‘Not so good,’ barked Setsu, and when she spoke, because she was the eldest, the others were quiet. ‘The awabi are fewer now and not so easy to find. It was the war. The soldiers dropped their blowing-up things in the sea and killed the fishes.’
‘It was not so,’ said another. ‘It was the fishermen. And the boats with the dredge.’
‘Now they are not allowed. Awabi are saved for
ama. Ama
must live. Keep the village alive.’
Vera looked for the girls the age she had been. There were one or two and now they had the bellies of mothers. If Hanako had been alive, her daughter would have been diving.
‘You, children?’ said Maiko, prodding her.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I would have liked to, but it has not happened.’
‘It is the war,’ said Setsu, offering comfort. ‘The blowingup things make the wombs go dry and no children are born, and if they are born they are’ – she shook her head – ‘not good, not right.’ Neither her eyes nor her voice wandered off, but looked directly at Vera. Did she believe that she had gone only a small distance and remained in Japan?
‘I cannot blame the war,’ Vera said. ‘I had a husband, but he was older and he died.’
‘Find another one,’ said Setsu.
Vera said she had been looking. ‘I have not found the right man.’
‘The right man?’ said Yuriko, and cracked up laughing as if it were a ludicrous concept. Bawdy laughs all around in which Vera had to share.
And now the ease of trading stories and names, catching up. Once she’d been there, nothing had removed Vera from the scene, even twenty years of not seeing. The questions sent her back to those days so that she could see with her own eyes just the way it was. She could not tell them how happy it made her and how sad at the same time. She had worried they would somehow blame her for the war; they had worried that her life was endangered by knowing them, the enemy. And she had to ask the questions.
‘Keiko?’ she said.
‘Gone to Hiroshima.’ Very long faces. ‘With
katanatogi.’
So they had been together when they went. But
Ikkanshisan? To Hiroshima? There had been no return address on the letter. Surely Hiroshima was a place people ran from, not to, if they had legs to run, she thought. ‘When?’ she asked.
‘Soon after,’ they said.
She did not ask for anyone else.
She felt ashamed, about Tamio. She was afraid to ask as she was afraid to know. Her intemperance, her great love, her innocent passion, had brought trouble on him and on the summer island. She feared he had met a terrible fate. She dreamed of him falling out of an aeroplane. She dreamed of him standing before a great white shroud that was also a sail, with black characters written on it, in lovely lines that she could not read, but she believed he was sailing to the world of the spirits. ‘Oh where do you go, and what are you?’ she said in her dream. ‘And what will happen to you if I do not dream you any more?’
No one else spoke of him.
Then Maiko said, ‘We do not use the rope any more.’
‘No?’
‘Diving is good. Only the rope, that was what made it dangerous.’
They said nothing for a moment and someone she did not know passed tea.
‘And you,’ said Maiko. ‘Have you been afraid?’
What a question. ‘Who has not been afraid?’
‘Have you been brave?’ Maiko asked.
And she said she hoped she had been.
‘Your father?’ Maiko inquired, and they all sat, brighteyed, inquisitive about this man. Vera believed they recalled the very cut of his coat at that moment.
‘He is well,’ she said firmly and shortly, although she was not exactly certain of his health as their communications had ceased for the moment.
‘He traded the mother-of-pearl shell with Mikimoto,’ said Maiko. They knew as much as Vera knew.
‘Do you still work there?’ Vera asked.
‘Oh yes. And the young ones, they work for him.’ They nodded, polite, polite. ‘The
ama
dive for the tourists now.’ They laughed.
More little cups of cooling tea and the sun dragging its heels on the floor, but soon they would go and get their families’ dinners. Vera looked at Maiko and she must have read her mind.
‘Yes you can ask,’ she said. ‘It is a long time ago.’
‘And Tamio?’ Vera said it as if it were just one in a string of curiosities she came with. She could not say it idly and she could not say it with great intention. No one was fooled by her act.
‘Oh Tamio,’ said Setsu.
‘Ta-mi-o!’
