One Morning Like a Bird

by Andrew Miller

  She goes in through her gate. He keeps walking. He is pleased, however, she has taken the trouble, the risk, however small, to warn him. Pleased that she is, in some way, a friend.

  He eats in the Low City, a place by the water, then goes to the Mitsukoshi and buys a new watch, a Seiko, as much like his old watch as he can find. On a different floor in the same store, he buys a hat, plain brown, an austerity hat of the kind that will soberly express, in queues for the tram, queues for rice, meat, bread, sugar, charcoal, his devotion to the subjugation of China.

  There is plenty of time. His watch, which the sales girl set for him with careful reference to her own, says ten past two. He flags a taxi outside the store, travels south to Azabu, gets out at the end of Ishihara’s street, and walks, partly screened by the trees, until he is opposite the house. The car is there, bright as a new toy, but there is no sign of any guests, no prefatory commotion. He keeps walking, reaches the other end of the street, then comes slowly back on the same side. This time, as he approaches the house, he hears voices. One of them loud, good-humoured, a voice that knows it will not be contradicted. The other, Ota’s, smooth, carefully subordinate. He stops and edges forward until he can see the flank of a ministry staff car, a uniformed driver at attention beside the open passenger door. He cannot see the men talking. Their voices fade into the garden. The driver drops his stance, swings shut the door of the car, and strolls round to lean against the warmth of the bonnet. For a second time, keeping to the sparse shadows of the trees, Yuji walks past the house. He tells himself he is waiting for a more opportune moment to make his entrance – it would not do to arrive so soon after such an important guest – but as he comes again to the junction with the main road he stands there like a man trying to remember the address of someone he has not visited in years, as if he doubted this clipped, respectful street could possibly be the one he wanted . . .

  In his pocket, he touches the box with the pin inside. This, surely, is the moment to put it on, the moment to surrender himself to his protectors. With Ishihara there will be no forced marches in the snow. No beatings from drill instructors. No bayoneting of bound prisoners. He will be part of some troupe, semi-official, decorating the fringes of the regime, breathing, with their productions, a little life into the tiny souls of military planners. There will be cars and money. There will be pink-brown pills to banish sleep. There will be actresses whose age is hard to guess. There will be much excited talking about death, but little actual risk of it. Ishihara, perhaps, is the boy under the shutter he has looked for in so many dreams, the boy who will lift him to safety when the pillars of fire fall and the others are reduced to ashes.

  He takes the box from his pocket. He is fiddling with the clasp, freeing it, when a taxi swings into the road from the direction of Roppongi and with a grinding of gears accelerates past him. He looks up, catches a brief clear view of Dick Amazawa, a glimpse of two others on the seat beside him.

  Was he seen? Was he recognised? He is sure he was not. Amazawa, though looking out, was looking in, his big face blind to anything beyond the haze of his breath on the window. The time is ten past three. At exactly fourteen minutes past, the taxi returns. Yuji raises an arm, steps out.

  ‘Shinjuku.’

  ‘Shinjuku?’

  The rear of the cab is blue with cigarette smoke but the smell of Fumi’s perfume, a scent he remembers perfectly from their dance at the Don Juan, lingers in a sticky cloud of sherbet and honey.

  They pull onto the main road, turn north. He cannot believe how simple it was (he who has had such trouble stopping taxis!). He twists, stares from the rear window at diminishing Azabu, holds his breath. It is not, of course, too late to tap the driver’s shoulder, say he has forgotten something, has changed his mind. Apologise to Ota at the door, a low bow to Ishihara who will graciously excuse him, link arms and lead him over to the general. It is not too late, it is not too late . . . And then, plainly, it is. He breathes out, sits back, picks at the brown band of his new hat, and does not hear, until it is repeated for the third time, the driver’s question.

  ‘Whereabouts?’

  In the days of Grandfather’s youth, Shinjuku was little more than a way station on the road to the province of Kai, a place to find a bed for the night on visits to the city. Now, a short drive north from Azabu, it’s modern Tokyo, its crowds as dense as any in Asakusa or the Ginza. He pays off the taxi outside the Hamada Cinema. There’s a Mikio Naruse film playing.

