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

by TESSA MORRIS-SUZUKI

  Immediately, Jun was on his feet again, running for his life. He left the path and ploughed through the undergrowth, ignoring the pain of the branches that whipped across his face, and hearing the curses and ragged breathing of his pursuer grow more distant behind him. He glimpsed a patch of light between the trees, leaped towards it, and realized his mistake too late as a ridge of snow collapsed beneath his feet, and he found himself hurtling sideways down a cliff, hitting his head on something hard as he fell.

  It felt as though he would go on falling for ever, but at last his body came to a halt, and just for a moment, Jun felt the softness of the snow moulding itself around his cheek, numbing the pain and the metallic taste of blood filling his mouth.

  Then darkness fell.

  CHAPTER 2

  Elly Ruskin’s disintegrating map of Tokyo — folded the wrong way too many times — showed two expanses of green in the heart of the maze of streets that formed the veins and arteries of the city. One patch of green was the empty space surrounding Emperor Hirohito’s palace. The other was Ueno Park with its wide lawns and lotus ponds, and adjoining the park, the great walled garden outside which she was standing. The sign on the concrete gatepost in front of her read Tokyo Anglican Theological College. The iron gate was closed and bolted shut.

  Elly gazed through the gate, unsure what to do next. Her best shoes, carefully polished for the occasion, were pinching her feet, and she had a faintly sick feeling — was it hope or fear? — in the pit of her stomach. She glanced again at her watch: the odd little watch with an engraved silver face that Fergus had found for her in a flea market a couple of weeks before their wedding.

  Nearly quarter past two. Fergus was running late, as always. He’d just returned to Tokyo that morning from a hasty trip up north to cover some mysterious incident near Misawa, and now he was in a nearby café interviewing a Japanese woman poet who had spent the war years in China. They’d agreed to meet at the gateway by two, as soon as the interview was over. On any other day, Elly would have turned the delay into a joke — ‘Fergus Ruskin time’, a special time zone, thirty or forty minutes later than regular Japan time. But today she didn’t feel like joking.

  Elly longed for Fergus to be as excited as she was by her plans for their future. She wished that they had had more time to talk about and prepare for this meeting. Everything depended on how it went. But Fergus was always on the move and it was hard to pin him down. In her darker moments, Elly felt that his heart was not in this project. Was he simply going along with it to humour her?

  Beyond the wrought iron of the theological college, she could see a long driveway leading up through a grove of dark evergreen trees. The college buildings were invisible, and it was strangely quiet. The alleyways of the Yushima district, with their bars and fish shops, laundries and brothels, were just around the corner, but Elly could hear nothing except the sound of the wind and the cawing of crows in the treetops.

  It was uncomfortable standing alone in front of the closed gate. Although there seemed to be no one else around, Elly had an irrational feeling that she was being watched. She could see herself as she might appear through the eye of the imagined observer — an awkward angular woman, not quite Japanese, with her nearly black hair cut square across her forehead. ‘Half’ was the word they liked to used here — hafu, reducing people like herself to eternal incompleteness with a single word. Neither safely Japanese nor self-evidently foreign. An odd piece that fitted nowhere in the national jigsaw. There were moments when it wearied and oppressed her, and moments when she enjoyed playing games with the unspoken questions that she saw in the faces of others.

  She paced impatiently up and down across the uneven paving stones, and then, for the sake of doing something other than waiting, headed back along the narrow road to see if she could spot Fergus arriving.

  He should have been here by now. The interview he was doing started at twelve, and surely couldn’t have gone on for more than an hour and a half. Elly imagined him appearing at the end of the road in his usual whirlwind of untidy energy: tousled red hair standing on end, his coat half unbuttoned and his overflowing canvas satchel spilling a trail of paper behind him. Her angel with flaming hair. That was what she liked to call him — when he wasn’t drunk, at least, and when she wasn’t in one of her prickly moods. But the roadway was empty.

