New Hokkaido

by James McNaughton

  ‘Yeah?’ The bearded man regards him with open suspicion.

  ‘Gidday mate. Is Ritchie around?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Ritchie. He said he lives here.’

  ‘Never heard of him.’

  ‘This tall, curly hair. About forty. Shorts and boots.’

  ‘Never seen him before.’

  ‘He came over this morning. Said he lives here in number 3.’

  ‘All kinds of dodgy buggers hang around here off-season, mate.’

  ‘Okay. Thanks.’

  He heads for the beach with the vague hope of stumbling across Ritchie by chance, but as soon as he takes the path at the end of the cul-de-sac into the pines it becomes apparent that it’s very unlikely to happen. It seems an army could hide there. Still, he persists along the track. The rising wind announces itself in the branches overhead and something cracks. The ocean thumps and roars. He hurries back.

  Her welcoming smile is less radiant this time.

  Seeing the unopened packet on the table he cries, ‘You haven’t started yet?’ He tears it open and upends the little pottle of tomato sauce. After a piece of fish he says, ‘Something funny is going on next door.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Something strange. The guy I met this morning, Ritchie, the neighbour who I described as nosy, doesn’t actually live over the road. The real neighbour has never heard of this Ritchie. Said he’s probably just prowling around looking for something to steal.’

  ‘Okay. Better keep the door shut, then.’

  Her attitude strikes him as sensible. Ritchie, a sad little bloke, presents no danger if they take basic precautions. Her disapproval of the meal doesn’t register until he’s into his third piece of fish. She’s picking, wiping her fingers clean on a napkin between chips.

  ‘I’m glad you like it,’ she says.

  ‘I was starving.’

  ‘This … sorry, I’d need to be starving to enjoy this. It’s very greasy and tasteless.’

  ‘And hot and filling.’

  ‘Do they have bento or yakitori over there?’

  ‘No, it’s not for tourists.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘Maybe you need to grow up with this food.’

  ‘I think so.’ She watches him eat, resentfully, it seems to him. ‘But Kiwis like Japanese food too, not just tourists.’

  ‘That’s true. It’s just a small traditional place. Quick and cheap.’

  ‘The traditional food isn’t good. Always deep fried, right? Like this.’

  ‘Fish, yes. We used to eat a lot of beef and lamb, too.’

  ‘A country surrounded by sea and it deep-fries its fish. I think it says something.’

  ‘Really? What?’

  She wipes her fingers on her napkin again. Like a fly, he thinks.

  ‘It says we had a British heritage,’ he tells her. ‘We mainly ate beef and lamb. Used to, anyway. Most of it goes to Japan now, or Ireland.’

  ‘It’s good to eat fish, if it’s well prepared.’

  ‘Well, tourists come here to eat beef. New Hokkaido, right?’

  ‘Huh.’ She pulls a face. ‘It’s not like real Hokkaido beef.’ She wrinkles her nose over the remains of the chips and sauce on the greasy newspaper.

  A phrase he has wanted to say many times over the years to a Japanese person comes to mind. For the first time in his life he actually says it. ‘If you don’t like the food here, go back to Japan.’

  Her expression is cold and imperious. ‘Your culture has no cuisine.’

  He hears an echo in her phrase, perhaps an echo of some senior manager at Mazda. ‘My favourite meal is roast lamb,’ he tells her, ‘with roast potatoes, pumpkin and kumara. With mint sauce, rosemary, gravy, salt and garlic.’ In actual fact his favourite meal is sashimi, but he’s furious, and is arguing with senior Japanese management, for once, as much as with her. ‘It’s a pity all the lamb goes overseas now. It’s a pity New Zealand children don’t get to taste it.’

  ‘It’s a barbaric meal.’

  ‘Barbaric?’ He laughs hollowly. ‘Barbaric,’ he repeats, violently scrunching the newspaper. ‘When the word barbaric is used in this country, it’s not usually in reference to roast lamb.’

  ‘You know full well that Japanese cuisine is well regarded by your countrymen, especially by the younger generation who don’t consider eating rice a political act.’

