 
## The Wild Horses of Hiroshima

### A Novel

### Paul Xylinides
Smashwords edition. Copyright © Paul Xylinides 2014

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the author, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the purchaser.

ISBN-13: 978-1502428844

ISBN-10: 1502428849

PaulXylinides.com

Cover by: Design for Writers (Brown Media)

### Contents

1 "The Most Terrifying, Most Beautiful Thing"

2 I Am Sorry for Hiroshima ... and Nagasaki

3 Miyeko

4 His Japanese Mother

5 The Top of the World

6 Ursa Major

7 Return to Hiroshima

8 Yukio Washington

9 Gunshots in the Park

10 Shoot-Out

11 The Geisha Satoko

12 The Dawning Sky

13 Yoko

14 Boss Ayakura

15 Zhang Huan

16 Miné and Makiko

17 Uncle

18 The Yakuza

19 Elevation

20 Why We Destroy Each Other

21 The Prodigal Son

22 Pigeon With Green Peas

23 The Hit

24 Performance Art

About the Author

## Epiphany

"Such stuff as dreams are made on,"

Will S said, is all we ever were.

And so thought I,

In dappled shade,

Where river played

One blossom time,

Beneath a cornflower sky.

So memory, culled from that somewhere

Beyond all wrecking wind and time,

Beyond all pain,

With even and unhurried pace

Spoke all its meaning plain:

"Here – if I choose –,

Though at the centre of the storm,

I'll turn and dream again."

– David George Taylor on the front of his painting

"I realize the tragic significance of the atomic bomb...It is an awful responsibility which has come to us ... We thank God ... and we pray that He may guide us to use it in His ways and for His purposes."

President Harry Truman
"[Japan is] a string of islands in the so-called Pacific Ring of Fire, gripped uneasily between the Pacific tectonic plate and the Philippine Sea Plate. It has seen more than its fair share of catastrophic disasters – in the twentieth century alone, earthquake, typhoon, tsunami, fire, volcano, nuclear attack, and terrorism.

"Japan has always responded with stoic rebuilding. But unlike almost anyone in the world, the Japanese also refract their historic misfortune through a unique cultural lens, producing monster movies, Zen poetry, modernist post-apocalyptic literature, and even pornographic manga involving tentacle rape. Why is Japan's response to its history of disaster so fantastical?

"For centuries, Japanese authors, poets, and artists have mulled over the existential instability of their island life. They personified their demons, giving fears tangible shape to make them less frightening. The _namazu_ is a legendary figure and a popular subject of woodblock prints – a giant underground catfish who swishes his tail to cause earthquakes, often shown with a monkey or a minor deity ( _Kashima_ ) on his back, attempting to restrain him.

"[The] bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 ushered in a whole new era of horror. The response of many Japanese was to displace the trauma into the oblique and fantastical, into monsters and allegories.

"The Godzilla films clearly represent nuclear chaos engulfing Tokyo."

Britt Peterson, _The Globe and Mail_ , Toronto, Canada, March 19, 2011, p.F4.
"'Were there no such thing as man [...it] would all be natural woods and fields of grasses. This land would belong to the deer and wild boar, wouldn't it? Why did man come into this world? It's frightening...mankind.'"

Yasunari Kawabata, _The Old Capital_ , translated by J. Martin Holman, p.115.

"The sun fell out of the sky."

Tsutomu Yamaguchi, sole survivor of two atomic bombs – Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
1

_"The Most Terrifying, Most Beautiful Thing"_

In a train carriage, conscious of the worn nap of the upholstery rubbed so bare as to appear to reflect the soiled window, Miyeko bends to sit. Outside, past Yokagara Station, the squat wooden houses are fitted so close together that they flow past like an overcrowded harbour. For its part, the late summer sun is well-risen and well-anchored as on an invisible tether that could be tied off anywhere including to the train engine itself or to somewhere in the sky. The illusion of security it gives as it follows them is absolute and Miyeko is glad of it. So far, the war has little touched Hiroshima directly, but can this last? The ring of mountains in the far distance seems to promise as much. They have always been protective.

Miyeko is as immaculately groomed as she can be in these times. She looks out over the undamaged areas of the city that have escaped the attentions of "Mr B." – "Mr B.!" the silly ones have named the B52 bomber, running out their front doors and calling to each other, pointing and shading their eyes better to see the death-dealing behemoth droning high above them. Everyone has been prepared for so long, with shelters dug, cement poured, bags of essentials stacked at the ready, drills performed until one hardly needs be fully awake to do them, so that an expectancy verging on impatience charges the air for "Mr. B" to recognize their efforts and not find them wanting. There are even those who boast that their preparations are beyond reproach and certainly more than sufficient against whatever may fall from the sky. She knows nothing of this and must heed what others say.

One day, she had come home from school to find her American book gone from her bedside table. At dinner, a look and a nod from her father tell her all and she accepts their meaning. It is a small sadness among the world's much greater sorrows. Not that she understands how matters might improve by her not reading James Fenimore Cooper's _The Last Of The Mohicans_. Her father does not deny her the book out of hatred. The serious manner of his slight bow is a warning of danger, that is all.

According to his report of the event, the pilot witnessed, "the most terrifying, most beautiful thing" he had ever seen. Future images taken from space of the universe itself would show something on an infinitely grander scale but similar in effect: stars and galaxies being born in the thunder clouds of creation and destruction. Perhaps, as an old man, with the comfort of his cigar in hand, seeing these photographs had especially reminded him of what he had done.

At her train window, Miyeko blinked and blinked when the white light lit up the already bright morning, raising her arm against the new and blinding sun to protect her eyes. A few seconds of incomprehension filled the train carriage and then the whole of it was going over and the passengers transformed into flying debris - ordnances of flesh mistakenly designed to rupture and explode against hard and protruding surfaces, and then to lie like broken and bleeding marionettes.

With her arms broken and neck twisted, Miyeko remained motionless, in shock, aware of a cooling lubricant at the back of her head as she recorded images about her that mirrored her own condition. Somehow this immense unity of circumstance both appalled and gratified her, and she felt at peace, believing it to be the end of things. She could not identify what she was hearing but the sound of it had to mean imminent annihilation. Wildly, she imagined a monstrous wounded angel crashing into the universe. The other-worldly being was, in fact, the disintegrated city piling up against the undercarriage of the train. She did not see, as many in the city and beyond did, the triumphant mushroom cloud rising upon its stem until it finally poked its obscene head above the sky. And no one could see how dreams looked when they were destroyed, but everyone knew the sight of it would be unbearable and fled from the destruction that went deeper even than their melted flesh.

Many a soul could never recover.

Buried along with everything else, time continued to run like an underground stream beneath the surface of things. Aboveground, moments must be following upon each other but without significance to the train passengers. At first even those who were fit could not move. All who were still alive had been shocked out of their bodies and flooded the wreckage with simple awareness while their inert flesh nested on shattered glass, stretched across the wrong ends of things, lay upon burst and crumpled baggage. Elbows were jammed into eye sockets, hands had reached for another's throat and come to rest there, knees had sunk into soft stomachs. When, at last, consciousness of these effronteries began to dawn, those who could extricated themselves, not neglecting to make polite apologies.

With the war come so completely and suddenly upon them, Miyeko unaccountably felt relieved for those who had been awaiting its arrival with such impatience. There was an instant in which she did not imagine or entertain a thought of their probable complete destruction. They still proudly lived in her mind. She could not see the hanging flesh, or the charred lumps that just moments ago had been a parent, a sister, a brother. Conscientiously delivered to hastily established crematoria, these remains would disappear into mounds of ash that indiscriminately supplied marked and sealed envelopes should a claimant appear.

Those who unhappily did not make it into the cart of pure and complete annihilation, the partially spared, gathered their liquefied organs and their sticky folds of skin in their hands and fled that radioactive light with monstrosities of the flesh, hitherto not seen, already set to bloom from the burning of it.

The American pilot had noted the progress of the train around the city's perimeter as his plane droned toward the designated coordinates of release. The innocence of it had charmed him for a moment and its vulnerability had impinged upon his thoughts, but he had made no effort to calculate the total effect of the event he was about to unleash, for he knew that the sum of it was more than he could ever account for. His face had not shown this failure of the imagination as he gazed upon the peaceful scene below. It had registered as a virginal target and, puffing on his cigar, he had given the release command with a certain amount of satisfaction.

When the letter came from America, the nausea that Miyeko experienced caused her not to open it for a month and she did not know why she did not simply destroy it. It sat on her bureau in the small room that her aunt and uncle had provided her. She had not propped it against the mirror as a reminder of its existence as she had in the past with letters from her pen pal but still its flat and inconspicuous presence weighed upon her. One day brought a dutiful lifting of the spirit and she took the letter to her small window that directly overlooked the flowing waters of the Kyo River on whose bank her aunt and uncle had rebuilt their house.

Her uncle often told the story of their escape. How they had been breakfasting on the veranda that hot August morning. They had finished eating and were idly watching one or two small skiffs sail by when a light "like the snowy peak of Mt. Fuji exploding" replaced the ordinary light of morning. In a moment they found themselves flying out of their seats and airborne, their breakfast table and chairs magically about them, and her uncle saw the skiffs also caught up whether on a wave or in the air he could not tell. The next moment he was in the water with his wife clutching at him. Of his house he could see no more than the foundations on the river bank. Where had it gone? A special wind, he marveled, had carried him and his wife to safety. It had privileged them, he would now declare, to honour the dead and to care for their surviving niece.

Miyeko sat in the chair that she kept by the window for the view and looked again at the familiar return address: _Jonathan Springborne ... New Hampshire, U.S.A._ Fingering the foreignness of the paper and gazing at the line of stamps, she cut open the soiled and creased blue envelope and withdrew the letter within. Six years had passed but she recognized the carefulness of the hand in the large awkward script and an old feeling of companionship that she had forgotten passed through her as she began slowly to read.

Dear Miyeko,

This will be my last letter for awhile as the previous three have been returned to me, and I have not heard from you.

It makes me very sad that our two countries are at war and I hope that one day our correspondence may continue again. In all likelihood, with things the way they are, I shall be drafted when I come of age if I have not already signed up. What can you do when your country is at war, and was attacked? I cannot tell you how much I hate the idea now that I have come to know you. What would you think of me as a soldier fighting against your people? I can only imagine.

_As I said in my other letters, I managed to get a translation of_ The Tale Of Genji _(I had to send to New York for it!) and I have been reading it along with the original that you sent me. It amazes me how refined and developed was Japanese society at a time when, quite frankly, my people had not so much to boast about. (Between you and me, I would far prefer to find myself in Europe fighting against the Germans.) How are you managing with_ The Last Of The Mohicans _? The language is very flowery and poetic for the subject matter but Mr. Cooper gives a good idea of what this land and the spirit of its people are like._

Did I tell you that I plan to study forestry? This spring will see my last year of high school. What are your thoughts for the future? I cannot wait for this war to end and, if we happen to win, I do hope that Hiroshima escapes the fighting.

Do try and write to me! A letter might get through and that would be especially wonderful at this time.

Your friend,

Jonathan

She smiled when she finished and, without rereading any of it, she carefully refolded and deposited the letter with its boyish sentiments in one of her bureau drawers. She would not casually throw it away and neither would she particularly treasure it. Sufficient to put it out of sight and out of mind. She had struggled to read it. _The Last Of The Mohicans_ had gone with everything else and the English of her school years had long been fading.
2

_I Am Sorry for Hiroshima ... and Nagasaki_

The powers that be did not grant Jonathan Springborne his wish. Upon completion of his basic training, the orders for his platoon had it shipped from the East to the West coast so great were the imperatives of the Pacific. He had exercised the little right of choice he had and opted to become a medical orderly. Not that he didn't wish to fight and defend his country. He would willingly take up arms against its enemies if called upon. Rather, the thought of the wounded decided him and he never regretted his decision. It proved to be an exposed and dangerous role and his fellow soldiers understood this and treated him accordingly. He was secretly pleased that he did not have to compete for their respect. Ultimately their lives might be in his hands and the thought of this merited him an extra warmth from them. No one wanted him to be in any doubt should they be lying on the battlefield. They dealt gently with him.

For his own part, Jonathan Springborne was of the type who took to heart the admonitions of the ages and so, in regard to one of them, he was being "true to himself" although he little spoke of how deeply connected he felt to the world about him and sensitive to its well-being. He let his actions speak for themselves. Also, he harboured, as do so many Americans, especially from his part of the country, a deep well of mistrust toward authority of any kind and its claims of innocence before the unleashed horrors. Like his fellow citizens, however, once the peril has come, whether from a foreign power or from his own government, he willingly set aside personal feelings and did his duty while knowing all along that it was this characteristic that played a major part in the calculations of the powerful decision-makers. In the face of imminent danger, these ones well understood that most of the populace swiftly resolves its dilemmas.

