Tokyo Page 4

  I presented our findings to the MET and shook hands with my research assistants. We soon heard reports of effective crowd control, half a dozen officers penning fifty football fans threatening to riot. The basis of our strategy was a miniature divide and conquer, a technique that would evolve to control G8 demonstrations with water cannons. Kettling. Not a phrase we hatched, or a method we officially condoned.

  The divorce, losing my daughter, and a move back to England for a grim winter in a windowless lab, had taken all the joy from life. When I observed people, groups, cults and cliques, the ugly dysfunctions of a failing community, I was a student with no empathy for my subject. As if all the human parts of the world could be stripped down and examined like a car in a Haynes manual.

  I held out till January, and then flew to see Mazzy as arranged with Lydia. I had my little girl for three days. I picked her up from Del Mar and drove north towards Yosemite, one hand on the wheel, and one hand on Mazzy’s soft hair as she slept.

  I drove a horizon. Space. The car seemed to be getting smaller as the vista stretched into sky. I woke Mazzy because I thought we might shrink into nothing if I kept on driving without speaking.

  “Want some juice?”

  “No.”

  “Milkshake?”

  She shook her head. She looked from her elevated child seat to the low, scrub hills. Already she thought like me, suffered from the same waking grouchiness. Aged three she had to rebuild the world and its purpose each time she woke from a nap. Her mother would be ready for the day and all its dramas the moment she awoke.

  “We’re going to see some really, really huge trees,” I enthused.

  She had an electronic piano that played the sounds of different farm animals. I heard mooing cows and oinking pigs in reply. Barely speaking, and she already knew how to shun.

  I drove on, pointing out horses in fields, birds on house roofs, that kind of thing. Still, she prodded the toy and looked away.

  Then I broke the stalemate, and my principles, with a stop at McDonalds. A Happy Meal truce. Plastic toys and florid food. The company of other kids in the junk food madhouse of a thousand plastic balls and a creaking slide.

  She skipped across the parking lot, climbed into her seat, and danced a moulded clown along the dashboard. I pulled onto the highway, a tingling, tremulous joy. From a babble of random words, the muddle of imagined conversation that toddlers can entertain themselves with for hours, she burst into London’s Burning. She sang the rhyme all the way through, before I joined in on the verse behind, and the two of us sang in a raucous round, over and over, louder and louder, until we were shouting and laughing together.

  There would be photos in the snow at the lodge.

  A glimpsed, lone coyote. Padding through drifts outside the window.

  The two of us standing on a rock before the majestic granite of El Capitan.

  But no bittersweet moment would haunt me more than singing in the car.

  I drove Mazzy home and sat with Lydia in the kitchen. At a counter I’d fitted myself, carrying the ten foot length of pine from the truck with her uncle. She was already seeing someone else. A pair of men’s hiking boots in the cupboard. I didn’t dare raise the matter of who was touching my daughter, the thought alone made me sure I was capable of murder. There was nothing to say. Or there was too much to begin. I simply reported on what we’d done and where we’d been.

  “I’m glad you had this time with her, Ben.”

  Lydia had lost weight, painted her nails.

  “But that doesn’t mean you get the summer.”

  I’d proposed that Mazzy stay with me in London during June, and that I’d join my brother and his kids at a cottage in Norfolk for most of July.

  “It’s not about you.”

  “I know it’s not.”

  “You can’t ship her across time zones.”

  “She sleeps when she wants, anyway.”

  “Great. She’ll be awake all night and nap through kindergarten.”

  We sat and got nowhere. Or I got nowhere. Stability and bonding, home. The keywords in her defence. Or was she the prosecutor? I wondered if Lydia was afraid I’d snatch her away for good. That Mazzy would land in England and never see her mother again.

  I said, “Do you think I’m going to kidnap her or something? Is that it?”

  Lydia laughed. Dismissed the suggestion with a wave of her hand. “No, no. God, you fly over here for a weekend, play in the snow and feed her burgers, and then think you could manage the day to day care alone.”

  “Don’t start.”

  “It’s on your resume.”

  “What fucking resume?”

  “Your glorious parenting.”

  Then began the fire, the flames of argument and blame. Back to the moment on the beach, the father who let go of his daughter.

  Mazzy woke up, cried, and then ran upstairs to her room, slamming the door with all her tiny might.

  九

  WHEN KOJI STILL dreamed of cities, and the dreams were the glittering visions of a boy obsessed with manga and science fiction, he sat at the same wooden table in the same wooden house his father and grandfather had sat before. He ate rice, fish and miso soup. His grandmother poured more tea into his cup when it was empty. She shuffled across the tatami in her worn out slippers, talking to herself or reciting conversations from a different century. She woke at dawn every morning, creaking down the stairs into the dark kitchen. Her actions were automatic after fifty years of rising before her husband, even after he died, to cook his breakfast and boxed lunch.

