End of the World Blues

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  “This yacht,” said Mr. Nureki. “Self steering, self navigating, gyroscopically balanced. You could send her round the world and she’d come back undamaged.”

  “Impressive,” Kit said, wondering how much was true.

  “Pointless,” corrected Mr. Nureki. “Such technology steals all purpose from our lives.”

  The ocean hosted a battle between the rain, the wind, and the waves; as torrential downpours tried to hammer flat seas that the wind kept scooping into white-capped peaks. Kit could see how belief in the nature gods might make sense. If he’d been a fisherman or farmer, he’d have been praying to the kami too.

  Visibility was almost zero.

  Actually, it was zero. So hard did the rain beat into Kit’s face that the only way he could stand its sting was to close his eyes and hunch his shoulders. Of course, he could always have faced in the other direction.

  “You,” shouted a voice. A hand tugged at Kit’s arm, turning him. “Yuko says come below.” It was Tsusama, the eldest of Mr. Nureki’s sons.

  “I’m fine,” insisted Kit.

  “You’re sodden.”

  “That’s not a problem.”

  “Suit yourself.” The boy shrugged, then hesitated. Glancing round, he checked they could not be overheard. Since his words were ripped by the wind from his mouth almost before he could say them his caution seemed almost comic.

  “Did you love her?”

  “What?” Kit demanded.

  “Yoshi. Did you love her?”

  “Yes,” said Kit. “I did. A lot, just not very well.”

  Tsusama nodded. “Yoshi was my cousin,” he said. Kit and the boy looked at each other and then the boy headed inside, scraping water from his hair. Whatever Tsusama said, Kit was left alone after that.

  An hour later, with the wind less fierce, the torrential rain reduced to a drizzle, and the clouds almost empty, the yacht reached a line of green hills rising steeply from the sea. A length of beach could be seen to the north, but most of the coastline seemed to be wilder, with inlets and coves guarded by dark rocks.

  “Boso-santo,” said Tsusama. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Nureki-san’s eldest son was back. “We’ve been coming to the area my entire life. Yoshi used to visit as a child. Well, she did according to Father. That was before I was born.”

  “What happens now?” Kit asked.

  Tsusama shrugged. “Not my decision,” he said. “All the same you might want to get changed before you meet the high council.”

  “Die smart?”

  The boy grimaced, then patted Kit on the shoulder. “Yeah,” he said. “Something like that.”

  A cupboard built into the bow of the Suijin-sama seemed to contain nothing but suits. A roller drawer above held neatly stacked shirts and a chrome rail inside the door hung with ties. Someone had even put silk socks into pairs next to the shirts.

  Shaking his head, Kit said, “I don’t get it.”

  “What’s to get? Take a suit.”

  Kit did as he was told, choosing black, because all the suits his size were in black. He matched the jacket to a black tee-shirt, which was probably meant to be a vest but was what he could find. He kept the shoes he’d been wearing.

  “No gun?” asked Tsusama.

  In stripping to change Kit had revealed his lack of weapons.

  “Why would I carry a gun?”

  Tsusama shrugged. “I just thought,” he said. “You know…” He nodded towards Kit’s recently severed finger. “You were like us.” The idea of Mr. Nureki’s son considering any foreigner like us was so bizarre Kit wondered if the boy was mocking him. And then he realised something far more frightening. Tsusama was serious.

  “It happened in London.”

  “You owed a debt?”

  “I paid a price.”

  “There’s a difference?”

  “Oh yes,” said Kit. “A big difference.”

  “And this man you paid. Was he happy with the price?”

  It was Kit’s turn to shrug. “I doubt it,” he said. “He died before I could ask.”

  A single jetty jutted into the sea. Sun and rain had bleached its surface to a washed-out grey that designers around the world tried endlessly to imitate but never quite got right. It took years of weathering to achieve that effect. And though rain had darkened the wooden walk-way its planks were already patchy where the puddles had begun to dry.

  A narrow path wound between twisted pines beyond the jetty. About half way up, a huge boulder broke through the dark and gritty earth and forced the path to change direction. At the top, four vermillion-painted cypress trunks formed a perfect torii gateway.

