Asia Literary Review No. 20, Summer 2011

SUMMER 2011

Tales from Japan Jake Adelstein Liza Dalby Alex Kerr David Mitchell Masaru Tamamoto Akiko Yosano

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ASIA LITERARY REVIEW No. 20, SUMMER 2011

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ASIA LITERARY REVIEW No. 20, SUMMER 2011 Publisher Ilyas Khan Editor-in-Chief Stephen McCarty Deputy Editor Charmaine Chan Managing Editor Duncan Jepson Poetry Editor Martin Alexander Art Editor John Batten Consulting Editor Peter Koenig Production Shweta Moogimane, Michael Chau, Alan Sargent Design George Pang Distribution Manager Anil Kumar Cover Image Corbis; George Pang Back Cover Image Shinichi Sato, Shinagawa. See Tokyo: Life Implied, page 55

Asia Literary Review is published by Print Work Limited 2401, Winsome House, 73 Wyndham Street, Central, Hong Kong www.asialiteraryreview.com To subscribe email subs@asialiteraryreview.com Editorial: (852) 2167 8947 Email: stephen.mccarty@asialiteraryreview.com, charmaine.chan@asialiteraryreview.com Advertising: (852) 2167 8910 / 8980 Email: anil.kumar@asialiteraryreview.com Typeset in Adobe Garamond Printed in Hong Kong by Magnum Offset Printing ISBN: 978-988-18747-7-1 ISSN: 1999-8511 Individual contents Š 2011 the contributors This compilation Š 2011 Print Work Limited

Contents

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From The Editor

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n september 1, 1923, Japan’s principal island of Honshu was pummelled by a harrowing earthquake. Tremors tore down most of Tokyo and Yokohama, obliterated swathes of Chiba, Shizuoka and Kanagawa prefectures and visited devastation on extensive tracts of the Kanto region.

The Great Kanto Earthquake, with its epicentre offshore, 75 miles south of Tokyo, lasted up to 10 minutes – reports and observers’ locations varied widely – and posted 7.9 on the Moment Magnitude Scale (MMS). The damage was Biblical and the loss of life catastrophic: about 140,000 people, including roughly 40,000 who vanished, were killed.

The damage inflicted was the most profound suffered by the country before 1945. Firestorms, augmented by a typhoon in the Tokyo Bay area, vanquished cities; homes were swallowed by landslides; and tsunamis (from the Japanese for “harbour” and “wave”) of up to 33 feet thrashed the southeast coast. Government proposals to establish the capital elsewhere were discussed.

The extent of the destruction left the nation appalled and subject to psychological trauma, as revealed by various contemporaneous and subsequent reports. This is what happened next.

According to documents held by Brown University, Rhode Island, postearthquake hysteria and disorientation resulted in rumour-mongering across the stricken regions, the flames of misinformation fanned negligently or maliciously by Japanese newspapers. Tokyo had been erased, some reported and the Japanese government obliterated. The whole of the Kanto region had sunk below the waves and an enormous tsunami had carried all before it halfway across the country.

Martial law was declared by the Home Ministry, with public order the priority. Into the vortex of paranoia, hearsay and suspicion marched xenophobia, with Japan’s traditional adversaries the chief targets. Word spread that Koreans were profiting from disaster, committing robberies, rape and arson and detonating bombs, the aim being to destabilise Japanese society further.

Reacting to newspaper reports that Koreans were orchestrating rebellion and sabotage, mobs gathered in Tokyo and Yokohama – and committed 5

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mass murder. To the bands of vigilantes, uncontrollable fires and polluted water, consequences of a large earthquake, were proof of foreign political manoeuvring. Roadblocks were erected within the rubble of villages, towns and cities; shibboleths were used to determine whether suspects were Japanese or Korean. People with Korean accents pronounced some syllables differently to those with Japanese accents, so particular words served as ethnic identity tests. Failure to articulate a word correctly often resulted in murder, with innumerable deadly attacks witnessed by Americans in the Tokyo area and relayed to newspapers at home.

The Dunkirk Evening Observer of New York reported that some Japanese men had armed themselves with “heavy sticks, sections of pipe and … antiquated swords” and that Koreans were “beaten to death with clubs, hacked to pieces with swords; pierced with spears”.

Protection was offered to some potential victims, although in various instances protector turned killer. The police and Japanese Army sheltered 2,000 Koreans in Tokyo-region internment camps, but studies reveal that some killings were condoned or even carried out by soldiers or police.

Perhaps the most horrific slaughter took place after hundreds of Koreans were told to board boats in Yokohama Harbour, allegedly for their safety.

There, as related by Time magazine, a Captain Hedstrom, an American assistant superintendent at Yokohama docks, witnessed 250 Koreans, bound hand and foot, being placed in groups of five on an oil-covered junk and burned alive. Official orders, added Hedstrom, were “to kill as many Koreans as possible”.

Nor were Koreans the sole victims. Persecution extended to Chinese and Japanese speakers of regional dialects who were mistaken for Koreans.

By some estimates, more than 6,000 murders – and possibly as many as 10,000 – were committed in what became known as the Korean Massacre.

Witness accounts survived despite censorship of reports on the earthquake and subsequent atrocities.

About 350 Japanese, all civilians, were eventually charged with murder, attempted murder, manslaughter or assault. Most defendants received nominal sentences.

So much for the legendary Japanese self-control.

None of this damning evidence appears in the airbrushed government accounts of the disaster and reactions to it that surfaced in carefully selected 6

From The Editor

tales of heroism and self-sacrifice on the first anniversary of the earthquake.

In The Taisho-era Collection of Heartwarming Stories the emphasis is firmly on mutual assistance, selflessness and the commendable conduct of the populace and of the state in rapidly providing aid.

Undermining the official nostalgia, however, are interviews conducted by researcher Osamu Hiroi, albeit decades after the earthquake. Accounts tell of individual examples of extreme bravery, but also of government incompetence in distributing supplies; victimisation; and the cover-up of the Korean Massacre.

Which brings us to March 11, 2011 and the Great Tohoku Earthquake.

With an MMS reading of 9.0 the earthquake was the fifth-most severe recorded since 1900 and the worst to hit Japan. Calculations showed it to have been 32 times more powerful than the Great Kanto Earthquake.

Stringent building laws and the absence of fires across affected areas contributed to the relatively low loss of life; but still, 15,000 people were killed, most by the subsequent tsunami, and 9,000 are still missing. Add to the initial upheaval fears of nuclear annihilation courtesy of the damaged reactors of the Fukushima Daiichi Power Plant, plus adverse weather endured by survivors initially stranded on open ground, and the privations suffered would have required superhuman self-discipline to ensure the maintenance of civic responsibility and respect for the law.

Which, astonishingly, is what we almost saw … but not quite. In such dreadful circumstances perhaps no nation would have acquitted itself more admirably than the Japanese, generally cleaving to the rule of law, whether through a determination to do the right thing, or shock, or because of other constraints.

Reports from around the world highlighted the absence of unrest on any significant scale – but crimes were committed and started to come to light a week or so after the earthquake. Despite a sizeable police presence in affected areas and, remarkably, the attentions of the yakuza, who helped maintain order while protecting their turf (see Jake Adelstein’s opening article, The First Responders), looting and theft did occur, with hundreds of incidences of the latter reported by the media. In Miyagi Prefecture millions of yen and even bank books were stolen from houses and businesses; millions more yen in goods were looted from damaged shops; a bank was relieved of about 40 million yen by thieves; and petrol was siphoned from abandoned or washed7

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up vehicles. Theft of valuables from corpses was reported, as was the setting up of spurious donation programmes.

But perhaps more surprising was the attitude in some quarters to the government and its reaction to the crisis. As Masaru Tamamoto writes in our consideration of the Japanese psyche, Conformity, Deference, Risk Aversion: Parsing Japan’s CDR Complex, the customary obeisance to authority did not remain intact under the strain of contingencies.

Undoubtedly events could have turned much uglier had the laudable Japanese restraint not been largely conspicuous. But as with the first, events following the second great earthquake do raise intriguing questions as to what really underpins the Japanese character. To many Westerners, a Japanese citizen might still be that clichéd “inscrutable Oriental” of art and literature: living life by the rule book and suppressing his feelings. On the other hand, while devastating and hardly to be wished on any nation, such a monumental calamity as the Great Tohoku Earthquake might afford the rest of the world a peek into the Japanese mindset. Novelist David Mitchell, interviewed in these pages, observes: “Japan functions well as a social organism – as the recent past in Sendai shows – but there’s always a price. Self-abnegation can be expensive in terms of mental health.”

Facing one catastrophe after another, victims in Sendai and elsewhere began to question the government’s response. With up to half a million evacuees in temporary shelters, lacking sufficient food, water, clothing and heat; repeated power cuts in and beyond the disaster zone; hospitals running short of medicines; and Tokyo-centric media offering little information that wasn’t from official government or Tepco power-company mouthpieces, patience finally gave way to anger.

In a country where courtesy and acquiescence strangle even political debate, Prime Minister Naoto Kan was suddenly a focus for criticism. Instead of rallying the people he was elusive, complained websites and message boards. Instead of coordinating effective rescue and recovery efforts he was forever convening more committees and advisory bodies. His yelling at Tepco management, “What the hell is going on?” during a press conference might have been cheered by the displaced, but it did little to cut the intricate ties between government nuclear monitors and the industry.

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From The Editor

Have we finally reached a tipping point in Japanese thought and action – the point at which the Jasmine Revolution is exported farthest east, to find its most unlikely new home?

Last October, despite the Japanese economy having spent 20 years in stagnation, falling consumer prices, escalating joblessness among 20- to 30-year-olds, depressed production, a falling birth rate, an ageing population and the United States having taken China as its new dance partner, the International Herald Tribune published an editorial positing that Japanese national anxiety about the future was “overblown” and “overdone”.

According to the positive yarrow stalks the newspaper must have shaken out, the country’s “political and business elites” were finding ways of working together. Troubled American-Japanese relations were improving, thanks to mutual distrust of China. And Tokyo was finally showing interest in joining multilateral free-trade pact the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Moreover, said the editorial, Japan “will continue to enjoy relative domestic tranquillity” because “the country’s elected leaders do not face the outraged opposition of citizens and interest groups eager to make trouble in the streets”.

The country has been severely kicked while already down. How concussive the contrast between Japan 2011 and the imperious Japan of the future imagined by Philip K. Dick in his alternative history The Man in the High Castle. What price the erstwhile fantastic emergence of a literature of protest and a crystallisation of social dissent? *** This just in: print is dead. Again. Books are soon to be no more. In literature, the Kindle is king (and the iPad the putative usurper).

We know this because recently, omnipresent online retailer Amazon trumpeted the news that it is now selling more ebooks than printed books, less than four years after it began offering the electronic versions. Since April 1 it has sold 105 ebooks, downloaded to its Kindle ereader and other devices, such as the iPhone and iPad, for every 100 paperbacks and hardbacks combined.

But wait. Six months ago Amazon was gleefully announcing that ebook transactions had overtaken paperback sales; last July it was ebooks overtaking 9

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hardbacks. The latest shout from the rooftops sounds like another crusading cry from a branch of an industry making the most of its 15 minutes.

As Amazon and the rest hope consumers keep taking the tablets, it might be borne in mind that ebook deals represent what some commentators call “volume not value”: many electronic sales are US 25-cent downloads and numerous others are of “books” that web-watchers say might be dismissed as brochures were they to be seen in print.

Meanwhile, publishers’ ardour for the all-singing, all-dancing, “enhanced” ebook seems to have cooled. Exciting extras such as author interviews and reading guides were predicted not long after the prototype ebook hatched (partly as a reason for inflating prices). But at April’s London Book Fair a Bloomsbury spokesman remarked that augmented ebooks were merely an affectation that would never take root.

Last summer, the Association of American Publishers estimated that ebooks were responsible for only 8.5 per cent of purchases, albeit up from three per cent the year before.

And 98 per cent of authors’ royalties is still generated by sales of paper books.

As for readers, I have yet to see a literary-festival goer desperate to have his Kindle signed by an author at the end of an event.

Stephen McCarty

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The First Responders Jake Adelstein

The most important thing is helping the weak. Duty and kindness are second. Then the third would be: don’t betray others.

– Matsuyama Shinichi, chairman of the Kyokuto-kai yakuza organisation, on what it means to be a yakuza member.

For the yakuza helping the relief effort, it’s partly about living up to the slogans they profess. It’s also about getting a stake in the reconstruction of Japan. Construction is big business.

– Tomohiko Suzuki, author of I’ve Met 1,200 Yakuza, investigative journalist and former editor of the yakuza fan magazine Jitsuwa Jidai Bull.

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n March 11 at 2.46pm a devastating earthquake in the Tohoku region of Japan and the resultant tidal waves killed thousands of people and left thousands missing. The earthquake shook the country on every level: political, economic and social. The slow reaction of the Japanese government and the woefully inept response of the Tokyo Electric Power Company to potential nuclear meltdown made the nation shake also with anger.

While the cabinet of Prime Minister Naoto Kan was wrestling with what to do, spurning help from the United States and failing to mobilise the Japan Self-Defense Forces swiftly, there was one group of Japanese citizens who reacted rapidly and effectively to the crisis: Japan’s organised crime groups, also known as the yakuza.

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Japan is home to 78,000 yakuza, according to Japan’s National Police Agency (NPA) and when you take into consideration the thousands of front companies they own, affiliated industries and associated members, they constitute almost a second army. As unlikely as it may seem they were among Japan’s first responders.

On the night of the earthquake, 25 trucks carrying roughly 50 tons of supplies arrived at Hitachinaka City Hall in Hitachinaka, Ibaraki Prefecture. One hundred men in long-sleeved shirts and coats immediately began unloading the boxes.

These men weren’t from the Red Cross. They were members of Japan’s third-largest organised crime group, the Inagawa-kai, a fact they took great care to disguise: sleeves were rolled down to hide ornate tattoos of dragons and protective Buddhist deities, and gang badges with the organisation’s symbol (and corporate emblem) – bushels of rice with Mount Fuji in the background – were not on display. Those missing fingers wore gloves.

According to Inagawa-kai members, they arrived at night because they didn’t want their donations to be rejected out of hand. Since September 30, 2009, when the head of the NPA, the courageous Ando Takaharu, declared war on organised crime in a public statement to the press and in a directive to all Japanese police departments, life for Japan’s regulated – but not illegal – organised crime groups has been hard.* No one wants to be associated with them in public and the Inagawa-kai was well aware that any high-profile operation, even one with charitable intent, could invite police crackdowns.

Hitachinaka City Hall employees understood who they were, however, one of them showing me footage of the operation shot on his mobile phone that night. It wasn’t a time to turn down aid when no one else seemed ready to provide it, he explained.

Gangsters unloaded boxes of blankets, water, instant ramen, bean sprouts, flashlights, batteries, paper nappies and toilet paper. They were noisy but fast and efficient. When they had finished they nodded to the * Organised crime groups in Japan fall into “designated” and “non-designated” categories.

The police have criteria that are applied to determine an organisation’s status. By keeping the number of members with criminal convictions low, syndicates are able to avoid “designated” status.

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officials keeping watch, and left. On the next day another group, this time of 200 Inagawa-kai members in a convoy of 30 trucks, returned to the same prefecture, with 100 tons of food and supplies, as well as twice as many blankets as the first trip. It took them two hours to unload the supplies, after which they promptly left.

While covering the earthquake for various local and international media outlets I spent weeks tracking the yakuza and the role they played in the post-quake recovery efforts. Despite my long familiarity with these gangsters, I was surprised by what I found.

I came to Japan in 1988 and was the first American hired as a full-time reporter for a major Japanese newspaper. From 1993 to 2005 I worked for the Yomiuri Shimbun, spending most of that time on the police beat and writing articles in Japanese. The luck of the draw had me assigned to cover the organised-crime control division during my cub-reporter days, which is how I became good friends with the police busting the yakuza and some of the mobsters themselves. Although it can be hard maintaining a rapport with criminals, in fairness some of them live by a code of honour and are simply unlicensed bodyguards and/or merchants selling goods and food at the many festivals in Japan. Not all yakuza are criminals and not all criminals are yakuza. However, most yakuza make a living through illegal means and the use of violence.

Sometimes, the worst of times brings out the best of the worst and this was one of those occasions – although the cynical have cast doubts on the reasons behind their humanitarian efforts. To understand why the yakuza would perform a useful role in preserving the peace and providing disaster relief, however, one needs to fathom the role they play in Japanese society.

Although the authorities describe the yakuza as “anti-social forces” and “violent groups”, they are not secret societies. The Japanese government tacitly recognises their existence: they are classified, designated and regulated, but membership is not outlawed. These designated crime groups, of course, do not refer to themselves that way. They claim they are ninkyo-dantai (“humanitarian groups”) following the ninkyodo humanitarian philosophy that dictates those following the code should protect the weak and oppressed, provide help to the needy and sacrifice themselves for the greater good.

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Ninkyodo is a philosophy believed to have originated in China during the Chunqiu shiqi period (from 770BC to 476BC). The philosophy espouses that one should honour all kindnesses bestowed and repay them in full, protect the weak and oppressed and stand up against the powers that be.

Like its counterparts, the Yamaguchi-gumi, the largest of Japan’s organisedcrime groups, abides by a creed stating that members will honour the spirit of this philosophy and contribute to the prosperity of the nation.

The Tokyo offices of the Inagawa-kai, which claims 10,000 members, are opposite the opulent Ritz-Carlton Hotel in the Roppongi midtown area. The second-largest crime group, the Sumiyoshi-kai (12,000 members), under the name Hama Enterprises, occupies an office building in the luxurious Ginza district. The Yamaguchi-gumi, the Walmart of organised crime (40,000 members), has an entire city block in Kobe for its operations.

These white-collar yakuza have workplaces. If you want to know the addresses of the headquarters of the 22 major designated crime groups, just peruse the NPA website. Yakuza make their money from extortion, blackmail, construction, property, debt-collection services, financial-market manipulation, protection rackets, fraud and a labyrinth of front companies, including labour-dispatch firms, database servers and private-detective agencies. Tokyo alone has more than 800 of these front companies. The police know who and where the yakuza are. And so do many ordinary people in Japan.

The names of the yakuza elite, the bosses of bosses, are in yakuza fanzines available at major bookshops. In addition to the six titles (three weekly, three monthly), there are many yakuza comic-book biographies of bosses present and past. (The National Police Agency versus the Yamaguchi-gumi Kodo-kai comic book, published in March, chronicles five decades of attempts by the police to destroy the Yamaguchi-gumi.)

The origins of the yakuza are murky. The name comes from a losing hand in a traditional Japanese gambling game, played with cards, called hanafuda.

The losing hand consisted of an eight (ya), nine (ku) and three (za), totalling 20, which, according to the rules, was the worst possible combination. The name is a self-effacing reference to the groups’ provenance, many having originally been loose federations of gamblers.

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Some, such as the Aizukotetsu-kai, founded in Kyoto in about 1868 at the beginning of the Meiji period, have been around for more than a century.

In fact, the Aizukotetsu-kai were originally the primary customers of gaming giant Nintendo, which started in business by making hanafuda cards. Some yakuza even suggest Nintendo’s name was chosen out of respect for the “ninkyo” ideals of the yakuza. The “nin” in “ninkyo” is the same Japanese character as the “nin” in “Nintendo”. As late as the 1960s Nintendo employees had to check the card machines dispensing hanafuda decks to make sure no defective cards were being sold. Complaints from yakuza would often ensue if even the slightest flaws were found.

The word yakuza refers to two types of gangster. In addition to the federations of gamblers known as bakuto, there were groups of merchants called tekiya, who were also considered yakuza. The tekiya, itinerant traders who sold their wares and food at Japanese festivals, sometimes ran carnival games and dealt in stolen goods.

The yakuza really came to power during the chaotic years after the end of World War II. Then, joining the mob appealed particularly to those pushed to the fringes of society: disenfranchised returning soldiers; burakumin, the country’s outcast class; orphans; and, possibly the largest sub-population, the many Korean-Japanese who had been taken to Japan as slave labourers.

During the lawless years after Japan’s 1945 defeat the Korean-Japanese, who had been oppressed by the Imperial government, made inroads into the underworld. American occupying forces designated them “third-party nationals” and bestowed preferential treatment compared to that imposed on the defeated Japanese. This allowed them access to US military supplies and enabled them to run black markets.

In some ways, the 20th-century rebirth of the yakuza in Japan was a response to the domination of black markets by the Koreans, who had formed small gangs that would steal Japanese goods, then sell them. Because of General Douglas MacArthur’s decentralisation of the police force it was difficult to keep that kind of crime under control.

In February 1946 foreign nationals beat to death a senior police officer in Kobe. In April the same year a police captain was shot dead, also in Kobe.

The police asked Yamaguchi-gumi members to keep the peace and take over some of their duties. For decades afterwards the police and the yakuza had friendly relations.

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In some cases the police explicitly backed the Japanese yakuza in an effort to restore order and limit the power and breadth of the Korean gangs. In the post-war years Japanese syndicates fighting Koreans for black-market turf began reviving the old yakuza structure and incorporated many KoreanJapanese into their ranks; rather than wage direct war, they began a successful policy of assimilation.

By the late 1950s the Yamaguchi-gumi had absorbed the most vicious of the Korean gangs, the Yanagawa-gumi, gaining rapidly in power and prestige.

The Yanagawa-gumi ran proficient rackets, controlling food prices and even setting up a talent agency and a front company to legitimise its operations.

The Yamaguchi-gumi, which learned from its Korean allies, established front companies that ran Kobe’s ports and controlled the entertainment industry, managing the top singers and pop-culture stars of the era.

In post-war Tokyo, the Kyokuto-kai, a yakuza federation of merchants and black-market dealers, used Japanese-Korean members to recruit from among the Koreans, eventually gaining partial control of the city. In western Japan the Yamaguchi-gumi played both sides, promising to restore order and suppress the violent Korean gangs. While the Yamaguchi-gumi was consolidating power in Tokyo with the aid of the Korean-Japanese, the legendary Korean gangster, Hisayuki Machii, exploited American fears of a Communist takeover to build his own criminal organisation; some of this background is documented in Robert Whiting’s seminal book, Tokyo Underworld.

In 1948 Machii created the Tosei-kai in Ginza, then Japan’s largest entertainment district. The group took over the gambling dens, bars, cabaret clubs and sex trade. The Tosei-kai grew rapidly, elbowing into post-war reconstruction. (Even today it is estimated that three per cent to five per cent of all construction revenue goes into the pockets of the yakuza, according to the National Centre for the Elimination of Boryokudan*.)

The yakuza grew even richer and more powerful as a result of the national ban on methamphetamines in 1951. Japan was one of the first countries to manufacture amphetamines on a large scale, under the brand name Hiropon (“hiro” meaning fatigue and “pon” being the sound of something hopping away). Amphetamines were distributed widely to the Japanese Army at the * Boryokudan means, literally, “violence groups”

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close of the war when food was in short supply. Demand for Hiropon did not diminish after it was banned and the yakuza stepped in to fill the gap.

The yakuza’s reputation for keeping disputes among themselves and not harming citizens has protected them from public ire and police attention.

One reason they are tolerated is that, although they are criminals, they share standards and practices that keep them in check.

Failure to observe these rules results in expulsion. In theory, if not in fact, yakuza are banned from theft (including looting), robbery (taking things by force), using or selling drugs, rape and anything else not in harmony with the “noble way” – ninkyodo. And although it may not be written, the prevailing rule of thumb for yakuza is “katagi ni meiwaku wo kakenai” (not causing ordinary citizens trouble).

In effect, yakuza are banned from committing street crimes.* As well as the above, that includes purse snatching, break-ins, muggings – any offence that makes the populace uneasy. On their own turf, yakuza are brutal enforcers when keeping the peace. This is in their own interests. If people don’t feel safe visiting the areas in which they have their sex shops, illegal gambling parlours and strip and hostess clubs they lose money.

By the night of March 11, in Tokyo, Fukushima, Miyagi, Chiba and elsewhere in Japan, local yakuza “soldiers” were patrolling the streets, keeping an eye out for looters, thieves and profiteers. In the sparsely populated towns in parts of Miyagi and Ibaraki prefectures, the yakuza were the most visible “police presence”.

Many yakuza had friends and relatives in the stricken areas. A mid-level crime boss told me: “I have family in Miyagi. They lost their homes. Our members went missing. We’re people too. We love our birthplaces. Of course we couldn’t stand by and not do anything, especially when the government was so slow to step up to the plate.”

As reports of violence and sexual assault started to drift in from the shelters, the NPA dispatched 30 female police officers. The Yamaguchigumi, in contrast, sent out 960 members across the nation to keep order within the shelters and devastated areas, particularly Iwate, Miyagi and * In response to the question, “Why aren’t blackmail and extortion banned?” the reply from Takashi Kobayashi, a former Yamaguchi-gumi member, was, “If you have something to be blackmailed about, you deserve to be punished. That’s social justice.”

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Fukushima prefectures. Internally they were called “The Yamaguchi-gumi Peace-Keeping Forces”. Bosses ordered members to walk around the shelters displaying their tattoos, knowing this would have a deterrent effect on petty criminals and sexual miscreants. One of the foot-soldiers who was living at a shelter proudly said, “Our tattoos are 100 times more intimidating than a police badge. The police can’t administer punishment right there on the spot.

We can and we will.”

Until March 21 the Yamaguchi-gumi presence at the shelters was greater than that of the police. By the beginning of April, officers from the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department and elsewhere were being dispatched to the disaster areas.

It is ironic that the first role of the yakuza was that of maintaining security, although they have a history of providing disaster relief. The response of the Sumiyoshi-kai in Tokyo to the Tohoku upheavals was fast and furious. The group opened its offices to people stranded in Tokyo after all major forms of transport shut down. In a surprising gesture of civility, members even reached out to the foreign community, offering shelter to Chinese and Americans and futon on which to sleep. Traditionally, the yakuza have defended their existence by claiming that if they were removed from society, foreigners would run amok. One yakuza fanzine has a section devoted to crimes committed by foreigners, the point being that Japanese thugs are better than those from elsewhere.

In Saitama Prefecture the Sumiyoshi-kai loaded trucks with food and other supplies immediately after the earthquake and tsunami and sent them to Ibaraki Prefecture. Within a week, the group had mobilised more than 100 drivers to take 60 cars and trucks carrying necessities to the devastated areas. In Sendai 100 of the group’s toughest thugs patrolled the streets and stayed at shelters to keep the peace, according to Sumiyoshi-kai members.

Similarly, the Matsuba-kai, which has a strong presence in the ravaged zones, rounded up 100 trucks and 121 drivers to deliver water, blankets and other essentials.

The response of the Kyokuto-kai was what might have been expected from a group with tekiya roots. Former itinerant merchants and food vendors, they sent foodstuff to places in need, with some members providing hot meals. By April 14 they had dispatched 2,000 kilograms of sugar, 15,000 bottles of water, 700 boxes of cooking oil, 80 portable generators, 600 light 18

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bulbs, 1,000 flashlights, 400 boxes of batteries, 250 boxes of miso for soup and seasoning, 30 tons of food and 80 portable cooking stands. To do that they mobilised 110 trucks, minibuses and cars. They travelled on roads where they still existed and made their own way where they couldn’t find them, driving through fields or having members carry supplies into areas where vehicles no longer had access. Members cooked meals at some shelters and left supplies at city halls, then returned to the Kanto region.

The chairman of the Kyokuto-kai, Matsuyama Shinichi, once said about the rules of being a yakuza: “The most important thing is to help the weak. The second is to fulfil your duties and obligations and be true to your feelings. The last thing is not to betray anyone.”

One Kyokuto-kai member who has made three trips to the earthquakeaffected areas echoed those words, saying, “We can only do what we know how to do. We’re the guys cooking yakisoba at the festivals. There’s something tragic about taking equipment and foodstuff we use on happy occasions like the Sanja Festival and setting up shop for those mourning the loss of their loved ones and their homes. Hardly a joyous occasion … If we were to shout out a hearty welcome, the way people do at an izakaya, it would be odd. But silence is odd too.”

Of course, the most efficient and fast-moving group in the relief effort was the Yamaguchi-gumi, which has an admirable record of post-disaster humanitarian work. In 1964, in the aftermath of the savage Niigata earthquake, Kazuo Taoka, leader of the Yamaguchi-gumi at the time, allegedly mobilised a third of the organisation to deliver food, water, radios and medical supplies to the area.

After the Kobe earthquake in 1995, the Yamaguchi-gumi, whose headquarters in the city are fortress like, gathered supplies countrywide and took them to the needy, dispensing hot food from its offices and patrolling the streets to limit looting. The organisation was lauded for being faster and more efficient than the government in delivering provisions.

Members set up hot-food stands in their headquarters and distributed daily essentials to all who arrived. One of the group’s most bizarre efforts saw members drill a well in the grounds of their premises to provide fresh water. It was a remarkable gesture that gained the goodwill of the people of Kobe. It was also wonderful publicity.

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Several decades of coping with emergencies have made the yakuza excellent first responders. Unlike many government agencies in which the constant rotation of staff destroys continuity or the accumulation of knowledge, the Yamaguchi-gumi is able to learn.

One boss, who led a convoy of trucks to Ibaraki Prefecture carrying two tons of water bottles and enough food supplies for 800 people for a week, proudly showed me pictures of him cooking yakisoba for the refugees near one of the shelters. “You have to know what the people need,” he said.

“Things that were lacking: infant formula, nappies – for babies and adults.

There is a huge elderly population there.”

The organisation, taking a cue from previous disasters, quickly listed the essentials it should provide: food, water, warm clothing, tampons and not only normal powdered milk but also special brands for children with allergies. Because the Tohoku region can be extremely cold, members also gathered for distribution raincoats, down jackets and kerosene heaters, plus the fuel to power them.

Under heavy police scrutiny, the Yamaguchi-gumi has done much of its work since the quake via civilian allies, called kyoseisha (cooperative entities) in police lingo. The acting leader at the time of the earthquake, Irie Tadashi of the Takumi-gumi faction, organised most of the support.

Yamaguchi-gumi associates distributed cushions, first-aid kits, shoes, socks and rubbish bags. The leader of the Okuura-gumi, an Osaka-based wing of the Yamaguchi-gumi, chartered several trucks and sent all 200 of his subordinates into disaster areas with supplies, reportedly even setting up temporary bathing facilities in Miyagi Prefecture and making sure victims received hot meals.

Their efforts impressed a senior police officer from Ibaraki. “I have to hand it to the yakuza,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “They have been on the ground from day one providing aid where others did not or could not. Laws can be like a double-edged sword and sometimes they hamper relief efforts. Sometimes outlaws are faster than the law. This is one of those times.” The Japanese government is hampered by red tape and requirements to account for all supplies and inspect materials.

Other police officers see a different side. “There’s an aspect of this which is girikake, or fund-raising,” said one Osaka detective in the organised-crime control division. “The yakuza do this for funerals and other events. They ask 20

The First Responders

all the lower members of the franchise to chip in funds and thus collect large chunks of cash. They’ve been doing it this time as well. It’s a great cover for collecting huge funds right under our noses. I don’t think all the payments they are collecting are going to aid relief. Maybe 10 per cent or more is staying in the headquarters’ accounts or in the pockets of some bosses.”

Some yakuza mid-level executives agree, although none is willing to criticise their superiors on the record. Suzuki Tomohiko, who has written several books on the yakuza, points out that, “after the earthquake in Kobe, the Yamaguchi-gumi moved in very fast for the reconstruction money. Their front companies cleared away debris and their construction companies were awarded rebuilding contracts. It helps to have a good public image when conducting business anywhere. By building goodwill now, there are certainly yakuza groups calculating that the authorities will look the other way when their affiliated companies get a chunk of the reconstruction funding.”

Senior detectives in the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department share that view. “We’ve been trying to push the yakuza out of the construction industry for a long time but they know that, with the rush to rebuild housing and homes, the local police won’t be able – or perhaps willing – to screen the companies involved.”

No doubt there is truth in these claims, but some genuine goodwill is undeniably involved. A Sumiyoshi-kai executive, a full-time gangster adept at extortion, explains the efforts simply: “In times like this, the usual societal divisions are meaningless. There aren’t yakuza and civilians or foreigners and Japanese. We’re all Japanese now. We all live here. Down the road, there is money to be made, for sure.

Right now, it’s about saving lives and helping each other out. Ninety-five per cent of all yakuza are human garbage. Maybe five per cent uphold the rules.

Right now we’re all doing our best. It’s one of the few times we can be better than we normally are.”

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JPN 311 (series, 2011) by Vincent Yu, archival fine-art print on HahnemĂźhle paper, 5in x 5in. Courtesy of the artist and The Upper Station, Hong Kong.

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The Zashiki Girls Alex Kerr

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The Zashiki Girls

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The Zashiki Girls

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The Zashiki Girls

“Well, where do you want to be?” I asked.

Wako simpered, “I want to go back to Kyushu. But they’ve concreted the rivers and replanted the jungle with sugi cedar. There’s no place for me there now.”

“What about you, Rako? Could you go back to Kyoto?”

“I’d love to be in Kyoto again,” replied Rako. “I dream of a room at one of the Iemoto arts schools. There are lots of Noh stages and tea-ceremony rooms they don’t know how to use anymore.”

“Why not move into one of them?”

