Yuko thought of those traders handing over rent to live like this, cut off from the world, and yet a conduit between countries as they sent and received goods. The fan-shaped man-made island of Dejima was built for the Dutch in 1636 and stretched two hundred feet from east to west and two hundred yards on the north and south side. To enter over the bridge a ticket was required. Shige skipped on to a list of the exports that poured through this place to Holland. Yuko imagined the ships as they sailed past the circular stone arc built into the sea. She saw the shine of copper, silver and gold; she felt the textures of the ceramics and lacquerware, the raw silk, shark skin and wood. She smelled the spices and tasted the strange new food: the sweet biscuits, the chocolate, beer, sour coffee, ham and vinegar.
The weeks passed but still she could not extricate herself from the siege of Sato. Summer and autumn played on a constant loop in her head, a cinema reel of sand and sea and Chinatown and that last afternoon. No matter how much she raged against her weakness, she still thought of him. ‘Stupid, stupid, forget, forget.’ She wrote prayers on paper and burned incense and visited the temples accompanied by Mrs Goto and her wishes were the same: exorcise this man from my body and mind. But he remained. ‘My imagination is my enemy. Thoughts of where he is and who he is with torment me. I see other women, giving themselves to him as I have. I fill my head with Mother’s words. He did not love me. He saw how weak I was and he left with no afterthought or regret. Mother says Jomei does not grieve for me. I was a distraction, some toy with which to play. Forget him.’
On those afternoons with Shige, she looked for Sato in the faces of men in the street, in the bodies emerging from restaurants or bars, and she saw him everywhere and nowhere.
As she fought this contagion of Sato, Shige would tease her. ‘The Children’s Society of Jesus, let’s see, well, the building used to be Maria-en.’ He stopped reading. ‘Daydreaming again?’
‘Just thinking.’
‘Of what?’
‘What you were saying. All these people here in the city, all their stories, all their joy, all their pain.’
Did he see the longing for a man other than him? She worried that she was snaring Shige in some lie. She did not think of love, or its more reckless relative, passion; she thought only of Shige’s kindness and attention and the way he said her name as if it were a pleasure on his lips. His company was a comfort and they had the common currency of Nagasaki. These were not nothing. She began to catch the details of him, the way he rubbed his right eyebrow when preoccupied, the slight bruising around his knuckles from the boxing he practised to keep fit, the strength of his hands, different from Sato’s slim, surgical fingers.
One day as bloated clouds carried the weight of rain, they went to Kajiya-machi and walked around the Sofukuji temple, which had been built for Chinese residents. More than three hundred years later, two stone lions still guarded the red entrance. They stood beside a robed gold Buddha statue in the main hall when Shige turned to her, aware once more that Yuko seemed distracted. ‘You seem not yourself?’
She felt a surge of irritation. ‘How would you know? We do not know one another.’
Shige said nothing but instead walked up to an inscription written in gold on a blue wooden banner above their heads. ‘If one should some merit make, do it then again, again. One should wish for it anew, for merit grows to joy.’ He smiled. ‘I like the sentiment. Happiness must be earned by good deeds.’ Shige looped his umbrella on his arm and pulled out a brown package from his suit pocket. ‘I have a present for you.’
He watched as she unwrapped the paper to reveal a tin of pencils and a sketch pad bound in cream calfskin. ‘Your mother mentioned you like to draw. I thought you could sketch on our excursions.’
Yuko had not drawn since Iōjima but she thanked him, touched if also saddened by the gift. She walked up to a tree covered with hundreds of prayers written on folded pieces of white paper. These handwritten blessings for love, or children, or prosperity were knotted onto branches, which hung low with the weight of all those desires. Early-morning rain had turned some of the handwritten notes to ink smudges, but those underneath the top layer were protected and dry. Yuko touched one of the prayers. ‘Have you ever felt your life is out of your own control?’
He was gentle with her. ‘Of course.’
‘Really?’
‘Of course, right now, for a start. I wouldn’t wish for you to be here if it were against your will.’
‘And if I were?’
‘Are you?’
‘Of course not.’ They walked past red and yellow lanterns and stood next to a giant cauldron made to feed victims of famine hundreds of years ago.
‘Marriage is –’
‘Perhaps we should not speak of that yet?’
He nodded his agreement. ‘Shall we go somewhere else? If you have time we could go to the cathedral? Maybe you could draw?’
Their footsteps were silent on the flagstones as they made their way from the red temple. Shige looked up and even though the rain was yet to fall he opened up his umbrella and Yuko walked beside him, the closest they had been in each other’s company. ‘He gave me enough space and only our elbows touched but he is drawing nearer, working up to the question. I know the moment is coming when I will have to choose between the kind, living man who stands in front of me, or the ghost of the doctor. As the first drops came I could think of only one question: does Shige represent the three rings of fence, moat and bamboo, or could he be the world beyond them?’
A Very Male Society
Danson-johi: While Amaterasu-omikami, the chief deity in Japanese mythology, is a goddess, Japan has been an androcentric country throughout recorded history. The imported religions justified male-dominated social institutions. Women were regarded as inferior and their subjection to men was considered a matter of course. As an old proverb implies, women could have no will of their own, for they had to obey their parents in their childhood, their husbands when married, and their sons in old age.
