The Gun Room

by Georgina Harding

  Mrs Ozawa says that’s fine.

  And Mrs Ozawa spoke directly to him and bowed to him, low, and he bowed too. He was glad that he was still standing below the threshold or he would have felt impolitely tall.

  One other thing, Laura said, before you go. They went back up the stairs and she gave him the keys and showed where the lock was tricky, and then pointed out the plant that grew in a large pot right beside the entrance. There’s a hornets’ nest. Look. She tapped the dry case of the nest which was grey and papery, just a few inches long, suspended from the stem of the plant. Or at least, there was last year. If they come back you won’t kill them, will you?

  Postcard

  I’m in Tokyo now. I’m going to settle here for a while. I’ve got a flat here, in a quiet district, the sort of place you’d like. It’s near the park and it’s an old house, and there are bamboos and clipped bushes in the gardens, and the streets are so small that they have toy fire engines as full-size ones couldn’t get through if one of the houses caught fire. My landlady is very small and very old. It’s all very neat, and the rubbish is collected in a tiny rubbish cart three times a week. The walk from the underground station goes through a park and there’s a temple in the park and the cherry blossom’s out.

  The postcard showed a detail of a shrine, an edge of dark cedar wall and a curve of shingle roof with cherry blossom about it. The gardens were the bit of Japan his mother would like. He wrote the card and then it sat on the low table in the living room for days, until he added a postscript.

  This is my address: 5-2-18 Inokashira. I know it looks odd. It’s really a kind of map reference as the streets don’t seem to have names.

  It was a postcard, not a letter. It was so much easier to write a postcard and say nothing. And he had written almost as if he was a child or as if he was writing to a child, as if their relationship was stuck so far back. His mother would take it in her hand and like the picture because she always liked flowers, and then she would read what he had said and think her own thoughts about the place, whatever they might be, but she would have no idea, no understanding at all, of why he was there. Jonathan’s in Japan now, she would say to his brother when his brother came in, her voice soft in the room, and there would be a pause before Richard replied. Would there be an edge in her voice or would it be no more than a statement of fact? Look, the card’s there on the table. A clear, musical voice she had, an indoors voice. Richard would have been out on the tractor all day, perhaps – if it had not rained, if the weather was kind and the land fit for drilling – out on the tractor also in his own thoughts, and talk of Japan would take him by surprise. Japan, or rather the Japanese, had been their father’s domain. Had enough time passed now, or would the word bring into this brief pause the memory of their father?

  He put the postcard up on the shelf by the door where he kept the keys so that he could take it to post next time he went out. Yet when he did go out he walked by it. And he walked by it again and again. Each time he came in or went out he saw it, the pink froth of cherry blossom about the dark curve of the shrine roof. He could have written more with each day that passed. He could have told them how very different the place was from whatever they might imagine, how different the Japanese were. He was paying his way by teaching them English. Every Japanese, it seemed, wanted to learn English, and any wandering English speaker could find work easily enough. He had signed up with a language school, the one Laura had worked for, taken on Laura’s private students as well as her flat while she was gone. There was a girl he taught, one of Laura’s students, who had a photograph of a different boyfriend in the same picture frame on her coffee table each of the three times he had gone to her house to teach; he hadn’t been there often enough yet to see if the photos and the boyfriends were rotated. And there was a microsurgeon, evidently very skilled, who wanted to learn English conversation before he took up a senior post in a hospital in Kentucky. He had absolutely no small talk but an extensive technical vocabulary, and when he ran out of other words he would show gory slides of operations he had performed, explain in detail the reattachment of lost fingers and hands and limbs.

  What does he want to go there for? Richard would have said.

  These were not the people his father had fought. The microsurgeon said that orientals had greater dexterity in surgery because they used chopsticks from an early age. Their fingers developed exceptional precision and strength. And he looked at the man’s hands and saw that they were indeed fine and delicate.

  Richard was four years older, his big brother; always his big brother not only by his age but by his build and his size, and his place in the world. What are you going anywhere for? he might have said. Richard had gone away only as far as agricultural college, and then done the right thing, come back home to his mother and taken the farm in hand. He had told Richard about his plan for the trip to Asia before he had told his mother. Richard had thought he was off on the hippy trail.

  Going to be a hippy, are you, then?

  No, a photographer. He did not say that aloud at the time, but only to himself. Richard would not have understood the weight each of those four syllables had for him, the ambition. Richard would have laughed, as he had always laughed at his dreams. Richard’s dream, if he had one, was in the soil at his feet.

  He wrote only to his mother, not to Richard, but what he wrote he expected that Richard would read as well. Look, there’s Jonathan’s card. I’m sure it’s for you too. As she or someone will surely have said, sometime before, Look, Jonathan’s had some pictures published in a magazine. What Richard thought when he saw those pictures, he couldn’t say. At least he would not have laughed. Would Richard have been impressed, that he had actually done something with his camera, had his name beneath the pictures, earned some money, or would they have stirred up the past, as his coming to Japan must have stirred up the past, as if all the things that he was doing so far away yet disturbed the past already made at home? You saw, Richard said once. Richard had accused him of seeing, and now he had made it his profession to see.

