by Susan Barker
My drunkenness confounded me. For years I had been very careful not to drink too much at work-related functions, and was constantly turning down invitations to after-hours drinking parties. Yet here I was at my own kitchen table, watching the jars in the spice rack revolve as if they were on a carousel. The irony did not escape me.
Headache aside, I began to enjoy the floating sensation of being drunk. Mariko was happy, talkative, and a pleasure to be with. Instead of paying attention to the words she said, I found myself admiring her pretty face and thinking what a fine young woman she will turn out to be. Back-lit by the table lamp, her features were charmingly sphinx-like, and every time she smiled her even white teeth gleamed. For hours we filled the kitchen with our senseless chatter, laughing for laughter’s sake as golden oldies played in the background. The sake seemed to dissolve the filter between my mind and mouth. A question I had previously thought too intrusive to ask slipped out.
‘When will you go back to Fukuoka?’ I said to Mariko. ‘Do you intend to return to your family there?’
Mariko held her gaze clear and steady and said: ‘No, Mr Sato, I do not. Fallen blossoms do not return to branches.’
Mariko spoke as if this silly proverb were an eternal truth. I thought this very sad indeed and tried to persuade her otherwise.
‘Blossoms are one thing, Mariko,’ I said, ‘and families another.’
Mariko fell quiet and thoughtful.
‘And you are not a fallen blossom,’ I added.
At this, Mariko looked up at me. ‘Thank you, Mr Sato, but you speak of what you do not know.’
She laughed softly in embarrassment, making me regret my breach of manners. I did not want to put Mariko into a melancholy mood – after all, this was supposed to be her birthday celebration. Mariko picked up the much diminished sake and poured some more into my cup. Though I had found it disagreeable at the start of the evening, the sake now went down like sugar water. The radio was playing ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’. I closed my eyes and imagined a beautiful jade- and emerald-scaled dragon swooping over the hills of Arashiyama.
‘I like it here. I am very happy,’ I heard Mariko say.
I opened my eyes, relieved to abandon the dragon, whose ambitious loop-the-loops had begun to make me queasy. ‘I am glad to hear it, Mariko,’ I said.
‘I have never known anyone as kind as you, Mr Sato. The way you have welcomed me into your home . . .’
‘Really, Mariko, in a week or two you will be dying to escape my boring, fusty old ways. You must think of this house as the place where time stands still.’
Mariko was quiet for a moment, then she smiled and said: ‘I wish it would stand still for ever.’
The alcohol had made me drowsy, so we retired at ten o’clock. I stood before the bathroom mirror, watching my reflection sway as I haphazardly brushed my teeth. The jukebox in my head was stuck on a remembered snatch of Simon and Garfunkel, a jumble of foreign syllables, meaningless to me. I soaped and rinsed my face with cold water, then I stumbled into the spare room and undressed, tossing my discarded clothes all over the floor. I pulled on clean pyjamas and unrolled my futon. Within a few seconds I had sunk into sweet oblivion.
I woke not much later, sensing that I had not been asleep long. I had been dreaming of you. In the dream we were in a boat, in the middle of an empty lake. You were afraid of the water and begged to be taken to the shore. So I began to row to the jetty. But as is always the case in these dreams, the harder I rowed, the further away the jetty seemed to be. Though I was dreaming I understood this paradox, but could not bring myself to stop rowing. It was a very powerful dream and I woke disorientated, wondering how the devil I had managed to row the boat into the spare room.
A figure was standing at the end of my futon. It was Mariko in a long white nightdress. Behind her the curtains were open, and yellow light streamed in from a neighbouring house. Raindrops, falling at a slant, tapped lightly at the windowpane.
‘Mariko?’ I said. ‘What is the matter?’
I sat upright. With her back to the window, Mariko’s face was in darkness, her hair loose about her shoulders.
‘I had a dream,’ she whispered.
‘A nightmare?’
The outside light shone through the thin cotton of Mariko’s nightdress, drawing my attention to the silhouette of her legs. This shadowy intimacy was most disconcerting and I wanted to get up and switch on the light.
