One Morning Like a Bird (20 page)

    ‘This must be worth something,’ says Yuji, nodding to the well-stocked shelves, the bottles and boxes, many with their labels printed in German or English.

    ‘Shall we go into business together?’ asks the nurse, pulling the steel door shut behind them and double-locking it with a key from the bunch she carries in the pocket of her apron.

    On the corridor, even in the middle of the morning, the overhead lights are burning as though shadow was a kind of pollution, something that might get into a wound. They pass Kushida’s office. The door is open. ‘Sensei?’ coos the nurse, tapping softly on the wood, but there is no reply. On the desk under the window, a large bell jar is striped with the sunlight that falls through the slats of the venetian blind. Inside the jar, hanging in a colourless fluid, is an object about the size of one of the carp in Kyoko’s pond. Yuji has a glimpse of an eye, immaculately shut, the splayed fingers of a miniature hand, a loosely flexed knee. ‘Everyone,’ says the nurse, ushering Yuji to the top of the stairs, ‘must have a pastime, no?’

He leaves the canisters outside Mother’s door, leaves his bicycle in the front garden, and walks to the tram-stop to catch a number 7 to Iidabashi. From there he crosses the main road, and keeping to the shadow side, the narrow strip of cool at the pavement’s inner edge, enters Kagurazaka, a High City district, one of the old pleasure quarters, but now long since left behind by the steady westward flow of money and fashion.

    Distracted by the shimmering blue line between sun and shade, he walks straight past the turning Taro spoke of and has to double-back until he finds it, an alley lined with boarding houses, Meiji or early Taisho firetraps, the way between them so narrow the little front gardens, growing wild in so much rain, have reached across to each other, tendril twisting round the tip of tendril.

    Ahead of him, two arrow-headed dogs are sleeping in the dust but there is, at first, no sign of the residents, the inhabitants of these shuttered, blank, blind old buildings. Only when he enters the alley does he begin to see them, soft human forms squatting or lying wherever the shade is deepest. Do they watch him as he passes? He cannot tell, but halfway down the alley he becomes aware of light feet following him and he turns to find a girl of eight or ten, a sleeping infant on her back, some little brother or sister tied to her with a length of patterned cloth, the weight of it making her stoop like an old woman carrying firewood. She asks if he is lost. He tells her he is looking for his friend. ‘That’s good,’ she says, she knows everyone in the alley, she even knows the names of all the cats and dogs. He gives her Junzo’s name. ‘He’s not here,’ she says, because she has never heard of him, but when Yuji describes him she nods. ‘He doesn’t have a name yet,’ she says, ‘He hasn’t been here long enough.’ She takes his hand and guides him to a house a degree more decrepit, more hopeless than the others. It is the house of an uncle of hers, she says, a sort of uncle. Inside, Yuji cannot see at all. He shuffles behind her, following the pull of her bony hand, the curdled-milk smell of the infant. They climb a tightly turning staircase. Now and then some partly open shutter or torn screen suddenly reveals the elaborate makeshift of the house’s inner structure, and as they ascend, their heads press against a damp and thickening heat as if they are climbing into the base of a storm cloud.

    At the top of the house, the girl sings out a greeting and slides open the tattered door. It is the attic room (what does one
pay
for such a room?), a space that can never have been intended for human habitation, its ceiling nothing but the steeply raked beams and tiles of the roof. Light comes from a hole you would have to lie on your belly to look through. There is a smell of birds, bird droppings, sour human sweat.

    ‘He must have gone out,’ says the girl. And then, as though the house, the whole alley, was truly another country, she adds, ‘You have made a journey for nothing.’

    On the wooden boards is an old but neatly rolled mattress, and next to it a shoulder bag and four or five books –
The Science of Logic Vol. IV
, a book of campcraft for boys, a Sino-Japanese dictionary. There is also a small picture frame, face down. On the girl’s back, the infant whimpers in its sleep. The girl whispers to it, a language all their own, then asks Yuji if he wants some tea. Cold barley? Salty cherry blossom? If he wants some, she will run and fetch it. He shakes his head. He cannot possibly wait here. Alone in this room it would steal into him; he would breathe it in like bad luck. He brushes a mosquito from his cheek. He would like to leave something, some evidence of his having been there, and he rummages in his pockets but can find nothing more personal, more suitable, than the propelling pencil he carries for making notes (those insights and observations that have no purpose to them any more). He stretches into the room, places the pencil on top of the books, then follows the girl down, each of them brushing the stairwell wall with their fingers. In the alley, he gives her a coin. She puts it in a fold of the sash round her waist. ‘He has to be fed now,’ she says. ‘Don’t you think he’s like a big insect?’

    Next morning, reluctant to be there again, in that heat, that stink, he finds excuses to put off his return. He has the Ishihara piece to revise, and now that he knows where Junzo is staying, has been to the alley, the room, what urgency is there? If Junzo wants a taste of squalor, if he is ‘hardening’ himself, then that is up to Junzo. It is not
his
responsibility to drag him home. Taro will take care of it, or Mr Miyazaki, or even Mrs Miyazaki, who, in her own way, is evidently not without resources. He stays busy, lets the day pass, but on the second day, stricken with shame, he makes up a parcel – a tin of Mosquiton, a wooden-handled French-made clasp-knife, his much-prized, much-scribbled-into copy of Rimbaud’s early poems (including ‘The Open Road’ – ‘A week of walking has torn my boots to shreds’), and on the third morning he sets out again for the alley. He looks for the girl, then, not finding her, finds the house and goes up on his own. The attic door is open, the rolled mattress is there, but the books, the bag, the picture frame have gone. He comes back down. As he opens the screen to the verandah a man in a crumpled
yukata
, a lacework of pale scars around his eyes, shuffles from the shadows and bids Yuji good morning.