  ‘It’s been on for twenty minutes,’ say the girl with the tickets.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ says Yuji, who’s seen it before, twice.

  The auditorium is almost empty. The film is melancholy, charming, restful. When he comes out – still on the steps of the cinema – he hears, above the ringing of trams and the rumble of passing trucks, the early evening chorus of birds.

  He buys a skewer of gristly meat at a stall near the station, eats it while sitting on an upturned crate beside the stall (one of three that serve as the stall’s restaurant). At some point he will have to make his way back across the city to Hongo. He will have to think about what he has done today, or undone. What he has broken. But for now he will fill out a little curl of time doing nothing anyone might imagine mattered, an hour that never needs to be accounted for. Who knows he’s here? Who would think of looking for him in Shinjuku? He chooses streets at random, stops under lanterns to listen to an accordion playing or a koto, then moves on, chooses again, this bright alley, this dark street. He wonders if he will find the Polar Bear Club, where Fumi worked, but realises it could have had a dozen different names since then, and would, anyway, have been shut for months by government order. He is becoming uncertain of his bearings, has, perhaps, strayed beyond the quarter’s secret borders, when, turning one more corner, crossing a patch of green, then threading the gate of a little shrine, he finds himself on one of the new avenues, walking on a pavement washed by the light of a department store. The half-dark crowd swim by, brushing softly against each other. Yuji steps into the gutter to make room for a soldier walking with his wife and child, then hesitates, struck by something in the man’s face. He looks back. The soldier has also stopped

  ‘Excuse me,’ says the soldier, taking off his cap, ‘but were you a customer, perhaps?’

  ‘A customer?’

  ‘Maybe I fixed your bicycle?’

  It takes a moment more, then Yuji suddenly recognises the little mechanic from the repair shop in Hibiya. ‘So you’re in the army now?’

  ‘I trained in ’37. I was surprised they left me alone as long as they did.’

  ‘You’ve closed the shop?’

  ‘I tried to find someone to run it while I was away but it’s specialist work. My wife and the baby are going to live with my mother in Shiba.’

  The woman is standing just behind the mechanic’s shoulder, a child about a year old tied to her back in a shawl. She is much younger than her husband. She looks tired and slightly frightened.

  ‘I’m sure your customers will not forget you,’ says Yuji.

  ‘Half of them are overseas themselves,’ says the man. ‘When I come home it’ll be like starting again.’

  ‘I used to do some work for Mr Horikawa,’ says Yuji. ‘He had an office above your workshop.’

  ‘Of course. Every day he would look in and greet us. Nobody in the street had a bad word to say about him.’

  ‘He’s gone somewhere?’

  ‘Gone?’

  ‘Moved?’

  ‘He’s dead,’ says the man.

  ‘Horikawa?’

  ‘It was even in the paper. I cut it out. If we were in the shop, I could find it for you. Popular Hibaya businessman in railway suicide. Something like that.’

  ‘Horikawa?’

  ‘With his son. The one who was a bit, you know, in the head . . .’

  ‘Both of them? Both dead?’

  ‘They went on to the line just the other side of the steel bridge. Waited there for the night train. I
t was a big funeral. Even the service of the forty-ninth day had a good turn-out. Or so I heard.’

  The child, catching at her mother’s hair, begins to whimper. The woman ignores it.

  ‘When did it happen?’ asks Yuji.

  ‘The beginning of October? People say his heart was getting worse. That he was afraid of what would happen to his son if he couldn’t care for him any more. His wife . . .’ He sucks in his cheeks.

  ‘Yes,’ says Yuji.

  ‘I’m sorry to be the one who brings bad news.’

  ‘You weren’t to know.’

  ‘He’s in the cemetery at Koishikawa if you want to pay your respects.’

  ‘At Koishikawa?‘

  ‘They had a family plot.’

  ‘Yes. I see. Thank you.’

  ‘And if your bicycle needs fixing in, say, six months from now, maybe I’ll be back in business.’

  ‘I’ll remember,’ says Yuji. They nod to each other, continue on their way, the child’s crying sounding in Yuji’s head long after he could possibly still be hearing it.

