Made in Japan

by S. J. Parks

  Beneath the silks Naomi’s T-shirt was damp and clung to her body.

  ‘You will go too?’ Kazuko entreated.

  Chapter 54

  That night she had her nightly call with Josh who was still in Australia. Naomi lay back against the pillow and attempted to balance the telephone against her chin to free her hands.

  ‘I have never seen him so angry. He is normally so mild-mannered. I barely recognized him. Best to stick with working on the teahouse.’

  There was a small time delay before Josh responded. She picked her book from the bedside table and opened the spine to fan herself. The Red Chrysanthemum proved more effective than the air-con, which was always playing up. The irritating agent came to mind. She wondered how Josh was doing in the depths of the Aussie winter.

  Josh was a few hours ahead, winding down his day. ‘He is under pressure,’ he said over the phone, picking a travel chess piece from the opposing side as he played himself.

  ‘He is generally very easy with the office. Indulgent almost.’

  ‘Yes.’ Josh allowed himself to castle, changing the two fortresses for better defence.

  ‘This issue was clearly important to him,’ Naomi continued. ‘The horseplay between Iwata and Takeshita couldn’t have angered him so much. They’re always at it.’

  Josh gave some thought to his move. ‘Stressed?’ His line of thinking had not moved on particularly.

  ‘I guess. What’s Sam’s thinking on the Guam Hotel?’ she asked. A conversation with Sam on this was still pending.

  ‘As you describe them,’ Josh said, ‘the offices sound scruffy. Financial trouble? But everyone is making money this year. Japan is a “best bet”.’

  ‘But he hates that project. He’s sending stuff out for construction that’s not signed off or approved.’

  ‘Sounds like it’s a scam. It’s all about the costs. You know what I think? I think he must be a bloody yakuza.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Josh. I am proofreading his book. A retrospective of his life’s work.’

  ‘And when did he last come up with a blockbuster? What date did they dry up?’ he countered.

  ‘He reads Bashō.’

  ‘Bashō?’

  ‘Poetry, Josh – you’ve heard of poetry?’

  He tapped the board with a chess piece before his next move.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asked. The sound was unidentifiable down the line.

  ‘It’s a white pawn.’

  ‘Chess?’ Infuriated that he was playing while on the phone to her she threatened. ‘Okay, a board full of chess pieces will welcome you home if I am out,’

  He turned back to the board to find a bishop on the other side had taken a white pawn and was annoyed at the unintended casualty. He had not been concentrating.

  They ran through the pleasantries they knew by heart and then Josh tried harder.

  ‘Their house? What’s it like?’

  ‘It was kind of exquisite, pared down, what you would expect. It was really kind of them, Josh, but slightly strange. Anything in the heat plays more slowly. They have a genuine George Nakashima.’ She found it addictive to be in Mochizuki’s company.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know, the guy who wrote The Soul of a Tree?’

  ‘For God’s sake, don’t go too native on me.’

  ‘We can’t all crunch numbers for a living.’

  ‘I don’t want to be here any longer than I have to but it does feel closer to home. It’s been good – we’ve got the go-ahead to invest in some people who build wind farms.

  ‘Is that a good idea?’

  ‘A bloody good idea; it’s the gale force roaring forties down here.’

  He rang every night at around ten his time and then went back, like an addict, to his risk predictions; a gambler promised a win if he kept playing compulsively because he knew he was on the side of the casino.

  ‘Come home soon,’ she said.

  ‘To Japan?’ he scoffed, more at home where he was.

  Naomi picked up The Red Chrysanthemum. She would, she decided, go on the business trip, and when she called home, if she called home, she might or might not give Josh her attention. She read for a time and then cast the book aside. She thought of Mochizuki, she thought of Josh, and then lay back and pleasured herself before sleep.

  Chapter 55

  ‘Oft I go to him

  By paths of dream

  Never resting my feet

  In the real world

  And it amounts to not a single glance.’

