100 Years of Vicissitude Read online

  Surrounding a small, flat expanse of gravel were maple trees, and I believed I could make out the sounds of a stream. A stone’s throw distant was the grand black silhouette of a temple or shrine, with winged roofing that pointed this way and that, uncertain in which direction Heaven lay.

  ‘This is enchanting. Where on earth are we?’

  ‘The aqueduct above us is named “Sosui”, and it was constructed between Lake Biwa and the city of Kyoto in the nineteenth century. It runs through Nanzen-ji, where we now stand: a Zen Buddhist temple in the foothills of Kyoto.’

  I had a hunch I hadn’t forgotten my guidebook. This was convenient.

  ‘An odd place to put a European-style waterway, slap-bang in the middle of this Asian religious house. Then we actually are back in the real world? I was joking.’

  ‘Not exactly. We’re lodged in a memory of the past, circa World War Two. It’s reality on rewind, I suppose.’

  This morsel threw me, so I unspooled my attention to check more closely than before, dubious thoughts running amuck. ‘A memory? My grandfather’s?’

  ‘Not his. Mine.’

  ‘Is he here?’

  ‘No. We’ll get to that part—just not now.’

  ‘In which chapter, then? Or do I have to wait for the epilogue? At my age, it would more likely turn out to be the requiem.’

  ‘Charming—and you take other people to task about over-dramatics. Have you forgotten that you skipped through the pomp and circumstance of your own funeral rites? We’ll get to “Pop” at another stage.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Soon. Trust me. Time is on our side, since we no longer have to fret about the concept. For the moment, I have skeletons to address and I need an outsider’s perspective. I hope you wouldn’t mind being chivalrous enough to escort me through the maze.’

  I squinted at her. ‘I have reservations. Chivalry is not my strong suit.’

  At that point in the conversation—in spite of said squint—I noticed something in the corner of my eye. Strangely, this called to mind a peacock.

  I loosened my lids to focus properly and saw it was another woman. I have no idea how I missed her before—she stood out well enough, hovering in the bright sunlight about ten metres away.

  The woman was wearing a mostly orange kimono, with sleeves that hung down past her knees, and she had hold of a salmon-pink parasol. When I noted the serene, alabaster face shading itself beneath, I decided chivalry might come to me.

  ‘Is it vital for me to know who the geisha is?’

  ‘Not geisha. Not yet, anyway. In Kyoto, they called them maiko, apprentice geisha. In Tokyo, the epithet hangyoku was used. You don’t recognize me?’

  I do have to confess the tidbit trounced me, yet once she made the remark the evidence became discernible, as I started to see the structure of the face. It had Kohana’s excellent symmetry written all over it, buried beneath the paint.

  ‘Kyoto. Geisha. It fits.’

  ‘Actually, I was only visiting Kyoto on this occasion. I was from Tokyo.’

  The focus of our conversation had her gaze set somewhere in the middle distance. I glanced over that way, but could find nothing remarkably magnetic. ‘What’s she—you—looking at?’

  I whispered the query, and can’t opine why. Perhaps I did so because the lady was oblivious to our presence here in the archway shadows.

  For her part, Kohana wasn’t concerned how far her voice carried.

  ‘Tell me you’re kidding. You can’t honestly expect me to remember minor details like that, can you? This was all the way back in 1944.’

  ‘Really?’ I did some quick finger counting, which isn’t as easy as it sounds when your digits are semi-arthritic. ‘But that would make you… I say, about…’ I was at a complete loss. It was impossible to calculate such things in our current state. ‘How old are you? Or were you, when you—?’

  ‘Died? I’d hit one day past a century when I gave up the ghost. Can we get back to the here and now of this place?’

  ‘I’m not sure I’d employ those words. “Elsewhere and past the use-by date” would better apply, with some kind of superlative thrown in to stress how far back we are. I hadn’t been born yet.’

  ‘My, aren’t you young?’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t get all hysterical about it.’

  Right then, I recognized the gown the other girl was wearing. It was the sheet of fabric Kohana had hanging on her wall, the silk number with the embroidered storks—sorry, wrong bird. The ibises.

