One Morning Like a Bird (26 page)

    ‘Now, taking heads,’ he says, ‘that needs a bit of skill. Use too much force and you’ll make a mess of it, have them running all over the place like a chicken. Just keep it nice and calm, get the prisoner to kneel in front of you, pour a little water both sides of your blade, swish it off, lift the blade high, breathe out, breathe in  . . . let it fall. Do it properly, you hardly feel the contact. Head pops off. Two big fountains of blood. Body tumbles into a hole. You wipe your blade, try not to look too pleased with yourself. Officers have the best swords, of course. Old family swords, or ones they’ve been given as graduation presents. Beautiful, some of them. They don’t get knocked out of shape like an NCO’s blade. You can keep chopping for as long as you’ve got strength in your arms. I knew a pair of captains, decent sorts really, family men, who had a competition to see how many heads they could take in an hour. When they’d finished, they had themselves photographed standing by a mound of Chink heads, like it was some office golf tournament. You’ve heard of the “Three Alls”, Takano? Seize all, burn all, kill all. That’s the army’s motto. Seize all, burn all, kill all. And don’t tell me it makes any difference who you were before – if you were educated or you could hardly write your own name. The educated ones can be the worst, like when I was up in Shunsi Province. What a shit-hole that is. Me and Yasumizo escorting a pair of Chinks to the hospital. No idea who they were. Big one might have been a communist, had that look about him. The other was probably just some peasant they pulled off the fields to make up the numbers. Anyway, we took them along to the hospital and when we got there they said we were in the wrong place. Have to go to the school next door, they said. Gave us a funny look. Well, we went over there. Just an ordinary middle school but they’d set up a kind of operating theatre in one of the classrooms with a sign on the door that said, “Training”. The hospital director was there, a smug bastard called Nishimura, and a colonel from the medical service, and about six doctors, just arrived from the home islands by the look of them, all hoping to impress the brass. Anyway, we handed over our prisoners. The big Chink lay down on the bed without any trouble, but the other, the little one, he starts crying at the top of his lungs. “Ai-ai-ai-ai!” One orderly was pulling him, another pushing, but he was stronger than he looked and he knew what was coming. In the end it was the nurse who got him on the trolley. She could speak a few words of Chinese, and though she was only young she talked to him like she was his mama, patted his hand, nodded and smiled at him right until the moment one of the doctors rolled him over and gave him a jab in the spine. Tell you the truth, I’d have been happy to go then, have a smoke outside, but when you’re a soldier no one cares what you want. You’re not even a human being any more. Just a tool. Pick up, put down, throw away. So we stayed, me and Yasumizo, in a corner of the classroom, scruffs from the infantry. “Now, then, gentlemen,” says the colonel, “shall we start with the appendix?” I remember that.
Shall we start with the appendix
? Like he was ordering something at a restaurant. Well, those doctors must have been hungry ’cause they jumped to it. Ever seen an appendix? Doesn’t look like much. Sort of thing you might use for fishing bait. Then they really got busy. Cut off the little peasant’s arms, made a hole in the big Chink’s throat. They were all chatting away, and when one of them made a mistake, got his nice white coat splashed, they all looked at each other and laughed. They cut off the Chinks’ balls. I don’t know what for. Science, I suppose. At the end of it the little peasant was good and dead but the other one was still breathing, a sort of “heh, heh, heh” noise. The colonel ordered one of the doctors to inject air into his heart but that didn’t work so two of them tried to strangle him with a piece of string. I couldn’t understand why they didn’t just cut off his head. They’d cut off everything else and it wasn’t like they didn’t have enough knives in there. Then this old non-com medic, you know the type, bows and says, “Honourable doctors, if you inject him with anaesthesia, he’ll die.” So they do it and he dies and they all go off to wash their hands and have a drink while me and Yasumizo put what’s left of our prisoners into a pit in the old playground. A big moon that night. The pit was as big as your garden. Stank like a tanning factory  . . .’

