Stretched the length of the bench opposite, Hideo Makiyama is reading Yuji’s article. Now and then he clucks, pulls out a pen from the breast pocket of his shirt, and puts a line through a word or sometimes, imperiously — the movement setting Yuji’s teeth on edge — through an entire sentence. The white light of the Ginza stabs the bar’s permanent midnight each time a customer pushes through the swing doors. Waitresses from the early shift are coming down the stairs, while those for the late shift go up with their bags and parasols to the dressing room on the first floor. Yuji watches for the girl who poured for him at the House of Falling Leaves but does not see her. Nor does he see her friend, the girl with the ribbons he left waiting for him in the corridor.
‘Too academic,’ drawls Makiyama, sitting up and shuffling the sheets of paper together. ‘Too much showing off. But other than that, not bad . . not bad at all.’
‘You think it will be suitable?’
‘With some tidying up.’
‘You’ll be able to place it, then? In Young Japan?’
‘I said so, didn’t I? They’re running a special on the key men of the new era, generals, politicians, sportsmen, writers. Ishihara will have three or four pages to himself. Lots of pictures, too, of course. Author at home, author at the Front, author contemplating the evening sky.’
‘So it will come out?’
‘In two weeks.’
‘So soon?’
‘They’ve been waiting for you.’
‘If I had realised.’
‘I told them not to be concerned.’
‘I’m grateful for your confidence.’
‘I look inside people,’ says Makiyama, yawning and stretching himself on the bench again. ‘I looked inside you.’
‘Don’t forget to pay him,’ says Amazawa. ‘And if you like it so much, shouldn’t he have something extra?’
Still prone, Makiyama peels three ten-yen notes from a roll carried casually in a trouser pocket, then, after a second’s teasing, peels off a fourth. ‘Didn’t you,’ he says to Amazawa, ‘have something you wanted to say to him? Some proposition?’
‘A proposition? Yes.’ He looks at Yuji with small bloodshot eyes, then hurriedly eats something out of the palm of his hand, swallowing it with a mouthful of beer. ‘Ever tried writing a screenplay?’
Yuji shakes his head.
‘There’s not much to it.’
‘No?’
‘It’s not really like writing a story. More like the blueprint for a machine.’
‘I see.’
‘You could try writing something for the Unit. You know the sort of thing.’
‘Hmm. I wonder . .’
‘It was his idea.’
‘Mr Makiyama’s?’
‘Ishihara, of course. He said he had spoken freely to you. That you understood.’
‘A vision of the future, perhaps?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘Or like the film at General Sugiyama’s?’
‘Don’t speak of that in here.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘No one is ready for that yet.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘You’ve read the Italian futurists? Marinetti, Balla?’
‘I’ve heard of them . .’
‘Something exalted, something delirious . .’
‘I could try, I suppose.’
‘By the way,’ says Makiyama, ‘you may find you have to break your connection with certain people.’
‘You think so?’
‘The front line,’ says Amazawa, pressing the head of the match against Yuji’s chest, ‘runs through every heart.’
‘I hadn’t thought of it like that.’
‘You can have that if you want,’ says Amazawa. ‘The front-line line. I’m giving it to you.’
‘Thank you.’
Amazawa and Makiyama look at each other. They start to giggle, though to Yuji, Amazawa seems close to tears as if his emotions had a life of their own and cycled mechanically through their repertoire with little regard for what he was doing or thinking.
‘You want to dance with her?’
‘With . .?’
‘With her.’ He points the match at Fumi.
‘You think she wants to dance?’
‘She’s on the dance floor, isn’t she?’
‘It’s true.’
‘Don’t you like her?’
‘She seems nice.’
‘How old do you think she is?’
‘I don’t know. Twenty-four, twenty-five?’
‘You’re not even close,’ he says. ‘If you want to be a real artist, you’ll have to learn how to tell such things at a glance.’
So Yuji dances with her. She lolls her head on his shoulder. She smells of sherbet and honey and cigarettes. They are moving, but much more slowly than the music. Talking into his chest, she says she used to be a taxi-dancer at a place called the Polar Bear Club in Shinjuku but that one night a girl jumped from the roof and after that business wasn’t so good. People complained the place was haunted.
‘You think it was?’
She shrugs, her shoulders like the delicate, useless stubs of wings. ‘Are you going to work at the Unit?’ she asks.
‘I’m not sure what the Unit is.’
‘It’s whatever he wakes up thinking it is.’
‘Ishihara?’
‘The general.’
‘The general?’
‘I’m awfully tired,’ she says. ‘You won’t let me fall, will you?’
He tells her he won’t. He tightens his arm around the top of her waist. They sway, their feet scuffing the boards. He is, to his surprise, quite comfortable with her, and as they turn in slow motion across the rhythmic gloom of the dance floor, his mind goes out in a long exhalation . . He finds himself thinking of a forest in France — Champagne? Compígne? — where the French have signed the instrument of surrender (he has not dared to visit Feneon again); of the barracks near Yokohama where Junzo, who in a letter to Taro has confirmed his unshakable resolve, is starting basic training; of that trouble at the cinema yesterday afternoon (he had gone to watch Mizoguchi’s The Gorge Between Love and Hate) when a man, slow to stand at the sight of the Emperor’s black Mercedes on the Nihon News newsreel, was shouted at, threatened by a figure at the back of the auditorium, one of those new-style patriots who, it was said, carry billy clubs beneath their jackets; and of the morning paper, the Yomiuri, that had on its front page a photograph of schoolchildren carrying their classroom stove slung from a pole like a pig on its way to slaughter. They were delivering it to the War Ministry to be melted down and made into part of an aircraft or the barrel of a howitzer or whatever it is the nation needs more of to ensure its victory. How bright their faces were! And how merrily they seemed to march behind their teacher! It was affecting, a genuinely inspiring example, yet with something so pitiful in it Yuji, reading on the downtown tram, found himself wishing it was he who marched ahead of them, leading them — by some suitably circuitous route — back to their classroom where the stove could be fitted again and next winter they would have something more than the spirit of sacrifice to keep them warm.
In his arms, Fumi has fallen asleep or passed out. He is holding her entire weight, though fortunately she is thin, emaciated even, and only her head, pressed against his chest, seems to have any weight to it. Should he manoeuvre her, unobtrusively as possible, back to the booths, or keep swaying with her until she comes to? He looks across the top of her head, her not very clean hair, hoping to find Dick Amazawa and somehow signal to him, but the film-maker is over by the bar using his outsized match to putt an orange into the cupped hands of a kneeling waitress. He lines up the shot with the greatest care. A small crowd gathers. At the third attempt the orange rolls neatly into the waitress’s hands. Everyone applauds, enthusiastically.