I spoke to the bridge of her glasses. ‘A mother? I don’t have one of those, Aunt. She died before Anju drowned. I have a father somewhere, but no mother. You know that.’
My mother hid herself with cigarette smoke.
Aunt Money poured tea. ‘Your mother has come a long way to see you, and I think you should apologize.’ I was ready to stand up and walk out, but my mother beat me to it. She collected her handbag and turned to Aunt Money. ‘There really is no need. He said nothing I disagree with. What I disagree with is forcing us to endure these family discussions when there is quite clearly no family and nothing to discuss. I know you act out of niceness, but niceness can leave nastiness for dead when you count the damage. Give my regards to my brother. There is an overnight train for Tokyo in fifty minutes and I intend to be on it.’ Maybe the passing years have altered the script a little, but this is the gist of what was said. Maybe I added her dark glasses, too, but I have no memory of my mother’s eyes.
Monkfish opens a can of coffee and switches on the radio. The sun switches on, too, as we cross Shimonoseki bridge. I am back on Kyushu. I smile for no reason. A soul returning to a body it gave up for dead, amazed to find that everything still works – this is how I feel. Broken fences, wildflower riots, unplotted space. Kyushu is the run-wild underworld of Japan. All myths slithered, galloped or swam from Kyushu. Monkfish remembers I am here. ‘As my dear old mum said, every single morning, “Rise early – the first hour is a gift from paradise.” Whatever. Twenty minutes to Kitakyushu . . .’
‘Mr Aoyama! Please accept my sincerest condolences on, uh, your death.’
Mr Aoyama lowers his binoculars and fiddles with the focusing. He is wearing his JR uniform, but looks much more distinguished than he ever did at Ueno. ‘Death is not so bad, Miyake, not when it actually happens. It is like being paid. And I must apologize for accusing you of espionage.’
‘Forget it. You were under loads of stress. Obviously.’
Mr Aoyama strokes his upper lip – ‘I shaved off my moustache.’
‘Good move, Station-master. It never suited you, to be honest.’
‘One should commemorate major life shifts, I believe.’
‘And you don’t get much more major than death.’
‘Indeed, Miyake.’
‘May I ask how I died?’
‘You are very much alive! Your body is on the KitakyushuMiyazaki coach. This is only a dream.’
‘I never had such an . . . undreamlike dream before.’
‘Dreams of the living can be calibrated by their Dead. Look closely—’
We are flying. Mr Aoyama is flying Superman-freestyle. I have a Zax Omega jetpack strapped to my pack. Below us are pink meringue clouds. Reams of Earth unroll away. ‘Another privilege we dead are afforded – unlimited freedom to marvel at the majesty of creation.’
‘Are you my Dead?’
‘I hired you and you hired me.’
‘Why has Anju never visited?’
‘Quite.’ Mr Aoyama checks his watch. ‘The matter in hand.’
‘Do the dead really, uh, mingle with the living?’
‘No big deal.’
‘You can really see . . . everything?’ I think of my Zizzi Hikaru sessions.
‘If we so choose. But would you bother watching a billion-channel TV? So little warrants attention. Wrongdoers imagine their sordid crimes to be so unique, but if only they knew. No. My purpose in your dream this morning is redemption.’
‘Uh . . . yours or mine?’
‘Ours. I treated you poorly at Ueno. Even if you did spit in my teapot.’
‘I feel bad about that.’
Mr Aoyama looks through his binoculars. ‘Newspapers of two days hence will be bad beyond belief. Look. Redemption approaches.’ Mr Aoyama points downward. The clouds part, as in ancient scrolls – and I see the secret beach, foot rock and the whalestone. Sitting on the whalestone is a girl, hunched up, miserably alone. Anju, of course. ‘Unfinished business, Miyake.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘You will.’
My jetpack misfires and dies. My mother – a face on the jacket of a horror video – but already she and the ninth-floor balcony hurtle away into the Tokyo sky. I spin, see a playground flying this way at terminal velocity, and remember that if I don’t wake up before I hit the ground I—
I awake with a ‘Gaaaghhh!’ on the back seat of a coach – its doors hiss shut as it lurches forward. I sit up, blinking. Yes, the coach. Monkfish offered to ask around some Kitakyushu truckers for a ride south to Miyazaki, but my mother is expecting me early this afternoon. I don’t want to risk being late. An old lady has joined me on the back seat since I fell asleep. She knits, has a face as round and chipped as the moon, and does aromatherapy, I guess, because I can smell . . . a herb with a name I can’t remember. She is sunburned shiny orange. Between us is a basket of persimmons. Not watery Tokyo persimmons – these are persimmons from tales. Persimmons worth risking the wrath of enchanters to steal. I drool – I have eaten nothing but crap for a day and a half. ‘I propose a barter,’ says Mrs Persimmon. ‘One persimmon for your dream.’
