MADE IN JAPAN
S. J. Parks

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Harper

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2017

www.harpercollins.co.uk

1

Copyright © S. J. Parks 2017

Cover layout design ©HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017

Cover photographs©Piyato/Shutterstock (front cover), hit1912/Shutterstock (back)

S. J. Parks asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books

Ebook Edition © May 2017 ISBN: 9780008201029

Source ISBN: 9780008201012

Version: 2017-08-17

‘The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is’

−Susan Sontag

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Epigraph

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

Chapter 72

Chapter 73

Chapter 74

Chapter 75

Chapter 76

Chapter 77

Chapter 78

Chapter 79

Chapter 80

Chapter 81

Chapter 82

Chapter 83

Chapter 84

Chapter 85

Chapter 86

Chapter 87

Chapter 88

Chapter 89

Chapter 90

Author’s Note

About the Author

About the Publisher

Prologue

The irony is that I am the one left to explain. I should commit it to paper, but I am no good with words. No one talks of shame any more, but when I walk out with this newborn, that is what I will feel. This child will want to know it all, and to understand it, and I doubt I will ever be able to bring myself to tell the truth.

It is evening, and in the thin dusk I am trying to gather and collect my thoughts. The senbei cracker fragments lie across the desk beneath the light that the evening has lent me. The blown rice will not be marshalled easily into my cupped hand. I do know now that he will not come. I know that he will not visit me again. The hot chocolate from the vending machine is too sweet and enough time has elapsed that the excuses are brittle and dried. A small sesame seed on my tongue brings a sudden burst of taste. ‘Etahin,’ so he had said.

The temple bell across the grounds sounds gently.

I should be the one to explain.

Naomi

The teahouse, Japan, 1989

Chapter 1

‘Architects spend an entire life with this unreasonable idea that you can fight against gravity‘

−Renzo Piano

Heathrow Airport, July 2012

Wednesday 18.45. Hana Ardent clipped into her seat belt early, as if to secure misgivings she held over travelling on her own. Two men fed the locker above her head as the other passengers politely squeezed past them in the aisle. She eyed them with the interest of one settling in for the long haul – in this case, flight BA4600 to Tokyo. Eleven hours and forty minutes, enough time to accommodate her entire week’s lectures. That’s if she were to attend them all.

If she could choose her companion for the journey it would not be the business traveller but the man in the maroon woollen. It was holey and not entirely clean and it held for her some comfort, as if he might live on the same edge of domestic chaos that she inhabited. He was a little older than her, possibly late twenties, and some part of his life must have necessitated this apparent neglect. By the time they touched down in Haneda International she would surely have discovered the answer. That Hana could have no say in the matter of her fellow travellers, even though she had paid a fortune for her economy ticket, riled her. She should make it into a game. Then again, perhaps not.

Against the window seat, following the indecisive summer light skittering across the tarmac, she traced the line of the ailerons at the edge of the wing. A cloud shift darkened the metal span, making it appear suddenly less resilient. Just like her determination to go. It was not as if she had ever been forbidden to make the journey, but she knew it was against her wishes, against her last wishes, though of course it had not been put in to so many words.

Ed introduced himself as he toyed with a loose thread on what must have been a favourite jumper. He explained he lived in Tokyo, was relatively new to his company and made so many trips he had to fly economy. There was, he said wearily, nothing special for him in an international flight. As he leaned back in his seat and focused his pale-grey eyes, shot with what might have been premature cynicism, he did nothing to calm her nerves. She checked her seatbelt. The line of flesh folded over the thin fabric at her waist was a little testament to her need for comfort food. Hana had dressed for the flight and might appear perhaps as a girl trying to stave off the onset of woman. Her thin tribal shirt complemented the scarf tied, Frida Kahlo-style, around her head, swaddling those of her thoughts that had a propensity to wander off. She was defenceless in the face of all things creative and still trying on a persona for size but hadn’t finally decided. Once he had settled, there was nothing between them but his wool and her thin sleeve of batik cotton.

It was her first trip to Japan she told him and she shared her excitement as the plane circled London and she drew him into a search for identifiable landmarks around her home in Dalston. But there was no sign of the Georgian terraces with tall, confident windows, built to see and be seen, and brick, that unmistakable colour of London rain. As the plane rounded the city sprawl, she didn’t notice his stolen glances for the playing fields of his West London Grammar.

‘So Hana means flower.’

He would have guessed she must be half Japanese. She knew she had chatted too much even before the engines drowned her out as they fought against gravity. Ungenerously, he shifted a scuffed leather document case to his knees decisively. But she carried on, telling him that her mother had lived in Tokyo in 1989.

‘A lot went on that year.’ He seemed obliged to tell her and rewarded her blank look with a catalogue. ‘Tiananmen. The fall of the Berlin wall. Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest.’

Hana laughed at his mock gravity and continued the game, adding a great earthquake to the list, which he claimed not to remember. He seemed tired of their first steps of acquaintance as he slipped the sheaf of documents from his case. She shouldn’t have talked so much.

He was returning from a business trip, he apologized.

Hana was left to survey the mood-board of Southern England – earth tones, fading to the shadows of a Sandra Blow sketch – and she busied herself with the intricacies of weaving a plait. She could see he was well-defended in a carapace of media; pads and pods and luxury headphones, which, she supposed, kept him reassuringly locked in some sort of solipsism. She liked his choice of his music. Easy Classical. She listened until the strains that came secondhand were too much effort to hear and she drifted back to Japan where she hoped she could paint over the outline sketch of her own past. In a matter of a few hours she would brace herself and prepare for a new perspective and then touch down on what would be another side of her.

When her hands left her hair she felt his eyes across her shoulder. The soft hair braid lay like a gift of intimacy between them. It was quite contrary to her intentions.

She read the open page. Clause 5. iv. Pursuant to any change in market conditions the vendor shall …

A lawyer? She wouldn’t have guessed. They would have no currency to exchange whatsoever. She opened the cover of her own book but had no inclination to read it and closed it again.

‘So your first trip?’ He seemed no longer able to concentrate on the merger documents.

She narrowed her almond eyes and nodded. She had never had the opportunity to go back.

‘Family?’

So simple a question but not so easy to answer. There was no family, no relatives, in fact; no one to visit. There never had been; how easily small openings in conversation could hit a nerve. A stewardess of an over-painted age stopped to offer drinks and Ed leaned in to pass her one as he asked how long she would be away.

Knowing that after the flight they would leave as strangers, she recognized an open opportunity to tell him anything she liked – a gift. What truths you could tell a stranger when a friend might pass judgment. A license to download. And so, without editing or exaggerating, she could talk to him more freely.

‘Six weeks or so. I’ll be teaching primary in the autumn,’ she began, applying the free lip balm generously.

Ed’s firm had sent him out to live in Tokyo the year before and he would probably stay another couple. So she might know someone on arrival – someone who would speak the language who she could call on if she had a problem. She weighed up whether he would offer to take her round. It was more likely they would leave the flight as they had begun, as strangers.

‘There was lot of work after the Oshika Peninsular incident.’

The reference sailed passed her until he explained.

‘Tohoku. The Great Eastern Earthquake.’ He hammered it home: ‘Last year the earth shifted almost a foot.’

She was wide-eyed. Her lips parted.

A foot – virtually the space she took up in her seat. It shocked her.

He drew attention to her book, changing the subject.

‘The Pillow Book?’ The spine was pristine.

For some reason, she did not want to mention that this love story was a departing gift from Tom. She and Tom had been together since school and lately she had wanted to ask him what she really meant to him but had never managed to bring it up. She thought she loved him but she had not yet learned to love herself. They were kind of cut adrift together. She had left him behind to finish his dissertation and house-sit the flat that was now hers.

‘From a friend.’ She tapped the cover casually.

Ed tried again – ‘Visiting friends here?’

She shook her head. But hoped for a place to stay, where her welcome would be whispered over rustling kimono silk, where a bamboo waterspout played over samisen music and delicacies on celadon-turquoise porcelain perfectly fitted her hand.

In reality she was travelling towards a void where she would know no one. And because she was part Japanese she felt foolish, as if she had been left standing waiting too long on a street corner. Hers was a history of carelessness. How reassuring it would be to say she was headed somewhere familiar.

‘And so your parents …?’ he asked.

She stopped him with a look.

She had lost her mother quite recently, and the words would still not come.

At her response he looked away and mouthed his apologies.

‘I‘ve arranged a kind of homestay, sort of hostel.’

Ed was well trained in the art of disguising when he was unimpressed but the edge of his mouth curled down; Hana ignored it.

Four hours in and green tea was offered. Ed passed across the plastic cup.

‘Sen no Rikyū would be upset. The Zen Master of simplicity.’

Hana’s eyebrows quizzed him.

‘Founder of the tea ceremony would have banished plastic.’

‘You’ve been to one?’

‘The whole ritual is played out very slowly. At half tempo.’

After a pause she interrupted him ‘My mother lived in Shimokitazawa.’

‘Nice area. You must have great photos.’

Of course there were photos. Photos of boots slipping from her tiny feet, on yellow-wellington days, bright enough to scare the wildlife halfway across the South Downs, where they spent rented weekends. But she had never seen a single photo from her mother’s time in Japan. Not a photo, not a face, found among her possessions to suggest she had ever lived there. Hana shook her head.

‘What did she do in Tokyo?’

She hadn’t told her very much. ‘Well … she did work on a … a teahouse.’

The seat-belt sign bleeped – turbulence – and as the plane bucked, half his green tea escaped across her jeans. As his apologies tumbled out he pushed his napkin softly against her thigh until they both looked up suddenly as if as each of them had been called from opposite ends of the plane. She liked his reserve. She trivialized the accident and holding his napkin to her jeans and continued.

‘I’m not a great traveller.’

He touched her sleeve with genuine concern.

Aware that she responded to his attention, they fell into an abrupt silence.

She watched him contemplate the ceiling vents. They were a good way into the journey and the air was stale.

‘You’ve done some miles then.’

‘Yes. A lunar mission only takes three days,’ he complained. ‘That’s half a million kilometres.’ She could tell he was the sort to be making constant calculations.

‘We’d be about a third of the way right now,’ he offered.

‘To the moon?’

‘Yes. You’ll find Japan as familiar – and you might as well be travelling through time too.’

It was effectively what she wanted to do: travel through time; find a piece of her mother; find a piece of her own history. She had always accepted the thin yarn of a story her mother had offered, and over the years she had darned and patched it until it fitted her needs. This was how they had always lived together, patching and making do.

Hana woke on the descent over the daytime Pacific to find her head lay on Ed’s shoulder. She smiled sleepily at the intimacies of the flight; his stomach filled with her untouched dinner, which he had tidied away. The honesty of their conversation.

She was not embarrassed until Ed opened his eyes and she shifted quickly to a safer distance.

‘You ‘ve got the address for the homestay – right? I’m really sorry – I would offer … but I’m going in the opposite direction.’

She was disappointed. She had imagined she would have a guide – at least to the centre of town.

‘But we should hang … definitely,’ he added.

It was such a little offer – she wouldn’t press him on it.

The plane dipped sharply sending her body temperature up until she felt a little sick. Below were the rice paddy fields and from this height it seemed there was little change in what she had left behind.

‘You okay?’

‘I’m fine.’

He was, she thought, genuinely concerned. She slumped forwards, fighting what might have been too embarrassing.

When they disembarked she was met in the terminal by a bank of chilled air laced with the smell of fast food. In the café, large, red, paper lanterns radiated a warm light. It was the red of the morning sun that rose early in the east. Her mother had talked about Amaterasu, the Goddess of the morning sun who created night and day and painted the Japanese landscape. It was part of their personal folklore and her mother had said she was her goddess: strong, creative and forgiving. And now on arrival, though she wasn’t a tourist as such she didn’t feel any immediate sense of belonging; this was a new world to her.

In the queue they said a simple goodbye. She opened her British passport at the photograph where her own almond eyes were lost to the stamps and seals that ward off counterfeiters. Her name, with its distinct spelling, somehow promised she would finally learn the truth about her own identity.

As he left beyond the visa line, she waved, touching the pocket where she had put his meishi business card. And so he left her between the no man’s land of duty-free and the threshold of Japan to find her way into the centre.

She marched blindly, past the bilingual signs of welcome and the helpful English guidance into town, to find the taxi ranks. It was too much for her to work out even in her own language. Luggage in tow she ignored the helpfully positioned tourist information desk and, in an ill-judged move, got into a yellow cab.

As the cab drove off, Ed’s card lay behind in the plane, forgotten amongst the collected crumbs beneath the armrest that had divided them.

Chapter 2

‘Entreat me not to leave thee or to return from following after thee; For whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; your people shall be my people’

−Ruth, to Naomi (Ruth 1:16-18, King James Bible)

Hana’s cab hurtled to join the writhing snake of traffic on the elevated section of the Tokyo expressway. It followed the contours of the Sumida River into downtown Tokyo where it split into so many tributaries, running off to Ginza, Chiyoda Ku and Tsukiji.

It hurt as she watched the taxi-meter move faster than the city as they drove across it. Beneath the highway they ventured into back streets, where the air was already thick with the smell of yakitori, so strong it might be an impediment to the karaoke drifting through alleys, eventually getting lost and petering out. Once they reached Shimokitazawa the noise of the traffic gave way to the random calls from the pachinko parlour as the car slowed to the pace of the footfall.

The end of the afternoon was still hot when she clambered out on the unfinished road at the top of a inauspicious residential cul de sac. As she counted the yen notes into the driver’s stark white gloves he must have read her surprise at the fare because he dropped his head in an apologetic bow. The empty street was pockmarked with the shadows of air-con units and laced with scrambled utility wires that looked as if they had been restrung in haste.