  Koji’s mother cleaned office buildings and his father was a security guard on a construction site in Kobe. The three of them in a two room apartment. Weekends Koji rode the train back to his grandparents’ scrapyard, playing in the twisted metal and broken cars. All around the house, beyond the rusting fence and pot-holed driveway, the fields teemed with rice. His grandmother wobbled the dusty paths, balancing jugs of iced tea for the hired labour, back bent over and swaddled against the sun. She watched them pick and plant, wagged her gnarled fingers and spun folk tales about devils in the hills.

  She moved to Kobe from Tokyo after the great quake of 1923. She spoke about it as though it had happened yesterday. Confused by recent events, yet lucid in the past. She told Koji about a city of oil lamps and paper screen doors, the great wooden temples. “What the earth left standing, fire ravaged.”

  Koji’s mother and father had been ash since January 17th 1995. Many knew the date. It was the morning of the Great Hanshin earthquake, when tremors rippled beneath the port city and shook buildings to dust.

  Koji had woken in a room that wobbled like jelly. He called out for his mother and father, but neither were home. He ran outside in his pyjamas, between the rubble and bleeding people, the fallen signs and sparking cables. A toppled highway. How strange to see a vacant taxi slewed to a halt in the middle of a road, pedestrians crossing on a red signal. He thought he saw a policeman wearing a scarlet Kabuki mask, and then realised it was blood.

  Rescue teams were already clambering on the debris in search of survivors. A salaryman, still wearing his shirt and tie, helped a fireman carry a woman to an ambulance. She could’ve been any secretary in any office, her company uniform powdered with dust. She was as loose as a doll when they laid her on the stretcher.

  He never saw his parents’ bodies. His mother was scrubbing toilets in a ten-storey block that snapped like a dead tree. His father wasn’t guarding a construction site. He died watching pornography, inhaling smoke from a noodle shop that had caught fire above a basement cinema.

  Koji moved in with his grandmother. She was all he had. He was all she had. When she remembered who he was. Afternoons he came home and found her talking to his dead father. Then she’d talk to Koji as if he were her son. A pantomime routine of fear. Koji running home from school, his grandmother w
aiting for him, his father. Angry if he was late. Dismissing his homework with a brush or a mop, the list of chores. The crone and the orphan. The couple who slept in the same futon until Koji was in his teens, curled like a cat at his grandmother’s feet.

  十

  “YOU’VE GOT TWENTY minutes,” I called to Mazzy through the bathroom door.

  Yamada planned to welcome her to Japan with a nabe feast, and had invited us to his house in Omori, a down town neighbourhood near Shinagawa.

  “And the Japanese punctuality stereotype is true.”

  “I heard you the first time.”

  Mazzy had already unpacked, hung clothes and scattered make up on the dresser. While she was in the shower I snooped around her room. T-shirts folded, jeans and a skirt on the back of her chair. Her sketchbook. When she was a child this was also my territory. Every nook and cranny of her space, my space. Now I felt like a soldier behind enemy lines, a secret agent with the threat of death if caught opening a drawer, turning the page of her journal.

  When the shower stopped I slipped back into the living room. Guilty. Proud and scared. I’d missed a transformation somewhere between London and LA. A point where the girl I carried on my shoulders, the girl who cried if her teddy fell on the floor, was buying lipstick and lacy underwear.

  She got dressed and I stood on the balcony and thought about Freud. It’s all well and good to stand back and pontificate on the burgeoning sexuality of one’s own progeny, but by god try watching other men leer at your daughter while walking her down the street.

  We were on the train to Yamada’s when I slipped in the question of boyfriends.

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “I’m allowed to ask.”

  She shrugged, looked at the train map.

  “Your mum said there was someone called Josh.”

  “Dad,” she said through gritted teeth. “Forget it.”

  Passengers looked up from their books. Perhaps they’d understood every word. Or not a single one. Deciphered the body language, the matching eyes. The teenage daughter who had the upper hand of her father.

  Mazzy scanned the quiet carriage. “This train is like a library.”

  “Reading books is hardly a bad thing.”

  She peered over a schoolboy’s shoulder, saw a cartoon office lady, skirt and blouse torn, devoured by an octopus.

  “Well,” I added. “It depends on what you’re reading.”

  Yamada lived on a hill behind the station. Expensive, prized land passed down by his wife’s family. Between modern apartment blocks sat his traditional house, wooden shutters and paper screens, a raked gravel garden. Small pine trees had been set beside stepping stones that laid a path from the gate to the door, and we balanced our way across and rang the bell.

  His daughter, Michiko, had just graduated from MIT, and welcomed us in with an American accent that lit up Mazzy’s eyes. Within minutes they were wandering the house with his wife, Hitomi, a music teacher who was as adept with the violin as she was at recalling the intricate histories of dead composers.

  After a tour of her home, Hitomi fluttered around the kitchen, chopping vegetables and checking steaming pots, while our daughters popped out to fetch dessert.

  Yamada proposed a drink. “A toast.”

  We went through to his study. Rows of files, books and bottles. He had a whisky collection to rival any Scotsman, and had gathered single malts from specialist distilleries around the globe.

  “A winner first,” he said, sliding out a bottle. “The Nikka Yoichi. 20 years old.”

  Yamada unscrewed the lid for me to savour the aroma.

