Other than the ticket inspector, his stand, the failing lamp on the east wall, and the aroma of sulfur–filled fuel that permeated through the halls like warm, noxious dust, the arrivals section of Tokyo's Keiwo station was deserted.
Kanae Kochou stepped off the train expecting to bump into all sorts of people of the wide world. To her dismay, she only heard the tapping of impatient Giyuu's service shoes. Shown the first sign of Tokyo by their window they had descended a stop too early, and at the midday hour they'd been stranded it was a dangerous hitch if they weren't willing to navigate on foot the greatest town of the world.
The inspector came up. "Take a taxi," he said. He had to lead the children outside to show what he meant: on the fragrant cedar road, a driver, his car, a fee. And go anywhere you'd like for this fee. The idea charmed the children, and they paid.
While Giyuu bent over the driver's shoulder to see the dials, Kanae watched Tokyo form. They emerged from the crescent boulevard onto the free road, and the air became cool and they could feel the ocean current again. For one transition moment, the land was as it always had been – but a stifling blast of cologne came in the window, and then the poof of dirt smoke, before the city was abruptly summoned, and from the ground spiralled the concrete towers, the urbane sidewalks, the automobiles, the silk ties, the Mata Hari parasols. If they had come five years earlier, they would have seen Meiji's wooden tenure, but it had been extinguished: for Yoshihito's reign were the effusive apartments in marble and stucco jackets and the cultivated greenland between. Kanae saw the children who clung to their mothers' crocodile purses and she must have felt nostalgia. The thinker's cane somewhere. The labourer's yukata. Her Parisian skirt in the middle. This was Tokyo, and from what Kanae observed, the true one. It was her first time here, but it was as cosmopolitan and astounding as any city she might have conjured in her dreams. Then, flicking the car, the driver announced it:
"Café Paulista."
The backside of Yoneda Magase's letter had given them this location, and a time. Giyuu peeked his Seikosha. 4:51 in the afternoon. Nine minutes from Magase, and he anticipated it. The overriding thought in Kanae's mind, however, was that Tsubone had surely by now discovered their disappearances, and their fate going back was sealed.
They entered the café. A finely–aproned woman met and led them to a place inside. The air felt like honey steam in there, and was suddenly redolent of coffee brimming in batches of filter paper, cheeses being churned on trays, the scents of wax–wiped island bars and perfumes of women in aerial heights…
Giyuu ordered tea and pretended to watch it swirl around the spoon. Kanae turned away and he glanced at her shoulder. He instantly saw Magase behind her. He held in his hands the burnished leather briefcase and the top hat, and on his elbow the ivory–handled cane. A pea coat around him. Vanity spewing like the loose valve of a beer cauldron, and he sat without requesting anything and put his arms on the table. Looking back at Giyuu, he smiled: a too pretty, but entirely genuine smile.
"If your face had been softer, and your eyes any bit a lighter blue," he said, "you two would have been indistinguishable."
Giyuu had to determine what he meant. "What are you…"
"Maybe I remember her too fondly," Magase replied, "but Tsutako had always been good to me, and good to you. A shame, that four years ago she was killed, and you remain."
Then he sat straight, crossed his legs over, and leaned his head back until it nearly touched the crown of the chair. Totally at ease, Magase pulled up his sleeve. A pocket pistol had been concealed below. He took it and pointed it to Giyuu under the table. He heard the cock of the hammer.
"Does this feel familiar, Giyuu?" Magase said. "My scouts told me you lived on the first floor and the rest on the second. I was surprised to hear you survived. After all, you were who we aimed for."
Briefly shocked, Giyuu rested his elbow across the top rail of the booth chair and then tried to look relaxed.
"But…" – though he could not hide the quivering in his voice – "…Morinaga said he ordered it."
"Is that true?" Magase scratched his chin. "He was always one to try and make himself a martyr for nothing."
"That means?" Giyuu asked.
"I ordered it. I ordered everything. On Otake arsenal and Ubuyashiki and you. But not…"
Magase exhaled, trembling slightly.
"I won't try to be a martyr neither. I didn't kill Miyamoto. But I have a nice idea of who did."
"Then why haven't you told me yet?"
"Because you've already been told. Past and future is a muddle for you."