Sato had agreed to our ultimatum; he had promised Kenzo, but he would not go. The conditions were simple: never see or speak to Yuko again, never talk of the affair and leave Nagasaki. There was no confusion to be had with these terms. We knew he would be resistant to the last demand but what could he do? Were he not to leave, we told him, we would tell his wife, the hospital, our mutual companions. He would be ruined, if not personally, at least professionally. We reiterated that this was no hysterical threat. We were determined that the doctor could no longer remain in the city. When I say we told him this, I mean Kenzo. I dared not face Sato, fuelled as I was by wild fantasies of the violence I might do to him. I wanted to hurt him physically for the pain he had inflicted on Yuko, and if that wasn’t possible, I wanted to be free of him for good.
As the weeks passed and the air began to carry the first fragrance of spring, I realised that I should not have left the matter to my husband. Kenzo must have faltered, or hesitated, or implied something that allowed the doctor to doubt our words. Our city was a small one, and the circles of the wealthy were claustrophobic. His continued presence was easy enough to establish. Nothing had changed for Sato except Yuko was no longer available to him. He had not been punished. I watched Yuko as she helped me plant amaryllis bulbs in the garden. Later she planned to meet Watanabe. We had expected more resistance to the engineer, and while we had not pressed her on marriage, we dared to be quietly hopeful. Her diary proved we had not been wrong, I read with relief.
‘I met Shige for lunch today at an udon restaurant. We sat side by side on a bench. He had tickets for a concert next week and wondered if I might like to go. I found to my surprise, and pleasure, I did, and not just for the music. The waitress brought us two steaming bowls of soup and I asked about his workday. He said he was bored with office work; he wanted to be out in the field. He said he might be posted to one of the nearby islands. “But it would just be
for a few months,” he said quickly and then he blushed, as if he had betrayed himself by admitting he had thought about how his future might affect me. He slurped up a noodle and asked, “What about you, Yuko? What do you plan to do with your life? Do you want to work?” I felt a surge of gratitude at his question. I told him I used to want to be an artist, now I was thinking about nursing. Shige drank some water and nodded. “That seems a fine ambition to me.” We smiled at one another, and for the first time in weeks, I realised I hadn’t looked around the room for Jomei’s face as soon as I walked into a new place. The relief of being free of him, if only for a moment. Will it last?’
When they left the restaurant, they stood next to a store selling incense, little trays of fragrant wood lined on a table as sandalwood smoke rose up from a burner. A leaflet fluttered by them and Shige stooped to pick it up, some workers’ literature denouncing capitalism, corrupt politicians, the suppression of labour unions, the occupation of Manchuria. The country had boiled with violence for years. Prime ministers assassinated, public figures murdered, Marxists rounded up, the military police on patrol at home and in territories abroad. Nagasaki was far from Tokyo but the politics travelled across the growing network of roads, rail and ferry routes.
Shige crunched the paper into a ball. ‘These ambitions abroad . . .’ He shook the paper in his hand. ‘They don’t seem to be about assimilating other cultures but using the sword to brand them with our own. I hear about these sacrifices we must make to build this great empire of ours, but what about you, me, ordinary people? What about an individual’s responsibility to himself, to his family? Aren’t these more important than our blood debt to Japan?’ She had not expected political debate. Yuko told him that her father said we were uplifting our brothers and sisters in Asia and that we must do all we could for Japan. A strong military builds a modern nation. He sighed. ‘Maybe. Sometimes I fear there is a fine line between liberating a country and invading it. Where will it end? Could you imagine sending a son to war, Yuko?’ Before she could answer Mrs Kogi appeared from the cake shop where they had left her and they began to walk. ‘I allowed myself to imagine a child with this man and I was surprised to find that while the thought did not frighten me, the future for that child did. I stopped and turned to him. “You make it sound as if war is inevitable.” He told me that he hoped not. “I don’t want a child born into that kind of world, Shige.” He nodded at this. “Neither do I, Yuko.”’
I knew nothing of her endorsement of Watanabe. She tolerated me but any closeness we once shared had been destroyed after Chinatown. Not knowing that she had feelings for Shige, I still believed Sato had to be eliminated. He hovered round the edges of our lives, a menace too easily within reach. What if their paths crossed down the years? The city was not big enough to be lost in. Sato had given me enough ammunition over the years to make him go. All I needed to do was send him a note. ‘Meet me at Kyogamine Cemetery, tomorrow at noon, Amaterasu.’
I dressed carefully on the day. I chose a navy-blue kimono, embroidered with herons in flight, and held my hair high with a pearl clasp. To anchor myself to my life with Kenzo, I wore the gold oyster-shell pendant he’d given me not long after we married. Before I left our home, I checked in the bedroom mirror for the lines and shadows that had crept onto my face. I concealed what I could with powder. Then I took a taxi to the cemetery.
