Tokyo Read online

  Koji walked into the room he slept in as a boy. He stood before his father’s portrait, the image his grandmother had honoured with burning incense. Koji hated his father’s face, which had now become his face. He smashed the frame, took out the photo, and tore it into tiny pieces. He set fire to the fragments in a tea cup.

  When Koji heard the gate shut, he knew who it was.

  He slid back the screen and saw her on the path. His grandmother. Jabbing her walking stick before each step as though checking the firmness of the ground, whether it would take her eighty-nine years or not. She was going to the orchard to pick fruit from the laden boughs.

  Koji watched her fade into the trees. She had once told him not to be afraid if he saw his grandfather’s ghost.

  All afternoon, Koji waited. A vigil. He hoped she might return with a bag of oranges to press into juice, vegetables to chop into a stew.

  Finally he went downstairs and touched her hollow bones. Then he went outside, taking the dirt path that cut through a thicket of bamboo, between the shells of mangled cars and shattered glass. The same path he ran barefoot as a boy, before the lies of cities.

  In the fields he saw men, farmers, knee deep in the flooded plains. As he walked he understood how each year the oranges swell with rain and sun, and then fall. How you can chart the progress of the stars on the reflection of a lake. How the wind ripples through shoots of rice like a wave does an ocean. The earth moved, he knew this much. Oblivious to the act played out upon its surface.

  Koji stopped at the edge of the terraced fields, where the paddies gave way to mountains and myths. The boy in a peach and a girl from the moon, the lost princess. He took off his shoes and rolled up his trousers. He waded into the water, the soft mud between his toes.

  十二

  I LOVED MAZZY too much to be involved in her life. That was my greatest failure as her father.

  Flying back to a frigid England from California, we hit some nasty turbulence over the Atlantic. The plane dipped and lurched, felt like a rickety glider put together with tape and glue. Cups and trays tumbled. People screamed, cried and vomited. The flight attendants sat with grim faced attempts at smiles while lightning cracked and blazed through the portholes.

  Although I had no fear, I was well aware at how unhealthy, and selfish, this nihilism was.

  I knew I had to get out of London when I had a fight on the tube. My first week back at work lecturing post-grad students on a rainy, February morning. Splashing down the escalators and cramming onto a carriage with the other sodden and miserable commuters.

  There was an elbow in my ribs. I left it alone, stepped away. When the next rush of bodies hit the door I was pushed back onto the angry limb and prodded again.

  We were wrestling on the lap of a shrieking woman before a Polish man and a builder hauled us apart. When I got a proper look at my opponent I saw he was in his late fifties, deep creases in a tired, life-beaten face. I shoved away the peacemakers and got off the train. In fear. Not at the aged opponent, but as if I’d just looked at the mask I’d grow into.

  The memory of the Shikoku hitch-hike, the tunnel and the pearls, existed like a fairy tale kingdom. A Narnia that would reappear if I stepped again through the back of the wardrobe.

  Or returned to Japan.

  A month later, when news broke about a little known cult from Tokyo, the Pana-Wave Laboratory, attempting to net an Arctic seal strayed into a river, I saw the opportunity for another trip east.

  Escape.

  Pana-Wave members dressed in white to protect themselves from the electromagnetic radiation that communists, who were set on killing their leader, Chiho, a charismatic septuagenarian whose acolytes worshipped like a goddess, emanated from power lines. She believed the seal was confused by these evil rays, and that if they removed Tama-chan to the white-lined pool they’d constructed at their headquarters, before freeing her into the Arctic, the imminent May 15th doomsday would pass by harmlessly.

  I talked the university into a research grant for Japanese cultism, a popular field since the sarin gas attacks by Aum Shinrikyo. Then I packed my life into cardboard boxes and drove out to a storage garage near Twickenham before a final pint in a pub by the Thames at Isleworth.

  A day later I landed at Narita airport to be met by the tall and somewhat vampire-like appearance of Professor Yamada. Clad in black, with long dark hair falling down his cheeks, he was more Transylvanian fashion designer than fusty lecturer. And immediately likeable, a wide smile creasing around his sparkly eyes.

