How long must he wait? A month? Two? Longer? It would be a mistake to try to go back too soon. But eventually, the end of the spring, say, the beginning of the June rains, he will stand on the step at Kanda and ring the bell, and Feneon, who will have had nothing to forget, nothing to fold, will greet him in the usual way. They will drink a glass of eau de vie. Yuji will explain his absence easily (his health, his mother’s health, even, perhaps, that he has been writing). Then the club will sit on the study floor to watch a hundred shades of grey flicker soothingly over the sheet pegged to the bookshelf. She will be there, of course — she must be if things are to be normal — but she will know how to behave. She will behave impeccably. And after the film they will practise their French in some harmless discussion and the evening will end with laughter, with calls across the dusky street as the club cycles home. He has only to be patient, to be silent, to keep his nerve. The end of the spring, the start of the rains, the first big cloudburst to drum on the roof.
Could it be that nothing has been lost at all?
20
At Setagaya, he sits on the verandah with Grandfather and Sonoko making bags for the loquats. If the young fruits are not covered while they are still the size of a child’s fingertip, weevils get in and suck out the juices. To make the bags they have on the wood between them a bowl of flour paste, a stack of magazines and newspapers. Sonoko is the most dilligent. Her pile of bags grows quickly, but Yuji’s pile is smaller even than Grandfather’s, for though his fingers are nimble, he is constantly stopping work to peer at a photograph or read a dozen lines of some story, weeks or months old.
One of the pages he pulls from a magazine, then pauses to read, is an account of a tour of Manchuria by a group of ‘notable authors’ invited to see first-hand the great strides made by the new administration in transforming such an antique place into a showcase of Asian modernity. At the bottom of the page, the authors are depicted standing in a line with certain representatives of the military. The most senior authors, the most notable, are in the middle of the line flanked by the highest-ranking officers. Ishihara is there (not in the centre but not at either extreme), dressed in a long leather coat like the one air ace von Rauffenstein wears in La Grande Illusion.
The faces of the writers are mostly smiling, as though the tour was a welcome break from the rigours of composition, the confines of their studies, but the officers’ expressions, shadowed under the peaks of their caps, are set and somehow unamused. Below the picture the caption reads, ‘Forward as one! The pen and the sword link arms.’
‘You want the weevils to beat us?’ asks Grandfather. He takes the page from Yuji’s hand, tears it in two and dips his brush into the paste. ‘Sonoko,’ he says, ‘it seems that Grandson wants the weevils to beat us!’
21
At home, the doors of the Japanese room are opened wide to the garden, the first time since the previous October. The mats and the woodwork are beaten and wiped. In a corner of the room where the air is touched by sunlight, an insect becomes a fleck of gold.
On the radio, daily bulletins plot the northward progress of the cherry blossom — Fukuoka, Hiroshima, Kyoto, Nagoya. There are also reports of the German advance into Norway, an action intended to protect the Norwegian people from the aggression of the British. Miyo, her hair tied up in a cloth, a duster in her hand, asks Yuji if Norway is close to Japan or as far away as Russia. He shows her the map in the morning paper. She stares at it, then laughs. She cannot explain why. ‘Because . .’ she says, and shrugs and goes on with her work. Is she frightened? Or do the movements of armies, the fall of nations, genuinely amuse her?
22
A bright Saturday, the second week in April, he goes to the blossom viewing in Ueno Park. He has arranged to meet Junzo, Taro and Shozo under the clock at the subway terminus, but when he arrives there with Miyo, only Taro and Shozo are waiting.
‘Little brother’s sulking about something,’ says Taro. ‘His mystery girlfriend, I suppose.’
The park at ten o’clock is already crowded and it takes them half an hour to find a place for themselves, two yards of unoccupied grass between a group of middle-aged office workers and a circle of young mothers, drowsy, with drowsy babies on their knees. They spread their blankets. Above them, the blossom is so dense that when a breeze blows, the whole head of the tree moves like a single flower. Miyo opens the bento boxes. They eat, picking the food from the little wooden pockets. They have sake with them but after the first cup no one bothers to pour. They watch the passers-by, are watched in turn. Somewhere in the park a van with loudspeakers is broadcasting speeches. Miyo takes out her sewing. Shozo pulls his cap over his eyes. In a quiet voice to Yuji, Taro says, ‘You’ve heard the rumours?’
‘Rumours?’ Yuji’s heart begins to pound. ‘What rumours?’
‘Spies, saboteurs, traitors in high places . . At the ministry it’s all anyone talks about.’
‘I’ve heard nothing,’ says Yuji, hiding his relief in a frown. ‘Is any of it true?’
‘Some, I suppose. I don’t know how much. Anyway, it’s best to be watchful.’
‘Of course.’ Yuji picks a blade of grass. ‘Though what is it exactly we should watch for?’
‘Whatever is out of the ordinary. People who seem to have something to hide. Foreigners . .’
‘Foreigners? Like the Feneons?’
‘Well, the Feneons, that’s different.’
‘If necessary,’ says Yuji, ‘we could speak up for them.’
‘It would be more sensible,’ says Taro, ‘to be discreet.’
‘Then we could speak up for them discreetly?’
‘And who would we speak to? The Tokko?’
‘Why not?’
‘Now you’re being stupid.’
‘Monsieur Feneon’s been here for ten years.’
‘I know all that. But these days it’s not how something is, it’s how it looks. Think of your father’s situation.’
‘Father?’
‘Even an important man like him was not protected.’
‘I am aware of it.’
‘And you are his son.’
‘So?’
‘Nobody is invisible.’
‘It almost sounds like you’re warning me.’
‘I’m saying you should use your head.’
‘And you?’
‘Yes,’ says Taro, nodding slowly. ‘More than you perhaps.’
They sit together, silently, as though on the brink of some sharp exchange neither is quite ready for, not today, not here in the open. Yuji flicks the rolled blade of grass away and gets to his feet. ‘I’m going to walk,’ he says. ‘You want to come?’
Taro shakes his head. ‘I’ll stay,’ he says. ‘Shut my eyes for a while.’
Alone, relieved to be alone, Yuji thinks first of heading towards the pond (‘In the dream of a city poet, electric dragonflies over Shinobazu Pond.’), then finds it easier to simply fall in with the movement of those around him, the aimless swirling of boots and wooden sandals, silken sleeves, epaulettes, piled hair, cigarettes, parasols. Only a man in tattered leggings hunkered in the shade of a stripped windbreak, one of the hundred or more who sleep in the park, who scavenge in the bins and grow beards like Chinese sages, seems to Yuji independent of the crowd and the crowd’s enormous slack mind. He watches him, admires the steadfast gaze, the immobility, then sees on the rising grass beyond him a woman’s back wrapped tightly in unpatterned water-green silk. He grins, almost calls out to her, but stops himself and circles cautiously until he is sure the old woman is not about to descend.