Jasmine Read online

  Jasmine

  THAMES RIVER PRESS

  An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company Limited (WPC)

  Another imprint of WPC is Anthem Press (www.anthempress.com)

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2012 by

  THAMES RIVER PRESS

  75-76 Blackfriars Road

  London SE1 8HA

  www.thamesriverpress.com

  Original title: Jasumin

  Copyright © Noboru Tsujihara 2004

  Originally published in Japan by Bungei Shunju, Tokyo

  English translation copyright © Juliet Carpenter 2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without written permission of the publisher.

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All the characters and events described in this novel are imaginary and any similarity with real people or events is purely coincidental.

  A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978-0-85728-250-7

  Cover design by Laura Carless.

  This title is also available as an eBook.

  This book has been selected by the Japanese Literature Publishing Project (JLPP), an initiative of the Agency for Cultural Affairs of Japan.

  * * *

  This ebook was produced with http://pressbooks.com.

  1

  On this late-June evening, the rain had ended, leaving a low bank of clouds and a damp wind blowing down off the mountains. The restaurant Teite had just opened its doors for dinner, and already a couple was ensconced at a window table. Through the blinds, they could see the leaves of the vine outside rustling at the window ledge, as if trying to peer in.

  The man was in his late thirties and the woman in her mid-twenties, seated not across from one another but obliquely at the small table. The woman, who was wearing an orange dress, had the window seat, and now and again she rested her elbow on the table and looked out absently at the trembling leaves. The man wore a light beige linen jacket, a blue-striped shirt, and a casually knotted cotton necktie, his taste in clothes discerning. As they spoke, their eyes were bright, their expressions animated.

  The restaurant had always gone by the name Teite. The current owner and chef, Shi Yang, represented the third generation of the family owners. His grandfather had come to Japan from Shanghai as cook for the manager of the Fisher Company and later went into business for himself, setting up a little Cantonese restaurant midway down Kobe’s Tor Road.

  Teite now served French food. Orthodox in menu and service alike, it had won acclaim for a style of cuisine that used no butter.

  The restaurant’s name – unusual even in China – was written with a character meaning “a three-legged kettle” by itself, “great vigour” when doubled. In Mandarin the compound was pronounced dingding, in Cantonese, teitei. Shi Ying had adjusted the latter reading to make it easier for his Japanese clientele.

  The couple was eating striped mullet, their knives and forks making light clinking sounds. Shi Ying had come by earlier to say hello and to provide a rapid-fire explanation of the dish: it was the first of the season, from Akashi, on the Inland Sea. It had been split open, stuffed with prawn mousse, and wrapped in a magnolia leaf. After a light steaming to impart fragrance, the mullet was sprinkled generously with sea salt and grilled.

  After the host had left, the man turned to his sister and said, “The food’s great, so I have no regrets. This tastes incredible. You know, I’m not the first to say it, but it’s funny to think the corpse of a fish could be so succulent.”

  “For heaven’s sake, Aki!” Mitsuru laid down her knife and fork in mock indignation, her bracelet brushing against her wineglass with a faint tinkling. The bracelet was inlaid with lapis lazuli, the deep, dark blue flecked with golden pyrite – a reminder of the legend that the gemstone was formed from the starry sky over Arabian deserts. Azerbaijan, a country caught between the Black Sea and the Caspian, was a leading source of lapis, and the ancient Silk Road owed its origin not to silk, but to this precious stone, routes having opened from China to the east and Egypt to the west in the course of the struggle for its possession.

  “Nice bracelet.”

  “It’s from Urumqi.”

  “So it’s from Shuichi. He’s back now?”

  Mitsuru nodded, lifting the braceleted arm and placing her fingers on her throat where her Adam’s apple would have been if she were a man. Her hand was long and tapered, and slightly bony. His own hand, wrapped around his wineglass, looked very much like it.

  “I haven’t heard from him,” he added.

