Keiko went to the dry cleaners and offered her services: they were Chinese. No no no, they said. Chinese workers were dying of starvation. And China was the enemy of Japan.
In Japantown her friends told her to go to the fishing boats. So Vera and Keiko took a long bus ride to Horseshoe Bay. They stood on the docks there and sniffed the air. It smelled of gasoline and kelp. But it also smelled of ocean and timber and wilder places farther north and they were excited. Keiko waited for the boats to arrive and spoke to the men in Japanese. She said she could dive. She said she could clean fish, scrub boats, anything. She said she was
ama.
But the men who ran the ships laughed. If they had jobs they had to give them to a man, with a family.
By then even the kindliest neighbours said, ‘But surely the girl’s father will come?’
But Hamilton Drew did not come.
Vera went again to the warehouse, which now was like a tomb; entering the door there was like entering a place of pain. ‘Where is my father?’ she asked.
This time Miss Hinchcliffe said she had heard from him. The letter was postmarked in Kobe, Japan, she said, emphasising the capitals. He wished to return and settle matters. But he was unable to do so at this time. She had confidence that he would. In the meantime he had asked her to carry on.
‘You are lying,’ said Vera. She was certain of it; she could tell
by the spots of red on the secretary’s cheeks. She backed away from the desk. ‘I will write to him myself.’ Then she ran out of the door into the evening gloom, so that the secretary could not see her crying.
‘What did she do before, in Japan?’ the kindliest neighbour asked Vera, about Keiko, encountering the two on the street.
‘I am a diver,’ Keiko said, understanding.
‘Oh,’ said the neighbour, her eyes jumping from Vera to Keiko. A furrow developed in her brow. Perhaps she thought that Keiko was a performing diver, like in a circus. ‘I don’t suppose there is much call for a diver here.’
Vera’s teacher advised Keiko to go to the aquarium; maybe Keiko could find a job cleaning tanks. This was a good idea, and they both went, but once again Keiko was refused. Men did that job.
They returned to Horseshoe Bay. ‘I am a good diver,’ said Keiko. ‘What I love to do. Go to shore I do it. Pick up shellfish under the water,’ she said.
They tried a strip of beach on Bowen Island. But even Keiko could not work underwater, not in Canada. It was too cold. One man told her to go to Australia, but she did not know how to get there. There was only one place she could dive. Japan.
And suddenly, more than anything, that was what Vera wanted. To go with Keiko to Japan. She was angry at Hamilton Drew. She did write to him, but all she could put for an address was Kobe, Japan. If her father came, if he at long last materialised, she wanted to be gone. To have disappeared somewhere, so that he would look for her, and mourn. Even better to have disappeared in the Far East, where he had disappeared himself.
She felt that she was a failure, a useless, unlovable girl. She had been insufficient to keep her mother alive, and no better at keeping her grandfather alive. Whatever it was they were fighting her father about, whatever it was the men were looking for, it was more important than she was: that was the message. She
might as well go off to Japan, wherever that was: she was no good for anything else.
It happened quickly, after that.
Keiko’s fishmonger in Japantown would let her work to earn the money to get home to Japan. Only for three months, he said, she could clean fish. But you cannot take that girl with you, he said. She is white, and she will not be safe.
‘He must be crazy,’ said Keiko to Vera. ‘It is not so.’
‘Japan will have war with all the white people of the world,’ said the fishmonger. ‘It is you who are crazy.’
Because they knew it would be for the last time, they returned to Homer Street. Hinchcliffe was positively rigid, Keiko strangely poised.
‘Honourable Miss Hinchcliffe,’ she said, bowing deeply. Hinchcliffe could not see the little smile around her mouth because Keiko’s face was directed toward the green linoleum floor. ‘We have much use of money you before given. And now we come to say that we like to go shopping more.’
‘It is for me,’ said Vera. ‘Grandfather would not have wanted me to be hungry.’
‘No,’ said Miss Hinchcliffe. ‘He would not. Whatever he left, it is for you. But he left nothing. I have looked.’
Vera felt as if she had lost him all over again.
‘I don’t believe it,’ she whispered.
Perhaps that was why Hinchcliffe opened the desk drawer and pulled out another two hundred dollars.
Keiko and Vera were ecstatic. It would go toward their tickets.
Anger was not all that drove Vera to go to a strange country. There was something more grand and admirable, under the
rage of an abandoned child. Japan was a palace of marvels. She wanted to go there to find beauty and tranquillity and mystery. She had seen this in the pictures. This was the Japan of her grandfather’s travels, of his life. She did not understand, or remember, that the pictures were ancient, that the world they described was one hundred and more years old. What difference did it make? The pictures spoke the language of dreams. She went to find the land where it was spoken.
But the language of dreams is loss. The love of beauty is elegy. Made of flesh, we see with the eyes of the past, over the shoulders of the living. The older Vera will tell this to her collectors, the ones who love the
ukiyo-e
but do not understand why. The ‘here and now’ that the
ukiyo-e
artists carved and coloured was already dying, even in its own time. It is useless to mourn or to fight it. We might as well celebrate. It is a kind of ecstasy.
