She pointed to another photograph. “That must be your father,” she said. “You have his face.”
The monochrome photograph of my family had been taken by our driver just before the war. We were all standing in front of the portico and the light of the sun and the sea made my father’s blue eyes paler, his teeth brighter. His carefully combed white hair seemed like part of the glare of the cloudless sky.
“He was very good-looking,” she said.
We were standing around him: Edward, William, and Isabel from his first marriage, and I from his last, each of us carrying his face in one feature or another. There was a timeless quality to our smiles, as though we would always be together, laughing, loving life. I remember the day still, from across the distance of the fleeting years. It was one of the rare moments when I had felt I was part of my family.
“Your sister?” she asked, moving to another photograph. I nodded and looked at Isabel on the balcony outside her room, her rifle in her hand, cheeks sucked in with determination as the lights from below seemed to lift her up. I could almost feel the soft wind that ruffled her skirts.
“Taken at the last party we ever had,” I said. “Before the war wrecked everything.”
* * *
The rain had stopped, and I suggested to Michiko that we have our meal out on the terrace. She insisted on helping me lay the table, and I rolled back the canopy to open the sky to us. We sat beneath a patch of stars, flickering seeds in a furrow in the clouds.
She had a hearty appetite, despite the simplicity of the meal I had made. She was also entertaining; it was almost as though we had known each other all our lives. She took a sip of the tea I had served, looked surprised, and lifted the cup to her nose. I watched her carefully, wondering if she would pass my test.
“Fragrance of the Lonely Tree,” she said, correctly identifying the brew which I had specially imported from Japan. “Harvested from tea plantations near my home. One could not obtain it after the war as the terraced fields had been destroyed.”
At the end of the meal she held up her wineglass and made a graceful gesture to the island. “To Endo-san,” she said softly.
I nodded. “To Endo-san.”
“Listen,” she said. “Do you hear him?”
I closed my eyes and, yes, I heard him. I heard him breathe. I smiled wanly. “He’s always here, Michiko. That’s why, wherever I go, I always yearn to return.”
She took my hand in hers and again I felt its birdlike fragility. When she spoke her voice was full of sorrow. “My poor friend. How you have suffered.”
I pulled my hand away carefully. “We have all suffered, Michiko. Endo-san most of all.”
We sat without speaking. The sea sighed each time a wave collapsed on the shore like a long-distance runner at the finishing line. I have always felt a greater affinity with the sea at night. It is magnificent during the day, the waves strong and loud, slamming onto the beach, propelled by the force of the entire ocean behind it. But when night comes that force is spent, and the waves roll to the shore with the detachment of a monk unfurling a scroll.
Then, softly, she began to tell me about her life. She spoke in a rapid, natural mixture of Japanese and English, the two interlacing like colored threads, spinning her tale.
“I am a widow new to my white robes. My husband, Murakami Ozawa, departed earlier this year.”
“My condolences,” I said, unsure where she was leading me.
“I had been married to Ozawa for fifty-five years. He owned an electronics company, a well-known one. His death made my world, my whole life, suddenly senseless. I was set adrift, and I closed myself up in my home in Tokyo, shutting out the world. I spent my days in the spacious gardens, walking barefoot across the pebble fields, spoiling the neat circles created by Seki, our gardener. He never complained, but only created the patterns again, day after day,” she said, a lost look in her eyes.
She could find no strength to pull herself out of her grief, she told me. Outside, the company’s board was frantic, for she had been bequeathed the controlling shares by her husband. She shut them all out and took no calls. The servants stirred the silences of her home with fearful whispers.
But the world intruded. “I received a letter from Endo-san,” she said, and her movement of looking away from me, as though she had been distracted by the glimmer of dew in the grass, was so unforced that anyone else would have thought it natural.
I was grateful for her kindness, although I managed to absorb her news with greater equanimity than she had given me credit for. “When did he send it?” I asked.
“Over fifty years ago, in the spring of 1945,” she said, giving me a smile. “It came out of the past like a ghost. Can you imagine its journey? He had written about his life here, and he had written about you.”
I let her fill our glasses. I had visited Japan often enough to know she would feel insulted if I had poured.
“I will tell you how we met,” she said after a while, as though she had been mulling over the decision for some time.
“Endo-san worked for his father, who owned a successful trading business. In fact, he was already running the business, traveling around China and to Hong Kong. He spent his evenings teaching in the
aikijutsu
school in our village. As the daughter of a samurai I was expected to be proficient with the sword, and in unarmed combat—
bujutsu
—above all other arts. Unlike my sisters I enjoyed
bujutsu
more than my music and flower-arranging lessons.
“At that time
aikijutsu
was just a fledgling art; it had not evolved into the aikido of today. My father was not impressed with it, but when I saw the class, and the movements, I knew I had found something precious. I think you know what I felt: it was as though my heart, long held in darkness, had turned to catch a glimpse of the warmth and light of the sun.”
She laughed softly. “I soon began to treasure the time I spent with Endo-san. My school friends teased me terribly about my feelings for him. But still I dreamed and dreamed, and wrapped myself in clouds of make-believe.
“As the eldest son he was expected to take over the company from his father one day. He was very often away from the country. On his return he brought me gifts, from China, Siam, the islands of the Philippines, and once even a woven headscarf from the mountains of northern India.
