Beautiful Star, page 16
As he gazed out over Toyama Bay, it started to rain. From there, the train turned west towards Takaoka, crossed the base of the Noto Peninsula, and passed north-east of the Kahokugata Lagoon before arriving in Kanazawa.
Jūichirō spent a restless night at an inexpensive hotel in front of the station. Given the nature of his business, he felt uncomfortable with the thought that he might seem threatening if he paid the young man a visit at night-time.
When he pulled back the faded floral hotel curtains the next morning, it was still raining. In silence, he carefully opened his pocket umbrella and ventured into the drizzly streets.
He had brought along the address that Iyoko had made a secret note of after going through the bundle of Takemiya’s letters to Akiko. They were all signed the same way:
TAKEMIYA KAORU
36-1, NIBANCHO, NAGAMACHI, KANAZAWA
At his hotel they told him it was a residential area full of old houses, the remnants of samurai mansions. In one letter, Takemiya spoke disparagingly about his family, stuck in their ways. His parents, his siblings, his uncle and aunt, all of them mere humans.
On the Korinbō-bound tram, Jūichirō went over the plan of action he had rehearsed several times in his head since the previous night. If his parents answered the door, he could hardly cut straight to the chase. First, he would need to convince them that he was completely versed in the commonsense ways of the human world. That he was a likeable, trustworthy man of property. He could broach the matter of marriage later.
He had lost his appetite since the night before, as if some rusty iron sheet was stretched around his stomach. His rain-sodden body felt heavy. His malaise did not presage a happy outcome during the course of the day.
The equinox had just passed, and spring in the northern provinces, when the plum, peach and cherry trees all blossomed at once, had yet to arrive. There were remnants of snow on the north side of town. Jūichirō got off the tram, opened up a city map under the eaves of a nearby shop and searched for his destination. He got lost and made a long detour before he arrived at what looked like the right area.
A willow tree, just beginning to bud, stood next to a stone bridge alongside a stone and mud wall that followed a stream. He was struck by the freshness of the waving green waterweeds in the stream.
Crossing the bridge, he entered a winding path. The houses were all old and looked like they had history, with bamboo poles placed across their mud walls, on top of which straw matting was heaped to protect them from the snow. The matting was still there, despite the arrival of spring. He could see apple trees on the other side of the walls. Rain had brought a glint to the glazed-lacquer roof tiles of the houses. Inside each gate was a small front garden where trees stood silently, supporting snowy skeletons. There was one gate to a small tenement block. It had lattice windows, but it was dark inside and seemed deserted.
At each gate, Jūichirō lowered his umbrella to check the name and number on the nameplate, but Takemiya’s name was not to be found. He paced up and down the path, stopping several times in front of the same gates. Wondering if he might be in the wrong place, he walked over to the adjacent area to make a careful check of the houses there. On the way, he met hardly anyone in the road. Only once did he hear the faltering, rusty sound of a bicycle bell pass by.
Jūichirō was exhausted by his walk and close to collapse. He decided to return to the area he had gone to first. Finally, he noticed a place with a nameplate he had missed the first time. It was a cheap hotel completely out of keeping with the area. A lamp displaying the name, Meiji Hotel, was hanging from a breeze-block wall at the gate. There were pines and palm trees in the dreary front garden used for cars to turn around, as well as a sign advertising a billiard hall that blocked out all the windows on the first floor of the crude two-storey wood-and-mortar structure.
A small nameplate with the name ‘Takemiya’ in faded black ink, was nailed onto the bamboo fence next to a side door. Jūichirō immediately opened it and went in. The gravel path led to the hotel kitchen area.
Jūichirō called out. Three or four grubby ramen bowls were hanging up at the dark counter. Rainwater had soaked halfway into the entranceway, reaching as far as some carelessly discarded geta sandals.
‘Mr Takemiya! Mr Takemiya!’
A diminutive man emerged from the back, dressed in a grey jumper.
‘Can I help?’
‘My name is Ōsugi. I wonder if Kaoru Takemiya is at home?’
‘Kaoru? He’s no longer here.’
Jūichirō sat down at the counter, shattered. Sensing that this might take some time, the little man sat on a little yellow vinyl chair. He was around fifty, with thin hair coiled on top of his head and a small, mousey, innocuous face.
‘I’m sure this is the place the letters came from.’
‘He left just over a month ago.’
‘But Takemiya is on the nameplate.’
‘Oh, that. That’s my name.’
‘You’re a relative?’
‘No, sir, I’m completely unrelated. Although this place is called a hotel, it also serves as apartments. Kaoru stayed for about a year. He was a ladies’ man, and quite vain with it. He asked to use my name so that he could have letters delivered here. Any letters addressed to “Takemiya, c/o Meiji Hotel” would only ever be for him. His name was Kaoru Kawaguchi, but even that may have been made up. He sent letters to all sorts of places under the false name, and goodness knows how many girls he hoodwinked. I didn’t see any harm in it, so I let him use my surname for free … I don’t know what kind of business he was in, but he read all sorts of books, and sometimes he practised Noh chanting. Writing letters seems to have been his pastime. At any rate, there was a lot of coming and going of girls. Ah, one of his fellow Noh students, a woman who runs the Senkaku Inn, helped him out in various ways. Why don’t you go and ask there? He might have shacked up with her over there … After all, his rent for this place was six months overdue, and she paid it off for him last year … Not that he left for that reason. He just packed up and went. I haven’t heard a word from him since. I guess he’s the type who keeps very much to himself.’
