THE LANTERN BOATS an utterly gripping and heart-breaking historical novel set in post-war Japan (Historical Fiction Standalones)

by TESSA MORRIS-SUZUKI

Soon after, Jun heard a shrill whistle from the forest, and a moment or two later the lights of a vehicle appeared ahead of them, shining over the pebbles of a small patch of beach. To the left of the beach, a long flat rock ran out into the water, like a natural jetty.

  As the captain steered the boat alongside the rock promontory, the figures of three men emerged from the darkness, picking their way confidently across the rocks, as though they had taken this path many times before. The man at the front was the only one who carried a light, but the two who followed were smoking. Jun could see the reddish sparks of their cigarettes bobbing up and down as they made their way towards the boat. No one said a word while the men on the boat lifted the crates and handed them across the narrow gap of water to the men on the rocks. The captain waited until the task was complete, and then passed the wheel of the boat to Orlov and leaped, with surprising ease for a man of his age, from the boat to the shore. He murmured a few words to the three men on the rocks, and Jun saw one them give the captain a small packet.

  The moment the captain returned to the boat, Chen muttered in Jun’s ear, ‘Now, go!’

  Jun handed his precious bundle to one of the men onshore, scrambled over the boat’s rail and jumped awkwardly on to the rock platform, jarring his ankle as he landed. An arm reached out to steady him, and the men guided him across the slippery promontory. When they reached the beach, Jun glanced back, but the boat had already moved away from the shore. There was nothing to be seen but a vague shape on the water, heading quietly back out to sea.

  Once they had finished loading the crates into the truck, the three men climbed into its cabin. One was taller than the rest, and seemed to be the boss. The others were a skinny lad little older than Jun himself, and a stout older man with a pockmarked face and a fur hat pulled down over his ears.

  ‘You, get in the back,’ Fur Hat said to Jun. ‘There’s a tarpaulin in there if you get cold.’ He spoke with a thick local accent.

  Jun scrambled up and found a spot for himself, wedged between the crates in the rear of the truck, the wrapped bundle held carefully between his knees. The vehicle was ancient and looked as though it might fall apart at any moment. Its sides were made of slats of wood, and there was no rear door — just two canvas curtains that flapped in the wind as they jolted up the narrow track behind the beach. It was bitterly cold, and Jun realized that it was hours since he had had anything to eat or drink. He groped among the crates, dragged out the tarpaulin and draped it around his body as best he could. The tarpaulin was greasy in places, and smelled strongly of fish.

  Through the gaps between the wooden slats and canvas curtains, he caught glimpses of black pine branches curving earthwards under the weight of snow. Sometimes the branches slapped against the sides of the truck, or falling lumps of snow thudded on its roof. The vehicle’s engine spluttered as they bumped along the track. Jun had to use his shoulders to stop the crates from toppling over on to him. After a while, they turned right, on to a smoother road that ran uphill in a long series of curves. The drive through the darkness seemed to go on for ever. His legs were cramped into a painful position and his right foot had gone numb, but there was no room to make himself more comfortable. By way of consolation, he hummed quietly to himself: ‘Katyusha’, ‘The Beacon’, ‘The Dark Night’ — songs that Colonel Brodsky and his friends in Karafuto used to sing after a few bottles of vodka. The Russian words ran through his head — ‘only the wind buzzes in the wires, the stars twinkle dimly, in the dark night . . .’ He had forgotten the lines that followed.

  ‘OK. Get out.’ The curtains at the back of the truck were jerked open, and Jun was startled to realize that he must have fallen asleep. The fur-hatted man helped him down, and his legs almost collapsed beneath him as the blood started to trickle back through his veins. He leaned for a moment against the side of the truck, clutching his heavy bundle in both arms. They had stopped at a crossroads with dense forest on either side. The air was freezing, and at first Jun could see nothing but the long stretches of two narrow snow-covered roads winding among the trees.

  ‘Where am I?’ he asked, with a sudden surge of panic.

  ‘Look,’ replied Fur Hat, leading him round to the front of the truck. A hazy streak of light extended along the horizon below them.

  ‘Aomori,’ said the man. ‘This road goes right into town. Just keep walking straight ahead until you reach the sea, and then turn right and follow the coastline, and you’ll come to the station.’