  ‘It’s always the last resort of pro-occupationists to say the food’s better.’ He gets up with the paper and walks to the kitchen.

  She’s apoplectic, unable to speak. Finally, it comes: ‘Are you saying you’re anti-occupationist? Please tell me you’re anti-occupationist?’ Her goading tone is awful. She’s daring him to say it, like a policeman looking for a chance to arrest him and beat him up.

  ‘New Zealand is being run into the ground.’

  ‘Say you’re anti-occupationist.’

  It’s a line in the sand for her, he sees, so he steps back. ‘Of course I’m grateful for the guidance of the IJA—it’s a great privilege to be part of the Empire. But modernisation would have occurred here anyway. We were a first-world country in 1942. In fact, modernisation would have occurred at a faster rate without intervention. We’d be more than a New Hokkaido.’

  ‘Much less, I think, from what I’ve seen.’ She stares at him as if he’s an insect.

  ‘I’m anti-occupation,’ he says, deliberately mildly.

  ‘I must leave.’

  He calls after her as she heads for the bedroom: ‘That doesn’t mean I’m anti-Japanese.’

  ‘Huh.’

  He stamps on the kitchen bin’s pedal, sending the lid up with a bang, and throws the ball of newspaper hard. He misses. A familiar eye stares out of the ball of newsprint. It can’t be, he thinks, teasing the paper open. It is; it’s Patrick, with his hair in a topknot and wearing a kimono. Flattening the page on the bench, feeling guilty that he’s still not on the road, he reads the caption. Patrick Ipswitch, Rising Dragon, aka the Night Train, the New Zealand born Pan-Asian Sumo Champion, pictured above in 1982, has been charged with the murder of his mistress one week after the unsolved murder of their illegitimate child.

  Hitomi comes out of the bedroom in her jacket, eyes rigidly ahead as she heads for the door.

  ‘See you,’ he says, returning to the photo.

  She slams the door and her footsteps quickly recede.

  ‘A cracker in the end, after all that,’ he tells the door. The sadness he hears in his voice, rather than the contempt he had intended, unnerves him. He’s sorry for himself. For the first time he doubts he will be able to speak to Noble Dawn. Patrick’s prosecution and almost certain death fill him with sorrow, and he fears being alone, of beginning a long and dreary struggle without end. He pours himself a glass of wine and shortly after pours another. He pictures Hitomi striding along the road in her blond wig, nose in the air, his sperm inside her. ‘Anti-Japanese,’ he says to himself. ‘Jesus.’ It’s almost funny. He drains the bottle and goes outside for a cigarette. Headlights flare on the pines. Their phantom remains drift for a moment in darkness. From the end of the driveway he sees that a Toyota has pulled up at number 3. Ritchie gets out, still in his shorts and boots, and waves.

  ‘Hey mate. You’re back.’

  Chris swiftly crosses the road. ‘Ritchie?’

  ‘Uh, yeah.’

  ‘You said you live there at number 3?’

  ‘Yeah. What’s up?’

  ‘But I just went over to see you and the guy in there doesn’t know you.’

  ‘Um, what? You been drinking?’

  ‘No, yeah, just a wine with dinner. Listen, a big guy with a beard said he didn’t know you.’ He points. ‘He was in your house.’

  ‘Huh?’ Ritchie turns and walks quickly up the steps. Chris follows. The drain is still gargling, the bathroom light still on and the top window cracked open, but there’s no steam. A horrible premonition of death grips Chris as Ritchie opens the door in a proprietary way.<
br />
  ‘Molly? Molly?’ The calls become fainter as he goes further into the house.

  In a moment of dazzling clarity, Chris sees everything. The big chilly bin the man carried contained a circular saw and bags. It’s a frame-up: they want to frame him for this woman’s murder. Molly’s murder. As the image returns of her blissfully closed eyes in the steam, he turns and runs. He gets into his car and tears away with the lights off to hide his number plates.

  Approaching the intersection with the main road, with its phone box and fish-and-chip shop, he turns the lights on and a figure rears up before him. He swerves, just missing Hitomi, who is walking on the dark shoulder of the road. He stops in front of her and throws open the passenger door.

