He takes a bath, lies there staring at the drops of condensation on the ceiling until the water is as chill as the air. Wasn’t he sincere? Didn’t he do everything that was expected of him? Why, then, this leaden sense of shame, this unsheddable feeling of having, from the very beginning, imagined everything wrongly? No wonder he cannot write poetry! Dragonfly had some of the honesty of childhood in it, but since then, idle in his little sewing room, he has carefully misunderstood himself, made himself as much a ghost as Mother, a footless shade, babbling, ravenous to be thought clever, important, different. A shade who became a father. A father who has given up his son.
He does not spend the day. He moves its hours one by one, an idiot at an abacus. Night comes. It is almost comically threatening. He mutters the child’s name until it sounds like a riddle. In Otaki’s someone is singing. He does not recognise the voice. He lies down, a finger tracing the little ridges of the matting. He is thinking of the writer Akutagawa, his scraps of beautiful work, his misery, his taste for Veronal. (There are old bottles of it downstairs in Mother’s room. She always had much more than she needed.) The thought is comforting, though slightly ridiculous. He is not Akutagawa. He is not Arthur Rimbaud dying of boredom and swollen veins in the desert. Nor is he Feneon or Uncle Kensuke or Father or Ryuichi. He is not Junzo. He is not Taro, or Professor Komada telling them that Proust slept in a cork-lined room. He is not Proust.
The singing stops. The list continues.
He will, he supposes, by morning, be left with something.
16
What should one wear to an afternoon of blood and silence? Something elegant? Something formal? Something of a military character? He chooses the suit that was his graduation gift from Father (and which Father must have intended him to wear on his first day in some school or office). White shirt, blue tie. He puts the box containing the ruby-headed pin in his jacket pocket, looks round for his watch, remembers, then goes down stairs.
As he steps into the street he sees Kyoko coming out of Itaki’s. They cross beside her gateway.
‘Be careful,’ she says, not looking at him. ‘He wishes to harm you.’
‘He has always wished to harm me,’ says Yuji. ‘Did you not know?’
She goes in through her gate. He keeps walking. He is pleased, however, she has taken the trouble, the risk, however small, to warn him. Pleased that she is, in some way, a friend.
He eats in the Low City, a place by the water, then goes to the Mitsukoshi and buys a new watch, a Seiko, as much like his old watch as he can find. On a different floor in the same store, he buys a hat, plain brown, an austerity hat of the kind that will soberly express, in queues for the tram, queues for rice, meat, bread, sugar, charcoal, his devotion to the subjugation of China.
There is plenty of time. His watch, which the sales girl set for him with careful reference to her own, says ten past two. He flags a taxi outside the store, travels south to Azabu, gets out at the end of Ishihara’s street, and walks, partly screened by the trees, until he is opposite the house. The car is there, bright as a new toy, but there is no sign of any guests, no prefatory commotion. He keeps walking, reaches the other end of the street, then comes slowly back on the same side. This time, as he approaches the house, he hears voices. One of them loud, good-humoured, a voice that knows it will not be contradicted. The other, Ota’s, smooth, carefully subordinate. He stops and edges forward until he can see the flank of a ministry staff car, a uniformed driver at attention beside the open passenger door. He cannot see the men talking. Their voices fade into the garden. The driver drops his stance, swings shut the door of the car, and strolls round to lean against the warmth of the bonnet. For a second time, keeping to the sparse shadows of the trees, Yuji walks past the house. He tells himself he is waiting for a more opportune moment to make his entrance — it would not do to arrive so soon after such an important guest — but as he comes again to the junction with the main road he stands there like a man trying to remember the address of someone he has not visited in years, as if he doubted this clipped, respectful street could possibly be the one he wanted . . .
In his pocket, he touches the box with the pin inside. This, surely, is the moment to put it on, the moment to surrender himself to his protectors. With Ishihara there will be no forced marches in the snow. No beatings from drill instructors. No bayoneting of bound prisoners. He will be part of some troupe, semi-official, decorating the fringes of the regime, breathing, with their productions, a little life into the tiny souls of military planners. There will be cars and money. There will be pink-brown pills to banish sleep. There will be actresses whose age is hard to guess. There will be much excited talking about death, but little actual risk of it. Ishihara, perhaps, is the boy under the shutter he has looked for in so many dreams, the boy who will lift him to safety when the pillars of fire fall and the others are reduced to ashes.
He takes the box from his pocket. He is fiddling with the clasp, freeing it, when a taxi swings into the road from the direction of Roppongi and with a grinding of gears accelerates past him. He looks up, catches a brief clear view of Dick Amazawa, a glimpse of two others on the seat beside him.
Was he seen? Was he recognised? He is sure he was not. Amazawa, though looking out, was looking in, his big face blind to anything beyond the haze of his breath on the window. The time is ten past three. At exactly fourteen minutes past, the taxi returns. Yuji raises an arm, steps out.
‘Shinjuku.’
‘Shinjuku?’
The rear of the cab is blue with cigarette smoke but the smell of Fumi’s perfume, a scent he remembers perfectly from their dance at the Don Juan, lingers in a sticky cloud of sherbet and honey.
They pull onto the main road, turn north. He cannot believe how simple it was (he who has had such trouble stopping taxis!). He twists, stares from the rear window at diminishing Azabu, holds his breath. It is not, of course, too late to tap the driver’s shoulder, say he has forgotten something, has changed his mind. Apologise to Ota at the door, a low bow to Ishihara who will graciously excuse him, link arms and lead him over to the general. It is not too late, it is not too late . . And then, plainly, it is. He breathes out, sits back, picks at the brown band of his new hat, and does not hear, until it is repeated for the third time, the driver’s question.
‘Whereabouts?’
In the days of Grandfather’s youth, Shinjuku was little more than a way station on the road to the province of Kai, a place to find a bed for the night on visits to the city. Now, a short drive north from Azabu, it’s modern Tokyo, its crowds as dense as any in Asakusa or the Ginza. He pays off the taxi outside the Hamada Cinema. There’s a Mikio Naruse film playing.
‘It’s been on for twenty minutes,’ say the girl with the tickets.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ says Yuji, who’s seen it before, twice.
The auditorium is almost empty. The film is melancholy, charming, restful. When he comes out — still on the steps of the cinema — he hears, above the ringing of trams and the rumble of passing trucks, the early evening chorus of birds.