Jon Grimwood - End of the World Blues

“About the bar,” Kit said.

“Pirate Mary’s…”

“No,” said Kit. “That name’s dead. You’ll need a new one.”

“Me?” Tommy looked puzzled.

“The site’s yours,” Kit said. “Just as soon as I sign the paperwork.”

“Fucking hell,” said No Neck. “You serious?”

“Yes,” said Kit. “Very. I can even recommend a bank who might help you raise funds for rebuilding.”

“Except I’m Australian,” said Tommy. “I mean, I’m grateful. But you know what they’re like about that.”

“Put the land in Micki’s name,” said Kit, glancing between them. “And then make bloody sure you register the marriage.”

Micki grinned.

It was, Kit had to admit, a relief when the two finally left, all smiles and hands in each other’s back pockets. Kit would have suggested they get a room, but his advice would have been completely redundant. From the way Micki and No Neck were glued to each other on the way out he imagined that was exactly where they were headed.

Kit was in the hospital ward he’d occupied before. The same cherry tree grew beyond its window, though the blossom was long gone. Behind the cherry, stood another just beginning to bloom.

“Autumn flowering,” his nurse had said. It seemed he was to get blossom after all. Two tubes fed into Kit’s wrist and electrodes read off his heart beat. He’d only recently got rid of the last catheter. This time round, the medical assistance had definitely been needed, Dr. Watanabe had been very clear about that.

The sliver of door frame had skewered his diaphragm. A little higher and Kit would have suffered cardiac tamponade, the membrane around his heart filling with enough blood to stop that organ from pumping. If not for Mrs. Tamagusuku’s quick action in staunching the wound Kit would be dead. It was, the doctor stressed, unwise to have been yachting in such weather.

A handful of cards sat on Kit’s bedside table. Some were obvious, like the one from Micki and No Neck, others less so…Mrs. Oniji’s card, delivered that morning, had been a surprise, its reference to Neku unexpected. There was even a card from Yuko. A simple snow scene in black ink on white paper, drawn with three quick flicks of the brush. Kit had been busy admiring it for most of an afternoon before he realised she’d drawn it herself.

The Suijin-sama had run aground and been broken by waves. Everyone knew the story. How Yuko Tamagusuku had left her dead husband to drag a badly injured guest into the dinghy with her. Not everyone agreed with her decision but all were impressed by her bravery and the fact she fought to keep the foreigner alive.

A knock at Kit’s door announced the arrival of Dr. Watanabe, or so he believed, until it opened to reveal Lucy, the nurse who’d removed stitches from his face three months before. “You have another visitor.”

“Aren’t visiting hours over?”

Lucy nodded.

A minute later an orderly came by to swap the high-backed chrome and leather chair in the corner for something simpler. At the same time, a second orderly removed Micki’s flowers and replaced them with lilies. By the time the hospital administrator arrived to check the room was ready, Kit already knew who his visitor would be.

“How are you feeling?”

“Better than I deserve,” said Kit.

Mr. Oniji smiled. “An interesting choice of words.” Indicating the recently installed chair, he said, “May I?” And Kit found himself apologising for not having already asked the oyaban to sit.

“You got my letter?”

Kit had. It contained the paper he’d signed relinquishing all rights to the site in Roppongi. It had gone wherever shreds of paper go when flushed down a Tokyo toilet.

“And they’re treating you well?”

He nodded.

“Good,” said Mr. Oniji. “I told them to give you the best.” He glanced round the room, nodding at the flowers and smiling as he noticed the blossom in the courtyard outside. And then Mr. Oniji’s eyes alighted on a picture frame half-hidden behind cards on Kit’s bedside table.

“If I may?” he said. Taking the picture to the window, Mr. Oniji looked at it very carefully. A minute or so later, he put it back.

“Very pretty,” he said slowly.

“Yes,” said Kit, “I think so.”

“Anyone I know?”

“My daughter,” Kit said.

The photograph showed Neku in grey skirt, white blouse, and navy blazer. The uniform of a school near Seven Chimneys. She looked very serious and ridiculously neat. Someone had styled her hair close to her head, gamine, Pat would probably call it. A smaller picture tucked into the frame showed her with her arms round Charlie, their smiles turned to the camera.

New term, announced Pat’s scrawl on the back of the picture. Me with Charlie, read Neku’s neater hand, in tiny letters across the rear of the snap. Her get-well card simply said, Am fine, hope you feel better. A friend will call.

A letter had been tucked inside. The letter was short, the spelling random. In the ten weeks she’d been living with Kate and Pat her tastes had obviously changed. Gone was the Hello Kitty note pad and in its place a flimsy sheet of onion-skin paper, with a gold moon printed at the top.

I’m in a band, wrote Neku. We’re really good. Well, we will be. I’ve got Mary’s old room and we’re going to paint it purple next weekend. We is me, Charlie and Billie, the drummer. I do bass, Billie keeps forgetting to hold onto his drum sticks and Charlie can actually play—guitar, keyboard and violin!

Kate says we have to practice in the garage and Pat says he doesn’t mind where we practise as long as we get better, I’ll burn you a CD. Kate sends her love. Pat says hello and I say goodbye, for now…

Only, maybe Neku’s tastes hadn’t changed that much. She’d signed her letter with a sketch of a cat.

“I didn’t know you had a daughter,” said Mr. Oniji.

“She’s living at her grandparents’ until I get home.”

Mr. Oniji nodded. “I see,” he said.

And then Mr. Oniji didn’t say very much for a long time. So Kit listened to the cars in the street and watched sun turn a hospital wall from yellow to pink and finally to a pale and flintish blue.

“You know,” said Mr. Oniji. “She looks very like a child I used to know. Her name was Nijie Kitagawa.”

“The daughter of a friend?”

“An enemy,” said Mr. Oniji, his face hardening. “Who nearly cost me my life, also those of my colleague Mr. Nureki and his eldest son.”

“Do I want to know what happened?”

“Many people died.” Mr. Oniji’s voice was flat. He glanced at Kit, considering. “They were not good times.”

“You make it sound like history.”

Mr. Oniji tapped the photograph. “Maybe it is,” he said. “At least, maybe it should be. But, you know…one member of that family took something belonging to me.”

“A case,” said Kit.

Mr. Oniji went very still indeed.

Looking from Mr. Oniji to Mrs. Oniji’s card, Kit smiled. “It might be worth trying the station lockers at Shinjuku Sanchome,” he said, reaching into his pajama pocket for a key. “I believe you have three days.”

Hayato Kato and Masato Inoue for translating lines from Yamamoto Tsunetomo’s Hagakure Kikigaki. Without these, writing this book would have been much harder. Also my thanks for their help in coming up with a suitable Japanese term for “floating rope world.” (All of the suggestions were excellent, but the final one caught exactly the right combination of history and artistic subversion.)

Timothy Gowers, Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge. I stole his four-dice analogy from a brief interview he gave to New Scientist.