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

by TESSA MORRIS-SUZUKI

  ‘How long will these stay fresh?’ she asked, examining one of the more expensive options: an elaborate array of sugary sweets, each shaped like a different flower. The man smiled and nodded at her with a puzzled expression on his face, so she repeated her question in Japanese, to which he replied in English, ‘Two weeks OK,’ holding up two bony fingers to make sure that she understood.

  All the while Elly had been weighing up in her mind whether, now that she was in this part of town, it would be worth going in search of the Lotus Bookshop. She was finding it difficult to stop thinking about the odd little book of Chinese poetry that she had found in Fergus’ duffel coat pocket. In her mind’s eye, she could see the inscription in the front with the flowing letter ‘V’ and the words ‘heart’ and ‘eye’, and Fergus’ hasty scrawl: Vida. Lotus Bookshop. 8 p.m.

  So they met in a bookshop. And what did they do there? Did they browse the shelves together, sharing their knowledge of China, their jokes about Chairman Mao? Perhaps Vida worked in the bookshop, or perhaps it was a famous rendezvous for intellectuals and poets.

  What would I know? Elly thought. In her childhood home in the Dutch East Indies, the most sophisticated Japanese reading material on offer had been the tattered third-hand copies of magazines like The Housewife’s Friend, which Mother occasionally managed to borrow from other members of the local Japanese community. Until they came to Tokyo, Elly had barely read a Japanese novel, let alone a book of poetry. She had tried to catch up since — reading most of Kawabata and even attempting Dazai Osamu, whom she found depressing. Difficult words and literary allusions were still a struggle, and she felt too embarrassed to admit her own ignorance. She could barely imagine the world people like Vida Vidanto lived in, let alone ever hope to enter into it. She longed, though, to catch just a glimpse of that world — even the smallest glimpse, perhaps, might help her to understand the allure that seemed to draw Fergus to the multilingual poet, as a moth is drawn to a flame.

  ‘I’ll take these,’ she said to the shopkeeper, and then waited while the man meticulously wrapped the box in paper decorated with tiny iris flowers, and tied it with a silk ribbon. By the time he was done, she had made up her mind. Or maybe she’d really made it up even before she left the house this morning. In either case, when she left the shop carrying her gift in its embossed paper carrier bag, she turned to the right and headed up the main street towards the bookshop district.

  She had a perfectly good excuse, after all. If she were to have any hope of being a good mother to Maya, she ought to learn more about India, the land of Maya’s father. Until she encountered Maya, Elly had barely been aware that there were Indian soldiers involved in the occupation of Japan, and her knowledge of Indian geography was vague. Even Bombay, the place where her own father was living with his new family, was a blur in her mind. Father never wrote to them, and Mother hardly ever mentioned him now: when she did, she no longer said ‘Your Papa’, the way she used to. He had become a troubling shadow in their lives, referred to, if at all, as ‘That Person’.

  It was only now, because of Maya, that Elly had begun to hunt for information about India. She’d even persuaded Fergus to take her to sample the curries at Nair’s Indian Restaurant in the city centre. A bookshop specializing in works on Asia seemed as good a place as any to pursue her quest for knowledge.

  But there was more to it than that, of course. Elly’s memories of her father had given her no reason to believe in male marital fidelity. She could still remember the giggling and other strange sounds that had sometimes drifted out of the thatched hut beneath the grove of banana trees on their plantation near Bandung, and recalled seeing her father stumbling up the path from the hut late at night with his hair tousled and his shirt unbuttoned.

  Men strayed, that was to be expected. Before her marriage, Elly had always told herself that she would be able to accept the fact. She’d been working at the Tokyo Press Club when she first met Fergus, and knew all about the world in which he had lived since the end of the war. Late-night drinking sessions and trips to geisha houses and hostess bars were part of that world. It would have been presumptuous for her to expect him to give all that up when they got married.

