Dreaming Spies (19 page)

For the next two days, we would walk for a time, sooner or later (usually sooner) to be offered a ride. Astounded farmers, curious rickshawmen, and (twice) wealthy owners of motorcars could not bear to pass us
up. During the walking periods, we were rarely without an entourage of schoolboys, with one or two bicycles ticking along as the group practised their careful English. On several occasions we encountered other white-clothed pilgrims, but even if they were going in the same direction, they were too put off by our appearance to join forces.

Our meals were from wayside stalls and cafes, bowls of
udon
or
soba
noodles, breads fresh from the recessed pots they were cooked in, skewers of mysterious meat-like substances, and endless thimblefuls of tea. As night approached, we began to watch for a likely ryokan or lacking that, a yadoya. Both times we were fortunate, to find a ryokan owner who, seeing two pilgrims, offered us bed, bath, and dinner at a price we could afford. No more fleas. We both craved beef (a most non-Buddhistic desire) but having been in the country for a week now, the earlier frank hunger was subsiding to a faint wistfulness, usually when confronted by another plate of dried fish and soya sauce. Our evening entertainment consisted of sitting with our feet around the room’s fire-pit while Holmes smoked a last pipe, and then unconsciousness.

Not once did I dream—although in the wee hours of the second night I woke standing bolt upright in a pitch-black room, primed to run, heart racing for no discernible reason. Fortunately, Holmes broke my panic by clearing his throat: Holmes; bed: Japan.

“Sorry,” I said. “I must have had a nightmare,” although I could remember nothing of the sort.

Bedclothes shifted. After the sound of a hand fumbling against the mats, our small torch went on, revealing that I had got halfway to the door before waking. I turned back towards the lumpy
futon
.

“It was probably the earthquake,” he said.

I froze. “Earthquake.” After a moment, I pushed down the nonsensical desire to run and put myself back between the bedclothes. An earthquake: I should have expected one, spending any time at all in this volatile island country. I just …

“I don’t like earthquakes,” I admitted.

In the morning, we woke as usual to the rhythmic pounding of rice
being hulled and the coughs and grumbles of rousing travellers on the other side of the paper. Tea came, a tiny sum was paid, thanks given and received. Then, geta back on our feet and straw hats on our heads, we resume our staffs and hit the road, watching for a likely source of breakfast along the way.

That was the pattern (less the earthquakes) for our pilgrim time in Japan: four days on an unlikely adventure. We walked until our feet ached, the clatter of our geta gradually becoming as brisk and sure as all the geta around us. We hunkered on our heels, we slurped pale tea at roadside tea-houses, we sat out rainstorms or plodded, shoulders hunched and feet sodden, beneath our oiled-paper sheets. I do not think I had a single entirely kosher meal—then, or the whole time we were in Japan—save those made up of nothing but rice and tea. But the rabbis do not demand starvation of the traveller, and I found I actually enjoyed eels, if I didn’t think about it too much.

Moving intimately among the people, on foot and on their common forms of transport, we absorbed the rhythm of their lives and the structure of this tight and efficient society. And its beauty: the simple elegance of a run-down shed; the meditative quality of a water wheel turning a stream’s power into clean rice.

Along one stretch of quiet road, I walked into an adjoining grove of timber bamboo. The smooth green trunks thrusting from the mossy soil were no bigger around than my arm, yet the lacy tops had to be sixty feet over my head. All parts of the giant grass flexed with the slightest breeze, yet it would take a typhoon to flatten them.

As I stood mesmerised by the lacy green motion, the rich odour of earth, the endless susurration of the flat leaves brushing the sky, it came to me that this country embodied the Chinese doctrine of paradox: the apparently weak prevails over the overtly strong; soft and yielding will always overcome hard and rigid.