  17

  On the front door of the house in Kanda someone has nailed a large sheet of paper. On it is written (in calligraphy a child would be ashamed of) ABOLISH DESIRE UNTIL THE FINAL VICTORY!

  For a few moments Yuji stands there with his bicycle, unsure what to do. Pass by? Pull it off? He cannot use the entrance through the garden. The kitchen door is bolted. And anyway, how would it help him now? It is too late for hiding. He leans his bicycle against the wall of the house. The sense of being observed from the buildings across the street is very strong. He takes the key from his pocket. As he opens the front door the paper flaps, shows, on its other side, an advertisement for tinned whale meat.

  He stands in the blackness of the hallway, holds his breath, listens, then hurries through to the salon, opens the window and unlatches the shutters. Brilliant morning light cuts across the room.

  He looks in the study, then all the rooms at the back of the house. All of it is secure, undisturbed, exactly as he and Alissa left it nine days ago (nine days!). Whoever nailed up the poster has not yet dared go any further than the door. Some neighbourhood patriot. Someone who imagines he has seen the enemy in his own street. Or was the poster discussed at a meeting of the local association? A warning, a punishment. Do they know his name? Where is Hanako now? Who does she talk to?

  He goes upstairs, examines each room in turn until he comes to Alissa’s. The curtains are part open (that, too, just as they left it). He sits on the stripped bed, then steps to the wardrobe and opens both its doors. Though she took all she could fit in the suitcases, pressed in, irritably, more and more, took most of her favourites, there are still eight or ten dresses hanging there, and in the rack of shelves beside the rail, blouses, shirts, rolled socks, camisoles. He touches the dresses, lets his fingers drift from one to the next. Most he cannot remember ever having seen her wear. Most smell only of the little embroidered pillows of lavender at the bottom of the wardrobe (La vraie lavande de Provence). A scarf – chiffon? – is steeped in some perfume of hers but this is not what he is looking for. He shuts the wardrobe, turns the little brass key. In the corner, in the space between the wardrobe and the wall, is a basket of plaited bamboo. He takes off the lid. It is a laundry basket, and crumpled at the bottom, overlooked or ignored, is one of her linen nightgowns. He lifts it out. It smells of her. It smells shockingly of the child. On the front are two small stains, creamy-yellow against the white, where her milk seeped from her, before or after a feed. He holds it up, examines it thoroughly, then takes off his clothes and pulls the gown over his head. It is tight across his upper back and shoulders but otherwise fits him quite comfortably. He curls on the bed, the rough ticking of the mattress. The room, the shadow light, hold him patiently. After an hour he gets up again, takes off the gown, puts on his clothes, goes downstairs, closes the shutter, re-crosses the salon, the dark hall, and leaves the house.

  From Kanda he rides towards home, but when he reaches the main road above Yushima he turns left towards the cemetery. The guardian, an old man carrying a broom of bound twigs, guides Yuji to the Horikawa family plot. There are flowers there, white chrysanthemums, but they are not recent, their petals edged with brown, like rust. Behind the grave are wooden sotoba boards with Horikawa’s Buddhist name and that of his son, who, in death, is named Righteous Serene Sincerity Boy. At the front, to the right of the grave, is a small box for business cards, the corner of a last card protruding a little from the slot.

  Yuji has brought no flowers or incense with him. The guardian would probably have sold him some but the guardian has wandered away to where his presence is just the faint scratching of twigs on the path.

  ‘I would have valued your advice,’ says Yuji to the stone. ‘You would have made me coffee on your spirit burner. We would have watched the trains and you would have told me what to do.’ He bows, deeply, straightens his back, then leans down for the edge of card, the little white tongue poking from the box. ‘With condolences, Yoichi Masuda, assistant to the vice president, West Japan Shipping Corp., Akita, Niigata, Hiroshima, Shiminoseki.’ The address of Masuda’s office is in Tokyo, the other side of Hibiya Park from Horikawa’s. Yuji returns to the gate. He cannot hear the guardian’s broom anymore, nor does there seem to be anyone else visiting the cemetery today, unless the two men standing under the cedar tree between the gate and the road are intending to go in. They have, however, nothing in their hands, and there is something slightly odd in the way the younger of the two glances at Yuji, then stares at the other man, in silence.