“The Iemoto have their rules and the rules keep getting stricter. Keeping girls like us is against the rules.”

Shiko recited them: “One, mysterious corners where ghost girls might move in – not allowed without special permission. Two: special permission not granted.”

“So,” continued Rako, “even though Kyoto is full of underused zashiki – and such beautiful zashiki! – they have no place for us.”

“Why not Tokyo?” I asked Shiko. As senior sister, she was the one in charge.

“After 1991 they ran out of money,” Shiko replied coolly. Speaking as the financier, she continued in business-school analyst mode. “At the end of the ’80s Japan was number one in the world in per capita GNP. Now it’s hardly in the top 20 and dropping.”

“But Japan’s is still a major economy,” I argued.

Ignoring that, she went on. “The main thing is that I can’t get a good cellphone.”

“That’s ridiculous. Japan is the land of cellphones.”

“Yes, but you can’t SMS and they don’t use SIM cards. And it’s hard to get Wi-Fi.” For someone who claimed to be hundreds, maybe thousands of years old and to have lived for most of that time in secluded back rooms in Japan, she sounded suspiciously like a young Western backpacker. Why did they need to be internationally linked?

“We’ve got cousins, in America, in Thailand and elsewhere and they’re all moving around these days. Especially in the Middle East, they’re clearing out from zashiki where they’ve been for decades and setting up house in exciting new places. Events are moving quickly, we need to stay in touch and in Japan it’s too hard to do that.

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JPN 311 (series, 2011) by Vincent Yu, archival fine-art print on HahnemĂźhle paper, 5in x 5in. Courtesy of the artist and The Upper Station, Hong Kong.

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Poetry Akiko Yosano (1878-1942)

Four Poems from the Kanto Earthquake of 1923 Still to be alive On this day when so many Lives were extinguished: I feel emptied, emptier Than how it must feel to die.

Sky is the only Thing that is orderly still: The sun has set but the moon has yet to rise Above the ruins.

The night of the quake The breath of despair sighing Out of the ground is The only thing that blows this Grass-pillow under my head.

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Even the moon has run away from danger tonight. The empty streets: the capital burns and keeps burning.

Translated by Mariko Nagai

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Maxine, Aoki, Beto and Me Wena Poon

M

axine was the first person to ring my cellphone when the Japanese earthquake hit.

“Weektor.”

I knew at once it was my grandma. “My name’s Victor.”

“Hai been dou ah?” she barked.

I was actually having sex with one of the models I photographed, so I wasn’t about to tell her where I was.

“At least tell me you’re on high ground,” she said in Cantonese.

“I suppose so,” I said. We were making out in the penthouse suite of one of Hong Kong’s tallest hotels. “Why?” “There’s been an earthquake. In Japan. Eight point nine magnitude.

Watch out for tsunami.”

I motioned for my model to turn on the hotel television, mouthing “apocalypse now” in Russian. She fiddled with the remote control.

“Are you at the restaurant?” I asked Maxine. “Are you safe?”

“No. Restaurant too near the sea. I’m back on The Peak.”

Earthquake footage unfurled busily on the TV. “Damn! I come home so rarely.” I sat up in bed. “Last time it was SARS. Now this. I’m never coming back to Asia again. It’s always one disaster or another.”

“I’m worried, zai zai.”

“Do you have friends in Japan?”

“Lots. And Sendai is where I source my special rice.”

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I should explain that my grandmother, Maxine Cheung, was one of Hong Kong’s most famous Chinese chefs. You might have heard of her.

“Chef” wasn’t really the right word: she was a food couturier. She spoke Cantonese, Japanese and French. She refused to speak English (“they don’t know how to cook; I have nothing to say to them”). Her restaurant had no name and no website. It did not advertise. Tucked in a nameless alley in Sheung Wan, it had two big, round tables and was open only one evening a week. Dinner was served, communal-banquet style, every Friday. There was no menu: you ate whatever Maxine cooked that week. She reared her own ducks, made her own foie gras. Whatever she couldn’t grow in Hong Kong or China she FedExed in from all over the world.

Above all, Maxine was famous for her rice. It was her rice that earned her the second Michelin star. Articles were written about her rice in every conceivable language. She was Rice Queen of Hong Kong. You had to wait two years for a dinner reservation at her place. I’d never eaten there. I’d only seen pictures.

When she mentioned rice from Sendai I sensed the beginning of a catastrophe. “I didn’t know you got your rice from Japan.”

“Yes. Nobody knows. I lied to Tony Bourdain when he interviewed me on TV. I said that I use Chinese rice. It’s my trade secret. I get it from Aoki.

My friend for many years. She’s a rice scientist.”

“A rice what?”

“It’s her own farm. In Sendai. She grows it organically, in small batches, custom tailored for me, and only for me. I have an exclusive contract for that rice and the seeds. It’s patented. But now I can’t get through. Cellphones are all jammed. I think her farm’s been hit. I’m so scared she’s dead. Zai zai ah, I’m so scared I can’t serve rice anymore.”

“You can get rice from China.”

“Chee-seen! I’ll never use rice from China! It has to be new-growth rice from Aoki. I told her, store the seeds in a bank vault in case of disaster. I don’t know if she has.”

“Maybe she’s okay. Maybe her farm is far from the earthquake area,” I said, as Veronika dressed. I held my face up for a kiss.

“I’ll call you later,” said Maxine. “Stay on high ground. I hope the tsunami doesn’t hit Hong Kong. If it does, it’ll be a relief. I won’t have to serve sub-par rice on Friday.” She hung up abruptly.

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I told Veronika, in Russian, about what had just happened.

She put on lipstick. “Well, if it hit us just now, it would have been a good way to die, wouldn’t it?” she said. “I better go. I’m supposed to be in Tokyo next for a show. Wonder if that’s affected.”

“See you in London?” I pleaded. A last kiss, then she fled in a rustle of borrowed silk. “And stay on high ground!” *** Maxine called again the next day, when I was at the magazine office. “Aoki called from refugee camp.”

By now, news of the Japan earthquake was unfolding like a slow train wreck across Asia. “Is she okay?” I asked.

“She’s fine. Family all fine. The moment they gave her a phone, the first person she called was her insurance-company rep. The second person she called was me. She never had a chance to put her seeds in bank vault.

Japanese believe in Fate.”

Maxine sounded depressed, an artist denied her calligraphy brush.

“Is her rice farm affected then?”

“Affected? Affected? There’s a porpoise in her rice field. It’s on YouTube.

I’ll send you link.” Maxine began sobbing. The last time she had cried was at Grandpa’s funeral. Turned out that it wasn’t the earthquake that did the rice farm in. It was the tsunami after. Grandma’s exclusive rice supplier was underwater, literally and figuratively.

“I’ll never make that rice again,” said Maxine, when she calmed down.

She sounded grim. I imagined her sitting in her cavernous apartment on The Peak, in her black mandarin-collared Comme des Garçons suit, while the Filipina maids went in and out quietly, changing her tea as it grew cold.

“I’ll have to close it down, close down the restaurant. I’ll have to change my name, move to Paris, start life over. It’s going to be difficult. I’m already 77.”

“You’re only 75.” She had just had a big birthday party.

“Seventy-seven according to Chinese calendar. It’s too late, Weektor. Too late.”

After Grandpa died Maxine raised her five sons by running his gourmet food import-export business. When she “retired” early, at 50, she sold the 37

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business and started her own restaurant. She hated her sons, who all went into law or politics. “Civil servants,” said Maxine contemptuously. Grandchildren were fine: she liked me. Said I took after her because I was an artist (this was decided on the basis of a crayon drawing at the age of five). When I was old enough she packed me off to boarding school in New Hampshire and told me, “Do not show your face in Hong Kong again until you have made something of yourself.” Not having yet made anything of myself, I live abroad most of the time as an itinerant freelance photographer.

“You could come live with me in New York,” I said consolingly.

“Your mother says you live in factory basement.”

“I’ve moved up to the ground floor!”

“Hold on,” she said abruptly. “Incoming call. Don’t hang up.” I waited: she put me on hold to music from her restaurant – Jeanne Moreau, Je ne suis fille de personne. Sad. Very sad. I imagined her serving this with morels.

She came back. “That was Aoki. She thinks she can get some money from insurance. She can start her farm again somewhere else when all this dies down. Of course, terroir will not be the same: never mind, can’t be helped. The bigger problem is she didn’t save a single seed. I told her it’s no use starting again if she doesn’t have that rice. I told her to try to think whether she has ever saved the seed, or given anyone a cutting, in the entire history of the farm.”

“Like, a backup copy?”

“Exactly.”

“And has she?”

“She said no yesterday. Today she remembers something. Slim chance, very slim chance.”

“Where?”

“Spain.”

“But how the hell did it end up in Spain?”

“When Aoki was student, her university had an exchange programme with Polytechnic University of Valencia; 1972. She went there for one summer. Lived with a host family that grew rice. When she came back, she sent them some seeds from her family’s rice field as a thank-you present.”

“But that was a million years ago,” I said. “They grow rice in Spain?”

On my office computer I Googled “rice in Spain”.

“Zai zai, can you speak Spanish?”

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“I can only speak whatever languages I have girlfriends in.”

“Which are?”

“At the last count, Russian, French, English and a little bit of Portuguese.

No Spanish. I’m not really into Spanish girls: they don’t age well.”

“You must go to Spain. For Por Por. Find that rice.”

“But I have a project starting in Brazil next week!”

There was silence. I heard a porcelain clink as she made herself some tea. Then, those little rosebud lips parted: “I ask so little of my family. And I give so much.”

“All right, all right,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Provided it’s quick. Where and when do I go?”

“I will call my travel agent for you. Aoki will send you address of that family. Call them in advance. See if they’re still there.” She added crisply: “Spare no expense.” *** The next day Aoki had access to a computer in her Red Cross camp in Japan and emailed me an address and a telephone number in Valencia.

Nobody in the magazine office in Hong Kong spoke or wrote Spanish.

There was a fancy gourmet coffee house downstairs. It was from Barcelona.

Their posters and coffee packages were in Spanish. I had high hopes, but everyone working there was Cantonese.

“We eat their food,” I complained to my photo editor. “But we can’t talk to them.”

“You could ask the Spanish Consulate or Mexican Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong.”

“To call a rice farmer in Valencia? No way.” I fumed and sat down. I went online and calculated the time difference. It was morning in Valencia.

I rang the phone number on Skype. Amazingly, a woman picked up.

“Dígame?”

“Hi, I’m calling from Hong Kong. Can you speak English?”

She sounded suspicious. Whatever she said I couldn’t understand.

Finally, I heard her saying something like ingles, and no, which must have meant “no English”, which was already obvious. Then she hung up.

“This is going to take time,” I said, feeling wretched.

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Maxine rang. “Did you contact the Spaniards?”

I explained. She said, “Use Google Translate, compose email in English, convert to Spanish. You can’t talk to them face to face, but you can email them this way.”

“Do Spanish farmers check email?”

“How you think I talk to my supplier for my customised jamón ibérico de bellota?” She hung up. I stared helplessly at my editor. “My grandmother is teaching me how to use the internet.” *** Hello. My name is Victor Cheung. I am writing from Hong Kong. My grandmother is Maxine Cheung. She is a Chef. His producer of rice in Sendai Haruka Aoki in Japan. Haruka Aoki remained with his family in 1972. She gave him the seeds of rice. Because Sendai earthquake, Aoki wants to know if your farm can start again with their rice seeds. You still have the seeds of rice, by chance? Really help. And my grandmother Maxine Cheung can help you grow your restaurant. It is really urgent. *** Grandma rang after I sent the email.

“I forgot,” she said brusquely. “Google translation is not always 100 per cent accurate.”

“Now you tell me.” *** Hello from Valencia. We have been asking about our friend, Miss Aoki, since we saw the earthquake Japan news. My grandmother remembers well. We are happy Aoki is alive. It is surprising to receive mail from my grandmother has not heard of Aoki for many decades. I have idea. Here is the phone number of my brother Beto (ALBERTO MARTINEZ). Beto studied in Miami and is now in Mexico City. He is the only family that can speak English. Why not call him and explain everything. We help it all we can. Salutations. Marta Ana Martinez.

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Maxine, Aoki, Beto and Me

*** I was at a nightclub in Kowloon busily making out with a Brazilian model when the email came.

“Can you speak Spanish?” I asked her.

She gave me an earful. By the time I had cut and pasted the email from Valencia into Google Translate, Carla had decided she had a headache and wasn’t going to spend the rest of the evening with me.

“If there’s anything I hate,” she said in Portuguese, “it’s men who are married to their phones. I mean, just look at you. You’re glued to the screen.

Why not have it implanted in your face?”

She unwound her endless legs from around me and stood up. I looked at them regretfully.

“No, no, this is on me,” I said, as Carla reached for the check. “Do you happen to know what time it is in Mexico City?”

“No!” “See you in New York?” I said, tilting my face up for a kiss. *** After several attempts, the call went through.

“Hello?”

I introduced myself. “Are you Alberto Martinez?”

“Yes. Wow, it’s incredible,” said the man in thick, Spanish-accented English. “I can’t believe my phone works at this altitude.”

“Why, where are you?” It was exceedingly windy and noisy at his end.

“Mountain climbing. I’m dangling from a rope and my iPhone rings.

Who are you again and what do you want?”

“Perhaps now’s not the best time.”

“I can talk for a few minutes. I’m just hanging out here waiting for the rest of my team to come up. Where are you calling from?”

“Kowloon.”

“Where is that?”

“Hong Kong.” I explained my mission. “Where are you?”

“El Pico de Orizaba.”

“Where is that?”

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“It’s a volcano. In Mexico. Marta told you to call me?” Alberto Martinez sounded astonished.

“Yes, apparently you’re the only one who speaks English.”

“I haven’t seen my family for over two years. It’s a long flight from here.

What’s this about? It must be urgent.”

I went out into the damp night as the bar was closing. I lit a cigarette.

“It’s about a Hong Kong Chinese chef, a Japanese rice grower and a Spanish farm.” *** I was running through the airport.

“Beto Martinez?” I panted, looking around the boarding area. “Which one of you is Beto?” There were dozens of Spanish-looking young men sitting around, all how I imagined Beto would look.

A tall, unshaven man raised his hand, smiling. “Beektor?”

“Ah yes,” I said, shaking his hand. “I was picturing someone still in mountain-climbing gear.”

“Let’s go, we’re about to board. You’re just in time.”

A little bus took us to one of the small domestic planes that flew between Madrid and Valencia.

“Nobody ever pronounces my name right,” I said suddenly. “You said Beektor.”

“Ah, v is a b in castellano.”

“And it’s a w in Cantonese.”

“Really?”

“Weektor. That’s how my grandma says it. It’s fascinating. Divided by a common consonant. Thank you for coming all the way to Spain.”

“Thank you for buying my air ticket. I couldn’t turn down the chance of a free trip to see my family.”

I had to gate-check my suitcase but clung on to my precious camera bag. There were some pretty explicit pictures of Carla in there for my private consumption.

“You’re a photographer?” asked Beto.

“Yes. And you? Rock climber?”

“Only on weekends. I’m a political reporter.”

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We talked business for a while, comparing notes, discussing the Japan earthquake news. Beto was interested in what I had heard since I had flown in from Asia.

“It’s not really my beat,” I confessed. “I do fashion photography.”

“Ah! You get to see the models!”

“Not just see. Hey, if you’re straight, the girls love it. They’re so tired of gay men day in, day out, in their business.”

Beto said he would love to have my job.

“But you actually cover things that matter,” I said modestly.

“You get chicks.”

“You get real salary.”

“We should switch sometime.”

“Damned right,” I looked out of the window. “So this is Spain. I never even knew you guys grew rice. My grandma says she gets the best pork from Spain. Pig and rice, pig and rice. You’re like the lost Chinese, man. You guys should come home.”

“I’ve never been to Asia. So you’re Chinese? I can’t really tell the difference between Korean, Japanese, Chinese. How do you tell them apart?”

“Oh, it’s all in the skin. Chinese people are orangey-yellow, Japanese people are greeny-yellow and Koreans are bluey-yellow.”

“You’re fucking kidding me.”

“Well, how do you tell a Mexican from a Venezuelan from a Spaniard?”

“Oh, but we’re so different.”

“You look the same to me!”

“Point taken,” said Beto, grinning. “What are you doing living in New York?”

“Running away from my family.”

“Join the club.”

The plane began to descend. “We’re here?” I cried, astonished. “I could have walked it.”

“Spain is a small country.” He looked outside. “Much smaller than you’d think.” ***

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“What’s ‘la huerta’?” I asked, looking up from my Valencia tourist brochure.

“This is it,” Beto pointed.

“The paddy fields?”

“Nature, the cultivated fields, everything – this is la huerta,” said Beto.

I photographed some low-lying farmhouses, soil channelled for irrigation, stagnant ponds. “Looks like China. Smells like China. Phoo-ey!”

“Really? China smells like that? It’s the fertiliser. Never changes. I hated it growing up. It’s very strange to be back here.” Beto shielded his eyes against the sun. “I believe that is my sister. Wow. She’s really thin now. Must be the stress of running this place. Hola Marta!”

“Beto!” The distant figure broke into a run. *** I didn’t want to be rude, so I hung around the house patiently as the entire Martinez family came out to meet and hug Beto. I was a bit jealous, really.

Even though I rarely went home my family would not even bother picking me up at the airport. We were pretty stiff-upper-lipped about missing each other. My parents never hugged me. But the Spanish – well, they let it all hang out. Lots of kissing, even among men. I wondered why Beto left home. Hell, if people hugged and kissed me like that I’d never go away. They seemed really glad to see him. With Beto translating extensively I met and exchanged greetings with his grandmother, his mother, his father, his sisters, his cousins, his nieces, his nephews.

Maxine sent me an SMS. WHERE’S MY RICE? I imagined her sitting up in her black Frette pyjamas, her hair in curlers, a bone-white cup of tea by her bed, busily sending texts in her typical, overcaffeinated way.

HAVE YOU FOUND MY SEEDS? I sneaked upstairs in the Martinez farmhouse into what looked like the children’s room. I sat on a miniature SpongeBob SquarePants sofa and sent a message back.

No. I’m looking!

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Maxine, Aoki, Beto and Me

Should I ask them?

I peered into the children’s cupboards and lifted the piano lid.

YOU HAVEN’T ASKED???

“Beektor!” shouted Beto.

I shut the piano lid hurriedly.

“What are you doing? Come outside and have a beer!”

Some of the younger men in the family were making preparations in the backyard. They pulled out a big tripod-looking thing and a giant paella pan. Someone brought out a cloth bag of rice. I watched with interest as they began cooking.

“My grandma asks if you know how to cook paella,” began Beto.

“Don’t be outrageous, of course I know how to cook rice! We invented rice.”

He translated. She made a face, shaking her head.

“She says rice began here, in Valencia.”

“Rubbish! Who brought it to Valencia? The Chinese!”

“No. The Moors.”

“Who do you think the Moors got it from? The Chinese!”

Beto translated, laughing. His tiny grandmother disagreed violently.

I pulled out my phone. “Tell her I’ll take a Wikipedia challenge. C’mon.

Let’s see who’s right.”

Beto had the same smartphone and handed it to his grandmother, who handed it hurriedly to Marta. Everyone began crowding around and arguing about the historical facts. Marta typed in the query, giggling and we compared screens as the results fell into place.

“Wait a minute, time out! She’s using Spanish Wikipedia,” I complained.

“Of course Spanish Wikipedia will say the Spanish invented rice!”

“No, no,” said Beto, as his younger cousins jostled for a look. “Let’s see.

It says the first case of domesticated rice was in – ” “Yangtze River! See! It’s ours!” I ran around the yard, arms in the air, as if I’d scored a goal.

“No, no, this can’t be right! Rematch!” shouted Beto.

I pulled the tourist brochure out of my hip pocket. “And it says here that you guys have this annual firecracker festival, Las Fallas – and who invented gunpowder?”

“Valencians!”

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“The Chinese! Face it, we win! We gave you everything!”

Beto translated to general laughter. I flipped through the brochure at the pictures of various foods and festivals. “Chinese,” I pointed at the pictures, as I was handed a large plate of paella and a wooden spoon. “Chinese, Chinese, Chinese. We have this. This, and this. Chinese, Chinese, Chinese.”

“You’re so full of shit, Beektor.”

A few rounds of paella and wine later I whispered to Beto, “So where are the seeds?”

“Oh,” Beto’s face fell. “I was worried you’d ask.”

My heart sank.

“They’re gone. We don’t have those seeds anymore.”

“Why didn’t you say so? I flew you all the way here, you scumbag!”

His eyes were merry behind the bottle of beer he was swigging.

“You tricked me just to get a free air ticket home!” Groaning, I pulled out my phone to deliver the bad news to Maxine.

“We grew them.”

I lowered my phone, staring.

“It’s what you’re eating,” said Beto. “It’s all around us. This is Haruka Aoki’s rice. We’ve grown it for 40 years.”

His little grandmother said something in Spanish and gestured at the rice fields and canals that lay beyond the low walls of the backyard. “La huerta valenciana.” *** The video connection wasn’t very good, but you could see an elderly Japanese woman’s face on the computer screen and you could hear her voice after a brief lapse.

“Hola Haruka Aoki! Cómo está?” said Beto’s grandmother to the computer screen. She turned to Beto. “Es tan pequeña!”

Beto asked if I could make the image bigger. Cursing, I adjusted the video connection and the preferences.

“Muy bien. Muy bien,” said Aoki. She then said something to Maxine in Japanese, who translated into Cantonese to me, and I translated into English to Beto. “Aoki says your grandma looks so old now.”

Beto hesitated. “I’m not going to translate that.”

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“Aoki wants your grandma to know that she’s forgotten her Spanish, she’s very sorry. She did not continue with her Spanish lessons after she got married.”

Beto translated and his grandmother said something back to him.

“This is gonna be tedious,” said Beto, chuckling. “Grandma wants to know if he is good looking. Her husband.”

On my laptop the old ladies filled three separate little thumbnail screens on the video-conference programme. They conferred impatiently through Beto and me, pausing every now and then to chuckle with selfconsciousness.

“He’s dead,” I said to Beto. “Aoki’s husband. Liver cancer. But he was good looking as a young man. Amazing. These gals have all outlived their husbands.”

Beto said, “My grandma wants to know if Aoki’s gonna be okay in the earthquake.”

“She says she’s okay.”

“Should we send something, anything she needs – food, clothing?”

Aoki remembered how to say rice in Spanish. “Arroz!” she said into the webcam. “Arroz!”

“Si, si, tengo el arroz,” said Beto’s grandma, smiling. She lifted her fingers to her lips and blew a kiss to her Japanese friend from 1972. *** Maxine was specific. The first shipment of rice had to be FedExed to her from downtown Valencia, because it had to make that Friday’s restaurant service. I also had to bring back in my hand-carried suitcase – “Do not check in!” – as many packets of rice seeds from the Martinez farm as I could stuff in it. I was not to FedEx the actual seeds “in case they land in enemy hands”.

“But who’s your enemy?”

“Ever since I got my second Michelin star, other chefs have been stealing my FedEx packages trying to find out where I source my stuff. Can you imagine if they laid their hands on the rice seeds? They’d grow it in China and everything would go to hell.”

“But the Martinez family grows it.”

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“Aoki has sworn them to secrecy.”

“Are you sure? In what language?”

“Never you mind.” *** A month later I found myself in Mexico City on a fashion shoot. I left a message for Beto Martinez.

“Hello?” I found the ringing phone in my pants on the hotel room floor.

“Beektor?”

“Beto?”

“Where are you?”

I ducked as Amelia threw her lacy slip at me in despair. “Hey man! I’m here! In your town!”

“Good! Wanna climb a volcano?”

“Sure!”

“Bring a flag. It’ll be a race. Spain versus Hong Kong. We’ll YouTube it.” *** “The only thing I know about China,” panted Beto, heaving himself up the next rock ledge, “is Hidden Tiger, Crouching Dragon. Or was it Hidden Dragon, Crouching Tiger? Or Crouching Dra – you know that movie?”

“Yes, it’s crap,” I said, climbing after him. “I’ll send you some DVDs of real Chinese sword-fighting movies. They will blow your mind, my friend.”

“How are you liking Mexico City?”

“Looks just like Shanghai: overbuilt, overblown, Third World masquerading as First.”

“You’re so full of it. What are you here for anyway?”

“Two days of shooting and three days of drunken orgies.”

“Do you know the Mexican model Carla Diaz?”

“Know her? I slept with her.”

“Elena Estes?”

“Done her.”

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“Veronika?”

“Done her.”

“Amelia van Buren?”

“Was doing her when you called.”

“Who else … can’t remember their names … Polly Simons?”

“Yep.” We rested on an outcrop of rock.

“How do you do it?” said Beto, drinking from his bottle. “I can’t even get the girls at the office to take a second look at me.”

“You have to create demand,” I said, beginning my ascent again. “Go someplace where everyone doesn’t look like you. Be exotic. Sometimes movies help. Farewell My Concubine. In the Mood for Love. Totally increased my cachet among the white girls. I play up the cute, helpless Asian guy.

Modest, subtle, minimalist. Emotionally unavailable. I always let them make the first move.”

“Really.” Beto inched up the rock face.

“Helps to be under 40. In my business the girls are constantly slimed by older men and lesbian women. They love taking me home.”

“I’m in the wrong line of work.”

“Totally. I think you should – ” My phone rang. I checked to make sure I was properly anchored, then retrieved it. “Hello?”

“Weektor.”

“Maxine?”

“Hai been dou ah?”

“Mexico. Climbing a volcano with Beto. Can I call you later?”

“Can’t wait. It’s oranges.”

“What about them?”

“Hong Kong customs froze my shipment of special Japanese oranges.

Radiation after earthquake. Need them by Friday for my orange peel duck soup. Chinese premier booked a table.”

I mouthed to Beto: global supply-chain problems. He threw up his hands impatiently and continued climbing. I asked, “Can’t you cook something else?”

“Normally, yes. But Chinese premier is coming just for the duck soup.”

“I can’t keep flying here and there solving your menu problems! I have work to do!”

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“You free to climb mountain with Beto, you free to help Por Por.” I swung helplessly in the wind while Beto disappeared above. “Let me guess. Your oranges cannot be found in Hong Kong.”

“In olden days, emperor sent men on horses by day and night across China just to retrieve fresh lychees for Empress Yang Guifei.”

“Is that true?”

“Google it.”

I sighed. “Where are the oranges?”

“Valencia.”

“But we were just there! Anyway you can buy Valencia oranges in the Hong Kong supermarket! I saw them! With my own eyes!”

“Sui zai. Valencia oranges in Hong Kong supermarkets aren’t from Valencia.”

Beto emerged on the rock face above me. I repeated what she said.

“She’s right,” he answered.

“What?”

Beto said, “They’re from Tunisia. Corporate growers. They’re brought into the port at Valencia and repackaged as being from Valencia. Cheaper.

Tell your grandma she’s right.”

“Maxine, I have a Valenciano here on the volcano who says that Valencian oranges are from Tunisia.”

“I already know. That’s why I want you to go to Valencia and source me authentic Valencian oranges. Actually grown there. On their soil.”

I explained the request to Beto.

“That’s easy,” he said, wedging himself in a crack in the cliff face. “There are small family farms near ours that are struggling because of the foreign imports. They can’t even give their oranges away. They’ll be happy to sell to Maxine. How many does she need? I’ll call Marta.”

I made some promises to Maxine and hung up.

“You know, I’m starting to see a pattern here,” I grunted, heaving myself up. “My grandfather ran an import-export business in Hong Kong. If I can’t do fashion photography anymore –” “We’ll start a business,” said Beto. “Spain-Hong Kong.”

“Exactly.”

“But we won’t get chicks.”

“No.” 50

Maxine, Aoki, Beto and Me

He rested, panting, as the wind swept sand off the ledge into our eyes.

“Let’s first climb this bloody volcano.”

I began climbing again, gritting my teeth with the effort. “Hong Kong will beat Spain! Yeah! S-A-R! S-A-R!” “I’m gonna win!”

“Says who?”

“Your phone will ring again and you’ll have to answer it, and I’ll race past you.”

“I won’t answer it!”

“You will.”

“I won’t!”

“You will. You’re the type.”

“It’s turned off!”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Anyway it won’t ring, we’re out of range.”

“We shall see.” *** On the cloudy peak of a volcano in Mexico, a cellphone rang.

A few moments later, a man unfurled a red and yellow striped bandana from his pocket and waved it triumphantly in the breeze.

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Venus (2010, detail) by Yoshitaka Amano, automotive paint on aluminium, 250cm x 150cm.

Courtesy of the artist and Art Statements, Hong Kong and Tokyo.

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Poetry Kevin Simmonds

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* “Peace” and Japan’s first and ancient name 54

Tokyo: Life Implied Shinichi Sato

Denenchofu

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Meguro

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Miyakezaka

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Ochanomizu

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Itabashi

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Nihonbashi

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Tomigaya

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Odaiba

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Tokyo: Life Implied

Shinjuku

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Osaki

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Harajuku

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Arakawa

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Haneda

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Haneda

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Tokyo: Life Implied

Meidaimae

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Suidobashi

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Tomigaya

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Minami-Shinjuku

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Tamagawa

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Poetry Gina Barnard

The Family Language The strongest smell of ocean was at seven, Japan’s coast. I found a transformer, blue, on the rocky shore.

I walked away from Dadoon. He let me. I brought back the transformer.

He thought it meant I was lonely, said in his second language, kawaiso.

Once I wrote kawaiso in a poem. My teacher corrected me: kawaiso na means pitiable. In the family we didn’t say na.

Languages deceive. My first words might have been English or Japanese: chu-chu, nen nen ko, towelketto *** I dream I speak to a lost Japanese boy – my language is in-between – I remember the song Mom used to sing about a lost cat and with those words I speak: Maigo no, maigo no, konekochan, anata no ouchi wa doko desu ka?

Ouchi o kiite mo wakaranai. Namae o kiite mo wakaranai.

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Lost, lost kitty, where is your home? I ask for your home. You don’t know. I ask you your name. You don’t know.

Speaking on a Train in Ibaraki That’s what I liked – no one bothers you, Dad told me. An American officer in Japan in the seventies: no one entered his space, no one looked into his blue eyes. *** Alone on the train platform in Mito. Sky misting black, waiting for the last train on a Saturday night. No one looked at me. Except one man – his face a fresh dango flushed with osake. Blue tie loose, sport coat wrinkled into his elbow creases.

Moshikashite … he began, leaned toward my face, you’re not …

Iie, I’m not Japanese. I didn’t know how to say in concise words, I am half Japanese.

He let out a nervous guffaw. In English – to practise – he said: I like Charlie’s Angels – Drew Barrymore, Lucy Liu – do you know? He paused, searching beneath my face, Oh! You … look … like … Cameron Diaz.

The train swept us in – I didn’t mind his chatter – it was easy on the ears, forgettable. I laughed No no no, wondering how an average-height hapa brunette could be a svelte, blue-eyed blonde.

I didn’t want to let English loose in the bright light of the train car. I just listened until he gasped – Oh – 90210! You … look … like … Brenda!

At Hitachino Ushiku Eki I stepped off, voiced an inelegant, Jaa, mata, a nod into the summer mist.

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Hymn for Trains and Ramen I make a sour slurping noise with steam, hot noodle grows – outside purpling blossoms, spring dimming lights signal close.

Human traffic forms a train – inside bodies’ frontiers, my work-worn shoulder hesitates to drop beside him near others hang and bob heads, sleep dead.

I feel out of place here – someone’s lurid sorcery breath of Kirin beer.

Working through this remembrance has given petals. Deplore the finches whose fine throats purge and call for more – your liver is closer to heart wouldn’t it feel my spear?

Spare the little birds’ crumb hearts – they peck at your knees, my dear.

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Memoirs of Memoirs of a Geisha Liza Dalby

T

he yamashiro is an old Oriental-style mansion, now restaurant, perched in the hills of Hollywood’s backyard. Neither truly Japanese nor Chinese, but rather that peculiar amalgamation of pagodas and dragons, koi ponds and pavilions that have whispered “Asian splendour” to Westerners since the early 20th century, the Yamashiro was the setting for several scenes in the 2005 movie Memoirs of a Geisha, based on Arthur Golden’s novel of the same name. There, on a chilly November night in 2004, I fell asleep on a bench behind the sound engineer’s station as the umpteenth take of one 40-second scene was being filmed.

With its unrelenting focus on catfights in a world ruled by jealousy, Golden’s novel should not be considered a realistic portrayal of the life of the geisha, but it is an engaging book with memorable characters and evocative descriptions. Having done his research, he took no more than the usual novelist’s leeway in fashioning a dramatic story. And let’s admit it – geisha are interesting. Living and working outside mainstream society, these women are defined by passion, discipline and art. They have been the subject of fiction and drama for centuries in Japan and perceived through the eyes of Westerners from at least as early as the publication in 1898 of the short story Madame Butterfly, by John Luther Long. I have no objection to an American author such as Golden or a film-maker taking inspiration from geisha. But I believe many people who saw the film were uncomfortable, perhaps without even understanding why. I know aspects of the film Memoirs of a Geisha that trouble me most are not those that bother other people. But it seems to 77

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me that the Western aesthetic point of view, poured like corn syrup over a depiction of Japanese culture, is what ultimately spoiled the movie.

