The Japanese Lantern

by Isobel Chace

  “What is the story?” she whispered to Edward.

  “The story of the Hagoromo, the feathery robe,” he whispered back.

  And then suddenly she became used to the convention and the dolls came alive for her and she was able to follow the story quite well for herself.

  There was a fisherman standing on a beach with a tree quite near him and on this tree he found the most beautiful feathery robe. After some indecision he decided to keep it as a relic, but no sooner had he done so than a beautiful fairy came to implore him to return it to her, for without it she could not fly back to the moon where she was one of the lunar attendants. In the end he gave in to her, and before she left she danced for him the most beautiful dance, which she could only do when she was wearing the robe. And then slowly she vanished from his sight.

  Other stories followed, but none with the same magic as this one. The little doll’s dance had been incredibly performed, her movements almost too human. It was superb.

  Halfway through Edward had taken Jonquil’s hand into his, but she didn’t notice until some time afterwards and then she felt it was too late to take it back. The trouble with Edward, she thought suddenly, was that he was trite. The thought made her want to laugh and she was glad that at that moment the performance came to an end and the audience began to shuffle out.

  It was amusing to watch the people who had come to the theatre; some of them dressed in Western clothes, others resplendent in kimonos, and all of them fitting their manners to what they had on. If a husband and wife wore their national costume, she would follow him a few paces behind to do his bidding. But if they were clad in dresses and suits, he would treat her very much as any European man would have done, even going so far as to stand aside for her in the doorways. Jonquil couldn’t help wondering if they never became confused, forgetting for a moment what they had on.

  Edward had been forced to park the car some distance from the theatre and so they decided to walk to the restaurant, picking their way through the narrow back streets, past some of the public television sets with their squatting audiences, and into the centre of Osaka overlooking the river.

  “I suppose you want to eat a Japanese meal?” Edward said with some distaste.

  “Not if you dislike it.”

  “I do. I think it’s beautifully set out, like a flower arrangement, but very distressing to the palate. Shall we settle for Chinese food?”

  Jonquil agreed readily to this idea. She liked to eat bamboo shoots and all the other things with their romantic sounding names. And so they stopped outside the next restaurant they came to and went into the vestibule, where the shoes of other patrons were already standing in neat lines.

  “I thought they only did this at the real Japanese places,” she said to Edward as they waited for the attendant to come to them.

  He shook his head.

  “Almost everywhere,” he said.

  To amuse herself, Jonquil looked at the shoes more carefully, wondering about the people who wore them. Then, at one end, one particular pair caught her eye. She recognized them immediately, without any hesitation. They were Yoshiko’s—a pair of sandals decorated with catfish and given to her by Jason in Tokyo. Jonquil still had her own pair that had been given to her at the same time. And. next to them were a pair of men’s shoes, larger than any that would be worn by a Japanese and therefore more than probably Jason’s.

  “Edward,” she whispered, “would you mind very much if we went somewhere else? Someone I know is here and it might be awkward.”

  She saw the glint in Edward’s eyes, but was too perturbed to pay any attention to it. She could hardly believe that Jason would have taken out Yoshiko in her stead, leaving Alexander alone in the house. But perhaps Nobuko was with him? Perhaps he had only asked her as a passing whim and had been glad when she had refused? He had probably been only too glad when later Yoshiko had agreed to go with him.

  She pulled urgently at Edward’s sleeve.

  “Please, Edward,” she urged him.

  Smilingly he agreed.

  “Shall we go back to Kyoto and have something there?” he suggested.

  “Oh, please,” she begged.

  The attendant seemed to take their change of mind as a matter of course and opened the door for them to go out, smiling pleasantly up at them.

  “Very hoppy you come in,” he said, chanting the words as though he had learned them by rote and had no idea as to their meaning. “Very hoppy. Come again.”

  They walked quickly and in silence back to the car. Once Jonquil stumbled on the cobblestones and Edward caught her by the arm, but she released herself immediately, not liking somehow to walk arm in arm in Japan where such a thing was never done.

  He held open the door for her and she settled herself quickly in her seat while he walked round the car and got in beside her. She could see by the light from the dashboard that he was smiling to himself and wondered what had amused him.

  “How long will it take us to get to Kyoto?” she asked. “Because I really am very hungry, aren’t you?”

  “Are you? Then why didn’t we eat there?”

  “Because—I told you—someone I know was there. With—with Jason.”

  His smile grew a little broader.

  “You couldn’t possibly have seen through that door,” he said.

  “I didn’t have to,” she retorted. “I recognized the shoes!”

  He openly laughed at that.

  “Forgive me, my dear,” he apologized, “but one pair of shoes is really very like another.”

  Jonquil felt a little shiver go down her back. She wished ardently that she hadn’t been so silly as to have scorned Jason’s advice. She wished too that she could have seen inside Edward’s mind to see just what he was thinking.

  “I recognized her shoes,” she said in a small, not very convincing voice.

  “That sounds a little more likely,” he admitted, but she could tell that he still didn’t believe her.

