‘What did she do before, in Japan?’ the kindliest neighbour asked Vera, about Keiko, encountering the two on the street.
‘I am a diver,’ Keiko said, understanding.
‘Oh,’ said the neighbour, her eyes jumping from Vera to Keiko. A furrow developed in her brow. Perhaps she thought that Keiko was a performing diver, like in a circus. ‘I don’t suppose there is much call for a diver here.’
Vera’s teacher advised Keiko to go to the aquarium; maybe Keiko could find a job cleaning tanks. This was a good idea, and they both went, but once again Keiko was refused. Men did that job.
They returned to Horseshoe Bay. ‘I am a good diver,’ said Keiko. ‘What I love to do. Go to shore I do it. Pick up shellfish under the water,’ she said.
They tried a strip of beach on Bowen Island. But even Keiko could not work underwater, not in Canada. It was too cold. One man told her to go to Australia, but she did not know how to get there. There was only one place she could dive. Japan.
And suddenly, more than anything, that was what Vera wanted. To go with Keiko to Japan. She was angry at Hamilton Drew. She did write to him, but all she could put for an address was Kobe, Japan. If her father came, if he at long last materialised, she wanted to be gone. To have disappeared somewhere, so that he would look for her, and mourn. Even better to have disappeared in the Far East, where he had disappeared himself.
She felt that she was a failure, a useless, unlovable girl. She had been insufficient to keep her mother alive, and no better at keeping her grandfather alive. Whatever it was they were fighting her father about, whatever it was the men were looking for, it was more important than she was: that was the message. She might as well go off to Japan, wherever that was: she was no good for anything else.
It happened quickly, after that.
Keiko’s fishmonger in Japantown would let her work to earn the money to get home to Japan. Only for three months, he said, she could clean fish. But you cannot take that girl with you, he said. She is white, and she will not be safe.
‘He must be crazy,’ said Keiko to Vera. ‘It is not so.’
‘Japan will have war with all the white people of the world,’ said the fishmonger. ‘It is you who are crazy.’
Because they knew it would be for the last time, they returned to Homer Street. Hinchcliffe was positively rigid, Keiko strangely poised.
‘Honourable Miss Hinchcliffe,’ she said, bowing deeply. Hinchcliffe could not see the little smile around her mouth because Keiko’s face was directed toward the green linoleum floor. ‘We have much use of money you before given. And now we come to say that we like to go shopping more.’
‘It is for me,’ said Vera. ‘Grandfather would not have wanted me to be hungry.’
‘No,’ said Miss Hinchcliffe. ‘He would not. Whatever he left, it is for you. But he left nothing. I have looked.’
Vera felt as if she had lost him all over again.
‘I don’t believe it,’ she whispered.
Perhaps that was why Hinchcliffe opened the desk drawer and pulled out another two hundred dollars.
Keiko and Vera were ecstatic. It would go toward their tickets.
Anger was not all that drove Vera to go to a strange country. There was something more grand and admirable, under the rage of an abandoned child. Japan was a palace of marvels. She wanted to go there to find beauty and tranquillity and mystery. She had seen this in the pictures. This was the Japan of her grandfather’s travels, of his life. She did not understand, or remember, that the pictures were ancient, that the world they described was one hundred and more years old. What difference did it make? The pictures spoke the language of dreams. She went to find the land where it was spoken.
But the language of dreams is loss. The love of beauty is elegy. Made of flesh, we see with the eyes of the past, over the shoulders of the living. The older Vera will tell this to her collectors, the ones who love the ukiyo-e but do not understand why. The ‘here and now’ that the ukiyo-e artists carved and coloured was already dying, even in its own time. It is useless to mourn or to fight it. We might as well celebrate. It is a kind of ecstasy.
But so dangerous, in the West. To give in is to give up ambitions. She will see this, in the prints she had examined so minutely, in her grandfather’s elderly wisdom. To adopt an inspired idleness, an absorbing ritual. It was so foreign and alluring in the land of her upbringing, her Canadian, Protestant upbringing. Though sad, Belle was never idle, but earnestly found digging up the flower beds or mowing the grass, rattling the dishes in the drying rack or sighing over the wringer washer. Never so beautifully turned out as the Japanese in their riotously painted kimonos behind a screen with chopsticks in their hair, busy in occupations of the moment, blissfully turned away from, but patiently awaiting, eternity. Vera would not get it right herself, not for many years.
Now she had an ambition.
She would go to the place where he had been, this grandfather of hers.
She would go into the pictures.
Maybe that is what happens to people who have been abandoned.
They go to the place where their abandoners have gone.
She went to where her grandfather had been.
But her mother had also left her.
She could not go to where Belle had gone. She would not go.
Later, when life was very dark and when she was nearly the age Belle had been when she died, Vera did think of going where her mother had gone. Of taking the bus, paying the exact fare, making her way along between the rows of seats, as that young mother with the faraway husband had done, lurching because her balance had never been good and it was worse with the medicine. And then ringing the bell for a stop. The handbag carefully left by the side of the bank.
She did not go that way.
‘For that you may be proud of yourself,’ said the sword polisher.
‘Do you think so? Some days I wonder.’
He offers neither condemnation nor praise.
‘You had another path to find.’
3 Uke-nagashi Warding off: take and give back
Yokohama 27 February 1936
High, light piles of snow sat on every flat surface–benches, roofs, even the narrow edges of the incomprehensible street signs. The sky was black and luminous; red beams of emergency lights crisscrossed in the sky above their heads. Trucks were parked across each end of the empty street. Apart from distant sirens, there was not a sound.
‘This is not Japan,’ whispered Vera. ‘We got off the boat at the wrong place.’
Keiko stood on the portside walkway, one cloth satchel in each hand. She lifted her face to the night and sniffed the sea air, trying to sense her way back. She had been gone for nearly three years. She had told Vera so many times that she would cry tears of joy when she stepped off the boat onto Japanese soil. But her face showed confusion and doubt.
The street was nearly empty. Keiko swayed. There were always crowds, cars and streetcars, men stepping wide-legged in kimono or swiftly in black suits with round black bowler hats. There were always women with babies bundled on their backs. Now there was no one. Then into the emptiness came the sound of a snare drum. And footsteps, so many. Around the corner came a column of soldiers marching on the broad, empty street. The men’s eyes did not look anywhere but straight ahead. On and on they came.
This