Big and rangy in build, in his role he also carried more equipment than others and made for a better target. He missed many close calls by virtue of being the one to be grappling for a body that had slipped beneath the water. Oftentimes he could only tell by the red showing on the surface. One after the other he would drag casualties to the beach. Once ensconced inland, he would find himself wondering what value he had as a target in the minds of the enemy soldiers as he tended to the wounded. What moral calculations were they making?

His last battle was on Okinawa where he was hit. While he was being treated on the hospital ship, he heard vivid descriptions of how the war ended, and he submitted a request that he might rejoin his company as part of the occupation forces.

It took two years for him to heal from his wounds in the American Forces Hospital. Having saved lives, he received extra consideration; otherwise he would have been shipped stateside despite his extended enlistment. While convalescing, he studied his Japanese and practiced it with the orderlies. One day he explained to his commanding officer that it would not feel right for him to leave Japan without having tried to discover the fate of the girl who had been his high school pen pal. His superior thought for a minute and then smiled and nodded his head. "Okay," he said. "Okay." With a little snort that signified something other than disapprobation, he dismissed him. He did not feel that he needed to tell this soldier that he had given him one of the best reasons for all that he himself had been through.

As for how to begin looking for Miyeko, Jonathan could not remember more than her first name and he had to write to his mother for her to send him the full particulars from their old correspondence.

In the train headed for Hiroshima, his thoughts in the main were that she could not have survived and he was going through the motions, that was all. As soon as he was released from the hospital, he had gone to Tokyo's main station wearing his freshly laundered uniform and carrying a small traveling bag. It heartened him that there was, in fact, a train and he allowed himself to continue entertaining hopeful images of what he might find. Perhaps the destruction had not been so complete and the number of victims had been exaggerated. This could sometimes be the case in the aftermath of the fiercest battles as he well knew.

There were other Americans in the carriage but, in order to be left alone with his own thoughts, he isolated himself among what looked to be Japanese businessmen. He occupied the seat in the aisle where he placed his long legs to allow room for the gentleman opposite. The slightest inclination of the head came his way as though directed to the sharp crease in his pants. Otherwise the eyes of his immediate fellow passengers remained lowered, the etched petals of the lids an impervious barrier to intimacy or acknowledgment of any kind. What he considered to be a characteristic natural reserve did not trouble him. At the other end of the carriage, the loudness of the Americans there carried through the intervening space; but thankfully it was just gossip, male gossip, not that a Japanese was to know that their guffaws did not signify gloating over past victories or more recent gratifications. He looked elsewhere to disassociate himself and to minimize the effect.

At the next stop, the businessmen disembarked and what appeared to be a married couple, the woman large with child, took their seats with an embarrassed air due to what social proprieties possibly being breached he could not tell, but he concluded that it must have everything to do with his foreign presence. As the train lurched away from the station, a young man in a rumpled suit sat opposite him, his casualness producing a calming effect. Jonathan's gaze did not go unreturned.

"American?"

The young man rounded his vowels and accented firmly in his search for clarity. The question was meant to open a conversation, and Jonathan smiled and crinkled his eyes as he answered the obvious with the obvious.

"American soldier."

He adopted a more serious expression, nodding his head.

"And you?"

"Japanese!"

A short laugh from both acknowledged the success of their joke.

"Japanese university student." The young man's good humour continued. "Medicine. A lot of patients. The war has made much business." His grim laugh came like a series of smoke clouds, and a veil slid across his eyes in evidence of a suppressed emotion. He blinked before he continued.

"You go to Hiroshima!" It was more an exclamation than a question.

"Yes, I am looking for someone." Jonathan thought there would be no harm and possibly some benefit in revealing his purpose.

The eyes observed him with an unnerving directness.

"Friend?" The Japanese student spoke as if he had discounted all of the possibilities and had a right to know.

"Yes, in a way, I suppose."

"American friend. Yes. Good times now in Hiroshima. New nightclubs. You find him somewhere." A laugh with a contemptuous edge to it.

"No, my friend is Japanese. We used to write letters a long time ago. Before the war. We were pen pals."

"Pen pals?" The Japanese student was ignorant of the term. He left unvoiced his surprise at all else he had just heard.

"Pen pals are people who start out as strangers and become friends by writing letters to each other. My friend and I – her name is Miyeko – exchanged letters before the war. Now I am looking for her."

"She is dead probably, or something bad." This brutal assertion came out of a rigorous honesty of opinion as well as a well-founded bitterness that, Jonathan saw, his fellow traveler managed to set aside when inappropriate. He expressed himself in the context of a vast and horrific truth.

"Yes. You are probably right, but I will try to find her nevertheless."

"Maybe she is alive. My name is Honda. What is yours?"

"Thank you for thinking so. I was a medic in the war, and you are right. It is possible that she is alive. I am Jonathan Springborne." He managed a smile, reached across and shook hands with his new acquaintance.

"Hah! Medic! We are the same."

"Yes, we are the same."

Another time, they might have congratulated themselves for the continuance of their initial joke with another laugh, but a sadness settled over them. The diminutive and rumple-suited Japanese medical student and the tall, neatly unformed American soldier exchanged a look that acknowledged they could not succeed in furthering the similarities between them.

"I am sorry for Hiroshima ... and Nagasaki." Jonathan spoke the words that arose in him, entities more concrete than anything else at that moment, including the train itself.

"We would do the same."

The immediacy of the response surprised and bitterly gratified Jonathan but the discussion ended there. All talk as to blame and responsibility foundered on this horrific common ground and, having come so quickly to it, they had nothing more of purpose to say. They were overwhelmed by a feeling that all in the future would be precarious. For the rest of the journey, they made small talk to break the gloom that was not to be wholly expelled. After a formal farewell in Hiroshima Station, with directions to help him on his way, they ended their acquaintance.

The turgid waters of the delta had spread out beneath the train as it pounded and ground its way like a boot-heel dragged across a xylophone over the bridge into the city. Miyeko's eyes had looked up as it reached shore as would those of any passerby at the passage of a train on iron tracks in the air. She had been just below, Jonathan Springborne already scanning the pedestrians although he possessed not even an approximation of her appearance, having never exchanged photographs.

The mixture of dread, awe, and reverence that had come over him when he embarked on the journey had stayed and now seemed to be in the air itself as he proceeded to the hotel that was close to the station just as his fellow passenger had pointed out. Although not heavy, his traveling bag felt awkward in his hand; he kept his expression reserved and respectful, fearing to intrude upon the citizenry with a visitor's direct stares, and allowed himself no more than a sweeping look.

The hotel clerk listened to his request with an intelligent lift of the head, peering through his spectacles, and he must have sufficiently understood Jonathan's Japanese for he extended a key to a room on the third floor. "Three!" he had said in English. Jonathan had to bend his head to get in and out of the ornate metal elevator cage that seemed out of place in this otherwise recently constructed building. Equally the door to his room forced him to stoop. And, as with everything else in this country that had not been designed for Americans by Americans, the space inside rendered him supremely unsuited. His dubious eye measured the bed. He parked his bag, looked out of the window at the remnants of prewar vehicular transportation filling the street with exhaust, and at the train station down the way. Attached to its admirable solid girth and promise of commerce to be found there, a long line of poor cousins in the form of wood and tin shanties allowed for the sale of various wares. He rummaged out an old map of the city and returned downstairs to make inquiries.

Thin and bespectacled, the clerk hung over the address that had been handed to him, written out by one of Jonathan Springborne's orderlies. As he formulated a response, collating past memories with what had taken their place, his expression alternated light and shadow. How was he to direct this stranger to a specific location in what was now a wasteland? Still, there were streets, and public transport of a kind operated, and taxis, of course.

"Take taxi!" It sounded a sage admonishment as the clerk weighed all considerations not excluding the import of the day's waning light upon the decision of the all-conquering American guest. Would he willingly march into the evening on his hopeless mission?

Nodding carefully, Jonathan asked where he might dine. He was satisfied that he had made himself understood and that no obstacles stood in the way of his venturing on his search in the morning. In the hotel's small dining room, he had a simple dinner of rice and chicken – there were no vegetables – along with a glass of beer. The veil of a dim evening sky hung over what little had taken the place of what once had been outside the soiled windows. On one wall, directly before him, a large framed photograph showed the vanished city. Had it been placed there out of sentiment or had it been dusted off for its minimally decorative value? He wondered what would be its status should prosperity return.

It showed the Motoyasu River branching into its delta with grids of housing and industry filling every flat inch of the cityscape. Low mountains vaguely encircled in the outlying distance. An enlargement of an aerial shot, at least four feet by three feet in size, the photograph gave little idea of the urban life, with square rooftops laying down a plain on the greater plain of the delta, the taller structures scantily obtruding above the flat uniformity: a domed building in one location, what were possibly hotels at others, and then the train station's enduring presence. Bridges crossed the various branches of the river but even these flat spans had no more than a utilitarian design. Try as he might, he failed to imagine what the life on the streets might have felt like from the sparse evidence of people and traffic. The dull greys and charcoals, and the failure to present the city's uniqueness, if it had any, prevented his desire for empathy but left in place the present impress of devastation. Looking at the past like this made him feel cold and distant, outside of time like a prophet.

After his dinner, he went out for a walk, but by then it was dark and the street was unlit. Late evening continued to shroud the distant hills in deep shadow where day and night meagerly wedded. Closer by, as if in brooding attendance, dim rail car shapes appeared to have been shunted next to each other; what might have been sooted storm lanterns or guttering candles beckoned in their windows. He squinted in an effort to make out the presence of occupants before turning his steps the other way where a line of huts that were closed shops gave him a sense of his bearings as he strode forward.

Figures approached and scattered before him. From his size, he must have appeared to be the stuff of legend and of nightmare. The quality of the air confused him with its sniff of split concrete, rusted metal and a variety of rot until he remembered the rich green growth and the profusion of flowers he had seen from the train window. Vegetation had thrived in the nuclear aftermath and its fresh dampness drew out and enriched the smells of the rubble and the decay. Barren voids in the atmosphere hung above the recently cleared lots. When a smothering wall of darkness formed before him, he pushed no further.

He retraced his steps and, back in his room, he placed mattress and box-spring end to end, and stretched out on his extended bed. Despite all thoughts of what had happened in this part of the world, sleep came eventually and easily.
3

Miyeko

He awoke entertaining the notion that, train schedule conforming, he would be gone by the end of the day, his duty done.

Intentionally he had not pulled the curtains the night before and early morning light flooded the room, an invasion of photons that were trapped in the diminutive space already crowded by him alone. They apparently intended to drive him away. Completely roused, he flailed about as though attacked by minute golden hornets. Tiny red spots covered his body. He inspected the mattress and, from the telltale signs, he had not slept alone. Lines of bedbugs filed along the seams. Japanese bedbugs engorged with American blood. Had the radiation increased their population? Enlarged them? What was the normal size of a bedbug? Ruefully he speculated upon the day ahead in his present condition. At least, he considered again, it was highly unlikely that he would find her. He spent the next half hour carefully going over himself in order not to be plagued with the consciousness of an infestation. Despite all, the light-filled room ensured that he had rid his person of every last intruder.

Unsure of the amenities available in the immediate vicinity of the hotel, he breakfasted on tea and rice pudding, once again in the dining room, while casting further reflective glances at the photographic enlargement on the wall that reminded him more and more of a reconnaissance shot. Could one of the monitors – a redneck type – from the Atomic Studies Commission have thought it a good joke to palm it off as an innocent memento of what once had been? "Here's a reminder for that empty wall of yours." Or perhaps it was just his recent scrape with the bedbugs speaking.

When he stepped outside for the taxi that the desk clerk had called, he looked about him at the humble eating establishments operating out of small, hammered together wooden huts in the otherwise empty lots, the beginnings of more substantial construction here and there, and, painted on the sloping roof of a larger hut that was set back from the street, he could make out the word for BEER. A line had already formed and it struck him that, in the conditions they faced, a glass of beer would be most welcome to the city's inhabitants. From their general drawn appearance, the drink should somewhat compensate for nutritional deficiencies and the rest of the day to day hardships of survival.

As for the world of nature, he marvelled again at how it had not long succumbed to the bomb, but had returned with rank vegetation and wildly abundant flowering wherever it could take root across bared foundations and seared terrain. It was a visitation that must have soothed the devastated city although the change had taken place due to radioactive stimuli.

A vehicle pulled to a stop before him that must be the taxi, but nonetheless he continued to stand and stare at the small three-wheeled affair thinking it might have some other purpose. No, the driver was looking at him, not out of curiosity but inquiringly, craning and twisting his neck behind the flat windshield. Jonathan Springborne accomplished the feat of working himself into the back seat by severely bending legs and clutching knees with his hands. He had thrust the piece of paper with the address under the nose of the driver who now looked back at him with an interrogative expression that turned into a nod of agreement at Jonathan's gesticulation to take him to where he wanted to go.

