The Gun Room

by Georgina Harding

  One day he went to a new student, a salaryman in his forties by the look of him, wearing a grey suit and opening to him the scuffed white door of a small and nondescript flat some place out towards Yokohama. It had been a long way to go for a single hour’s conversation class. The man lived alone and the flat was stuffy. He could see into the narrow kitchen that was like his own with a double gas ring and washing-up piled in the sink. The man made coffee, then they sat across a table and made stilted conversation and added to the pile of white cigarette ends in the ashtray – long cigarette ends since the Japanese never seemed to smoke a cigarette right down but lit another, as if by doing that they would save themselves from cancer. The man looked all a bit rumpled, like a salaryman not in the afternoon but after a night out. A salaryman should have been in his office at that time of day, but Jonathan didn’t ask what he was doing at home. He had made it a habit in these encounters not to ask anything personal. He had found that it was easier, with male students in particular, to read a passage about some neutral subject, hobbies or sport, and set the conversation off that way. This man’s English was quite good. He said that he liked to hike and to go fishing, and sometimes he played golf. More often, he said, he just went to the driving range. He spoke expressionlessly as if he was only building sentences and their meaning was irrelevant, so that Jonathan was unsure whether these were actually his hobbies or whether they simply happened to be the words that came to his mind. Sometimes I go to the driving range, he said. It is only a short range, seventy-five yards, but it is local and it is inexpensive. I practise my drive all afternoon. His grammar was good but his vocabulary was limited. When Jonathan attempted to move him into other subject areas he had trouble. Frequently he paused to find a word. He was very precise and would not ask for help or use any alternative, any roundabout expression, but leaf through a big Japanese dictionary, and the conversation would freeze until he had tapped another Mild Seven out from the packet and lit it, and found exactly the word that he wanted, yet still Jonathan was not convinced that its meaning mattered.

  Your English is good, Jonathan said as he left. What you need to do is more reading, to increase your vocabulary. Then you would speak it really well.

  The man stood with his hand on the door, close because the hallway was small. You are the first person I have spoken with in six weeks, he said. Jonathan thought he was saying that it was the first time he had spoken English, but then he saw that the man did indeed mean spoken, that this was the first conversation of any kind that he had had in all that time.

  They stood in the tiny hallway, very close.

  I lost my job, six weeks ago. I cannot tell that to anyone. The man’s voice and eyes were flat, without expression.

  But you must talk to someone. How about your family?

  My family is in Chiba.

  Why don’t you go and see them?

  I cannot tell them.

  Go and see them, tell them something else for now.

  He opened the door and Jonathan went out, then turned to shake his hand. He felt the responsibility of it, of shaking this man’s hand.

  See you next week then.

  He went the next week, all the way out on the Yokohama Line, using the map once more as the route was complicated and all the streets looked much the same. Right by the playground, left at the bakery, count the blocks. He got to the building, pressed the button by the door, waited. No one answered. He went across the street and looked up to the windows of the flat on the second floor but they were closed and there was no light or life to be seen. There was a little wall there before a parking space and he sat down on it to wait. He must have waited out the full length of the lesson on that little wall opposite the house, occasionally going across and pressing again on the bell.

  He went back to the language school, not home, though it was a long journey so he got there only just before it closed. Kumiko was on her way out. That new student you sent me to, Mr Miyazaki. He wasn’t there.

  Maybe he forgot.

  I don’t think so. Can you phone him?

  So she went back in to the reception desk and took up the phone and while it rang he told her about Mr Miyazaki.

  That’s terrible, she said. He must be so lonely. After a long time she put down the phone.

  Maybe he did what you said and went to Chiba.

  I don’t think so.

  Then to the driving range. He had told her about the golf as well.

  Could you try him again later? When do those places close?

  I don’t know. I think they stay open late.

  Beneath their words the image flashed of lonely Mr Miyazaki in leisure clothes, with the iron carefully held in his two hands, positioning, swinging, driving, through the afternoon and into the night, floodlit in the great green cage of the driving range. He saw it, and he thought that she saw it too.

  Before she locked up she wrote down the telephone number and put it into her bag. They got into the lift together. She made the steel space warm with her presence.

  Where are you going now? he said.

  They went to a tempura restaurant close by the language school. To have travelled somewhere else would have made it too much of a date. It was a traditional place with bamboo outside and dark wooden booths within, and almost empty. When she took off her black jacket she was the brightest thing there.

  It’s a lunchtime place but I came here once before with my boss when we had to work late.

  It’s fine, he said. It’s nice.

  You like to drink sake?

  Yes.

  It was nice to have her order the food and see it put before them, better than he could have selected for himself. To see her hands pour the warm sake from pottery flask to small pottery cup and to feel the glow of it when he drank.