She stuffed the change into her pocket. Her jeans had crusted from the spilt tea and felt as pleasant as if someone else had worn them before her. Her mind went back to Tom, alone in her flat. Would Sadie keep him company? Sadie had borrowed her jacket and had only just returned it in time before she left and she could never quite be relied on. What was she doing here in Tokyo and where the hell was she? It was it was a long way from home.

The taxi left and as the dust settled at her feet, a regret that she should have come at all gently settled. Shimokitazawa: a quiet residential suburb that the guidebook promised as a ‘suburb of film café’s, low-key nightlife’ with ‘hundreds of reasonable restaurant choices’. Not that she had any money left after her cab ride. She consoled herself that at least the budget homestay rates had been agreed in advance; she had chosen the homestay program to save on costs but also for a chance to live with a Japanese family.

As she wheeled her case past the misaligned wall at the entrance of number 65, she realized that she had got what she paid for. It was nearing 6 p.m. as she rang the bell.

Chapter 3

‘Clear-voiced cuckoo,

Even you will need

The silvered wings of a crane

To span the islands of Matsushima’

−Matsuo Bashō, The Narrow Road to the Deep North

The front door opened before her hand left the chanting, electronic bell. Perhaps the woman always watched for visitors. She was slight, a good head shorter than Hana and as agitated as a bird that does not own the pavement. Her greeting seemed lost in the effort of removing her housecoat.

Hana ignored the temptation to step back and call after the taxi but steeled herself to walk into this stranger’s house. It smelt savoury but was not unpleasant. The hall was spacious with a large central staircase of thin matchstick bannisters, empty but for a stainless-steel clock in a plastic mahogany case and from the curling rug at the doorstep, it was shabby. But she managed to hide her disappointment; find a smile and make appreciative noises as she surveyed the gallery landing, the empty walls and tired decor. Her own home was such a contrast to this, decorated with bolts of indigo and woodblock prints, brush-stroked scrolls, thumb-printed pottery and hand-painted china; a densely rich homage to Japan.

There was an unease behind the woman’s welcome. Maybe her appearance or the stain across her jeans was to blame? Her middle-aged Japanese host was tiny, and had pulled her thin hair across her scalp into a bun.

With forklift arms the woman communicated Hana should leave her case in the hall.

She was concerned that the lined and tired older woman should not lift it for her and it troubled her that she did not know how to say as much.

‘Noru desu.’ I am Noru. The aged woman slapped her bony breastbone and traced a legible greeting across the warm evening air. The enormity of the language barrier added to her jet lag. She would have so many questions – and she felt so ill-equipped to ask.

The house was silent but for a TV down the corridor as Noru took off on a tour of the lodgings. Hana trailed behind like a dependent child rather than a paying guest.

As they peered into the bathroom, Noru jabbed at the wood-lined bath, then at the shower head, positioned a foot from the floor, and she paused, lending some significance to a pair of plastic sandals by the door.

Hana had no idea. Should she wear slippers in the shower? From the back of the house came a short dry cough. As if attached by an invisible line, Hana followed on to the foot of the stairs where it was made clear that she should remove her shoes before she took to the first step. Was she was just another clueless foreign guest?

Her hot feet left damp prints on the first step and she was covered in embarrassment. As they reached the utilitarian beige of the upper floor, the smell of sour grass became overpowering. What was to be her room was off the open landing. Behind a thin door, with a quick yank of a grimy light cord, Noru showed her two single beds that were suddenly illuminated in all their plainness and just as quickly returned to gloom. It seemed clean enough.

A twin room. Assuming no one else arrived to use the other single, it would suit her fine. She thanked Noru, knowing she could not ask about the twin beds and the distance between them grew larger than just the language barrier.

Outside on the galleried landing, Hana took a seat on the tan leatherette sofa. She watched Noru drawing green tea from a giant floral flask on an old linen chest and accepted it though she had drunk plenty on the flight. It was easier to acquiesce.

‘Gohan.’ We eat. Noru tapped at her watch and then turned for the private section of the house, heading in the direction of the coughing below.

Alone, contemplating a pair of prints on the opposite wall, Hana was too tired of sitting and too weary to stand. Mount Fuji and a giant wave. She had finally arrived and all expectation was turned on its head. The volcanic cone of Fuji sloped smoothly towards a deep dusk-blue where a small fishing boat charted the choppy waters of the lake below.

Well, she rallied, she had brought her walking boots with her and could hike the Fuji trail to the top if she chose. If Tom could have come too she’d have felt more adventurous, but maybe scaring herself a little was a good thing.

The bitter tea, just the colour of the matting, felt acidic on her empty stomach and she regretted giving away her airline meal. And as a hollow emptiness descended on her, she tried to dismiss it as jet lag.

She could phone home. No, she should not phone home. Not now, not yet. All those years before, her mother, at pretty much the same age, had arrived in Tokyo, knowing no one either. And if she was honest she did know one person – the guy from the plane and with Noru that made two.

Her head fell back on the sofa and she bit into the rough side of her cheek. Her mother must once have loved Japan but it had obviously been a complicated affair as there were such huge blanks in the story. They had never come when her mother was alive: they had never had the resources; it had never been practical.

Now that her mother had gone, questions had begun to appear. Long-buried questions. Now she felt a fool for not asking, but then again she had been forced into accepting this and it had only now begun to irritate her.

Chapter 4

‘The events of human life, whether public or private, are so intimately linked to architecture that most observers can reconstruct nations or individuals in all the truth of their habits from the remains of their monuments or from their domestic relics’

−Honoré de Balzac

Hana sipped at the bitter tea. You really had to know how to ask the right questions. Her mother had hidden behind a memory that she would never share. She had cradled it like a burn to the hand and Hana had learned early on not to bring it up. Consequently it had proved a very successful way of avoiding the truth – which left Hana up against it now, up against that generational amnesia that protected the past and, at worst, buried it.

She really must find the teahouse. As her mother had described it, it lay etched on her mind, sitting in temple gardens, over an ornamental lake in one of the most tranquil places on earth. Working on that building and helping with the construction design, had been for her mother an exquisite project. On the rare occasions she had mentioned it she looked wistful, lost, and, when pressed, she would clam up, or ramble on about the way it was built.

This Zen teahouse had become a kind of monument to her and so Hana had brought from home the dog-eared Japanese map, folded into inconvenient ribbons and covered in nothing but kanji characters. The task of finding a major tourist site would be an achievement let alone an insignificant retreat in the middle of nowhere but the guy from the flight, Ed, might help.

With thoughts of freshening up she reached the hall, where Noru materialized, flapping her apron and motioning towards the bathroom at the back of the house. Once the door bolt was secured, she finally stepped out of her jeans. Peeling away the clothes she had first put on in London began the transition. You hadn’t arrived, she thought, until that moment when you remove the flight-worn souvenirs from the start of the journey. The deep wooden bath was already full of water and, ignoring the short shower hose, the slippers and the ashtray, she got in and sank into the hottest water she had ever braved. Soaping away the collected hours of arm’s-length intimacy and the Tokyo dust, she suspected she was breaking another house rule but who knew what it was.

Replacing the medicinal soap, she sank back for a blissful moment and remembered the London Fields Lido where she had first learnt to swim. She must have been about ten. This place prompted memories she hadn’t raised for years, as if, as Ed had said, she was travelling back in time. Her mother, with careful consideration, amid the shouts of pleasure or was it terror around them, had removed the floats from her skinny arms and let her go. Shoulder deep she had felt herself sinking, but her mother, beside her then, had watched her struggle to the edge, to safety. It was never going to be easy, but she had clung to that mantra, and as they walked home hers was strawberry-ice success and they shared the sweet melt line running all the way to her elbow.

The steaming bath threatened to overwhelm her and, having added more from the cold tap, she sank below the water line. She held her breath until it was not quite comfortable, then, expelling bubbles in punishing, controlled bursts, she finally let it all go, turning the water into a rolling boil above her head. It was the first time, she realized, that she was angry. She missed her mother and she was angry with herself for losing her. Now she was actually here she knew she should have asked more questions, demanded answers. She had so little go on.

Radiating more heat than a power plant, she stepped out, and realized her fresh clothes were in her bag. She tried to pull on her jeans but her clammy skin made it impossible and so she threw on a cotton robe she found on the back of the door. It smelt distinctly male and, ignoring a slight revulsion, she threw it on in favour of running to her room in a tiny towel.

As discreetly as she could she lugged her bag across the floor, battling to keep the loose yukata robe closed, intent on getting past unseen. She wasn’t sure but it was as if she had displaced someone from beyond the bathroom window vent.

She lay on the bed gazing beyond the weight of her exhausted eyelids, until suddenly energized she searched though her hand luggage for Ed’s card. And she searched again, only to find it missing, and, with vigorous frustration she realized she had probably already lost it.

On her way down she could hear more coughing. As if on cue Noru appeared as Hana descended the stairs. She ushered her into the dining room, waved a tea towel in the direction of a chair and hit the play button on some plinkety-plonkety Japanese folk music, then left.

There were five places laid at the table. It was difficult to judge the size of the house. As she waited for the other guests, her eyes ranged over the few effects in the room. A small CD collection included ten copies of the same album from a cute girl band and beside the potted cactus was a range of English football mugs. She supposed they belonged to a teenage boy, but this impression was quickly dispelled when an approaching shuffle announced the laboured arrival of a really old man. Could it be Noru’s father? Anticipating the difficulty he would have seating himself, she got up to help him to his chair and, with the arrogance both accrued in old age and naturally excused by it, he sat down at the head of the table and ignored her. Saucepans clattered in the kitchen.

‘It is my first trip to Tokyo.’ He ignored her, and she chose to turn up the volume. It didn’t matter that he wouldn’t speak English ‘My mother lived in Shimoktazawa in the eighties. For over a year.’ He could be deaf. ‘My mother, Naomi,’ she said again, for her own benefit.

He turned his head slowly as if to do otherwise would startle him and snorted down his nose, shaking his head his up and down in what could have been recognition.

‘Ukai,’ he said, introducing himself by tapping a bony finger to his chest. He had the tanned, desiccated face of a smoker. His wheezy laugh was lost in a fit of coughing that immediately brought Noru back into the room.

Hana recognized the look on her face, that look of spent patience, which must remain unvented and often accorded to the very old, the infirm, or the long-term ill.

Noru fell on him, rubbing and thumping the base of his back and drawing vigorous circles over his chest.

‘So da ne.’ She comforted him as you would a young child. No wonder she looked exhausted, this nurse and housekeeper.

‘Can I help?’ Hana was unsure at first whether she had made herself understood. But her offer was turned down graciously and she turned to look at the becalmed old man as Noru left him as she attended to the cooking. His rheumy eyes shone with his exertions and he looked at Hana directly.

‘Na-o-mi,’ he said. She could swear he said it, under thin breath. Just a copycat word? She could not ask another question for fear of bringing on another bout of asthma and so they sat in an uncomfortable silence animated only by his laboured breathing and the ticking of a cuckoo clock. The displaced German clock, like her, seemed to have lost its cultural way and migrated east. Did she have any better reason for being here? Contemplating the wizened figure at the head of the table, age itself looking like a wrong turn, she dropped her head with the thought that at least her mother had been spared this.

Chapter 5

Waiting for the evening meal took her back to the goodbye supper with friends. Tom had given a Japanese Kanpai toast and they had shared a bottle of sake Sadie had brought. They had found some shakuhachi flute music and talked of geishas, She had promised them all armfuls of manga comics.

Now she was here it was a sour joke. Moist amethyst and livid yellow pickles sat curling beside some dried fish. Noru fussed about serving them but eventually joined them at the table. At least the dinner was offered in small portions and she would manage the rice out of politeness.

Slipping the paper chopsticks from their sheath she broke them apart, whittling at the loose splinters before she began to eat. This prompted an exaggerated reaction from Noru, who exhaled in voiced panic.

‘No. No,’ Noru burst out shaking her head like an old turkey bird. Looking to the old man for his reaction to her carelessness. Noru could not begin to tell her what custom she had offended. Self-consciously Hana picked at the sticky rice and the air-conditioning unit cooling the back of her neck joined forces with her jet lag to bring her close to tears. They didn’t intend to make her feel so unwelcome, she knew that, and she forced a smile.

There were still two empty places laid at the table and she longed for a diversion. Just then doorbell went and Noru got up. Hana heard an American voice in the lobby, apologizing.

‘Yeah. Sorry it’s late. No, I won’t eat. Just going straight to sleep, thanks.’

Piles of dark unruly hair and a girl with olive skin appeared in the door and Hana noticed the energy in the house had changed. After an exchange of smiles, the girl said, ‘I’m Jess. Dead tired so I’ll see you later. I’m gonna head up.’

‘Bikyhikibiri!’ a man’s voice boomed from the back of the house.

As the diatribe continued Ukai turned his milky eyes towards Hana, followed by Noru and then Jess until she was the focal point of everyone’s stare.

‘You washed with soap in the bath?’ Jess whispered.

Hana nodded.

‘They never do this here.’ She was matter of fact; she was obviously not new to the house. ‘We share the water.’ It was not good news.

Hiding in the shadow of the doorway clutching a towel, a bare-chested man in his thirties appeared, rattling on in complaint until Noru’s response sent him into retreat.

Hana remembered the bathrobe and winced. Moments later he returned wearing a fresh cotton yukata gown over his heavy frame. He was newly shaven and his damp skin shone.

‘Kombanwa,’ he said to the room, acknowledging the girls before he sat down heavily beside old Ukai, and began again a low, gravelling rant.

‘Night,’ the American said. ‘See you tomorrow.’

