The building must have been a silk factory: I could see a vat for boiling cocoons, four or five industrial-sized looms and dozens of hexagonal silk bobbins. The boy was standing in the corner, next to a small door, beckoning us. We went to him, our footsteps hollow and lonely-sounding in this high-ceilinged industrial cathedral. He pushed open the door and stood, fingers resting on the doorhandle, showing us into what must have been the manager’s office. We came to stand behind him. When I saw what was in there I put my hand over my mouth and groped for the wall, trying to stop my knees buckling.
‘Old Father Heaven,’ Liu whispered, ‘what happens in here? What happens in here?’
41
Some things are more terrible, more awful than you can imagine. It was in the car on the way to Fuyuki’s party that I remembered what oshaka meant. Where I’d read it. I sat up straight, breathing deeply to stop myself shaking. I should have stopped the driver. I should have opened the door and stepped right out of the moving car, but I was paralysed, the awful idea crawling through me. When I arrived at the apartment complex there was a faint glaze of sweat on the nape of my neck and in the hollows at the back of my knees.
My car had been the last in the convoy, and by the time I got upstairs people had already been seated to dine. It was chilly outside – the pool was freezing, crammed with reflected stars – so we were shown into a low-ceilinged dining room overlooking the pool. Tokyo Tower, on the other side, was so close that its red and white candy-cane light bathed the large round dining-tables.
I stood for a moment, surveying the scene. It all seemed so unthreatening. Fuyuki, tiny and skeletal and dressed in a red racing-driver’s jacket emblazoned with the word ‘ BUD ’, was in his wheelchair at the head of the top table, smoking a cigar and nodding genially at his guests. There were only a few spaces left at the table near the window. I slipped into a seat, nodding tightly to my neighbours, two elderly men, grabbed a napkin and pretended to be absorbed in unfolding it.
In the corner, behind the display cabinet, was a small galley kitchen where the waiters were busy with trays and glasses. Standing in the middle of the food-preparation area, cool and unflustered by all the activity, was the Nurse. Dressed in her trademark black skirt suit and turned a little away from the room, so that the glossy wig obscured part of her face, she was chopping meat on a large wooden board, her white-powdered hands moving deftly, almost a blur. Jason was watching her from the doorway, one hand raised casually to lean against the frame. A cigarette burned between his fingers, and he moved only to allow a waiter to pass with a plate or a bottle. I tucked the napkin over my lap, my movements wooden, automatic, unable to tear my eyes from the Nurse’s hands. What strange meat, I wondered, were they accustomed to preparing? And how had she removed the insides of a man, a man whose watch hadn’t even been disturbed in the process? The hostesses seated near the kitchen kept shooting her uncomfortable looks. With her holding the knife as she was, her hands moving so rapidly, you couldn’t expect people to act naturally.
A waiter reached into a circular recess at the centre of the table where I sat. He twisted his hand a few times and a sudden blue flame leaped into the air, making some of the hostesses jump and giggle. I watched the waiter as he adjusted the flame, then placed a large stainless steel flask of water over it. Dark pulpy strands of kelp moved at the bottom and, as the first bright bubbles collected like silver stones, ready to rise to the surface, he scraped from a silver platter into the water a pile of chopped carrots, mushroom and cabbage, a handful of tofu squares, creamy as flesh. He stirred the soup once, covered it with a lid and moved to the next table.
I looked down at my place mat. A large linen bib was folded in front of me, next to it miniature bamboo tongs and a small bowl of sauce, gleaming with fat.
‘What’s this? What are we going to eat?’ I asked the man on my right.
He grinned and fastened his bib round his neck. ‘It’s shabu shabu. Do you know shabu shabu?’
‘ Shabu shabu?’ The skin round my mouth tingled minutely. ‘Yes. Of course. I know shabu shabu.’
Sliced beef. Plain meat, brought raw to the table. Mama Strawberry wouldn’t eat shabu shabu here. She wouldn’t eat anything in this apartment because of those stories – the stories of strange meat, served up side by side with the stalls that sold oshaka. Oshaka. It was an odd word that meant something like second-hand, or discarded belongings, which would have been rare things in a city like post-war Tokyo where nothing that could have been eaten, burned or traded for food would have been discarded. But in the car I’d recalled there had been a more sinister meaning stilclass="underline" the yakuza had used a play on the words osaka and shaka, a reference to the Buddha, to describe very specific ‘discarded’ belongings. When Strawberry said oshaka she meant the possessions of the dead.
The waiter took the lid off the flask on the table and the sweet steam rose up in a column. In the boiling water the cubes of tofu bounced and lifted and somersaulted.
The sliced beef came round, cut as fine as a carpaccio, the plate visible through the flesh. I allowed the waiter to place the platter on my left, but I didn’t immediately start rolling the meat on to my tongs as my neighbours were doing. Instead I sat and stared at it, my throat knotted. Everyone was eating, lifting the raw slices of beef, holding them up to the light so the meat was illuminated in its red and white marbling, then plunging it into the boiling water, swishing it back and forward – swish swish, shabu shabu. Dunk it in the sauce now, and throw back your head. The diners dropped the meat almost whole into their mouths. Pearls of grease collected on their chins.
People would soon notice I wasn’t eating, I thought. I snapped up some meat, dipped it in the sizzling soup and lifted it to my mouth, taking a tiny nibble from the edge. I swallowed hard, not tasting it, thinking suddenly of Shi Chongming and how painful it was for him to eat. I rested the remainder of the meat in the sauce bowl and took a hasty swallow of red wine. Bison, over on Fuyuki’s table, wasn’t eating either. There was a faint look of unease on his face as he studied the Russians, who sat on either side of him, both shovelling the beef enthusiastically into their mouths. That’s because you know, Bison, I thought. You know all about oshaka and zanpan stew and what Fuyuki thinks makes him immortal. Don’t you? You know the truth.
The waiters had stopped moving in and out of the little galley kitchen, and Jason had slipped inside. He stood quite close to the Nurse for some time, talking to her in a low murmur. Every time I looked up he was there, speaking urgently, trying to convince her of something. She didn’t break off from her work – it was almost as if he wasn’t there. Once he happened to turn and look into the dining room and caught me watching him. I must have looked very white and shocked, sitting so upright at my table. He opened his mouth, seemed about to say something, then swung his eyes to indicate the Nurse, and sent me a private smile, a smile I was supposed to share. He put the tip of his tongue on his bottom lip, pushing against it so that the inside of his mouth was momentarily revealed.
I dropped my eyes to the cooling meat on my chopsticks. A growing skin of congealing fat was whitening on it. My stomach cramped, discomfort raced through me.
At the other table Bison and Fuyuki were discussing a skinny young man with pockmarked skin and dyed-blond, feathered hair. A new recruit, he looked anxious to have been summoned to the table. ‘Step forward, chimpira,’ said Fuyuki. ‘Come here, chimpira. Come here.’ Chimpira was a word I hadn’t encountered. It was only months later that I discovered it was a term for a Mafia junior soldier. It meant, literally, ‘little dick’. The chimpira came to stand in front of Fuyuki, who turned his wheelchair away from the table and, using his cane, lifted one side of the chimpira ’s baggy lavender suit to reveal not a shirt but a black T-shirt. ‘Look at this,’ he said to Bison. ‘This is the way they dress today!’ Bison smiled weakly. Fuyuki sucked in his cheeks and shook his head regretfully, dropping the cane. ‘These young ones. What a disgrace.’