by S. J. Parks
They ambled over the tracks and the humid air clung to them like disappointment. ‘We’ll get something to eat?’ Jess said.
They would head for Ziggy’s. For a moment Hana thought she had a waitressing job in mind for her? It might be in Tokyo but she didn’t want to spend her time in a café. At least the bar was different – nothing like it in London.
‘I told you about Miho’s Pastries,’ Jess cajoled, explaining Ziggy’s was her regular; it was so reasonable it had become her dining room.
Knocking gently at the window, pressing against the plate glass, Jess rubbed her empty stomach and reached for Hana to do the same. As Hana peered into the small café she could see shelves of well-travelled coffees and Kilner jars of mulberries and cinnamon lining the walls.
Miho waved from the back of the store. Taking out her earphones she came over to usher them in. The cool of the air-con was as welcome as the brewed coffee and croissant she offered them. Dressed in bleached linen, an indigo band around her bobbed salt-and-pepper hair, she wore huge wedge platforms as if in homage to a style now out of place on a woman of her age. A tried, failed, but not entirely vanquished, style. She was old enough to be their mother.
Hana drank her coffee, her stomach rumbling for pastries that had yet to arrive.
‘My best customers today.’ Miho smiled and offered more coffee. Hana felt at home immediately.
‘Just like a diner. I give you refills.’ She was warm and she was generous.
‘Here comes noodle legs.’
A pastry delivery arrived from the French bakery, Miho explained, on the other side of the tracks. She approached a large stack of plastic trays on legs cautiously and carefully relieved the boy of the top layer. The café was suddenly infused with the delicate aroma of cinnamon.
‘So you are from London?’ Miho placed two pastries directly onto the table.
In the background some Eighties track was playing lightly.
Jess’s mouth was dusted with icing sugar.
‘Could you maybe talk to Emiko? Hana wants a job.‘
Miho nodded, eying Hana.’
‘Sure.’ Her accent was American.
‘She spent time in the States,’ Jess explained.
‘Do you plan to go back?’ Hana asked.
A strain came over Miho’s face. It was youthful, though crossed with inevitable age.
‘I have no plans right now. You know my kid is with his dad. He’s just fine. It is about time I get to see him again. I may go back next fall.’
‘How old is he now?’
‘You want to see a picture of him?’
Miho reached into her back pocket and produced her screen saver. A shot of an old photograph. She was younger slimmer but recognisable, standing beside a man in hiking boots carrying a child in a frame backpack: a rotund toddler with a crop of unmanaged black hair.
‘Long time back. Before we broke up,’ she concluded.
Jess cooed, ‘Cute baby.’
‘You don’t need glasses.’ Miho smiled fondly. ‘He’s left college now.’
‘Good-looking, I bet,’ Hana offered.
‘And did you get to go to his graduation?’
‘I haven’t seen him so much. Hardly since this photo was taken. Pretty much.’ Miho was unemotional.Resigned.
Hana looked down in silence and Miho noticed her distraction.
‘Okay, Hana?’
Hana smiled and traced circles in the sugar dust.
Miho pulled up the skirts of her apron and joined them at the pine table.
‘I left him in the States when I couldn’t support him. It was best for him. I’ve been back a long time.’
‘Really?’ Hana responded. She didn’t understand. It seemed like a little tragedy.
‘I am not an American citizen,’ Miho explained. She caught at a pastry flake on the table and blew it, along with her reminiscences, out of her hand, as if they were really of no importance to her. ‘Too many coffees to make an airfare.’ She grinned.
‘He’ll visit Tokyo,’ Jess said. ‘Hana is back. She had family here.’
Miho nodded as if she guessed she might. People arrived and she had to serve them.
Fleas or no fleas Hana decided it was time to get back to their room.
Jess swigged the last of her coffee and called back to remind Miho to speak to Emiko.
‘Okay,’ Miho promised. As they left her she was busy with pancakes.
Hana scratched the side of her neck. ‘The cat has to go.’