She seemed very much at home and very content to leave Hana with the growling man who must, she assumed, be Noru’s son.

Noru deferentially placed sticks of startling luminous fish and sticky rice in front of the young man and it had a beneficial effect.

He turned to look at Hana as if she reminded him of someone.

‘So, welcome to Tokyo. I am Tako. You met my mother and grandfather?’ He had once got lucky with a gap year student.

His dark hair was wet and he looked like an overgrown cuckoo. It was no surprise that Noru was stretched, cooking for two generations and guests.

‘Hana, right? Japanese for flower.’ He smiled benignly like a prince appeased. ‘Ukai can write your name in kanji alphabet sometime.’ He jabbed his chopsticks at the old man enthusiastically, revealing his bare chest beneath the yukata and a lurking breastplate tattoo.

‘Thanks.’ Who would refuse such an offer?

‘You know Chelsea?’ he asked, pointing at the line of football mugs.

‘Yes.’ It was drawn out and unconvincing. The Chelsea she knew was a place where her grandparents had lived until she’d gone to senior at the City of London School for Girls. They would take her to St Luke’s playground off Sydney Street, and then, later, on those Sunday-lunch visits she and her mother were obliged to make, they would go to the Physic Garden. When she was older she would meet friends at the Goat pub, before trekking home to East London. Chelsea did not mean a football club to her and he could see that.

‘So, you are gonna see the sights, right?’

‘And lots of temples.When I find them.’

This sent him ricocheting to be of assistance. He retrieved a map and laid a hand on it ceremoniously as if it might be a passport to friendship. Opening it at his end of the table he strategically identified the areas marked and then promptly dashed it away, clearly having an Einstein moment.

‘I myself can show you.’

Too fatigued to give him anything but a lukewarm response she hesitated. ‘Thank you.’ Should she say it? ‘Very much.’

‘You are British. British and –’ he paused ‘– British Asian?’

This caught her off-guard, for while she was used to people turning over guessing stones – the game had long since ceased to irritate – but she had assumed foolishly, that possibly they might get it right here in Japan.

‘Japanese.’

‘So. I see,’ he said, more winded than intrigued.

Had she expected to walk off the plane and fit in? Outside there was just enough light to see the old wooden house opposite through the heavy dirt on the insect netting. Could she belong here? Idly, she prodded the pink seafood round the bowl with her chopsticks.

‘Chelsea is my club,’ he continued beaming indulgently and she tried hard to reciprocate the smile. For some reason nothing fitted. Perhaps she might be happier in a different homestay? She wouldn’t jump to a rash decision, but tomorrow she could look at different places to stay; maybe the American could suggest one.

She made her excuses and was sorry for not managing to eat what they had presented. She could sense their disappointment but, at the noise of her chair, as she pushed her seat back under the table, they broke from their disenchantment and wished her goodnight.

‘Oyasuminasai,’ Noru chimed with her son.

Upstairs in the twin room the American girl, despite the humidity, was hidden under a floral sheet. Hana’s room was now their room. She had, considerately, left the light on but the air-con was off and there was no remote control. The solution hung pendulously over her bed. She climbed gingerly on to the bed base and reached for the switch until the girl stirred.

‘Hospital soap,’ she mumbled sleepily.

She would leave it tonight.

As Hana closed her eyes thoughts of home drifted in. Tom would be at lunch now. It was only yesterday he had seen her off from the platform in Paddington and brought her case all the way, in an unusually generous gesture for him. He had given her The Pillow Book as she stepped onto the train. It was only as he receded with the station that the realization she was leaving him behind had hit. She had hoped for larger assurances that he would miss her; she wanted him to say it would hurt and preferably badly. She wanted him to work on what she meant to him until her return. But he was not demonstrative; he could be needy and that display of affection was entirely different, veering as it did towards his own requirements, not hers. Did she trust Sadie with him? How could she begin to taunt herself and so soon when she felt so very off-centre already? She would be away for nearly two months and to begin counting the days was a poor start. A poor start. A poor start.

She fell asleep with unexpected ease.

Chapter 6

Populationof Tokyo : 37.8 million

The next morning, bending over with the curvature of the earth, time prodded at her ribs, calling for a start to the day that was much too early. But she was used to broken sleep. For a while, when her mother had been ill, her own sleep patterns had been affected and she had wandered around the house at odd hours, drying the last of the cups on the draining board or aligning cookery books. Since she had gone, Tom could wake to find her tidying or cleaning as if she had a responsibility to keep her mother’s flat more pristine than it had ever been, as if she might walk in unexpectedly and find Hana was coping okay; that it was all under control.

Her damp bedclothes clung and on waking in the half-light her mouth felt dry – could she safely drink the water here? In the single bed beside her, Jess, the American girl, was still asleep. Hana could hear birdsong, loud birdsong, in the heart of the city. Wide awake but unable to move from the bandage of sheets, she willed her roommate to surface but she was no more compliant than she had been the night before. So Hana lay a little longer, planning her day. She would find the teahouse at the temple. She had read of the wooden structures and the Buddhist temple Asakusa Jinja, and the Shinto shrine at the Meiji Jingu. She would head at some stage for Kyoto, which, though high on her list, would be a push to afford.

Finally Jess stirred and pulled herself up to sit against the wall, crowned in a bird’s nest of hair. She looked across at Hana with dark circles under her eyes.

‘Coffee!’ Her arms stretched as she broke away from the deep sleep of her first night. ‘It’s good to be back.’

Back from where? Hana wondered but didn’t yet say it.

Jess stretched some more.

‘This is the best place in Tokyo,’ she continued, as if to someone else.

Hana blinked back at her as if a strange creature had joined the room. The best? This was hardly believable and she couldn’t bring herself to agree even out of politeness.

‘Bit of shouting last night,’ Hana contended

Jess nodded.

‘Bikyhikibiri. Bikyhikibiri.’

‘Which—’ Jess looked over a virtual set of glasses professorially ‘—translates as pubic hair. Don’t leave it in the bath.’ She waved any concern away and giggled.

Hana’s lips soured.

Jess was laconic but friendly and gave Hana the facts quickly: she had been working up north on an aid project and had come back down to Tokyo for a few weeks before returning to Seattle. Though younger than Hana she was a seasoned traveller, happy living out of a rucksack for months. It was the second year she had come to the homestay and the formula worked well for her.

Jess put her arm round her in a welcome squeeze. ‘I’m back in Tokyo to make some good money. And you? Why are you here?’

Hana began a vague meandering on the cultural attractions of Tokyo but Jess cut her short.

‘You’re part Japanese, right? And you chose my favourite homestay?’

Hana nodded and then broached what was uppermost in her mind. She lowered her voice confidentially. ‘I am going to have to change homestay.’

‘Great, then I get the room to myself.’ Jess was deadpan and Hana wondered whether she should take her seriously. ‘No, you’ll like it here. The family goes out of their way to help. Why leave when you just got here?’

The fact that it felt as cloying as a home for the elderly was too difficult to put into words, too ungenerous, and so she just said, ‘Well … money.’

‘Money? This is cheap. I start my bar work this week. Great money and it’ll see me through a whole semester. You should think about it. They always need people.’

Younger but so aware, Hana thought. Jess urged her to come and see the club with her that morning. A club? Hana had worked in a bar but a club? It was a hostess bar. And it didn’t appeal. Charity Aid and club hostess. Jess was interesting.

‘Emiko will give you a job. And then I could show you round Tokyo. ’ It sounded like a bribe.

‘No. No, thanks.’ Objections that she was here only for a short time were irrelevant. There was no doubt she could do with the money. ‘This morning I plan to find the local temple.’

‘Local temple? I can show you better temples.’

‘Well, you see … when she lived here, my mother worked on a project at the teahouse, somewhere in the grounds of one of the temples.’

Jess nodded encouragingly, while at the same time mentally counting the number of small temples that littered each small district of Tokyo. It seemed a little futile to her.

‘Did she give you the address?

‘No. Well, no.’ It was too long to explain.

‘You know which one?’ she added to make sure.

‘Not yet.’ Assured that six or so weeks was ample time to discover it.

‘So that shouldn’t be too difficult to find.’

‘Exactly,’ Hana replied, misreading the cynicism.

‘What’s the hurry? The temple will be there tomorrow. Be there the next day. Been there a while,’ Jess urged. ‘You work nights with me, go sightseeing during the day go home with more money than you transferred. Including the flight.’

She could see Hana warming.

‘I need to get a black dress for the job. Will you come? We’ll go meet Emiko.’

‘Okay, I’ll think about it.’ She would have to hold her own with this one.

Chapter 7

Seismological measurement of Fukushima earthquake magnitude 9 on the Richter scale

Birdsong came from the same deck that the folk music had the night before. Breakfast was laid out as self-service, and Hana and Jess ate rice and then wedges of sliced white bread, twice the size of a paperback and half as nutritious, that they covered in sugared orange jam. Between mouthfuls they discussed their plans for the day and then headed out.

Before they reached the station Jess pointed out the dormant neon nightclub sign.

‘Try it? There’s no commitment.’

Hana could see she was never going to take no for an answer.

Jess ran down to the basement, leaving her at the sign.

She quickly returned.

‘Emiko – the manager – can see you at the end of the week.’ She couldn’t have been more pleased with herself.

Hana didn’t want to be ungrateful, ‘I’ll see,’ was all she said.

Jess drew her towards the rail tracks.

‘Come to Ziggy’s to meet my good friend Miho.’

And they headed up the main street with its tiny stores; pottery spilling towards the fresh noodle makers calling beside loud carousels of ‘anime’ covers for any accessory.

Hana waited patiently in a din of local music as Jess fingered lollipop pens and fake-fur key rings with ears. All this from the home of Zen, she thought, as she waited too long under the awning of sound. She considered her new companion a little critically but in the assault of the unfamiliar she was already attached to her.

‘Have you chosen yet?’ Hana was surprisingly irritable given they had met so recently.

Jess emerged manga-eyed with a cartoon bag of irresistibles and she was back on message. ‘It’ll be fun and it’s the only temp job a foreigner will get in Tokyo.’

She was as short as a haiku poem but without the poetry.

‘And the clients?’ hana was worried about dodgy clubs.

‘It is tame. It’s safe,’ she reassured.

Hana’s nose wrinkled. She was far from convinced.

‘Remember I worked here all last summer.’

‘How did you find it?’ Hana twisted at her woven bracelet.

‘The homestay. Ukai, the old man, once had a share in the business that owned a chain of clubs across the city. Apparently did very well property dealing in the eighties. That was until a big deal in Guam nearly ruined him. It’s why Noru takes in foreigners. The house is their only remaining asset and the old man isn’t as well connected as he was.’

‘So they were an important family?’

Jess surprised Hana by laughing, as if the idea were ludicrous. ‘Well, let’s say influential. They’re Etahin.’

‘Etahin?’ Hana hadn’t a clue.

‘Low class,’ Jess said confidentially. Hana threaded her cotton art bag over her shoulder, engaged. Jess knew Noru and the family quite well. So they had hit hard times and Noru was whittled away by the workload and the responsibility. This all seemed to mitigate against an early move from the homestay; they would probably be relying on the income?

‘And the old man’s health has taken a dive since last year,’ Jess added unsentimentally, as if she could hear Hana weighing up her decision. And that swayed it. Hana saw she shouldn’t really contemplate moving homestay now, leaving them so early on.

On the way to the café Jess explained that she had worked with the same volunteer group as last year.

‘Yes, straight down from Fukushima.’

‘Same charity programme?’ Hana asked.

‘Same programme with the same volunteer group’ Jess conceded proudly.

Hana turned in admiration. And a memory suddenly flew to mind. One weekend last month she and Tom had walked along Regent’s Canal, and, after getting drenched in an English monsoon, once home Hana had used old newspaper to stuff Tom’s wet boots as they dried. Later, when making supper she had unfurled the paper to catch the vegetable parings, smoothing the corners until she was disturbed by a photograph under a headline. It was of a large merchant ship, a cargo vessel, resting incongruously on a landscape of debris: afloat on shards of wood, sections of wall, severed concrete platforms and flimsy girders. A sea of detritus. The bric-a-brac of a town destroyed. The vernissage of a ship – resting on kindling, once houses and stores, garden fences and schools – that had now been washed clean and was drying in the sun. The caption read Tō hoku – After the tidal wave. Across the hulk was a great expansive sky of hopeful blue on a cloudless, unthreatening day; well after the force of nature had taken its random hit on the Japanese coastline. There were no harrowing details. It was majestic; a great feat of engineering resting on the fragments of a community. It presented like a life raft to a culture, the ship ashore resting easily back on the land where it had first been constructed. A huge piece of flotsam cut it loose from its securing lines by the nihilistic force of a tidal wave. It seemed to be a monument to the survival of something grander than destruction and, like a sorrow, rested heavily on the obliterated scene of what once was. In some way she did not understand, it belonged to her. She felt a kinship then with Japan that she had never before felt with such intensity. She too was a survivor of her own family tragedy.

‘That was in Fukushima,’ Jess reconfirmed.

Hana snapped out of her reverie and was immediately honest with her. ‘I couldn’t do it. You’ve seen so much.’

‘We get to see the wastelands.’ Jess conceded. ‘But you rebuild.’

Jess bordered on glib and Hana gave way to a creeping skepticism. She eyed her petite figure. Jess would be particularly ineffective in rebuilding the havoc she had seen.

‘You. You are rebuilding?’ Hana offered tentatively.

‘I don’t have a truck license,’ Jess drawled amusingly. ‘We counsel. We don’t get close to the affected communities or their grief, but we counsel the counsellors. To be more accurate, we organize their entertainment: films, music nights. As they are the ones who work with the families, day in day out and they need a programme of events to take their minds off what they have seen and heard. They need to be fresh to counsel the survivors. Many have nothing left to hold on to but the promise of that counselling.’

