Authors: Eric Van Lustbader
With a start, Nicholas found himself alone again in the shop. The saleswoman was looking at him oddly, not certain whether to smile or frown at the peculiar expression on his face.
Back on the Nakamise-dōri, he returned to the precincts of the Sensoji Temple, where rice crackers and tortoiseshell sticks were still sold just as they had been a hundred years before. He wanted to stay immersed in the past, unwilling as yet to let go of the last sweetly painful tendrils of his waking dream. At a streetside stall he paused to buy a confection made of egg and flour poured into a doll-shaped mold before bean jam was squeezed on and the whole was grilled with the deftly economical movements of the ancient vendor.
But, once holding the tiny cake in his hand, he found that he had no taste for food, especially sweets. The past was like the taste of ash in his mouth. He had thought that with Saigō’s death the detritus of his earlier life would dry up and blow away like the soft shed skin of a snake. But he saw now on his return to Japan that this was not so. It could not be. There was a certain continuity to life that was not to be denied. As Nicholas’ father, the Colonel, had often said: this is the only true lesson of history, and those who do not heed it, perish because of their ignorance.
Now, at the doorway to the Sensōji Temple, he gave the unwanted food to an old man with a back as thin and bent as a sapling’s trunk in a high wind. The old man, in a black snapbrim hat and Western dress, nodded his thanks but made no effort to smile.
As Nicholas went into the temple itself, echoes and the ripples of history seemed to reach out from the dim incense-filled interior with its high vaulting ceiling and cool stone floor, to remind him once again of all that he dare not forget.
When he reemerged into the spangled night of
shitamachi
, Tokyo’s downtown, the old man was still where Nicholas had left him, one hand curled around the thick copper rim of the huge vessel used to burn incense.
Nicholas had had enough of old Japan and the tangled web of memories it had unearthed in him. He longed for the spark and dazzle of the new Tokyo, the soaring, ugly buildings so new the lacquer had not yet dried in their towering gallerylike lobbies; he longed for the bustle of the young Japanese, so chic and beautiful in their wide-shouldered jackets, their loose blousey shirts, and their high-waisted trousers.
Underground, he took the Ginza Line nine stops, transferring to the Hibiya Line for the short trip to Roppongi. He emerged from the subway exit and went west, toward Shibuya. He took the all glass elevator in the Ishtbashi Building to the top floor and entered the ironclad doors of Jan Jan. From its southeasterly facing floor-to-ceiling windows he could make out the floodlit stone walls of the Russian embassy.
The air was alive with the percussive rhythms of rock music: The Yellow Magic Orchestra and an English group called Japan. It was well after midnight and the place was jumping. Cigarette smoke blued the pale walls. The intense spot lighting striking like arrows straight down from the enormously high acoustic baffled ceiling dappled the springy wooden dance floor, turning it into a rippling tiger’s pelt.
Around the central dance floor rose three tiers of clear Plexiglas tables and midnight blue velour-covered banquettes. Waitresses moved quickly and efficiently in amongst the crowd. There was movement, heat, sound in crushing waves. The electricity of modern life.
Nicholas’ mind was engaged as he moved slowly through the bouncing energetic throng. His eyes roved across the sea of young painted faces, seeing the laughter, the self-engrossment; observing slick-winged hairstyles, arms entangled around waists and buttocks, whirling torsos, dervishes of the night, enraptured by a combination of the musical pulse, the boost of liquor and, perhaps, illicit drugs, and, above all, the narcotizing sense of eternal youth. The concept of mortality had no place here and, if it came, would never be recognized.
For just an instant Nicholas wondered what it was he was searching for. Then he thought of Justine and knew that he would not find it here.
When Akiko Ofuda saw Nicholas walk in through Jan Jan’s high Edo period portals she turned her head partly away into the shadows. Her heart was beating fast. Bewildered, she fought to understand the reason for his abrupt appearance. Did he know anything?
Could
he?
But no, she thought, calming herself. It was too early. His presence must be merely a coincidence. A jest of the gods. She rose from where she had been sitting at a table along the second tier and walked slowly, lithely, circling the perimeter of the light-streaked dance floor.
