The Gun Room

by Georgina Harding

  There was no reason to follow once the girl was there. She tucked a black-gloved hand to the side of his arm and they walked like that all the way up the avenue towards Meiji Jingu, Jim with his hands in his pockets and she with her hand to his arm, though it was only the lightest of touches, and went on across the road to the entrance to the shrine. Jonathan waited, and then he entered too. There was space beyond, grass and trees. He saw them across the grass and stood at a distance from them and took out his long lens. He saw them speak, pause, walk on, apart this time. He could see their hands and their faces but not their eyes. He took no picture. He put the lens back in its case, slung the strap on his shoulder and turned back into the city. He didn’t go into the first station he came to but walked on, going nowhere but only into the flood, the streams of men and women passing him, never quite brushing against him, one after another, and not one of them knew him and he knew none of them nor ever would.

  6

  Girl in a White Dress

  Kumiko never spoke to him again about the photos. There was just a look the following day, as she sat behind the typewriter in the school reception, that he thought was wholly Japanese. It was Japanese in that he could not interpret it. It was foreign, inscrutable, utterly discreet, all that the Japanese were supposed to be.

  He gathered courage, looked at her straight.

  Will you come out with me this week?

  OK.

  She was wearing a prim outfit that morning which held him back, a straight grey skirt and a little red top over a white blouse that was buttoned at the collar. Her hair was pulled tight into a ponytail.

  How about Friday?

  OK.

  What shall we do?

  Go dancing.

  So they went dancing. They met in Shinjuku and went to a noisy bar, then up in a lift to a disco on a high floor, and they danced and didn’t talk. Kumiko wore a red dress and danced like crazy. She looked like a flame in the flashing lights.

  He didn’t know if something was broken or not. He looked at her face and couldn’t tell. She had closed the subject for them both, put it away, folded, perfectly wrapped, the knowledge of his guilt. The Japanese had such skill at wrapping things. Whatever you bought, they took such care to wrap. They made lovely paper and cloths and boxes for the wrapping. They made books with beautiful covers and they covered the covers with brown paper before you took them home. And where there was pain or anger or embarrassment, they wrapped that too, and if you were English you didn’t know what they meant, if it was forgiveness or forgetfulness or if it remained between you.

  They went hiking again in Chichibu Tama to see the autumn colours, just the two of them now, not four, and in all of that day they did not speak Jim’s name. They walked in step, alongside or one ahead of the other, and their feet fell soft on the paths which were already carpeted with layers of leaves.

  She looks no different in the pictures he took of her that day in the gorge from the first time they went there. Only the gorge has changed. The colours are all they are meant to be, brilliant reds and golds and a postcard sky. He had taken many of the same vistas as before, vistas that drew others beside himself, who queued (and whom with conscious irony he had photographed queueing) with their cameras at specific points along the path, apparently content to collect the clichés, to store away the same experience that everyone else stored away; and you’d think, when you looked back, that it was the same, the same as before and the same for everyone. Kumiko poses and smiles in front of the waterfalls as others girls do, as families do, as couples or lone hikers do who ask others to take their picture for them. When he compares the autumn photograph with the one from before, he sees that she has posed in front of the waterfalls in the same spot and with the same wide smile as she had posed before. She is the same Kumiko. Only the colour of the view behind her has changed, and Jim is missing, and the girl whose name he fails to remember. It occurs to him as he looks back that the difference he felt was in himself rather than in her. Though it doesn’t show. He looks as happy when she takes his picture as the others do in theirs.

  He said what everyone said, that the autumn colours were very beautiful in Japan.

  Everyone says that, she said.

  He wanted to tell her that he came from a greyer place. Sometimes it’s like this, he would say, but often it’s damp, grey, the colours muted. It was himself he felt muted, pale with doubt.

  OK, now I can take a picture of you, she said.

  She took the camera from him.

  He stood where she had stood, the waterfalls at his back. Too pale, he thought he was, and too far off. A pale gaijin, outside of it all. That was what gaijin meant, someone from outside.

  Smile!

  Plough

  What she did not know with her senses he could not make her know. She knew his body as he knew hers, and beyond that he knew her city but she could know only his words. They went to see an exhibition in the overheated eleventh-floor gallery of a great department store, of Impressionist painting that the Japanese so love; and he showed her a field of plough. It was the best he could do for a city girl, to show what was inside himself. See, he said, how the soil can shine where the metal blade has cut through and turned it up smooth to the light; see, there is purple in its colour as well as brown. They stood on thick carpets hot in their coats with all of the floors of the department store below them, and outside the traffic moving on straight Tokyo streets. What the painting could not show was the feel of it, the weight of plough beneath your feet, hard when it was dry and claggy when it was wet, and the odour, which was less an odour than a sensation of cool air rising, of moisture rising from cut soil that will steam when the sun strikes it after dawn.

