After the next winter Keiko returned with news: Tamio had been seen in a nearby village. So the Headman was defied. But it did not seem to matter. Tamio was soon absorbed in the war machine.
They thought about Vera, but again: what was there to say? Letters were prohibited. Keiko needed all her wits to stay alive. Each winter, her absence seemed longer.
Soon after Pearl Harbor Mikimoto’s factory was ordered closed. Most of the people of Toba were out of work. The government wanted to make a war industry there, but Mikimoto refused to give up his property. By the end Mikimoto was in a bomb shelter. Keiko’s house was bombed, leaving her with nothing. She moved in with her brother, who had also lost his house. They were cooking rice out of an airman’s helmet that had been found on a dead body.
The last winter he asked her to stay on the island with him and she agreed.
Days after the surrender, Ikkanshi was seized with elation. He wanted to sing, to babble, to tell everyone his private feelings. Of course it was crazy. The country was in ruins. They had been peppered with bombs. And then, the bomb. Hundreds of thousands lay dead and unburied. People were dazed, as the truth entered their heads.
And yet. And yet.
It was over. He was alive.
He had spent nearly a decade hiding, by being in the open. He had had to keep his thoughts silent. Now, he spoke freely.
He left the island. Keiko stayed to dive; it was the best place for her. He went to Hiroshima Prefecture. For six months the sword polisher worked hauling water, building houses, burying the dead. There were so many soldiers returning from Russia, China, and the South Seas, who had lost home and family. He searched. He hoped to hear of Tamio, but he did not.
The Occupation forces again outlawed the sword. Ikkanshi moved to the island of Amakusa, where the people were poorest. There was a library, which had been closed for years. Everywhere people were hungry for knowledge. He put up a sign on the door offering a class in English literature. One hundred people came: they sat shoulder to shoulder, filling the room. He discovered himself as a teacher. It was very popular at the time, this English literature. He made comparisons with Japanese literature and encouraged the people to think about what Japan had done. He questioned obedience. He used the old warrior myths for examples of trickery, slavery, and behaving boldly only for the benefit of others.
He often thought of Vera the child woman, and hoped that she was safe. One day, he was reading Shakespeare in class. He came upon Othello: ‘Think of me as one,’ he said
to his students, ‘who loved not wisely but too well.’ And into his mind came Vera, the girl who slunk like a wild cat. He remembered the name of that warehouse on Homer Street where her father did business, and finally he wrote a letter to tell her that he and Keiko had survived the war.
When Oshima was on trial, Ikkanshi visited. The prison was bare, but clean, and they spoke in a courtyard with guards at either end with their backs discreetly turned. This was a mark of respect for Oshima’s rank and achievements. He was not at all shamed. He told Ikkanshi that Hitler had been pleased with the
katana
Oshima had given him. He told him what a high opinion Hitler had of him.
‘He confided in me in advance that he was going to attack the Soviet Union,’ he said proudly. ‘He always said of me: Oshima has a very good brain.’
Ikkanshi pitied Oshima, but Oshima did not pity himself. He was in a dream of glory. He had stayed with Hitler until the very end. Ikkanshi asked if Hitler had had the courage to use the
meito,
or have someone use it on him.
‘That was not in his tradition,’ said the officer.
No one knew what had become of the sword. For a time Oshima and his delegation had stayed in a hotel in the Austrian mountains. Then the Americans had come to shake them out.
‘Hiroshi,’ the sword polisher said, ‘you may be sentenced to death.’
‘I sincerely hope so,’ he told his old friend.
But as the months passed Oshima grew more sanguine. ‘We were on opposite sides, old friend. How did you survive, those last years? Where did you hide?’
‘My shield was the people. I did not hide,’ the sword polisher replied.
The letter was addressed to Vera Lowinger Drew, Lowinger Warehouse, Homer Street.
She showed it to Horace. ‘Should I read it?’
‘If you don’t, I will.’
He scanned it first, and left it on the table for her. ‘Keiko and your sword polisher are alive.’
Still, she did not write back to him.
