The Love of Stones

by Tobias Hill

  At Moscow I wait four hours for the connection. The transit lounge windows are high, rained clean, and beyond them are towers and runways and the black edges of pine forests. Two Japanese girls take timed photographs. Jean-Baptiste Tavernier is here too, at the end of his seventh journey. He has been here for three hundred and nine years, buried beside a clapboard church an hour out on the Tula road. At least he got what he was looking for. My world is defined in this way. The Brethren is always ahead of me, solid as a sextant.

  The Tokyo plane smells of old furniture; nothing else is different except the passengers. Beside me a woman and child eat Japanese snacks and play stones-scissors-paper for hours. They have the comfort in quietness of a functional family. The same eyes, the irises so black the pupils seem dilated with pleasure or lightlessness, the epicanthal folds turning upwards so that both mother and daughter look as if they are always smiling. Most of the time they are. They offer me pickled plums. The woman nods to encourage me.

  ‘Please. You travel alone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She makes a sound – ah – as if I have said something too sad for words. ‘Have more. This is your first time to Japan?’

  ‘Third.’

  She raises her eyebrows. Three is an impressive number, and I am not quite what she expected. ‘But for vacation?’

  ‘Business. Just business.’ The girl looks up at me with eyes shining. Watching me for something. I wonder what she sees and what she wants.

  The plums are salty sweet. The taste stays in my mouth as I try to sleep. The oddness of it keeps me awake. I turn towards the curved wall and think of Japan.

  It is a long way to go in search of stones. I can say this to myself although I do not feel it. It is further than Tavernier ever travelled, although the world has diminished in the years between us. Japan – Jipen to the mainlanders. Marco Polo called it the Country of Gold. The Japanese name is more beautiful, less mercantile: Nihon, Source of the Sun. It is a curious way to refer to one’s own country. As if even the inhabitants saw their islands as the end of the world, not its centre. And not an end, but a beginning.

  I have been there to sell, never to buy. In the stone trade this is how the world divides. There are countries where raw jewels are found, as if the earth is more nourishing in their climates. Then there are the places they end up. The Countries of Gold, although ‘gold’ is relative. Sometimes it is less than elemental. In 1893, for example, a worker at an Anglo-African mine unearthed the largest diamond anyone had then discovered. Even once the cutters had sheared it down, the stone weighed nine hundred and ninety-five carats. A diamond the size of a fist. It came to be known as the Excelsior. The black man who found the jewel received £500, a horse and harness, and a brace of pistols. Three golden wishes. I hope they got him as far as he wanted to

  This time is different. I have nothing to sell now. The rubies were the last of my stock, and the last of those is gone. Now I am only looking for something. It is a kind of endgame. Mongolia passes below us, rivers silver in the retreating dark.

  I sleep shallowly. As far as I am aware I do not dream. The woman with smiling eyes snores beside me. Beyond her, the child carves patterns with her nails into a tin food cover. Each time I wake she is still carving. She draws the English alphabet, the Japanese syllabaries, a cartoon girl with enormous eyes. Endless noughts and crosses. Her face absorbed in her solitary games. Ex nought. Ex nought.

  Ex nought

  Ex

  My passport is almost full. The immigration officer pores over it as if he can read something criminal into the order of visas. Outside the sky is paling towards morning, daylight returning to its natural pace.

  Space waits at the end of the document for the details of my nearest relatives. Only Anne’s name is entered. The officer turns back a page and rubber-stamps me sixty days. I go through Nothing to Declare and find a currency exchange. A thirty-year-old woman with a girl’s voice takes my seamed English money and gives me a slimmer envelope of unwrinkled yen. Outside a Japanese family flags down passers-by to photograph its reunion.

  The city shuttle costs more than I have to spare. The carriage is packed with international commuters, slack-faced from long hauls. Between their backs I catch sight of myself, reflected in the windows. Smiling. Not happy, nothing so solid. It is only that no one knows me here. It is what I am used to, this. It helps me concentrate on what I’m doing. I am tracing a man who signed his name as ‘Three Diamonds’. He has been dead for some time now.