It was a serious choice for a summer programme. Jess held on to Hana’s admiration.

‘Last year I was also teaching at Berlitz Language School.’ She let this slip casually, as if looking for more approbation.

And it struck Hana that the promised bottom line – the huge amounts of money Jess earned out here – was the result of more hours than she had explained.

Chapter 8

They reached the door of Ziggy’s café. Jess hammered on the glass, but no one heard, or else she had deafened them in her efforts to be heard.

‘Miho’s asleep.’

‘So Miho’s a friend?’

‘It’s her café. She’s great. Opens early and adores Americans. Some days she’ll let me eat without paying. So I wanted to tell her we’ll be two for breakfast after the bar shift.’

‘But I haven’t decided.’

‘Come on. I need some company down there. You’ll thank me.’ The prospect of the basement bar had grown no more attractive than at first. Jess needed her company and chance had thrown her no other allies.

They gave up on any response at Ziggy’s café and as they left Jess had to draw Hana from the path of a noodle delivery scooter strafing them at speed. She seemed surprised that she didn’t know to watch for them.

‘And you are a bit Japanese, right? So you are coming home,’ Jess continued, essentially thick-skinned but perhaps she needed to be.

‘Not really.’ Hana’s response was quiet.

Last night, getting out of the taxi, any expectation that she might be coming home had evaporated.

The noodle biker waved an apology and drove on with his ramen soups swinging behind him.

Hana waved back. ‘I have never been to Japan before.’ She couldn’t see why further justification was needed.

‘So the trip’s about you?’ What Jess lacked in subtlety she made up for in perseverance.

Hana could do without the analysis. But she smiled. Would anyone go travelling and leave themselves behind at baggage carousel? Was it an omission, not to have checked the occupancy rates, thus landing Jess as a roommate? But she was warm and kind of vital. And Jess did have local knowledge. Drawing her back to this, she asked, ‘So where will I find the local temple?’

Jess had never been and saw no urgency to go on Hana’s first day. She stopped at a blinking vending machine; she would need coffee before they took another step.

Hana refused either the chemically warmed or the ice-chilled can. And as if she sensed she was weighing her up, Jess bent over posturing like a sage and rolled the cold can across her forehead for comic effect. ‘Wait a minute,’ Jess said to the ground. She had found a small kitten cowering with the wind-blown trash under the vending machine. She picked it up and nestled it against her ear, walking on.

‘Wait. Won’t it belong to someone?’

‘It’ll take a holiday just for a day or so.’

‘And Noru won’t mind?’

‘Who would tell?’

Hana smiled at her new friend’s independence.

‘Where exactly did Naomi live?’ The cat was tucked under Jess’s arm.

‘I don’t know but she would have known this main street.’ Hana wondered how much would it have changed; the racket of piped music, the disarray of wares halfway across the street, signs so numerous they had become wallpaper hopelessly competing for attention.

‘You look like her?’ Jess asked.

Idly Hana imagined there might be someone on this very street that might just remember her mother and recognize some similarity, some feature or in the way she walked.

‘A bit. Not really. We enjoyed the same things. We were similar in that way.’

‘You were?’

Hana nodded and pursed her lips, and for once Jess caught the subtlety that she had lost her and said she was sorry.

Hana went on quickly. ‘She lived here when she worked on the teahouse. Around eighty-nine.’

‘So …’ Jess registered with the strike of a can hitting the pocket of the vending machine.

‘So the teahouse is important.’

‘But you are looking for your father?’ Jess tugged at the ring pull on the can.

The suggestion winded Hana. The faceless man that was her father had been a completely unacknowledged presence for so long that she had edited him out of her existence in the way that he had surely done for her. How could this stranger not realize that she shouldn’t ask? There was a time when she believed her mother had not known who her father was. A faceless one-night stand in Tokyo? But she knew Naomi too well to really believe it.

At first she didn’t respond and then replied, ‘No,’ to Jess’s open skepticism.

‘Miho’s coffee is better than this,’ Jess concluded resignedly.

Chapter 9

After supper, Tako skipped in, wearing a clean, pressed T-shirt.

‘Ladies, ladies.’ He chose to pronounce it as if it were a disease for dogs. He started regaling them with earthquake facts which had become a recurring theme with him, and he clearly enjoyed the response.

‘A thirty-nine metre wave.’ If he intended to frighten Hana he often succeeded.

Unexpectedly he produced a bottle of Blossom soap and presented it as a gift. Had he heard them complaining?

Noru scowled at her son as she cleared the table. Her housekeeping didn’t run to gifts for guests.

‘When do I show you round?’ Ever generous. He leafed though a guidebook as he held it under Hana’s nose. What could she tell him? He was the last person she would choose.

Her smile was noncommittal.

‘Okay, so when is best?’ he persisted.

There was something about him she didn’t trust. She searched Jess, who bailed her out very casually

‘We have a few trips planned. Thanks though.’ And she grabbed the soap before marching out.

It was Jess’s turn for the bathroom first and so Hana took out her battered city plan, tracing her finger across the legend of flags and dots and icons. She had scanned the whole of Shimokitazawa and found nothing.

Jess returned in a towel-wrapped turban …

‘Sweet to give us soap.’

‘Sweet?’ Hana hoped he was harmless.

As she scratched at the back of her neck Hana remembered the cat had slept in Jess’s bed for two days. It was sure to have fleas. Resignedly, she held her feet in her hands and rocked back and forth, eventually coming to settle on the uncomfortable homestay bed, intending to broach the subject of the cat with Jess soon.

On their way up the main street the next morning, Hana passed gift-wrapped melons in the window of the supermarket. They were the price of a European flight at home.

‘It is what it is.’ Jess was clearly resigned to the cost of living because she knew the short cuts. ‘I never eat melon,’ she said as if possessed of great wisdom.

Hana would not buy this as evidence of an economic sage but she did realize then, even without giving way to her taste for melon, that she would go to the interview at the end of the week or answer to her roommate, repeatedly. And so, before they reached the rail tracks, she had decided, since she planned to be in Tokyo for at least six weeks or more, she would join Jess at the club. Why not?

Her first quake began halfway to the station with what she thought was a train rumbling. She didn’t see anything particularly odd but she could hear the creaking of wooden buildings bracing against the tremor as if shaken by the vibrations of an ancient engine. It lasted for no more than ten seconds.

‘We should be inside,’ Jess advised and pointed to the pachinko parlour.

‘You okay?’

Once inside she was a little shaken but the vibration stopped as suddenly as it had arrived.

‘An earthquake virgin.’ Jess tried to make light of it to put her at ease. ‘We have loads of these little tremors. And the pressure release is a positive thing.’ She smiled with a bright idea. ‘Let’s play.’

Hana reminded Jess they were headed for Nakajima no Ochaya to drink tea but she was caught by the novelty.

The doors opened to a cacophony that drowned the shouts of welcome; chrome ball bearings in Brownian motion, like so many metallic castanets. Lights flashed in purple, red and emerald green in line upon line, and on the small screen of each pinball display an ancient geisha played out a love story or cartoon boy hero dazzled a conquering light sabre.

There were plenty of empty seats peppered with random regulars, most of whom slumped as if permanently attached to the furniture, spent cigarettes between their lips,

Jess whooped like a cowgirl to straddle a chair. She turned. ‘Are we feeling lucky?’

Hana was happy to observe and took up a position behind her. Winning balls from another machine clattered. She was far from the tranquility of the teahouse.

Jess took the joystick, jabbing at a console worn smooth as washed pebbles. Bearings collided and bounced through a maze of obstacles and at every winning gate more balls fed her play. It was a while before she was conscious of another person standing behind her. Hana turned to find Tako had appeared like a screen genii. He had a habit of turning up like an irritating pop-up ad. Had he followed them? He wore his shiny athletic jacket and bright white T shirt.

He couldn’t stay, but since he knew the game so well he would show them how it was done. Could he show them? Jess made way for him and he flashed his skills until three jackpot winners appeared on screen and a deafening number of balls fell in payout.

He indicated with a generosity as large as the sum was small that it was all theirs.

‘Yeeha!’ Jess called.

Tako rose for Hana to take a turn.

She declined, not wanting to risk the winnings, and thankfully, in the void of any encouragement, he left them.

‘I will add to the money,’ Jess announced, ‘and we’ll go for a big lunch.’

The restaurant was the size of a corridor. A thatch protected an old water wheel and a large, plastic raccoon bear stood to attention.

‘Mickey Mouse? But a bit tanned.’

Jess shot Hana a look. ‘This is Tanuki. He brings good fortune, especially in financial matters. And sex,’ she added in a helpful afterthought.

‘Funny there’s so much superstition. Mickey Mouse doesn’t mean anything,’ Hana said. Here it seemed important to hang on to the significance of things.

‘He has big balls too,’ Jess stated the obvious mischievously. She had an appetite and chose quickly from the menu. They ate and talked of Seattle and London sushi and that thing guys do when they start a row about something trivial when they need to bring up a different injury.

As they left neither could decide who best resembled the potbellied bear raccoon.

‘Go lucky,’ Jess burped solemnly.

‘And you,’ Hana wondered for a moment whether she would ever need anything more than good company and so, ditching the teahouse idea for the day, she fell in with Jess.

Jess wanted Hana to see the city before they got stuck into work, so the next day they crossed the whole of Shibuya, took the metro to Aoyama and walked the hill to Omotesandō. There they peered beyond concave glass so unreflective it seemed they could reach in for the Yamamoto and Gucci bags, too expensive to touch.

To vary the homestay offering of rice, pickles and dried or jellied fish, they chose to eat at the end of the metro line on the pavement terrace of a student café screened off with sculptured tea bushes. They were the only foreigners in the place but drank their way to the point where it didn’t matter.

After plenty of warm sake, they returned to the house where Ukai, oblivious to the hour and to their greeting, was still painting in poor light at the dining room table. He often worked at his SUMI-E, and in the cool of the late afternoons he would trim the kiwi vine that ran over the door. The brushwork was some sort of farewell poem in calligraphy; a tradition, Jess had said. Great big black strokes of angry ineptitude.

Jess cast an eye over progress as they passed. ‘Not bad for a yakuza.’

Now used to her humour, Hana found branding the old man a gangster amusing.

She was sure he had said ‘Naomi’ on that first night. If she could just make herself understood enough to talk to him …

They took the stairs unsteadily.

‘Are these mosquito bites?’ Hana inspected her arms before scaling the stairs.

Jess ignored her and returning to a pet subject said, ‘I think I saw one of the guys I met at the club in that restaurant, If I don’t pull soon …’

She laughed like a hyena as Hana held the banister unsteadily.

‘Tako?’ she suggested weighing both in each hand for comic effect and risking a fall.

She stabilized for a moment. ‘Now, the lawyer from the plane …’ Hana began, holding her forehead in exasperation at losing contact. ‘Fluent. And he was great company too.’

‘Careless at best,’ Jess slurred, and in her optimistic way rambled, ‘confidentially, you know, my Japanese isn’t bad either.’ There was nothing confidential about it and she was, as usual, endearingly keen to come top in the competition for great company.

As Hana jabbed at the air-con remote, Jess promised to search for English law firms in Tokyo and slumped on her bed. Hana found that, on returning to the room this time, it had strangely begun to feel like a haven in the city.

Neither of them saw Tako emerge from the lobby door to listen from the bottom of the stairs.

Chapter 10

On Thursday afternoon they walked to the metro.

‘Trust me, we want to take the Ginza line beyond Asakusa temple.’

Though Hana had wanted to head for Meiji Jingu temple in Harajuku, she went along with it.

The approach to the painted wooden structure at Asakusa was lined with kiosks selling souvenir biscuits, miniature samurai swords and polyester silks, and, under the canopied bronze incense burner, people stood washing in the curling smoke. Cupped hands drew the incense silently over their faces and hands. It was, Hana supposed, as effective as any purification for the soul, and she wanted to try it, wafting trails of incense across the air, following the contours of her upper body. Jess could not be persuaded to join in and they left the main complex to skirt the site for the teahouse.

Their hands traced the brushwood fence tied with origami prayers and tagged wind chimes sang as they passed. Before they reached the teahouse, they came across a forest of little statues lining the path, no more than a foot high, constructed from stones, each wearing startling scraps of red cloth, tied as bibs. Hana called to Jess for an explanation.

‘Those—’ Jess threw out as she marched on ‘—they’re Jizo.’

Hana waited for more.

‘For the God of little ones. Any who died in childhood or were Unborn.’

It was unsettling. Futile rags on petrified stones. And they walked on.

Finally Jess stopped. Opening her arms to a building rising up in front of them: a red pagoda with storied eaves like the exposed ribs of a musical instrument. As if the chimes they had heard along the way emanated from this enormous child’s rattle.

‘Chashitsu. The teahouse,’ Jess said with a flourish, making the pronouncement as if she had guided Hana to the very heart of her pilgrimage. She watched Hana carefully for her reaction but her rapt face changed suddenly.

‘Well, this isn’t it,’ Hana was obliged to point out. ‘A world-famous temple?’ she added crossly.

‘Yes, but the style …’ Jess’s confidence faded. It was a reference and weren’t they out looking for references? Wasn’t this why they had come to the garish, red, Buddhist temple in the first place?

Hana walked around the wooden pagoda. For Jess it was no big deal. She would never get the architectural subtleties. The simplicity of Zen. It was stunning but it was all wrong and far from the simple structure she was looking for. As they left they passed the Jizo stones, draped with fading rags, and coldly chilling.

