Father begins to push himself up from the mat. ‘If you will excuse me . .’
‘Before we finish,’ says Saburo, ‘let me thank you again for your confidence in me.’
‘Not at all,’ says Otaki. ‘It’s we who must be grateful.’
‘I am a soldier,’ says Saburo. ‘I think like a soldier.’
‘That’s exactly it,’ says Itaki.
‘Soldiers don’t put off what needs to be done,’ continues Saburo. ‘They do it straight away.’
‘Like photographers!’ cries the photographer, his face blazing from the drink.
‘So I have made a rota . .’
‘A rota?’ asks Otaki, quietly.
‘For fire-watching,’ says Saburo. ‘Other rotas will follow. I will post them on the gate of my house. Everyone will make it his duty to read them at least once a day. There can be no excuses.’ He pauses to put on his cap, to carefully adjust it. ‘The honour of taking the first watch I have awarded to the Takano family. It is now nine twenty. Deployment will commence at nine forty-five.’ He uses the wall to gain his footing, takes the crutch and leaves with the old woman. The door slides shut. The chimes jangle. The men keep their eyes lowered. Otaki bares his teeth at the table, makes a kind of sucking noise. After a few moments his sister, very discreetly, begins collecting the dishes.
At nine fifty Yuji is in his greatcoat on the drying platform, a woollen muffler wrapped over his skull and knotted beneath his chin. On his right sleeve he wears the armband Saburo gave him at nine forty-five, a white band on which Kyoko or the old woman has embroidered the character for fire. He has also been issued with a wooden rattle and a whistle on a length of string. At ten o’clock Miyo brings him tea, then he is alone again. Father will relieve him at two o’clock but two o’clock is a long way off. He sniffs, dabs at his nose, punches some warmth into his arms. One by one, with a soft metallic sound, the big orange leaves of the gingko tree are falling. He starts to pace, then stops and creeps to the platform parapet. Something is moving down there. One of the cats? He leans over, squints. A torch beam bursts against his face.
‘Don’t let me catch you sleeping,’ hisses Saburo, a voice without a body. ‘Don’t ever let me catch you sleeping!’
The light clicks off. For half a minute Yuji is blind, then the night patiently reassembles itself. The tree, the far-off flickering of ‘Jintan Pills’, the undulating roofs, the decorative rake of searchlights above the palace. And finally, untellable at first from the fragments of beam at the backs of his eyes, the stars in their vast garrisons, glistening in the brittle air.
2
In the heart of the Low City, a man is lying under the front of a blue van. Only his legs are visible, two stout legs and a pair of feet in split-toed canvas boots. A small crowd has gathered, the sort who will stop to watch two birds fighting over a worm. Yuji, raw-eyed after three shifts on the platform in the eight nights since the meeting at Otaki’s, is kneeling at the side of the boots trying to decide whether he should mention the policeman who, at a policeman’s leisurely pace, is making his way past the line of traffic behind the van. What do they have in the back today? Radio valves, two or three sacks of charcoal, some light bulbs, a case or two of Korean brandy . . How interested would a policeman be in such things?
The legs are stirring. ‘Give me a pull!’
Yuji grips the canvas heels, leans back his weight. A stocky, moon-faced, middle-aged man appears, Grandfather’s neighbour, Mr Fujitomi.
‘Try her now.’
In the cab, the ignition is a button on the floor. The first time Yuji tries it the engine rasps, sputters, dies. He tries again. This time it fires.
‘Tough as tanks,’ says Fujitomi, jumping up beside Yuji and using a sheet of newspaper to wipe the oil from his hands. ‘You could drive one of these all the way to Moscow.’ He swings shut the door. The policeman’s face floats in the wing mirror. Fujitomi frowns. ‘Let’s go,’ he says. ‘The river. Nice and gently.’