  18

  On the day of Father’s departure they travel to the station by taxi, arriving there a few minutes after eleven. They have agreed to have coffee somewhere, a last conversation before the midday train renews their separation. ‘There’s a place across here,’ says Yuji. ‘It won’t be as busy as the station.’

  They cross the road, each of them carrying a suitcase. The café has not altered since Yuji was here with Taro. The mural of the temple, the photograph of Hitler and Mussolini, the waitresses in their berets. Even the record they are playing seems to be the same Italian song, in which the only word Yuji recognises is a drawn out ‘amo-re, amo-re’.

  They order coffee, are told there is no coffee, not this week, and order tea instead. There are not many other customers. A few couples, a few on their own reading newspapers and smoking.

  ‘It’s really starting to feel like spring,’ says Father. ‘It’s years since I saw spring on the mountain. Perhaps, after all, you’ll have an opportunity to visit?’

  They have already, at home the previous evening, discussed those matters of a practical nature that need to be understood between them. Father and Mother will stay on at the farm for an unspecified period. In the meantime, if Yuji’s red paper arrives (and Father’s visit to Kushida produced no reassurances), then the house in Hongo will be shut down. Miyo will go to Setagaya to help Sonoko. Items of value – the books from the garden study, various old scrolls and lacquerware – can be stored somewhere safe, somewhere fireproof. Somewhere bombproof.

  The waitress brings their tea. The clock on the wall behind Father’s head says quarter past the hour.

  ‘This is the first cold season I can remember,’ says Father, ‘that you have not been ill.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It seems that the family is generally in better health these days.’

  ‘Auntie Sawa?’

  ‘Certainly no worse.’

  Yuji nods. He feels he is carrying a small pistol in his hand which, beneath the table, he is pointing at Father’s belly. He tells himself for the hundredth time that if he could face Feneon, say what he said to Feneon, then he can face Father. But Feneon – however Yuji sometimes chose to think of him – was not his father, whereas the man across the table, the bearded, still vigorous man tipping the ash from his cigarette into the mount Vesuvius ashtray, held him as a baby, taught him as a child, saw all his childish s
truggling towards the beginning of adulthood. All his subsequent failings.

  ‘I hope,’ says Father, ‘it’s not a crowded train.’

  ‘No,’ says Yuji.

  ‘A crowded compartment, particularly when people are eating, makes the journey much more tiresome.’

  ‘Perhaps you’ll be fortunate?’

  ‘Yes, perhaps.’

  ‘What Miyo hinted at,’ says Yuji, staring into the green depths of his tea, ‘maybe it’s more serious than I admitted.’

  ‘You’ve admitted nothing,’ says Father. ‘Are you referring to your new friend?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She is someone you wish the family to meet?’

  ‘There are things that need to be explained,’ says Yuji. ‘There are aspects.’

  ‘Aspects?’

  ‘She is not Japanese.’

  ‘A foreigner?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I wonder, could she be connected to the Feneons?’

  ‘You knew?’

  ‘I am guessing. How many foreigners are you acquainted with?’

  ‘She is Monsieur Feneon’s daughter.’

  ‘And she has a name?’

  ‘Alissa.’

  ‘Alissa.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I assume she lives in her father’s house. Isn’t that by the cathedral?’

  Yuji nods. ‘The house is empty now.’

  ‘Empty?’

  ‘They have left Japan.’

  ‘The whole family?’

  ‘It is only the two of them.’

  ‘But the father and the daughter?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘They no longer felt safe here?’

  ‘How could they?’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘There is something else . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  Yuji draws the photograph from the inside pocket of his jacket. It is one of those Miss Ogilvy made them sit for at Christmas. In the picture, Alissa’s red jacket looks black. Emile is lying with his cheek against her upper arm. Alissa is smiling, shyly. Yuji finds his own expression impossible to read. Part of the fireplace is in view, and the front half of a grey cat. He passes the picture across the table. Father takes out his glasses, glances at his watch, then studies the picture. At last, removing his glasses, folding them, he gives the picture back.