she asked.
“He never picked up the stone.”
“So he didn’t. But he expressed perfect displeasure, often enough.”
“They cut off Mogens’ ring finger with his wedding ring on it and sent it to Copenhagen, on the very same flight he was supposed to continue on from Harbin. I bet you didn’t know that.” Owen said.
“I did know that. I know about Unit 731 and their ‘medical research.’”
“How?”
“Kawabata told me.”
“Kawabata?”
“Yes.” Her sudden self-satisfaction seemed tinged with regret at his name.
“So he survived the war?”
“Of course he did.”
“Then he brought you the sheets himself.”
“It’s possible.”
“It’s possible? Such coyness, lady, doesn’t become you.”
“Yes, he brought them. There may have been others involved.”
“What others?”
“Why don’t you ask him?”
“He’s alive?”
“Of course. Sometimes Japanese live long lives. Longest in the world , you know. Are you surprised I’m alive? I don’t really think so. Kawabata is probably younger than me.”
“He’s alive ? Where is he alive?” Owen was furiously calculating. Kawabata would have to have been young in Manchuria, but that made perfect sense. The youth would see the atrocity clearly, and find a way to overcome it. Or at least live in conscience with it, but he’d read conscience was not a Japanese property. Those who argued God existed because something had to explain the presence in human beings of a sense of right and wrongness needed to live in Japan, Owen had decided.
There were no interior voices. Conscience quite kayoed. Instead, the antennae were supremely fixed on messages from the group outside. It was not that Kawabata was diligently listening to outside voices; a good Japanese he had never heard anything else. He knew he existed because neighbors existed. If they vanished so did he, was that it? But still he brought extra pages—the young supremely obedient, supremely fixed person opted to bring an extra sheet. Perhaps he was part Danish? He managed to store extra sheets safely somewhere and after the war bring them safely home. In the midst of the inferno a hand took hold of him and simply guided him through a simple kindness. The Samaritan paused on the roadway out of what? Messages directly from the supreme being? The example of Christ? It made no sense to think of Christ as a modest risk-taker, did it?
Owen repeated as if to savor the syllables, “Kawabata is alive?”
“Oh yes and very fit. A tennis player. I used to play tennis and I was very good. But not now,” her voice trailed off.
“A tennis player?”
“I said that.”
“Not a saint. A tennis player.”
“Yes, not a saint, but I suppose he might be—mightn’t he? No I think not. Too worldly. Like you.”
“And he comes to see you?”
“He came once. Just once. He’s not a regular. He’s not a ‘returner’. I didn’t have information for him.” She smiled.
“And tea sweets.”
“Boxes and boxes of them. This place is littered with them. And of course I offered him some, but he wasn’t much interested. Do you play tennis?”
“Avidly,” Owen answered.
“Then you must play with him some time.”
“Why?”
“Because I think he’d teach you something. He’s very precise in his demeanor and very serious. He always turned down the sweets. Unlike you.”
“I understand Japanese relentlessly push away proffered food,” Owen said quickly, smiling at her.
“And they squat on their haunches to smoke at train stations,” she replied.
“Before they serve and run to net.”
“They seldom go to net, as well you know. They’re back court players, and so is Kawabata, I bet.”
“So he came here more than once.”
“Never. I just surmise certain things. It’s a generalization I can offer after a long and thoughtful life.”
“I wonder if Mogens died thoughtfully.”
“I do wonder that myself, sometimes. And I wonder if he might be waiting for me in the afterlife.”
“Waiting with vengeance?”
“Oh yes. He might not believe, as we Japanese do, that the dead are all good. So there I’d be quite dead and quite good, but he might not believe it.”
“And would he have reason?”
“Perhaps Kawabata-san might know that.”
“You confided in him?”
“No. But perhaps Mogens did. He’d after all, be the one to know if vengeance was required, wouldn’t he?”
“Was it?”
“Perhaps. But we’re forbidden vengeance, aren’t we?”
“We are indeed,” Owen said. “But Kawabata might not be. Is Kawabata a Christian?”
“Heavens no!” she answered.
Her instant response surprised him, and he suddenly realized that in the non-Christian world, which presumably Kawabata inhabited, retribution might be more than just possible. It occurred to Owen that delivering the scribbled, emotional sheets to Mioko might have been more than simply informing her of Mogens’ situation——rather a sharing in its degradation, a sharing of pain. Or more than that, a getting even, perhaps a direct assault on her for whatever role she might have had in Mogens’ fate. Or might Kawabata be simply the supreme naif who did as he was asked—out of some strange very Japanese amalgam of obedience and compassion?
On the train back from Suma, the gentle rocking summoned Mariko again and her slick softness blended off into the darkness of the Inland Sea to his right, undulating in the reflected light of the train car in the window, gathering him up in the steady clicking of the steel wheels, spinning him back into that wavy beachball hard breathing so that he felt like a child slowly congealing in freezing slushy water whose arms were being hacked, then sawed off. He heard Mogens’ coughing question, “Why, Lord, do you show me these things?”
And he heard Mariko’s sly
