One Morning Like a Bird Read online

  ‘But it’s me,’ she says, switching into French. ‘Don’t you know my voice yet?’

  ‘You’ve never called me before,’ he says.

  ‘Do I sound so different on the telephone?’

  ‘A little, perhaps.’

  She speaks to him in Japanese again, the usual mix of Tokyo polite-style and something more direct, more blunt, more definitely Alissa Feneon. She tells him how Junzo came to the house with a book he had promised her (‘one of those impossible volumes of philosophy he always has his nose in’), and how it seemed no one had seen Yuji or heard from him in weeks. Had his winter illness come?

  ‘Yes,’ says Yuji, ‘it came.’

  ‘But you have recovered now?’

  ‘There has been an improvement.’

  ‘You don’t sound ill.’

  ‘Would you like to hear me cough?’

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘I don’t want that, of course.’

  There’s a pause. He waits. He cannot begin to imagine why she has called him. He is not even sure where she found his telephone number. Could she have asked Junzo for it?

  ‘I was going to mention something,’ she says.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘If you would like to go to the kabuki.’

  ‘To the kabuki?’

  ‘To see Kasane. Do you know it?’

  ‘It’s a ghost story,’ he says. ‘Everyone knows Kasane.’

  She explains to him that Mrs Yamaguchi, her dance teacher, has been assisting a company of young actors who, though amateurs, are, in Mrs Yamaguchi’s view, both talented and dedicated. Their speciality is the staging of performances in the old style, such as might have been seen in the days of the first Nakamura. They do not, for example, use any electric lighting.

  ‘I see,’ says Yuji, half fearful this is some sort of game. ‘So it’s kabuki in the old style.’

  ‘Mrs Yamaguchi will be going. And she has given some tickets to her students. I have two.’

  ‘Two?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘To Kasane?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Why do you keep repeating everything?’

  ‘I’m sorry . . .’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she says. ‘You’ve been ill. You probably haven’t been speaking to people.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So you’ll come?’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘Tomorrow!’

  ‘We could meet at the house at five, then take a taxi. The theatre’s in Tsukiji.’

  ‘Ah, Tsukiji . . .’

  ‘I thought you might find it amusing, especially as you’ve been unable to leave the house for so long. Aren’t you bored to death?’

  What, he wonders, what form of words, would make her understand that he would rather spend the evening grinding chalk between his teeth than go to a student performance of kabuki? Why has she chosen him? What does she want? It is highly irritating that she refuses to translate his hesitation into what it so obviously signifies.

  ‘At five o’clock?’

  ‘You could wear a kimono,’ she says, ‘if you think you remember how to.’ And she laughs, a sound like someone throwing petals in his face. He hangs up. Miyo is eavesdropping in the Western room. Haruyo, he supposes, will have heard everything from Mother’s room – Mother too, perhaps. He goes upstairs, lies on his mattress. Is she, perhaps, a little crazy? He has known her since she was sixteen, but other than Garbo, Dietrich, Bette Davis, Vivian Leigh, Danielle Darrieux and a few others, he has no one to compare her with. He has seen other foreign women, of course, has surreptitiously studied them, their height, their high colour, their colourful eyes, their interesting hair, but it is only Alissa he has had any dealings with, just as her father is the only foreign man he has ever spoken to. What is her interest in kabuki? What is her interest in classical dance – a form not even Japanese people take much notice of? Can she not be satisfied with Molíère and waltzes?

  Lying there, he is starting to feel pleasantly fatigued again. There is, he assures himself, plenty of time before tomorrow to think of some excuse, some unavoidable commitment he forgot somehow to mention to her. My sincere apologies . . . Most awkward . . . Most unfortunate . . . Another occasion, perhaps? She, who seems to so admire all things Japanese, and who doubtless subscribes to the curious Western theory of Oriental inscrutability, might enjoy a little demonstration of it. He will hide from her in language. He will conceal himself in a smoke of impeccable manners. It would, after all, require nothing more difficult than a passable imitation of Father.

