‘Yuji!’
Father is calling him in. Father is scowling magnificently. Yuji, clutching his gifts, crosses the street towards him.
9
In the little cemetery at Kotobuki the men are cleaning Grandmother Takano’s grave. When they finish, they cross a path to Ryuichi’s grave and start again, wiping and scraping away another year of lichen, of the city’s soft fall of soot from the stacks across the river. Kensuke’s daughter, Asako, sits with her child, three-year-old Akiko, in the shade of a gingko tree, and answers, as simply as she can, the little girl’s questions about the world of the dead, the duties of the living. All across the cemetery, across the whole city, the smoke of incense uncoils in the shimmering heat of midday. The men step back, mop their faces. Their brows are shining. They stand in silence until the child, running from the shade, clutches Kensuke’s hand and tugs it as though suddenly afraid for him. He lifts her up, sits her in his arms. Grandfather takes out his pocket watch. The lid flashes in the sunlight as he opens it. ‘The taxis will be waiting,’ he says. ‘I don’t like to make them wait in this heat.’
They go to a restaurant in the Hamacho quarter, owned by a Mr Kono, the adopted son of one of Grandfather’s old employees. Kono has kept the best table for them, in a private room that overlooks a small garden where the blooms of the pomegranates are so vivid they almost burn the eye. The meal begins with chilled bean curd. Later there are salads, persimmon leaf sushi, eel hamo-style. Yuji is kneeling beside Asako. When, yesterday, she arrived at the house with her father and daughter (Sawa, at the last minute, had decided her back was too painful for such a journey), she was wearing a skirt and blouse, but today, for the Festival of Lanterns, the Festival of the Dead, she is dressed more formally in a cream kimono with a pattern of tangling ivy. To Yuji, who has not seen her since her wedding in Showa 10, she appears to have lost all trace of the old mountain-child boisterousness that once so impressed him. Each speaks evasively about the present, the recent past, and starts to smile only when they reminisce about the long-ago summer at the farm — the waterfall, the berry-picking, the ill-tempered cockerel that pecked at Yuji’s heels until she chased it off with clods of earth. As they talk, the little girl, shy, almost voiceless in this unfamiliar company, prods suspiciously at her food and every few seconds glances up intently at the side of her mother’s face.
Across the table, Uncle Kensuke is showing Grandfather a photograph. Yuji has already seen it — Hiroshi stiff and gaunt in the uniform of a newly graduated pilot of the First Air Fleet.
‘He should be with us today,’ says Grandfather. ‘He should be here.’
‘He would have liked to,’ says Uncle Kensuke, ‘but it seems that their training is intensifying.’
‘The same goes for your husband,’ says Grandfather, looking over the table at Asako. ‘You would think Mitsubishi could spare him for a day or two.’
‘Minoru,’ says Uncle Kensuke, ‘is helping to build the planes Hiroshi will be flying. Skilled technicians are in short supply.’
‘Like everything else,’ says Grandfather. ‘Well, at least they let my great-granddaughter come, eh? I must be grateful for that, I suppose.’
As the meal ends, Kono persuades them to take some little glasses of cognac. He joins them, and sits with Grandfather while the old man tells him tales about the city in the days of the first China war of ’94, stories that falter into song, into sighing nasal elegies for the tea houses of the Yanagibashi, the night cherries of the Yoshiwara . . Father and Uncle Kensuke move to the open screens, light cigarettes and peer out at the lengthening shadows of the garden. Yuji, his back to them as he shows the child for the fifth time, the sixth, the seventh, the only magic trick he knows (a ten-sen coin that ‘sinks’ through the skin of his hand to reappear behind one or other of her ears), listens to Uncle Kensuke talking, quietly and earnestly, about Father and Mother coming to the mountains.
‘We’ve more than enough room since the children left. We grow much of what we eat, kill the occasional hen. And Noriko can be as quiet there as she is here. With all that has happenened it can hardly be comfortable for you staying in Tokyo. As for the future . .’
‘Things are not as bad as all that.’
‘Really? That’s not been my impression.’
‘And what about Father?’
‘I’d ask him too if I thought there was the slightest hope of his coming. At least out in Setagaya he’s practically in the countryside. Things should be safer there.’
‘Safer?’
‘If there’s bombing.’
‘Bombing!
‘Look in the papers. The Germans are raiding English cities every day.’
‘The comparison is a little misleading, isn’t it? Where would these bombers come from? Chungking? Moscow?’
‘You should talk to Hiroshi. He has told me things I do not dare to tell Sawa. She has trouble enough sleeping as it is.’
‘I can’t see Noriko making such an upheaval. You saw her this morning.’
‘Better to make such a move now while there is still some normality.’
‘I appreciate your generosity.’
‘So you’ll consider it?’
‘There’s the question of Yuji.’
‘He, of course, is welcome too, but his situation . . I doubt even your friend Kushida can keep him out of the army for good . .’
Two butterflies, black as charred paper, blow into the room, flutter clumsily over the end of the table, then find their way back into the garden again.
‘On a day like today,’ says Father, ‘the situation doesn’t seem so serious. I don’t want to act rashly.’
‘I understand that,’ says Uncle Kensuke, ‘but if you don’t act at all . .’
For the three days before the visitors make their return journey, the child, with her small, determined face, follows Yuji around the house as though connected to him by a length of wire. When he slips away from her, she calls for him, hunts him down. He tells her, in an exasperated voice, that he is trying to write a film about the end of the world. She frowns, then squats on the mat in front of him and begins to wail. He gives in, takes the records out of the storage cupboard, lifts the gramophone from its long sleep beside the corner bookshelf in the Western room, and plays ragtime and jazz until the needles are blunt. He folds her birds out of paper, catches cicadas for her and shows her how, from her cupped hands, to free their clumsy bodies into the air again.
‘She’ll miss you,’ says Uncle Kensuke, sitting down on the verandah beside Yuji, the last morning of the visit. In the garden, the girl, a straw hat tied under her chin, is chasing dragonflies, now and then pausing to be sure that Yuji is watching her.
‘It must be the trick I showed her in the restaurant,’ says Yuji.
‘Who knows. Children choose the people they want.’
‘I thought I might remind her of Minoru.’
‘It’s possible. Though you could hardly be more unlike him.’
‘Is the taxi on its way?’
‘Another half-hour.’
‘I hope Auntie Sawa will be feeling better,’ says Yuji.
‘Yes. Let’s hope so.’
‘And please give my regards to Hiroshi.’
‘When we see him. They don’t give him much leave, and these days he often prefers something more exciting than a farm in the mountains and the company of two old people. You might see him in Tokyo one day.’
‘Yes. If I’m here.’
‘You want to go somewhere?’
‘I’m not sure what I want. But probably it won’t have anything to do with what I want.’