One of the advantages of the spot was its proximity to the hospital and its relative seclusion. Sato could meet me there unseen. The place felt abandoned, as if no one had visited or thought of it for years. To reach the graveyard, one passed through an iron gate, orange with rust, and followed a dried mud path under a black locust tree. A collapsed wall marked the boundary of the graveyard, and within, pomegranate trees lent shade to the sandstone crosses and marble headstones. The city gravediggers brought the Christians here, but no burials had taken place for a long time. The names of Portuguese and Dutch traders could still be read on the crumbling graves. The path continued through the trees to the base of the hill at the far corner of the cemetery and climbed up to tombs carved into the soil in higher and higher layers.
Kyogamine bled into Hiagashi Cemetery. Here, Christian bones gave way to the remains of Japanese merchants and nobles. At the summit, a slab of another fallen grave, warm under the sun’s rays, was my seat and I sat upon its flat surface and looked down on Nagasaki, the city growing like a giant metal insect across the land. I knew the doctor had arrived when a turtle dove beat its wings and rose from a branch. My heart pounded as I turned around and watched him approach. We had not seen each other for nearly seventeen years. The passage of time had been good to him, age had settled well on his face. He had kept lean and walked with that same slow swagger. My desire was still there too. How ashamed I would be if he realised this. I clenched my fists and placed my hands on the grave to steady myself. I must be unreadable to him. He lowered himself next to me. We sat in silence and then he placed his palm over my fingers. He looked at me but said nothing. I pulled my hand away; he could not soften me that easily. I readied for the fight as he lit a cigarette. I knew how to purge Sato from our lives. We do terrible things because we can, and only sometimes because we must.
‘When are you leaving Nagasaki, Jomei?’
He laughed at this. ‘I’m not. I had a change of heart.’
I watched him smoke. ‘Kenzo made our requirements clear.’
He stretched his back. ‘A little extreme, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Why would you do this to us? I’m not talking about me. Why do this to Kenzo?’
He sighed. ‘It wasn’t planned.’
‘She’s a child.’
He stubbed the cigarette out on the grave. ‘She’s a woman. She knew what she was doing. Who she was had no relevance. It was unfortunate, the connection, that’s all.’
‘Unfortunate? Have you no idea what you’ve done? We’ll tell Natsu.’
He leaned back, a portrait of calm. ‘That’s your choice.’
‘You don’t believe us?’
‘I do, but I won’t leave Nagasaki.’
‘Must I repeat it? We will tell Natsu, your boss. How would either feel about you bedding a young patient? You do remember your wedding and professional vows?’
He laughed. ‘If only you were as clever as you think you are. I admire you, Amaterasu, I do. You’ve worked so hard, left that past of yours behind, and look where you are now, an engineer’s wife with wealth and a home and status among our city’s rich. I’m happy for you. You got what you wanted. It’s admirable, but I wonder what those wives would think if they knew how far you had come. Would they be as impressed as I am, do you think? I could ask them.’
I mimicked his insouciance. ‘I didn’t think you’d stoop to blackmail, Jomei.’
‘Well, I could say the same. Let’s not call it blackmail. Persuasion, perhaps.’
The sun was low, his profile merging with the light. ‘I see. So why did you come today? What was the point?’
‘Curiosity . . . and I wanted to apologise. Not about Yuko.’ He cleared his throat and turned to face me. ‘I wanted to tell you that I’m sorry for what happened. I never got the chance to say so at the time.’
I touched my necklace. ‘That was long ago, Jomei. I hold no grudges, I promise you.’
‘Amaterasu, has it occurred to you that Yuko and I are in love?’
I clenched my fists once more. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. How can you say such a thing?’
He stood up, put his hands in his trouser pockets. ‘I am married to Natsu, yes. I know my responsibilities, but I will always be here for Yuko if she needs me. I want you to know that. Tell Natsu, if you must, and I will tell the coven of witches you call friends, if I must. So be it.’
How dare he think he could dictate what we would do. ‘Jomei, Jomei.’ I forced a smile, tipped my head, as if in pity. ‘Don’t you see what’s happening here?’ I kept my
voice low but strong. ‘I won’t only tell Natsu about Yuko. I’ll tell Yuko about what happened when I was not much older than she was. I’ll tell her everything . . . everything.’ I walked up to him. ‘I wonder how she would react to that news?’
His face contorted in anger as he took his hands from his pockets. He grabbed me by the shoulders. ‘You would do that to your own child?’
‘Gladly.’ He let go, as if contaminated. ‘Now, when did you say you were leaving Nagasaki?’
I can still see him standing by that fallen grave, defeated by his own cowardice. We had all been taken in, and let down, by him: Kenzo, Yuko, Natsu and, yes, even me. He and Kenzo had been the closest of friends, for many years. Remnants of that bond surely remained? Who would seduce a friend’s daughter with no care or shame? Sato talked of love but he was a foolish man who had exploited Yuko. He was more than double her age; he had no right to sour her young life with all those extra years of experience, regret and cynicism. And lastly: I too felt betrayed. I sent the doctor away not just for Yuko, but for myself. This was the maggot that burrowed into my own rotten heart.
A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding Page 10