  On the dashboard TV in his station wagon, we watched a live feed of the Pana-Wave convoy parked across a highway. Since failing to repatriate the strayed seal the group had been searching for refuge to ride out the impending devastation, when the Earth would pass by an invisible tenth planet of the solar system. This close encounter would switch the north and south poles, trigger tsunamis and quakes, and wipe out humankind.

  Yamada pointed at the screen. “You see the swirls painted on the side of the trucks?”

  “They diffuse evil rays.”

  He laughed. That deep, diaphragm bellow. “And you want to study this?”

  I wasn’t back in Narnia yet, but a return to the tranquillity of a Japanese lifestyle, despite being in the midst of a city twice the size of London, was the beginning of a recovery, a transformation.

  Or simply forgetting. Living in a space that was free of Lydia memories. In Japan it was all me. My invention of a self. Friends and family were a mouse click away, but it’s the day to day living that defines who we are, the bed we wake from, what’s for breakfast, the angle of the sun, or lack of it, in the room you walk into when it’s time to start work. The stock-taking hours of a lifespan.

  I ate grilled fish and rice for breakfast. Bowls of miso soup. I kept my shoes clean because everyone else in the country did. I fell asleep with the audio files of my Japanese for Busy People textbook chattering in my dreams. I had stabs of self-awareness in the smallest things, the veins on a leaf that blew into a lift, the sound of rain striking a plastic bag.

  Yet the back of that magical wardrobe couldn’t be opened while I was boxed in a university office, collating data on Pana-Wave members’ jobs, ages and occupations, and reading reports from their employers and teachers. Then a day before the predicted end of the world police raided Pana-Wave sites across Japan, including the camp atop Gotaishi mountain where Chiho lived in a van called Arcadia.

  Born in Kyoto on the brink of World War II, Chiho was a baptised Christian who spent as much time at college as she did hospitalised from numerous suicide attempts. Accounts from her neighbourhood portrayed a woman who walked naked through the streets talking to the stars. Eventually she became a member of the now defunct God Light Association, and from the disbandment formed a breakaway sect combining Abrahamic ideology mixed with Buddhism, Hinduism and parapsychology. She also communicated with the dead, conversing with Pope John Paul II and Audrey Hepburn, as well as the rescuing aliens who were going to beam up the Pana-Wave believers from our doomed planet.

  The white clad convoy was hounded by the media. There was a moral panic in the press and public who feared another Aum-like cult. Understandably, as the group had constructed a mobile laboratory and dressed as scientists. Initially I focused, entertained by the Sci-Fi doctrine – ET as angel, the flying saucers to save the faithful – and distracted from my own failings.

  However, and not that unlike Pana-Wave members seeking escape from their daily lives, I needed an excursion beyond the Tokyo machine. A new fairy tale to lift me from the humdrum toil, the daughterless reality.

  Instead of buying a ticket for a UFO I flew down to Fukuoka and saw old friends from my teaching stint, guys stranded in their ex-pat lives, some happily, some less so, realising that despite being married, having children and speaking fluent Japanese, they’d always be seen as foreigners, gaijin. We drank beer and ate Haka
ta ramen, talked about England with the wistful longing of men twice our age.

  Then, rather than board the plane back to Tokyo, I took a train out to the northern highway and stuck out my thumb. I was too old for standing by the side of the road and waiting for a lift, but the destination was simply an excuse.

  And I never even got past Hiroshima.

  For hours I watched cars accelerate when they saw me, as if only hitting the ramp at maximum velocity ensured blast off and escape from the foreign hitcher. While trucks and buses rattled along the concrete bypass, I thought about Lydia, our final kiss outside the courthouse, the awkward hug. How she already saw me at some imagined distance.

  Still waiting on the slip road when a thunderstorm burst over my head, I was soaked by the time two university students pulled over. They laughed hard at my bad Japanese and angled the heater vents onto my sodden jeans. After a short drive they dropped me outside Fukuoka where I bowed a thank you and pulled out my camera. I have a photo of them holding rolled up umbrellas like kendo swords. My plan was to photograph every driver who picked me up, a gallery of good Samaritans.