To her surprise Jess agreed.
Chapter 12
‘A clump of summer grass,
Is all that is left,
Of the hopes and ambitions,
Of ancient warriors’
−Matsuo Bashō, The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Tokyo
Heat trailed Hana all the way from the shade of the cherry trees beside the concrete-covered river and over the level crossing to where the warning bell sounded.
Hana had established the site of a number of teahouses across the city. Some were not attached to a temple and she could discount these and many temples had no teahouse, which narrowed it down a bit. The one over the lake at Hamarikyu Gardens was enormous, and so trodden by tourists as to be disappointing. She felt she couldn’t possibly afford the tea ceremony they offered, and she didn’t trust the cafés advertising the experience. That afternoon she promised herself she would find the local temple and walk around the grounds, but first she would head back to the homestay to change.
Ukai sat as he often did just under the porch that ran the length of the old wooden house. He was bare to the waist and his frail arms stuck out like undernourished chicken wings. As she stopped to greet him, she saw he was labouring to breath.
Very suddenly Tako emerged from the screen and, standing behind the old man, began shaking him violently. He could not have seen her coming up the track. Was it a manoeuver to help him catch his breath? To stop him choking? It was so hard it looked as though it would finish him. Leaving Ukai motionless Tako left as quickly as he had arrived. Ukai’s head hung across his shoulder. She took a step towards him. On his upper arm was a small tattoo. A black bird. He was stock-still. And she was unable to approach him and unable to pass. Was he dead? She had no voice to reach for and she turned for the house, knowing he should not face the end alone. That she was his only witness scared her but she was unable call out. Suddenly the seizure passed and she could see him return to shallow breathing. And as soon as he moved she was reassured … released.
Once upstairs, Hana pushed on the lever of the hot water flask that sat on the chest beneath the Fuji prints. Cradling her cup of green tea, she slumped onto the sofa. What had she seen? It was rough treatment. Had she seen some vital essence leaving the man? Jess would be back from her teaching session in a few minutes and she needed to talk to her. The circular fluorescent light was ticking in no particular sequence and it felt like the fragile order that had been established since her arrival had just slipped.
She sipped at the green tea like a bird. That first night, she had felt sure Ukai had recognized Naomi’s repeated name. Unable to face going back past the old man, she dug the folding map from her luggage. The corners were worn at the folds and parts of the city were rubbed away. She opened it distractedly and, without focus, looked for the symbols for temple. Perhaps all these years later the teahouse had been replaced and she would never find it.
The door slammed marking Jess’s return. Would she have seen him? Was he still alive? Hana finished her tea quickly and braced as Jess’s bag of grammar books hit the sofa.
‘Ukai?’ Hana asked in a low reverential whisper. ‘And did you see Tako? What was Tako doing?’
‘Ukai was on the porch,’ Jess said dismissively, ‘sunning himself.’ Then she added, ‘He waved. They waved.’
Hana couldn’t quite work out what she’d seen and didn’t want to understand it. Had she got it all wrong? Should she feel so uneasy with these people who Je
ss had stayed with last summer and had felt comfortable enough to come back to.
‘Guess what?’ Jess smiled with some degree of self-satisfaction. ‘Success.’ She lifted an up-turned teacup and raised a toast to more sencha.
Hana, ignoring her, peered through the banisters down to the lobby where the landlady scuttled to tend to her aged father. A silent agitation travelled across the house; Hana seemed to feel the metronomic beat that precedes a tragedy. Noru darted out from the front door leaving the sun to cauterize the hall floor.
Jess could hear nothing special in the silence.
‘You got it,’ she blurted. ‘You got the job!’
Hana was too preoccupied to listen.
A bicycle bell sounded from the road below and then, with the inevitability of a score, a muffled involuntary shriek rose from deep inside house.
Hana dragged Jess by the sleeve to their room.
Jess listened briefly, then carried on. ‘Just seen Miho. Emiko can probably take you.’
