‘Eighty-two years. It is not so old, for him,’ the woman replied.
The old man jumped up lightly, while the ball was in the air. He caught it in one hand and whisked it behind his back. He took out a coin, put his head back, and set the coin spinning on
the tip of his nose. It flashed in the sun. The children screamed and jumped around. He took out another coin.
Head back, he shouted in Japanese, ‘Do you think I can do it?’
‘Yes,’ shouted the children. ‘Yes, you can do it!’
‘I think I can do it,’ he said.
‘You can, you can!’
He took the other coin between thumb and forefinger. He rubbed it lightly, as if he were polishing a lens. He twirled it in his palm. The other coin was still spinning on his nose.
Vera began to laugh. If she were not looking at this she could not believe it was happening.
He tossed the second coin and caught it with the coin on his nose. It teetered there for a minute. Then it fell, and took with it the coin that was spinning. But Mikimoto caught them both. Then he reached into the folds of his
hakama,
somewhere in there, there must have been a bag, and he pulled out a handful of coins. He walked into the mass of children, giving them away.
Vera stepped back.
But he was coming toward her.
‘How do you do?’ he said, formally, bowing first and then extending his hand. She did the same.
‘You are the girl from Canada. The daughter of the daughter of James Lowinger. He was my friend. Why are you here?’
‘He left me with Keiko.’
‘Yes I know. They tell me this strange thing. Then you are here because of the Pearl King. I brought James Lowinger here. He loved the
ama
you see.’
‘I am an
ama.
I want a job. Please,’ she said.
But he turned away. The children were calling, ‘Grandpa.’ Someone brought him an umbrella. He began to twirl it and once again he was on his back with his feet in the air, the sharp tip and curved handle of the umbrella spinning. The crowd closed in around him.
Later, when Vera was about to get in the boat, a man came.
‘Mikimoto Taisho says you can work at Pearl Island, but not here.’
‘Why not here?’
‘You are too thin,’ he said. ‘The water is too cold. You can work at Pearl Island. You can speak English to the visitors.’
This at least felt to Vera as if she were closer to her grandfather, to his Japan.
Coming down from the Bund, a stone buttress that was intended to keep the foreigners from the Japanese, James Lowinger passed the rickshaw men with their bent backs and braying cries, their foreheads grooved by the strap they used when pulling a particularly heavy load. He’d been to the customs sheds, cavernous enclosures that seemed to have been there for centuries, but were in fact not much older than he was. The wood-beamed ceilings were thirty feet high; inside, men wearing
hachimangi
across their foreheads pulled two-wheeled carts loaded with crates. They strained, and they shouted to get people out of the way. Uniformed officials scanned the goods and made intricate markings on fine, nearly transparent paper. Old men sat in small, enclosed boxes amidst the fray, with brush and ink writing the exquisite
kangi.
This went on day and night.
He felt alive there amongst the goods, all wrapped and dedicated to this address and that, over the seas and far away. These items were world travellers, as he was. Coming from one place and destined for another, they kept their privacy, boarded up, with nails through, bolstered with straw stuffing against breakage.
His feet made a hollow sound on the wooden bridge over
the canal to Homura. The year was 1900. Not so long ago it was guarded; foreigners were not allowed to cross. But now the government of Japan had given up trying to keep the peoples apart. Sailors, merchants, and westerners who studied Japanese ways were drawn over this pretty arch to the other side.
In Homura, the houses were low and the doors were silent panels that slid away, to leave one wall open, and the interior visible to the world. He jostled along amidst women in high clogs, and samurai in straw sandals. Their swords may have been banned, but their wide-legged swagger gave them away. Message boys ran between them all. He went to the street where the tradesmen worked, the artisans. Looking in at the doors he saw the unmistakeable swaybacked shape of the Singer sewing machine, the bent head of a woman, the whir of the treadle. Then he found what he was looking for: the Yokohama printmakers. He always came here when he was in town, and he had become something of an expert on their work.
They were carving their wooden blocks to impress on the rice paper. James looked at the fresh prints, still damp from the ink. He was not sure he liked them. They were different than the older
ukiyo-e.