Giyuu lost his patience. He struck the table with his fists and crouched over it. But before he could demand anything Magase seized him by the hair above his ear and pressed with impossible quickness his cheek against the table surface. He used no force, but the humiliation of the position was enormous. After being warned that they were enemies in public and to behave, Giyuu was soundlessly released, and for the first time Magase acknowledged Kanae.
"Since you came, Kanae, remember when you were first taken to the medical faculty, and you told me your stories of the night your parents died?" he asked.
"…While I helped treat you. I haven't forgotten," Kanae replied. Her topaz necklace stifled her.
"You told me, on one of those medicine evenings, about a boy named Giyuu. And how you pitied this boy! He'd just lost his sister and he didn't have parents and from what you could tell, not a single companion of any sort. But from the way he treated Shinobu you saw he was a good guy, hmm–hmm."
"What about it, Yoneda?"
"He had stayed with you the night your home was attacked. You tried a few times, and you finally got him to recount his sister. You already knew she was dead. Giyuu suffered and suffered, trying to remember, but he could only give you the barest of details. He couldn't even say her favourite colour. At the time you only thought it strange, but I knew better. Now, even more so."
Magase pointed his finger across the table. More and more he badgered and grew terser.
"Because you are guilty, Giyuu, incurably guilty," he said.
Giyuu answered tremoring. "Of what?"
"You should know. No: you will know." The abscess that ransacked his lifetime finally burst, and Magase offered between the tenses: "It is something you've done in the future. But I saw it with my own eyes. I knew I hadn't dreamt it. You killed Tsutako Tomioka!"
He said it with so much conviction and so little vacillation that Giyuu knew he believed his own words, and he did not even ask himself what he was going to reply until it was his turn to speak. When that came, however, he felt disgraced by Magase's truth, and even Miyamoto evacuated his mind.
"I never imagined that in all this orb of earth there'd be splendour such as your sister," Magase wallowed. "But Douma – you – you both, working together, and that other one…"
His tone had become slight and creaking. A few customers had turned to look at them. Giyuu replied in a most tenuous voice.
"You don't know what you're talking about."
Then Magase leaned back in his chair, his eyelids damp and reddened, and he focused on Giyuu and lifted the gun over the table. He began to see the end.
"Don't make me shoot you," Magase said.
Giyuu felt his throat shrink. But he tried his best not to shake, and felt summoned in that moment by a well of courage when he stood too and placed his hand over the gun's nozzle.
"Even if what you're saying is true," he said, "what reason do you have to care?"
Magase had to look at him sideways, like a butterfly, to see him with his morphed eye. He did not say the four syllables so much as spit them out, one by one:
"Motherfucker!"
In an imperceptible move he lifted the gun over his fingers and shot Giyuu in the face. He had no idea when it him. From the bits of eye that drained slowly down the wall behind him he saw girls and men screaming, Magase gone already, but Kanae was left alone. For the moment he must have been satisfied with that circumstance.
Thinking he was dead, Giyuu Tomioka awoke in an unfamiliar room. His eyes pointed upwards, he saw the ceiling fan spinning to disperse a cloud of pollen floating from an open window, and he only felt the pain when he looked back down.
Kanae finished wrapping the bandage around his arm. The final jerk stung Giyuu fully awake. Her white cuffs were soaked red and the purple bags of fatigue languished under her eyes.
"Am I…" he was unsure what to ask.
"Magase shot you in the arm. But you fainted. I'm guessing you perceived it as something worse than that."
Kanae stood up: explaining she had taken him to a hotel, she went to a contraption of tea on a low table and began to prepare it. Giyuu examined the room. By his feet was the bloodied tray with the scissors, and beyond a bonsai tree installed in anticipation of Golden Week had shed most of its green blossoms. They had fallen between the keys of a typewriter. Apparently, this hotel was built mainly to attend to Westerners – Kanae had told him that.
Giyuu dragged his hand across his face and it felt as it always did. He even had a stubble – but why did he feel conscious of it, now? Perhaps it was the effect of a lingering aura of death that had yet to be fully exhumed from his lungs, from the pores under his eyes.
"Kanae…" Giyuu started. "Did you hear what he said?"
"Who said what?"
"You know. Magase, about my sister. That I killed…"
The cup and plate in Kanae's hands clattered. "If that's true," she said, "then your sister condoned her death. Ignore him."
