One Morning Like a Bird Read online

  At the shrine, they join the back of the crowd and shuffle through the churned snow between big yellow lanterns. Ahead of them, muffled handclaps summon the kami. The snow is lighter now, and as the last flakes fall the air turns sweet with the steam from the hot sake the priests and shrine-virgins are ladling from cauldrons big as baths. Grandfather gives Miyo a pair of coins to make her offering and buy herself a trinket at one of the stalls lining the path. Yuji waits, considering whether he too might be given something. And then the thought strikes him – if Father one day mused aloud, however obscurely, about the difficulty of managing without his salary from the university, of living on his savings, could it even have been Grandfather who suggested the allowance be scrapped?

  He hangs back, slips away, climbs onto a stone by one of the vermilion gates and looks out over army caps and student caps, over shawls and scarves and the bright lacquer of women’s hair. He is hoping for a moment of casual good fortune, and that out of all this crowd he will spy Kyoko Kitamura, whose footprints were one of the sets leading through the snow from the neighbours’ gate. His plan – a plan that never varies – is to catch her attention without, at the same time, being discovered by the old woman. If he succeeds, then Kyoko, supposing she is in an indulgent mood (and why should she not be on New Year’s Eve?), might find some way to join him for a minute, perhaps share a baked sweet potato with him in the shadow of a camphor tree. But if the old woman sees him, then the game is up, and not out of any unusual zeal on her part to keep her grandson’s wife guarded, but because she cannot forgive Yuji for living a safe and idle life while Saburo, only child of her only son, risks everything. She has a photograph of Saburo, a big one she keeps beside the god-shelf and which, one morning, she invited Yuji to admire and be shamed by. A picture taken in a studio in Nanking, Saburo in a winter coat with fur collar (non-standard issue), his left shoulder turned to the camera to show off his acting corporal’s chevron. A handsome soldier, the sort schoolgirls develop squints knitting mittens for. And should something happen to him – a not unlikely prospect, as everyone knows the casualty lists are far longer than those names inscribed each year in the Yaskuni shrine – then it seems certain the old woman, in her grief, her rage, will denounce Yuji as a coward, accuse him in front of Itaki the tobacconist, Otaki the noodle-seller, Ozono the brush-maker, in front of the whole street. For what would restrain her? Is it not true that these days the Takano family can be insulted at will?

  Someone is calling him. He turns, scans, sees at last, in the light of a kite stall, the Miyazaki brothers, Taro and Junzo, waving to him. He waves back, pushes through to them. They exchange their New Year greetings, first in their own tongue, then, more quietly, as fellow members of the club, in French.

  ‘Your people here?’ asks Taro.

  ‘Somewhere,’ says Yuji.

  ‘Ours too,’ says Taro. ‘Somewhere.’

  ‘Have you noticed,’ says Junzo, leaning and speaking in a stage whisper, ‘how the priests all look a bit Chinese this year? And there’s a definite smell of garlic about the place. Shouldn’t we, as respectable citizens, report them to the Tokko?’

  Taro punches his brother’s shoulder. He’s grinning but there’s no amusement in his eyes. ‘Little brother’s had a few,’ he says.

  Yuji nods, looks from one to the other – from Junzo, with his hair poking in tufts from under his student cap, a yellow scarf wound round his neck and trailing almost to the ground, to Taro, who, in his new hat, his new coat (a ministry pin on the lapel like a drop of spilt silver), is as neat as the menswear poster outside the Shirokiya department store. There’s a second of silence between them, then, as though to cover an unexpected awkwardness, they start, in hurried voices, to speak about the French Club’s year-forgetting party at the Feneons’, and laugh, all three genuinely amused this time, at the recollection of Junzo’s barking competition with Feneon’s pug, and how at the end of it, Alissa Feneon awarded Junzo the prize, a mock diploma torn from the back page of a newspaper, an advertisement – aimed, presumably, at the families of military men – for a kind of indestructable Rayon sock.

  When the laughter stops, Yuji says, ‘I’ve had some bad news.’

  ‘Your father?’ begins Taro, cautiously.

  ‘No, no . . .’

  ‘You mean,’ says Junzo, ‘someone’s given you a job?’

  ‘I mean I shall need to find one now.’

  ‘So, it’s the allowance,’ says Taro.

  Yuji nods.

  ‘A cut?’

  ‘Worse.’