I had been hired (at Golden’s suggestion) as “geisha consultant” for the film. I was known not only as the anthropologist who wrote the 1983 book Geisha, but also, under the name Ichigiku, as the first foreign geisha. During my research I was invited to join the geisha of the prestigious community of Pontocho in Kyoto, dressing in kimonos and performing on the shamisen, interviewing and living with them for a year and a half. It made perfect sense for the film to have on set someone who could answer all the geisha-related questions that would inevitably crop up. And so I found myself working with everyone: producers, director, writers, set and costume designers and actors.

I tagged along on the first location-scouting trip to Kyoto in March 2004 and was on the set for five months of filming, which took place mostly at Sony Studios in Culver City, California and on an elaborate exterior set built in the oak-stippled hills of Ventura County, near Los Angeles. Little of the movie was shot in Japan. It became apparent during that first reconnaissance foray to Kyoto that permission to film on location would be impossible to obtain, no official wanting to be seen sanctioning the project.

Before long the Kyoto teahouse proprietresses had become wary of anything to do with Memoirs of a Geisha, book or film. Some of the geisha I knew felt Golden’s book had brought worldwide attention to their profession. Geisha are nothing if not astute businesswomen, so on the whole they welcomed the publicity. But when pressed, those who had actually read Sayuri – the title of the Japanese translation of Memoirs of a Geisha – were annoyed by many details. “Why Sayuri?” they asked. “That doesn’t sound like a geisha name.”

“How can she have blue-grey eyes if she’s Japanese? Was she supposed to be a foreigner? What was all that about her ‘water nature’? What was that ceremony about the virginity dumplings?”

By this time, several geisha “documentaries” had emerged and every teahouse proprietress who had allowed the clumsy foreign camera and sound crews to tramp through her tiny tatami rooms had regretted it. The cantankerous former Gion geisha Mineko Iwasaki was still demanding every film-maker work through her (though my own geisha friends rolled their eyes at her extravagant claims to have been the toast of the geisha world 78

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during her prime.) Memoirs of a Geisha was a hot potato that nobody in Kyoto wanted to handle – except Iwasaki.

So the location-scouting trip turned instead into a research-gathering venture, a chance to immerse oneself in the atmosphere of the city and experience the real world of the geisha. In Kyoto, we walked the narrow alleys of the geisha districts of Gion, Pontocho and Miyagawa-cho, places I knew from my days as Ichigiku. A banquet was arranged at Ichiriki, the most famous and exclusive teahouse in Gion, where we were attended by a phalanx of geiko (the Kyoto dialectal term for geisha) and maiko (the city’s distinctive young apprentice geisha). What irritated them most about Golden’s book was that he called them geisha instead of geiko. They couldn’t understand Golden’s defence that “geisha” is now part of the English language and that he was afraid people would pronounce geiko “gecko”. He was probably right.

Through private connections we were able to interview a first-year maiko and watch her put on make-up and her kimono. We toured famous Kyoto attractions such as the Heian Shrine gardens and Kitano Tenjin Shrine, with its majestic entrance gate; climbed through the tunnel of red torii gates leading up to the fox shrine, Fushimi Inari, and wandered in the eerie bamboo groves of Arashiyama. We strolled over a little bridge crossing the gentle Shirakawa river that wanders through Gion. Many of these places would be recreated in an elaborate simulacrum of the geisha quarters – reportedly the largest outdoor film set Hollywood had ever built. A silken tent could be pulled over the entire “town” to achieve total lighting control.

It was a little bit Gion, a little bit Pontocho, a dollop of Kamishichiken, a tad Miyagawa-cho. It was a made-up Kyoto geisha quarter, for which I gave the film-makers the generic word “hanamachi”, meaning flower town, an area where geisha work.

Even if filming on location in Kyoto had been possible, most of the movie was set in the 1930s, so many changes would have had to have been made. The idea of creating a set from scratch back in California became even more appealing to the studio heads. I could see that, with this in mind, everyone was serious about doing their homework – which seemed exactly the right approach. Where then did it go so wrong? Of course I recognised that this was a Hollywood extravaganza, not a documentary. Historical and cultural accuracy was never going to be the main goal. Twenty years earlier 79

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I had had the experience of seeing my own story made into a television movie called American Geisha, so I was not naïve about how components are changed and twisted for impact. Yet, in the initial discussions for Memoirs, I was impressed by the good intentions of the undeniably smart and creative group of people who had been assembled for the project. I was excited to be part of it and actually thought I could make a difference. No more silliness like the 1956 comedy Teahouse of the August Moon, starring Marlon Brando.

Or the following year’s Sayonara, also with Brando and featuring Ricardo Montalban in the role of a Japanese kabuki actor.

But ultimately I could not watch the movie Memoirs of a Geisha without squirming. Such a lost opportunity – it could have been something truly cross-cultural, interesting and beautiful. But it wasn’t. Many people simply shrug off this idea with the cynical view that the issue was money – that turning a profit is the primary motive driving a Hollywood feature film.

My experiences behind the scenes have convinced me that the issue is not that simple. Of course everyone wants a film to make money, but there is a potpourri of motives and often tension between the “creatives” who make the film and the “suits” who count the pennies. It seemed to me that most of the people in Hollywood I dealt with were sincere in thinking that their efforts constituted improvements in both the story and the appearance of Memoirs.

This raises the question of authenticity. Ironically, the producers seemed to be obsessed with it. I could see that a great deal of care and money was spent on making many details “authentic”. For example, the food for the banquet scene in which Sayuri brings a box of ceremonial sweets (“the virginity cupcakes” as the set dressers called them) was flown in, at great expense, from a Kyoto restaurant; a 1930s-style kanji font was specially devised for one shop sign on the street of the set. Who would have noticed such points? On some level, authenticity was fetishised. How else to explain the fact that although the traditional look of a geisha’s white make-up was ditched for being too “mask like”, the make-up artist was instructed to use genuine geisha cosmetics from Kyoto? She thinned the paste until it was simply modishly pale – but she could still say it was geisha facial make-up.

It seemed like making an unequivocal demand for the finest toro tuna-belly sashimi – for it to be slapped into a tuna-salad sandwich.

Day after day, standing around the set during the tedium of filming, 80

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I tried to view the experience as an anthropologist, observing the clash of Japanese and Western viewpoints. The native Japanese (translators, actors’ relatives and sundry helpers) tended to keep to themselves in a group watching the scenes being played out. Often I sat with them, listening to their comments. Being Japanese, they were too polite to tell the director that something about the scene was wrong.

“Mameha would never deliver that line to Mrs Nitta standing up … that would be incredibly rude … She would be sitting on the tatami, across from her …” So I would be deputed to convey their opinions to the director’s chair. Changes like those were easily made and in making them the crew felt they were being sensitive to Japanese values. Yet many of my Japanese friends who viewed the final version found the whole thing so strange that it hardly occurred to them to expect the characters to behave like Japanese.

They were all speaking English (of some sort) after all.

Yes, they were speaking English and there is no way the film could not have been in English. It would have been silly to attempt anything else.

Golden’s novel was written in English and as readers we simply accept that we comprehend events that would have taken place against a Japanese linguistic backdrop. (This kind of suspension of disbelief is much easier to pull off in a book than in a movie. Where readers can imagine characters to fit their own conceptions there are no jarring discrepancies. In a movie though, viewers are constantly confronted by someone else’s ideas.)

But in either case, ideally, language should fade from the conscious and not call attention to itself. In the film, however, actors were made to speak Japanese-accented English, a non-existent language that was unnatural for everyone. The language was conspicuous and what it said was, “this is fake”. The young Japanese actress Suzuka Ohgo (who played Chiyo) quickly became so proficient in English that she had to be de-trained. She was instructed to refer to her “sheesta” instead of her “sister”.

Early on, critics pounced on the casting of Chinese actresses in most of the major female roles as an indication of lack of authenticity at best, political insensitivity at worst. I think this was a red herring. Having a panAsian cast was not necessarily a drawback for a movie like this. When the project was given the go-ahead as a major Hollywood picture it demanded international stars. As it was, there were two male Japanese actors recognised worldwide – Ken Watanabe and Koji Yakusho – but no women. (Koyuki, 81

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Tom Cruise’s love interest in The Last Samurai, was unavailable.) The international Asian women stars happened to be Chinese, or MalaysianChinese. But the problem was not with Zhang Ziyi, Gong Li or Michelle Yeoh. All are accomplished actresses. It is true they did not look or act like Japanese geisha in the movie – but they could have, given the chance. As professionals, they did their best to be what director Rob Marshall wanted.

At one point Youki Kudoh (in the role of Pumpkin) popped out of the dressing rooms with her hair in the traditional “split peach” style of a maiko.

She looked adorable and utterly convincing, I thought. Trish Almeida, the key hairstylist, was certainly capable of recreating the look of a real maiko.

Yet Pumpkin was sent back to the hair studio for one of the Broadway-style Orientalist confections favoured by the director. Her hair was scraped back ballerina style, with artificial flowers and towering chignons alternating with modern, loose strands draped sexily over her shoulders.

Unsurprisingly, Marshall comes from a Broadway theatrical background.

Invariably courteous, always curious, he is not the stereotypical Hollywood tyrant-director. Actors love working with him. He sought my opinion and information on all sorts of questions. Yet in the end, everything he saw, heard and experienced of Japan was subjugated to his personal creative vision. For him, Memoirs of a Geisha was a love story that hinged on the geisha characters being the most beautiful and alluring women in the world.

He had to feel that the characters were so – and, unfortunately, his reaction to the real geisha he had met was typical of that of many older Westerners.

With their matt make-up, elaborate kimonos and oiled hair, geisha appear exotic, but not exactly erotic.

In Japan, geisha preserve an old-fashioned ideal of femininity. They are valued for precisely that reason. But to make the movie work for his presumed audience and, I think, even more important, himself, Marshall had to “improve” the traditional look of the geisha. He felt he was making them more beautiful. I know he was not ignorant of how a real geisha should look; he just didn’t find it attractive and assumed his audience wouldn’t.

Yet because the “look” of a geisha is shackled to the reason the profession exists in Japan, altering their hair, kimonos and make-up undermined any pretence of authenticity the movie might have claimed.

A geisha’s aspect has its own beauty. Deliberately, geisha have preserved their style in the face of Westernisation and all the fashion experimentation 82

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avidly pursued in modern Japan. By now, I would like to think American audiences are able to appreciate diverse forms of beauty. Much of the outside world’s interest in geisha is founded on their different aesthetic. The film could have made an effort to convey this: another opportunity lost.

Other details were changed in perverse ways. Gong Li was particular about how her figure would look and insisted on a more form-fitting shape than a real kimono would allow. During a rehearsal, I was asked to demonstrate how a geisha would pick up her long kimono as she stepped out of her house onto the street. She would gather a pinch of the fabric between the fingers of her left hand, holding the front hems to knee level as the back swung gracefully above the ankles. I had seen it done on numerous occasions and been taught to do it myself when I stepped outside a teahouse as Ichigiku. I couldn’t understand why it didn’t look right when the character Hatsumomo followed my directions. The next day, I happened to see that same kimono on a wardrobe rack so I examined it. That costume kimono was missing the front overlap panels, or okumi, that a normal kimono has.

That explained its odd lack of drape and flow. It may have looked like an actual kimono, but it didn’t behave like one.

That was the beginning of my quarrel with the costume department.

There are reasons, I explained, for a kimono’s construction. It affects walking, sitting and body language. But Hollywood Americans are used to putting their creative stamp on matters and the head costume designer, Colleen Atwood, in particular, felt little reason to let the cultural rules of the kimono interfere with her creations. She preferred to have kimono and obi match rather than contrast in the Japanese manner. She didn’t care for the slight fold of cloth (hashiori) expected to show at the lower edge of the obi, so she eliminated it.

Kaori Momoi, the Japanese actress who played the role of Mother (Okaa-san), was appalled. She refused to let the costume department touch her, instead supplying her own kimono dresser. Consequently, hers is the only character in the movie whose kimono looks bona fide.

The last addition to a film, after the editing is complete, is the score.

Some of the music is for atmosphere. Sometimes it swells to the forefront.

Because performing traditional music is one of a geisha’s skills, the threestringed shamisen figured in a number of scenes. Of all the geisha arts, their music is the toughest for foreigners to appreciate. Not expecting such music 83

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could ever be used unfiltered, nevertheless I put together a video of examples with the idea of giving composer John Williams a sense of geisha vocals and instrumental performances. Williams, however, had done his own delving into Japanese music and discovered the popular Yoshida Brothers.

So in a scene where Hatsumomo plots to make young Chiyo deface one of Mameha’s kimonos, we hear the raucous folk-style Tsugaru shamisen on the soundtrack. It was like choosing Duelling Banjos for the score of a Noel Coward play. There is no lack of music that expresses inner torment in the geisha oeuvre. I can’t help thinking that the very strangeness of a ko-uta would have been more effective.

By the time the music was inserted my advice was no longer necessary.

Ultimately, the film Memoirs of a Geisha was a squandered opportunity to explore a singular social and aesthetic world fascinating because of its idiosyncrasies. It was as if geisha were remade in the stale images of Western fantasy. Perhaps I should have been more worried early in the project when I realised Marshall’s assistant had slipped all his exquisite raw fish titbits from a banquet into his pocket rather than eat them. Afterwards, he dumped them on the street, then stopped at the Starbucks in Gion and had a green tea latte. Just as with “fusion” cuisines, slapdash creative novelty can end up rather unappetising.

Pan-seared sushi rice at the Yamashiro, anyone?

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Send-off by Fire Blair Reeve

W

hat i want to know more than anything is whether John Coltrane ever cut his finger on the kitchen knife. And if so, did he bleed all over the floor? Did he run to the bathroom abusing himself for being a clumsy moron? Did he wrestle with the packet and destroy two bandages before putting one onto his finger properly? You look at every picture of Coltrane and there he is, the stately composure, the epitome of cool. If there’s one thing I can’t imagine it’s John Coltrane in the kitchen screaming at Alice, “Cripes, damn! Quick girl, where are the freakin’ bandages?”

I do it all too often. If it’s not the Global vegetable knife it’s the Cuisinart blade. If it’s not the Cuisinart blade it’s the cheese grater. There’s nothing more annoying than playing piano with a bandage on my forefinger, or any finger. At least piano playing is the one thing I can do without fumbling.

I didn’t really do much home cooking during my time in Japan, but I remember it was on one of those bandage-on-my-finger nights, just after we had played the last adagio of our set – a quiet rendition of Naima – in the lobby of the Osaka Hilton that I met Kyoko. I’d left my home in San Francisco to stay in Japan on a working-holiday visa and had landed the gig through an American agent who’d said that Japanese Hiltons wanted foreign musicians playing their hotels. Performances were only three nights a week so I supplemented my income with part-time work in an English conversation school.

That was May 2007. I’d answered an ad in the friendship column of Seek Japan magazine. It read: 27 year old Japanese woman, looking for foreign 85

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friend to enjoy nature with. I liked its simplicity and the possible double entendre, although I didn’t much like the email address she was using: Beyondthebluesky@. It sounded sentimental, typical of the addresses you’d see in the romance columns. I never answered romance-column ads but I sometimes typed out replies, then deleted them.

She wrote, Dear T –, Thank you for your email. My name is Kyoko. I work in a graduate university in Banpaku Memorial Park. Perhaps I can show you around this park. Would you mind if I come to your hotel one day? I would like to hear your jazz band. I hope we can become friends. Please write back to me.

We met formally in the lounge bar and I was disappointed, which I shouldn’t have been given that she had advertised for friendship only. She repeated this in her email too, but I suspected otherwise – she’d stated her age in the ad. I was disappointed because I was living in a city filled with attractive women and if there was any hope that our friendship would move beyond the blue sky, it was quickly extinguished when I saw her wave at me in the lobby.

Kyoko wasn’t terribly unattractive, but the middle of her forehead seemed permanently pinched as if a bad mood had burrowed in there. She had an unsightly mole on the side of her nose too although this became irrelevant when she smiled. Her smile was a rare creature but it had the same calming effect on me as modal jazz. I tried to cover up my disappointment by admiring her like she was the emperor’s daughter.

We met once a month for day outings, once for a picnic in the park near her university (pleasant), once in Koshien to see the Hanshin Tigers (boring) and once in Osaka Business Park to watch hanabi (exciting). It was then that Kyoko invited me to Kyoto. I liked that similarity of names and I repeated it to myself like a tongue-twister: Kyoko-Kyoto-Tokyo. She showed me that the first character in her name, 京, was the same as in Kyoto, meaning capital, which was also the last character in Tokyo, which was why she’d been named a “child of the capital”. She’d been born in Kyoto and raised in Tokyo but had moved to Osaka for her research. I never quite understood the nature of her research, except that it was related to Japanese culture and the only reason I remember that was our day in Kyoto, the old capital. She was going to teach me about okuribi, something to do with the Obon Festival, which, as it happened, fell on my birthday. What I do remember was that I naively agreed to go, not quite realising that our trip 86

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to Kyoto – our fourth friendship date – was, for Kyoko, a step beyond the blue sky.

It’s funny – my day in Kyoto, the temples, the fires – it all seemed surreal at the time, but here and now, three years later, the memory seems to have grown and deepened – along with a moment that still burns inside me ... Kyoko and Kyoto ... the three candles ... my birthday okuribi ...

Gozan no okuribi means send-off fire from five mountains. Japanese believe to send off ancestors by fire. In Kyoto such a festival is very majestic, Kyoko explained by email. She was fond of teaching me snippets like this. From Kyoko I learned interesting expressions such as ofuro agari no ippai wa ii ne: a beer is great after a hot bath. She told me about an artistic concept called mono no aware and that Murasaki Shikibu, a female scribe from 10th-century Japan, wrote the world’s first novel around this idea. I learned the difference between hanami and hanabi – flower-watching and flowerfire. I learned to say O-bon, putting equal stress on both syllables instead of my elongated “oh”. In return I taught her that in English we don’t use “very” with words like majestic, fantastic and wonderful, a linguistic rule I’d only just learned myself.

In some ways I thought she wanted a student more than a lover. Or perhaps I encouraged the teacher-student relationship as a means of avoiding the other. In any case I learned a lot from Kyoko, most of which I quickly forgot. It was too much high culture too quickly and I hadn’t decided if Japan really interested me. Gozan no okuribi was something nobody could forget though. Fire seems to go hand in hand with summer in Japan, although you’d think it would be cosier and safer to burn things festively in winter.

There were enormous hanabi displays every weekend throughout July and August, visible above the elegantly curved gables of Osaka Castle, which we watched from Osaka-jo-koen one hot July evening. I remember seeing a vast orange circle spread against the night sky as two bright red circles popped inside it.

– Hey, it’s Anpanman, I said, feeling pleased with myself.

Kyoko smiled, non-committal about the resemblance. And then she turned to me, saying – I’ll go to Kyoto for Obon on August 16. Would you like to join me? I answered yes without quite understanding the depth of my immersion into Kyoko’s hospitality.

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– Isn’t Oh-bon like some kind of festival of the dead?

– Mmm. At O-bon we celebrate our ancestors. We visit the family grave and make the prayers. In fact, I have some family graves in Kyoto, but my sister college there invited me to see seminar on making of okuribi.

– Oh, so what about me then?

– You can come. It’s no problem.

She looked at me with a quizzical smile, as if she sensed fear in me, but it was the look itself that made me uncomfortable. It said: you can come closer, I don’t bite. But her pinched brow continued to propel me gently away from such thoughts.

Although she was generous and kind there were moments when I sensed a rigidity or impatience with me, which I couldn’t help imputing to those tetchy lines in her forehead. Thinking of Kyoko now reminds me of the big Buddha I saw in Nara – the one with his left hand beckoning come hither and his right hand gesturing stop.

I came hither to Kyoto with Kyoko. We sorted out the details by email.

We were to be spending the whole day there, visiting temples, attending a seminar and writing our private wishes on gomaki – wooden boards that are burned to a cinder. This sends the wishes floating off into the night sky with the ancestral spirits and releases them into some yonder world of memory.

Later in the day we’d be climbing a mountain to watch the okuribi. My only responsibility was to take a bottle of sake. *** On the morning of August 16 I met Kyoko at Shin-Osaka Station. This time I really did admire her like she was the emperor’s daughter. She was dressed in a kimono, which I thought seemed rather impractical for hiking.

– Wow. Your kimono is gorgeous. Are you planning to climb a mountain in that?

She shook her head. – In fact, we don’t wear kimonos in summer. This is yukata. It’s lighter and easy to walk in.

I was truly impressed, whatever they called it. The pattern was a dazzling blend of fiery reds among tropical blues with touches of green; dozens of watery bubbles merged with something floral, or coral, like a chameleon’s skin. It made her prettier than usual. It seemed to brighten her cheeks and 88

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smooth out her brow. At first, she moved rigidly and formally in it, like royalty. There was a wide belt tied around her waist and I could see she had a T-shirt on underneath. On her feet, instead of geta, she wore Nike sports shoes.

– We’ve got a lot of walking to do, she explained.

We took a JR line to Kyoto and arrived in less than 30 minutes. The train was bursting with foreigners and Japanese. I felt for the first time that twinge of possessive pride any Western guy must feel when he’s accompanied by such an exquisitely dressed Japanese woman.

Up and down, the carriage was dotted with colourful kimonos, sparkling pools of beauty among the jeans and T-shirt crowd. It was then that I mentioned my birthday.

– I’m 30 today, I said. Kyoko showed no surprise, but wished me happy birthday while applauding silently. *** The area outside Kyoto station was buzzing with Obon tourists like us. It was a clear day, the heat already stifling and I could see a scattering of buses waiting in their bay, engines idling.

– We’ll take a bus to Ryoan-ji, said Kyoko. She found ours and asked me to wait.

– We need obento. I held a place in the queue while she slipped away.

She took a while to return and I began to worry that the bus would leave before she came back, or that I would pass out from exhaust fumes and heat.

– That took a long time, I said.

– So many people. I had to go to Isetan department store inside the station. She wrapped the lunch boxes in a blanket and tucked them neatly into her rucksack.

We boarded the bus and headed into the northern suburbs of the city.

From time to time I could spot the roofs of temples and shrines poking up among the modern buildings. If not for that, I remember thinking Kyoto would look as drab as any of the other towns we’d passed through from Osaka.

– Ryoan-ji is Zen temple. There we can admire dry garden.

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I listened to Kyoko talk earnestly about the temple and its history. After arriving, we walked through some flower gardens to the main pavilion and eventually found our way to the sand and rock garden. I recall the garden mainly because of the awe it seemed to strike into the hearts of the other visitors. People stood around in silence. Some took photographs. I didn’t understand the reverence.

– What does it mean? I whispered to Kyoko. I noticed the pinch in her brow build slowly and return for the first time that day. I was in for a whole day of history, but there were too many long Japanese names and periods and titles and it was impossible to keep track. Once those pained dimples appeared above her eyes her demeanour seemed to stiffen and her face reformed its default expression. Then I saw Kyoko in a different light. I began to sense an anxiety on her part, a self-imposed standard she made herself live up to that had physically manifested itself in that way. If her face was a melody it was all agitato and minor second intervals.

– The garden is for meditation. Each person must find his own meaning, she said.

I concentrated my gaze on the rocks for a minute.

– I’ve found the meaning, I joked.

– Oh really? What did you find?

– Uh uh, each person must find their own meaning, I replied. She smiled and said nothing. It was then that I wondered if my reaction to Kyoko’s expression was a product of my own modes of thinking. Maybe I was the one filled with Monk dissonance. Perhaps it wasn’t that she was objectively unattractive, but instead that the combination of our particular psyches worked to produce this disturbance in me. When I think of Ryoanji, I think of that idea and I attribute it to a minute’s meditation on a Zen garden. Were we two different people desperately trying to bridge a cultural chasm? Islands of rock forever isolated from one another? I was not the kind of person who could suddenly develop a fawning interest in Japanese Buddhism out of thin air and Kyoko was not the sort of person who could relax so easily around foreigners, despite (or maybe because of) her excellent English.

We walked alongside a busy road for 30 minutes, past stands of bamboo and lush green bush to Kinkaku-ji, the next temple on our to-do list. I can clearly remember standing by the edge of a green, algae-filled pond, trying 90

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to find in myself a genuine appreciation for a building I knew nothing about.

With the right background (a proper knowledge of the era in which it was built) it may well have been fascinating, but to my eyes, unable to forget that we were looking at a reconstruction, I saw a not-so-old, kitschy gold façade, almost flimsy or fragile, a tourist attraction past its prime. I took some pictures with my keitai and crossed the little bridge for a closer look.

I’d been reading a plaque near the entrance while Kyoko bought our tickets.

Later I said, – Isn’t this the one built by the famous shogun Yoshimitsu Ashikaga?

– You’ve heard of Ashikaga Yoshimitsu?

– Of course, I replied. He built the golden pavilion around 1400. Isn’t its other name Rokuon-ji? It’s uh ... I stopped and grinned, forgetting the rest.

This elicited a laugh from Kyoko.

– You cheated, she said, smiling. It was the first time I sensed she was enjoying my clowning around and not merely tolerating it.

I noticed a Western man nearby, looking at her. He turned away when he saw me watching him.

We took a bus back into the city and another to Kyoto University, where we sat on the thin blanket Kyoko pulled from her backpack. We had lunch in the grounds in the shade of a Japanese maple. There were clusters of tourists huddled beneath other trees. We split our chopsticks and began to eat.

– So, how do you feel about Zen temple? Kyoko asked me.

– How do I feel? I didn’t know how to answer. – I wish I’d done some research beforehand, I said. – It’s difficult to appreciate when you’re ignorant of what it all means. I probably missed some of the beauty because of that.

I suppose I saw something I wasn’t expecting. Kinkaku-ji looked sort of forlorn and lonely and ... uh. I wanted to say unkempt, but when I thought about it I realised that wasn’t true. The temples and gardens had all been as kempt as Kyoko herself.

– Maybe you came to know mono no aware, she said and I laughed, thinking it sounded corny, like Yoda explaining the Force. But I felt a spark of pride at my ability to glimpse this so-called pathos of things, this impermanence of beauty. It spurred me on. I told her I liked the koi flashing orange in the ponds and the peaceful auras surrounding Japanese temples.

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like that, I said, tracing with my hand the curve and flick, but I must have looked awfully naïve. Kyoko took my hand and looked at my bandaged finger.

– Again? she asked and I nodded tamely. She was watching me with that curious smile and it occurred to me that I was soliciting her welfare, leading her on.

– What do you feel about Zen temples? I asked. I felt stupid asking, even more so when I observed that the question seemed to embarrass her. When she spoke, her words became vague and I could make little sense of what she said. Apparently the question was for foreigners only.

We finished lunch and walked towards the university. The seminar, in Japanese, lasted an hour, but I sat and watched the slides showing construction of the okuribi fires, which are lit every year on the sides of the mountains surrounding Kyoto. Each fire depicts a different Chinese character. I remember there was “gate”, “large” and “boat”, but their symbolic meanings eluded me. It wasn’t until later, sitting on our little mountain – Yoshida-san – that Kyoko explained things in more detail.

The okuribi was due to start at 8pm. We spent the afternoon wandering through backstreets to the Ginkaku-ji Temple. At Ginkaku-ji – the Silver Pavilion, which I learned was modelled on Kinkaku-ji, the Golden Pavilion – we bought our gomaki. From the entrance I could just make out a small, dark, old three-storey building like the one we’d seen earlier. I wondered what all the fuss was about.

– Where’s the silver? I asked Kyoko. She had been talking about that during our walk but my mind had drifted.

– As I said, the plan for silver coating was never completed.

We paid a few hundred yen each and took some black felt pens to write our wishes. Suddenly I felt self-conscious. I wrote something about good health and wished I wasn’t so clumsy around kitchen knives. Kyoko wrote hers in Japanese.

– Can I ask what you wished for? I said.

– A safe passage for my ancestors. I could not visit the grave this time, she replied. ***

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Mount Yoshida was hardly a mountain, but the hill rose steeply, high above the suburban area behind the university. We’d had an early dinner and made sure we climbed the hill before the crowds to secure a good spot for viewing. We sat while I talked about the Bay Area and the music of the classic Coltrane quartet. I tried to explain the Acknowledgement section of A Love Supreme in terms of a Japanese aesthetic, the way the notes aspire to a spiritual peak, an evanescent beauty, but fall away just as quickly so that you’re left with the bittersweet feeling of having glimpsed but not grasped something very majestic.

– I’ll lend you my CD sometime, I said.

– I’d like that. But you shouldn’t use “very” with words like majestic.

– Heh. Very good. We were both in cheerful spirits.

As 8pm approached many city lights were extinguished until the vast grid of Kyoto was a black canvas mapped out by thin remaining rows, twinkling like an airport runway. There was hushed anticipation in the large gathering of people around us and when the first fire, the 大 character, was lit I almost fell back in fright at how big and bright the flames were. The “dai” mountain was close by. In the next 20 minutes, other okuribi appeared on distant mountains and I stood in awe at the scale of the flames. There were gasps of appreciation – and appropriately, fireflies flitting around. I suddenly became aware of a warmth against me. Kyoko leaned into my body. Her hand felt for mine and we stood there transfixed for half an hour.

Eventually we sat down on our blanket again. I removed a small bottle of sake from my bag and Kyoko provided two wooden cups.

– You should tilt your cup towards the fire, Kyoko said, pouring the alcohol. – It helps your wish come true.

When I did this I was to observe the fire reflecting on the surface of the sake. Of all the strange and new things I’d witnessed that day, this custom left a particularly poignant impression, as if in its own enigmatic way it made perfect and natural sense: catch a glimpse of the fire in your sake and you’re borne into that magical realm where ancestors are freed and your wishes come true. The rippling flame, the stealth of desire. We stayed on the top of that hill until every other person had left, the okuribi long expired and I found myself tipsy, with an arm round Kyoko. Her serious demeanour, the pained expression, the formal attire, all had melted into a soft, pliable liquidity. The night embraced us with its heat and before long we were 93

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entwined, struggling against the friction of our minds, igniting like a match.

I shouldn’t say my surrendering surprised me – it had become inevitable during the day, an unconscious decision dispersed across the daylight hours, not attributable to a sentimental moment.

We lay beside each other for a while and I fretted, not quite accepting what had just happened, while Kyoko reached for her rucksack and pulled out a small Isetan box, a lighter and three candles. Inside the box there was a chocolate cupcake. She pressed in the candles, lit them and presented it to me with a kiss on the nose. I saw the flames reflected in her eyes and for the first time I found myself in awe of her beauty.

– Make a wish, she said.

– My wish has already come true, I replied. At once, her pinch returned, but she continued to smile and hold the cake until I blew out the candles, wish-less, aware that something wasn’t right. I panicked. Here I was, all over again, mentally running to the bathroom for a bandage.

– I mean, you know, I meant this day. It’s been the best birthday in Japan I could have hoped for. Honestly, thanks for bringing me along.

I didn’t know what I meant. I hadn’t meant anything at all. She continued to smile, but the smile evolved into something distant, a new kind of beauty – the kind that brings pain.

As if in response to my anxiety Kyoko stood up. – We have to catch our train. She began packing our things. I rose with her and realised the extent of the darkness around us. I could just make out the whiteness of a path, but it veered off through trees where it was impossible to walk without a light.

– I guess we can use our keitais. I pointed my phone at the ground.

The light was poor, even with both phones operating. We inched our way forward when the path fell under black shadow and stumbled about, holding hands. We clung closer, afraid of tripping where the ground fell away more steeply, holding the trees for support. It was difficult to know if we were even following a path. Eventually I gripped something that was too smooth to be a tree and, holding my keitai closer, saw that it was red – one of the gateways to the Yoshida Shrine.

– There are steps here we can follow, said Kyoko, sure that we were on a proper path at least. We descended with a kind of slow crab-walk. It must have taken us half an hour to reach the street. I checked my watch.

– It’s nearly 12.

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– We need a taxi. The last train is at 12.37.

We scuttled along back past the university towards the river that runs through the centre of Kyoto and stood on a street corner searching for cabs.

There were groups of people walking around in kimonos but few taxis in sight. Whenever one did come past it was either occupied or on call.

– Perhaps we can find a place to stay, I suggested.

– Not a chance. It’s Obon.

She was short with me, but I was relieved that her eyes seemed not to show it this time. She suddenly looked worn out, as if the weight of so much history had settled on her shoulders. We were both uncomfortable for a moment. I smiled, trying to show that the state of affairs didn’t bother me.

I could see people walking along the riverbank so I took her hand and led her down the embankment. The river had wide banks on either side – lower than the street – for walkers and cyclists and a grassy stretch for picnicking.

We walked along the bank for several minutes until we found an area where trees overhung the grass and I indicated that we should stop. Kyoko had become amenable, her mood had lightened again and she seemed fine with my plan.

I unpacked our rug, spread it across the ground and pulled her down beside me, using our backpacks as makeshift pillows.

– Oh no, the cake, she said. I took the mangled Isetan box out of my bag and opened it. My birthday cupcake was half-squashed against the cardboard. We both picked a little off the top, but neither of us had much of an appetite.

– Glad you got chocolate though, I said. It’s my favourite. It’ll make a great breakfast. Ever had Ghirardelli chocolate? I asked her. – It’s the best.

