere state of consciousness was too much for her.

Those who ran
Fuyajo
were understandably perturbed and then, as Dean’s state declined rapidly, filled with anger. She had many more years left in her and, they felt, after she had passed beyond the barriers where sexual union was paramount, she could still fulfill her potential as the house’s finest
sensei
, training the younger women.

But such was not to be. In the spring of 1958, when Akiko was thirteen, Ikan could not be roused from her
futon.
Fright flew through
Fuyajo
like an evil
kami
, turning the girls nervous and short-tempered. All conversation dropped to a whisper as the doctor arrived and took the long, slow climb up to her room. Akiko was kept with a group of the girls and they forcibly restrained her from ascending.

There was no life left within Dean’s glorious husk. The old physician shook his head from side to side and clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. He sat on the edge of her
futon
and stared down upon the pale face and thought that he had never seen such magnificent human beauty in his life.

By her side he found an empty bottle of sakē and a small vial. This, too, was empty, save for a light dusting of white powder along its curved inside. The doctor dipped his little finger and touched the white tip to his tongue. His head nodded again, his tongue continued its clucking.

He heard movement behind him and he quickly pocketed the vial. Perhaps there was something for him to do here, he thought. For when those who ran
Fuyajo
asked him the cause of death, he lifted his shoulders, let them fall resignedly, and told them she had died of heart failure, which in a sense was true.

He felt no compunction about lying to them or even falsifying the death certificate. In fact he felt ennobled by the deed. He had read the papers concerning Vice-Minister Shimada’s shocking suicide and in its aftermath the unraveling of the evidence against him. This woman had endured enough, he thought. Let her death be a peaceful, natural one; a death that will cause no further ripples of evil talk.

Those who ran
Fuyajo
wasted no time in explaining to Akiko what had happened. And at last it dawned on her what the composition of her life would be from this moment on until the day she died, perhaps in precisely the same manner that her mother had expired. And that knowledge was totally unacceptable to her.

That night she gathered up her belongings, much as Ikan had done the night before her departure from her family’s farm deep in the countryside, and several items of her mother’s that she loved and did not want to leave to the scavengers at
Fuyajo.
Stuffing these, too, into a small, battered bamboo suitcase, she stole out of the building in the dead of night. The height of the varied activities served to shield her from discovery.

Soon she was crossing the narrow street and, turning a corner, hurried down a dark alley, moving quickly and surely until she had left the
Yoshiwara
far behind her. She never once looked back, and she never returned.

They came after her, of course. They had every right to. She was an enormously valuable commodity and they had a great many years invested in her. There were no
Yakuza
involved in running
Fuyajo
and the
Boryokudan
held no piece of it. Still, those who had founded the Castle That Knows No Night were hard businessmen and their descendants to whom the running of the brothel now devolved were much like their ancestors. And though the Occupation Forces had begun to disband the
Yoshiwara
, and
Fuyajo
was thus forced to move, they did not take kindly to Akiko’s defection. In fact, they wished to put an end to it as swiftly as possible. To that end they dispatched two thugs to return her to her proper home and, if that were not practical, to exact from her the highest possible penalty for her treacherous deed.

The first Akiko suspected that she was being followed was when she saw two shadows moving at once, one slightly ahead of her and one perhaps two blocks behind her. She would never have seen the shadows at all—for they were absolutely silent—had it not been for the cat. Four tiny kittens had been suckling at the cat’s distended teats when Akiko stumbled into her territory and, startled, she had arisen and, arching her back, hissed at the intruding shape, baring her teeth and glaring carnelian eyes into the wan light.

Akiko gasped, her heart pounding painfully in her chest, and she skidded to one side, her head and shoulders moving away from the angered cat even as her feet and legs were still sliding along the pavement toward it. That’s when she saw the twin movements, and her eyes went wide.

She pressed herself against a cool wall, looked to front and back. Now there was nothing. Silence. The absence of traffic was eerie and not even a
kōban
, a police call box, around.

She was still in the Asakusa district, filled with the old traditional ways, Tokyo’s last remnants from ages gone by. The buildings here were small and low, of wood and oiled paper as they once had been throughout Japan, no steel and glass towers as in other sectors of the city.

Akiko, her heart still in her throat, sidled away from the bristling cat, certain now that the long arm of
Fuyajo
was stalking her. But there was no way they were going to bring her back to that hated place, she decided. She would die first. And not before she hurt someone badly.

A red rage beat through her like a tide, an accumulated sizzling she was still only dimly aware of. Quickly she knelt down and as she did so, a dark flicker came to the corner of her eye, a swift blur like a racing cloud obscuring for a moment the face of the moon.

Unhesitatingly she opened her bamboo suitcase and took out the pistol. It was fairly small, a pearl-handled .22 caliber, well oiled and in good operating condition. It was fully loaded, she had double-checked that before she had removed it from its hiding place beneath her mother’s
futon.
Why Ikan would have such an implement in her possession Akiko could not fathom, but the day she had discovered it more than a year ago she had had enough sense not to tell anyone, not even her mother, what she had found. And tonight she had not wanted to leave it behind. Now she knew why.

They were closing in. Akiko swiftly closed her suitcase and stood calmly, the pistol hidden behind her. Curiously, she felt no fear. She had been born into the night, and darkness held none of the primitive terror it did for many people. She was at home in its furtive light and rather enjoyed the anonymity its shadows afforded her. Night at
Fuyajo
would find her rising from her
futon
to roam the many rooms at will, honing her instincts and her hand-eye coordination, stealthily climbing back stairs and crawling through vent passageways in order to observe the myriad couples.