She kept him in sight all the while, watching him clandestinely but carefully. What she saw was a ruggedly angular face that had nothing of the classical beauty about it. It was far too odd and distinctive for that. The long upswept eyes hinted of his Oriental blood, as did his prominent cheekbones. But he had a good solid Anglo-Saxon chin that was as Western as his father.
He was black haired and wide-shouldered, with the odd narrow hips of a dancer and the thickly muscled legs of the serious athlete.
Akiko found herself longing to strip him naked to admire the sight of those overlays of long, sinewy muscle. But other than this, it was difficult to say what she thought of him on first sight. So many conflicting emotions swirled inside her, contending for ascendancy.
How she hated him! She was struck anew by the force of it. Seeing him so abruptly, in so unforeseen a manner brought the full shock of the secret emotions she had been harboring for so long into the forefront. She trembled in rage even while her eyes drank in the emanations of his power. It was evident even from such a distance: the lift of his head, the rolling liquid stride, the minute movements of his shoulders and upper arms. These all spoke of the extreme danger leashed tightly inside this man.
But as she herself moved, keeping pace with him, she felt an odd elation begin to suffuse her and she thought, What extraordinary
karma
I must possess to gain this added advantage over him from the start! Her pulse beat hard within her as her eyes drank him in, noting his strength, the intensity of his spirit. Oh, but she longed for that moment when he first saw her. Unconsciously, her fingers rose to her cheek, softly stroking the taut flesh there. She experienced an almost giddy sensation at the intensity of her longing, and a part of her wanted to draw it out as long as possible. After all this time, she did not want the end to come so soon, certainly not until the time of her own choosing.
Oh, yes, it had been a stroke of genius suggesting to Sato that he invite the
gaijin
to the wedding. “Especially this Linnear,” she had whispered in his ear late one night. “We all know his family’s history. Think what face it will give you to have him present at such an event!”
Yes, yes, Nicholas, she crooned silently as she stalked him high above his head, the time is coming soon when I will look directly in your eyes and see that strength crumble and fly away like gray ash in the wind.
She felt intoxicated, her throat constricted, the muscles in her thighs trembling with the flutter of her heart as she felt herself drawn inexorably toward him. But she used all her training to restrain herself from destroying in an instant of ecstatic gloating everything she had worked for for so long.
Now she broke away from his orbit, walking more quickly, ignoring the glances of those she passed, the lust of the men, the envy of the women; she had become inured to that. It was time to pick up Yōki; Sato would soon be home from the wars.
Akiko watched Yōki out of the corner of her eye as they sped through the center of Tokyo and out again. She is a magnificent creature, Akiko thought. I have chosen well. She had found Yōki some weeks ago and when she was certain of her choice had struck up a conversation with her. That had led to an odd—at least Akiko saw it as that—kind of friendship. Its borders were the night when, as far as Yōki was concerned, they both emerged like nocturnal birds.
Akiko had once asked Yōki what occupied her during the day. “Oh, on and off, I’m a saleslady,” she had said. “You know, door to door. Perfumes and cosmetics. Otherwise I watch television. Not only dramas but programs where I learn calligraphy, flower arranging—even the tea ceremony.”
In a culture where 93 percent of the population watched TV at least once a day that was, perhaps, not surprising. Yet it nevertheless chilled Akiko that her country was teaching its population by proxy. She had learned the tea ceremony from her mother, and she remembered watching the older woman’s face, listening to the tone of her voice, seeing the patterns on her kimono moving just so here and not at all there, resolving to memorize every detail no matter how tiny for those, her mother had once told her, were all that would be noticed.
Could the emissions of an electronic cathode ray tube provide such teaching? She was sure it could not, and she found herself disgusted when she thought of the number of women being taught in such an impersonal manner.
But outwardly she showed none of this disdain. Yōki was important to her—at least for the next several hours.
The limo pulling up onto the gravel verge of the two-story house pushed her thoughts back to the present. Seiichi Sato lived just north of Ueno Park in Uguisudani in Taitō-Ku. A block and a half to the southwest was wide Kototoi-dōri, the avenue that curled like a serpent around two sides of the park. Beyond, the high tops of the carefully pruned cypress stood stark and utterly black against the faintly pink and yellow glow from the Ginza and Shinjuku nightspots. The trees were the natural markers of the Tokugawa Shōgun graveyard across the myriad railroad tracks in the northern end of Ueno.
