‘Mickey Mouse? But a bit tanned.’
Jess shot Hana a look. ‘This is Tanuki. He brings good fortune, especially in financial matters. And sex,’ she added in a helpful afterthought.
‘Funny there’s so much superstition. Mickey Mouse doesn’t mean anything,’ Hana said. Here it seemed important to hang on to the significance of things.
‘He has big balls too,’ Jess stated the obvious mischievously. She had an appetite and chose quickly from the menu. They ate and talked of Seattle and London sushi and that thing guys do when they start a row about something trivial when they need to bring up a different injury.
As they left neither could decide who best resembled the potbellied bear raccoon.
‘Go lucky,’ Jess burped solemnly.
‘And you,’ Hana wondered for a moment whether she would ever need anything more than good company and so, ditching the teahouse idea for the day, she fell in with Jess.
Jess wanted Hana to see the city before they got stuck into work, so the next day they crossed the whole of Shibuya, took the metro to Aoyama and walked the hill to Omotesandō. There they peered beyond concave glass so unreflective it seemed they could reach in for the Yamamoto and Gucci bags, too expensive to touch.
To vary the homestay offering of rice, pickles and dried or jellied fish, they chose to eat at the end of the metro line on the pavement terrace of a student café screened off with sculptured tea bushes. They were the only foreigners in the place but drank their way to the point where it didn’t matter.
After plenty of warm sake, they returned to the house where Ukai, oblivious to the hour and to their greeting, was still painting in poor light at the dining room table. He often worked at his SUMI-E, and in the cool of the late afternoons he would trim the kiwi vine that ran over the door. The brushwork was some sort of farewell poem in calligraphy; a tradition, Jess had said. Great big black strokes of angry ineptitude.
Jess cast an eye over progress as they passed. ‘Not bad for a yakuza.’
Now used to her humour, Hana found branding the old man a gangster amusing.
She was sure he had said ‘Naomi’ on that first night. If she could just make herself understood enough to talk to him …
They took the stairs unsteadily.
‘Are these mosquito bites?’ Hana inspected her arms before scaling the stairs.
Jess ignored her and returning to a pet subject said, ‘I think I saw one of the guys I met at the club in that restaurant, If I don’t pull soon …’
She laughed like a hyena as Hana held the banister unsteadily.
‘Tako?’ she suggested weighing both in each hand for comic effect and risking a fall.
She stabilized for a moment. ‘Now, the lawyer from the plane …’ Hana began, holding her forehead in exasperation at losing contact. ‘Fluent. And he was great company too.’
‘Careless at best,’ Jess slurred, and in her optimistic way rambled, ‘confidentially, you know, my Japanese isn’t bad either.’ There was nothing confidential about it and she was, as usual, endearingly keen to come top in the competition for great company.
As Hana jabbed at the air-con remote, Jess promised to search for English law firms in Tokyo and slumped on her bed. Hana found that, on returning to the room this time, it had strangely begun to feel like a haven in the city.
Neither of them saw Tako emerge from the lobby door to listen from the bottom of the stairs.
On Thursday afternoon they walked to the metro.
‘Trust me, we want to take the Ginza line beyond Asakusa temple.’
Though Hana had wanted to head for Meiji Jingu temple in Harajuku, she went along with it.
The approach to the painted wooden structure at Asakusa was lined with kiosks selling souvenir biscuits, miniature samurai swords and polyester silks, and, under the canopied bronze incense burner, people stood washing in the curling smoke. Cupped hands drew the incense silently over their faces and hands. It was, Hana supposed, as effective as any purification for the soul, and she wanted to try it, wafting trails of incense across the air, following the contours of her upper body. Jess could not be persuaded to join in and they left the main complex to skirt the site for the teahouse.
Their hands traced the brushwood fence tied with origami prayers and tagged wind chimes sang as they passed. Before they reached the teahouse, they came across a forest of little statues lining the path, no more than a foot high, constructed from stones, each wearing startling scraps of red cloth, tied as bibs. Hana called to Jess for an explanation.
‘Those—’ Jess threw out as she marched on ‘—they’re Jizo.’
Hana waited for more.
‘For the God of little ones. Any who died in childhood or were Unborn.’
It was unsettling. Futile rags on petrified stones. And they walked on.
Finally Jess stopped. Opening her arms to a building rising up in front of them: a red pagoda with storied eaves like the exposed ribs of a musical instrument. As if the chimes they had heard along the way emanated from this enormous child’s rattle.
‘Chashitsu. The teahouse,’ Jess said with a flourish, making the pronouncement as if she had guided Hana to the very heart of her pilgrimage. She watched Hana carefully for her reaction but her rapt face changed suddenly.
‘Well, this isn’t it,’ Hana was obliged to point out. ‘A world-famous temple?’ she added crossly.
‘Yes, but the style …’ Jess’s confidence faded. It was a reference and weren’t they out looking for references? Wasn’t this why they had come to the garish, red, Buddhist temple in the first place?
Hana walked around the wooden pagoda. For Jess it was no big deal. She would never get the architectural subtleties. The simplicity of Zen. It was stunning but it was all wrong and far from the simple structure she was looking for. As they left they passed the Jizo stones, draped with fading rags, and coldly chilling.
‘Tan-tan-tanuki no kintama wa,
Kaze mo nai no ni,
Bura bu-ra’
‘Tan-tan-tanuki’s balls ring,
Though there is no wind,
They swing-swing-swing’
− schoolyard song in Japan
The basement smelt of disinfectant. Emiko, the manager, was at the bar, facing away from her, stock-checking her screen; the light was flat, barely sufficient. Someone hollered from the back and she answered him meekly in Japanese. He began testing a UV light and it picked up the white T-shirt she wore over tight jeans. Behind her the light pulsed across an enormous woodblock print, exposing an octopus that filled the entire wall. They might as well be under water.
She pulled up a bar-stool and greeted Hana quietly, with scant energy for someone desperate for staff. The opening conversation was short; like the atmosphere in the room, she seemed a little stale, and as she perched on the stool, Hana knew she was out of place.
Emiko closed her screen; she had a tiny scar above her upper lip, where a kiss might have been planted in a near miss; a fine line between love and hate perhaps. Hana watched her. But