  “We’re at a shrine?”

  “Among other things,” said Tsusama.

  “What other things?”

  “We have houses,” the boy said. “A temple and family shrines. This is where we meet. There are rules…” He hesitated.

  “That sometimes get broken?”

  “Only once,” said the boy. “The cost was terrible.” Glancing at his watch, Tsusama nodded to himself. His father and brother had gone ahead, accompanied by Yuko. Tsusama was to deliver Kit to the ryokan exactly an hour later. This would allow sufficient time for the high council to meet. He was not to think, however, that the council met on his behalf. Their meeting and his presence on the island were coincidence.

  The quietness is misleading, Mr. Nureki had told Kit. We are all in the eye of a terrible storm. Kit was still wondering if the man meant it figuratively, literally, or both.

  “How long have your family owned the island?”

  The boy smiled. “Not my family,” he said. “All of us, all the families, and this particular island is new.”

  “Really?” Kit looked at the rocks, the dark volcanic sand of the little beach, and the worn path leading to where black-eared kites soared above the battered torii. The broken earth was sticky with rotted pine needles, ruts in a track leading to the jetty suggested generations of carts unloading cargo. If its newness was true, the island was a masterpiece.

  “Seven years,” said Tsusama. “Mr. Oniji bought a strip of cliff and had this island built half a mile off shore. It took three months to sink the foundations and another eighteen to landscape the island and erect the shrine, torii, ryokan, and houses.”

  “But that’s old,” said Kit, nodding towards the distant torii.

  A smile was his reply. “Eleven hundred years,” he said. “Probably the oldest now existing. Mr. Oniji found it in Honshu.”

  “And the temple?”

  “From Sapporo. Also most of the houses, although Tamagusuku-san insisted on shipping his own from Okinawa.” Something clouded the boy’s eyes and he turned away, their conversation over. At 6.35 pm exactly, silence having filled the remaining minutes, Mr. Nureki’s son checked his watch one final time and indicated the path.

  “Go now,” he said.

  Pine needles still crunched where heavy branches had kept the worst of the rain from reaching the ground. Mostly, however, the needles just slid wetly, like scabs of ground breaking free. Kit stopped at the torii to clap once and bow to any kami who might be watching. Behind him he heard Tsusama do the same.

  CHAPTER 63 — Saturday, 14 July

  In 1997, “Beat” Takeshi directed a film about an ex-cop. He wrote the script, took the leading role, produced the film, and included his own paintings as props to make visual points about life’s strangeness.

  A drop-out from university, whose nickname came from his days as a comedian in a Tokyo strip joint, Takeshi called his film Hana-Bi, which means fireworks, but uses a word that breaks into fire and flower.

  And yet, what a thirteen-year-old Kit took from the film was not the lyricism of its camera work, nor an awareness that its script was so spare Hana-Bi could almost qualify as a silent movie. He took the image of Beat Takeshi as ex-cop Nishi, his face impassive and his eyes hidden by dark glasses.

  Kit was reminded of this as he entered the ryokan, a lovingly restored country
inn. And he was reminded of how hard it could be to tell senior police officers, politicians, and Yakuza grandees apart. So many dark suits, so many pairs of dark glasses, all those impassive faces.

  He smiled.

  Mr. Oniji, Mr. Nureki, and Mr. Tamagusuku sat at a side table. Tsusama and his brother stood behind them, both stony faced and obviously on their best behaviour. A couple of older men, who looked like senators or titans of industry, sat at another table. And on a chair between the two tables sat an old man with thinning hair. All of the men except the last wore dark suits; he had a simple yukata and rope sandals.

  Kit bowed.

  “You smile?” The old man lifted his head. Obviously wondering what this stranger found so amusing.

  “What else is there to do?” asked Kit.

  The man nodded. “You may sit,” he said. When Kit remained where he was, the old man sighed.

  “I am Osamu Nakamura…”

  The kumicho. The man Mr. Oniji advised and Mr. Tamagusuku obeyed. A man linked to the collapse of a major bank and the building of a bridge between Tohoku and Hokkaido, a project so grandiose no one had dared complain for fear of being regarded as unpatriotic.