‘No, not a nightmare. And maybe not a dream either. I heard a voice – the same voice that urged me to take up that cello yesterday. The same voice that told me to go to your office.’
Her whispers lifted the hairs on the back of my neck. I wanted to hear more, but I was concerned by how inappropriate it was for Mariko to come to me in the dark, in only her nightdress.
‘She said that I mustn’t let you live alone any more,’ Mariko said.
Her shadowy face was deathly serious. I remembered her tale of the woman who knelt by her bed and spoke to her. The woman with your name. The air beneath my duvet became clammy.
‘I am quite happy living alone,’ I said, hoping my brisk tone of voice would drive out the eerie atmosphere.
Mariko stood quietly, waiting to hear more. The drawstring at the neck of her nightdress was untied, exposing the ivory wings of her collar-bone.
‘I am sorry that you had a bad dream, Mariko, but I think you ought to go back to bed. We can talk about this in the morning.’
‘What I have to say cannot be said in the morning,’ Mariko said.
‘Well, if it cannot be said in the morning, then perhaps it shouldn’t be said at all. I think you had too much sake and need to go and sleep it off.’
‘I barely had a drop.’
‘Please go now, Mariko. We will talk tomorrow.’
‘If you think I have a choice whether or not to be here, Mr Sato, you are mistaken. I chose to be here no more than you chose to walk into the bar that night.’
‘Really, Mariko, you are making no sense.’
‘We were led to each other. Don’t you see?’
It made me light-headed to hear this secret intuition of mine spoken out loud. An intuition I have had since the night she stole into my office. Perhaps you have known of it all along. As I sat dumbstruck, Mariko took the opportunity to lift up the skirt of her nightdress. Before I had time to realize what she was up to, she had pulled the dress over her head. It fell to the floor beside the cello in a sinking cloud of whiteness.
‘Mariko!’ I said. I threw back my duvet and leapt up. I twisted my head away, as if Mariko were Medusa and one glance might turn me to stone. ‘What on earth are you doing?’ I was shocked. Had she been driven mad by grief?
‘Why are you afraid to look at me, Mr Sato?’ she asked calmly, as though I were the aberrant one.
I turned my eyes back to her, to where she stood in only her knickers. Everything about her, from her narrow hips to her slight bosom, screamed with obscene youth. She looked at me steadily, as serene and unabashed as Eve before the fall. I switched my gaze to the cello to banish her from my field of vision. I would not let my body respond. I would not.
‘Mariko,’ I said, ‘I am going outside for a walk. When I return I want you to be back in your own room. Do you understand?’ My hands were shaking as though I had some disorder of the nervous system.
‘OK,’ Mariko replied. ‘I promise to go and leave you alone. But first, you must look at me again.’
‘No,’ I said.
‘I promise you. Look once and if you still want me to go away and leave you alone I will. For ever, if that is what you want.’
Who was this changeling who had possessed Mariko and cornered me in my own home? I wanted to bolt for the door, but was nervous she would block my path. My eyes roved desperately along the dark spines in the bookcase.
‘Why are you doing this?’ I asked.
‘Why do you think?’ she whispered.
‘I think you have taken leave of your senses!’
/> ‘She says she is sorry for what she did. That you were a good husband, but she could not go on in this world . . .’
Well, I was livid. Never have I wanted to hit a woman as I wanted to hit Mariko right then. But it passed, thank God. I turned my head and looked her straight in the eye. Her nudity had lost all its power.
‘My wife did not kill herself,’ I said. ‘You do not have the slightest idea what you are talking about. I do not know who has been visiting you from the spirit world, but let me tell you this: it certainly isn’t my wife.’
Mariko’s confidence did not falter. She stood there bold as can be. Either she was truly convinced, or lying through her teeth. It did not matter. Her integrity had vanished in my eyes.
‘She told me that you would not believe me at first. She told me that I must give you time.’
‘Why are you doing this, Mariko?’
‘You mustn’t resist the truth.’
‘Who are you?’ I asked. I truly did not know any more. Everything she had told me was suddenly cast into doubt. Why was she making up these lies? What end did it serve?