– I like Meiji, she said. Something about the way she said this bit me. It was like she thought I’d scorned all Japanese chocolate just because of my preference.

– Man, that okuribi really was something. I think those shapes have burned into my memory. I lay back and searched for stars twinkling through the leaves above.

Kyoko lay beside me mumbling something about wishes. She began speaking to me in Japanese, short, sharp questions that I couldn’t possibly answer. She seemed to be answering them herself. She kept saying “so desho?” sounding like a strict schoolteacher. I just answered “hai” to everything, a 95

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little weirded out. I didn’t want to ask. At some point during the interrogation I fell asleep.

I slept restlessly for a couple of hours but my fatigue must have kicked in hard by three, because I slept soundly until a little before six. I awoke sore, with a dog snuffling at my feet. Kyoko had gone. The cupcake was sitting in its box nearby. The three candles had been set alight and were now burning low, close to their ends. Coloured wax had pooled over the top of the cake and there was a piece of scholastic notepaper under the box that said, “I hope all your wishes came true. Please keep the blanket for yourself.” I sat bolt upright and fumbled for my phone. Her number came up with a dead signal.

I walked alongside the river in a foul mood, kicking stones into the water and humming the changes of So What in my head. I wondered if Miles Davis had been in a place like this, trying not to feel sorry for himself, wondering if there was relief mixed with his blues. But deeper down I knew I’d brought this on by sending Kyoko too many mixed signals and now I was hurting. The blackish water below me flowed shallow over a series of concrete weirs at the same pace as my step. I remember hating those weirs – how they made an otherwise picturesque river ugly.

Early risers were out walking their dogs. The city of Kyoto was waking to another clear day. I found a taxi rank beyond the next bridge and took a cab to the station.

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Murdo Macleod

Interview: David Mitchell James Kidd

“You cultivate the habit of the open mind. You must be aware that anything could fly in the window at any time. So you keep the window open rather than allow an idea to brain itself on the glass.”

– David Mitchell on writing

D

avid Mitchell is not the first writer who springs to mind for a profile in the Asia Literary Review. Viewed from a certain angle, Mitchell, 42, personifies almost stereotypical Englishness. Born in Southport on Merseyside and raised in the heart of England (Malvern, Worcestershire), he is tall, blond and exhibits the type of self-deprecating sense of humour once considered a national necessity. Discussing his childhood, which he 97

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describes as “English, straight, white, middle-class”, Mitchell says, “Like most teenagers, I felt my parents had entered a world’s most-boring-person competition, and won. Which of course is not fair, and no doubt my own kids will one day be saying the same sort of thing about me.”

Mitchell writes exclusively in English and occasionally about the most Anglicised subjects. Black Swan Green (2006) fictionalised his Midlands childhood in 13 chapters lovingly packed with references to British television shows, schoolboy slang (“Epic!”) and 1970s pop music. The narrator, budding teenage poet Jason Taylor, is a dead ringer for a young Mitchell. Despite his fascination with the Falklands War, Taylor displays only a hazy concept of a world outside his own geographical and historical moment: “Dad talked about how spices used to be like gold or oil nowadays. Clippers and schooners brought them back from Jakarta, Peking and Japan. Dad said how in those days Holland was as powerful as the USSR is today. Holland!”

Little else about Mitchell’s literary career is so straightforward, or so simply parochial. Granta may have named him one of its Young British Novelists in 2003, but this is a writer who, in effect, was made in Japan. Mitchell began to write in earnest only after moving to Hiroshima in 1994, by coincidence the same year that fellow novelist David Peace made his way from the north of England to Tokyo.

Mitchell and Peace taught English, a job that afforded sufficient time, space and money to nurture their literary careers. “I worked for 40 hours a week but only taught for about six or seven,” says Mitchell. “I had to ‘put my face out’, as they say in Japanese, but no one was interested in what I was doing outside the classroom.”

Mitchell stayed for eight years in total, completing his residence in Hagi, a small city on the Japan Sea known for its pottery. During that time, he published his first two novels – Ghostwritten (1999) and number9dream (2001) – and completed parts of his breakthrough third novel, Cloud Atlas (2004). As he acknowledged in an essay written for his American publisher, Random House, in 2000, Japan allowed him to write without too many distractions. “I would probably have become a writer wherever I lived, but would I have become the same writer if I’d spent the last six years in London, or Cape Town, or Moosejaw, on an oil rig or in the circus?”

The answer to this question, as Mitchell acknowledges, is no. Japan was muse and patron, informing the content of his work and its eclectic, 98

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entertaining and genre-hopping forms. Mitchell declares an interest in manga and anime, saying, “They are both extreme plot-driven forms of fiction that pay close attention to camera angles.” He adds: “Hyper-modernity lends number9dream its stage and its scenery. If you are writing about contemporary Japan, its cyber, virtual and techno aspects are attractive elements. William Gibson reached the same conclusion, long before me, in Neuromancer.”

Mitchell’s novels could be described as literary mosaics. His most famous works, Cloud Atlas and Ghostwritten, present seemingly unconnected narratives that gradually develop into a bigger picture through recurring plots, characters, settings and leitmotifs. Ghostwritten appears to be a collection of independent short stories, set in various cities across Asia. In Tokyo, a young Japanese jazz musician falls in love with a girl from Hong Kong; in Holy Mountain, a woman’s life doubles as an account of the last half century of Chinese history; in Hong Kong, a British banker narrates the gradual decline of his life and moral code. His wife leaves him, he has an affair with his Chinese maid, is investigated for nefarious financial misdeeds and eventually collapses beside a hilltop Buddhist shrine.

But boundaries in Ghostwritten, whether literary or geographic, are porous and easily negotiated. Characters slip from place to place and story to story: the Chinese maid in Hong Kong is the granddaughter of the woman in Holy Mountain; the young lovers in Tokyo are spotted by the envious British banker in Hong Kong. Even Mitchell’s prose refuses to stay put. The opening line, “Who was blowing on the nape of my neck?” whispers through the entire book.

Mitchell’s recent work has inverted this narrative method: instead of seemingly disparate yarns that somehow link to form novels, Black Swan Green and last year’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet present apparently coherent linear stories that, on closer inspection, comprise sub-plots and micro-narratives that feel like discrete short stories.

The prototype for this form was Mitchell’s second novel, number9dream.

Its hero, Eiji Miyake, arrives in Tokyo hoping to track down his father, who abandoned the family years before. Miyake shuttles fluidly between reality and his own private fantasy world, which he experiences through an array of different narrative genres including a video game, a manga scenario, a pastoral idyll, a yakuza movie and a sexual-exploitation farce. This duality affects time (Miyake’s past and present) and place. Miyake also bounces 99

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between the highly structured surfaces of Japanese society and its chaotic underbelly: love hotels, computer hacking, dirty deals in boardrooms.

Mitchell is justly celebrated for his narrative ingenuity, but he also has his critics. Reviewing The Thousand Autumns in The New Yorker, James Wood wrote: “Lavishly talented as both a storyteller and a prose stylist … he is nevertheless an artist of surplus: he seems to have more stories than he quite knows what to do with.”

Also stinting in his praise is Philip Hensher, who wrote in The Spectator (once again about The Thousand Autumns), that “despite his evident inventiveness in creating a novel’s structure, I wonder about his attachment to anything but the conventions of literary storytelling”.

Hensher is typical of Mitchell’s detractors, who acknowledge his talent but argue that he seems more interested in chasing his own literary tail than engaging with reality. Common reproofs insist that his fiction is not only too clever (or too entertaining) for its own good but also an empty exercise in postmodern self-reference. Another of Hensher’s concerns is that Mitchell portrays foreign cultures with all the subtlety of Godzilla in a china shop.

Mitchell counters by arguing that his fiction is profoundly engaged with the world and people around him, no matter how fantastic the tale it tells.

His early books, Ghostwritten and number9dream, simply reflected the life he lived at the time. “I described the world around me. It was pure youthful mimesis. I wrote what I saw, and what I saw was a world where coincidences happen, where cultures bleed subtly and quietly into one another,” he says.

“Political borders are strict, but cultural ones tend to bend, give way, melt and fragment – simply because culture exists in people, and people up-sticks and move.”

This last observation is true of Mitchell: he now lives in Clonakilty, Ireland, with his wife Keiko and their daughter, nine, and son, six. The reasons for departure were mainly financial: Japan’s high cost of living made it difficult for Mitchell to support his young family from his writing alone. His decision to return to the British Isles coincided with his first commercial success as an author: having received ecstatic reviews and a place on 2004’s Man Booker Prize shortlist, Cloud Atlas sold more than half a million copies.

Years after he left, Japan continues to exert a powerful hold on his imagination. The Thousand Autumns is arguably his most “Japanese” novel to date. Set at the turn of the 19th century, the story begins on the artificial100

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island trading post of Dejima in Nagasaki Bay. Its content and form pay homage to Japanese culture. “On every page of The Thousand Autumns I gave myself licence to do a one-sentence ‘haiku line’ in the hope that it would infuse the book with a more Japanese feeling,” Mitchell says. “The ace of spades of the haiku form is compression – how to pack the maximum into the minimum.”

I first met David Mitchell during a publicity tour for the paperback publication of The Thousand Autumns; we talked over tea at London’s Goring Hotel. Although never less than polite, he was clearly in a rush and slightly distracted. Japan was still reeling from the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that struck on March 11 and Mitchell was understandably concerned not to exploit the tragedy to sell books. (Coincidentally, an earthquake strikes Dejima in the novel.) “News vulturism is as nauseating as disaster tourism,” he says, discussing the media response to the tragedy. “At the same time, of course I want news crews to be there and reporting. Perhaps the press can’t win, but please let them be wise and sane, and unhysterical, and humane.”

That first meeting was followed by a lengthy phone conversation as Mitchell waited for bread to bake. Genial, patient and thoughtful, he considered questions scrupulously and chose his words with similar care, perhaps the legacy of a stammer that, as Black Swan Green reveals, he worked diligently to overcome.

This attention to words also reflects a love of language and storytelling.

Mitchell speaks like he writes, moving easily from seriousness to humour, from considerations of high art to popular culture, from directness to digression. He delights in making imaginative connections: mention of our shared admiration for eclectic BBC Radio 3 music programme Late Junction mutates into an artistic statement.

“There’s an underthought-about artistic quality of propinquity [to Late Junction],” observes Mitchell. “When things are next to each other they emit a field and make a third thing – like a Venn diagram. When you get a piece of Korean wedding music alongside one of Brian Eno’s Apollo recordings they do something to each other that gives greater value. It works with colour too. Put green next to orange and you’ll see a dark penumbra created by those two colours being there. I wondered whether this might work with narrative too.”

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Late Junction accompanied the nocturnal writing sessions of Cloud Atlas, earning an honourable mention in the novel’s acknowledgements. One can detect its subliminal influence on Mitchell’s technique of splicing genres such as science fiction, the historical and epistolary novel, the journal, espionage thrillers and the gangster yarn. Each story is self-consciously echoed by the succeeding ones, as if Cloud Atlas were an elaborate literary matryoshka.

“One of the happy accidents of Cloud Atlas was realising that radically different genres do something to one another. How it works I don’t know, but something happens,” he admits. “It’s an artistic effect I’m now conscious of and I seek to deploy when appropriate.”

It seems entirely in character that Mitchell should describe his first impressions of Japan by drawing on works from two genres. His feelings of confusion and cultural dislocation are conveyed through Mr Baseball, an obscure 1992 movie starring Tom Selleck. Mitchell was particularly taken with a scene where one macho, individualistic American player encounters his Japanese counterparts, filled with esprit de corps. Selleck rebels and shouts, “Are you going to tell me how to take a crap next?” He opens the door to a bathroom and finds an Asian toilet sunk into the floor. He stares at it then turns round. “Okay, I need someone to tell me how to take a crap.”

Mitchell also cites Youth, Joseph Conrad’s autobiographical tale of a young sailor’s inaugural voyage to Bangkok. “If Asia is a part of a Westerner’s youth, then it does something psychic and strange. As you age, youth and Asia become conflated in your memory. You hunger for one as you hunger for the other.”

The reference to Conrad is instructive. Like him, Mitchell is attracted to voyages of geographic exploration that double self-consciously as narratives of imaginative self-discovery. “It all sounds rather Germanic,” Mitchell says, laughing. “I need a quiff and a moth-eaten waistcoat to discuss this.” But it does strike a chord. “Being outside your home culture, you learn that you are dragging half a ton of preconceptions around with you – all the things you never realise you’ve been taking for granted, because they were instilled in you by the environment that made you. Suddenly noticing this great big sack chained to your foot is a fine opportunity to know yourself better.”

For Mitchell, writing has always been central to processing these experiences, whether he is exploring a new country or analysing his relationship with it. He describes the process as akin to taking text photographs. “These 102

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record the smells, moods, ghosts, sounds and random metaphors that drift by. An example might be an old man’s skin is like a mottled banana.”

Conversely, new experience has always inspired Mitchell’s writing: locations suggest characters, which suggest plots, which suggest themes. The seeds of Hong Kong in Ghostwritten were sown, in part, by the Nick Leeson case, but also by visiting an old university friend who worked for a Hong Kong bank. “I have never written an East-meets-West novel, a novel about metafiction or a global novel. I had no interest in expat novels and I didn’t think readers would either.”

Mitchell’s practice of writing himself into a place might explain the recurrence in his work of the traveller who is a stranger in a strange land and must imaginatively accustom himself to his new surroundings. One thinks of 19th-century adventurer Adam Ewing in Cloud Atlas arriving in New Zealand from America; Jacob de Zoet swapping Holland for Dejima; and Eiji Miyake leaving his Kyushu home to search for his father in Tokyo.

By contrast, failure to habituate has disastrous or bizarre results. In Ghostwritten Neal Brose is the English banker on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Part of what ails him is his attitude to Hong Kong, which he treats like an exotic London suburb crossed with a glorified cash machine.

Hong Kong responds by sending the ghost of a Chinese girl to haunt Brose’s apartment and imagination.

Mitchell’s twin ambitions to write and travel were roused, it seems, at an early age. He speaks wistfully about his “pretentious” love of language as a teenager. “You acquire a synaesthetic appreciation for words. They have flavours and textures. Dusk and twilight are both beautiful words, but they are not quite the same. Even ‘maybe’ and ‘perhaps’ glance off the eyeball at slightly different angles, don’t you think?”

Both his parents were, broadly speaking, artistic, although Mitchell stresses they were in no way bohemian: his father worked for the Royal Worcester Porcelain company, now defunct (“the company, not my dad”); his mother was a freelance floral artist who painted greetings cards and adverts. “My parents immunised me against certain myths about the ‘artist’s life’ from an early age. I realised that art is work, and the nuts and bolts of doing it are discipline and hard work. Inspiration is a fancy word for ‘having a good idea’ and creativity doesn’t mean much when you examine the word under a microscope. Artistic myths won’t get you very far.”

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But going far was precisely what the adolescent Mitchell wanted to do. “I had a globe that I almost used to drool over. I indulged in map lust. I wanted to canoe downriver as far from Worcestershire as possible. Of course, when you do, and live abroad for long enough, you come to learn that mundanity is not a place you can escape from, but an inner state.”

Mitchell’s first voyage was less than epic: he studied English and Comparative Literature at the University of Kent. His youthful enjoyment of Shakespeare’s “oddball” plays such as Timon of Athens and Cymbeline give some indication of future imaginative acts. “They are structural messes, but you can find half-hidden gems there too. I liked the fact they were neglected, that I felt as though I was discovering them.”

After gaining his Master of Arts degree (he researched the postmodern novel), Mitchell began to discover the world for real. He spent a year in Sicily, teaching English in Catania, before moving on to Hiroshima. “I wanted to eat the world,” he says. “I went to Japan, but it could just as easily have been anywhere else.”

This destination was largely determined by Mitchell’s Japanese girlfriend at the time, who happened to live in Hiroshima. He arrived with few assumptions about the country and even less knowledge. “I was too young and stupid to have pre-armed myself with preconceptions. I had read some Mishima, but that’s a long way from being ready to live there.”

Mitchell found Japan baffling and exciting, humbling and slightly humiliating. Although he would learn to speak Japanese at an “upperintermediate level”, he describes being “infantilised”. “You can’t speak or express your needs. Even when you are learning the language you talk like a four-year-old. But I wanted the differences and the difficulties. Had Japan looked too much like Worcestershire I would have been disappointed.”

Mitchell realised he was not simply an observer of cultural difference but an agent of it too: his height, skin colour and fair hair ensured he was a novelty wherever he went. “You’re looked at a lot. Kids giggle at you. You unnerve people. Just by asking someone a question their stress levels rise.

They will be embarrassed by their inability to understand you, even though you are the guest in their country. If you are white and male, you get an easier ride. You don’t know the social codes but you are forgiven more readily – more than, say, a Japanese American.”

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It was his first inkling of Japan’s complex relationship with foreigners – a theme that pervades The Thousand Autumns. In Mitchell’s case, he found that many of his existing ideas were challenged and reshaped. Japan recalibrated his knowledge of World War II, for example.

“The British can be obsessed and uncritically proud of their role in World War II. The Japanese often prefer amnesia,” he says.

But he also cites “ignorant” clichés still prevalent in the West, among them Japan’s never having apologised for its part in the war. “It is not widely known that during the US occupation of Japan, media discussion – including analysis of the war – was illegal. It was even illegal to refer to the fact that it was illegal to talk about the war. That wasn’t Japanese censorship – it was imposed by MacArthur’s headquarters in Tokyo.”

The embargo may have been imposed by the Americans, but it has had a profound effect on Japanese culture. World War II has marginal status on school curricula and a similarly tangential presence in cultural life. When Mitchell visited Hiroshima’s Atomic Bomb Museum he was surprised how little political context was provided to the horrific events of August 1945.

“Can you imagine a British museum about the Blitz that fails to mention why the Blitz happened? Me neither.”

Mitchell has written that the process of cultural exchange made him feel like “an alien amongst natives” (a phrase coined by Donald Ritchie, the renowned critic of Japanese cinema who spent most of his life in Japan).

Mitchell was especially disconcerted by his first encounters with the urban landscape. “[Japanese cities] are TV – huge, loud, compulsory television.

Big screens play adverts and movie trailers while you wait to cross the road.

To walk through one of Japan’s rich cities is to channel surf, and opting out of this extreme consumerism is not really an option. Only gaijins who can’t speak the language are spared.”

Experiences like these would later shape number9dream. They awoke a broad fascination with the interface between the individual and mass culture in Japanese society, between the human and the technological and between ideas of self-expression and self-sacrifice.

“The social contract in Japan requires the self-abnegation of the individual and the sacrifice of family life on the altar of the breadwinner’s job for life. The pictures from ‘Advertland’, then, are cruelly tantalising: they show individuals being, acting and consuming as freely as their real-life counterparts never 105

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can. Those open roads, those deserted beaches, those spacious, sunlit houses!

No wonder Hawaii is a Japanese version of fairyland.”

Mitchell quickly understood that this was not the end of the story.

“Self-abnegation is never wholly attainable: you can shelve your dreams and aspirations and loves, but they’re still there on the shelf. It still aches where they used to be.”

One of Mitchell’s most perceptive guides to contemporary Japan was Haruki Murakami, whom he describes as “the poet laureate of Japanese alienation, astute about the melancholy of hyper-modern Japan”. Murakami, says Mitchell, discovered that modern novelists can use global popular culture as an 18th-century novelist would refer to the Greek and Latin classics. “You can talk about Snoopy, Charlie Brown and The Beatles and people all over the world will know exactly what you mean.”

Murakami’s influence is especially strong in Mitchell’s early work. In Okinawa, the opening chapter of Ghostwritten, Quasar is a cult member who commits a murderous terrorist attack on Tokyo’s subway system. The story was partly inspired by the Aum Shinrikyo cult that, in 1995, released Sarin gas on trains in the capital, killing 11 commuters and poisoning 1,000 others. Quasar finds solace, albeit of a profoundly deluded variety, in the insane mythology propagated by the cult’s leader, His Serendipity. Modern Japan is portrayed as a virus that spreads decadence, greed, sex and even racial impurity through the modern media. Alternately pitiable and monstrous, Quasar is a distorted emblem of Japanese social obedience and self-sacrifice.

“Cults have been popular in Japan because they combine family love with self-abnegation. That’s a potent and attractive mixture. The habitual suppression of personal desire has to be extirpated from an early age or the country simply wouldn’t function. You couldn’t cram that many people onto a Tokyo subway train if they behaved like North Americans.”

Quasar personifies the sinister side of this social contract. “Japan functions well as a social organism – as the recent past in Sendai shows – but there’s always a price. Self-abnegation can be expensive in terms of mental health. If the cost of British individualism is a cavalier thuggishness, for example, the cost of Japanese social harmony – the oft-vaunted ‘wa’ – can be seen in the hikikomori [people who have withdrawn from society], the daily average of 17 minutes that Japanese fathers spend with their children, the woeful birth rate, social ennui and the suicide rate.”

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It does not escape Mitchell’s attention that Japanese artists have found this burden as heavy to bear as any. He argues that it takes special courage to choose an artistic career in Japan, which discourages the pursuit of individual desires. “It is a brave soul who strays off the near-compulsory highway of Japanese life – school to university to company – and chooses the unsalaried life of the writer.” Mitchell again cites the example of Murakami, who didn’t just buck the social norm but the literary criterion too. “He seems to draw flak for being arguably the best-known living Japanese person while eschewing the Japanese literary establishment and the role of national literary ambassador. Murakami rejected the Kiriyama Prize [in 2007] ‘for personal reasons’ and continues to hoe his own row – I admire him a lot.”

Murakami was one of several writers who helped Mitchell understand the Japanese psyche. But it was Shusaku Endo (1923-1996), through his novel Silence, who helped inspire The Thousand Autumns. Set around Nagasaki shortly after edicts against Christianity were ruthlessly enforced, Silence tells of a young Portuguese priest who travels to Japan from Macau to confirm his mentor’s apostasy.

“Apart from providing useful historical information for The Thousand Autumns, [Silence] also issued a challenge,” says Mitchell. “If this Japanese writer can produce a convincing psychological portrait of a historical foreigner, why can’t I attempt something similar, only coming in the opposite direction?”

Yukio Mishima, says Mitchell, portrays the grandeur and beauty of the culture superbly, “although he’s too much of a humourless misogynist for my liking”. He calls Jun’ichiro Tanizaki a “great writer” who evokes an “older, faded Japan” with a skill Proustian and his own. “Tanizaki is perhaps the pick of the bunch. I find much to admire in his The Makioka Sisters.”

These authors all helped Mitchell comprehend the cultural DNA that underscores the Japanese mind: “Memes instead of genes, if you like.” There is, he says, a “cultural, if not personal assumption of Buddhist reincarnation”, a belief in nature gods and a Confucian belief in social hierarchy, reflected in family and company structures.

Mitchell concedes that his work has not always inhabited this mindset as precisely as he would like. He describes number9dream as “perhaps not quite right”, a weakness that can have its advantages: Mitchell admires David Lynch’s films specifically for their “not-quite-rightness”. Although he strove 107

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in The Thousand Autumns to portray the Japanese faithfully and accurately, this was not always possible, not least because Mitchell himself was writing in English. “It can be tortuous, especially when Japanese characters are speaking to one another. Basically, I avoided contractions – do not instead of don’t. When they speak to the Dutch, they make mistakes.”

In The Thousand Autumns, Japan itself emerges as a kind of fiction, an idea as much as a place that is being continually created and interpreted. As Jacob leaves Dejima his final thought is, “Obscurity is Japan’s outermost defence.

The country doesn’t want to be understood.” But Mitchell argues that the stereotype of the “inscrutable Oriental” is a two-way game. “Asian people, in my experience, are neither less nor more inscrutable than Europeans,” he says. “That myth of inscrutability is not real, but nevertheless it is bought into by both parties.”

Dejima – which Mitchell discovered by missing his stop on a Nagasaki tram – provides a perfect canvas for this cultural investigation. In his fictional retelling, it is a hinge between isolationist 18th-century Japan and an increasingly expansive and aggressive Europe. “Dejima is a unique conduit in colonial history. The whites stayed quarantined in a walled enclave; the terms of their lives were dictated to them and they conformed. But as well as this ‘house-arrest’ set-up, it was also a cultural cat flap through which all knowledge of Japan exited and all knowledge of the West entered.”

The Thousand Autumns narrates a strange and tentative series of cultural exchanges. The Dutch introduce the latest advances that Enlightenment science has to offer, including medicine, astronomy, economics, engineering, warfare and navigation. Mitchell says these were to the Japanese what “a cure for cancer or interstellar light-speed travel” would be to us.

The Japanese greeted these innovations as they did almost every foreign import – with suspicion. An exception is Mitchell’s heroine, the curious, clever and open-minded Orito Aibagawa. Having fallen in love with her, Jacob risks falling foul of Dejima’s severe restrictions on personal freedom: all contact between Japanese and Europeans was strictly monitored and broadly discouraged.

This law effectively outlawed the “accidental” on Dejima and tested even Mitchell’s powers of storytelling. “Novels need those sorts of encounters, which possibly explains why there isn’t much fiction about Dejima. You

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need an unwatched corner for your principals to have sex in. But there were no unwatched corners in Dejima.”

Dejima’s proscriptions regarding social and cultural interaction did assist Mitchell in one area: the decision to keep the relationship between Orito and Jacob implied and chaste. “If Orito had sex with Jacob, she would have become a character in a poor Hollywood movie. The novel would smell like a male writer engaging in an Oriental fantasy. That is why she is not a geisha, but an intelligent woman who is needed more by Jacob than he is by her.” Mitchell adds that he was persuasively advised in this matter by his wife. “I think her exact threat was, if she read another bloody novel where an Asian woman falls swooningly at the feet of a Western interloper, she would castrate me with a bread knife.”

Having set many of his stories in Asia, from Japan to Korea, China to Mongolia, Mitchell is understandably sensitive to charges of Orientalism.

I ask whether he has ever had any reservations, political or aesthetic, about writing in English about Asian culture. “I worry now,” he replies. “At the beginning of my career I was too young and ignorant. I read Said’s Orientalism in my early 30s. I remember thinking, ‘Jesus, this guy would hate me and my books.’ But still.”

Today, however, he improvises a response to Said’s hypothetical objections by posing a succession of counter-questions about his “right” to imagine cultures other than his own. “Why do you have to be Asian to write about Japan? Why can’t I have a protagonist who’s my age but Japanese? Isn’t there a reverse racism if I say, ‘I’m white, therefore I have no business writing about non-white people’? By the same rather crap logic, no novelist from India or Pakistan or Africa or even South America has any business writing about the British – an untenable argument leading to a mutually uncomprehending world, right?”

In this light, it is slightly ironic that Mitchell’s next book sees him return to Britain, at least in part. “Its centre of gravity is the British cultural solar system from 1970 to 2030, but there are asteroids all over the world through empire and emigration.” He adds that it will see the reappearance of a character from The Thousand Autumns: the botanist and medic Dr Marinus.

Marinus will, Mitchell explains, be reincarnated in the form of a young girl.

“Marinus’ previous reincarnation was as a Dutchman of the Enlightenment

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whose curiosity took him to Dejima, but his karmic hand is rarely as lucky as that when he returns to a new body.”

It is a bewildering concept until Mitchell explains it as reincarnation as literary conceit, a surrogate perhaps of the author’s own transgressive and boundary-crossing imagination. Marinus is a template for any fictional character: he can be anyone anywhere at any time, in the 18th or 21st century.

“Marinus is a tourist down human history. In a way he can be me.”

Our discussion ends with Japan’s future, catastrophically threatened by earthquake, tsunami and nuclear emergency. Mitchell doesn’t know anyone directly affected (his wife’s family lives in the west of Japan), but he has read as widely as he can. “Where to start, where to end? Immeasurable human misery; the daily indignities of the displaced. An immediate economic hit as the rebuilding costs mount. A shot in the arm for the construction industry.”

Although he struggles to think of any positive outcomes, he does hope that the earthquake might spread doubt that nuclear power is a post-oil saviour. “It is monstrous that the costs of storing radioactive waste are rarely, if ever, factored into the price of nuclear energy. To leave unborn generations with those environmental headaches so that we can recharge our iPhones seems metaphorically and literally criminal. If our current fears mobilise our governments into wartime-sized research programmes into renewable energy, then the catastrophes of March 2011 would have one positive consequence.”

Mitchell has learned more about the calamity from discussions with his wife than sifting the Western media. “She says that there is nothing like living in an earthquake zone for engendering an almost fundamental fatalism,” he says. “There is absolutely nothing you can do to protect yourself. Your only defence is blind luck.”

In a way, the earthquake disclosed what Mitchell’s fiction has always implied – that the inherent humanity of the Japanese is hard to defeat. “The British live amongst their relics – Stonehenge, Windsor Castle. That isn’t possible in an earthquake zone because your relics are levelled when a big one hits.” He speculates that the Japanese locate their sense of permanence not in buildings but in each other, the people who constitute the national culture and ethos. “In Britain we talk about people as national treasures in the metaphorical sense.

In Japan individuals are given the status of ‘national treasure’ quite literally.

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A medal is handed out from the imperial office to masters of traditional arts, like ceramicists or haiku poets. Perhaps that is because a building can easily be knocked down. A bloodline is harder to annihilate.”

Mitchell’s own future seems assured. A success both critically and commercially, he has sold more than a million books worldwide and won several major literary awards (he has yet to claim the Man Booker, for which he has been longlisted four times and shortlisted twice). And rumours have been confirmed that Cloud Atlas will be the first of his novels to be made into a movie, although he says that reports announcing the cinematic adaptation, starring Tom Hanks, were somewhat premature.

“It’s still in development hell, although it’s as close to the exit marked ‘Production’ as you can get without actually going through it,” he says.

Mitchell has clearly adapted to life back in the West, but I wondered how the transition had affected his wife. Did she fare any better, at least initially, in the West than her husband did in the East? “She is tolerant of the less-than-great stuff, values the good stuff and finds the latter offers adequate compensation for the former. If you manage that equation, you’ll be okay living abroad. If you can’t, you won’t, not in the long term. My family is lucky that she can.”

Ask what Mitchell misses about Japan and he answers with several textual snapshots. “Scenes of Japaneseness. Arriving at a guest house in the Nagano mountains. Dunking your Mr Donuts doughnut into your green-tea cappuccino. Onsen spas. Sunset over the Seto Inland Sea. Crowds getting non-aggressively rat-arsed underneath the cherry blossoms. Courtesy. An ability to distinguish service from servility – Americans have this knack too.

The food. Two or three old friends. The goofy humour.”

During his first weeks in Japan he took the ferry to Beppu and fell to playing drinking games with several Hiroshima tram drivers. “They didn’t speak any English. This was my first month in Japan, so I hardly spoke a word of Japanese. One guy wanted to ask where I was born: he finally got me to understand by miming being his own mother giving birth to his newborn self. Probably you had to be there, but I laughed myself into an out-of-body experience.”

Does David Mitchell consider himself an Asian writer? After considerable thought he answers by quoting Charlie Chaplin’s “elegant refutation” of Nazi accusations that he was a Jew. “I was not born with that honour.”

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Staring at the Sea 8 (2004) by Weng Fen, C-type print, 125cm x 160cm.

Courtesy of the artist and Art Statements, Hong Kong and Tokyo.

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The Farewell Parlour Jane Wallace

D

awn woke him, daylight piercing the blisters in the autodark. Koy let himself drift in semi-consciousness until the morning webcast blared in his ear. He scrabbled for the alarm’s off button, silenced the hourly news bulletin and flopped back on the pillow. It was still early; he could have five more minutes. Then he remembered. Today was his 80th birthday. Today was the day he was going to die.

He flipped back the covers. Lithe as a cat, he was on his feet and across the floor to the pod’s window in a single move. He pressed the open button and what was left of the autodark drained away to reveal a close-up of a family eating breakfast in the neighbouring high-rise block and a patch of hazy sky.

He was so close he could have reached out of the pod window and twitched the washing strung like bunting across their balcony. The father, wearing his habitual white T-shirt and grey sweatpants, bent over his rice and soup breakfast, served as usual by a bleary-eyed wife still in her pyjamas. There was nothing amiss. Today was the same as yesterday and the day before: a perfectly ordinary day in the Fukuoka suburbs. There was nothing out of place, no dark star, no thunderclap, to mark the date, to commemorate the momentous event of his death.

Turning from the window he padded the few steps to the kitchenette and filled a beaker with water. As it heated in the multiwave he walked the 16 paces to a toilet and shower separated from the main room by a smokedglass screen. He stood over the bowl for a long time, waiting for the geriatric dribble. In the mirror behind he stared at his lined face and salt-and-pepper 113

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hair, more salt than pepper now, a manifestation of his advanced age. That and his inability to relieve himself like a horse. Otherwise he was as mentally and physically fit as a man half his age.

The water was ready and he made tea, carrying it to the table under the window. He didn’t bother with a dressing gown: the pod had been far too warm, even stifling, since the envirocon had broken down. He traced a bubble in the autodark. It all needed refilling but there hadn’t been the money to fix that either, not that it mattered now whether the neighbours could see in or not. They had about two hours to be bothered by Koy’s green briefs before the problem was removed – permanently.

