One Morning Like a Bird

by Andrew Miller

  The place he chose, a street of unlicensed women, he had heard about from a student bragging at the university, and though it meant a train ride it also offered anonymity, for in Tokyo, a city where one is always running into the same people, where coincidences grow like bindweed (read Kafu), who knew who might, at the wrong moment, look out of a restaurant window, a passing taxi . . .

  The room he finally entered – he had walked the length of that street a dozen times, building his resolve – had nothing but a narrow mattress on the floor, and walls so thin any passing sailor could have punched a hole and watched the woman laugh at him, his ignorance. She called him, as she unbuttoned his shirt, her ‘little virgin’, and when, hotly, he protested this, telling her how his mother’s friend Mrs Sasaki, under the guise of giving him some of her deceased husband’s good clothes, had, shortly after his nineteenth birthday, made him ‘a man who knows women’, she applauded with her fingertips, crying, ‘So you’ve done it once! With one of Mama’s friends! Congratulations!’ And with this woman, with her gold teeth, her tongue like a stick, he let himself be intimate, had lain on her, gasping and writhing as though swimming through sewage.

  The hostess is at the door. She is so sorry to disturb them, but she wishes the gentlemen to know that the bath is ready. She bows, withdraws. The girl with the ribbons hauls Makiyama to his feet. Yuji, an unlit cigarette between his fingers (who gave it to him? If he smoked it, he’d choke), hears himself talking – passionately, insistently – about Momoyo, his dear Momoyo, with whom he shared a thousand silent glances of innocent devotion. If they had married, he would by now – it can be taken for granted – be established in some reputable university or publishing house or newspaper office or something. Certainly he would not be living in a former sewing room. He would not be writing about toothpaste. They would have an old house in the High City, a verandah, tangled with flowers. And then a child, a grandchild for Mother, a little boy who, as the first-born, could even be called Ryuichi.

  ‘But how nice,’ says the waitress, quickly hiding her yawn. ‘So you’re definitely going to marry her?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Miss Momoyo?’

  ‘But this was years ago. Don’t you get it? Her family refused to permit the match. They sent a letter to my father. “Momoyo is, regretfully, too young for such a momentous step.” It was a stupid lie, of course. The truth was, they could never let their daughter marry into a family in which the mother had not left the house in a decade. It would be even easier for them, today. Today we would not even dare to ask.’

  The waitress looks confused, then sorry for him. He knows that he should ask her something now, should flirt with her, make jokes, even if they’re bad ones, but he needs, quite urgently, to find the toilets, to be privately in the darkness, to press his forehead against something cool.

  He puts down his cup, then climbs a rope of air until he’s standing. Somehow he gets clear of the room. The corridor is bright, bare. No one’s about. He cannot remember where the stairs are. He takes a few steps in one direction, a few in the other. Through the walls and doors of the rooms on either side of him come murmurings, muffled laughter. He hears what sounds like a woman weeping. He wishes it would stop. He wants to leave now. He must leave . . .

  At his shoulder, a door slides back, half the width of a face at first, then wider. The girl with the ribbons is there, undressed to her under-kimono, which is bound so loosely it looks as if at any sudden movement it must slip to the floor. Below her throat he can see the place where her make-up ends and the rose of unpowdered skin begins.

  ‘Your boss is snoring,’ she whispers, ‘and now I have no one to wash my back.’ She pouts at him, widens her eyes.

  He asks her where the toilets are.

  ‘Downstairs,’ she says, and points. ‘Shall I wait for you?’ she asks.

  ‘Please do,’ he says. ‘Yes.’

  She bows. He backs away, finds the stairs, finds the stalls, vomits, spits into the stinking hole, then sits on the step in the foyer putting on his boots. He has, in a way he cannot begin to comprehend, lost one of his socks. The sight of his naked foot moves him almost to tears. He is touching it, stroking it as if it was some poor hairless cat, when a movement in the mirror beside the door makes him glance up. The hostess is standing behind him at the bottom of the stairs. There is nothing kind in that face and he does not dare to turn. He thrusts his feet, the bare and the dressed, into his boots, ties the laces, snatches his coat, and plunges into the alley, racing headlong through Sanbancho, a runner matched against himself.

