The hostess is at the door. She is so sorry to disturb them, but she wishes the gentlemen to know that the bath is ready. She bows, withdraws. The girl with the ribbons hauls Makiyama to his feet. Yuji, an unlit cigarette between his fingers (who gave it to him? If he smoked it, he’d choke), hears himself talking — passionately, insistently — about Momoyo, his dear Momoyo, with whom he shared a thousand silent glances of innocent devotion. If they had married, he would by now — it can be taken for granted — be established in some reputable university or publishing house or newspaper office or something. Certainly he would not be living in a former sewing room. He would not be writing about toothpaste. They would have an old house in the High City, a verandah, tangled with flowers. And then a child, a grandchild for Mother, a little boy who, as the first-born, could even be called Ryuichi.
‘But how nice,’ says the waitress, quickly hiding her yawn. ‘So you’re definitely going to marry her?’
‘Who?’
‘Miss Momoyo?’
‘But this was years ago. Don’t you get it? Her family refused to permit the match. They sent a letter to my father. “Momoyo is, regretfully, too young for such a momentous step.” It was a stupid lie, of course. The truth was, they could never let their daughter marry into a family in which the mother had not left the house in a decade. It would be even easier for them, today. Today we would not even dare to ask.’
The waitress looks confused, then sorry for him. He knows that he should ask her something now, should flirt with her, make jokes, even if they’re bad ones, but he needs, quite urgently, to find the toilets, to be privately in the darkness, to press his forehead against something cool.
He puts down his cup, then climbs a rope of air until he’s standing. Somehow he gets clear of the room. The corridor is bright, bare. No one’s about. He cannot remember where the stairs are. He takes a few steps in one direction, a few in the other. Through the walls and doors of the rooms on either side of him come murmurings, muffled laughter. He hears what sounds like a woman weeping. He wishes it would stop. He wants to leave now. He must leave . .
At his shoulder, a door slides back, half the width of a face at first, then wider. The girl with the ribbons is there, undressed to her under-kimono, which is bound so loosely it looks as if at any sudden movement it must slip to the floor. Below her throat he can see the place where her make-up ends and the rose of unpowdered skin begins.
‘Your boss is snoring,’ she whispers, ‘and now I have no one to wash my back.’ She pouts at him, widens her eyes.
He asks her where the toilets are.
‘Downstairs,’ she says, and points. ‘Shall I wait for you?’ she asks.
‘Please do,’ he says. ‘Yes.’
She bows. He backs away, finds the stairs, finds the stalls, vomits, spits into the stinking hole, then sits on the step in the foyer putting on his boots. He has, in a way he cannot begin to comprehend, lost one of his socks. The sight of his naked foot moves him almost to tears. He is touching it, stroking it as if it was some poor hairless cat, when a movement in the mirror beside the door makes him glance up. The hostess is standing behind him at the bottom of the stairs. There is nothing kind in that face and he does not dare to turn. He thrusts his feet, the bare and the dressed, into his boots, ties the laces, snatches his coat, and plunges into the alley, racing headlong through Sanbancho, a runner matched against himself.
15
Twenty-four hours after reaching home from the House of Falling Leaves, his winter illness begins. It announces itself with the usual prefatory dream, a fire dream in which he stumbles through dense smoke across a field of charred grass in search of the boy with the shutter.
He has had these dreams so many years now it is hard to know where history ends and the invention of his dreams begins. Certain things, of course, he has no need to question, for they are facts known to everyone. He has not simply dreamt the thirty thousand who burnt to death in the grounds of the old army-clothing depot on the east bank and whose charred bones and blackened teeth are still uncovered by builders, by anglers digging for bait, by ghoulish children. But the rest of it — the boy, the shutter, the miraculous escape — where did he hear all this? Did Father tell him? Grandfather? Someone at school? Or was it one of those newspaper accounts, those ‘My Story’ columns that ran for months after the earthquake, tales of improbable survival that began with lines such as ‘I was sitting quietly a home . .’ or, ‘Just as I turned into Okura Dori . .’
The boy — for this is what Yuji remembers of it, what he believes he remembers, what he would set down as an account, more or less accurate, of the actual events — was from the Low City and not perhaps the eleven- or twelve-year-old he is in the dreams but a teenager or even a young man of sixteen or seventeen who, once the fires started soon after the first shocks at midday (shocks so violent the seismographs at the Central Weather Bureau were immediately rendered useless), would have been a link in those disciplined chains of neighbours who went on passing water from the wells until, unable to keep their faces to such a terrible heat, they dropped their buckets and fled. Some then returned to their homes to rescue a roll of cash, a tethered dog, a household shrine. Of these, most were never seen again. The rest, the boy and his family among them, retreated through blazing streets towards the river, only to find the bridges were also burning. Overwhelmed by exhaustion, tormented by heat and smoke, hundreds leapt into the water where, in the days that followed, their swollen corpses, face down, jostled each other in the currents. Those who still had the strength for it fought their way along the bank until they found a bridge intact, then streamed across it, lifted now by the wild hope of saving themselves on the far side.
From somewhere — the ruins of his own house or the debris in the street — the boy had picked up a wooden shutter to protect himself from the rain of sparks and cinders that grew heavier with every moment. With this held over his head, he waited, one of the thirty thousand, in the grounds of the old depot.
By the middle of the afternoon, observers in the hills of the High City could see a number of fire storms, swirling columns of fire hundreds of feet high, collecting over the surface of the river. People took photographs, but these, in their stillness and silence, record only great areas of darkness, a blurring, like collapsed sky. Of the fire’s shrieking, its unpredictable movement, the quality of intention it possessed, no means existed to convey such horror. Whatever the storms touched — a boat, the piers of a bridge, the shady honeycomb of a waterside pleasure house — it was consumed in an instant as though by a force infinitely more destructive than fire. At last, at four in the afternoon — the moment recorded precisely on the heat-shocked faces of countless wristwatches — the largest of the storms discovered the crowd in the grounds of the depot, and having nothing left to burn, and ravenous for fuel, it fell on them. In an instant, the field became a furnace. Men and women, who seconds before had wept or prayed, were suddenly welded into tangled house-high sculptures of blackened limbs. But as the fire raced forwards (more like a great body of water now, a death-wave), it sent ahead a violent wind that surged beneath the boy’s shutter and flung him upwards with such force and speed the flames, quick as they were, could only roll and boil beneath him as he flew.