  Next lift was a husband and wife, nurses who shared fruit salad from a Tupperware box. They giggled and looked between the seatbacks, including the husband, jerking the car over the white lines each time we drifted towards oncoming traffic. My lens captured an odd moment, as they leant together and touched cheeks, giving the effect of conjoined twins merged at the face.

  And then again a rainy highway, the swoosh of traffic on a wet road. Next hitch was an older couple and a similar photo, faces leaning in but not quite touching. Twins who’d survived the operation to separate one from the other.

  I made it to Kita-Kyushu and hiked up a hill to the youth hostel, an empty box, divided into smaller boxes, containing empty bunk beds. No other guests. Going from room to room I didn’t feel that I’d disturb a ghost, more that I actually was one.

  I resisted the urge to call friends by doing some yoga and reading Snow Country, a Kawabata novel about a wealthy Tokyoite falling for a rural geisha. A lonely man living out a fantasy affair. Then I stared through a screen window on a city that wouldn’t be here had it been sunny on the 11th of August 1945. Because cloud covered the Kita-Kyushu factories, the Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

  I dreamed of a flattened town. Wooden homes blown apart like models, the billowing mushroom. It was a startling vision to begin the morning with, and I slid from my sleeping bag and walked through an industrial estate, only looking for a lift when the weather bubbled and darkened.

  The sky came down in waves, a downpour so torrential you could imagine koi swimming in the gutters. Once the rain ceased I hopped a barrier and climbed a steep verge to the highway. The sun burned itself through the clouds. Steam rose from puddles and wet grass. I sat on my pack and watched mountains emerge from misty valleys, temple roofs and factories, pylons striding across the hillside like hikers fixed on safety ropes. Everything would be all right, I thought. Whatever happens.

  Then the Chief of Police for Foreign Crime pulled over and picked me up. He told me his job when I asked how he’d learned to speak such fluent English.

  “Interrogating drug runners and gangsters.” He smiled. “Russians, Filipinos, Chinese and Americans. We all watch the same cop movies.”

  An hour later his stately Lexus deposited me on the melting tarmac of a Hiroshima pavement. I have a photo of the Chief posing before his car as though the proud owner of a new purchase. The moment he pulled away, a hot wind blew more rain from a bruise of clouds.

  I was in the park, the site of the bomb. I sheltered from yet another storm with some tramps beneath a bandstand. They drank plum wine from jam jars. When a drain overflowed and flushed out a giant cockroach a barefoot drunk danced around it like a matador, his toothless fans cheering and calling for blood. He ran out of breath then speared it with the end of an umbrella.

  And then the rain stopped. I splashed through puddles, watched clouds drift where sixty years ago the sky had ignited. Standing before the skeletal ruin of the one surviving building, the charred rafters jutting like the ribs of a body, I realised I couldn’t face the tears and horror of the museum alone.

  I’d already walked the bare hall in Nagasaki, seen children’s paintings of exploding suns, fisted scrawls in red and orange. The matchstick families burning up in crayon.

  After the park I felt empty. Bereft is the word I want to use, but of what I’m not sure. I have film-clip memories of a covered shopping street, a restaurant with plastic seats. Then a walled garden, temples and limpid pools. Along a gravel path between tiny, manicured trees, I met a German tourist, also hefting a backpack. He told me his name, but I don’t care I’ve forgotten. I remember he was a scientist. Maybe genetics? Definitely a cold, exact subject. Together we climbed the pagoda and looked out over the city. The German suggested I get the bus with him to the youth hostel.

  I said, “They close early.”

  He said, “There’s nothing to do in Hiroshima after nine o’clock.”

  Then I just left, no polite excuses. I hated him for having the sense to eat and go to bed. I walked into a phone box and called Phil, an old teaching friend living in Matsuyama. No one picked up, so I called my mother in England. I’m not even sure why, and was glad when she didn’t answer.

