Made In Japan. S. Parks J.
you telling the truth, Jess?’ It was so little to ask.
Jess turned emphatically and looked at her wide-eyed and innocent.
Hana was as ready to swallow this as a pill. She bound the plait and said they missed her at the memorial.
Jess vehemently kicked aside an obstruction on the floor and mumbled about school as if she were offended to have been challenged.
Why was it, Hana wondered, with a sense of injustice, that Jess singled out her walking boots for attack? ‘I won’t ask why you couldn’t get them to assign someone else to class today and come with me.’
She left it open for Jess to convince her that she had had no choice in the matter and the effort she made to persuade her was payment enough. Hana did, however, have difficulty in imagining that Jess lacked the ability to coerce them into a timetable change for a memorial service.
In the small room, the clutter, lately an object for her own complaints, made the space smaller still.
‘I don’t know why they asked us to the ceremony,’ Jess said finally ‘Still, it’s not everyday you go to a reincarnation. How was it? ’
‘Very complicated and involves forceps.’
‘Forceps?’
‘For the rebirth.’
‘I didn’t know.’ Jess shifted uncomfortably.
‘And rubber gloves.’
Jess finally got it and laughed hard and loud. When the laughter trailed off, Hana opened up.
‘I had the feeling—’ She paused, not sure if she should broach it. ‘I had the feeling that the priest recognized me.’
Jess snorted. ‘You think he knew your mother? Some random Englishwoman from decades back?’ Hana closed the subject down, though she was on the back foot that afternoon.
She regretted mentioning it.
‘It can’t be that easy,’ Jess continued. ‘How old was this priest?’
‘He was old,’ Hana replied.
‘How old? I know you want to believe it but the chances of him knowing her are miniscule.’
Hana was hurt. It was, of course, unlikely and she dismissed the idea. She slumped resignedly and stuffed the neon laces inside her boots.
Jess felt obliged to be more encouraging. She was reluctant to raise the other option but she went ahead anyway.
‘Or maybe you look like him?’
Hana knit her brows.
‘I mean your own father.’ Jess’s tone was softer now. ‘How did he die, if you don’t mind me asking?’
Hana had never known a father and so could not mind.
‘I never said he died.’
‘Un bel di, vedremo’
−Puccini, Madama Butterfly
Imperial Palace Hotel, Tokyo, 1989
Naomi was getting used to the heavy thread count of the cotton sheets on her bare skin. Changed daily, they barely bore a trace of his heavy sleep. At first, the starched arrival of room service, bringing so many scratched and buffeted chaffing dishes, had delighted them, though it had never been possible to eat it all. They had tired of the cloying delights of the international hotel and Josh now preferred to eat breakfast elsewhere, partly because he wanted the company bill to bear scrutiny, and because they had lived in the hotel for so much longer than expected.
Naomi was charged with finding a rental apartment and so far they had failed to agree on anything suitable. This morning they were again going to meet the agent who would find their rental in the city. Though Tokyo housed thirty eight million people there should be a good deal of choice out there for their budget; it was just that she didn’t speak the language and she had no idea where the signs might direct her.
Her morning start had become increasingly languid when the rest of her day stretched to a distant vanishing point.
Today, as he slipped the last limb into his blue suit, Josh warned, ‘It’ll be busy so do leave early.’
And, like a skimming stone, he threw the glossy city plan entitled ‘The Detailed Map of Tokyo for Business Man and Tourist’ onto the bed beside her.
‘I am neither.’ She reached to catch it and was genuinely daunted by the question of what lay between the two but Josh had no time for her existential meanderings this morning and was keen she first found them a place to live.
‘I’ll meet you there.’ He dropped a kiss on the crown of her head and left her alone with her question. He was generally more comfortable with imperatives and they would talk over breakfast.
In the three weeks since their arrival she recognized her rootless existence had begun to strain the relationship that she had cherished so much as to drop everything and follow him to nurture it. The heavy closure of the fire-retardant door reduced her to the privileged isolation of an inmate of a luxury Wandsworth prison. And this brought back thoughts of her home in Clapham. Annoyed at her own distortion of the privileges she enjoyed, it brought her once again to ask why she had made the rash decision to leave her course at the Architect’s Institute in London and follow him to Tokyo.
If she did not leave the room soon she would suffocate. She threw the map aside and leapt out of bed. She left the lobby in summer whites, prompting the hotel staff to whisper about the ghost on the 47th floor who kept time like no other guest among the business clients in the hotel.
At Shibuya Station she was caught in the spring tide of dark heads, where a crowd the size of a billing at the Hammersmith Palais negotiated six or more optional exits. She was carried across the eddying tide of people to a pillar where the current divided as if at the foot of a bridge spanning a river in spate. She retrieved the city plan wedged in her bag; Josh would be waiting for her. A master in origami had ingeniously folded the map and once opened it clung unhelpfully to her body as a set of streamers escaped on a strong downdraft. She gave up trying to scan the oscillating paper as it flapped aggressively at her face and tore as she tried to restrain it. He had given her a couple of landmarks to head for; first was the Hachikō Statue on the south-west side of the station. Below her a grid of crossings led like an Escher print to every point on the compass in a Kafkaesque joke. From one of the branches she should take the hill up to where they were to meet. She checked her watch and it was nearing 9.30 a.m. She was lost for a lead and he would be exasperated again. She closed her eyes.
Though now used to the city’s disregard for personal space, she became aware of an individual standing beside her.
‘You lost? Want some help?’
The girl was about her age, unusually tall and her hair was styled in a short bob. Naomi began folding the map, very roughly.
‘I’m trying to find the Hachikō exit.’
Her short, close-fitting cotton dress was covered in old roses. And she led her towards the exit.
‘You know about Hachikō?’
All it took was a shake of the head and she started on a story as if she were a complementary city guide.
‘Every day an old professor left his dog outside the station for the day when he commuted.’
Her English was good. She probably made a habit of picking up lost souls for language practice. A dog story. Naomi looked at her watch.
The girl upped her pace and continued her explanation.
‘He was old and—’ They scuttled down a flight of stairs on a second