by S. J. Parks
‘What?’ she said quietly. And then she became for him someone that he did not recognize. ‘Inafu. She is nothing but a comfort woman,’ she wailed. ‘This is how we live, Mochizuki. I find you the toy to dally with, and you and I inhabit the rest of the world as one, together. When we met you had such unreliable prospects. No one would have taken you on. Your family lay behind you like a sea drogue, dragging you down. No respectable woman would have given you the time of day. Who but me would have taken the risk? I ran the chance of besmirching my own name.’ Everything she had never dared voice threatened to wind her.
She got up quickly and put on her short, silk housecoat and tied the sash with the vehemence of an act of violence.
‘You didn’t just come from the wrong side of the tracks you came from the underclass.’ It came in the strength of her rage. Circling him, she paced around the bed, where he sat, vulnerable to her attack.
‘You said you didn’t believe in any of that,’ he queried, quietly shocked as if she had hit him between the shoulder blades, unawares.
‘I didn’t but it seems everyone else has agreed that you and your forebears will never wash their stained hands of dirty work. The only work they can get. Tending the carcasses of men with a stench that all the waters of soap land couldn’t clean. The lingering smell of prostitution, like running sores. You think I don’t know how much you rely on that yakuza you call Ukai?’ She did not pause for breath. ‘Sure, you were bright. You were talented but they weren’t merely holding you back, they were going to sink you. I cut you loose and together we have built this existence.’ She spat the last word.
He was left blinking in the strength of light that she had shed on her innermost thoughts. He could see that if she had been anyone else but Kazuko from the start she would have fallen in with the ingrained prejudice that would have him tied to a caste as old as Buddhism. They had lived together all these years and she had absolved him of this accident of birth that had once found him one of the dispossessed.
She walked to the en suite.
In the past she had told him she did not care. His mind screamed; he had lived, nourished by this premise, and he had now pushed her to the point when she had reneged upon it.
She emerged, with over-the-counter sleeping pills that she occasionally resorted to, and left their bedroom.
Were they not equal in one another’s eyes, despite the fact that her forebears had held elevated positions in government? A cabinet minister had no bearing on who they were as a couple, as individuals, or as man and wife. He had sought to buoy them up. They held their heads high.
The last thought brought him choking for air like a man caught in the tidal wave that will inevitably drown him. This invective threatened to destroy everything they had built, leaving debris in its wake that could not be pieced together and reassembled. He saw the vision of his loss.
This was the same woman who had nursed his night sweats when fevered, the same woman who had reviewed his early submissions of work with good counsel, who had brought the burden of cultivating a network upon herself, on his behalf, when he had lacked the confidence and the connections. And now … and now she had written the unspoken secret between them across his eyes and he was blind. And she was blind. She had so washed away his ability to feel, that anything he might say to her would amount to no more than the mutterings of the air in a seashell.
He had broken the vow of which they had never spoken. He could not remind her of why it was that she had taken up with his crippling past. He owed her everything and she had given him all and he had betrayed her. He cast the first blow and could not retaliate. He could not raise another blow in the game of injuries. She had been accepting of him for so long.
The weedy rushes of his past were now pulling at him, dragging him below, as if he never had been free – as though he had let go of her hand, the very hand that had reached down for him from the lifeboat. It was her face looking to find him, Kazuko’s and no one else’s; hers was the only hand to pull him up.
He could hear her crying in the other bedroom. He remained with the covers around him like a loincloth, immobilized like a man with hypothermia. Then she came to him, silhouetted against the doorframe.
‘If I am to give up something so must she,’ Kazuko said coldly, and went back to her sobbing.
Chapter 78
A dusting of snowflakes fell on the waxed fleece-lined hat. With the brim tucked into her collar and her trousers tucked into her boots Mrs Mochizuki was lost in a walking overcoat, beneath a hammer-grey sky. Unbalanced by a heavy bag, she stepped carefully over the dirty ruts that led from her car to the temple across the road. In the flat light the whitewashed walls were sullied beside the snow that lay curled like a great sleeping cat beneath the high walls. Reduced to going cautiously up the steps until she reached the gravel path towards the visitor’s kiosk, where her pace quickened with a purpose. Though the wooden shutter was propped open, she found it empty. Nobody was around.
‘Hi,’ she called. Her breath clouded the glass and then vanished behind her reflection against the temple and the silence of the snow.
‘Hi,’ she called again with the knuckle of her gloved hand.
She could raise nobody and would have to look for the temple lodgings where she knew the girl was living.
Shifting the bag to the other shoulder, the absent young woman who usually manned the kiosk caught up with her. She was in red hakama robes, though it was a quiet day for visitors to the temple.
With a muffled clap of her hands at having found someone to ask or in a bid for warmth, Mrs Mochizuki asked the way, ‘To the …’ She debated: should she or should she not ask for the directions to the lodgings? Then she settled on, ‘Classrooms?’
Regretting that her indecision might seem odd to the girl who studied her as if she found a lone woman odd today.
As if reading her mind, Kazuko said, ‘A friend. I come to visit a friend.’ The corners of Kazuko’s mouth curled reassuringly.
