by Cory Taylor
‘Does your father talk about the war?’ I said.
‘Never.’
‘Don’t you ask him questions?’
‘No.’
The taxi arrived and Hiroko helped me load my bags in the boot and then bowed to me while I climbed in the back. She had wanted to come to help me buy my ticket but I’d decided to see if I could remember any of the basic Japanese I’d picked up in the camp. As a precaution she’d written everything down so I could show it to the ticket office if I got stuck. She told the taxi driver where to take me, then stood on the curb bowing until we were deep in the Tokyo traffic and I lost sight of her.
While we cruised across town I thought about what she’d said, that Tokyo was turning into London or New York. I’d never been to either place but it struck me that Tokyo was like a Western city only in the most superficial way, that you just had to leave the main streets and venture into the laneways and back alleys, as I’d done on my two nights alone in the city, to feel like you’d left everything familiar behind. The sights and sounds and smells were not like anything I’d ever experienced before. I wasn’t exactly afraid on my night walks, but I wasn’t entirely comfortable either. I hardly ever saw another foreigner, for instance, and this made me nervous, in the same way I’d been nervous when I’d first arrived at Tatura, and I found myself feeling outnumbered the way I had back then. Not that anyone seemed hostile in the least. They stared, but it seemed like simple curiosity. And of course I stared back, searching every face for similarities to the faces I’d known so well in the camp, seeing resemblances in the eyes, the noses, the cheekbones, the glossy hair.
And then there were the boys. Stanley would be thirty-three by now, I knew that, but the schoolboys I passed in the street reminded me of the way he’d looked when I’d first met him. Especially the bigger ones who were no longer children. I sought them out in the shops and in the trains, waiting for that look they had—the look that said they were somewhere in between childhood and adulthood, savouring their own thoughts, savage the way Stanley had been, liable to believe absolutely in some future they could see up ahead of them as bright as day, but couldn’t catch.
In Tokyo it had taken Hiroko hours to find the telephone number for Chicago Night. She’d called to say I was coming and written the number down alongside the address in Japanese in my diary. She’d also trained me to say chikago naito so that I’d be understood if I needed to ask directions.
‘Did you ask him about Stanley?’ I dared to ask.
‘He was busy,’ she said.
I wasn’t sure if that meant she hadn’t asked, or if she’d asked and the man had been too busy to answer. Not that it made much difference now. At least the owner knew I was on my way. I’d asked Hiroko to tell him the name of my hotel in Nagasaki in case he wanted to leave me a message, or better still if he wanted to let Stanley know where I was staying. I half-expected Stanley to be waiting for me there when I arrived.
The possibility that Stanley didn’t want to see me hadn’t occurred to me. At least it had, but I’d rejected the idea out of hand. At that stage I was still vain enough to think that once I arrived on Stanley’s doorstep he would naturally welcome me like a long-lost brother. I even dared to imagine other feelings he might still have for me as well.
Hiroko had warned me about the rain. She’d said the tail of a typhoon was passing over Kyushu and the weather was likely to be very wet. When I changed trains in Hakata the rain outside the station was torrential, and then all the way to Nagasaki I stared out the window at a grey world of water and fog that was like the inside of a cloud.
I’d seen pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombs had been dropped. The cities had been reduced to moonscapes. It didn’t seem possible that in such a short time a new city had been built out of the ruins, with train stations and trams and hotels and department stores that were full of people. As we pulled into town I wondered where they’d all come from and why they looked the same as any other rain-soaked crowd, umbrellas up, raincoats flapping. I suppose I’d expected to find a city still on its knees and a population of survivors still visibly suffering the after-effects of the bomb. What I hadn’t imagined was this pretty seaside town with mist-shrouded green hills spilling down towards the bay, and a harbour full of shipping. It was as if nothing more violent than the weather had ever happened here.
