Chameleon (14 page)

5

O’Hara said nothing during the drive back to Kyoto from Osaka, nor did Sammi encourage any conversation. He knew Kazuo was deep in thought. The house of Tokenrui-san was on the curve of a street in the old section of Kyoto. It was built in 1782 and had changed very little since then. The cypress bark on its sloping roof had been replaced many times through the years, as had the waist-high bamboo fence encircling it. But the cypress columns around its railed veranda were originals, as were the delicate screens in the main room, one depicting the return of a warrior to his home, and another, by Isono Kado, a famous artist of the seventeenth century, of a hawk perched on a pine-tree branch. The paintings had been rescued from one of the royal houses during the great fire, which had destroyed more than half the temples and homes of Kyoto in 1788.

For years the house was inhabited variously by students, monks and Heian priests, and it fell into disrepair. Then, in 1950, Kimura’s son-in-law, Tasaguyi, had acquired it and restored it as a wedding gift and dowry to Kenaka, Kimura’s only child. But now Tasaguyi and Kenaka were gone, and he lived there with his two grandchildren, Samushi and Tana.

The house was close to the street and was built like a half-moon, its inside curve facing a lush flower garden built around the fish pond which was fed by a stream that gurgled constantly under a corner of the veranda of the main house. The carp and goldfish, some of them more than four feet long, had been there so long, Kimura had forgotten how old they were.

At the far side of the garden, facing the back of the main house, was a workshop that had been built ten years after the main house. It was this small dwelling, with its large main room and small tub room, that had been O’Hara’s home during the two years he trained for his initiation into the shichi, the inner council, of the higaru-dashi, as well as his sanctuary during the long months of his recent exile.

The sweet smell of wisteria seemed to be everywhere as they entered the main gate and walked around the corner of the house toward the garden. And there was always a silence there, as if God had turned off the sounds of the world. He said good night to Sammi, thanked him and went around to the back to his place of peace, a sanctuary where he had retreated to consider his plight and make the decisions which had kept him alive during the long ordeal of the Winter Man.

From a group of trees near the doorway of the house, there were sounds; a twig cracking, a leaf falling, followed by a low, friendly ‘ruff.’

‘Hi, kids,’ O’Hara said to the big male akita dog, Kazuo-dan, and his mate, whom O’Hara had named Konsato, which means ‘concert,’ because when she was a puppy she bayed constantly: at the moon, the stars, the sun, the blossoms and anything else she could raise her head and howl at. The male, a large silver-gray dog, its tail curved up over its hindquarters, stepped out of the shadows to greet him. He was a regal animal, his bloodlines tracing back to a sire that was once guard dog to an emperor, and he carried himself with restrained élan. The female was more frivolous. She hopped about, licking O’Hara’s hands and nibbling Kazuo’s neck, which the male treated with a kind of annoyed tolerance.

He could sense Tana’s presence before he saw or heard her. There was a lacquered vase of white chrysanthemums in the tokonama which faced the door as he entered. She had prepared a snack of makizushi, tiny rolls of vinegared rice wrapped in thin seaweed and stuffed with asparagus tips and fish or seafood, and placed it on a low table near the sliding rosewood doors that led to the garden. His silk nightshirt was laid out beside hers near the futon on his bed.

Once inside, he could hear her singing softly, somewhere in the back of the house.

It was going to be difficult, telling her. He turned into the lavatory which was off a short hallway that led from the door to the main room. He slid the door shut and got out a straight razor and a mug of shaving soap and, after lathering his face, he shaved off his beard. As he shaved, his eyes kept drifting to the mirror and the reflection of the photograph of the Hichitani Chemical plant behind him.

It was a grim, dark, foreboding picture, showing the plant as a gray mass with tall stacks, lurking under an ominous tumour of polluted clouds. In the foreground, the polluted sky was reflected on the shiny ridges of the waves of the bay. The photograph was one of hundreds shot by the American photographer W. Eugene Smith, as part of an essay on the tragedy of Hichitani.