  18

  He leaves for the house in Kanda a few minutes after four o’clock. He rides his usual route, but being ill has stripped him of a layer of skin so that the sudden flights of sparrows, the singing of tram cables, sunlight in a gutter, the whiff of, what? – spring mushrooms? – startles and amuses him, diluting a little the exasperated mood he has been in all day, the sense of having been burdened by a ridiculous commitment he has been too dull, too timorous to escape from. His hope now is simply to persuade her to give up the kabuki and come to the cinema instead. There’s a Marcel Carné film at the Montparnasse in Asakusa. He could buy her a coffee, perhaps an ice cream, get her home by nine. If she becomes tedious, argumentative, starts to lecture him on the traditional arts of Japan, he can cough into his sleeve and let go a few deep sickbed sighs. Even Alissa must understand that.

  He props his bicycle by the drainpipe, folds his raincoat over his arm, rings the bell. Hanako answers. ‘The master isn’t here,’ she says.

  ‘Ah . . . ? But Miss Feneon?’ He would like to add, ‘She called me.’ He would like even Hanako to know he has not simply taken it upon himself to ring the bell without a proper invitation, but before he can speak she has stood aside to let him enter.

  He follows her through the house to the kitchen door, the only door – some quirk of Russian architecture? – that gives onto the garden. She stands aside again, stares at him, then drops her gaze. Alissa is under the magnolia tree, reaching into its lower branches, apparently to inspect the buds that line the wood like so many creamy-white candles. For a moment he observes her in silence, her braided hair, her rose kimono tied with an obi of the deepest indigo. Then Beatrice barks and runs over the grass to greet him, sitting at his feet and gazing at him with moist, adoring eyes.

  ‘She thinks you’ve got something for her,’ says Alissa. ‘She thinks you’re Junzo.’

  ‘I don’t,’ says Yuji, who thinks it not quite right that a dog should be fed sweets like a spoilt child.

  ‘I’m sure she likes you anyway,’ says Alissa, taking her stick from where she has hung it over a branch. ‘She’s very forgiving.’

  ‘Monsieur Feneon isn’t here?’

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘I told you on the phone, didn’t I? He’s in Yokohama.’

  ‘Yokohama?’

  ‘He can’t be here all the time.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘He has a business to attend to. I’m sorry if you are disappointed.’

  He says he is not. They look at each other. Already, he thinks, it’s started, the long evening of embarrassment, but when they go into the house to drink tea she starts to play the hostess, asking him, earnestly, about his health, gently scolding him for not wearing a kimono, and does it all so skilfully, in such a grown-up manner, he is, despite himself, put at ease. The stance he has imagined himself taking, the tone of vexed politeness, has no opening, no chance to emerge. When he tries to say something sarcastic about the failings of student theatricals, it comes out as a perfectly harmless enquiry, one she answers at length, with much enthusiasm.

  From in front of the house the taxi sounds its horn. Yuji accepts his coat from Hanako and follows Alissa into the street. They settle into the back of the cab. The driver manoeuvres to the main road past a party of schoolgirls on bicycles, and what looks like a neighbourhood shogi competition, a dozen benches spilling into the middle of the street, young and old sitting as
tride them, leaning intently over the boards.

  He settles back against the frayed leather of the seat, looks out drowsily at the traffic, at the sunlight slanting over the roofs, the evening air in which a golden dust seems to hang, suspended. And as they ride – so slowly they will surely be late – something begins in him, an emotion as sweet as it is painful, and that he cannot, in this perfectly ordinary Tokyo dusk, begin to account for. It is as if he was sitting at the side of a piano on which someone was sounding the same deep note again and again, louder and louder, more and more insistently, until his entire body, the blood itself, vibrated at the exact same pitch. If this is memory then it’s memory as possession – but memory of what? He presses his fist to his lips. Alissa turns to him.

  ‘I’ve been selfish,’ she says. ‘You are not well yet.’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘It’s nothing serious.’

  ‘Should we turn back?’

  ‘There is really no need.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Quite sure.’

  ‘It’s not far now,’ she says. ‘You’ll feel much better out in the air again.’