They drove in the direction he had walked the previous evening and he saw that there would have been nothing to see, or encounter in particular, beyond the no longer existent wall of darkness that had turned him back: scattered blocks of cement in green-infested rubble lots, square-hewed, riven as though by lightning, the road grid open to view across the exposed flats. Clusters of huts spooled smoke from their rusted and blackened stovepipe chimneys whose angle reflected the usual passage of the local winds. The horizontal tin roofs above these raw shelters of discarded planking must be a drum skin in the rain, a cooking element in the sun. He checked his map as they crossed over water. The Aioi Bridge traversed the Ota River. Did he have it right? He asked. Yes, he did, but what did it matter in this wasteland? They drove another mile. There were no street signs but the driver made a display of knowledge of their whereabouts, nodding as he surveyed the scene. Finally, he stopped and turned to face his passenger. According to him, they had arrived.

"Wait!"

Having made sure that he was understood, Jonathan extricated himself from the car and looked about him. From the map he knew that they were in the area of ground zero. The huts that he saw were not original dwellings but makeshift shelters erected on the original plots by those of the former occupants who had somehow survived. Large tracts of real estate sat vacant, awaiting claimants. Jonathan wondered where some of these might be. What dispensations had total war provided the survivors? Well-trodden paths crisscrossed the tangled blanket of assorted wild flowers, grasses and weeds. Vines entwined the huts, their shivering tentacles raised above the tin roofs.

He chose one of these dwellings and made the door of it tremble under his closed fist. The roof was level to his forehead. He could smell cooking and the fustiness of cheap reclaimed wood. A woman half his size appeared in the door opening. She looked straight ahead and, when he spoke, she tilted her head and showed him empty eye sockets. He apologized, and he heard the door close as he retreated.

The next hut over proved empty and, at the next, it was the same. At last an old gentleman greeted him, immediately interested in the nature of his visitor, bowing and beckoning him inside. He bent low and entered, in order to be polite, and squatted on a square of old pallet where his host gestured for him to stay while he rummaged a few feet away and finally returned with a corked bottle and two drinking bowls. These he filled and, with a bow, offered one to his guest. He waited for him to drink and cackled with pleasure at Jonathan's signs of appreciation.

"Thank you! Thank you! Very good!" His loud proclamation made him immediately self-conscious as it filled the hut and must have seeped through the thin walls.

He smacked his lips and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He couldn't identify the alcoholic rice drink, but the very essence of hospitality flavoured it.

His host bowed with evident satisfaction and, before taking a drink himself, set down his bowl and swiftly pulled apart his upper garment, baring the concave shell of his chest like some weather-warped lyre and pointing demonstratively at the glistening scar tissue that ran from his neck in a broad curve to his lower ribs. His eyes glistened as he held out a restraining hand and covered himself again and, then, voiced his formula of forgiveness.

"Americans good! Russians no!"

That had been their preference. To be vanquished by the lesser of two evils.

Unblinkingly, Jonathan held himself still and silent. Many Japanese had welcomed the Americans as a counter to a Russian invasion. "It was war. It was war." After a moment, he bowed his head in acknowledgment of the old man's kind words. Retrieving the folded paper from his jacket uniform, he extended it to his host with a look of inquiry.

After a brief study of the contents, his host expressed his understanding and signalled for a writing implement that his visitor provided from his shirt pocket.

Jonathan departed to the sight of the old man's bows of assurance and respect, their meeting as much a part of history as anything else that had taken place in the past. They had emptied their bowls, displaying mutual sympathy and mute regard, a shaft of light from a small square of cracked window spreading between them.

The old man had directed him to the city's main post office where he was informed of the present address of the person he wanted. He climbed back into the still attendant taxi and handed the information to the driver who graciously looked apologetic at his own incapacities.

Having dismissed his taxi, he whiled away the time looking at the river from the back veranda of the house that Miyeko's uncle had rebuilt back from the shore. The unfathomable blast had swept away the entirety of it. Her uncle who was a building contractor had arranged the whole matter quite expeditiously considering the circumstances, explained the aunt who formally entertained him with tea and cakes. She seemed even more reflective than having an unexpected guest might account for her being. He understood when she withdrew for long periods of time and then returned with yet another pot of tea.

He very soon regretted that he had not simply gone away and come back later, but she had invited him in, gently admonishing him to stay, and he had yielded to the unreasonable idea that he might get a feel for Miyeko's life by installing himself on her domestic platform. It had seemed natural to accept the invitation. However, seated on a floor mat before a low table with a soft cushion for support, he soon felt uncomfortable and at a disadvantage, quite unable to visualize what she might be like in her comings and goings other than a younger version of her aunt whose periods of abstraction did not reassure him as to the reception he might find with her niece.

Left alone, he would get to his feet and stand at the railing. The broad movement of the river held light skiffs borne along by the vagaries of the currents and the manipulations of the occupants whose efforts were indecipherable to him. Their loose clothing acted like sails or pennants in the wind. The mind being what it is, he could not help but imagine these boatmen annihilated in a concentrated tumult of white light and, for that moment, the effect of his thought paralyzed him. Swiftly, the eradicated figures in their small craft reconstituted and he felt himself to be of less substance in comparison and he wondered at himself for being there. From their stances, some of them could have been fishing. Beyond, the distance of the far river bank created a haze that concealed anything it might have contained of interest.

Eventually, a tiredness came over him, and it felt quite in order for him to lay down on the small mat and rest his head on the pillow. Stretched out on his back, he closed his eyes and must have dozed for, when he opened them again, he felt refreshed and more as though he belonged, although not nearly as much as the small porcelain figure of a Buddha that sat in a recess of the outer wall. He had noticed it before, but his nap had served to strengthen its presence. He was gradually becoming one with the house or, at least, with this part of it, and a proprietorial lightness came to his being.

The uncle returned first and, at his appearance, all sense of belonging abruptly drained away. He needed to explain himself, although the aunt must have already told her husband everything that she knew.

"Hello." \- He felt the awkwardness of his Japanese pronunciation. - "My name is Jonathan Springborne. Before the war, your niece Miyeko and I exchanged letters while we were in school. I have been in the American Hospital in Tokyo for two years hoping that when I recovered I might find what happened to my friend from that time. Forgive me for the trouble I am causing you."

He had spoken simply and to the point, having long prepared his Japanese for the gist of this little speech.

The uncle's forthright look appraised him in the manner of someone who had people working under him but had had to work on his own account before he attained such a position. Nothing in life had come easily and, at this stage of things, he took pleasure in directing others. Jonathan Springborne saw in him pride that came from a rising above circumstance. The Americans had done their worst and he had gone into the river with his home shattered about him. He had sunk into the waters in a state of oblivion, and yet here he was alive and rebuilt. He nodded a great deal in praise of his good fortune, and Jonathan showed his own pleasure in turn. Soon their common humanity welled up and flooded the recent history that neither of them would have countenanced had it been of their choosing. Jonathan cast admiring looks on the craftsmanship and the design of the house that, in all ways, seemed to him traditional and appealing with its curved roof of fired, green clay shingles, the amber sheen of the closely fitted wide-planked floor silken in its effect, the paper-screened sliding doors, the overall sense of proportion, and the harmonious integration of purpose. He was relieved to find himself becoming comfortable once again.

Having been waylaid and alerted by her aunt, Miyeko interrupted them, her eyes widely wondering. With her arrival, the whole point of the enterprise came into sharp focus. Considerately, both aunt and uncle withdrew seeing no need to chaperon or to intrude. They retreated from the room with bows of discreet excitement aroused by what they could not have said, other than the strangeness and incongruity of this American's visit.

"I am so pleased ... to find that you are well, and I am so sorry for your family."

The aunt and uncle had told him the extent of their niece's loss and something of her present circumstances.

She inclined her head.

"It is good of you to trouble yourself. I see that you did not get your wish." Her manner was gentle and reflective. She was taller than both her aunt and uncle and little resembled them. He hoped that the hurt in her eyes was due to what his unexpected appearance had recalled for her and not evidence of a sorrow that could not be healed.

"My wish? Oh!" Miraculously, he remembered the last letter he had written to her. "No, and I am glad, after all, that I didn't have to fight the Germans. I wouldn't have had this opportunity. At least I did very little fighting, although I did see a lot of it. It was brutal, and your soldiers were relentless." He gave her a confiding look. "I suppose we were as well - I was happy to be a medic."

"It must have been very dangerous."

Her body appeared to sway as if she might faint.

"Let us not speak of it!"

"You were wounded."

Her aunt must have told her, or had she noticed how he favoured himself when he rose to greet her?

"Yes, in my back." He did not know the word for spine and tried to point.

"I myself do not know the word." She was conscious of her halting English. "I have not practiced. It has been a long time since I have read _The Last Of The Mohicans_. My father took it from me when the war started and we began to study German in school."

"It's 'spine.' I was on my back for nearly two years. After three operations, it's as good as it will get, and it's not too bad." He did not mention his frequent need of an armchair. "It is nothing compared to what you have suffered."

"No. I escaped. I was fortunate." She made no reference to her family allowing a silence to envelope her.

"My aunt and uncle have been very good to me. They want me to marry ... but I have a job."

From their exchange of letters, he knew that she had wanted to be a performer, to play music and to be in the theatre. It had been this dream of hers, if he were to admit it to himself, that had inspired him so determinedly to find out her fate. Had she been an average school girl with ordinary aspirations he might well have left the question unanswered.

She raised and quickly lowered her hands to show her former pen pal the scar tissue on the back. "These saved my face and then my arms were broken. My neck as well. I am grateful to be independent. The unfortunate ones cannot help themselves."

Her uncle had found her a position. She had lost everything but her spirit, Jonathan could see, although much of it like her body had been shredded.

His back ached sharply, and the time had come for him to leave.

"I am very pleased to have found you. Despite everything, I shall go back to America with peace in my heart." As he spoke, he knew that he did not want to leave her, like this, forever. She did not answer, and he could not tell why. If they had just met with no past whatsoever, he would have no trouble politely withdrawing, but huge and unspeakable events had brought them together and gave each other's presence meaning that would otherwise be absent.

"Would you mind if I stayed a few more days in the city?" He spoke at last as much to break the silence, it seemed, as anything else, but he was pleased with himself, and his manner was suspenseful awaiting her reply.

She bent her head in agreement.

"We could take a walk by the river." Her words were tentative as if she were unsure what she was proposing. For a moment, she looked frightened as he looked at her questioningly. They entertained the same wavering image of the river and themselves momentously walking beside it.

He was out of the door and down the street before her aunt and uncle could make another appearance. In two days time it would be a Saturday, when she did not work, and they had agreed he would return then. He had walked half a mile and was becoming concerned how he would find his way back to the hotel when a horn sounded behind him. He had not noticed this little van when he left. It proved more cramped in the front seat than in the back of the taxi, but Miyeko's uncle gave every impression of hospitable empathy as they persevered.

Jonathan spent the following day watching the light brighten and fade at his window while lying flat on his back on the extended mattress in his new room. Saturday morning, he breakfasted at one of the nearby food stalls before returning to the hotel and hiring a taxi.

They had themselves driven to a park across the river. Jonathan paid the driver extra and asked him to return in a few hours time. Miyeko had brought a silk-covered hamper that he took from her. As they walked, and ate, and walked again, they told each other stories of horror. Thousands had come to this park after the bomb had fallen in order to flee the firestorm, their flesh melted, their skin seared to a plastic finish. They sought relief for their naked and monstrous bodies in the grasses beneath the trees and in the pools of water, and found none. That first night, all was unspeakable darkness and suffering and, when daylight came, there was no balm in its promise.

Jonathan and Miyeko sat on carefully tended grass by the river bank. Above them, dark twisted tree branches spouted leaf-hung filigrees where a breeze folded origami from the air. In their present state of mind, they might see anything formed there, and they looked down to what they were eating from the picnic hamper. Miyeko rested on her knees, her hair falling in an unbroken sheen down her back, while Jonathan sprawled on his side, conjured there in his American uniform like a genii from the barrel of a gun. Between the trees, they had glimpses of strolling park visitors, and heard now and again a shout from a swiftly hushed child. Birds largely unseen attempted to rouse each other with their calls. The hypnotic mass of the waters idled by.

In these expanded moments, emotions came to them in rough outline. They spoke of loss and grief and pain.

Here was why he had crossed the Pacific, and had tended to those who had no more than a word and a whisper left to them, his hands buried in their open bodies. He had stumbled around the decapitated, extinguished terror with sacred morphine, put tourniquets on the limbless. Here was the life he had tried to save.

Partly, it was Jonathan Springborne's purity that touched Miyeko, for it offered a scintilla of redemption for those who had visited such destruction upon her city. Mostly, it was the faithfulness of this man who long ago had been her pen pal and had determined to find what had become of her. Such devotion and care would not wither in time. She would have to deny nothing of herself. He allowed all of the horror its rightful place deep within her and within himself.

