One Morning Like a Bird Read online

  ‘I play them very badly,’ she says, smiling at her father.

  ‘Won’t you play something now?’ asks Taro, the peacemaker. ‘Then we can settle this matter at once and give the prize to music.’

  She shakes her head. She’s not in the mood, she’s unprepared, she does not give impromptu recitals, but Taro persists and the others join him, until, taking her stick, she gets up from the sofa, and goes to the piano. It’s an English make, Collard & Collard, an odd and lovely object that must have travelled half the world crated in the hold of some wallowing cargo vessel. She settles herself on the stool, looks put out, irritated, flicks through some pages of manuscript on the music stand, then shuts her eyes, opens them, and leans her whole body into the first soft chords. She plays for five, six minutes, no more, her head tilted to the side, an expression of intense listening on her face. The music spreads in ripples, its rhythms simple as a lullaby, light as spring rain. The debate, with its mixture of earnestness and nonsense, is forgotten. When she finishes, and the echo of the last deep note has faded, there’s a hush in which only the murmuring of the embers in the stove can be heard. They applaud. She blushes, stands, limps back to the sofa.

  ‘That was beautiful,’ says Yuji quietly, the words out of his mouth before he has considered them.

  ‘Chopin,’ she says, turning to him, her blush briefly deepening. ‘ “Grande Polonaise”. I’m glad you liked it.’

  12

  An earth-tremor at three in the afternoon. Yuji is in the garden, talking through the fence with Kyoko. The old woman and Haruyo are in the street haggling with the boiled-bean-seller. There’s a sudden breeze, the bamboo rustles. Under their fingers, the fence vibrates, under their feet, the earth. They wait, breathlessly, three, four seconds. Then everything resumes, everything is normal again.

  In 1923, Kyoko was a small child in her home village in Saitama Prefecture. She thinks Yuji was in Tokyo. He has not chosen to correct her, and Saburo, he assumes, has simply forgotten, as Saburo forgets so much. He grins at her. She grins back. For a while they hold the fence as though, without their gripping it, it would fly into the air and be lost.

  13

  On Mother’s birthday, to please her, or rather, to honour her as one honours on certain auspicious dates the family ancestors, Yuji spends the day being as useful as he can. He tidies his room, puts his bedding to air, returns various cups and dishes to the kitchen. He helps Father in the garden weeding and pruning, and after lunch pays Otaki the money he owes. In his room again, he sews a button onto a suit, reads a dozen pages of Isabelle, learns a new French idiom (entre chien et loup). Then, a few minutes before five, the little parcel with its wrapping of dark red paper in his hands, he goes downstairs and slides open the doors to Mother’s room. Haruyo is there, hunched beside a brazier on which a small copper kettle is beginning to steam. She dips her head to him. He walks past her, past the folding screen, and kneels opposite Mother. He bows, and wishes her a happy birthday.

  There is only a single lamp for the whole room, and not a bright one, so it’s difficult to tell if becoming fifty-one has made much difference to her. He can see no threads of grey in her hair, and the skin of her face – a little blue under the eyes – shows, in this light, barely a wrinkle. Of her body, wrapped in an unpatterned kimono and darker shawl, he has only the sense of something immensely fragile.

  She says how nice it is to see him. He thanks her. Round their knees the shadows lie like pools of water. She smiles drowsily as though she has recently woken from a sleep or will shortly need one. Has he, she asks, lost some weight? He says it is unlikely. In the holidays everybody ate a great deal. ‘You know how you get in the winter,’ she says. He says he knows. ‘I pray for you,’ she says. He says he knows. He thanks her. ‘You must listen to Dr Kushida,’ she says. ‘He will advise you. He has been a good friend to the Takano family.’

  Behind her head, Ryuichi, school uniform buttoned to the throat, school cap clasped in white-gloved hands, examines Yuji with a gaze he can only endure for a few seconds, such is the weight of judgement in those twelve-year-old eyes. Above the photograph is the slender cross of ivory tipped with iron presented to Grandfather Yakumo when he left the college in Seoul, and on the table below, a stick of incense, a flickering nightlight, an offering of mandarins.

  He passes his mother her birthday present, a box of taorizakura cakes from the shop by Ueno Station. She thanks him. She says she hopes he hasn’t spent too much money on her. He assures her he hasn’t.