Even so her enquiry elicited a degree of surprise. In the middle of the morning the children would be in their lessons.
Further reassurance was needed and so she placed her hand on the forearm of the girl with the intimacy of friendship. ‘What I would really like to do first …’ she demurred, and then said, ‘Could I trouble you … I would like to take a look … at … I would like to buy an omamori.’ Kazuko thought to buy a souvenir amulet and at this simple request they turned for the kiosk.
‘And which prayer would you like?’ the girl asked as she brought up a display board of silken amulets from under the counter.
Kazuko removed her heavy, heavy bag and rested it on the thin lip of the counter.
‘Here?’
The girl proposed an amulet that was to safeguard students and their studies. She handed Kazuko a woven pouch of a frog.
‘No.’ Kazuko passed it back and began turning each amulet on the board as she made her choice.
Kazuko’s cheeks, full-bloodied with the cold, prickled on reading the next, Anzan: a prayer for pregnancy and a healthy delivery. And beneath it, in vermillion and gold brocade, the tasselled prayer was labelled, ‘Kanai Anzan’, for the peace and prosperity of the household.
It could not be both. In this case she supposed it could not be both.
This choice was proving difficult. She regretted the diversion.
‘What colour would you like?’ the acolyte asked, trying to assist her.
‘It doesn’t matter.’ She always chose the earth prayer. She would have the earth prayer. ‘May peace prevail on earth.’
She clutched at the tasselled brocade and thrust it in her pocket. She complimented the girl on her hair ribbon and asked again for directions. The request was less strange when the lady carried a prayer in her pocket and with a wave of an arm she sent her in the right direction across the grounds.
Kazuko had secured enough promises from Mochizuki to believe she had him tethered but curiosity drew her to seek out the girl
, and see her condition for herself. Under the umbrella of the funematsu pine she sheltered for a moment beside the snow-crusted fishpond where the cold-blooded carp lay unseen on the bottom. Across the expanse of ice a scantily clad novice came to the edge of the frozen water and rolling up his sleeves he caught up a large steaming bucket. As he poured the contents of scalding water over the frozen pond he momentarily disappeared behind a cloud of steam that enveloped him like a genii from the myth.
Beside him now she asked him engagingly what he was doing. He explained that he made an ice hole so that the fish could breathe. If he did not ensure the pond could breath they would loose the old whiskered carp in this unusually fierce weather, he told her.
She nodded sagely. ‘Can you tell me the way to the lodgings?’ she asked, cajoling him as if he were smart if he could do so.
Hakuin the monk pointed her in the direction of the bell tower and watched her disappear beneath the pine.
She headed towards the renovated teahouse. Moments after she had passed beneath it a large icing of snow reached critical mass and fell from the branch and met the ground with a dampened thud, covering her tracks.
She would not look at the teahouse. She skirted the eastern end of the lake and arrived to find the living quarters were deserted. In the lee of a mordant wind, she stopped beneath the eaves, drawing up her collar and wrapping her arms around her, a gloved hand resting on her bag. It weighed heavily. It was still there. She patted her load. And then questioned again her intentions with the girl. She should leave now and head home. But hearing distant murmurings across the compound she began to meander between the deserted buildings, scanning for lights. Looking in each window for bearings she found what she was sure was her room. Snow danced as she opened the unlocked door. She could make out a pile of English books in the shadows, on a stool beside the bed. From the bottom of her own bag she retrieved a hardback book and cast it like a skimming stone towards the thin pillow on the bed and then as quickly as she had entered, left.
Her trail of footprints to the living quarters described an elaborate kanji alphabet, arcing and doubling back on itself across the compound where she heard, from the low purpose-built block beneath her, faint children’s voices. She sheltered under cover of the eaves and, as she drew closer, could make out they were the younger children at class. Off balance, her glove touched the crisp snow on the window ledge and she steadied herself to peer into the classroom at their young teacher. The class of kids were 5th grade and younger, a mixed group, in an optional language class perhaps. The girl wore a long soft cardigan of blue and paced confidently at the front of her class, her arms wrapped across her front. It was when she turned in the other direction that Kazuko saw her extended belly, flaunting her condition like a personal jibe. Seeing this swollen evidence, she made up her mind to go into the classroom.
But in a moment’s hesitation she changed her mind. She too taught children. This audience of infants was too large, too young, and too innocent for what she wanted to say. She must come back and confront the girl. Leaving in a hurry, the cold air on the warmth of her throat had cauterized it. She could not scream. Gasping for air, the now-familiar thought played on her mind: if I am to give up something so must she.
But there was another way.
If the girl would not give up the pregnancy, she determined that she, Kazuko, should keep the child and bring it up.
If I am to give up something so must she, she thought again.
Chapter 79
Naomi’s swollen legs began to feel tight; she stopped pacing back and forth across the front of the class, like a caged creature. She had been in danger of wearing a groove across the floorboards.
