by S. J. Parks
Aiming her toothpick at the ashtray Jess intended to offend.
‘Club rules. You girls can’t sit together.’ Emiko shuffled off in her two-toed socks and wedged geta.
Hana guessed the need for quiet respect among the shaky reality of lucky, nodding cats, of piped birdsong, of posters of tiger-maned genii gulping energy drinks, or large-eyed manga characters endorsing air-con systems. She had to invest in them herself and yet the references were still cold. She could not see how Naomi could possibly have belonged here.
‘Smile and play beautiful,’ Emiko called from the kitchenette, reminding them again to move apart.
‘We are starting to look like corpses,’ Jess complained of their nocturnal hours.
Her lips glossed a vampire-red made Hana giggle.
Emiko’s silken arm interrupted them to retrieve an ashtray from between them, her departure stiff, the ornamental cherry blossom in her hair shook indignantly. Hana gently pushed Jess until she slipped off her stool obediently.
‘I’m done here,’ Jess whispered vehemently out of the blue.
New clients arrived and the room became ionized with expectancy. Yoshi was a regular and his party tonight was Australian.
As Emiko had taught her to, Hana called out his regular beer order before Yoshi reached her: ‘Asahi, Sapporo, Sapporo.’ The longer the memory, the larger the tip. Was this the kind of man who might have known her father? The missing man who hadn’t even registered his name on her birth certificate? She had begun to toy with an identikit for him, which she revised and reconstructed at whim: the cosmopolitan business man lost to tragedy; the composer of international standing; the trading-company shogun.
Jess was to host another group of Australians from a shipping company as Hana wiped the condensation off the cold drinks. Deferentially she offered each man a glass as if it were jewel-encrusted. It was uncomfortable for her as she somehow found it sexually charged. Jess fell on the English speakers, as if she was dehydrated and they could quench her thirst.
The karaoke wailed.
Hana wanted to know what Hajime, the doorman, had stamped on his chin. At first Emiko left her to guess.
‘Mum. He is not so rough as he looks.’ She laughed.
She had to serve shabu-shabu stew, and as she stepped up to the tatami matting, across the smoke-filled room, waving from the exit, about to leave with one of the Australians, she spotted Jess,. Hana knelt to pour the hot sake. Why had she ignored their pact not to go off alone? It was about 2 a.m. and she hadn’t finished her shift. She couldn’t follow her.
She watched Emiko pick her way through raw scallions and carrots cut as blossom, to adjust the flame. In her concentration Emiko’s red-pressed lips might have been made of plastic. She ceremoniously brought a lacquer bowl to Hana’s ear, pausing for her to appreciate a skittering noise, eliciting Hana’s soft revulsion. This had become a ritual performance and, as the crustacean slipped into the boiling stock, Hana’s foreigner scruples made it a regular party trick.
Emiko confirmed that Jess had indeed left the club. Would her anger or concern win?
Emiko’s patience with Jess had finally run out.
‘Don’t worry.’ Her ornaments trembled in frustration ‘She does this.’
Hana left, emerging from the basement with her eyes closed against the sharp morning light.
When she opened them she saw a lone policeman, on the first shift at the Koban, stretching his arms. In the silence of the early morning, an apprentice monk stood across the road, his Buddhist habit and white leggings shaded under a straw-brimmed hat. He wouldn’t see many people at this hour. so the alms bowl he cradled seemed useless. The futility of it all. All she could do was wait at the homestay for Jess. As she left, club music drifted up from the depths, reminding her of home.
No one, she realized, could accompany her on this journey if she never made a move herself.
But where was Jess?
Chapter 20
Hana headed towards the homestay, passing over the level crossing and down the deserted main street laced with its waste of utility wires. Stray branches of plastic cherry blossom punctuated the street at intervals, and were greying with dust. A pink promise stuck in the wrong season.
In the empty twin room she was surprised that she could drift towards sleep.