Afterwards she gave him the tea and pulled a chair and sat across him. Giyuu noticed she wore her hair loose now: the two butterfly clips shone iridescent on a windowsill, beside a sparkling soda–coloured paperweight.
But they spent the rest of the evening in silence. Exhausted from the wound, Giyuu nearly fell asleep in the seat. Night dropped and, unable to bathe lest the bandage be soaked, he toppled soundlessly into the perfumed bed and his fatigue finally bubbled to engulf him. The blankets seemed to vibrate and lull him into sleep. Though it was a turbulent sleep: and by the fifth time he awoke mired in the bonfire of sweat, he realised Yoneda Magase's bullet still clung to the back of his eyes, peeling them and souring them, and it inspired a fear like nothing else.
At two in the morning, Yoneda Magase sat tired and depressed in the incense smoke and the heavy heat, wearing golden–rimmed glasses, and he had a volume of Baoyuan open on his desk to while away the time, beside the pocket gun. When the young lieutenant entered the office he gave way at once, with a single sigh, which might have represented his weariness with Tokyo, with the blood on his sleeve, or with his whole condition.
"Speak up," Magase said.
"A letter from the General."
"General?"
"Morinaga."
Magase sighed again, and received the envelope and shooed the boy. He cut it open and read it in dull candlelight.
My first Tsuguko Magase,
Firstly, I have received news that the ship set sail for Final Selection a week ago never reached Shikoku. My contact there has no reason to lie to me, and I've been led to assume that the storm sunk it.
The ramifications of this go for both sides of the war. There is no keeping this news from anyone: it will blow a hole in both sides; perhaps we will stay equal in that way. But one of Tsubone's Tsuguko was on the ship –– it will devastate her more than anyone else, and I am telling you to be careful.
She believes I attacked her home. Do not trust fully that she may never uncover the truth, and to that I say I am aware you sent a letter coercing Giyuu Tomioka to pursue you, and he complied. Tangle with the boy no longer. I am ordering you.
The northern part of Ubuyashiki's camp has been enclaved. You are closer to them than I or Yokota. Destroy the enemy with your men and leave this mess with the boy.
Your past rashness towards Ubuyashiki and Tsubone disappointed me. I have already told you to be a bigger man than the old leader ever was. I want to see the wisdom take fruition in you.
Magase crumpled the paper, but composure returned halfway and his fingers untersed and the half–done bunch dropped to the floor. Then he called the lieutenant again.
He said lightly, "What do you think about having a pacifist for a leader?"
"Think about who?"
"You know – Morinaga." But the lieutenant seemed not to understand, and Magase realised he was only going to if he gave up the contents of the letter. He told him never mind, and to listen and relay his reply.
"To Morinaga. I refuse your orders. I will not interrupt my business with Tomioka and will not go north," Magase murmured, barely conscious. He guessed he'd do anything to maintain this state, no matter how contrarian to Tsutako's dream.
It was late morning when Tsubone Endou entered Nagoya, and now work was beginning to start and heavy smoke clouds floated over charcoal–soiled puddles, and the air was suddenly redolent of putrefying industry, but still fresh…
She had been here before: but with the onset of industrialisation, Nagoya was one of the first to transform. Sleepless yet, her head was unclear, and she crossed her arms over her eyes and tried to remember the Sakura eddied streets and live Shamisen bands greeting them at every corner, the burlesque hopes and dreams under an evaporating feudal sun, but it was hopeless. Youma spoke up.
"You feel nostalgia for this place. You think you're supposed to, I mean," he said.
Tsubone's reply was abrupt:
"It was this city I arrived in when I came to Japan."
The gate had been parted open, and in the arcaded courtyard of the regional headquarters the soil was salt–soaked and the wooden roof spurs that knifed talismans on red ribbons rotted. At the four corners of the estate were the inward–tilting, smaller pagodas: at the centre was the largest one that held in its mast the office, the view, the phones. But from the garden to the spiral stairs to the door the complex was deserted, and totally silent between the grass and the sky.
Yobusake had told her in their meeting: "Come to me in Nagoya, and I'll show you how to win this war," and when she forgot where to find him she went to Ubuyashiki's office on the top floor and sat on the unmade bed and picked up the receiver on the right–hand table. This side was the line to Yobusake –– she remembered at least that. The dial tone faded and she heard the reply over the whirr of electrical artifacts and radio crackle.