  He drove with assurance away from the lighted streets of Osaka and out into the country. The last of the neon lights fell away behind them and there was nothing but the black night ahead of them. Perhaps it would only take half an hour to reach Kyoto, Jonquil comforted herself. Nothing very dreadful could happen in half an hour.

  But she had forgotten that it was only half an hour if the car was going. Edward drove on in silence for about twenty minutes and her fears were almost lulled to sleep, but then, just as she was beginning to tell herself how silly she had been, he drew into the side of the road and stopped the car.

  “You know that I’ve fallen in love with you?” he said.

  Speechlessly she shook her head.

  “Well, I have, darling Jonquil!”

  “Let’s go on, Edward,” she suggested unhappily. “I would like to get something to eat.

  “Don’t you like me at all?” he asked.

  “Of course I do!” she exclaimed. “It’s just that I’m hungry—and—and—I don’t like you in that way.”

  She thought she might have hurt him and cast him a quick look. Surprisingly he was still smiling. “Don’t you?” he asked softly. “How do you know? Believe me, it will do you little good to go on chasing Jason, so you might as well be kind to me.”

  “What do you mean?” Jonquil asked indignantly.

  “Do I have to put it any clearer? Jason’s a finished man. My firm will buy him out before the month is out—”

  “I don’t believe you!”

  “Don’t you?” He took her firmly into his arms. “You’re so beautiful, little Jonquil,” he whispered.

  “Let me go!” she cried out, but he held her closer.

  “It’s no good struggling,” he told her. “Even you must know that I’m much stronger than you. You’ve fought me for long enough—”

  “Let me go!” she repeated fiercely, hating his kisses and badly frightened by the expression on his face.

  With an effort she wrenched one arm free and opened the doo
r, and with another wriggle she was free and out of the car. It was difficult to run in her high-heeled shoes and she kept tripping. She heard the car coming on behind her and hid breathlessly in a small copse of bamboos waiting for it to go past her. It seemed minutes before she saw it creeping slowly past and even more slowly vanishing round the corner out of sight.

  At first she was so relieved to be rid of him that she was quite buoyant about her situation, but when she began to think how far she was from Kyoto her heart sank. Perhaps, she thought, she would be able to stop a car going in that direction. But how could she possibly know whether such a thing was ever done in Japan? In the end she decided reluctantly that she would have to walk and hoped that it was not as far as she feared.

  Several cars passed her by, their headlights frightening her a little as they showed up ghostly bushes or an unexpected farmhouse. And once she heard a cow tearing at the grass in the field beside her and it was quite five minutes before her heart settled down again to its normal rate of beating. Two more cars went by and then another came up behind her. But this one, instead of hurrying on like the others, came to a slow stop beside her.

  “Get in,” Jason commanded her.

  She hesitated for a moment and then she pulled open the rear door.

  “You always seem to be finding me when I’m lost,” she said sadly.

  “I do, don’t I?” he agreed. “But I meant it when I said I wouldn’t be patient for very much longer. Do you want to sit in the back? Or are you just avoiding sitting next to me?”

  She was puzzled by what he meant for a minute.

  “I thought Yoshiko was with you,” she explained. It was suddenly terribly important to tell him that she hadn’t intended to offend him.

  “Yoshiko?” For a moment he sounded astonished. “Was that why you wouldn’t stay for a meal?” he asked, and his voice was surprisingly tender, causing her heart to do the most treacherous things.

  She went round the car and got into the passenger seat beside him. It was silly, but after Edward’s car, Jason’s seemed strangely familiar, almost as though it had been the family car for years, whereas she had only driven in it once or twice before. She liked the feel of the canvas covers beneath her fingers and the swish of the cool night air in her hair as they went along.

  “N-not exactly,” she denied. She couldn’t very well tell him that she had been overcome with sheer jealousy.

  “Yoshiko went out with Kagami,” Jason told her. She gasped with surprise, and he must have heard her, for he went on, “I believe she went out with him last night too.”

  “Don’t you mind about it at all?” she asked.

  “Of course I mind!” he said, and he sounded quite angry. “I’m very fond of Yoshiko and I want her to be happy. I can’t believe that she will ever be happy with Taki. He would expect her to conform too much, and there’s a great deal of the rebel in Yoshiko.”

  “Yes, there is,” Jonquil agreed.

  There was a long unbearable silence until she felt impelled to break it.

  “Why did you go to Osaka?” she asked.

  “To pick up the pieces,” he said, without making any effort to spare her feelings. She felt rather small and consequently resentful.

  “I should have managed,” she said. “Edward had gone.”

  He seemed to have nothing to say to that, but after a while he smiled at her.

  “Shall I tell you a story?” he asked.

  She nodded, mystified by his suddenly cheerful manner.

  “It’s a very old story, one that Nobuko told me when I was a little boy. Once upon a time there was a monkey, a rabbit and a bull-frog. They were very good friends and one New Year’s Day they all felt very hungry, so they all went to the nearest village and stole an enormous mortar stone full of mochi—”

  “What’s mochi?” Jonquil interrupted.

  “It’s a kind of rice dish that’s eaten on New Year’s Day. It’s pounded into a thick paste and cooked over charcoal.”

  “Nice?”