Koy found himself curiously untroubled by that thought as he drank deeply from the beaker, glad of the rehydration. Perhaps he was in denial.

That was why he didn’t feel any different, apart from being hungover. He hadn’t planned to overindulge the night before but events had overtaken him. Transition parties were always awkward affairs: friends and colleagues standing in a circle with one glass of wine each, willing the statutory two hours to end. He had expected his own would be the same. But the other teachers at the junior school had surprised him, bringing bottles of jizake that soon set the party humming. A couple of his students had gatecrashed: little Sato, with tears in his eyes, pressed a prohibited, non-consumable gift – the deer he had carved in class – into his hand. Koy, who had worked until the last possible moment, gulped back his emotions with the alcohol.

He understood how strange it must have been for Sato and the other pupils to have a regular fixture disappear, literally overnight. They hadn’t found a replacement for him either, probably wouldn’t, woodcraft being one of those practical skills now irrelevant to modern life.

A bit like himself: fit for scrap only. When Koy was born, people died naturally. They might have lived to 90, even 100. Successive governments changed that: accountants computed the available resources and divided them by the population. The result was in minus figures, so something had to be done. Single-child policies were unpopular and their impact would not be felt fully for many years.

The problem was now. The problem was too many elderly at the top of the demographic pyramid. So the authorities decided to augment the death rate instead.

Koy was about to become a statistic. He had listened in the statutory 114

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ante-mortem classes. He knew the procedure was painless; he agreed that to live longer was selfish; he understood that to move aside was the greatest gift with which you could endow a younger generation. But he wasn’t sure he was ready to make the Ultimate Sacrifice.

He had the right of refusal, of course, but what a disgrace for the family if he exercised it. There had been a high-profile case recently of an actor, Muto, who claimed he deserved another decade. The outcry had been phenomenal.

The media flayed him, the public boycotted his movies and hate campaigns were set up on the web. He held out for three months, eventually taking his own life when the shame became too great to bear.

Koy didn’t want to put his son Jun through such humiliation. And Suzi would be viperous. Koy had no doubt she had already earmarked the extra cash for a hair transplant, or arse lift, or whatever the fashion was these days.

He found himself strangling the beaker of tea as he thought of his daughterin-law. Suzi always claimed they were so poor, begrudging every cent of Koy’s maintenance. He knew what Jun earned. It was enough to support everyone if they were careful. It meant living without luxuries, but what could he do?

Teaching didn’t cover the rent, even with the government subsidy. He was sorry to be a burden to them but he had spent his life providing for Jun. His son should have been happy to look after him, particularly when there was a time limit.

Aware of the deadline he shaved and had a shower, placing the used towel and razor in a refuse sack near the kitchenette. Most of his possessions had already been cleared from the pod; the few left behind he would arrange neatly, ready for Jun to do a final sweep that afternoon. A new tenant was moving in tomorrow and there would be a fine if the pod was not empty.

He took his formal suit out of the cupboard and examined it. People wore whatever they wanted to the farewell parlour, sometimes the most outlandish outfits, but he considered the black silkwool appropriate. He chose a dove-grey shirt and buttoned the jacket over it, impressed that it still fitted after 20 years. It had lasted well: quality was guaranteed in the old days.

Stuffed in the breast pocket was the white sash he was supposed to wear at the ceremony. Like a marked man, he thought, fingering the cheap material. He considered leaving it behind, a small act of rebellion. Then he thought better of it. No one else would find it amusing and it was too late 115

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to make that sort of gesture. He put it on, crossing it over his chest and knotting it at the hip. Ready to go, he took a last look around the pod. It was as empty as a shed skin. He was pleased to close the door on the grim waiting room his home had become.

Koy travelled alone in the elevator to the ground floor. He left the keys on the counter of the concierge as arranged, surprised that old Tanaka wasn’t there to say goodbye. Then he remembered the facilitator in the class warning that people might act strangely on the day. Tanaka’s transition was due soon. Koy figured he didn’t like to be reminded.

The pavement outside was busy with early-morning traffic. Office workers in smart business wear, some holding half-eaten breakfasts, streamed past.

The shops were already open, their wares set up in enticing displays on the street. Most people were so concerned with reaching their destinations that few noticed Koy’s white band. Those who did looked away again quickly or smiled hesitantly before they walked on. A couple in their 40s stopped to pump his hand up and down, gushing their admiration. Feeling like a fraud, he accepted their compliments even though they were for an act he was yet to perform.

At last he turned into a side road called Heaven Street. He passed several flower shops and funeral brokers before he came to the farewell parlour. It was a cream, low-rise building with a tiled roof curling up at the eaves. With its timbered gables and wooden porch it looked more like a samurai house than a termination station. Painted characters above the lintel read House of Eternal Rest.

Glass doors at the back of the porch pulled apart as Koy approached; he went through into the marble foyer and looked around. The envirocon had been set too high and he shivered in the chill. Behind the rosewood reception desk on the left three sombrely clad clerks stared at their worktops.

Suspended above them was a wide screen down which scrolled the names of those transiting that day and the rooms in which the ceremonies were to take place. Koy was top of the list.

He had to watch the roll-call loop past several times before reality sank in and fear began a slow crawl up his spine. His gaze swung back to the entrance. It was quiet, but the clerks seemed not to have noticed him. He could back out slowly, no one would see. If questioned, he could say he was lost, had made a mistake …

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As he dithered, the door in the back wall was flung open. A pencil of a man, tall and skinny with a pale face like a rubber top, rushed into the room, clutching a folder to his chest.

“You must be my nine o’clock,” he panted, extending a hand.

“Yamagama, events director. I’m the host today. Sorry, so sorry, the traffic was terrible, complete gridlock at junction seven, held up for hours – a complete disaster!”

“I’ve just arrived myself,” said Koy. He wanted to wipe his hand after touching the limp fingers.

“Murder it was, everyone pushing and shoving. Ah, you’ve only just got here too? Hmm, okay, well that’s good, all good.” The official flipped out his tie and readjusted the immaculate knot. “Some of our celebrants like to be in the room before the guests arrive, you see, some time for quiet contemplation, as it were, before the big event. There.”

He patted the tie back into place. “We’ll have your room ready in a tick.

In the meantime, we can make sure everything’s in order, can’t we? You’ve signed all the forms, I presume?”

“I think so,” said Koy, still trying to identify an escape route.

Yamagama rifled through the papers in the folder. “Yes, very good. Now, how would you like to pay? Cash or chip?”

“Pay? What? Actually my son pre-paid.”

“Ah yes, so he did. Wonderful, wonderful. Well, let’s get on with it, shall we? No time to hang about! This way, please.”

He turned to the rear door and swept towards it. Koy hesitated.

“Come on, don’t be shy! They’ll all be here soon, all waiting for you!”

Yamagama stood by the door, beckoning him with a wave of the folder.

Koy was well aware of the expectations of his family. Duty drove him forward, one slow foot in front of the other, until he had caught up with his guide. They passed through the doorway together. Then Yamagama set off at a fast pace along a maze of corridors and dead ends decorated in neutral beige.

“Ten suites we’ve got here, some bigger, some smaller,” went Yamagama’s running commentary. “Yours is Willow, I believe? Yes? One of our smaller rooms, in fact, but still beautifully decorated. You’ll be very pleased. Here we are.”

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he had said, the wood-panelled salon was modest for its purpose. Twenty people could have stood comfortably in the room and no more. Koy intuited the hand of Suzi in its choice. Even at this stage she had to scrimp.

“The food and drink will arrive shortly.” Yamagama interrupted his thoughts. “If you don’t mind, I’ll just leave you to settle in. Lots to do backstage!”

“Ah, okay,” said Koy. The door slammed shut before he could protest at being left alone. He cast a dubious eye around the box-like room, noticing there were no windows and the pot plants were synthetic. On a podium at the back was a red velvet couch, a specially designed day-bed where the finale would be played out. It was done up like a throne, with the frame painted gold and chipped in places. He wondered whether the upholstery really was velvet. He stepped closer to touch it. As he suspected, it was Wipe-Kleen.

He shied away from the chair when a couple of waiters entered with a loaded trolley. They ignored him, setting up a buffet table onto which they decanted crockery, napkins and plates of cold appetisers. With nothing better to do Koy surveyed the work until a bespectacled face bobbed up from behind them.

“Dad? You’re here early.” Jun bounded into the room. His grin was switched to full beam and he looked as comfortable as a celebrity at a charity prize-giving function.

Koy spread his hands. “There wasn’t a lot else to do. You’re on your own?’

“No, no, Suzi’s coming, she’s coming soon. It took a while to get the kids up this morning.”

It was his transition and the stupid bitch couldn’t even get out of bed on time, Koy thought, fuming. With 90 minutes to go he didn’t want to start an argument so he let his pained expression convey his real thoughts.

“So, ah, you know who’s coming?” Jun said, ignoring the disapproval and rubbing his hands together, still with the talk-show smile.

Koy confessed he did not.

“Really? Didn’t Suzi tell you? Oh my God, she’s invited everybody, so many people! You’ll be thrilled, really you will. It’ll be lovely to have all the family, all your friends, with you, at this time.”

Koy didn’t even try to look convinced.

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Dad, I know it is, and I appreciate that it’s hard for you. I just want to let you know how truly grateful we are, myself and Suzi, for what you’re doing. It will make a big difference to our lives, to all of us. Especially the children.”

Koy searched his son’s eyes. They were lit with the fervour of the neophyte and contained not a trace of sorrow. The counsellors had influenced him too. Poor old Jun. He wasn’t a bad kid. They’d rubbed along all right, until Koy’s status dropped from being head of the family to a monthly bill and the strain had started to tell. Well, that debt was about to be paid off. Koy could understand Jun’s relief, but he had hoped for more than a pleasantry.

“I hope so, son, I hope so.”

They embraced awkwardly then stood apart, Jun rocking on his feet and glancing at the waiters.

“Ah, here’s Suzi!” he said as a pin-thin woman entered the room, a wriggling child attached to either hand at sufficient distance to keep her chic grey dress out of reach. She unleashed them and they ran to the podium, where they started scrambling over the couch.

“The others are just coming,” she told Jun, her gaze scouring the room until it alighted on the buffet table. “We ordered three plates of rice balls,” she said to the back of a waiter’s head.

The man turned and stared at her.

“Well, go get the other one!” ordered Suzi. Finally she turned to Koy. “Hello Father.”

“Good morning,” said Koy without affection.

“Everything to your satisfaction?”

“I’m sure it is to yours.” Koy stared pointedly at the two boys, who were helping themselves to the sweet tray.

“I think it’s perfectly fine, for the money. You know, if there had been contributions from elsewhere, we could’ve had a bigger send-off, but as it was just me and Jun …”

“What about the koden?”

“You’ll find it doesn’t add up to much these days.” She flipped him a withering look and walked over to the buffet table to reprimand the boys.

The guests began to file in, some Koy recognised, some he did not. There were neighbours from the old street, a few friends and former colleagues and one or two distant cousins. They pressed the traditional envelopes tied with black and white ribbons into Jun’s hand then greeted Koy warmly, 119

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complimenting him on his health and appearance. Soon he was handing out drinks and making introductions, catching up on the news and wishing he’d tried harder to keep in touch.

All too soon a bell tinkled. Yamagama stood in the middle of the room.

He was flanked by a waiter carrying a blue glass goblet on a silver salver.

“Ladies, gentlemen, your attention please,” he said. “It is time.”

The crowd parted as Yamagama and his attendant progressed to the red couch. Yamagama motioned for Koy to take the place of honour.

“Go on!” Suzi’s sharp elbow nudged him.

He thrust his hands into his pockets and trudged forward, catching Jun’s eye. Jun smiled at him and punched the air in encouragement. Reaching the podium, Koy mounted the step, unbuttoned his jacket and sat down.

“We are gathered here today,” Yamagama began from behind him, “to celebrate the transition of this man to a new level, to a better place that some call Heaven.”

Koy contemplated the spread of faces below him. They were smiling and well-meaning, urging him along the right path. All apart from Suzi, who looked sourly over the shoulders of her offspring as they jiggled their PlayBoxes. He stared at them, feeling his jaw clench. Where was the respect?

Today of all days, they could have left the damned games behind. At least they had turned the sound down; he supposed he had to be thankful for that.

Normally he would have let the matter ride, but today he found he could not quell his irritation. Why should they be allowed to play? Their father or another of the adults should tell them off. Koy was centre stage, it wasn’t his place to do it. He looked around for Jun. He was standing two rows back from his children, oblivious to their behaviour and out of eye-contact range.

There was nothing Koy could do; he’d have to put up with it, as he always did. Annoyed, he tried to concentrate on the ceremony.

“And this, we give to you, the liquor of everlasting rest. Drink deeply with joy, your spirit is set to pass to the other world and remain in happiness for perpetuity,” Yamagama intoned.

A victory flicker of light from a PlayBox returned Koy’s attention to his grandchildren, both plugged into machines and with a total disregard for their surroundings. Koy shook his head, seeing, in the unappealing tableau, his legacy. When he was gone, and Jun was gone, they would remain. All his 120

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hard work and sacrifice, the years he had gone without to better Jun’s life. Is this what it all added up to?

A polite cough sounded in his ear. The waiter crouched at his right knee was holding out the blue goblet. The poisoned chalice, Koy thought. Was he going to roll over for that too? An image of little Sato and the carved deer flitted through his mind. It wasn’t right; this wasn’t right. He had so much more to give, so much more to live for.

“Now the journey begins. Brother Koy, is there anything you wish to share with us before you taste the first sip of Paradise?”

Koy looked at the proffered goblet. He felt the breath of Yamagama on the back of his neck. He cleared his throat.

“Yes, there is actually.” He stood up. “I’m not doing this. Nobody should have to do this.”

Gasps echoed around the room, faces were aghast. “Shame,” someone mumbled.

“Thanks for coming and everything, but I’ve changed my mind,” he said, undaunted by the blazing coals of Suzi’s eyes. “I’ve got the right of refusal and I’m going to exercise it. Right now.”

He stepped off the podium and shouldered his way towards the exit, shrugging off the hands that tried to restrain him.

“Mr Koy!” he heard Yamagama call. “Wait a minute!”

Not a chance, thought Koy, hurrying through the corridors. In a few seconds he was back at the bland foyer, then full of people. He threaded through them, trying to make himself unobtrusive. One of the automata at reception happened to be facing his way and spotted him.

“Ah, Mr Koy, Mr Koy!” he shouted. “You’re wanted in the Willow Suite!”

Koy ignored him and quickened his pace, afraid they might stop him.

With a final sprint he was through the entrance just as the glass doors glided together behind him.

It was hot and humid on the road. The rumble of traffic was like a sonic headlock and the air tasted of diesel oil, but he sucked in its vitality with deep breaths. Over his shoulder he saw the receptionist on the porch, looking from side to side. They were coming for him.

Koy swung around wildly, wondering where to go. He chose left, taking off along the pavement, dodging the pedestrians and hawkers, circling waste 121

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bins, thinking of a place to hide. Not the park or back to the pod … perhaps the Millennium Mall. He took the first right, a short cut.

He stopped running when a black bar materialised and thumped him in the chest. He fell to the ground, winded. Looking up, he saw an extendable walking stick that Yamagama, who now stood over him, was folding down to pocket size.

“That was silly,” he said as Koy recovered his breath. “You shouldn’t run off like that. It gives the wrong impression.”

“Impression! I was well within my rights, thank you.”

“You found him then,” said the receptionist, jogging up to them. “You’re not the first who’s done a runner,” he told Koy. “You looked the type when you came in.”

“Maybe it was the welcome I got.”

“You should have halted proceedings in advance if you weren’t sure,” said Yamagama.

“I didn’t know I was going to change my mind.”

Yamagama’s shoulders relaxed. “Come on, let’s go back and we can sit down and talk about it, find a solution that suits everybody. Let’s get you standing up, shall we?”

He stooped to grab Koy with a gloved hand. “Help me with him,” he said to the receptionist.

“I can do it myself,” said Koy. They heaved him up nevertheless. As he steadied himself he felt a peculiar buzzing where Yamagama gripped his arm.

“There you go, you’ll be all right now,” said Yamagama, releasing him.

He indicated the alley behind. “This is the quickest route. Follow me.”

Koy trailed after the officials through the dark passage. His heart hammering against his ribs, he felt like a guilty schoolboy on the long walk to the headmaster’s office. But he had done it. He had actually said no. He struggled to breathe with the elation of staying alive. What would they do now, what could they do to him? Nothing, they couldn’t do anything. He imagined they would take him back to the room, try to coax him into it using the disapproval of family and friends. They could talk all they liked, he wasn’t backing down now, he who had looked death in the face and overcome it. As they passed the back of a restaurant Koy narrowly avoided treading on a cockroach running the gauntlet between two waste bins. He 122

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smiled as the insect scurried into the stinking recesses: a lucky escape. He knew how it felt.

Jun and Suzi were waiting, tight-lipped, on the farewell parlour porch with their two children. Koy presumed the rest of the guests had gone. Suzi was white with a barely contained anger that exploded the moment she saw Koy. “What the hell d’you think you’re doing?” she burst out. “You’ve brought disgrace to the whole family!”

“On the contrary,” he said, “I’ve made a stand for human rights.”

She snorted with disgust. “You silly old fool. The best thing you can do for humanity is to remove yourself from it. Get back in there and finish the job, you coward.”

“I will not.”

“Jun! Tell him!”

“Dad.” Jun’s voice was conciliatory. “It’s not what anyone wants. You don’t want it, I don’t want it, we don’t want it.” He took Suzi’s hand as she grimaced. “But please, just think about what you’re doing, what you’re doing to us and even to yourself. Remember that actor, Muto? You don’t want to end up like that, do you?”

“I am not going back in there,” Koy stated.

“Ah-hem!” Yamagama’s pale face appeared behind Suzi’s shoulder, interrupting the stand-off. “Mr Koy, I can see there’s much for you and your family to discuss. Because we are quite busy here today, I wonder if I might prevail upon you to finish this debate at home?” He leaned into Suzi as a party of four or five visitors passed into the foyer.

“Home?” queried Koy. “I don’t have one anymore.”

“Well, maybe your son can accommodate you for a little while.”

Yamagama stared at Jun. “I’m so sorry, but we don’t really have the facilities here.”

“There’s nothing we can do,” began Suzi.

“Madam, I will have to charge you extra for the suite.”

“Okay, okay,” said Jun. “Come on Dad, you can come back to our place.”

Yamagama beamed. “Marvellous. So if you’d just like to sign here for the release papers?” A clipboard was produced and he whipped away the documents before Koy had a chance to read them properly. “Wonderful, 123

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wonderful. Well, I hope you sort it out. We’re not going away so, any problems, you know where to find us! Now, if you’ll excuse me, must dash!”

They watched him disappear through the glass doors before turning in the direction of the metro station. It was a 30-minute ride by rapid transit to Shinshikita, one of a string of purpose-built new towns on the outskirts of Fukuoka, where Jun had bought an overpriced unit Koy knew they could barely afford. Koy had been there once; it was a featureless box, piled high with Suzi’s idea of tasteful furnishings, which he had immediately disliked.

But he was happy to go there now, content to go anywhere, even sit on the train for the next 24 hours. It was such a pleasure to feel the lift and glide of the carriages, the hiss of their motion, to let the breeze from the swish of the doors opening and closing ruffle his hair. The glacial set of his daughter-inlaw’s face could not spoil his enjoyment.

They travelled in silence until they reached the front door of the unit. The children ran into their bedroom, intent on starting a new game. Koy removed his shoes and strolled into the kitchen, settling himself as comfortably as he could in the modern bucket chairs surrounding the fashionably oversized table. Jun took a seat next to him while Suzi stood with her back to the sink, arms crossed, staring at Koy. He met her eyes.

“So,” he said, smiling sweetly.

“So?” she countered.

He leaned back in the chair and rested his hands on the table.

“So. I think I’d like a cup of tea.”

“Tea?” she shrieked. “Now you want tea?”

“Yes, I think I do,” said Koy, unperturbed.

“Of all the …! He’s done this to us and now he wants tea?” She looked to Jun for support but he merely inclined his head.

Koy had to hide a smile as Suzi banged the kettle and crockery against the counter. He yawned and relaxed farther into his chair. He was beginning to enjoy himself. *** It was three days before Jun found the courage to ask Koy about his plans.

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house where they could watch the latest terrorvision. Koy was revelling in the peace of an empty kitchen when he heard the front door open. Jun bounded into the room, fresh from work. He shrugged off his jacket, slung it over a chair and sat down opposite his father.

“Good day at the office?” asked Koy. “Yes, good,” replied Jun. “What have you been up to?”

“Not much,” said Koy. He had been keeping a low profile and had not left the house since he arrived.

“Ah.” Jun’s smile dimmed. “That’s what I’ve been meaning to talk to you about.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, what you’re going to do now.”

“Go on living.”

“Of course. But where will you do that?”

“Here of course, at least initially. Then once I’ve got a job I can probably get my own place.”

“Hmm, hmm.” Jun looked uncomfortable. “You think anyone will hire you, at your age?”

“I don’t see why not. Anyway, let’s not worry about that at the moment.

The most important thing is that I’m still alive.”

“Yes,” said Jun, after too long a pause.

“And if all fails, I can always sell my story to the media.”

“They don’t seem to be interested so far.”

“Yamagama and his friends have hushed it up. They have to.”

“I’m glad they have. You see Dad, we still haven’t decided what to do about, ah, telling people. Telling them you’re still … here.”

“I’m sure they’ll find out soon enough.”

“And what happens when they do?”

“I think they’ll be pleased.” Koy blinked, suddenly feeling light-headed.

He remembered he hadn’t eaten much for lunch.

“Pleased? Oh Dad.” Jun buried his face in his hands. “Did you think at all about us before you did this, about what would happen to the family?”

“Of course I did, son, but I also thought about me. And about the thousands of other 80-year-olds facing transition.”

Jun looked up. “There’s a good reason for why it happens.”

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shouldn’t have to.” Koy slapped his thigh, giddy at the thought. “That’s what I’ll do, I’ll start a pressure group, change people’s perspective so there’s no shame in a natural death. That’s it, the Natural Death Party!”

“You can’t do that! The facts are there. We must reduce the number of people or face destruction of the human race.”

“Propaganda.” Koy tripped over the pronunciation of the word, his tongue feeling swollen. He wondered if he should drink some water.

“Scientifically proven and democratically agreed.” Jun leaned across the table. “Do you know how selfish you’re being?”

“Iss not like tha,” Koy slurred.

“What?”

“Iss noh the ssaim.” The words were like toffee sticking his teeth together.

He tried to move his mouth to form the shapes for sound, but he had lost control of his lips.

“Dad, are you okay?”

Koy was finding it difficult to keep his head upright. A grey interference crackled on the edges of his vision. He felt no pain but knew he couldn’t hold on. His life force was deserting him. The memory returned: the gloved hand of Yamagama, the buzzing in his arm when they pulled him off the pavement.

“Dad!” Jun jumped to his feet.

“Yamag …” he tried to say, “Yamagama.”

Jun pulled out his phone and jabbed at the buttons. “Emergency, yes, it’s my Dad. I think he’s having a heart attack or something. What? How old is he? Well, he’s 80. Yes, 80. You’re what? But that’s ridiculous.”

Koy saw Jun’s outraged face before the world lapsed into monochrome.

He was falling into darkness with no end, with no farewell.

126

Conformity, Deference, Risk Aversion: Parsing Japan’s CDR Complex Masaru Tamamoto

S

toic was the word commonly used by external commentators to capture the Japanese people’s reaction to the Higashi Nihon triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown. In Japan, the mood was more like resignation: shikata ga nai. It cannot be helped. People wondered what form the next devastation would take.

What can be done?

Local government offices across the country began to accept donations of relief goods. The authorities took charge of delivery and distribution and knew what was needed. There was an official list. Bottled water was on the list one day, but the city-office clerk in Niigata made it clear that only twolitre bottles were acceptable, no one- or half-litres. Sanitary napkins were required, but all donations had to be delivered in unopened packaging for safety reasons. Donations had to come from what people already had at home: goods should not be purchased to be given away, said the clerk. Authorities were mindful of possible panic hoarding and subsequent shortages.

The clerk was talkative. Distribution at evacuation centres could not be implemented until there were enough goods to be shared equally and fairly, she explained. No water could be allocated at an evacuation centre with 100 refugees if there were only 90 bottles available. One evacuation centre could not receive what another could not. All women had to be given the same number of sanitary napkins at the same time. The clerk confirmed these principles, although she was unsure of the details and ignorant of conditions on the ground. She sat in a government office a safe distance 127

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from Fukushima’s nuclear reactors and was following instructions from other clerks sitting higher up.

Deference allows the Japanese authorities to blunder on without fear of endemic protest or social strife – despite, for example, reports in March of Prime Minister Naoto Kan screaming for information about the reactors that had not been made available to him. Different offices issued contradictory reports on radiation leakage, when information was made public at all.

Officialdom works to a need-to-know blueprint, even among its own members. There is normally little coordination. Only “necessary” information is shared or announced publicly and much is restricted to avoid fomenting fear and panic. The task of the authorities is to protect the people by keeping them ignorant, or so goes the paternalistic logic of rule. Of course, much information, if made public, will be the cause of great inconvenience to the establishment, as the Japanese have been discovering to their dismay.

For years, nuclear-safety warnings have been made by experts; the advice is ignored, the “troublemakers” marginalised. Emergency has forced the authorities to divulge more information than usual.

The strangling of communication has long stifled real policy debate in Japan. The national bureaucracy hoards intelligence, each government ministry jealously guarding its turf. With a virtual monopoly on information, Japan’s hundreds of thousands of civil servants have effectively captured the state. The economic and social stagnation of the last two decades has stemmed from an absence of discussion. Parliamentary politics, which should be effecting change, is paralysed. Japan is on a path of certain decline.

Some observers inside and outside Japan liken the recent disasters to the Meiji Restoration or defeat in World War II, hoping that the cataclysm might act as a tonic for Japan’s revitalisation. So dire is the state of the country that they see the need for change as revolutionary as that of 1868 or 1945.

Japanese citizens continue to defer to authority in resignation, even though a tacit deal was struck post-1945. The state would guarantee safety, predictability and equality through a system of career-long employment and redistribution of wealth. Society, in exchange, would comply with the state’s commands. But the state’s ability to keep its side of the deal has become precarious since Japan’s bubble economy burst in 1991. Society’s continuing deference has less to do with the power of the establishment than with the nature of society following the post-1945 deal.

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Deference is closely linked to the Japanese norm of conformity, which partly explains the absence of urban riots and other forms of unrest. Before the post-war agreement began to fray in 1991, when the arrangement became an expensive way to run a country, most Japanese identified themselves as middle class. They were pleased with the rising standard of living and, more, that everyone was alike. To be alike put people at ease and fashioned a sense of safety. Equality came to mean sameness of result. If all around you are equally miserable, that is tolerable, so the feeling goes. Therefore, the way in which the authorities distributed disaster-relief goods was true to a powerful social sensitivity.

But this kind of egalitarianism does not make for tolerance of others.

Difference makes people uneasy. There is an almost obsessive concern in Japan with how others see you. Decency and respectability are narrowly defined by how much one conforms to the social mean. Deviation readily invites ostracism. Intolerance of differences forges a society in which envy is a pervasive emotion. This unattractive trait makes a person feel small and stirs the desire to cut down to size the enviable other. The society of envy is ripe with rumour-mongering and back-stabbing. This is Japanese harmony.

Where difference causes envy, and envy arouses feelings of inferiority, and inferiority kindles humiliation, and humiliation justifies anger there is little room for choice or agency. The liberty to choose and act assumes that the individual is autonomous. Autonomy means moral decisions are not bound by loyalty to a group. And an individual exists when he is free to join multiple groups, each with an equal degree of importance and loyalty.

Only morally autonomous individuals can take responsibility, because they can freely choose and act. After the nuclear emergency, while grave mistakes were pointed out, no one person took responsibility. All employees of Tepco, the power company that operated the reactors, accepted managementproposed pay cuts of at least 20 per cent. When all are responsible, no one is responsible.

Groups and organisations, not individuals, are Japan’s social agents. The ordinary person is bound by loyalty to one group, normally that of his place of work, for any group shuns those of divided loyalty. Decisions are made by the group, in the name of the group. (In the ’70s and ’80s, visiting Soviet officials commented that in Japan, socialism was realised.) To stand against one’s own and only group carries the risk of social isolation. This is the 129

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Japanese consensus. As the post-1945 deal took shape, the primary impulse of the group became self-preservation. This status quo orientation made change incremental and risk-taking inimical. Risks would be sanctioned in the knowledge that other similar, related groups were prepared to act in the same manner. Whether risk leads to success or failure, all are in the same boat and that expunges the sense of uncertainty. This is what the Japanese call the convoy system. Risk aversion is its hallmark.

A risk-averse society was made possible by a national bureaucracy whose myriad rules and regulations, extending to the minutiae of everyday life, severely dampened economic and social competition. Dampened competition also provided predictability and safety, which became cherished social values. So deference to the national bureaucracy was due. Where sameness is fairness, individual agency is an onus, not a privilege. It is where the prime minister is not given information by government ministries.

The Japanese conformity-deference-risk-aversion complex is apparent in the mindset of the peasant. Vulnerable to the whims of authority and the power of nature, the peasant is fatalistic about forces beyond his control. His weakness makes him devious. He must band together with other peasants to gain strength in numbers but he distrusts his fellows, for he knows their weaknesses – just as they know his. The peasant wants to eliminate uncertainty and yearns for a life of predictability and safety. It was as if Japan’s post-war democratic deal recreated village life on a national scale: successful for a while, but now spent.

Cataclysms, however, tend to reinforce the status quo. The Higashi Nihon Daishinsai is likely to prove insufficient to alter the peasant mentality and shatter Japan’s feudal relations.

130

Blue Murder Suzanne Kamata

O

n the first day of spring Keita Hosokawa fell in love with a bird.

If anyone had told him a week before that that would happen, he wouldn’t have believed it. He was fed up with birds. Specifically crows.

That year the crows seemed greater in number than ever. Fatter, too.

They feasted at the roadside shrines where hump-backed women set out oranges and bowls of cooked rice for their dear departed. They swooped on cemeteries and ate the offerings from gravestones. They ate until they were as big as niwatori, until it seemed like the telephone wires would not support them.

As if there weren’t enough food available elsewhere, they fed in Keita’s orchard. He could see them through the window as he ate his breakfast: a murder of crows settling in the branches of his nashi trees. The sight of them made him weary before the day’s work had even begun. He turned away from the window and tried to smile at his son.

Ichiro sat in his high chair, banging his spoon on the tray. His bib was soaked with drool. “Wan wan wan!” he barked, like a dog.

Keita sighed. He tried to make the boy say “otosan” or even “papa”, which was easier to pronounce than the Japanese word, but he wouldn’t learn. He could say “mama” and make a variety of animal sounds, but he seemed wilfully to ignore Keita.

“Papa,” Keita said softly, trying again.

Ichiro’s spoon flew out of his spit-slimed hand and onto the floor.

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“Miaow,” he said, spotting Neko-chan licking her paws in the corner.

“Papa,” Keita repeated.

From the kitchen, his wife Misa giggled. “Don’t feel so bad,” she said.

“He doesn’t see you enough to know who you are. He’ll figure it out soon.”

“He doesn’t see me because I’m out in the field trying to protect his legacy,” Keita said, suddenly feeling angry. He knew Ichiro wasn’t to blame.

He was a baby. He slept almost all the time. When he was a little bigger Keita would take him to the orchard and prop him against a tree. “This is all yours,” he would say, as his father had once told him. “Someday you’ll take care of these trees.”

Even if Keita and Misa had other children, Ichiro, as the firstborn son, was entitled to the family property. The land with all the trees and the house would be passed on, as had happened for generations.

Keita’s parents were usually at the breakfast table with them, but they had left the previous day for Texas to visit Keita’s sister. She was a doctor and had gone to the United States to conduct research into kidney diseases.

Keita’s parents worried about her because she was past 30 and unmarried.

It didn’t matter to them that she had bought her own house and drove an imported car, or that she could afford annual vacations in Europe. They had hopes of a traditional life for her, one with a husband and children. Still, she was allowed to do as she pleased. Keita, as the oldest son, was bound to follow their desires.

When Keita turned 29 his mother had declared it was time for him to take a bride. He felt the weight of duty and meekly agreed. His first choice of wife, a tittering young woman with waist-length hair and dimples, seemed to like him but refused the role of farm wife. The next 10 he met had almost identical reactions. They wanted careers in tall, air-conditioned buildings.

They didn’t want to share a roof with his parents. He thought he might have to settle for a foreign bride, one of the Southeast Asians sent to Japan to marry the country’s undesirable bachelors; he wondered how he would communicate with such a woman. He had never studied Thai or Tagalog and his English wasn’t good.

But then his luck changed. A family friend introduced him to Misa, who had grown up on a farm. She knew all about nashi: how to pollinate them, how to batten the branches when a typhoon was approaching, how to

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turn the fruit into a sweet liqueur. Her hair was short and she didn’t mind dirt under her fingernails.

The mayor attended the wedding and made a speech praising their complementary qualities. Keita had always been a dreamy boy, he said, but Misa was of simple tastes and practical and she would keep him tethered to the earth. Their honeymoon was in Hawaii, where Keita marvelled at acres of pineapple and sugar cane. What must it be like to be in charge of all that, he wondered. His family’s farm was modest by comparison.