They walked out of the park and its past and drove back into the city where no spot existed without these same memories.
4

_His Japanese Mother_

His father and his father's family adored his mother no less than he did, and he knew that the same was not true for everybody. To his young eyes, there were those who actively hated her, and it seemed as if they were continuing the war right here at home years after it had ended. How could his mother live here so different was she from everyone else: and so out of place with her looks, her customs, and her dress from the enemy country? Wrapped in a kimono and with obi carefully tied, she ventured out on shuffling feet, her hair in the shape of a crayoned black cloud, with lacquered sticks protruding, whose hidden function endlessly fascinated him. Why had he never asked her about them? He would trail along beside her, his small hand firmly in her grip, holding two fingers, every now and then casting an awestruck look at this woman so exotic and so familiar who was his mother assigned to him by some unknown authority or government department, or perhaps she had descended from the sky itself! How else explain her presence in these mountains that perpetually surrounded them? How did she come to be bent over her work in the back garden that sloped upward toward those undiscovered heights, or be walking along the rise and fall of the highway with the trees on either side, or be reflected in the gaze – dully or brightly as the case may be – of the shopkeepers and the townspeople, or be held in his father's uniformed arms? He had scooped her up! Yukio visualized it – a backdrop of paper-and-wood houses in flame and a giant mushroom cloud, man-made and standing tall, and his father had insisted on her and had brought her back with him like some kind of booty – the best kind. As a result he loved his father for how else would he Yukio exist in just this way? Most of all he loved his mother for he wasn't sure how she existed at all.

Self-consciously at her side, he was not brave like her, uncomfortable in himself with his hand in hers that he already knew he would let go one day. Perhaps the worst was the town drunk looking down upon him and believing he could see through everybody and had the power to make him believe the same. Those hot red eyes, ever on the edge of fatal engorgement, fired contempt for all that you were. He drank out of despair for what he saw. That had to be the explanation for him.

A lollipop would help, handed to him by Mr. Tuggett, the proprietor of the General Store. The shiny round gift of it turned shyness into self-worth, and he would pull off the cellophane wrapping that he would tuck into his pocket, and be content to ogle the display of hunting knives arranged in order of size, the one larger than the next. His eye would make a selection and he would imagine it attached to his belt ready to hand as he moved in the deep forest that began at the head of their garden.

"Good day, Mrs. Springborne." This had been the greeting to his mother. It had been as the minting of a coin forged out of disparate elements. The wonder of it was that it should issue from the aproned figure of Mr. Tuggett and that he should be specially compelled to the task, this man whose normal service entailed the sale of grains and salt and bags of sugar and tins of soup, and all the other supplies and condiments stacked in aisles and mounted against the walls. He had his sleeves rolled up to the elbow past a moldy black anchor on his left forearm surmounted by a galloping horse. Yukio peered and looked away, clenching his teeth so as not to ask, but the mote-filled light from the street parted his mouth and decided him.

"What's that?" He pointed, and it was an accusation that he uttered. The man should reveal all and, for a moment, there was silence, and he, though low to the plank floor, was in charge waiting to be satisfied, his words making attendant those within earshot.

"Son, these tattoos are from when I was at sea, just like your dad, and I wanted everyone to know about it."

"You were together on the same ship?"

"No, but we were together." Although Mr. Tuggett answered elliptically, somehow Yukio knew what he meant, and he was satisfied as was everyone else who listened.

"And the horse?"

"That," said the storekeeper, "is a wild horse and there is not much else to be said about it. Except that I was out West at the time." And he winked without saying anything more.

Yukio stared a little longer. Finally, his eyes went to his mother for reassurance and then back again to the row of knives, while Mr. Tuggett rang up his mother's order and then bagged the onions and carrots and cabbage and Instant Rice, his mother's look one of resignation upon this last item.

She bowed to the storekeeper and, with head politely bent, shuffled out of the establishment with her little one in tow trailing his lollipop and glancing behind him as they went. The eyes in the store, for all their friendliness, peered after them and the lingering gaze made him feel embarrassed until they were down the road and, with deliberate steps, onto the highway, the towering mountains hemming them in.

Wheeling around to sight a falcon and follow its course, he dropped his lollipop. "Look!" She had directed his attention from the black crows fluttering and disputing on the asphalt edge and he had obeyed not to miss what it was. At the last moment, he did see the falcon enter a cloud and, although the bird disappeared with numbing swiftness, the picture in one of his books came to mind and reminded him of its winged rapacity. His lollipop was gone – the bird's fault and his own – but he was fulfilled and at one with this kimono-clad lady who was pushing with her toe the sticky yellow mass, stuck with bits of gravel, into the weeds at the edge of the highway.

A crow wallowed in the air directly in front of them, dangling something red in its beak. He grimaced, firmed his back, and allowed his mother to draw him along facing the traffic that rarely appeared but, when it did, was almost upon them. Solid tree mass on either side closed them in, sloping upwards to steeper inclines and across shifting planes that would switch back or rise straight to isolated peaks encumbered by no more than sunlight and cloud and sometimes rain. It must have been a potency drawn out of these natural rough-cast pyramids that had overcome the imperial armies of Japan, for what were the like of Mr. Tuggett and the town drunk, or even his father for that matter without the help of some hidden power?

Again he evaluated his father. The man was not a conqueror, not with his quiet considerate air. Rather, he seemed vanquished, tongue-tied, and submissive. How had he won his Japanese wife? Yukio pondered the details with little success. Most of the time he was much the same as his dad. It must be, he had concluded, that the two of them balanced each other, his mother in her kimono and his father in his park ranger uniform. But that did not seem right. It must have been his soldier's uniform, he thought, instead, and somehow that did not seem right either considering who won and who lost. His mother appeared to him as neither victim nor booty. Certainly not with her air of independence in the kimonos she constantly wore.

Interminable the distance back, impossible for his little legs to keep the circular motion of the world going. At last, his mother would submit and bend for him to clamber onto her and hold her about the neck, from where he happily struck off the familiar landmarks of their progress: bridge railing, dust-covered supine tree trunk, cool ashen trail complicated by branch and darkly scalloped bark as he peered into its depths leading off the highway. His father had once hailed them from those shades and it had been a reunion to wonder at. An absence of further distinct markings rendered the final stretch hypnotic and wearisome and the goal impossible until reached. They turned off at the mailbox, its red flag either up or down, and would spy their home in a cleared patch of forest whose perimeter seen from on high outlined a giant bear's paw print.

He does know the why of her existence; inarticulately, he knows it. Wrapped in her kimono's patterned silk that catches the light or becomes one with the gloom, she puts up an easel and sketches mountains and clouds that belong to some other land not this. She teaches him to use the brush and the pen while she utters sounds like a bird. He answers her and it is as though he has jumped off a cliff and found there is no below. She works in her garden planting seeds that have come in the mail, and she takes entire mornings to prepare a meal, for what else will define her? He feels that her family is her excuse but not her reason, and he does not mind.

They enter a cathedral whose domes of leaf-filled light are mounted on soaring tree trunks. The air is a clear and subtle water suffused with russets, browns, and grey spectra. Sumptuously gilt spirits rise from skeletal green ferns whose fronds secrete shadow upon the forest floor. They appear to welcome their arrival with a yearning sway; he no more than turns his head, for there is the clearing with its middling pool of blue-lit ragged sky and the forest-dappled ground of pine-cones and pine-needles.

Clad in panels of mosquito net about the wrap-around veranda that is his racing circuit and war ground in the rain-grizzled, thunderous days, the squat, weathered wood house awaits them.

Jabbering, he slides off her bent back and rushes to the furthest reaches of her speculative gaze where he occupies himself with something or other he will not remember, knowing that she will eventually come to him or summon him, and the rest of the day will unfold its fulfillments, and show the fruits of all of their labour.

Sometimes he would nearly forget his father's existence; other times he could not wait to hear the scrunching sound of the wheels and the heave of the engine. The man arrives like an officious stranger in his uniform with its peaked flat-brimmed hat, the browns and khakis coordinated to the insignia on the side of the car. Out he steps and, arms out-flung, gathers him up into the warmth that is his father beneath the ironed shirt that he grasps by the epaulets after his arms slip from around the thick, tanned neck. He leans back and looks into eyes filled with promises and passion and adventure and a great barely scratched at world.

Together they go to his mother at the door, who returns inside, and they seat themselves at the scarred kitchen table where she serves a lunch of hot vegetable soup and grilled cheese sandwiches, with tumblers of cold milk beside them. He spoons up the tomato-coloured contents of his bowl not caring what is what, listening to the talk as it eddies across the table and back. At times it is all one language to him but he knows it is two: phrases and sounds from one end of the world spliced to those at the other end. He attends carefully for nowhere else does he hear this silky forest stream blend that flows into boulders and swirls around them.

He looks at his father who has shown him many such passages of water and at his mother. They have caught her, when out in the woods together, bent over the music that seemed to have arisen from these streams and led them to her.

"It is a samisen," she once told him and he saw tears come to her eyes as she proceeded to play, and he saw that it took courage to do so and not set the implement aside. She had allowed him to breach the purity of her private world and, in the times following, she played for him as well as for herself.

What stayed and returned to him was the image of her in the woods, tea-black hair loose over her shoulders, kimono sleeves hanging down, smooth eggshell profile turned toward him, fingers staying the frets at the instrument's arm as she plucked the hidden belly of it. Frozen in place, he would succumb to it all and bow as she had taught him.

"You must be careful. It is springtime and they are very protective."

His father smiles. The cave he has been describing is well-known and this year small black bear cubs have been sighted close by. The rangers have posted signs and are warning early visitors to keep their distance.

"Just make sure not to let Yukio wander."

"Of course."

Each morning he waited for the yellow school bus and for its narrow double doors to open immediately with a slap and a sigh. The vehicle stopped on the rattling, spurting gravel with no time for anything like a goodbye from him. His mother marked their parting with a respectful nod.

" _Yoi_!"

She whispered her admonition to be good in Japanese, and he was proud and dutiful for a moment as he mounted the scant tall steps. The door closed with a quivering crunch and, already heaved away, he staggered to a seat with all eyes on him in the narrow swaying passage, not cold, not indifferent but startled at the visitation of him, new to them once again, all to his wonderment and theirs.

He had no friends and no enemies, not yet. The children were a flock of birds that perched en masse, mindfully wheeling or feeding as a group, communally energized, the one or the other of them popping up or chiming in, although he himself did possess a singular purpose that involved staring at a girl who perfectly ignored him from afar. Her complete obliviousness caused him to be totally and fatally smitten. Was she waiting for him to make her acknowledge his existence and his regard? A seamless and impermeable barrier invisible to all but his mind's eye kept him in his place for most of a year, until a frustrated urging of his spirit had him submit his claim upon her favours.

Her rebuff was complete.

"I think you're awful!"

She turned away, having confidently annihilated him. It was the first really dramatic moment of his life. Wounded to the core, he examined himself as he never had before.

At first, he stood what was left of his ground, motionless, as the girl joined the play of the other children. An incoming tide of reflection of the sort that he had previously ignored swept through him: he really was different and he had not extended the anomaly of his parents to himself. Unlike him, they knew who they were and what they meant to each other. Busily accepting the way things were, he had kept the significance of his otherness hidden from himself. When the bell mercifully sounded, he felt fortunate to be able to walk and to find his way back to his desk.

Once home, he went into the bathroom, climbed onto a chair, and studied his appearance in the mirror. A thin coating of yellow on his skin, thick dark brown hair, and leaf-shaped eyes separated him from the mental snapshots he had of the children on the bus and at school. His head was large like his father's and oval like his mother's. He scowled at it before dismounting from the chair that he heaved into a corner, rattling everything at that end of things.

"What is the noise?"

His mother was at the door, questioning with wide open eyes. She calls him to follow her. Silk rustles on the floorboards. Through the corridor's windows, tree branches witness his passage. He can go outside and either play in their shelter or crouch in the ferns and turn into shadow; be a concealed mountain lion on the hunt. It does not matter whom he will stalk. His mother will make a tasty meal. He will rip away that silk and sink his teeth into great bits of her in a wild frenzy of hunger.

"Here."

She hands him the bowl, its inner surface sticky with cake dough. He takes the wooden spoon and draws it between his teeth. He encircles the bowl with one arm and scrapes away with his other hand, gathering and swallowing dollops of cake dough. Finally, he looks up at his benefactor, his animus drained away. He gently bats his eyes before scraping away one last spoonful and runs to her.

"Come and help me with the weeding!"

He is on his knees in the garden at the back of the house when his father comes home. His mother is bent over like one of the snapdragons, her dark hair hiding her face. That is what it is to be alive. He looks at the sunlight on her kimono. She is tying the young tomato plants to stakes that she has pushed into the earth beside their wobbly stems.

Half-turning, he looks toward the sound of the car door. He finds that he cannot move when his father appears on the veranda, deep in shadow, but then he vaults into light, the last hallowed thinning light of the day that the mountain allows them. They have no sunset. In its place, a darkness increases and cascades upon them down the westerly slopes. Their sun is at the tree-line and burns golden; beyond the ridge, paradisal light will bathe the land for another hour or two.