  But Elly understood herself well enough to recognize her own desperation for emotional fidelity and the feeling of security that came with it. ‘You are the most lovable person I’ve ever known,’ Fergus had once said, not long after they met, as they walked hand in hand around the lotus pond in Ueno Park, ignoring the sidelong glances and unspoken judgements of the passers-by. Elly had laughed and replied, ‘Don’t be so daft!’ Typical Fergus, she had thought: both the overblown language and the choice of words. Not ‘beautiful’ or ‘charming’, but ‘lovable’. All the same, when she looked back to that afternoon she felt a kind of warmth throughout her body. That, perhaps, was the moment when her war had finally ended and she had started to come back to life.

  An occasional sexual fling she could survive, though she did sometimes wonder whether, if it happened, it would be better to know about it or to be kept in the dark. But in recent days she had been beset by anxiety about Vida Vidanto, and the sparkle that she seemed to ignite in Fergus’ eyes.

  Elly knew with a dreadful certainty that if Fergus fell seriously in love with another woman, the ground beneath her feet would open up into a bottomless void.

  * * *

  The narrow lanes of the bookshop district were full of people. Half a dozen young men in brightly coloured happi jackets were marching down the main street towards the crossroads, discordantly banging drums and cymbals to advertise the opening of a new store. Elly could remember the address that had been printed on the label in the little purple poetry book, but it gave her no help in finding the shop she was looking for. The numbers of the buildings were almost entirely random, and the whole place was a labyrinth of tiny streets and shops crammed into impossibly small spaces. She wandered around for a while, inspecting the arrays of books set out on tables under the awnings of the stores.

  Because the day had still been quite bright when she set out, she hadn’t brought an umbrella with her, but now a misty rain was starting to fall, so she stopped to buy an old-fashioned oil-paper umbrella from a second-hand shop in a back street, as much to protect her precious carrier bag of expensive sweets as to protect herself. Perhaps, on reflection, it would have made more sense to buy the sweets on the way home. The handle of the umbrella was slightly cracked, but she liked the way that light shone through the paper when she opened it. She tried asking the shop owner for directions to the Lotus Bookshop but the only response was a slow shake of the head and that long sibilant ‘Sa—’ that indicates a reluctance to admit to ignorance.

  What, if anything, do I really think I’m going to find there? Elly wondered. What, if anything, do I really suspect? If Fergus had been at home more in recent weeks, his presence might have helped to ease her fears, but he had only been back from Hiroshima for a couple of days before leaving again to spend two weeks in Okinawa. The long days alone had given her too much time to think.

  After wandering around Kanda for half an hour, she was about to give up the quest for the Lotus Bookshop with a mixture of disappointment and relief. She took a shortcut down a narrow alley back towards the tram stop. But then, halfway down the passageway, she happened to glance up, and saw the rather crudely-painted blue water lily on a shop sign high above street level. Lotus Shobo. The sign protruded from the upper floor of a narrow building squeezed in between a printery and a stationery store. She could have ignored it and walked straight on. It was almost lunchtime already, and she had plenty to do at home. But instead, without pausing to think exactly why, she opened the rattling door of the building and stepped inside.

  A flight of grimy concrete steps led up into the gloom above. The stairway was steep, and Elly was out of breath by the time she reached the front door of the bookshop, which was adorned with a poster advertising a Study Circle on Women in the New China. The poster showed a striki
ng image of a woman in khaki uniform holding a rifle in one arm and a baby in the other.

  As soon as she opened the door, Elly could hear the buzz of voices within. This was not what she had been expecting. She had imagined a quiet little bookshop where she could browse the shelves undisturbed, getting a feel for the place and the people who frequented it. But this stuffy, crowded room, whose smell of cigarette smoke and sweat hit her as soon as she stepped across the threshold, was clearly a gathering place as much as a bookshop. The walls were lined with tall overflowing bookshelves, and a display of books about China had been set out on tables down one side, but the centre of the room was filled with several dozen people, most of them women, who were sitting facing a lectern.

  ‘Welcome to our circle,’ said a beaming elderly woman, thrusting a bundle of leaflets into Elly’s hands.

