“We die every day,” Kit said. “It’s called being human.” Taking a stumbling step towards Tamagusuku, he watched the other man steady his automatic.
“Yoshi,” said Kit, taking another step. “I’m sorry.”
Tamagusuku fired.
Kit must have imagined the click of an empty gun, because wind through the rigging would have drowned any noise that subtle. Yuko’s husband slapped his gun, as if it had jammed, firing again. Tamagusuku was about to pull the trigger a third time when Kit reached for his throat.
“Wait,” Yuko said.
“Too late,” said Kit, tightening his grip.
The protest was slight, but Tamagusuku very definitely shook his head. Grabbing the jagged spike of wood still sticking from Kit’s chest, the man twisted, and gulped air as Kit screamed.
Expecting the man to ram home the spike, Kit pushed at Tamagusuku’s wrist and accidentally helped Yuko’s husband do what he’d always intended, rip free the splintered piece of door.
Kit crumpled.
“Wait,” said Yuko. “I want to talk to him.”
“No,” Tamagusuku said. “Not this time.” Kneeling on Kit’s chest, he reversed his gun and raised his arm, ready for a final blow.
“You killed her,” whispered Kit, and the darkness he awaited never fell. Because in that moment Yuko stepped forward and slammed her whisky bottle hard against the side of her husband’s head. When the bottle didn’t break, she hit him again.
“Yoshi was my twin,” Yuko said.
CHAPTER 66 — September
The report in the Asahi Shimbun was suitably restrained. Under a heading Yacht Lost in Storm, Untimely Death, it ran a photograph of the Suijin-sama. A smaller picture, set to one side, showed a serious-looking Tek Tamagusuku, wearing a dark suit, with his hair swept back and slightly grey at the temples. The caption announced, Family in mourning. Irreplaceable loss to Japanese business, says Kisho Oniji.
A small feature on page three mentioned that the Suijin-sama was one of thirteen Japanese-registered vessels lost in the typhoon, although it was the only one lost near Tokyo Bay. An editorial, opposite the Letters page, put shipping losses in the context of wider damage, while the financial pages dealt with the implications of that damage for world risk/insurance ratios.
In passing, the feature mentioned an interview with a Texas-based academic denying Asia’s worst typhoon had anything to do with global warming.
Local news shared space with stories from the wider world. A bomb blast in Baghdad, tension on the Chinese/Russian border, more riots in Mexico City, a possible, very tentative cure for breast cancer.
But the news that really interested Kit concerned the 47 Ronin. Men from the construction company had worked alongside bozozoku clearing rubble from Roppongi’s streets, busily photographed by what remained of the camera crews. When the clearing was done, neither bikers nor builders returned to the site, and neither was prepared to say how such an agreement had been reached.
“What happened?” asked Kit.
No Neck laughed. “Someone made a call to someone else, you know how it goes…Everything comes right if you wait long enough.” At his shoulder, Micki grinned, quickly covering her mouth with one hand.
Micki and No Neck had arrived with a huge pile of newspapers, going back weeks to the night of the actual storm. Being No Neck, he also carried a crash helmet and wore a ripped tee-shirt reading, Where are we going? And why am I in this hand basket?
“You’re lucky to be alive,” he said.
“Yeah,” said Kit. “I know.”
“And you look like shit.”
“Tommy…” It was weird to hear No Neck called by his real name. Weirder still that he smiled sheepishly at the girl who used it. If No Neck didn’t look out, his real name was going to prove catching.
“You look good,” Micki said.
“No.” Kit shook his head. “Tommy’s right, I look terrible.” He’d seen himself for the first time in a mirror that morning. His hair was greyer than he remembered and getting thin. Pretty soon he’d need to get it cropped. But then, pretty soon he’d need to do a lot of things, so he might as well start now.
“About the bar,” Kit said.
“Pirate Mary’s…”
“No,” said Kit. “That name’s dead. You’ll need a new one.”
“Me?” Tommy looked puzzled.
“The site’s yours,” Kit said. “Just as soon as I sign the paperwork.”
“Fucking hell,” said No Neck. “You serious?”
“Yes,” said Kit. “Very. I can even recommend a bank who might help you raise funds for rebuilding.”
“Except I’m Australian,” said Tommy. “I mean, I’m grateful. But you know what they’re like about that.”
“Put the land in Micki’s name,” said Kit, glancing between them. “And then make bloody sure you register the marriage.”
Micki grinned.
It was, Kit had to admit, a relief when the two finally left, all smiles and hands in each other’s back pockets. Kit would have suggested they get a room, but his advice would have been completely redundant. From the way Micki and No Neck were glued to each other on the way out he imagined that was exactly where they were headed.
Kit was in the hospital ward he’d occupied before. The same cherry tree grew beyond its window, though the blossom was long gone. Behind the cherry, stood another just beginning to bloom.
“Autumn flowering,” his nurse had said. It seemed he was to get blossom after all. Two tubes fed into Kit’s wrist and electrodes read off his heart beat. He’d only recently got rid of the last catheter. This time round, the medical assistance had definitely been needed, Dr. Watanabe had been very clear about that.
The sliver of door frame had skewered his diaphragm. A little higher and Kit would have suffered cardiac tamponade, the membrane around his heart filling with enough blood to stop that organ from pumping. If not for Mrs. Tamagusuku’s quick action in staunching the wound Kit would be dead. It was, the doctor stressed, unwise to have been yachting in such weather.
A handful of cards sat on Kit’s bedside table. Some were obvious, like the one from Micki and No Neck, others less so…Mrs. Oniji’s card, delivered that morning, had been a surprise, its reference to Neku unexpected. There was even a card from Yuko. A simple snow scene in black ink on white paper, drawn with three quick flicks of the brush. Kit had been busy admiring it for most of an afternoon before he realised she’d drawn it herself.
