‘You mean, if you get your papers?’
‘Isn’t it inevitable?’
‘Tell me, are you writing these days?’
‘Some journalism.’ He shrugs. ‘I wouldn’t necessarily call it writing.’
‘Your father said it was something on Ishihara. He said it was well written.’
‘I didn’t know he had seen it.’
Uncle Kensuke smiles. ‘Apparently you left the magazine open on the table one morning.’
‘And he said it was well written?’
‘He doesn’t much care for Ishihara, of course, or Young Japan, but he has always respected your ability.’
‘My ability!’
‘When Ryuichi died your father became rather cynical. Stubborn and cynical. He wasn’t always so. When he was young he was full of enthusiasms. Quite a talker, even. You should not mistake his reticence for indifference.’
‘Did he say anything else? About me?’
‘Only that he was afraid he would not be able to protect you.’
‘From whom?’
‘He was not specific.’
‘I thought it was Father who needed protecting.’
‘All of us will need some protecting before the world is much older. But what about poetry?’
‘It doesn’t seem like a time for poetry.’
‘No? I can’t think of a better one. Isn’t poetry just about paying attention to what is here? Two men, for example, sitting talking while a child runs in the garden. The quietness of that has a certain value, don’t you think, in such a clamorous age?’
‘I’m not sure many share your view, Uncle. People want other things now.’
‘You might think it’s not a time for something as trivial as dyeing cloth, but now I’m doing it more carefully than ever because indigo is my way of speaking. Which reminds me. I have something for you. It’s in the suitcase. I’d almost forgotten . .’
They go through the house to where two tan leather cases are waiting by the edge of the vestibule step. Kneeling, Uncle unbuckles the smaller case, pulls out a pair of folded yukatas, some Tokyo newspapers, then lifts out a square of folded silk and holds it up to Yuji.
‘I remember the summer you stayed with us as a little boy you used to sit in the dyeing barn, sometimes for an hour or more, watching what I was doing. Hiroshi never had that sort of interest.’
Yuji takes the cloth, lets it fall open. It’s a square of subtly dyed silk, the indigo darkening in diagonal waves from blue-black to a blue so pale it’s like the blue of a vein on the inside of a child’s wrist.
‘It’s just a test piece, too small to be of much use, but somehow I liked the way it came out. I thought you might like it too.’
Yuji thanks him, holds the cloth up to the light that comes through the open doors of the Western room. ‘Do you also remember,’ he says, ‘how, that summer, you would often massage my chest in the evening before supper, and because the dye was on your hands it stained my skin? Even a month after I came home I could see it, though every day a little fainter.’
‘Indigo has special properties. Wrap something in indigo and you preserve it.’
‘Then,’ says Yuji, carefully folding the material, ‘I must find something precious to wrap in this.’
‘I’m sure you will,’ says Uncle Kensuke, absently, as he buckles the straps of the case.
In the garden the girl is calling Yuji’s name. A repetitive little voice, shrill as an insect. ‘Yuji! Yuji! Yujiii!’
10
The days that follow the visitors’ departure bring the first rumours of Saburo’s return. In the noodle bar, Sachiko, Otaki’s wall-eyed sister, serving him a lunch of zaru soba, tells him she has heard from a regular customer, who has a nephew who drinks with an assistant at the military clerk’s office in Ueno, that Saburo will be back before the beginning of the ninth month. The next afternoon, Mrs Itaki, wiping down the woodwork at the front of her shop, assures Yuji that her husband has been told by a soldier who saw Saburo in Dairen only two months ago that his ship, in all probability, will dock at Yokohama on 7 September. Even Miyo claims to know something, telling Yuji that their neighbour will return no earlier than the thirteenth but no later than the twentieth. Her informant is the soy-seller’s son, who heard it from his father, who heard it from the wife of an official he delivers to up in Yanaka.
The first of September — the beginning of the typhoon season, the seventeenth anniversary of the Great Earthquake — is a mournful day of sultry heat that feels neither like summer nor autumn. Yuji waits in his room and once an hour imagines he hears, rising above the cries of itinerant salesmen and the cooing of radio orchestras, the voice of his old friend, his enemy, calling to him.
On the seventh he waits again. Again on the eighth, on the ninth . . There are no more rumours. People seem to have forgotten about Saburo. Is he coming back at all? Yuji has not seen Grandma Kitamura since the telegram (is she ill?). Kyoko, he has glimpsed several times in the garden, early mornings and dusks on those days she was not on the trains. On the last occasion he imagined he noticed a subtle alteration in her, a suggestive melancholy in the way she picked a leaf from the surface of the pond, then stood still as a horse in the shade of the plum tree . . If a wound can get better, it can get worse too. Could the Kitamuras be waiting for a second telegram with darker, more conclusive news? Whatever the truth of it, he will listen to no more gossip from waitresses and serving girls.
On the thirteenth he cycles through a rising wind to meet Oki and Shozo at the bathhouse. As they wash at the taps, Oki says that he saw Junzo, two days after the Festival of the Dead, in a café in Jinbocho.
‘Who was he with?’
‘He was on his own.’
‘What did he say?’
‘Not much.’
‘Not much?’
‘It hardly seemed like him at all. After a few minutes I felt embarrassed and made up some appointment. In fact, I said I was meeting you.’
‘Did he ask about me?’
‘Just said I’d better go if I was meeting you.’
‘That’s it?’
‘That’s it.’
Upstairs, after the bath, they drink beer and watch through the room’s only window the sky building with storm clouds. On the roof of the house opposite, a woman plucks streaming washing from a line, balls it in her arms, and hurries inside. ‘We’re in for a blow, all right,’ says Watanabe, swaying by the young men’s table on big splayed feet. ‘There’ll be roofs stripped by morning.’ His wife shouts up the stairs, tells him to close the rain shutters. The light goes on, feebly, under a shade of insect-speckled glass.
‘By the way,’ asks Shozo, as the young men gather by the street entrance, buttoning coats and tying mufflers, ‘is the French Club still going, or is that all over now?’
‘Over?’
‘I was just wondering. You know. . With things as they are.’
Outside, they separate with hasty waves. Yuji, his trouser cuffs snapping at his ankles, wheels his bicycle into the teeth of the wind. The sky is turquoise, orange, bruise yellow. A warm rain begins, a swirling downpour that seems to fall from all sides at once. In less than a minute Yuji is as wet as when he sat in the baths. A man beckons to him from a doorway. Yuji shakes his head. There is not far to go, and this sudden violence — all of summer being torn to pieces — is exhilarating. He shouts out scraps of poetry: ‘Cette idole, yeux noirs et crin jaune, sans parents ni cour!’ The wind smears the words across his face, the rain dashes them away. A pot of flowers (the kind of big ceramic tub he would struggle to lift on his own) sails from a roof garden and explodes in a halo of earth and petals against the manically creaking sign of a leather-goods store. When he reaches home he’ll carry the sake bottle up to the platform and stand there, captain of a doomed ship, reciting the whole of ‘Le Bateau Ivre’ to the thrashing gingko tree. What does it matter if it’s bad for his health? With things as they are, isn’t good health more of a threat to him than sickness? Good health could be the death of him.