One Morning Like a Bird

by Andrew Miller

  5

  Two days later he rises from his bedding an hour before first light, breakfasts in the kitchen on a handful of yesterday’s rice, a mouthful of cold tea, then steps over the sleeping Miyo, puts on his boots, scarf and ‘peach-bloom’ trilby, slides the front door to the width of his shoulders, and posts himself, quietly as he can, into the dark of the front garden.

  Most of the snow has melted but the air is cold as pond water colder now than when the snow was there. He hurries to the end of the street, pushes up the sleeve of his coat to check the luminous dial of his watch, then turns onto the main road, the north–south that runs in front of Imperial and on towards Kanda. When he has walked some two hundred yards, he stops and slowly retraces his steps. A one-yen taxi passes, a woman in the back, her powdered face lit for an instant by the flare of her cigarette. Then an old man goes by, hauling a white cow on a length of rope, muttering to it his complaints about the world while the beast pours steam through its nostrils. At last, coming towards him, he hears the quick scuff and tap of the footfall he has been listening for. A shadow appears, hesitates at the sight of him, then comes closer.

  ‘So it’s you, is it?’ Her breath touches his face. He nods, then tells her – with what he hopes is an appealing listlessness – that he has been out most of the night, walking and thinking.

  ‘Out drinking on the Ginza, you mean.’

  ‘I’m not one of those,’ he says. ‘In fact, I have a lot on my mind right now.’

  This, she must know, is not unlikely (though whose mind these days does not carry its burden?). Her voice softens a little. ‘Even so,’ she says, ‘I don’t have time to talk to you now.’

  ‘You’re going to work?’ he asks, as if the idea has just occurred to him, though he could, if called on, write down her hours as accurately as any of her supervisors at the railway company. Kyoko Kitamura, reporting to Tokyo Central Station at six o’clock for the seven fifteen express to Shimonoseki. If he was to unbutton her winter coat, he would find beneath it the black dress and black stockings of her uniform. Her cap and apron – washed and starched – will be in the canvas bag over her shoulder, next, perhaps, to a lunch box, a pack of cigarettes, a magazine or two.

  ‘As we’ve run into each other,’ he says, wondering at how easily these half-lies come to him, if he should be troubled by such a facility, ‘why don’t I see you to the station? There’s no sense my trying to sleep now.’

  At first she refuses, then seeing he will not be easily shaken off, and seeing too how well the darkness covers them, she agrees he can walk her the five hundred yards to the tram-stop. He talks to her about the New Year holiday, how nice it was, how boring. He tells her he looked for her at the shrine.

  ‘We didn’t stay for long,’ she says. ‘Grandmother’s chilblains are bad this winter. The cold is painful for her. I have to bind her feet at night.’

  ‘And Mr Kitamura? Did the New Year mail get through?’

  There was, she says, a card with a printed New Year message, to which Saburo had added a line of his own.

  ‘A line? Well,’ says Yuji, ‘there can’t be much time out there for writing.’

