Linnear 01 - The Ninja (50 page)

Yukio sat back in the seat, linked her arm through his. ‘Why don’t we stay overnight in Osaka?’ she suggested and then, as if in explanation, ‘I hate trains.’

Nicholas thought about that. Perhaps it wasn’t such a bad idea. The nightlife there was bright and glossy and he needed cheering up right now.

The little bit of clandestine cloak-and-dagger that Yukio and he had concocted regarding Saigo - he had quite conveniently forgotten whose suggestion it had been - had proved unnecessary. Astoundingly, before she had even had a chance to leave for the dinner at Satsugai’s house, where she was to take a peek at Saigo’s ticket destination, a note had been delivered to Nicholas. It was in Saigo’s hand and it invited him to come to a town called Kumamoto in Kyushu for a visit during the next few weeks. No reason was given for the invitation. Like everything in Saigo’s life, this, too, was meant to be secretive.

Nicholas had read the note with a mounting sense of deflation. Irrationally, he felt as if Saigo had somehow read his mind and he could not throw off the anticipatory overtones the words set off in him, like a far-off bell tolling from some fog-shrouded hillside. “This will all be unexplored territory,’ Kansatsu had said to him, ‘if you decide it’s what you want. It is totally your decision to make, Nicholas. I cannot guide you. Only say that here you can go no further. For that you must look to the darkness - and the light.’ Squelched, his plan had been cruelly revealed as just so much juvenile fantasy and, instead of thinking about why he had been asked south, he made himself busy feeling unhappy, defeated. And to make matters worse, Yukio went to dinner at Satsugai’s anyway.

Mountains reared silently through the perspex window, blue-grey, ragged with streaks of snow running down from their summits like spilt cream. One of the three ranges of Alps - the most southerly, headed by Mount Shirane - passed like a cincture about Honshu’s waist. Where was he headed now, he wondered. Into the light or the darkness? Did it matter?

‘Especially this one,” Yukio said as if there had been no space of silence between. ‘I hate this one. All the wide seats, the chrome trim, the bigger windows don’t mean a thing to me. It’s worse on this one. Because of the silence. The silence makes me restless.’ She made a face. ‘My foot’s asleep.’ She shifted, stretching out legs on which she had been sitting. The businessman across the way rattled his paper, peals of warning.

‘All right,” Nicholas said. ‘Yes.’ There seemed no good reason to rush headlong into Kumamoto. Anyway, he’d only been to Osaka once when he was much younger and he was curious to see how much it had changed. Would he recognize it? He thought not.

He felt Yukio’s presence close and warm beside him and he wondered if it had been intelligent to take her. In truth it had not been his idea. But after making his decision to accept Saigo’s summons, it had proved quite impossible to deflect her. ‘It was you, after all,’ she had said in her most persuasively accusatory tone, ‘who got me involved in this in the first place.’ He couldn’t recall whether or not that was so. ‘It’s only fair you take me along now.’ She had flung her head back defiantly, sensually -but then, even in anger, she was superbly sensual. ‘Besides, if you don’t, I’ll only come with you on my own. Do you think you could hide from me?’ He thought not. Decidedly un-Japanese, he had said to himself while acquiescing. Did the Colonel give in to Cheong in this way?

He often trembled when she was so close to him, his muscles jumping and twitching quite beyond his control. He sometimes clandestinely watched this phenomenon as if he were an outsider. This helped stymie the feelings of terror that rose, fluttering like leathery bats, from the pit of his stomach, rising towards his head. This he knew he must not allow to happen, otherwise he felt he might go mad. She passed a hand across his flesh and thus stirred that hidden pool at the core of his being which he had, for a time, thought closed even to himself. It remained inaccessible to him.

Mr Mitsubishi, face glossy as a horse’s hide after a canter, had put his paper down, folding it lengthwise. He proceeded to destroy the pyramid beside him, opening his attach^ case, closing it again. On its spotless top he unfolded waxed paper in which was a chicken sandwich. Light lanced from his round glasses as he ate, turning him blind for moments at a time. Perhaps somewhere, Nicholas thought, he had a small bag of crisps or a bar of chocolate.

Behind him, a group of Japanese businessmen, in all respects identical to Mr Mitsubishi, rustled inside their dark three-piece suits like chrysaline insects, black bowlers on their laps, chattering animatedly about the two Jacks, Ruby and Kennedy.