She woke involuntarily a couple of hours later and Jess still had not returned. Emiko, she reassured herself, had said this was typical.
Ignoring the cheap club dress, she grabbed her smock and ran to Miho’s hoping to find her.
Ziggy’s was full with post-school-run mothers. No Jess.
She joined a table just finishing their coffees.
Miho greeted her with her customary politeness while she cleared lipsticked cups and quietly drew the crumbs away from Hana’s side of the table. It was an act of servitude: the wrong moment to interrupt. Miho left to raise the mothers’ bill.
‘Itterasshai.’ Miho followed the women to the door lingering after they had gone.
Hana had to stop her as she passed.
‘Have you seen Jess?’
Miho seemed to read her face, as if she were searching to see what she understood. It was unnerving and she waited too long for a response.
‘Yes.’ Miho folded her arms and Hana’s tension release was instant and prompted her further. ‘Today, no.’
Hana’s concern racked back up a notch. ‘She left the club with some Australians. In working hours.’
‘Jess missing again?’ Miho’s response was unexpectedly flat. So this happens with Jess.
Hana was still concerned for her missing friend and Miho reassured her.‘She does this,’ Miho told her. Emiko would only tolerate this behaviour from a gaijin, and would never let non-foreigners get away with it. ‘More than once she has been in trouble on this. She’ll be walking in here before lunch, is my guess.’ Miho shoved her hands conclusively in the wide apron pocket that fell below her thickened waist. Perhaps Miho had been as careless herself once. It didn’t seem to trouble her. She had once told Jess that at her age it took time to work out which kite, among a bright sky of flying ribbon tails, to follow; it took time to grow in consideration and master the strings.
‘So, what is it to be?’ Miho said peremptorily.
Hana found that today Miho was rather impatient to serve other people. Her obvious lack of concern was some comfort, however, and Hana relaxed and ordered a green tea.
‘Sencha.’ Miho repeated, as if to no one in particular, as if thinking out loud to better tether her thoughts.
When Miho returned with her tea, Hana still felt like she was delaying her from another purpose. She would catch her quickly.
‘I wanted to ask …’ Hana began.
Miho turned back towards her slowly as if she were about to ask her something she could not countenance.
‘I came to Shimokitazawa because my mother lived here.’
Miho’s faced dropped to what might have been mistaken as an unfriendly jowl.
Hana persisted.
‘If I wanted …’
Whatever it was she wanted to raise, Miho didn’t want the half of it, her reticence to hear her out was palpable. Hana stopped short of giving more detail.
‘If I was looking … to find the records of someone living here …’ Hana took it slowly.
Miho waited, caught in the thin skein of Hana’s need.
‘… where would you start?’ My mother lived in Shimo in the late eighties?’
Hana thought Miho looked wounded; it might be concern.
‘That’s a long time ago. If you are looking for family you should go to the Municipal Record Offices. I have a relative there. I’ll give you his name.’ And she hurried off, calling ‘chotto matte’ to an unidentified customer at the back of the café, but glancing back at Hana as if in afterthought she said, ‘You want me to give you an address? It’s in Shinjuku ku.’
Hana did not want to delay her further.
‘I’ll find it.
Thanks. And who should I ask for?’
Miho looked as though she were plucking a name from a long roster of relatives who worked at the Municipal offices. ‘Tachi. Ask for Tachi.’
Hana drank a little tea and bit into the shaped biscuit. It was starched and tasteless. She would go now, rather than wait for Jess. And it felt at that moment as though, for the first time, she had a map. A map home.
Chapter 21
Chinese zodiac: Year of the Dragon; heavenly branch of the astrological element water
Hana was at the bottom of a broad flight of steps in Shinjuku. She remembered a childhood afternoon one autumn, out roller-blading with friends in Victoria Park, where at the scrolled iron gates, out of breath, she had whispered in the guise of sharing a secret with them that her father had died before she was born.
