When they have devoured the cake, they sit around the stove for the evening’s discussion. It’s Shozo’s turn to choose the subject. He removes his glasses, blinks, puts the glasses on again, and with great seriousness, in good French, tells them that the question for debate is ‘Which of all the arts should be accounted the most sublime?’
‘Well,’ says Feneon, reaching for the wine bottle, ‘that should keep us busy.’
Having proposed the question, Shozo begins a defence of folk art, in particular those ancient dances still seen at country fairs and which, in his opinion, represent an unbroken tradition stretching back to the very origins of . .
Oki rolls his eyes. Folk dances might be all right for peasant farmers in Tohoku, but for everyone else . . ‘What about architecture? The Chrysler Building, the Bauhaus . . why can’t we build like that in Tokyo? Why doesn’t Tokyo look like New York? Maybe we need another earthquake.’ He turns and quickly, in Japanese, apologises to Yuji, who excuses him with a blink and starts on his own small speech, arguing not for poetry but for what he assumes would have been Feneon’s choice. Cinema, he says, is where the arts are brought together. All the most interesting artists now are film-makers. Isn’t Jean Renoir even greater than his father, Auguste? And who in Japan deserves more attention than Yasujiro Ozu or Mikio Naruse?
He’s warming to it, beginning to enjoy himself, the sound of himself, the accent he has worked so hard at, when Alissa cuts across him. Theatre, she says, is superior to cinema because a live performance is always superior to a recorded one. However many times a play is put on, however familiar the actors are with their parts, each performance is unique.
This, thinks Yuji, is an absurd objection. (And should a nineteen-year-old girl in the company of men, all of them, with the exception of Oki, at least a little older than her, express herself in such a forthright manner? Even for a foreign girl it is surely slightly improper.) He does not look at her, but assumes the tone of a professor whose lecture has been needlessly interrupted by one of his students. All performances, he says, regardless of whether they are filmed, have, at the moment of their enactment, the self-same quality of the unique. Celluloid is but a method of preserving this, which means therefore it remains, permanently, or at least in a practical, but also perhaps in an ontological sense, even at the thousandth time of showing—
‘I’m not sure,’ says Alissa, ‘anyone understands what you’re saying.’
‘My opinion,’ says Junzo, ‘is that in debates of this type one should always side with the person who knows how to make chocolate cake.’
‘Aren’t we forgetting music?’ asks Feneon.
‘In the West you have music,’ says Oki. ‘Here we have twanging.’
‘I’d rather have the music of the shamisen,’ says Alissa, sharply, ‘than almost anything. I’m bored to death with Schumann and Beethoven.’
‘But you play the lieder so sweetly,’ says Feneon. ‘I was lying in bed this morning listening to you.’
‘I play them very badly,’ she says, smiling at her father.
‘Won’t you play something now?’ asks Taro, the peacemaker. ‘Then we can settle this matter at once and give the prize to music.’
She shakes her head. She’s not in the mood, she’s unprepared, she does not give impromptu recitals, but Taro persists and the others join him, until, taking her stick, she gets up from the sofa, and goes to the piano. It’s an English make, Collard & Collard, an odd and lovely object that must have travelled half the world crated in the hold of some wallowing cargo vessel. She settles herself on the stool, looks put out, irritated, flicks through some pages of manuscript on the music stand, then shuts her eyes, opens them, and leans her whole body into the first soft chords. She plays for five, six minutes, no more, her head tilted to the side, an expression of intense listening on her face. The music spreads in ripples, its rhythms simple as a lullaby, light as spring rain. The debate, with its mixture of earnestness and nonsense, is forgotten. When she finishes, and the echo of the last deep note has faded, there’s a hush in which only the murmuring of the embers in the stove can be heard. They applaud. She blushes, stands, limps back to the sofa.
‘That was beautiful,’ says Yuji quietly, the words out of his mouth before he has considered them.
‘Chopin,’ she says, turning to him, her blush briefly deepening. ‘ “Grande Polonaise”. I’m glad you liked it.’
12
An earth-tremor at three in the afternoon. Yuji is in the garden, talking through the fence with Kyoko. The old woman and Haruyo are in the street haggling with the boiled-bean-seller. There’s a sudden breeze, the bamboo rustles. Under their fingers, the fence vibrates, under their feet, the earth. They wait, breathlessly, three, four seconds. Then everything resumes, everything is normal again.
In 1923, Kyoko was a small child in her home village in Saitama Prefecture. She thinks Yuji was in Tokyo. He has not chosen to correct her, and Saburo, he assumes, has simply forgotten, as Saburo forgets so much. He grins at her. She grins back. For a while they hold the fence as though, without their gripping it, it would fly into the air and be lost.
13
On Mother’s birthday, to please her, or rather, to honour her as one honours on certain auspicious dates the family ancestors, Yuji spends the day being as useful as he can. He tidies his room, puts his bedding to air, returns various cups and dishes to the kitchen. He helps Father in the garden weeding and pruning, and after lunch pays Otaki the money he owes. In his room again, he sews a button onto a suit, reads a dozen pages of Isabelle, learns a new French idiom (entre chien et loup). Then, a few minutes before five, the little parcel with its wrapping of dark red paper in his hands, he goes downstairs and slides open the doors to Mother’s room. Haruyo is there, hunched beside a brazier on which a small copper kettle is beginning to steam. She dips her head to him. He walks past her, past the folding screen, and kneels opposite Mother. He bows, and wishes her a happy birthday.
There is only a single lamp for the whole room, and not a bright one, so it’s difficult to tell if becoming fifty-one has made much difference to her. He can see no threads of grey in her hair, and the skin of her face — a little blue under the eyes — shows, in this light, barely a wrinkle. Of her body, wrapped in an unpatterned kimono and darker shawl, he has only the sense of something immensely fragile.
She says how nice it is to see him. He thanks her. Round their knees the shadows lie like pools of water. She smiles drowsily as though she has recently woken from a sleep or will shortly need one. Has he, she asks, lost some weight? He says it is unlikely. In the holidays everybody ate a great deal. ‘You know how you get in the winter,’ she says. He says he knows. ‘I pray for you,’ she says. He says he knows. He thanks her. ‘You must listen to Dr Kushida,’ she says. ‘He will advise you. He has been a good friend to the Takano family.’
Behind her head, Ryuichi, school uniform buttoned to the throat, school cap clasped in white-gloved hands, examines Yuji with a gaze he can only endure for a few seconds, such is the weight of judgement in those twelve-year-old eyes. Above the photograph is the slender cross of ivory tipped with iron presented to Grandfather Yakumo when he left the college in Seoul, and on the table below, a stick of incense, a flickering nightlight, an offering of mandarins.
He passes his mother her birthday present, a box of taorizakura cakes from the shop by Ueno Station. She thanks him. She says she hopes he hasn’t spent too much money on her. He assures her he hasn’t.