  Unexpectedly, he gave Jun a heavy slap on the shoulder with one gloved hand. ‘Good luck. You’re gonna need it,’ he added with an odd little laugh. He climbed back into the truck, which turned along the side road to the right, skidding alarmingly on a patch of ice.

  Jun watched its tail lights disappear into the dark.

  * * *

  The narrow road towards Aomori sloped steeply downward through dense forest, and the places where the snow was packed hard by the wheels of passing vehicles were very slippery. Jun kept to the deep snow at the side of the road, even though this meant that his feet sometimes sank into drifts, allowing icy chunks to slither over the tops of his boots. His toes were numb, and he wished that he could bury his hands deep in his pockets, but he couldn’t because of the bulky bundle that he carried in his arms. He should have asked for a bag to carry it in. His muscles were tensed against the cold, and he felt light-headed from tiredness and hunger.

  But he was also strangely excited. The air was crisp and pure. The clouds had melted away and the dark sky was full of stars. He was walking alone on the soil of his homeland. He thought back to the only time he had done this before. It was just over two years ago, when he had first arrived in Japanese waters, having paid the smuggling boat to bring him across from Karafuto via Vladivostok and Korea. He had been hoping that he might find a place to live and work in Tokyo, but once he arrived, he found the city terrifying — its vastness, its confusion, the crowds who thronged the black market. The limbless veterans in white garb, begging by the roadside; the huge Americans in their khaki uniforms, spilling drunk out of the bars. As he hunted for a place to sleep in the garish Tokyo night, one of the Americans had grabbed him by the arm. Jun had struggled frantically, expecting to be dragged away to prison. But instead, the American just took Jun’s face between his two fat hands and gazed at it for a while, and then said something that sounded like ‘sugar’. Jun kneed the man in the groin and ran for his life into a rabbit warren of backstreets. The following day, he found his way back to the waterfront, where the smuggling boat had put in again to pick up a fresh cargo bound for Kaohsiung. He had persuaded them to take him on as a deckhand, and had barely set foot on land since.

  But here it was different. No crowds. No chaos. Just the silence of the forest, broken now and again by the distant cry of an owl or the rustle of some night animal in the undergrowth. Even the bitter cold seemed comfortingly familiar: an old friend from his childhood. It reminded him of the nights when their Karafuto neighbour Uncle Zima used to take him into the mountains to set traps by lamplight for foxes and sable and Arctic hares. After two years spent sleeping on a cramped wooden bunk in the little boat, he was finally free and alone. If it wasn’t for the bundle in his arms, he could have walked forever through the snow and the stars, and found an empty cottage somewhere in the mountains where he could sleep surrounded by the sounds of the forest at night, and by day, dig the soil and plant potatoes . . .

  As he rounded a bend in the road, he saw that the lights of the town were nearer now. A couple of dogs suddenly started to howl somewhere close by. Below, the forest opened into farmland — rectangular rice fields where the snow was interspersed with patches of dark ice. He stopped to scoop a handful of snow from the roadside and put it into his mouth to ease his thirst, and then continued his journey, whistling softly to himself. As he reached the first houses on the outskirts of town, he noticed, with surprise, the faint streaks of milky light in the sky above the horizon to his left — dawn could not be
far away. The road crossed a small river, and then met the wider highway that ran parallel to the shore, heading towards the lights of the town.

  The bundle in his arms seemed to be getting heavier as he walked. The weight of it reminded him of the sack of handguns they had once put ashore in Okinawa. He had known they were handguns because he had glimpsed their barrels through a small tear in one side of the sack. But the shape of this bundle was different. Round and solid. More like a heavy cooking pan without handles.

  Straight on, the man in the fur hat had said, but the road was not straight. It branched confusingly as it approached the centre of the town, and when he reached the railway, Jun found that he was on the opposite side of the tracks from the station building. Luckily the trains weren’t running yet, so he wandered across the tracks and entered a wide, well-lit square, facing an imposing station building with pillars on either side of the entrance.