The plant was located on the shores of a nameless bay a few kilometres south of Minamata on southern Kyushu. Hichitani had been, for fifty years, the patron of more than seven hundred workers in this isolated village, and its only industry. There was no private enterprise in the village, except for the fishermen who lived there, and most of their boats were financed by the company. Hichitani provided the townspeople of Minamata with jobs, housing and a company store where they could buy food and clothing. Many of the men and women, whose grandparents had worked in the factory, had never been more than a hundred kilometres from the town where they were born. Its very isolation perpetuated the tragedy. Minamata was the culture for an epidemic of horror than spanned half a century.

The Hichitani corporation produced anodized aluminium — from raw materials to finished product. The effluent from its smelting plant was carried through long pipes and dumped into the ocean on the far side of a peninsula that protected the bay from the open sea. The prevailing tides, however, carried the sea water around the peninsula and back into the bay.

One of the chemicals in the raw effluent was mercury, an almost infinitesimal amount of mercury. But when mixed with water and catalysed by other chemicals in the waste, the mercury produced mercuric oxide, a deadly poison. The years passed and with each day, microscopic pearls of death drifted in with the tide and settled on the plant life and on the floor of the bay. The bay was a fisherman’s paradise, and the fish, the main food source for the village, fed on the plant life and ingested the deadly pearls from the water.

Decades passed. The mercuric oxide slowly infested the bay and its environment. Its effect on the people was gradual, developing over two generations. Then, in 1947, the plant doubled its capacity.

The first big fish kill occurred the following year, a year before the birth of the Matzashi child. Hundreds of tuna, sea bass and mackerel had drifted onto the beach of the bay. It was blamed on the red tide, and the incident was never reported to the press, but a few days after it happened, a group of engineers arrived from the main office in Ube, to study the fish kill. Hichitani later said their findings were inconclusive.

In 1949, the first deformed child was born and the effects of thirty years of pollution began to show. Nobody was too concerned about the Matzashi baby. After all, it was rumoured, the husband and wife were directly related. But two months later a child was born with no eyes, and then another with shrivelled, wasted legs, and another whose head was three times the normal size. Fourteen deformed children were born that year and five employees of the plant died of dysentery.

The scientists returned. Very quietly. On the team that was sent down the second time was Tasaguyi, a brilliant young chemical engineer. He moved to Minamata with Kenaka, his bride of less than a year, and set up an in-depth study of waste handling at the plant. Kenaka taught school. During the next three years, dozens of horribly deformed children were produced among the workers and townspeople who lived along the bay and fished its waters. Several of the older workers went blind, others died of a painful, kind of dysentery that killed or crippled its victims. The place seemed cursed, which indeed it was.

The first of the Tasaguyi children, Sashumi, was born in 1952. He was a normal but frail child Who was constantly ill. Tana, the daughter born the following year was deaf at birth. Ironically, it was Tasaguyi who detected the presence of mercuric oxide in the fish, the water and the plant life of the bay, but it was too late to help his daughter.

He sent the children back to Kyoto to live with their grandfather, and still believing the company would take drastic steps to save the village, and to prevent a panic, he quietly presented his findings to the board of Hichitani. The company announced it would build a new waste-treatment facility at the factory and a new water-treatment plant for the town, but still did not reveal to the people of Minamata the danger that lay at their doorstep. By then, there were hundreds of deformed children in the town, and dysentery was almost endemic.

Tasaguyi resigned, formed a citizens ‘group in the village and announced his findings to the press. A national scandal resulted. But a few months after beginning his crusade, Tasaguyi began suffering telltale cramps and diarrhoea. He kept up the fight. The cramps got worse. He began losing weight. Then he awoke one night desperately ill and died in agony eight hours later. Kenaka was determined to continue his fight, but she, too, was already terminally aff1icted with mercury poisoning. Kimura brought his beloved daughter back to Kyoto, where, for the last two months of her life, she was raving mad. He refused to commit hr to an institution and instead kept her locked in the workhouse, where he tended to her until she died.

The workhouse had been empty from then until O’Hara came to live there for the last two years of his training as a shichi. But the photograph remained on the wall as a perpetual reminder of the horror of Minamata and its devastating effect on this one family.