The lines had changed since the coming of the Americans. They were not so fluid, or so sensual. The landscape had retreated under the foreign influx.
He picked one up. Here was Mr Audubon, the American painter of birds, in a scene from his life. How had this story, this anecdote of despair, come to live in Japan, come to rest in a Yokohama print shop? The story was that the great artist had left his work for safekeeping with a friend. The friend kept it in a wooden box. The artist, who was poor, travelled all the year in the wilderness looking for birds. When he returned to collect the three hundred prints, his entire early work, he opened the box to find – nothing! sawdust! A rat leaped out, fat and resentful.
‘Now you tell our stories,’ James said in awkward Japanese.
The printmaker grinned. ‘We are like the rats,’ he said. ‘As you have eaten ours, now we eat yours.’ He laughed uproariously.
These shops had the easy bustle of newspaper offices; they were pressed with events of the moment. People came in to gossip; up and down the street stories were relayed like military dispatches. James lingered. Today the men talked about Mikimoto. How he won first prize in the sea products competition. How the Dowager Empress had ordered some of his pearls for her own collection. James knew Mikimoto; he had met him years ago, at the sea products exhibition. People had called him crazy, before, when he said he could coax the oysters to work for him.
At night the quarter was dotted with the paper lanterns that gave it a faintly macabre, ephemeral feel. The lanterns swung in the wind, and occasionally a flame went out, showing that all light was provisional. It might vanish, leaving him alone between strange doorways. But there was a place where he would be welcome, and that was where he was going. The
Miyosaki,
the pleasure district.
In his favourite house he was welcomed; he unbuttoned. Under the skilled hard hot fingertips of these small strong women he felt the muscles at the back of his neck and his thighs, even his jaw, and even his teeth, loosen. He travelled too much. He was always at sea and no land was home and now he was nearly forty, and he knew it. He breathed the salt sweet, sour plum air of Japan, and he thought that this place at least welcomed him.
He did not stay the night. He excused himself, bowing, backing out of the room. He had matters to attend to. At the Grand Hotel he slept for one hour. He rose, got hot water, and washed. He did not shave; already he had adopted the moustache and beard he would wear until his death.
He had oatmeal for breakfast: Japanese food was for later in the day. He had two places to go. The first was the Marine Products Exhibition. The second was the small Anglican church.
Amongst the displays of turban shells and dried octopus, the aquaria where wall-eyed fish circled the glass walls to show off their colours, the bins and bins of seaweed under its many names, James searched for him. He was not difficult to find.
A thickening of the crowd, a knot of people, grew, blocking the aisles. Their necks bent this way and that to get a look. He knew before he saw. Inside this circle would be a diminutive figure in his long black skirt, the
hakata,
with his cotton
haori
over his shoulders. You couldn’t actually see him. What you could see was, every few seconds, an oar flying into the air, twirling and then dropping. James wedged his way in. The man he was looking for held his oar in front of his stomach, and spun it with both hands, as if it were a propeller. He passed it to the small of his back. He passed it over his head. He tipped back his head and placed the oar flat on his forehead and it spun there.
The crowd sighed and murmured.
James decided to wait out the flying things – the man had now replaced the oar with an umbrella and started spinning again. In a few moments the juggler ended with a flourish, bowed, and waved away the cheers. He picked up a bowler hat with a bamboo staff. The hat was a sign of a Western-thinking Japanese. He was smaller even than most, and as thick in the calf as a peasant. He had large ears that the Japanese considered lucky.
‘Ah, Mikimoto, there you are,’ James said. ‘Ever the showman.’ He clapped him on the back.
Mikimoto understood English but did not speak it. James understood a fraction of the Japanese he heard, but was able to intuit meanings, practised as he was in foreign languages.
Bowing and then raising his head, the little man extended his right hand. Any and all forms of greeting! his smile indicated. James reached to shake it but as he did a ball rolled out of Mikimoto’s
haori
sleeve into his palm. His hand inadvertently retreated.
