‘But the rain. The wind –’
‘It will end.’
He did not say what they all feared: that he would join the army. But of course he likely would have in any case. It was surprising that he had not been called up yet.
No one ever said that it was her fault. But Vera knew that he had taken his first steps away from the people in her arms.
Vera and her father arrived in Toba. They stayed in a little inn there, where the people knew Vera and were polite to her father. It was shimmering in September sun and beautiful: you could look onto the bay and see the pearl rafts floating on the quiet water. Hamilton Drew wanted to present himself to Mikimoto Taisho. He said that Vera should thank Mikimoto Taisho for protecting her, because that was what he had done.
‘From what?’ she said.
‘You were living amongst the enemy. You don’t understand at all the danger you have been in.’
They took a ferry to Tatoku Island. In the icy wind on the deck he put his arm around her shoulders and squeezed her. It was an experimental hug. She was nearly as tall as he was.
On the island, the
ama
in their head-wraps were balancing on the bamboo rafts. They waved to Vera as she walked into the house. A woman answered: Mikimoto Taisho was doing his exercises in the bath. They had to wait. Then she returned and said
that she was very sorry, that he had got out of her sight and that he was in the boat. She pointed along the shore. There was a short, thickset man, his age showing only in his white hair, leaning into the single oar. Standing, he sculled it outward. They walked along and waved to him, and he turned around to come ashore. When he stepped out of the boat, his face was pink and smooth.
‘I have come to say goodbye,’ said Vera. ‘And to thank you for being kind. This is my father.’
Hamilton Drew made one of his stiff bows. Then the whitehaired little man in his
hakama
stretched out his hand. He wanted to show that he leaned toward the west.
‘I am James Lowinger’s son-in-law,’ Hamiton said. ‘And I represent Lowinger and McBean.’
‘I believe you tried before this to make some business with me,’ said Mikimoto. ‘James Lowinger was not happy.’
There were a few seconds of curious silence. Hamilton Drew’s face clouded over. Vera remembered then, what her grandfather had said: ‘What did he take? He took my name, my reputation …’
‘Not good then. Maybe not good now too,’ said Mikimoto pleasantly. He spoke to Vera. ‘It is good that you go home. It is war now.’
They walked together up the beach. The wind was cold and wet across their faces.
‘I understand you can no longer import the mother-of-pearl you need from China,’ said Hamilton Drew.
‘Of course not. We are at war with China, still.’ He turned to Vera. ‘We will miss you,’ said Mikimoto Taisho. ‘But you must come back.’ He did not like to mix business with the personal lives of his employees, which he took very seriously.
‘I can get it for you in Canada.’
Mikimoto-san turned his eyes back to Hamilton Drew.
‘You speak of mother-of-pearl?’ he said. ‘I am buying it now from the United States of America. Now I have one concern. I must keep the operations open. I must keep the people in work when times are difficult.’
‘I believe we have great untapped sources in Canada,’ said Hamilton Drew.
Mikimoto-san tossed up the sleeves of his coat and a ball came out of the right one, rolled around in his left palm, and disappeared again. He made it come down again and he gave it to Vera.
‘Just so,’ he said. He strolled more quickly and turned his gaze out to sea.
‘Ask him what he hears from the military government,’ prodded Hamilton.
Vera was dressed in a travelling suit that her father had brought her. The jacket was too loose around her body, and the skirt was too short. Besides, the western style felt strange to her. Her hair was wound around itself into a knot, which sat at the nape of her neck. Despite the cold, her skin felt hot.
‘I cannot ask him that, Father.’
They were to sail in a Canadian Pacific liner from Yokohama. She’d been there only once, that day she and Keiko had arrived, the day of the attempted coup. But this was the town where her mother was born. She saw the Grand Hotel; her grandfather had stayed there. She wanted to stay there too and, as there was still a festive feeling between them – united! After so long! The adored missing child and father! – they did stay there. It was ten days before the boat sailed. On each of the days they walked the Bund; they looked down on Homura. They visited the church where Sophia and James were married, and Hamilton was only mildly amused: although his two in-laws rarely agreed on anything, they had agreed to disapprove of him. The
Mayasaki,
the pleasure quarter, was closed to them.
