The river bus approached its dock. Somehow twenty minutes had passed in a second. As the boat slowed to a muffled impact, people in the cabin gathered their packages and children and rose from their seats. Harry knew he couldn’t stay on for a third ride; the policeman already gestured with his book for Harry to rise and join the other passengers disembarking. When he pushed Harry, the gun almost dropped from Harry’s belt. Instead, the policeman’s book fell on the deck, open to a print of two lovers, the woman’s legs elevated to display the nest of her sex and the darkened, swollen length of his. The boat rocked gently. The bow lamp swung from side to side. The policeman snatched up the book and shouted, “This is art.”
As if Harry were a man to disagree.
15
KATO HAD AFFECTIONATELY called Harry his “ape,” his “imp,” his “fearless boy”; he couldn’t dump Harry over one mistake. The trick, Harry thought, was to find Kato, plead his case and then wheedle his way back into Kato’s good graces. Never mind that a humid day had led to a night of heavy rain. Harry darted from dripping eave to dripping eave on his way to the music hall.
The Folies was shut, front doors and back. Harry went around to the bright marquees of the Rokku and, drenched by the rain, ran from movie house to movie house, squandering money on tickets and breathlessly running up and down aisles in search of Kato. There was no sight of him there or in the food stalls along the street, and when the movie marquees went dark, the entire Rokku plunged into black. Harry would have tried finding Oharu, but he realized that he didn’t know where she lived. Off the Rokku, the entire city was snuffing lamps and drawing windows shut. The last street vendors retreated with the clatter of clogs on stone, the last red lanterns of the taverns died. At midnight anyone caught on the street without a good excuse would be taken to a police box. Uncle Orin would be summoned, there would be a scene. Yet Harry would not give up. He was sure that Kato had not gone home because the artist had brought a sketchpad to the music hall.
Gone where? Harry splashed to the brothels Kato favored, peeking in doors for the sight of his clogs or umbrella, but Kato had disappeared. Harry’s clothes were a wet second skin. He trudged across the Asakusa temple and through the garden to the relative shelter of the temple gate. Looking up at the lantern of the gate, he remembered views of the same giant lantern in a series of Kato’s prints, with the same row of souvenir shops leading to the same broad avenue. A View from the Green House, the prints had said. Usually that sort of picture included a veranda with courtesans or geishas. These didn’t. Harry couldn’t think of a brothel that had exactly such a view. For lack of any other idea, he set off to find what house did.
He moved in the shadows, watching for rickshaws or the shuttered lanterns of police until he reached a two-story house that seemed shut tight. It was sheathed in copper tiles green as dragon scales and Chinese eaves curled like tails. A shimmer of water over tiles gave the house the illusion of shifting life. On either side, an umbrella store and a bicycle repair shop appeared to cringe at the proximity of such a fearsome neighbor. The upper windows were closed to the rain. On the front doors and gate were padlocks the size of horseshoes, and the front window was locked and covered by bamboo grown wild in pots. Harry sank as far into the doorway as he could get, soaked and defeated. Resting his head against the door, he heard the faintest possible plucking of a shamisen, like the idle sound of overflowing water. No one simply passing by would have noticed.