Mikimoto laughed uproariously. He removed the ball. He extended his hand again. As James reached to shake it, another ball appeared. Mikimoto was laughing very hard and two bystanders were laughing too. He took a third ball from somewhere in the folds of his
haori
and began to juggle.
They had met three years before, in this very building, both looking into a display case with a disappointing array of seed pearls offered at too high prices.
‘Too many people want pearls,’ the Japanese had said. ‘Soon – five years, ten years – there will be no oysters left in the sea.’
They were pleased to have found a common concern. They had moved away from the shop and into the street. A young man materialised at Mikimoto’s side. He led them to a teashop.
‘We must –’ Mikimoto said. He could not find the words in his limited arsenal ‘– We must –’ He put up his hands. In a curious gesture he scooped his arms as if he were trying to hold water.
The other man explained then, that Mikimoto had a dream. In his dream he saw many thousands of oysters and abalone nesting along the ocean floor. Pearl banks tucked into the narrow channels were protected and harvested by the fishermen of Ago Bay, to give beautiful pearls for the necks of beautiful women.
‘He has made a part of his dream come true. You know, Mikimoto
compels’
– that was the strange word he used – ‘the oyster to make a pearl.’
James listened, his breath slowly coming in. He had been looking, during his long pearl pilgrimage, for some way to make this beauty come to light without the attendant ugliness,
and some way to put the oysters back in the sea, to save something for the future.
Two years ago, the serious young Japanese explained, Mikimoto had convinced the people of Jinmyo Mura to give up fishing so that they could work with him on farming oysters. But he was not having so much luck. The oysters suffered from enemies: the starfish, the octopus, the red tide, the cold currents. ‘You know about the oyster because you travel the world over. There is a question Mikimotosan would like to ask you.’
‘I am no expert on the mollusc,’ James said. ‘Mostly I see them in huge piles, rotting, and smelling vile. But by all means, ask.’
‘What he would like to know is how the pearls get into the oyster.’
James was amused. ‘He wonders about that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then your boss is not alone. You and everyone else since time began. If I knew the answer to that I would be a wealthy man.’
The Japanese looked at him with complete seriousness. ‘I am sorry but I do not understand.’
‘I can give you theories going back to the Greeks. Great minds have studied this question and they do not know either. It is probably just an accident.’
The acolyte translated this to Mikimoto who answered back with a few terse words and a brilliant, wide smile.
‘Thank you very much for your answer.’
‘I have not given you an answer, my friend.’
‘Yes you have. If it is an accident, he says, then we learn how to make it happen on purpose. We will sow pearls and make them grow like rice, like turnips.’
James looked into his little white porcelain cup and into the cups of these other two men.
‘How much schooling?’ he said to the interpreter, indicating the fierce, small silent figure at the table.
‘Nothing past eight years when still a child. Mikimotosan must go to work to support the family, noodle shop and selling vegetables.’
‘Tell him science. What he is talking about is science. In Japan there are men who study the oysters in universities, who do research. That is who Mikimoto must ask if he wants to grow oysters like a crop.’
‘Mikimoto-san knows everything about oysters. He studies them every day, watching. He opens thousand on thousands of oysters.’
‘Yes I can believe that. Mikimoto knows the practical side of sea life, but a scientist will know other things that will help you.’
James could see the young man was already thinking of the next place to ask, and hardly noticed when they shook hands to say goodbye.
That was three years ago. Today, Mikimoto was haggard, thin, and grey in the face. But he smiled hugely, from ear to ear. ‘Good luck or bad, my friend?’ he asked.
‘Some of each,’ said James. ‘How is it going, your grand concern?’
The same translator appeared from behind the booth. ‘Magic continues. Mikimoto made pearls are the most beautiful. Thanks to you.’
‘To me? No, I’m sure I have done nothing.’
‘You explain that Mikimoto-san must see a scientist. He went to see a scientist, and stayed at his research station. He asked the scientist, what should I put in the shell? We had tried already many things: broken glass, clay, but the oyster spat it out. He tried wood, but it rotted. He has found an answer now.’