  15

  Twenty-four hours after reaching home from the House of Falling Leaves, his winter illness begins. It announces itself with the usual prefatory dream, a fire dream in which he stumbles through dense smoke across a field of charred grass in search of the boy with the shutter.

  He has had these dreams so many years now it is hard to know where history ends and the invention of his dreams begins. Certain things, of course, he has no need to question, for they are facts known to everyone. He has not simply dreamt the thirty thousand who burnt to death in the grounds of the old army-clothing depot on the east bank and whose charred bones and blackened teeth are still uncovered by builders, by anglers digging for bait, by ghoulish children. But the rest of it – the boy, the shutter, the miraculous escape – where did he hear all this? Did Father tell him? Grandfather? Someone at school? Or was it one of those newspaper accounts, those ‘My Story’ columns that ran for months after the earthquake, tales of improbable survival that began with lines such as ‘I was sitting quietly a home . . .’ or, ‘Just as I turned into Okura Dori . . .’

  The boy – for this is what Yuji remembers of it, what he believes he remembers, what he would set down as an account, more or less accurate, of the actual events – was from the Low City and not perhaps the eleven- or twelve-year-old he is in the dreams but a teenager or even a young man of sixteen or seventeen who, once the fires started soon after the first shocks at midday (shocks so violent the seismographs at the Central Weather Bureau were immediately rendered useless), would have been a link in those disciplined chains of neighbours who went on passing water from the wells until, unable to keep their faces to such a terrible heat, they dropped their buckets and fled. Some then returned to their homes to rescue a roll of cash, a tethered dog, a household shrine. Of these, most were never seen again. The rest, the boy and his family among them, retreated through blazing streets towards the river, only to find the bridges were also burning. Overwhelmed by exhaustion, tormented by heat and smoke, hundreds leapt into the water where, in the days that followed, their swollen corpses, face down, jostled each other in the currents. Those who still had the strength for it fought their way along the bank until they found a bridge intact, then streamed across it, lifted now by the wild hope of saving themselves on the far side.

  From somewhere – the ruins of his own house or the debris in the street – the boy had picked up a wooden shutter to protect himself from the rain of sparks and cinders that grew heavier with every moment. With this held over his head, he waited, one of the thirty thousand, in the grounds of the old depot.

  By the middle of the afternoon, observers in the hills of the High City could see a number of fire storms, swirling columns of fire hundreds of feet high, collecting over the surface of the river. People took photographs, but these, in their stillness and silence, record only great areas of darkness, a blurring, like collapsed sky. Of the fire’s shrieking, its unpredictable movement, the quality of intention it possessed, no means existed to convey such horror. Whatever the storms touched – a boat, the piers of a bridge, the shady honeycomb of a waterside pleasure house – it was consumed in an instant as though by a force infinitely more destructive than fire. At last, at four in the afternoon – the moment recorded precisely on the heat-shocked faces of countless wristwatches – the largest of the storms discovered the crowd in the grounds of the depot, and having nothing left to burn, and ravenous
for fuel, it fell on them. In an instant, the field became a furnace. Men and women, who seconds before had wept or prayed, were suddenly welded into tangled house-high sculptures of blackened limbs. But as the fire raced forwards (more like a great body of water now, a death-wave), it sent ahead a violent wind that surged beneath the boy’s shutter and flung him upwards with such force and speed the flames, quick as they were, could only roll and boil beneath him as he flew.

  How high did he go? As high as the wind? As high as the black pall that had formed over the city and later doused the embers with a rain black as tar? He was found on the afternoon of 2 September, lying completely naked in the Yasuda Gardens, the shutter wedged in the boughs of a nearby tree. The soles of his feet were scorched and all the hair had been singed from his body, but he was otherwise unharmed. On waking he remembered nothing. Later, he recalled seeing birds, vast flocks of them, flying across the face of the sun.