  ‘Really?’ she says, unwrapping her gift, ‘but it looks so expensive.’

  ‘Just something small . . .’

  ‘You’ve been too generous.’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Still . . .’

  Haruyo brings them tea, then retires to the far side of the screen. Though he would admit it to no one, Yuji is frightened of Haruyo, her slab face, the unseemly vivid bulk of her, afraid of her ever since the night – the second after his return from Uncle Kensuke’s – he crept down the stairs from his new room hoping to find comfort in Mother’s bed and found instead Haruyo, motionless by the side of a lantern whose flame splashed her shadow over the walls, big as a net. Nothing was said, but she looked at him then as no adult had looked at him before, certainly no adult he knew, no adult who lived in his home.

  ‘What is your news?’ asks Mother. ‘Let me hear your news.’

  He tells her what seems appropriate, harmless. A few remarks about his friends, about what he’s been reading. He does not, of course, mention the matter of the allowance. Nothing of that nature can even be hinted at. They are silent for a minute. Yuji looks at his tea but does not pick it up.

  ‘Your father . . .’ she says.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘How hard it is for him now.’

  Yuji drops his chin in what he hopes will be taken for a gesture of reflection. How long has he been in the room? Fifteen minutes? Half an hour?

  ‘There’s blossom on the plum tree,’ he says.

  ‘At the bottom of the garden?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That was always the first.’

  ‘Shall I bring you some?’

  ‘Thank you,’ she says, ‘though sometimes I prefer just to picture it in my mind. It seems more perfect.’

  He tells her – the clever boy lecturing his mother – how the old poets used to cover their windows on the night of the full moon so they could imagine its beauty rather than be distracted by anything so obvious as the thing itself.

  She smiles. ‘My son,’ she says, ‘a poet . . .’ And for a few seconds it looks as if she might hold out one of her long, white hands to him, as if the spell might break. But then she shivers and looks down. Behind the screen, Haruyo stirs in her fabrics, clears her throat. Yuji rises to his feet, his movements, in this strange room, soft as incense smoke.

  That evening after supper he opens the doors of the storage cupboards that stand on the landing between his room and Father’s. The cupboards are so solid, so mysteriously large, he has no idea how they were brought into the house. Lowered through the roof? Carried up the stairs plank by plank and assembled there by a carpenter? For all the years of his life (and for years before that) the cupboards have been the dark and mothballed repositories of whatever was finished with but could not be thrown away. Bamboo fencing swords, school satchels, carp banners, kites, foreign hats long out of fashion. There are even parcels of baby clothes preserved by meticulous hands for some imagined continuation of the Takano line.

  He wants to find Ryuichi’s gloves. Each boy had two pairs, white, with three rows of raised stitching on the back and a single mother-of-pearl button at the wrist. One pair of Ryuichi’s was, presumably, reduced to a powder of ashes, but the other . . . He looks, does not find them, neither Ryuichi’s nor his own. Instead, behind a box of Shunkei lacquer, on which the remains of a large insect are lying, he discovers a pile of jazz records from the 1920s – Jimmy Harada, Noriko Awaya, King Oliver’s Cre
ole Jazz Band. One by one he slips them from their paper covers, runs the light over the shellac grooves, blows away grains of dust. There was music in this house once. Music and tapping feet, the wail of trumpets, voices, flippant or heartbroken, singing of love, the city, the future . . .

  He goes to his room, opens the door to the drying platform, steps up into the night air. He drags his bedding from the poles and carries it inside. It’s too early to sleep but too late to do much else. He spreads the bedding on the mats, then, still on hands and knees, recites to himself, like some manner of talking dog, the ghost poem from Electric Dragonfly.

  Do ghosts get bored of being ghosts?

  At night they burn like candle flames

  But the days must be difficult –

  Hearing children on the way to school,

  Hearing the thrum of kite strings.

  At the song of the red-hot-pepper vendor

  Even a dead tongue burns.

  There he stops, for though the poem has another four lines, there are tears falling onto the backs of his hands. He can no longer speak.

  14

  He finds Makiyama in a bar by Shibuya Station drinking beer with his assistants, Ito and Kiyooka. It’s four in the afternoon. At six they move to Sukiyabashi and start on the sake, then to the Black Pearl on the Ginza and finally through the stained-glass doors of the Don Juan, where they take one of the booths by the dance floor and Makiyama buys a bottle of whisky. A tango band is playing. The singer, in his white tuxedo, sighs into the microphone. Between the pillars, clouds of cigarette smoke shift in the breeze from a ceiling fan.