  His father drives the tractor with slow concentration, twisting his body round to look back as he drives forward, looking at his line ahead and turning too to see the plough draw in the furrows, watching the line of the furrows, the depth, adjusting his pace where the plough skates over a stretch of compacted clay. He watches all that, turning at the wheel, looking ahead and looking back, and seeing the gulls who are his companions following, rising and circling and following again, like pieces of the sky come to the brown land.

  His father had committed himself to a tactile world of physical things. To an identity and an existence which should have been so constant and complete that other existences could be forgotten. To an occupation in which a man need never stop, in which work need never be done, which might, you might think, be so physical, so relentless, that it might obliterate all other thought; and yet the mind is there, thinking, while it all goes on, still living its other, previous and continuing life. There is space there for the mind, an emptiness in which thought persists even as the automatic and the physical work goes on. He ploughs the length of a winter’s day, and yet there is room in his mind for other thoughts, always, a layer of thought that all the physical work cannot erase, that is turned up again and again, shining like wet clay even as the light fades.

  His father had come to the farm after the war. It was his uncle’s farm, and his uncle was old, and he came fresh from the army and the East and worked with his uncle and took it on. The work went on there much as it had through the war, with only the changes of modernisation that everyone was making, and those less on this farm than elsewhere because his uncle was old and did not like to see change. He could imagine that the work had gone on in much the same manner throughout all the time that he had been away just as it did now that he was there, and he could trust that it would continue to do so, in his hands or those of some others; that the farm had a permanence not given to other endeavours, that ran through without seam from peace into war and back into peace.

  He wished that there was this painting to show her: his father riding on the combine in a cloud of yellow dust; the boys with their mother below in the field, standing in the bright new-cut stubble and seeing the golden crop fall before the header, all in the dust and the roar of it, waving up to the happy man in
the stifling cloud and the man waving back, and there was a smile on his face despite the dust, and he shouted something that they couldn’t hear but they knew that it was something fine. The painting would be gold as a Van Gogh, happy as a Van Gogh (if Van Gogh were happy), a golden day. Harvest days must by definition be such golden days, when the ripe grain was dry and the sun shone – but then it would be done, and there would be the rest of the year to go round before those days came again, and even as they approached there would be the tensions and fears, the false alarms, the servicing and breaking and repair of unreliable machines, the listening to forecasts and the looking at the crops and the looking at the sky, and the clouding over of the sky, the sudden storms; and some years, dark days, the flattening of the crop, the heads turning black before they were cut, when the golden days had come only singly through long weeks of rain.

  There was his father driving the combine, and the other men out in the field, and the tractor and the grain cart, and old Billy beside them with his gun to shoot the rabbits. He held his mother’s hand and watched for the rabbits. Look, Mummy, that one’s got away. She tightened her hand on his. Perhaps she was as glad as he was to see the rabbits escape. The roar came close as the combine passed them going back up the field. He thought of the animals hiding in the crop. They were caught in there when the combine came, when it made the first cut around the edges of the field, caught in an island of cover that reduced as the combine worked on, forced further and further into the crop. He thought of their crouching panic, hearing the roar as it got closer and circled about them, until at the last they understood, some of them sooner, some almost too late, that the single strip of safety left to them also would disappear; that they must make a dash for it. When he thought of that, his father was suddenly terrifying, driving in the cloud at the centre of it all, driving the huge red machine that drove the animals out into the new-cut open. Now the combine had reached the end of the field. It turned, worked back towards them. As it approached he saw the heads of wheat shiver as some animal began to make its way through. Something bigger than a rabbit. Might be a hare, he said to his mother. He kept his eyes on the trickle of movement until the animal broke. Look! It ran so close that he could see its fear, dodging this way and that, a hare as big as a dog zigzagging across the stubble. He hoped, desperately, that the hare would get away. He loved Billy at that minute, that he did not raise his gun and let the hare go.

  He rode up in the tractor with his father. He sat on his father’s knees with his father’s arms strong on either side of him and felt the throb of the engine. He could see further from up on the tractor. He could see the fields all round, and the house away across the fields, and the church and the village, and another church in the distance, a dull breadth of land beneath the big sky. He felt power up there. He felt his father’s power. He felt safe on his knees with his arms around him, but sometimes he was afraid as well. It was like that with his father. His father was a big man, with strength in him that you could feel. And sometimes the weight of him seemed like a steadiness, but other times there was a tension in him as if he were made of some hard brittle substance and not of flesh, his arms rigid, like straps strapping him in, his mind gone elsewhere, his body hard as if it would break and not bend if Jonathan so much as moved or asked to be released. Even then in the happy golden time, there were moments that went wrong. You did not know when they would come, and that made them the more frightening. There would be sudden anger in him, anger at some fault in the machine or in the field, or at something else never explained, and swear words spat out over the boy’s head. He might stop the engine running but keep rigid for some moments as it stilled, as the machine sputtered out a last puff of blue smoke, the boy unable to move from the trap between his arms even as the juddering ceased, the boy putting a soft small hand to his wrist, turning about, asking if they could get down now. And his father would seem to remember him, as if he had forgotten him in all that time that he had been sat between his arms, and help him to climb down.

