One Morning Like a Bird

by Andrew Miller

  ‘What will you do now?’ she asks.

  ‘Now that I’m well?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I have lots to do,’ he says.

  ‘You’ve found a job?’

  ‘Not exactly a job.’

  ‘Grandmother says that soon everyone will be forced to work. In factories, digging shelters . . .’

  ‘Shelters? In Tokyo?’

  ‘It might be good for you to do some digging. That kind of work can soothe the nerves.’

  He glances across at her. Is that what she would like to see? Him wielding a mattock, excavating some great hole under the city, choking on the dust?

  ‘As I told you,’ he says, ‘I’ve got plenty to do. You’ve heard of Kaoru Ishihara, I suppose?’

  ‘Mother Behind my Eyes?’

  ‘Yes. Blood of Honour, The Last Stand. I’ve been commissioned to write a piece on him. A critical essay for Young Japan.’

  ‘On the train,’ she says, ‘I’ve seen some of the junior officers – the more serious ones – reading Young Japan.’

  ‘It will be quite an important piece. Literary but also political. Different dimensions and so on.’

  ‘You must be pleased,’ she says. ‘You could really make a name for yourself.’

  ‘It’s the sort of thing,’ says Yuji, ‘I’ll be doing a lot more of now. I’m afraid the shelters will have to wait.’

  ‘Of course.’

  At the statue of Saigo Takamori there is, happily, no sign of Grandma Kitamura, though a dozen others are stood there, women and children mostly, looking out expectantly for some familiar face to blossom suddenly among the ranks of strangers.

  ‘The tea will be cold,’ says Yuji.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she says.

  He turns and gazes up at the bronze samurai and his faithful dog. ‘Did you know,’ he says, ‘that after the Great Earthquake people used this statue as a noticeboard? It was covered with the names of the missing. A name, the last known location, the address of the family, sometimes a photograph or a sketch. It was the same with the statue of Kusunoki Mosashige outside the palace.’

  ‘I hadn’t heard that,’ she says, and he can see, as she joins her gaze to his, that she’s imagining it, the way it must have looked with hundreds of little pieces of paper fluttering on its sides. He, too, of course, must imagine it, for by the time he returned from Uncle Kensuke’s most of the notices were gone, though some, yellowing and torn, stayed up stubbornly for a month or more, until the autumn winds released them. Where Father posted Ryuichi’s name he has no idea, but he points to a spot halfway up the plinth and tells her it was there.

  ‘If it troubles you to wait here . . .’ she says, a voice more tender, more intimate than any he has heard from her before.

  ‘Thank you for your thoughtfulness,’ he says, ‘but I have been here many times. It no longer . . .’

  ‘Anyway,’ she says, ‘might it be better if you left before Grandmother arrives?’

  He nods, hands her the tea tray. ‘It was nice to meet you today,’ he says.

  ‘I am glad you are well,’ she says. ‘Please have good luck with your new work.’

  He thanks her again and leaves. He does not look back. He is afraid he will see a boy in a high-collared uniform, white gloves on his hands, crouching at the warriors’ sandalled feet. He is afraid that if he turns the boy will leap down and pursue him through the park, enraged, swift as a fox.

  23

  As the embarrassment of doing the piece is now outweighed by the shame that would follow from not doing it, from being discovered as a liar, a fantasist, a person who should immediately be sent to dig shelters beneath the streets of Tokyo, he calls Makiyama’s office and leaves a message with Kiyooka that he would, if it is still possible, if he has not left it too late, be grateful to accept Mr Makiyama’s generous suggestion of a study of Kaoru Ishihara.

  ‘By the way,’ drawls Kiyooka, ‘we have one of your socks here. Perhaps you would like to collect it?’

  24

  At the dining table in the Western room he reads an account of the German Army’s capture of Copenhagen. This time there is no attempt to claim that the action was intended to protect the inhabitants from an aggressor. The Danes have simply been absorbed into the Reich. The audaciousness of the attack, the speed with which both the city and the country have been conquered by small forces of determined soldiers, is a lesson, so the author of the article suggests, the Japanese military will surely wish to profit from.