The arms of sympathy and the assurances of the safety of her secret had bonded them. The confessional had been worth the lie as it had won her a lasting set of loyalties. They had sped round the park afterwards and this time in the warm intimacy of linked hands they formed a strong chain against anyone coming close, dividing and joining again as the obstacles approached. Though secure in her friendships, what she could never tell them was the truth: that she had no idea how it was that she had come about. Only since Naomi had passed away and the opportunity was lost had she felt the need to ask about the man Naomi had hidden … stolen … lost. And if Hana felt lost then Naomi was responsible. How could it have been so difficult to tell her story?
Today it would change. She paused at the top of the stairs, imagining that, when she walked back out of the building, she might discover something. She carried her passport with her in the hope that behind the grey, concrete façade, data running decades back had been kept with a precision for which the Japanese have always had a reputation.
In her search for the man who had chosen to remain a stranger, she was reticent. This was balanced with the chance of disturbing some terrible secret that should remain unspoken. Why her existence was of so little value to him could not pain her any more than his neglect had already done.
The empty pavement suggested a city backwater and on the whole it didn’t look too promising. She rallied. All she would need to do was give her name, date of birth and as easily as opening the drawer on a metal filing cabinet, she would discover who she was. They may hold a photograph.
But this man had never made any effort to get in contact and this, along with her mother’s fierce resistance in the past to questions, worked like a conspiracy on her determination to go ahead, unzipping her so that she began to empty from the inside. To be unwanted and of little worth was a state that Naomi had done so well to counterbalance.
A wheelie bucket lay in her path and a janitor passed a ragged mop head in an arc of water across the shiny grey floor. It reminded her of the arched brush strokes of Ukai’s calligraphy. Jess had told her that this was a tradition and Ukai had been writing his own farewell.
An aberrant wheel squeaked as she skirted the attendant, heading for the windowless lobby, deserted but for two men, in identical uniforms, who staffed the desks behind the ill-lit reception. The fish tank on the counter emitted a faint singed smell where a rough section of cardboard was in contact with a bulb and, as she waited, four pale fish tracked back and forth across the tank. A man in a grey shirt approached. In Japanese she stumbled to make herself understood, falling quickly back on her English though they spoke none. As he consulted the other man his ID badge caught precariously on a thread, she could barely tell the two individuals apart .
‘Registration …? He looked blankly at her. ‘Koseki …?’ Hana thought this meant ‘family registration’ but he understood her no better than his colleague.
‘Tachi?’ she persisted. ‘Can I speak to Tachi?’ This was met with no recognition whatsoever. Taking her British passport from her bag she opened it at her name: Hana Ardent; place of birth, Tokyo.
Both clerks retreated to an empty desk to consult a small book. Shoulder-to-shoulder, as they leaved through the pages, a lively conversation ensued.
Hana, meanwhile, tapped at the fish tank trying without success to startle the fish off course. A word emerged from their drifting conversation that she did recognize. ‘Korean’. She knew she was not Korean. Naomi, in the slim volume of collected facts that she paid out over time, left her certain that she was half Japanese.
As she leaned on the desk for support,the second clerk returned and spoke slowly, ‘Here we are for Japanese Nationals. Try British embassy.’
He returned the little red passport.
It was uncomfortable to be going backwards and it was uncomfortable to find she was nobody in this country. And it was not singed pride or frustration that made her eyes start to well.
Chapter 22
Tokyo, 1989
A bare leg emerged from Naomi’s loose cotton kimono and hung over the arm of the black chair she had sourced from a subterranean store in Shinjuku. Josh would be due back from work soon. For many days she had spent her enthusiasm on furnishing the house they had finally rented. Josh had relented and let her choose the one in Shimokitazawa. Her stumbling Japanese had improved as she had trawled for items for the house and she had picked up some fluency, but she found visual structure easier than the conceptual bricks of language.