  The theatre is on the corner of a street by the Tsukiji Canal, close enough to the market for a breeze from the bay to carry with it a small stink of fish and fish guts. Yuji, to give himself more time to recover, insists on paying the driver, then walks beside Alissa to the entrance of the theatre. It is not, despite the brightly painted banners over the doors, a place of any great promise, but once they have left their shoes with the attendant and stepped inside, he sees that it is larger than he had imagined, and has, with its scattering of old posters, the age-darkened wood of its beams, the slight confusion of its architecture, something homely and authentic which, despite himself, his mood, the sense of dislocation it has brought with it, touches him with its charm.

  They find Mrs Yamaguchi surrounded by her students. She is wearing a kimono of Omeshi silk, and over it a formal coat marked with the crests of the school. To Yuji, though he is certainly no expert, she has the look of a retired geisha, a former Oka-san, perhaps, from one of the older, stricter houses in Shimbashi or the Yoshiwara. Her eyebrows are razored, her hairline neat as if she still wore a wig, though her hair, with its delicate chain of red coral, is, as far as he can tell, her own. Alissa introduces him. The teacher smiles and says, ‘So you are the poet? How wonderful.’ If she laughed, he would not be surprised to find she had blackened her teeth, like the beauties of Grandmother’s day.

  The rhythmic wooden clapping of the Ki begins. The inner doors swing wide. They wish each other a pleasant experience, then join the queues filing into the auditorium. The only illumination comes from the pulsing of a half-dozen naked gas flares along the edge of the stage, an uncertain light that leaves large areas draped in shadow, but it does not take long for Yuji to realise that all the seating is in traditional matted stalls and that there is not a single Western-style chair in the whole room. Was Alissa warned of this? How could such a mistake have been made? He turns, stares back to where Mrs Yamaguchi and her students are already settling onto their knees, adjusting their collars, batting their fans. Are some of them watching him, slyly, waiting to see how the ‘poet’ will manage his little difficulty?

  The flares are dimmed. The clapping builds to its crescendo. He leans towards Alissa, clears his throat – there is nothing for it but to guide her, as swiftly as possible, out to the foyer again – but she is speaking to him, saying, ‘Here, in here,’ and they shuffle sideways into an unoccupied stall between the aisle and the raised walkway of the hanamichi. She passes him the stick, then, without the slightest visible difficulty, gracefully even, as though easing herself into a hot bath, she kneels. He takes his place beside her. He is still holding her stick, the warm handle. After a moment he lays it carefully on the mat between them.

  The last lights gutter, go out. For quarter of a minute the hall is in perfect darkness, then Yuji hears the sound of bodies turning (silk on skin) and turns himself to see, at the back of the auditorium, a candle flame moving in hesitant rhythms along the hanamichi towards the stage, and carrying on its tip the long white oval of an actor’s face. It is not until the flame is almost level with where he is kneeling that Yuji sees how the candle is attached to a long pole and the pole carried by a figure in black who moves in the shadow beyond the candle’s soft bloom of light, stepping back as the actor steps forwards, stopping when he stops. They reach the stage. The shamisen begins to play, a single string plucked with a kind of violence, a sound so sharp, so heavy with nostalgia, the audience lets go a soft collective sigh of grief and pleasure. And in that instant Yuji understands what it was that wrung his heart in the taxi – that his journey with Alissa has unburied the memory of another journey, eighteen, nineteen years ago, when he went with Mother to the Kabuki-za Theatre, just the two of them (Ryuichi must have been with Father or at one of his many school clubs) riding in a rickshaw over the pitted roads of the Low City, crossing Sakura Bridge, crossing Kamei Bridge. He cannot remember the tea house they stopped at. The Kikuoka? He cannot remember which of her kimonos Mother was wearing. He cannot even remember what plays they saw, but what has stayed, what has lain inert all these years waiting for the precise circumstance that would allow it to burn again, is the ecstasy of being pressed against her shoulder, the scent of her, the warmth, the rich serenity of being in exactly the place he wished, above all places, to be. So meagre is his store of such memories – material from the time before – he almost laughs out loud at the luck of coming across it like this on an evening he expected nothing from. It is a victory of sorts. A small defeat for that darkness time drags in its wake.