His father strides towards them, ignores what he is doing, and does not reckon his state of mind; instead he swings him round and round making the air flicker and swirl.

Yukio held onto the thick tanned forearms that were, as with the rest of this man, his own property, and leaned back to be swung around forever. When he was put down, the forever continued to spin and knocked him off his feet.

The next day, he did not see the girl at all face to face; her back was always to him. He would turn to her, able somehow to home into exactly where she stood or ran, and he could tell that she knew exactly when to have her back turned to him. There was no approaching her, ferocious creature that she would be if he did. Besides, what had he to say? Words did not exist for what he felt. He could only speak around it and be more ridiculous and annoying. And he could not forget that the bathroom mirror had delivered its verdict and was on her side.

One of the school boys hurtled toward him, heedless, looking back and laughing at his pursuers. Maybe Yukio could have stepped aside, if there were time, but he did not try; he anchored his legs tight into the ground, brought up his arms, and with a little push had the wayward boy ricocheting away. For a split second his eyes fixed on Yukio with alarm and accusation, and then the boy lay on his back, pale and motionless, eyelids deathly closed.

An ambulance came. He could hear it from inside the building where he had been removed, its siren screaming at what he had done, and then a dead silence. Never before had he noticed how lifeless inanimate objects like desks and chairs could be, offering no solace at all. Only his mind was busy. For one thing, life as he knew it would definitely come to an end. The liquidation of his person was not out of the question. Incorrect he was to find when, a week later, he was brought together with the boy into the principal's office where their parents and his teacher had gathered. The expressions of the adults were complex, full of questions that he was sure he could not answer and, at times, everyone looked at him and him alone.

His mother surprised all. She knelt down as if descending from above, some blossom that the sky had kept hidden to itself and now released. Her eyes were liquid and she smiled at him, tenderness itself as she asked him the one question they were all here to have answered. It interested him that she spoke in English.

"Are you sorry?"

Although it was hard, he decided to make things easy and not be obstinate and unhelpful.

"Yes."

He apologized for hurting the boy and for all the trouble he had caused everybody. That was the truth although he kept a lot to himself because to say anything more would lead to unnecessary difficulties and ill feelings. Everyone was willing to accept his expression of remorse, and his mother rewarded him with a look of love and relief, and it was better than a hug.

She understood that there was more to the incident and that his decision to apologize like this took a lot into account that would not just disappear from his mind. He did not realize it then but he had taken the best course. Its merits lingered on and on, and shaped him, and set him on a definite path however much he might question its complete integrity in time to come.

For a moment there was silence but it was the silence of freedom. He did not know that more could not follow from this circle of judgment and that they would have to release him. Inside himself he was released and the adults that closed in on him and then drew away proved him right. It was as easy as that.

He went up to the boy who looked warily at him, but closeness melted the reserve and mistrust. Under the power of human magnetism and the propulsive force of their emotions, they unavoidably embraced. They shed consequences not tears, and they performed more for the respective adults who needed this resolution than for themselves, and so, for the sake of their parents, they clung to each other. In that instant, he understood why adults had no other recourse than to drop bombs when they went too far without restraints.

They relinquished their hold and, momentarily at a loss, waited for a signal.

"Go to your classes now!"

At the principal's avuncular tone, their teacher leads them away. The parents come together, looking to shake hands, while his mother bows, a little apart, turned slightly toward him. He vows that he will not again expose her like this.
5

_The Top of the World_

From cairn to cairn, the Appalachian trail tracks the mountain range that forms the top of this part of the world as it stretches out on all sides from New Hampshire to South Carolina, promising to lead to the seat of the Gods. Depending upon one's cast of mind, these might be the Olympian anthropomorphic Gods and their willful antics or, more likely, the powers within all things that are manifest at some point beyond the senses. It is a promise that is iterated along the entire length of the trail whose end will be little different from its beginning: a log shelter with one side open to the elements, set beside an innocuous stream, and a short trek to or from the oblivion of the highway.

The scraped toes of Yukio's hiking boots snagged against the rocks. To the surrounding horizon, clouds hung above and below him. At both sides, gulfs swept away to the outermost limits of vision where solidities merged with erupted domes of cumulus. He hiked through billowing vapour. Every few hundred feet hand-erected cairns marked the way, modest sentinels of piled rock emerging from the pale shifting mist. When the way appeared, his heart sang for these simple stone pillars lacking all attribution as they beckoned him onward one after the other. Volunteers had laboured to make a gift of these mountains and skies, their diminutive persons placing stone upon stone in the vast heights.

It was ironical that someone so large would think himself so small as he seated himself against a rock. He dug out one of the numerous energy bars he had packed, and tore at the cellophane wrapping with his teeth. One can either become jaded or develop a relish for the same old food. In Yukio's case, he enjoyed more and more these nutty, chewy, seed-filled snacks. He spooned instant coffee into his stainless steel mug and poured cold water over it, adding a squeeze of honey and a squirt of condensed milk. He stirred assiduously. Here was something else that he relished: the knowledge that one did not have to heat water for coffee and how he enjoyed the taste of it.

He had planned a trip of ten days and, since he was solo, had eschewed all extras. Not carrying a stove relieved him of the additional weight of cooking implements and fuel. He had brought one change of clothes, his single-man tent, sleeping bag, air pad, and rain gear. Also, a flashlight, disinfectant, tin of band-aids, his Swiss Army knife, and a water bottle. Sardines and crackers supplemented his energy bars. That was it. No books and no camera. Just a pen and a small notebook. No distractions.

He halted at evening's onset when pastel islands of lichen mist formed from the clouds, and set up his camp in the shelter of two small boulders, placing heavy rocks in the tent's inside corners, whether or not against the wind time would tell. He ate his sardines and crackers washing them down with water from his canteen. He had no fire, being high above the tree-line. Spanning the entire planet, the setting sun took its heat with it, and he was thankful at these heights for the thick sweater and jacket that experience and his father's early instruction had taught him to bring.

He watched as a lone sky-singed falcon occupied the final vastness of the sun's dying blaze, the great sweep of its flight ending in a flaming haze that swallowed up the charred image of it.

With the burned clouds banked against the last of the sun's fire, he crawled into his darkening nylon-walled shelter and drew the zipper against a deeper ursine black that had begun to rear among the few stars that were about, a great bear come to feed in the night's berry patch. He worked his way into his down-filled bag and awoke in an hour or two when the tent bellied - like Dizzy Gillespie's trumpet-blowing cheeks - and further bowed its arched aluminum poles. The gales that arose tore away the whole of the world except for him and his shelter, obliterated it, and replaced it with cyclonic space. Swaddled as he was in his survival gear on the last standing platform in the universe, the winds tossed him into the gullet of a planet-devouring creature, and they howled as they made headway through the penetrable night.

He slept and woke, slept and woke again to the same rending of the endless dark.

The dawn came as a corrective. A dilute light suffused the stillness of his blue tent walls. He undid the zippers and crawled out of his cocoon like a huge caterpillar that had failed to metamorphose onto the world's ridged inhospitable spine, but he stood and stretched as if he were in his bedroom. Filling his lungs with the thin clean air, he snuffled in the direction of the eastern sky's flaring tints. Swiftly numbed fingers grappled to dismantle the tent and he didn't settle down to breakfast but instead chose to set off and eat while hiking through a slight mist that hovered at waist level. As it rang and scraped against his boots, the feel of the trail became more familiar. The white blaze of the sun bleached and beaded the blue in the sky. Night's residue held yet in the westward gulfs, its retreating veil shimmering along its far edge with iridescence where the risen light showered.

Scooping with his mug, he filled his canteen from silver-shot water in amber rock basins. After a spell, he removed his jacket and sweater and in late morning he stopped to chew on yet another energy bar. With his back against a boulder and the sun a distant crown, he sat and crossed his legs, roughly Buddha, roughly lotus, and meditated, with eyes open, as his mother had taught him. He was not transported. It was as it was. Nothing but self, nothing but all. That was he. Each instant destroyed and created. He was a being subject to life and death in a seamless continuum. He saw through the vastness of himself, he saw without his eyes. He became one with the world.

In the same way, his mother had sat on a rock ledge, in shadow-brushed woods, not far from the house, as still as one who would feed wild birds, her empty hand cupped outwards. Cautiously he had come toward her from the side, the snapping twigs and crackling leaves betraying him, and, because she paid no heed, he called in order to repossess her. She turned her head and beckoned to him.

He clambered onto the ledge, crossed his legs, and, like her, straightened his back.

"Let your feelings and your thoughts go where they will, and let them come to an end when they do. Let yourself be."

For the first time, he had become fully conscious of himself. Although he could not identify it, he realized there was more to him than he had imagined. No greater delight than being seated beside his mother, both of them still and attentive, sharing the harmony and mystery of the forest that had become a part of them.
6

Ursa Major

After it broke his father's spine, the bear roared and turned its head to Yukio, blood dripping from its open jaws. He fought it senselessly, hurling himself upon its matted back, gouging the reddened eyes, and tearing at the windpipe. The bear reared and shook. Yukio let go and, as the bear faced about, he charged, driving it backwards into the gully with him on top, ignoring the claws raking his flesh. Rocks lay everywhere and he reached for one and pounded the skull with no effect and then the ear. A stunned look clouded the bear's eyes and spiralled in an instant into an abyss of rage accompanied by a roar as of a mountain tumbling upon itself. Yukio pounded again and again until the maddened creature abruptly shook him off and twisted itself onto its four feet. It dared him with back-curled snout before it turned away and scrambled up the far side of the gully and disappeared over its ridge.

His father's body was too heavy for him to carry. Before he set off down the trail, he covered it with rocks.

Miyeko knew when he returned. The look of death was about him. Cloaked in despair, he lacked all urgency. She bathed the great welts on his arms that would scar, listening to him, although his first words, "I had to bury Father," had told her everything. She could see him stumbling back along the trail, the blood and the sweat-smeared dirt of a fight to the death upon him. She remembered looking into eyes like these. The present was the past again.

Fellow rangers recovered the body. When they brought it to her, she acknowledged their efforts with a slight downward tilt of the head and then she removed the rough-spun wool blanket and replaced it with a length of silk cloth that she had cut from a bolt that she used for her kimonos. None of the men gathered there were offended. An expiring breeze gentled the falling leaves. Nothing grated in the services she performed. There was nothing to rebuke in the foreignness of it all. The waiting ambulance attendants who had retreated after their initial examination secured the shrouded body and drove of without haste, their siren that had sounded on the approach now mute.

His mother made coffee and sandwiches that Yukio helped her serve on the veranda where the rangers congregated standing like trees on the creaking planks as though uprooted from atop nearby boulders. Secretly glad that the bereaved were occupying themselves, they ate and drank with a subdued relish, and vitality returned to them after their awkward empathies with loss. They departed with an awkward grace as soon as they had finished what they had accepted in hand. Tipping their hats to his mother and with a final utterance and gesture of shared sorrow, they were still not quite sure they had bridged the continent-wide gulf that seemed to lie between them and this exotic transplant in kimono dress, her hair grief-black, her face porcelain with loss. They were more at their ease with Yukio, grasping his hand and shaking it firmly, as they made eye contact and encouraged him to "be strong" and commended him again for doing "what was necessary." The last to leave said something about "the arrangements" and that they would be "contacted." Their retreating backs dully confirmed for Yukio that a world had spun away and was now forever lost to him.

If Miyeko wanted the occasion to be marked differently, she did not say but accepted the traditions of the community and did not object or intrude in any way with her own feelings and ideas. The open coffin, the glossy finish that the ministrations of the funeral workers had applied to her husband's remains, the "viewing" of the unfamiliar artifice they had rendered as an answer to death, she endured it all without complaint. For the first and last time, Yukio saw his mother in Western dress: a dark funeral outfit with broad-brimmed hat and veil that raised no comment and a minimum of obtrusive glances. How she rid herself of it, he did not know. A few weeks after his final hike across the Appalachian Range, they embarked for Japan.
7

_Return to Hiroshima_

Yukio had agility and speed but little heft. He had not been bulking up for years like the other sumo wrestlers. He forced extra into his stomach when he should have ended the meal and he went immediately to his mat and lay there, for the food to become a part of him. At the end of the afternoon, he would get up and work on the dough of his body at the weights with purposeful slowness, conserving mass as he strengthened. In addition, he exercised his mind as he had done with his mother in the reaches of the New Hampshire forest, going into himself and making the world his own until all things were incorporated in him and what had been outside lost its separate reality and he could not say what was apart from himself. The world was himself and this world included his opponents in the ring. He could choose for them to be whatsoever he willed and he battled them with that familiarity and that intimacy with himself. They were an eye of his that had gone bad and had to be torn out, a self become flesh that must cease to be and no longer dominate inside and out of this circle of sand.