  Of the dreams, no two are quite the same, but in all of them Yuji must cross the grounds and find the boy before the storm falls. He must crawl under the shutter with him. He must cling on and brace himself for the fire, wind and flight that follow. Sometimes he comes within a dozen strides of the boy; at others he can see nothing but the tormented crowd. This time, this dream, he is close enough to glimpse the boy’s bare legs under the smoking wood of the shutter, and he is fighting his way forward, fighting with a desperate strength, when suddenly he sees, in ordinary daylight, Miyo with a basket of washing in her arms looking at him quizzically from the step of the drying platform. She puts down the washing and hurries off. A few minutes later Father is there, kneeling beside the mattress and smelling faintly of ink and cigarettes. He puts a hand on Yuji’s brow. He says something. Yuji hears himself reply, a voice that blossoms out of the air between them and says the strangest things. Father goes. Miyo comes back. She has a bowl, some medicinal broth, its steam acrid as smoke. She holds it to his lips and when, a minute later, he brings it up again, she cleans him.

  He knows his body is suffering. He observes the familiar symptoms, the signs both sides of the skin that he is in for an unpleasant ride, perhaps a dangerous one, but his mind is buoyant, gently exhilarated, and sits on his flesh like a butterfly on a statue. His neck aches a little, his mouth is dry, but it doesn’t matter. February sunlight is pouring through the panes of the drying-platform door and everything, the piles of books, the backs of his own pale hands, the light itself, seems precious and extraordinary. He would, he thinks, be quite content to die like this, to leave the world with this accelerated sense of things. First, of course, like the old poets, like Basho taken ill on the road outside Osaka, he must compose his death poem, but the lines that come to him, far from being solemn, wistful, somewhat wry, are all exclamatory and pathetic, like the lines a stage lover cries before he swallows poison. And who would he dictate it to, this death poem? To Father? To Miyo, dabbing his face with a cloth? He squints at her. She smiles. He wonders what she would do if, under the guise of sickness, of a fidgety delirium, he reached a hand inside her kimono. Would she run away? Or would she loosen her obi, keep her gaze on the wall? He shuts his eyes. A dying poet should not spend his last hours stroking, in his imagination, the thighs of a housemaid. (And wasn’t he offered far more than this in the House of Falling Leaves? An offer he fled from like a frightened boy.)

  When he opens his eyes again, Dr Kushida is in the room, black bag in hand, his face quite expressionless, the way, perhaps, he had once looked at poor Amano. From the bag he takes a syringe, loads it from a glass ampoule, pulls down the quilt, rolls Yuji onto his side, and injects him in the muscles of the right buttock. The injection is bizarrely painful. Yuji groans, though in a voice so small it’s like the voice of a mosquito. The doctor shines a light in his eyes, then presses the ivory horn of his stethoscope so hard against the flushed skin of Yuji’s chest it leaves behind a pattern of raw circles.

  On later visits he burns, in leisurely fashion, little balls of moxa on Yuji’s back. There are more injections – neuronal, trional, camphor. And as Yuji coughs phlegm into a bowl or lies prostrate (all lightness has passed now, his body is wet earth, a sack of wet earth), Kushida, in a low voice, a confidential purr, talks to him about the cases he has at the clinic, and in particular the venereal cases. Gonorrhoea, syphilis, sores that never heal, or seem to heal only to break open again months later. He never speaks of such things when Father is present. With a half-smile he offers Yuji advice, telling him that if he goes with a woman he suspects is unclean (‘and so many are, so many’), afterwards he should wash his genitals in his own urine. Is this what Mother meant when she told Yuji to listen to Dr Kushida, that the doctor was a good friend of the Takano family?