He finished shaving and went back down the hail toward the main room. O’Hara loved this house. It had been his only real home. It was here he had lived for two years while he trained for the Ritual of the Shichi. He had kept an apartment merely as a base during his years in the service, but he was rarely there. And for the past year he had hidden in this ancient house, communed with its ghosts, reaffirmed his mental and physical commitment to higaru-dashi and his emotional commitment to Kimura, Sammi and, most of all, to Tana.

The main room was startlingly simple, yet strangely warm and inviting. The only electrical device was a lamp over the tatami on which O’Hara slept. There was a low table with a mat beside it, several candle lanterns and a bookshelf. Nothing else.

Except the flowers. Each day Tana decorated the room with flowers. Red and white and purple and pink, every colour one can imagine. It was the flowers that gave the place its warmth and life.

O’Hara walked across the room and popped one of the snacks in his mouth, savouring the shrimp she had mixed with the vinegar rice in the makizushi. He could hear Tana in the small room that contained the great redwood tub, preparing his bath. She was singing softly to herself, a birdlike voice that was always slightly off-key. He changed into the knee-length black silk nightshirt and sat cross-legged on the mat.

Tana dipped her arm into the steaming water until it covered her wrist. It was very hot, but Kazuo liked it very hot. She guessed he had been, gone for perhaps three hours, but there were no clocks in the house and O’Hara did not own a watch. There was a small fear in her stomach, a gnawing anxiety. Something was going to take him away, to draw him back to the ways of the West. She sensed the danger.

When O’Hara first came to live there ,during the preparation for the ritual vows of the shichi, Tana was a child. Shy, withdrawn, wary at first of the fair gaijin, the foreign devil whom her grandfather had seemed to adopt, she was drawn to him gradually by the same strength and mysticism that attracted her grandfather and brother. He was unlike the other shichi candidates she had known. He laughed readily and made jokes on himself. He was gentle and was rarely moved to anger. And, best of all, he learned sign language so they could talk. In the evenings, after the mental and physical strain of the long days of the shichi preparation, he would sit near the fish pond, and with fingers wiggling, he would tell her ghost stories from America.

Samushi, whom O’Hara nicknamed Sammy, changing the y to an i so it would look Japanese, had also resented O’Hara at first. It seemed, to Sammi, an insult that Tokenrui-san, his own grandfather, would assign his grandson to the fair-haired Kazuo for training into the higaru--dashi. But the young novitiate soon learned that it was an act of love, for O’ Hara was not only classically disciplined, he was an excellent teacher. It was O’Hara who discovered that Sammi had remarkable reflexes and who devised a series of moves to best use his speed. It was also O’Hara who devised the gruelling exercises that built up Sammi physically so he could deal with the rigors of higaru-dashi, exercises that were so painful that in the early days of the training, Sammi would often work the last two or three hours of the day with tears streaming down his face.

There was, of course, no quitting. To do so would have been to dishonour not only himself and Tokenrui-san but his sister and O’Hara as well. Besides, O’Hara, himself preparing for the mystical journey into the seventh level, conducted a personal daily ritual which was almost crippling in its demands. Sammi’s resentment faded, to be replaced first by respect, and then by love. By the time O’Hara became a shichi and Sammi was inducted into the higaru-dashi, they were as brothers.

When O’Hara left to fulfil his obligation to his father, it was a painful experience for all of them, but it was agony for Tana. She hurt deep inside, the kind of hurt that could not be cried away or beat away or screamed away. It tormented her, and the ache in her chest and her throat stayed with her. She was only fourteen, yet she knew the depth of her feeling was very different from the feeling of deep friendship, the almost family bond, that had grown between O’Hara and her grandfather and brother.

Tana was in love with O’Hara, yet years passed and she told no one, not even Kimura. So for the next seven years, as she grew into a stunning woman, wise but uncomfortably aloof, she thought about Kazuo every single day. She wanted to forget about him, tried to forget about him, but it was futile. The young men of Kyoto courted her and were rejected. Finally she told Tokenrui-san of her plight.