Time and again, our senses had been jarred by the hard intrusion of the West: a kimono-clad man wearing a bowler; corrugated roofing on a two-hundred-year-old wooden structure; the fizzy lemonade served
with our perfectly grilled fish the day before. But even then, a vine had already begun to overgrow the metal roof, and the cloying drink had been transformed by a sprig of some unassuming herb.

On the one hand, traditional Japanese life appeared to be under threat from the habits of the West; on the other, I would no longer be willing to bet on the outcome. When one considered this country’s willingness to embrace the foreign (ironic, considering its two centuries of deliberate isolation), one had also to take into account the innate industry of every citizen, from the small child gathering sticks for the fire to the ancient grandfather shooing away the birds from a fresh-planted rice paddy. There seemed to be no loungers in the land. No beggars. Even pilgrims like us were regarded as being hard at work on our prayers.

Flexibility added to deep roots, and the willingness to work: I did not think Japan would remain on the edge of the world for long.

The days might have been easier had our Japanese been a touch more fluent and we had been able to read, rather than guess at the meanings of signs. However, this was an educated land: if there was no eager schoolboy to hand, we needed only hold out our piece of paper to be escorted down the road in the right direction. Bows came more naturally now, as did the slurping of our food, the scrubbing of our backs in public, and the art of sitting on our heels. I caught sight of my face in a looking-glass tacked up outside a
benjo
—the toilets—and for an instant, I gaped at the woman with the weird, pale eyes.

Mojiro-joku, the place we were headed—we lacked an address, but then, Japan did not seem to have actual addresses—was a village in the hills, formerly a station on the Kisokaido road. In the days of the Shoguns, a traveller would have been guaranteed good lodging and a ready supply of bearers and horses, every three or four miles along the way. Since 1911, when the train was laid through the valley, things would have changed. As we climbed the Kiso Valley, we saw shuttered shops and ryokans in need of repair, as the cold breeze of modernisation blew the skirts of the shopkeepers’ kimonos.

Wednesday night, our last on the road, we scrubbed and soaked with
extra care, and gave our clothes over to be cleaned. In the morning, we bought new tabi, trimmed our fingernails, restored our rucksacks to order. Holmes submitted to a shave that left him smooth as a baby. When we set off up the road for the last time, we were remarkably presentable.

The rainstorm hit us at noon, pounding from above, throwing mud from below. We crammed into an inadequate space beneath a fallen tree and cowered under our oiled-paper sheets, watching the sky try its best to wash the Kiso Valley into the sea. Eventually it slowed. We crept out, gazing ruefully down at our formerly white garments. Even Holmes, despite his cat-like ability to avoid muss, was comprehensively spattered.

“I did not know that Japan went in for mud-baths as well,” I said.

“Perhaps we should have kept the new tabi until the last minute.”

“Do you suppose there’s an inn nearby?”

“Not one that will permit us to arrive in the village precisely at three.”

“Well, at least there is plenty of water to wash in.”

The now-raging creek was nearly as brown as our garments, but we followed a smaller stream back a distance, and found a spring with a calm pool of relatively clean water.

And that is where the bears discovered us.

As I rubbed at the mud under my nails, I studied my bedraggled tabi, wondering if an honest rinse would make them any more uncomfortable. I turned to address the question to Holmes—and found myself face to face with a bear.

I admit it: I screamed. Even though I had heard they were herbivorous, even though the short-sighted creature looked more puzzled than aggressive, the noise I made could only be called a scream. I turned to flee, and a bar on the geta broke away, shooting me down the stream-bank like a greased log. I banged my backside, wrenched my ankle, and ended up with mud in more orifices than I’d realised I had.

As I sat there, dripping brown and watching the tail ends of mother bear and cub rapidly crash into the undergrowth, I began to laugh. So much for impressing Miss Sato with my supreme competence.

I was limping rather badly when we trailed into the village, at 2:59 in the afternoon. News of our progress had clearly preceded our persons, for as we walked along, people gathered in shop doors and windows to watch us pass. I gingerly fished the weathered page from my furoshiki, but no one seemed to need it, simply waved us on through the village.