Vera searched out the printmakers’ shops. The good ones were very expensive. But you could still find the old
ukiyo-e
in the bookshops. She looked at the pictures and exclaimed over them: how different was their world than the Japan she had come to! And yet there was sameness. She knew so much more, now that she was older. But she had no money to buy things. Her father
stood outside the doors, edgily looking down the street. It seemed as if he were very anxious to be gone.
‘This country is not the same,’ he muttered.
‘Not the same as what?’ she asked. Japan had finally become believable to her. When the police stopped them she could speak in simple Japanese. She could tell them that she and her father were leaving on the next boat for Vancouver.
‘Did you live in Kobe after all?’ she asked him when they stopped for tea.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I never lived in Kobe for long.’ He could not even remember the address he’d had there. ‘I lived in Hong Kong for a couple of years. Then I was in Indonesia. I travelled a lot. Okinawa. Did you know that Mikimoto has started operations there?’
‘What were you doing there?’ she asked.
‘Looking for opportunities,’ he replied. ‘Something your grandfather never gave me.’ Mostly he told her stories of his business deals, deals that were thwarted, or went wrong. ‘What we need to dream up,’ he said, including her, ‘is something that thrives on war, that doesn’t just lie down and die because of it.’
Passersby looked hungry and sick. These were the city folk who took the trains to the villages on weekends, in order to try to find food. They gathered around the newsstands to look at the headlines, but they did not buy the newspapers. They stood and murmured, as if their standing would force the news out into the air.
The day their ship was to leave, Vera’s eye fell on a magazine with a glossy cover. It was more like an American magazine than others she had seen, and she wondered where it had come from. On the cover was a picture of two men: one was a Japanese, and the other was Hitler. They were beaming happily as the Japanese man presented the Führer with a
katana.
It was pulled out of its
saya
for show.
Hitler: she had often seen the Führer’s picture in the papers since coming here. Even Horace Calder had shown her his pictures
in the American paper he wrote for. She recognised his face, so she was not surprised. The Japanese man: who was he? But the sword. It was the sword she recognised.
There it was, the beautiful
meito,
Ikkanshi-san’s pride and joy. The sharpest blade, oiled to perfection. The
jihada
a graceful line of waves. The
hamon,
and very clearly, held up to the light, the
horimono.
The god Fudo was engraved on the
hamon,
the god with his sword and his rope:
‘the rope to bind the emotions and the sword to cut down evil,’
that was what Ikkannshi-san had said.
The blood drained out of her head. She thought she might faint.
‘Please, I need money!’ Vera said to her father.
He passed her a handful of yen and she pushed to the centre of the clutch of people and bought a copy. She held it against her chest. It felt like a stone there. She held it away from her and looked at the magazine: the Japanese was presenting the sword to Hitler. It was a special gift. There was no mistaking it. The sword was the
meito
that Ikkanshi had worked on so hard.
People stood on the shore to watch the boat pull away. They had spools of paper in their hands. Passengers on deck held the other ends of the paper, lucky people, like herself, Japanese, or American, Italian or German or Canadian, who were leaving. The boat’s engines were fired and it began to pull back. The people held out their hands and the spools of paper spun around their fingers, letting out more and more lengths of the white, fluttering reels. People waved, and cried, and blew kisses. No one waved to her, or to Hamilton Drew. At the last minute, she felt the awful pull of her love for Keiko.
Eventually they had gone too far and one by one the ribbons of paper were stretched tight, and broke, and both ends, separated, fluttered down to the surface, and in a minute, sank.
Vera fell into her bunk, and pretending to be seasick (an
ama!
Seasick! How absurd that her father had believed her!) she looked at the magazine and wept.
Hitler was holding it, wrongly, you can be sure, with the blade directed outward, rather than inward, as etiquette decreed. But
he was looking pleased with himself. She understood by reading that this famous Japanese
katana
had been presented to the German leader as a gift and to emphasise their great friendship, by the Japanese Ambassador to Germany, General Oshima.