  ‘I wore it today, for him,’ Kohana said beside me in a more subdued voice. ‘It was his favourite.’

  She motioned at the approaching figure of a man with a strong profile, dressed in Japanese military uniform, a vintage Second World War number. He stood to attention before the geisha with a superbly straight posture, and bowed formally.

  ‘Hangyoku,’ Kohana whispered, so close that I could feel her warm breath on my neck. ‘Not geisha, not yet. I told you.’

  ‘Sadly I will never, ever be able to remember that word,’ I murmured in return. ‘Geisha’s easier. What does it matter? Call me a heathen.’

  Back on stage, the geisha gave the pilot that entrancing smile I’d witnessed earlier. Even the makeup couldn’t disguise it. Then they talked together, but we were too far away to get the gist.

  ‘It’s a stunning gown,’ I admitted.

  ‘This kimono was lost during the firebombing of Asakusa in 1945, when the okiya I lived in was destroyed.’

  ‘But I believe I saw it just now, on the wall of your hovel.’

  ‘Cottage.’

  ‘Cottage. Right you are.’

  Like that kimono, questions hung unanswered. I detest such moments. As I believe I mentioned, a mystery leaves a sour sensation in my throat—unless, of course, I’m the architect of said whodunnit.

  To compensate, I tried to focus on the girl chatting with the man, and studied her mannerisms. She occasionally laughed in a controlled, subtle fashion, and when she did so she sheltered the lower half of her face with an elaborately opened fan. Once composure was regained, the fan would close up shop with a deft flick.

  There was a scarlet-fringed collar poking out above the gown that set off her white throat and upper shoulders, although I noticed a couple of patches on the back of the neck were left exposed to the elements, sans greasepaint. Tassels and not-so-hidden extras adorned an elaborate, glossy, brunette hairdo.

  ‘Grant me one request.’

  ‘What now?’

  ‘Is that a wig? Or did you really have hair like that?’

  ‘It was my own.’

  ‘How did you make the hair so shiny, and what did you do to cause it to defy gravity?’

  ‘Shhh.’

  The other girl had a bright, colourful sash wrapped tightly around her waist and tied together in elaborate fashion, yet it dangled to her ankles. On her feet were white socks, with wooden clogs that looked like precarious miniature towers.

  ‘We call the shoes okobo—but sometimes you may hear the term geta. Foreigners generally use that. They were worn to prevent our kimono from touching the ground. This pair was thirteen centimetres in height. They took a lot of practice.’

  Tall, yes, and eye candy, to be sure, but I had no clue why we were here.

  ‘Is this a pucker-up and make-out memory?’ I asked, with some suspicion.

  Kohana barely registered the query. ‘Patience.’

  ‘Well, when does it get otherwise involving?’

  ‘Keep your smoking jacket on, and allow it to unravel.’ She clicked her tongue. ‘My gosh, you have too many questions.’

  ‘Of course I do! Bah. It feels off. Not only are there connotations that this is going to be courtship bunk, it’s also voyeuristic. Here we are studying you, yet you’re right beside me and refuse to fill in the gaps. You wouldn’t like me when I work myself up into a lather of pedantry, Kohana, and I have to assume you’re already impartial to my charms.’

  The girl looked f
ed up. ‘Yes, yes. He left me today. In a few minutes from now, if you must know.’

  ‘Ah-hah, so we are adrift in tear-jerking terrain. Due to some fit of bizarre nostalgia, or am I to take it you enjoy rehashing misery? The scoundrel was married, am I right?’

  It seemed Kohana couldn’t detach herself from the scene of the couple, not even while I needled her with a shoddy insult or two.

  ‘He wasn’t married. No, I suppose his was a different kind of commitment. Y was a pilot, a lieutenant, with the Japanese Imperial Navy. He was here on leave from a posting in Taiwan.’

  ‘Which “here” are we looking at? What’s the date?’

  ‘It’s 1944. I told you.’

  ‘When, precisely? Humour me.’

  ‘September 17.’

  ‘About a year before the end of the Pacific War. How long had you known the man before today?’