  Jun glanced up at the station clock. 5 a.m. Twenty minutes to wait for the first train to Misawa. He took a seat on a bench in the waiting room, as close as possible to its oil stove, inhaling the smell of paraffin and rejoicing as warmth began to flow through his frozen veins. A couple of ancient women wandered in, bent double from the waist under the weight of the baskets on their backs. They sat opposite him, glancing at him out of the corners of their eyes from time to time as they chattered and stretched their crooked legs towards the warmth of the stove.

  Jun ran his hands again around the wrapped bundle. Circular. Hard. He tapped it very gently. Not hollow. The sound it made was muffled. There was no one in the waiting room but the two old women and himself, so he cautiously tried to push his little finger through the knot in the cloth to see if he could feel what was inside, but the knot was tied too tight, and he was afraid to loosen it.

  * * *

  There were fewer passengers than he expected on the local train to Misawa. He chose an almost empty carriage near the back of the train, and gazed out of the window at the snowy landscape of Aomori beyond. The train began to hiss and shudder in preparation for departure, and at that moment another passenger — a tall, thin man in a cast-off army coat — flung open the door of the carriage, strode in and, seating himself by the window on the opposite side from Jun, pulled his cloth cap down over his eyes and promptly went to sleep. As the train pulled out of the station, Jun studied the man’s oddly mismatched clothing. His coat and cap looked cheap and tattered, but he was wearing shiny new metal-capped boots and his gloves were made of very fine black leather.

  The train rocked slowly along the tracks. Jun felt his eyelids drooping. He woke briefly with a start as his shoulder connected with the hard metal frame of the window, but then he slipped back into a dream in which the bundle on his knees had become his mother’s head. His mother was lying, as she used to after his father died but before the Russians came, with her head in his lap, while he cleaned her ears with the long, thin wooden stick that she kept for this purpose in her black lacquer chest. He could see how her greying hair was thinning, and trace the deepening lines around her eyes. He moved his hand to stroke her hair, but found himself instead stroking the rough crêpe cloth of the parcel.

  If you drop this, you’re dead.

  The echo of the captain’s words startled him out of sleep.

  A bomb. Suddenly he was wide awake. What if he were carrying a bomb? That would explain the weight, the shape, the size. Circular, metal, smooth. Not hollow — filled with some powder or gel, probably. Would the bomb be primed? Could the rocking of the train, which was swaying violently as it gathered speed, cause the thing to explode?

  With desperate, shaking fingers, Jun started to untie the knots in the cloth and open the bundle.

  Then something clamped like a vice around his neck. A leather-gloved hand.

  He hadn’t even noticed the tall man at the window opposite move from his seat, but now the man’s powerful left hand was squeezing Jun’s windpipe while his right hand held a knife against Jun’s ribs. A serrated knife, very sharp. Its blade cut into his skin, hard enough to draw blood.

  ‘Stand up!’ the man hissed in his ear.

  Jun got shakily to his feet, one arm still clutching the half-unwrapped bundle. The leather-gloved hand remained tight around his throat, but the point of the knife had now moved to the middle of his back, jabbing painfully into the skin just to the right of his spine. His attacker pushed him towards the back of the carriage.

  ‘Open the door,’ he commanded.

  Jun’s hand slipped on the handle as he tugged the door open. The man shoved him forward into the rattling, half-open space between the carriages. Jun could see the snowy ground between the tracks racing past below. It was useless to cry out for help. No one would hear him above the racket of the train, and he would be dead before help arrived. He waited, dizzy with terror, for what would happen next.

  But, for a while, nothing happened. The man was completely silent. The knife was still lodged in the small of Jun’s back, the grip of the gloved hand still like a band of steel around his neck. The metal plates that connected the carriages swung back and forth beneath their feet, grinding and squealing as the train rocked from side to side. Jun and his attacker swayed with the movement of the train, their bodies pressed against each other as though in some kind of horrible dance. He had caught only a glimpse of the other man’s face, but wondered, from his size and stature, whether this could be the tall leader of the trio of men who had unloaded the crates from the boat and driven him to the hills above Aomori.

  We’ll know what you’re up to every step of the way, the captain had said. Of course, he’d been followed. He should have known. But why? Why give him the package to carry, and then trail him all the way to Misawa? Why not simply hand the bundle to the three Japanese smugglers and let them deliver it?

