There were few people out on the streets. The night air was raw with icy sleet, and on the pavements was a thick layer of slush. Vera begged to go back to the house. Once there, she slept again, hoping that she would wake up and find herself back in Vancouver.
But she did not.
On the second day, as soon as the household was awake, Keiko and Vera dressed and went outside. Again they walked down the hill into the town. This morning the sun was shining on the iced pavement and the women were abroad. One of them exclaimed in joy when she saw Keiko. She put down the bicycle she was pushing and embraced her. More women followed her example, and in a few moments Keiko and Vera were in the centre of a crowd of exclaiming, laughing women. They were all small, with rounded, strong bodies; under their old-fashioned bonnets with
long brims were bright, curious eyes. Keiko proudly introduced Vera to each one. These were her friends, the
ama
divers, she told Vera.
These women stared frankly into Vera’s face. Their eyes were laughing and they looked her curiously all over, making exclamations to themselves. They pointed at her hair. But they were delighted. And Keiko was so proud. If Vera could have felt anything but a seething self-pity she would have been ashamed, as she had never presented Keiko this way when they were in Vancouver.
Keiko took her to the temple and to the vegetable stalls and to the harbour where the fishing boats came in. They walked up the hillside to get a view of Ago Bay, and Keiko showed Vera the rafts that floated in the protected inlets. These belonged to Mikimoto, the pearl king. Keiko explained that there were baskets of oysters suspended in the water under these rafts, and each of these oysters had been seeded with a pearl. The oysters had to be protected from cold and seaweed and other enemies, so that the pearls could grow.
But even the pearls could not pacify Vera. She was cold and afraid. Where had Keiko brought her? This was not Japan. It was frigid, and poor, and there were soldiers in the streets. The State of Emergency because of the attempted coup in the army continued. At night Vera lay on her floor mat and heard raised voices, harsh cries, and the sounds of drunkenness from the street.
Inside the home it was not quiet either. Keiko asked her brother to lend them money. The sounds of their arguing passed through each paper partition. Vera could not understand. She asked Keiko: what does it mean. ‘My brother does not have money,’ said Keiko. ‘He goes to borrow from a loan shark.’ There was little money to be had anywhere: the war in China was draining them all.
‘But then it is a bad war,’ said Vera. It seemed obvious.
‘You cannot say this. You do not speak against what the Emperor has asked of us. We must sacrifice.’
Then the brother relented and said that the country was
running out of oil, but that you could not say that either, because it was a military secret.
‘If it is a secret, how do you know it?’ Keiko asked, full of scorn. ‘Do they tell you their mind, these lieutenants of the Emperor?’
‘Be careful what you say,’ the brother said, his face darkening. ‘You went away. You do not understand what we’ve become.’
But he did one thing for her, perhaps because her presence with the white girl made him fearful. He came home to say that the charcoal man had received his call-up papers. He would leave immediately, probably even tonight. As he was a single man, and lived alone, his house would be empty. The brother had arranged that Keiko could live there. She could put the rent the charcoal man asked for in a special metal box and save it for when he came home from the war. Now the brother stood at his door with his feet apart and his hands on his hips. Vera and Keiko packed their bags without even seeing the little house. When they left, the brother’s wife pressed some paper money into Keiko’s hand.
‘Perhaps the charcoal man will never come back from the war,’ said Vera, as they trudged back down the hill.
‘That is terrible to say,’ said Keiko.
The house was high up on the other side of the town, near the forest. Black dust was on everything, as if the owner had slept with charcoal and eaten with charcoal and lived with charcoal piled around him. Keiko began to clean. Vera sulked, until she could not stand herself any more, and then she got up and helped to wash the floor. The good thing, Keiko said, was that the owner had left a small pile of charcoal behind the house, and they could use it to keep warm. When that ran out they would go up into the forest to collect firewood.
With the money from her brother’s wife, Keiko bought a bicycle. They bought eggs and fish and a large bag of rice. It would last a few weeks, Keiko said.
‘I begged before, from Miss Hinchcliffe. I not beg again,’ said Keiko. ‘I am
ama
diver and I will find work.’