  ‘Almost three weeks? We met at an officers’ party in Tokyo in late summer. We spent two of those weeks there, and then, at his invitation, the final one here in Kyoto in order to visit his family in Fushimi.’

  ‘Where the feminine saké comes from.’

  ‘You remembered.’

  ‘I’m not completely oblivious. So, correct me if I’m wrong: you entertained notions of deep affection for this man within a smattering of days?’

  ‘We were in the middle of a war and time was scanty.’

  Kohana frowned, though her face was too confoundedly young for the expression to have definitive meaning.

  ‘If we move closer, perhaps we can hear what they’re saying.’

  ‘And why on earth would I do that? I don’t take to eavesdropping. I mean this in my case, of course—you’ve heard all the sweet nothings before.’

  ‘Oh, put a lid on it.’

  ‘Temper, temper.’

  She seized my hand and tugged me after her, out of the security of shadow, to be closer to our colour-mismatched lovebirds. If I’d tried to drag my feet, I doubt I could have stopped her. My withered bag of bones had nowhere near the stampeding vitality Kohana gave off in presumed death.

  ‘Aren’t we likely to interrupt things?’

  ‘How? We’re just ghosts—so much for not being forgetful.’

  The voices became clearer as we neared, and true to my slave driver’s suggestion, they paid no heed.

  In all honesty, I doubt the pilot would have noticed us if we were flesh and blood passers-by. It was apparent that his attention was devoted to the jewel before him, and fair enough too.

  ‘You wore it. You look exquisite,’ the man remarked, in a hearty baritone.

  He struck my ear as a young Gregory Peck. The fact I could understand him at all was a fortuitous bonus—when had I picked up Japanese language skills?

  ‘I’m flattered that you appreciate my kimono.’ Kohana’s voice came from a different source, this time the student geisha, with a softer, more singsong inflection.

  The man touched the girl’s cheek, taking care not to spoil her makeup.

  ‘Without this face, the garment would be sorely lacking.’ He blinked a few times, and the hand dropped. ‘I must tell you something. I’m being transferred to the Philippines and will be leaving on a flight this afternoon.’

  ‘This afternoon—? Why?’ His escort’s intonation lacked the strength and confidence of the one I’d lately become accustomed to. ‘I thought you were a training instructor, that you were out of combat duty.’

  ‘Things change, Kohana-chan. This is war.’ He looked past her and stroked his chin. ‘You wouldn’t understand. You’re a child.’

  ‘Is that so? I’ve been woman enough to this point.’ That was more like it. Not in any way shrill—it was a deserved reproach, uttered with a tad of dignity.

  Obviously the barb also made its mark. The man’s gaze drifted to hers, but I fancied he was holding something back.

  ‘Very well. I’ll tell you as much as I can, which I’m afraid is very little, about the new posting. It’s an idea of Vice Admiral Onishi’s: the shinpū tokubetsu kōgeki tai, a special attack group.’

  ‘What makes it special?’

  ‘This is a new weapon the enemy won’t expect. A divine wind, like the one that stopped the Mongols invading our land.’

  ‘Seven hundred years ago? I thought military technology had improved since then.’

  ‘The same wind blows.’

  Well, that was disengagingly cryptic. I yawned.

  There were lead-grey tufts of clouds in the nearby hills that threatened to despoil a marvellously sunny day. For now, the light was so bright it felt like the world was overexposed and the colours—particularly of the kimono—incandescent. Probably this was down to my inability to adjust to direct sunshine, after years without.

  ‘Is it dangerous?’

  The girl’s face was nowhere near so blinding as the kimono, white-washed aside from a pert red mouth and watchful eyes. If there were an incorporeal being hereabouts, the geisha would be a better candidate for the role than myself. Even so, her façade was composed and her tone wonderfully steady. It was the question that came across strained.

  ‘There is always danger in war, my flower. If I had the freedom of choice, I would stay here with you—but, alas, I do not.’

  I recognized the lofty, patronizing overture, since over time I’d availed myself of a barrelful of like-minded gems. On top of this, he had squirreled away something, believing her too naïve to get the gist.

  ‘I am not going on the mission for Emperor or for Empire. I am simply going because I was ordered.’

