‘Rimbaud shot Verlaine.’
‘Only a small wound.’
‘Is that your definition of friendship? Fine to shoot them so long as you don’t actually kill them? I shall have to warn the others.’ He rubs his hands across his face, rasps the stubble. Beneath his breath he starts to sing. ‘ “Quand Madelon vient nous servir à boire” . . I think,’ he says. ‘I shall go to bed with the rest of the Saint-Emilion. You don’t mind, I hope?’
‘No,’ says Yuji. ‘No, of course.’ Then, speaking carefully as though stood before the examiner, he expresses again his regret over the fate of France.
‘I don’t hold you personally responsible,’ says Feneon.
‘Thank you,’ says Yuji. He bows, steps back, turns, and retreats to the hall. Hanako has gone out, the door is shut. He pulls on his boots, takes his umbrella, opens the door. From the step, as he buttons his coat, he sees that someone is sheltering behind the pillar of the verandah across the street. The brim of a hat, the hem of a raincoat, the heel of a shoe. For a moment he can go neither forwards nor back. Then he puts up his umbrella and hurries to his bicycle, his boots splashing in the yellow mud of the road.
4
He is sitting on the drying platform, his back to that part of the wooden wall that divides the platform from Father’s room. The writing board is on his lap, and on the board a page of writing, the last of the Ishihara piece. He has found an entirely unexpected pleasure in the work, just as he found something disquietingly sympathetic about Ishihara himself. Even the novels, with their utter indifference to the genius of the language, their interminable dark combats between unblemished youth and corrupt old age, the page after page of impossible odds, flashing swords, terse farewells, the boy heroes with skin ‘pale as a maiden’s’ or ‘shining with the vitality of his seventeen years’, have had unexpected virtues, have even, on occasion, spoken to him, to some inner and unattended condition of his heart, his spirit.
Is he not, then, quite what he thought he was? Not the observer standing at a distance, arms folded, a supercilious smile on his face, but nearer to one of those Ishihara spoke of as the future, pouring from the factory gates as the steam whistle shrieks? Can he imagine himself among them, brow grimy with sweat, eyes narrowed against the evening sun, not an individual any more but part of the animated destiny of the nation? ‘A hundred million hearts beating as one!’ ‘Onward, Asian brothers, onward!’ ‘Work, work, for the sake of the country!’ To say such slogans sincerely, to shout them out when everyone was shouting them out so that you cannot tell your own voice from your neighbour’s, might that not be a little like falling in love?
He is crafting a sentence about Ishihara’s manner of speech, its passionate sincerity (he wants, but cannot quite bring himself to write ‘apparent’) when Miyo puts her head out of the door and tells him he has a visitor.
‘Someone to see me?’
She makes a face as if to say. ‘Isn’t that what a visitor is?’, then slips away. He brings the board inside, buttons his shirt. He has not heard anyone arrive, no car pull up, no call from the vestibule. Who visits him in the middle of a Tuesday morning? An angry woman? A father demanding explanations? Or someone from the military clerk’s office, a red envelope in his hand?
He goes downstairs. The doors of Mother’s room are open. There are voices inside, the sighing sing-song of middle-aged women. Cautiously, he peers inside. ‘Mother . .?’
The room is lighter than usual, morning sunlight filtering through the paper screens where the sharply etched shadows of leaves move almost imperceptibly.
‘Here he is,’ says Mother. ‘Please sit with us, Yuji. Mrs Miyazaki is paying us a visit.’
He looks at the other woman, recognises her, though only just, for in all the time he has known Taro, the seven years since they first sat beside each other in Professor Komada’s class, he has seen her no more than three or four times. A woman — today in a pigeon-coloured kimono — in awe of her children, her children’s confident friends. One of the old-style wives, content to kneel at the kitchen door waiting to be told when to bring the sake in. A life lived at the edge of the visible. Yet here she is, sitting on a cushion at the house of Professor Takano and his well-born wife, her hands in her lap, the little movements of her fingers suggesting an embarrassment that moment by moment threatens to crush her.
Yuji kneels beside Mother.
‘Mrs Miyazaki was just telling me about her son,’ she says. ‘It appears that he has volunteered for the army.’
‘Taro?’
‘Junzo,’ says Mrs Miyazaki. ‘Junzo has gone.’
He gapes at her. ‘Junzo?’
‘He left the house four days ago. I have not seen him since.’
‘Junzo? But he has exemption. He has his student deferment . .’
‘Mrs Miyazaki,’ says Mother, ‘was wondering if he had said anything to you.’
‘About this? No. Nothing.’
Discreetly, Mrs Miyazaki begins to weep. Haruyo brings in the tea.
‘He has not been himself for several weeks,’ says Mrs Miyazaki, dabbing her powdery cheeks with a tissue. ‘His elder brother thinks he might have made an attachment. One that has caused him some unhappiness. Please forgive my rudeness, but you are quite sure there is nothing you can tell me? You are his friend. He would not have done this without a reason, would he?’
For the first time, Yuji sees something of Junzo in her, something sharp and unexpectedly wilful in her gaze. He turns from her, exchanges a glance with Mother, then looks at Ryuichi, the candlelight playing palely over his face. He cannot take it in. Junzo in the army? Junzo at boot camp? Junzo at the Front with the likes of Captain Mori and Corporal Kitamura? And what is this nonsense she wants him to tell her about? A mystery girlfriend he has never met?
They sit there in silence, their faces composed as though waiting, with some impatience, for a messenger to arrive. After a minute Yuji makes a sound in his throat, a grunt of irritation. (What is this pigeon-coloured woman doing here, tearing his day in two?) He tells her that he is, regrettably, unable to answer her question. Is it possible there has been a misunderstanding? That Junzo only spoke of volunteering without ever intending his words to be taken seriously? He will, however, attempt to investigate. He will try to discover the information he should already possess but somehow does not. He apologises, climbs to his feet.
‘There,’ says Mother, her voice like the careful folding of silk. ‘I was sure Yuji would be able to help you.’
‘Indeed,’ says Mrs Miyazaki. ‘He has been most kind.’ And she begins again to weep, more loudly this time, crying up tears from her belly as though her second-born, her baby, her brilliant Junzo, was already lost to her. It is unlikely, thinks Yuji, as he slides the doors shut behind him, that such a disturbing sound will be permitted to remain much longer.
5
It takes three days to find Taro. When he has tried all the usual places he goes down to Tokyo Central, to a drinking house in the precincts of the station, a fifteen-seater that specialises in broiled eels and a clear soup of eel livers, and where he knows that some of the junior men from the government offices like to stop for an hour between work and the train ride to the suburbs. Taro is at a table in the corner with four others, all in shirtsleeves. The cook, fanning the charcoal, where a row of skewered eels is sizzling, sees Yuji and barks a welcome. Taro glances up. Yuji raises a hand. He hopes that Taro will leave the table and join him but Taro stays where he is. Yuji takes the seat opposite him. He is introduced. Everyone is perfectly civil but the mood is cool. They are from the ministry, servants of the minister, agents, in their humble way, of the Imperial will. He — whoever he is, whatever it is he does — is an outsider. Soon they politely ignore him. When one of them mentions a certain Mr Honda and the others immediately guffaw, no one troubles to explain why Mr Honda is so amusing. Yuji studies the tabletop. After twenty minutes two of the men, draping jackets over their arms, picking up their umbrellas and briefcases, leave for their train. A few minutes later the others go.