She went to the inspectors’ office and put her name on the list. But there would be no diving until May. In winter her fellow
ama
worked for Mikimoto cleaning oysters at the pearl farm. But even Mikimoto had fewer jobs now than before. All over the world the Depression had cut into the pearl business. Keiko spoke to her friends in the street. She heard that some
ama
had to go
dekasegi,
away from home. Some worked as farm labourers. There were no machines for this work, only women with long knives in the fields. Some went to Yokohama or even Tokyo, to do cleaning work. But in those strange places, there would be fewer jobs as well, Keiko reasoned. She was determined to remain in Toba. The Emperor’s lieutenants, she said, would not change the sea.
Vera stayed inside, huddled on the futon. It was her job to keep the fire going in the hearth. Every hour she got up and raked the coals, and put on more charcoal, and when the charcoal was gone she put on some of the twisted roots she and Keiko found in the forest. She could not believe this was happening to her. It was as if she had descended into a fairy tale.
‘Soon spring comes,’ said Keiko. ‘It is better.’
One day when Keiko was out, a man came to the door. Vera was afraid to answer. He tapped gently, and then he looked in through the window. Finally, Vera answered but she could not understand what he was saying. That evening, when Keiko was home, he came again. He was a friend with a message. A woman had slipped on the bamboo raft in Ago Bay where the
ama
worked cleaning the oyster shells. She had fallen into the icy water and her foot had been caught between the poles. She had broken her ankle.
Keiko met the others to take the ferry to work the next morning.
‘Don’t be afraid,’ Keiko said to Vera when she left the house. ‘I will come back.’
Vera did not feel afraid. She felt nothing, other than cold. She lay on the floor, under the layers of cotton cloths that were meant to keep her warm, and hated Japan. She was afraid to go out-side
because she looked different and people stared. No one spoke to her. If they had, she would not have understood. Finally, in the afternoon, hunger forced her out. In town, one man looked her in the eye. He wore a heavy sack of tools on his back, and he limped. He had a long, grey, thin beard. When he smiled at Vera she could see that most of his teeth were gone, and she was frightened of him. She had no strength; climbing the steep streets with a bucket of potatoes nearly made her faint. Once a man came out of a shop waving a bamboo stick and shouted at her.
‘Why?’ she asked Keiko later.
‘Only because you are strange to him.’
She felt just as strange to herself. She wondered if she were still the same girl she had been. There was one tiny pane of mirror in the house, and it hung on the wall by the door in a small shrine. Vera looked into it over and over. What she saw was a ghost with lifeless, nearly white hair and a red nose that ran with the cold.
She thought of the pictures she’d pored over on Homer Street, and tried to find even one thing that looked like the Japan she had fallen in love with. There was wind, and rain, and snow, but the people were braced against it; they were not sensuous or graceful. There was no promise of cherry blossoms or teahouses around the bend in the stream, or after the shower had passed. Something frigid and hard had found its way into this tropical place. The snow was no genteel flurry of white to walk through in sandals. It beleaguered the people’s walking, and weighted their every gesture. Like great white waves, it was water turned enemy, lying stiffly at their feet, in the frozen froth at the sea’s edge, or crouching on the roofs and hills as if to kill.
When Keiko came home with her wages they went to the shops and bought coffee beans. Their biggest expenditure was for a hand grinder. Vera put the beans in the small wooden drawer and turned the handle, while the smell of coffee beans came out. It was the one thing that made her happy, because it reminded her of the café in the flatiron building on Homer Street. Keiko
used the big iron pot that the charcoal man had left, to make broth and noodles.
One night when the sky was white with a freezing fog, Vera woke from her sleep on the floor mat to the sound of whistle blasts in the street. The blasts were shrill, and insistent. Footsteps pounded past the door. Keiko told Vera not to get up, but she herself stood by the window in the darkness, peering out. She could see down the hill to the rooftops of the main streets.
‘They’re chasing that man who everyone says is a Red,’ she said.
‘What is a Red?’
‘A Communist.’ Keiko sucked in her breath. ‘I can see him. He is on the roof next door.’
The shouting and footsteps were right outside their house. Vera cowered under her blanket. ‘Come inside, away from the window,’ she hissed at Keiko.
But Keiko stood where she was.
‘They are men in black. They have seen him. Now they’re running over the roof. I fear they will catch him.’