  It was only when she reached the corner and looked down towards the main street of Yushima that she caught sight of Fergus, quite a long way off. Not hurrying, but standing in conversation with a tall, long-haired woman dressed in some kind of flowing greyish gown. The Japanese poetess, she supposed. A surge of irritation seized her. This was the day that could change their lives for ever, and there was Fergus dawdling in the street exchanging pleasantries with some suspiciously attractive and vaguely familiar-looking woman. She started to hurry towards him, but at that moment Fergus caught of sight of her. He gave an apologetic little gesture of farewell to the woman, who responded, rather surprisingly, by placing her hand briefly on Fergus’ arm. Then Fergus was running towards Elly, all smiles and apologies.

  ‘I’m so sorry, my love. Blame Chairman Mao. We got caught up in debates about the Chinese revolution, and the time ran away from me again.’

  There was a fading glow of laughter in his eyes from some joke that he had shared with the poetess.

  ‘Charming, was she?’ asked Elly, unable to help herself.

  Fergus gave her a nudge and a grin. ‘Do we detect just a wee note of jealously here, madam?’ And then more seriously, ‘She’s a very interesting woman, actually. You’ve met her, you know. Don’t you remember? She was at Ted Cornish’s Halloween party. Speaks beautiful Chinese. Russian and Esperanto too, apparently. There was a little group of them in China during the war — traitors, from the Japanese point of view. Working with the enemy. Vida must have seen some remarkable things in her time, though whether I can get her to talk about them is another matter. We just scratched the surface today. I’m hoping there’s more to come.’ And then, slipping his hand companionably under Elly’s arm, ‘But anyway, never fear, she’s nowhere near as charming or wise as my bonny wife.’

  Vida? What sort of a name is that? thought Elly. Neither Japanese nor Chinese. Presumably some sort of fancy pen name. Now that Fergus mentioned it, she did remember the woman at the Halloween party, drifting around Ted Cornish’s house as though she owned the place. She could remember wondering at the time what a down-to-earth Harvard law graduate like Ted was doing with a fey Japanese companion who looked as though she drank herbal teas and read tarot cards. But Elly didn’t want to talk about the strange woman now. There were more important things to deal with today.

  This time, as they approached the gateway together, a gnome-like man in a beige uniform appeared from a little gatekeeper’s lodge inside the grounds and unbolted the gates with a screeching of rusted metal. He didn’t respond to Fergus’ cheery greeting, but just bowed to them as they walked through the gateway and into the dark garden beyond.

  The long driveway led between granite walls, mottled here and there with patches of moss and lichen. Elly felt the tension in her stomach return, and gripped Fergus’ arm more tightly.

  ‘We do have a chance, don’t we, Fergus? You don’t think this is just a wild goose chase?’

  Fergus paused for a moment before replying. ‘I don’t think it’s going to be easy, Elly. I don’t want you to get your hopes up too much. All we can do is try. I know how much this means to you.’

  How much this means to you. Not ‘to us’. To have a child to call our own. To rescue one child from the ashes of defeat and occupation. If only, thought Elly, he would say ‘how much it means to us’.

  * * *

  Further up the driveway, the trees on either side thinned out. They could see a wide expanse of patchy lawn and beyond, the building itself, with a pillared portico and a central tower topped by a domed roof. It seemed artificial and a little ridiculous in this setting: a grand mansion from some Europe
an spa town, or even from a Hollywood film set, transplanted complete with garden to the middle of Tokyo’s huddled chaos of wooden houses.

  Elly was expecting signs of activity, noticeboards advertising church services and lectures, or perhaps the sounds of choir practice, but everything was very quiet. The area in front of the house was elaborately paved with a pattern of brown and white tiles, but dry weeds sprouted between the cracks. The cream-painted shutters on the windows were all closed. A cedar tree near the edge of the lawn had pale scars in its black bark that looked like bullet holes. Beneath its branches was a large Japanese stone lantern — the only obviously Japanese thing in this surreally Western landscape.

