‘I hope you haven’t been following me,’ she says, as he walks up to her.
‘How could I? I had no idea you were coming today.’ He points to the tea tray in her hands, the two cups. ‘Have you lost her?’
‘I’m sure this is where I left her, though now it seems she has vanished.’
‘She will have met a friend,’ says Yuji, ‘and the friend has taken her to meet another friend.’
‘Someone with a lot of grandchildren, perhaps?’
‘Lots of grandchildren and lots of interesting ailments.’
‘So now I’m waiting for her like a servant,’ says Kyoko, turning her smile into a pout. ‘What a nice way to spend my day off.’
‘Did you arrange a meeting place?’
‘The usual,’ she says.
‘The statue? I could carry the tea for you.’
She bites her lip, throws him a hard glance, but lets him take the tray from her hands and follows him as he steps into the current of the crowd again. Soon he’s making her laugh with his muttered commentary on the blossom-viewing parties, the over-ripe wives, the shrunken husbands, the red-faced children chasing each other bawdily between the trees. A holiday crowd more akin to the big-thighed clay manikins unearthed from Yayoi sites (grainy pictures of them in Father’s books) than the race of ‘warrior gods’ the vans with the loudspeakers are shouting about in the distance, though this last thought, mindful of his talk with Taro, mindful too that he is in the company of the wife of an acting corporal in the Kwangtung Army, he keeps to himself.
‘I heard you were ill,’ she says.
‘Who told you that?’
‘Who do you think?’
‘Who told her?’
‘Who do you think?’
He nods. He would like to know what else Haruyo tells the old woman. That she heard him make arrangements to go to the kabuki with the foreign girl? That she heard the front door slide open at six the following morning?
‘I’m well now,’ he says.
‘That’s good.’
‘Any news from over the water?’
‘A photograph.’
‘Another new coat?’
‘A coat? No,’ she says. ‘It’s not that sort of photograph.’
He waits for her to explain what kind it is but she doesn’t. He has heard of soldiers sending pictures home of prisoners or even of the enemy dead. Some girls, it was said, carried such pictures as love tokens.
‘What will you do now?’ she asks.
‘Now that I’m well?’
‘Yes.’
‘I have lots to do,’ he says.
‘You’ve found a job?’
‘Not exactly a job.’
‘Grandmother says that soon everyone will be forced to work. In factories, digging shelters . .’
‘Shelters? In Tokyo?’
‘It might be good for you to do some digging. That kind of work can soothe the nerves.’
He glances across at her. Is that what she would like to see? Him wielding a mattock, excavating some great hole under the city, choking on the dust?
‘As I told you,’ he says, ‘I’ve got plenty to do. You’ve heard of Kaoru Ishihara, I suppose?’
‘Mother Behind my Eyes?’
‘Yes. Blood of Honour, The Last Stand. I’ve been commissioned to write a piece on him. A critical essay for Young Japan.’
‘On the train,’ she says, ‘I’ve seen some of the junior officers — the more serious ones — reading Young Japan.’
‘It will be quite an important piece. Literary but also political. Different dimensions and so on.’
‘You must be pleased,’ she says. ‘You could really make a name for yourself.’
‘It’s the sort of thing,’ says Yuji, ‘I’ll be doing a lot more of now. I’m afraid the shelters will have to wait.’
‘Of course.’
At the statue of Saigo Takamori there is, happily, no sign of Grandma Kitamura, though a dozen others are stood there, women and children mostly, looking out expectantly for some familiar face to blossom suddenly among the ranks of strangers.
‘The tea will be cold,’ says Yuji.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she says.
He turns and gazes up at the bronze samurai and his faithful dog. ‘Did you know,’ he says, ‘that after the Great Earthquake people used this statue as a noticeboard? It was covered with the names of the missing. A name, the last known location, the address of the family, sometimes a photograph or a sketch. It was the same with the statue of Kusunoki Mosashige outside the palace.’
‘I hadn’t heard that,’ she says, and he can see, as she joins her gaze to his, that she’s imagining it, the way it must have looked with hundreds of little pieces of paper fluttering on its sides. He, too, of course, must imagine it, for by the time he returned from Uncle Kensuke’s most of the notices were gone, though some, yellowing and torn, stayed up stubbornly for a month or more, until the autumn winds released them. Where Father posted Ryuichi’s name he has no idea, but he points to a spot halfway up the plinth and tells her it was there.
‘If it troubles you to wait here . .’ she says, a voice more tender, more intimate than any he has heard from her before.
‘Thank you for your thoughtfulness,’ he says, ‘but I have been here many times. It no longer . .’
‘Anyway,’ she says, ‘might it be better if you left before Grandmother arrives?’
He nods, hands her the tea tray. ‘It was nice to meet you today,’ he says.
‘I am glad you are well,’ she says. ‘Please have good luck with your new work.’
He thanks her again and leaves. He does not look back. He is afraid he will see a boy in a high-collared uniform, white gloves on his hands, crouching at the warriors’ sandalled feet. He is afraid that if he turns the boy will leap down and pursue him through the park, enraged, swift as a fox.
23
As the embarrassment of doing the piece is now outweighed by the shame that would follow from not doing it, from being discovered as a liar, a fantasist, a person who should immediately be sent to dig shelters beneath the streets of Tokyo, he calls Makiyama’s office and leaves a message with Kiyooka that he would, if it is still possible, if he has not left it too late, be grateful to accept Mr Makiyama’s generous suggestion of a study of Kaoru Ishihara.
‘By the way,’ drawls Kiyooka, ‘we have one of your socks here. Perhaps you would like to collect it?’
24
At the dining table in the Western room he reads an account of the German Army’s capture of Copenhagen. This time there is no attempt to claim that the action was intended to protect the inhabitants from an aggressor. The Danes have simply been absorbed into the Reich. The audaciousness of the attack, the speed with which both the city and the country have been conquered by small forces of determined soldiers, is a lesson, so the author of the article suggests, the Japanese military will surely wish to profit from.
He folds the paper (which today has a special supplement on patriotic recipes) and looks into the garden at Miyo crouching on the path beside the bamboo. What is she doing there? The door onto the verandah is open. He goes outside and crouches beside her. She points into the heart of the bamboo, the little depression where the cat made its nest. He cannot see anything at first — the ground there is densely striped with shadow. Then he notices the death-shrunken form of a kitten, and nearby, partly buried under the pale leaves, a second.