Sato’s house was large by Tokyo standards, built on the
ken
principle, the standard six-foot unit of construction. It was made of bamboo and cypress; the three-layered roof was of terra cotta tile. The far end of the house contained a great notch to accommodate a more-than-one-hundred-year-old cryptomeria whose boughs overgrew the sheltering eight-foot fence, swaying over the road itself.
The driver came around and opened the rear door for them, and Akiko took her charge inside.
Seiichi Sato sipped hot sakē from a tiny porcelain cup and contemplated the Void. He did this, sometimes, in moments of intense stress, to clear his mind. But mainly he used this form of mental exercise when he was impatient. In a land where patience was not merely a virtue but a way of life, Sato had had to teach himself this attitude as if he were some form of alien in his own culture. Yet he had worked diligently, even obsessively at it, and he knew that his patience had won him all that he held dear today.
He was in the six
-tatami
room—space being defined in Japanese houses by the number of reed mats the wood floor could contain—with only a small table, a cotton futon and a drawered
naga-hibachi
of burl paulownia wood dating from the early part of the nineteenth century. A recess in the right top of the long brazier allowed for the heating of sakē as well as food.
Sato wore only a white cotton kimono. Its bold crimson square reproduced the crest of the Danjuro line of
kabuki
actors. He looked calm and assured, his cool eyes staring at a spot not within the realm of the physical world.
A soft knock on the
fusuma
made him blink but otherwise he did not move. Now he unlocked his thoughts and allowed the keen sense of anticipation to enfold him like a cloak on a chill winter’s eve.
He reached out and moved the paper door an inch to the right. Just the pronounced curve of the front half of Akiko’s eye gazed at him from beneath a half-lowered lid. The sable darkness dusted along the delicate flesh was like the painting of dusk across a changing sky. The coal black iris was like the heart of some deeply buried treasure. Despite himself, Sato felt the quickness of his pulse, the heat of his own breath firing in his throat.
“You are late.” His voice was breathy as he began their ritual. “I thought you would not come.”
Akiko heard the thickness in his voice and smiled to herself. “I always come,” she whispered. “I cannot do otherwise.”
“You are free to walk away.” Sato’s heart constricted as he said those words.
“I give my love to you freely and I am bound by it. I will never leave you.”
The script had been developed over a period of months to provide them both with a degree of excitement and intrigue within the carefully prescribed boundaries of societal courtship. Of course, there were aspects about their courtship—minor ones, to be sure—that had Sato’s mother been alive she would have disapproved of in the most vociferous language.
Sato bowed his head and, opening the
fusuma
farther, moved back on his knees and shins to allow her entrance. As Akiko entered, the dual
kanji
ideograms for
sōbi
hovered in the center of Sato’s being like a feudal
daimyō
’s banner, for she did indeed possess sublime beauty. And, despite their ritualistic dialog, he knew it was he who was bound to her for all time, body and spirit.
For a time they knelt facing one another, Sato’s large, capable hands held palms up, Akiko’s smaller ones resting lightly in his. Locked, their eyes stared within and through. Sato, contemplating the
karma
that had brought them together, felt the essence of her stirring, a lacquered kite rising above rooftops and rustling crowns of cypress and pine. A strong gust took it suddenly and it shot straight for his heart, lodging there like a broken wing.
“What are you thinking?”
The question startled him. Was it just because of the abrupt sound from out of the silence of the beating of their hearts, he asked himself. From deep within him came a secret fear that somehow, in some unfathomable way, her mind had pierced his flesh, peering into his inviolable thoughts. And in that split instant, a brief shudder contracted the muscles ridged along his gently arched back and he blinked, his eyes searching hers as if she were a stranger.
Then her lips bowed into a smile and her white, even teeth showed. “You are so solemn this night.” She laughed, and he saw the play of light along the side of her throat, the small shadow lying in the hollow like a teardrop.