How high did he go? As high as the wind? As high as the black pall that had formed over the city and later doused the embers with a rain black as tar? He was found on the afternoon of 2 September, lying completely naked in the Yasuda Gardens, the shutter wedged in the boughs of a nearby tree. The soles of his feet were scorched and all the hair had been singed from his body, but he was otherwise unharmed. On waking he remembered nothing. Later, he recalled seeing birds, vast flocks of them, flying across the face of the sun.
Of the dreams, no two are quite the same, but in all of them Yuji must cross the grounds and find the boy before the storm falls. He must crawl under the shutter with him. He must cling on and brace himself for the fire, wind and flight that follow. Sometimes he comes within a dozen strides of the boy; at others he can see nothing but the tormented crowd. This time, this dream, he is close enough to glimpse the boy’s bare legs under the smoking wood of the shutter, and he is fighting his way forward, fighting with a desperate strength, when suddenly he sees, in ordinary daylight, Miyo with a basket of washing in her arms looking at him quizzically from the step of the drying platform. She puts down the washing and hurries off. A few minutes later Father is there, kneeling beside the mattress and smelling faintly of ink and cigarettes. He puts a hand on Yuji’s brow. He says something. Yuji hears himself reply, a voice that blossoms out of the air between them and says the strangest things. Father goes. Miyo comes back. She has a bowl, some medicinal broth, its steam acrid as smoke. She holds it to his lips and when, a minute later, he brings it up again, she cleans him.
He knows his body is suffering. He observes the familiar symptoms, the signs both sides of the skin that he is in for an unpleasant ride, perhaps a dangerous one, but his mind is buoyant, gently exhilarated, and sits on his flesh like a butterfly on a statue. His neck aches a little, his mouth is dry, but it doesn’t matter. February sunlight is pouring through the panes of the drying-platform door and everything, the piles of books, the backs of his own pale hands, the light itself, seems precious and extraordinary. He would, he thinks, be quite content to die like this, to leave the world with this accelerated sense of things. First, of course, like the old poets, like Basho taken ill on the road outside Osaka, he must compose his death poem, but the lines that come to him, far from being solemn, wistful, somewhat wry, are all exclamatory and pathetic, like the lines a stage lover cries before he swallows poison. And who would he dictate it to, this death poem? To Father? To Miyo, dabbing his face with a cloth? He squints at her. She smiles. He wonders what she would do if, under the guise of sickness, of a fidgety delirium, he reached a hand inside her kimono. Would she run away? Or would she loosen her obi, keep her gaze on the wall? He shuts his eyes. A dying poet should not spend his last hours stroking, in his imagination, the thighs of a housemaid. (And wasn’t he offered far more than this in the House of Falling Leaves? An offer he fled from like a frightened boy.)
When he opens his eyes again, Dr Kushida is in the room, black bag in hand, his face quite expressionless, the way, perhaps, he had once looked at poor Amano. From the bag he takes a syringe, loads it from a glass ampoule, pulls down the quilt, rolls Yuji onto his side, and injects him in the muscles of the right buttock. The injection is bizarrely painful. Yuji groans, though in a voice so small it’s like the voice of a mosquito. The doctor shines a light in his eyes, then presses the ivory horn of his stethoscope so hard against the flushed skin of Yuji’s chest it leaves behind a pattern of raw circles.
On later visits he burns, in leisurely fashion, little balls of moxa on Yuji’s back. There are more injections — neuronal, trional, camphor. And as Yuji coughs phlegm into a bowl or lies prostrate (all lightness has passed now, his body is wet earth, a sack of wet earth), Kushida, in a low voice, a confidential purr, talks to him about the cases he has at the clinic, and in particular the venereal cases. Gonorrhoea, syphilis, sores that never heal, or seem to heal only to break open again months later. He never speaks of such things when Father is present. With a half-smile he offers Yuji advice, telling him that if he goes with a woman he suspects is unclean (‘and so many are, so many’), afterwards he should wash his genitals in his own urine. Is this what Mother meant when she told Yuji to listen to Dr Kushida, that the doctor was a good friend of the Takano family?
His fever builds, breaks in a drench of sweating. In the days that follow he passes hours gazing at the old language of cracks on the ceiling. Questions appear — the sort that lethargy incites but cannot answer. He longs to be left alone, to be wretched alone, but the hours are punctuated by visits — Father, Miyo, Kushida, even, one afternoon, Haruyo, who stands above him like a wall and recites the message from Mother, her expression of concern, her wishes for his recovery.
And then, from no observable cause other than the slow accretion of new strength, he wakes out of a deep sleep, seventeen days after falling ill, and listens, with simple curiosity, to the noises of the street — the tofu-seller’s bugle, the play of wind chimes, the chattering of sewing machines and radios. He sits up. When the dizziness passes he drinks the water by his bed and washes the taste of medicine from his mouth. He dips two fingers into the glass and wipes his brow, his eyelids. He is setting the glass down again when he sees the marks on his hand, the scatter of ink scratches over the muscle at the base of his left thumb. He angles his hand to the light, then turns it so that his fingers point towards his chest. Is . . hi . . ha . .
Ishihara.
Ishihara!
It is a full minute before he can explain it to himself, can draw to the top of his mind the memory of Hideo Makiyama leaning across to him, pen in hand, under the slowly turning blades of the ceiling fan in the Don Juan. The intuition. The wonderful idea. He did not want Fritz Lang, or that troublesome neurasthenic Akutagawa. He certainly did not want Arthur Rimbaud (Arthur who?), with or without the mysterious letter. What was needed, what was long overdue, what he — and therefore the public — had a raging thirst for, was a comprehensive study of the young star of modern Japanese writing, the author whose books were read even by those who, strictly speaking, could not be called readers at all, who did not give a damn about ‘literature’ or the values of so-called educated people and who could only be spoken to by a man with a genius for simplicity. And this was his offer, this he would allow Yuji to attempt. And to seal the matter, to make some manner of contract between them, he had clutched Yuji’s fingers between his own and written, with a few quick darts of his pen, Ishihara’s name, an act so pointless, so entirely ludicrous, Yuji, his head already throbbing from the drink, had let the moment fall like spilt ash to the dark of the bar’s floor.
Cautiously, he stands up from the mattress. He puts a jacket round his shoulders and goes onto the platform. A fine rain is falling, and further off, in columns of blue shadow, a heavier rain is falling over the Low City. There is no one in the Kitamura Garden. In his own garden, Miyo is hurrying back from the privy, sheltering herself under an umbrella painted with irises. He holds out his hands. On his palms he feels each raindrop’s soft arrival. He should, he knows, attempt to be like rain, to have the same indifference and generosity. He also knows that by tomorrow he will have quite forgotten the wisdom of this.