For the first year of marriage Keita and Misa had worked side by side among the trees, but then she became pregnant and nausea and headaches had forced her to stay in the house.

Today, Keita would be going into the orchard alone. Misa would play with Ichiro. Perhaps she would watch the afternoon dramas while he had a nap. With Keita’s mother in Texas she would be able to relax for a change.

Keita, too: the bickering women frayed his nerves, almost made him want to stay among the trees.

He scraped the last grain of rice from his bowl and pushed the breakfast dishes away. “I guess I’d better get out there before the crows eat all my fruit,” he announced.

Misa murmured her agreement and gathered the dishes.

“Moo!” said Ichiro. *** Keita could hear the crows as he stamped into the field in his work boots.

“Kah! Kah!” They seemed to be mocking him, telling jokes at his expense.

Keita didn’t know how to frighten them away. He had positioned a straw man in a floppy hat, plaid shirt and worn-out jeans in the centre of the field but the birds didn’t seem to mind. They perched on the scarecrow’s shoulder.

He tied aluminium pans to the branches of trees, having heard that metallic brilliance would ward off the intruders, but after a day or two of wariness the crows returned in full force.

If he’d had a gun he would have blasted into the trees, but he had no such weapon. A sudden burst of fury sparked him with energy. He filled his lungs and screamed, “Iiiiiiyyaaaa!” running through the orchard waving his arms as though deranged. The crows lifted into the air, flecking the sky 133

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with black. They circled cautiously, then one brave bird descended towards the trees.

Keita sighed. If it wasn’t crows it was typhoons. If it wasn’t weather it was blight. He wished he could take a season off from farming. A few months in, say, an office would refresh him.

He had been to the doctor recently to find out why he was always exhausted. His body felt worn and defective even though he was only 30.

His sight was failing, his girth expanding, his intestinal tract rebelling after every meal.

“Too much stress,” the doctor told him. “You’ll have to stop smoking and drinking – and you’d better find another job.”

Keita had laughed; if only it were that simple. He had signed up for a karate class – he had become a black belt while in college – hoping for physical release. But the weekly sparring matches left him breathless and sore and he found himself being beaten by 16-year-old beginners.

Now, standing in the field, he thought about all the work that had to be done. He knew he could call on the neighbouring farmers to help, his parents being out of the country, but asking them seemed like too much trouble. All he wanted to do was lie down under the trees and sleep.

Instead, he scrabbled for a stone and tossed it at a plump black bird.

“Kah!” The crow ruffled its feathers and fixed its beady eyes on him, but didn’t fly away. Keita turned from the orchard, from his day’s work and walked down to the river that ran alongside his property.

He found a broad, smooth rock and sat there to contemplate the water.

The river gurgled and flowed and its melody, a balm for tattered nerves, soothed him. He listened and watched and succumbed to the caresses of the spring breeze on his face. It was in such a beatific state that he first saw the bird.

She rose a few yards in front of him on blue-tinged wings. He admired the long beak, the russet breast as bright as a wedding kimono. Her grace, the curve of her neck, made his heartbeat quicken. He had seen spindly legged egrets and mallards in the river, but never such a bird as this. In the deepest part of himself he began to believe that this bird had been sent to him in this moment of difficulty to ease his pain. It was a wild idea, but he clung to it nevertheless.

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mysterious visitor. He watched as she dived into the water to hunt. The ayu wriggled in her beak but she flew into a nearby tree and stunned the fish with a quick slap against the bark before gulping it.

What kind of bird was she? And where had she come from? He would ask his friend Junji. Junji was a serious birdwatcher from way back; he had a list of all the birds he wanted to see during his life. Junji’s vacations were always part of his quest to tick off birds on the list and he had ventured as far as Brazil to catch sight of a parrot in the wild. On a trip to Washington state he’d been lucky enough to see a bald eagle. His mind was an encyclopaedia of bird lore.

Keita stayed at the river all morning watching the bird. He went back to the house for lunch, but didn’t tell Misa what he’d seen.

“How did your work go?” she asked him, dishing out curry over rice.

“Fine,” he said. He could not meet her eyes. He imagined Misa crying out in jealousy. “What?” she might say. “You prefer her company to mine?

What about your family? Ichiro? Me?” In reality, if he told her the truth she would probably chastise him for wasting the morning, not for being unfaithful.

He returned to the riverside after lunch but the bird had disappeared.

After an hour’s vigil he went back to his nashi trees. That night he called Junji.

“Sounds like a kingfisher,” Junji said. “But that’s impossible. They don’t live round here.”

“Maybe it got lost,” Keita said. “Or it might have escaped from a zoo.”

“Or maybe you need new glasses.”

Keita didn’t laugh. The next morning he would take his camera. He would show Junji he wasn’t dreaming. *** She was there, swooping through the trees on cobalt blue wings. He wondered if she had a nest nearby. He imagined eggs, then a flock of kingfishers to fly through his mornings.

He hid in the bushes and when the bird settled for a moment on a black pine branch he clicked the shutter. He took dozens of photographs, putting his camera down only to eat the lunch Misa had prepared for him.

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Though he felt a niggling responsibility to attend to his trees he stayed at the river, watching the bird’s every flutter. At dusk he returned to the house, reluctantly.

“You’re late,” Misa said over her shoulder. She was in the living room, seated on the tatami with the baby.

“I know. Sorry.” Keita saw his dinner laid out on the table and knew it was already cold. He sat down to eat.

In the early days of their marriage Misa would have sat down beside him while he dined, even if she had already eaten. But now the baby took up almost all her time. Keita could hear her singing to him now: “Flying crows, why do you call? ’Cause on the mountainside we’ve seven, seven little babies with lovely round eyes.”

She had the voice of a lark, but he hated that song. The crows that plagued his orchard were not pretty. They were creatures from a nightmare.

He had heard of two schoolchildren being pecked by them. They dropped pebbles on railway tracks, messing up train schedules. So what if, according to legend, crows pulled the sun into the sky each day? The birds were a nuisance at best and there was nothing lovely about their eyes.

He wanted to tell Misa to stop singing, but Ichiro began clapping his hands in delight.

The two of them were perfectly content without him. He felt that he was nothing more than a field hand or a houseboy. *** When Keita uploaded the pictures to his computer that night he was disappointed to find that none of the images had turned out as expected. In some, the bird in flight appeared as a blur across the centre of the photographs.

Others were underexposed or awash with light. Still, he emailed them to Junji and they conferred by phone.

“Could be a kingfisher. But they’re usually more skittish around humans.”

“I was well hidden.”

Perhaps Keita had a special affinity with the bird. Maybe she trusted him more than she did other people. The thought warmed him.

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pictures in front of Ichiro’s face, but they had so much else to interest them – their songs, their kisses, their secret games. He would keep the bird for himself.

The next day his mother and father called from Texas. His mother went on about the wide-open ranches and the gigantic beef steaks.

“I bought you a pair of cowboy boots,” she said. “I hope they’re the right size.”

Keita muttered his thanks, then inquired about his sister, who, it turned out, had taken up yoga and become a vegetarian, much to his mother’s confusion.

“I’ll let you speak to your father now,” she said.

Keita braced himself.

“Have you outwitted the crows?” the elder Hosokawa asked.

Keita sighed. He’d covered the trees with netting, but a few of the black demons had found an opening. Those that hadn’t had spent the morning tormenting the cat.

“Crows are omnivorous,” Junji had told him. “They’ll eat anything.”

Even Neko-chan, who slept at the foot of his futon? He’d read an article in a newspaper about crows attacking baby squirrels in another town. The birds nudged the squirrels off the telephone wires, then assailed and ate them after they had fallen to the ground. The reporter had called the birds “a new type of serial killer”.

“Please don’t speak to me about crows,” Keita, still smarting from the conversation with his father, told his wife. He knew she didn’t really care what went on in the orchard. She was just making conversation. He wished they had more to talk about, like in the old days, before marriage, when they had been a mystery to one another.

Keita knew there was work to be done, but on this morning he didn’t even pretend. He inserted a blank memory card into his video camera and marched straight to the riverbank. Why hadn’t he thought of this earlier?

On video he would be able to capture the grace of the bird as well as her delicate shape and brilliant colours.

Keita crouched in his usual spot behind a bush; the grass there had become matted from his daily vigils. He kept his camera at the ready for an hour, then two, but the bird – his bird – never appeared. The crows, he thought, his stomach tightening. The crows have murdered my lovely bird.

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If they were brave enough to dive at humans and hungry enough to eat squirrels, then wouldn’t they attack smaller birds as well? He tried to muster hope, but after searching the surrounding area all day he left the riverbank and returned to the house.

As usual, dinner was on the table, but Keita ignored the grilled fish and soup. He poured himself a cup of chilled sake and took a big mouthful.

“What is it?” Misa asked, the baby on her lap. She had a rattle in one hand and reminded Keita of a court jester. There was no way she would ever be able to understand his sorrow.

In his dreams that night the kingfisher glided on the air, circling ever closer to Keita’s hiding place. He sat transfixed. The bird, no bigger than a swallow, landed on his palm. She studied him with curious brown eyes and let him stroke her blue back with one finger. And then she ruffled her feathers and flew into the sky.

Keita woke with a kernel of hope nestled in his heart. Today she would be there, waiting in the trees. He was sure of it as he bolted out of the door without eating breakfast. More than food, more than air, he needed a glimpse of his exquisite bird.

The sun rose higher in the sky as he stared at the river. The fish swam, undisturbed. Sparrows fluttered past, but there was no flash of blue. No long-beaked lover roosting on his palm.

He heard rustling behind him. The grass twitched and parted and there emerged Neko-chan, a gift in her mouth. Keita stared, appalled, not wanting to believe he had shared his bed with this beast.

The bird’s resplendent plumage was tattered and mauled. Its entrails leaked through a rip in its chest. One leg was bent, the claw dangling. Its eyes were opaque, unseeing. A lustrous blue feather stuck to Neko-chan’s fur like a macabre corsage.

Keita’s eyes filled with tears. He took off his glasses and the bird deposited at his feet became as blurred as in the crude photographs. The cat rubbed against his legs and he kicked her away. For months there had been no elation in Keita’s life; but when this wonder appeared he had found joy.

Yet he couldn’t protect this wild spirit from danger and he couldn’t protect his orchard – the trees he had been entrusted with, that he was meant to maintain for Ichiro and all the generations to follow.

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His hands trembled as he bent to grasp the dead kingfisher. The body was still warm, but there was no heart beating against his hand. With one thumb he stroked the feathers. Then he laid the bird back down on the ground and began to dig with his hands. The dirt flew into the air. It fell on his head, but he didn’t care. When he had dug a deep enough hole he settled the carcass at the bottom and filled it in. He found some large stones near the river and arranged them on top of the grave. Then he crouched there, behind the bushes and tried to rock the sudden loneliness out of his body.

His grief was so absorbing that he didn’t hear the bird calls at first.

“Kah! Kah!” He looked over his shoulder and saw a black-crowned figure flapping its wings. It was even larger than the jungle crows that targeted his orchard.

The being came closer and closer, but he wasn’t afraid. Beside it, a taller creature picked through the grass on elegant long legs, its pure white plumage dazzling in the sunlight.

He imagined being lifted by those great white wings and carried away from the river, skimming the tops of the trees in his orchard, flying across the Pearl Bridge and beyond. He would leave all this behind and travel to another country. Maybe he would work in an office, or a clean, gleaming shop. Maybe when he was gone his wife and son would finally appreciate him. Perhaps they would think he had joined his ancestors and pray to his photograph, setting out his favourite food every morning on an altar.

Meanwhile, in some other land, he would find respect and love. There would be no more crows, no more Neko-chan. He would begin again.

“We brought you breakfast!” a voice called out.

Keita stood up and shook away his fantasy. He brushed the dirt off his pants.

“You didn’t eat,” the voice sang. “You must be famished.”

His stomach rumbled as if in reply. He rubbed the tears from his eyes and put his glasses back on. He was hungry. Taking a deep breath, he flew to meet them, his wife and child.

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Miku Shiraishi by Hiroto Kitagawa (2010, detail), acrylic on terracotta, 170cm x 37cm x 25cm. Courtesy of Yoshiaki Inoue Gallery, Osaka.

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Poetry Gina Barnard

Mother Tongue 1. Tsukuba, Ibaraki-ken Outside my fourth-floor apartment window, neon lights – KARAOKE. Telephone lines intersect sky, the skate park, graffiti faded, across from the shop called Anti-New. I ride my bike, careful to avoid the barricade of bars at each crossing, to get to Seibu, Creo, Jusco, the centre of Tsukuba, Science City.

It is all concrete miles of concrete.

Outside Daily Yamazaki, I call home on the orange payphone. My humid ears sweat down to elbows, face wet, melt into plastic. People walk in, doors chime – they don’t see me – walk out with riceballs and shochu, icecream bars and pantyhose.

2. Mito, Ibaraki-ken Ashita Mito e ikimasu Ashita Mito e iku

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The bus moves through narrow streets packed with cement houses, bluetiled roofs, stuck behind red lights and a setting sun. Nauseous in the dark tunnel of that bus.

Let off at the circle of department stores, train station, under bridges, asphalt, fluorescent lights, I stumble into a bathroom, any bathroom, heave into the porcelain curved hole in the ground. Nothing comes out.

Ask the florist, Biru Gaaden wa doko desu ka?

Her eyes roll up in thought: Biru Gaaden?

Hai, Biru Gaaden wa doko desu ka?

Eeto, Beeru Gaaden desu ka?

I was asking for the Building Garden. At the Beer Garden, on the top floor of the department store, lanterns hung from vendors’ stalls. Smokey yakitori chicken, thick yakiudon – soy sauce darkened, bright green nori, coral red pickled ginger.

All the beer I could drink for 3,000 yen.

3. Tokyo, Ryogoku Kokugikan

Sumo ga tsuki desu Sumo ga tsuki da

Wide cheeks of flesh – Yokozuna’s hair knotted small atop his thick head.

The clacks, the moans of the referee, the slaps, the salt – Religious origins the gyoji throws salt into the ring 142

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prayers for a bountiful harvest Yokozuna – claps his hands together, extends his arms, turns palms upward – he is concealing no weapons his weight shifts from sky to ground left to right, tosses the silk loin cloth into monumental thighs. driving evil from the dohyo.

Beliefs 1. Nagano, Japan We played with frogs rich with dirt and stream.

Fields of soft grass Grandmother’s childhood home.

What if you believed that the only gods were among us?

In every tree, every mountain every lake, every wind?

We poured water onto ancestors’ headstones – left tangerines to nourish the birds around and above them.

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in sky led their way.

We danced in a circle motioned our arms into the moon sang Tsuki ga deta deta dug at the sand and stepped dug at the sand and stepped.

Glowy lanterns on water lead them back to their sky.

2. California, USA In Bible Study our youth leaders told us Jesus died on the cross for our sins.

A cartoon Jesus hung on the wall.

I sat outside a Dairy Queen in my youth leader’s car, the red and white DQ sign sun-bleached chewing a dry hamburger, the white paper wrinkled in my lap. Sipping a vanilla shake from styrofoam.

The asphalt’s heat rising through the car windows.

I asked her if it was true what they said about Jesus.

She said, Yes. How do I save myself?

She said, Close your eyes.

In her tiny car, I nodded down mouthed in an audible whisper:

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I believe Jesus died on the cross for my sins.

The raw onions of the hamburger still bitter in my mouth.

Elegy for Obaachan How will you find me?

Ojisan tells me you will visit in humid August during Obon with the others.

You will know – the house in Kashiwa behind a stone wall and the family name.

We light fireworks so you can see.

Sparks batter the sky but they won’t guide you to America. In California at a McDonald’s a dark-haired woman is told: Go home, Jap! Would I lead you here?

I can’t remember when you died.

Only weeks later came a letter and father, forgetting his goodness said because mother married a gaijin they forgot she exists.

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The Missing Word Became an Invisible Bridge – we were so close we could hold hands across the and a – we were floating above words that whatever error was, wasn’t one.

Moon can glow without the. So too a hydrangea grows without a.

A trailing thought to be intimate with language, to speak closer to you.

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154

Under Blossoming Boughs John Givens

O

hasu went upstairs to collect the scarlet underskirts herself.

A single wild cherry tree had emerged from the pre-dawn mists shrouding the moorlands, sparsely covered with blossoms and insignificant when compared to the grand cherry trees that grew inside the walls of the pleasure quarters. No one but her seemed even to have noticed the little tree, and Ohasu stood at the railing of the rooftop laundry platform and took comfort in its flowering, for she too often went unnoticed.

A small packet in her kimono sleeve contained a gift from her patron.

The gel cubes of candied agar-agar were the colour of the spring sea, limpid and glistening, and dusted with honey crystals like flecks of sunlight. Ohasu had been a child with neither breasts nor shame-hair when her patron began visiting her at the pleasure quarters. She had wept at first but eventually stopped weeping, and she had learned where to place her fingers and how to move her lips in a pleasing manner, although she was judged too small and too melancholy for an age that celebrated cheerful brightness. Her patron had remained steadfast for the most part, however, indulging himself only intermittently with other girls; but the years had passed, his courting had become feeble, and although Ohasu still tried to encourage him with smutty gossip and loose sashes, sustaining the throb of love’s urgency was beyond the old fellow now. Most visits ended with him sinking sullenly to the bottom of a wine pot.

Ohasu checked the underskirts to make sure they were dry, then selected one of the cubes of agar-agar.

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Her patron had caught her copying poems into a pillow book one night and told her that only by seeing into the true heart of something could you write about it. He said the great haikai poet Basho himself had said it.

Ohasu had wondered how you could be certain that what you were seeing was really the heart. She pressed the yielding lump of gel against the roof of her mouth and felt it dissolve in a flood of sweetness. What if inside one heart you found another? Smaller, quieter, even more frightened?

There had been a wild cherry tree near her childhood home, and she used to play under it while her mother worked in the fields. She would make twig dolls and wrap them in mulberry-bark robes she stained with berry juices.

But that world had ended and this one had replaced it, and not even the beauty of seasonal changes could compensate her for what had been lost.

Ohasu smoothed out the scarlet underskirts they would wear that day then folded them neatly. She popped another sweet in her mouth and hurried back downstairs. *** Spring arrives in the faint haze that wreathes these nameless hills. *** His eyes opened to the glow of a sun not yet risen. The air was dry and cool and still, and he listened for the first stirrings of neighbours then sat up and slid open his white paper doors.

Dew coated the planks of the narrow verandah-corridor. The leaves of the potted camellia were beaded white with it, and Old Master Basho breathed deeply in the dawn air, his thin chest lifting and falling with the exaggerated effort he associated with good health. He lived alone now but still wondered at times what it would be like to share his cottage with another. His last acolyte had disappointed him by asking to be allowed to apprentice himself to a playwright known for his vivid imagination.

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water fell back into the communal well, regular as heartbeats, filling him with a familiar yearning to insert himself into the world and say what could truly be said about it.

Actors stamping and flapping and shouting imprecations. Gaudy costumes. Painted faces. Improbable coincidences leading to unlikely resolutions. Better by far to be an old man alone in a hovel, abandoned, gnawing on a fish bone.

He smiled at the hyperbole but also enjoyed the bitterness of it.

So, the sound of the water in the well and the sound of rain on the broad, raggedy leaves of the banana plant growing at his front gate …

Or the scent of rain arriving in dust. Or the colour of rain shimmering in a hardwood forest. Or the shape of wind-driven rain striding across empty moorlands …

Or of rain lacing the river to the sky. Or pocking sleet floating on the surface of an old pond …

Or, rather, how rain in a rooftop collection barrel leaks out onto the roof tiles, the stillness of it understood at the moment of its interruption … or, better still, the murmur of rain dripping into the tub of scouring ash kept at the scullery door … not what it’s like but what it is …

He turned away, disgusted with his inability to resist embroidery, and sought refuge from himself in the magnificent cherry tree blooming in his neighbour’s garden.

One heavily laden branch hung over the back fence, the shell-pink clouds of blossoms glowing in the misty light with a delicate and pre-emptive beauty.

He studied the unmoving masses of flowers then closed his eyes to see the image more intensely; and as he did so, a temple bell sounded in the distance, the long, slow, mournful reverberations of it like the voice of the Earth itself, reminding him of things he remembered and things he’d forgotten. *** Clouds of cherry blossoms – is the temple bell at Ueno?

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The wife of the lesser of the Tada brothers believed in the virtue of steady accumulation. Those who placed their trust in the possibility of an unanticipated windfall profit were fools in her opinion, although she seldom said as much because her own husband was just such an improvident person, and nothing could be done about it.

Your services have been requested, she declared to the three girls kneeling before her. For a picnic outing on the riverbank under blossoming boughs.

Merchants. Shogunate officials. And a poet.

The wife knew that pleasure seekers considered Oyuki indefatigable and Osome silly and pliant. Little Ohasu had seemed an odd choice, however, although older visitors enjoyed the girl’s fondness for linked poetry so probably the presence of the great Basho explained her inclusion.

If they tell you to dance, sway like willows in a gentle breeze. Let the softness of the season suggest love’s languor. Your time has been purchased, but other arrangements have not been made. Let your sleeves hang long, loosen your bodices. They will wish to feel like superior beings. Ease them into it.

The wife of the Lesser Tada paused to make certain they understood her instructions.

You are to imply that more is available than might have been thought.

Precious secrets, hidden mysteries. You are to suggest that your natural willingness to conform to the desires of others is impeded by constraints over which you yourselves have no control. You are to assure your guests that only here within the walls of the New Yoshiwara can the deeper hues of the colours of spring be revealed. Is this clear?

No one replied, and the scullery maid waiting in the doorway used this silence to announce that morning gruel was ready.

Is there anything about this you don’t understand?

The three girls looked down meekly at their hands, Osome and Oyuki contemplating breakfast and Ohasu wondering if she would have time to prepare a few stanzas of her own for the day’s linked poem.

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*** How envious: mountain cherries north of this floating world. *** Old Master Basho dribbled a splash of water into the well of his inkstone then began rubbing his ink stick on its upper slope, the sour-dark scent of blackness rising into the splendid pink glow of his neighbour’s cherry tree.

He had hoped to edit his travel journal from the previous year; but the prose sketches of places he visited and the stanzas written in praise of them now seemed like lifeless husks to him, like objects draped with cloths so that their shapes remained even as the things themselves became obscured.

What he wanted was to make statements about the world that deserved to exist in it. But ideas accumulated, images multiplied, and even as he struggled to cut out unneeded phrases new ones occurred to him. Better ones. Different ones …

Neighbours began shoving night shutters into their wooden frameholders, the swish-crack, swish-crack like the sound of loud counting.

His boy used to complain about it. He said it was too noisy for delicate ears. But the young fool soon would be prancing about on stage dressed in a woman’s kimono and wearing a wig, smirking at shouts of approval from bumpkin samurai and pouting flirtatiously. Delicacy indeed.

Old Basho bent to his task. He would need a hokku head stanza to start today’s poem. The merchants who funded him styled themselves as followers of the way of haikai linked poetry, although for them it was hardly more than an amusing pastime. He had the last half of an idea – Nothing you own is yours – but no good image to introduce it; and as he pondered options, the first tentative squawks of the fresh bean-curd vendor’s horn sounded in the distance, lonely as a heron’s cry, and he heard in it a reminder of his own irrelevance.

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*** Recollecting various things – the blooming of cherry blossoms. *** Blood-red soul banners hung in a swollen mass under the eaves of the shrine for the unborn, the newer ones still bright with pain.

Osome went on ahead to the baths, but Ohasu waited with Oyuki as she bowed in the sanctuary and clapped twice to call her losses to her. On this day too I ask for your forgiveness.

Ohasu herself never became pregnant. She didn’t know why and she didn’t know whether she should feel relief or regret, but suspected that one day it would be the latter.

You who never were will never cease to be for me. Oyuki’s face was shadowed by the tumorous red bundle suspended above her. Although the supplications inked onto the newer strips were still legible, none of the soul banners carried a name. The unborn were like bits of foam floating anonymously as they transited to the yellow springs of hell. On your behalf I call for the relief of the pure promise of the Lotus Sutra. And also in the name of the Jizo Bodhisattva, I request it for you.

Oyuki had been betrayed by a lover she trusted. He was the son of a rich trader and famous in the pleasure quarters for wearing robes and sashes secretly lined with exotic silks from the land of elephants. The insides of his sleeves might show a pale apricot when folded back, a dark cinnabar, a rufous gold, or even the luscious gleam of ripe pomegranate seeds. Oyuki had given this Second Genji whatever he asked for – her money, her love, the best of the gifts she received – and he had pledged to redeem her contract one day and set her up in a cottage near his family mansion. But his father had betrothed him to the only child of a soy-brewing magnate from the west; and although the lovers had soaked their sleeves with weeping, Oyuki was left alone in Edo while her heart’s desire trudged off to assume his bride’s name, her father’s fortune and the duties of family progenitor.

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Except Oyuki hadn’t been left quite alone enough, and the abortifacient she took made her sick for weeks.

If the Second Genji had felt oppressed by his new responsibilities as adopted heir, he soon discovered the solace that could be obtained in the pleasure quarters of Old Kyoto. Carnal novelties filled his nights and days. Endurance matched invention; observers became participants; and outrageous tales of concupiscent glory reached Edo eventually, so that for Oyuki, the memory of the taste of his love on her lips became like that of bitter radish.

It’s not much, said Oyuki as the two young women continued down to the baths. To offer such prayers.

Perhaps not, said Ohasu. But they hear you.

Empty words, said Oyuki.

Perhaps. But there’s comfort in them. *** A bush warbler shits on the rice cakes at the end of the verandah. *** Cherry petals filtered down like flickering chips of pink light.

Lovely, yes, Oyuki said. She inserted the bridge then twisted the middle tuning peg of her shamisen, the plucked note rising as the silk string tautened.

But they won’t last the night.

No. Ohasu gazed out at the spring river thudding past, the heavy flow reaching the grassy edge of the riverbank. It’s the end of the season.

Talk that Old Master Basho’s followers wanted him to take on a housekeeper had reached the ears of the wife of the Lesser Tada, and she had spoken to Ohasu as the girls awaited their palanquins. They feel he’s too much on his own now. You might be seen as an appropriate choice.

Ohasu knew that disposing of her person while recovering the cost of her contract would be viewed as a double blessing by the House of the Lesser Tada, for undesired pleasure providers soon became burdensome.

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Make yourself agreeable, the wife had told her. Show them how well you can obey. Speak in a mild voice. Don’t interrupt the gentlemen when they are composing their poems, and don’t offer any ideas of your own. But do try to find out who will make the final decision.

Oyuki flipped her sleeves back then began adjusting the top and bottom pegs, sending those tones too soaring upwards into the pink light of the cherry blossoms above them. Silly Osome must be lost, she said and Ohasu nodded but said nothing.

She would not disturb the Old Master in any way. She would rise early and do her chores quickly and quietly. She would clean and cook and serve food beautifully arranged on decorative platters; and when other poets visited, she would wait unobtrusively in a corner and listen as they discussed literary matters. Probably they wouldn’t even notice her. But if someone asked her opinion about an image or a phrase she would reply modestly yet forthrightly, and they would appreciate that she was a person of substance.

Oyuki loosened her bodice as the merchants began arriving, then shoved the neckband of her kimono away from her nape. Money, she said, and plucked out the opening bars of a popular old remorse ballad, embellishing the arpeggios shamelessly, her skirt flap parting when she leaned to the side and revealing the slope of a white thigh.

Their guests were ruddy, well-fed men, each secure in the magnitude of his own accomplishments. The merchants’ robes were muted shades of beige and lavender, taupe and pale grey, as required by sumptuary regulations; but cunningly wrought ivory baubles dangled from silk cords on their sash pouches: a grinning skull, a rat on a rice bale, a sleeping cat, a sack of coins, a snake tied in a knot, and a rare hinged specimen that portrayed a pair of baboons squat-fucking, the realistic action of which was much admired by connoisseurs, who detected in the intricacy of its design and the audacity of its mechanism the epitome of the modern style of the Edo townsman.

The merchants had sent servants at dawn to encircle the area around one of the larger cherry trees with red-and-white-striped barrier curtains. All down the length of the riverbank other parties had done the same. Red felt ground mats covered the grass, casks of rice wine stood against the trunks of every cherry tree, and black lacquer stacked boxes of seasonal delicacies dominated the centre of each picnic site, along with tray tables arranged for the convenience of pleasure seekers.

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At last! Osome pushed her way through the barrier curtains, her plump cheeks rosy. I couldn’t find a good bush! Then I got lost coming back! All these cherry trees look alike!

Osome had broken off a flowering branch that she waved like a dancer in the new-style kabuki theatre. Oyuki whacked her shamisen as if punctuating a dramatic entry and Osome cocked a saucy pose, then began singing, ‘Oh, come and look! What won’t you see?’ in a sweet if reedy voice.

Start again, said Oyuki, struggling with the unfamiliar melody; but Osome continued with, ‘Rice crackers, salmon crackers and …’ and I forget the rest of it, she said, smirking at her own foolishness.

Osome slumped down beside her companions, jarring apart the elaborate brocade mass of her front-tied sash knot. Next time I’ll just piss in those reeds down there, she said, and Oyuki laughed. Wet feet!

The grassy scent of rice wine greeted Ohasu as she began filling the longhandled pourers. She could let it be known that she rarely became ill and still had all her teeth. And that because she was small, she wouldn’t take up much space. A scattering of cherry petals spangled the lid of the wine cask, the pale pink flakes lovely against the reddish-brown lacquer surface. She was careful not to disturb them as she replaced the lid. And her night visitors all agreed she was a sensible person. Even if a little too quiet.

Osome came over to help, her withering sash knot clutched up against her midriff. Which one’s your famous poet? she whispered, then tucked in behind the tree to reconfigure herself.

He’s not here yet, Ohasu said.

And these are the ones who will decide it?

Perhaps some of them.

And you’ll go if requested?

Ohasu looked down at her hands. It’s a matter of the price for my contract …

Of course. But if you do go, then you’ll have lots of opportunities to practise your poetry. Osome began reconfiguring her obi, struggling with the stiff, new oversized knot. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?

Yes.

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*** Under the trees, soup and fish salad too: cherry blossoms. *** Petal fall continued throughout the afternoon. Every cherry tree on the riverbank had its crowd of revellers regretting the passing of the year’s most precious season, and consoling themselves with music and laughter.

The rising wind ruffled the surface of the river, blew up dust on the cart tracks, and sent latecomers scurrying through pink swirls of petals as they searched for an open space where they too could celebrate what was being so poignantly lost.

Old Master Basho accepted wine when it was offered but didn’t seem to mind when the pourers were commandeered by others. Osome heaped a dish with fish salad for him; he smiled at the excess and said he couldn’t finish half that amount. Ohasu selected a few of the choicest titbits and arranged them tidily, hoping that her sense of moderation might be interpreted as an indication of a subtle nature.

Basho sat by himself at the edge of the red felt ground mat. He replied politely to queries about his well-being and commented on issues of local concern, but volunteered nothing about himself and asked no questions of his own. Ohasu watched him covertly. She thought he seemed exactly as he should be.

You don’t need to control the source of supply in order to secure the hemp-rope market, a provisioner to the shogunate declared loudly, the wine making him boisterous. But you do need to control distribution. He held out his cup and Ohasu filled it. Manage your carters, said the provisioner, watching Oyuki as she worked out the complexities of the Rice Crackers Song. And your dockers too. Keep them sweet.

‘What won’t you see …’ Oyuki picked tentatively at the opening phrases, mistiming the tricky up-pluck syncopation. ‘Lips and … and tongue …’ She tried it again. ‘A husband’s lies and a something something and lips and … lips and … tongue …’ I just can’t get that part!

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You’re too tentative, Ohasu said, starting around with the wine pourers again. Just jump at it.

Jump at it?

You have to make it bigger. Up quick then down hard.

Are you talking about me? asked a cotton merchant, his face flushed pink and his smile easy.

Or you could cheat and finger-pluck it with your left hand, said Osome; but Ohasu said no, the next stroke still had to be timed properly. Up big then down. Ohasu chopped the beat with her free hand as if wielding a plectrum herself, and the cotton merchant tried his joke again. So, it’s a thing that goes up and gets hard then comes back down again? Whatever can it be?

Oyuki stroked out the first notes of a love song and sang, ‘Some men yearn to discover a shy beauty waiting under the blossoms …’ Then she released the tension in her centre string so the tone wilted in comic deflation.

‘And some to find her shame-place pink and slimy as the gill slits of a sea bass …’

What! shrieked Osome, and Ohasu laughed too. That’s smutty! she cried, but she was glad to see that old Basho seemed not to have heard.

You’re too much for me, said the cotton merchant, glancing around for allies. For all of us, the provisioner concluded approvingly. Girls swollen with the juices of spring. He could see how it would go.

Osome snapped off the tip of a blossoming branch then flopped down beside the cotton merchant, her sash knot collapsing in a surge of brocade that spilled down over the man’s sedate sleeves like a sack of dropped weasels. ‘Oh, come and look, what won’t you see!’ Osome inserted the spray of pink flowers in his topknot. Who can be moderate under the blossoms?

