Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [119]
Later, they ate dinner in a dimly lit restaurant on the outskirts. Waiters moved between the tables replenishing glasses, removing plates; steaming dishes arrived from the kitchen. Yasuko glanced about, her face shadowed with something resembling grief.
‘Yasuko? Are you okay?’
‘I hate this place. They make me sick, these people.’
‘What people?’
‘All of us. We can afford to leave food on our plates when people outside are starving. There’s a joke going around: “What do good parents share with their children? Malnutrition.” I hate myself for being here.’
And he learned that Yasuko, too, had been devious, that the why of her presence in Tokyo was to try and reassemble a fragmented family, pay respects to the dead, pull the surviving pieces together.
‘I have an uncle. A schoolteacher. He works all hours and he can’t feed his family. Black market is a criminal offence, but there’s no food, Joe. He may end up killing himself.’
One of her cousins had been an officer in the Emperor’s army, present whereabouts unknown.
‘My mother hopes he’s dead. Traditionally it would, of course, be more honourable to be dead.’
‘This morning you said we’re spies. I walk around making notes in my head. Today I give them a present of half a hot dog and they respond with a traditional thank-you. But will our presence, our observation, change all that?’
‘It could.’ She shrugged. ‘But don’t be too sure. Group harmony versus individuality? The old ways are pretty strong.’
He was unconvinced. ‘At SCAP we have these brainstorming sessions. We feel they should be more like us. But when does “a little more” become too much? How long will it be before the old ways are abandoned, the new world calling payback time? Perhaps we should try to be a little more Japanese.’
‘Speak for yourself,’ she said.
After that it became easy to tell her the story of his mother and father. Or at least some of the story. She said,
‘How come you’re still in Tokyo? You should be hightailing it to Nagasaki.’
‘I’m leaving tomorrow on the train. Suzuki will be able to tell me more.’
‘Suzuki?’
‘My great-uncle’s widow.’
‘The men in your family surely seem to have had a thing for Japanese women.’
They spent the night in a patched and tattered house in the district of the floating world where escape was still possible, where soft girls and loud music blotted out reality for those who could afford black market fantasy. And they, too, floated for a while in tentative exploration until fantasy was abandoned and the force of truth took hold. They stripped each other bare, slippery as eels, her scarlet mouth blurred and swollen, heat fused their bodies, sent the blood coursing between them with a sense of arching, of piercing; an ecstasy of escape.
Wrapped together, the futon thin beneath their bones, they lay watching the sky spin slowly out of darkness through the dirty glass of the window.
They had not slept and now it was almost dawn.
She poured water into a wooden bowl and washed him attentively. He sponged her body clean of sweat and semen.
‘You have perfect feet,’ he observed, drying her toes, kissing the high, narrow arch. He cupped her small breasts. ‘Perfect all over, in fact.’
‘You know what they say about the Japanese body: fine from head to hips, then we have these short legs.’
‘Perfect,’ he said firmly, ‘like my hair.’ He could tell her now how she had scared him on that first encounter at Tule Lake.
She laughed and said that was her way of dealing with important things: to be stern.
‘I was important?’
‘Of course. I watched you every day in the mess hall. I spilled stuff down my blouse because I wasn’t paying attention to my food.’
‘I searched for you, to say goodbye, that last day before I left for the language training camp. I looked all over.’
‘I had some kind of bug, and I can tell you that camp hospital was no place for a sick person to be. I made an official complaint but those sons of bitches