  He pushed back the paper screens from the window, and the glass ones behind them, knelt on the floor where he could rest his elbows on the sill, took pictures of his view. He took the same pictures repeatedly, as if to make a study of his surroundings through all of the times of the day, the differing lights and shadows. Before he will leave this apartment, he will have taken hundreds of the same shots.

  The shots of the gardens are full of oblique angles, form dictating their composition as within the gardens themselves, where the positioning of trees and shrubs is careful and their shapes are controlled, foliage and style of growth more important to the gardener than flowers. Only rarely are there people to be seen in these gardens, but there is always the notion of people within the houses behind them, screened from view, here and there some bedding hung out from a window or balcony to air, a rectangle of bright artificial colour above the overall deep green of the plants below. From the small window in the kitchen there are other shots, these also angled but that is of necessity, because of the awkwardness of the position of the window. These shots show the rails of the external metal staircase leading to his door, the big pot with the hibiscus in it – it is possible to gauge the month when the photograph is taken by the leaves, which are absent in the first shots because the hibiscus comes into leaf so late, but fresh green and obscuring in others that follow. Then beyond the stair and the pot there is a narrow perspective down the street, and here there are figures, single or paired but rarely more than that: Mrs Ozawa or some other elderly neighbour walking hunched over a stick, a mother with a child in a buggy, older children walking to or from school with leather satchels on their backs. Generally the pictures show women because this is a purely residential district inhabited in the hours of daylight almost entirely by women and children and very old men.

  Often when he had been into the central parts of the city he stopped in the entertainment district by the station on his way ho
me. Even after the late trains, there were bars that stayed open when everything else was closing, people who hung about as the streets darkened and the lights went out. There was a bar that he found, that he got to like. He had found it by chance, Ken’s Bar, the sign hand-printed in roman letters pointing up a flight of stairs. The walls of the bar were bare planed wood and the cramped space smelled of beer and pungent Japanese cigarettes, and a little of the wood itself. There were two places he particularly liked to sit, one at a table by the first-floor window from which he could look down on the narrow street, the last lit lanterns and stray salarymen, the other on a stool by the bar. The barman – Ken, he guessed it was, almost always the same barman and he appeared to own the place – had a steady presence. If you sat up there you sat close to him, and a nodding relationship was easy but there was no requirement for more. After a few visits he bought his own bottle of whisky to keep behind the bar. He had to spell out his name for Ken to write on the label. It looked strange to him when the bottle went up beside the others on the shelf, the one English name alongside all the names in Japanese.

  Could you write my name in Japanese instead?

  You want Japanese writing? Not kanji. Katakana I can do.

  It was late at night and there were only a couple of other customers in the place, and Ken had nothing better to do than watch and wipe the counter clean. He took the bottle down again, and Jonathan said his name again, pronouncing each syllable precisely and adding a hint of a final vowel to the last consonant, jo-na-tha-nu, and Ken wrote out a new label in the phonetic script the Japanese use for foreign words.

  That’s better.

  But he kept the bottle down beside him and topped up his drink, added water from the jug on the counter.

  Do you get other gaijin here? Gaijin was the word Japanese used for foreigners, and it was used so pervasively that every gaijin learned it within days of arrival.

  One American came, last week. You American?

  British.

  From London?

  From Norfolk. That’s in the east. A long way from London.

  What you do in Tokyo?

  I take pictures.

  Many pictures to take in Tokyo.

  His English wouldn’t carry the conversation much further. Jonathan took up the bottle again and made the whisky darker in his glass.

  He was in Tokyo. He was in a bar in Tokyo. A man had asked him where he came from and the thought had pulled at him, pulled him down inside himself where there were other thoughts that he did not want to think. And he had drunk too much whisky.

  Much later he asked, When do you close?

  Morning.

  So he stayed until morning, or at least until dawn. Some new customers came in and made vague company, and he stayed there slowly drinking, and his Japanese seemed to improve with the drink, and he didn’t think too much, and time passed more easily the more of it passed and he did not see it go. When he stumbled down the stairs at last it was beginning to get light. The street cleaners were out in front of the station, working round a few slumped figures on benches. He walked by them with his camera in the bag on his shoulder. He walked into the park. He felt that he was past sleeping. If he did not sleep then he would not have to dream. There was a path that led through the park, past a police box and over a bridge across a little lake, directly towards the street where he lived. He didn’t go right through but instead turned away along the edge of the lake. There was a fine mist just over the water, and the water was opaque and the carp in it were hidden, save for when one broke the surface and set a ripple going. He should have taken pictures but he didn’t remove the camera from its bag. He walked on through trees as if he had left the city altogether, and at last he came to another gate, and went out into little streets where he got lost, and it was a long time before he found his way home.

  He should have taken pictures. Photographers like to take pictures in the early morning, when the light is soft and things are only just becoming themselves. The early morning is when discoveries are made, things seen that could not be seen in the night and that would not be allowed to be exposed under the bright light of day. When reality is either questionable or most itself. When a farmer who has not slept all night goes out where the fog hangs over the flat land, and there’s a shot in the woods and the pigeons are shaken suddenly into flight. And a boy who is awake early goes out and walks along the edge of the plough and into the trees to see. And the plough falls away into rice fields, and the fields are flooded and there are green shoots in the water, and the path is narrow and the village is burning, and there is smoke or perhaps it is mist and there is crimson in the mist, and first it is flame but then it is blood, on the ground, such a pooling of blood.