    From between his fingers the long-since-extinguished cigarette tumbles to the mat. He whispers something, some unintelligible protest, then at last falls silent, his weight pressing more and more heavily against Yuji’s shoulder. After a minute the door slides open. The women come in. They have the bedding with them and swiftly, speechlessly, as though it has now a familiar routine, they lift the sleeping man and lie him in it. The old woman starts to undress him. Yuji follows Kyoko out of the room. She comes with him as far as the street gate. ‘He’s ill,’ she says in a whisper. ‘The wound keeps opening. Those things  . . . Please, pay no attention.’

    ‘You’ve heard them?’

    ‘He’s ill,’ she says. ‘And when he drinks  . . .’

    ‘You think they’re not true?’

    ‘True?’

    ‘The stories?’

    She shakes her head. ‘I have to go in,’ she says. ‘I have to go in now.’

    ‘You’ll be needing this,’ he says, taking the crutch from where Otaki has left it propped against the gate. He hands it to her as tenderly as he can, as though it was a spray of plum blossom. She thanks him, clutches it across her breasts, and scurries inside.

14

‘What did he want?’ asks Father, coming from his room and stopping Yuji at the top of the stairs the following morning.

    ‘I don’t know,’ says Yuji. ‘He was drunk.’

    ‘I see,’ says Father, ‘Hmm.’

    Yuji waits. Is that it? Can he go? He does not want to repeat what he has heard, to say (standing in the morning shadows at the top of the stairs) that their neighbour is an expert in decapitation, or that Japanese doctors in China behave like the criminally insane. Whatever Kyoko might wish to think he is sure the stories are true. Saburo hasn’t the imagination to invent such things.

    ‘He’s brought it back with him,’ says Father.

    ‘What?’

    ‘The war.’

    ‘Yes.’

    ‘I pity him.’

    ‘Yes.’

    ‘I never liked him, but even so.’

    ‘Yes, even so.’

    ‘To lose both parents while still a child. A hard beginning.’

    ‘When you were in the army, Father  . . .’

    ‘It was 1913. There was no war.’

    ‘I know. But what did you do?’

    ‘Tried not to die of boredom.’

    ‘That’s all?’

    ‘Studied when I could. Played a lot of
shogi
.’

    ‘It wasn’t so bad, then?’

    ‘Stay on the right side of Kushida, Yuji. I’ll do what I can.’

    ‘Thank you.’

    ‘Ishihara’s group. Can they help you? I imagine they have better connections than I do. Now, at least.’

    ‘You would approve of me accepting their help?’

    Father starts down the stairs. ‘I might,’ he says over his shoulder, ‘prefer it to having you howl in the street at night. Your mother certainly would.’

15

The money from Hideo Makiyama has dwindled to a handful of small change. The screenplay, which one day might bring him a hundred yen or more, is just a single sheet of paper with a single unfilmable scene about a boy flying to the heart of the sun. The last handout from Grandfather went on new boots for the coming winter. As for the banknotes Uncle Kensuke pressed into his hand at the station, he cannot account for them at all. Books? Beer?

    It is time to see old Horikawa again, to sit at the window, look at trains and drink coffee. After his efforts to write ‘something exalted, something delirious’ he should have no difficulty scratching a few lines in praise of shipping companies or toothpaste. He sets off for Hibaya, cool early October sunshine on the back of his neck, but when he reaches the building and walks up the broken wax tiling of the stairs, the office door is shut and locked. There is no sign on it, no ‘Back in an hour’ or ‘Closed for reasons of ill health’. He goes down to the repair shop, calls a greeting, steps inside. The shop is a nest, a densely packed hive of bicycles – new, old, wheels on, wheels off. They even hang from the ceiling, clusters of them suspended from hooks. He calls again, gets no reply. The concrete floor is dotted with flowers of oil. Behind a curtain at the back of the shop, an infant is wailing, methodically. He goes back upstairs, writes a note on a scrap of paper and slips it under the door, then, with nothing better to do, he eats under the railway line, an elbow-to-elbow place where every time a train rumbles overhead the surface of his broth breaks into delicate ripples.