  Outside the landscapes grow together, rural, industrial and urban. There is no transition. Between blue-eaved houses, the dry stubble of September rice paddies. Between factory wings, blue-eaved houses. After London they look unfinished, as if someone has left off a necessary patina of grime. Not that Tokyo is clean – already I can smell its pollution in the train’s conditioned air. But its fabric is newer. Everything has happened faster here. Less has been forgotten. What took London two centuries changed here in a matter of decades.

  I stay on the train until Shinjuku. Getting off is easier than getting out. The terminus itself segues into elevated restaurants, game arcades, underground shopping malls, columned aquaria through which people move, distant beyond shoals of cichlids. Crowd currents guide me to the eastern exit.

  It is almost ten by the station clock. My watch is still on London time, and I turn it forward nine hours while commuters mill around me. On the wide pavement, rows of noodle stalls and telephone booths converge. For a moment I think of calling Anne again. The food stalls are nearer and I have more appetite for what they offer. I order ramen soup and bend my face into its steam, wolfing reconstituted fish. Besides pickled plums, it is the first meal I’ve chosen to eat since London – since, in fact, George Pyke’s sliced white bread. I think of him, an old man at the edge of the stone trade, alone with his photographs. Marvellous, marvellous.

  The pavement is crowded up to my stool. A high-school boy peers down at me. His face is like Yohei’s. I remember Eng, his philosophy of strangers. I wonder if Yohei himself was the one I should have been waiting for. Or George Pyke. Yohei never said how you were supposed to tell. Overhead, Jack Nicholson drinks Asahi beer on a giant video screen, his smile reaching between buildings.

  I pay up and go on east, into the backstreets. They remind me of Diyarbak’r, although in almost every way they are different. There is no smell of decay, only the fumes of food and air-conditioners, and there is nothing here built before the war, only strip shows, revolving sushi bars and love hotels. It is the sound of the two cities which is the same. The hubbub of crowds, the noise of trade, the underlying humanity of that. If I close my eyes I can lose myself in it. An amplified woman’s voice sings advertisements for sex or food or alcohol. I understand only the desire in it, like a prayer or muezzin’s song.

  The day is heating up and I take off my coat and carry it. The bag chafes at my shoulder. I don’t lose myself. My eyes sting with tiredness. At the next junction is a lit plastic sign for the Hundred Per Cent Inn, a man sweeping dust and cicadas off the steps. I go up past him and inside.

  At reception an old woman is eating sashimi from a polystyrene tray. Above her a sign, in anglicised Japanese, lists prices for a Nap or a Night. The woman cuts the fish with her chopsticks, her arms lean and muscular. She looks up as I reach her, her features puckered with concentration.

  ‘Good morning.’

  ‘Oh.’ Her face falls open with panic. She flutters a hand at me, willing me away, as if foreign addresses can only lead to an escalation of multiracial disasters. The sweeper comes in behind me. He calls out as if I were far away, a telephone presence on a long-distance line.

  ‘Yes, hello? Hello?’

  I force a smile. ‘Do you have a room?’

  ‘No room.’ He waves the broom, a fairy godfather in Terylene shirt and wash-shrunk trousers. ‘This is capsule hotel.’

  ‘Fine. You have a capsule?’

  ‘You want capsule?’

  ‘Yes
, I do.’

  The sweeper glances at the woman. Imminent panic is spreading between them. ‘No rooms, only capsules. Please.’

  ‘Won’t I fit?’

  He shrugs unhappily. ‘You want a capsule?’

  The jet lag is catching up with me. It doesn’t make me noticeably more patient than I have to be. ‘I want one bed, for one night. A bed in a capsule is fine. Small is fine. I can pay now or later.’

  They prefer now. The old woman motions at me to take off my shoes before she leads me away. The place feels cheap but I’m too tired to care. At the end of the last hallway she fusses over a locked door.

  Inside, the dormitory is empty. It reminds me of the stone room. A Cornell box of a place, where I can be slotted away like a balla, a Tree of Diana, a lick of steel. Folded on the capsule pillow are a pair of pyjamas, homely, Hundred Per Cent embroidered on the breast. Down the hall there are lockers, a sauna room, a few Western showers smaller than the capsules themselves. The old woman explains details I am past interpreting. She waves dramatically at the sauna, as if it might house something monstrous.

