She was accustomed to the times when he did not answer. But this time he looked angry, and she was frightened.
It was near the end of summer: September the fourth, to be exact. The sword polisher had been listening to his radio. The very day before, Britain had declared war on Germany.
He saw two men come off the ferry.
One was the basket maker. He had been expecting him.
The other was the white man.
Ikkanshi knew him.
It was the girl’s father.
Hamilton Drew was changed; still Ikkanshi could tell it was he. He was older, heavier, a little soiled. He was a man who had been searching and had not found what he had been looking for, so he had made do with what he found. He had cheapened himself in the process.
He stepped off the boat. No one came to greet him. Perhaps no one knew who he was.
He had arrived at the time of the festival. Most of the village people were in front of their houses, watching the men practising to carry the palanquin to the shrine. It would begin in only four days. Vera was somewhere in the crowd. She was subdued, the way all the women were, because of Hana’s death. He thought that he should find her, and warn her. They never spoke of her father and had not since the very beginning when she had told him how she had tried to find him, when her mother had died, and that he had
not answered her letters. That was a long time ago now. Ikkanshi supposed he had always known that Hamilton Drew would find her. A lost father would be returned to his daughter; lost fathers always are. But he had hoped that it would be at her choice, not his.
He found her amongst the girls. She was watching the parade. He followed her eyes and saw her lover. Tamio could not make his limbs function. He must have been drunk; he was staggering but she was not laughing at him. She was watching him as if she did not know him, coolly, incuriously.
‘A man has arrived on the ferry,’ he told her.
‘Is it your basket maker?’ she asked.
‘No. It is Hamilton Drew.’
The sword polisher startled her. More likely he shocked her. But Vera did not take her eyes off the cavorting boys with their burden, the idol on their shoulders. Her own shoulders were rigid.
‘Your father,’ he said.
‘I know that’s who he is,’ she said, and for the space of time it took her to say it she was the old Vera. But he saw the change. She went hard at that moment. Ikkanshi saw in her who she would be twenty years hence, and he did not like it. She gave a raucous laugh. He wondered for a moment if she too were drunk.
‘And so another man steps off a boat and thinks he will change my life?’
He supposed that she referred to her grandfather. That she was thinking back, years ago, to when she needed this man who went by the name of her father.
Ikkanshi wanted to caution her. ‘We don’t know what he is thinking.’
She gave him her headstrong stare, taking it as a reprimand.
‘You will have a little time before he finds you. I believe he will go to the Headman first.’ Hamilton would have
learned his lesson, from his last visit; to bypass the Headman might save some hours at the beginning, but it would only make your errand longer in the end, if not impossible.
‘Prepare yourself,’ he told Vera.
She ran.
And he watched the back of her go into the grass.
There was no question of her running open-armed to her long lost father. She was running away. She would have run to Hana, but Hana stood in her mind’s eye tied to a stone in the sea-forest. And she could not run to Tamio because he was one of the bearers. Even had he been there, what could he do? In that instant her young lover became a stranger. It was in the grief of Hana’s death, it was in the age-old village ceremony, it was in the arrival of her father, all at once. They all became strangers to her, then. They became like people in a dream, familiar of face but opaque of motive and meaning. When the true stranger transformed himself into her nearest relation, her young lover and the rest of the people were transformed into creatures she did not know.
She ran and he watched her go.
The tide lifted the boats during the night, leaving meandering veins in the muddy places, and no marks at all on the sand. Then it let them settle back again. Early the next day, the
ama
went out to fish. Vera was with them.
Outside of the lee of the island, the winds took the surface of the sea and played with it. But that was only on the surface. Underneath, the water was as always. The blue light came from only one source: above. The currents went around the world.
Perhaps they left here and made their way by those arrows she had seen in geography books, arrows that went under the tips of continents and encircled islands, completely around the globe.
Diving down was like stripping off layers of herself.
It was an ecstasy. She felt skinned, completely alert. She could have snapped off her rope. She was connected to no one and nothing. She was not sinking; the world was drifting off. It was going away. She would have only herself.
‘Be careful,’ said Keiko. ‘Go slowly. You want to do something very daring and very dangerous to prove that you deserve to live.’
Now that Hana is dead
was understood.
But that was not it: she wanted to become so exhausted that she expected nothing. She wanted to feel nothing, and to erase all that she loved here. She had longed to escape and now that escape was at hand – her father had come! – she hid from it.
Diving down, she saw that even fifteen yards was not far. The sea was so much deeper than that. When you swim over a hole in the sea the hole is so much darker. Creatures you cannot imagine live in those holes. What you are is only a cut, a scratch on the sea. There is a whole population, underneath, the white fingers of coral, the scabby fish, the octopus steaming along at its steady pace like a locomotive, its tentacles flowing out at the back. What she engaged in was a kind of courtship and she had fallen in love, fallen in love with the sea.
I sometimes think I see Hana in the street. She is not at all the simple diving girl. She has got away from the island, and has become sophisticated, sitting at a café in Vancouver with rumpled morning hair and a small dog on a leash. Or, she stands in the line-up for a film, arm-in-arm with a man. Today, she was window-shopping. I saw her from behind, the nape of her neck, the shape of her ankles unforgettable and bringing back those days on the beach fifteen, twenty years ago. I could also see her face in the glass, imposed on a pink satin music box that she seemed to like. There were fine, beautiful wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, crow’s feet we call them in English – but the Japanese would have another name. I realise it is not Hana at the same moment that I realise that, all these years and on the other side of the Pacific, I have been looking for her.
