‘I already paid at the airport.’
‘You didn’t pay enough. Cough up another ten thousand yen.’
This is an exorbitant price, but I either pay or piss my pants. With difficulty, I extract my wallet, roll up the note, and post it through the grille. Lao Tzu rips it in two, and scrunches it up his nostrils to plug a nosebleed. ‘So. Which way is the toilet?’ I ask. Lao Tzu looks at my swelling bladder. ‘I had better show you the way.’ Liverpool Cathedral is a tiled rat-run maze. Lao Tzu crawls ahead on his belly. I backstroke after him. Water slides down the walls in curtains. Sometimes sprinklers erupt in my face. My bladder-baby begins to wail with the voice of a seal dragged inland against its will. ‘Are we nearly there yet?’ I gasp. I stand up in a grotto. Stalactites drip. A row of men in uniforms occupy the urinals. I wait. I wait. But none of the men moves.
‘Colonel Sanders!’ General MacArthur claps my shoulder. ‘One of the natives stole my platinum lighter! Worth a fortune, dammit! Heard anything on the grapevine?’ I have been encased in the body of the chicken magnate to spy on GHQ, and to discover if they know anything about the kaiten project. How weird to be so fat. I know unseen meanings flow beneath the words, but it is hard to focus with a singing bladder. ‘No?’ General MacArthur sneezes a fountain. ‘Lemme give you a lift to the port, anyhow.’ The US Jeep drives to Kagoshima port. My bladder is now a child clinging to my waist. I am afraid she may be punctured by a sudden jolt of the Jeep, but we get to the ferry terminal without mishap. Unfortunately, the complex has been rebuilt since the war, and all the signs are in Braille. I consider pissing into a trashcan, but I am afraid of the headlines – ‘Local Boy Miyake Forgets Toilet Training’ – and stumble down a corridor. Urine streams in pulses from a dying beagle. My bladder is nearly too heavy to carry. ‘This way,’ hisses an invisible companion. I find a brand-new toilet as vast as an airport. Floor, wall, ceiling, fittings, sinks, urinals, cubicle doors – snow-blind white. The only other patron is a speck in the distance. A lawyer. I go up to the nearest urinal, hold my golden twin against the wall, and—
The lawyer hums ‘Beautiful Boy’ in such an offputting way my bladder corks up. I glare at him and jump with shock – he is standing right next to me, pissing away. He still has no face.
I awake with an hysterical bladder to a hideous shipwreck noise very near. The typhoon batters back the door when I shift the sack of earth. I piss through the crack. The urine flies off and probably reaches the Sea of China. I go back to my nest of tarpaulin, but nothing can sleep through this night sky violence. The god of thunder is stamping over Kagoshima, looking for me. I wonder why my dreams are so clear – usually they evaporate the moment my eyes open. When I began my serial uncle visits, post-Anju, I imagined there lived somewhere, in an advertland house and family, the Real Eiji Miyake. He dreamed of me every night. And that was who I really was – a dream of the Real Eiji Miyake. When I went to sleep and dreamed, he woke up, and remembered my waking life as his dream. And vice versa. The typhoon catches its breath, and renews its assault as a gale. The potting shed is not going to blow away. I roll over on something hard, and find a medium-sized, flat, round stone. I put it in my backpack. When the gale subsides to a high wind, I am amazed to hear a person snoring – inside the potting shed! I get up and look behind the narrow partition. A woman, still asleep! She does not look like a gardener – she must be a visitor who somehow got trapped here by the typhoon too. Maybe she was too afraid to tell me she was here, and just fell asleep. Do I wake her? Or would that scare her to death? Her eyes open. ‘Uh . . .’ I begin.
‘So, you found me at last.’ She springs up and her kimono swings open. I am too startled to speak. For a weird moment, I mistake her for the mother of Yuki Chiyo, the girl who reported herself lost at Ueno. She dabs my nipples with her wet thumb, her other hand explores inside my boxer shorts – this is wrong, I already told Ai I love her, but her lips slide open for me and a million tiny silver fish change direction. I cannot fight this. I cannot move, look away, respond.
So I come.
Over her shoulder I glimpse Mrs Persimmon. She perches on the sack of earth and sucks dripping pulp from persimmons. She spits out shiny stones.
