One Morning Like a Bird Read online

  CONTENTS

  One Morning Like a Bird

  Imprint Page

  Dedication

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Part Two

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Part Three

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Historical Note

  Author's Note

  One Morning Like a Bird

  Andrew Miller

  www.hodder.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2008 by Sceptre

  An imprint of Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette Livre UK company

  Copyright © Andrew Miller 2008

  The right of Andrew Miller to be identified as the Author

  of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance

  with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  ‘I May Live On Until’ by Fujiwara no Kiyosuke, Translated by Kenneth Roxroth,

  from ONE HUNDRED POEMS FROM THE JAPANESE, copyright © All Rights Reserved by

  New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

  Excerpt from ‘One morning like a bird . . .’ by Hitomaro, Translated by Kenneth Roxroth,

  from ONE HUNDRED POEMS FROM THE JAPANESE, copyright © 1955 by

  New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

  ‘Will I Cease to Be’ by Lady Izumi Shikibu, Translated by Kenneth Roxroth,

  from ONE HUNDRED POEMS FROM THE JAPANESE, copyright © 1955

  by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,

  or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher,

  nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which

  it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious

  and any resemblance to real persons,

  living or dead is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  Epub ISBN 9781848948242

  Book ISBN 9780340825150

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.hodder.co.uk

  For Frieda

  PART 1

  Fire Dreams

  I may live on until

  I long for this time

  In which I am so unhappy,

  And remember it fondly.

  Fujiwara No Kiyosuke

  1

  He is squatting in his room in the High City, an open book in one hand, the fingers of the other hand stretched towards the glazed blue belly of a brazier. The room is small, the old sewing room, only four and a half mats, and made even smaller by the clothes that hang from the beading along the walls, by the piled books, by the bedding still unrolled from the previous night, though it is already past seven o’clock and pitch dark outside, this last evening of the year.

  It has been his room ever since he was sent to sleep there on his return from Uncle Kensuke’s after the Great Earthquake. The first room he ever slept in on his own and where, in his twenty-first year – the eleventh of the Showa Era – he wrote, between the February coup attempt and the end-of-the-summer cicadas, all the poems in Electric Dragonfly, a miraculous season, but one that has never returned . . .

  He sighs, withdraws the hand he was warming, turns the page of his book, transfers the book to the warmed hand and holds out the other to the charcoal. He is reading in French – not his beloved Rimbaud, but a tale by André Gide he read in Professor Komada’s class at Nihon – a strange romance he did not quite understand then, and which now, for entirely different reasons, he is failing to understand for a second time. For how is he to concentrate on the adventures of Gérard Lacase when so many other matters – matters that cannot simply be pushed aside – turn the words on the page into marks as meaningless as the light reflected in the panels of the drying-platform door beside him? So the young hero (who confesses to knowing nothing of life except through books) must set out again and again for the château of la Quartfourche while Yuji examines from every futile angle the latest and most pressing of his difficulties, the matter of his allowance, of its cessation, announced to him by Father in the garden study three days ago, no warning, no warming up, everything delivered in a kind of distracted aside, Yuji by the door, Father at his writing table, smoking and peering at the end of a bookshelf . . . Apparently, the allowance had become a burden on the household economy. There was a need to make changes, to curtail expenses. It was the new circumstances, etc. An unfortunate but necessary measure, though at twenty-five he was surely old enough, etc. He was thanked for his understanding. It was understood, of course, that he understood.

  ‘With immediate effect?’

  ‘From the New Year.’

  ‘Ah.’

  So now he must find ways of making up the difference, the difference being almost everything. He will have to rely on people like old Horikawa, on Hideo Makiyama, a future of hackwork like the copy he wrote in November for the West Japan Shipping Corporation. (The newest ships! The fastest routes! Niigata docks are truly a gateway to the world!) Is this how a life goes wrong? How ambition is cut off and talent thwarted, so the fishmonger can be paid?

  In the street below, too narrow for much in the way of traffic, a car is creeping towards the house. It stops beneath his window. A minute later the front entrance slides open and a voice, the sort that might emerge from the throat of a speaking bear, calls, ‘Is this a house of ghosts? Where are you all?’

  Yuji drops the book onto his bedding, shrugs off the blanket he has been wearing round his shoulders, stands and descends – careful on the polished wood – the steep, unlit L of the stairs.

  ‘Grandfather!’

  ‘Grandson!’