Jūichirō made his way to the Senkaku Inn, the same place where Akiko had stayed previously. When he announced himself as Ōsugi from Hannō, he was given an unexpectedly warm reception. The maid brought him a selection of food and drinks to the tea-ceremony-style room overlooking the river. But there was no sign of the landlady.
Midday chimes from a loudspeaker echoed through the streets. Jūichirō showed not the slightest inclination to pick up his chopsticks and tuck into the titbits on his tray. The river view was misted in rain, and the room was filled with the scent of strong incense. At last, he felt able to sit up straight.
He was kept waiting for thirty minutes before the landlady turned up. She was plump, with a touch of grey in her hair, and she wore a gaudy, finely patterned purple kimono. She greeted him politely at the door, ordered the maid to withdraw and proffered a sake bottle with her own hands.
‘Come, Father, how about a cup of sake? You are so kind to come all the way to see us. We were fortunate enough to have your daughter stay in this very room.’
It felt odd to be addressed as ‘Father’. In order to pour, she kept her left arm tucked in her sleeve while her fully exposed right arm gave off an unusually dull, white, fleshy glow in the gloomy room.
The landlady would not let Jūichirō get a word in. He had barely put his lips to his cup before she slid back on the tatami mat and gave a deep bow of greeting, planting both hands on the ground. As she raised her face, it was already soaked in tears. She said:
‘There’s something I need to say. I fully appreciate your feelings but, I beg you, please take pity and return Takemiya to me. No questions asked. That is my only desire.’
It took some effort for Jūichirō to convince the landlady that he, too, was looking for the young man. Without touching on his daughter’s pregnancy, he described in detail how he had ended up here.
Changing tack, the landlady suddenly adopted a coarse tone as she related at great length and without any sign of self-recrimination how she had worked hand in glove with Takemiya in his first meeting with Akiko. She had first met him the year before last during a recital of the Noh drama Himuro. She was enchanted at the time by the figure he cut in his white kimono, splashed with indigo patterns, and his formal skirt. They went out together for less than two years. Sometimes she had to put up with his infidelities, or make excuses about his being the son of a good family whenever she found herself face to face with one of his other lovers. His chanting was so good that he ended up making a stage debut in Dōjōji.
The landlady was unable to shed any light on where Takemiya had disappeared to. But she did offer some food for thought. It seems that he had been seeing a cabaret girl behind her back. The girl was from the Sanbanchō area of the old Itsusaka red-light district. She was not familiar with the name of the girl or the establishment where she worked, but someone did once spot Takemiya rubbing shoulders with a girl who fitted the description one early afternoon among the hills of the Itsusaka area.
Thinking all along that Takemiya had run off to Akiko’s place, the landlady never pursued the matter.
Jūichirō was almost faint with fatigue, so he asked for a mattress to be laid out in order to take a nap. He slept only lightly, but whenever he tried to awaken, his body refused to move, as if he were encased in clay. When he did occasionally open his eyes, he caught sight of an ikebana arrangement, mostly involving rape flower buds, in a small black vase by his bedside. But whether this was reality or an illusion, he was unsure.
When people take a nap straight after such a shock, they sometimes have surprisingly happy dreams. Jūichirō’s dream lacked a definite narrative, went through richly coloured changes and was dotted with moments of euphoria, as if he had abandoned himself to a speeding sleigh.
When he arose to take a bath just after three-thirty, a cloudless blue sky was visible through the bathroom window. He made a quick departure, map in hand.
The Itsusaka red-light district had many houses built in the Kyoto style. Even a casual visitor like Jūichirō could immediately distinguish the pleasure quarters, along the upper reaches of the narrow stream, from the old-fashioned, more transactional red-light quarter downstream. Small greengrocers and fishmongers stood between the two areas and, at this time of day, those were the only shops, with their fresh produce on display, that showed any activity. There were additional shops specializing in stationery and cheap sweets, as well as a lending library. Two or three children were engrossed in a game of kicking stones around in the middle of a sunny backstreet. As they played, their kneecaps, scarred with all sorts of little wounds, caught the sun and shone the colour of ginger.
The old red-light quarter was being refurbished with new bars, cabarets and inns. But the half-completed repairs to the original tiled entranceways, with their apologies for door curtains hanging outside, gave the whole area an even more dodgy feel. Jūichirō stole glances at the cabarets with their American-style names, and at the bars with their cabaret-like pretensions, but all their front doors were closed and there was no one about. Some faded artificial cherry blossoms, still dripping raindrops, and a rain-stained nude on a signboard advertising the ‘Cherry Blossom Festival’ gleamed in the setting sun that emerged after the rain.
