snow began to fall, silent, and pink where it crossed the hard white beams of searchlights.
It was morning when they got off the train in Toba. The station was on a platform, high above the ground. There was snow here also but the sky was blue; behind were mountain slopes. At least the peaks were white and high and reminded Vera of the pictures. Not far away, the town ran down to a beach; beyond it was a bay of small, tree-covered islands.
Keiko and Vera carried their wrapped bundles through narrow streets, their feet cold and wet. They came to a house and the door was opened to them. The woman who looked at them gave a little cry and covered her mouth, and then ran behind a screen. A man came out. He was grave and stern, but not very old. He looked at Vera, and embraced Keiko, but he did not smile. Vera stood with her head hanging down. She was so tired she could have slept leaning against the doorpost. The man took pity, and let them come in and gave them a place to sleep.
When they rose it was night again. Vera sat in absolute silence; she could not say one word to anyone, and no one would look her in the face. It was as if she did not exist. This invisibility gave her a curious freedom. She watched, and listened. What she observed was that, overnight, Keiko had grown. She was a tall woman here, and stood straight. Her glance was direct. Her voice was loud and her movements decisive. She was Mrs Lowinger: she had been away in Canada and she had come home. Vera could not understand her words, but she knew that Keiko explained her as James’s granddaughter, now Keiko’s charge.
Vera did understand that the people in the house said they could not stay longer than a few days. The children were afraid of her. They asked if she were a devil, and Vera understood the question, and blushed fiery red. Their mother told the children to be quiet, but she did not look at Vera any more.
Keiko agreed that they must leave: all she needed, she said, was a bicycle, a job, and a little house. She repeated these words in English to Vera.
‘Come,’ she said, after the evening meal.
They went out of the little slope-roofed house and walked down the slippery hill to the shops. Men passed them going up; they bowed and greeted Keiko, restrained, but respectful. In the centre of the town there was a tangle of narrow streets. Along the streets were little shops with cloth banners hanging beside the doors. Keiko pointed into the dark insides. Here was where the men drank. Here was a cinema, new since Keiko had left. Here was a noodle shop, run by an old aunt of hers, and there a stationer’s.
There were few people out on the streets. The night air was raw with icy sleet, and on the pavements was a thick layer of slush. Vera begged to go back to the house. Once there, she slept again, hoping that she would wake up and find herself back in Vancouver.
But she did not.
On the second day, as soon as the household was awake, Keiko and Vera dressed and went outside. Again they walked down the hill into the town. This morning the sun was shining on the iced pavement and the women were abroad. One of them exclaimed in joy when she saw Keiko. She put down the bicycle she was pushing and embraced her. More women followed her example, and in a few moments Keiko and Vera were in the centre of a crowd of exclaiming, laughing women. They were all small, with rounded, strong bodies; under their old-fashioned bonnets with long brims were bright, curious eyes. Keiko proudly introduced Vera to each one. These were her friends, the ama divers, she told Vera.
These women stared frankly into Vera’s face. Their eyes were laughing and they looked her curiously all over, making exclamations to themselves. They pointed at her hair. But they were delighted. And Keiko was so proud. If Vera could have felt anything but a seething self-pity she would have been ashamed, as she had never presented Keiko this way when they were in Vancouver.
Keiko took her to the temple and to the vegetable stalls and to the harbour where the fishing boats came in. They walked up the hillside to get a view of Ago Bay, and Keiko showed Vera the rafts that floated in the protected inlets. These belonged to Mikimoto, the pearl king. Keiko explained that there were baskets of oysters suspended in the water under these rafts, and each of these oysters had been seeded with a pearl. The oysters had to be protected from cold and seaweed and other enemies, so that the pearls could grow.
But even the pearls could not pacify Vera. She was cold and afraid. Where had Keiko brought her? This was not Japan. It was frigid, and poor, and there were soldiers in the streets. The State of Emergency because of the attempted coup in the army continued. At night Vera lay on her floor mat and heard raised voices, harsh cries, and the sounds of drunkenness from the street.
Inside the home it was not quiet either. Keiko asked her brother to lend them money. The sounds of their arguing passed through each paper partition. Vera could not understand. She asked Keiko: what does it mean. ‘My brother does not have money,’ said Keiko. ‘He goes to borrow from a loan shark.’ There was little money to be had anywhere: the war in China was draining them all.
‘But then it is a bad war,’ said Vera. It seemed obvious.
‘You cannot say this. You do not speak against what the Emperor has asked of us. We must sacrifice.’
Then the brother relented and said that the country was running out of oil, but that you could not say that either, because it was a military secret.
‘If it is a secret, how do you know it?’ Keiko asked, full of scorn. ‘Do they tell you their mind, these lieutenants of the Emperor?’
‘Be careful what you say,’ the brother said, his face darkening. ‘You went away. You do not understand what we’ve become.’
But he did one thing for her, perhaps because her presence with the white girl made him fearful. He came home to say that the charcoal man had received his call-up papers. He would leave immediately, probably even tonight. As he was a single man, and lived alone, his house would be empty. The brother had arranged that Keiko could live there. She could put the rent the charcoal man asked for in a special metal box and save it for when he came home from the war. Now the brother stood at his door with his feet apart and his hands on his hips. Vera and Keiko packed their bags without even seeing the little house. When they left, the brother’s wife pressed some paper money into Keiko’s hand.
‘Perhaps the charcoal man will never come back from the war,’ said Vera, as they trudged back down the hill.
‘That is terrible to say,’ said Keiko.
The house was high up on the other side of the town, near the forest. Black dust was on everything, as if the owner had slept with charcoal and eaten with charcoal and lived with charcoal piled around him. Keiko began to clean. Vera sulked, until she could not stand herself any more, and then she got up and helped to wash the floor. The good thing, Keiko said, was that the owner had left a small pile of charcoal behind the house, and they could use it to keep warm. When that ran out they would go up into the forest to collect firewood.
With the money from her brother’s wife, Keiko bought a bicycle. They bought eggs and fish and a large bag of rice. It would last a few weeks, Keiko said.
‘I begged before, from Miss Hinchcliffe. I not beg again,’ said Keiko. ‘I am ama diver and I will find work.’
She went to the inspectors’ office and put her name on the list. But there would be no diving until May. In winter her fellow ama worked for Mikimoto cleaning oysters at the pearl farm. But even Mikimoto had fewer jobs now than before. All over the world the Depression had cut into the pearl business. Keiko spoke to her friends in the street. She heard that some ama had to go dekasegi, away from home. Some worked as farm labourers. There were no machines for this work, only women
