‘Here comes a warship! Here comes a warship! Look at the flags! Just look at all the flags flying! Banzai! Everybody, banzai!’
Your father dies the next morning, without much pain, without much suffering, or so the doctors assure you.
You don’t recall your father’s funeral at all. But you do remember that when you were accompanying his body from the hospital back to his house, a great, full spring moon was shining down on the roof of the hearse as you crossed the city.
4. Tokyo: A Mental-scape
You hate the parents who gave you life, who gave you away, twice gave you away. But you love your adoptive family, who took you in, who gave you a home, especially your mother’s elder sister, your Aunt Fuki. You are happy with your adoptive family, you are happy with your Aunt Fuki; you are happy here, happy here in this happy house, this happy house next door to poverty –
You love the streets around your house, the streets of Honjo, on the eastern bank of the Sumida River. There is not one single beautiful street, not one single attractive house in all of Honjo. The shops are drab, the road a swamp in winter and dust in summer and leading only to the Big Ditch. The Ditch floating with weeds, the Ditch stinking of shit –
But this is the place you love: the Ekōin Temple, Halt-Pony Bridge, Yokoami, and the Hannoki Horse Ground; these are the places which will haunt you for the rest of your life, your thoughts and your dreams, their dusty streets, their flooded streets, their shabby houses and their open sewers, and their nature: roof-top grasses, spring clouds in puddles, the tall trees by the temples and the willows along the open sewers; this is the nature you will always love the most, the nature which lives faintly, subtly amidst all the artifices of our so-called human civilisation, blooming and flowering, with all its beauty, with all its brutality –
With all its mystery …
Every morning you walk through Honjo with your adoptive father, you walk and you talk, your heart bursting with joy, so happy and so curious, so filled with love, so filled with wonder, until, until –
Until one morning, the early glow fading in the sky, you and your adoptive father are walking towards your favourite place, the Hundred-Piling Bank of the Sumida River. There are always fishermen here, and you like to sit and watch them fish as your adoptive father tells you stories of the fox-spirits he has seen on his walks, fantastic stories, magical stories. You reach the Hundred-Piling Bank, but this morning the place is deserted. The only things moving are the sea-lice crawling in the gaps of the stone walls of the broad bank. You start to ask where the fishermen have gone, why there are no fishermen today. Your adoptive father points down at the river, towards the water, and he says, ‘Look at that …’
And you look, and you see –
Below your feet, between the pilings, among the garbage, among the weeds, a shaven-headed corpse bobs up and down upon the waves, rising and falling, falling and rising, up and down, with the current, on the tide.
You look away, you turn away, turning away into your adoptive father, hiding away in his coat. But he takes your arm, and he takes your face, and he says, ‘Look, Ryūnosuke! Look! You cannot turn your face from horror, you cannot look away from death. You cannot hide, you have to look. So look, Ryūnosuke! Look and see …’
And now you look, and yes, now you see, see this place for what it really is, see this world for what it truly is: corpses floating in its rivers, hanging from its trees, bodies falling by its wayside, burning in its fires, the factories on both banks, these rows upon rows, the shacks upon shacks, these endless shacks, the railway tracks and the utility poles, its affluence and poverty, the satiated and the starving, all crawling in its gaps, bobbing up and down, rising and falling, pretending and pretending, pretending everything is fine, pretending everything’s all right, nothing wrong, there’s nothing wrong: there’s no deceit, there are no lies, no lies, no lies. No smell of piss. No smell of shit. No smell of death. No cheap cake in a fancy box. No low-grade sake in an expensive bottle. No patched-up clothes, no patched-up screens. No chipped wooden desks, the baize worn thin and varnish gone. No faded red cushions, all threadbare and darned. No artifice, no pretence. No self-deceit. No fathers who are no fathers, no mothers who are no mothers. No scars, no scars across your heart, your broken, broken heart; all lies, all lies –
And now, now you turn; and yes, yes, you run; faster than you’ve ever run before, faster than you’ll ever run again, down these dusty streets, past these open sewers, to your house and through your gate, through your door and up your stairs, to your aunt in her room, always in her room, behind her screens, always behind her screens, your face buried in her breast, your tears burning through her clothes, her arms wrapped around your back, her hands running through your hair, she is whispering, she is whispering, ‘There, there, Ryūnosuke. There, there, my dear, dear child. This is the world of men,