The bright garden lies trashed by an orgy of gods. Spilt juices from green veins scent the peaceful air. Ripped blooms, torn branches, uprooted shrubs. I find a small, flat, round stone. I put it in my backpack. I would love to stay a while and watch the pond, but I want to avoid the potting shed owner, and anyway the Yakushima ferry leaves in ninety minutes. I wade through the ripped bougainvillea and clamber over the wall, in time to surprise a schoolgirl on a passing bus. My only witness. Back among the houses, neighbours are already up, discussing the mending of fences. I stop at a Lawson’s and buy a bottle of Minute Maid grapefruit juice and a cup ramen – kimchee flavour – and ask the girl to add hot water. I eat it on the sea wall. Sakurajima belches ash into the spotless sky, and the sea is ironed smooth. Typhoons wreck worlds but the following morning cleans worlds up. I phone Uncle Money to say I am still alive – I tell him I spent the night with friends in Kagoshima – then I walk the rest of the way to the port. The ferry is waiting – cars and trucks are already being herded on by harbourmen with flags and whistles. I fill in my boarding card, pay my fare, wash, brush my teeth and look for a telephone.
‘Typhoon eighteen was on the news,’ said Ai, ‘but it didn’t get much attention because of the pigeons.’
‘Pigeons are grabbing headlines?’
‘All day yesterday, all over Tokyo, pigeons were flying into buildings, colliding with cars. Like some freaky disaster movie. You can imagine the rumours, theories and experts cramming the TV stations. Secret government tests, avian flu, Aum cultists, magnetic-wave shifts, earthquake doom-mongers. Then the moon last night had its brightest halo for twenty-seven years. How ice crystals in the atmosphere could affect pigeons nobody knows, but it adds to the general spookiness. And this morning, I went to buy some coffee for breakfast, and the camphor tree in front of the prison was black with crows! Worse than an amateur brass orchestra warming up! Seriously, it was as if the prince of darkness was due any moment.’
‘So much for my measly typhoon.’
‘Let me change the subject before the beeps go. I spoke with Sachiko before she went to work yesterday evening. If you need anywhere to stay when you get back to Tokyo, you can kip here. On the sofa. If I say so. You have to clean up and cook every third day. And you mustn’t answer the phone in case Sachiko’s gran calls and assumes you’re her live-in lover.’
‘Hey . . .’ I like the ‘if I say so’ most of all. ‘Thanks.’
‘Don’t decide yet. Mull it over.’
Several islanders spot me as I board the ferry. Schoolmates’ mothers, cousins’ friends, a sugarcane and fruit wholesaler who does business with Uncle Orange. They ask about life in Tokyo, more out of politeness than interest. I say I am back to collect my winter clothes before the weather changes. Talk is of the typhoon, and how much repairs will cost, and who is likely to pay for what. I hide in the second-class flooring area, and make a sort of protective barrier with my backpack to doze behind. A Kansai ladies’ ramblers’ club takes up the rest of the floor around me. They are kitted out in flannel shirts, body-warmers, multi-weather trousers, silly hats and sensible footwear. They unfold maps and plot routes. You can tell the islanders apart easily – they looked bored. Because there was no sailing yesterday afternoon the boat continues to fill with passengers. I shuffle up for a man with a greyhound jawline and cheekbones who asks me what time the ferry arrives at Kamiyaku, the main port on Yakushima. He pays for this information in unshelled peanuts. I accept a few to be courteous but they are badly addictive. We munch our way through most of the bag, piling up a mound of husks. Greyhound is a publisher in Ochiai and knows Ueno lost property office – he met Mrs Sasaki’s sister at a literary dinner once. The engines groooaaarrrrrrrrr into life, the hiking ladies wooooooooo! and the porthole view rotates and slides away. The nine o’clock news bulletin is about the expected resignation of another prime minister following a coalition collapse. ‘Nothing is older than this morning’s news,’ says Greyhound, ‘and nothing is newer than Pericles.’ Pretty soon the offshore reception turns the news to hiss, and the Kirishima-Yaku national park video clicks on. All islanders know the script off by heart. It lullabies us on these crossings.
All Japan has been concreted over. The last sacred forests have been cut down for chopsticks, the inland sea has been paved over and declared a national carpark, and where mountains once stood apartment buildings vanish into the clouds. When people reach the age of twenty their legs are amputated and their torsos are fitted with interfaces that plug directly into sophisticated skateboards – for use in the home or office – or into grander vehicles, for longer journeys. My twentieth birthday was back in September, so I am long overdue this rite-of-passage operation. But I want to keep my legs attached, so I joined the resistance movement. I am taken to be introduced to our three leaders, who live in Miyakonojo, a place remote beyond cars. Their bodies are amputated too, for extra camouflage. Their heads sit in a row, under the blazing sun. Their necks are trussed to the edge of a bowling pit, and I realize I have been brought before Gunzo, Nabe and Kakizaki. Fortunately, when they see me they blink excitedly – ‘Messiah! Messiah! Messiah!’ This perplexes me. ‘Are you quite sure?’ They seem to be. ‘The message shall be revealed to you! You alone shall reverse the meteoric dive of humanity into endless suffering!’ That sounds great. ‘How?’ Kakizaki’s lower jaw falls off, but he says these words: ‘Pull out the plug.’