  ‘Get in!’

  She keeps walking.

  He drives alongside her at walking pace. ‘Please get in, Miss Kurosawa. Something’s happened next door. I think there’s been a murder.’

  ‘Are you insane?’

  The anger in her face is too much for him to overcome. He pulls the door closed and accelerates away.

  Chapter 23:

  A pie in Palmerston North

  He drives fast to Palmerston North and buys a ticket for the late train to Auckland, which is due in thirty minutes. The timing is fortunate. His car has surely become a liability: Ritchie has seen it and the police will be looking for it. The long-term prospects are frightening so he refuses to consider what he’ll do about the car after seeing Noble Dawn, if it’s even at the station when he returns. He eats a pie to ease his anxiety. There’s a phone box and he has time to kill. He tries a four-digit number from memory.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Hitomi.’

  ‘Oh, what a surprise. Where are you?’

  ‘Up the road a bit. Is everything okay?’

  ‘I was very offended. You understand that I must be offended if you tell me that you hate my countrymen.’

  ‘I don’t hate them. I’d love to go to Japan. I just want self-rule for New Zealand.’

  ‘I understand that.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Yes, very well.’

  ‘Then what were we arguing about?’

  ‘I cooked something. Are you hungry?’

  ‘I just had a pie.’

  ‘A pie.’

  ‘It was amazing.’

  ‘Huh.’

  He fancies he can hear her smiling. ‘I remembered the number,’ he says, grateful for the connection it has enabled. ‘It was written on the phone at the bach.’

  ‘Four numbers. Oh, you did very well.’

  ‘Did the police turn up over the road?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Wait … yes, it’s quiet, no police.’

  ‘I’m going. Please remember me kindly.’

  ‘You can pick me up on your way back from Auckland if you like. I’d like to meet your new dog.’

  ‘I’ll call you.’

  He’s still smiling a minute after putting the phone down. It looks like the bearded man at Ritchie’s was taking the piss, giving him—an obvious townie—the run-around. He goes to collect a refund on his train ticket but is told it’s not possible. Even this can’t dent his good mood, and after giving the ticket to a man approaching the window he feels even better.

  Inside his car, his beautiful car, he puts on Johnny Lennon’s banned Rising Moon album, turns it up loud and heads north. Not for the first time, he wishes Johnny were still alive. He’s too young to remember Johnny’s death, but Patrick told him a lot of people thought he was a loudmouth who brought it on himself, that his death was inevitable, and even that his homecoming gig in Levin was an act of suicide, since he was banned from public appearance, let alone public performance. And yet some people accused him of selling out. He was too abrasive, too naive, pro-Japanese, an anarchist, a clown, a drunk, a wife-beater, a criminal, a Maori-lover. To Chris he was a genius and everything he said or did was special, and if he contradicted himself when he was alive it was because he had to in order to please different factions. The fact that he made it to thirty-two is remarkable, given that he was such a lightning rod. But there is never anything ambiguous in the music; it is searingly truthful in the ways that really matter. Chris plays the track ‘Pieces’ three times in a row, singing along with gusto, and is filled with righteous passion. This music will last forever. In the end, Johnny believed in the humanity of all, Japanese included; and Chris, inspired and uplifted by Johnny as he so often is, believes in the humanity of Noble Dawn.

  Chapter 24:

  Auckland

  When he finally gets onto the motorway south of Auckland, Chris feels he’s made it, but the length and breadth of the road surprises him. He must have slept on the way in and out of the city on the trip with The Typhoons two years ago. It’s early, only 5 am, and yet traffic is starting to flow. More than a million Japanese live here now. Down the highway, the city’s dark towers have come into view, sprinkled with lights. They are both attractive and intimidating. A move to Auckland, away from his apartment and the familiar faces and streets of Wellington, would stretch him, but it feels inevitable that one day he will try his luck in the nation’s major city. By comparison, Wellington is a village of shabby three-storeyed poured concrete boxes. It’s an administrative centre and a transport hub, but there’s no real money around, and the reason he stays is because he grew up and played rugby there. He knows Wellington’s rules. It feels like the towers of Auckland looming higher down the motorway would make him or break him in ways he can only guess at.