The others giggled a little. Vera thought it cruel. The strange brutality of the summer island crossed her like a shadow. Did they still hate him so much for cutting the nets? He had endangered them, she understood. But perhaps, she thought, they had forgiven now, that they saw with clear eyes, after the war, where they had been carried on the words of the schoolbooks, the Emperor, the Headman. But she had misunderstood.
‘We helped him.’
The older ones, who remembered, giggled again.
‘Headman said we must not, but we do.’
‘How?’ Vera asked. It was so long ago.
‘Keiko found him fuel, for his motorboat. He stayed on an empty island. We got him food. And some awabi he sold to get money. In time he got to the mainland.’ These women were past age, really, energetic, sprightly, beyond embarrassment, beyond anyone’s power but their own. That was what it meant to cross the frontier ninety times a day, between air and ocean bed.
‘Do you know what became of him? Did he ever come back?’
‘Oh no, he did not come back,’ said Maiko.
‘He could not come back,’ corrected Setsu. Those who remembered, laughed over her romance. Others looked only mildly interested, and sat, as if knowing the conversation had to move on to something of import soon. The younger ones, who might have been twenty, or sixteen, she could not tell, those who were beautiful and learning, watched Vera open-eyed.
‘He drank too much sake at the
O-Bon,’
said Setsu. ‘And he performed this evil deed.’
There would be no forgiveness?
‘We were in danger then.’
‘But where did he go?’
‘To war,’ said Maiko. ‘Of course to war. It was only a matter of time. All the boys went to war.’
‘And his parents?’
Silence.
Maiko again. ‘We do not speak of Tamio’s parents. They are dead now.’
The old aunt and uncle: they had been kind to her.
Maiko patted her hand. ‘Father died in bombing. Mother killed herself. No one there to help her. It is not so unusual.’
Vera took a train to Hiroshima.
She knew how to find Ikkanshi-san.
She went to a shop that sold antiques. Stone lanterns. Iron teapots. Baskets, not as beautiful as those made by Bamboo. She thought that such a shop would carry swords, but she could find nothing, no helmet, no braided armour. She knew that to carry a sword was illegal, and the men who had sold them were gone away. In the market she at last found an art shop. The shop sold
ukiyo-e.
She spent a long time looking at the pictures and found one or two she liked: a pillar-print by Kitiagawa Utamaro of a courtesan and her gallant rescuer, and a beautiful little print by Choki depicting a mother and child catching fireflies. As she approached the counter to pay, she took a risk. In the
back was old armour, and helmets. She tried her rusty Japanese.
‘Katana?’
she said.
‘No.’
‘Where can I buy them?’
‘You cannot.’ He spoke in English.
‘I am a collector,’ she said. ‘From Canada.’
He only stared at her and shook his head.
‘Destroyed,’ he finally offered.
She stepped closer. ‘I am not looking for a
katana,
but for a
katanatogi,’
she said. ‘His name is Ikkanshi-san.’
‘Oh, very great
katanatogi,’
said the man and smiled noncommittally.
‘He lives in Hiroshima.’
‘No, he does not,’ said the shopkeeper, and now she knew she had him.
‘He does not? If you know that perhaps you know where he lives.’
‘Actually, Ikkanshi-san not
katanatogi.’
She repeated in Japanese that she was a friend, that she had been told he had come to Hiroshima.
‘Prefecture,’ insisted the shopkeeper. ‘Not city. No one come to Hiroshima City. Crazy.’ He laughed as if he were in fact crazy.
‘But you know him.’
‘He is famous.’
‘I knew him,’ she said, ‘when I was a child, before the war. He lived on an island then.’
‘Famous, but not for
katanatogi.
He makes no swords. No one makes swords now.’
‘Then what is he famous for now?’ she asked.
‘Teacher. And wife makes pots.’
‘Where?’ Vera persisted. If he was a famous teacher he must be alive.
And the man did not know. Where did he live? He did once know, could not recall. Had no idea how he had heard
of this famous teacher with his wife and her pots. Vera was so angry she leaned on his counter and threatened him, like a crazy woman. Of course it was the wrong thing to do and produced an effect remarkably like that of an oyster shutting its shell. There was no crack, there was no way of getting in, the shopkeeper’s face became blank with determination to give nothing.
Shiran kao.
In the end she left the market.
She went to Nagasaki.
