Linnear 01 - The Ninja (51 page)

But down the next block they heard the stentorian tones and the intermittent music of the samisan. Culture shock. And turned in to investigate.

It was the Bunraku, the traditional puppet theatre, indigenous to Osaka, as the Kabuki was to old Edo. Yukio was delighted and, clapping her hands together as if she were a child, implored him to take her inside. He dug into his pocket, bought them two tickets.

The theatre was nearly full and they had some difficulty finding their, seats. The play had just begun but Nicholas knew from the billboards outside that it was famed Chushingura, ‘The Loyal Forty-Seven Ronin .

The puppets were magnificent, the principal ones dazzlingly dressed, so complex that they required three men to manipulate them successfully. The master puppeteer for the head, body and right arm, a second for the left arm and the third for the legs or, in the case of the females, the kimono skirts.

They were seated near the back and, some time after they arrived, a couple of marines drifted in. Why they had come to the Bunraku on leave Nicholas could not imagine. One was white, the other black. They might have been waiting for their girls or, perhaps, a third buddy. The white man slid into a row but the black marine turned, stood waiting in the centre aisle.

Nicholas saw Yukio’s eyes drifting from the colour of the stage. He saw where she was looking. Like a retriever on point, her’ gaze locked on the large bulge of his crotch. Colours swam in reflected light, reminding Nicholas of an aquarium his parents had taken him to in Tokyo. It all seemed so unreal. Her lips slightly open, he saw the sharp rise and fall of her breasts as she breathed, as she watched.

In the dimness he felt her fingers between his thighs, caressing, the zipper of his fly being drawn down, the heat enveloping him. Hard. And still she stared, never turning her head, her eyes wide and glittery. His loins turned to water. He wanted to shout to her: Stop! But he could not. Had she blinked in all this time? He wanted to take her fingers away from him but he did not. Just sat there watching the Bunraku, the black marine’s crotch in the periphery of his vision, ballooning ominously. How big was he? How big could a man be? Was that a criterion for sex appeal, the way Americans felt about big breasts? Did it drive women wild?

The samisan played on. The ronin fought with proper valour. Yeah, yeah. Yeah

‘You know what it is I hate about being Japanese?’ she said. Streetlight, blue-white through the blinds, threw angular bars of light-shadow-light across the top of the far wall and part of the ceiling.

He turned in the bed. ‘What?’

‘Not having light eyes.’ She sighed and he knew her wide, sensual lips were drawn in a pout. The French girls I see in Kyoto and the American ones, too, with their short hairdos and their blue eyes. Funny, I’ve always dreamed of having green eyes like emeralds.’

‘Why think about it?’

‘It makes me realize, I think, just how much I dislike myself. Here’ - she reached out, took his hand in hers, guided it to the heat between her legs - ‘this is the only thing that matters. Right here.’

‘No,’ he said, taking his fingers away, ‘that’s not important at all.’

She turned on her side; her voice was light now. ‘Not even a little bit?’

He laughed. ‘All right, yes. Just a bit, then.’ He rose up, leaning over her slightly. Her skin was pale in the half-light, her thick hair a black forest. ‘Look, Yukio, I was interested in you before we danced that night.’

‘Before I -‘

‘Rubbed yourself all over me.’

She put her hand out, lightly stroking his chest. A muscle fluttered and he felt the familiar tightening of his stomach. It felt as if a hand were pressing against his lungs, pushing powerfully down so that he had difficulty in breathing. He might have been an asthmatic in fog.

‘What is it?’ she said just before he whirled away to sit on the edge of the bed. ‘What are you afraid of?’ she sat up and he felt her looking at him. An odd way to put it. ‘Is it me, Nicholas? Are you afraid of me?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said miserably.

And that was the trouble.

They left Osaka on an old pre-war train which, despite its perfect cleanliness, was in marked contrast with the superliner that had brought them to the city.