  At that moment, Elly caught sight of Vida. The poet was sitting with two other women at the front of the room, facing the audience, and was deep in conversation with an elderly man who appeared to be the master of ceremonies. Presumably the owner of the bookshop. He wore horn-rimmed glasses and had a long, thin white beard which made him look like a Chinese sage. People kept interrupting his conversation with Vida to ask him where to place a pile of books or what time they would be stopping for a lunch break. They addressed him, Elly noticed, deferentially as ‘Hasuda-sensei’. Vida was dressed in pale green, and wore an embroidered stole around her shoulders. Her tall form looked more curvaceous and her face looked plumper and paler than Elly had remembered.

  Elly was tempted to beat a hasty retreat. Her curiosity about Vida had drawn her to this place, but the last thing she wanted was a face-to-face confrontation with this woman. Having come this far, though, she felt that she would attract less attention if she sat quietly at the back of the room than she would if she turned and walked out now. And besides, she was intrigued to know what was going on here. So she found a seat in a dark rear corner, sandwiched between a plump middle-aged woman with permed hair and a gaunt young man in a shabby black student uniform, who had entered the bookshop just behind her.

  CHAPTER 8

  ‘That’s it?’ asked Goto, thumbing through the pages of Jun’s green notebook with his stubby fingers.

  He asked the same question every evening, when Jun met him to report the results of the day’s surveillance mission. He never made any other comment, or offered any words of praise. Just ‘that’s it?’ — as though he were always waiting for something more. It left Jun feeling tense and troubled. Was he failing in his mission?

  They were sitting together in the dining room of the Zero Club: a cold, echoing place, designed for the days when the Club had hosted grand corporate dinners and sports competitions. The room was largely empty except for the two sagging brown armchairs where Goto and Jun were sitting, and a single square table at one end, where the Unit members ate, drank and played endless games of cards. There was a bar along one wall of the room, but its metal grille was bolted shut. Goto and the others brought in cases full of vodka and Torys whisky from the Z Unit boats, and stored them in the kitchen. A dour elderly woman in an off-white pinafore and headscarf cooked their meals and occasionally swept the floors, but her efforts at cleaning were half-hearted, and there were growing shadows of grime in the corners of the room.

  A bottle of whisky stood on the table. Goto refilled his glass and poured one for Jun. The other Unit members would be back soon, and they’d start another game of stud poker. When they’d first played, Goto almost always won, and Jun had found his small cache of earnings rapidly dwindling. But now he was starting to get the hang of the game and play more confidently. He discovered that he could easily remember the face-up cards, see patterns and make calculations, and he could read the expression on the German Kaspar’s plump, red-veined face like a book, though Goto’s permanent scowl was always harder to interpret.

  But today, before the others came, he had a question that he needed to ask. He had been thinking about it for days, afraid of the reaction that it might provoke, but increasingly desperate to know the answer.

  ‘When I’ve finished my surveillance, when you’ve got all the information you need about her, what will happen to her then?’ Jun spoke softly, his body tense as he waited for an explosion of wrath or a torrent of sarcasm from the sergeant. He was not supposed to ask questions.

  But Goto just stared at him blankly. ‘Happen to who?’ he asked.

  ‘The Fox, of course. What will you do once you have all the information you need about her?’

  Instead of an explosion there was silence. The sergeant sat for a while, staring at his drink and tracing little patterns in the condensation on the outside of the glass. Then he said, ‘You’re supposed to be a smart guy, aren’t you, Kamiya-kun? Come on. You tell me. What do you think’s going to happen to her?’

  He didn’t seem to expect an answer, and Jun didn’t attempt to give one. They just sat for a while, emptying the bottle of whisky, and when the other Unit members arrived, Jun suddenly found that he didn’t feel like playing cards. Instead, with a muttered excuse, he wandered off to his own room where he lay on his bed for a long time, too tired to move, but unable to sleep.

  * * *

  The next morning was warm, with a smell of rain in the air. Jun, still bleary-eyed from his sleepless night, was at his regular post in the café opposite the Fox’s apartment block when he saw her step out of the front door of her apartment building, wearing a loose grey cape over her pale-green dress and carrying a silky umbrella. She paused on the doorstep to lock the building’s front door, and then set off down the road in the direction of Kanda.