  He folds the paper (which today has a special supplement on patriotic recipes) and looks into the garden at Miyo crouching on the path beside the bamboo. What is she doing there? The door onto the verandah is open. He goes outside and crouches beside her. She points into the heart of the bamboo, the little depression where the cat made its nest. He cannot see anything at first – the ground there is densely striped with shadow. Then he notices the death-shrunken form of a kitten, and nearby, partly buried under the pale leaves, a second.

  ‘Did none survive?’ he asks.

  She puts a finger to her lips.

  25

  The day before the Emperor’s birthday, Yuji cycles to the Kanda bookstalls to buy second-hand editions of Ishihara’s novels. In warm streets under a faultless sky even Yuji with his old habits of self-care, his sick-boy’s caution, is dressed for the good weather – open-neck shirt, flannel trousers, canvas shoes.

  To find Ishihara’s books will be easy enough. The people who read him are not collectors. When the story has been read the book is empty, used up. Those who can be bothered dispose of them for a few sen at the stalls. The rest leave them under their seats in the subway or on the luggage racks of trains, where they become part of the city’s unofficial circulating library.

  On Ooka’s stall half a dozen of the books are on prominent display, but Yuji does not want to explain himself to Ooka, who will certainly try to make a joke about this new and unexpected interest. He slides past to Shinkichi’s stall. Shinkichi is a sullen man who does not enter into conversation with his customers. He buys Song of Death, The Last Assault, Tears of a Hero, Blood and Beauty, Mother Behind My Eyes. Each of them has some wild illustration on the cover. A pair of schoolboys splashed in their own gore, gazing at each other passionately in the moment of death. A pair of samurai with gaping wounds, gazing at each other admiringly in the moment of death. A grieving mother kneeling under a rain of blood . . .

  Shinkichi makes a parcel of the books. Yuji hangs the parcel from his handlebars. He has what he came for but cannot quite resist going the ten yards to Yoshimasu’s stall to look there (under the guise of general browsing, of an idle and utterly carefree examination of the stock) for that unloved edition of Electric Dragonfly.

  Has someone bought it? Has the pretty girl Ooka laughed about taken it home with her, where even now she is lying on the mats of her room reading it aloud to herself while a drop of tea slides from the rim of her cup to leave a perfectly neat little splash on the page? He rests the bicycle’s crossbar against his belly, starts to flick through the piles. There are volumes here, armfuls of them by people he has never heard of, young poets who, no doubt, considered themselves on the cusp of a brilliant career, then found they could not fly again. What became of them? Where have they gone? What becomes of those who have ceased to promise?

  Around him the day suddenly darkens, as if at the passing of some large and unpalatable truth, but the moment is fleeting, the sunlight falls on the back of his neck again, and when he finds Electric Dragonfly in its pristine cover (a line-drawn dragonfly, a lily pad) he silently greets it, lifts it deftly to the top of the pile, and turns away, wheeling his bicycle through the crooked corridor between the stalls.

  At the end of the street, he hesitates, looks in both directions, then climbs into the saddle and rides towards the Russian Cathedral. It is not the way home, certainly not the most direct way, but the route will lead him past Feneon’s house. The unwisdom of this, the untimeliness
, is perfectly evident to him, but makes no difference. He brakes as the house comes into view, freewheels past the shut front door, his heart like a stone in his throat. What did he expect? That Feneon would be sitting on the doorstep looking out for him? Or Hanako waiting with a message – ‘Everything is understood, everything is excused. Please come back’?

  He stops outside the fan shop, looks over his shoulder. Should he ride past again, keep riding up and down until at last someone comes out? At his side, in the shade of the shop’s awning, a little girl is playing with a doll. She tells Yuji the doll’s name, holds it out to him, the grubby wood of its limbs, the painted blue eyes. He nods to her and rides away.

  That night he has another fire dream, unforeseen, unseasonable. In the dream he finds Dr Kushida cross-legged on a pile of corpses, his skin flaking from him like the skin of a grilled fish. Miss Feneon, says the doctor, has a message for him. She is out there somewhere (he waves a ruined hand). Yuji must search for her before it is too late. ‘Look at your watch,’ says the doctor, then sighs and settles back on the corpses as the flames creep over him like red and blue vermin.