    ‘Good morning,’ says Yuji.

    ‘You were looking for someone?’ asks the man, not recognising Yuji’s voice.

    ‘The one who was in the attic,’ says Yuji.

    The man grunts, straightens his back, puts his stick across his shoulder. He swings an arm, marches on the spot in sandals soled with pieces of motorcycle tyre. ‘I was an army man myself,’ he calls, as Yuji, the parcel under his arm, walks away between the light and darker blues of morning glory. ‘How do you think I lost these, eh?’ – a finger jabbing towards his eyes, the broken stare – ‘Sitting at home minding my own business?’

7

On the dance floor of the Don Juan – a floor at this mid-afternoon hour otherwise deserted – Dick Amazawa’s mistress, Fumi Kihara, is dancing alone to the music of a gramophone. At the edge of the floor, in the same yellow-striped jacket he was wearing in the Azabu Hills, Amazawa is conducting the music with a matchstick the length and thickness of his arm. The match is a prop from a short film he has just completed, a Home Ministry commission in which – so he has just explained to Yuji – Fumi plays a bored young woman about to light a cigarette when a silver-haired gentleman in civil defence uniform leans through the window to ask, ‘Do you need that more than he does?’ At this, the camera spins to a trench – in fact, the corner lot of a studio in the suburbs – where a handsome sapper under heavy fire is searching frantically for a match to light the fuse of his bomb.

    ‘It’s simple,’ says Amazawa, now holding the match like a
kendo
sword and softly tapping the top of Yuji’s head, ‘but simple takes some thinking about.’

    Stretched the length of the bench opposite, Hideo Makiyama is reading Yuji’s article. Now and then he clucks, pulls out a pen from the breast pocket of his shirt, and puts a line through a word or sometimes, imperiously – the movement setting Yuji’s teeth on edge – through an entire sentence. The white light of the Ginza stabs the bar’s permanent midnight each time a customer pushes through the swing doors. Waitresses from the early shift are coming down the stairs, while those for the late shift go up with their bags and parasols to the dressing room on the first floor. Yuji watches for the girl who poured for him at the House of Falling Leaves but does not see her. Nor does he see her friend, the girl with the ribbons he left waiting for him in the corridor.

    ‘Too academic,’ drawls Makiyama, sitting up and shuffling the sheets of paper together. ‘Too much showing off. But other than that, not bad  . . . not bad at all.’

    ‘You think it will be suitable?’

    ‘With some tidying up.’

    ‘You’ll be able to place it, then? In
Young Japan
?’

    ‘I said so, didn’t I? They’re running a special on the key men of the new era, generals, politicians, sportsmen, writers. Ishihara will have three or four pages to himself. Lots of pictures, too, of course. Author at home, author at the Front, author contemplating the evening sky.’

    ‘So it will come out?’

    ‘In two weeks.’

    ‘So soon?’

    ‘They’ve been waiting for you.’

    ‘If I had realised.’

    ‘I told them not to be concerned.’

    ‘I’m grateful for your confidence.’

    ‘I look inside people,’ says Makiyama, yawning and stretching himself on the bench again. ‘I looked inside you.’

    ‘Don’t forget to pay him,’ says Amazawa. ‘And if you like it so much, shouldn’t he have something extra?’

    Still prone, Makiyama peels three ten-yen notes from a roll carried casually in a trouser pocket, then, after a second’s teasing, peels off a fourth. ‘Didn’t you,’ he says to Amazawa, ‘have something you wanted to say to him? Some proposition?’

    ‘A proposition? Yes.’ He looks at Yuji with small bloodshot eyes, then hurriedly eats something out of the palm of his hand, swallowing it with a mouthful of beer. ‘Ever tried writing a screenplay?’

    Yuji shakes his head.

    ‘There’s not much to it.’

    ‘No?’

    ‘It’s not really like writing a story. More like the blueprint for a machine.’

    ‘I see.’

    ‘You could try writing something for the Unit. You know the sort of thing.’

    ‘Hmm. I wonder  . . .’

    ‘It was
his
idea.’

    ‘Mr Makiyama’s?’

    ‘Ishihara, of course. He said he had spoken freely to you. That you understood.’

    ‘A vision of the future, perhaps?’

    ‘Perhaps.’

    ‘Or like the film at General Sugiyama’s?’

    ‘Don’t speak of that in here.’

    ‘I’m sorry.’

    ‘No one is ready for that yet.’

    ‘I’m sorry.’

    ‘You’ve read the Italian futurists? Marinetti, Balla?’

    ‘I’ve heard of them  . . .’

    ‘Something exalted, something delirious  . . .’

    ‘I could try, I suppose.’

    ‘By the way,’ says Makiyama, ‘you may find you have to break your connection with certain people.’

    ‘You think so?’

    ‘The front line,’ says Amazawa, pressing the head of the match against Yuji’s chest, ‘runs through every heart.’

    ‘I hadn’t thought of it like that.’

    ‘You can have that if you want,’ says Amazawa. ‘The front-line line. I’m giving it to you.’

    ‘Thank you.’

    Amazawa and Makiyama look at each other. They start to giggle, though to Yuji, Amazawa seems close to tears as if his emotions had a life of their own and cycled mechanically through their repertoire with little regard for what he was doing or thinking.

    ‘You want to dance with her?’

    ‘With  . . . ?’

    ‘With her.’ He points the match at Fumi.