  Jun followed her at a safe distance, keeping to the opposite side of the road. There was one moment when he was almost caught off guard, as she suddenly ducked into a narrow laneway and pressed a doorbell on a stone gatepost outside a wooden house set slightly back from the road. A woman dressed in white like a nurse came out to open the gate, and the Fox disappeared into the building within. Once she was out of sight, Jun strolled casually along the lane past the gate, and read the words on the discreet brass nameplate: Yamada Private Clinic.

  Expecting a long wait, Jun went in search of a convenient vantage point. The lane was straight, narrow, and empty. At the far end there was a tiny shop selling cigarettes and assorted groceries, with a bench outside where he could safely sit and wait for the Fox to come out of the clinic. He wondered what she was doing in there. Was she ill? The thought seemed oddly upsetting. But then again, the clinic might just be a front. What better place than a doctor’s clinic for a network of spies to have their rendezvous? It was private and discreet, and no one would question the comings and goings of strangers.

  While he waited, Jun jotted down his observations — 11.05 a.m. Fox enters Yamada Private Clinic. Met at gate by nurse. 11.15 a.m. Another woman — mid-twenties? also patient? — arrives. Then, as nothing else seemed to be happening, he extracted a paperback from his jacket pocket. He had had few chances to read books in Karafuto, and none at all on the smuggling ship, but now he discovered that he had a taste for reading, particularly samurai adventure stories. The bookshops provided anonymous paper covers that conveniently concealed the title of the novel he was reading, so a passer-by might easily have mistaken him for an earnest student studying for an exam. Waiting for the Fox to emerge from the clinic, he became so absorbed in the adventures of a trickster spy in feudal Japan that he almost missed her shadowy form slipping quietly out of the gateway sooner than he had expected. She was already at the far end of the lane, heading back towards the main road, by the time he glanced up and glimpsed her.

  He had assumed that she would turn right in the direction of her home, but instead she went the other way. A misty rain was starting to fall now, and the Fox opened her umbrella and twirled it above her head. Jun, who had no umbrella, drew the collar of his jacket tighter around his neck and pulled his cap down over his forehead, but could still feel the damp seeping into the neck of
his uniform. The Fox walked swiftly past the walls of the old Confucian temple and over the bridge that spanned the brown waters of the Kanda River. Beyond was a maze of narrow streets, and Jun quickened his pace, keeping close behind his target to make sure that he didn’t lose sight of her.

  Eventually she stopped outside a narrow building in a laneway, looked briefly in both directions up and down the alley, and then pulled back the sliding door of the building and vanished inside. Jun paused to light a cigarette and gaze at the goods in the window of the neighbouring stationery shop before following her. The building that the Fox had entered only seemed to have one door, so he had little fear of losing her. A blue-painted sign on the wall of the building read Hasu Shobo. Jun wrote a short description of the place in his notebook, and watched as other people, mostly women, entered the building after her. It seemed as though some kind of meeting was going to take place.

  His heart beating more rapidly, he followed them into the grimy narrow building, and up the dark stairway that led to a bookshop on the second floor. He had practiced cover stories for various occasions during his training sessions with Goto, and had his excuse ready. If anyone questioned his presence, he would say that he was looking for the French language class run by Professor Mori. But when he entered the crowded little meeting room, his presence seemed to be taken for granted. He took a seat in a corner in the back row, next to a rather earnest-looking woman — aged about ten years older than himself, he guessed — with square-cut dark hair and features that looked vaguely foreign. The woman had a large carrier bag balanced on her knees, and had propped her old-fashioned paper umbrella against the back of the seat in front of them. Drops of water from its folds created a spreading puddle beneath Jun’s feet.

  He glanced through the bundle of crudely printed leaflets that he had been given as he entered the room. There was a sheet of information about today’s event, and a random selection of advertisements for future meetings, including a Japan–Korea friendship exhibition and a protest against the ‘phoney peace negotiations’.