Between the hillsides and the edge of the sea, winds huffed, arriving and departing. Wet snow muffled the town and weighed on the houses. There was never enough wood for the fires.
The
ama
were in winter disguise. They hid under the funnellike brims of their sun-bonnets. They pushed their bicycles, and when the snow was too much for the bicycle wheels they pulled small sledges behind them. The cheap sandals, called
zouri,
they made at home to sell were tied on the sledges.
‘You may go to my aunt and uncle’s
udon
shop,’ Keiko instructed when she left for work. ‘You can at least learn some more Japanese. The town is as good as the school for learning.’
But Vera was shy. The town was completely different from the summer island. She stayed at home all morning. But by noon, hunger would drive her to the noodle shop. She hung her head low because when she entered the talk amongst the men would cease. The aunt made her welcome.
‘It’s good, she comes. People come to look at her, brings business.’
She took her to a seat at the end of the counter; the aunt gave her soup. The talk began again. She could understand some things the people said now.
When Vera looked into the street she would sometimes see faces looking back at her with unfriendly curiosity. When school
closed, Hana would go by with her friends. She waved gaily to Vera but she did not come in.
One day she saw the basket maker.
She remembered him from last winter; he was the first man in the village to speak to her. But she had been afraid of him. Then he had appeared on the summer island. Now it was winter and like the others he came to the village, to the mainland, and wandered, as restless as they all were.
He saw her in the window, and beckoned.
She held back.
He smiled. He had black teeth with one jagged point on the left. She thought he was old, very old. It was impossible to tell how old.
Vera stood up at her seat and went out through the door. She was taller than he was. He had a limp. Still he was always walking. They said he had fought in the war. ‘Did you hurt your leg in the war before this one or was it already like that?’ she asked him rudely, in English. To her surprise, he answered.
‘It was not already like that, or I could not have fought in the war.’
‘Is that why you make baskets, because you can’t do other work?’ Vera said.
‘I make baskets because it keeps my mind from getting strange ideas.’
‘Oh,’ said Vera. ‘What are the strange ideas?’
He laughed very hard.
‘What is your name?’
‘My name is Bamboo.’
‘It is not your name,’ said Vera. ‘It is the name of the stuff you work with.’
He laughed again. ‘It is not my real name but the name I chose.’
‘Where do you live?’
‘I live in my parents’ home.’ He named a village. ‘But two times a year I go around to the villages. Autumn is the season to go up the mountain. The others cut wood to burn as charcoal.
They ask me to use up the bamboo they clear at the same time. I leave the stalks to dry and use them next spring.’
‘You came to the island. Where else do you go?’
‘I go everywhere,’ he said.
‘Do you go to Kobe?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘That is too far.’
She was disappointed. But she did not tell him why.
‘What do you want?’ she said. He had beckoned her after all.
‘You do not go to school because there is war,’ he said, not asking, just knowing.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘No.’ She did not know what to say.
‘And you stay home, or come to
udon
shop,’ he said.
He stopped talking and went into a little dance. It involved placing his feet as far apart as the width of his shoulders and twisting and turning and placing his hands on his shoulders, then lifting. He removed the backpack that contained his tools and set it down.
‘Katanatogi
knows you are not in school.’
‘How does he know?’
‘Perhaps Keiko told him, I don’t know,’ said the basket maker, with a wide smile.
‘But how does Keiko tell him?’ Vera asked.
‘People who write letters that they don’t want anyone to see can send them by me. I carry letters wherever I go.’
Vera thought of the pleased smile the sword polisher tried to hide when she had told him, ‘Keiko says you are the best polisher in Japan.’ She had a strange sensation. She drew back to go inside again.
‘You are the pearl girl, that is what we call you,’ the basket maker said. He laughed and showed the jagged teeth.
‘I know many things about pearls and much else too,’ he said. ‘You can ask me. I knew Lowinger-san as well. I saw your grandfather when he came here first, with his wife. Long time ago.’
Vera showed nothing on her face to let the basket maker know he knew something she did not know.