As the shops thinned and gardens peeped between the houses, we neared what could only be a ryokan. Ancient wood, well-maintained thatch, raked gravel, and a small and perfectly spontaneous garden on either side of the entrance. Everything—thatch, gate, stones, tree bark—might have been manicured at dawn. If I’d been told that the gardener had chosen the precise arrangement of cherry blossoms drifting across the moss, I’d not have doubted it for a moment.

Beside the entranceway, half-concealed by the world’s most perfect green bush, emerging from a bed of flawless green moss, was a stone about thirty inches tall. Its surface was blotched with lichen, and as one studied it, the lumps and indentations made it look remarkably like a crouched monkey. A shaggy patch of moss even gave the suggestion of a head, twisted into a sly grin.

Inside the gate was the usual welcoming committee in bright kimonos. I had to give them full points: they stifled their natural reaction to finding a mud-clotted Golem on their doorstep.

I pulled a wry face at the neatly-arrayed slippers, then shook my head, saying in Japanese, “Bath first,
neh
?”

A wave of relief swept through the committee. One of them performed the inimitable quick step-and-turn that swaps indoor shoes for outer, gave me a quick bow, and scurried along beside the high wooden wall to a gate. We startled a pair of gardeners—a tall man whose left hand was a mass of scar tissue and his short, middle-aged, half-lame assistant—who broke off their contemplation of a large rock hanging from a sling to gape at this mud-caked Western female. I gave them a nod, then hurried after the maid.

As with most ryokans, the inn was a series of pavilions linked by
roofed-over walkways. This design meant that if fires were spilled by a tremor, there was a chance the whole place wouldn’t burn—a floor plan used even by inns whose baths were naturally heated, as was the case with this one.

The washroom attendant scoured furiously away, toe to scalp, using many rinsing buckets before I was permitted to limp across the room and sink into the steaming water. By this point in the régime, I no longer took much note of other women, even before removing my spectacles. And on those occasions when men were present, I was learning the trick of selective blindness. This time, I was alone in the broad wooden tub. I closed my eyes and submitted to the blissful heat. The room was still, the only sound a musical drip of water and the murmur of distant voices. Somewhere, a rooster crowed. The day’s tensions began to give way. The bear; the fall; the freezing water and disgusting muck: going, going …

I opened my eyes to find Haruki-san kneeling at the side of the bath, hands together in the lap of her simple indigo-patterned kimono. I hadn’t heard so much as a whisper of cloth.

“You’ll have to show me how you do that,” I said.

“What is that, Mary-san?”

I just shook my head. “It’s good to see you, Haruki-san. Do you need me to get out?”

“My father wishes to know if you and Holmes-san would like something to eat.”

I slid off the bath’s low seat to submerge in the water, then came up again, running my hands back over my hair. “I’m sure Holmes is starving. I’ll come now.”

“I regret curtailing your bath, but later there will be … another opportunity.”

I looked at her sharply, caught by an odd depth in the statement, but I said nothing, merely worked my way up into heavy air and out of the bath. The attendant came forward with a tiny towel, but Haruki-san was looking at my ankle.

“You are hurt.”

“Just a sprain. One of your local bears took me by surprise.”

She blinked, but merely addressed the attendant, who trotted from the room, returning with a low stool and a bundle of cloth strips. I sat. Haruki-san knelt and took my ankle in her hands, weaving the bandage into a support around the joint.

When she had tucked in the ends, I stood, testing it gingerly, then with more confidence. “You’ve done that before,” I remarked.

“A few times.”

“You could get a job in the best sports club in London,” I said. “Thank you.”

She stepped back with a bow, and allowed the woman to finish wrapping me up in a simple
yukata
of the same design as Haruki-san’s. There wasn’t much the woman could do about my cropped hair, and I would not permit her to apply any of her powders and paints, but when I followed the maid along the walkway to our room, I looked better than I had for quite some time. I felt positively glowing.