‘Shave my head and squat in the subway with a begging bowl.’
‘You could still take the Civil Service exams . .’
‘I’m too old. It would look odd. Like I had failed at something else.’
‘There’s always school teaching,’ says Junzo. ‘Couldn’t you bear it for a year or two?’
‘Just the smell of a classroom makes me want to throw up.’
‘Well, there’ll be something for you,’ says Taro. ‘A man of your talent. Something will come along.’
Yuji thanks him, but in that moment all three fall silent as if struck by the same thought, the same vision of what, one day soon, might come along for them. Their silence catches the sushi-master’s attention. He glances up — three young men scowling at the polished wood of the counter — but his hands go on with their work. There is no discernible pause in the movement of his blade.
8
Out of the throng at the Kanda bookstalls, boss-eyed Ooka taps the shoulder of Yuji’s greatcoat and tells him he’s seen a copy of Electric Dragonfly on sale, good as new, not a crease or a thumbprint, nothing, in fact, to suggest that anyone has even held it, yet alone read it. It was on Yoshimasu’s stall but maybe it’s gone now.
‘I expect some pretty girl has bought it. Pretty girls like poetry, don’t they?’ He laughs, and Yuji laughs, too, then comes straight home and shuts himself in his room.
How many others are there out there, untouched, unread, not even a crease or a thumbprint, no tea ring, no ink splash? Is there anything sadder or more useless in the world than a book of poems nobody wants?
9
Though Grandfather’s home lies within the thirty-five wards of the city, reaching it is like going on a trip to the country. Tram, subway, train, then a forty-minute walk past new homes, building plots, fields of tea, rice paddies, even a pair of thatched farmhouses like Uncle Kensuke’s.
From the garden gates a gravel pathway curves between persimmon and plum trees, jujube, maples. Then after a hundred steps the ground on one side is suddenly clear, and there, beneath a dreaming pine, is the old rickshaw, its leather hood bright with moss, its painted spokes woven with long grasses. It is not the rickshaw, of course, the one in which, in the time of the Meiji Emperor (or so the story is told), the eighteen-year-old grandfather — already known among his fellow runners as ‘Iron Thighs’ — pulled some eccentric actor the 230 miles from Tokyo to Kyoto to attend a moon-viewing party in a villa above the Daisen Temple. This one, used now by the hens as a roost, is only a souvenir bought for a few yen from a scrap merchant in Honjo, but each time Yuji passes, he is tempted to lift its shafts out of the grass, to lean his weight against the chest bar, to rock it a little. Has he inherited any of the old man’s skill or strength? How far would he get, even with hens for passengers? As far as the station? As far as the road?
Another hundred steps and the house appears, low and weathered under a heavy roof of blue tiles. Grandfather’s housekeeper, Sonoko, is outside, leaning over a starching board she has propped against one of the verandah corner posts. Hearing Yuji, she straightens and wipes her brow with the back of her hand, like a countrywoman looking up from harvesting. She’s forty, forty-five. Dark-skinned, a few freckles across her cheeks, broad hips swelling the lines of her kimono. Pretty in a rustic, old-world way, and with some unusual quality of stillness, of inner poise, that makes Yuji think how pleasant it would be to lie with his head on her lap and sleep for an hour, as he assumes — as everyone assumes — Grandfather sometimes does.
‘He’s in the model room,’ she says.
He thanks her, though he would have looked nowhere else on a winter’s day at such an hour, just as, arriving on a summer’s morning, he would look first in the vegetable garden, or in autumn, in the shade of the trellis outside the kitchen where the pickling barrels are kept.
He pulls off his boots, crosses the eight-mat room, and announces himself at the doors to the twelve-mat, the model room. After a few moments he receives an invitation to enter.
‘I need your young eyes,’ says Grandfather, who is kneeling at the far end of the room, his head almost touching the mat as he peers under the shin-high table that carries the model. ‘There’s a boat down here somewhere. I must have caught it on my sleeve.’
Yuji kneels beside him. After half a minute he finds the boat in the shadow of a table leg. He lifts it, carefully, as though lifting a little singing insect, a kusa-hibari, perhaps, and places it in the palm of Grandfather’s hand.
‘I need stronger lights in here,’ says Grandfather. ‘Or,’ tapping an arm of his glasses, ‘a stronger pair of these.’
The boat, he explains, is a sweet-seller’s boat, the kind that used to be common enough on summer evenings in the old days, advertising its presence with the beating of a drum and carrying such delights as ‘moss in a stream’ and ‘the beautiful Bay of Tango’. He smiles to himself, smiles at his modern, half-Westernised grandson (a creature he should, perhaps, disapprove of, but never has, treating him always with a shrewd generosity of judgement which the boy’s father — the professor, the travelled man! — seems incapable of), then he takes a pair of bamboo tweezers and sets the boat down on the Sumida, that length of curving blue satin he cut from one of his wife’s obi the year she died, the year the model began.
‘So,’ he says, brushing a hand over the stubble on his skull, ‘I told you I had some interesting new pieces. Think you can find them?’
Pausing now and then to crouch and look more keenly, Yuji, in a sideways shuffle, slowly moves the length of the room where, on a table that leaves only the narrowest of corridors, the Low City, from Tsukiji to Umaya Bridge, has been rebuilt out of paper and pins, out of memory and street maps and stories. Hundreds of cardboard roofs, bicycles made from fuse wire, trees whose foliage is skeins of coloured wool. The sides of trams are cut from tins of soya oil. Utility wires are black thread from Sonoko’s sewing box. Those dogs coupling outside the fish market are chewed paper and Chinese ink, their tails a pair of bristles from a writing brush. The Low City, as it might have appeared the last day of August 1923. Still hours to go before anyone will notice a light bulb start to swing or see ripples in the surface of his tea.
‘These are new, I think,’ says Yuji, pointing to two geisha, tall as thimbles outside a tea house in the Yanagibashi district.
‘Shall we see where they’re going?’ asks Grandfather. He holds back the sleeve of his kimono and lifts off the roof of the tea house. Below — and Yuji half expects to see their faces turned up in horror — the tea-house guests are gathered in matted, discreetly screened rooms, while maids and brightly painted geisha dance attendance. Some twelve or fifteen of Grandfather’s buildings have been treated this way, including, below its roof garden, the top floor of the old Mitsukoshi, where Mother was shopping with Mrs Hatanaka when the first shocks hit the city, and where, escaping over the glass of the shattered display cases, she cut her feet so badly.
At midday, Sonoko calls them to eat. They sit around the table-stove. An iron pot is simmering on a stone tile. Sonoko, her hand wrapped in a piece of scorched linen, takes off the lid. Steam pours out, a scent of braised onions, the earthy scent of turnips and something else, something ripe and sweet and bloody.
‘Mountain whale?’ asks Yuji, using Grandfather’s name for the wild boar.
‘I thought we would have something special today,’ says Grandfather, ‘as your visits are rather infrequent.’