He buys a skewer of gristly meat at a stall near the station, eats it while sitting on an upturned crate beside the stall (one of three that serve as the stall’s restaurant). At some point he will have to make his way back across the city to Hongo. He will have to think about what he has done today, or undone. What he has broken. But for now he will fill out a little curl of time doing nothing anyone might imagine mattered, an hour that never needs to be accounted for. Who knows he’s here? Who would think of looking for him in Shinjuku? He chooses streets at random, stops under lanterns to listen to an accordion playing or a koto, then moves on, chooses again, this bright alley, this dark street. He wonders if he will find the Polar Bear Club, where Fumi worked, but realises it could have had a dozen different names since then, and would, anyway, have been shut for months by government order. He is becoming uncertain of his bearings, has, perhaps, strayed beyond the quarter’s secret borders, when, turning one more corner, crossing a patch of green, then threading the gate of a little shrine, he finds himself on one of the new avenues, walking on a pavement washed by the light of a department store. The half-dark crowd swim by, brushing softly against each other. Yuji steps into the gutter to make room for a soldier walking with his wife and child, then hesitates, struck by something in the man’s face. He looks back. The soldier has also stopped
‘Excuse me,’ says the soldier, taking off his cap, ‘but were you a customer, perhaps?’
‘A customer?’
‘Maybe I fixed your bicycle?’
It takes a moment more, then Yuji suddenly recognises the little mechanic from the repair shop in Hibiya. ‘So you’re in the army now?’
‘I trained in ’37. I was surprised they left me alone as long as they did.’
‘You’ve closed the shop?’
‘I tried to find someone to run it while I was away but it’s specialist work. My wife and the baby are going to live with my mother in Shiba.’
The woman is standing just behind the mechanic’s shoulder, a child about a year old tied to her back in a shawl. She is much younger than her husband. She looks tired and slightly frightened.
‘I’m sure your customers will not forget you,’ says Yuji.
‘Half of them are overseas themselves,’ says the man. ‘When I come home it’ll be like starting again.’
‘I used to do some work for Mr Horikawa,’ says Yuji. ‘He had an office above your workshop.’
‘Of course. Every day he would look in and greet us. Nobody in the street had a bad word to say about him.’
‘He’s gone somewhere?’
‘Gone?’
‘Moved?’
‘He’s dead,’ says the man.
‘Horikawa?’
‘It was even in the paper. I cut it out. If we were in the shop, I could find it for you. Popular Hibaya businessman in railway suicide. Something like that.’
‘Horikawa?’
‘With his son. The one who was a bit, you know, in the head . .’
‘Both of them? Both dead?’
‘They went on to the line just the other side of the steel bridge. Waited there for the night train. It was a big funeral. Even the service of the forty-ninth day had a good turn-out. Or so I heard.’
The child, catching at her mother’s hair, begins to whimper. The woman ignores it.
‘When did it happen?’ asks Yuji.
‘The beginning of October? People say his heart was getting worse. That he was afraid of what would happen to his son if he couldn’t care for him any more. His wife . .’ He sucks in his cheeks.
‘Yes,’ says Yuji.
‘I’m sorry to be the one who brings bad news.’
‘You weren’t to know.’
‘He’s in the cemetery at Koishikawa if you want to pay your respects.’
‘At Koishikawa?‘
‘They had a family plot.’
‘Yes. I see. Thank you.’
‘And if your bicycle needs fixing in, say, six months from now, maybe I’ll be back in business.’
‘I’ll remember,’ says Yuji. They nod to each other, continue on their way, the child’s crying sounding in Yuji’s head long after he could possibly still be hearing it.
17
On the front door of the house in Kanda someone has nailed a large sheet of paper. On it is written (in calligraphy a child would be ashamed of) ABOLISH DESIRE UNTIL THE FINAL VICTORY!
For a few moments Yuji stands there with his bicycle, unsure what to do. Pass by? Pull it off? He cannot use the entrance through the garden. The kitchen door is bolted. And anyway, how would it help him now? It is too late for hiding. He leans his bicycle against the wall of the house. The sense of being observed from the buildings across the street is very strong. He takes the key from his pocket. As he opens the front door the paper flaps, shows, on its other side, an advertisement for tinned whale meat.
He stands in the blackness of the hallway, holds his breath, listens, then hurries through to the salon, opens the window and unlatches the shutters. Brilliant morning light cuts across the room.
He looks in the study, then all the rooms at the back of the house. All of it is secure, undisturbed, exactly as he and Alissa left it nine days ago (nine days!). Whoever nailed up the poster has not yet dared go any further than the door. Some neighbourhood patriot. Someone who imagines he has seen the enemy in his own street. Or was the poster discussed at a meeting of the local association? A warning, a punishment. Do they know his name? Where is Hanako now? Who does she talk to?
He goes upstairs, examines each room in turn until he comes to Alissa’s. The curtains are part open (that, too, just as they left it). He sits on the stripped bed, then steps to the wardrobe and opens both its doors. Though she took all she could fit in the suitcases, pressed in, irritably, more and more, took most of her favourites, there are still eight or ten dresses hanging there, and in the rack of shelves beside the rail, blouses, shirts, rolled socks, camisoles. He touches the dresses, lets his fingers drift from one to the next. Most he cannot remember ever having seen her wear. Most smell only of the little embroidered pillows of lavender at the bottom of the wardrobe (La vraie lavande de Provence). A scarf — chiffon? — is steeped in some perfume of hers but this is not what he is looking for. He shuts the wardrobe, turns the little brass key. In the corner, in the space between the wardrobe and the wall, is a basket of plaited bamboo. He takes off the lid. It is a laundry basket, and crumpled at the bottom, overlooked or ignored, is one of her linen nightgowns. He lifts it out. It smells of her. It smells shockingly of the child. On the front are two small stains, creamy-yellow against the white, where her milk seeped from her, before or after a feed. He holds it up, examines it thoroughly, then takes off his clothes and pulls the gown over his head. It is tight across his upper back and shoulders but otherwise fits him quite comfortably. He curls on the bed, the rough ticking of the mattress. The room, the shadow light, hold him patiently. After an hour he gets up again, takes off the gown, puts on his clothes, goes downstairs, closes the shutter, re-crosses the salon, the dark hall, and leaves the house.
From Kanda he rides towards home, but when he reaches the main road above Yushima he turns left towards the cemetery. The guardian, an old man carrying a broom of bound twigs, guides Yuji to the Horikawa family plot. There are flowers there, white chrysanthemums, but they are not recent, their petals edged with brown, like rust. Behind the grave are wooden sotoba boards with Horikawa’s Buddhist name and that of his son, who, in death, is named Righteous Serene Sincerity Boy. At the front, to the right of the grave, is a small box for business cards, the corner of a last card protruding a little from the slot.