  He knows Karangahape Road and Ponsanabe from the rugby trip, so he heads there. The day labourers are leaving their guesthouses as he arrives. Like ghosts or smoking sleepwalkers, they wait for the trams that will take them to the wharf at the bottom of Empress Street.

  He wants something a little more upmarket than a working man’s house. In Ponsanabe he finds a bed-and-breakfast, a large wooden bungalow advertising a vacancy and parking at the rear. It reminds him of the guesthouse his mother ran. A good omen. He pulls on the handbrake in the leafy car park with satisfaction.

  The asking price is more than he expected. The Kiwi receptionist, a grandmotherly type, sees him blanch at the cost and offers to throw in a free breakfast. The smell of bacon wafting out of the dining room makes his mind up. After dropping his bag in a double room glowing with polished kauri, he eats his fill and drinks coffee over the paper. The fifteen-day sumo tournament has already started. Some of the celebrity judges for the senior bouts are listed, but Noble Dawn’s retirement name is different again from his fighting and birth names, and Chris has forgotten it. Even if he’s not a judge, Chris is certain he will be there, that the tournament is the reason he came to New Zealand. He’s sure that the revenge was not plotted from afar but opportunistic, that when Noble Dawn got to New Zealand and saw that Patrick was isolated he spontaneously decided to settle an old score. Noble Dawn was an athlete, and that’s how athletes are. They see, they fight, they forget. Until they see again. Regarding the missing Lyttelton Ferry, Chris sees there are no further developments. It is assumed the boat sank rapidly in deep water near Kaikoura.

  The sky is lightening as he heads out on foot to secure a ticket for the tournament from the booking office on Empress Street. As he walks he thinks through the apology he will present on his brother’s behalf. He practised it in the car on the drive up, this earnest and deeply felt apology, but the words are still somewhat vague given that he has no idea what Patrick did to earn Noble Dawn’s wrath. He stops at a phone box and tries the prison. No luck. For a moment he considers calling Hitomi. I know what she did, he thinks: she fucked around and didn’t respect institutions. ‘An honorary Kiwi,’ he says to himself, and leaves the phone on the hook.

  The Japanese woman in the ticket office regards his request with suspicion. He knows there’s no way he can get a seat near the front and will have to sit at the back in the ghetto reserved for Kiwi sumo enthusiasts. Even so, the ticket i
s expensive.

  ‘Sorry, is one of the judges the esteemed wrestler previously known as Noble Dawn?’

  ‘Pardon me, I don’t know that name.’ A phone call confirms that he is.

  Is this the key, he thinks, a lack of fame compared to Patrick?

  Empress Street at rush hour is too much for him in his fragile, sleepless state. Too many coffees have made him seedy. There are way too many people and almost all are Japanese. A homeless local is bowed in a doorway. A tram clangs past and he sees more of his countrymen: hungover labourers making their way, late, to the wharfs in the hope of a miracle. The magazine shop he enters feels like a place of refuge. Far from the door he finds the current issue of Sumo and several back issues. The current names mean nothing to him, but he recognises the profiles of great wrestlers of the past and their statistics are familiar to him. He reads the experts’ opinions as to how they would fare today. Like most New Zealanders, his enjoyment of sumo ended with the Night Train’s retirement and the subsequent failure of another Kiwi to reach the first division. It was a strange, short-lived national passion. Commentators said he won many of his fights before contact, and it was true that even lay people watching at home saw that many of his opponents were visibly disconcerted by his gaze. Chris, like everyone else, knew where that gaze came from. After the charge would come the Night Train’s trademark flurry of open-handed blows at the throat and chest of his opponent. From there the bout could go anywhere: trips, pushes, lift-outs. As supreme champion, wearing the heavy rope around his waist, the nation cheered when he swung his legs high and crashed them down on the ring, clearing it of evil spirits. He was as big as anyone in the competition and explosively fast. The gaze that rattled opponents said: This sacred ring is my country and I’m clearing you out of it.