‘After the first death there is no other’ A famous saying, but it is wrong. First was my mother’s. Then my grandfather’s. The deaths begin to accumulate. Each one is a little less shocking than the one before – we know this blow. It has come down on us before – but now it is heavier. The deaths form a phalanx, a wall. This wall runs alongside the living, dividing our sightlines; it alters perspective. It is like the blinkers the old milk horse wore as he walked the alley behind the house on Ivy Street. You may see something of these blinkers in the
ukiyo-e.
The artist seems to
be lurking, peering out from between two timbers, or alongside the eaves of a house, or even the back end of a horse. The obstruction looms so large in the foreground that the rest of the view is dwarfed. It is what you must look past, and it defines the life beyond.
On Homer Street, after Grandfather’s death but before Keiko and I left for Japan, I went for weeks without looking at the
Three Views of Crystal Water.
But then I’d be curious, and return to it. Was there more? And there was.
The third time, I saw the pictures in a different order. They told another story. It was so obvious I wondered why I hadn’t seen it before.
This time the story, like so many stories, began with the letter. A man and a woman passed by night on the arch of a bridge. They were both wrapped and unrecognisable in travelling cloaks. The woman extended a hand holding the paper; the man took it. The woman was a servant of a woman held captive in the pagoda behind, in the distance. It was her task to pass the message to this man, in the dark hour before dawn, hoping that he could help her mistress escape.
The bridge fascinated me. It was a short, rounded arch, an arc, a dream bridge. A bridge is a connector, a link, a way of crossing the water. People go over it, to exile, or freedom. There were so many bridges in my life: my grandfather and Keiko came down one toward me. My mother jumped or fell off one. There was Adam’s Bridge, that my grandfather told me about, from the island of Paradise to the real world, the attached, mainland world that does not float. Later on, I crossed that bridge, or tried to.
The second print, in this third version of the story, was the one of the seashore. When the stranger had read the letter, he went to the secluded spot above the beach, and hid himself. He spied on the women in their secret nakedness drying around a fire after diving in the sea. They had children with them. They seemed at peace and happy. But in fact they were poor fisherwomen, and almost slaves, forced to remain that way by the rulers in the pagoda.
Amongst them, the onlooker saw the woman who had sent the missive. She was the most beautiful and he fell in love with her. Yes, he would help her escape.
But this could only lead to tragedy.
The last picture explained the tragedy. The lovestruck traveller was determined that the beautiful captive
ama
would be his. He had been, under his disguise, a powerful samurai. He attacked the rulers, entered and set fire to the pagoda and then stood outside to ensure that his adored one and her younger charge escaped. We see the two leaving, one on horseback, one armed with the long pole –
a naginata
– as a weapon. Too late they realised that freedom was banishment from the sea. This is a terrible vengeance, the greatest punishment, to be forced to leave. But there, small, in the foreground was the stream: crystal water. They would follow it up to its source, in the mountains far away. Their protector, their liberator, stood, armed, in front of his conflagration, unable to follow.
As a child, I placed
The Three Views
in the province of romance, of nostalgia, the poetry of secret meetings and forced separations, of one-must-go and one-must-stay, in a turbulent world. Now, as an adult, I place them in the province of prophecy. The pictures told the story of my life, and the people in it were or became those I have met, and those I loved.
On the subject of lovers, then. Unsatisfied longing was my romance. All my life, I would be drawn to a discontented man. Yes, it was what Keiko said about polishing a stone. Girls do find a young man who attracts them, and then, to justify that wanting, they apply to that hapless character all the wonderful qualities they think they ought to love. All they really want is him, simple and lusty and whole. But girls do not like to believe that of themselves. He has to be finer, purer; he has to be different, misunderstood, tormented, and vulnerable only to them.
I would place on his sullen, innocent head the mantle of deep thought, strong feeling, of a tragedy perhaps. And this mantle had one purpose: it allowed me to fall in love with him. It was as if his longing might be for me, his intellectual restlessness (of which
I had only the eyes for proof) created by need of a companion like myself. I could meet him in some unknown space, and be known by him, and he by me. His diffidence would be gone. I would save him, in other words. I would make him whole, make him come alive, become more than he was when I came upon him.
Tamio was distant from the island people, I thought. He deserved more, and if I promised more, he would come to me. I wonder who I really was saving – Tamio, myself, or possibly, layers down under the water, my disappointed father, or my faraway, so often sad, mother.
I took charge because I hated to be abandoned; I, Vera, could not tolerate being left. I went out to meet the man who would change my life, my father, because of that other time when I had stood at the port of Vancouver and waited, an abandoned child. I, Vera, went to meet my father not because I needed him – perhaps by then I did not need him – but because I did not want to be waiting for him.
I wonder what happened to Vera.
How can you wonder, Ikkanshi-san laughs to me, because you are Vera. That girl was you.
And she was me, I do admit. I do more than admit it; I strive to believe it. This entire exercise is, in a way, a means of my coming to know in my heart, in my gut, that Vera and I are the same. But the more I enter that young mind and body the more of a stranger I find her.
I mean, what happened to that brave girl, that nervy girl who took what she wanted and kept going back for more, who knew she would escape from it and not be drowned?
She went on a journey of many years, offers my samurai teacher.
That’s not it.
She forgot herself.
But she did not entirely forget because all of it lived in her body, and her body remembered.
11
So-giri
Many cuts; running cutting through a crowd
Vera discovered her father in the Headman’s house. The little house was a cave, despite the glow of the late afternoon, smelling of charcoal, smoky timbers, fish, wet rope and seaweed, of salty things left to dry in the sun. Inside the hut, she was temporarily confused by the darkness, which was punctured by two squares that glowed like fires, but were not fires, only small windows. In the hearth there were ashes with a faintly discernible pink glow. She hovered tall in the doorway before she bowed and then sank to her knees.