She had found them a two-storied house rather than an apartment, and, while disappointing from the exterior, the space was bright and open. Josh complained that they could have lived in a stylish apartment but he had settled in quickly enough. The house had hidden surprises like a vast American top-loader washing machine. It troubled her that when Josh came home he had raised billions of paper yen at a signature, and she had come to value a domestic machine.
French windows lead out onto a slip of a terrace with views out over persimmon trees onto a strip of land owned by the TEPCO corporation; attractive if you could edit out the rather ominous rusting sign stuck in the centre of the vacant plot. It was their first house together and therein lay much of its charm. She had framed woodblock prints from an Oriental bazaar on Aoyama Dori, and sheets of handmade washi paper patterned the walls. She and Josh would go to the Meiji Shrine flea markets on Sundays, where she had fallen with delight on old fabric stencils, and she had found bands of old obi silk, which she had thrown over as window dressings above the blinds. But her interest in these things had stalled and that afternoon, when she had taken out her sketchpad to draw the old persimmon tree in the TEPCO garden, the sight of the English brand of Windsor and Newton paints had made her cry. She couldn’t say what prompted it but after about twenty minutes into the sketch she felt better.
Beside her on the floor lay the day’s copy of The Japan Times, folded open at the classified ads. The headline articles ranged from a dry roll call of recent Japanese finance ministers between Takeshita and Murayama to bathetic editorials on how best to clean a frying pan. She had thrown the paper aside in exasperation. The employment section was unusually small today and beneath advertisements for real estate were a few classified ads for English teachers and bar hostesses. An insurance company sought applicants ‘with some knowledge of English. Typing skills essential.’ She could rule out most of the column inches devoted to bilingual candidates as she had established early on that any architectural practices she could make contact with would not take her on as she hadn’t completed her training and was not fluent in Japanese. She had begun to feel pinioned.
She heard the heavy, wooden, front door signalling Josh’s return. For a few days now she had begun to tense when he returned until his enquiries about the job hunt were over. That morning he had left her with a request to find a local drycleaner, and she was in no mood to explain that odyssey either.
When Josh returned he would usually find her contentedly starching some hand-woven indigo textile, which she would tell him, with some conviction, was a work of art and fit for the V&A. And while he might care very little, he did not seem about to dampen her passion. As far as h
e was concerned, her insatiable appetite for this newly adopted country and its curious ways left her happy. But perhaps she was tiring of her own company.
She watched him walk in and strip himself of the lightweight summer jacket, bringing in the heat and the clammy air. The espadrille caught on her toes swung like a metronome counting her boredom.
‘Aha,’ she said as she flung her arms wide to greet him without getting up.
He bent to kiss her hello, touching her pale hair, which took on a stronger curl in the humidity
‘You look as though you have been sitting here all day?’
She could not tell him she hadn’t moved for hours – that she was an alien here and felt secure only in the rickety little house with its American top loader.
‘I thought the plan was to produce another glossy publication of photos: My Month in Tokyo? The Japanese lantern? English across the Tokyo T-shirt Revealed?’
‘I have started sketching today and now you are back I would like to sketch you,’ she said, playing the coquette.
‘What, now? When I am hungry and will look gaunt and lean and malnourished?’
Her smile was equivocal, more wan than amused.
‘You could maybe do something after we’ve eaten,’ he suggested. ‘With me reading?’
‘The light will have gone. We’ll do it another day.’
He left her to go upstairs, eager to change into his own yukata gown. As he switched on the air-con over their bed, he found a postcard she had been writing home on her bedside table. A postcard home. To her mother in Clapham. It began with fulgent news of her last exploration to the shrine at Asakusa but remained unfinished. A half-written postcard. What can have been so distracting? The air-con rattled over the bed with the lungs of a smoker; she would have to get it seen to, he thought.
Once changed he went downstairs, and hung at the door as she prepared dinner.
Very casually, he began, ‘You could teach English, perhaps? The pay isn’t an issue and the hours are flexible so you could carry on with the arty projects at the same time?’