  ‘All of it?’

  Yuji nods again, then finds, suddenly, he does not want to discuss the matter at all, that there’s a tightness in his throat, a bubble that threatens to swell into a sob. If he was to stand in front of the Miyazakis blubbing, the shame of it would burn for months . . .

  He is saved by drums, by lights. The priests and their assistants, illuminated by the brilliant-white cones of two searchlights, are processing up the steps of the hall of worship. Afterwards, the ‘Navy March’ is played through speakers slung from wires between the trees. The friends agree to meet at Watanabe’s bathhouse as soon as the holidays are over, then Yuji enters the crowd again, moves through its shifting labyrinth until Mrs Sakaguchi, mad for gossip about his embarrassing parents, tugs at his sleeve as he passes the purification trough. He backs away from her, apologising and bowing, then follows a side path out of the shrine precincts and onto the road to the cemetery.

  He has given up the hunt for Kyoko (did he really expect to find her?) but is in no mood to be at home, sitting in the cold and perhaps having to listen to more reminiscences about the old days at Imperial. In a few minutes he is alone, walking through the lanes of a neighbourhood almost untouched by earthquake and fire – or as untouched as anywhere in this city of disasters. A secretive place where the mouth of an alley, a pair of wooden sandals propped on a verandah, the snow-covered slats of a dog-fence, float uncertainly in the light from tightly latticed windows. At night almost anyone can become lost in such a neighbourhood, but Yuji, preoccupied by an unhappiness almost indistinguishable from a certain type of boredom, navigates with an unconsidered sureness of step until a subtle chilling of the air warns him he is only a turn or two from the cemetery. He does not believe in ghosts and yet, somehow, this does not stop him from being afraid of them. He slows his pace, imagining them roused by drums and gongs, gathering at the cemetery gates (rustling together like the wings of insects) and waiting for some foolish young emissary of the living to pass close by.

  And it is then, just as he is considering turning back towards the holiday crowds, that he sees two figures appear, palely, from the dark at the end of the street. He steps under the eaves of the nearest house, presses himself against the shutters, but already he can tell that the figures are men, not spirits, and pale only because, other than for loincloths and headbands, they are both naked. They are running, hopping over the snow, though their progress is pitifully slow. As they come closer, he hears their little yelps of pain and self-encouragement, and as they draw level with him, he sees how their skin glitters with ice like fish scales. Shrine runners. Middle-aged penitents hoping to earn a year of better luck by dousing themselves with buckets of bitter-cold water at every shrine they stagger into. Clenched teeth, clenched buttocks, they do not even glance at Yuji as they pass, though he is no longer hiding from them. If Junzo and Taro were with him, he might have found the scene absurd, would, perhaps, have slyly laughed, but on his own he simply watches them as they disappear into the bend of the street, stares after them, enviously, as if these men had found a form (forget how mad it looks) that answered whatever urgencies provoked them. If he was to strip now and bundle his clothes, would they object to him hopping over the snow at their backs? It would almost certainly kill him, but no one – not Father or even the old woman – would dare to call him frivolous. How amazed they would be to see him return to the shrine in nothing but his underwear! To hear him hollering to the
kami as the well water broke over his head!

  It’s two o’clock before he is in his own neighbourhood again, cold and hungry. He would like to warm himself with a bowl of steaming noodles, and wonders if Otaki, in festival humour, might still be open, but the shop is shut and shuttered, a tongue of snowless pavement outside where the dregs of the broth have been poured away. On the Kitamura Gate the flame is out. He watches a while, his ears stinging with the cold, then goes into his own house, slides the door and stands on the beaten earth of the vestibule listening for voices. A glow in the panel above the doors to Mother’s room is enough for him to see Father’s boots beside the vestibule step, and the shadow of Miyo asleep under her quilt on the mats at the bottom of the stairs, an arrow charm from the shrine next to her pillow.

  He goes to the kitchen, eats a mouthful of congealing rice, washes it down with a cup of water. When he’s finished, he steps over Miyo and climbs towards his room. At the turn of the stairs, his toes touch the shaped hard edge of something, and though the turn is the darkest place he knows, as he reaches down, that it’s the old talisman of the seven gods that Mother leaves out – with her own hands or Haruyo’s – for him to slip beneath his bolster and so enter the New Year with propitious dreams of eagles, sacred mountains . . .