  −

  Tokyo, 1989

  Water had pooled on the platform that formed the beginnings of the foundation for the teahouse. Reflected in the patches of water, the opaque sky was soiled white and over-washed. Rain was gathering. The clouds pillowed like the weighty breasts of a girl beneath thin cotton. Around the ornamental garden, the leaves dripped in the humidity and it was not clear where the murky, oriental pond ended and the livid moss banks under wet shrubs began. In the middle of this, the construction site looked like an act of vandalism. Beneath the funematsu sail pine, an abandoned cement-mixer stood, catching rainwater in its gurning mouth. The white sand beneath the tree had lost its customary moonshine, now an occluded, yellowing, damp crust, as mud from the construction had spread across the virginal blanket. The whole site looked like a desecration.

  Uprights, chosen by Minamioka as the structural supports for the building, stood inanely pointing to the sky. The treated wood of the pillars was defaced by the rain, running with long dark stains of neglect like graffiti. Amid the manicured green of the washed garden the building site looked more like the lost ruins of an ancient civilization: totems telling of decay, where the pillars stood for dead trees rather than joists, upon which the strength of the whole construction would lie.

  Naomi was sitting alone at the gate, an occasional drop getting through her thin summer skirt. As she waited, she pushed on her cuticles, exposing the white half-moon at the base of her nails. Her thoughts trailed back to Tokyo. The Guam project for the passenger lounge was nearing completion and she made a mental note that she would soon have to dispatch the client copies with a set of internal layout drawings. Scrambled subway maps.

  She sighed and looked up over towards the teahouse site where play had been postponed. On the side of the cementmixer drum, in both Kanji and English. were the words ‘Ukai’ in black stencil. It surprised her to find Ukai Constuction here in the temple gardens on the teahouse project. She ran her hands along the split bamboo seat, absently tracing the pronounced growth ridges like finger joints. Ukai’s influence was felt on just about every project that the practice handled. The rain looked threatening, and she regretted that she hadn’t made provision for it.

  A tall figure walked up from the path down below. She watched him approach, his head visible now and then among the shrubs and bushes. As he got closer she could see he was wearing a light American raincoat with the collar tuned up. His stride was strong and purposeful. He smiled broadly as he came to a standstill in front of her. He had been lunching with the abbot.

  ‘So Iwata brought you?’ Mochizuki questioned.

  ‘No, he had something to do so he got me a taxi.’

  ‘My firm’s total profit blown on your taxis,’ he said, and then he laughed loudly.

  She looked away, seeing nothing but verdant green. ‘You had said it was okay for me to take it this morning if I needed to.’ She was defiant as he loomed over her.

  He dropped the subject and looking in the direction of the teahouse site said,

  ‘Come on. Let’s go look’. He touched her shoulder encouragingly. ‘You didn’t dress for the weather.’ He touched her again, feeling at the delicacy of the thin blouse.

  They moved off to inspect the site and he made her walk on ahead of him, along the narrow path between the short-cropped azalea bushes. He watched the hem of her long skirt dampen and discolour with flecks of mud along the short distance. The moisture made the thin
cloth cling to the back of her calves as she walked. The brooding cloud cover thickened and it became gloomier just before the onset of rain. The shrubs around them began to call to one another as the first heavy raindrops fell. Mindful of her flimsy clothes, he lifted up the corner of his raincoat.

  ‘Here,’ he said, motioning, offering to share its cover.

  She held the corner of the coat high over her shoulder and they walked back down the hill as the rain gathered momentum. It was difficult to walk along the narrow path two abreast. She moved closer towards him so that her hip was nestled in behind him. Her body brushed against him as they walked and he was very aware of her warmth through the thin wet cloth of her shirt. The rain picked up, turning quickly into an aggressive deluge. They took their cue and sped up but they found themselves too late and caught the worst of it. Running together under the raincoat along the narrow path was as successful as a three-legged race. So she broke away from him and ran on ahead to a nearby wooden building, the yoritsuki changing rooms, near the gate to the outer garden. She ran up to the loka terrace and took cover beneath the protective overhang but the angle of the rain drove beneath the canopy. She slid open the shoji doors and ran breathlessly inside.