There was a brief exchange of shouts, and then the shots of a gun.
‘Did they kill him?’
‘No. They take him away.’
‘What did he do?’ Vera asked.
Keiko said something in Japanese.
‘What does it mean?’
‘I cannot explain.’
‘Please.’
‘He has been taken for what is called “Dangerous Thoughts”. There is a law against them. He will be in prison. Maybe if very many people know what he has said, the newspapers will publish that he has changed his mind,’ Keiko said, and climbed silently into bed.
Vera lay awake pondering the idea of thoughts that were dangerous. Could the police here read people’s thoughts?
‘I think we should go home again,’ said Vera in the morning.
She knew it would not be easy. ‘Maybe Miss Hinchcliffe will send us the money. Maybe my father –’
‘Be patient,’ said Keiko. ‘In a few months it will be spring.’
She got a calendar and hung it on the wall. She explained the way the Japanese counted the days: eighty-seven days after February 4
th
, which they call
risshun,
a change would come. On the eighty-eighth day, which would be the beginning of May, the fishing season would begin and they would sail for the summer island. They had always done this and would do it again.
Vera counted the days. Spring came, and the trees were in blossom, and there was warmth in the air that blew off the crusted remains of icy snow in the shadiest parts of the treed hillsides. With the ice went a stiffness and fear from the people.
When the eighty-eighth day came, the whole village set out together with ceremonial flags flying, nearly three hundred men, women and children, in small sailboats and a few motorboats. She and Keiko went in the boat of Keiko’s old aunt and uncle, and their son. They had one of the few motorboats. The island was twelve miles from the mainland, a journey of six hours. At the end they stepped onto a low, bare volcanic rock and were welcomed by a posse of wild cats. There were dozens and dozens of them, arching from behind the rocks, meowing and stalking with tails swishing, giving no quarter. Vera had never seen a wild cat. To her a cat was a pampered pet, sleeping on a pillow. Keiko explained that the cats were left behind the year before, and the year before that, for as long as the people had been coming to the summer island for the fishing season. They lived on mice and snakes.
They unloaded their belongings onto the pebbly shore. They brought very little, just their sleeping bundles, a few
yakata
and baskets containing rice, diving gear and cooking pots. Keiko gestured to Vera to lift up the cloth-tied bundles that she had brought. The men went to put in place the wooden docks that had been stored away from the water and the winter storms.
Carrying their bundles, the people walked all together up the small winding street that ran up from the harbour. The procession was natural, and unhurried, passing one after another of the low, weathered wooden houses that, like the cats, had been left behind the year before and the year before that for as long as anyone could remember. Stones were set in rows on the roofs of the houses, which were grey and matched the rock. As each family reached its home, the members disengaged from the group, bowed, and disappeared inside.
That first night of the first summer on the island, Vera lay down on the floor mat, exhausted from the day’s sail. She could hear nothing but the wind and the sound of the water, a hollow percussive sound as it broke somewhere over the rocks. Where had she come to now? This island was a farther place even than the village from her world. She wanted to cry, but Keiko was beside her. The old aunt and uncle and even a boy, near her age but a little older, could hear. She was determined not to make a sound. She went to sleep pretending she was dead.
But sunrise came even to the dead. Her spot on the floor was directly in line with the rising sun; a beam crept slowly over the windowsill, and made its way up from her feet to her face. Vera opened her eyes. She was awake in a wooden box. And it was as if she had woken up for the first time in a year. Every board and mat and corner and basket Vera could see was freshly cut and full of meaning.
The box had been constructed carefully, simply. Vera could
see each board as it lay next to the other, and the beams that were the straight trunks of thin trees that lay across them. Probably years ago, perhaps even one hundred years ago or more, when this box was built, the trees grew on this island. Perhaps that was why there were no trees here now. They had all gone for houses. The wood was grey and in some places russet, and in spots it showed the stains of water that had got through. There were knots and eyes in it and where there was a hard round eye, the surrounding log had been shaven. That meant that all along the planks Vera could see round hard grey places like pupils, each one in the centre of an oval like an iris, so that the whole made an eye. They did not feel like peering eyes, but like spirits that were friendlier now, less strange.