‘Your grandfather’s wife, that is your grandmother.’
‘I know,’ she said testily.
He rolled his eyes. ‘That woman made everyone afraid.’ Then he laughed.
So she was very fierce. That was fine; Vera could be fierce, too.
‘I am a big friend of Mikimoto Taisho,’ said the basket maker. ‘I help him. Long time ago, early very early when he began with just a few oysters. Every oyster was in a basket. Now they are in metal cages. Then, every one, I made.’
Vera shrank from the man. She thought of him as sinister. He was armed with sharp things. He had knives, blades, pliers, and cutters. He came without being asked; he moved without apparent schedule between homes and was taken in without question, as if people knew they were fated to open their doors to him.
‘Do you want to see where I work?’ he asked. ‘Come with me.’
She agreed to follow him. She wanted to know what else he could tell her. But when they reached the hut by the side of the road, Vera would not go inside. It smelled of
shochu
and by the smile on the basket maker’s face she imagined he was going to drink some now.
He made a gesture of raising a small cup to his lips.
‘This is how I do my best work,’ he laughed. ‘Your grandfather liked to join me.’
She shook her head.
‘No,’ she said.
‘Nothing to fear,’ he said. ‘I tell my best stories with this too,’ he said, lifting the cloth door and pointing to his bottles. ‘Your grandfather, he had many stories too.’
He turned his back to her, concluding the conversation. He opened the tool basket at his feet and removed a small cross made of two pieces of wood, fitted a stalk of bamboo over it and stood its end on the ground. Then he found a hammer and banged the end of the stalk so that it split the bamboo into four. Vera watched for a minute, but he seemed to have forgotten her.
Vera kicked the snowdrifts all the way home. She did not like the basket maker but she was now connected to him.
‘Why do people think bad things about the basket maker?’ she asked Keiko later.
‘I do not know what people think,’ said Keiko, ‘especially now.’ She was silent for a minute.
Then Keiko lifted her hands and brushed her two palms together, swish swish swish. I am through with that, the gesture said. It had belonged to Miss Hinchcliffe but she had made it hers. They laughed a little too long, out of relief perhaps. Keiko gestured with the bottle and limped some more, but Vera said, ‘Is it true he helped Mikimoto Taisho?’
‘He made many baskets for the oysters to hang in the water. So many hundreds. He had to get helpers and train them. Mikimoto Taisho made work for most of the town, and others from the peninsula.’
‘Did the basket maker truly know my grandfather?’
‘Did he tell you that?’ said Keiko. ‘He knows many things.’ She went very still.
Vera thought of what the
katanatogi
said. In this village people knew things. The old men and the old women saw everything. It was both good and bad.
Every day, at the
udon
shop, Vera sat at the counter, slumping, trying to fit in with the walls, hoping that the people would forget about her and talk. Again Vera saw the basket maker in the street. It did not take long to catch up with him because of his limp.
‘If you wait a moment I will give you something.’
She stopped, and waited. He brought three strips of pliant bamboo out of his backpack and swiftly wrapped one around his finger, bent it backward, tucked the end in; then he made another figure – because that was what they were, figures – and attached it to the first. On one he made a tongue, or a finger that stuck out. On the other he made a hole. He put the stick from the male figure – because that was what it was, a man – into the hole of the female figure.
‘Katanatogi
and Keiko make like this.’ He made a circle with
the thumb and forefinger of one hand. With the other forefinger he poked through the hole.
She threw the figures back at him.
He laughed and showed the black hole in his mouth.
For New Year, Vera and Keiko made a
shimekazari
to put over their door. It was a clutch of rice straw tied up with jute. Its purpose was to ward off evil. In olden times, Keiko said, a dirty beggar had come asking for shelter. He went from door to door, in the whole town, and was turned away everywhere he went. But there was one family who took him in. They let him bathe. They gave him a meal. When he had eaten, the dirty beggar revealed himself to be a god.
By the time they had hung the decoration, and admired it there over the doorway, night had fallen. A boy was there in the gloom, across the narrow street. Vera saw him through the window. It was Tamio. She ran out toward him; he stopped. But he did not come near her. He looked straight ahead down the road.