  An earthquake had seen to the bridge, along with the cranes, the bulldozers, and most of those recruited for the project. The last thing anyone heard, the kumicho had been too ill to appear at a court hearing. So his lawyers had demanded the trial relocate to Sapporo, where he lived. Somewhere in the middle of this muddle, the case collapsed.

  “I’m glad to see you’ve recovered,” Kit said.

  The old man laughed.

  “You know why you’re here?”

  No, he could honestly say he didn’t. Kit could take guesses, but few of them seemed likely and most were frankly improbable. Yuko had sold him out, this much seemed obvious. Apart from that…

  “Your friends have been causing us trouble.”

  “My…?”

  “The 47 Ronin,” he said sourly. Someone snorted at the name, only to apologise before the old man could turn to see who it might be.

  “You know about this, of course.”

  Did he? Kit nodded. “Someone destroyed their bar,” he said. “My bar. Then Tamagusuku-san tried to steal my land. The bozozoku occupied the site to stop the developers moving in.”

  “It’s not…”

  Osamu Nakamura held up one hand to still Mr. Tamagusuku’s protest. “So,” said the old man, “you organised this protest.”

  Kit shook his head. “I didn’t even know it was happening.”

  Mr. Tamagusuku snorted.

  “That’s what this is about?” said Kit. “A bunch of bikers who want their bar back? That’s why you’ve brought me here?”

  “No one brought you here,” said Mr. Nureki, glancing at Nakamura-san to check he was authorised to speak. “As I understand it, you wanted to visit my niece Yuko. When she refused, you said the meeting could be anywhere she chose, that she could bring anyone she trusted. Well, she trusts me. And I trust this council.”

  “You present a problem,” said the old man. “This does not make us happy.”

  No shit, Kit wanted to say.

  “The choice is yours. You can be the solution or remain the problem. Either way, this matter will be solved.”

  “Let me guess,” said Kit. “You want me to stand down the 47 Ronin, tell them all to go home?”

  The man nodded.

  “And why would I do that?” asked Kit. “Even if I could stand them down, which is doubtful. These people are a law unto themselves.”

  Like you, he thought.

  “Because this situation is not good for any of us,” Mr. Oniji said. His glance at the kumicho was part apology, part unspoken plea—Let me handle this. “You know how these things work,” said Mr. Oniji. “Tokyo is bidding for the Olympics. This kind of conflict is bad for everybody.”

  “It’s the camera crews,” said Kit, realising the obvious. “So long as they remain you can’t move the Ronin.”

  “The press won’t remain forever,” said Yuko’s husband, his voice hard.

  “But until they leave,” Kit said, “you’re fucked.” Looking round the low ryokan he saw impassive faces stare back. “Where’s Yuko?” he demanded.

  “Why?”

  “Because I came here to talk to her.”

  “You can talk to me,” said Mr. Tamagusuku. “If you say anything of interest I’ll be sure to tell my wife.”

  There was one door into the inn and an internal door to the kitchens. That made two ways out at the most, in a room full of hardcore Yakuza, all of whom he could assume were armed.

  “You’re smiling again,” said the kumicho.

  “Just thinking,” Kit said.

  “About what?” Nakamura-san seemed genuinely interested.

  “Among one’s affairs should be no more than two or three matters of what one calls great concern…”

  The old man smiled.

  “Hagakure,” said Mr. Oniji; he sounded surprised.

  “This,” Kit said, “is one of those matters. There are things my wife would want her sister to know.”

  “She’s not your wife,” said Mr. Tamagusuku. “Under Japanese law unregistered marriages are invalid.”

  “You were married?” asked Mr. Nakamura.

  “In San Francisco,” Kit said. “Fifty-five dollars, cash in advance. It worked for us.”

  “But Yoshi Tanaka never registered it here?”

  “So I gather.”

  “And this is what you wanted to tell Yuko?” The kumicho sounded puzzled. “That you were married to her sister?”

  “No,” said Kit. “Yuko knows that already. I mean to tell her who really murdered my wife.”