Embarrassing. ‘Was I mumbling?’
She keeps her eyes on her stitches. ‘I collect dreams.’
So I tell her my dream, leaving out the fact that Anju is my sister. Her knitting needles make the sound of swords clashing on a distant hill. ‘I will not be short-changed, young man. What did you omit?’ So I admit that Anju is my twin sister. Mrs Persimmon considers. ‘When did she leave, this unfortunate?’
‘Leave where?’
‘This side, of course.’
‘This side of . . .’
‘Life.’ No, her knitting needles make the sound of a blind man’s stick.
‘Nine years ago. How did you know?’
‘I shall be eighty-one on Thursday week.’ Her mind is wandering, or mine is plodding. She yawns. Tiny, white teeth. I think of Cat. She unpicks a stitch. ‘Dreams are shores where the ocean of spirit meets the land of matter. Beaches where the yet-to-be, the once-were, the will-never-be may walk amid the still-are. You believe I am an old woman hoary with superstition, and possibly deranged to boot.’ I could not have put it that well. ‘Of course I am deranged. How else could I know what I know?’
I am afraid of offending her, so I ask what she thinks my dream means.
She smiles toothily. She knows I am patronizing her. ‘You are wanted.’
‘Wanted? By . . . ?’
‘I do not give free consultations. Take your persimmon, boy.’
Miyazaki is toytown after Tokyo. At the bus station I go to the tourist information office to ask about the clinic where my mother is staying. Nobody has heard of it, but when I show the address I am told I will need to get on a local bus headed for Kirishima. The next one is not for over an hour, so I go to the station bathroom, clean my teeth, and sit down in the waiting room drinking a can of sweet cold coffee, watching the buses and passengers come and go. Miyazaki people amble. The clouds are in no hurry and a fountain makes rainbows under palm trees. A retired dog with cloudy eyes comes to sniff hello. A very pregnant mother tries to control a clutch of floppy, spring-heeled children. I remember my persimmon – my grandmother says pregnant women must never eat persimmons – and peel it with my penknife. I get sticky fingers, but the fruit is pearly and perfect. I spit out shiny stones. One of the boys has just learned to whistle but he can only do one tune. The mother watches the kids leap along the plastic seats. I wonder where their father is. Only when they start playing with a fire extinguisher does she say anything: ‘If you touch that, the bus men will be angry!’ I go for a walk. In a gift shop still with its unsold 1950s stock I find a bowl of faded plastic fruit with smiley faces. I buy it for Buntaro to get him back for my Zizzi key-holder. At a Lawsons I buy a tube of champagne bombs and read magazines until the bus arrives. I should be nervous, I guess, but I lack the energy. I don’t know what day it is, even.
I expect a smartish institution with carparks and wheelchair ramps on the outskirts of town – instead, the bus follows a lane deep into the countryside. Over a thousand yen later a farmer on the bus points me down a country road and tells me to walk until the road becomes a track and the track runs out. ‘Can’t miss it,’ he insists, which usually spells disaster. A hillside of pines sheers up on one side; on the other, early rice is being harvested and hung out to dry. I find a big, flat, round stone on the track. Crickets trill and ratchet in Morse. I put the stone in my backpack. The cosmos is flowering mauve, magenta and white. All this space. All this air. I walk, and walk. I begin to worry – after twenty minutes I can see the end of the lane, but there is still no clinic in sight. Comic-horror scarecrows leer. Big heads, bony necks. The road runs out of tarmac, and I can see that the track dies altogether at a group of old farm buildings at the foot of an early autumn mountain. Sweat pools in the small of my back – I must smell none too fresh. Did the bus driver let me off at the wrong stop? I decide to ask at the farmhouse. A skylark stops singing and the silence is loud. Vegetable plots, sunflowers, blue sheets hanging in the sun. A traditional thatched teahouse stands on a small rise in a rockery taken over by couch grass. I am already past the gate when I see the hand-painted sign: Miyazaki Mountain Clinic. Despite the signs of life, nobody is around. I see no bell or buzzer near the front door, so I just open the door and enter a cool reception room where a woman – a cleaner? – in a white uniform is organizing mountains of files into hills. It is a losing battle. She sees me. ‘Hi.’