  A man in US uniform with a gun in his hands stood blocking the grand flight of stone steps that led up to the open front door. Elly could glimpse an ornate arch of stained glass above the doorway, and a stag’s head hanging on a panelled wall in the entrance hall beyond. As they approached, she noticed that, beneath his American military helmet, the soldier’s face looked entirely Japanese. He stared at them with an expression of stony hostility.

  ‘We are in the right place, aren’t we?’ she whispered uneasily to Fergus.

  ‘Hi there,’ Fergus called out, giving the soldier a smile and a wave of his hand. ‘We’re here for the children’s concert.’ And then, when this produced no response, he added, a little less confidently, ‘The children’s concert at the theological college? To raise money for the Elizabeth Saunders Home?’

  The soldier’s expression remained utterly immobile. His face, half shadowed by his pudding-bowl helmet, was broad. He had pouches under his eyes and his slightly froglike mouth looked as though it naturally turned downward at the corners even when he smiled. If he ever did.

  ‘Not in here, you ain’t,’ he replied. His voice was brusque, dismissive and entirely American. Japanese-American, Elly guessed. ‘This here’s GHQ property. Seminary’s round the back.’

  He gestured with his thumb towards a path that circled around the house. As they retreated across the lawn towards the path, Elly was overcome by an urge to giggle. Something about the soldier’s face and manner reminded her of Johnny Rocco, the villain in Key Largo, which she had watched with Fergus at a cinema in Ginza a couple of weeks earlier. In fact, the whole building somehow recalled the sinister decaying hotel where Bogie was held hostage with Bacall.

  ‘What a peculiar place!’ she said softly to Fergus. ‘Whatever do you think goes on in there?’

  ‘American military orgies, maybe?’ suggested Fergus with a small grin, ‘Opium smoking? Drag parties starring General MacArthur in Christian Dior frocks?’

  ‘Shhh,’ replied Elly, ‘the Anglicans might hear you.’ She fought to suppress the slightly hysterical laughter that she could feel bubbling within her.

  As they walked from the sunlight of the winter’s morning into the shadow cast by the tall house, the path grew narrow and slippery. The air was damp with leaf mould and a faint smell of rotting compost. The path led toward a little half-moon bridge spanning a stream where water swirled between smooth boulders. Beyond was a perfect Japanese garden: a miniature universe, with its fish-pond ocean, its rock mountains, its forests of ferns and, towering over them, a single stone lantern, identical to the one that they had seen at the front of the house. The building that surrounded three sides of the Japanese garden had a grey-tiled roof and rice-paper screens opening on to its wooden verandas. Its austere beauty was in complete contrast to the ostentatious Western mansion to which it was attached.

  Elly was thinking about Madame Sawada, the woman they had come to meet. This house had been her home, and its vast garden must have been her childhood playground before defeat in war brought her father, Baron Iwasaki, and his great Mitsubishi business empire to their knees. Now Madame Sawada was apparently relegated to some kind of dower house in a corner of the gardens, while the Japanese-style rear of the house was occupied by the Anglican church, and the Western-style front by . . . God knows what. How strange it must be, thought Elly, to have grown up in this place, and to see your own home transformed like this.

  She had met Madame Sawada just once before, at an event hosted by the Tokyo Press Club, and found her rather intimidating: small and smiling, but clearly a person with a steely will. Elly had, very tentatively, broached the question of adoption with Madame Sawada at that first meeting, and the response had been faintly encouraging, so she had spent the next few days painstakingly writing, crossing out and rewriting a long and very carefully phrased letter explaining her circumstances. Most of them, at least. There were things that she strategically left out — about her father and her wartime experiences — and others things she couldn’t bring herself to put on paper. Her memories, for example, of Charlie: the child they never had.