That same day, in the same place, Tetsuo Morinaga awoke from dreams of his daughter to find that he was in Nagoya, and that he missed the singing of the roosters. A cold, cutting noise rose in the four corners of his skull, and he stood from the bed, fully clothed, and he saw the attendant who held in his hands the letter. He extended it, saying: "Magase's reply, General."
Morinaga read it and put it down wearing a lopsided expression. But it was instant, classy: there were no damning words to come from the hard line of his lips.
"…If that's what he wants. Magase can write his 0wn story with his own pen. But after the revolution," he said. Then he turned to the bedside table with a fast twist of his shoulders. "Keep sending him letters. And if he doesn't listen after the third, I'll go there myself."
And though Morinaga calmed it could be seen that his granite hands trembled while he slipped the gun into its holster. Anyone would have thought that Magase was the cause. Causing things, as it seemed, appeared to be his greatest talent.
"I'm going to see the benefactor," Morinaga said. He let nobody stop him. "I will go alone. In the meantime…"
"We change camp?" the attendant said.
"Sure. Change it."
When the Ittōsai estate floated into the horizon he thought he might be relieved of nostalgia, but the truth was that even on the journey it was relentless. Nagoya was an old town, but it was a tired old town when he first came here, shuffling, thirteen, in shoes one bigger than the other. Now he was forty–nine in a crumpled collar and the grass still grew on the dirt sidewalks and Sakura trees glowed pink on wooden sticks like syrup popsicles.
And the live shamisen bands greeting him on every corner were still there, the burlesque hopes and dreams. But he had received everything he needed to receive thirty–six years ago and suddenly there wasn't anything new anymore.
"Rainbow" was the title of the Ittōsai estate – but nothing nowadays is fabulous and no gold rises from its ashes. It was a strange house, on a corner prefaced one side by a mountain wall, long and deep and wooden, with too many doors to count. It had never looked so foreign in his memory, and quiet further. Morinaga watched the building from the opposite pavement, his hand in his pocket, and he located where he had always entered and crossed the road.
On Sundays, because of his newfound faith, Morinaga knew Yobusake dismissed all guards, and all the mistresses had left regardless. He took off his sandals. In the living room that smelled still strikingly of oak essence he hid beside the cabinet that held the porcelain figures he once cherished and listened to the toilet flush and the creak of the door. Old photo frames reflecting him on an opposite drawer nearly gave it away. Yobusake appeared, limping, bent as a rotten fence, and he started up the stairs, and when Morinaga pulled his tongue between his teeth and turned to face his back with the revolver, he stopped without making a sound and the click of the hammer was the first thing that resounded between them.
"Tetsuo," Yobusake said, without looking back.
"Colonel. Let's go to your room."
They sat across one another. Yobusake in a chair in the corner and Morinaga with the door behind him and pointing the gun. Perhaps the older man had concealed his own, and they could have been able to blow two holes in each other, at the same time, and they would have stayed equal in that way. But thirty years ago, when they spoke of equality in their fool's legislature, that high–mindedness is what had defeated them.
"No security," Morinaga said, and he glimpsed the cross necklace in his open collar. "You were stupid to believe I wouldn't come after you."
Yobusake replied painfully, and painfully only once, "I really didn't think you would."
He wiped the sweat over his eyes, and resumed a gentleman's tone.
"If that's what you want to know," he said, "I didn't kill your daughter. And I've got nothing to do with that ship sinking."
"That's not what this is about."
"You split open my son's head. What else should it be about? Do you know what Tsubone told me?"
Morinaga did. There was a notice sent to him, which he hadn't replied.
"He hasn't woken up since then. He won't wake up anytime soon. It's not death, but it's not near to life."
"A coma."
"She says so."
Yobusake looked out the window, his arm across his knee. "I still wonder, when I gave you that mission, what made you come back so changed," he said. "Even though we're no longer Kenpetai, and I'm no longer your colonel, I wonder."
Morinaga's reply could be barely heard over the rising of his chest.
"I haven't changed. I'm the same I've always been."
Without understanding, he looked at the revolver. "You don't have to do this," Yobusake said. "I can tell you where Ubuyashiki is. Then everybody just walks away."