As he became more competent, he would fling the white purifying salt higher and higher. After pacing back and forth, his feet would root solidly far apart and he would raise them with easy effort and stomp the ground with a force and a sound that ought to dismay anyone or anything that would doubt what prowess he might bring to bear. Malign spirits evaporated. He preferred to collide; timing and positioning were foremost in his strategy, and he came to be known as "the express train" among those who take no accounting of the finer points of the sport. Against the immovable ones or the "whales," as they are called, whose passive strategy of "wait and see" was ultimately the same, he lost as much as he won.

All of his days were a discipline. He took cold showers morning and night. Should his eyes open from sleep in the dark, he rose up and began his day. He sat cross-legged upon his mat until light from the sun greyed and then silvered the finely woven black tresses that hung in the sky. He walked everywhere. At week's end, he took himself out of the city and pilgrimaged to the outlying hills and mountainsides where the air settled deep in his lungs and the eyes of the country-folk lowered submissively at his passing bulk. He could be no other than what he appeared, one who overturned worlds big and small. All was his: the world of the sky and the earth that all shared, the fruit of the land and the streams, the trees unburdening themselves of blossom, the children in antic procession behind him. Everything belonged to his bearing and his grace, his lightness of step, his attentiveness. No blade of grass was more at home than he on his return over the same roads as he had come.

He cut his own hair and washed his clothes himself. He did his own cleaning. Daily he visited his mother with whom he had only once exchanged a word of English and he would prepare a meal for both of them. Miyeko made no demands. She had seemed to shrink in the house built and paid for out of the proceeds from Jonathan Springborne's life insurance, with its high ceilings and large rooms, located in the Ming district of the once devastated city. Along with his increased girth, Yukio stood at six feet seven inches although she chose not to ask the exact figure. Whimsical indulgence would soften her features as she contemplated her son and thought on his present pursuits. She could not help but remember the exuberant growth of the wild grasses and flowers that had mantled every surface of Hiroshima in the bomb's aftermath, but she kept the memory to herself.

Jonathan had been tall and strong – stronger if not for his back – and Yukio had surpassed him, that was all. It is food such as fish and rice. He has missed it all these years and now his body shows its gratitude. Surely she is not responsible.

Miyeko planted plum trees in the garden with generous space for them to grow and had a stone wall erected for privacy. Twice a week she would go to one of the long-term care facilities and read to those who had no means to occupy themselves. She did not object when Yukio entered the sumo camp. He was determined and she saw that it would not be a little life nor felt that it would be of trivial consequence. She found his presence a meditation unto itself. Her maternal hand upon all that flesh had become tentative and conflicted, but she was not so in her parental enjoyment. Rather she discreetly brimmed with it.

Every day he visited her although she was quite independent. He would come from the camp where he housed with the other wrestlers, usually in the late afternoon when she liked to meditate in shimmering, hammered gold light. However fugitive, she could depend upon its daily appearance. Sometimes she would leave off and greet him with a smile; otherwise she continued to sit apparently undisturbed by his tinkering in the kitchen where he prepared their meal of rice and fish and vegetables that she knew to be merely an appetizer for his further consumption later that evening in the camp.

Together they ate at the low table by the window looking onto the plum trees, the tended flower beds, the interspersed lawn that he himself kept trimmed, the tracery of flowering wisteria across the face of the stone wall.

She would sit in the delicate shade of those trees and read the American novels she loved. She would not have that world closed to her again by event and the passing of time. A dictionary at her side, she religiously looked for the meaning of each word as necessary. And still, despite her reading matter, she would not allow herself to converse with her son in his father's native tongue. One of Yukio's worlds would not, from her lips, adulterate the other although, at a sign of interest, she would freely pass a book to him. In his turn, he would share with her the Japanese writers whom he read – Yasunari Kawabata, Kobo Abe, Haruki Murakami ... his namesake Yukio Mishima. One – Murasaki Shikibu – came from her and she insisted upon his reading it. _The Tale Of Genji_ , she explained, was known to every self-respecting Japanese just as Shakespeare's plays were compulsory in the West. In this way, the two language streams flowed between them, the one on the page, the other on the tongue.

She inquired after all the details of his training and wished to hear the manner in which he fought and the nature of his opponents. He described the different personalities, their styles and the tendency for the fighters to fall into certain broad categories depending upon their physique and their psychology. He himself combined two of these, being of the athletic mold and yet carrying substantial extra poundage that put him not quite in the "whale" category but suggested the formidable character of this school. He dyed his hair black to deflect attention away from his ambiguous appearance and succeeded in authenticating his new identity in her eyes. At the same time, the irony of his reliance on artifice as he pursued the end of being an immovable force escaped neither of them.

In his doting on his mother lay the different irony of her power over him that she would never think to exert. To do so would be to lose it. The influence of example, on the other hand, was another matter where there could be no qualms.

"Sit. Sit and rest. Here, let me!"

He would relinquish the ladle and with a Western hug and Eastern bow betake himself to the low table and its absence of concession. He sat on the cushion and crossed his legs in rough fashion, waiting and listening to his mother's movements, the unhurried clacking and scraping of utensils, pots and pans, the pleasant humidity of cooking in the air. He could tell from the sounds when she filled the bowls and set these in the tray. Back and forth she went, placing the food on the table. What was it that flowed from her? It was not a question that could be answered, no more than was the substance of the world that he attended to. What flowed through and informed it all? Its seamlessness and universality had always struck him. Being faced with an opponent would throw into relief and dramatize his impression. His interrogative attitude to this phenomenon had always been what most characterized him. Could one's entire life be an inquiry?

"Thank you. Here. Let me."

He gazed upon his mother as he always did. Until the death of his father, she had been an exotic figure whose presence burned into the mind an aberrant vision, a constant and awkward revelation. And now here, across land and sea, she was herself and normal, a part of the world that she gave to him. He had not been born into it, but he was making it his own.

"I feel as though I am more than myself when I am in the ring. That there is a lot more at stake than with the other fighters. It is as if the war is still being fought. It troubles me."

"Don't let them make you think in that way! Remember, you are half Japanese, you have your father and your mother. The more you realize both worlds, the more at ease you will be. It is a great thing that I never managed."

"I am sure you would have if we had lived in New York City."

"Perhaps. It is too late now, but not for you."

He watched her eat. Her oval face ever fascinated him as did her delicate movements, the sacramental way she raised the bowl and served the contents. He took in the folds of her deep blue gown, flower-splashed and broadly tied, her straight dark hair. He thought of the women he visited. None were like her. If one had been, of course he would have passed her by. He admired the particular sweet discipline of her expression. He believed that what he read in it was in fact there ordered and composed. He allowed it to speak to him. She had absorbed all of that death. In his eyes, she was equal to any power in the universe. When she spoke of his father, she spoke of more than the man.

"At the beginning, I was grateful for his kindness, but we never spoke of ... anything important. Perhaps once. Afterwards all was understood."

And once they had spoken of love in that world they had come from.

She was trying to tell him something, not about herself, not about his father, but how one world may bind to another when love is destroyed. There are other states of being that are love. There is a love that is not the love one looks for or expects. He knew this when he went into the ring, and when he pursued his pleasures. Could it all be the same however different in kind?

She was fifty now and he worried for her. He would have liked her to have a man, not pass her days in memory and discontent. A comely and courtly man would make her forget and remember with joy. He would have her blossom without any efforts on her part. He could be a path to his father and a new broadened path to himself. He speculated insanely upon the satisfaction he would have in this unknown person. How had he dared to presume in this fashion! He shrugged off the whirlwind of thought.

"You have as little company here as in the wilds of New Hampshire."

"I go out. I have my garden. This is my world and I am content."

From the thinning in the silvery air between them, he could see that, yes, she was at home and he ought not intrude.

"And the memories? What makes you forget them or do you? How do you live with them?"

He ended badly. It was intrusive of him. He made a conscious effort to relax and accept whatever came of these queries without proceeding further. Feeling bulky and awkward, he waited, observing himself from outside, reaching to refill his bowl. It was odd to be uncomfortable in this manner, with one's parent, but the cause lay within himself.

"My memories have become the air that I breathe. They are the world that I see and that I hear. All of it – memories and world – are inseparable. And they change with me. Above all, they have become light in their being and are bearable, Yukio. Strange as it may seem, at times they are very bearable." Her words came as though woven from the most fragile shreds of material. Her soft laughter at her own insights drifted between them on memory's fine gossamer. "Now stop it or I shall cry!" Indeed tears had started to form.

"I thought you might like some company."

His words had the desired effect of stopping her tears.

"A man! Yukio, you mean a man!"

"I want you to be happy." His voice was a murmur, while his head twisted to the side as though from a difficult birth.

After a moment, she spoke.

"As long as I am well in my being, I do not look for happiness ... or love. Happiness and love are already there. Yukio, I am not unhappy."

At this, Miyeko rose to her feet and began to clear the table.

"You are stronger than me."

"I am your mother." Her gaze caressed him in a way that no other could and, in this moment of fullness, she turned away with laden hands.
8

Yukio Washington

Yukio had his own alarm clock to wake him at dawn if need be. He squashed the button under the broad pads of his fingers and lifted himself off the thin mat. Stirrings came from the lumpy pool of sleep spread about him as of cattle couched in a field, broadened and deepened by the coffee-black air. The snores of twenty bodies in two rows of ten clashed above their heedless wallowing, although strange mergers of mind took place in the communal unconsciousness whose participants best forgot or left unmentioned once awake. Deep in their psyches, they took on hectic pursuits together to a dubious end. In the small light of the remaining moon and the last flicker of stars that two fingers might pinch out, he wore his brethren's impenetrable dreams and nightmares about him like a night cloak. He shook it off and went to his first ablution of the day and then to the kitchen where he worked at the fires until they roared. He set the night-long soaking rice upon the heat with the tea water beside.

While waiting, he takes a mop and pail and washes the floor; he dries it with a huge towel and wipes his sandal bottoms so that there will be no tracks. When there are fifteen minutes to go in the cooking, he presses the buzzer that sounds mercilessly throughout the building. He attends to the blast of it filling the hallways and to the thudding feet in its aftermath, the blowing and remonstrating as of rhinos on the move. Under the released pressures, the plumbing clangs and reverberates while the dishes in his arms clatter onto the dining table. The light at the windows is ash grey, and the communal climb up the sides of the day has begun, with him in the forefront, lowest of the low, preparing the way. After he serves the food, he too can eat and from then on it is all catch-up for him.

He practices in the outside courtyard with the other young bulls. They have made the beds, swept the corridors, cleaned the washrooms' toilets, sinks, floors, and showers; all these are as fetid as the rikishi – those in the top ranks – can make them in their never-ending competition to see who can leave the most crap for the lower rankings behind them. They are in the _dohyo_ \- the ring - for a few clashing seconds where their built-up strengths release in an explosion of mind and body that have completely fused. One wrestler – one world – throws the other out of the circle or onto the sand at his feet.

After each has exchanged bows of mutual respect, the victor calmly moves onward leaving the vanquished determinedly to reconfigure. Yukio apprentices under Full Moon, a mature bull who requires him, according to the general rule of servitude towards one's superiors, to intuit his unspoken needs and deal with them unflinchingly as they come up.

Endowed with a greater imaginative range than his fellow trainees, Yukio visualizes his response to every possible blow and collision and so regularly finds himself caught flat-footed, heaved off his feet, plowed under, or simply outguessed. He expects to lose since he has less training. And he falls short in the sport's culture. An accident of birth is not enough. What he does possess is the ability to come back and, each time, he realizes he can take whatever is next.

He becomes less concerned by the overwhelming force that charges at him and increases his focus on what to do about it. The more he stands his ground the more solidly he plants himself in the ring. Although to his opponents he is never quite the immovable mountain he imagines himself to be, it is this thought emanating from him that gives pause. He may then upset whatever strategy – blunt or otherwise – they use against him.

He broadcasts that "Washington" will be acceptable as his ring name and the brazenness of it goes far to producing a fatally blinding animus not only in his opponents but also in the spectators. In his own mind, he identifies himself with the tallest mountain in New Hampshire and the American East Coast, and the bear he had fought to save his father serves for his opponents.

Two decades have passed when Yukio enters the ring in order to be elevated into the highest ranking should he win. He continues to be the mountain, and he is himself; he repels all that oppose him. He is the spirit of the mountain, and the cloud and sky about its peak, the source of thunderstorms and lightning. Calm and deliberate he is nature at its worst. He changes from moment to moment. He becomes pure rage. The muscular cones of his thighs flute down to feet that tread light as a mountain lion. He gentles the sand with a soft smack of one foot and then the other, lifting them horizontally to waist height and then planting them into the ring. His eyes lock with the eyes directly before him. Each stamp of the other's feet quakes the ground, the lard of the other's great belly uncontrollable in space; the open circle of the pincer arms that are themselves like bowed long-toed legs have him already in their grasp. He waits that moment for the other to make his move in order to parry it but his opponent is equally patient. They both as by mutual agreement rush each other at once. His shoulder drives into the bulging wall of flab, his knuckles slip over it as his hands shoot for the belt, the infuriated hugeness driving him back, seeking to encircle and lift him out of the ring. He back-pedals to the edge, while keeping himself slanted forward, and, with a pull at the waist belt, urges on the other's momentum as he twists away to remove any further impediment to the onrush. Sumo flesh weighing in at two hundred pounds in excess of Yukio's three hundred and ten hurtles over the line and across five of the spectators in the front row.

