To last forever …
‘And this one is the brain of a businessman,’ the doctor is saying, but you are staring out of the window, staring at a brick wall stained with moss, broken glass bottles embedded along its top; to keep people in, to keep people out?
‘For some reason I know not,’ you tell the doctor, ‘I feel closer to the sister I never knew than to my mother. But if Hatsu was still living, she would be over forty, and maybe she would look as my mother looked, in that upstairs room, puffing on her pipe, drawing fox-faced people.’
The doctor nods, smiles and says, ‘Please do go on …’
But you do not go on. You do not speak. You do not tell him that you often feel there is a woman in her forties somewhere watching over your life; a phantom not exactly your late mother, not exactly your dead sister. And probably it’s just the effect of nerves wracked by coffee and tobacco, but perhaps there is the ghost of a presence somewhere, giving you occasional glimpses of itself and a world beyond this world –
Some-where, over-there …
The anniversary of your sister’s death is the fifth of April. The anniversary of your mother’s death is the twenty-eighth of November. Her posthumous name is Kimyōin Myōjō Nishin Daishi.
You cannot remember the anniversary of your birth father’s death, nor recall his posthumous name.
3. ‘Father / Chichi’
You are eating spoon after spoon of ice cream in the Uoei restaurant in Ōmori, and your father is saying, pleading, ‘Come back, Ryūnosuke. Leave that house in Honjo, and come back home with me. You will want for nothing, Ryūnosuke. Here: have another bowl of ice cream …’
Your mother mad, your father busy, he gave you away. He gave you away to your mother’s brother, Akutagawa Dōshō, and his wife Tomo, a childless couple. And you are glad he gave you away, you are happy he gave you away. But he does not leave you alone, he does not stay away; he tries to take you back, to steal you away, with bananas, pineapples and ice cream. ‘Here, son, here: have another bowl, and another …’
Your father was in the dairy business and, apparently, quite successful, ‘able in word and ingratiating in manner’, as Confucius said. But he was also a very short-tempered man, a man who had seen military service, who had fought in the Boshin War of 1868, fighting with the Satsuma rebels against the Tokugawa at Toba-Fushimi, who had fought and won; your father was not a man accustomed to losing, to accepting defeat –
So much gained for some …
‘One more time,’ he bellows, face red.
You are in your third year of Middle School, and you are playing wrestling with your father. You have thrown him easily with your speciality judo throw, the ōsotogari outside thigh sweep, and sent him sprawling. But your father springs to his feet again, his arms spread and squaring up, advancing towards you now. Again, you throw him too easily, much too easily –
So much lost for others …
‘Another go!’ he shouts.
You know he is angry. You know if you throw him again, you will have to wrestle him again, endlessly until he wins, all the time his temper rising, his attacks becoming more aggressive. And sure enough, he comes at you again, and you are grappling again. And so now you let him wrestle with you for a while, a little while, before falling, deliberately falling back onto the floor, deliberately losing, deliberately a –
‘Loser,’ your father gloats. ‘Loser!’
As you get back to your feet, as you dust yourself down, as your father struts about the room, you glance at your mother’s younger sister, the woman who is now your father’s second wife, who has been sat there watching you both wrestle, and she smiles at you now, and she winks at you now, and you know she knows, she knows you let your father win, you let your father have this day. Just this day, one last day –
‘Father hospitalised …’
You are twenty-eight years old and you are teaching in Yokosuka when you receive the telegram. Your father has the Spanish flu. You travel to Tokyo. You sleep in the corner of his hospital room for three days. You are bored beside his deathbed.
On the fourth day, you receive a call from your friend Thomas Jones. He is about to leave Tokyo and he invites you for a farewell dinner at a geisha teahouse in Tsukiji. You leave your father, hanging onto his life by a thread, and set off to the teahouse.
You have a most enjoyable evening in the company of four or five geisha. Around ten o’clock you leave, and you are heading down the narrow stairs to the waiting taxi when you hear a soft, beautiful, feminine voice calling after you, ‘Ah-san …’
You stop on the stair. You look back up towards the top of the staircase. One of the geisha is staring down at you, her eyes fixed on yours. You do not speak. You turn back, going through the door, out into the taxi.
All the way back to the hospital, you are thinking of the geisha’s fresh, young face, her hair set in a Western style, and her eyes, her eyes. You do not think once of your father, dying in the hospital.
He is waiting impatiently for you. He sends your two aunts outside the two-panel decorative folding screen by his bed. He beckons you towards him, gripping your hand, caressing and stroking it, and he begins to tell you of things-long-past,