‘Hello. Could I, uh, speak to the nurse in charge, please?’
‘You can speak with me, if you like. Suzuki. Doctor. You are?’
‘Uh, Eiji Miyake. I’m here to meet my mother – a patient. Mariko Miyake.’
Dr Suzuki makes an ahaaaaaaaa noise. ‘And a very welcome guest you are too, Eiji Miyake. Yes, our prodigal sister has been on tenterhooks all morning. We prefer the word ‘members’ to ‘patients’, if that doesn’t sound too cultish. We were expecting you to call from Miyazaki: did you have any trouble finding us? I’m afraid we are rather a long way out. I believe solitude can be therapeutic in our hemmed-in lives. Have you eaten? Everyone is having lunch in the refectory.’
‘I had a rice-ball on the bus . . .’
Doctor Suzuki sees I am nervous about meeting my mother with an audience looking on. ‘Why don’t you wait in the teahouse, then? We are rather proud of it – one of our members was a tea-master, and will be again, if I have any say in the matter. He modelled it on Senno-Soyeki’s teahouse. I’ll go tell your mother her visitor is here.’
‘Doctor—’
Dr Suzuki swivels around on one foot. ‘Yes?’
‘Nothing.’
I think she smiles. ‘Just be who you are.’
I take off my shoes and sit in the cool, four-and-a-half-mat hut. I watch the humming garden. Bees, runner beans, lavender. I drink some barley tea – warm now, and frothed up – from the bottle I bought in Miyazaki. Kneeling on the ceiling, a papyrus butterfly folds its wings. I lie back and close my eyes, just for a moment.
New York billows snow and grey crows. I know the driver of my big yellow taxi, but her name escapes while I look for it. I wade through journalists and their bug-eyed lenses into the recording studio, where John Lennon is swigging his barley tea. ‘Eiji! Your guitar had given up all hope.’ Since I was twelve, I have wanted to meet this demi-god. My dream has come true, and my English is a hundred times better than I dared hope, but all I can think of to say is ‘Sorry I’m late, Mr Lennon’. The great man shrugs exactly like Yuzu Daimon. ‘After nine years of learning my songs you can call me John. Call me anything. Except Paul.’ We all laugh at this. ‘Let me introduce you to the rest of the band. Yoko you already met at Karuizawa one summer, on our bicycles—’ Yoko Ono is dressed like the Queen of Spades. ‘It’s all right, Sean,’ she tells me, ‘Mummy’s only looking for her hand in the snow.’ This strikes us as very funny indeed. John Lennon then points to the piano. ‘And on keyboards, ladies and genitals, may I introduce Mr Claude Debussy.’ The composer sneezes and a tooth flies out, which causes a new round of laughter – yet more teeth fall out, causing yet more laughter. ‘My pianist friend, Ai Imajo,’ I tell Debussy, ‘worships your work. She won a scholarship for the Paris Conservatoire, only her father has forbidden her to go.’ My French is perfect, too! ‘Then her father is a beshatted boar with pox,’ says Debussy, on his knees to gather up his teeth. ‘And your Ms Imajo is a woman of distinction. Tell her to go! I always had a penchant for Asian ladies.’
I am in Ueno park, among the bushes and tents where the homeless people live. I feel this is a slightly inappropriate place for an interview, but it was John’s idea. ‘John – what is “Tomorrow Never Knows” actually about?’
John pulls a philosopher pose. ‘I never knew.’
We giggle helplessly. ‘But you wrote it!’
‘No, Eiji, I never . . .’ He dabs his tears away. ‘It wrote me!’
At that moment Doi lifts the tent flap and delivers a pizza. When we open the box, it contains cannabis compost. Picture Lady – it seems we are her guests – produces a cake knife with a polished stoat skull. We are each served a thin slice – it tastes of green tea. ‘Which is your favourite song by John, Eiji-kun?’ I realize that Picture Lady is in fact Kozue Yamaya working undercover – we all laugh at this.
‘“#9dream”,’ I answer. ‘It should be considered a masterpiece.’
John is delighted with this answer, and mimes an Indian deity, singing, ‘
Ah, bowakama pousse pousse
.’ Even the perspex whale outside the science museum giggles. My lungs fill up with laughter and I am having serious trouble breathing. ‘Truth is,’ John continues, ‘“#9dream” is a descendant of “Norwegian Wood”. Both are ghost stories. “She” in “Norwegian Wood” curses you with loneliness. The “Two spirits dancing so strange” in “#9dream” bless you with harmony. But people prefer loneliness to harmony.’
‘What does the title mean?’