  “Cedar wood?”

  “And walnuts, roasted pecans. You wouldn’t know it was 53% proof.”

  I watched him carefully pour.

  “This is what we do best. Take someone else’s idea and improve it.” He passed me the glass. “Well, what we used to do best.”

  “Shall I drink?”

  “Let it sit for a while, admire the nose.”

  I hovered over the glass. Inhaled fruit cake and chocolate. I looked at Yamada, eyes closed over the bouquet, the enigmatic man who’d represented Japan at kendo, who knew more about cult life than cult members.

  “I never really asked what got you into social psychology, this obsession with conformity.”

  “I’m real inaka mono.” He smiled. “Country pumpkin.”

  “Bumpkin,” I laughed. “Though pumpkin works.”

  “Bumpkin, yes.”

  “The outsider in the big city.”

  “Free from my hometown. Expectations.”

  “My brother says I was a born psychologist. Awkward. A watcher rather than a doer.”

  Yamada nodded. “Once you set yourself apart from the group, you see it for what it is. There was a moment when I was young.” He clicked his fingers, searching for the word. “Epiphany.”

  “This sounds interesting.”

  “Whisky first.”

  We touched the drinks and toasted. “Kampai.”

  “To daughters.”

  Yamada sipped and appreciated in silence, savouring each mouthful, studying the dark gold in his glass.

  I drank too, tasting a hint of liquorice. “Stunning,” I said, feeling like the amateur connoisseur.

  “Subarashii,” Yamada confirmed, taking another, reverential sip, before he looked up and talked.

  “I lived with my grandparents. My father was working in Osaka, and my mother lived in Nagoya, running a clothes shop. I was told they lived apart for business reasons, and ignorantly I believed them. Anyway, my granddad kept some animals. A typical small farm. I knew he’d fought in China, and been a prisoner of war in Siberia, but this was never talked about. Well, until junior high school. I came home and dumped my bag in the kitchen. He’d cut himself sawing wood, and was sitting at the table drinking a beer with his bandaged hand. He gave me a glass of milk and told me to do my homework. I sat down and he picked up my history textbook. We both read quietly, a peaceful country kitchen. Then. Then he started, mumbling, slapping the pages. ‘Nani kore? What is this? A fantasy?’ I told him it was about Japan in the war. ‘Lies,’ he exploded. ‘They teach you fairy tales?’ I’d never seen him like this. I was terrified. He flipped through the book before slamming it on the floor.”

  Yamada shook his head and finished his drink. “Poor man.” He opened the mini-freezer by his desk and scooped out more ice cubes. From a shelf he took down another pair of tumblers. “New whisky. New glasses.”

  He gave no introduction to the pedigree of the next bottle, thinking about the past in his head, not the aged malt.

  “Did your grandfather tell you the truth?”

  “Ten years later. I was on a break from university when he took me into the garage. He said, ‘The nail that sticks out will be hammered down.’ A Japanese proverb about following the crowd. But he added, ‘Better to dent the hammer with your head than crouch with the nails.’”

  Finally, his grandfather told him about fighting in Manchuria. Marching across China under the rising sun of the Emperor.

  “His best friend was lucky. A sniper killed him instantly, and his body was sent back to Japan for a proper funeral. When a dead soldier couldn’t be recovered, his friend would cut off the little finger and mail it to the family. It was the fingerless corpses, the normalcy of washing rice in a blood-red river, that my grandfather admitted was more terrifying than death.”

  Not until a week before he died could he share the experience, and only then with his grandson, not his wife or his daughters.

  “He died in shame. His unit captured a group of Chinese soldiers. They came under fire from another platoon, and his commanding officer ordered him to execute them. If he’d disobeyed an order in front of the enemy, his superior officer would’ve shot him. Although he couldn’t refuse t
he command of bayoneting the prisoners, he said that he’d die a criminal for committing a criminal act.”

  Yamada finished his third whisky and put his hand on the bottle. Then he paused, thought better of another drink to cloud the story.

  “Not just my grandfather. He held everyone from the Emperor down to those who physically carried out the atrocities responsible.”

  I looked up from the ice bobbing in my glass, finished an expensive, award-winning whisky, and could barely recall its taste.

  Yamada studied the woodblock print on the wall. A lake scene with falling snow, a boat punted to shore, the faces of the female passenger and the boatman turned away from the viewer.

  Before we had the chance for any trite conclusion, the theories on following and leading, the blind conformer, we heard the front door open, the rustle of bags and coats, our daughters.

  十一

  A WEEK AFTER starting his first job as a junior tax clerk, Koji rode the train back from his company dormitory and found his grandmother in the hallway. She’d been dead for three days. Her desiccated body no heavier than a pile of twigs.

  Koji grabbed the phone to call someone.

  Who?

  He sat for a while on her favourite cushion. He expected her to move. To get up and shuffle into the kitchen and start cooking.

  He studied the black and white wedding photo. Both his grandparents dressed in silk kimonos. His grandfather proud and stern, a hint of playing the samurai in the antique costume. His grandmother an ivory figurine, face white with heavy make up, her dark, painted lips.