Mariko began to move towards me, but stopped at the chime of the doorbell. The doorbell never rings at night, and the intrusion felt surreal. Mariko looked behind her and back again, uncertainty flickering in her eyes. ‘Leave it,’ she said.
But I had already sprinted from the room.
Outside, the flashing lights of an ambulance bathed our lawn. At the door, beneath a large, rain-drummed umbrella, stood Mrs Tanaka’s niece Naoko with Mr Tanaka in his wheelchair. So unexpected was the sight of the ambulance I wondered if I had opened the front door into a parallel universe. Had the sinister melodrama upstairs really managed to distract me from all this? Across the road Mr and Mrs Ue were at their living-room window, noses pressed to the glass.
‘Naoko!’ I exclaimed. ‘What is going on?’
‘My aunt is in that ambulance,’ Naoko said gravely. ‘She fell and knocked herself unconscious in the garden this afternoon. She had been lying there for several hours before my uncle telephoned for help.’
‘Oh, no!’ The news winded me like a punch in the stomach.
Mr Tanaka grimaced, his lips like slippery eels. He looked very disgruntled to be out in the cold and wet so long after his bedtime.
‘They say she is in a coma,’ Naoko continued.
The ambulance began to pull away, the siren wail starting up.
‘They are taking her to Casualty . . .’
A lump of sorrow caught in my throat. ‘Are you going there too?’ I asked.
Naoko nodded. ‘We are leaving now.’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Wait one minute. I just have to change my clothes.’
III
Mrs Tanaka has been transferred to a private room in the head injuries ward. They have just let us see her. Oh, it was awful! She has an oxygen mask on her face and tubes coming from everywhere. Weighted by the cruel hands of gravity, the flesh of her face hung slack and sallow. The doctor came and spoke to Naoko and me. He said that her condition is stable and there is a good chance of her pulling through. Naoko wept very hard when the doctor told us this, even though it is good news. I patted Naoko’s shoulder, then I excused myself to go to the bathroom, where I splashed my face with cold water. Afterwards I went to the hospital pay phone, inserted some change and dialled our home telephone number. The phone was picked up after the first ring.
‘Yes?’ Mariko said.
She sounded wide awake though it was nearly two o’clock.
‘Mariko,’ I said, ‘I am staying at the hospital tonight. I want you to know that you are welcome to stay at my house. But first you have to tell me what is going on. And why you lied to me the way you did.’
I waited. From the other end of the line came a hesitant silence. Then a deep breath and a sob as Mariko began to cry.
19
MARY
The car gutter-crawls through the grid of streets, modifying its course now and then, like the line of an Etch-a-sketch. We drive by the Umeda ferris wheel and the flashing arcades. Everyone seems caught in a mood of excited abandon, the neon buzz as heady an aphrodisiac as the full moon. Girls emerge from print-club booths to giggle over their pictures, their cutesy poses and love-heart motifs. A new tribe of male bar hosts, slick in Comme des Garçons suits, sweet-talk passing women into their clubs for champagne and exorbitant tête-à-têtes. I am uneasy about being chauffeured like this, like some imitation VIP. At the traffic lights we purr in challenge to the other cars, quietly confident of our superiority. I want to tap on the partition between me and the driver and ask where we are going, but the partition must be up to avoid just that. I twist my neck round as we pass over the Yodo river, discomfited to see the Osaka I am familiar with slipping away. We join a motorway and I read the kanji signs listing the exits for commuter satellite towns: Amagasaki 5 km, Tarakazuka 9 km. Is this where we are headed? My chest is tight, my stomach an aviary of fluttery birds. The last time I had a case of nerves like this was when I first arrived in Japan, jet-lagged and culture-shocked. I ease the slippers lent by Mama-san off my feet and massage the pinched flesh above my toes. None of Mama-san’s shoes fit me and she was in too much of a rush to go down to the dressing room to find something in my size. So she gave me her toilet slippers – the very same pair she slides her dainty feet into before squatting atop the porcelain shrine. They were the only things she had that could accommodate my gaijin feet. If I was Japanese I would be mortified to be breaking the sacred taboo ‘thou shalt not wear toilet slippers in public’. But I’m not, so the cultural stigma is at one remove. Let others be mortified on my behalf.