But so dangerous, in the West. To give in is to give up ambitions. She will see this, in the prints she had examined so minutely, in her grandfather’s elderly wisdom. To adopt an inspired idleness, an absorbing ritual. It was so foreign and alluring in the land of her upbringing, her Canadian, Protestant upbringing. Though sad, Belle was never idle, but earnestly found digging up the flower beds or mowing the grass, rattling the dishes in the drying rack or sighing over the wringer washer. Never so beautifully turned out as the Japanese in their riotously painted kimonos behind a screen with chopsticks in their hair, busy in occupations of the moment, blissfully turned away from, but patiently awaiting, eternity. Vera would not get it right herself, not for many years.
Now she had an ambition.
She would go to the place where he had been, this grandfather of hers.
She would go into the pictures.
Maybe that is what happens to people who have been abandoned.
They go to the place where their abandoners have gone.
She went to where her grandfather had been.
But her mother had also left her.
She could not go to where Belle had gone. She would not go.
Later, when life was very dark and when she was nearly the age Belle had been when she died, Vera did think of going where her mother had gone. Of taking the bus, paying the exact fare, making her way along between the rows of seats, as that young mother with the faraway husband had done, lurching because her balance had never been good and it was worse with the medicine. And then ringing the bell for a stop. The handbag carefully left by the side of the bank.
She did not go that way.
‘For that you may be proud of yourself,’ said the sword polisher.
‘Do you think so? Some days I wonder.’
He offers neither condemnation nor praise.
‘You had another path to find.’
3
Uke-nagashi
Warding off: take and give back
Yokohama 27 February 1936
High, light piles of snow sat on every flat surface – benches, roofs, even the narrow edges of the incomprehensible street signs. The sky was black and luminous; red beams of emergency lights crisscrossed in the sky above their heads. Trucks were parked across each end of the empty street. Apart from distant sirens, there was not a sound.
‘This is not Japan,’ whispered Vera. ‘We got off the boat at the wrong place.’
Keiko stood on the portside walkway, one cloth satchel in each hand. She lifted her face to the night and sniffed the sea air, trying to sense her way back. She had been gone for nearly three years. She had told Vera so many times that she would cry tears of joy when she stepped off the boat onto Japanese soil. But her face showed confusion and doubt.
The street was nearly empty. Keiko swayed. There were always crowds, cars and streetcars, men stepping wide-legged in kimono or swiftly in black suits with round black bowler hats. There were always women with babies bundled on their backs. Now there was no one. Then into the emptiness came the sound of a snare drum. And footsteps, so many. Around the corner came a column of soldiers marching on the broad, empty street. The men’s eyes did not look anywhere but straight ahead. On and on they came.
This was the Japanese Imperial Army. Keiko and Vera stood silent, in awe. The soldiers held their bayonets over their right shoulders; one man in front held the flag, that red ball of a sun with its radial spokes.
The column of soldiers turned a corner and was gone. The footsteps echoed for long minutes after.
When the army had passed, one bystander ran, ducking from doorway to doorway. Another, in an army uniform, trained a limp fire hose on the front of a building. No water came out of the nozzle. It was as if he were waiting for the building to burst into flames.
Keiko told Vera to stand against a wall. She darted across the street; surely the man with the hose would tell her what was happening.
Vera watched their terse exchange. Keiko walked back slowly toward her charge. Vera could tell she was shocked despite her composure. Her shaky English was not quite up to the task of explanation. There had been a ‘fight’ in the army. More than a thousand army soldiers had gone into the Diet, the government chambers. Certain important men were dead, killed by soldiers. Junior officers had killed their superiors. ‘Savagely and without regard for the aged,’ was what the soldier had said. They even tried to kill the Prime Minister. What would happen next? Keiko had gone pale. ‘He said we should go home while the trains are still working. And stay inside.’
‘But what home?’ Vera asked. It was the first time she had thought about it: where would they live?
Keiko dug into her satchel for a headscarf. She wrapped it over Vera’s head, tying it at the nape of her neck, as if in that way she could make the girl blend in. Then, carrying their luggage, they began to make their way through the city to the train station. It was not very far.
Vera gazed around her; overhead the searchlight beams slashed and slashed the darkness. A man stood silently in front of the newsstand reading a sandwich board. Keiko read it out loud. ‘The Emperor has said the rebels will be caught and punished.’
Vera had not known until then that there was an emperor.
‘The officers will be killed. And others are killing themselves,’ Keiko said.
Vera did not understand why they would do that. Keiko spent some of their few yen to buy the newspaper. She was scanning the article for names.
‘Is someone you know in the army?’ Vera asked.
Keiko shook her head.
‘Someone who came to our village used to be in the army. But I believe he is not any more.’
She did not find his name, and Vera could see that she was relieved.
More 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.