She twisted sideways and leaned against the cotton merchant to reconfigure her sash knot again, emitting little grunts of consternation at the effort required.

‘Orange and pink on the …’ No, it’s, ‘orange and pink on the … this and this!’ Oyuki hit the up-twang perfectly. But no one seemed to be listening so she retuned her shamisen and began strumming out the lugubrious opening bars of Green Willows Pink Blossoms, holding each note cluster solemnly before sliding on to the next.

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Oyuki joined in at, ‘Wetting my sleeves and the hems of my skirts, wetting the path as I walk on my weeping way;’ then Osome came in as they sang, ‘Sad spring rain in the lonely sadness of the willows,’ their plaited voices rising sweetly plaintive within the flickering pink lattice of falling cherry petals, while the merchants sprawled on their red felt mats discussed forward contracts and funding strategies as they sipped from their elegant wine cups, and the old poet on his own seemed aware of everything and nothing. *** The sound of the bell fades, but the scent of blossoms continues for an evening. *** The merchants dragged Osome off to see the evening cherry blossoms illuminated by bonfires suspended in iron baskets, but Old Master Basho stayed behind at the picnic site. Ohasu poured for him. Despite the wife’s admonition, she had prepared a few ideas on the chance that she might be invited to participate in the merchants’ linked poem; but they had tossed out stanza after stanza with the casual ease of boys flipping pebbles into a cistern and the poem was quickly completed.

It seemed too easy, Ohasu said.

It was what they wanted. Old Master Basho had made suggestions for improvements here and there, and reworded a few awkward phrases, but the finished poem had met the aesthetic requirements of the fee payers.

Ohasu sat so as not to block his view of the river. Didn’t you want more from it?

The Old Master held out his cup and she poured for him. Does it matter?

Just that the blossoms will be mostly gone by tomorrow …

He drank again and thrust out his cup. That too is something over which I have no influence.

The rest of their party returned subdued. There’s a baby, Osome said.

A baby?

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Floating in the shallows.

Ohasu and Oyuki followed Osome back to an inlet filled with rubbish and river foam. Servants at a nearby party had already waded out to retrieve the little corpse. It lay on the grassy bank, its umbilical cord still attached and the dead grey flesh spangled with cherry petals.

Osome clutched the front of her robe closed. It was a girl.

Yes. Someone went to inform the abbot of a nearby Pure Land temple, and the others who were there soon began drifting off. Osome and Oyuki returned to the merchants’ party, and only Ohasu remained, kneeling beside the tiny body, the two of them within the blowing swirls of falling cherry blossoms as the evening wind continued to strip the trees.

The Old Master came up behind her, his carry sack hooked over one shoulder. You couldn’t leave her alone.

No. She wouldn’t know.

I’d know.

Basho told her he had waited all year for this day, determined to say what he truly felt about it. But all that had occurred to him were things remembered, phrases borrowed, images salvaged from previous failures. So his page remained blank. Perhaps it was better that way.

You don’t mean that, Ohasu said.

You’re telling me what I mean?

Ohasu gazed up at him then lowered her eyes. No, she said meekly.

If you love something in the way you describe it, then all you love is words.

Ohasu placed one hand on the baby’s chest. How would you describe her?

Basho turned away and started trudging up towards the embankment road. Ohasu called after him. They said you might need a housekeeper …

Who said it?

Ohasu looked down at her hands, embarrassed by her boldness.

I need no such thing.

I would do what I was told then just sit in a corner and learn from what you taught others.

About what?

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The art of poetry. So I can write truly about my life.

Who would read it?

My mother.

Then what you want to write is a letter, not a poem.

She’s dead.

He looked back at her. And that’s what you think poetry is?

Because I had no chance to say I forgave her …

Old Master Basho regarded her silently, then said, We all need forgiveness.

But he also asked her if she understood the requirements of the seasons, and Ohasu said she thought she knew most of them. *** Only briefly above the cherry trees: tonight’s moon. *** There was dancing that night, but it was the merchants who danced. They threw themselves about wildly, hopping and pivoting and waving their sleeves, executing clever steps and complicated figures, not all of which came off as intended.

Oyuki played the same tunes again and again, always willing to do whatever was asked of her; and Ohasu and Osome tapped on small hand drums and cried Hoi! Hoi! to encourage the merchants in their mad capering.

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All poems in the text are my translations of haiku by Matsuo Basho (1644-1694): ‘Spring arrives / in the faint haze that wreathes / these nameless hills.’

Haru nare ya / na mo naki yama no / usugasumi. (1685) ‘Clouds of cherry blossoms: / is the temple bell at Ueno? / At Asakusa?’

Hana no kumo / kane wa ueno ka / asakusa ka. (1687) ‘How envious: / mountain cherries north of / this floating world.’

Urayamashi / ukiyo no kita no / yamazakura. (1692) ‘Recollecting various things: / the blooming of / cherry blossoms.’

Samazama no / koto omoidasu / sakura kana. (1688) ‘A bush warbler / shits on the rice cakes at the / end of the verandah.’

Uguisu ya / mochi ni funsuru / en no saki. (1692) ‘Under the trees, / soup and fish salad too, / and cherry blossoms.’

Ki no moto ni / shiru mo namasu mo / sakura kana. (1690) ‘The sound of the bell fades, / but the scent of blossoms continues / for an evening.’

Kane kiete / hana no ka wa tsuku / yūbe kana. (1684) ‘Only briefly / above the cherry trees: / tonight’s moon.’

Shibaraku wa / hana no ue naru / tsukiyo kana. (1691)

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Still Sitting on the Fence (series, 2011) by Gavin Au, tintype, 54.3cm x 54.3cm.

Courtesy of Lumenvisum, Hong Kong.

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Poetry Jenna Le

Thoughts While Walking in a Japanese Garden and Encountering a Scarecrow 1.

Pardon me, my fellow pedestrian: I’m not trying to grope you. My arm is just wired this way.

My forearm is jointed to my humerus at exactly this wide angle. I swear I can’t control my fingers: they’re stiff as the blades of the fan carried by a geisha, spread out and trembling.

2.

The auburn-leafed trees overhead are generous with their rustling.

In contrast, the minimalism of my ex-lover’s beauty.

Last year, his starved body wrapped itself around my also-undernourished self, a snake entwined around a trellis.

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That snake wasn’t even green, but whiter than the trellis.

3.

Would you call this a scarecrow? This man made out of chicken wire, loosely draped with a black cloth mesh? Propped on a bench facing the koi pond he can hardly hold himself upright but leans heavily backward like a drunk, a reclining Greek hero his head crowned at random by fallen maple leaves and his crotch haphazardly heaped with dry pine needles which I want to brush away with my hand but do not.

4.

As evening falls, the orange sunlight and the wind start to flow in the very same direction, pushing in unison against the orange signboard flowers, making them look more coppery than they already are.

Pretty ex-lover, if I’d only known the only kind of alchemy that works is this redundant kind.

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The Rule of Reflections Graham Arnold

A

t nine, Nhat Phung understood the secret of reflections, long before reunification, before the where-are-theys and how-long-will-theys of re-education camps, before shirts of gold, balloon-skin fishing nets, flowereared men, fish-singing women. Before parentless Dung the loveliest. Before all these, Nhat had gleaned reflections off nearly everything – and in nearly every reflection he envisaged what would come.

What would come always arrived at its own time – a second, a minute, an hour after a vision; sometimes a day, a week, a month. There was the time a man stepped out of a shining river holding a bicycle wheel. A day later Nhat’s uncle Thoi stood in the doorway, drunk, hugging the wheel of a bicycle he had pulled from a ditch. There was a reflection in a shattered light bulb casing of his mother tearing out manioc roots, which would happen the following January, in his father’s gleaming silver tooth of the end of the war and exploding coconut trees and ratta-tat-tat; and then of a new darkness: exodus, men from the north, non-citizens, collective farms. There were reflections of vacant dinner tables, a boot knocking a spray of teeth from his mother’s lips, his father returning after two years in a re-education camp, his shrunken body just a sack of organs, bones, brain, disappearing into an endless vortex of re-education, re-location, re-re-re until finally in the polished brass of a lamp base Nhat saw this: an overloaded bus, a woman speeding beside it on a motorcycle, her face a knuckled fist against the wind.

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That night Nhat’s mother sewed three gold rings into a seam of his shirt.

“These are food, shelter, safety,” she said. Nhat plugged a hand into his armpit. His mother gripped the back of his jaw and drew his face towards hers. “Thoi has a son in Toronto,” she said. “I’ll meet you there.”

Through the bus window Nhat watched kumquat and gum branches chop at the wheels of his mother’s motorcycle. For 15 minutes she did not look up but squinted at the dimly lit road ahead, towards the uncertain future of her son, her disappeared husband, her mother hobbled with stomach tumours. Nhat’s final memory of his mother: a lusty gob of spit flying from between her booted teeth, the onrush of wind knocking the spit behind her like a baseball, his mother sinking behind the bus, out of sight, gone.

On the beach the palm trees shivered. Coconuts splashed into the sand. Men were shaking nuts from the trees and stuffing them into sewnup blankets and pants with the legs tied off. In the distance a boat engine clapped to life. A light blinked and with that blink a reflection in the lit water: a man with ears cupped like half-closed flowers, a young girl, a dark corner. Uncle Thoi emerged from behind a tree, his breath dancing with the milk of fermented coconut. He was squeezing the neck of three conjoined shirts bulging with mangoes.

“The rocks,” he said, “will tear your knees up.”

Nhat folded his arms over Thoi’s neck. Wet, salt, dark. Nhat’s father had once warned him that Thoi was not to be trusted. “Your uncle,” he’d said, “will snatch the air from your lungs when you’re not looking.”

Hands green with moon glow cast rope ladders and the ladders splashed in the water. Nhat and Thoi climbed into a boat with smoke stacks that unfurled like cornucopias among the standing bodies of 300 men, women and children, their eyes fizzing with thoughts of left-behind loved ones, the unbearable unknown.

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a shrubbery of knees and thighs, water jugs, knife-edged supply crates. They pried the bodies apart with their hands. A finger poked out from under a bench, the fingernail split down the middle like a cashew nut.

“You’re The Keeper now,” Nhat said. He was crouched beside Dung, her smell of cat and sand, her same-every-day jeans with her brother’s Memphis address markered onto the inner lining of the pockets. She held a wedge of broken mirror to Nhat’s face.

“You’re a dirty ghost,” she said. Nhat’s face stared back, a parabolic silhouette of mirror grime. And then another image – an old woman bent in a rice field, her foot ankle-deep in mud. She was digging a thumb into her stomach, what she always did to ease the bloating below her ribs.

“I know her,” he said.

“Who?” He blew onto the glass and his warm breath swam over field, old woman, foot, thumb. He felt scooped out. Something snapped shut in his throat.

“My grandmother,” he said. “She’ll die.” *** At night rats slid under the tarpaulin and bit you; and if you moved one way you were on top of someone and the other way on top of someone else.

Thoi slept next to Nhat with his head on a steel first-aid box. For food there was five-day-old rice and boiled manioc. Nhat dreamed of his father’s green coconut grove, his terraced breadfruit and banana slopes, mangosteen and water apple. Thoi pulled a dried oyster from his pocket and pushed it at Nhat’s face. “Protein,” he said and from it Nhat extracted a worm.

He hid inside a plasterboard crate. He saw a cloud framed by the edges of the crate and thought how wonderful to contain that which is uncontainable.

The framed cloud was like a photograph of what was inside him, white, what he wanted to project to the world, and he concentrated on that white square until the cloud descended towards the boat and his insides rose like steam out of his mouth to meet it and he was floating above everything that was and everything that would be. No more reflections. No more disappeared mother, father, country. He was something as diaphanous as a piece of sky. *** 175

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The boat was pulling the entire expanse of sea behind it. Nhat and Dung made a tent from sewn-up coats. Dung shifted her body upright and there was that smell of cat and sand.

“Do you want to see something?” she said.

“What?” asked Nhat.

She unsnapped her jeans and tugged them below her waist and the pink skin there was like two shaved knuckles. Nhat could only understand this space in terms of what it lacked in contrast to his own.

“Mine’s different,” he said.

She pulled up her pants and Hoc slid into the tent and told them Truc, The Keeper, had given up looking.

“Truc’s hair,” Dung said, “is gone.”

Hoc’s mouth released a bouquet of wet leaves, his warm breath in Nhat’s ear. “It was his father,” he said. There had been famine in Truc’s village. The father had tried to burn the family while they slept. “Truc’s hair was on fire and his father put it out with a pillow. He said he saw a halo above Truc’s head and it was a sign.”

“What’s a halo?” Nhat said.

“A ring.”

“I’ll get him,” Dung said and she left and Hoc pushed a leg into the open space. Hoc who liked to draw boats floating in giant cups of tea. A day earlier Nhat had seen in the curvature of a polished spoon Hoc’s what-would-come: Chi Ma Wan Detention Centre, a typed rejection letter for sponsorship in America, then among the washboard cackle of spoonbills, Hoc shaking a can of gasoline over his head, a match, what Truc survived – the worst.

“Don’t,” Nhat said.

“Don’t what?”

But Nhat understood the rule of reflections, that no image ever lied, that no matter what he did to stop, prevent or intervene, there was only what would come.

A hand stretched into the tent. “The rings,” said a voice. The hand disappeared and then a face in the open triangle of the tent flap. “Your spirits,” said Thoi, “are unbalanced.” His face was floating. This suspended face throbbing with the milk of fermented coconut. Nhat squeezed his armpit and felt the rings in the seam of his shirt.

“Rings are halos,” Nhat said.

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“These rings are not halos. They have weight.” The hand again, this time reaching towards Nhat’s shirt. “They’re knocking you off balance.” *** On the horizon a dot. The dot expanded into a black shape and then a white shape and then a boat, a five-man fishing trawler. The two boats converged the way random floating leaves do and Nhat saw the faces of the five men looking yanked back. Their empty nets sagged like deflated balloons. Their boots clunked on the deck. Then this: a spindrift of AK-47 fire, skulls hitting the deck like split coconuts, curved machetes with blades as long as babies and the bodies, each emptied of three souls and nine spirits, folded over railings and dropping into the hardest splashes you’ve ever heard.

One of the men had a hand up the shirt of a teenaged girl. Another rattled a coffee can with rings, necklaces, watches, bills. A third disembowelled the engine with bolt cutters. And where was Dung? Where were Truc and Hoc? One stood in front of Nhat and Thoi, his ears cupped like half-closed flowers. He was staring at Thoi’s watch, his outstretched hand weighing the air, the fingers whispering, give.

The men remained for nine hours. Thoi’s cheekbone was a blue eggplant where he’d been struck with a rifle butt. He whispered with three friends near a spool of rope, gut-cramped, his only meal in the last 42 hours three gold rings.

“They’ll have to split me open to find them,” he’d said to Nhat, patting his shoulder as if sharing a secret, as if they’d been his rings all along. *** Nhat woke and it was dark. One of the five men stood by the steersman’s window and lit a cigarette and moved on. Moonlight blew onto the window and in the reflection Nhat saw a dark corner, Dung, the man with cupped flower ears – the same reflection he’d seen on the water on the night of their departure. But where was Dung? After all, this was a reflection, her future.

Maybe he could warn her. To hell with the rule of reflections, perhaps there was a maybe-just-once lurking somewhere in the eye of that window, for what’s the point of anything if you can’t change what has been foretold?

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Then a dry manioc starch filled his mouth. A word blossomed in his throat, mewled over his tongue and stopped at his teeth, the word realising it was too late. The moonlight had shone for a few seconds only before disappearing behind dark clouds; what Nhat had seen in the window was not a reflection of what would come but the other side of the steersman’s cabin, Dung and Flower Ears in a dark corner and this word refusing to be jettisoned from his mouth, now.

The cabin stank of raw meat. Flower Ears pulled himself off Dung, his belt in one hand. Nhat stood in the doorway clutching the empty condensed milk can, the only thing he’d been able to find and hurled it into the air. The sound of thudding boots. The belt snapped around his neck and squeezed the cabin into three paisley clots and Nhat wondered why not the AK-47 propped against the steering column but saw it was too far for Flower Ears to reach but anyway wouldn’t it be an easier death? Spindrifting bullets, Nhat’s head cracking the floor like a split coconut, a bright sheen of blood steaming with his three souls and nine spirits. Then a sound of clapping bones and the belt loosened. Air. The three paisley clots congealed back into a cabin with a dark corner, a condensed milk can, stillest-of-still Dung and Flower Ears spilled onto the floor, a steel box tucked into his head.

“Stay,” said Thoi and his hands curled over the AK-47 snout, hands that moments earlier had splashed the first-aid box into an ear cupped like a half-closed flower and he slid out of the door, shooting into what was already a parade of gunfire singing across the deck. *** The bodies of the five men, their feet denuded of boots, were piled onto the trawler deck in a red heap. The trawler was relieved of engine parts, fuel, food and released to the sea. Nhat sat beside Dung’s body for half a day before consenting to the rail fold, drop, the hardest splash you’ve ever heard.

The steersman made the engine go but the boat ran in circles so 83 men leaned over the side to keep it straight. Thoi disappeared and then returned.

His eyes looked pushed out of his face, as if they’d been removed and put back, but in the removal something vital within him had slipped out and could not return. He spoke to no one and curled up beside an empty oil drum. Rain beat down and Nhat felt it like sticks on his face and some men 178

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caught the rain in plastic coats and funnelled the water into bowls. There was no more keeper of the can. Hoc and Truc had disappeared among the crates and water jugs and knee-thigh shrubbery. There was only what had happened and what would come.

A woman sang and fish knocked against the sides of the boat. She stopped and the fish disappeared and then she started again and they returned, this singing lasting hours until another trawler, more men, these with nets pregnant with shivering fish.

“Hong Kong,” they said in broken English, pointing west. One held a bag of sugar apples. Another passed out wrinkled pesos. Somebody gave Nhat a nativity snow globe. He wobbled it and the inner world exploded white and then the next day a miracle, a third boat with men in uniform who had blankets and hot soup and a thick rope to tow their boat into a port full of boats large enough to swallow theirs.

The wooden dock was a new world under Nhat’s feet. His knees wobbled like the sea, like the snow globe in his hand. He shook the globe and this is what he saw reflected in the glass: a knuckle-faced woman on a motorcycle peeling through the dark, spit sliding from tooth-booted mouth, riding away from what was and towards what would come – son, detainment, Toronto – the whole time this blizzard within the globe churning itself into an infinite cloud of white and Nhat opening his mouth, waiting for what was inside to steam out, hoping any moment the clouds would drop.

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Location (1997) by Yuichi Yokoyama, pencil, watercolour, marker and screentone on paper, 80cm x 109cm. Courtesy of Nanzuka Underground, Tokyo.

180

Osama in Abbottabad Charles Allen

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do wonder if Sheikh Osama, between watching Al Jazeera and believing himself to be directing the struggle against the Great Satan, ever paused to reflect on the ironies of his choice of retirement home. Abbottabad is as close a match to Camberley in Britain as you could hope to find in Pakistan: free of urban clamour; stocked with all the prerequisites of Western-style living, such as lawns and tennis and squash courts; blessedly tranquil except when the military cadets are out on the ranges. Its very name honours the first British officer to visit these parts, Captain James Abbott, who arrived in December 1846 and stayed on to bring the local Pathan tribes into the British fold.

By behaving like a tribal patriarch, Abbott charmed into line the tribesmen of Hazara, a Pakistani region comprising six districts, of which Abbottabad is one. Indeed, he identified with them to such a degree that he came to be seen by the authorities as having “gone native” and was sacked. But it was from Abbott that those same authorities first came to hear of a phenomenon that was already beginning to reshape the thinking of the frontier tribes and would continue to haunt the region to the present day. It came in the form of a settlement in the mountains 30 miles west of Abbottabad overlooking the Indus River, known locally as the Qila Mujahedeen, or “the Fortress of the Holy Warriors”, but which the British called “Camp of the Hindustani Fanatics”. These “fanatics” were not locals but outsiders from the Indian plains, followers of a charismatic leader named Syed Ahmad, who, after visiting Mecca and being inspired by the Wahhabi 181

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fundamentalist movement, returned home to restore India to Islam through jihad. Because the Prophet had begun his Islamic conquest by first making a retreat from the dar ul-harb (“domain of enmity”) of Mecca to the dar ulIslam (“domain of faith”) of Medina, Syed Ahmad followed suit, believing that he would find his dar ul-Islam in Afghanistan and from there start his holy war. The Afghans wanted nothing to do with these Indian jihadis – but the Pathans in Peshawar welcomed them with open arms, believing that they would help rid them of their Sikh rulers.

In spring 1827 Syed Ahmad summoned all Muslims to join his holy war.

The Pathans rallied to his cause and the Sikhs were driven out of Peshawar, whereupon Syed Ahmad set about imposing Wahhabi sharia on the city and the surrounding country. After only two months the locals had had enough and put every Hindustani mujahedeen they could catch to the sword. Syed Ahmad survived the massacre and fled across the Indus River, only to be cornered by a Sikh army north of Abbottabad. On May 8, 1831 he and about 1,300 of his jihadis made a last stand at Balakot and died bravely.

That should have been the end of it. But his followers on the plains rallied and, led by a brilliant organiser named Wilayat Ali, regrouped and re-established themselves as a secret organisation. Wilayat Ali spread the story that Syed Ahmad was not dead but hiding in the mountains waiting for the faithful to resume the jihad, reshaping Indian Wahhabism into a cult centred on its hidden imam. A secret network was established by which funds, supplies and weapons were sent along covert caravan trails across India to the Qila Mujahedeen in the mountains, along with volunteers to be armed and trained. The new jihad was to be initiated in the spring of 1854.

All this went unnoticed by the British authorities until a messenger was caught carrying a bundle of “treasonable correspondence”. Commissioner Frederick Mackeson of Peshawar then raided the rebels’ mountain stronghold, which did little more than drive the Wahhabis deeper into the mountains. He was later knifed to death on his verandah by a “fanatic from Swat” in the first of many martyrdom operations directed against British targets. The great jihad was then rescheduled for the summer of 1857 – only for the jihadis to be pre-empted by the military uprising the British named the Sepoy or Indian Mutiny.

Despite a second round of heavy losses, the Indian Wahhabis regrouped, restored their mountain stronghold and prepared for a third jihad. By then 182

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they and their founder had achieved almost legendary status among the western Pathans, so in 1863, when the British authorities sent an army into tribal territory to destroy the Fanatic Camp once and for all, the Pathans went to their rescue and forced the intruders to withdraw with heavy losses.

So it went on, one attempted revolt after another, culminating in the great frontier uprising of 1897, initiated by a mullah known to the British as the “Mad Fakir�, who proclaimed that he had been ordered by the martyr Syed Ahmad to turn the British out of the dar ul-Islam of Swat and that he was backed by a heavenly host hidden from human sight. The revolt spread and took six months and an army of 40,000 men to put down.

Amazingly, the successors of Syed Ahmad and his Hindustani Fanatics clung on in their mountain fastness until 1901. They then decided to move deeper into tribal territory and set up a new camp at Bajaur in Mohmand country (where Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri, said to be the brains behind al-Qaeda, had his base until quite recently). According to the Peshawar District Gazetteer they were still preaching jihad in 1931, still calling upon the tribes to rise against the British defilers of the dar ul-Islam of Pathan territory.

When Sheikh Osama first came to these parts to help drive the Russians out of Afghanistan the legacy of Syed Ahmad and his Hindustani Fanatics was there waiting to be claimed: a people hooked on jihad, the PakistanAfghanistan border idealised as a dar ul-Islam, and the notion of a Qila Mujahedeen in the mountains from which to launch jihad firmly established.

Osama took up these three models and ran with them. It may even be that in his last years he dreamed of himself as the hidden imam of legend, waiting to be summoned by the faithful to lead the last jihad. If so, that dream was rudely shattered on the night of May 1, 2011.

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Ruffle (Dress 04) (2009) by Motohiko Odani, C-type print, dimensions variable.

Courtesy of Yamamoto Gendai, Tokyo.

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Petals and Smoke Monica Zarazua

O

n one side of the tollbooth is the past, on the other is the future.

Where I sit, inside the tollbooth, is the natural present. On one side is reality, on the other is a different reality. I’m the point in the middle that fractures both. I pass on the hallucinatory drugs. If you want to unlock the door in a 2,000-year-old tree you must pay me first. I’m the elf carrying the key so I will be the one giving you permission to enter a world filled with superdome-sized creatures that fly and flask-sized creatures that jig and speak in rhyme.

Then again, I’m a grown man. This isn’t a fantasy tale. It’s a tale of horror. Every person who stops to pay their US 75 cents is a plastic pawn.

I turn it into a game: the setting up, the conversing and joking until they expose their teeth and the perfectly timed moment when I thrust my knobbly knuckled hand inside their mouths and remove the molars with my grip of iron strengthened by years of training as a sniper in my first and second war tours flying night missions from Taichung over the dark waters.

And yet, if I wanted to I’d write a realistic tale to expose the mundane yet eternal beauty of the human spirit. This tale would be a close-up of the fascinating people who pay their toll every day. I’d describe the single parent who is making it and destined to love again. Or the child who can’t speak and sits in his car seat, his foot wagging on its ankle just as a puppy’s tail wags on its rump. Or the man loosening his tie while contemplating infidelity but in the end deciding that what matters is tying the tie to the side mirror and watching it flap like a kite in the wind.

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The truth of my job is that I sleep half the time and most people are jerkoffs who don’t look at me, who chirp “thank you” one after the other then go on their way without a second look. The chair isn’t remotely comfortable. It bears the butt imprints of all co-workers who precede and follow me. We’re lined up in our shifts one after the other like a string of teeth. To pass the time we file our nails, look at porn, read every article in the newspaper or put on cheap headphones and sing along to the Bee Gees or The O’Jays. Some of us plot to blow up things. Do you know why people wear face masks while riding on their mopeds and do you know the causal work conditions for alcohol abuse? I do.

But what do I really understand? I sit in my nub of a booth. Out of boredom I write a murder mystery, but instead end up with some sentimental crap about a small-town boy in love with a girl with a long black braid. The girl runs from him and jumps onto a moving train, never turning around towards him but gazing forwards into the tunnel that will take her out of the valley to places and people that’ll change her forever. Meanwhile, the boy collapses on a slab of stone that’s been warmed by the sun.

As I write this spittle of a story, I can see that all of it’s going to end in a glass drop. The boy will run his course. The train will run its course. The tracks will end abruptly, because that is the sort of world that it is running through. The train will reach the end of the tracks and become a drop dangling at the tip of the rail bent over white space. Inside the drop is the boy, the girl, the green valley where they live surrounded by mountains that are daggers that fell from the sky. All of it reduced and contained inside a drop that dangles back and forth off the end of a track, ready to fall at any moment and when it does everything inside it will My shift ends. I don’t stay to finish the story that has no blood and guts but is all petals and smoke. And life is anything but petals and smoke. Take the front-page news today. Girl gang-raped for 2 hours while 20 bystanders watch. This is the world: blood and guts, so one has to make himself into iron. The only iron in my story is the train so I don’t stay for the end but clock out and drive home to a house that’s as cold as it was in the morning but with a different quality of sunshine: a lesser kind, weaker and already melting away. Did the same headlines make the news in the cities where my daughters live, or have such reports become mundane?

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Submission The boy in the story I wrote yesterday was me, of course. The girl on the moving train was a metaphor for when my wife Mauve headed to heaven or wherever it is that old mamas and media naranjas go when they pass on. Of course, we weren’t children when Mauve died. We’d already been married for decades and through all them years of marriage, good and bad, I acquired a thick collection of sentimentality that leaves me writing like a sissy. But I tell you what, I’m giving in. There’s a lot of sentimentality: petals and smoke built up in my system – but I’m going to purge all of it.

The sentimentality is the elephant in the room, the elephant in the tollbooth. I will euthanise it, remove one side of the tollbooth and drag the body out to the side of the road where there’s grass. That will be as close to the open savannah as the elephant will ever be. The decomposing flesh will bring out folks with their hands covering their noses, coming to stare at the elephant’s grey hide. It’ll be a different tone dead than it was when it was alive. Lizards with blue and green underbellies and iguanas with jewelled eyes fade when they die. Whether their eyes are open or closed, their colours change from pistachio green interlaced with royal blue to flatlined grey.

All pretty things fade when dead and sentimentality is no exception. The elephant, no longer in the booth, will be lying on its side. It will have turned the colour of a dirty eraser.

The elephant is the symbol for all the sentimentality built up from years of living in a family of women where the chatter and contemplation never stopped, where if it wasn’t the wife having a crisis trying to untangle the ways and whys of the world, then it was the youngest daughter, and if it wasn’t the youngest then it was the middle, and if it wasn’t the middle then it was the eldest.

I’ll write out the elephant that’s been sitting in the tollbooth with me.

Then I’ll hand the pages to the next person who pulls up. In the moment when I hand the story over, it’ll be finished. I won’t study the person I give it to. I won’t try to figure out whether they’re going to read it or throw it out of the window as they speed down the freeway, their engines picking up rapidly from 35 to 45, 55 to 65, 75 to 85, all the pages fluttering and landing on the windshields of the cars behind them. The drivers of those cars will be momentarily blinded and scream, “Fucker of mothers!”

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It doesn’t matter whom the driver is. I’m not a romantic, I don’t go to church and I don’t burn incense, but whoever pulls up when I put the final punctuation on the story will be the person who’s supposed to pull up.

Whether they read the story or not is unimportant because there’s nothing going on here – not fairytales, horror stories, lyrical realism, not young love, only the steady progression towards another night, another morning.

Petals and Smoke (by the Man in the Booth) It was August on the Pacific island of Taiwan. The air was thick and tropical in a village with a school with cement steps still warm from the day. Five kids sat talking in low voices, laughing. One of them was a girl: normal, a square-shaped yet pretty thing. Both her parents worked double shifts. She was an only child and her grandmother was a vegetarian who fell asleep by 9pm. The girl didn’t even have to sneak out of the window. She went out of the front door, holding the screen door behind her, allowing it to ease quietly into place.

The other four kids on the steps were of the male species. It was hot, but they kept their shirts on except for one who was lean, muscled and hungry like a street dog. Another, the tallest, wore a hat cocked to one side.

The third was chubby with a cloud of hair that was its own living organism capable of taking off and jumping onto the rooftops if it chose, but it wanted only to be with the other heads of hair soaking in the night, the summer air, the croaks of the frogs underground and the imperceptible breaths of five baby birds nesting on the shadowed cement wall above their heads.

The fourth boy sat on a silver bicycle with a raised seat and polished handlebars. He wheeled back and forth hands-free, like a unicyclist who will never dismount because if he does, all his loved ones will be shot through the head. It was as if he lived by eating food tossed to him by people who wanted him never to stop riding. It was as if he learned to bathe by standing first on one foot, then the other and that eventually he learned to stand upside down and pedal with his hands so that he could reverse circulation and live a longer life.

These were the four boys. Why was the girl there with them? This was why: she liked it. They made her feel safe and they would do things like walk 188

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her to her front door and they wouldn’t pick at her hair or at the clothes she wore or say she had a booger in her nose then laugh.

Contemplation Strange, as I look out of the tollbooth window and through my reflection, I see the same grizzled face as always, but it’s the girl I identify with the most. Is it because I have three daughters? Except if it were my daughters caught in the dark with boys, grown or not, I wouldn’t be staring gently at my reflection as sentimentality pressed its warm, heavy body against me.

Try as I might, I couldn’t ever understand my girls. Even Mauve became somebody else when she was with her brood. There’d be times I’d come home from work and they’d be gathered around in the kitchen. I’d come in and it was like I was an alien. Not a frightening new species, but one that was a wrinkled version of the one already known. They’d laugh, especially the youngest one, whom I love the most but understand the least. If I hadn’t seen Mauve give birth to her, I could believe she grew from a vine in a wild garden or fell from a tree, then was brought to us in a basket. She’s wild in a way that doesn’t come from anywhere; it has no explanation. Maybe this is the mystery that drives me towards the girl. The boys I already have figured out. They’ll become entrepreneurs, marry, stay single, fall in and out of love, read the newspaper, punch a time clock. One will be a lifelong ladies’ man, another commit suicide, several will have cancer, three will have mediumsized dogs. The details go on and on.

Peter Samuel Malik Saul But the girl … I don’t know her name. I see her sitting with her hands around her knees. Fireflies sink and rise, 95 per cent settled and five per cent not.

Divination The teenagers sat on the school steps enjoying each other’s company. A woman approached. She saw them sitting in a circle and wondered what they were 189

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doing out so late. Where were their parents? Didn’t they have a curfew? She wondered if she should risk walking by them, because she’d heard stories about groups of adolescents surrounding lone women, demanding money and groping bodies. It had happened to one of the other receptionists she worked with and it had happened to a girl somewhere near Kaohsiung. She picked up her pace.

One of the boys was smoking a cigarette. The woman craved one, then noticed there was a girl among the boys. She was clutching her knees.