I handed the taxi driver the address of my hotel and we drove ten minutes along the harbour-front then up a winding tree-lined backstreet that was a jumble of apartment buildings, noodle shops and grocers. I’d asked Hiroko to book me into a Japanese-style hotel and she’d found the Seibold Ryokan, named, I later learned from the hotel brochure, after a famous German who’d taught Western medicine to the Japanese and made pioneering studies of its flora and fauna. When the taxi stopped I saw that the hotel boasted a garden at the front enclosed by an elegant fence the colour of wheat.
My room was on the ground floor and overlooked the garden. A woman brought me green tea and showed me how to prepare it. After she withdrew I lay back on the tatami floor to rest. In a few minutes I’d dozed off into a half-sleep in which I knew I was dreaming and was afraid of waking up before the dream was over. Stanley was in the dream, but only vaguely. He was on board the same train as I was but he was in another carriage so I wasn’t able to sit with him. When I asked the conductor if I could change seats and move to Stanley’s carriage he said no. And so for the whole journey I was worried that Stanley might not know I was aboard or might get out at a station without telling me and leave me alone on the train.
When I woke up it was dark and muggy and I was covered in sweat. I took a shower as best I could in the narrow bathroom, then dressed and went to the front desk to ask for directions to chikago naito. I showed the desk clerk the address Hiroko had written down.
‘Taxi?’ he said.
‘Can I walk? Is it far?’
‘Rain,’ he said. ‘Taxi.’ He reminded me of the conductor in my dream. He had the same way of preventing me, very politely, from doing what I wanted to do.
I waited outside for the taxi, under a borrowed umbrella. I hadn’t been permitted to leave the premises without it. The rain had eased a little but it was still wet and, when I looked up at the streetlights, I could see the raindrops lined up in mid-air, not falling but moving left to right like bees swarming.
The taxi driver dropped me at the end of a street too narrow and packed with pedestrians for him to navigate. He bobbed his head up and down and apologised, sumimasen, sumimasen, then opened my door with the lever he had next to his seat. I paid and stepped out into the rain while he pointed in the direction I should go. Chikago naito. Migi no hou.
‘Arigato,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’
He waved and drove off slowly.
I entered a warren of restaurants and bars and nightclubs, with neon signs out the front and touts trying to entice the passers-by to come inside. I wasn’t the only foreigner there. I passed some American boys, obviously sailors on shore leave, wandering along in pairs trying to keep their eyes off the photographs of dancing girls and topless waitresses that the touts kept flashing at them. Hey American, the touts called out. How are you? Beri weru san kyuu.
Chicago Night was at the end of the lane and up a steep stone stairway. I saw the sign from the bottom of the steps, written in English. I didn’t think it could be a brothel, although it seemed to be surrounded by them. There were no pictures of girls, no touts, just an elegant black-framed gate, which led to an irregular stone pathway dotted here and there with lanterns. I felt a thrill as I entered, as if I’d found a portal to another world, an Alice-in-Wonderland rabbit hole. At the end of the pathway was another gate, this time a wooden sliding door. Beyond this gate was a curtain, and behind the curtain was a room about half the size of an average living room. It didn’t take long to see that Stanley wasn’t there. Apart from the barman and his single customer the place was deserted. They both looked up at me and chorused a greeting I didn’t
understand.
‘Konban wa,’ I replied. It was hard to be heard over the music, an old-fashioned jazz number I knew because Bill had liked to sing it to me. You always hurt the one you love, the one you shouldn’t hurt at all.
I sat down on a stool at the counter, next to a young man of about nineteen or twenty dressed in a loud Hawaiian shirt. The counter ran down the centre of the room and divided it in half again. I pointed to the bottle of Scotch whisky that was on display on a shelf behind the bar, along with a whole range of other foreign and Japanese drinks. The wall and the ceiling above the shelf were decorated with album covers and posters of American jazz greats. The barman asked me in English how I wanted my drink.
‘Ice and soda,’ I said.
Wakarimasita. I presumed this meant he understood, since he turned the volume down on the record player and started to prepare my drink with an unusual amount of care.