  As soon as the question entered Jun’s head, he knew the answer, and he cursed himself for not having seen it sooner.

  He’d been given this mission because he was nobody. He was invisible. He had nothing: no home, no family, no documents, no identity except a false seaman’s card. Maybe the whole plan was that he would never complete the mission and return to the boat. Even if he hadn’t tried to open the bundle, perhaps the bomb was designed to explode in his arms, or maybe Mr Kitazawa from the barber’s shop had been ordered to get rid of him once he’d delivered his ‘gift from Captain Endo’.

  He was no one, so no one would notice his absence when he disappeared. If his body turned up in a ditch, he would become just another of the nameless dead.

  The train was starting to slow now as they approached a station. Jun braced himself, wondering if this would give him his only chance to cry for help. There was a long, slow screaming of brakes as the train pulled to a halt.

  ‘Move,’ said the man softly, herding Jun into the next carriage, where a door opened on to a snow-covered and almost deserted platform. Still locked in the stranger’s murderous embrace, he stepped out of the train into the chill air of small country station.

  He looked wildly around for help. There was a station attendant at the far end of the platform, deep in conversation with a passenger, and Jun wondered for a moment if his cries might reach that far, but his throat was half crushed by the man’s hand, and the train emitted hisses of steam loud enough to drown any human sound. His only hope was to break free and make a run for it, but the grip on his neck was making him faint, and Jun could feel how the tip of the knife had ripped through his thick padded jacket and the woollen jumper that he wore beneath it. The man shoved him roughly towards the back of the platform, where a short flight of steps led to a path that headed into a thicket of trees.

  ‘Keep moving. Don’t look round,’ said the man. His voice was quiet but hard and sibilant. He had an accent that Jun could not quite place. Not from this area. Maybe Osaka?

  The path into the forest narrowed. There was no light ahead. Just the tall trunks of trees and a scrubby undergrowth of bamboo. They were walking into a wasteland, out of
the reach of other human beings.

  ‘You little shit.’ Jun was startled by the venom in the stranger’s whispering voice. ‘You were told not to open the parcel. You knew what would happen if you tried to mess with us.’

  Why the hatred? wondered Jun. He doesn’t know me, and now he’s going to kill me. Why does he have to hate me too?

  Jun didn’t want to die. Somehow, at this moment, it mattered very much to him that he was the only member of his family still alive. He had to survive. He wanted to live. He wanted to go to Misawa. He wanted to see the gulls circling above the Kabushima Shrine.

  They moved forward in silence. The only sounds were the wind in the trees and the crunch of their boots in the snow, each step taking them deeper into forest, away from human life. Jun couldn’t stop the trembling of his legs, yet he kept on moving, forced forward by the pressure of the knife at his back. For some reason, he heard his father’s hoarse voice echoing in his head: ‘That’s what made them happy. That’s what made them happy.’

  At last, they reached a small clearing, where a little light shone through the branches above. The snow here was almost knee-deep. The sun had risen high in the sky, and drops of water hung from the tips of icicles on the branches, poised, waiting to fall to earth. A bird started singing very clearly in a tree somewhere close by. The man pulled the knife out from the back of Jun’s jacket and swung it upwards as though to strike at his throat. At that moment, Jun’s fear of the bundle he was carrying vanished. If he was going to die, it was only right that his attacker should die with him. He flung the bundle into the snow at the side of the clearing, where it landed with a muffled thud, but no explosion.

  The unexpected movement made the man with the knife hesitate and turn his head just for a second, and in that instant, Jun broke free, lunged forward and started to run towards the path that continued beyond the clearing, heading up the hillside. He was younger than his attacker, and the gap between them briefly widened. But when he reached the far side of the clearing, a hidden log snagged his feet, throwing him off balance. He stumbled forward on to his knees. As he started to struggle to his feet again, he felt — but did not see — the man’s boot crash into his ribs. He toppled to one side, the breath draining from his lungs. Curling up in agony and raising his arms to ward off the rain of blows, he somehow managed to grab one leather-booted foot in both hands and pull with all his might. The man emitted something between a groan and a curse as he lost his balance and tumbled backward.