One did not travel to Osaka for culture - one went to Kyoto, the country’s original capital, for that. It was commonly said -mostly by the inhabitants of Tokyo - that Osakans were money-mad businessmen, greeting each other on crowded street corners with the all-too-familiar phrase ‘Mo kari makka?’ Making any money?

Nicholas had little first-hand knowledge of such affairs yet it was true that secreted along the city’s riotous streets, like tiny pockets of the past encysted within the neon age, were numerous shrines to Fudo-miyo-o, the deity overseeing such matters as concerned the dedicated businessman. These shrines never seemed to lack for attention.

He took them to a smallish modern hotel not far from the Dotombori where they checked into separate but adjoining rooms. It being still too early for dinner, they immediately set out to see the city.

Yukio insisted on seeing Osaka Castle, that last bastion of refuge of the Toyotomi family, besieged by leyasu Tokugawa after he had already assumed the mantle of Shogun in 1603. It had been erected by Hideoshi Toyotomi - as had much of Osaka - and was completed within three years, in 1586.

‘There was a time,’ Yukio said as they strolled through the park, bordered at their backs by the modern Osakan skyline, ‘when the Lady Yodogimi was my ideal.’ The castle loomed through the lowering afternoon, seeming larger than life, a squat pagoda, stolid and boxlike. It was not, Nicholas reflected, the kind of structure that leyasu would have had built.

The crowds grew in size as they approached the castle’s outward fortifications. ‘What I thought was so … special … was how she carried on the will of Hideoshi, even after his death, just as if she were a samurai herself. She devoted herself totally to the safety of the heir.’

‘Oh.yes,’ Nicholas said. ‘Yes.’ They had reached the first of

the stonework, massive and hulking in the lengthening shadows. ‘To the detriment of the rest of the country. She and Mitsunari plotted -‘

‘They plotted - as you choose to put it - to protect the Shogun’s son. They did what honour dictated.’

Nicholas shook his head from side to side. ‘Yukio, Yodogimi was the Shogun’s mistress, not his legal wife. Her aspirations were a bit grandiose.’ He waved a hand as if in dismissal. ‘In any event, leyasu proved a far too potent foe for them.’ He stopped.

‘You talk as if Yodogimi was some kind of villain in some children’s storybook.’

‘Well, she hardly had the best interests of Japan in mind, you must admit that.’

‘Perhaps the child would have grown up to be this country’s finest leader.’

Nicholas looked past her. To their left was a small shedlike structure. The arms house. It was here that Yodogimi had brought her son and their retainers when the end had become inevitable; it was here she took her son’s life before committing seppuku. ‘That’s all rather irrelevant, don’t you think? In the years it would have taken him to come of age, without one daimyo strong enough to become Shogun and lead Japan, the country would have been plunged again into the civil war from which Hideoshi had saved it. Without leyasu’s strength, Japan would have been doomed.’

‘Still, such a brave woman. Loyal and brave.’ Yukio’s voice might have been the whisper of the wind. ‘So selfless.’ She watched the parade of tourists before the shed. ‘I admire her so much.’

Hidden, the sun slid downwards to the earth as if too heavy to sustain its own weight. The sky was like grey ribbons fluttering across an excited girl’s breast, parting at the soft advance of her lover. There was a brief flash of gold, stonework in flickering torchlight, then it was gone.

‘Come on,’ he said, taking her hand. ‘Onwards and upwards.’

Of course, the original Osaka Castle had been razed in 1615, when it had been overrun by the forces of the Tokugawa; a structure previously regarded as impregnable. This one they strode had been constructed of ferroconcrete in 1931.

Nightside. Along the Dotombori, jammed with restaurants, shops, news-stands, movie theatres, nightclubs, restless crowds and, above all, the vast spot lit signs glittering in the night, pushing the darkness away as if it held no dominion here. Colours spun, neon lights blinking on, off, on in time to the heartbeat of the shifting traffic.

Time seemed suspended here, as if in a dream these dazzling coloured lights, celebrants of power, called here to summit, would brook no outside interference even from such a basic concept.

A great replica of a crab, crimson and white, its spiny carapace gleaming, so many centred spots focused upon it the light seemed to drip from it like honey, hung over them, a temptation to enter and eat the night away.