  Sweating from the drink, Makiyama undoes the top button of his shirt, hangs his hat on his knee, and pulls the cork from the bottle. He’s thirty-five or thirty-six, dressed in a new suit of lime-green serge, a pair of tan and cream spats on his feet. In his jacket lapel he has a pin, a curious pin with a head of red glass, perhaps even a ruby. Does it mean something?

  A waitress takes the seat beside him and starts to feed him peanuts, sweet-bean paste. On the other side of the booth, Ito and Kiyooka are watching the dancing, their heads moving in unison like a pair of Siamese cats in the window of a hairdresser’s shop.

  Yuji hasn’t drunk like this for months. Beer, sake, whisky. The effort of keeping up, of being congenial, of remembering why he’s there at all, is starting to exhaust him. He has extracted no promises, nothing but a few vague and lordly assurances that may already have been forgotten. He sips from his glass and listens to Makiyama trying to impress the waitress with his wealth of connections, though it’s obvious she has never heard of any of them. Only when he mentions the pulp writer Kaoru Ishihara does she show any genuine interest.

  ‘Ishihara, eh?’

  ‘An old friend of mine. You could even call me a kind of mentor.’

  ‘Really! But it must be nice,’ she says, dropping another peanut into his mouth, ‘to know someone like Ishihara.’

  He grins at her, then pushes her away and turns to Yuji. He has, he says, grinding the nut between his large yellow teeth, just had another of his celebrated intuitions. ‘Come closer,’ he says. ‘Lean closer.’

  Hideo Makiyama’s story is a Low City story, his success a Low City success. No one seems quite sure of where he comes from – Honjo, perhaps, or Asakusa, or even somewhere out of town, some unlikely little place only the slow trains stop at. Has he attended university? Has he attended much high school? He seems to Yuji a man who would struggle to write a thank-you letter, and no more of an intellectual than Miyo. His talent – if talent is the right word – is of a different order entirely, simpler, much more lucrative, for behind the shine of his brow, his slick moustache, he possesses a gift of insight into the appetites of the crowd, their vanities, their fears, the strange fastidiousness of their obsessions, their fickleness, their love of novelty. He would have done as well in the dry-goods sector, or selling cars, or women’s fashion, except that literature offered a certain status, a certain respectability, though one that did not at all prohibit him from passing the working day in a Ginza beer hall. He has no prejudices. High art or low, he doesn’t care. Nor is he burdened by tradition, for he knows nothing of it. His questions are so simple, so childlike, so unapologetic, some of the older writers (who thought their reputations safe) live in terror of him. Will it sell? How many? To whom? What will the margins be? The percentages? The profit share? You cannot catch him out. His memory for numbers – monthly circulations, print runs – is unfailing. He knows (for example) that only thirty-seven copies of Electric Dragonfly were ever sold and this, at five per cent of two yen per copy, represented an income of three yen and seventy sen, a contemptible sum even by the miserable standards of the genre. A head for numbers is starting to make him wealthy. Numbers, and a snout like those dogs one sees foraging in the spilt bins behind restaurants.

  At midnight the band starts to pack away their instruments. The dancers-for-hire sit down and rub their aching calves. The waitresses are tired too. They move from booth to booth collecting bills, their sandals scuffing the wooden floor. Startling from a short sleep, Makiyama drops a banknote on the table, crams his hat on his head, and strides down to the Ginza Crossing, where he stops a one-yen taxi by stepping in front of it and spreading his arms. They squeeze, all four of them, into the back. Makiyama calls an address to the driver, who seems to know it. They jolt forwards, cruise awhile under the lights of the Ginza, then turn up towards the park and into the darker, emptier streets around the government buildings.

  As they travel, and the wind stirs the litter from the night-stalls, Makiyama starts to sing. It’s the lovers-parting-in-the-dawn-mist song from a new musical he’s invested in at the Moulin Rouge in Shinjuku. Then he breaks off and says it’s a shame, a damned shame what they did to your father. Writing a few lines about the Emperor – what was it? Fifteen years ago? – really came back to kick him in the teeth, eh? It was tough. It was damned tough. But certain things just couldn’t be allowed any more, and if the people at the top didn’t set an example, what could you expect from the riff-raff? It wasn’t personal. Just a question of discipline, of being ready for what was coming, of showing the world that Japan meant business. Even so, yes, he was sorry for what had happened, genuinely sorry for the Takano family’s misfortune.