A woman, her hair bundled high and sporting a man’s nylon jumper, appeared out of nowhere and looked back at Jūichirō, eyeing him suspiciously. She was probably returning from her bath. The clatter of retreating geta grew so faint that every step sounded grainy.
Jūichirō walked aimlessly. He felt that the least he could do right now was to keep walking until he collapsed in exhaustion.
It eventually dawned on him that he had no idea what Kaoru Takemiya, or rather, Kawaguchi, looked like, let alone his girlfriend. Even if he struck lucky and bumped into them in the street, would he actually be able to tell? But weariness clouded his judgement, and he was fully confident he would be able to recognize Takemiya from a hundred paces if the boy really was from outer space. Assuming, of course, that he really did come from there.
The pleasure quarters further upstream had preserved their olden days charm, with rows of red-ochre-painted lattice windows and the area in front of the entranceways thoroughly swept. The sun was low, and evening sunshine pressed in from an angle.
After trudging up and down the hills, he finally reached the top of one hill close to a street where the trams ran, and an unexpected view opened up to the west. He saw a scattering of houses that turned into fields and, way beyond that, the sun on the point of dipping below the horizon. The rumbling of the trams blurred in his mind into the sound of the setting sun.
Just as the sun completely disappeared from view, he observed a single white dot shining among the banked clouds in the sky, like the scale of a little fish between the waves as it caught the light. It was Venus, the morning star. During this transitional season, it appeared in the evening time. Its angle of elongation from the sun appeared to be no more than 10 degrees.
The chances of finding Takemiya were zero. As her father, what could he tell Akiko? ‘Turns out he was from Venus. He’s left you behind and returned home.’ Should he say that? ‘Turns out he was human. He deceived you and now he’s vanished into thin air.’ That might be better. The evidence pointed both ways. Jūichirō did not believe that Takemiya was Venusian, but a human father would go out of his way to repress that truth and lie to his daughter in order to preserve her dreams. The latter, blunt response seemed more appropriate for a family of extraterrestrials.
If he were an earthling, he would have made it look as if Takemiya was a Venusian without any hesitation. But even from the perspective of an extraterrestrial, Jūichirō could appreciate that Akiko, an extraterrestrial herself, had committed the mistake of harbouring fantasies about an earthling, and one way for her to atone would be to remain ignorant of her own groundless illusion. Fundamentally, Akiko had gone astray by defiling beauty with a false reality.
‘I’ll make that girl pay,’ thought the tender-hearted Martian. After returning to Hannō, the exhausted father knew what his line was going to be:
‘Turns out he was from Venus. He’s left you behind and returned home.’
His circuitous sympathy was in no way a compromise with the human understanding of reality.
7
‘Give the young ones a dream.’ So went Katsumi Kuroki’s slogan.
Its appeal to many young people was premised on the vagueness of its actual meaning and the fact that present-day youngsters had lost their dreams. But Kazuo saw things differently. The only thing that satisfied him was a sense of reality. Namely, the reality that he hailed from Mercury. The reality that Earth was a delightful planet, that its nature was beautiful, its women graceful, and in so many other ways worthy of preservation … For him, what other reality was there?
Since he held this sense of reality so close to his heart, he impressed others as a young man filled with bright hopes. He felt confident that, compared to other youths of the day with their nervous disorders, he came across as likeable, with a lot of promise.
‘I get the feeling you’re the only one with a strong vision about the future of Japan and mankind. I’m not just saying that. It’s the impression I get from you.’ Kuroki’s comments were actually way off the mark, but Kazuo liked the sound of them. If things carried on like this, earthlings would unknowingly vote for an extraterrestrial at some point, and fall under extraterrestrial control. What greater state of bliss could there possibly be?
Whenever there was any incident in the world, Kuroki would send off what they call a ‘full and frank’ letter to high-up American officials. He would eventually receive back a two- or three-line note from some administrative assistant, which he would then print up with relish in a pamphlet. Kazuo found Kuroki’s naivety rather hard to take but, on the whole, he liked him.
The various ways in which Kuroki won popularity among earthlings, especially among the Japanese, provided Kazuo with an unparalleled opportunity to learn. Within a very short time, Kazuo even came to pity his father’s poor understanding of human psychology.
Jūichirō’s lecture tour had gone very well, but it owed its success to ‘sick’ people. In that sense, it resembled the pathetic success of artists.
When the end-of-term exams finished at the beginning of March, Kazuo handed over all his duties for their father’s tour to his sister. He had heard that a politician should be visited in the morning, so he called on Kuroki’s house in the Setagaya district at eight-thirty, clutching the business card he had accepted previously. He was surprised how small the place was, enclosed by a sooty hedge and filled to overflowing with visitors. Kuroki needed to attend a parliamentary committee meeting from ten that morning, but before that he was receiving callers in no particular order.
Kazuo announced the purpose of his visit to the student who greeted him at the door, but of course Kuroki could not remember someone he had only asked to drop by in passing. Kazuo found this hint of insincerity rather refreshing and appealing.
