The workhouse had been empty from then until O’Hara came to live there for the last two years of his training as a shichi. But the photograph remained on the wall as a perpetual reminder of the horror of Minamata and its devastating effect on this one family.
He finished shaving and went back down the hail toward the main room. O’Hara loved this house. It had been his only real home. It was here he had lived for two years while he trained for the Ritual of the Shichi. He had kept an apartment merely as a base during his years in the service, but he was rarely there. And for the past year he had hidden in this ancient house, communed with its ghosts, reaffirmed his mental and physical commitment to higaru- dashi and his emotional commitment to Kimura, Sammi and, most of all, to Tana.
The main room was startlingly simple, yet strangely warm and inviting. The only electrical device was a lamp over the tatami on which O’Hara slept. There was a low table with a mat beside it, several candle lanterns and a bookshelf. Nothing else.
Except the flowers. Each day Tana decorated the room with flowers. Red and white and purple and pink, every colour one can imagine. It was the flowers that gave the place its warmth and life.
O’Hara walked across the room and popped one of the snacks in his mouth, savouring the shrimp she had mixed with the vinegar rice in the makizushi. He could hear Tana in the small room that contained the great redwood tub, preparing his bath. She was singing softly to herself, a birdlike voice that was always slightly off-key. He changed into the knee-length black silk nightshirt and sat cross-legged on the mat.
Tana dipped her arm into the steaming water until it covered her wrist. It was very hot, but Kazuo liked it very hot. She guessed he had been, gone for perhaps three hours, but there were no clocks in the house and O’Hara did not own a watch. There was a small fear in her stomach, a gnawing anxiety. Something was going to take him away, to draw him back to the ways of the West. She sensed the danger.
When O’Hara first came to live there ,during the preparation for the ritual vows of the shichi, Tana was a child. Shy, withdrawn, wary at first of the fair gaijin, the foreign devil whom her grandfather had seemed to adopt, she was drawn to him gradually by the same strength and mysticism that attracted her grandfather and brother. He was unlike the other shichi candidates she had known. He laughed readily and made jokes on himself. He was gentle and was rarely moved to anger. And, best of all, he learned sign language so they could talk. In the evenings, after the mental and physical strain of the long days of the shichi preparation, he would sit near the fish pond, and with fingers wiggling, he would tell her ghost stories from America.
Samushi, whom O’Hara nicknamed Sammy, changing the y to an i so it would look Japanese, had also resented O’Hara at first. It seemed, to Sammi, an insult that Tokenrui-san, his own grandfather, would assign his grandson to the fair-haired Kazuo for training into the higaru--dashi. But the young novitiate soon learned that it was an act of love, for O’ Hara was not only classically disciplined, he was an excellent teacher. It was O’Hara who discovered that Sammi had remarkable reflexes and who devised a series of moves to best use his speed. It was also O’Hara who devised the gruelling exercises that built up Sammi physically so he could deal with the rigors of higaru-dashi, exercises that were so painful that in the early days of the training, Sammi would often work the last two or three hours of the day with tears streaming down his face.
There was, of course, no quitting. To do so would have been to dishonour not only himself and Tokenrui-san but his sister and O’Hara as well. Besides, O’Hara, himself preparing for the mystical journey into the seventh level, conducted a personal daily ritual which was almost crippling in its demands. Sammi’s resentment faded, to be replaced first by respect, and then by love. By the time O’Hara became a shichi and Sammi was inducted into the higaru-dashi, they were as brothers.
When O’Hara left to fulfil his obligation to his father, it was a painful experience for all of them, but it was agony for Tana. She hurt deep inside, the kind of hurt that could not be cried away or beat away or screamed away. It tormented her, and the ache in her chest and her throat stayed with her. She was only fourteen, yet she knew the depth of her feeling was very different from the feeling of deep friendship, the almost family bond, that had grown between O’Hara and her grandfather and brother.
Tana was in love with O’Hara, yet years passed and she told no one, not even Kimura. So for the next seven years, as she grew into a stunning woman, wise but uncomfortably aloof, she thought about Kazuo every single day. She wanted to forget about him, tried to forget about him, but it was futile. The young men of Kyoto courted her and were rejected. Finally she told Tokenrui-san of her plight.
‘One cannot try to forget, for the trying itself keeps the memory alive,’ Kimura told her.
She went to the temples and asked the gods to rid her of her obsession for Kazuo.
And what did the gods do?
They sent him back to her.
Sometimes it was difficult to understand the message of the Tao. So she accepted their gift without understanding it.
She was twenty-two years old when O’Hara came back. At first he still seemed to think of her as a child. Her aloofness vanished. And one night as he started to tell her about some interesting incident from his days in intelligence, she interrupted him and, with her hands, she said, ‘Tell me a love story instead.’
O’Hara did not need the wisdom of the Tao to figure that one out.
But now the dream was threatened. There was no answer in the Tao. Her fate was no longer in her own hands.
She stood in the doorway to the living room and dried her arm. She still did not see or sense him in the room. O’Hara leaned back on his arms and looked across the candlelit room at her. She was shorter than her brother, and very slender. Her skin was flawless and the colour of sand. Her black hair hung almost to her waist. Her brown eyes seemed misty under hooded lids, as they always were in candlelight. Her breasts poked at the short nightgown that hung by thin straps from her shoulders.
She was delicious.
He watched her for several minutes and then moved so she would see him. His presence there startled her, for she usually sensed him before she saw him.
She looked at his smooth face, at his green eyes.
She spelled out the words with her fingers, moving them in a gentle, constant flow that reminded O’Hara of a dancer’s hands.
‘No beard.’