There were rattles, squeaks and a fair amount of jounces. The swaying, too, was more pronounced but, oddly, the added vibration produced in him a calming effect. His mind kept returning to the Bunraku performance; to, more accurately, Yukio’s performance. Was she a nymphomaniac, he wondered? But how could he tell? He did not even know the clinical definition. Was someone who was sexually insatiable a nympho? Could it be that easy to define? He couldn’t even say that Yukio was insatiable. Her sexual thirst could be slaked. It just took an enormous amount of energy. And, anyway, what if she was? Would that make any difference to him?

He turned away from her presence, staring out of the window. Rattle, rattle. Someone came down the aisle, half fell against her as the train lurched around a turning. The land fell away in a sharp gradient here, giving onto flat fields and rice paddies. He thought he saw cattle standing motionless in the distance. In less than an hour the tracks would turn southeast towards the sea.

-The day was bright, the sun burning away the white ground fog by late morning.

Kobe, along with Yokohama, the busiest port in Japan, was already far behind them, with its scores of freighters and its international settlement comprising fully a quarter of the city’s population’.

We’re well away from there, Nicholas thought. Such strictly business-oriented places, like parts of downtown Tokyo, made him nervous. Like airports, they all had a frightening similarity that cut across language and even race. He never knew where he was in airports - he could be anywhere at all in the world and never know it. Railway stations, however, were quite different. Oddly enough, there were no two alike that he had seen and this kind of old-world individualism was comforting to him. Of course, on trains, one could look out of the window and see far more than just grey clouds like wisps of an old man’s beard, parting like gossamer. What held the goddamned thing up, anyway?

He tore his eyes away from the ribboning land, glanced around the car. The passengers, too, on this train were different.

The last businessman had debarked at Kobe and now, all around him, he watched the people of the land. A man in blue overalls and thick-soled, high-topped shoes sat with his thickly calloused hands crossed over his lean belly, chin on his chest, legs stretched out, ankles crossed. He had very short hair that was white and a stiff-looking moustache that was black. A farm worker, perhaps, on his way home. Across the car, a fat woman in a bright white and crimson kimono slept peacefully with her mouth open and the breath hissing in and out. Beside her, a squat stack of brown-paper-wrapped parcels. Two kids in Western clothes knelt, arms and elbows along the seat top, making faces at anyone who passed.

‘…in the back.’

‘What?’

‘Nicholas, have you been listening to me?’

‘No. I’m sorry. I was dunking about the Bunraku.’

She laughed. ‘You mean the way I jerked you off.’

‘I don’t understand,’ he said, ‘why you feel you have to talk like a sailor. Why, for example, must you say “fuck” instead of “make love”?’

‘Because,’ she answered seriously, ‘ “fuck” is exactly what I mean. Have you ever made love, Nicholas? Tell me what it’s like.’

‘I make love to you.’

‘What are you talking about? We fuck like bunnies.’

‘I don’t think drat is what even you do.’

‘Oh no?’ Her tone rose slightly. ‘Listen, Nicholas, I fuck you the way I fuck everyone else. You know what I do with you? Well, I do it with other men, too. With Saigo, for instance.’ Now why did she bring him up? ‘I come on the edge of his hand, against the instep of his foot, his tongue and his nose, his-‘

‘All right!’ he cried. ‘Enough! What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

She rubbed herself against him, began to purr like a giant cat. ‘Me? I’m just trying to get you excited, that’s all. You weren’t paying attention to me and I -‘

‘Jesus I’ he said, getting up. ‘Is that the way?’ He went roughly past her, out into the aisle to the end of the car, stood watching through two sets of glass at the jouncing car behind his. Christ, he thought, did she think telling him about her past conquests would turn him on? What a twisted idea. He felt cold and slightly nauseated. He braced himself against the swaying with a stiff arm against the doorframe.

On his right a town flashed by, becoming smaller as they pulled away towards the southeast. He glanced at his watch, calculating distances and speed. That should be Kurashiki. Good. They were but moments away from sighting the northern end of Seto Naikia, the Inland Sea, which he had always found so peaceful and calm during the summers his parents had taken him there as a child.

They plummeted through thick stands of tall gaunt pines, the car darkening abruptly and eerily as if they were in the midst of an eclipse. Then, just as swiftly, the sun broke through again and the foliage fell sharply away on the right, revealing the high bluff along which they raced. Below them, Seto Naikai, glittery with sunlight, dancing like ten thousand golden scimitars, a jewel field.