"You could."
"It'll be a win for both of us. I'm just a life."
"That you are."
Morinaga eyed the distance between them. Senseless. Even the gun. In a moment he could put his hands around his neck and stop it all. But then his death would not be beautiful. In his boyhood, consumed by aberrated patriotism, he admired the samurai who slit their stomachs and let their heads bow to be severed – even today, that taste for beauty at the end lingered with Morinaga.
"Ever since Miyamoto died," he said, "I've had a new perspective on things. That was no death for a girl. And what I did to your son wasn't right, either. But even if I hadn't done it, Colonel, I'm still unredeemable. Much like you. Much like me, thirty–two years ago, when I killed my first man for the Kenpeitai, crying, and four years later, when I killed my seventeenth, and it seemed all normal. But I'll admit I'd been killing on my own will sometimes. I was in a bar in this town in those days and there were some men in there drinking sake and one of them kept looking back at me. We knew each other, not well, but we weren't strangers. I ordered my dinner and spirit and had it. On the way to the counter to pay the bill I heard him say something hard to ignore about a girl I liked and his guy–friends laughed. Do you know what I did?"
"Yeah. I know what you did."
"I ignored him. Ignored him and nearly went outside but he made one other comment. Then I turned and tilted my head to the yard and told him to come outside. Then I waited. He came out with his friends and I got him pretty good right then and there. Picked up a stick and put it up his nose. He sat there yelping. The blood shocked his friends so much they couldn't tell what happened. Five minutes later though they got through it and they whistled the police on me. I didn't really try to run. I was feeling like some kind of shit that day. I thought maybe I'd extricate myself if I didn't. But in the cell I recuperated and knew I'd never be forgiven. Even if he forgave me, I wouldn't forgive myself. I didn't know what I'd disgraced but I felt so anyway. Still after you bailed me. I thought I would never want to stand in the sun again. Do you understand?"
"Do I understand?" Yobusake said.
"Yes."
"Do you have any idea how crazy you are?"
"You talking about this conversation?"
"I'm talking about you."
Yobusake slumped in his chair. He finally said, in a terribly exhausted voice, "Yes, Tetsuo, what I made you do… it may have been a mistake. But this isn't justified. After all I've done."
"I've had a gut feeling for a long time that it isn't," Morinaga replied. "But for men such as us, we listen to our heads. That's what you taught me."
Yobusake had to squint at him sideways, as if scrutinising a guilty child, before he saw his fate peering back at him through the mint eyes. He did not pronounce the three words so much as he carved them out, one by one:
"Go to hell!"
He did try to jump. He closed his eyes and jumped without knowing where it would take him. Morinaga shot him in the chest. Everything he had known, loved, or made pooled on the bed behind him. The faces of men of the same race on their knees before him. A hungry child finding him on a hot day in another place. He lay in scuffled breathing on the bed, before the bullet clogged his lungs and he began to choke. Then he was dead without making a sound and without bothering anyone else, and it was an effortless, pleasurable, and climactic passing.
Uncertain how long he toiled without tears, Morinaga was interrupted by the ringing of the phone. Already the blood had reached the tips of his socks and dyed them. He put his feet on the table, took the headset into his lap, and picked up the receiver. He replied after the dial tone over the whirr of electrical artifacts and radio crackle.
"Hello?" he said.
He thought he recognised the voice. "Is this Ittōsai?"
"No."
"Is he there?"
Morinaga watched Yobusake's body. "No, he isn't. It'll be a while before he returns."
The voice answered, growing suspect, "Who is this?"
"You know who it is," Morinaga replied.
Tsubone's forehead fell into her hand and at once she knew everything. Morinaga dignified himself and went on.
"We need to meet up somewhere," he said.
"I don't need to see you."
"I think you do, Tsubone. Judging by you calling this phone, you're in Nagoya, too. The Ubuyashiki son won't lead and Yobusake can't. I'd say your people looked to you to the job, but instead you're chasing me."
"And?"
"If you don't find me it'll be for nothing. So, do you know where I'm going?"
"I don't care where you're going."
"But I know where you are. You're in Ubuyashiki's room, in the regional HQ. But that's not there I'm going."
"Then where?"
Morinaga held the bunch of his tongue, then released it. "I'm going to the Kawabun Hotel. To the ball. I want to see you there. Tell them your name is Margaret Meister."