Yukio holds where he is, just within the ring, like a plump fig clinging to its stem in the wind. Not unusual such a win where the larger one is defeated. It comes with an extra dash of satisfaction though, a spiritual release into the stands where the crowd roars to receive it.

He wipes sweat from his brow and awaits the extrication of his opponent's blubber from the sweat-greased laps. The referee stretches his arms out, forming his robe into butterfly wings, and superfluously signals what all know. Hiding a third of the spectators behind his bulk, Katsutoro – the Planet – bows deeply as does Yukio. With his assistant mopping him, he leaves the ring amid applause and jeers. Some do not care that he is American. He has his fans and Katsutoro has his.

Not that there isn't an uproar in the days that follow. Every win against the odds in Yukio's case is a reminder of the past when a circle of destruction that rose skyward decided the outcome. After a few more matches of the same order, he deflates the drama by stepping away from it. He goes to his mother.

"You need to explain yourself. They need to understand you."

Yukio settled by the garden window and opened the box his mother has given him. Inside was a small bundle of the thinnest airmail letters, the kind that folded upon themselves and had narrow flaps that sealed the edges, letter and envelope all of one piece, as thin and gossamer as time past, blue like the sky they traveled through. It was not easy to read the faded blue ink on the lighter blue paper. Was this format still available and used, with its sky-signifying colour, the tissue thinness of the paper making for the cheapest freight? A slight breeze would carry it across the waves. Written before the war, they were letters between his parents.

Dear Jonathan,

Thank you for accepting me to be your "pen pal." This exchange is very interesting since it makes me think in English. You know that my name is Miyeko and that I am fourteen years old. And that I live in a city called Hiroshima. I am joined with my mother and father and three brothers, and my mother's parents. Please excuse me when I am going to sound silly. Everything is different. The handwriting. The grammar. Even the fact that your country is across the ocean makes me wonder what to say. Of course, the same is true for you. I think a lot about that. What to communicate over such a distance with someone you have not met. Is it not like starting a conversation with a stranger in a bus? This is not something we do. My father is very serious when I tell him that I write this letter. And my mother has a worried look....

He worked his way through the letters, two dozen in all, written over two years, peeling apart the soft paper like history's sun-burned skin from the raw body of the present, all that materially survived of lives lived in the passage of time. They contained simple thoughts and emotions that stood out in delicate sharp relief from the blur of what the correspondents did not say about a dimly perceived greater world. As with all young people, they showed themselves painfully conscious of their limitations.

While he read, a photon film from the sun gilded the blue paper with yellow glisten. The future in the form of his hands held the past. Here were his parents without having met and without consciousness of him. He did not exist and now how huge and solid he felt himself to be, and how much larger what he held. It was at the vanishing point and beyond size. Its immensity spread far beyond him although, from one moment to the next, his thought easily overwhelmed it. He unfolded another.

Dear Miyeko,

Today there are rainclouds in the mountains and it will definitely pour down. Our letters seem to take longer to arrive these days, don't you find? I see from the postmark of your latest that the delivery process began nearly a month ago. It is to be expected, I suppose, but it is not as though they have to go through a war zone. Mountains and valleys, mountains and plains, and endless water separate our two addresses, that is all. It should be simple enough for a plane to cross, a ship to sail.

Yes, it definitely looks like rain (here I am again with the weather report, but in the mountains it affects everything), and so I am not going for a hike today as I had planned. Instead I shall catch up on my exam work in case the outlook is improved next week-end and I won't feel like studying then.

_No, my parents do not ask me to show them your letters to me, but I fully understand your father's concerns and do not mind that he reads what I have written. My mother does ask me about you and about your family and is genuinely interested that we are corresponding and getting to know each other, although it was not always so, I have to admit. At the beginning, even she was –_ _what can I say? –_ _a little dubious. I find that, these days, people's ideas change a lot and they seem to have ideas where before they had none. (I am not speaking of my mother.)..._

There they were, before he existed. Was he not there as well? It was his world as much as theirs, and yet it was more than merely a stage with him in the wings. That was too definite. Too sterile. The real present chose from among the vaguest of futures. What he required in order to exist was a series of choices with each one changing the stage itself. There were no right lines to be spoken. In that same present, other choices were being made on other stages, choices that led to war and to a sequence of events that would culminate in a bomb of historical proportions. His entrance required a larger stage – a larger present – than the small sideshow of his parents' innocent correspondence. And how could this living organism with all of its infinite possibilities of choice be called a stage? The earth itself shifted under one's feet. Without a war, the exchange of letters might have ended from natural causes, so to speak. The momentum of their separate lives would have carried forward the Japanese girl and the American boy with little more than inconsequential memories of their correspondence and its mildly affective details of each other's daily pursuits, hopes, and plans. Their letters represented an exercise in language and no more than a youthful reaching out to another culture. All of it would only have been of little more than sentimental value should these letters have survived the end of their pen pal relationship. If there had been an arousal of feeling beyond that of two people interested in each other's worlds, the words did not show it. As for imaginings, had they existed, they died unexpressed.

No, his birth required a war and, more than that, it required a nuclear event that would annihilate his mother's family and send its apocalyptic wind to carry his father to her. It called for the history of the world and the clash of nations to engender him. He hated to think it, but here was a sumo match writ large, and the story of mankind was full of them.

These were ordinary letters. More ordinary he could not imagine.

"Today we went to the temple where the monks served us small cakes. We were dressed in our best clothes and, afterwards, we walked the grounds with the other visitors."

"I suppose I am a Christian, but it is not something I think about very much."

These were the lives that others viewed as expendable. Whatever he was he owed to them. And what did he owe to those – the Oppenheimers, the Tellers – who used their brains more efficiently to melt flesh, to be the destroyers of worlds? He calculated that the thin bundle of letters he held in his hands, no different from countless similar bundles in drawers and attics everywhere, contained more value in their artless words than all the equations of death that the brain's dancing neurons devised to string out on blackboards as they sought their own survival on the drive to the desert lab. Except as a part of history, he determined that it had not been necessary for him to exist.

With the publication of his memoir, he returned to the ring where he was welcomed and applauded, neither American nor Japanese, but an amalgam of what survived and flourished.

"Yukio Washington!" announced the referee, the sleeves of his robe outspread and hanging an inch above the ground, its pelican-and-blossom pattern of no consequence whatsoever here beyond spectacle and a completely outrageous window into other dimensions of time and culture. The presence of the disconnected among this shirted, shiny-faced mob was not unpleasant. The official drew back and waited.

Yukio stepped into the ring, crouched, stamped his feet, rose, and retreated. He returned with a fistful of salt, stood for a moment before he cast it in a silver-white arc, letting it dribble from beneath his hand while he shot it upward to form a winged shape with tail and head. He had no intention to be showy. It was what he wanted to do with the purifying salt.

The opponents' eyes locked. A grunt sounded and Yukio lingered longer than he should have, missing the belt, and he had already lost the match, won by a handful of blubbery waist that he could not hold onto as he was flipped to the ground over an out-thrust knee. It was a good way to begin again, without an immediate triumph. Upright, he acknowledged the bow of respect and wondered at what had arisen in him despite himself. Or because of himself. His most troubling self to date. Did he make a last minute decision to throw the contest? Was he consciously starting a new narrative or did he lose outright? An exhalation of breath filled the arena as he made his bow.
9

_Gunshots in the Park_

"Now let me see!"

Yukio's thick fingers are poised. The large typewriter waited infinitely dependable as is the patience of inanimate objects. The white sheet of 22 weight paper satisfactorily etched with words and punctuation held tight to the roller, but he had more to put down as he read it over.

How she is gazing out a window, black hair typically falling to her waist where it feathers in a contemporary silver tint. She is tracking her lover until he disappears at the end of an industrial/residential street, around a corner there, waiting for him to stop and he does come to a halt as if he has thought of something – it must be she. What has reminded him? Some form of etiquette he learned in childhood? She would not call him tutored in the protocols of romance. He lifts his hand at the last moment and gives a backward wave before he is gone from view. Even as she turns away, both satisfied and irritated, text appears on her screen. Love words. From a tough guy.

"Okay, baby. Next time better. Count on it."

Characteristically there is no exclamation mark. Not exactly Genji, but good enough considering whom he might be channeling. Then again, she herself will not be wasting away with expectant sighs until such time as he comes knocking on her door again, keeping his taxi waiting in case she's not in.

Yes, there have been advances since trysting in the eleventh century when lovers rode half the night along precipitous snow-clogged mountain paths and across treacherously rigged bridges to their long-nailed, black-toothed mistresses. With dawn, they set out once more, their passions sated, not neglecting to linger with backward glances and, once home, they would pen the verses their night of love has inspired dispatching them under seal by courier. Choice sentiments such as, "The deep snows have buried the heron's nest./It struggles tirelessly as do I to come to a warm sun." Worlds of the heart would end if the rider should, on his way, suffer a mishap. Today, nothing has changed but the style and the method.

"Watch where you're shooting, lover boy!"

They are still where they can joke about it. She and her lover with a gun.

Yukio has her mind darken in the room's early morning shade, her body lose some of its little fullness as though what lies within the pearl grey light eats at it. (In his loose imagining, her body is completely devoured.) It settles into itself, no longer an object of desire or an instrument of temptation. She has discarded its self-conscious trappings. Its juices have receded, drawn away like her lover by some outgoing tide that is neither of day nor of night. Except for the human razzmatazz the two of them might be crabs decoupled on the beach. Yukio has her unconcerned with any of this. She is young and confident. Clothes are at hand as are the many years of ripeness. "She wears time like a new dress." Doubtful of the line, he keeps it in reserve. He names her, and brings her into existence.

In her studio apartment, Mura makes herself a coffee and then another, immune to the physical cost that is still negligible, for she will sleep in a moment and show no ill effect. Her phone's empty screen images her disappointment when she checks it but light fills her face when she thinks of her lover with a gun, every detail of him: the incoherent intelligence, the scars, the tattoos.

She awakes in some disorder to pull on her knit thigh stockings and slip into a loose short dress. She brushes her hair and lightly applies powder to her cheeks and gloss to her lips. She shrugs into a washable turquoise blouse and leaves the apartment, turning off the lights with a sideways thrust of her hand that does nothing to deflect the disarray she leaves behind her with the thought that, who knows, she might never return, it being after all an exciting world out there if she is to go by Yoko's outlaw life. In her shoulder bag, she carries two spritz bottles. One she has filled with clean water. To the other she has added a red vegetable dye. Unlike her namesake, the immortal Shikibu of the aforementioned Genji fame, she does not find her world "fascinating" and worthy of recording so as not to be lost to future generations. Her society is something to be changed, not remembered for all time other than as a caution. Today, spritz bottles are her instrument.

Perhaps here in the state of the world is the real reason why she sleeps with a man who carries a gun, and not the little romantic moment of their meeting. She clatters down the stairs in her hard-heeled slip-ons. There is no carpeting and no elevator in the building. It is an industrial make-over – cement block walls, plasticized resin underfoot, hard-core city living that attracts a certain type of occupant: bohemian with a job. As for Mura, she currently enjoys an artist's grant from the Hiroshima Committee For Nuclear Disarmament. Her mission: to raise public awareness of the unresolved nuclear threat to humanity.

Outside the flat brick facade, she notes the congealed figure dipping a beak-like hand into the trashcan before the day's pick-up. She sees that, for the elderly lady who passes him, neither he nor the trashcan possess any reality. Her cane supports more of her effort to walk than do her quavering legs. Already, Mura feels implicated in the lives of these two persons. They solidify her street identity, and she passes them by with an unconscious lizard-like blink that is more characteristic than she would have liked to think. Embarrassment cooks and toughens her epidermis's thick silk. Once she completely separates herself from these discomfiting indicators of social disintegration, a natural provocativeness returns to her step.

Yukio leans back from the typewriter. It has been that plum blossom time, after a hard winter and a recent snowfall so late in the season. Rude rains quickly chased away the brief visitation, and then the former epiphany returned although with less strength than before. Now he looks up and it is as if the thousand-year-old painting of white blossoms falling across his window had not been there yesterday. Between the exposed branches, he sees white cloud in sympathetic attendance, while the sky is mostly a deep ocean blue as though concealing another storm. He knows it does not, for there is none of the arrested stillness, the tension that is the same as in the ring.