  And in this state he starts attending to the play. He doesn’t care that the theatre is chilly or that his knees are beginning to ache. How skilled the young actors are! How wise of Mrs Yamaguchi to assist them! The shrieks, the bursts of drumming, the sudden stillness, the buffoonery are no longer quaintly antique but a language profound and perfectly evolved. He gives himself up to it – Takao’s murder, Tanizo’s love for Kasane, her transformation into a limping monster – and when the onnagata playing poor Kasane strikes the gesture for pointing to the moon, Yuji is as excited as anyone, and had he known the actor’s name, would have shouted it out along with the others.

  It lasts an hour. The next act, following an interval, will be a dance piece, the one which Mrs Yamaguchi presumably has been helping with, but as Alissa stands, Yuji sees her face contort. She leans heavily on the stick, then, after a few seconds, straightens and smiles at him, an apologetic smile that is also sad and somehow coquettish.

  ‘We could leave now,’ he says.

  ‘Don’t you want to see the dancing?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ he says, ‘I’ve had enough for today.’

  In the foyer, they find Mrs Yamaguchi again, explain to her how, most unfortunately, they are unable to stay. The teacher nods, turns her eyes from Yuji to Alissa, back to Yuji. She and her students, she says, will be going to the new Chinese restaurant in Shimbashi, once the dancing has finished. Would Alissa and Yuji care to join them? Yuji opens his mouth to answer but Alissa, bowing swiftly, excuses them both. The girls, her fellow students, wave their neat goodbyes. ‘How nice,’ says Mrs Yamaguchi, smiling at Yuji from a face as stiff and white as those on the stage, ‘to meet a friend of Miss Feneon’s.’

  They collect their shoes, step into the street. Yuji offers to find a taxi but Alissa says she needs to walk off the stiffness. ‘You’re sure you didn’t mind leaving so soon?’ she asks.

  ‘I was ready to go.’

  ‘I think I’ve converted you a little.’

  ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘a little.’

  It’s a night more like mid-May than March. They walk beneath a half-moon, its light in shallow silver pools on the roof tiles of the houses. From the corner of his eye he watches her, wondering if she is still in pain. If she is, she hides it well. She is walking easily now, and with no more than the usual small adjustment
to each stride, that slight roll as she settles onto her left foot. A block from the Matsuya, as though by unspoken agreement, they slow, then stop. She adjusts her obi; he glances at his watch.

  ‘Do you have to go home now?’ she asks. ‘Are you hungry at all?’

  He suggests one of the neighbourhood noodle bars, places he has been to at the end of an evening’s drinking with Junzo and Taro, and where a dish of yakisoba costs no more than a tram ride.

  ‘Or,’ she says, speaking quickly, ‘we could go to the Snow Goose.’

  ‘The Snow Goose? But isn’t that . . .’

  ‘I have a new pupil,’ she says, ‘a financier of some kind who has fallen in love with Beethoven. He’s twice as old as my other students and at least twice as rich so I charge him twice as much.’

  ‘You’re good at business,’ says Yuji.

  ‘I mean,’ she says, ‘it could be my treat. A way of apologising for making you sit through an hour of kabuki.’

  Has someone spoken to her about the allowance? Is this financier of hers a fiction, a way of saving his blushes? Should he be offended? He must refuse her offer, of course, that seems clear, though he would, very much, like to go to the Snow Goose, a proper restaurant, an authentic Western-style restaurant he has passed by a hundred times without ever having stepped inside. And if he leaves now, brings the evening to an end, he will have to go and eat in Otaki’s on his own, or take the risk of some icy encounter in the kitchen at home with Haruyo. He studies the toes of his shoes, frowns at the moon, performs in his head the tiresome mathematics of obligation and counter-obligation – though with a foreigner (even one in a rose kimono) the rules are surely different. More lax, more agreeable perhaps . . .

  ‘It seems . . .’ he mutters. ‘I mean, I wonder if . . .’