  ‘What if I ask you to belay the order, or insist that you stay?’

  ‘Such an enterprise would have the same impact as my parents’ attempt. If we were to place it on a numerical scale from one to ten, I’m afraid it would rate only as—’

  ‘Zero?’

  ‘Zero is a powerful number to bandy unwisely.’

  ‘Oh, rubbish,’ I muttered.

  Thunder rumbled somewhere, but there was neither lightning nor rain. The air felt heavy around us and it surprised me a shade could be so sensitive.

  ‘I may be unwise,’ the girl was saying, ‘and yes, I am young. But I comprehend the truth when it blows my way, like those laughable winds of yours. Besides, you people bandy about “Zero-sen” enough on your own—isn’t it what you call your silly airplanes?’

  Bravo.

  In answer, the pilot bobbed his head. He may have been as starched as a dinner shirt, and the movement conducted almost imperceptibly, but I noticed.

  ‘He nodded,’ Kohana assailed me in the left ear, ‘didn’t he?’

  ‘To my mind, yes.’

  ‘I thought so then, and I believe so now. But I never knew whether he was acknowledging the point, making some kind of vague apology, or if he did so out of politeness. I still can’t fathom the gesture.’

  ‘I got the impression the man was more acknowledging the sting in your words.’

  ‘What’s the use of returning here if nothing is clear? Isn’t it a complete waste of time?’

  I patted her shoulder. While I instantly twigged that, in doing so, I was treating her in the same condescending manner as the heel of a pilot, another option escaped me.

  ‘Kohana, my dear, are you forgetting we have a lot of time to waste?’

  ‘No. Don’t be stupid. Of course not.’

  ‘Just double-checking.’

  She pushed her arm around my waist and this time manhandled me away from the two people, back toward the shadowy arches of the aqueduct. I may have been put out, but was grateful she showed some discretion and hadn’t yanked me by the beard.

  While we walked, I felt her arm tremble a fraction, and I made up my mind a shot of levity was in order.

  ‘So, as you implied, he was married to his job, a depressingly familiar lark. This all took place a very long time ago—what happened to the rotter?’

  ‘Y was killed the following month.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘He was sent
on a one-way mission to fly a tokkō—kamikaze—attack.’

  ‘Self-immolation was this ingenious new weapon he boasted of?’

  ‘Most likely. The Japanese love to sacrifice themselves for stupid things.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know. I do wish I could convey an appropriate homily—you know, “He died with honour”, or with his boots on, or whatever Hallmark classic you gift to a war widow. And yet—’

  ‘There’s nothing honourable about nose-diving an airplane, packed with explosives, into an enemy ship? Have no fear, I’m there with you.’

  ‘Where did it happen? Near Japan?’

  I was thinking of Okinawa—I’d read about the battle years ago. Oddly enough, Kohana read my mind.

  ‘No, no, Okinawa was the following year. Y killed himself in the Philippines, at the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Right here.’

  In a flash, we were standing on the flat deck of a monstrously huge vessel, with a twisted bundle of burning metal nearby and Caucasian-looking sailors running about, screaming and shouting. Others sat and bled, and some lay prone, burnt, blackened, or missing limbs. Perhaps some of these were included in the collection embedded in the metal walls.

  Water cannons sprayed everywhere, yet missed the blaze itself, and airplanes buzzed high above. There was the muffled, far-off sound of machine guns and explosions.

  Thrown all together like this, it was madness.

  ‘Jesus wept,’ I managed. ‘He was not selfish in death. It looks like he took a crowd of other people with him.’

  To my consternation Kohana, standing beside me, had commenced on one of her fancy cigarettes. I hadn’t seen her light up. I looked around at puddles of gasoline on the deck nearby.

  ‘Should you be smoking here?’

  ‘Once again, you forget. We’re yūrei—what do you call them, spirits?’ She exhaled a liberal plume of smoke as she surveyed the wreckage. ‘What a mess. What a stupid bloody waste.’

  ‘Kohana, might I remind you that we’re supposed to be paying a social call on your memories? It’s impossible for this to be one of them.’