  Shuichi, an old college friend, was a Beijing correspondent. Three months ago, public security authorities in Beijing had arrested him for “reporting Chinese national secrets extorted by unlawful means.” Just two weeks ago he’d been deported, but his current whereabouts were unknown. He had a wife and child living in Kawasaki, but he hadn’t been to see them.

  “You know what? I’m a horrible person.”

  “Mitsuru, how you can say that about yourself?”

  “I can, because I am horrible. I have wicked thoughts…”

  “To do with Shuichi, you mean?”

  “I’m not saying, even if you are my brother.”

  Because you are my brother is more like it, he reflected. He looked over at her, noting her even features, then said in a soothing tone, “They’ll go away, these thoughts. I don’t know what’s on your mind, but believe me, they will.”

  “Oh? How?”

  His eyes took on a mischievous glint. “Easy. You give in to ’em.”

  She smiled with sudden cheerfulness and took up her knife and fork, handling them as lightly as a pair of feathers. “The corpse… of a fish,” she muttered.

  “You’ve seen him, haven’t you?”

  Mitsuru bent over her plate, feigning interest in the mullet’s mortal remains. Ten days ago Shuichi had slipped down to Osaka, and the two of them had spent a few days at a hotel on the southern tip of Awaji Island in a room overlooking Naruto Bridge and the famous whirlpool.

  “Where is he now?”

  “He’s not in Japan anymore.”

  “So where’d he go?”

  “Yugoslavia. He says civil war is brewing.”

  “Wicked thoughts? Mitsuru, don’t tell me—”

  She kept her eyes downcast, and twisted the bracelet around her wrist.

  She means to follow him, he thought. Which would mean prying him away from his wife and child once and for all. Calling this “wicked” was perhaps a bit strong, but their mother had given her a strict upbringing and that was the way she saw it.

  Mother will take it hard, he started to say, and then was brought up short – he himself was leaving in two days for a China still under martial law.

  “A minute ago, Aki, you said I should give in to them.” She picked up her wineglass and sighed, just enough to cloud the crystal rim. She had on a bright dress, but as her eyes darkened, her whole being seemed to drain of colour.

  Aki merely smiled lopsidedly and looked idly around the room. Rather to his surprise, every table was now filled.

  Their entrée arrived: roasted young rabbit.

  “I’m going to see Mother tomorrow,” he said. “What should I expect? Is her memory really slipping?”

  “Yes. The other day she asked me where she was. I told her, ‘We’re in Mikage, Mom, your old neighbourhood in Kobe. Down that way is Fukada Pond, where the ducks are. Beyond it is Henri Charpentier, and just up the hill is the Garden Oriental Soshuen.’ She cocked her head like this and said, ‘Mikage?’ like it didn’t ring a bell. Then she looked straight at me and said, ‘I’m sorry, my d
ear, but I don’t know your name.’ The doctor told me later that when people bring her fresh flowers, she tears them apart and eats the petals.”

  “That’s going beyond forgetfulness,” said Aki, pulling white petals from the little arrangement of orchids on the table. He was going to toss them into his own mouth, but stopped when he saw the sheen of tears in his sister’s eyes. He took up his knife and fork, cut the rabbit on his plate into petal-thin slices, and ate three of those instead, one after the other.

  “That’s still not all. You know what else she said? ‘I wonder how Dad is.’”

  “Hmm. Which one do you suppose she meant – yours or mine?”

  Mitsuru lowered her eyes, fringed with long lashes, and shook her head. Aki was the child of their mother’s first marriage, Mitsuru of her second. Both of their fathers had died young.

  “I told her he was fine, and she glared at me and called me a liar. I wonder if she knew all along and was playing some kind of a game.” Opening her cloth handbag, she took out a handkerchief and pressed it to the corners of her eyes. She never carried a leather purse.