-He watched, transfixed at the sight. But still. Part of his mind was in a film. This was the point when Yukio should come silently up behind him, put her arms around him and tell him she was sorry. This was no film and it never seemed to happen to him that way. And why should he expect it? He did, nevertheless. The eternal romantic.

Islands, so far from home, humpbacked and flat-faced, stretched one after another across the waters of the Inland Sea, all the way to the horizon. Was there really, as he had been told as a child, more land than water here? He could not say he had thought then that it did not matter. They looked like pieces of intricate knitting, these islands, terraced to make them productive; usable land was at a premium in Japan.

One day, he thought, I would like to spend my time just travelling from one island to another, talking to the people there, sitting down to eat with them after helping them in the terraced fields, spending a night here and there. I think that if I did that, I’d probably live out my life and die before I got to the last one. What an idea! Never to go back, only forwards. Each day different from the one before and the one after. Never to get tired; never to get bored. As he was now? Awfully young to feel this way, he mused. But he knew that he was not bored or tired but merely feeling the symptoms of each, hiding what he really felt. Fear.

In Hiroshima it was a completely different story. In the bay, above which they passed like a wisp of smoke, they saw Miyajima, marked by the great orange and black torii, the gate of the Itsukushima Shrine. It was one of the most spectacular sights in all the islands, one of which he had seen many pictures but, until now, had never seen in person.

It hung there as if in mid-air, rising out of the tidal waters like a great three-dimensional cuneiform character written upon the world, mark of the old Japan, a warning never to forget the past.

The train seemed to stand, huffing, for a long time in the Hiroshima Station. All about them were the squat, ugly, industrial structures dominated by a kind of incandescent silence hanging in the air, as thin and brittle as the shell of a robin’s egg-The seat facing them, long vacant through the afternoon, was taken by a gaunt, spare man in a grey and brown kimono. His head was hairless save for a few wisps of white beard hanging from the point of his narrow chin. His skin seemed as translucent as parchment, stretched across high cheekbones, but underneath his eyes and at the sides of his mouth one could see the masses of wrinkles like the vast accumulation of the years, an ancient tree whose age one could count by the number of rings in its flesh.

His eyes were bright chips as he nodded to them. His hands were lost within the folds of his formal robe.

Soon after, the train gave a little lurch and they began to move slowly out of the station. On the way out, the feeling of oppression only magnified as if all the air had been sucked away and what remained to breathe, if only they should open the window and stick their heads out, was the frosty vacuum of space. They might have been on another planet.

Nicholas felt a creeping in his flesh and he looked out of the window, upwards into the bright porcelain sky, certain he had heard the heavy drone of an airplane.

The train moved with unutterable slowness through the city. For a moment they could see, silhouetted against the near horizon, the shell of the old observatory, standing just as it had been left in 1945, -“ts surmounting hemisphere a bird’s-nest skeleton, a lonely, forbidding eyrie for the gulls that swooped low near it but would never touch its inimical skin. Perhaps even after all this time they could still feel the incendiary heat, the hissed outpouring of radiation, carrying it in their bones like a race memory, the survival instinct.

‘You want to know the real me?’ Yukio said into Nicholas’s ear as they both stared at the only monument to what had happened here such a short/long time ago. ‘There. You see it. That is what I am like inside. What you see on the outside is all that’s left standing.’

Now, he thought, she had become maudlin, turning full circle from her usual sardonic tough-as-nails stance. But, he thought, it was this dichotomy that most intrigued him about her. And he did not for a moment think she was as uncomplicated as she made out. He knew that to be a defence - her ultimate defence perhaps. Still, he could not stop himself from wondering what manner of unfamiliar territory lay beyond the stonewall she had so effectively erected.

Streamers of cloud flew obliquely across the sky as they left Hiroshima behind, seeming to begin from the ground, reaching up into the very heart of heaven.

‘Pardon me,’ said the old man across from them. ‘Please excuse this intrusion but I could not help wondering.’

He paused and Nicholas was obliged to ask him, ‘What were you wondering ?’

‘If you have ever been to Hiroshima.’