‘My name is Arthur Wheeler,’ I said. ‘I’m looking for Ueno Saburo-san.’ This was another thing Hiroko had made me practise, how to pronounce Stanley’s real name.
The barman merely nodded. He was a man of around fifty with greying hair cropped close to his scalp and a neat salt-and-pepper moustache. His wire glasses gave him an incongruously learned look, as if his daytime job was at a university and the bar was just a hobby.
‘Actually I’m looking for his mother, Mariko-san,’ I said.
He placed my drink on the counter and added a plastic stick to stir it with. Beside it he placed a small plate of green edamame beans.
‘Yes,’ he said, and then turned to the young man. ‘This is my friend Haruo.’
I shook hands with Haruo, who apparently spoke no English. He smiled broadly and ducked his head.
‘My name is Ikeda,’ said the barman.
I shook his hand then removed the plastic stirrer from my glass and took a sip of my drink.
‘From Australia?’ said Ikeda-san.
I nodded.
Ikeda-san wiped the counter with a cloth and said something to Haruo, at which Haruo jumped up off his stool and trotted towards a back door hidden behind a curtain. He gave me a little duck of the head before he disappeared.
Ikeda-san placed another dish on the counter.
‘Daikon,’ he said. ‘Please try.’
He handed me some chopsticks and watched while I chewed. It was some vegetable I couldn’t identify chopped into matchsticks and massaged with a sweet vinegary dressing.
‘Good,’ I said. ‘Oishii.’
He bowed in a womanish way.
‘Do you know Saburo-san?’ I said.
He didn’t reply. I couldn’t tell if I’d made him uncomfortable or not. He attended to a dish he was preparing on a narrow bench underneath the counter. The cooking arrangements, like everything else in the bar, were cramped but functional.
He looked up from his work. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Please wait a minute.’
I waited for half an hour, drinking steadily, eating everything Ikeda-san put in front of me. Nobody else came into the bar.
‘It’s quiet,’ I said.
‘Too early,’ he said.
‘Have you owned the bar for long?’
‘I don’t own the bar. I only work here. It started 1951.’
‘I was very surprised when I arrived in Nagasaki. So many new buildings.’
‘Yes. Everything new.’ He didn’t seem convinced that this was a good thing. ‘When I came back here there was nothing,’ he said. ‘No house, no family, no work.’
‘Where were you?’ I said. ‘Before that.’
‘China.’
After a long silence he asked me if I would like to hear another record.
‘Yes please.’
‘You choose.’
I told him he could choose because I didn’t know a lot about music and he seemed to know a great deal.
‘You like Ink Spots?’ he said.
‘I had a friend who liked them very much,’ I said.
He went to a long cupboard in the corner and opened the sliding doors. Inside were shelves packed tight with hundreds of records. He searched for a minute then pulled one out. He showed me the cover. Ella Fitzgerald and The Ink Spots.
‘That’s a big collection,’ I said.
‘We buy from America,’ he said. ‘Chicago.’
‘Chikago naito,’ I said, and he laughed.
‘Yes yes, chikago naito. Your Japanese very good.’
He was just taking the record out of its sleeve when the door swung open and Haruo came in followed by a woman in her mid-fifties wearing a lolly-pink kimono and a short perm. Stanley’s mother had changed. I’d never spoken to her at Tatura but I’d seen her often enough and I’d heard her on the night she’d attempted to poison herself. That dishevelled, unruly woman had gone. In her place was a trim, pretty hostess with a direct gaze and a professional smile.
‘Welcome,’ she said. ‘Good evening. So happy you come.’
Her dental work flashed gold under the counter lights.
I realised when I stood up that I’d had too much to drink. The room rolled a little as if we were on the water.
‘Hello,’ I said. I held out my hand and then checked myself and bowed instead. Stanley’s mother bowed back.
‘You Wheeler-san,’ she said. ‘I know you anywhere.’ She was flirting with me, but it was more of a reflex than a sign of affection.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
It was either the shock of seeing her again or the drink, but I felt like my legs were about to give way underneath me. I sat down on my stool again and held the counter to stop myself from losing my balance.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Too much whisky.’
