The irony is that I am the one left to explain. I should commit it to paper, but I am no good with words. No one talks of shame any more, but when I walk out with this newborn, that is what I will feel. This child will want to know it all, and to understand it, and I doubt I will ever be able to bring myself to tell the truth.
It is evening, and in the thin dusk I am trying to gather and collect my thoughts. The senbei cracker fragments lie across the desk beneath the light that the evening has lent me. The blown rice will not be marshalled easily into my cupped hand. I do know now that he will not come. I know that he will not visit me again. The hot chocolate from the vending machine is too sweet and enough time has elapsed that the excuses are brittle and dried. A small sesame seed on my tongue brings a sudden burst of taste. ‘Etahin,’ so he had said.
The temple bell across the grounds sounds gently.
I should be the one to explain.
Naomi
The teahouse, Japan, 1989
‘Architects spend an entire life with this unreasonable idea that you can fight against gravity‘
−Renzo Piano
Heathrow Airport, July 2012
Wednesday 18.45. Hana Ardent clipped into her seat belt early, as if to secure misgivings she held over travelling on her own. Two men fed the locker above her head as the other passengers politely squeezed past them in the aisle. She eyed them with the interest of one settling in for the long haul – in this case, flight BA4600 to Tokyo. Eleven hours and forty minutes, enough time to accommodate her entire week’s lectures. That’s if she were to attend them all.
If she could choose her companion for the journey it would not be the business traveller but the man in the maroon woollen. It was holey and not entirely clean and it held for her some comfort, as if he might live on the same edge of domestic chaos that she inhabited. He was a little older than her, possibly late twenties, and some part of his life must have necessitated this apparent neglect. By the time they touched down in Haneda International she would surely have discovered the answer. That Hana could have no say in the matter of her fellow travellers, even though she had paid a fortune for her economy ticket, riled her. She should make it into a game. Then again, perhaps not.
Against the window seat, following the indecisive summer light skittering across the tarmac, she traced the line of the ailerons at the edge of the wing. A cloud shift darkened the metal span, making it appear suddenly less resilient. Just like her determination to go. It was not as if she had ever been forbidden to make the journey, but she knew it was against her wishes, against her last wishes, though of course it had not been put in to so many words.
Ed introduced himself as he toyed with a loose thread on what must have been a favourite jumper. He explained he lived in Tokyo, was relatively new to his company and made so many trips he had to fly economy. There was, he said wearily, nothing special for him in an international flight. As he leaned back in his seat and focused his pale-grey eyes, shot with what might have been premature cynicism, he did nothing to calm her nerves. She checked her seatbelt. The line of flesh folded over the thin fabric at her waist was a little testament to her need for comfort food. Hana had dressed for the flight and might appear perhaps as a girl trying to stave off the onset of woman. Her thin tribal shirt complemented the scarf tied, Frida Kahlo-style, around her head, swaddling those of her thoughts that had a propensity to wander off. She was defenceless in the face of all things creative and still trying on a persona for size but hadn’t finally decided. Once he had settled, there was nothing between them but his wool and her thin sleeve of batik cotton.
It was her first trip to Japan she told him and she shared her excitement as the plane circled London and she drew him into a search for identifiable landmarks around her home in Dalston. But there was no sign of the Georgian terraces with tall, confident windows, built to see and be seen, and brick, that unmistakable colour of London rain. As the plane rounded the city sprawl, she didn’t notice his stolen glances for the playing fields of his West London Grammar.
‘So Hana means flower.’
He would have guessed she must be half Japanese. She knew she had chatted too much even before the engines drowned her out as they fought against gravity. Ungenerously, he shifted a scuffed leather document case to his knees decisively. But she carried on, telling him that her mother had lived in Tokyo in 1989.
‘A lot went on that year.’ He seemed obliged to tell her and rewarded her blank look with a catalogue. ‘Tiananmen. The fall of the Berlin wall. Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest.’
Hana laughed at his mock gravity and continued the game, adding a great earthquake to the list, which he claimed not to remember. He seemed tired of their first steps of acquaintance as he slipped the sheaf of documents from his case. She shouldn’t have talked so much.
He was returning from a business trip, he apologized.
Hana was left to survey the mood-board of Southern England – earth tones, fading to the shadows of a Sandra Blow sketch – and she busied herself with the intricacies of weaving a plait. She could see he was well-defended in a carapace of media; pads and pods and luxury headphones, which, she supposed, kept him reassuringly locked in some sort of solipsism. She liked his choice of his music. Easy Classical. She listened until