At my feet is a bath plug, with a shining chain. I pull. Underneath is earth – since the asphalting laws, earth is forbidden. It stirs, and a worm wriggles upward and out of the hole. Another follows, and another, another. The last Japanese worms. They wriggle their way to a preordained position on a nine-by-nine grid. Each position on this grid is a kanji or a Japanese character, written in worm bodies instead of brush strokes. These words are the one true scripture. It is also death for the worms – the tarmac hotplates their tender bodies. As they sizzle, they smell of tuna and mayonnaise. But their sacrifice is not in vain. In the eighty-one characters I read truth – the secrets of hearts and minds, quarks and love, peace and time. The truth glows in blazing jade on my memory’s retina. I shall impart this wisdom to my thirsty species, and the arid deserts will bloom.
‘Miyake! Miyake, you mongrel! Wake up!’
The upside-down face of Mr Ikeda, my ex-sports teacher, floats above me. A half-eaten tuna-and-mayonnaise sandwich wilts in his hand. I jerk up with a groan of annoyance. Mr Ikeda assumes I am just sleepy. I have to remember something . . . ‘I saw you in the ferry terminal, but then I said to myself, “No, Miyake is in distant Edo!” What are you doing back so soon? The big city too much to handle, hey?’
I am forgetting something. What is it? ‘Not really, sir. Actually, I—’
‘Ah, to be young in Tokyo. I could almost envy you if I wasn’t already me. I spent the first two Great Primes of my life in Tokyo. I waltzed into
the
top sports university – you wouldn’t have heard of it – and a wild young thing I was, too. The days I had! The nights I had! My nickname among the ladies gives you the full story. Ace. Ace Ikeda. Then in my first teaching post I put together one of the finest high-school soccer teams Japan ever saw. Could have gone all the way to the national cup qualifiers, if the referee hadn’t been a geriatric, blind, crippled, corrupt, dribbling sack of slugshit. Me and my boys – our nickname? The Invincibles! Not like’ – Mr Ikeda waves his hand in disgust at the students in their ‘Yakushima Junior High’ track-suit tops – ‘this pack of mongrels.’
‘Are you coming back from a friendly, sir?’
‘Nothing friendly about that bloated faggot tapeworm Kagoshima coach. During the typhoon last night I was praying a lorry of something flammable would crash into his house.’
‘So, what was the score, sir?’
Mr Ikeda grimaces. ‘Kagoshima Tosspots – twenty; Yakushima Mongrels – one.’
This knife I cannot resist twisting. ‘One goal? A hopeful sign, sir.’
‘Kagoshima Tosspots scored an own goal.’ Mr Ikeda skulks off. The tourist video clicks off – we must be within broadcasting range of Yakushima. I look through the window and see the island, sliding over the horizon. The prime minister promises that under his guidance the country will become a lifestyle superpower. Greyhound cracks open a peanut. ‘Politicians and sports coaches need to be smart enough to master the game, but dumb enough to think it matters.’
I remember my dream.
‘Are you suffering from sea-sickness?’ asks Greyhound. ‘Or was it your ex-games teacher?’
‘I . . . dreamed I was a sort of Sanzohoshi carrying the Buddhist scriptures from India. I was shown the divine knowledge necessary to save humanity from itself.’
‘I’ll give you six per cent on the first ten thousand copies sold, nine per cent thereafter.’
‘But I can only remember one word.’
‘Which is?’
‘“Mumps”’
‘As in . . .’
‘The illness that makes your neck swell up.’
‘“Mumps” what?’
‘Mumps . . . nothing.’
‘Deal’s off.’ Greyhound shakes the bag. ‘I ate the last peanut.’
Yakushima grows whenever you look away. Leaving a place is weird, but returning is always weirder. In eight weeks nothing has changed but nothing is the same. The Kamiyaku river bridge, the crushed-velvet mountains, the gaol-grey escarpments. A book you read is not the same book it was before you read it. Maybe a girl you sleep with is not the same girl you went to bed with. Here comes the quay – one of the rope-throwers shouts at me and waves. One of Uncle Tarmac’s mah-jong boozing partners. The gangplank is lowered, and I join the big group of disembarking passengers. I should go and pay my respects to the head of the family, Uncle Pachinko. But the point of this journey is to pay my respects to Anju. Outside the ferry ticket office a van pulls up, and a wholesaler who does business with Uncle Orange offers me a lift.