  Yuji wakes. He gropes his way off the mattress, reaches up for the light. His watch is lying as a bookmark inside Tears of a Hero. He takes it out and squints at it. Ten to four! Ten minutes to find the boy. Ten minutes before the fire falls. Ten minutes to be ready.

  And what message could she possibly have that should delay him?

  PART 2

  The Drunken Boat

  I drifted on a river I could not control,

  No longer guided by the bargeman’s ropes.

  Arthur Rimbaud

  1

  Ishihara’s house is in the southern suburb of Azabu. It is not easy to reach and for the last part of his journey Yuji has been forced to the expense of a taxi, the young driver taking several wrong turns before arriving on a tree-lined street, a place half rustic, half genteel, with nothing to disturb the singing of birds and insects except a small party of children playing soberly in the care of a servant.

  Outside the gate, in the partial shade of a tree, is a large, brilliantly polished car, an Armstrong Siddeley (the new six-cylinder Merton model) with tan leather seats, walnut dashboard, headlights under peaks of chromed steel. Yuji tidies his hair in the glass of the car’s rear window, then tries the garden gate. It’s locked. He looks for a bell but finds instead a cabinet at the side of the gate with the end of a speaking tube inside. How does one begin with a speaking tube? He utters his name into the mouthpiece, listens to the hissing of air, closes the cabinet and waits. After several minutes a bolt is drawn and a man two or three years Yuji’s senior stands in the gateway, the expression on his face suggesting he has been needlessly disturbed from important work. He is dressed in a finely cut lightweight suit. His hair is cropped like a soldier’s and there’s a small scar by his right eye but he’s as pretty as an onnagata. In reply to Yuji’s bow he says he is Ota, Ishihara’s personal secretary, then, saying nothing more, he shuts the gate and leads Yuji around the side of the house – a two-storey building in a style not quite indigenous, not quite not – to the garden at the back. Here, the land slopes gently down to a pavilion in the shade of a purple-flowering sandalwood tree. All the pavilion’s screens are open, and on the far verandah a man, stripped to the waist, is vigorously wiping his chest with a cloth. On the wood by his feet is a set of barbells.

  ‘Sensei!’ calls Ota. ‘The journalist is here.’

  ‘Who? Oh, he’s not really a journalist,’ says Ishihara, crossing the mats towards them and smiling at Yuji. ‘I’m not sure I would have invited a mere journalist to join us today. Mr Takano is more of a . . . literary gentleman.’ He laughs, still rubbing himself with the cloth. ‘Won’t you come inside?’ To Ota he gives orders for tea to be brought out. ‘I only drink Ceylon tea,’ he says to Yuji, ‘and in the English way, with lemon and a little sugar. I hope that suits you? I find it helps my concentration.’

  Yuji takes off his shoes and steps into the pavilion. Ishihara picks up a silk shirt the colour of persimmon leaves, puts it on and begins, with slender fingers, to button it. He apologises for not being ready to receive a guest. Yuji apologises for disturbing him.

  ‘You’ll be staying for lunch, of course?’ asks Ishihara.

  ‘Lunch?’

  ‘Just a few of us – Major Yamazaki from the War Ministry; Dick Amazawa, a director with the Shochiku film company; Ota; and you. And you needn’t worry. I haven’t invited our mutual friend, though he speaks rather highly of you. He was quite excited at the thought of your writing a really in-depth piece, quite persuasive.’ His shirt is buttoned now. He lights a cigarette, exhales slowly. ‘So, how shall we begin?’

  ‘However you prefer,’ says Yuji, who, as he crossed the city, had nothing more precise in mind than that he would scribble frantically into the pad he has in his pocket while Ishihara made some sort of speech about himself.

  There is a playful grin on Ishihara’s face. ‘You’re a writer,’ he says. ‘I’m sure you can read a man’s character in the objects he surrounds himself with. This is where I work. It’s what the Americans would call a “den”. Feel free to explore. I shan’t disturb you.’ He turns and goes again to the far verandah with its view across the ample roofs of neighbouring houses, the heads of trees luminous in their fresh May foliage. For a few seconds Yuji stands regarding the other’s back and wondering what exactly he is being tested on. His skill as a writer (if that is what he is)? Or something else, something less obvious?