  Waki Akihiko hadn’t learnt of the existence of a mysterious creature known as a “little sister” until he was grown up. When he was three, his father suddenly disappeared, and when he was nine his mother remarried. He then went to live with his paternal grandparents in the city of Tanabe, in Wakayama Prefecture, until he finished high school. During that interval, communication with his mother stopped. One morning, while a university student in Kyoto, he’d found a girl with braided hair outside his lodgings, standing in the soft sun of early spring. That had been no ordinary day: following his first-ever experience with a woman, he had returned home early to encounter for the first time his half-sister.

  Mitsuru picked up her glass, which still contained a good deal of white wine, and emptied it in one gulp, exposing her slender throat. She might have a nice-looking throat, but he felt compelled as her elder brother to tell her off. When had she started to guzzle her wine like that? Yet, nothing could be harder than drawing such lapses in behaviour to the attention of the offender. Considerable courage was required to look a woman of character in the eye and point out her failings – even if she was your little sister. More courage than he could muster, as it happened. Mitsuru was obviously vulnerable at the moment; it wouldn’t take much to topple her over. He decided that as her elder brother his only recourse was to reach over and fill her glass with more wine.

  “Thanks,” she said, leaning an elbow on the table and making lines in the tablecloth with her nails. She made no move to pick up the glass.

  “So tell me,” she went on, “have you found out anything more about your dad?”

  Aki nodded, poured some wine into his own glass, and let a moment pass before speaking. “When he was young he worked for a Shanghai movie company called Huaying. I told you that much, right?”

  “Yes, and even though all the other Japanese employees were repatriated after the war, he didn’t come back for five years. Then when you were still little he took off for China again, leaving Mom and you behind, and never came home. Which should I say, ‘came back’ or ‘came home’?”

  “Same thing.”

  “I guess so. Anyway, what happened after that?”

  “Ah. After that it gets interesting.”

  Huaying – an elegant name meaning, literally, “flower shadow” – was actually an abbreviation of Zhonghua dianying lianhe gufen youxian gongsi, or Chinese Film United, Ltd. This wartime movie company grew out of the cooperation between the Japanese Army, which occupied the city after the 1937 Battle of Shanghai, and the Nationalist government of Wang Jingwei, who had parted company with Chiang Kai-shek. Huaying used to control the production and distribution of all Shanghai films. It was supported by the Japanese film pioneer Kawakita Nagamasa, founder of the Towa Company, and by Zhang Shankun, the big-time Shanghai producer. Huaying distributed over 140 motion pictures throughout China, but these were later dubbed “slave movies” and excluded from the official history of Chinese cinema.

  A large number of film-minded young Japanese had found employment at Huaying – among them Aki’s father, Waki Tanehiko, who joined the company on graduating from the prestigious East Asia Common Culture Academy, a Japanese institution in Shanghai specializing in Sino-Japanese relations. After returning to Tokyo in 1946, Kawakita had set about importing and distributing Western films, thereby contributing to the revitalization of the postwar movie industry. Former Huaying employees had aided him in this work. For one reason or another, Waki Tanehiko’s repatriation was delayed, which kept him from participating in the rebuilding of Towa. An almost 500-page company history, published in 1978, called Half a Century at Towa, devoted considerable space to Kawakita’s prewar accomplishments on the Chinese mainland; there were a good twenty pages on Huaying, including detailed accounts of the doings of its Japanese employees – but not a word about Waki Tanehiko. Just as Huaying movies were expunged from the history of Chinese cinema, so Tanehiko’s existence had apparently been consigned to oblivion.

  The assumption that he was dead, however, was open to question. After leaving Shanghai in 1950, he ran a small trading company in Kobe, eventually marrying and fathering a child, Akihiko. Five years after his return in October 1955 he suddenly went back to Shanghai. Some two months later came word of his arrest in Beijing on suspicion of spying. Nothing further was known of his fate. In May 1958, the so-called Nagasaki flag incident brought Sino-Japanese trade relations to a halt. Then in summer 1961 the family learnt through the Japan-China Friendship Association that Tanehiko was dead. Yasuko, Aki’s mother, tried more than once to go to Beijing herself, only to be stymied by opposition from those around her – or by obstruction by invisible sources.

