‘One plus one plus two equals four,’ said Ryūnosuke.
Terugiku gently touched her hand to his cheek as she softly said, ‘Not everything in this world is an ill omen, Ah-san …’
‘I know,’ said Ryūnosuke, holding her hand to his cheek with his own. ‘But I also know I really should be going now.’
‘Now,’ asked Terugiku, ‘really …?’
Ryūnosuke took her hand from his cheek, squeezed it gently, then placed it in her lap and nodded.
‘But what about your friends,’ asked Terugiku. ‘Should I wake them, so you can say goodbye?’
Ryūnosuke shook his head and said, ‘I don’t like goodbyes.’
‘Then why are we saying goodbye,’ asked Terugiku, leaning over to look up into his face, smile up into his eyes. ‘Is this goodbye?’
Ryūnosuke looked away, turned away, to his notebook, to tear out a page, to hand her a page, a page on which he’d written –
Kanzōmo saitabatten wakarekana …
‘The summer lily just bloomed, but now we say goodbye,’ read Terugiku, and then, her eyes downcast, she said, ‘So this is goodbye.’
Ryūnosuke stood up and walked towards the doors, Terugiku standing up and following him. Ryūnosuke opened the sliding doors, then turned back to Terugiku and said, ‘I hope not …’
‘Thank you,’ said Terugiku, kneeling down on the floor before him, placing one hand on the other on the mats. Then, bowing her head, she said, ‘My name is Waka Sugimoto. Next time we meet, please call me Waka.’
Ryūnosuke turned and walked out of the room, he did not turn or look back, he walked out of the house, through the garden, the rain now stopped, the rain now gone, a figure in the garden, the figure of a man, a Western man, his hands a spyglass, but Ryūnosuke did not stop, he did not look back, he walked through the gates and back down the hill, through Maruyama-chō, its lanterns no longer lit but its willows still weeping, under the willows and over the bridge, over the Matsugae Bridge he walked, looking never back, looking only up, the stars still in the sky, up through the Triangle of Prayers, up towards the Ōura Tenshudō, the stained windows of the Temple of the Holy Mother, the Passion of the Christ illuminated in the darkness, shining through the coming dawn, calling to Ryūnosuke, summoning Ryūnosuke, calling him to prayer, summoning him to his knees, in a pew, among the faithful, his hands together, his lips moving, ‘Lead us not into temptation …’
After the Mass, his prayers said, Ryūnosuke stayed in the pew, stayed in his seat, before the tomb of Father Petitjean and the statue of the Holy Mother and Child, his eyes moistening as he stared up at the cross on the altar.
And then with a deep intake of breath, now rubbing his face with both hands, Ryūnosuke got up from his seat, left the pew, and walked down the aisle, past the baptismal font, to a table standing before the doors, piles of prayer books and crosses on rosaries for sale on the table by the doors –
Ryūnosuke held up a rosary to a priest by the table. ‘How much?’
The priest took the rosary from Ryūnosuke, the cross from his hands, and said, ‘I’m sorry, sir. This is only for Christians, not for tourists …’
Ryūnosuke looked at the priest, this foreign priest on native soil, and said, ‘Excuse me, my mistake; I mistook you for a salesman, this place for a museum.’
The priest started to reply, but Ryūnosuke was walking through the doors of the Ōura Tenshudō, down its steps and down the hill, teardrops in his eyes, falling on his cheek, echoing in his heart, the chambers of his heart …
On the bridge again, standing on the bridge, on the Shianbashi bridge again, the Bridge of Hesitation, Ryūnosuke heard a sound from the water under the bridge, he looked down over the edge of the bridge into the water, and in the water he saw a face, a face staring back up at him, a face reflected in the water, the face of a Kappa staring back up at him, the face of a Kappa reflected in the water, reflected and staring back, smiling now, saying now, ‘Quack, quack! Pleased to meet you. I’m a Kappa; the name is Tock.’
*
I alight from the train onto the platform, go down the stairs, through the ticket gates, out of Tokyo station and into the path and the screams of a madman: ‘Humanity has become too proud, people become too arrogant! They laugh in the face of nature; they no longer respect the Heavens. But beware, and keep your pride in check. For do you think your duty to the gods is merely to wear beautiful kimonos, eat rich foods and live in gaudy palaces? Something dreadful will come of it, something terrible is on its way. This city will be destroyed in less than the span of a single day. And all will be ruin, and all will be corpses. For when the world is touched by Heaven’s anger, then the world will be turned upside down.’
After the Disaster, Before the Disaster
In an emergency such as this earthquake,
art is useless, to say the least.
Our recent experience only helped to expose
the ultimate futility of all artistic endeavours.
Ruminations on the Earthquake, Kan Kikuchi, 1923
After the disaster, Ryūnosuke would live for four more years.
Before the disaster, during that summer, Ryūnosuke and the artist Ryūichi Oana had been staying in Kamakura. They had returned to Tokyo on August 25, the heat in the capital still extreme, but then, just four days later, at twilight, Ryūnosuke had started to shiver, his temperature rising to 38.6. Dr Shimojima diagnosed influenza; Ryūnosuke’s mother, aunt, wife and children had all caught colds, too, to varying