The classroom was too warm. Out across the snow-covered contours of the hill the bare trunks of the deciduous trees stuck out like the underbelly of a young animal where the flesh was visible beneath scant hair. Inside, the smaller children chanted and repeated the colours of an absent rainbow. But gradually she began to lose control and they began to misbehave. As one lost interest, the others caught the infection, and their attention was lost like melting snow, as each read her own distraction. Her mind wandered. Thoughts of Mochizuki surfaced with the repetitive pattern of her fabric stencil. She had not seen him in two weeks and he had made no attempt to be in touch but she reminded herself that this was natural. His lifestyle. The last refrain from the chanting class trailed off and petered out in an unenthusiastic end. They began to wriggle. Her focus returned when one wandered off to the back of the class. She dropped the paper sun in her hand and she called him. Bending, with the limited agility of an older woman, she retrieved the disc she had coloured. and as she pinned the clock hands like whiskers across its face, she thought she saw someone crossing the compound from the direction of her room.
At eleven she would usually return to her room while the children had their break. For fifteen minutes she could lie on her bed and rest the object, which she assumed was a head lying on her pelvis, and she would ease the weight from her watery, blown ankles. Never had the mindless contemplation of an unremarkable ceiling held such attraction. Without the trapping of her collected fabrics, her ikats and prints, the sparse room had no personality but even so it was a haven. She resorted to number chanting to calm her runaway mind in the hope that she could displace the skulking anxiety that threatened to consume her.
Inside her room she found wet footprints on the floor and then she saw her, sitting in a large overcoat beside a leather bag on the bedside stool. Kazuko threaded the brim of her hat through her fingers as if she were sifting the fabric pensively or was it nervously?.
This gave Naomi to understand her visitor was not a threat.
‘You are not surprised to see me?’ Kazuko made no attempt to move.
Naomi said nothing. What could she say?
Kazuko broke their silence. ‘I have been meaning to come and see you for some time.’
And what could this woman tell her? Did she come to announce that she had her blessing? Naomi stayed by the door rather than venture in further.
Kazuko beckoned Naomi into her own room, indicating with a pat of the coverlet that she should come and sit beside her on the thin single bed.
A role reversal that had begun when Naomi had played at being Mochizuki’s wife. Of course Kazuko would make herself at home now, in her room.
She could’t take a single step towards her.
‘Will you?’ Kazuko tried patting the bed again.
‘Why have you come?’ Naomi could not look, waiting for an answer, but she closed the door.
Chapter 80
‘I thought it was time we spoke,’ Kazuko explained. Woman to woman, she thought about saying, but cut it short. It was too forgiving too soon, lacking in credibility. This girl no longer belonged to the sorority and would have to make her own way.
‘I am not in a position—’ Naomi began with a protest.
‘The past,’ Kazuko began, cutting her off. Kazuko did not need to be reminded of the position she was in, what Naomi would or would not deign to talk about. She could see better than the young girl herself and did not need to be told. Her hardened face relaxed in an act of extreme will.
‘The past, memories of the past, are our kasa.’ She used the Japanese word for umbrella. ‘We think that our past unfolds and stands over us like some shelter from the elements.’ Her voice now soft and conciliatory, Naomi finally came to sit on the bed, at the very furthest edge beside the door. ‘And yet life can blow it inside out.’ She paused. ‘And we protect our memories for good reason. What would so-and-so do in just such a situation.’ She went on.
‘But we cannot cast aside the past when it’s always attached to us. Who we are is integral to our past. Our past will always catch up with us.’
Naomi heard her out. Her own history before she came to Japan was so severed from the present that it seemed to belong to someone else.
‘There are things you do not know about my husband, that you should kno
w.’
Kazuko undid the top buttons of her coat and continued. ‘He is, sadly, tainted by his past and his future is not his own. He has limited his options because the choices he makes do not wholly belong to him. He owes people.’
Naomi would have seen the cormorant tattoo on his left shoulder. Would he have said he owed Ukai or that he belonged to a band of brothers? Kazuko believed not.
Naomi looked away.
Kazuko’s eyes narrowed. ‘I do not mean a debt to me. He owes the yakuza and neither you nor I can shelter him from that and neither you nor I could ever get close. It is not as simple as you imagine; it goes way back. More than one generation. We are an old society and we have different values of loyalty. Once he became known, and his past was a hindrance, these men gave him an opportunity to loose it. He chose to live under their, shall we say, guidance.’
She is quiet enough now, Kazuko noted. It was going her way. She would win her confidence. Her trust.
‘He can do nothing without their agreement. You are young. You know nothing of the way life really works here. You don’t expect to live here? No one would support that. Your best option is to go home and start again. You should go home. Nobody knows what has happened to you here. You must leave and begin again without being saddled with a child. Start afresh, not as a single mother with a half-caste child. You will not have a life here.’ Her voice softened. ‘Leave now for England.’ She paused. ‘And you may leave the child with us.’
Naomi appeared dumbstruck by her suggestion. But must hear her out.
‘Leave because he will leave you now, sooner or later.’
The older woman worked on her insecurities. He had been away. She had not seen him recently. It seemed ten days absence still could not detract from the fact that she trusted every word he had said to her. She looked defiant but still she pressed her
‘You do not have to go through with this pregnancy. Give up the child.’