  I change and shower. It is days, now, since I have been naked. I stay under the water for as long as I can and dress in my only clean clothes, letting my skin breathe. Through the extractor fan I can still hear the advertising singers. I lock up my belongings and crawl into my private space. Quarter life-pod, three-quarters coffin.

  The walls are inlaid with switches. A television is set flush into the ceiling. The mattress smells of disuse and the sweet must of a humid climate. I lie back against it and imagine, although I know they are not there, others around me. Chrysalised people. Suspended for their naps or nights, all of them waiting for something. The sensation leaves me dizzy and I breathe in, willing it away. The flat face of the television stares down. I switch it on and channel-surf.

  A man eats eggs against the clock. Two samurai fight in a field of snow. The last station is pay-as-you-watch porn. A man masturbates onto a woman’s breasts, his sex and her face obliterated by decal squares. His features are contorted with adrenaline or joy. I watch him make love to himself until the free time runs out and I sleep. The capsule expands into my darkness.

  It is evening when I wake. There is no way to know it in here except by the clock. For a second after my eyes open I don’t know where I am, or even what the choice should be.

  It is as if the wind has changed on my life and I have been caught. I am lost in myself, between places. It is like a curse, although the Three Brethren carries no recorded curse. Then I turn my head and see the clock beside me. The luminosity of numbers counting themselves out.

  It is 8 p.m., Tokyo time. I reach out clumsily and the television comes on in a babble of manic game-show hosts. I slap at its face until the noise goes away. My locker key is in my shirt pocket, and I go and get myself together. Nothing waits at reception except another television. There is a stack of telephone directories behind the counter, but they are out of reach, the script is beyond me, and explaining to the old woman that I am looking for Mushanokoji, the soy sauce makers, already seems like an impossible inter-cultural effort.

  Outside the night air is still warm. On the hotel steps men sit in their Hundred Per Cent pyjamas, drinking and smoking. They lounge back, as if in a lazy, dreamlike way the city street has become their home for the night. As if it belongs to them. Across the road are the lit plinths of vending machines.

  I cross. Cans of beer, plum wine and saké wait illuminated in the vending displays. I get a beer and walk back to the hotel. Only the salaryman on the top step nods at me. I wonder if there is a pecking order, a hierarchy of stairs. ‘Good evening! Welcome to the Hundred Per Cent Inn.’ He repeats himself in good French, just to be sure. He is handsome and quick with it. A tanned John Wayne face. I nod thanks. He gestures towards his friends. ‘Are you American? We are regulars here. We saw that you have bought a beer. Good Japanese beer. We’ll be happy if you drink it with us.’

  ‘That’s kind of you.’ I sit down. The middle-step men nod encouragingly. We toast one another, kampai, kampai. Cicadas chirr in the road trees.

  ‘It is good to talk in English,’ says the man beside me. ‘For us. A difficult language, so different. My name is Tomoyasu.’

  ‘Katharine.’ We shake hands. The lower echelons move, repositioning themselves. ‘I’m glad to help. There’s something you might do for me, too.’

  ‘I see,’ he says, a little drunk, seeing nothing. ‘May I ask you, Katharine – I hope it is not impertinence – my colleagues and I were wondering: are you staying here?’

  ‘For tonight.’

  ‘Eh?’ He says it to the other men, stretching the word out into a whole phrase of meaning. There, what did I tell you? On the bottom step, a man with no hair mutters. Above him, a man with a packet of Marlboro replies. There is a friction to their voices, a street-hardness, that I didn’t expect. The surfaces of Tokyo are so smooth, it is easy to believe there is nothing else. No depth or shade, as if a city could be reduced to two dimensions.

  ‘Were they talking about me?’

  Tomoyasu shrugs. ‘It is not so important.’

  ‘Really. What is it,’ I ask, already knowing. ‘Are capsule hotels only for vampires?’

  ‘Vampires. Ahaha.’ He smiles. ‘No, only men. Usually only men. Maybe it is not a rule. The staff didn’t mention this?’

  ‘Not in so many words.’

  ‘Now it doesn’t matter so much.’ He stops himself. His smile has relaxed but not faded.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Capsule hotels are for workers, like us. But now the bubble is bursting, the salarymen have no salaries. Maybe now they stay home instead of working late. They go and get drunk with their wives.’