Hana nodded, unable to answer as she moved to take a vantage point by the window. The insect screen rendered the scene in sepia: across the road beneath the bleached porch , the old man’s chair was vacant. Jess came up behind her to witness the family cameo darting around the body and tending to their tragedy. Tako and Noru and a lifeless Ukai.
Jess pressed her hand on the small of Hana’s back. It hit Hana in that moment that she not been touched this way since she left London. Heavy with loss she rested her forehead lightly on Jess’s shoulder, as if she might share the weight. Below, Tako crossed the porch, head in hands, and it appeared he was weeping. The two young women drew back in silence. She had misinterpreted what she had seen?
Hana sat at the end of Jess’s bed, with the satchel of grammar books locked in her arms for support like a favourite pet. And Jess listened sympathetically, as Hana struggled to balance her fixation over the moment she saw Tako by the old man. ‘What do you think of Tako?’ she asked slowly.
‘He’s sweet. Organized a birthday present for me last year. Keen but harmless.’
Hana considered this for a moment before returning to the subject of Ukia. ‘I tell you, it was as if he had already gone.’
‘Already left his body?’ Jess was struggling to help.
The question released in Hana the lidded grief that had been working loose. Buried regret welled uncontrollably down her cheeks.
‘I know. I know. It is hard. And while we don’t know him any better really than …’ Jess’s voice trailed as if she realized this wouldn’t do for consolation. This man was, to them, no more than a passerby, but she could not say it. It would sound too disrespectful. And Hana’s displaced grief needed only the warmth of her arms for support.
Two days later, in the thick light of early evening, the wooden house across the street had been transformed for the wake. The screen doors opened onto candle lit offerings. It had become a Buddhist shrine: a pavilion where gold-leafed balls of rice and oranges ran like a large beaded necklace between the waxy heads of chrysanthemum flowers and carved stands of paulownia wood.
A bare-chested figure swung a heavy chain of burning incense over the offerings, building on the close, dusty air and scenting the house. He chanted a mantra that called upon the absent body. The fragrant smell at the open window of her room drew Hana involuntarily. It was a sumptuous farewell for the old man with a birdlike tattoo, and she fought not to think back to the umbrellas and shiny pavements of the East London funeral. She had had only one question to ask him.
The following day, Tako walked into breakfast and Hana found that there was to be yet another ceremony. In a black kimono, he stood constructing a jam sandwich from the buoyancy-aid bread. And while demonstrating his ineptitude at preparing food for himself, he invited them to attend a memorial ceremony to be held at the local temple – a larger temple not so far from here. The invitation was extended to them both.
‘I have –’ he said suddenly, remembering, and digging into his pocket ‘– something for you.’ He placed a boxed tube of topical insect cream on the table.
Jess and Hana exchanged glances. It was just what they needed. They watched him leave, sandwich in hand and jam glistening on the wide black sleeves he was so unused to wearing.
Later that day Hana filled the mosquito plug with another tab and Jess sat cross-legged on her bed, a language primer balanced on her knees which she ignored in favour of a sheet of paper listing English law firms in the city. ‘I don’t suppose that we can get out of the service tomorrow?’
‘No. Definitely not,’ Hana said. They had to go whether they really fitted in or not.
‘Another temple …’ Jess had seen enough of them lately.
‘But you knew the old man.’
‘Okay, we’ll go,’ Jess said quickly.
‘I couldn’t go on my own and you said you would come. You knew him best.
Jess nodded.
‘What do you suppose we wear?’
Jess readily offered to lend her something and Hana picked through a mound of black jersey from her rucksack and found a long wrap skirt.
‘This okay?’
‘Anything you like,’ Jess responded, without looking up.
It occurred to Hana that Jess might have no intention of turning up.
‘Please come. I don’t know but I might find it difficult. If we went together …’ she trailed off, ‘it would be easier.’
In Jess’s reply Hana couldn’t tell whether she merely sympathized or was offering a concrete assurance.