  He told her that he had been travelling. He told her about Indonesia, how there had been ferries from island to island, jungle, volcanoes, beaches. Then about Thailand, Hong Kong. Not Vietnam. Only the light things. He could not reconcile the weight in him with the lightness of his contacts here, the sense that he was floating in this alien city, that the city was a floating world, all its crowds and lights and colours. Even Mr Miyazaki was floating, like a lone man on a raft out in the ocean. The girl’s face drew him, her hands on the sake cup, as if she alone was rooted in the earth.

  She asked about his home. In that moment it seemed unimportant. Only the present moment mattered.

  Where do you come from? London?

  No, not London. Always they asked him that. From the countryside. My family has a farm.

  That happy smile, the warmth of her. What sort of animals do you have?

  No animals. It’s all arable. This he must explain as she does not know the word. We grow things. Wheat, potatoes, things like that. It’s very different kind of country from here. Flat, with big skies. There are no mountains like in Japan, no volcanoes, no earthquakes. He looked into her eyes and wanted to say more, something about the weight and flatness of the land he came from, that seemed something he wanted to tell her about himself, about the frozen weight of its geological past that was so different from all that she knew. He could not say that to this girl. He did not know why he suddenly wanted to say that. He said only that he meant to take some trips into the countryside, that he had not so much as gone yet to Hakone, or Fuji.

  And you must go to the coast, she said. Izu, maybe. I know a place in Izu.

  Where’s that?

  On the coast, like I said. And of course you have to go to Kyoto. And there’s Nikko, that’s an easy day trip, but it’s most beautiful in the winter, in the snow.

  Someone told me I should go to Kamakura.

  My grandfather lives in Kamakura, she said. The temple there is famous for its flowers.

  What kind of flowers?

  Hydrangeas.

  He wasn’t sure he much liked hydrangeas but he didn’t say so.

  I’ll take you there, she said.

  They travelled back together
as far as Shinjuku where each of them took a different line. They said goodbye there, on her platform, then he went to find his own. He saw her enter her train, small and jaunty, and the doors closing behind her. He turned in the other direction and then he got lost. Every gaijin gets lost sometimes in Tokyo, he told himself. Perhaps even the Japanese were sometimes lost. He wished that the girl was still with him. Perhaps it was the loss of her presence that made him lost now. He thought that he had learned his way round Shinjuku. He went there every day and yet he had never been to that particular platform before and now none of the tunnels he entered looked familiar to him. He saw signs for every train line but his own, so many different train lines, so many exits, innumerable connecting tunnels between them, and people walking as they always did underground, not strolling but with their directions fixed, even in the evening when there should be no urgency any more, when they must have had a meal or a drink, though it was early still and there were not the drunks about yet, when they should be relaxed or just slow and tired, going home. He came to an exit and went up, for air if for nothing else, though perhaps he thought also that it might be easier to orient himself above ground. He climbed the steps into the night and into the equally incomprehensible sprawl of the streets, but here at least there were colours and traffic, distinct sights and sounds, strips of sound that he walked through and escaped, passing from one sound to another, and there were people, and people were different above ground, talking, laughing, stumbling, milling about, not closed like the automata underground, and high above the lights, above the neon signs and all the lit floors of the buildings, there must be a black sky. He walked on, knowing that he could not become more lost. After a while he came to an open area, and there was another entrance to the station, and at the top of the steps two tall gaijin men. He could see that they were American. There was something about them that made it obvious, some openness, stance, confidence of manner. These two wore suits and were almost militarily clean-cut, standing smartly as soldiers are supposed to stand but more smartly than the soldiers that he had known. Mormon missionaries; there were lots of them in Tokyo. They were always in pairs, and they spoke Japanese, and Japanese girls thought them handsome. He asked how to get to his line and they told him the way.

  He didn’t have any classes that took him into the school until the following week. She was there at the desk wearing a yellow dress.

  I called Mr Miyazaki.

  Does he want me this week?

  He didn’t answer. I called that night when I got home, and then in the morning here in the office. I call him every morning but there’s no reply.

  Again, there was Mr Miyazaki between them. But she looked very pretty in the dress.

  He didn’t pay, she said.

  If he had no job then probably he had no money.

  Then he can’t pay his rent either.

  So he will have gone. Maybe he’s just gone.

  If he has no job, he thought, if a salaryman has no salary, what is he then?

  At the weekend he had finally written a letter home. The postcard on the shelf was too old by now, the cherry blossom long fallen. The card itself looked worn from lying around so long. So he had sat down on a cushion on the floor at the low table before the window, the window open to the May air and the quiet of the gardens, and written to his mother. It was the thought of Miyazaki that had made him write. The letter was the longest he had written since he had gone away. He had told his mother again about where he lived, and Mrs Ozawa downstairs, how he was taking pictures and teaching English, but he wrote more this time. He told her the good things about Japan, that there was a courtesy to everything, and that though the city was ugly on the surface people took the old aesthetic very seriously, and every now and then you came upon a piece of the old aesthetic and it was beautiful. There were shops in Ginza where they sold beautiful fruits, melons that were prized for the perfection of the patterns on their skin, and these were sold as gifts for twenty times their value as fruits, and were put into cushioned boxes and carefully wrapped to be taken away. He had written that, and then he had read it over and wondered why he had chosen to write about the melons. He had read over the whole letter, and saw that it was written from a great distance, the distance between Japan and England, but also the distance between his words and himself. He had thought that he should begin again and write something that closed the distance, but he had sealed the envelope and decided to send it anyway.