  Yuji bows. Miyo takes the old man’s cape. It’s almost too heavy for her, like some huge, dark moth she
has captured. Under the cape, Grandfather is wearing a kimono of slate-blue silk, an inch or two of saffron at the sleeves. Father comes in from the study. He greets Grandfather – an exchange of the slightest, most stubborn nods – then the three of them go through the Western room to the Japanese room, where, with Grandfather in the honour place, the alcove behind him, they settle onto sitting cushions. The brazier here is the largest in the house yet seems to warm only the tips of their noses, their knees and fingertips. For most of the winter the room is unused, but the Western room, with its comfortable furniture, its electric heater, would not be quite proper at New Year.

  ‘A good trip over?’ asks Father.

  ‘A driver I’ve had before. He knows his way around.’

  ‘He’ll collect you later? You know you are welcome to stay . . .’

  ‘These days I prefer to wake in my own house.’

  ‘Mmm. I understand. And how is your health?’

  ‘Better than yours, I expect. Books will cripple a man faster than digging in his garden ever will. Look at you. You can’t even sit with a straight back.’

  ‘Well, I shall have more time for the garden now.’

  ‘And Noriko?’

  ‘Noriko?’

  ‘She’s joining us?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘No? A pity.’

  ‘Yes. A pity.’

  Grandfather frowns. Father frowns and stares at the matting. On each visit the same question about Mother. On each visit the same reply. A ritual neither seems able to abandon.

  The front entrance again. A voice calling its greeting.

  ‘That’ll be Kushida,’ says Father, standing and going to receive him.

  Yuji, left alone with Grandfather, wonders if there might be some way of hinting at the matter of his allowance, of its cessation etc, the difficulty it will cause, the sheer unfairness of it, but the old man, with his wide, wind-burnt face, looks as if he is stirring an enjoyable anger somewhere in his depths. It is not perhaps the moment.

  ‘You haven’t been out to see me for a while,’ says Grandfather.

  ‘Please excuse me . . . I’ve been meaning to.’

  ‘I’ve made some interesting additions to the model.’

  ‘Yes? I’ll come soon.’

  ‘You should. I’ll be dead one of these days, you know.’

  Father leads Dr Kushida into the room. The doctor is chaffing his hands. ‘The snow at last,’ he says, bowing to Grandfather. ‘Started just as I was passing the botanical gardens. One minute nothing, the next . . .’

  ‘I could smell it as I set out,’ says Grandfather. ‘Like iron.’

  Miyo brings in a tray of red and gold cups, red and gold flasks, the festival set. Father and the doctor light cigarettes. Yuji coughs. The scroll in the alcove is a Chinese painting of two figures with packs on their backs labouring up a hill where the pine trees are bent almost double by the weight of the snow. On the shelves beside the alcove is Father’s collection of antique incense burners.

  ‘I have a new patient at the clinic,’ says the doctor, combing his moustache with the tips of his fingers. ‘Came in at the beginning of the week. Name of Amano. He was’ – turning to Father – ‘at Imperial the same time as us or, at least, there was an overlap – 1911, I think.’

  ‘Is his case serious?’ asks Father.

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  For several minutes they discuss him, this Amano, or someone who, in 1911, might have been Amano. Was he in the rowing team? Was he the one whose elder brother died of blowfish poisoning? Or was that Maruyama?

  Grandfather holds out his cup for Miyo to fill. He stares impassively through the smoky air. He does not think highly of the doctor, once describing him – to Father! – as having the looks of a Meiji petty bureaucrat, the type he’d had to deal with at the mayor’s office in the days he was selling his transport interests to the city. And what can ‘university talk’ mean to one who was earning his rice in the wards of the Low City by the time he was twelve? The life at Imperial, the high ideas and the in-fighting, must be as strange to him as the dancing of cranes.

  Haruyo appears, informs them the bath is ready. As their guest, Kushida has the fresh water, then Grandfather, Father, Yuji and finally – as Mother and Haruyo bathed in the morning – the little serving girl, Miyo. The bathroom is on the ground floor, opposite the panelled wall of the stairs where the telephone (one of three private lines in the street) is mounted. At one time the water was heated with coal, but five years ago, when everything in Father’s world suggested only serene progress towards an honourable retirement, a new system was installed to heat the water electrically, a method everyone praised as clean and modern (and long overdue) but that has somehow never worked as well as the coal.