  “Yes. Anyway the three animals thought so, for as soon as they had the mochi they began to quarrel over it. Then the monkey had an idea. He suggested that they should take it to the top of a hill and roll it down to the bottom, with all of them racing after it. The first one down the slope would have the dish.

  “The rabbit agreed that it was a splendid idea, for he could run almost as fast as the monkey. The bull-frog wasn’t quite so keen, but he was over-ruled.

  “Then the race began. Unfortunately the monkey made a mistake and sat down on a thorn bush by accident, so he was out of the running. But the rabbit was still there and he rushed down and caught the stone, but the mochi had fallen out. And so it was left to the bull-frog who was coming slowly down the hill to find the mochi, and he ate it all up.”

  Jonquil chuckled.

  “It sounds like a Japanese version of the tortoise and the hare,” she said.

  “Very much the same idea,” he agreed. “I just wanted to tell you that I’m the bull-frog in the story.”

  Jonquil gave him a startled glance.

  “But who are the rabbit and the monkey?” she asked. But even as she asked the question she thought she knew the answer. The rabbit was Mr. Kagami and the monkey was probably Yoshiko’s father, Mr. Matsui, who had suggested the race.

  It left her in no doubt as to Jason’s feelings for Yoshiko, she thought miserably. He could not have made them clearer.

  “Can't you guess?” he asked her.

  Painfully she nodded her head.

  “Yes, I can,” she said.

  “And that reminds me,” he went on. “Tomorrow it’s my turn to take you out, but I can’t in the evening for I shall have to go back to Tokyo. Would you like to come with me to a tea ceremony? I rather think Mitchi Boko will be presiding.”

  She knew that she ought to refuse. It would hurt unbearably to be with him when she knew that he was only taking her because he couldn’t be with Yoshiko—yet. But she couldn’t refuse. To be with him, even for such a short while, would be something that she would be able to remember all her life.

  “I should love that,” she said out loud. “But what about Alexander? I don’t think that I should leave him in the daytime.”

  “Yoshiko will look after him.”

  “Then I should like to,” she said shyly. “Thank you very much.”

  He smiled at her and she felt better. It had been nice of him to say so little about Edward, she thought. He could have reminded her that he had warned her about him, but he had said nothing.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you about Edward,” she said humbly.

  He put his hand on hers and squeezed it.

  “I’m sorry too,” he said. “But only because I wanted to spare you any disillusionment.”

  “I’m not disillusioned,” she said. “It’s difficult to explain exactly. I thought he was amusing, nothing more.” Edward’s threats seemed to have very little meaning now that she could feel the strength of Jason’s character.

  “Then I needn’t worry about your broken heart? ’ he laughed at her, and she joined in, reluctantly, feeling slightly guilty that she should laugh so easily when it might have been so serious.

  “No,” she admitted.

  He drove the car right into the garage beside the house and they walked up to the front door together. It was the first time Jonquil had seen it. She was fascinated by the large globular lantern hanging over the doorway and decorated with the picturesque Japanese script. It seemed to her to be a symbol of all Japan, for in its light the trees and the grass seemed just that much greener than real life.

  Perhaps, she thought, when I get back to Australia I shall find that Jason too was no more than a part of all the tender beauty of the country. A beauty that stirred one almost to tears.

  She turned at the doorway and confronted him.

  “Thank you for rescuing me again,” she said. “I don’t mean to be a nuisance to you.”

  He reached
up a casual hand and pulled at her fair hair.

  “Go and get yourself something to eat,” he said fiercely. “Tomorrow is always another day.”

  CHAPTER IX

  The kitchen was dark and deserted and it took Jonquil a little while to find the switch. Immediately the room was flooded with light and she breathed a quick sigh of relief. She was not normally nervous, but Edward had upset her a great deal more than she would have admitted at the time. She sat down on Nobuko’s stool and buried her face in her hands. She wouldn’t have minded quite so much, she thought, if Jason hadn’t known about it. But after all his warnings he might so easily have thought that that was the sort of thing she wanted. She didn’t mean to cry, but she could feel the silent tears against her hands and felt more miserable than ever.

  With an effort she pulled herself together sufficiently to see what food she could find. The charcoal stove had gone out, but she found an electric hot plate and a frying pan and began to fry some eggs and bacon.

  Behind her she heard Jason come in from outside and a few seconds later he joined her in the kitchen.

  “I hope you’re cooking enough for me too,” he said gaily. “I could eat an ox!”

  That started her off crying again. It was dreadful that he should have missed his evening meal because of her! The tears ran down her cheeks and into the sizzling fat, making it crackle fiercely.

  “There are lots of eggs,” she said.

  He came over to her and turned her round to face him, wiping her tears away with his fingers.

  “Poor Jonquil,” he said gently.

  “It isn’t that,” she said hastily. “It’s just that I’m tired. I often cry when I’m tired.”

  “Do you?” he asked. He took out his handkerchief and mopped her up properly. “Do you know, I think I could eat three eggs!”

  She gave him a rather shaky smile.

  “Why not?” she asked. “Sometimes in Australia when we’re rounding up the cattle I’ve seen the men eat half a dozen eggs together with a great round of steak!”

  Jason chuckled.