“We began to see each other regularly. We would walk along the beach, gazing out to the Miyajima Torii Shrine, and I often met him for tea in the pavilion in the park, feeding the ducks and the obedient lines of ducklings in the lake. I think those were the happiest days I can remember.
“My initial infatuation matured into something deeper and more permanent. My father, who was a magistrate, did not approve of our friendship. Endo-san was of course very much older than me, and his family, although originally of the samurai class, had been relegated to the status of merchants, a very low position on our social order, as you may know. His father had decided to turn the family’s various farms and properties into commercial concerns. They were wealthy, but not acceptable to the aristocracy.”
I leaned forward, not wishing to miss anything. Endo-san had given me only a cursory description of his childhood and he had never fully revealed his background. During the years when I lived in Japan I had tried to conduct my own inquiries, but without much success, as the documentary records had all been destroyed. But now, hearing it from her, from one who had been there, my curiosity was stirred once again.
She saw my interest and continued.
“The fact that Endo-san’s father was a disgraced court official was very much talked about in our village. But that did not bother me at all. In fact, my feelings for him were strengthened and I often said very rude things to his family’s detractors.
“My father felt that I was spending too much time with Endo-san, and I was forbidden to see him.” She shook her head. “What obedient children we were. There was no question of ignoring my father’s commands. I cried every night, for it was a terrible time for me.
“It was also a terrible time for Japan. To survive, we had become a military nation; you are a scholar of Japan, so you know what it was like. Oh, the endless chanting and shouting of war slogans, the violent clashes between the militarists and the pacifists in the streets, the frightening marches and demonstrations—I hated all of them. Even in my deepest dreams I heard them.
“Endo-san’s father disagreed with the military and made his opinions widely known. This was seen as acting against the emperor, a crime of treason. His father was sent to prison and the family was ostracized. Endo-san’s views reflected his father’s, although he was more subtle in expressing them. Still, there were attempts on Endo-san’s life, but he remained obdurate. This, I think, was due in part to his
sensei.”
I nodded. Endo-san had studied under O’ Sensei Ueshiba, a well-known pacifist who was, paradoxically, one of the greatest Japanese martial artists of all time. I recalled the first time I met O’ Sensei. The man was then in his late sixties, suffering from illness, just a few months from death; yet he had thrown me around the training mats until I could not breathe, my head dizzy from the falls, my joints sore where he had locked me.
I told Michiko this and she laughed. “I too was thrown around like a rag doll by him.”
She stood up and walked out into the night, then turned back to me and said, “One day, a few months later and after Endo-san had been away for some weeks, I met him again. I was on my way home from the market, and he came up behind me and told me to meet him on the beach, where we had sat so often. I went home, pretended to my mother that I had left something at the market, and then ran all the way to the beach.
“I saw him first. He was facing the sea. The sun looked as if it had leaked its color into the sea, into his face and eyes. When I reached him, he told me he was leaving Japan for a few years.
“ ‘Where will you go?’ I asked him.”
“ ‘I do not know yet. I wish to see the world, and find my answers,’ he replied.”
“ ‘Answers to what?’ I asked.”
“He shook his head. Then he told me he had been having strange dreams, dreams of different lives, different countries. He refused to tell me more.
“I told him I would wait for him, but he said no, that I should live the life that had already been written for me. To attempt to do otherwise would be foolish. We were not meant to be together. My future was not with him.
“I was so angry with him, talking like that. I told him he was
baka
—an idiot. And you know, he only smiled and said that it was true.
“That was the last time I saw him. Later I heard that he had been sent by the government to some place in Asia, some country I had never even heard of—Malaya. It was very puzzling, I thought then, that a man so opposed to Japan’s aggressive military policies should have accepted service with the government.
“But as I have said, I never saw him again, even when he came back for a short visit. I could not, however much I longed to. My father had arranged a marriage for me, and I was being taught how to take care of my future husband and run his house. Ozawa, like Endo-san, was involved in his family’s company, which was then making electronic equipment for the war.”
She paused, and in her face made translucent by memory I saw the girl she had once been and I felt a faint sadness for Endo-san, for what he had thrown aside.
“I have never stopped thinking of him,” she said.
I pushed back my chair, feeling tired by the conversation, disturbed by the emotions her arrival had awoken within me.
“May I stay here for the night?” she asked.
I was disinclined to allow another person to unsettle the structure of my life, which had been laid out carefully over the years. I had always appreciated my own company and the few people who had tried to breach my barrier had always been hurt in the process. I looked out to the sea; there was no guidance from Endo-san but that had never stopped me from asking him. It was late and the taxi services in Penang were notoriously bad. Finally I nodded.
She was aware of my reluctance. “I apologize for causing you inconvenience,” she said.
I waved her apologies away and stood up, wincing at my stiff joints, hearing the expected pops and cracks in them—the symptoms of age and the lack of training. Old injuries sent their repetitive messages of wear and pain, urging me to surrender, which I always refused to do.
I started to clear away the remains of our meal, stacking the plates into little piles.
“You have no picture of him?” she asked as she helped me carry the plates to the kitchen.
I saw the faintest expression of hope in her eyes, like a weak flaring star, and I shook my head. “No. We never took any,” I replied, watching the flare sink into the ocean.
She nodded. “Neither did I. Our village did not have cameras at the time he left Japan. It is so ironic, really—my husband’s company now produces some of the most popular cameras in the world.”