One Morning Like a Bird Page 4

  There are only six or seven this side of the screen, and on the other side, to judge from the light voices that float under the ceiling on steam clouds, a few more. Taro is perched on an upturned bucket, a towel round his neck. Yuji joins him, scrubs Taro’s back. Taro scrubs Yuji’s. Clean, they climb into one of the baths (not the hottest, nor the one with the swaying bag of medicinal herbs). They shut their eyes and sigh.

  ‘Junzo?’ asks Yuji.

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘Junzo?’

  ‘Supposed to be here.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  It’s twenty minutes before Junzo arrives. Yuji, with one ear cocked to the cooing and chattering of the women – he knows Kyoko sometimes comes to Watanabe’s – watches him washing at the tap and thinks how easy it would be, through the steam, like looking through the fine linen of a mosquito net, to take him for a boy of thirteen or fourteen, though only two months ago they celebrated his twenty-first birthday at the billiard parlour on the Ginza, a raucous and beer-drenched occasion, half the philosophy class from Imperial there, singing or spewing . . . He has rarely traded schooldays stories with Junzo but can imagine well enough how things might have been. Did he too have to marry himself to a creature like Saburo, or did brains and little-dog fearlessness and having Taro at his back keep him safe? For so much better made is the elder brother than the younger – who seems, by comparison, to have been stitched together from whatever was left over, the trimmings – even big-fisted Saburo would think twice before taking him on. When Taro was called up for his year of service (it was 1935 and still, despite the best efforts of the military, a time of peace), he was barely out of basic training before they were using him to put some muscle on the city limbs of the new intakes. Barracks judo champion, a sprinter, a notable swimmer, he never even had to leave Tokyo. Just the type the army is always hungry for, the sort who makes them look the way they like to imagine themselves – virile, graceful, natural conquerors.

  A different story when they are faced with material like Yuji or Junzo. Then they feel offended, and something wild comes into their eyes. Captain Mori, the officer who, in the July of Yuji’s twentieth year, examined him in the gymnasium of a high school in Hongo, had particularly expressive eyes, and for three minutes, as Yuji stood in his underwear in front of the desk, the captain had stared at him with such a concentration of contempt it was as if all the oxygen was being sucked out of the room. Between them, on the gymnasium floor, was a sixteen-kilo burlap sack of rice. The captain ordered Yuji to lift it over his head. Yuji, bending, gripping two burlap ears, dragged the sack to his waist, swung it towards his chest, and for a second seemed to have it there safely, before some lapse of will, some failure of technique, sent it plunging to the floor again, where it landed with such a thud it startled into flight a pair of horseflies mating on the tip of the captain’s swagger stick. He was made to try twice more. The last time, he could hoist the sack no higher than his thighs, and at this, this failure, this sickening display, the captain sprang from behind his desk. Despite the heat, he began to demonstrate a callisthenics routine, performing the moves as if tearing to shreds an invisible mattress. Black moons appeared beneath the arms of his field shirt. After a minute he stopped (he was not so fit himself), snorted, mopped his face, and informed Yuji that the army would rather have a schoolgirl than him, it would rather have a Korean, it would rather have . . . Yuji, head bowed, kept his gaze on the desk. In the open file he could see Dr Kushida’s letter, typed on clinic stationery, a large military stamp on the top left corner. Approved? Not approved? The captain sat down, rocked on the rear legs of his chair and lit a cigarette. To his NCO he said (no longer shouting, no longer interested), ‘Mark this hero down Class F. Health grounds. Case to be reviewed in twelve months . . .’

  He has never been recalled. Nor – as long as Kushida could be relied upon to send his annual letter – did he think it likely he ever would be. Why should the Emperor burn such crooked timber as Yuji Takano or Junzo Miyazaki – for Junzo, along with his student deferment, has a Class D – when each year another half-million boys turn twenty and repopulate the empty parade grounds? But this was before the fighting at the Khalka river, the fighting at Changsha, the casualties at Changsha, the defeat at Changsha, the calls for a new offensive, an invincible tide of fighting men to sweep away the nation’s enemies once and for all. Would half a million be enough for that? A million? Last month Ozono’s son, who can barely see across the street without his glasses, received his red paper. How long, then, before everyone was equally suitable, and some functionary at the War Ministry placed quite a different stamp at the top of the doctor’s letter?

  Pink from the heat of the baths, they retire to the matted room upstairs, a little mah-jong hall old Watanabe, in a brief and long-since dissipated mood of entrepreneurial ambition, took over on the death of the previous owner. The maid brings the young men beer and salt crackers. As they start to drink, Junzo, to explain his late arrival and the green bruise on his cheek the water has brought out, tells the others about the book fight in the corridor of the philosophy building, the Hegel gang versus the Schopenhauer gang. His bruise was The World as Will and Idea glancing off his cheekbone, a blow he repaid with volume three of The Science of Logic that split open his opponent’s lip.

  ‘So you were in the Hegel gang,’ says Yuji. ‘For the beauty of his dialectics?’

  Junzo shrugs. ‘Schopenhauer hated women,’ he says.

  Taro grins at Yuji. ‘Little brother’s in love,’ he says, ‘but it seems he has sworn never to reveal her name.’

  ‘Could it be Mrs Watanabe?’ whispers Yuji, for which he is shot with a star-shaped cracker that ricochets off his chin and lands in his beer. He fires back but misses.

  Mr Watanabe, presiding over a mah-jong game on the far side of the room, scolds them. They are, apparently, disturbing the concentration of the players, four bathhouse regulars slamming down the little tiles as though to shatter them. Taro apologises, then looks at his brother and Yuji with a quick frown as if to say that he, a government employee, cannot any longer conduct himself so carelessly, that something more and better is expected of him. It’s a look Yuji sees on his face more frequently these days.

  For a minute, sipping at their beers, scratching their chins, inspecting fingernails, they are silent. Then Yuji, under cover of the game’s clatter, calls to order a meeting of the club.

  ‘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 sch
ool 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 ro
ofs, 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 . . .’