  They chose the name Charlie half-jokingly quite early on in her pregnancy — Charlie for Charles if the baby was a boy, or for Charlotte in the case of a girl. She could not bear to remember the hopes and dreams they’d had for Charlie, before that dreadful rush to hospital two months too early, with Fergus helplessly squeezing her hand and telling her to keep calm, though he had been more visibly distraught than she was. And then seeing the face of the doctor floating through the fog of anaesthesia, and knowing before anything was said that her child was lost.

  It was two days later that the doctor explained quite coldly and clinically, as though talking about some third person who was not in the room, that an unusual malformation of her uterus made it unlikely that she would ever carry a healthy baby to full term.

  Elly must have worded her letter to Madame Sawada well, because months later, long after she had given up hope of ever getting a reply, an embossed cream envelope appeared in their letterbox containing an invitation to attend this concert, where a group of children from the Elizabeth Saunders Home would be performing alongside the Anglican theological college choir. A handwritten note included with the invitation card offered them a little private chat with Madame Sawada beforehand, about ‘the matters you raised in your correspondence’. When she first read this, Elly had been overwhelmed by a flood of unexpected and contradictory emotions, and now, as she and Fergus hurried towards their meeting, those emotions returned in full force: she felt intoxicated by a lethal mixture of longing and fear of disappointment.

  * * *

  The Anglican college’s assembly hall must once have been a grand reception chamber in the traditional style. Elly could imagine minor politicians or army officers kneeling on brocade cushions in the pre-war years, with hands folded and heads bowed as they sought some favour from the almighty baron. But now it had a faded and neglected air.

  The alcove at one end of the room, where once there might have been a valuable brush painting or a calligraphy scroll, was adorned with a rather ugly brass clock and a garish oil-pastel drawing of Jesus on a donkey. The tatami floor was covered with cheap carpeting, on top of which a plywood stage had been erected. Young men and women — theology students, Elly assumed — were bustling around setting out rows of metal folding chairs in preparation for the concert, and trestle tables for the reception to follow.

  Elly and Fergus stood awkwardly at one end of the room, uncertain what to do next. Through the windows, they could see out into the sunlit garden where a shining cascade of water fell from a grey rock into the pond below. Then the brass clock in the alcove struck the half-hour, and at that precise moment a diminutive, round-faced woman swept into the room. She wore a woollen suit that Elly guessed must bear an expensive designer label, and had a large silver cross on a chain around her neck.

  ‘Mrs Ruskin,’ she said, seizing Elly by the hand, ‘I am so happy to see you again. And this must be your husband. Mr Ruskin, it’s a pleasure to meet you. I am Miki Sawada.’

  She spoke in English, but her pronunciation was laboured. Elly guessed that this was someone who was more comfortable speaking in her native language, so she bowed slightly and replied in Japanese, ‘We are most grateful to you for taking the
time to see us when you are so busy.’

  Madame Sawada led them briskly to a small study across the corridor from the main hall, calling out as she did so, ‘Kato-san, tea please.’ They settled into deep leather armchairs in the study, and a moment later a morose young woman in black appeared with a pot of pale tea and a plate of little candies shaped like cherry blossoms.

  ‘Mrs Ruskin,’ said Madame Sawada, leaning forward in her chair with her plump hands clasped on her lap, ‘our time is limited, so let me come to the point right away.’

  She looked, Elly thought, like a headmistress about to deliver moral guidance to delinquent pupils. ‘I have had a number of couples approach me about adopting one of our children — American military couples, mostly — and I must say I always have mixed feelings. Of course, we think that the ideal future for our children would be to find a happy, stable family life in their fathers’ homeland. But on the other hand, so often these couples seem to view our children’s home as though it were some kind of pet shop. They think they can come and pick out a child to take home with them, just like choosing a puppy or a kitten. That sort of attitude is completely unacceptable. I have responsibilities to the children. My task is to choose suitable parents for them, not the other way around. I’m sure you’ll understand.’

  She stared sternly at Elly and Fergus, and they nodded — Fergus (whose spoken Japanese was still limited) smiling cheerfully as though he had just heard good news.