Maybe she needed help but was too terrified to lift her head. If the woman had been a man she would have told those teenagers to go home. Then she would have made sure the girl made it to somewhere safe and that there was somebody to take care of her, but she was not a man; she was just a woman so she scurried back round the corner, slipped off her high heels and positioned herself behind a wall where she could watch and listen to what those teenagers were about – even though, with a sinking heart, she realised she already knew. Four boys and one girl in the dark at 10pm and the girl too frightened to look up and ask for help? The woman gripped her cellphone. It was sure to happen soon. If the girl was lucky they’d get her good and drunk first so that she would be numb throughout the ordeal. The woman strained her neck to see who was passing a bottle. The girl lifted a Thermos to her lips.

It struck the woman that maybe the girl wanted this. Maybe she was encouraging the boys. Maybe the boys were the ones who were frightened, not the girl. Maybe it was the girl who was the ringleader, the one who had filled the bottle – look – there she was giving it to the boy on the left, the one with curly hair who took it but laughed nervously. The woman shook her head. Times were different. Every day she heard girls talking on the bus, so she knew that this generation were not focused on their studies or on their families, but on being fast.

Yes, it might very well be the girl getting the boys drunk so that she could take one of them behind the bushes, lift up her skirt, unsnap her bra and pull his sweaty hands onto her. The woman slid the cellphone back into her pocket. If it was the girl who was initiating then there was no need to call the police. It was underage but consensual. The girl was no longer sitting with her hands around her knees. Now she was laughing. Now she was standing and picking a flower from a bush, twirling it in her fingers. The 190

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woman put her shoes back on. She no longer cared if the teenagers heard her.

Ninety-five per cent of her was concerned, but there was the five per cent that had lain in a ditch beneath one million stars and no one had helped her.

The world was hard. The girl was gonna learn, so the woman prepared to walk away, but not without dispensing some advice.

Dear girl, There is a place called Touching Breasts Alley. It is so narrow that in order to avoid scraping against the walls you have to squeeze your shoulders so closely in towards each other that your breasts touch.

It’s a joke! If you take this too seriously and do not laugh then do not go into the alley because in this narrow space there will be lots of darkness.

One must not take the darkness seriously, otherwise one will never leave.

One will become a rat with highly evolved vision that can see clearly both in the dark and in the sunshine. This is the sort of rat you will become, but it does not mean you will be any less disgusting. My advice to you is to have more fun.

There is a thing called free will. Will yourself to laugh frequently. Train yourself to laugh when you are in the deepest place where the darkness suffocates you, because you will be in this pit not once, not twice, but so many times that you will forget. When you are down there you will forget there is anything else but this crevice that you reside at the bottom of, as if you were a spider and will die with your belly full of flies and your legs thin and bent. Where are the muscles in a spider’s legs? Do you see now? If you do not train yourself, if you do not prepare yourself for laughter, then the first time you drop into the crevice you will stay down there. The crack is narrow. It is easy to slip into, difficult to climb out of. Laugh, laugh, laugh.

It will bounce off the walls and rise beyond.

In life there will be suffering. There will be pain, but remember all the little pains are practice for the big ones – and there will be big ones. When you were a little girl and would scrape your knee, you should have laughed at the sound of the words bloody kneecap. They should have made you think of a baseball cap turned backwards and resting in the middle of your leg that was painted red. You should have taken the joke further and drawn a smiley face on your kneecap so that whenever you fell, your kneecap would squish

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up and make the painted mouth into an “O” of surprise, a small hole to let in the light.

Little girl, when you are on your bike that is so hard to pedal it causes you to be at the end of the pack, just keep chuckling under your breath.

Even when you fall so far behind that you are not part of the pack anymore, keep laughing. Know that you will be the tail. Then you will be the period.

Then you will be an accidental flick of ink on white parchment. Then you will not even be on the paper. You will not be able to hear the shrieking sound of the happy voices, but keep on pedalling and laughing as if life were just a big circus show, because guess what? YOU ARE IN THE SHOW! You are the last clown out of a foamy car that looks like it can hold only five clowns but instead holds 15. You are so far behind the rest that you emerge after a pause of 80 seconds, when the audience believes that surely there could not be another clown in there because the roof of the car is deflated!

Then you emerge. What a roar of delight you will give the crowd coming out at the end like that! This should make you laugh, because if you can make an audience of 2,000 people laugh, then you can make yourself laugh too.

Your professional obligations demand that you make a silly face of surprise with your mouth in an “O” like a hole punched in a paper lantern. When you turn and look at the car, which is now completely deflated, even you are amazed that you fitted inside and were able to rise out of its flat interior.

So remember to laugh!

Sincerely, The Woman Behind the Bushes Who is Whom?

I pause. The pencil tip is on the paper. Who’s the woman? A car approaches.

Where did she come from? I prepare to collect the toll. She’s nothing like any of my daughters. She’s the antithesis of Mauve. Everyone waits.

I’m not her. The car idles. A foot presses on the brake, bobbles on its ankle.

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Solidification The girl walked through the narrow alley towards home. One boy followed closely. He put his hand on her shoulder. She held back a scream. Relief replaced it. She realised it was him, but ‌ how strange he looked. Different.

Now she didn’t recognise this boy, less so when he whispered, Hey. He stopped because he did not know the proper words for the transition to the next scene, which he had been plotting with the other boys. All had noticed her budding breasts and imagined her sprouting pubic hair. Instead of trying to speak, he reached out his hand and touched her cheek. He listened to her breathing. Even though they knew one another, she could not know the thoughts of her he had been harbouring while he lay sweaty beneath the covers. She was not as pretty as other girls, but she was always there, so much there that he knew her smells and her touch.

Sometimes she touched him on the arm if she was laughing hard or if she tripped. He knew her smells, her posture, the way her hair hung around her face. Because he knew her so well he wanted to say: I would like to know your other smells, but instinct told him this line would not open her up. Maybe the girls at the back of the bus, maybe those girls. He paused and thought of them with glitter on their shoulders, their smooth legs. He looked at her legs but could not see them because it was too shadowy in Touching Breasts Alley. Still, he knew that Band-Aids covered where she had nicked herself.

The girls at the back of the bus never nicked themselves when they shaved their legs, but she did. She was a little bloody.

He tasted his tongue, fat and fleshy, before grabbing her and thrusting the flesh into her mouth so she could not scream. Her backpack was still on.

It scraped against the cement wall. The straps were his buddies, clasping her shoulders as he clamped down on her wrists. She wriggled and thrashed.

There was a turtle that swam in a pond, a dreamy pond on another summer day in a park in full bloom of tourists, trees and lotus blossoms. Among the lotus pads was a turtle with a spot of orange-red on its face. It had four flippers and a tail. This was an excellent animal to represent him and his four friends. And she was what? She was the turtle shell at the centre, bigger than all of them combined. They were the four extensions bobbing and steering, sticking out of her and allowing her to move and experience the greatness of that thing called body, that thing called water. She was a turtle 193

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the way she thrashed around and the way she made him feel like a webbed form. He was part of her flesh, immersed in pubic hair that was like a thick growth of lotus flower leaves flapping in a hot breeze.

She whimpered when he whistled to the other boys and loosened his grip.

The others came from either end of Touching Breasts Alley. All converged towards the point that was her. Owing to the narrowness of the alley the boys were confused as to how to position themselves. They did not have room for manoeuvre. For a few moments that were so slow it was comical they fumbled, turning her around, turning themselves around, setting down their backpacks and trading places until finally they had her pressed to the ground.

What a sound makes the zipper, zip zipping up the night in the alley inside each of them.

What did the girl think about while lying face down in the alley? Did she think of her mother, her father?

Admittedly, it disturbed the second boy that she was face down, limp as a rag doll, so he gently felt the back of her head. He wanted to make sure her face was not forced into the cement. He had always thought she was pretty in her own way. If he looked at her parts individually then she was really pretty. If he looked at the left eye, which was hazel with long eyelashes, then looked at the right eye, which was brown and a bit larger, then he saw that she was the most beautiful creature on the island. Her nose was absolutely symmetrical in the region of the nostrils. Her lips had a pleasing curve to them and they were a dark coral colour, which he imagined was the same colour as her lips down there. It was dark in the alley, so all he had as fuel for his fantasising was the movie of a blonde woman crouched on a bed with white sheets, her hands between her legs. The flesh there had many folds. He had been surprised how many folds there were for he had always imagined that there was just one slit that expanded and contracted. The woman was flip-flapping the folds quickly between her fingers. Her head was turned to face the camera. This turning of her head made him think of stray dogs humping and staring at the people who were staring at them. Some people laugh at humping dogs. Others feel a strange tingle as they watch the beasts go at it so thoughtlessly, so without mercy.

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possible for a girl’s fingers to reach down that far, although now that he knew it seemed obvious, because his fingers were long enough to reach down to his nut sack, which felt good swinging and knocking against her lying on the ground. Except he was a little confused as he pumped away, because she was dry down there, not like the blonde with the gaze of a street dog whose fingers moved so quickly like a Master Wu shrapnel knife slicing up thin slivers of ham.

The girl lay on the ground and she was not wet at all. She was not a dog and she was not a girl. She was a blob. He was inside the blob, giving it form.

He lent it concreteness. He was the generator, the thruster, the solidifier.

Laceration Dear girl, Well, there you are. Did you practise laughing? Can you do it right now?

Emit a chuckle?

Affectionately, The Woman Behind the Bushes Contemplation She twisted her head to look for light. What was there might have been a star. It was a pinprick of light tiny even to her pupil, which was stretched as far as its circumference could reach. There was the silver prick in the sky that was a star and the dilated circle that was her eye. The points reflected back and forth across the distance, along a straight line.

Ruination In the window I see a man who grimaces like he has kidney stones or as if he were a Faulknerian character who won’t die but stays wedged between his daughters’ rib cages.

One wishes such things didn’t happen, that newspaper stories were fiction, that it’s all a figment of the imagination of the woman in the bushes.

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iron, if one can protect the daughters. One wishes a father could be in the sky, an all-seeing, almighty saviour, because every female is a daughter. One wishes that he could hover and descend even in death and scare off the bad boys. But spirits are thinner than smoke.

Each of us carries the potential for everything inside us. Still, I didn’t mean this story to come out violently like that. If Mauve had read it she would’ve put her hand to my cheek and wondered what sort of man I’d become without her. If I’d known what I was going to write, I wouldn’t have picked up the pencil. I’m a Dirty for putting the girl in the alley. I told myself to let the story go as it would. I let go, didn’t control, but what freedom is this? I want to destroy what I created. Here’s a boy with his buttocks in the air. There’s a girl lying face down in the alley. Her hair is smeared across her face. Does anyone know why? No more questions allowed. No more pictures please. If I destroy it then I destroy the girl in the dark, the girl with the boys, the girl with her hands around her knees.

After Silence I can’t take back what I wrote, but I will write more. I set the first pages aside.

Intersection The morning light filters through the clouds and the girl exhales a breath that remains suspended for three frames.

Sometimes, after several days of not seeing or talking to her friends, it is like they are fading away, pretty dreams in the early morning. The fading away is a good reminder that the intersection of lives is temporary.

The intersection is a hummingbird hovering or a performer atop a 40-foot-high unicycle. The hummingbird and performer slow, quicken, sway but do not stop moving. The air around them is never still. It goes on vibrating until death calls a cellphone, Mother Earth rumbles, a voice says come home, spirits extend their filmy hands, the expiration date finds its place on the calendar. Then the hummingbird rises, the unicyclist climbs atop the seat on tiptoe, extending a leg in one direction and an arm in the other. Maybe the hummingbird is higher than he, maybe he is higher than 196

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she, but they both drop to the ground. The hummingbird glows ruby. The unicyclist’s smile graces his lips, but they will both die with their first and final contact with the Earth. They will fade and the point of intersection will have dispersed.

But for now the hummingbird is still in the air, the unicyclist is rolling through his tricks and she runs to meet up with the boys who are at the end of the alley.

They are going to the beach. Why haven’t they ever gone to the beach?

They live on an island after all, but they had not thought too hard about it until yesterday, when they watched City of God and realised that they too had beaches. Their beaches were not Brazilian, but they were formosa and touched by the Pacific Ocean. They made a pact to visit every beach, starting with the one closest to them. They agreed to meet the following morning.

Some arrived sleepy-eyed and some bright with excitement. The island is another world once it opens up beneath the sun, a world with grinding heat, glaring signs and the sounds of markets spilling onto the streets, the traffic already winding. They join the surge of vehicles, two bodies to a moped.

They follow the Dongshan River, which originates in the mountains and moves through the belly of Lotung into the countryside, where rich folks who live in the capital build their vacation homes. They pass the bridge where rowers are practising for the dragon boat festival and go all the way down past the locked gates and families on bicycles ringing their bells. They go all the way until there is nobody but them, until the road turns into sand.

Then they park the mopeds, run the rest of the way whooping, with bags of food and soda-pop bottles knocking against each other. The gang of dogs has already heard them coming. They barely glance up, but give a final sniff to washed-up debris, then trot away around the northern tip of the island.

The sky is overcast. The air is sticky with salty humidity and thick with heat.

There is a lighthouse, black sand. They run, some of them all the way into the ocean, some of them up to their knees. They run away, far from each other, then sprint back again. They are coiled springs daydreaming and rolling cigarettes, putting their favourite songs on replay. It isn’t like a beach in the City of God. It is overcast. Their skin is as pale as bones but it is exactly their beach, their island, the intersection of their lives, where they pop seaweed bulbs with their toes and let the ceaseless waves wash over them.

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Driftwood The ocean covers all letters and words. It provides relief from the culminating summer and dust that inevitably fill the tollbooth, where he has been sitting for more than six hours on a July day. The water rolls in over his hands and wrists. He drops his pencil and it becomes driftwood. Hurriedly, he picks up the sheets of paper and holds them above his head so that the ocean rolling in and around his belly will not damage them further. Do you see him becoming clearer as you pull up to the tollbooth? The man is drying out the papers, drying out the island kids in the Midwestern breeze that smells of lawns freshly mowed and fireflies zooming low, of barbecues, silver beer and Pepsi cans. He is inside a glass booth: a glass drop. It is unclear whether he thought to write The End, because a car is rolling up right at this moment, and he must run out to meet it. He hands over the pages to the driver instead of collecting money for the toll. Then, quick as that, he turns and heads for the side of the road, towards home. He is eager to be there now that he has released the girl and released the boys. His load lightened, he climbs atop the elephant and leans forward into the grey flesh, ready to find his daughters, whomever they have become, wherever they have wandered off to.

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My Kind of Town …

Ships in the Night Michael Hoffman

T

he children think I’m mad because I talk to them of ghosts. For other reasons too maybe. Still, they like me, they’re not afraid of me; sometimes they treat me almost as one of themselves, forgetting, if only at moments, that I’m old enough to be their great-grandfather. This gives me immense joy.

There are so few children nowadays, so few. I seem to attract them. I was born in Otaru, in the first year of the Showa Era – 1926 – one of seven brothers and sisters. Today almost every child is an only child. Otaru today, I tell them, is a ghost of its former self. They laugh. No, you crazy old man, they say, this is real, the present is real, the past is the ghost, if ghosts exist.

Oh, they exist all right, I say. Come, I’ll show you. *** They exist. I’m one of them. The children can’t believe I’ve lived here all my life. Not only lived here – never left, never been outside the city limits.

“Not even to Sapporo?”

Sapporo’s right next door, 40 kilometres east, give or take; a bright, modern city.

“Once, before you were born.”

“You’re joking! He’s joking!”

They go to Sapporo every weekend – shopping, movies, restaurants.

“Otaru’s a backwater,” they say. “There’s nothing here, nothing to do.

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When I grow up I want to live in Tokyo. Have you ever been to Tokyo?”

“Never.” Same questions, same answers, same astonishment. It’s a game we play.

“When I was your age,” I tell them, “Otaru was no backwater. You should have seen it then, you wouldn’t recognise it. Here, come with me.”

We walk down to the port. “Look into the water. What do you see?”

“Nothing.”

“Look closer.”

“Nothing.”

“Well, 80, 90, 100 years ago, that water you’re looking at teemed with fish. Herring. You could scoop them up with your fingers. My father was a fisherman. Started on the boats when he was younger than you. Much younger. School? Oh no – children in those days didn’t go to school; at least most of them didn’t. I quit school at 12. Went to work as a messenger boy for a newspaper. Otaru had its own newspaper then. Fishing? No, I never took to fishing. I was the black sheep of the family, a bitter disappointment to my father – to my father’s ghost, I mean. To myself too. They say you get over seasickness; I never did. I was never strong. But my father – there was a man for you! An Otaru man, at a time when Otaru was … well, no backwater, as I was saying. My father came to Hokkaido as a baby. Hokkaido was wilderness then, more or less, its indigenous Ainu hunter-gatherers still in the Stone Age; none the worse for it, they seemed to think. But civilisation, so called, was on the march, not to be held back. Honshu was overpopulated and poor; Hokkaido, if you believed the government propaganda, was empty and rich. The government wanted Hokkaido colonised and encouraged poor farmers and fishermen to venture north. They were pioneers, my people.

They left home hardly knowing what pioneering meant, any more than we know today – but they learned. School? There was no time for it. Those first few years, those first few winters …

“To you children winter means skiing, skating, sitting at home playing computer games; to the pioneers, all too often, it meant freezing to death, starving to death. My father never learned to read or write, but he could string a net like nobody else and those nets were bigger than houses.

“Each net would be worked by 20 men in two boats. Herring are night fish. Every night the men would go out in the boats. They’d catch tons of fish, tons. He grew up, my father, to become a big fishing boss, one of 200

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the biggest, 100 fishermen working under him. People like him were called ‘herring gods’. They grew rich and made the city rich.”

If only it could have lasted. *** Ghosts. Even the buildings here are ghosts. Not haunted houses: living ghosts in their own right. Stone warehouses with hipped roofs, granite bank buildings with pseudo-classical Greek columns – what is all this Westernstyle, early 20th-century architecture doing in a small (and shrinking) Japanese city? You won’t find its like anywhere else in Japan, such is Otaru’s boast: true, for all I know. Well, solidity is what it conveys, and solidity was the point – the solidity of a bygone time! Solid remnant of a solidity that proved illusory! Is there anything more ghostly than that?

“Come, children, let me show you something …” Sushi restaurants and souvenir shops, cafés and ice-cream parlours – that’s what most of these buildings are today. Imagine Otaru as a tourist town! What would my father have said? He was lucky. He died unexpectedly. Thirteenth year of Showa – 1938. Stroke. Never saw death coming, either to himself or to his city. The herring deserted Otaru; spawning patterns changed. Herring gods went bankrupt; commerce shifted to Sapporo; Sapporo grew and grew while Otaru shrank and shrank. It is shrinking still: its population is 140,000, less than half what it was in its heyday 80-odd years ago.

“So as not to become a ghost town, children, Otaru became a tourist town. Before you were born; when your parents were children – early 1980s, about then.

“Apropos, a funny story: a gentleman from Tokyo comes to Otaru to sample the famous sushi. Expecting Tokyo or Sapporo manners, he plies the chef with questions about the fare. What kind of fish is this? Where was it caught? And so on and so on – to which the chef, an Otaru man of the old school, no pamperer of tourists, replies with such grumpiness and ill humour that the tourist – a freelance journalist as it happens – vents his indignation in a national weekly magazine. ‘Please go there and piss in front of that outrageous restaurant,’ he wrote.”

“You’re joking!”

“I am not! I have a copy of the magazine, I’ll show it to you; 1992.

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Otaru’s manners have softened a bit since then. We’ve become Sapporo-ised, Tokyo-ised.” Well, not all of us …

Yes, a most un-Japanese solidity is what those buildings convey, which is only fitting, Hokkaido being a most un-Japanese place, an un-Japanese appendage to Japan, like a new, concrete Western-style wing tacked onto an old wood-and-paper Japanese house. Riches from the herring fishery brought commerce, textile factories, banks. The Otaru port, long since eclipsed by Kobe and Yokohama, was one of the biggest in Japan before the war. “That famous scenic canal so beloved of tourists,” I tell the children, “wasn’t so scenic when I was your age.

“I worked here, loading and unloading ships. I wasn’t much older than you. Lasted three months. My strength gave out. I was never strong. Look out there on the water, what do you see?”

“Nothing.”

“Of course. That’s because you’re seeing it with the eyes in your face, not the eyes of your imagination or, in my case, the eyes of memory. It was much bigger then; what’s left is only a bare, preserved prettified remnant. It swarmed with barges hauled by steam launches carrying merchandise from ships at sea to those stone warehouses you see there, now sushi shops and whatnot. Oh yes, this Otaru of ours was a bustling little place in its prime!

Come, children, I’ll show you …” *** We troop into the Otaru Museum, across the street from the canal. From outside it looks like a warehouse. It was a warehouse – the first licensed warehouse in Hokkaido, built in 1893. I used to work here – in the museum, not the warehouse – worked here all my adult life. It’s my home. Not my house, but my home. Who am I? Well, you already have most of my biography, though I’ll forgive you if you failed to notice.

What’s to notice? I was born here, grew up here, grew old here, never married ... Two things in life I love: the past and children (though I never had any, or perhaps for that reason). In a sense I made Otaru’s past my past and Otaru’s children my children. Eccentric? Never mind. The parents know and trust me and the children feel safe with me, even when I talk to them about ghosts, even when I take them to the ancient cemetery, the 202

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Stone Circle at Oshoro. Behaviour that would be suspicious in others is not in me. It’s a sort of gift I have.

The woman at the wicket knows me, of course and ushers us in, all smiles, no charge. Forty years I worked here – researcher, tour guide, chronicler and preserver of the vanished past of this obscure little city of mine. Two pamphlets I’ve written, anonymously: I have no desire for fame. Tourists buy them. They sell well. Tourists buy anything as a souvenir. Very few, I imagine, read them. One is a history of the Otaru fishing industry, the other a biography of Otaru’s ghostliest ghost, the writer Takiji Kobayashi.

It’s a grainy old photograph I’ve brought them here to see, blown up to life size, rather blurred, as the past should be. The time is late Meiji, roughly 1900; the place, Ironai-dori, the heart of downtown, “the Wall Street of the North”, so it was called, in all seriousness; so it’s still called, though no longer seriously, just to make the tourists smile. The photograph shows it lined with shopfronts and thronged with kimono-clad men, the occasional carthorse shambling among them. Not a woman in sight. This is Otaru, the Otaru of my childhood: mercantile, masculine, a little vulgar, no airs, few graces. “See that man?” I say, pointing. “That’s my father.” It’s not true, but it grabs their attention and deepens their interest. *** “Children,” I say, “forgive me; just now I need to be alone.”

It comes over me from time to time – a wave of sadness so deep, so overpowering. Sadness I call it, but it’s more like terror, when the present seems – how shall I put it? – like a huge eye from which there is no hiding, a vast mouth open to swallow me. It’s the earthquake that’s done it now, I think, the Great East Japan Earthquake – thousands dead, whole towns destroyed, radiation leaking from smashed nuclear-power reactors. Not here, not in Otaru. Still. These are my worst nightmares of the present and future coming true.

The children are disappointed. “Aren’t you going to take us to the Stone Circle?”

“Not tonight, children. Some other time. Soon. I promise.” And because I have no secrets from them I add, “I must go to the cemetery alone tonight.

There’s someone I have to meet.”

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*** It is a half-hour drive, out in the country though still within Otaru. The ocean heaves; it too is distressed. A sharp breeze rustles the leaves. Only the moon, just past full, is untroubled. My van is ancient but cooperative. It knows the road, knows it as well as I do. This is the only road it has ever been on, the only road on which I’ve ever driven it. I own the van for one reason, one destination: the Stone Circle. Often with the children. Sometimes, as now, alone.

The stones that make up the circle are fragments of what is believed to be a prehistoric cemetery about 4,000 years old. It is not an imposing site.

Children seeing it for the first time are unimpressed, even disappointed.

“Use your imagination,” I tell them. “Without imagination you’ll never see anything anywhere, not even in that Tokyo you dream about.”

He is waiting for me. I thought he might be. We often meet here. Takiji Kobayashi, the writer. He died when I was five, in the eighth year of Showa, 1933. He was 29, writer, martyr; tortured to death by police after his arrest in Tokyo as a member of the outlawed Communist Party. I discovered him years later, after the war. I read his novels; I can recite whole passages from his most famous, Kanikosen, by heart. It’s about a revolt on a Hokkaido fishing boat. Working conditions were appalling. The revolt failed. The exploiters, the capitalists – men like my father – won. After the war I dreamed of joining the Communist Party. Why didn’t I? Fear. I was no Kobayashi. Fear of whom – the police, or my father’s ghost? Both.

“You’ve come back to life,” I tell him. “People are reading you again.

With the recession dragging on, things are as bad for workers as they were in your day.”

He nods in silence.

“There’s talk of revolution again – not widespread, but here and there.

Communist Party membership is rising.”

He begins to fade.

“Wait. Don’t leave. Talk to me. I came here specially …”

“Well?”

“I’m 85. I’ll die soon.”

“We’ll have a good talk then.”

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“Listen. Two years ago a famous critic called Kanikosen ‘the work best depicting the questioning of and resistance to the capitalist system’. I’ll show you the article. If there’s a revolution you will be its godfather. Do you realise that?”

“You’re mad. Go back to your children. Your place is with them.”

“Yes. My place is with them.”

“Well? Go.” “Soon.”

“What are you waiting for?”

“Well … my father.”

“Your father! Does he visit you too, the slimy capitalist?”

“He never has.”

“Well, goodnight then.”

It’s chilly. There are blankets in the van. I take one and lie down, wrapping myself in it, in the centre of the circle. The ground is hard, but I’m used to it.

Faintly, in the distance, I hear the waves rising and falling, rising and falling.

It’s May. Herring season. He would have been out there tonight …

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Contributors JAKE ADELSTEIN was a reporter for Japanese newspaper the Yomiuri Shimbun from 1993 to 2005. In 2006 and 2007 he was the chief investigator for a US Department of State-sponsored study of human trafficking in Japan. An expert on the country’s organised crime, he works as a writer and consultant in Japan and the United States. He writes for the Daily Beast and Newsweek and is working on his second book, The Last Yakuza.

CHARLES ALLEN is an authority on British Indian and South Asian history. In 2004 he was awarded the Sir Percy Sykes Memorial Medal by the Royal Society for Asian Affairs for his contribution to Asian studies. Published work includes: The Taj at Apollo Bunder (with Sharada Dwivedi, 2011); The Buddha and Dr Führer (2009); and God’s Terrorists: the Wahhabi Cult and the Hidden Roots of Modern Jihad (2006). Ashoka the Lost Emperor will be published in October.

GRAHAM ARNOLD, from Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, teaches English in Toronto. His work has appeared in The Malahat Review, Echolocation, Event Magazine and Ninth Letter. He has been a Pushcart Prize nominee and is working on a collection of short stories about Japan as well as a novel set during the 1923 Tokyo earthquake.

GINA BARNARD, a contributing editor to Poetry International, has been published in New Madrid, Web Del Sol, Poetry Now and Cosumnes River Review and in Japanese translation in Poemaholic Café. She was born in Fussa, Tokyo and spent her early years in Japan and the Sacramento Valley, California. She lives in San Diego.

LIZA DALBY is an anthropologist and writer whose specialist subject is Japan. She is the author of Geisha; Kimono: Fashioning Culture; memoir East Wind Melts the Ice and two works of fiction, The Tale of Murasaki and Hidden Buddhas.

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JOHN GIVENS teaches fiction writing at the Irish Writers’ Centre in Dublin. He received his Master of Fine Arts degree from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, studied art and language in Kyoto for four years and worked in Tokyo as a writer and editor for eight years. He has published the novels Sons of the Pioneers; A Friend in the Police; and Living Alone, Atheneum; and short story collection The Plum Rains.

L. Nakanishi-Lind

Fiction and non-fiction writer MICHAEL HOFFMAN, from Montreal, has lived in northern Japan for the last 30 years. His nonfiction appears regularly in The Japan Times and irregularly elsewhere.

He is the author of five books of fiction, his latest collection being Little Pieces: This Side of Japan.

SUZANNE KAMATA, originally from Michigan, has lived in Japan for most of her life. She is the author of the novel Losing Kei and The Beautiful One Has Come: Stories. She has also edited three anthologies, including The Broken Bridge: Fiction from Expatriates in Literary Japan and Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs.

ALEX KERR graduated in Japanese Studies from Yale University, later taking Chinese Studies as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University. He first went to Japan in 1964 and has lived most of his life in Japan and Thailand. His books include Lost Japan (1993), originally written in Japanese and the winner of Japan’s Shincho Literary Prize, best-seller Dogs and Demons (2001) and Bangkok Found (2010), the sequel to Lost Japan.

JAMES KIDD, based in London, writes for The Independent on Sunday, the South China Morning Post, The Observer, Time Out, The Jerusalem Post, The Daily Telegraph, The London Magazine and Square Meal magazine. He is a member of the advisory board of the Asia House Festival of Asian Literature in London. He wrote the introduction for the 20th-anniversary edition of Patricia Cornwell’s debut novel, Postmortem (2010).

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Contributors

JENNA LE’S poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Barrow Street, Frogpond, Modern Haiku, The New York Quarterly, Post Road, Salamander and other journals. She won the 2011 Minnetonka Review Editor’s Prize and was nominated for a 2011 PEN Emerging Writers Award.

Shanti Matulewski

Artist and illustrator MICHIRU MORIKAWA has won Britain’s prestigious International Manga and Anime Award and a Best New Manga Artist award from publishing house Kodansha. As a graphic artist, Morikawa has designed concert, theatre and public-service posters in Japan and Britain.

Singapore-born American novelist WENA POON is the author of Lions in Winter, The Proper Care of Foxes, The Biophilia Omnibus and Alex y Robert, which was serialised by BBC Radio Four as a Book at Bedtime. She won the 2010 Willesden Herald International Short Story Prize and has been nominated for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the Singapore Literature Prize and the Bridport Prize for Poetry.

BLAIR REEVE, who holds a BA degree in Japanese and English Literature, performed poetry in New Zealand in the mid- and late 1990s, recording some presentations on CD. Later he moved to Japan for seven years and now resides in Hong Kong. His poems have been published in Glottis, Takahe and JAAM, by online magazines Cha and Trout and in Japanese journals. He is working on a collection of short stories.

Tokyo-based photographer SHINICHI SATO hails from Oita in Kyushu. He specialises in interior and architecture-related photography, as well as the portrayal of quotidian cityscapes, which he shoots with a large-format, custom-made Ebony 45S flatbed view camera for detailed natural perspectives. In 2000, in conjunction with author Yumi Yoshimoto, he published the photography and short-story collection Where I Am.

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KEVIN SIMMONDS is a poet, composer and performance artist.

His publications include Mad for Meat, the anthology Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion & Spirituality and the edited collection Ota Benga Under My Mother’s Roof. His music has been performed around the world. Fellowships and commissions have been granted by Cave Canem, The San Francisco Arts Commission, the Fulbright Programme and the Jack Straw Writers Programme.

MASARU TAMAMOTO is a research associate at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge and a visiting bye-fellow of Selwyn College, Cambridge. He is also a senior fellow of the World Policy Institute, New York.

Julian Ryall

JANE WALLACE is an author and journalist based in London and Hong Kong. She published her debut novel, Into the Light, the first of the science fiction trilogy Epizodes, in 2010. She is a lifetime member of the Hong Kong Writers’ Circle and her short stories appear in many of its anthologies.

SEAN MICHAEL WILSON, from Edinburgh, lives and works in Japan, the only British professional comic-book writer to do so.

He has written 17 comic books for American, British and Japanese publishers, often working with Japanese and Chinese artists. He is also the editor of story collection AX: Alternative Manga.

AKIKO YOSANO (1878-1942) was a prominent Japanese poet and author who campaigned for pacifism, social reform and women’s rights. In her first collection, Midaregami (Tangled Hair; 1901), Yosano pioneered a revolutionary approach to tanka poetry, using it to convey a sensual and romantic individualism. Her death went largely unmarked during the chaos of World War II, but modern audiences are beginning to rediscover her work.

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Contributors

MONICA ZARAZUA, from Michigan, recently completed a Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and has been published in The Collagist and The Blotter. A former schoolteacher, she lives in Oakland, California.

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Art and the Artists YOSHITAKA AMANO is a renowned Japanese animator, cartoonist, designer and artist whose work has featured in print, films and popular computer games.

Hong Kong artist GAVIN AU reprises Weng Fen’s Staring at … photographic series to reflect on the absence of freedom of expression in China and an increasingly degraded urban environment in Hong Kong.

Artist WENG FEN, from Hainan, China, gained international attention with a series of photographs of people, usually girls, optimistically staring at horizons out at sea, or into the distance at newly constructed high-rise buildings below blue skies in Chinese cities.

HIROTO KITAGAWA, from Otsu City, Shiga Prefecture, Japan, graduated from the Kanazawa College of Art, later studying sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts, Carrara, Italy.

MOTOHIKO ODANI, from Kyoto, has been widely exhibited, most recently in Bye Bye Kitty!!! – Between Heaven and Hell in Contemporary Japanese Art at the Japan Society Gallery, New York.

Artist YUICHI YOKOYAMA lives in Saitama, Japan. In the last two years he has exhibited in Russia, Sweden, France and the United States. An English version of his graphic novel Garden of Baffling Delights was published recently.

VINCENT YU is a Hong Kong-based photojournalist who visited Saitama Prefecture a few days after the Tohoku earthquake shook Japan on March 11, 2011 (echoed in the 311 titles of his photographs).

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