"And if I don't come?"
"You will. Otherwise, Yobusake won't be the last of his kind."
Tsubone didn't answer immediately. Then she said, "Yeah, I'll come see you, all right. Bring a present of my own," and hung up.
Outside the Hotel Kawabun, debutantes in taffeta gowns clung to tall, high–nosed women with porcelain handbags, and while Tsubone stood with them the scent of warding oils nearly became unbearable to her tentative nose. Youma hovered with her and they waited. When the clock struck seven in the evening he disappeared and the girls began to enter, but she was seized by the arms by a pair of obvious mother and daughter. They said she was unfamiliar and asked who she was, and Tsubone refused to answer, and then they asked who was her date, and she wasn't sure either.
"I'm here alone. I've just come to see how it is," she said.
"Bull," the older woman replied. "Even if you're just looking, you'll find something for you."
Since that moment where they failed to recognise her they treated her kindly, and taken inside by them they exchanged courtesies and Tsubone told them farewell. She never had to use the name Margaret Meister, but she did wonder what title Morinaga adorned to enter.
When she came into the room from the cold street the warmth pushed against her, as if to force her back; the slow murmur of people inside, released by the opening of the door, seemed to swell in her ears before they became accustomed it.
Around three dozen people milled about the ballroom, and of course she knew none of them: she saw the sober blacks and greys of men's suits, here and there the soft pinks and blues of girl's dresses, and the occasional kimono. In her uniform Tsubone was conscious of her appearance amongst. They moved sluggishly in the warmth, and Tsubone moved with them, trying to spot Morinaga, hoping to be hidden.
In a space of the floor cleared from people two young couples were dancing without music: small, neat, aloof, with an air of carelessness she couldn't hope to match. Youma must have seen them too and perhaps he felt nostalgia. She would discover Morinaga uneventfully: seated in a chair parlour, against the wall, alone as well. Too in his uniform and too without his sword. They had taken hers at the entrance, with questions, but Tsubone hid the gun beneath her haori, and she watched Morinaga from the crowd but for several moments did not move. He appeared anxious, and more assailed than her by the knowledge of his clumsiness: had he thought she would not come? Between them he was always the stalwart one, and the once or twice she had seen him falter it was but a tremor in a world of earthquakes. A mutual friend once said he only did that when she was there, but she hadn't believed him.
Tsubone left the gun in her pocket, stood in front of him, and said nothing. He saw her feet and looked up into her eyes. His mint pupils were stained with the dark puddle of guilt.
"I killed Ittōsai," was the first thing he said. "I came here alone. There's nobody to stop us now."
Then he astonished Tsubone with the sudden violence of his request, the massiveness of his loyalty: "Will you dance with me?"
She was going to kill him – she had told herself that on the way here. But instead she felt defused and disarmed, petulant and fallible: like a nun who lost her cowl, wandering the convent, meaning no blasphemy. Then she asked herself, honestly, if this is how it'd always been, and she uncovered no other answer besides yes.
He held the tip of the thin bundle of her fingers and stood. Taller than her by but a shoe's width, she was brought near, one arm splayed and against each other, the other held to their backs. Her hard elbow caught and compressed his spine. The cluster of chandeliers above glowed scarlet and rust on his shoulders, and the colours began to sway as he swayed. She heard the music start and imitated him with geniality.
It was three trips for the tango, a tap of the heel, a twirl. A pace forward for Giyuu, two backwards for Youma and his wife. Three steps for three children in her home and three bullets. Four boleos for Morinaga, who blew fire and fury into her heart. And suddenly the totality of her betrayal flooded her: that she danced with who ordered the barrage on her home, with another man besides her husband. She imagined him watching them plaintively, from heaven, but did she stop? No, she did not. She rocked, and turned, and curved, and tilted, and found herself prideful over the young couple she thought impossible to emulate: they were two cherry blossoms in the yard of the same military school, planted in parallel by coincidence; they had bloomed together, and now their leaves touched the stars.
And when the music ceased, they stared for a long time into each other's eyes. Morinaga drew his face close, and Tsubone thought for an instant they might do the indescribable. But his cheek brushed past hers and his mouth came to her ear: telling duly that the boat she was on had sunk, and that Shinobu Kochou was dead.