The Suijin-sama had run aground and been broken by waves. Everyone knew the story. How Yuko Tamagusuku had left her dead husband to drag a badly injured guest into the dinghy with her. Not everyone agreed with her decision but all were impressed by her bravery and the fact she fought to keep the foreigner alive.
A knock at Kit’s door announced the arrival of Dr. Watanabe, or so he believed, until it opened to reveal Lucy, the nurse who’d removed stitches from his face three months before. “You have another visitor.”
“Aren’t visiting hours over?”
Lucy nodded.
A minute later an orderly came by to swap the high-backed chrome and leather chair in the corner for something simpler. At the same time, a second orderly removed Micki’s flowers and replaced them with lilies. By the time the hospital administrator arrived to check the room was ready, Kit already knew who his visitor would be.
“How are you feeling?”
“Better than I deserve,” said Kit.
Mr. Oniji smiled. “An interesting choice of words.” Indicating the recently installed chair, he said, “May I?” And Kit found himself apologising for not having already asked the oyaban to sit.
“You got my letter?”
Kit had. It contained the paper he’d signed relinquishing all rights to the site in Roppongi. It had gone wherever shreds of paper go when flushed down a Tokyo toilet.
“And they’re treating you well?”
He nodded.
“Good,” said Mr. Oniji. “I tol
d them to give you the best.” He glanced round the room, nodding at the flowers and smiling as he noticed the blossom in the courtyard outside. And then Mr. Oniji’s eyes alighted on a picture frame half-hidden behind cards on Kit’s bedside table.
“If I may?” he said. Taking the picture to the window, Mr. Oniji looked at it very carefully. A minute or so later, he put it back.
“Very pretty,” he said slowly.
“Yes,” said Kit, “I think so.”
“Anyone I know?”
“My daughter,” Kit said.
The photograph showed Neku in grey skirt, white blouse, and navy blazer. The uniform of a school near Seven Chimneys. She looked very serious and ridiculously neat. Someone had styled her hair close to her head, gamine, Pat would probably call it. A smaller picture tucked into the frame showed her with her arms round Charlie, their smiles turned to the camera.
New term, announced Pat’s scrawl on the back of the picture. Me with Charlie, read Neku’s neater hand, in tiny letters across the rear of the snap. Her get-well card simply said, Am fine, hope you feel better. A friend will call.
A letter had been tucked inside. The letter was short, the spelling random. In the ten weeks she’d been living with Kate and Pat her tastes had obviously changed. Gone was the Hello Kitty note pad and in its place a flimsy sheet of onion-skin paper, with a gold moon printed at the top.
I’m in a band, wrote Neku. We’re really good. Well, we will be. I’ve got Mary’s old room and we’re going to paint it purple next weekend. We is me, Charlie and Billie, the drummer. I do bass, Billie keeps forgetting to hold onto his drum sticks and Charlie can actually play—guitar, keyboard and violin!
Kate says we have to practice in the garage and Pat says he doesn’t mind where we practise as long as we get better, I’ll burn you a CD. Kate sends her love. Pat says hello and I say goodbye, for now…
Only, maybe Neku’s tastes hadn’t changed that much. She’d signed her letter with a sketch of a cat.
“I didn’t know you had a daughter,” said Mr. Oniji.
“She’s living at her grandparents’ until I get home.”
Mr. Oniji nodded. “I see,” he said.
And then Mr. Oniji didn’t say very much for a long time. So Kit listened to the cars in the street and watched sun turn a hospital wall from yellow to pink and finally to a pale and flintish blue.
“You know,” said Mr. Oniji. “She looks very like a child I used to know. Her name was Nijie Kitagawa.”
“The daughter of a friend?”
“An enemy,” said Mr. Oniji, his face hardening. “Who nearly cost me my life, also those of my colleague Mr. Nureki and his eldest son.”
“Do I want to know what happened?”
“Many people died.” Mr. Oniji’s voice was flat. He glanced at Kit, considering. “They were not good times.”
“You make it sound like history.”
Mr. Oniji tapped the photograph. “Maybe it is,” he said. “At least, maybe it should be. But, you know…one member of that family took something belonging to me.”
“A case,” said Kit.
Mr. Oniji went very still indeed.
Looking from Mr. Oniji to Mrs. Oniji’s card, Kit smiled. “It might be worth trying the station lockers at Shinjuku Sanchome,” he said, reaching into his pajama pocket for a key. “I believe you have three days.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Hayato Kato and Masato Inoue for translating lines from Yamamoto Tsunetomo’s Hagakure Kikigaki. Without these, writing this book would have been much harder. Also my thanks for their help in coming up with a suitable Japanese term for “floating rope world.” (All of the suggestions were excellent, but the final one caught exactly the right combination of history and artistic subversion.)
Timothy Gowers, Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge. I stole his four-dice analogy from a brief interview he gave to New Scientist.
Everyone at the Akasaka Prince Hotel, the Akasaka Tokyu, and the Hilton Hotel, Shinjuku. All of whom let me use them as office space and clog up their bars and lounges with my papers, laptops, and general mess.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in Malta and christened in the upturned bell of a ship, JON COURTENAY GRIMWOOD grew up in Britain, the Far East, and Scandinavia. Currently working as a freelance journalist and living in London and Winchester, he writes for a number of newspapers and magazines, including the Guardian. He is married to the journalist Sam Baker, editor-in-chief of the British magazine Red. Visit his website at www.j-cg.co.uk.
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End of the World Blues Page 37