Horace Calder, seventeen years older than Vera, but still a young man, and a happy drunk, developed a heart condition. He had to give up drinking. But, he said, he would rather not live, than not drink. When he was only forty-five he died of a heart attack. It was 1950, a time of families, and small children. Vera had no family, no one. But she fitted in, among the many young war widows. In a way, she was one.
She spent time in bars, and she met men. They were discontented men; they felt familiar to her. But she made sure she always woke alone. Her dreams were important. When she woke with a lover she could never remember her dreams, much less drag them to the surface.
Never? said the sword polisher. Was that the lover’s doing?
Whenever she woke with a lover she gave up her dreams. The orange Hiroshige sky, and peacock-blue ink water, the gentle rocking of the
konachi,
the slop slop of the sea on its wooden sides, the smell of the charcoal burner, the slap of
ama
hands on
ama
skin, the laughter of women circled together, the hands reaching over the side of the boat to pull her up, and the cup of tea in her hands.
And one day, finally, it was time. Vera returned to Japan. Perhaps it was one of those dreams where Tamio sailed his boat. Or one of those nights she thought she saw Hana on the street. Maybe it was because Hamilton Drew came to see her and asked what she had heard. She shook her head.
‘But they were your friends,’ he said.
Yes, they were.
It was simpler now. Without thinking, without forcing herself or refusing herself, she walked into the Canada Pacific Steamship Lines office and bought a ticket.
She expected to recognise Tokyo as the Edo of her woodcut prints. But nothing was standing, there was no bridge, no pleasure quarter, no lanterns, no banners, no parades. She took the train to Nagoya, and then to Toba. It was the most beautiful place on earth. She had a room in the little
ryokan
she had stayed in with her father, with windows looking over the inlet. The water was marked out with pearling rafts, and the hills with patchy, khaki earth and clumps of cedar, pine and even cherry trees that rose directly from the narrow beaches all around.
The innkeeper gave her
sakura
tea – cherry blossoms – its salty, sweet thick taste a balm. She ate a magnificent, endless meal, of which the highlight was local lobster with sesame sauce. The cooks came in and knelt, and bowed with their faces to the floor.
She found the village little changed.
She walked the street that twisted against the slope, above the harbour. It was springtime, and the ground was wet, and there were men on the beach working on their
boats. They had motors now, many of them, given to them by the Americans, she supposed. She had lost touch with everyone, first through war and then through trying to forget and then because she thought the news, if she should get it, would be unbearable. But still she looked at the backs of the men bent over the sides of their boats. She would know the shape of Tamio’s anywhere. She saw the Pearl Museum, and an aquarium where her old friend the octopus was well represented. At the Pearl Museum there were
ama,
now dressed from head to toe in white, and waving to the crowd.
She felt old. She had changed immeasurably; she wore a tailored suit with wide pleated trousers and she had darker hair, cut short. Near the harbour she went to an
udon
shop. It was not the uncle’s
udon
shop, but one much like it. She ordered lunch; the words in Japanese coming back when she looked at the food. The sea had not failed the people. The tiny molluscs with their thumb-sized burden of meat, soft shellfish that you ate whole, seaweed salad, red snapper, squid in its wine-red soup, the soup of the fermented soy bean, and finally rice. She stood up satisfied and somehow reassured, as if the process of remembering might begin with her digestion. She walked and found the streets of her lonely walks to the market, and finally, the hillside road – hardly wider than a path – that led to Keiko’s house. But she did not go there.
Instead she turned and walked back out into the street and who did she see there, walking with his bad leg and bent under his backpack of tools, but the basket maker.
‘Bamboo!’ she stopped him.
He looked at her and not a flicker of surprise moved his weathered face, the eyes, though sunk in folds, so bright and unclouded that he might have been an immortal. He bowed his greeting.
‘That was not my name,’ he said. ‘My name is Ishihara, Kamesuke. And you are the pearl girl.’
She bowed too. ‘How did you know me?’ She began to speak in halting Japanese.
‘It is not at all difficult to know you,’ he said. ‘People stay the same. And we remember you, because you have entered the stories. I told you that you would.’