The BMW rolls into the outskirts of a small town, shunning the township lights, and turning onto a dirt track parallel to the railway lines. The area is desolate and lonely, the only buildings haunted-looking shacks. The car bounces along, the suspension jolted by the stones and potholes. What would Yuji be doing out here? Is the driver taking me to the right place? I try to remember what he looks like behind that partition: tall, broad, wearing a uniform and chauffeur’s cap. Was it my imagination or was that a homicidal glint I saw in his eye as he opened the door for me? The headlights are the only source of light now, illuminating a few metres either side of the car, rendering visible bamboo thickets, a rusting bicycle, an abandoned refrigerator, its door hanging from the hinges like a dislocated jaw.
The engine drone shifts in pitch as we turn into a decaying yard, at the end of which sits a house with windows behind wooden shutters. We stop and the driver’s door clicks open. A moment later mine does too.
‘This is it,’ he announces.
I climb out onto the hard-packed earth. There are stars in the sky and a distant bonfire smell.
‘What is this place? Is Yuji here?’
The driver gives a shrug of indifference, impatient to drive away and leave me outside this derelict house, the kind dumb teenagers in slasher movies use for games of hide-and-seek. The glare of the headlights picks out the busted neon sign above the porch: LOTUS BAR. More neon tubing is attached to the wall, twisted into the likeness of a curvy, hour-glass woman; classy. By the door an upturned paint can sits in a puddle of green emulsion. A vandal has splashed green paint along the bottom of the wall and all across the doorway. In the headlights I can see the paint has been splashed right round the corners, to encircle the building in a ring of green. I remember something I learnt in a history lesson, half a lifetime ago, about the red crosses they painted on doors to mark out households with the plague.
I turn to the driver with pleading eyes. ‘Can you wait with me while I check whether Yuji is in there?’
But he is already reopening his door, ducking down so his chauffeur’s cap doesn’t get knocked off by the door frame.
‘Please . . . just for a minute or two.’
The driver slams the car door and fires the ignition. Jesus, he’s going to leave me here. I want to thump the windscreen but instead I watch him go. The headlights
vanish back down the dirt track and the yard is devoured by darkness, leaving me with nothing left to do but venture inside.
There is no doorbell, but the lock is broken. The first thing I see when I swing open the door are the candles, dozens and dozens of them, everywhere. Stout candles without holders, dripping wax on the tables, over the bar. Everything is bathed in their cathedral glow. The walls are alive with flickering shadow, the cobwebs in high corners transformed into a gossamer canopy. Beneath the deceptive gilt of the candles I can see the bar top has been eaten away by mildew, gangrenous with decay.
‘Mary.’ Yuji is behind me in the doorway. He must have hidden outside when he heard the car coming. For a split second I think that he is wearing a mask, his face is so disfigured by swellings and blood.
In English I murmur: ‘Jesus, Yuji . . .’
I rush over and hug him, half crying. He must hurt so much.
‘I know. I look like shit.’
The front of his T-shirt is stiff with dried blood. I hug him again and Yuji sucks in his breath as my arms crush something damaged. I pull back and touch his face, sticky with congealed blood. His forehead bears a two-inch gash, like someone tried to hack a second mouth below his hairline.
‘Oh God. You need to go to the hospital, you need to get . . .’ I don’t know the word for ‘stitches’. ‘. . . You need to get sewn up.’
‘It’ll heal by itself.’
‘But it must hurt.’
‘I’ve got used to it.’
‘Where are we? What is this place?’
‘Some old bar. It’s safe here.’
‘Your nose looks strange. Is it broken?’
‘I don’t think so. They broke my tooth, though.’
‘Who broke your tooth? Who are “they”?’
‘Masked assassins. Ninjas. They came down from the sky on ropes. Twelve of them. They’ve learnt their lesson, though. They won’t be coming back round here for a while.’
