opened the desk drawer and pulled out another two hundred dollars.
Keiko and Vera were ecstatic. It would go toward their tickets.
Anger was not all that drove Vera to go to a strange country. There was something more grand and admirable, under the rage of an abandoned child. Japan was a palace of marvels. She wanted to go there to find beauty and tranquillity and mystery. She had seen this in the pictures. This was the Japan of her grandfather’s travels, of his life. She did not understand, or remember, that the pictures were ancient, that the world they described was one hundred and more years old. What difference did it make? The pictures spoke the language of dreams. She went to find the land where it was spoken.
But the language of dreams is loss. The love of beauty is elegy. Made of flesh, we see with the eyes of the past, over the shoulders of the living. The older Vera will tell this to her collectors, the ones who love the ukiyo-e but do not understand why. The ‘here and now’ that the ukiyo-e artists carved and coloured was already dying, even in its own time. It is useless to mourn or to fight it. We might as well celebrate. It is a kind of ecstasy.
But so dangerous, in the West. To give in is to give up ambitions. She will see this, in the prints she had examined so minutely, in her grandfather’s elderly wisdom. To adopt an inspired idleness, an absorbing ritual. It was so foreign and alluring in the land of her upbringing, her Canadian, Protestant upbringing. Though sad, Belle was never idle, but earnestly found digging up the flower beds or mowing the grass, rattling the dishes in the drying rack or sighing over the wringer washer. Never so beautifully turned out as the Japanese in their riotously painted kimonos behind a screen with chopsticks in their hair, busy in occupations of the moment, blissfully turned away from, but patiently awaiting, eternity. Vera would not get it right herself, not for many years.
Now she had an ambition.
She would go to the place where he had been, this grandfather of hers.
She would go into the pictures.
Maybe that is what happens to people who have been abandoned.
They go to the place where their abandoners have gone.
She went to where her grandfather had been.
But her mother had also left her.
She could not go to where Belle had gone. She would not go.
Later, when life was very dark and when she was nearly the age Belle had been when she died, Vera did think of going where her mother had gone. Of taking the bus, paying the exact fare, making her way along between the rows of seats, as that young mother with the faraway husband had done, lurching because her balance had never been good and it was worse with the medicine. And then ringing the bell for a stop. The handbag carefully left by the side of the bank.
She did not go that way.
‘For that you may be proud of yourself,’ said the sword polisher.
‘Do you think so? Some days I wonder.’
He offers neither condemnation nor praise.
‘You had another path to find.’
3 Uke-nagashi Warding off: take and give back
Yokohama 27 February 1936
High, light piles of snow sat on every flat surface–benches, roofs, even the narrow edges of the incomprehensible street signs. The sky was black and luminous; red beams of emergency lights crisscrossed in the sky above their heads. Trucks were parked across each end of the empty street. Apart from distant sirens, there was not a sound.
‘This is not Japan,’ whispered Vera. ‘We got off the boat at the wrong place.’
Keiko stood on the portside walkway, one cloth satchel in each hand. She lifted her face to the night and sniffed the sea air, trying to sense her way back. She had been gone for nearly three years. She had told Vera so many times that she would cry tears of joy when she stepped off the boat onto Japanese soil. But her face showed confusion and doubt.
The street was nearly empty. Keiko swayed. There were always crowds, cars and streetcars, men stepping wide-legged in kimono or swiftly in black suits with round black bowler hats. There were always women with babies bundled on their backs. Now there was no one. Then into the emptiness came the sound of a snare drum. And footsteps, so many. Around the corner came a column of soldiers marching on the broad, empty street. The men’s eyes did not look anywhere but straight ahead. On and on they came.
This was the Japanese Imperial Army. Keiko and Vera stood silent, in awe. The soldiers held their bayonets over their right shoulders; one man in front held the flag, that red ball of a sun with its radial spokes.
The column of soldiers turned a corner and was gone. The footsteps echoed for long minutes after.
When the army had passed, one bystander ran, ducking from doorway to doorway. Another, in an army uniform, trained a limp fire hose on the front of a building. No water came out of the nozzle. It was as if he were waiting for the building to burst into flames.
Keiko told Vera to stand against a wall. She darted across the street; surely the man with the hose would tell her what was happening.
Vera watched their terse exchange. Keiko walked back slowly toward her charge. Vera could tell she was shocked despite her composure. Her shaky English was not quite up to the task of explanation. There had been a ‘fight’ in the army. More than a thousand army soldiers had gone into the Diet, the government chambers. Certain important men were dead, killed by soldiers. Junior officers had killed their superiors. ‘Savagely and without regard for the aged,’ was what the soldier had said. They even tried to kill the Prime Minister. What would happen next? Keiko had gone pale. ‘He said we should go home while the trains are still working. And stay inside.’
‘But what home?’ Vera asked. It was the first time she had thought about it: where would they live?
Keiko dug into her satchel for a headscarf. She wrapped it over Vera’s head, tying it at the nape of her neck, as if in that way she could make the girl blend in. Then, carrying their luggage, they began to make their way through the city to the train station. It was not very far.
Vera gazed around her; overhead the searchlight beams slashed and slashed the darkness. A man stood silently in front of the newsstand reading a sandwich board. Keiko read it out loud. ‘The Emperor has said the rebels will be caught and punished.’
Vera had not known until then that there was an emperor.
‘The officers will be killed. And others are killing themselves,’ Keiko said.
Vera did not understand why they would do that. Keiko spent some of their few yen to buy the newspaper. She was scanning the article for names.
‘Is someone you know in the army?’ Vera asked.
Keiko shook her head.
‘Someone who came to our village used to be in the army. But I believe he is not any more.’
She did not find his name, and Vera could