  Richard

  Where were you?

  When?

  This morning. I looked in your room. Where were you?

  Nowhere.

  Richard was blocking his way. They were in the corridor at the foot of the stairs. Ahead of him, beyond Richard’s body, it led to the back door and the kitchen. Behind was upstairs, and the hall and the bolted front door and the sitting room, and his father’s study, and he didn’t want to go that way.

  You went out. Your boots are muddy. I saw, the mud’s wet.

  I didn’t go anywhere.

  Richard grabbed him, grabbed his arm and twisted him round and bent his arm and held it in a half nelson, high up the centre of his back, pressing it higher.

  The corridor was dark and he could see his boots at the end of it, in the light that came in through the narrow pane of glass above the back door, his boots lined up with the others where he had taken them off and put them so neatly side by side when he had come in, when he had crept upstairs in his socks and thought that no one would know, when already he wasn’t sure what he had seen, and thought that if he went back to bed and got up again then it would be gone like a dream as if it hadn’t happened at all.

  Let go. The pain shot through his arm. He didn’t know if some of him was actually breaking.

  Then their mother came out from the kitchen and Richard dropped his arm in a flash. She didn’t notice anything because there was someone at the back door. It was Billy Eastmond there, and some other men, and one of them was a policeman. He felt strong now that the pain had gone.

  I was just having an adventure. You don’t have adventures. I’m going to have more adventures than you ever will.

  3

  Kumiko

  The photographs travel the city. At Shinjuku station people pass through smooth conduits, channelled between one action and the next. Light shines equally off the hard surfaces of walls and floor and ceiling, and the moving people make soft-edged shadows where they go. In Kanda, in the business district, two salarymen bow to one other in the street. He photographs them from the side so that they appear like mirror reflections of themselves, in dress and position and in the identical briefcases they carry, and the image is repeated but broken and jumbled amongst all the other reflections in the glass of the building behind them. In Akihabara, he photographs whole streets of electrical and camera stores, rising floor upon floor, graphic upon graphic, window displays packed with televisions and cameras, aisles within stacked to the ceiling with hi-fis and speakers, streams of dark-haired men milling beneath. He photographs from behind the heads of men who crowd to inspect the newest systems, the black domes of heads before the circling black disc on a wall-mounted record deck, which seems to mesmerise when placed at eye level, playing vertically before them, or again from behind, a row of black heads wearing headphones to listen to quality of sound. He has taken those photographs and walked on elsewhere. A young couple walk in front of him in the street, the young man’s hand around the young woman’s waist, and the picture he takes is of his hand, resting with the thumb to the girl’s waist, the lowest finger to the curve of her hip, his arm bare save for a metal watch strap on his wrist – his right wrist, indicating that he is most likely a left-handed man, and this is all that there
is to distinguish him. In Shibuya, he photographs a vast billboard carrying an advertisement for Dior perfume. A teenage girl walks beneath the three-quarter profile of a beautiful and sophisticated Caucasian woman – Caucasian, not Japanese, because the ideal above this girl will be Western, not Japanese – whose dangling diamond earring is the same length as the girl. In this image as in the others his regard is impersonal, the figures similarly impersonal, reduced at times to no more than forms. A girl has the same value as an earring. Perhaps they cannot be otherwise because he is so foreign here. He sees this when he looks over the photographs so much later, he sees what he was doing. Or, it was what Tokyo was doing to him. There were so many of them, so many Japanese, the population of this city so numerous and so homogeneous, so Japanese. He thought that he looked for individuals but he could apprehend these people only in the mass. It made him all the more solitary. This is what the pictures show: not so much the world about him but his own solitariness behind the lens.

  Kumiko worked at the language school. He saw her on the first day he went there, and he saw her after that whenever he went in. He had known her for some time before he dared to take her picture.

  She had a wide smile and her skin was dark and a little coarse, her attractiveness like that of pottery, not porcelain. She wore brightly coloured clothes, short skirts, coloured tights, but more often jeans and skimpy tops and a short black jacket. He saw all that. He saw, and saw her intently, but spoke to her no more than the job required. Hi. Ohayu. How do I get to this student’s house? If the directions were difficult she might take up the telephone and talk to the student in Japanese, and draw him a map. She drew deftly, a map from some subway exit, turn left at the first lights, over the pedestrian bridge, right or left at the bakery or the coffee shop or the noodle bar, you’ll find the building two blocks down on the left. He watched her small hands and then her face as she drew, with her eyes turned down to the paper. She looked up and smiled again before he had taken his look away. He took the paper when her hands had left it and folded it safe into his wallet, and found that he too was smiling as he went out. He waited for the lift. The language school was just three rooms on a fourth floor with a big sign downstairs and a small one inside the lift. By the time the lift doors opened he was closed in himself again. He went down and out again into the crowds.