Chapter 13
On Sunday afternoon they browsed the Meiji Shrine flea market, strewn with old kimonos and bric-a-brac. It looked as though thieves had emptied every drawer in the neighbourhood and laid them across the vacant car lot.
Hana found a waxed paper stencil, similar to one they had at home in London. Had it come from the very same market years ago? On the lower slopes of the hill in Harajuku, they stopped at a booth to have their photos taken, the template distorting their faces with huge dish-shaped eyes. They laughed as a sheet of portrait squares hit the slot. They had become cartoon Anime, like the cute army; girls disguised as kawai manga dolls, marching past in short white socks and and bows.
They set off downhill, arms linked, and as they reached Omotesandō subway Hana caught Jess’s arm for attention. Ed, from the plane was coming towards them.
He was coming up from the subway, taking the stairs two at a time till they faced one another.
Hana smiled. ‘Hi’
He needed no prompting to remember her as they damned the flow of subway passengers at the entrance.
‘I lost your card.’ She grimaced in apology for not making contact.
‘Don’t worry about it. I’ve been at my desk since I got here.’
He was clearly keen to make her feel easy. After he had said ‘Hi’ to Jess, he apologized and said he couldn’t stop, but as he turned to leave he said, ‘I’m going to Tsukiji fish market early in the morning with a friend. Want to come?’
Hana’s heart sank. ‘I’m sorry, we have go to a memorial service.’
‘Great idea,’ Jess yelled after him as he left, still apologizing because he was late.
Jess had often complained, Hana reminded her accusatively, that she had ‘done’ the fish auctions as a tourist attraction, countless times.
Nevertheless Jess flailed after him till she caught him up, and eventually returning, arm raised as if she had secured European peace, with his mobile number.
Hana looked at Jess as if she had appropriated a friend. ‘We can’t go tomorrow. It’s the memorial.’
Jess nodded unconvincingly, and as they dropped into the metro a bank of warm air lifted their thin cotton skirts, as light as the friendship.
Chapter 14
700,000 tonnes of seafood processed through Tsukiji Market every year
That morning Jess woke at 4 a.m. to leave for the fish market, creeping quietly from their room as Hana slept.
Hana slept deeply. She dreamt she was among the crowds on a busy market day in Hackney, though the crowds were from Omotesandō. A monk in saffron robes passed, cycling a rickshaw, and, as he retreated, the sleeping passenger, curled in fetal position across the back, was her mother. As she woke her dream world splintered. She looked across at the empty bed beside her with immediate annoyance. Jess, she assumed, had gone alone to Tsukiji fish market. Raving American. It was very unlikely she would get back in time to get to the memorial which was disrespectful to the family and she would be fawning over Ed. As she prepared to go to the service alone, Hana dressed resentfully in the clothes Jess had been so ready to lend her.
Jess’s trip to Tsukiji was unedifying. She had assumed Ed was going with friends travelling through, but it turned out he was taken up with colleagues visiting from the Hong Kong branch and she had barely had a chance to speak with them on the guided tour she had taken several times before. She made her excuses, something about a memorial, and left them early. Once she got back to Shimokitazawa Jess headed straight for Ziggy’s and found Miho serving a couple of two-toed builders from the bamboo-scaffold site opposite.
‘Is it latte, Jess?’
Jess nodded as she helped herself to a kilner jar of cinnamon sticks.
Miho perched on the corner of the table, pulling a stray hair from her sharp fringe.
‘You didn’t work last night, so you are in early?’
‘I went to Tsukiji market.’
Miho’s raised her brows; Jess had been so often before and complained she had seen enough.
‘I guess you took the new girl?’
‘Well, no,’ Jess demurred, ‘I left her to sleep. She’s busy with other stuff.’ She drank from the too-hot latte.
‘How is the club? Okay?’
Jess nodded, nursing her scalded lip.
‘Is she at language school?’
‘Too busy looking for the teahouse her mother Naomi worked on.’
Miho started. ‘Naomi’s teahouse?’