  ‘Lucky wives.’

  ‘No, no. Unlucky bubble.’ The conversation runs out into quiet. The cicadas change rhythm, their chirr breaking into a chant.

  Chhhh, cha-cha-cha.

  ‘Salarylessmen, can I say, Katharine?’

  I laugh. Only because he does. He keeps going. ‘Businessless. Less business, more pleasure. Personally, I am a company lawyer. These men are my colleagues. Our company makes the glass tubes for neon signs. And as for you, you are a salarywoman?’

  ‘No, I’m just looking for someone.’

  A train chatters in the distance. The company men drink their beer and don’t talk, as if they are listening. The Pyjama Gang surveying its turf. They seem uncomfortable in themselves, now. Shifting, unsettled in the late summer breeze. Men caught in uncertain lives. Part of me pities them for that.

  Tomoyasu drains his plum wine. In the bottom of the cup is a pickled plum. He upturns the cup, catches the plum in his hand, eats it. ‘So. You are a private investigator. Investigating private things. But Tokyo is a big place.’

  ‘Actually, it’s a family I’m looking for. I think they’re quite well known. The Mushanokojis.’

  ‘Eh?’

  Even as I say it the man with no hair looks round at me. As if the name alone makes me worth seeing. ‘You know the Mushanokoji family?’ asks Tomoyasu. He spits out the plum stone.

  ‘Only by name.’

  ‘Oh, it is a big family. Big business.’ His English deteriorates with excitement. ‘Condiments, shoyu, neh? Soy sauce. Very respected, so. Why is it you want to meet the Mushanokoji family?’

  ‘It’s complicated. But I was wondering if one of you might know where the company offices are. There’s a telephone directory inside …’

  He isn’t listening to me. The bottom-step man is talking again in his matter-of-fact undertone. He is half-turned, his face in profile against the blue light of the vending machines. Tomoyasu nods when he is finished.

  ‘Mister Abé says that he knows a place. One of the Mushanokoji men goes there. Not a top man. Middle-management.’

  ‘What kind of place?’

  ‘A bar.’ He shrugs again. ‘For men.’

  ‘Would they let me in?’

  He regards me. ‘Forgive
me, but I think they would pay you.’

  They don’t have to, I think. Nor do you have to forgive me. I say, ‘How often does Mister Mushanokoji go there?’

  Tomoyasu calls out. The bottom-step man mutters back. ‘He is always there when Abé-san has been. Often, regularly, frequently, you would say? It is a very expensive place. One moment please …’

  He walks quickly back into the hotel lobby. The colleagues say nothing while he is gone. The bottom-step man strokes his head, as if he can feel my eyes settling there. Tomoyasu comes back with a pen and paper, already writing as he sits. ‘This is the bar name, Sugi. This is the address. It is some way from here and not easy to find, so probably it is best if you take a taxi. You should give this to the driver.’

  ‘Thank you.’ I take the paper. For a second he doesn’t let it go. Then he pulls back as if ashamed of himself.

  ‘Thank you, Katharine. I have enjoyed meeting you. You have made my conversation much better.’

  They all stand to say goodbye, Tomoyasu first, the other-step men following his lead. Mr Abé waves down a taxi. The passenger door opens automatically. As I get in there is the tumble and clatter of the vending machine in the street behind me, another measure of alcohol falling into its lit aperture.

  The car is upholstered in pale imitation leather. The driver wears white gloves, like a mime artist. He opens the glass partition and takes my directions and reads them without acknowledging me, as if the paper has been passed to him by an invisible presence. I imagine him drunk in Hundred Per Cent pyjamas while Tokyo passes outside.

  It is an appropriate place to come, in the search for jewels. There is a department store here which sells matching his-and-hers chopsticks, forged of platinum. A hotel with a golden bath, carved in the shape of a phoenix: three hundred and thirteen and a half pounds of metal, the largest piece of gold in the world, in which businessmen float, light reflecting off their collops of fat. The capital of the Country of Gold. It is all metal and light, a landscape held in a fine balance. Like watchworks, I think, wheels resting between ruby axles. A delicate thing. Pedestrians and cyclists crowd up to the stoplights.