‘Make the most of it,’ says Mr Suzuki, the manager of the Montparnasse, sitting in his white suit in the ticket booth. ‘From now on I’m just showing jidaigeki pictures. Noble warriors, women with no eyebrows, lovely costumes . .’
‘Haven’t you said that before?’ asks Yuji, wheezing from his run, and looking past the manager’s head at the posters for Stagecoach and Pépé le Moko.
‘I mean it,’ says the manager, snipping Yuji’s ticket from the roll. ‘This foreign stuff will get me shut down. Or worse. The next time you see me I’ll have a samourai topknot. You’ll think I’m one of the Forty-seven Ronin.’
In the little auditorium thirty, perhaps forty customers are waiting on seats of frayed green plush. A few couples, but mostly men on their own, amateurs of cinema — some in uniform — who find at the Montparnasse what the sushi tsu find at Kawashima’s. Yuji takes a seat at the end of a row halfway back. There is a short wait while Suzuki moves from the ticket booth to the projection room (they can hear his footsteps, his weary tread on the stairs), then the newsreel begins — trumpets, eagles, a spinning globe. They stand for the Emperor, sit again, polish glasses, light cigarettes, and bend towards the screen, lean like divers at the edge of a glittering pool.
Three hours later, sated, they file outside, blinking in the blue and gold of early evening. Yuji loiters at the kerb, his atoms dispersed between the deserts of New Mexico and the labyrinth of the Kasbah. He is staring, with vacant intensity, at a board outside the confectionary shop on the other side of the narrow street. There is a painting on the board of the seasonal delicacy ‘autumn comes to the treetops’, and he is wondering what Ringo Kid — a man who gallops through treeless landscapes — might make of such a delicacy (would he buy some for a sweetheart?), when a customer, a woman, a slight figure in a blue and white kimono, comes out of the shop and stops directly opposite him.
‘Mr Takano?’
‘Mrs Yamaguchi!’
‘What a surprise to see you here.’
Students on bicycles glide between them, then two taxis full of young geishas, shamisen cases on their laps. He crosses the street. She waits for him, neat as a doll, in her hands a box of sweets wrapped in paper decorated with autumn flowers — dahlias, amaranths.
‘I was at the cinema,’ says Yuji.
‘The Montparnasse?’
‘Yes.’
‘What a nice way to spend the afternoon. What did you see?’
He tells her (‘Gabin is a favourite of mine,’ she says), and then, to defend himself against the charge no one has made, the accusation that he is the sort of young man who spends the day in cinemas instead of taking part in the physical labour even fashionable woman are preparing for, he gives an absurdly detailed reprise of his day — the failed search for Horikawa, his inability to find even the mechanic who would surely have been able to tell him where Horikawa was — an account she listens to intently and with just the faintest smile on her lips.
‘And the dance school?’ he asks, blushing and scowling at the paving stone between their feet.
She thanks him for his kind enquiry. It is not, she explains, a time favourable to an enterprise such as hers, but she has been able to keep a few of her older students, the professionals mostly. The others, one by one, have dropped away. She was particularly sorry not to have Mademoiselle Feneon any more.
‘Alissa?’
‘We have not seen her since the rainy season, though she wrote a most polite letter. I hope her ill health is no longer troubling her?’
‘She’s away,’ says Yuji, quickly.
‘In the country, perhaps?’
‘Yes. In the country.’
‘For a foreigner she danced very well.’
‘She did?’
‘Oh, yes. You should have seen her dancing “Snow”. Really, a quite unexpected poise.’
‘I have heard her play the piano. When she plays Chopin, it’s as good as the radio.’
Mrs Yamaguchi nods, amused again. ‘I hope you find your business acquaintance,’ she says.
‘My . .?’
‘The man you were looking for?’
‘Oh . . yes. Thank you.’
She bows and moves away, pigeon-toed, her dancer’s back straight as a board above the immaculately tied obi. Then she turns — sinks it seems — into one of the alleys that wind like waterless streams down towards the river.
A polite letter? Ill health? What else did the letter say? And if Alissa was ill, why had Feneon not spoken of it? What sort of illness? A serious one?
He recrosses the street. Outside the Montparnasse a small queue is forming for the evening showing. Suzuki is in his booth again, scissors and tickets at the ready. And something — the white of his suit, perhaps — brings unbidden to Yuji’s mind the Hitomaro lines Alissa recited in the moonlit study: ‘One morning like a bird she was gone in the white scarves of death.’
And then? Something about a child, who cries for her, who she left behind . .
He looks towards the alley where Mrs Yamaguchi disappeared. If he ran, he might catch up with her, stop her, question her. What she doesn’t know she will be able to guess, a woman like her. Who else can he ask now that Feneon’s house is forbidden to him? He bites his lip, stares as though staring would bring her back, draw her to him. Then he looks down, walks to the wall beside the cinema, and quietly takes his place at the end of the queue.
PART 3
Yuji in the Year of the Snake
I go out of the darkness
Onto a road of darkness
Lit only by the far-off
Moon on the edge of the mountains.
1
Meetings of the local neighbourhood association are held in Otaki’s noodle bar, a familiar space — gloomy, savoury, endearingly scuffed — where nobody’s intimate domestic life need be exposed to the curiosity of his neighbours. There has not been a meeting since the irises were in flower. Then — at the firm request of the Home Ministry — associations from Okinawa to Hokkaido, gathered to discuss how they might contribute more to the national struggle, what they might cut back on, what they could do without, how, in this particular hour of destiny, they might, somehow, be better neighbours to each other.
This evening’s meeting, twilight, the second week of November, is also at the exhortation of the ministry. A new guide has been issued, a booklet with the imperial standard on the cover, and inside, in numbered paragraphs, a list of the duties all loyal subjects must be ready to perform. Through the neighbourhood associations (the national defence women’s groups, the Great Japan youth associations, the patriotic workers committees), every man and woman in the home islands will be welded into a single disciplined force. Everyone will have his place. Everyone will wait on the Emperor’s word, ready, should the order come, for the ‘smashing of the jewels’ — the final sacrificial battle. There’s a new slogan, the winning entry in a competition run by the Asahi newspaper. ‘Abolish desire until victory!’ Associations could, if they wished, shout this heartily at the conclusion of their meetings. Such behaviour, the booklet suggested, was in the interests of everyone.