    After eating (and it’s true what Kushida said, his appetite is better these days, he
is
healthier, so much so he has once or twice seriously considered taking up smoking), he walks to the park and squats on a grass bank beneath a maple tree to read the paper. The delegation who signed the pact in Berlin have arrived home. Prince Konoe and senior members of the government have expressed their gratitude. The Fifth Division has entered Hanoi. The people there have welcomed them as elder brothers, though in the photographs the people are just shapes in the margin, out of focus. The back page of the paper shows a woman modelling the new monpe trousers at the Matsuya department store. The trousers are a synthesis of fashion and the national will. They are elegant, perfectly modest, but leave the legs free for the physical labour all sections of society must now be prepared to take part in  . . .

    He folds the paper, discards it at the first bench he passes, and returns to the building. The office is still locked, and now, downstairs, the steel grille of the repair shop is shut and chained. Is there some local holiday? A neighbourhood
kami
of good profits, a Buddha of low taxes to be venerated? He looks at his watch. Almost half past three. On Tuesday afternoons the Montparnasse in Asakusa shows half-price double-bills of British, French or American films. If he can get there in time, then the day will not have been wasted. He scribbles another note to Horikawa, hurries to the stop opposite the Imperial Theatre, takes a cross-town bus to the Kannon Temple, then jogs the 500 yards to the cinema.

    ‘Make the most of it,’ says Mr Suzuki, the manager of the Montparnasse, sitting in his white suit in the ticket booth. ‘From now on I’m just showing
jidaigeki
pictures. Noble warriors, women with no eyebrows, lovely costumes  . . .’

    ‘Haven’t you said that before?’ asks Yuji, wheezing from his run, and looking past the manager’s head at the posters for
Stagecoach
and
Pépé le Moko
.

    ‘I mean it,’ says the manager, snipping Yuji’s ticket from the roll. ‘This foreign stuff will get me shut down. Or worse. The next time you see me I’ll have a samourai topknot. You’ll think I’m one of the Forty-seven Ronin.’

    In the little auditorium thirty, perhaps forty customers are waiting on seats of frayed green plush. A few couples, but mostly men on their own, amateurs of cinema – some in uniform – who find at the Montparnasse what the sushi
tsu
find at Kawashima’s. Yuji takes a seat at the end of a row halfway back. There is a short wait while Suzuki moves from the ticket booth to the projection room (they can hear his footsteps, his weary tread on the stairs), then the newsreel begins – trumpets, eagles, a spinning globe. They stand for the Emperor, sit again, polish glasses, light cigarettes, and bend towards the screen, lean like divers at the edge of a glittering pool.

    Three hours later, sated, they file outside, blinking in the blue and gold of early evening. Yuji loiters at the kerb, his atoms dispersed between the deserts of New Mexico and the labyrinth of the Kasbah. He is staring, with vacant intensity, at a board outside the confectionary shop on the other side of the narrow street. There is a painting on the board of the seasonal delicacy ‘autumn comes to the treetops’, and he is wondering what Ringo Kid – a man who gallops through treeless landscapes – might make of such a delicacy (would he buy some for a sweetheart?), when a customer, a woman, a slight figure in a blue and white kimono, comes out of the shop and stops directly opposite him.

    ‘Mr Takano?’

    ‘Mrs Yamaguchi!’

    ‘What a surprise to see you here.’

    Students on bicycles glide between them, then two taxis full of young geishas,
shamisen
cases on their laps. He crosses the street. She waits for him, neat as a doll, in her hands a box of sweets wrapped in paper decorated with autumn flowers – dahlias, amaranths.