  Crouching in the tepid steam, Yuji washes at the bucket, then lowers himself into the water on thin white arms. The bath is a wooden oval bound with hoops of steel, a little land-locked boat. Whenever Kushida bathes at the house, whenever Yuji has to use his water, he is sure he can smell Lysol disinfectant in the steam, just as he is sure he can smell it on his clothes for several hours after he has been up to the clinic to collect Mother’s drugs. He rests his chin on the tension of the water and finds himself thinking of Amano, of poor Amano in his metal-frame bed listening to the horns of the New Year traffic, to the nurses scuffing along the polished corridors in their paper shoes. It was Monsieur Feneon, one French Club night at his house in Kanda – the discussion taking an unusually serious turn – who said that while everyone understood that everyone must die, no one was able to imagine his own death. Imagination, he told them, baulked at that. But could this be true of Amano now? Must he not, as gravely ill as the doctor suggested, imagine his own end constantly? And what does he picture? His wife and children standing around him weeping or bored, and then, at last, the white cloth, which someone has been carrying carefully folded for just this purpose, floating down to cover his face? Or is he beyond anything so obvious, so literal, and sees instead his death figured in a sequence of memory, something mysteriously retained and played like ten frames of film in a relentless loop against the inner skin of his eyelids?

  Yuji slides beneath the water, lies there in a foetal hunch. Because his chest is weak, he cannot hold his breath for long. He listens to the world played through the water, to the muffled drumming of his heart. A poet, even one who has not written in almost two years (who poetry has abandoned as mysteriously, as abruptly, as it arrived), has a duty to imagine what imagination baulks at, but the best he can achieve before the air in his lungs starts to burn is something indistinct and swirling, a patch of brightness disappearing into the general dark, like a coin sinking to the bottom of a pond, or the moon through blown clouds, or a head, a face white as a mask, peering through smoke . . .

  He surfaces. Whoops for breath.

  After the baths, more sake. Grandfather has brought with him a bottle tapped from the cask he receives each year from a business associate who retired up in Iwate. Miyo and Haruyo bring through trays of food – clear soup, steamed yellowtail, deep-fried tofu, pickles and rice. At half past eleven the dishes are cleared, and everyone, with the exception of Mother who goes nowhere, and Haruyo, who goes nowhere with her, prepares to leave for the shrine.

  Of the men, only Grandfather is wearing a kimono. Father and the doctor are identical in suits, sack coats and homburgs. Yuji is in a woollen jacket, and a coat that looks, from a distance, as if it might be made of camel hair, like Monsieur Feneon’s. Miyo, thin as young bamboo, has on her usual kimono of dark blue stripes on grey, a black jacket, a grey shawl, colours appropriate to her station, and ones that will not offend those guardians, official and unofficial, of the new austerity, among whom Haruyo it seems now numbers herself, for she has already made the girl wipe off the smear of lipstick she had put on, and would have forced her to remove the comb from her hair, the tortoiseshell one with moonstones Mother gave her last summer for her fourte
enth birthday, if Father had not spoken up for her. (‘No one will notice such a trifle.’)

  In the front garden, those five yards between the porch and the street, the snow is already ankle-deep. It lies like laundry in the arms of the persimmon tree outside Mother’s window, and like a perfect scoop of sugar on the saddle of Yuji’s bicycle, which he has left propped against the fence. They gather in the street, adjust hats and scarves, put up their umbrellas. On the gate of the neighbouring house a lantern is burning beside the coil of sacred rope, and on the pavement below two sets of footprints are filling with fresh snow.

  Grandfather gestures to the flag that drifts and snaps from a nail in the pillar of the gate. ‘Is that a decoration,’ he asks, ‘or is the boy still away?’

  ‘Saburo?’ asks Yuji. ‘He’s not expected back for months.’

  ‘So the wife lives alone with the old woman? That can’t be much fun for her.’

  ‘Three more flags in this street alone since the fighting at Changsha,’ says Father. ‘Half the city must be over there by now.’

  ‘Well,’ says Kushida, buttoning a glove, ‘not every young man needs to worry about that.’ He glances at Yuji. Yuji bobs his head. Father mutters something. Grandfather grunts but says nothing. They start to walk.

  Halfway to the shrine, they hear the first bell, the first deep note of the hundred and eight. Moments later the air is a solemn confusion of bell answering bell across the widths of the city.

  A voice cries, ‘The Year of the Dragon!’ Neighbours flit past – Mr and Mrs Itaki, Kiyama the wedding photographer, the Ozonos. Then out of the veils of snow directly in front of them appears Father’s old assistant, Tozaburo Segoshi, with his wife and two gangling teenage daughters at his side, the same Segoshi who rose through the law department at Imperial by clinging to Father’s bootlaces, who has made a career for himself by filling out the margins of Father’s work. Seeing Father, he stops mid-stride, emits a mew of embarrassment, and hurries off at such a pace his women, hobbled by the tight skirts of their kimonos, can barely keep up with him. Even a year ago he would have stopped and bowed profoundly. He would have waited for Father to pass. He would have been honoured.