  Next I walked into a bar I didn’t leave until 6am.

  It was a small, narrow room. The wooden walls lined with records. I sat on a high stool at the counter and drank a couple of beers before starting clumsy conversations with the other early birds, mostly scruffy, long haired drop outs of the Great Salaryman Race. My pocket dictionary and limited slang was all I had to patch together some banter. A guy with a ponytail and goatee told me he’d just come out of prison. When I asked, “For what crime?” he replied, “The whole world’s a prison.” But I may have misunderstood.

  Once the words ran out I performed some tricks, coins vanishing, reappearing, a pepper pot smashed in a beer towel then found whole in a handbag. They liked that one, the crowd gathered at the bar and buying me drinks, having me buy them drinks.

  And then everything changed.

  She was sitting alone in the corner, smoking and drinking. She wore a turquoise Chinese dress cut to the top of her thigh. Her long hair was plaited into a single braid that hung down her chest like black rope. I was helpless. All teenage hormone, current and volts. As far from that measured and logical psychologist as I could possibly imagine.

  Between thinking about speaking to her, and one more beer of courage, she left. Her chair and glass emptied. The warm glow of drinking with people whose names I didn’t know turned to a tightness in my chest, panic.

  I put down my beer, hurried outside, and apologised for following her onto the street. Then I asked if I could buy her a drink.

  **

  I took Mazzy on trips to museums and galleries, ambled around the tourist spots in Nippori and Ginza. We ate mochi cooked on glowing coals, sweet anko bean cakes shaped like fish. She made an effort for me, most of the time. Perhaps she felt sorry at my attempts to get her to like Tokyo, her father. She was happiest walking Michiko’s Labrador in Yoyogi Park, watching the performance artists sing and dance. Tokyo, young and loud. Hip, if her generation even use that phrase. And chatting to Michiko at a thousand words per minute. I left them to it, walked beneath the crows that swirled above Meiji shrine and over to the international book store in Shinjuku, soothing my ego by confirming that Gangs, Groups and Belonging was stocked on the Kinokuniya shelves.

  Then the brief holiday was over, and it was time for Mazzy to return to her studies. Yamada drove us out to The American School campus at Mita. She was pretending to be nonplussed about the whole thing, but the disinterest wasn’t convincing. She was looking forward to a new school, new friends. I’d already met with the gleaming Principle and been shown around the gleaming classr
ooms and the gleaming gym and met with some of the gleaming students. And the price of a semester matched the sparkle of the school.

  “Did you check out their tennis courts?”

  “All weather. The coach was ranked in the top hundred. A French guy.”

  I turned to her in the back-seat, tapping away at her screen.

  “Don’t pull out your phone in class.”

  “Jesus, dad.”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “What if my laces come undone? What should I do then?”

  I saw Yamada holding back a smile, and I gave her no more advice on how to be a student. Not after she reminded me that she topped most of her classes in San Diego. Instead I waited until we pulled up, wished her good luck and kissed her on the cheek, and then watched her walk through the gates.

  When I got back in the car, Yamada told me I should be proud. “She’s smart. Mature.”

  “I’m adjusting to the fact.”

  “Michiko went to the US a girl, and came back a woman.”

  “A woman,” I repeated. “That’s a euphemism I don’t want to think about.”

  I watched Mazzy till she disappeared through the school doors. She didn’t turn to wave. She didn’t need to.

  “Let’s take a walk,” suggested Yamada. “Stretch our legs.”

  We drove towards Tokyo Bay. More suspended highways. Rooftops filled with air conditioning units, the occasional forlorn smoker puffing beside a whirring fan. I saw into tiny apartments, a man in boxer shorts stirring a cup noodle, a woman in pink ear muffs ironing. Then beyond the city centre, sun and space, the sky streaked with furrows of cumulus. Nearer the bay factories and warehouses appeared. When the road arrowed at the glittering water we took an exit and spiralled down to a park raised from reclaimed land, clusters of fir trees and an empty sports pitch.

  “Before the earthquake,” began Yamada, “this would be filled with footballers and golfers.”