  ‘There’s plenty of time,’ she says. ‘He’s just not the sort to write much.’ She doesn’t add ‘as you know’ or ‘you know how he is’, and again Yuji wonders what, and how much, Saburo has ever told her about the two of them. Would he have reminisced, with a bark of indulgent laughter, about his days at middle school, when it was Yuji, skinny little Yuji with no elder brother to protect him any more, who did much of his writing for him? Would he have recalled for her the fact that, though he was indeed expert at making water-bombs or cracking people over the head with a shinai, in calligraphy class he barely knew which end of the brush to hold? Has he, then, with a frown of amazement, tried to explain to her his long alliance with Yuji, a bond between two kinds of weakness, revived at the outset of each new term with a leisurely beating and certain simple though effective acts of humiliation, such as forcing open Yuji’s mouth and spitting into it. Or is it his task to explain to Kyoko that her husband – heroic young veteran of the Kwangtung Army – was, for some years, his private bully? Not, it should be said, that they ever truly hated each other, not then. On the contrary, they were drawn together by mutual loneliness, a precocious knowledge of loss (Saburo’s mother a victim of the influenza in Taisho 8, his father dead from cirrhosis of the liver the first year of Showa), so that even as one brought down his fist and the other grunted with pain, it was a type of friendship, and one that lasted, in its own mysterious fashion, until the marriage two years ago, or until that spring afternoon three weeks after the wedding when Yuji, outside Otaki’s, watched the couple returning to the old woman’s house arm in arm under the shade of a parasol, petals in Kyoko’s hair from blossom-viewing in the park, and on the groom’s face, a look of imbecilic happiness, even a kind of innocence, as if, five minutes earlier, he had suddenly imagined himself a man of boundless virtue, and immediately, without the slightest struggle or doubt, had started to believe it. It was then that Yuji should have rushed across the street and flung himself on Saburo’s back. When would he own such invincible rage again? Instead, he had watched them turn in at the old woman’s gate, heard the street mutter its approval of such a handsome pair, and without so much as a shrug retreated to his own house, climbed to the drying platform, and stared, an idiotic sneer on his face, across the fence to the neighbours’ garden.

  To be forgotten by someone like Saburo Kitamura! To be thrown aside like a broken sandal so that the present moment could be enjoyed without the inconvenience of remembering anything as unpleasant as spitting into a boy’s mouth. It was an insult both painful and shaming. Also, perhaps, a judgement, a moment of revelation that exposed him, if only to himself, as the kind of man even thugs and dullards could leave behind them in their dust . . .

  At the tram-stop, a dozen men and women are huddled, half-asleep, in their coats. ‘Stay here,’ says Kyoko, peering to see who among them might recognise her. ‘That’s far enough. Go home.’

  He does not wish to anger her – he’s seen her temper flash out more than once when he’s been slow to follow her direction. He lets her go, retreats a little, then crosses to the gateway of a school on the far side of the road, where he waits until the tram rattles into view, collects its load, and rattles off, its single headlamp throwing a limp yellow beam onto the track ahead.

  She will be gone for two days, sleep most of the third, be back on shift by the fifth. Five trips a month, Tokyo to the deep south, waiting tables in a swaying box as the country flashes by the window (a glimpse of mountains, a glimpse of the sea, towns and cities half known, half anonymous).

  Does Saburo approve, or is he just relieved not to have to send more money home? Even with his promotion, there won’t be much to spare after buying fur collars for himself and paying for studio portraits. The old woman takes in sewing, of course, in the season, but so do half the wives and widows in the city, there’s no money in it. It’s Kyoko who makes ends meet in that house, Kyoko with her cap and apron, her strong legs of a farmer’s daughter from Saitama Prefecture.

  He leaves the gateway and turns for home, feeling something awkward, something more difficult than his usual sly pleasure in harming an absent enemy, the usual uncomplicated interest he takes in that tight, sturdy body under the winter coat. But it’s not until he’s passing the university library, where a lone light burns feebly against the brightening sky, that he realises he has started to respect her. It startles him. He cannot believe he ever really intended to fall in love with her, this wife of a man he has never stopped being frightened of. And yet how interesting it is, how poetic, to think that he might!

  6

  When Yuji arrives at the office – a rented room above a bicycle repair shop in the Hibiya district – Horikawa is sitting at his desk speaking on the telephone. He is also doing calculations on the sorobon, smoking a cigarette (Airship brand), picking at his breakfast r
ice, glancing at the racing pages of the paper and waggling a finger to welcome his visitor. His feet are hidden by the clutter under the desk but Yuji wonders if he might be doing other things with his toes, a little typing perhaps, some filing. No one else he has ever met can perform as many tasks simultaneously, and perform them well, for the calculations will all be correct, no rice will be spilt and the good horses will be sorted from the bad. So remarkable is this talent it’s generally agreed that he would, by now, have his own building in the Marunouchi were it not for certain bad stars that gave him a son, Yuji’s age, who staggers through the house moaning and drooling, a wife, a third the husband’s size, with a taste for brandy, and in his chest a swollen heart that now and then lingers between beats, so that – terrifying to those who have witnessed it – he sometimes halts mid-stride in the street, suspended between two worlds, the living and the dead.