Chapter 11

‘Tan-tan-tanuki no kintama wa,

Kaze mo nai no ni,

Bura bu-ra’

‘Tan-tan-tanuki’s balls ring,

Though there is no wind,

They swing-swing-swing’

− schoolyard song in Japan

The basement smelt of disinfectant. Emiko, the manager, was at the bar, facing away from her, stock-checking her screen; the light was flat, barely sufficient. Someone hollered from the back and she answered him meekly in Japanese. He began testing a UV light and it picked up the white T-shirt she wore over tight jeans. Behind her the light pulsed across an enormous woodblock print, exposing an octopus that filled the entire wall. They might as well be under water.

She pulled up a bar-stool and greeted Hana quietly, with scant energy for someone desperate for staff. The opening conversation was short; like the atmosphere in the room, she seemed a little stale, and as she perched on the stool, Hana knew she was out of place.

Emiko closed her screen; she had a tiny scar above her upper lip, where a kiss might have been planted in a near miss; a fine line between love and hate perhaps. Hana watched her. But for a gentle tick at the corner of her lip, her face was immobile. At the back of the room men were playing a day’s game of cards. Hana had could see pretty quickly that she was not what Emiko had expected. She scratched at her neck. It was infuriatingly itchy and too late she realized it was off-putting.

As Emiko asked another routine question, they were interrupted by rapid footsteps on the stairs. Jess breezed in.

Emiko met Jess’s excitement only to dampen it.

‘Your friend is here only for a short time,’ she said apologetically and with impeccable grace excused herself to respond to one of the card players. Hana looked at Jess apologetically. She had been turned down when they had bet on a certainty. To her surprise she was disappointed. They went back to the street as if they needed air.

Jess began an athletic rant.

‘Emiko actually said that?’ As Hana relayed their conversation.

It was never easy to be rejected, even when she hadn’t staked a whole lot on the idea and she appreciated Jess’s indignance.

‘So, let’s try something else,’ Jess continued energetically and flipped quickly to reassurance, tapping Hana’s hand to comfort her. As they walked away Jess waved familiarly to a woman standing behind a tsunami of pottery, spilling into the street as if she knew everyone here. As if she belonged.

They ambled over the tracks and the humid air clung to them like disappointment. ‘We’ll get something to eat?’ Jess said.

They would head for Ziggy’s. For a moment Hana thought she had a waitressing job in mind for her? It might be in Tokyo but she didn’t want to spend her time in a café. At least the bar was different – nothing like it in London.

‘I told you about Miho’s Pastries,’ Jess cajoled, explaining Ziggy’s was her regular; it was so reasonable it had become her dining room.

Knocking gently at the window, pressing against the plate glass, Jess rubbed her empty stomach and reached for Hana to do the same. As Hana peered into the small café she could see shelves of well-travelled coffees and Kilner jars of mulberries and cinnamon lining the walls.

Miho waved from the back of the store. Taking out her earphones she came over to usher them in. The cool of the air-con was as welcome as the brewed coffee and croissant she offered them. Dressed in bleached linen, an indigo band around her bobbed salt-and-pepper hair, she wore huge wedge platforms as if in homage to a style now out of place on a woman of her age. A tried, failed, but not entirely vanquished, style. She was old enough to be their mother.

Hana drank her coffee, her stomach rumbling for pastries that had yet to arrive.

‘My best customers today.’ Miho smiled and offered more coffee. Hana felt at home immediately.

‘Just like a diner. I give you refills.’ She was warm and she was generous.

‘Here comes noodle legs.’

A pastry delivery arrived from the French bakery, Miho explained, on the other side of the tracks. She approached a large stack of plastic trays on legs cautiously and carefully relieved the boy of the top layer. The café was suddenly infused with the delicate aroma of cinnamon.

‘So you are from London?’ Miho placed two pastries directly onto the table.

In the background some Eighties track was playing lightly.

Jess’s mouth was dusted with icing sugar.

‘Could you maybe talk to Emiko? Hana wants a job.‘

Miho nodded, eying Hana.’

‘Sure.’ Her accent was American.

‘She spent time in the States,’ Jess explained.

‘Do you plan to go back?’ Hana asked.

A strain came over Miho’s face. It was youthful, though crossed with inevitable age.

‘I have no plans right now. You know my kid is with his dad. He’s just fine. It is about time I get to see him again. I may go back next fall.’

‘How old is he now?’

‘You want to see a picture of him?’

Miho reached into her back pocket and produced her screen saver. A shot of an old photograph. She was younger slimmer but recognisable, standing beside a man in hiking boots carrying a child in a frame backpack: a rotund toddler with a crop of unmanaged black hair.

‘Long time back. Before we broke up,’ she concluded.

Jess cooed, ‘Cute baby.’

‘You don’t need glasses.’ Miho smiled fondly. ‘He’s left college now.’

‘Good-looking, I bet,’ Hana offered.

‘And did you get to go to his graduation?’

‘I haven’t seen him so much. Hardly since this photo was taken. Pretty much.’ Miho was unemotional.Resigned.

Hana looked down in silence and Miho noticed her distraction.

‘Okay, Hana?’

Hana smiled and traced circles in the sugar dust.

Miho pulled up the skirts of her apron and joined them at the pine table.

‘I left him in the States when I couldn’t support him. It was best for him. I’ve been back a long time.’

‘Really?’ Hana responded. She didn’t understand. It seemed like a little tragedy.

‘I am not an American citizen,’ Miho explained. She caught at a pastry flake on the table and blew it, along with her reminiscences, out of her hand, as if they were really of no importance to her. ‘Too many coffees to make an airfare.’ She grinned.

‘He’ll visit Tokyo,’ Jess said. ‘Hana is back. She had family here.’

Miho nodded as if she guessed she might. People arrived and she had to serve them.

Fleas or no fleas Hana decided it was time to get back to their room.

Jess swigged the last of her coffee and called back to remind Miho to speak to Emiko.

‘Okay,’ Miho promised. As they left her she was busy with pancakes.

Hana scratched the side of her neck. ‘The cat has to go.’

To her surprise Jess agreed.

Chapter 12

‘A clump of summer grass,

Is all that is left,

Of the hopes and ambitions,

Of ancient warriors’

−Matsuo Bashō, The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Tokyo

Heat trailed Hana all the way from the shade of the cherry trees beside the concrete-covered river and over the level crossing to where the warning bell sounded.

Hana had established the site of a number of teahouses across the city. Some were not attached to a temple and she could discount these and many temples had no teahouse, which narrowed it down a bit. The one over the lake at Hamarikyu Gardens was enormous, and so trodden by tourists as to be disappointing. She felt she couldn’t possibly afford the tea ceremony they offered, and she didn’t trust the cafés advertising the experience. That afternoon she promised herself she would find the local temple and walk around the grounds, but first she would head back to the homestay to change.

Ukai sat as he often did just under the porch that ran the length of the old wooden house. He was bare to the waist and his frail arms stuck out like undernourished chicken wings. As she stopped to greet him, she saw he was labouring to breath.

Very suddenly Tako emerged from the screen and, standing behind the old man, began shaking him violently. He could not have seen her coming up the track. Was it a manoeuver to help him catch his breath? To stop him choking? It was so hard it looked as though it would finish him. Leaving Ukai motionless Tako left as quickly as he had arrived. Ukai’s head hung across his shoulder. She took a step towards him. On his upper arm was a small tattoo. A black bird. He was stock-still. And she was unable to approach him and unable to pass. Was he dead? She had no voice to reach for and she turned for the house, knowing he should not face the end alone. That she was his only witness scared her but she was unable call out. Suddenly the seizure passed and she could see him return to shallow breathing. And as soon as he moved she was reassured … released.

Once upstairs, Hana pushed on the lever of the hot water flask that sat on the chest beneath the Fuji prints. Cradling her cup of green tea, she slumped onto the sofa. What had she seen? It was rough treatment. Had she seen some vital essence leaving the man? Jess would be back from her teaching session in a few minutes and she needed to talk to her. The circular fluorescent light was ticking in no particular sequence and it felt like the fragile order that had been established since her arrival had just slipped.

She sipped at the green tea like a bird. That first night, she had felt sure Ukai had recognized Naomi’s repeated name. Unable to face going back past the old man, she dug the folding map from her luggage. The corners were worn at the folds and parts of the city were rubbed away. She opened it distractedly and, without focus, looked for the symbols for temple. Perhaps all these years later the teahouse had been replaced and she would never find it.

The door slammed marking Jess’s return. Would she have seen him? Was he still alive? Hana finished her tea quickly and braced as Jess’s bag of grammar books hit the sofa.

‘Ukai?’ Hana asked in a low reverential whisper. ‘And did you see Tako? What was Tako doing?’

‘Ukai was on the porch,’ Jess said dismissively, ‘sunning himself.’ Then she added, ‘He waved. They waved.’

Hana couldn’t quite work out what she’d seen and didn’t want to understand it. Had she got it all wrong? Should she feel so uneasy with these people who Jess had stayed with last summer and had felt comfortable enough to come back to.

‘Guess what?’ Jess smiled with some degree of self-satisfaction. ‘Success.’ She lifted an up-turned teacup and raised a toast to more sencha.

Hana, ignoring her, peered through the banisters down to the lobby where the landlady scuttled to tend to her aged father. A silent agitation travelled across the house; Hana seemed to feel the metronomic beat that precedes a tragedy. Noru darted out from the front door leaving the sun to cauterize the hall floor.

Jess could hear nothing special in the silence.

‘You got it,’ she blurted. ‘You got the job!’

Hana was too preoccupied to listen.

A bicycle bell sounded from the road below and then, with the inevitability of a score, a muffled involuntary shriek rose from deep inside house.

Hana dragged Jess by the sleeve to their room.

Jess listened briefly, then carried on. ‘Just seen Miho. Emiko can probably take you.’

Hana nodded, unable to answer as she moved to take a vantage point by the window. The insect screen rendered the scene in sepia: across the road beneath the bleached porch , the old man’s chair was vacant. Jess came up behind her to witness the family cameo darting around the body and tending to their tragedy. Tako and Noru and a lifeless Ukai.

Jess pressed her hand on the small of Hana’s back. It hit Hana in that moment that she not been touched this way since she left London. Heavy with loss she rested her forehead lightly on Jess’s shoulder, as if she might share the weight. Below, Tako crossed the porch, head in hands, and it appeared he was weeping. The two young women drew back in silence. She had misinterpreted what she had seen?

Hana sat at the end of Jess’s bed, with the satchel of grammar books locked in her arms for support like a favourite pet. And Jess listened sympathetically, as Hana struggled to balance her fixation over the moment she saw Tako by the old man. ‘What do you think of Tako?’ she asked slowly.

‘He’s sweet. Organized a birthday present for me last year. Keen but harmless.’

Hana considered this for a moment before returning to the subject of Ukia. ‘I tell you, it was as if he had already gone.’

‘Already left his body?’ Jess was struggling to help.

The question released in Hana the lidded grief that had been working loose. Buried regret welled uncontrollably down her cheeks.

‘I know. I know. It is hard. And while we don’t know him any better really than …’ Jess’s voice trailed as if she realized this wouldn’t do for consolation. This man was, to them, no more than a passerby, but she could not say it. It would sound too disrespectful. And Hana’s displaced grief needed only the warmth of her arms for support.

Two days later, in the thick light of early evening, the wooden house across the street had been transformed for the wake. The screen doors opened onto candle lit offerings. It had become a Buddhist shrine: a pavilion where gold-leafed balls of rice and oranges ran like a large beaded necklace between the waxy heads of chrysanthemum flowers and carved stands of paulownia wood.

A bare-chested figure swung a heavy chain of burning incense over the offerings, building on the close, dusty air and scenting the house. He chanted a mantra that called upon the absent body. The fragrant smell at the open window of her room drew Hana involuntarily. It was a sumptuous farewell for the old man with a birdlike tattoo, and she fought not to think back to the umbrellas and shiny pavements of the East London funeral. She had had only one question to ask him.

The following day, Tako walked into breakfast and Hana found that there was to be yet another ceremony. In a black kimono, he stood constructing a jam sandwich from the buoyancy-aid bread. And while demonstrating his ineptitude at preparing food for himself, he invited them to attend a memorial ceremony to be held at the local temple – a larger temple not so far from here. The invitation was extended to them both.

‘I have –’ he said suddenly, remembering, and digging into his pocket ‘– something for you.’ He placed a boxed tube of topical insect cream on the table.

Jess and Hana exchanged glances. It was just what they needed. They watched him leave, sandwich in hand and jam glistening on the wide black sleeves he was so unused to wearing.

Later that day Hana filled the mosquito plug with another tab and Jess sat cross-legged on her bed, a language primer balanced on her knees which she ignored in favour of a sheet of paper listing English law firms in the city. ‘I don’t suppose that we can get out of the service tomorrow?’

‘No. Definitely not,’ Hana said. They had to go whether they really fitted in or not.

‘Another temple …’ Jess had seen enough of them lately.

‘But you knew the old man.’

‘Okay, we’ll go,’ Jess said quickly.

‘I couldn’t go on my own and you said you would come. You knew him best.

Jess nodded.

‘What do you suppose we wear?’

Jess readily offered to lend her something and Hana picked through a mound of black jersey from her rucksack and found a long wrap skirt.

‘This okay?’

‘Anything you like,’ Jess responded, without looking up.

It occurred to Hana that Jess might have no intention of turning up.

‘Please come. I don’t know but I might find it difficult. If we went together …’ she trailed off, ‘it would be easier.’

In Jess’s reply Hana couldn’t tell whether she merely sympathized or was offering a concrete assurance.

Chapter 13

On Sunday afternoon they browsed the Meiji Shrine flea market, strewn with old kimonos and bric-a-brac. It looked as though thieves had emptied every drawer in the neighbourhood and laid them across the vacant car lot.

