Andrew Miller: One Morning Like a Bird

‘So you were in the Hegel gang,’ says Yuji. ‘For the beauty of his dialectics?’

Junzo shrugs. ‘Schopenhauer hated women,’ he says.

Taro grins at Yuji. ‘Little brother’s in love,’ he says, ‘but it seems he has sworn never to reveal her name.’

‘Could it be Mrs Watanabe?’ whispers Yuji, for which he is shot with a star-shaped cracker that ricochets off his chin and lands in his beer. He fires back but misses.

Mr Watanabe, presiding over a mah-jong game on the far side of the room, scolds them. They are, apparently, disturbing the concentration of the players, four bathhouse regulars slamming down the little tiles as though to shatter them. Taro apologises, then looks at his brother and Yuji with a quick frown as if to say that he, a government employee, cannot any longer conduct himself so carelessly, that something more and better is expected of him. It’s a look Yuji sees on his face more frequently these days.

For a minute, sipping at their beers, scratching their chins, inspecting fingernails, they are silent. Then Yuji, under cover of the game’s clatter, calls to order a meeting of the club.

‘Any business?’

‘ J’ai vu Alissa,’ begins Junzo, ‘in Kyobashi with one of her piano students. She said her father has agreed to a film evening, the first Sunday of next month. She asked me to suggest a film.’

‘You?’

‘Why not?’

‘I hope you didn’t ask for Cyrano de Bergerac again,’ says Taro. ‘Why don’t we have The Thief of Baghdad or Iron Horse ?’

‘My vote,’ says Yuji, ‘is for The Blue Angel . Or maybe Flesh and the Devil .’

‘It doesn’t matter what you want,’ says Junzo. ‘She asked me and I said we’d be happy with anything by Chaplin. Any objections?’

There are no objections.

‘That’s enough French,’ says Taro, flicking his eyes towards another bather, a sharp-featured man, who, nursing his beer, has, perhaps, been taking an interest in them, this foreign babble between them. They lean away from each other, sit on their heels again.

‘But you’re really making progress,’ says Yuji, softly, in Japanese, to Junzo, and though he says no more, not wanting to cause embarrassment or a swollen head, he considers Junzo’s progress in the language to be nothing less than remarkable. For himself, for Taro, there were the years with Professor Komada. They could even count Monsieur Feneon as one of their teachers, for everyone made good progress once the professor persuaded him to take the short walk from his house each month in order that the senior class might come to know for the first time an actual Frenchman. The other members of the club, Shozo and Oki, have all the resources of the language school at Keio. Only Junzo (who in his first term at Imperial successfully pestered his brother to show him this club where Japanese and foreigners mingled so informally) has had to rely on his own efforts, on the occasional class from Taro, some prompting from Yuji. Alissa, of course, is always patient with him, untangling his grammar, making him study her lips as she pronounces some phrase the Japanese mouth seems hardly framed for.

Across the room, the mah-jong ends with shouts, accusations. Two of the players walk out, the other two growl like street dogs. Mr Watanabe, with an expression of high disdain, totters away to the kitchen and the rattan armchair beside the hot-air flue, a snug corner for drinking shochu and smoking homemade cigarettes, and where, once or twice a year, sleep hitting him like a wave, he sets fire to himself and wakes to the sound of his own shrieking.

Hungry, suddenly bored of the old bathhouse, the three friends put on still-damp shoes and coats and march through the cold to eat sushi at Kawashima’s. They arrive as three others are leaving and take their places along the counter on three warmed stools. Behind them, the tables have their usual mix of diners, the casual, and those of a more serious character, for though the most dedicated of the tsu will not eat sushi later than midday, fearing for its freshness, even at night there are men who lean over their food like scholars, who eat without speaking, who know everything. .

Yuji has squid and tuna belly, mackerel, kuruma prawn. The little plates mount up. He becomes morose at the thought of the expense. Kawashima’s is far from cheap, and once he has paid Taro what he owes him, he will have spent a week’s money in an evening — a perfect example of the recklessness he can no longer afford. But as his mood blackens so his appetite grows perversely sharper. He tries the blue-fin, the scallop, the Pacific saury.

‘I thought you were out of cash,’ says Junzo. ‘The allowance?’

‘Exactly,’ says Yuji.

‘That’s tough,’ says Taro.

‘On the positive side,’ says Junzo, dipping the tip of a little finger into the Murasaki sauce, ‘perhaps your need will inspire you.’

‘To leap into the Sumida?’

‘Ah, but are you the type?’

‘Seriously,’ asks Taro, ‘what will you do now?’

‘Shave my head and squat in the subway with a begging bowl.’

‘You could still take the Civil Service exams . .’

‘I’m too old. It would look odd. Like I had failed at something else.’

‘There’s always school teaching,’ says Junzo. ‘Couldn’t you bear it for a year or two?’

‘Just the smell of a classroom makes me want to throw up.’

‘Well, there’ll be something for you,’ says Taro. ‘A man of your talent. Something will come along.’

Yuji thanks him, but in that moment all three fall silent as if struck by the same thought, the same vision of what, one day soon, might come along for them. Their silence catches the sushi-master’s attention. He glances up — three young men scowling at the polished wood of the counter — but his hands go on with their work. There is no discernible pause in the movement of his blade.

Out of the throng at the Kanda bookstalls, boss-eyed Ooka taps the shoulder of Yuji’s greatcoat and tells him he’s seen a copy of Electric Dragonfly on sale, good as new, not a crease or a thumbprint, nothing, in fact, to suggest that anyone has even held it, yet alone read it. It was on Yoshimasu’s stall but maybe it’s gone now.

‘I expect some pretty girl has bought it. Pretty girls like poetry, don’t they?’ He laughs, and Yuji laughs, too, then comes straight home and shuts himself in his room.

How many others are there out there, untouched, unread, not even a crease or a thumbprint, no tea ring, no ink splash? Is there anything sadder or more useless in the world than a book of poems nobody wants?

Though Grandfather’s home lies within the thirty-five wards of the city, reaching it is like going on a trip to the country. Tram, subway, train, then a forty-minute walk past new homes, building plots, fields of tea, rice paddies, even a pair of thatched farmhouses like Uncle Kensuke’s.

From the garden gates a gravel pathway curves between persimmon and plum trees, jujube, maples. Then after a hundred steps the ground on one side is suddenly clear, and there, beneath a dreaming pine, is the old rickshaw, its leather hood bright with moss, its painted spokes woven with long grasses. It is not the rickshaw, of course, the one in which, in the time of the Meiji Emperor (or so the story is told), the eighteen-year-old grandfather — already known among his fellow runners as ‘Iron Thighs’ — pulled some eccentric actor the 230 miles from Tokyo to Kyoto to attend a moon-viewing party in a villa above the Daisen Temple. This one, used now by the hens as a roost, is only a souvenir bought for a few yen from a scrap merchant in Honjo, but each time Yuji passes, he is tempted to lift its shafts out of the grass, to lean his weight against the chest bar, to rock it a little. Has he inherited any of the old man’s skill or strength? How far would he get, even with hens for passengers? As far as the station? As far as the road?