  His fever builds, breaks in a drench of sweating. In the days that follow he passes hours gazing at the old language of cracks on the ceiling. Questions appear – the sort that lethargy incites but cannot answer. He longs to be left alone, to be wretched alone, but the hours are punctuated by visits – Father, Miyo, Kushida, even, one afternoon, Haruyo, who stands above him like a wall and recites the message from Mother, her expression of concern, her wishes for his recovery.

  And then, from no observable cause other than the slow accretion of new strength, he wakes out of a deep sleep, seventeen days after falling ill, and listens, with simple curiosity, to the noises of the street – the tofu-seller’s bugle, the play of wind chimes, the chattering of sewing machines and radios. He sits up. When the dizziness passes he drinks the water by his bed and washes the taste of medicine from his mouth. He dips two fingers into the glass and wipes his brow, his eyelids. He is setting the glass down again when he sees the marks on his hand, the scatter of ink scratches over the muscle at the base of his left thumb. He angles his hand to the light, then turns it so that his fingers point towards his chest. Is . . . hi . . . ha . . .

  Ishihara.

  Ishihara!

  It is a full minute before he can explain it to himself, can draw to the top of his mind the memory of Hideo Makiyama leaning across to him, pen in hand, under the slowly turning blades of the ceiling fan in the Don Juan. The intuition. The wonderful idea. He did not want Fritz Lang, or that troublesome neurasthenic Akutagawa. He certainly did not want Arthur Rimbaud (Arthur who?), with or without the mysterious letter. What was needed, what was long overdue, what he – and therefore the public – had a raging thirst for, was a comprehensive study of the young star of modern Japanese writing, the author whose books were read even by those who, strictly speaking, could not be called readers at all, who did not give a damn about ‘literature’ or the values of so-called educated people and who could only be spoken to by a man with a genius for simplicity. And this was his offer, this he would allow Yuji to attempt. And to seal the matter, to make some manner of contract between them, he had clutched Yuji’s fingers between his own and written, with a few quick darts of his pen, Ishihara’s name, an act so pointless, so entirely ludicrous, Yuji, his head already throbbing from the drink, had let the moment fall like spilt ash to the dark of the bar’s floor.

  Cautiously, he stands up from the mattress. He puts a jacket round his shoulders and goes onto the platform. A fine rain is falling, and further off, in columns of blue shadow, a heavier rain is falling over the Low City. There is no one in the Kitamura Garden. In his own garden, Miyo is hurrying back from the privy, sheltering herself under an umbrella painted with irises. He holds out his hands. On his palms he feels each raindrop’s soft arrival. He should, he knows, attempt to be like rain, to have the same indifference and generosity. He also knows that by tomorrow he will have quite forgotten the wisdom of this.

  16

  Downstairs for the first time in three weeks, he sits in the calm of the Japanese room, sipping tea and waiting for the bath to fill. In the alcove, the scroll has been changed. The snow, the bowed pine trees, the men ascending, have been replaced with a painting of bush warblers on a branch of plum blossom.

  The bath is so hot his body b
ecomes numb. He lies there, fingering the soft fringe of ragged hair at his chin, his sick-man’s beard. The light of a spring day is slanting through the vent in the wall above him, a clear gold light that falls on the little bran sack Mother uses in place of soap. The season has moved on while he lay upstairs, the year has turned. He should be pleased, but the thought of going back, of starting again the struggle involved even in an existence like his . . . is he ready for that? It is almost a relief when, standing up from the bath, he is swept by a sensation of profound weakness, so that for several seconds, as the light flickers and the water drips from his skin, he can do nothing but stand there, wavering between the elements.

  17

  The last of the night sweats give way to nights of honest sleep. His face, smooth-shaven again, loses its shadows. In weak sunshine he takes strolls in the garden, little restorative circuits in which he breathes, as deeply as he can, the ripening air. He is out there one afternoon, reading on the stump of the old pine tree they cut down in Showa 10, when the phone rings and Miyo calls him from the verandah. When he takes the receiver and offers his tentative ‘Moshi-moshi’ he cannot quite identify the woman’s voice.