  He points to the bench by the door. Yuji sits. On the wall opposite the bench, a wall that on his last visit still had a framed photograph of Tokyo Central on it (a view from Nihombashi before the earthquake, the station’s dome and towers on the far side of the tracks that separated it from the Low City), there is now a map of Japan, like the ones they used to have at school. Red dots and red circles for the towns and cities, the country the colour of flypaper, the sea an unbroken blue. One of the pins holding the bottom of the map has fallen out and the paper has rolled upwards, giving the country a curled tail like a smoked fish. While Horikawa talks, and the wooden beads of the sorobon click, Yuji counts off the dots and circles he has been to outside of Tokyo: Kyoto and Nara on visits to Uncle Kensuke; Snowy Akita on trips to Grandfather Yakumo and Aunt Togashi, both long dead now; Yokohama – which hardly merits inclusion on such a list – to look at the foreigners, to look at the liners, to make (once) an outing to a certain place behind the docks, an afternoon he would prefer to forget about; and Kamakura, where on family holidays they used to rent a villa in the hills and spend two weeks of the summer, holidays whose heat and flavour are now just a clutch of mental postcards – Father on the beach with a towel round his head, reading a newspaper, Mother in a polka-dot swimsuit, Ryuichi eating watermelon, the juice running off his chin.

  As for anywhere beyond the black lines marking the coasts of the islands, there is nothing. Father, at his age, or a little older, was preparing to set sail for Marseille, the beginning of a six-month tour of British and European universities – Mother, who now travels only to the bathroom or, on rare occasions, into the garden, lived a whole year in Korea when Grandfather Yakumo was teaching at the Christian college in Seoul. But for himself, he finds it hard to believe he will ever do more than add a red circle or two to his collection. And anyway, these days leaving Japan means leaving in a uniform on your way to China . . .

  When Horikawa puts down the telephone he pays Yuji out of the petty-cash tin, then lights the spirit burner in the corner of the room and makes them both some coffee. The morning is bright. Despite the cold, they sit at the open window watching trains cross the railway bridge. Horikawa knows them all, each engine’s destination, and points them out for Yuji with the tip of his cigarette, speaking of them as if they were old friends leaving for the country but whose return was promised.

  To Yuji’s question about more work he answers with a grimace. The West Japan Shipping piece, he says, was well received. The vice president’s assistant had his secretary call to say how pleased they were. But business almost everywhere was slow. It was the time of year. It was the international situation. War was always good fortune for someone – a skilled worker in heavy industry could get all the overtime he wanted – but for others . . . ‘Take your Monsieur Feneon, for example. Silk brokers like him can’t rely on the old markets any more. How much Japanese silk will there be on the catwalks of Paris this spring? These days—’ He stops, leans to the window. ‘Ah, engine two hundred and seventy-one. She’s for Nagoya. These days you need to know someone in the government. Someone who can hand out a nice fat contract. If I was in Feneon’s line, I’d go to the War Ministry and talk about parachutes.’

  ‘Parachutes?’

  ‘They’re made of silk, aren’t they? Even with our airmen’s indomitable spirit I expect they still like to take off with a parachute on their backs.’

  Yuji, who has long wished to be of service to Feneon, to repay his many kindnesses and show that he is not only a loyal friend but someone whose thinking can have practical as well as merely intellectual outcomes, is immediately struck by the brilliance of the idea.

  ‘Should I suggest it?’ he asks. ‘Do you know someone who could help?’

  ‘I was . . .’ says Horikawa widening his eyes, ‘. . . I mean, do you really think the government would employ a Frenchman to make parachutes for us?’ He starts to giggle. ‘We might, while we’re at it, ask the Americans to make our gun sights.’

  ‘But we’re not at war with France. Or with America for that matter.’

  ‘Well, it’s true . . .’

