Jon Grimwood - End of the World Blues

“Did you love her?”

“What?” Kit demanded.

“Yoshi. Did you love her?”

“Yes,” said Kit. “I did. A lot, just not very well.”

Tsusama nodded. “Yoshi was my cousin,” he said. Kit and the boy looked at each other and then the boy headed inside, scraping water from his hair. Whatever Tsusama said, Kit was left alone after that.

An hour later, with the wind less fierce, the torrential rain reduced to a drizzle, and the clouds almost empty, the yacht reached a line of green hills rising steeply from the sea. A length of beach could be seen to the north, but most of the coastline seemed to be wilder, with inlets and coves guarded by dark rocks.

“Boso-santo,” said Tsusama. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Nureki-san’s eldest son was back. “We’ve been coming to the area my entire life. Yoshi used to visit as a child. Well, she did according to Father. That was before I was born.”

“What happens now?” Kit asked.

Tsusama shrugged. “Not my decision,” he said. “All the same you might want to get changed before you meet the high council.”

“Die smart?”

The boy grimaced, then patted Kit on the shoulder. “Yeah,” he said. “Something like that.”

A cupboard built into the bow of the Suijin-sama seemed to contain nothing but suits. A roller drawer above held neatly stacked shirts and a chrome rail inside the door hung with ties. Someone had even put silk socks into pairs next to the shirts.

Shaking his head, Kit said, “I don’t get it.”

“What’s to get? Take a suit.”

Kit did as he was told, choosing black, because all the suits his size were in black. He matched the jacket to a black tee-shirt, which was probably meant to be a vest but was what he could find. He kept the shoes he’d been wearing.

“No gun?” asked Tsusama.

In stripping to change Kit had revealed his lack of weapons.

“Why would I carry a gun?”

Tsusama shrugged. “I just thought,” he said. “You know…” He nodded towards Kit’s recently severed finger. “You were like us.” The idea of Mr. Nureki’s son considering any foreigner like us was so bizarre Kit wondered if the boy was mocking him. And then he realised something far more frightening. Tsusama was serious.

“It happened in London.”

“You owed a debt?”

“I paid a price.”

“There’s a difference?”

“Oh yes,” said Kit. “A big difference.”

“And this man you paid. Was he happy with the price?”

It was Kit’s turn to shrug. “I doubt it,” he said. “He died before I could ask.”

A single jetty jutted into the sea. Sun and rain had bleached its surface to a washed-out grey that designers around the world tried endlessly to imitate but never quite got right. It took years of weathering to achieve that effect. And though rain had darkened the wooden walk-way its planks were already patchy where the puddles had begun to dry.

A narrow path wound between twisted pines beyond the jetty. About half way up, a huge boulder broke through the dark and gritty earth and forced the path to change direction. At the top, four vermillion-painted cypress trunks formed a perfect torii gateway.

“We’re at a shrine?”

“Among other things,” said Tsusama.

“What other things?”

“We have houses,” the boy said. “A temple and family shrines. This is where we meet. There are rules…” He hesitated.

“That sometimes get broken?”

“Only once,” said the boy. “The cost was terrible.” Glancing at his watch, Tsusama nodded to himself. His father and brother had gone ahead, accompanied by Yuko. Tsusama was to deliver Kit to the ryokan exactly an hour later. This would allow sufficient time for the high council to meet. He was not to think, however, that the council met on his behalf. Their meeting and his presence on the island were coincidence.

The quietness is misleading, Mr. Nureki had told Kit. We are all in the eye of a terrible storm. Kit was still wondering if the man meant it figuratively, literally, or both.

“How long have your family owned the island?”

The boy smiled. “Not my family,” he said. “All of us, all the families, and this particular island is new.”

“Really?” Kit looked at the rocks, the dark volcanic sand of the little beach, and the worn path leading to where black-eared kites soared above the battered torii. The broken earth was sticky with rotted pine needles, ruts in a track leading to the jetty suggested generations of carts unloading cargo. If its newness was true, the island was a masterpiece.

“Seven years,” said Tsusama. “Mr. Oniji bought a strip of cliff and had this island built half a mile off shore. It took three months to sink the foundations and another eighteen to landscape the island and erect the shrine, torii, ryokan, and houses.”

“But that’s old,” said Kit, nodding towards the distant torii.

A smile was his reply. “Eleven hundred years,” he said. “Probably the oldest now existing. Mr. Oniji found it in Honshu.”

“And the temple?”

“From Sapporo. Also most of the houses, although Tamagusuku-san insisted on shipping his own from Okinawa.” Something clouded the boy’s eyes and he turned away, their conversation over. At 6.35 pm exactly, silence having filled the remaining minutes, Mr. Nureki’s son checked his watch one final time and indicated the path.

“Go now,” he said.

Pine needles still crunched where heavy branches had kept the worst of the rain from reaching the ground. Mostly, however, the needles just slid wetly, like scabs of ground breaking free. Kit stopped at the torii to clap once and bow to any kami who might be watching. Behind him he heard Tsusama do the same.

In 1997, “Beat” Takeshi directed a film about an ex-cop. He wrote the script, took the leading role, produced the film, and included his own paintings as props to make visual points about life’s strangeness.

A drop-out from university, whose nickname came from his days as a comedian in a Tokyo strip joint, Takeshi called his film Hana-Bi, which means fireworks, but uses a word that breaks into fire and flower .

And yet, what a thirteen-year-old Kit took from the film was not the lyricism of its camera work, nor an awareness that its script was so spare Hana-Bi could almost qualify as a silent movie. He took the image of Beat Takeshi as ex-cop Nishi, his face impassive and his eyes hidden by dark glasses.

Kit was reminded of this as he entered the ryokan, a lovingly restored country inn. And he was reminded of how hard it could be to tell senior police officers, politicians, and Yakuza grandees apart. So many dark suits, so many pairs of dark glasses, all those impassive faces.

He smiled.

Mr. Oniji, Mr. Nureki, and Mr. Tamagusuku sat at a side table. Tsusama and his brother stood behind them, both stony faced and obviously on their best behaviour. A couple of older men, who looked like senators or titans of industry, sat at another table. And on a chair between the two tables sat an old man with thinning hair. All of the men except the last wore dark suits; he had a simple yukata and rope sandals.

Kit bowed.

“You smile?” The old man lifted his head. Obviously wondering what this stranger found so amusing.

“What else is there to do?” asked Kit.

The man nodded. “You may sit,” he said. When Kit remained where he was, the old man sighed.

“I am Osamu Nakamura…”

The kumicho . The man Mr. Oniji advised and Mr. Tamagusuku obeyed. A man linked to the collapse of a major bank and the building of a bridge between Tohoku and Hokkaido, a project so grandiose no one had dared complain for fear of being regarded as unpatriotic.