There was just as much destruction, from the second bomb. She went to the part of town where the foreigners had come those centuries ago and where the traders in beautiful things still were clustered. Or were clustered again, because surely they too had fled these parts. And now she asked a different question, again in Japanese.
‘Pots,’ she said. ‘I hear there are very beautiful pots made here.’
‘On the island of Amakusa,’ said the shopkeeper. ‘There are many potters there.’
‘Why are the potters there?’ she asked.
‘It is the soil. Very good. And the island is so far away that the people are left alone and the potters who make these beautiful things must be left alone to do that.’
Vera took the ferry from the far side of Nagasaki to the island of Amakusa. As the boat drew in she saw the fisherwomen wading in the tidal flats, their baskets floating behind them, with pennants flying – turquoise, yellow, lime. Their bonnets poked forward as they stared, intently, into the muddy sway of the edge of the sea. She saw them flip the eels from the ends of their hooks, over their shoulders into the baskets and she laughed, she loved the gesture so. That was who Hana would be, not the girl with the dog, window-shopping on Robson Street.
The tide was out and the blue-grey sky was soft over the water and the darker hills. She set off walking up the road.
There was nothing else to do. It was a beautiful place, and a mournful one. She heard soft wings overhead: eagles. They must have come for the fish from some sea stack farther off.
She was certain why Ikkanshi and Keiko had come here. The black steep rocks and the flat sandy coves were like the summer island. The hollowed out, faded bamboo tubes that floated in on the tide were the same, and the wild cats that minced along the narrow stone ledges. It was, in a way, a place of hiding. There were old grey wooden huts, and a few new houses, climbing the hillsides.
A man with a rickshaw stopped her. Where would she like to go?
Vera said she was in search of a man who was a teacher. And taking a chance, she said, he used to be a famous sword polisher. And his wife is a potter.
‘I know,’ he said.
They were in a little town on the sharp side of the hill, a few hours’ walk: he showed her how the road wound and how to carry on walking. When she came to the outside of a little settlement there would be houses and one would be the house of these people.
‘They are your friends?’ he asked. Or was she a buyer, a trader for the pottery?
In this case he wanted to share Vera. The people were poor. He offered to carry her a little of the way, but she said no. She stopped and removed her town shoes. She had brought with her a pair of straw sandals, and put them on her feet. But she was unaccustomed to them and after a mile of climbing, her feet were sore.
Vera felt no hurry so she sat to rest her feet. There was a ruined castle on the horizon. A winding road. The sound of a hidden creek, making its way down the hill. Otherwise it was silent there, except for birdsong, and in the distance, when the wind blew, the sound of the sea. There was rain or mist in the hills. The moss was thick on the slippery stones.
She saw an old red torii arch, a series of arches, climbing a hill. The red was freshly painted, but the stones were ancient, mossy, the doorways of the buildings at the top made from old grey and ridged wood. She climbed the footsoftened steps and sat at the top on a bench. The eagles circled above her again. It was very peaceful. Although she had never been there before, she felt she had found her way back.
The hills, the air, and the ground pressed closely on her senses. She could feel the old simple concentration coming back. He had taught her that: what greater gift? It began to rain but there was sun somewhere in the clouds of fog that swam in and out, because she could see light falling, now on this hill, now on that rice paddy, now on an old face.
We abandon the landscapes of our lives, and then return, beaten back by love, and hate, bearing our small triumphs and hiding our wounds, and expect to be recognised, expect to be embraced and to feel as we once felt. But the land too has suffered. Sometimes there is nothing there. Sometimes, like that day at the torii arches, the very signs of neglect and decay are words, and magic.
Vera heard a sound, coming up the steps. It was the sound of a straw broom. A caretaker or an old priest was probably coming. She wiped her eyes and prepared to look like an interested tourist. The man appeared, absorbed in his work. He had the white and blue fisherman’s headscarf tied over his head, and knotted at the nape of his neck. It was pulled very tight and revealed a beautifully shaped dome of a head. He was not an old man but he stepped haltingly. She could see that one leg was giving him trouble. But the other, the back of him, his waist – she knew it before he turned around to face her. And there were the deep-set, oval eyes.