  He starts to look. The pavilion – the den – seems more a place for relaxation, for pleasure, than for the hard, anxious business of writing. At one end, there is a desk of glass and tubular steel, a chair of steel and leather, but the typewriter on the desk seems as ornamental as the vase of white lilacs beside it. There is not, in fact, any paper to be seen.

  At the other end of the room, under a raised and tied mosquito net, is a divan upholstered in peach silk, and on the mats beside it a scattering of magazines – Vogue, Jardin des Modes.

  Bookshelves (coloured glass) hold mainly copies of Ishihara’s own works, though with some unexpected additions: volumes of history and economics, like Shigeo Iwanami’s Lectures on the Historical Development of Japanese Capitalism, the same edition Father keeps in the garden study. On the wall between the shelves is a large photograph of Ishihara with an older man, the pair of them muffled in winter coats and standing in front of a monument Yuji has seen before but cannot quite identify.

  ‘The Brandenburg Gate,’ says Ishihara, who has stepped quietly in from the verandah, ‘Berlin. That’s Kyushi Hiraizumi. It was my thirty-fifth birthday. I am, as you should know, almost exactly as old as the century.’

  ‘So you’ve been to Europe?’

  ‘Berlin, Paris, London, Vienna . . . even to the Eternal City.’

  ‘The Eternal . . . ?’

  ‘It is what they call Rome. Do you think you would like to see Rome?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Perhaps you will.’

  ‘I’ve hardly travelled at all.’

  ‘You are still young.’

  ‘But the way things are going, the international situation . . .’

  ‘The way things are going will give many excellent opportunities to adventurous young men. You needn’t worry about that. But is this what you want to talk about? The international situation? I suppose the author of Electric Dragonfly cannot have a very high opinion of my little efforts with the pen.’

  ‘Not at all,’ says Yuji, ‘I was only . . .’

  “‘In the dream of a city poet, electric dragonflies over Shinobazu Pond. The lilies open like distant gunfire.” Have I got it right? I hate to misquote.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Yuji, blushing and looking down at Ishihara’s naked toes. ‘It’s correct.’

  ‘The problem,’ says Ishihara ‘– and you don’t object, I hope, to our speaking freely? – is that people now prefer stronger flavours. Or to put it another w
ay, it is the tastes and appetites of the popular classes that dominate our society, as they dominate societies all over the world. Your poetry, Takano, belongs to a more elegant age, the time, perhaps, of our grandfathers or great-grandfathers. It is over. It will not return.’

  ‘So poetry is finished?’

  ‘Have you ever stood outside a factory and seen the workers streaming out of the gates the moment the steam-whistle sounds? I recommend it if you want a view of the future. A featureless crowd, semi-educated, longing for some distraction from the harsh reality of their lives. By their mid-thirties they’re exhausted. Do you think they read much poetry? Indeed, do you think they read at all?’

  ‘Then what hope is there for your own . . . work?’

  ‘None whatsoever.’

  ‘So . . . ?’

  ‘What shall we do?’ He lights another cigarette, flicks, with a frown, a speck of ash that has settled on the cuff of his shirt. ‘What else but side with history? With the future. I wonder if you know what that means.’

  ‘Siding with the crowd?’

  ‘I’ve heard,’ says Ishihara, ‘that you care for cinema.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And your favourite film?’

  ‘La Grande Illusion.’

  ‘Shall I tell you mine? Ah, but here is our tea.’

  Ota places the tray on the verandah, pours from a silver teapot, throws Yuji a glance of rich hostility, nods to his employer, and withdraws.

  Ishihara hands Yuji a cup. ‘Don’t worry about Ota,’ he says. ‘He is somewhat possessive, that’s all. Now, take a sip and tell me what you think.’

  ‘It’s very good,’ says Yuji.

  ‘Just the right degree of stimulation?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Yuji. ‘But I think you were about to tell me the name of your favourite film?’