  He carries it to his room, pulls off his jacket and tie but nothing else, then gropes his way into the bedding, curls up and lies gazing at the blue snow-light in the glass of the drying-platform door. The shrine runners run through his head, feebly glittering figures always a step or two from disappearing into the night. In reverie they gain strange identities. Father and Dr Kushida. Junzo and Taro. Himself and Ryuichi. Himself and Saburo. Staggering over the snow, hopping over the snow . . .

  Then out of the small-hours hush he hears, faintly from some neighbouring house, the sound of piano music on a wireless. The Schumann piece, perhaps, everyone pretends to like so much. Then it ends, or the dial is turned, and something else begins, the simple notes of a koto playing a song he remembers from earliest boyhood, ‘The Boatman’s Song’, a sentimental, empty-headed little ditty, and to his own cold fingertips he starts to whisper the old words: ‘I am dead grass on the riverbank. You are dead grass too.’

  2

  Despite the seven gods his sleep is dreamless. He lies in to some unseemly hour (as young boys, he and Ryuichi were always up at dawn on New Year’s Day), and in the afternoon plays flower cards with Miyo in the Western room, now and then looking up to watch Father in the garden brushing snow from the delicate plants, unburdening them. Miyo, who excels at flower cards, wins fifty sen and insists on being paid immediately. He pays her, wondering if she has a little purse hidden somewhere, a purse of little coins, perhaps under the house.

  At twilight he goes upstairs and onto the platform. With his back to one of the drying posts he gazes over snow-heaped roofs to where a red neon sign for Jintan Pills winks blearily from its gantry in the Low City. He likes sometimes to imagine it’s sending him a message, a warning, an invitation, something meaningful, but today it is simply, ‘Jintan Pills, Jintan Pills, Jintan Pills . . .’

  From the gardens he hears the collar bell of Kyoko’s cat. He leans over the parapet and sees its shadow spring from the fence and glide under the bare branches of the gingko tree. The animal is pregnant and seems to have made a nest for herself in the bamboo that grows in a screen round the garden privy. No way of knowing, of course, which of the local toms has been with her.

  3

  On the second day of the holiday he does what he calls his accounts. The reckoning is very simple. After paying Miyo, he has eleven yen and fifty sen left in the world. He owes two yen to Taro, one to Shozo and three at the noodle shop. This leaves the almost useless sum of five yen and fifty sen. On the credit side, there are ten yen owing to him for the Niigata Docks copy, another ten for translating, for the Fukuhara Toothpaste Company, a document entitled ‘Gingivite – Le Grand Défi de Notre Époque?’ The rest is all hope, ambition, speculation. No sign yet of any New Year gift money. No one decently to borrow from. Little chance of credit.

  He turns over the paper and on the other side starts to make a list of people who might help him. He puts Grandfather at the top. Even if the old man was involved in the decision to stop the allowance – especially if he was involved – would he not agree to a small loan? There have been several in the past (some of them repaid). But with Grandfather there is always the difficulty of knowing what he has anymore, whether he has given all his money away to shrines (a new carved roof for the shrine at Mita, a god-car for the shrine at Kitazawa), to family spinsters in the country, to former employees on hard times, or whether it is still lying in bars of jade and bolts of silk in a fireproof godown somewhere by the river.

  Horikawa (of Horikawa and Son, Horikawa Trading Inc., the Horikawa Talent Bureau) can usually be counted on, but only for scraps . . .

  And Makiyama? Whatever one thinks of him, whatever one cannot avoid thinking, it must be admitted he has the necessary connections. He took the John Ford essay last summer, placed it with Eastern Review, and might, if Yuji can find him sober, be persuaded to take something else, something on Fritz Lang, or the stories of Akutagawa, or even – why not? – on Arthur Rimbaud. For that he would need only the books that lie around in his room. He could write it in a week, in two days, though he would have to find some contemporary relevance, some angle to make a dead French poet enticing to a modern Japanese readership . . .

  There is a way, of course, a way he has thought of countless times. Monsieur Feneon must be persuaded to show him the letter, the one he mentioned (and so casually!) that spring afternoon in Professor Komada’s rooms, but which, in the years since, nobody in the club has succeeded in gaining so much as a glimpse of, all requests met with the same enigmatic smile, the same flutter of the hand. But a story based on the letter, an essay that linked the names of Rimbaud, Feneon and Yuji Takano, a literary detective story, a kind of séance, it could even make a news story, something for the human-interest pages in the Yomiuri, a respite from reports of battlefield sacrifice, or some village in Shikoku where they have vowed to give up sleep so they can plant more rice. With the letter in his hand, would he need Makiyama?