It was made in the Shinto period, Ikkanshi-san had said, by Nagasone.
She remembered, she remembered it all.
He had lied to her. He had said that the sword was not for this war.
He had also said the sword must go to its fate.
Its fate was Oshima, Berlin, and Hitler.
But he must have known that. He had made the sword for Hitler. She felt so cold. Who was Ikkanshi-san?
‘There are many ways a sword can cut,’ he had said.
She heard her father’s voice, saying that she had been in danger, and that she did not understand. And Mikimoto too had said that it was good she was going home. It all made sense now. They had all been evil, Tamio and her
sensei
too.
Vera’s father, Hamilton Drew, was a slim, red-haired Scot with a moustache that added years to his boyish face. He was tall – that was where Vera’s height came from – and perhaps because he didn’t hear well, or perhaps simply because he wanted to be particularly attentive when she spoke, he leaned over her. It was fun to be with him and to notice these inherited likenesses. The bending, the attentions to others, gave him a certain charm. Perhaps it was studied. Charm was not what the Scots were known for. Charm was English, her mother had told her; a manufactured trait and not to be fallen for. Never trust a man with
two first names, Belle had said as well. Meaning, whose first name and surname could each have been a first name.
‘What is the problem with two first names?’ Vera had asked, when once her mother had pronounced this homily after a salesman named James Martin, or perhaps Scott Morris, had called.
And Belle had puckered up her forehead trying to remember the reason. ‘My mother told me. She was psychic, you know. She thought that a man with two first names might not be who he pretended to be.’
Vera hadn’t listened. But apparently Belle hadn’t listened either. She married Hamilton Drew, who had two first names.
A man with two first names was suspect because maybe he had got into trouble in another place and had dropped his last name so as not to be traced. In other words, maybe he was Jack Martin Finch, she had said, laughing, naming birds she liked. And he’d got run out of town. Then he’d be just Jack Martin in the next place, do you see?
Vera’s mother had been afraid of everything. Even afraid of a name. Therefore Vera could be afraid of nothing.
Hamilton Drew had watery blue eyes and blondish-red eyebrows that stood out, brush-like, half of the hairs going up and half going down. The brows were fascinating and moved of their own accord, giving emphasis to certain phrases: ‘The point is,’ he would say, and the right brow would jump when he hit the explosive P of point, while the left one would flatten into a straight line on the verb, as he drew it out. Vera was not sure whether these theatrical expressions were voluntary or not, and she didn’t feel she could ask him. ‘Hey Dad, are you aware that your eyebrows are dancing?’ was not possible. The years they’d been separate (when exactly had they been together? She was vague on that) precluded these kind of intimacies.
As a speaker, he could not fail to attract attention. He was intense and engaging; he seemed to mean what he said. But his voice was soft, so soft that you had to concentrate
to follow his words, and perhaps this too was intentional. But for all his animation in public, he was a quiet man in private. There was no hallooing and slamming of doors, no whistling as he returned. He moved softly and efficiently, like a large cat, but without sensuality. He seemed strong, although he never exercised. He walked on shipboard, walked and walked the decks as if his life depended on it, and Vera had to skip and scuttle to keep up. If there was a love interest in his life, meaning a woman, he had not seen fit to confide this to his daughter. His real love was his plans. He was a man with several plans, any one of which might make him a fortune. A man whose fortune was overdue. Perhaps that was his hurry.
Hamilton, or Dad, as Vera began to call him, was close with his feelings. Back on the summer island he had loomed up, the only person taller than her, with his blue eyes oddly lit and his face alert to her every move, as if she were a treasure he was about to capture, and called her his dear darling lost daughter. Leaving with her, he had opened his arms and, tranced, she had stepped forward into them. There was hard muscle and bone there and a heart beating fast in its cage of bones. His was so unlike Tamio’s cushioned, quiet embrace that Vera drew back, and blamed herself. Confusing to have a lover one minute, and the next to be taken to heart as a little girl. But over the checkerboard on ship and while passing through the Canadian immigration office, her father rewrote her like a lost diary.