  Yuji, trapped against the car door, bows as best he can. The speech has surprised him. He is also surprised at how grateful he feels, though it’s inconceivable that Makiyama has ever read the 482 pages of Democratic Principles and the Japanese Constitution, or has the slightest real grasp of Father’s arguments. The same, of course, could be said about most of the others, those whose muttering – or in some cases shrieking, hysterical shrieking – made, in the end, Father’s situation intolerable. And now that they have pulled him down, they will, perhaps, like Makiyama, begin to pity him, so that in a few years it will appear he fell through something as natural and implacable as bad luck, his enemies nothing more than bystanders, innocent witnesses to an event they could not possibly have altered the outcome of.

  They stop at the mouth of a stone-paved alley somewhere in Sanbancho. The neighbourhood is poorly lit. The houses have their eaves pulled low, like caps. The alley is so narrow they have to go in single file. At the end, there is a little shrine to the fox god. A woman is praying there, but hearing the men, she lifts the hems of her kimono and hurries, on wooden soles, through a doorway where a lantern marked with the characters for falling leaves swings its crimson light in the wind.

  They follow her inside. Makiyama shouts for service. The hostess of the house appears, trotting out of her booth and calling a welcome. Recognising Makiyama, telling him how well he’s looking, how prosperous, she leads them up the stairs and along a corridor to a room at the back of the house. From the tobacco haze, the smell of fish, it’s evident the room has only recently been vacated. A maid appears and straightens out the sitting cushions, polishes the table. Yuji slips the catch on the window. There’s a courtyard below with a fe
w shrubs, a line of sake kegs outside the open doorway of the kitchen. On the far side of the courtyard, where shadows blur and focus behind the paper windows, a girl’s voice is singing to the accompaniment of a shamisen: ‘Yes, I am in love. They were talking about me before daylight . . . though I began to love without knowing it . . .’

  The maid brings in a tray of tea and sweets, then a tray with sake flasks and sake cups. Yuji shuts the window and joins the others at the table. The hostess is telling them the local scandals – affairs, jealous lovers, who’s in money trouble, who’s disgraced. After twenty minutes the doors slide open. Two girls are kneeling in the corridor. They chant their greeting and enter. One of them Yuji recognises as the waitress from the Don Juan. The other is perhaps also a waitress, though with her purple kimono, the ribbons of raw silk in her hair, she could pass for a certain grade of geisha. She is not as pretty as the girl from the Don Juan but when she starts to talk it’s obvious she’s a natural storyteller, an excellent mimic. Soon she’s the favourite, and takes her place beside the sprawling Makiyama. The other girl, seeing that Ito and Kiyooka can have no interest in her, kneels in front of Yuji, picks a flask from the table, and fills his cup. She asks him if he likes to drink, if he likes the Ginza, if he likes tango or prefers some other kind of music. Does he ever go skiing in the winter? For herself, she has never skied, though sometimes she thinks she would like to try. How cold it is these last days. Cold as anything.

  Every minute or two (though minutes are no longer evenly divided but float like globs of fat in water) Yuji holds out his cup and watches her replenish it. Now and then she lets him fill a cup for her. He wants to make her drunk – as drunk as he is himself. Then they will be helpless as children, and the worst that could happen is they wake in a pile on the mat together, daylight streaming through the window. He doesn’t mind that. What worries him is that she’s been given orders – by the hostess, by Makiyama even – to do something with him (or whichever of the men shows a taste for her). He steals glances at her while she pours for him, and sees, with inebriated clarity, that what is natural in her, her youth – she’s several years younger than him – her laboured, youthful interest in him, is not yet entirely sunk in artifice or the fatigue of her trade. She has little in common, then – little beyond the obvious – with the woman in the room behind Yokohama Docks, but it’s her he starts to think of now, of the hour he spent with her after the negotiations with Momoyo’s family had failed and in his anger, in the violence of his disappointment, he had set out to prove that love was an itch any man could satisfy by spending a few yen.