  The acoustics of the deafening rain were muffled inside the wooden changing rooms. He followed briskly after her to find her leaning against the wall for support. She turned to him, beaming and panting with exertion. They were both very wet; his look as good as a challenge. Her cotton shirt clung, on her rising breath, to her breasts. He dropped his case and put his arms around her; beneath his raincoat her hands met him and ran up his back as they kissed. Rainwater still ran down their faces. He stopped and broke away just as their need for one another became more desperate. She sank to the floor and her eyes tempted him to follow her. Mochizuki held his hands up in protest, surrendering not to her but to circumstances that would allow him to go no further.

  She ignored his resignation, approaching him on her knees. Gently determined when she undid his flies, finding him hard and waiting for her. Gently exposing him, she ran her hands down his buttocks to draw him closer. She ran her tongue up the stiff shaft and round the helmet-like ridge, closing her mouth over the smooth tip and toying with the small indentation at the top, pulsing her tongue as she held him firmly. His hands rested on her head, his thumbs pivoted against her cheekbones. When she paused he gently pushed back her head so that she had to look up at him. Her lips were parted needily. She lay back, drawing up her wet skirt. This time, his resistance gone, he joined her on the floor. Then, as suddenly as the rain came, the cloud passed. They stopped, at the same time as if exposed in the sunlight. They were partaking of something forbidden in the teahouse complex in the temple grounds; it was the middle of the day and they might get caught.

  ‘We are the outsiders, Naomi-chan. We have to be careful which rules we break.’

  Naomi stole home early that afternoon. She stood virtually alone on the station platform. As the train stopped, with nurtured precision the doors opened to a persistent computer-generated alarm. Tinny interjections pulsed in and out of her consciousness, her waning concentration. The rain had passed and it was a warm, hazy evening where the air temperature stole nothing, imposed nothing. In the light, dense, heavy particles, the flotsam of the world, floated like dowdy angels.

  She did not feel as she supposed she might. She stepped through the sliding doors, finding sanctuary in the relative calm of the carriage. The shrill of the station’s overloud, overbearing and plangent voice muted as the doors closed behind her.

  She took a seat, to be carried inexorably home. Insistent advertisements called her: bright betrayals of western models wearing bananas; a million and one Kewpie girls in sugared wedding gowns, not a groom in sight; posters for energy elixirs for tired salary men; comic offers of hemorrhoid remedies; banners that decorated the ceiling in some sort of festival of quotidian Japan. The interconnecting carriage of very few people ran on forever.

  Her skirt still carried the mud splashes from the temple but she could find nothing across the afternoon that made her feel besmirched. The act of love would have been a natural conclusion to the understanding between them. Long, velour bench seats offered tens of free seats like a vendor selling nothing anybody wanted. In half an hour they would be going at a premium. Standing-room only. Now she sat alone but carried the afternoon she had spent with Mochizuki for company.

  The low-lying tenement buildings crawled in pursuit of the train tracks, their scattered heights intermittently dominating the evening sun, the windows offering half-second glimpses of broken privacy amid untimely neglect. Small groups of people on bicycles held back by the barriers at the crossing, moved off again like clockwork as the train moved on. Josh would return from his trip to Australia that night.

  She drifted into reverie again until a curve of sound reached her untending ears and she arched her back and rested her head, aware that she had found a place to inhabit with the architect that felt right, and to be woken from her being and nothingness no longer seemed like a threat.

  Chapter 56

  Mochizuki’s publishers were in Nagoya and Naomi thought they must have gone to the wrong address when they climbed the narrow external staircase to the top floor of an unmodernised scruffy warehouse.

  The nervous publisher had stains under the arms of his white shirt. And while Mochizuki’s staff jumped to his assistance, the man jumped because he was jumpy.

  The publisher presented the prepared layouts on the long trestle, and they walked round the table and circumnavigated Mochizuki’s life’s history.