  I wrote a letter, he said to the girl. I need a stamp. Can I scrounge one off you?

  For England? I don’t think we have any but I’ll see.

  There was no one else in the office. He was waiting for a group of students to come and then he would give a lesson in the classroom there.

  He had told his mother about the flowers as well. People go at particular seasons, he told her, to view the flowers.

  When do the hydrangeas come out?

  Not for a while.

  Can we go somewhere before then?

  I’m free on Saturday. What are you doing on Saturday?

  I take pictures, he had told the girl. I’d like to see them, she said. But there were so many rolls of film now, stacked on the shelves in the door of his fridge, stored in the cool until he got round to having them processed. When he went out, he took more. When a film was finished, he rewound it and removed it and put it into his bag, and reloaded the camera, and when he thought about it he took whatever rolls of film there were out from his bag and put them away in the fridge, yellow rolls into their black canisters put away in the whiteness beside the milk and the orange juice, that a picture in itself. Then he closed the door and left them in the dark. Will you show them to me? she said. If he was to do that then he would have first to see what was good enough to show, print what might make sense to another person’s eyes. You can’t see any yet, I have to get them printed first. For himself, he thought, it did not matter now. Perhaps it was only the seeing that mattered right now, the way he saw through the camera, the way that the camera taught him to see. Don’t you have any at all? I sent a lot home, he said, when I was travelling. Some of his tourist shots of the islands, his first impressions of Asia, he had packaged up and sent home. He still had others, but they were packed away. He wasn’t sure what he had and what he didn’t have, what was and what was not developed. There was some stuff from Hong Kong, and there were the contacts of Vietnam. There’s nothing, he said, just a lot of rolls of film. So she offered to find him a professional lab. Thanks, he said. He could not explain his reluctance even to himself. But there are an awful lot of them, you know. To print them would be to fix them, one instant after another, all the instants of his days here repeated in the sheets frame by frame, moments that he had seen and forgotten beside the moments that he remembered – and none of them important, none mattering in the slightest against what had gone before.

  On Saturday will you bring your camera?

  Of course. He brought his camera everywhere.

  The pictures he would have liked to have shown her were other pictures, quite other things altogether. The things that were permanent, not instants, even when they were gone. He wanted to show her those things so that she would begin to know who he was.

  They met at Shinjuku where they had said goodbye the other night. He found his way easily this time so he was there early and saw her come out of her train. She was wearing cropped jeans and white plimsolls, and she had her hair in a ponytail which made her look like a child. They took a long journey then right across the city to the docklands, where he had been only once before. There was a garden there that had originally been the garden to a palace.

  He took his first photographs of her standing beneath an arbour of wisteria. She stood very simply with her two hands joined before her, her face more delicate with the hair pulled back and the delicate flowers hanging about it, and the shadows of them on her cheek. He took one of her solemn and one of her smiling. Later he would take that smiling image and blow it up, and sm
ell again the scent of the flowers.

  Fire

  Now that she had his address, his mother wrote him letters again. The letters told him about the weather and the garden, and had pieces of news in them about what Richard was doing on the farm, or about people in the village to whose names he sometimes couldn’t put a face. What touched him most was when one said how the swallows had come back and were nesting again under the eaves. That took him home more than any rational thought. He went out then and bought an airmail form, and sat down in a coffee shop and wrote a brief reply, long enough only to just about fill the inside page of the form.

  I saw a strange thing the other day, when I was standing at a bus stop on my way to give a lesson. A house burned down before my eyes. There was smoke rising across the street, and flames suddenly on a rooftop. I had my camera on me, I always have my camera on me, so I crossed the road and went to see. It was down the side street, a little wooden house of a type they have all over the place here, one of the older houses squeezed in now among the newer ones. There was nobody in it. There was just the house, and it seemed to burn down in no time – or most of it had gone before the fire engine came and we few bystanders were waved back to the main road. I don’t know if the pictures will be any good. I should have got there a bit sooner, when the flames were clear and before the roof fell in. All there was to photograph by the time I was there was just chaos and smoke, no form to it any more. It made me think of the stubble burning, the pictures I took at home the year before I came away. Do you remember? I took a load of pictures of the stubble being set light to, and the fire moving across the field, and the rats running from it. I suppose that if there were any rats in the house they got away before I reached the scene. (Never seen rats in Japan though, only cockroaches, big ones in my flat. The previous tenant’s a Buddhist and wouldn’t kill them.)