  ‘And Monsieur Feneon’s been here for years! Everyone knows him. You know him. His daughter walks around in kimonos. She takes classes in classical dance.’

  ‘The lame girl?’ At this, Horikawa begins to wheeze. He presses a hand to his chest, then tugs from his jacket pocket a large handkerchief and carefully, starting at the brow and working down to his throat, wipes the shine from his face. Horikawa sweats winter and summer, an oozing that carries the not unpleasant smell of the preparations he takes for his heart, those bitter teas of roots and fungi harvested in remote mountain forests. ‘Perhaps she really thinks she is Japanese, but it will take more than kimonos and being able to dance Flowers of the Four Seasons to persuade the gentlemen at the ministry. But don’t worry. Feneon’s an old hand. He’ll use his contacts in Indochina. Move back into tobacco or rubber. He’ll know what to do.’

  He asks Yuji to stay and play a game of shogi with him, but Yuji, who has not enjoyed being laughed at, invents a vague appointment, excuses himself, and leaves the office. In the repair shop below, the mechanic in his oil-grimed leggings is squatting on the floor with a bicycle wheel in his hands, holding it up like a type of old-fashioned sun-sight. He nods to Yuji, calls out a tradesman’s bright good morning. Yuji nods back, takes in, in a single glance, the cluttered workshop, and walks towards the palace moat thinking how hard it is not to become at last like everyone else, not to lose, as one grows older, all delicacy of response. Horikawa, for example, is a clever man, but he is too cynical, too interested in money, too sunk in the narrow ambitions of commerce. Feneon, of course, is also interested in money, but Feneon knows literature, knows art, while Horikawa knows – what? Trains, racehorses. Is that how you protect yourself? By reading? By listening to music? Or does the world exert an ineluctable force that only the most exceptional can resist? And is he one of them? Is he exceptional?

  He stops by the bank of the moat opposite the boat-rental pier and looks down at his reflection, an outline that could be almost anyone’s. Between the drifting willow leaves, bubbles break the water’s surface. Something is down there, some bony fish or other, dull in its own dull kingdom. He turns away, and to protect himself a little from his own interest in money, to distract himself from the nagging fear he may not be quite as exceptional as he once believed, he conjures up the spirit of Arthur Rimbaud striding along a country road to Paris, crazy grey eyes, his pockets stuffed with paper, a poetry so pure everyone will either fall in love with him or want to murder him . . .

  At home, lunch is ground beef and grated yam. Father has carried his food out to the garden study to continue, undisturbed, his reading in those volumes of archaeology that are his new obsession. The Jomon Era, the Yayoi, the far edge of history. Cultures that have to be imagined from shell-mounds, fragments of terracotta. Yuji eats with Miyo in the Western room. After lunch she shows him a beauty magazine she has borrowed from one of the other serving girls in the neighbourhood. In an article called ‘Please Be Proud of Your Japanese Skin’ the
re is a character she cannot read. It is, he says, the character for ‘fate’ or ‘the path you are obliged to follow’ or ‘the unrefusable way’ or, to put it plainly, ‘the unavoidable’, ‘the inevitable’. Also, perhaps, ‘submission’. She thanks him, then hearing Haruyo slide open the door of Mother’s room, she hurriedly rolls the magazine and thrusts it inside her kimono, between her little breasts.

  7

  Rain, then sleet. Yuji hurries through the door of the bathhouse, stows his umbrella, picks at the knots in his laces, tugs off his boots, examines the fringes of wet sock where his boots have leaked, puts the boots into an open locker, and greets Mrs Watanabe, who bows and tells him that his friend, that nice young man, arrived ten minutes ago, something Yuji already knows, having just seen Taro’s leather brogues drying in the locker above his own.

  In the next room, he strips, takes his towels and slides open the door to the baths. The bathhouse has been here since before the Great Earthquake (the boast is that they only closed for a week), a shadowy place, slightly shabby and not, perhaps, as clean as it should be, but for its customers its dereliction is its charm. They would go nowhere else.