She took this as a hopeful sign, but could not put her question into words.
‘Where have they put you and how long will you stay?’ he asked, somewhat anxiously.
She laughed through her tears at the question because it was the same one – polite, but telling – that the people addressed to all the strangers in their midst.
‘No one has put me anywhere. I came on my own.’ She pointed out the hotel, and said she would stay until she found the people she was looking for, or found out where they might be. ‘You are just my man, Ishihara-san,’ she said. ‘You must know all their stories.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘no one knows all of the stories. I only know one or two.’
‘Mikimoto Taisho,’ she said, starting at the easy ones.
He said the King was well and back in business. ‘Bigger than ever. He welcomed the Americans with his arms open,’ he said.
‘Setsu,’ she said.
He pointed toward the water. ‘Diving,’ he said.
‘Still?’
‘Indeed. Others?’ he said, with his grin even more gaptoothed than before. How could she ask about Keiko and Ikkanshi-san? She did not want to hear of them, from him.
The next day a delegation to see her arrived at the
ryokan.
It consisted of the Headman’s two sons, grey-haired now, and an official from the town who she did not recognise, a man with a cropped GI haircut and a wide, and ‘open for business’ grin. He was Teru and he produced from behind him a pretty but wordless woman for whom she too, had
no words, because she had taken Hana’s place. There was much bowing, murmuring and smiling. But no one hugged her, not until Maiko appeared.
She looked so foreign at first Vera did not know her, but then as soon as her eyes got used to her she saw Hana’s mother had changed only a little. She might have been Vera’s age when Vera had lived in her house as her daughter. Now she was fifty-three. She was rounded and dark skinned like a seal, firm-fleshed, quick and lively like any cold-water creature. Her face was open and she smiled, cried and laughed in Vera’s arms and Vera in hers. Vera did not feel she herself had grown until she held that wise woman against her breast.
It was not
risshun,
yet. The
ama
were still in their land disguise, riding bicycles with bonnets over their heads, the brims long and trained like the blinkers on a horse so that they only saw the ground in front of their wheels. An
amagoya
had been built for them at the shore. The new government wanted to extend the season: they would dive from here from the twenty-first of March until May. But if the wind were too high or it rained, they would not dive. They were going the next day.
That morning, Vera walked, picking her way in leathersoled shoes when she should have been barefoot. She saw the Quonset hut on the beach.
‘No one is allowed there,’ said an American soldier, gesturing with a weapon at which she glanced askance as she veered off the pathway toward the gravelly beach. He must be kidding.
‘Who does this allowing?’ she asked him, already a few steps down the slope.
‘That is the house of the diving girls,’ he told her, not really answering, and so she continued.
‘I know it well,’ she said, ‘because I am one of them, or was, before the war.’ She did not stay to hear his reply.
She bent to enter the doorway.
The place was dark, how dark she had forgotten. The
irori
gave its lingering smell of charred wood, and touches of pink edged the grey ash just as a sunrise will light up the edges of cloud before dawn. On the shelf behind sat the tools, the knives and prising tools, the goggles and caps. The small forms around the square of the hearth seemed almost inanimate until their faces turned to her, making the pathway of light from the open door and then blocking it. They laughed, their faces split open like fruit gashed; they glistened there in the darkness and she stood in confusion wondering what was so funny.
‘You have not stopped,’ one said, and the other said, ‘She did not stop did she?’
‘Stopped what?’
‘Growing!’ they said. And they all laughed and she remembered that laugh, how it scalded her and comforted her and kept her within their strong company when she was such a lonely girl.
Sabishi.
One reached her hand up to point out where her head was, nearly in the rounded top of the hut. Maiko patted the space beside her. They offered her tea and very dry biscuits. Their bicycles were parked outside. They were in their clubhouse and they were girls together.
‘How is the fishing?’
‘Oh it is good, very good,’ they said in their cagey way. Now Vera laughed.
‘How much do you get on a good day?’
‘Oh the same; it is very good,’ each one said modestly ducking her head and with eyes sliding slightly to the side.