With his mother clinging more and more to her younger son and his father disappearing for long stretches to work, Justin was left to discover the wonders of Sapporo with Sixth Uncle, who had come on holiday with them as he often did, partly to help with the children but mainly to organize the logistics of traveling in a foreign country — booking tickets, sorting out the best hotel rooms, moving the family swiftly through airports, finding good restaurants. He always seemed to know people everywhere they went — contacts he’d met through business, or friends of friends of friends, who were always willing to help show them around or lend a car and a driver. He was “good with people”—affable, insistent, often daring in his humor, occasionally foulmouthed but always unthreatening in his chubbiness. He would flirt with hotel receptionists and sweet-talk directors of airline companies; he always got what he wanted. The youngest of the uncles, he was only twelve years older than Justin — barely in his mid-twenties at the time, though already very much a man, someone whom Justin recognized as inhabiting his father’s world, not his, in spite of the childish banter that passed between Sixth Uncle and him.
They visited the Snow Festival, just the two of them. It felt like an adventure, striding forth into the bitter cold, deliberately walking through the snow and feeling it seep through their boots, leaving behind the younger brother, who was too small and weak, and his parents, who were too old and slow. “I’m going to have my ass kicked for leading you astray,” Sixth Uncle said, and laughed as they walked around the fantastic ice sculptures. “Your mother is going to bite my head off when she sees her dear little son frozen to the bone. Hey, look at that — remember that?”
It was the Leaning Tower of Pisa, which they had seen during a previous holiday, but made entirely of snow. Elsewhere there was a life-size pyramid and a faithful reproduction of the Kinkaku-ji in Kyoto; there were fearsome ogres and cuddly polar bears and a herd of long-necked dinosaurs; Mount Rushmore with different, unrecognizable heads; Eskimos and penguins; a tropical landscape of palm trees and a beach with sun loungers — all glowing with the pale white-blue of snow and ice. They threw snowballs at each other, as people who are not used to snow always do, and if they tripped and fell they just lay on the snow, feeling its strange powdery-crusty texture beneath them. Justin no longer noticed the cold; his fingers were swollen and numb but impervious to the biting frost, and he felt a growing strength in his legs as he ran along the edge of a perfectly flat snow-canal that led to a Dutch windmill.
“Little bastard, you’ve got a lot of energy,” Sixth Uncle wheezed as he caught up. “Your grandmother keeps telling me I need to lose weight, but thank God I’m a bit fat, because it protects me from this damn cold.”
They found a small restaurant, a dimly lit place hidden down a nondescript alley — a tip from a local acquaintance, Sixth Uncle said, guaranteed to be the best food in the area. The warmth of the room felt delicious, the air humid and wood-scented. They ordered too much food, as was the custom of their family, and Sixth Uncle had a bottle of sake that seemed too big for one person.
“What a great holiday this is,” Sixth Uncle said as he refilled the tiny cup; he misjudged the size of it, and the sake spilled onto the smooth lacquered surface of the table. “Thank goodness you’re around, though; otherwise it would just be your shit-boring parents.”
Justin smiled; Sixth Uncle was the only person he knew who spoke of his parents in this way — irreverently, whatever respect he had for Justin’s father well hidden under layers of coarse humor.
“How on earth did such boring parents bring up a happy, strong boy like you? If you were a couple of years older I would let you drink some sake while no one’s looking. Hey, maybe I could slip it into your teacup? No, no, that would be too bad of me. Not even I would do that to my favorite nephew — though you’ve always been very grown up for your age, so I wouldn’t give a shit about getting you drunk. Only thing I’d worry about is your dragon-tongued mother. Oh, my God, speaking of getting drunk, I think I’m already pretty wasted.”
Justin toyed with a piece of lamb that was drying out on the helmet-shaped griddle in front of him, slowly sizzling to a crisp alongside a charred piece of corn. Sixth Uncle had told him that the dish was called “Genghis Khan” because the grill was modeled on the exact form of an ancient Mongol armored helmet, but Justin had not believed him — Sixth Uncle was full of amazing, unbelievable stories. Often Justin had thought that these stories were Sixth Uncle’s way of enlivening the heavy atmosphere at the dinner table, for he was the only one who would say anything amusing (and Justin would be the only one to laugh), but recently Justin had begun to realize that Sixth’s Uncle’s anecdotes were aimed at him. He had sensed a growing connivance, Sixth Uncle reaching out to him tentatively, for reasons he was not able to fathom. He was glad of the jovial company but troubled by the lack of clarity; in spite of Sixth Uncle’s almost comic façade, he, too, operated within the family’s unspoken language, in which one was somehow expected to understand all that was not articulated.
“Do you know what I’m going to do when I retire?” Sixth Uncle continued. “I’m going to buy a stinking huge farm in Tasmania and never come back. People tell me property is dirt cheap over there. I can get a massive ranch with sheep and cows and live happily ever after.”
“But, Sixth Uncle, you don’t know anything about sheep or cows.”
“How difficult can it be?” Sixth Uncle poured another overfilled cup of sake and looked at the clear beads of liquid on the table. “Must be easier than dealing in property.”
There followed a silence that made Justin anxious: one of those moments just before someone said something important. In his family’s unsaid-said ways, he understood that this was a preparation for an announcement of some kind, the delivery of news that would mark a turning point — perhaps something relatively minor, but a shift nonetheless.
“Do you know what people in the business call me? ‘The Fixer.’ Sometimes they call me ‘The Enforcer,’ but I don’t really like to hear that. ‘The Fixer’ sounds better. Even the family calls me that sometimes.”
Justin nodded. He had heard his father refer to Sixth Uncle’s pragmatic, no-nonsense approach to problem solving, the way he could always untangle a sticky situation.
“In every generation of our family, there needs to be a fixer. Before me there was Third Uncle, whom you never knew. Without him, the family business would have gone bust several times over — your grandfather was a clever man, but he wasn’t streetwise at all. The family needed someone to look after the more practical side of things so that the glamorous stuff could happen. The small details are important too, that’s what Third Uncle told me. I learned everything from him. And after me it’ll be your turn.”
The small window next to their table offered a view of the narrow alley; above the doorways of the alley, lamps had come on. Justin could not see the sky, but he guessed that the snow had made the evening draw in. A flag sign fluttered above an entranceway; amid the Japanese characters, he recognized the Chinese name for Hokkaido: North Sea Island, a place marooned in the cold north.