  Out in the garden the crows are squabbling. In the Western room the clock is chiming the hour. He puts down his pen. Today, perhaps, he will see Mother. Today is one of the usual days, one of those appointed to such meetings. He combs his hair, goes downstairs to find Haruyo. She is in the kitchen squatting by the half-open door to the passage along the side of the house, a heavy shawl across her shoulders, her long-stemmed pipe in her mouth. Without looking at him, she says that Mother is too tired to see anyone, that she is resting. Resting? She nods. He wonders if she also forbids Father, this nurse-servant who has become Mother’s warder. He wonders, too, how a person can be tired when they do nothing, when they have done nothing for seventeen years, when every day they are resting, resting.

  Back in his room, he picks up the little sheet of accounts, stares at it, then takes his fountain pen and writes across the bottom, in the neat, cursive script he first learnt at middle school, ‘Ô saisons, Ô château, quelle âme est sans défauts?’ Then he rips the page in two, drops the halves into the brazier. Black-ringed holes appear. Finally, a flame.

  4

  Early on the morning of the last day of the holiday, Uncle Kensuke rings. Yuji, still in bed, knows it must be Uncle calling because Father, who has answered the phone, is asking about the snow in the mountains. ‘Has there been much yet? Hmm. I see. That must be difficult for you . . . Yes. Here too, a few inches.’

  Sometimes Uncle Kensuke and Auntie Sawa come to Tokyo for the holiday, but this year they will not be coming until the Festival of Lanterns, the Festival of the Dead. Father asks about the children, Hiroshi and Asako, and Asako’s husband, who everyone says is doing so well with Mitsubishi. ‘And Sawa? Her back? Hmm.’

  Now it’s Uncle’s turn to ask questions. ‘Oh, much the same,
’ says Father, though Yuji cannot tell if he is speaking of himself or Mother, or everything. ‘This year will be better, perhaps. I might try my luck at a little farming, like you. I could buy some chickens, keep a pig.’ He laughs. ‘If we have food shortages, I can make my fortune.’

  There is a long pause while Uncle speaks. He is the younger brother and not, therefore, not strictly, the one to be proffering advice to the head of the family, but Yuji hopes that is exactly what he is doing. If Father has the subtler brain, the one best suited to the play of abstracts, the framing of elegant questions, the exegesis of documents whose difficulty is like a glass surface thick as a fist, it’s Uncle Kensuke who has inherited Grandfather’s common sense.

  ‘Well,’ says Father, ‘well, we’ll see.’ Then he laughs the same unhappy laugh at what is evidently a question about Grandfather. ‘The model? Oh, yes, it still goes on, I believe.’

  That night Yuji wakes out of a dream. Not one of the fire dreams – he’s been spared those for almost half a year – but some troubling dream whose details disperse in the instant of waking, leaving only an atmosphere, a sense of ominous approach, of struggle. And what comes to comfort him as he lies in the frigid small-hours stillness of his room is the memory of Uncle Kensuke’s farmhouse above Kyoto, and of Uncle himself, always more artist than farmer, hoisting sheets of silk and linen from the vats in the floor of the dyeing barn, where all through the cold season the indigo leaves lie steeping in a brew of wood ash and lime and sake. Men’s urine, too, if Hiroshi is to be believed.

  It is so many years now since that summer – the invalid nephew sent to get clean air in his lungs, to become a proper boy with a boy’s vigour – it still surprises him how much he has kept of it, that it was not all swept from his mind the moment he returned to Tokyo and saw Father pushing through the tattered crowd at the station, ash on his shoes, ash on the cuffs of his trousers. Instead, it has survived, like something improbably fragile salvaged from the chaos of a ruined house, though time has coloured it with a thin wash, a binding glaze, so that the shadows under the pine trees and the smoke from the saucer of smouldering chrysanthemums, the black of Asako’s hair, the grey of storm clouds, are all faintly indigo now. Even the moon of that summer, westering over mountain villages and lonely farmhouses has, in memory, some blush of indigo, as if it, too, once hung dripping over the vats in the barn.