‘Really?’ she says, unwrapping her gift, ‘but it looks so expensive.’
‘Just something small . .’
‘You’ve been too generous.’
‘Not at all.’
‘Still . .’
Haruyo brings them tea, then retires to the far side of the screen. Though he would admit it to no one, Yuji is frightened of Haruyo, her slab face, the unseemly vivid bulk of her, afraid of her ever since the night — the second after his return from Uncle Kensuke’s — he crept down the stairs from his new room hoping to find comfort in Mother’s bed and found instead Haruyo, motionless by the side of a lantern whose flame splashed her shadow over the walls, big as a net. Nothing was said, but she looked at him then as no adult had looked at him before, certainly no adult he knew, no adult who lived in his home.
‘What is your news?’ asks Mother. ‘Let me hear your news.’
He tells her what seems appropriate, harmless. A few remarks about his friends, about what he’s been reading. He does not, of course, mention the matter of the allowance. Nothing of that nature can even be hinted at. They are silent for a minute. Yuji looks at his tea but does not pick it up.
‘Your father . .’ she says.
‘Yes?’
‘How hard it is for him now.’
Yuji drops his chin in what he hopes will be taken for a gesture of reflection. How long has he been in the room? Fifteen minutes? Half an hour?
‘There’s blossom on the plum tree,’ he says.
‘At the bottom of the garden?’
‘Yes.’
‘That was always the first.’
‘Shall I bring you some?’
‘Thank you,’ she says, ‘though sometimes I prefer just to picture it in my mind. It seems more perfect.’
He tells her — the clever boy lecturing his mother — how the old poets used to cover their windows on the night of the full moon so they could imagine its beauty rather than be distracted by anything so obvious as the thing itself.
She smiles. ‘My son,’ she says, ‘a poet . .’ And for a few seconds it looks as if she might hold out one of her long, white hands to him, as if the spell might break. But then she shivers and looks down. Behind the screen, Haruyo stirs in her fabrics, clears her throat. Yuji rises to his feet, his movements, in this strange room, soft as incense smoke.
That evening after supper he opens the doors of the storage cupboards that stand on the landing between his room and Father’s. The cupboards are so solid, so mysteriously large, he has no idea how they were brought into the house. Lowered through the roof? Carried up the stairs plank by plank and assembled there by a carpenter? For all the years of his life (and for years before that) the cupboards have been the dark and mothballed repositories of whatever was finished with but could not be thrown away. Bamboo fencing swords, school satchels, carp banners, kites, foreign hats long out of fashion. There are even parcels of baby clothes preserved by meticulous hands for some imagined continuation of the Takano line.
He wants to find Ryuichi’s gloves. Each boy had two pairs, white, with three rows of raised stitching on the back and a single mother-of-pearl button at the wrist. One pair of Ryuichi’s was, presumably, reduced to a powder of ashes, but the other . . He looks, does not find them, neither Ryuichi’s nor his own. Instead, behind a box of Shunkei lacquer, on which the remains of a large insect are lying, he discovers a pile of jazz records from the 1920s — Jimmy Harada, Noriko Awaya, King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band. One by one he slips them from their paper covers, runs the light over the shellac grooves, blows away grains of dust. There was music in this house once. Music and tapping feet, the wail of trumpets, voices, flippant or heartbroken, singing of love, the city, the future . .
He goes to his room, opens the door to the drying platform, steps up into the night air. He drags his bedding from the poles and carries it inside. It’s too early to sleep but too late to do much else. He spreads the bedding on the mats, then, still on hands and knees, recites to himself, like some manner of talking dog, the ghost poem from Electric Dragonfly.
Do ghosts get bored of being ghosts?
At night they burn like candle flames
But the days must be difficult —
Hearing children on the way to school,
Hearing the thrum of kite strings.
At the song of the red-hot-pepper vendor
Even a dead tongue burns.
There he stops, for though the poem has another four lines, there are tears falling onto the backs of his hands. He can no longer speak.
14
He finds Makiyama in a bar by Shibuya Station drinking beer with his assistants, Ito and Kiyooka. It’s four in the afternoon. At six they move to Sukiyabashi and start on the sake, then to the Black Pearl on the Ginza and finally through the stained-glass doors of the Don Juan, where they take one of the booths by the dance floor and Makiyama buys a bottle of whisky. A tango band is playing. The singer, in his white tuxedo, sighs into the microphone. Between the pillars, clouds of cigarette smoke shift in the breeze from a ceiling fan.
Sweating from the drink, Makiyama undoes the top button of his shirt, hangs his hat on his knee, and pulls the cork from the bottle. He’s thirty-five or thirty-six, dressed in a new suit of lime-green serge, a pair of tan and cream spats on his feet. In his jacket lapel he has a pin, a curious pin with a head of red glass, perhaps even a ruby. Does it mean something?
A waitress takes the seat beside him and starts to feed him peanuts, sweet-bean paste. On the other side of the booth, Ito and Kiyooka are watching the dancing, their heads moving in unison like a pair of Siamese cats in the window of a hairdresser’s shop.
Yuji hasn’t drunk like this for months. Beer, sake, whisky. The effort of keeping up, of being congenial, of remembering why he’s there at all, is starting to exhaust him. He has extracted no promises, nothing but a few vague and lordly assurances that may already have been forgotten. He sips from his glass and listens to Makiyama trying to impress the waitress with his wealth of connections, though it’s obvious she has never heard of any of them. Only when he mentions the pulp writer Kaoru Ishihara does she show any genuine interest.
‘Ishihara, eh?’
‘An old friend of mine. You could even call me a kind of mentor.’
‘Really! But it must be nice,’ she says, dropping another peanut into his mouth, ‘to know someone like Ishihara.’
He grins at her, then pushes her away and turns to Yuji. He has, he says, grinding the nut between his large yellow teeth, just had another of his celebrated intuitions. ‘Come closer,’ he says. ‘Lean closer.’
Hideo Makiyama’s story is a Low City story, his success a Low City success. No one seems quite sure of where he comes from — Honjo, perhaps, or Asakusa, or even somewhere out of town, some unlikely little place only the slow trains stop at. Has he attended university? Has he attended much high school? He seems to Yuji a man who would struggle to write a thank-you letter, and no more of an intellectual than Miyo. His talent — if talent is the right word — is of a different order entirely, simpler, much more lucrative, for behind the shine of his brow, his slick moustache, he possesses a gift of insight into the appetites of the crowd, their vanities, their fears, the strange fastidiousness of their obsessions, their fickleness, their love of novelty. He would have done as well in the dry-goods sector, or selling cars, or women’s fashion, except that literature offered a certain status, a certain respectability, though one that did not at all prohibit him from passing the working day in a Ginza beer hall. He has no prejudices. High art or low, he doesn’t care. Nor is he burdened by tradition, for he knows nothing of it. His questions are so simple, so childlike, so unapologetic, some of the older writers (who thought their reputations safe) live in terror of him. Will it sell? How many? To whom? What will the margins be? The percentages? The profit share? You cannot catch him out. His memory for numbers — monthly circulations, print runs — is unfailing. He knows (for example) that only thirty-seven copies of Electric Dragonfly were ever sold and this, at five per cent of two yen per copy, represented an income of three yen and seventy sen, a contemptible sum even by the miserable standards of the genre. A head for numbers is starting to make him wealthy. Numbers, and a snout like those dogs one sees foraging in the spilt bins behind restaurants.