  A dozen people started talking at once and fell silent the moment Osamu Nakamura slammed his hands together, the clap beginning in noise and ending in total silence. “There was no murder,” he said. “A gas canister exploded.”

  “It was a bomb,” said Kit.

  The old man shook his head, though when he spoke his voice was softer, almost regretful. “No one doubts that you loved Yoshi.” Glancing at Mr. Tamagusuku, he dared the younger man to disagree. “But there was no bomb.”

  “Mr. Oniji knows it was a bomb.”

  “No bomb,” said Mr. Oniji.

  “You told me it was.”

  Mr. Oniji shook his head. “I made an error,” he said. “An antiquated heating system exploded. It was an accident. I’ve seen the final report.”

  “May I sit?” Kit asked.

  Win first, fight later.

  He took the stool indicated and buried his head in his hands, trying to arrange his thoughts. When he looked up, the whole room was watching him. Without knowing it, certainly without intending to, he’d got their total attention. He also had his final answer.

  “Mr. Tamagusuku tried to have me killed,” said Kit, his voice calm. “When that failed, he planted a bomb.”

  “Enough,” said Yuko’s husband, pushing back his own chair.

  “Sit down.” The old man’s voice filled the room. Tamagusuku-san ignored him, and Kit caught the exact moment Mr. Oniji and Mr. Nureki exchanged glances. Not clever, thought Kit, watching Mr. Tamagusuku stand alone, his hands bunched into fists.

  “I couldn’t work out how he could bring himself to murder Yoshi,” said Kit. “Even if that meant getting rid of me. Only Yoshi’s death was a mistake, wasn’t it? You believed Yoshi was with Yuko. So when the first attempt failed…”

  “What attempt?” asked the kumicho.

  “He sent a hit man.”

  Mr. Tamagusuku’s first blow caught Kit in the shoulder, freezing his arm. The second just missed his throat and would have landed, if the kumicho’s bodyguards had not dragged Tamagusuku-san off in time.

  “I…know…nothing…about…a…hit man.”

  “What about a bomb?” asked Mr. Oniji, shrugging when everyone in the room turned to look at him. “Just asking,” he said.

  “Well?” deman
ded the old man.

  Mr. Tamagusuku hesitated.

  It was enough.

  Stepping forward, Kit kicked Tamagusuku-san hard between the legs, and would have kicked again, if not for the bodyguards. When they yanked Kit away from Mr. Tamagusuku, they were less gentle than when it was the other way round.

  “Take him outside,” said the kumicho.

  And as fingers locked onto his elbow, Kit realised the old man had been talking about him. “Wait,” he said. “Please let me say something first.”

  “No.” The kumicho’s voice was firm. “This is not about you anymore. You will wait outside while we make our decision.”

  “One moment, if I may?” said Mr. Oniji. He turned to Kit. “How many people have you told about this?”

  It was a question with only wrong answers.

  “None,” Kit said, and watched Mr. Oniji smile.

  The last of the black-eared, high-circling kites had abandoned its kingdom to the stillness of the coming storm. Shingle shifted slightly as it was lapped by waves, and the Nureki boys looked at anything and everything except the man they were meant to be guarding.

  It was hot, because Tokyo Bay in July was always hot, so the boys pulled at their shirt collars and played with their ties. After a while they held an intense and private discussion that resulted in them both removing their jackets. And through all of this the two boys clutched their guns clumsily, sometimes forgetting to keep the muzzles trained on Kit at all.

  He was grateful for that.

  Having sunk towards the Izo headlands, the sun vanished behind Fuji-Hakone, and Kit sighed and smiled. Staring at an unseen mountain, while thinking precisely nothing, Yoshi would have been proud of him.

  “You’re wanted,” said Tsusama.

  Kit blinked.

  “Take your time,” he suggested.

  Nodding his thanks, Kit straightened himself and led the way back to the ryokan, hearing the boys whisper behind him. He entered the room first, with his head up and his expression firm. Kit had his own thoughts about what was coming. And any hope he might have was killed by the expression of regret on Mr. Oniji’s face.