  ‘So how old was I when I produced this?’

  ‘Young, Mochizuki-san.’

  ‘Exactly. I don’t want to give such prominence to this because it is not honed. It is a very good effort but it isn’t truthful,’ he said as Naomi leafed through volumes of work that lay on the bench before them. The breadth impressed her; a meandering line of projects, conceived according to his principles rather than the impulse to achieve as an imperative. Page after page showed his conviction and love of wood as a material. Mochizuki’s had told her his designs valued space as much as the objects that defined it.

  Mochizuki congratulated the publisher on his proofs as he accompanied him round. He was keen to get the retrospective published because he knew that the deal on the Guam Hotel would tarnish his standing and he was preparing for the financial fallout.

  Naomi handled the sheets of domestic houses, a subway station, corporate buildings from his early days, and more recently, a private gallery on the hillside outside Shikamura.

  The retrospective volume would feature the best. She could see.

  The publisher was delighted at their reception. Halfway round the trestle they came to an abrupt halt.

  Mochizuki said nothing and the publisher looked to Naomi. They stared at one another for enlightenment.

  ‘No.’ Mochizuki took some nourishment from his cuticles. ‘This section must come earlier.’

  This request threw the whole flow of the book into confusion.

  The publisher sucked his teeth. ‘Chotto …’ The deadlines were too close to make such a radical alteration.

  ‘And this? This should be photographed again.’ Mochizuki demanded. ‘This isn’t me.’ He was almost apologizing. His work meant everything to him and he was defined by it. It was worse than nothing if it went out as the compromised version. He himself felt compromised.

  ‘We’ll come back. We’ll come back and review this.’ They left the overworked man with hours of rejigging.

  Naomi couldn’t understand what had suddenly sent him ricocheting so off course.

  Back in the car she asked, ‘What did you mean when you said your work wasn’t truthful?’

  ‘At this time. At this time of my life.’ He paused. ‘Early on, the efforts made to give it individuality robbed it of purpose. By trying so hard to be noticed, my work fell into the category of merely competent. I had not fully understood. The
realities of youth are blind to context and the compensations of age are larger if we don’t force the design. There is no history without personal experience. I was not telling the truth; I was broadcasting. I am mindful now that there is a pleasure in the juxtaposition of texture, like the fabric of being.’

  He was older. She never noticed his age.

  Chapter 57

  They picked up the loan car from the construction company. It was a large family saloon. It fitted like a bad start, so inappropriate for just the two of them.

  The locking bleeped. ‘Mochizuki,’ he said, bowing exaggeratedly as he opened the door, introducing himself as her chauffeur for the trip.

  ‘Where are the white gloves if you’re going to be driving me around? Give me a Tokyo taxi.’ A sweet-sour smell of air freshener cocooned her, warning of a claustrophobic journey of some hours ahead. As soon as they hit the road, it began to rain. Heavy summer monsoon rain and he soon pulled off the expressway into a gas station.

  ‘Who loaned this car on empty?’ He was annoyed and it was only the start. Naomi pulled a lipstick from her clutch and applied a peach shade as four attendants descended on them straight out of the formula one pits in zipped overalls with chevrons shouting on the arms. One bounced on the balls of his feet at their window as Mochizuki told him to fill it up. ‘Mantan.’

  The pump attendant offered the tab on a small blue tray. While Mochizuki signed the chit, the boy hung in and stared at Naomi.

  Mochizuki pushed the tray back impatiently.

  The car kangarooed across the forecourt to the café.

  ‘You seen a girl before?’ he threw out in English.

  Naomi found it proprietorial.

  ‘Let’s get lunch,’ he said, before pulling on the handbrake ‘He never see a good-looking woman before’?

  ‘You’ve never driven this model before?’

  He punched her softly in protest and they ran the short distance out from under cover.

  Cries of ‘irasshaimasse’ greeted them as he chose a table by the window, overlooking the car lot, then took out a cigarette.