Hana found a waxed paper stencil, similar to one they had at home in London. Had it come from the very same market years ago? On the lower slopes of the hill in Harajuku, they stopped at a booth to have their photos taken, the template distorting their faces with huge dish-shaped eyes. They laughed as a sheet of portrait squares hit the slot. They had become cartoon Anime, like the cute army; girls disguised as kawai manga dolls, marching past in short white socks and and bows.

They set off downhill, arms linked, and as they reached Omotesandō subway Hana caught Jess’s arm for attention. Ed, from the plane was coming towards them.

He was coming up from the subway, taking the stairs two at a time till they faced one another.

Hana smiled. ‘Hi’

He needed no prompting to remember her as they damned the flow of subway passengers at the entrance.

‘I lost your card.’ She grimaced in apology for not making contact.

‘Don’t worry about it. I’ve been at my desk since I got here.’

He was clearly keen to make her feel easy. After he had said ‘Hi’ to Jess, he apologized and said he couldn’t stop, but as he turned to leave he said, ‘I’m going to Tsukiji fish market early in the morning with a friend. Want to come?’

Hana’s heart sank. ‘I’m sorry, we have go to a memorial service.’

‘Great idea,’ Jess yelled after him as he left, still apologizing because he was late.

Jess had often complained, Hana reminded her accusatively, that she had ‘done’ the fish auctions as a tourist attraction, countless times.

Nevertheless Jess flailed after him till she caught him up, and eventually returning, arm raised as if she had secured European peace, with his mobile number.

Hana looked at Jess as if she had appropriated a friend. ‘We can’t go tomorrow. It’s the memorial.’

Jess nodded unconvincingly, and as they dropped into the metro a bank of warm air lifted their thin cotton skirts, as light as the friendship.

Chapter 14

700,000 tonnes of seafood processed through Tsukiji Market every year

That morning Jess woke at 4 a.m. to leave for the fish market, creeping quietly from their room as Hana slept.

Hana slept deeply. She dreamt she was among the crowds on a busy market day in Hackney, though the crowds were from Omotesandō. A monk in saffron robes passed, cycling a rickshaw, and, as he retreated, the sleeping passenger, curled in fetal position across the back, was her mother. As she woke her dream world splintered. She looked across at the empty bed beside her with immediate annoyance. Jess, she assumed, had gone alone to Tsukiji fish market. Raving American. It was very unlikely she would get back in time to get to the memorial which was disrespectful to the family and she would be fawning over Ed. As she prepared to go to the service alone, Hana dressed resentfully in the clothes Jess had been so ready to lend her.

Jess’s trip to Tsukiji was unedifying. She had assumed Ed was going with friends travelling through, but it turned out he was taken up with colleagues visiting from the Hong Kong branch and she had barely had a chance to speak with them on the guided tour she had taken several times before. She made her excuses, something about a memorial, and left them early. Once she got back to Shimokitazawa Jess headed straight for Ziggy’s and found Miho serving a couple of two-toed builders from the bamboo-scaffold site opposite.

‘Is it latte, Jess?’

Jess nodded as she helped herself to a kilner jar of cinnamon sticks.

Miho perched on the corner of the table, pulling a stray hair from her sharp fringe.

‘You didn’t work last night, so you are in early?’

‘I went to Tsukiji market.’

Miho’s raised her brows; Jess had been so often before and complained she had seen enough.

‘I guess you took the new girl?’

‘Well, no,’ Jess demurred, ‘I left her to sleep. She’s busy with other stuff.’ She drank from the too-hot latte.

‘How is the club? Okay?’

Jess nodded, nursing her scalded lip.

‘Is she at language school?’

‘Too busy looking for the teahouse her mother Naomi worked on.’

Miho started. ‘Naomi’s teahouse?’

It was as if she also had her own scald to contend with. It was too late for her to disguise the charged reaction and she looked away.

‘So you knew Naomi? You met her?’

Saved by a call for more genmai tea from the builders, Miho left quickly, to serve them. Jess grew curious until Miho finally returned to sit down with her.

‘So …’ Jess leaned in confidentially, aware that she had stumbled on something.

‘So tell me.’

Miho shook her head.

Her face was grave as if it was a subject she could not bring up now. ‘That woman—’ She couldn’t look her in the eye, as it all came flooding back ‘—that woman was responsible … for …’

‘For what?’

Miho wrung her hands as the memory took hold and she looked pained.

‘You can tell me,’ Jess encouraged, coaxing her with a pat to her hand.

Miho hesitated searching the wall shelves, as if struggling to line up her thoughts. ‘She was responsible for the …’ She held her breath until, barely audible, in a whisper she exhaled, ‘… the death of a good friend.’

‘You can’t mean that? Is this true?’

‘I don’t want to talk about it, Jess.’ Her voice hardened. ‘Not to you, not to your English friend.’

Jess was silenced. She sat back as the unexpected blast from Miho continued – Miho who was usually so mild, whose age had taken the edge off life’s disappointments: ‘And you are not to encourage her in this, and you are not to tell her.’

Jess was shocked.

Miho’s animated breathing counted the beats of the silence between them. ‘It is for the best,’ she said, more kindly. ‘Trust me. The truth would hurt.’ She was calmer now. ‘So you won’t tell?’

Jess searched the line of a knot in the pine table, finally nodding her head and pursing her lips.

‘I’m closing early. I have to go.’ Miho got up. ‘Aren’t you coming to the memorial?’

Jess pushed on the heavy handle of the glass door. ‘I may not get there,’ she said, and chose not to mention she might see Hana there.

Chapter 15

Tako had given Hana the directions for the temple where the memorial service was to be held. He had not, thankfully, offered to take them. She knew that waiting for Jess to return was pointless and she left the homestay in good time to take a short train ride, planning to walk beyond the residential area before it started.

By the time she found the site on a wooded hill, the black jersey wrap skirt she had borrowed from Jess was clinging to her legs. The air had changed. In silence the grey, tiled rooves of the temple swept up towards birds of prey circling in deep thermals of blue. Under mottled pine shade she walked towards the red torii gate, and it felt as if, since leaving the homestay, she had travelled to another country, in the tranquility of the gardens.

She would not have chosen this day as a first visit to the temple. It must, she guessed, be where the local teahouse was sited and, though it was an inauspicious day to do so, she would take time to find the small wooden building, after the ceremony. She walked beneath the torii to fall behind the guests.

Beyond the torii gates was a couple, old enough to be walking towards their own goodbyes, They were among the few individuals left from Ukai’s life-scape for whom his passing wrote off their indebtedness or those who celebrated his death as marking an end to his potential to intimidate. Some had profited from his insistence on minimum disclosures and creative accounting and some were merely of such advanced years that they had forgotten who he really was but they had been garnered to attend through custom to pay their respects. It was a small turnout for the man who once owned real estate worth the city of Shanghai and Beijing put together.

Hana made her way to the main building, until the heavy scent of incense bore down on the clear air.

The body lay in an elevated cask in front of the altar, and on either side sat Ukai’s immediate family, Noru and her son Tako, flanked by a sparse number of elderly guests. Hana found them a rough lot, more than one bore a facial scar. It was not high society and it certainly put Tako into context.

Beyond the body in the depths of the shadowy interior, gold leaf flickered across the offerings like fish scales, the light coming to rest for a moment on the cheeks of the serene Buddha. Out on the airless terrace, Hana chose to kneel in empty space on one of a pair of zabuton cushions, beside an elderly lady with dyed black hair. The powdered woman wore a light, summer, gauze kimono, coloured like raspberry fool.

In the heavy heat all Hana’s discomfort focused on her dislike for this misshapen jacket deforming the elderly woman. She watched as a trickle of sweat released a dark line of temporary hair dye from her temple. A triangle of white handkerchief trimmed with lace arrested the falling beads at the pressure of her lined hands. The woman interrupted her gaze and introduced herself,

‘Saito-san.’

Hana bowed her head in return.

Hana was thankful she could not see the body of the old man. Trails of curling smoke from incense sticks below the casket, and the waxy blooms of lime green chrysanthemums, began to add to her nausea. As the monk began chanting mantras, Noru and the other guests added their voices.

Saito-san rose uneasily to add another quill of incense to the ashes in the copper bowl and returned to her cushion. Hana became nervous that she too would be expected to take part and that she too should make some offering. The sweat ran behind her knees and, during the quiet hypnotic drone of the priest, she followed the rigorous curve of the mighty dragon across the beam beneath the eaves; like the reputation of the master builder who had raised it, fading in strength with the peeling paint.

Jess still had not appeared and Hana worried that the square void of cushion beside her yawned like an insult. But, as she’d said, who was Ukai to them? They hardly knew him and the ceremony was so unfamiliar it belonged to another world. As the monk rang the bell it sounded like a human voice. A feeling akin to heat exhaustion took hold and she forgot how she found herself sitting in the small gathering amid the haze of stifled and conflicting emotions around her. After more prayers had been said the mourners began to rise individually, like random seeds on the air, as the incense was left to drift over and purify the body.

A man’s shoes, black, pointed and highly polished, passed closely, as she knelt. Iwata paced over to speak with the priest, who addressed him,

‘Iwata-san.’

Iwata-san bowed ‘Kare wa konakatta?’

‘Arimasen,’ the priest replied.

Hana listened to them but couldn’t make out much. He’s not here?

She understood very little – they had expected another guest? She watched Saito-san get up with difficulty and peck, in two-toed wooden geta, towards the priest and the shiny-shoed man with matching hair oil.

‘Kare wa doko ni imasu ka?’ she asked.

Hana heard – ‘And where is he?’

Saito-san bowed reverentially over her heavy obi.

‘Mochizuki wa Arimasen.’ Who ? Hana wondered was Mochizuki?

The small party was led to the back of the traditional buildings by the priest who paused and smiled at her.

‘Welcome. I am Hakuin, abbot here. ‘

She might have taken his prolonged look as recognition, since he hesitated as though he had a great deal more to say. But he was distracted and his eyes left her to follow a tall woman in the clean-cut Shimada jacket in the distance. Was it Miho? Hana couldn’t be sure as her silvered bob was hidden behind a veil. She had become a totem for the other guests who greeted and circled her as if they participated in a Japanese folk dance, and so Hana kept her distance.

Joining the trail of wry strangers retiring to the tatami room, she began to feel faint. They were a small, ageing crowd and many, clinging to the past in traditional dress, cooing over the tall, elegant woman. Hana couldn’t make out any of their exchange. Who were these strangers to her?

Iwata San acknowledged Saito, in the manner of one well-known to the other but fallen recent strangers.

They all asked after the Mochizuki, as if his absence would fill a vacuum.

A tentative woman in black approached Miho, her veil adding another layer of separation between them. Her caution was well chosen, as her reception remained cold and barely acknowledged. It was easy to read their lack of warmth for each another and the strange absence of connection among any of them.

She thought for a moment that the woman she took to be Miho had seen her. Falling in with the milling group, drifting with as much purpose as the eddying incense, she would eventually reach her beside the door. But the woman appeared to be skirting the line to find an alternative entrance.

Wordlessly ushered in by Tako, the guests filed inside, laying crisp white envelopes, tied with elaborate black knots, on a dish in the hall; money shrouded in elegance. With nothing to give, Hana clutched her wrist and bowed gently when it fell to her, excusing her own breach of etiquette. As the waves of nausea overcame her, she left the assembly to stand under the trees in the lifeless air.

The teahouse might just lie beside cool waters further into the grounds, and in the wilting heat she decided she should leave the strangers and try to find it.

Just as she was going, Noru approached her, asking if she would come to eat with them.

She felt obliged to follow and there was the consolation that she might find Miho to talk to, but when she joined the mourners the woman in the veil had gone.

Chapter 16

‘I am so sorry,’ Jess exclaimed, blowing into their room at the end of the day. ‘They kept me late for another class. You okay?’

‘You went to Tsukiji market?’

Jess raised a flat hand for her to wait, for her to stop right there. It looked as though it was a rehearsed denial.

The hand pushed further as Jess read her skepticism.

‘You didn’t go?’ Hana jumped to the conclusion she preferred.

‘I …’ Jess lingered. Nobody could easily challenge a silence.

Hana toyed with her hair, weaving the braids of a plait, waiting. She was sick of listening to silent replies. She should be told. But Jess had only to walk the length of their short room for her resolve to challenge her to dissolve. But a niggling disappointment that Jess could possibly be unreliable left her feeling insecure. She was strong, she was creative, and she was forgiving. Amaterasu. ‘Are you telling the truth, Jess?’ It was so little to ask.

Jess turned emphatically and looked at her wide-eyed and innocent.

Hana was as ready to swallow this as a pill. She bound the plait and said they missed her at the memorial.

Jess vehemently kicked aside an obstruction on the floor and mumbled about school as if she were offended to have been challenged.

Why was it, Hana wondered, with a sense of injustice, that Jess singled out her walking boots for attack? ‘I won’t ask why you couldn’t get them to assign someone else to class today and come with me.’

She left it open for Jess to convince her that she had had no choice in the matter and the effort she made to persuade her was payment enough. Hana did, however, have difficulty in imagining that Jess lacked the ability to coerce them into a timetable change for a memorial service.

In the small room, the clutter, lately an object for her own complaints, made the space smaller still.

‘I don’t know why they asked us to the ceremony,’ Jess said finally ‘Still, it’s not everyday you go to a reincarnation. How was it? ’

‘Very complicated and involves forceps.’

‘Forceps?’

‘For the rebirth.’

‘I didn’t know.’ Jess shifted uncomfortably.

‘And rubber gloves.’

