Andrew Miller - One Morning Like a Bird

The last lights gutter, go out. For quarter of a minute the hall is in perfect darkness, then Yuji hears the sound of bodies turning (silk on skin) and turns himself to see, at the back of the auditorium, a candle flame moving in hesitant rhythms along the hanamichi towards the stage, and carrying on its tip the long white oval of an actor’s face. It is not until the flame is almost level with where he is kneeling that Yuji sees how the candle is attached to a long pole and the pole carried by a figure in black who moves in the shadow beyond the candle’s soft bloom of light, stepping back as the actor steps forwards, stopping when he stops. They reach the stage. The shamisen begins to play, a single string plucked with a kind of violence, a sound so sharp, so heavy with nostalgia, the audience lets go a soft collective sigh of grief and pleasure. And in that instant Yuji understands what it was that wrung his heart in the taxi — that his journey with Alissa has unburied the memory of another journey, eighteen, nineteen years ago, when he went with Mother to the Kabuki-za Theatre, just the two of them (Ryuichi must have been with Father or at one of his many school clubs) riding in a rickshaw over the pitted roads of the Low City, crossing Sakura Bridge, crossing Kamei Bridge. He cannot remember the tea house they stopped at. The Kikuoka? He cannot remember which of her kimonos Mother was wearing. He cannot even remember what plays they saw, but what has stayed, what has lain inert all these years waiting for the precise circumstance that would allow it to burn again, is the ecstasy of being pressed against her shoulder, the scent of her, the warmth, the rich serenity of being in exactly the place he wished, above all places, to be. So meagre is his store of such memories — material from the time before — he almost laughs out loud at the luck of coming across it like this on an evening he expected nothing from. It is a victory of sorts. A small defeat for that darkness time drags in its wake.

And in this state he starts attending to the play. He doesn’t care that the theatre is chilly or that his knees are beginning to ache. How skilled the young actors are! How wise of Mrs Yamaguchi to assist them! The shrieks, the bursts of drumming, the sudden stillness, the buffoonery are no longer quaintly antique but a language profound and perfectly evolved. He gives himself up to it — Takao’s murder, Tanizo’s love for Kasane, her transformation into a limping monster — and when the onnagata playing poor Kasane strikes the gesture for pointing to the moon, Yuji is as excited as anyone, and had he known the actor’s name, would have shouted it out along with the others.

It lasts an hour. The next act, following an interval, will be a dance piece, the one which Mrs Yamaguchi presumably has been helping with, but as Alissa stands, Yuji sees her face contort. She leans heavily on the stick, then, after a few seconds, straightens and smiles at him, an apologetic smile that is also sad and somehow coquettish.

‘We could leave now,’ he says.

‘Don’t you want to see the dancing?’

‘Perhaps,’ he says, ‘I’ve had enough for today.’

In the foyer, they find Mrs Yamaguchi again, explain to her how, most unfortunately, they are unable to stay. The teacher nods, turns her eyes from Yuji to Alissa, back to Yuji. She and her students, she says, will be going to the new Chinese restaurant in Shimbashi, once the dancing has finished. Would Alissa and Yuji care to join them? Yuji opens his mouth to answer but Alissa, bowing swiftly, excuses them both. The girls, her fellow students, wave their neat goodbyes. ‘How nice,’ says Mrs Yamaguchi, smiling at Yuji from a face as stiff and white as those on the stage, ‘to meet a friend of Miss Feneon’s.’

They collect their shoes, step into the street. Yuji offers to find a taxi but Alissa says she needs to walk off the stiffness. ‘You’re sure you didn’t mind leaving so soon?’ she asks.

‘I was ready to go.’

‘I think I’ve converted you a little.’

‘Yes,’ he says, ‘a little.’

It’s a night more like mid-May than March. They walk beneath a half-moon, its light in shallow silver pools on the roof tiles of the houses. From the corner of his eye he watches her, wondering if she is still in pain. If she is, she hides it well. She is walking easily now, and with no more than the usual small adjustment to each stride, that slight roll as she settles onto her left foot. A block from the Matsuya, as though by unspoken agreement, they slow, then stop. She adjusts her obi; he glances at his watch.

‘Do you have to go home now?’ she asks. ‘Are you hungry at all?’

He suggests one of the neighbourhood noodle bars, places he has been to at the end of an evening’s drinking with Junzo and Taro, and where a dish of yakisoba costs no more than a tram ride.

‘Or,’ she says, speaking quickly, ‘we could go to the Snow Goose.’

‘The Snow Goose? But isn’t that . .’

‘I have a new pupil,’ she says, ‘a financier of some kind who has fallen in love with Beethoven. He’s twice as old as my other students and at least twice as rich so I charge him twice as much.’

‘You’re good at business,’ says Yuji.

‘I mean,’ she says, ‘it could be my treat. A way of apologising for making you sit through an hour of kabuki .’

Has someone spoken to her about the allowance? Is this financier of hers a fiction, a way of saving his blushes? Should he be offended? He must refuse her offer, of course, that seems clear, though he would, very much, like to go to the Snow Goose, a proper restaurant, an authentic Western-style restaurant he has passed by a hundred times without ever having stepped inside. And if he leaves now, brings the evening to an end, he will have to go and eat in Otaki’s on his own, or take the risk of some icy encounter in the kitchen at home with Haruyo. He studies the toes of his shoes, frowns at the moon, performs in his head the tiresome mathematics of obligation and counter-obligation — though with a foreigner (even one in a rose kimono) the rules are surely different. More lax, more agreeable perhaps . .

‘It seems . . .’ he mutters. ‘I mean, I wonder if . .’

‘Good,’ she says, turning from him and starting to walk again. ‘That’s settled, then.’

The Snow Goose is on the Ginza, opposite the billiard parlour where they celebrated Junzo’s twenty-first birthday. On the front of the restaurant, on the frosted window, a flight of geese are picked out with pieces of golden glass. The doors are open. A doorman pulls back a curtain of red plush. It’s noisy inside, and busy. They have to sit for half an hour on a velvet sofa, then a waiter — a waiter with a blond moustache! — escorts them to a small round table by the wall. He pulls out the table for Alissa, pulls back Yuji’s chair. On the starched linen the cutlery glitters. In the skins of the wine glasses twenty different lights are trembling.

‘I already know what I’m having,’ says Alissa. ‘Its called a Wiener schnitzel. Have you ever had it?’

‘Is it new?’

‘It’s the speciality here. A bit like tonkatsu , though made with veal instead of pork. You should try it. It’s delicious. And we should have a bottle of wine, too — unless you would rather drink something else?’ She picks up the wine list, runs a varnished but unpainted fingernail down the page. ‘I think . . I think Papa might choose this one. A white from Alsace.’

‘Alsace?’

‘They sometimes think they’re German but they’re French really. We don’t have to worry.’

‘Your father said that drinking wine was his duty now. His patriotic duty.’

She nods. ‘He fought the last time,’ she says. ‘He was wounded twice, the second time’ — she touches her breast — ‘a piece of shrapnel just missed his heart. Anyway, there’s no one to fight yet. I mean, they haven’t actually invaded or anything.’