  Feeling slightly guilty, Aki picked up his wineglass and drained its contents, just as Mitsuru had done, then quickly polished off the remainder of the young rabbit. He couldn’t suppress a small belch. “Sorry. That’s what comes of eating too well. Anyway, here’s the interesting part: I heard he may be alive.”

  Mitsuru held her napkin to her mouth, unnecessarily, and said in a muffled voice, “Then Mom’s question wasn’t so far off. I wonder if she knew by some kind of telepathy. Where’d this information come from?”

  “Shanghai. That’s why I’m going back.”

  “Isn’t there a ban on travel to China now?”

  “Not an out-and-out ban anymore. It’s left to the traveller’s discretion – you can go if you want. This time the day after tomorrow, look for me on the East China Sea.”

  “You’re going by boat?”

  “Yes. I bet not many people take a slow boat to China anymore, but it appeals to my sense of fun. Even more so at a time like this. In the old days everybody went by sea – my dad, too. Luckily, I’m on sabbatical and have all the time in the world. And a multiple-entry visa. It’ll be a kind of fact-finding mission. What do you say, Mitsuru – want to come along?”

  Aki peered into his sister’s face. He had issued the invitation on the spur of the moment and half in jest, but now it struck him that this wasn’t a bad idea at all – far better than her chasing after Shuichi all the way to Yugoslavia, God forbid.

  He went on, “Check out ‘Shanghai’ in an English dictionary sometime and you’ll see something interesting. S-H-A-N-G-H-A-I. The first meaning they give is ‘Chinese harbour city,’ naturally. Next is a kind of long-legged fowl. But there’s more: there’s actually an English verb, ‘to shanghai.’ Nautical slang. Means ‘to force someone aboard a ship by plying him with drugs or liquor; to procure sailors for a sea voyage by kidnapping.’ How about that? For a city to be turned into a verb, and especially a verb reeking of danger like that – makes you realize the place lived up to its old nickname, ‘demon city.’ What do you think the next entry is, after ‘shanghai’? ‘Shangri-la.’”

  “Ooh, we can go shangri-la-ing in Shanghai. What would ‘to kobe’ mean?”

  “Unfortunately kobe didn’t
make it in, not even as a place name. We think of it as our gateway to the sea – one we opened up to foreign countries – but we’ve got it backwards. It was England that determined the world’s ports of call, back when it ruled the seven seas. English domination of the Orient meant they had to secure shipping routes, starting from London and then on to Port Said, Aden, Bombay, Madras, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shanghai – with Kobe at the very end. We’re the back of beyond, the tail end of the world. So what do you say, Mitsuru, want to shanghai? Or be shanghaied? Could be another way for you to carry out your wicked thoughts.”

  “Okay, okay. What are you going to do in Shanghai – try to find your dad?”

  “Yes, but do me a favour – don’t blow it out of proportion, all right? After all this time, I won’t find out anything to get excited about. I’ve got no obligation and no responsibility to track him down in the first place. And all this about him being alive is probably nothing. Still, there are worse ways to spend a sabbatical than playing detective for a little while.”

  “But isn’t the city still under martial law? Sounds pretty dangerous to me – ten thousand people killed, they’re saying.”

  “Your Shuichi’s Yugoslavia could turn out to be worse. Ten thousand dead may be overdoing it anyway. I’d put the number of deaths at Tiananmen Square more in the range of a few hundred.”

  Mention of the crackdown that had occurred in Beijing earlier that month, at dawn on 4th June 1989 made Aki feel uncomfortable. He couldn’t help recognizing the phoniness that always attaches to any bystander presuming to speak about other people’s misfortunes. China was a foreign land, which made the Chinese people strangers – strangers among whom his father’s own secrets lay buried. Why had Tanehiko left his wife and child to head back there? What lay behind the charge of espionage? He’d been presumed dead, and almost thirty years had to pass before this rumour surfaced out of nowhere that he might still be alive.