Jess finally got it and laughed hard and loud. When the laughter trailed off, Hana opened up.

‘I had the feeling—’ She paused, not sure if she should broach it. ‘I had the feeling that the priest recognized me.’

Jess snorted. ‘You think he knew your mother? Some random Englishwoman from decades back?’ Hana closed the subject down, though she was on the back foot that afternoon.

She regretted mentioning it.

‘It can’t be that easy,’ Jess continued. ‘How old was this priest?’

‘He was old,’ Hana replied.

‘How old? I know you want to believe it but the chances of him knowing her are miniscule.’

Hana was hurt. It was, of course, unlikely and she dismissed the idea. She slumped resignedly and stuffed the neon laces inside her boots.

Jess felt obliged to be more encouraging. She was reluctant to raise the other option but she went ahead anyway.

‘Or maybe you look like him?’

Hana knit her brows.

‘I mean your own father.’ Jess’s tone was softer now. ‘How did he die, if you don’t mind me asking?’

Hana had never known a father and so could not mind.

‘I never said he died.’

Chapter 17

‘Un bel di, vedremo’

−Puccini, Madama Butterfly

Imperial Palace Hotel, Tokyo, 1989

Naomi was getting used to the heavy thread count of the cotton sheets on her bare skin. Changed daily, they barely bore a trace of his heavy sleep. At first, the starched arrival of room service, bringing so many scratched and buffeted chaffing dishes, had delighted them, though it had never been possible to eat it all. They had tired of the cloying delights of the international hotel and Josh now preferred to eat breakfast elsewhere, partly because he wanted the company bill to bear scrutiny, and because they had lived in the hotel for so much longer than expected.

Naomi was charged with finding a rental apartment and so far they had failed to agree on anything suitable. This morning they were again going to meet the agent who would find their rental in the city. Though Tokyo housed thirty eight million people there should be a good deal of choice out there for their budget; it was just that she didn’t speak the language and she had no idea where the signs might direct her.

Her morning start had become increasingly languid when the rest of her day stretched to a distant vanishing point.

Today, as he slipped the last limb into his blue suit, Josh warned, ‘It’ll be busy so do leave early.’

And, like a skimming stone, he threw the glossy city plan entitled ‘The Detailed Map of Tokyo for Business Man and Tourist’ onto the bed beside her.

‘I am neither.’ She reached to catch it and was genuinely daunted by the question of what lay between the two but Josh had no time for her existential meanderings this morning and was keen she first found them a place to live.

‘I’ll meet you there.’ He dropped a kiss on the crown of her head and left her alone with her question. He was generally more comfortable with imperatives and they would talk over breakfast.

In the three weeks since their arrival she recognized her rootless existence had begun to strain the relationship that she had cherished so much as to drop everything and follow him to nurture it. The heavy closure of the fire-retardant door reduced her to the privileged isolation of an inmate of a luxury Wandsworth prison. And this brought back thoughts of her home in Clapham. Annoyed at her own distortion of the privileges she enjoyed, it brought her once again to ask why she had made the rash decision to leave her course at the Architect’s Institute in London and follow him to Tokyo.

If she did not leave the room soon she would suffocate. She threw the map aside and leapt out of bed. She left the lobby in summer whites, prompting the hotel staff to whisper about the ghost on the 47th floor who kept time like no other guest among the business clients in the hotel.

At Shibuya Station she was caught in the spring tide of dark heads, where a crowd the size of a billing at the Hammersmith Palais negotiated six or more optional exits. She was carried across the eddying tide of people to a pillar where the current divided as if at the foot of a bridge spanning a river in spate. She retrieved the city plan wedged in her bag; Josh would be waiting for her. A master in origami had ingeniously folded the map and once opened it clung unhelpfully to her body as a set of streamers escaped on a strong downdraft. She gave up trying to scan the oscillating paper as it flapped aggressively at her face and tore as she tried to restrain it. He had given her a couple of landmarks to head for; first was the Hachikō Statue on the south-west side of the station. Below her a grid of crossings led like an Escher print to every point on the compass in a Kafkaesque joke. From one of the branches she should take the hill up to where they were to meet. She checked her watch and it was nearing 9.30 a.m. She was lost for a lead and he would be exasperated again. She closed her eyes.

Though now used to the city’s disregard for personal space, she became aware of an individual standing beside her.

‘You lost? Want some help?’

The girl was about her age, unusually tall and her hair was styled in a short bob. Naomi began folding the map, very roughly.

‘I’m trying to find the Hachikō exit.’

Her short, close-fitting cotton dress was covered in old roses. And she led her towards the exit.

‘You know about Hachikō?’

All it took was a shake of the head and she started on a story as if she were a complementary city guide.

‘Every day an old professor left his dog outside the station for the day when he commuted.’

Her English was good. She probably made a habit of picking up lost souls for language practice. A dog story. Naomi looked at her watch.

The girl upped her pace and continued her explanation.

‘He was old and—’ They scuttled down a flight of stairs on a second wave of commuters ‘—one time he didn’t return and the dog waited for his master for days.’

They emerged from the station at street level, to an obscured sun. Beneath animated screen-clad buildings the massing crowds were cowed in the electronic din of commercialism. Where would Josh be waiting? It was the most kinetic urban space she had ever seen and she drew her attention back to the girl, glad for a moment to have a guide.

Her voice rose against the half-truths of advertisement jingles. ‘The professor had suffered a seizure and he died and never returned.’

They came to a halt in front of a statue of a dog.

‘Here is Hachikō. This is your Hachikō exit.’

Naomi stopped out of politeness but had an eye on the next waymark as a pedestrian claxon sounded on the massive crossing. She hoped to make the lights but she could see the crowd thinning and the last stragglers beginning to run to beat the change. She would miss it anyway.

‘The emperor heard about this act of loyalty so admired in the Japanese character and he agreed to this statue.’

The girl followed her eyes towards the sea of people.

‘Where do you go from here?’ The girl doll tugged at the line of her sharp fringe.

The lights changed. Naomi’s mounting anxiety dissipated as she surrendered to being very late.

‘It’s near PARCO, Udagawacho,’ she said, reading the biro on the back of her hand.

‘I know the store. I’ll go that way with you.

She might be difficult to shake off, Naomi thought.

‘Is it out of your way?’

‘I guess not.’

Waiting for the sea of people to move from the edge of the road. Languid little questions followed as they made their way through the crowd.

‘Yes, almost a month. An amazing city. ‘

The Japanese girl was time-easy and very laid back. It was late; it would rile him but there was little she could do about it. Her responses were short.

‘An architect but not qualified. And you?’

‘PR. My friend is an architect. You should meet him.’

She might be the type who knew everyone. Over the sea of heads a digitized figure cartwheeled across the face of five buildings as the accumulation of bodies waiting to cross deepened.

The girl beside her bridged the alien space between her and the crowd, somehow emphasizing it. The otherness of the place was daunting. Had she really committed to living here? They crossed to walk up the hill together. At the Seibu Store a six-foot seed pod filled a window and shook like a silent maraca; the first sign, in the urban landscape, that was organic. She wished the seed would grow to a pantomime vine and she could climb it and escape.

‘PARCO,’ the girl announced.

‘Thanks.’ Naomi hoped it wouldn’t be too difficult to shake free of her politely.

‘I’ll leave you here.’ The girl began backing off easily, waving as she left.

‘Thanks. Thanks so much,’ Naomi yelled back.

And then, on a second thought, the girl turned again, taking a paper from her clutch.

‘I’m Miho. Give me a call sometime.’

Chapter 18

A B-52 bomber wingspan formed the lintel entrance to the café. A self-conscious witticism from an international designer. Josh was sitting beside a half-drunk cup of coffee at a table just inside and she met him with an emollient kiss. With a copy of the Economist to hand and his leg crossed high, he had the distant ease of man of privilege. He finally smiled.

‘Half my waking life waiting for you, then a little more time waiting for the apology.’

‘I am sorry,’ she said, throwing the map on the table and sitting down.

He cut her no slack at all.

‘I nearly drowned in the crowd.’

He glanced approvingly at the close-fitting knee length skirt she had chosen. She had good legs.

‘You’re a good swimmer, Naomi.’

She thought of the girl in the cotton dress, cum lifeguard.

‘Nice choice.’ She surveyed the apocalyptic interior of the café, ready to acknowledge that there were some good reasons for coming to Japan; if only to see at first-hand the architectural experiments.

‘You want to order coffee? You’re too late for a bite.’

Josh proceeded to pick up the map and painstakingly refold it along the original lines, the fissures in his complexion lost in his flexing jaw.

‘You been having a picnic with this?’

Often he left the hotel room early to get to the office because he was keen and he finished his working day late as London woke and Sydney was a sparkling hour ahead. Some days he tried to cover it all. Because she hadn’t yet found them an apartment he had been obliged to take control.

‘The apartment we saw yesterday was great and I just don’t get why you don’t like it. Great views, central …’

‘It was just so soulless. We could be anywhere in the world.’

‘With Tokyo Tower on the skyline?’

‘It’s a warren. A ghetto exclusively for Westerners. We should live like locals while we are here.’

‘Is international so bad? With a gym and pool, and when else do we get to live in a condominium?’

Josh looked out over the expansive pavement. A smell of sweet soy baking drifted on the air. He had persuaded her to uproot and he supposed he should give her a say in where they lived.

The sun was still struggling to break through the heat haze and, just as she ordered ice tea, the diminutive figure of Mr Kami, the rental agent, left his motorbike and came towards them, swinging his helmet from its retro leather strap.

He laid it on the table wearily as he surveyed them. Slight as a jockey, his simian face ridiculously wizened.

Naomi shook his hand, entranced as he rolled a matchstick between his yellowing teeth.

‘I show you a Japanese traditional style without fear or favour,’ he said proudly, retrieving his helmet. The girl was certainly opinionated and had wrong-footed him yesterday over the luxury apartment he had felt sure he would secure for them. They were so young yet sky-high real estate values that made his eyes water were within their budget because a company allowance would cover it. Quite why she carried so much weight in the decision when the guy had liked it was a conundrum. His own choice was limited to the pigeon coop he called home.

Josh gave Naomi a knowing look. The man was a walking set of idioms and ‘without fear or favour’ was his catchphrase.

‘Excellent,’ she emphasized as Josh recovered his Economist.

Mr Kami opened his arms expansively and swung them, helmet and all, in the direction he intended to take them. He would bring them to their senses. They, or more precisely she, had asked for a property with character. Well, he would show them a rental with character. Given his wealth of experience, this was just one step in a well-worn process. The property he had in mind was one they would be unable to settle on but fitted her revised brief and he knew it would send them straight back to the Tower of Babel and the cloying luxury that people mistook for privilege in Hiroo. The detour this morning would ultimately save him more effort in the end. That said, she was wasting everyone’s time, including her own. What she was looking for did not exist. She was a romantic, impractical girl, looking for a Japan lost some time back with the shogunate.

The house was indeed traditional. Just a short walk from the prime real estate of Shibuya, set in gardens of a quarter of an acre that some family feud or canny speculator playing the long game had retained. She hung back with Josh as Mr Kami spoke with the occupant in high whispers of disagreement.

Josh lost patience. ‘What are we doing here? I should be at work.’

She wasn’t going to let him have it both ways. ‘Why are you here? I could go round on my own. You didn’t have to come.’

Josh looked at her from the full height of his education.

‘Look, my Bohemian princess, we could end up with a very shaky decision if left up to you. This place looks condemned.’

‘You would have me live in a box on the forty-third floor? Did I leave London for the penal colony of apartments in Hiroo Garden Hills?

‘Correction: it wasn’t a box, it was bigger than, this wooden … this …’ he paused, attempting to retain some tact ‘… this garden shack.’

She had to agree it looked as though it would be over-ventilated in the winter and the towering real estate around it left it in permanent shade.

As Mr Kami beckoned them from the porch, she saw him watching mischievously for her response. She would uphold a pretense with him.

‘What a contrast.’ She smiled benignly.

‘We Japanese are about contrasts,’ he said sagely, scratching his bald head.

It was open-plan, dingy and ill-lit. In the entrance hall stood an oxblood chest with an intricate black, metal phoenix over the lock. Unable to resist, she ran a finger along the top. A line in the dust came to a halt at the photograph of an elderly couple beside an incense stick, alight and trailing coils of spent ash on a strip of brocade. The face of the elderly woman in a kimono carried a demure smile as if she too were in on a joke. A figure passed across a curtained doorway ahead of them.

‘Very nice.’ Naomi said vaguely, searching Josh for what would be a charged reaction but finding he would not return her glance. His arms were folded across his blue summer suit to contain his patience.

‘And which room is that?’ she asked, pointing in the direction of a figure passing in the distance.

‘That is the other half of house, belonging to the owners,’ Kami announced.

‘So a mere curtain divides the two dwellings?’ she asked incredulously.

‘There is a possibility to make an adaptation,’ he said almost genuinely.

She couldn’t help herself but burst out laughing. A large generous English laugh that was full and deep had the effect of throwing her head back and making her pale hair resonate with the sound. She finally came to realize that she was laughing alone and had angered the two men for different reasons. That she was the object of their astonished attention was for a moment a greater cause for amusement. She held her slim arms and pursed her lips in an effort to rein in the uncontained mirth.

‘I don’t … I don’t think I should take any more of your time here.’

Mr Kami was surprised that such strength could come from her slim figure. He looked nervously over the shoulder of his check jacket. The landlord had undoubtedly heard the outburst.

How could she possibly live here and how could she remain marooned in the hotel?

‘I have a call to make and must get back.’ Josh took her by the elbow across the garden as if carefully leading an unexploded device that might go off at any time.