Stanley’s mother said something to Ikeda-san in Japanese and the next thing there was a glass of water on the counter in front of me. I drank the whole thing down.
‘I came to see Stanley,’ I said. ‘Saburo-san.’
‘He isn’t here,’ said his mother, her smile fixed.
She went around to the other side of the bar and helped herself to a drink from a giant bottle of sake. Then she said something to Haruo and he went to lock the front door.
I had a terrible feeling that I’d done the wrong thing by coming here and I apologised again.
‘I don’t want to cause any trouble,’ I said.
‘No trouble,’ she said.
Haruo and Ikeda-san exchanged a look and then Ikeda-san offered me a cigarette from a pack he kept on the counter. Stanley’s mother took one too and Haruo lit first mine and then hers. She took a long, slow draw and stared at me over the top of her glass. I remembered the wild look she’d sometimes given me on the parade ground at Tatura. That was gone now. Where she’d once looked fearful she now appeared indifferent, lazy almost, as if everything that could have happened had happened and there was nothing left to be afraid of.
‘Away on business,’ she said.
‘What sort of business does Stanley do now?’ I asked.
She looked at Ikeda-san.
‘Real estate,’ he said. ‘Fudosan.’
‘When will he be back?’ I said. ‘I’ve come a very long way and I don’t have a lot of time. I have meetings in Tokyo.’
‘Tomorrow,’ said Stanley’s mother. ‘We go tomorrow. Where you stay?’
I gave her one of the hotel cards I’d brought with me in case I got lost.
‘I come there,’ she said. ‘Twelve o’clock.’
I thanked her again and then she suggested we get something to eat.
‘You like gyoza?’ she said. ‘Dumplings?’
‘I’m not sure,’ I said, ‘but I’m not that hungry after all the food Ikeda-san has given me to eat.’ I smiled at him and took out my wallet to pay, but she waved it away.
I offered money to Ikeda-san, but he refused to even look at it. Dame, dame.
Haruo came with me to the front gate and showed me out. Stanley’s mother was already walking away up the street, a small, determined figure. Her umb
rella was the same loud pink as her kimono. I bowed to Haruo and said goodbye, then hurried away after her.
24
Stanley’s mother took me to a place not far from the bar where she was obviously well known. She introduced me at length, to the cooks, to the customers, to the girl who served us our beer and dumplings. Nobody here spoke English, so all I could do was sit on my stool and smile whenever I heard my name mentioned.
Along with the dumplings came two bowls of steaming noodles. Stanley’s mother showed me how to suck them up without burning my mouth on the hot soup and then we concentrated on eating for the ten minutes it took to finish off a bowl. All the time I was wondering what she thought about my showing up like an apparition. Apart from an occasional sideways glance, she barely looked at me. I might have been a child she’d been conned into taking care of for the evening while his parents were out enjoying themselves.
‘Very good,’ I said, drinking the dregs of my soup from the bottom of the bowl the way Mariko-san had done.
‘Thank you very much,’ she said, which made me wonder whether the dumpling shop was hers, as well as the bar, since she seemed so at home in both.
‘Is Ikeda-san your husband?’ I ventured.
She laughed for the first time all evening, waving her hand in front of her face as if she was swatting a fly. Chigau, chigau. Bad joke.
‘Is Saburo-san married?’ I said. It was a possibility. In all the years I’d waited for news of him, I’d tried to imagine a life for Stanley, a pretty wife, a few handsome children, success in some profession or other that required a perfect command of English.
Mariko-san shook her head. Mada desu. Not yet.
Later, when we were walking again out in the busy alleyway, she turned to me and asked me if I was married.
‘Divorced,’ I said.
‘Children?’
‘One boy.’
‘Me too,’ she said, giggling. ‘Divorced. One boy.’ She slapped me on the arm coquettishly.