‘How are you?’ Vera asked.
He scowled. ‘My feet are cold and wet.’ He made it seem as if it were Vera’s fault.
She did not know what to say. He was so unlike his summer self. Keiko came out through the door.
‘Come inside,’ said Keiko. ‘Can you visit us?’
He sat with his teacup in front of his heart, held in both hands. His hands were black. He had been taken out of school to work on the charcoal. He explained that he had to watch the fire all day. If the fire got too hot, the wood turned to ash and that was useless and he would be beaten. If it was not hot enough, then the wood did not burn. Gradually he softened, and his face softened; he was not angry at her, just angry.
‘Are you hungry?’ he asked Vera.
‘Not so much,’ she said. It was true. Somehow Keiko managed to feed them both well.
‘Why are we talking like this, secretly?’
‘It seems there is a rule that no one is to know we’re friends.’
‘Where did this rule come from?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Tamio, ‘where did they all come from?’ That was a joke, and they laughed together.
Winter deepened, and darkened, and the snow outside built up to the window ledges, and the narrow walkways became narrower between piles of snow, and everyone waited for the thaw. If Vera saw the bent-over shape of the basket maker with his large backpack, she turned and went up an alley until he was gone. Vera’s life had no luxuries, unless you counted the warmth of the bed under its pile of cotton blankets, or the pearls; imaginary, white, smooth, lustrous, warming under her fingers, that now appeared before her eyes when she closed them at night, rolling out of the corners of the dark sky. So many pearls: she was dreaming pearls there in the dark room, with the smokestained timbers. Outside, the blazing white blinded her eyes, but when she looked inside, it was as if the corners of the rooms were adrift in pearls.
It was dark when Keiko came home, tired from work. Keiko and Vera went to
o-furo,
the bath. The women waited outside the little hut under the stars.
First went the men, who by right were treated to the water at its cleanest and hottest. Some took their bottles of sake in with them. Some, who had been loading and unloading charcoal from the carts they pulled from the forest hillside, were black when they entered, on their hands and feet and necks, even their faces.
That was the way it was done. By tradition, as well, the women were not privy to men’s conversation in the bath. Except that the voices were loud and the night was silent. The women stood outside the door waiting for the men to dress. So it was the case that everyone knew how, in the bath, the schoolteacher said that soldiers of the Emperor must overcome the Chinese. Once in control, Japan would help the Chinese by driving out the white men from China. Then with the help of China’s vast riches they could drive out the white men from all of Asia. This was the
goal. We have no fuel, he said. We have no resources. But we must reach the rich countries and instruct them in the right way.
‘Hitler is sincere,’ said the schoolteacher. ‘Nothing he does is vulgar. He is a hero sent to achieve a new world order.’
Once or twice a voice was raised in disagreement.
‘Where do you get these ideas?’ said an old man. The old ones were safe, and could say what they wanted: no one would take them away. ‘Not from the newspapers I hope. The newspapers are lying to us. They are not telling us what is happening in the world.’
Vera stood waiting under the stars. Even they were foreign to her. Everything looked strange to her now.
After the men had dried themselves, they filed past, important, some drunken. The women stepped off the path to give way. When the boys emerged, pink and scrubbed, steaming a little in the frigid air, the older
ama
laughed at them. The shy young women like Hanako cast down their eyes while the boisterous elders shouted names and ribald comments that Vera did not understand.
When the last man had passed out of the doorway, the women stepped forward. Setsu, the eldest, went first, with the next eldest on her heel.
Once inside, they pulled off their numerous wraps, and holding a thin washcloth over their pubis, went to the wooden buckets to wash with soap before stepping into the water. They squatted on their heels and without affectation busied themselves with great energy soaping and scrubbing under each arm and in the crevice under their bodies. Politics was gone, for the time. The youngest ones giggled. Vera and Hana shouted too; it was fun. Not until the last one sank herself below the surface of the water, in the steamy, condensation-dappled wooden shed, did the conversation become serious.