‘We have just been shown the ex-granny annex,’ she said, by way of excuse, and then turned towards the agent as he returned to join them.

‘How quaint. When was the house built, Mr Kami?’

‘I believe,’ he said, as threaded the leather strap of his helmet between his hands, ‘not long before the nineteen sixties. Nineteen twenty-three was the last big earthquake and the Great Fires, and not much survived that levelling. We are due an earthquake every fifty years.’ He tapped her hand in a kind of ‘nota bene’ consideration. Yes, she could work it out.

‘Today, in eighty-nine, we are a full sixteen years overdue a large-scale tectonic eruption, according to our best Japanese estimates.’ He seemed pleased to be imparting such usefully intimidating information.

The basis of this calculation lay with authorities ranging from folkloric to seismic analysts. His use of the first-person plural for a catch-all of one hundred and twenty million people had began to grate.

‘So, you like Hiroo Garden hills better now?’ He smiled victoriously.

‘I thought you had one more property to show us?’ she parried, as Josh’s perfunctory farewell kiss landed on her cheek from nowhere, in the way that his decisions often did. He could see she was well able to manage Mr Kami on her own.

‘I am going to have to go, Mr Kami. Naomi can take a look and then we can discuss whether she thinks it is a contender?’ Josh rattled the sabre that was his rolled-up Economist for emphasis. He nodded towards her. ‘See you later.’

As he left, almost as an afterthought, he called back his thanks in the agent’s direction.

Naomi turned to give Mr Kami her full radiant attention.

‘I hope the next property might be some way between the two styles? Is it somewhere between the two?’ She fanned herself with the city plan imperiously.

Mr Kami looked at her from under his barber-trimmed brows.

‘You are the student of architecture, Miss Naomi. You will tell me how is the style.’ He looked at her less-than-practical sandals and contemplated whether he should make them walk to the next viewing. She was so young, but with the controlling vote over such a large budget, he dismissed the thought and hailed a taxi.

That night, she wore her loose Indian cotton trousers; Josh took her arm as they walked as they often did under the railway arches in Ginza. They followed a noisy line of ten-seater restaurants as if the street itself were a menu card; shelves of moulded plastic meals; levitating chopsticks above glutinous dishes of cascading noodles, tonkatsu and ebi rice; the air warm from the charcoal braziers and the heat of the summer city. And she did not miss the electric blue of home skies at dusk.

‘I think you’ll like it.’

‘Well, after the shack you led us to this afternoon, I am going to have to take a look at it myself.’ He would never leave her to make a decision.

‘You don’t have time to see it,’ Naomi protested. She wished he would trust her judgment.

‘The presentations to the Aussies finish at the end of the week. And after the G7 summit it’ll go quiet.’

‘You’ll have to trust me, because it’ll have gone by then.’

‘What?’

And his complaint was lost as she drew him inside a ramen bar, sure that he would be easier to persuade once he had food inside him. They ate a simple dinner of yakitori and soba broth. But even so she could not get him to commit to the property.

Last thing that night, back in the chill of the air-conditioned room, clutching starched fresh sheets to her chin, she watched as he strode in his boxers to open the chilled drinks fridge.

‘Water?’

The head of an iceberg lettuce rolled out over his bare foot across the floor.

‘What is this?’ he moaned. The water was barely accessible.

She had stuffed a picnic lunch above the cans of Asahi beer and miniature whiskies and between the fresh tomatoes she had crammed wrapped slices of ham and a cucumber.

‘I can’t afford to eat out every meal and, besides, what happened to home cooking? Sometimes for lunch … I … look – we have to find a house soon, Josh.’

Josh had overlooked the fact that she might feel a need for money when he had so much. But in his defense he felt all she had to do was to ask him.

The cold, blue light of the mini fridge did not illuminate his response.

He finally answered as his head hit the pillow.

‘Okay, the architect gets to make the decision on the house. Go and see it again tomorrow and you decide.’

Chapter 19

Shimokitazawa, 2012

As she poured a mixer into the second Whisky Mac, the diamante on Hana’s short evening dress caught the bar spotlight like a cheap promise. She could carry as many drinks on the small, silvered tray as a Chinese acrobat now. While watching the effervescence Hana mentally measured her progress since leaving London: she had charted the temples in six districts of Tokyo and had to acknowledge what she could only describe as a personal insolvency. Living in Japan, with all its eccentricities, seemed an occupation in itself and she felt she was trapped sleeping or spending hours in the persistent half-light of the basement club.

The blinking neon arrow to the basement attracted mostly benign regulars. They were now on smiling terms with Hajime, who needed no encouragement to show off his broken tooth. The undernourished doorman had a prominent kanji character tattooed on his chin and she wondered what communication he had chosen to make ever so visible. He was paid to filter newcomers and the clients she had seen were fine. It was a relief that Tako had never once appeared. The job was just as it had been advertised: easy job; easy money.

Two months before she arrived, a hostess was abducted north of the city but she had stopped worrying that the same fate would befall every bar worker in Japan. She had Jess, and, besides, Wednesday night – their night off, when the transvestite danced – was as lively as it got.

Tom had rung, last night, and said he had issues with her working in a hostess bar. It was hard enough that eight hours behind, they didn’t speak often enough, but to have a disagreement too. His criticism was easier to bear than news that he was seeing a lot of Sadie. He had suggested the lawyer Ed should find some documentation: something with her name, or Naomi’s name … or his name. But there was nothing positive in the Helvetica Neue font that returned her text messages. Ed was out of the country. He was tied up.

Jess was over at the other end of the bar, picking her nails with a toothpick with great concentration. Backlit with amber light from the wall of whisky, she looked like someone Hana didn’t know. The bottles were tagged with personal labels for individual clients – Tanaka, Saito, Nakamura, Watanabe – warding off the impersonal among so many people. Jess slipped off her chair, pulling at her Lycra dress, to come and sit beside her.

‘Day off tomorrow. We’ll get a bento picnic from the 7-Eleven and take it to temple six hundred and fifty three?’ Jess’ enthusiasm was flagging.

Emiko, dressed as usual as a geisha hostess in her red kimono, brought them a tray of newly washed tumblers.

‘Polish those smiles.’ Her tone was pleasant.

The air was smoke-filled as Hana took up the lint cloth, behind her an enlarged print of an old woodblock, ‘The Diver’: an erotic dream of a geisha, lying in folds of generous kimono silk coupled with a giant octopus. Every tentacle, as she carried its weight, searched out an orifice. Emiko had explained that the kanji hieroglyphics floating like bubbles over the geisha, were moans of pleasure.

Emiko followed her disapproving gaze.

‘It’s okay, the artist got a month’s jail sentence for his efforts.’

Emiko motioned Jess to move causing her pretty hair ornaments to backchat in her heavily sprayed hair.

Aiming her toothpick at the ashtray Jess intended to offend.

‘Club rules. You girls can’t sit together.’ Emiko shuffled off in her two-toed socks and wedged geta.

Hana guessed the need for quiet respect among the shaky reality of lucky, nodding cats, of piped birdsong, of posters of tiger-maned genii gulping energy drinks, or large-eyed manga characters endorsing air-con systems. She had to invest in them herself and yet the references were still cold. She could not see how Naomi could possibly have belonged here.

‘Smile and play beautiful,’ Emiko called from the kitchenette, reminding them again to move apart.

‘We are starting to look like corpses,’ Jess complained of their nocturnal hours.

Her lips glossed a vampire-red made Hana giggle.

Emiko’s silken arm interrupted them to retrieve an ashtray from between them, her departure stiff, the ornamental cherry blossom in her hair shook indignantly. Hana gently pushed Jess until she slipped off her stool obediently.

‘I’m done here,’ Jess whispered vehemently out of the blue.

New clients arrived and the room became ionized with expectancy. Yoshi was a regular and his party tonight was Australian.

As Emiko had taught her to, Hana called out his regular beer order before Yoshi reached her: ‘Asahi, Sapporo, Sapporo.’ The longer the memory, the larger the tip. Was this the kind of man who might have known her father? The missing man who hadn’t even registered his name on her birth certificate? She had begun to toy with an identikit for him, which she revised and reconstructed at whim: the cosmopolitan business man lost to tragedy; the composer of international standing; the trading-company shogun.

Jess was to host another group of Australians from a shipping company as Hana wiped the condensation off the cold drinks. Deferentially she offered each man a glass as if it were jewel-encrusted. It was uncomfortable for her as she somehow found it sexually charged. Jess fell on the English speakers, as if she was dehydrated and they could quench her thirst.

The karaoke wailed.

Hana wanted to know what Hajime, the doorman, had stamped on his chin. At first Emiko left her to guess.

‘Mum. He is not so rough as he looks.’ She laughed.

She had to serve shabu-shabu stew, and as she stepped up to the tatami matting, across the smoke-filled room, waving from the exit, about to leave with one of the Australians, she spotted Jess,. Hana knelt to pour the hot sake. Why had she ignored their pact not to go off alone? It was about 2 a.m. and she hadn’t finished her shift. She couldn’t follow her.

She watched Emiko pick her way through raw scallions and carrots cut as blossom, to adjust the flame. In her concentration Emiko’s red-pressed lips might have been made of plastic. She ceremoniously brought a lacquer bowl to Hana’s ear, pausing for her to appreciate a skittering noise, eliciting Hana’s soft revulsion. This had become a ritual performance and, as the crustacean slipped into the boiling stock, Hana’s foreigner scruples made it a regular party trick.

Emiko confirmed that Jess had indeed left the club. Would her anger or concern win?

Emiko’s patience with Jess had finally run out.

‘Don’t worry.’ Her ornaments trembled in frustration ‘She does this.’

Hana left, emerging from the basement with her eyes closed against the sharp morning light.

When she opened them she saw a lone policeman, on the first shift at the Koban, stretching his arms. In the silence of the early morning, an apprentice monk stood across the road, his Buddhist habit and white leggings shaded under a straw-brimmed hat. He wouldn’t see many people at this hour. so the alms bowl he cradled seemed useless. The futility of it all. All she could do was wait at the homestay for Jess. As she left, club music drifted up from the depths, reminding her of home.

No one, she realized, could accompany her on this journey if she never made a move herself.

But where was Jess?

Chapter 20

Hana headed towards the homestay, passing over the level crossing and down the deserted main street laced with its waste of utility wires. Stray branches of plastic cherry blossom punctuated the street at intervals, and were greying with dust. A pink promise stuck in the wrong season.

In the empty twin room she was surprised that she could drift towards sleep.

She woke involuntarily a couple of hours later and Jess still had not returned. Emiko, she reassured herself, had said this was typical.

Ignoring the cheap club dress, she grabbed her smock and ran to Miho’s hoping to find her.

Ziggy’s was full with post-school-run mothers. No Jess.

She joined a table just finishing their coffees.

Miho greeted her with her customary politeness while she cleared lipsticked cups and quietly drew the crumbs away from Hana’s side of the table. It was an act of servitude: the wrong moment to interrupt. Miho left to raise the mothers’ bill.

‘Itterasshai.’ Miho followed the women to the door lingering after they had gone.

Hana had to stop her as she passed.

‘Have you seen Jess?’

Miho seemed to read her face, as if she were searching to see what she understood. It was unnerving and she waited too long for a response.

‘Yes.’ Miho folded her arms and Hana’s tension release was instant and prompted her further. ‘Today, no.’

Hana’s concern racked back up a notch. ‘She left the club with some Australians. In working hours.’

‘Jess missing again?’ Miho’s response was unexpectedly flat. So this happens with Jess.

Hana was still concerned for her missing friend and Miho reassured her.‘She does this,’ Miho told her. Emiko would only tolerate this behaviour from a gaijin, and would never let non-foreigners get away with it. ‘More than once she has been in trouble on this. She’ll be walking in here before lunch, is my guess.’ Miho shoved her hands conclusively in the wide apron pocket that fell below her thickened waist. Perhaps Miho had been as careless herself once. It didn’t seem to trouble her. She had once told Jess that at her age it took time to work out which kite, among a bright sky of flying ribbon tails, to follow; it took time to grow in consideration and master the strings.

‘So, what is it to be?’ Miho said peremptorily.

Hana found that today Miho was rather impatient to serve other people. Her obvious lack of concern was some comfort, however, and Hana relaxed and ordered a green tea.

‘Sencha.’ Miho repeated, as if to no one in particular, as if thinking out loud to better tether her thoughts.

When Miho returned with her tea, Hana still felt like she was delaying her from another purpose. She would catch her quickly.

‘I wanted to ask …’ Hana began.

Miho turned back towards her slowly as if she were about to ask her something she could not countenance.

‘I came to Shimokitazawa because my mother lived here.’

Miho’s faced dropped to what might have been mistaken as an unfriendly jowl.

Hana persisted.

‘If I wanted …’

Whatever it was she wanted to raise, Miho didn’t want the half of it, her reticence to hear her out was palpable. Hana stopped short of giving more detail.

‘If I was looking … to find the records of someone living here …’ Hana took it slowly.

Miho waited, caught in the thin skein of Hana’s need.

‘… where would you start?’ My mother lived in Shimo in the late eighties?’

Hana thought Miho looked wounded; it might be concern.

‘That’s a long time ago. If you are looking for family you should go to the Municipal Record Offices. I have a relative there. I’ll give you his name.’ And she hurried off, calling ‘chotto matte’ to an unidentified customer at the back of the café, but glancing back at Hana as if in afterthought she said, ‘You want me to give you an address? It’s in Shinjuku ku.’

Hana did not want to delay her further.

‘I’ll find it. Thanks. And who should I ask for?’

Miho looked as though she were plucking a name from a long roster of relatives who worked at the Municipal offices. ‘Tachi. Ask for Tachi.’

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