He follows her through the house to the kitchen door, the only door — some quirk of Russian architecture? — that gives onto the garden. She stands aside again, stares at him, then drops her gaze. Alissa is under the magnolia tree, reaching into its lower branches, apparently to inspect the buds that line the wood like so many creamy-white candles. For a moment he observes her in silence, her braided hair, her rose kimono tied with an obi of the deepest indigo. Then Beatrice barks and runs over the grass to greet him, sitting at his feet and gazing at him with moist, adoring eyes.
‘She thinks you’ve got something for her,’ says Alissa. ‘She thinks you’re Junzo.’
‘I don’t,’ says Yuji, who thinks it not quite right that a dog should be fed sweets like a spoilt child.
‘I’m sure she likes you anyway,’ says Alissa, taking her stick from where she has hung it over a branch. ‘She’s very forgiving.’
‘Monsieur Feneon isn’t here?’
‘No,’ she says. ‘I told you on the phone, didn’t I? He’s in Yokohama.’
‘Yokohama?’
‘He can’t be here all the time.’
‘Of course.’
‘He has a business to attend to. I’m sorry if you are disappointed.’
He says he is not. They look at each other. Already, he thinks, it’s started, the long evening of embarrassment, but when they go into the house to drink tea she starts to play the hostess, asking him, earnestly, about his health, gently scolding him for not wearing a kimono, and does it all so skilfully, in such a grown-up manner, he is, despite himself, put at ease. The stance he has imagined himself taking, the tone of vexed politeness, has no opening, no chance to emerge. When he tries to say something sarcastic about the failings of student theatricals, it comes out as a perfectly harmless enquiry, one she answers at length, with much enthusiasm.
From in front of the house the taxi sounds its horn. Yuji accepts his coat from Hanako and follows Alissa into the street. They settle into the back of the cab. The driver manoeuvres to the main road past a party of schoolgirls on bicycles, and what looks like a neighbourhood shogi competition, a dozen benches spilling into the middle of the street, young and old sitting astride them, leaning intently over the boards.
He settles back against the frayed leather of the seat, looks out drowsily at the traffic, at the sunlight slanting over the roofs, the evening air in which a golden dust seems to hang, suspended. And as they ride — so slowly they will surely be late — something begins in him, an emotion as sweet as it is painful, and that he cannot, in this perfectly ordinary Tokyo dusk, begin to account for. It is as if he was sitting at the side of a piano on which someone was sounding the same deep note again and again, louder and louder, more and more insistently, until his entire body, the blood itself, vibrated at the exact same pitch. If this is memory then it’s memory as possession — but memory of what? He presses his fist to his lips. Alissa turns to him.
‘I’ve been selfish,’ she says. ‘You are not well yet.’
‘No,’ he says. ‘It’s nothing serious.’
‘Should we turn back?’
‘There is really no need.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Quite sure.’
‘It’s not far now,’ she says. ‘You’ll feel much better out in the air again.’
The theatre is on the corner of a street by the Tsukiji Canal, close enough to the market for a breeze from the bay to carry with it a small stink of fish and fish guts. Yuji, to give himself more time to recover, insists on paying the driver, then walks beside Alissa to the entrance of the theatre. It is not, despite the brightly painted banners over the doors, a place of any great promise, but once they have left their shoes with the attendant and stepped inside, he sees that it is larger than he had imagined, and has, with its scattering of old posters, the age-darkened wood of its beams, the slight confusion of its architecture, something homely and authentic which, despite himself, his mood, the sense of dislocation it has brought with it, touches him with its charm.
They find Mrs Yamaguchi surrounded by her students. She is wearing a kimono of Omeshi silk, and over it a formal coat marked with the crests of the school. To Yuji, though he is certainly no expert, she has the look of a retired geisha, a former Oka-san, perhaps, from one of the older, stricter houses in Shimbashi or the Yoshiwara. Her eyebrows are razored, her hairline neat as if she still wore a wig, though her hair, with its delicate chain of red coral, is, as far as he can tell, her own. Alissa introduces him. The teacher smiles and says, ‘So you are the poet? How wonderful.’ If she laughed, he would not be surprised to find she had blackened her teeth, like the beauties of Grandmother’s day.
The rhythmic wooden clapping of the Ki begins. The inner doors swing wide. They wish each other a pleasant experience, then join the queues filing into the auditorium. The only illumination comes from the pulsing of a half-dozen naked gas flares along the edge of the stage, an uncertain light that leaves large areas draped in shadow, but it does not take long for Yuji to realise that all the seating is in traditional matted stalls and that there is not a single Western-style chair in the whole room. Was Alissa warned of this? How could such a mistake have been made? He turns, stares back to where Mrs Yamaguchi and her students are already settling onto their knees, adjusting their collars, batting their fans. Are some of them watching him, slyly, waiting to see how the ‘poet’ will manage his little difficulty?
The flares are dimmed. The clapping builds to its crescendo. He leans towards Alissa, clears his throat — there is nothing for it but to guide her, as swiftly as possible, out to the foyer again — but she is speaking to him, saying, ‘Here, in here,’ and they shuffle sideways into an unoccupied stall between the aisle and the raised walkway of the hanamichi. She passes him the stick, then, without the slightest visible difficulty, gracefully even, as though easing herself into a hot bath, she kneels. He takes his place beside her. He is still holding her stick, the warm handle. After a moment he lays it carefully on the mat between them.
The last lights gutter, go out. For quarter of a minute the hall is in perfect darkness, then Yuji hears the sound of bodies turning (silk on skin) and turns himself to see, at the back of the auditorium, a candle flame moving in hesitant rhythms along the hanamichi towards the stage, and carrying on its tip the long white oval of an actor’s face. It is not until the flame is almost level with where he is kneeling that Yuji sees how the candle is attached to a long pole and the pole carried by a figure in black who moves in the shadow beyond the candle’s soft bloom of light, stepping back as the actor steps forwards, stopping when he stops. They reach the stage. The shamisen begins to play, a single string plucked with a kind of violence, a sound so sharp, so heavy with nostalgia, the audience lets go a soft collective sigh of grief and pleasure. And in that instant Yuji understands what it was that wrung his heart in the taxi — that his journey with Alissa has unburied the memory of another journey, eighteen, nineteen years ago, when he went with Mother to the Kabuki-za Theatre, just the two of them (Ryuichi must have been with Father or at one of his many school clubs) riding in a rickshaw over the pitted roads of the Low City, crossing Sakura Bridge, crossing Kamei Bridge. He cannot remember the tea house they stopped at. The Kikuoka? He cannot remember which of her kimonos Mother was wearing. He cannot even remember what plays they saw, but what has stayed, what has lain inert all these years waiting for the precise circumstance that would allow it to burn again, is the ecstasy of being pressed against her shoulder, the scent of her, the warmth, the rich serenity of being in exactly the place he wished, above all places, to be. So meagre is his store of such memories — material from the time before — he almost laughs out loud at the luck of coming across it like this on an evening he expected nothing from. It is a victory of sorts. A small defeat for that darkness time drags in its wake.