  This was what he thought he had gone to Japan to do: to take pictures of things and of people in their relationship with things. To photograph the material, form without meaning, and somehow achieve meaning in the process. He had photographed tacky modern things, the tasteless or rather the sugary, and the ersatz, where Japan had borrowed from America and Europe – and Disney and pretty much anywhere else – and created its strange new modern material self in the borrowing. And he had photographed beautiful things that seemed imbued with a deep essential identity. No other culture he knew of had given such perfection of beauty to simple things as the Japanese. Perhaps it was his version of his father’s physical existence, this absorption in things, even if it was only the seeing and not the doing of them. What he did was to go out early, as the farmer went out early, in the different dawns of different seasons, the almost-empty dawns of summer and the already-populated dawns of winter, and take his pictures, and sometimes he would be taking the same picture as he had taken before but it would be different because this was a different moment. Sometimes the photographs show that, by the difference in light or by some extraneous feature like a passing figure in summer or winter clothing or an autumn leaf, but sometimes they are almost indistinguishable, and put side by side the repeating photographs will repeat angle and composition as if there was only one way of seeing whatever object it was that was the subject of the photograph.

  Again, there are the tabi, the workmen’s shoes, put out to dry on two posts of a bamboo fence, rubber soles and calf-length canvas leggings sticking into the air; yukata hung to dry empty of their wearers; umbrellas in the narrow street below his kitchen window; the old hornets’ nest by his door, uninhabited all year but still attached undamaged to the bare hibiscus; the waiting black limousines and the white gloves of sleeping drivers; the station platforms; the rush-hour salarymen on the trains or eating their Morning Service of coffee and slab-toast and hard-boiled egg on stools in cafe windows by the station exits.

  He has seen these things too many times. There are just too many images, too many prints, too many negatives, too many rolls of film still undeveloped. And he has brought all of them home. Before he left he knew that he should make a selection but he couldn’t do it. He was too close, he thought, he couldn’t see his way through. Even now he finds their number overwhelming.

  However many there are, he thinks as he looks at them that he has failed. These pictures are not the place. They are only what he had chosen to photograph. They reflect him back to himself. It is not Japan he sees in them but only his failure.

  On one of those morning trains he has photographed a girl asleep with her head down and her hair over her face so that she appears to have no face. It’s early so there’s no one in the seats beside her, there is just this office girl in a belted mac with her hands on the bag on her lap, legs wearing zipped leather boots and angled neatly to one side, catching a last bit of sleep on her way to work. He has taken so many pictures of these people yet still he is not seeing the uniqueness of their identities. He is photographing them much as he is photographing the things. Even when he has been in the city so long, they are collectively Japanese to him. He cannot tell what is and what is not a mask, or catch the moments when the mask slips, those moments that would make a photograph something more than itself. Or perhaps he was asking too much. What he saw were only the neutral faces that the office workers put on so carefully each morning when they woke in the city, in this biggest and most crowded city where there must surely be more office workers than in any other city, or when they woke outside of the city in whatever distant suburb they lived, the faces they put on when they were half asleep before the long journey which they would make like sleepers, sleepwalking their way into work, sleepwalking through the crowds but with a mask of wakefulness that was dignity for themselves and politeness to everyone else.

  The Japanese that he had learned was not enough. He had become accustomed to watching others speak without the expe
ctation that he would understand. He watched as an outsider, watching their speaking mouths and their eyes and their hands, and whatever were their surroundings when they spoke, as if it was all of equal value. Knowing what he did of the language, he would make out individual words that he understood, but beyond that he listened only to the pattern of it, and Japanese was full of pattern, of the repeated sounds that marked the points in a sentence, of the repeated words of courtesy, of small unimportant words that were used again and again as if they were only the beat in the slow dance that connected one speaker with the other.

  Sometimes since he had been travelling he longed to be home where he knew what it was that people were saying. Sometimes he feared terribly the time that language would again close in on him. To be foreign was an attempt to be abstract, to free himself of the baggage of meaning.

  He went out alone, pushing himself to see more, to see more closely, to see what was beneath. He experimented with photographing what his eyes saw but his mind didn’t recognise, the unformed moments, sights that didn’t register because they had no significance: the tap running, the telephone ringing but the photograph is silent, the car that passes though it will appear still in the picture, a chair leg, the ground at his feet, the white lines of an empty pedestrian crossing, a tangle of electricity wires and then a pigeon in a blur above his head; then lowering his camera he took a picture of the obvious, a flat display of sunglasses in a shop window, ranks of paired black eyes staring out into the street.