After Grandfather’s illness, that event in the middle of the night that had left him for a few hours paralysed and barely able to call for help (‘It was,’ said Sonoko, ‘like the cawing of a bird’), Mr Fujitomi had made several neighbourly visits, each time bringing with him some little luxury — a half-dozen Californian lemons, a parcel of good tea or, on one occasion, a box of pharmaceuticals that Grandfather’s doctor had assured them were no longer available — and on each visit he sat for an hour by Grandfather’s head to listen, carefully, to the unintelligible sounds he made. On the third or fourth of these visits he found Yuji in the vegetable garden, prodding tentatively at the dry earth with one of Grandfather’s hoes. He had laughed at him, told him the garden would take care of itself until the spring then — after a pause in which he seemed to study Yuji carefully, to weigh him up — added that his son, Tamotsu, had received his red paper a month ago and was now with the Thirty-fifth Regiment somewhere in central China.
‘I hope he comes back soon,’ said Yuji.
‘You’re supposed to offer your congratulations,’ replied Fujitomi, ‘but I too hope he comes home soon. Tell me something. You know how to drive?’
An hour later, on land at the back of Fujitomi’s house, Yuji was at the wheel of the blue Nissan receiving his first driving lesson. Driving, so it turned out, was quite a pleasurable activity. It was not even that difficult, as long as all he had to avoid was a few trees.
‘Tamotsu was my driver,’ explained Fujitomi. ‘And I have no other sons. Perhaps you could fill in for a while? Unless you have something better to do. There’s money, of course. You won’t be short.’
‘You want me to drive for you?’
‘Pick-ups and deliveries.’
‘That’s it?’
‘Pick-ups and deliveries. No heavy work.’
There was one more afternoon driving circuits round the cedar trees, then early the following morning, a light mist on the road, they set off for the centre of Tokyo. Somehow — and even Fujitomi’s imperturbability was tested — they survived the near-miss with the bus in Akasaka, the many near misses with angry cyclists, the terrifying moment when Yuji came within the width of a sandal from reversing into a canal in Kyobashi.
They picked up — sacks, boxes, sealed cases, crates, barrels. And they delivered — to hotels, to large houses, to the backs of businesses, to men who, looking somewhat like Mr Fujitomi, handed over grubby bundles of yen. Of these, at the end of the day, Yuji always received his share. By the first week of November, he could, had he wished it, have eaten at Kawashima’s three nights a week. He could even have afforded the Snow Goose if there had only been someone to take there. He forgot about Horikawa, about scribbling for a living. He found it amusing, though slightly disconcerting, that money could be made so simply. Pick up, deliver. Pick up, deliver. No heavy work.
At the river (the engine has cut out twice more and twice more Fujitomi has crawled between the wheels), they cross at the Ryogoku Bridge. Their next collection is in Honjo, somewhere deep among its web of wires and chimney shadow. They pass temples, slums, little chaotic factories, then pull up beside a gate in a blackened wall. Yuji sounds the horn.
‘Got a new boy?’ asks the man who unlocks the gate.
‘Helping while Tamotsu’s across the water.’
‘The Thirty-fifth, isn’t it?’ asks the man. ‘Not a bad outfit. Long as he keeps his head down.’
Under his coat — a civilian coat of black and white twill — the man is in puttees, breeches, a tunic with five brass buttons down the front. So too are the men who load the van. It’s not the first time in his new work that Yuji has seen this, and though Mr Fujitomi has offered no explanation, none, perhaps, is required. Rice, fuel, tobacco — even items like paper and soap — the army has them in abundance. All over the city there are depots, all over the country, soon, perhaps, all over Asia, each barracks, each camp, a new outlet, a fresh business. Is this what war is about? Not abstract concerns like racial destiny but the making of more and more money? A yen block to counter the dollar block, the sterling block? It is a view of things Yuji is not accustomed to, not yet. The soldiers, Mr Fujitomi, the likeable, practical men they meet in yards who snap open crates with a crowbar, who drag tarpaulins, who do impressive sums in their heads, seem part of a different system, a kind of parallel circuitry that has no more to do with sacrificial battles than it does, say, with poetry.