They dined in a place of glossy emerald-green lacquered wood and thick bars of mirror-bright chrome as incandescent as neon tubing, replicating portions of their faces as they moved. In a private tatami room, shoeless, stuffing themselves with sashimi and sake - did they both appear so much older ? - she would not let him forget the castle’s awesome history or its daunting inhabitants.

‘I suppose I adore her because I am so little like her.’ She poured more rice wine with a steady hand.

‘Meaning?’

She met his gaze for a moment before her eyes slid away. ‘I’m not loyal and I’m not in the least brave. I am only Japanese.’ She gave a tiny deprecatory shrug. ‘I am a Japanese coward. No one is interested in that. A Japanese without any family: therefore without loyalty.”

‘You forget your uncle.’

‘No.’ She shook her head; her black hair gleamed in the low light. ‘I don’t forget him. Ever.’

‘He’s family.’

Her eyes flashed. ‘Must everything be spelled out for you? I hate Satsugai. How would you feel about an uncle who would not have you with him, who put you into the hands of -‘ She swallowed sake convulsively.

‘One day,’ he said, eyes on his plate, ‘you will find someone. Fall in love.’

‘No loyalty, remember?’ Her voice held a tinge of bitterness. ‘I was born without it just as I was born without the capacity to love. They are alien concepts to me.’

‘Because you think that sex is the only thing you have.’

‘The only thing that makes me happy,” she corrected.

He looked up. ‘Don’t you see that’s just because you think of yourself as worthless?’ He reached out, covered her hand with his. ‘What you really can’t conceive of is anyone caring about you - I mean you as a person, not wanting to be with you because of what you can do with your body.’

‘You’re being an idiot.” But she did not take her hand away and this time she did not look away either.

‘If that’s what you choose to call it.”

‘I do. I have no trust. Truly. Can’t you just accept me for what I am? You can’t make me over.”

‘It’s not a question of that. I want what I feel is inside you to have a chance to come out -‘

^Oh, Nicholas’ - she put her fingers against his cheek - ‘why torture yourself by thinking about some future that will not come about. Who knows? I may be dead in a year -‘

‘Shut up,’ he said quickly. ‘I don’t want to hear you talking like that, understand?’

‘Yes,’ she said, surprisingly meekly. Her head dipped as if in penance and her thick hair slid across one side of her face like a midnight waterfall. She was the model Japanese wife bowing before the inevitable authority of her husband’s words.

‘And anyway, who says you’re not brave?’ He wasn’t used to this. He wanted desperately to lean over the table and kiss her half-open shadowed lips, but lacked the nerve. ‘Just think of what you’ve been through, growing up with that couple. That took a lot of strength.’

‘You think so?’ A little girl now.

The waitress rustled in and knelt by the side of the low table, delivering more food and drink. Nicholas watched her leave as she slipped on her geta at the threshold.

‘I just said so,’ he whispered fiercely. ‘What’s the matter with you?’

‘I don’t know.’ Dark eyes on the tabletop. ‘I don’t know.’ He filled her porcelain sake cup, white and tiny.

They went put walking, she chattering on animatedly as if nothing untoward had happened, clutching his arm, aimlessly drifting from topic to topic.

Stealing the dark, hiding it in their side pockets as they filtered through the honky-tonk nightlife, through swirling colours and blaring noise. The air smelt of incense and petrol fumes, the walls of the evening brilliant with the unrelenting marquees here in the city of merchants, erected almost overnight, this new class universally despised by the noble samurai and the lowly peasant alike.

An enormous arcade of pinball wizards they passed up after staring for long moments like the most ignorant of country bumpkins and, farther along, the electronicized insistency of American rock V roll, a quicksilver pulse projecting from a music store’s loudspeaker. The wail of harmonized black voices drenched by a wave of strings and the backbeat, always the backbeat like a burnished path guiding you through the melodies. They dance before the lighted window on which is taped a black and white publicity photo, streaked by reflected light: John, Paul, George, Ringo. Close your eyes and I’ll kiss you/ Tomorrow I’ll miss you/Remember I’ll always be true … Around and around. And then while I’m away/I’ll write home every day … Red and green and yellow neon bars, swinging her from one to the other; a rock ‘n’ roll fan overnight. And I’ll send all my loving to you…

‘Who are they?’ says Yukio, slightly out of breath.

‘The Beatles,’ says the shopkeeper. ‘A new band from England.’

And Nicholas buys her the record, imported and exorbitant.