He reaches for his tea that is also fresh and spring-like (unobtrusively his mother has deposited it beside the typewriter as he clacked away on it) and also thousands of years old.

"You want some too? Too bad! Too bad!"

"Tay! Tay!" Bood hops on his perch.

After he finishes drinking, he adds one drop of plum blossom honey to the liquid dregs in his cup.

"Here!"

He holds up the small, clay-fired vessel. Bood, well aware of the routine, flies from his perch, settles beside the typewriter and dips in his beak with a drawing sound as if sucking on a reed. Yukio waits until the inevitable tapping at the bottom of the cup sounds, not unlike the earlier tapping of the typewriter keys, and flicks the bird away, dismissing his failed efforts as easily as he would his own.

Wings flutter. The bird accomplishes a landing and sets to grooming itself. It focuses beady eyes upon everything but its giant provider.

Both of them inhabit the same, differently infinite universe.

What thinks the bird of those few disheveled blossoms that remain? Last night's storm has left an expanded world; it increased its perspectives and diminished its substance. This had been the sheltered side of the house; at the back, where his mother lodged, the ground would be thick with casualties. He thinks to go to her when a knock sounds at the front door. Feeling intruded upon, Yukio heaves himself to his feet.

He is surprised to recognize his visitor.

"Come! Come!"

His words and his thick hands invite and guide Jovo in, old friend, old warrior that he is. He shows him to a seat and checks the tea pot. Half-empty. The spout beneath the dragon head does not breathe but the belly is still warm. He adds a pinch of leaves and brings hot water from the brazier. When the green tea's liquor has freshened, he fills two cups. The result is palatable.

Their talk is filled with reminiscence. They exchange stories of old wounds and scar tissue. The roar of the crowd does not quite sound but the memory of it buoys them. They recollect the sweat and the stickiness with pleasure.

"You are like a brother to me. A brother!"

Yukio is unnerved. He has heard the sentiment before and does not feel like a brother to Jovo. Perhaps a friend. People are thrown together is how he puts it to himself, but he does not speak this truth and nods and smiles in response.

He knows that Jovo's beam is for the American pathfinder that he sees before him. It is pleasant to be cherished by this Mongolian wrestler whose way to acceptance in this insular land has been more arduous than his own.

"You have always been good to me, Yukio, always!"

He is unrelenting.

Yukio's eyes narrow. A thin saliva filament on his friend's lip takes him aback. What has happened? He cannot recall this hint of vacuousness about Jovo's face. Abruptly he beseeches him to go out and Yukio welcomes the suggestion.

The park and the fish pond in it are both crowded.

"There is hardly room for us anywhere."

Yukio nods toward the varicoloured carp sliding past each other at their feet. Both he and Jovo are naturally aware of their own size but are not self-conscious. A family gets up to leave and they take its place on the bench, one of a number encircling the pool. Jovo begins to speak, looking straight ahead as though the air will be his go-between. Yukio's gaze sweeps over the other park visitors. Do they overhear the guttural servings that come to him like the sound of feet on submerged pebbles? All appear to be respectfully ignoring them, but this pervasive attitude of non-existence does not fool him. It is laughable really that two retired sumo wrestlers in traditional dress seated before slow-moving, prehistoric, and timeless fish do not exist. The carp swim as if their sole purpose is to avoid an ultimate merging together. Perhaps it is the same for these crowded island people. He imagines the formation of one huge fish lording it over whatever remains and the thought leaves him momentarily feeling larger than he already is.

Jovo's words have taken on an even harsher, self-protective quality that hides a note of appeal. It has altered Yukio's apprehension of the world about them, endowing it with a watchfulness it previously lacked, turning it into an organism that is attending to them while studiously pretending the opposite.

"I know how and when I am going to do it. My friend, I cannot give you the details. What I am asking is that you take care of the business afterwards. I know what happens. I know. The body is a matter of sanitation for them, no more. You will do it for me, won't you?"

"Yes, I shall take care of things."

Jovo's gravity and determination had convinced him, but he had not been able just to accept what he was saying. He had had to make sure and had interrogated him and then had rubbed his nose in his answers and turned him inside out. He had finally ground his teeth. They rose from the bench and he walked Jovo to his home, at the point of stumbling beside him. He felt less than supportive for having withheld immediate assurance that he would fulfill his dying wish. The sibling moons of their faces had caught in the emptiness of the day, for this day was empty as only flesh can be and they nodded and embraced in their understanding of it. The gunshots that came from the vicinity of the park, so distant as not to be accurately identified, made for a curious seal to the pact they had made.

At Yukio's reappearance, Bood tilts his head. He is being spoken to, and the sounds come to him as repetitions which they are. Oftentimes he ignores what is only said once as beneath his dignity.

"It is the end, Bood. It is the end."

Yukio says it twice, because of what he has to say and because it is some kind of rule to be repetitive with animals and birds. Bood fixes him with a glossy red eye. Yukio turns from the futility of it but is comforted that there is another life form present.

As he shuffles to the brazier with tea water in hand, his mother announces her approach. He pauses to hear the sound of her, the soft sliding of her fingers on the corridor wall, the stiff-legged pace of her steps careful as a crane in muddied water. Her sight is mostly gone, but there are compensations, she says, and he is glad and he chooses to believe her. Much of the day the sound of her samisen filters through the house and he knows it to mean more than music. Her spirit is released and walking abroad, and he joys in the fact of it. When he visits, her peaceful face shows pleasure.

Miyeko's day begins with no feeling of emptiness or, she would say, her emptiness is full. In the morning, how that bird sings! She listens to it until its song ends and the light that she can see enters her. How the bird's song raises the morning! Like light it enters the cells of everything and tunes them to a higher pitch. She waits for the song's lingering effect to soak through her and then she takes up her instrument. At first, the sound is raw and intrusive as she sweeps by the fresh memory of the bird's melody with her own. She is deliberate and she is careful, attentive to more than she is doing but that is a part of it.

"I heard you earlier go out and now come in."

He watches as she moves into their large front room. She skirts the brazier that glows after his exertions. They sit opposite each other on the floor mats and she pours the tea. Her sight is not good enough to tell when the cups are full but her hearing and her sense of timing are. She pours and straightens the pot, pours and straightens the pot. Her movements are not tentative as they might be considering her age and frailty. The air of a smile plays like a soft breeze about her parted mouth that appears never to have voiced complaint. He enjoys watching her show of gratification that things work despite her diminished capacities. He thinks of her as imbibing life's subtlest wine.

When he tells her of Jovo's plans and of the service he has asked him to perform, her reply is careful.

"It is what we do for each other. He wants to know that there will be someone there and that he will not be entirely alone. He needs that knowledge. We cannot always count on the world to give us meaning. Remember your father."

"Yes."

Jovo has told him what to expect. In the emptiness of his room and at a time of day that none will know, he will plunge his knife in and then draw it across his bared abdomen. In Yukio's mind, the foretold day coils about the lifeless body like a serpent. In reality it will flow on more easily than water over polished stone, but he does not see it. In his mind, he himself is already there in the day's open jaw.

Mother's and son's spirits meet and the orbs of their being merge as one and are protective of each other. Unnoticed, Bood looks off at something in or about the late afternoon light that is like something in the eye. They as well feel a presence at the periphery of things.

Miyeko goes to the kitchen where she puts water to heat in the rice pot. She returns and sits and goes back to it early and waits to hear the bubbles rise. She sights them bursting silverly tumescent at the surface and adds pinches of salt that further send the water into a fury. Strips of wakami and handfuls of rice minutely judged quiet the frenzied boil and she lowers the cooking flame until she hears the soft sound of simmering whereupon she covers the pot and lowers the flame further to a low pulse.

She prepares a stir-fry: a palette of vegetables and fish whose chunkiness is lost to her but the yellows and reds and greens and silver greys swirl about the pan in a hiss of oil, miso and soy.

Bood joins the meal, hopping from plate to plate; the humans do not mind since he gives them no reason to shoo him away. He brandishes a few clumped grains of rice at a time in his beak or minute bits of stir-fry. With a tilt of his head he swallows each bite whole, his eye at once outward-looking and self-involved. When the meal is finished and they rise from the table, the now plumper bird is already back at its perch after a short flight.

Together they do the dishes, stack them to dry, and silently part for their mats.

Yukio rises into darkened drifts of late afternoon light. In the front room, Bood is pensive in the deeper shadow. The bird clings to its hidden perch as if to a hardened ligament of curdled gloom, expecting rightfully that it will be swallowed in the doughy rising since no escape has ever presented itself. The switched on yellow light hides more than it shows.

For Yukio, at this hour, the typewriter becomes an instrument of darkness. He turns on the floor lamp beside it and takes his Waterman fountain pen from its upright position in the little holding mug that is too small to use for drinking. He cannot get out of his mind the item he caught on the news after his visit to the park with Jovo.
10

Shoot-Out

On the opposite side of the fish pond sat yet two more examples of man's bloated presence on this planet. In dissatisfaction, Mura crossed her semi-stockinged legs and turned her gaze away from the sumo wrestlers to the ancient carp. Their mouths agape, their bodies sliding, stream-lined and phallic, barbed and world-weary, she thought them to be consciously inured to this pool. Those that did not swim were patient and penitent. Their overriding attitude seemed to be that they could not expect this species of hell to get better. They overwhelmed her. Visitors seated on the other benches or strolling by became ambiguous in shape and intention.

The two sumo wrestlers continued to exchange confidences. Her shrug had more to do with the milling of the carp than anything she could discern beyond the crowded cement-enclosed water before her. This present congregation of fish had chosen to gather in particular at her feet, had it? One or two sinewy forms kept their distance, maintaining some self-involved pursuit or other in sunlight-rinsed shadow.

Yoko arrived at the park entrance to her right, his figure appearing cut-out and insubstantial in an open-collared, lime-green silk shirt. Overall, he wore a light and loose-fitting, sand-toned linen suit. He sighted her through the strollers crossing his vision, blinking as if he were a camera. The entire scene would have been in the photo. It was a habit whose merits she continued to weigh, his scoping all within range like this. Something bulged under the jacket's right-hand pocket on his approach; the hand-tooled leather shoes twinkled. It disarmed her to know what lay beneath this attire. At the same time, it flashed across her mind that she was not looking at his face and that she was possibly going to end things.

He sat down beside her. If not for his closeness, he might have been a stranger. To tease him she recrossed her legs. Even though they had first met at just such an hour, he seemed out of sync with the general order of things competing with sunlight itself. While she accepted that he was making a concession, meeting as they did, the thought of his gun caused her to be argumentative, critical, and rebellious.

"You look uncomfortable."

"It must be the fish. In America, they say ... ." She caught his wry smile and interrupted him.

"I meant you look awkward. Why do you not shoot them? Isn't that what you gangsters do?"

"Better that than join them."

"You don't want to swim with the fishes." She idiotically felt protected at the thought of his capacity to shoot at fish.

"Perhaps without these clothes." His laugh came easily and she lightened up a little.

When the shooting began, she thought that he was responsible even as he picked her up and threw her into the pool. She could properly interpret nothing through her flailing limbs.

The men entering the park seemed immediately to fall backwards and sideways to the ground in response to the sound of gunfire alone. On hands and knees, her nearly useless deadweight clawed across scum-mantled boulders, heart beating, lungs working like a bellows. She dragged herself to the edge of the pool and onto the flagstone path where she crawled to the bench. Gunshots sounded again, and then her hero was back pulling her upright.

"Get moving!" His command was harsh and guttural, canine in its insistent tone. His face had distorted, all of its recent niceties displaced by the raw inner man.

Her attention flicked away from him to bodies scattered about the pool, as motionless as the vacated benches, drained of the same life force that flowed in a torrent through her as she had never before felt it. She breathed and drank it in, choking on it and on the soiled pool water that was still in her mouth and throat. It had the taste and texture of oiled scum. She let him pull her away. They tracked the side of the pool and out of the park. A corpse lying half in the street gutter surprised her. She stumbled over it, touched the asphalt with one hand, and recovered herself. Temporarily she forgot the name of the man who dragged her along, this man who had been all over her body – this man must know what next had to be done, why else had she given herself over to him? Is this then what she could expect to manifest beyond their orgasms? She did not know him but they could not be more intimate.

Her water-logged stockings had gathered below her knees where they had fallen; her short dress clung to the tops of her cold and slimed legs. Churning skinny thighs fought the impediments; shards of hair beat at her face and leeched there. Her wide open eyes saw nothing of significance beyond car litter, swathes of sidewalk, brick battalions mounting upwards and brandishing glass shields. Spires rose out of the ground as though fired there from the sky or space itself. She fell into a car whose door her lover with a gun had opened and pushed her through. It slammed closed before she was accommodated and already she was taking note of the leather upholstery, the undulant dash, while the fool held up outside gazing about him for the way a bullet might come. He would crumple across the hood, or onto the road, him and his coolly turning away as if avoiding a silent ineffectual shot. He walked deliberately to the driver's side where he paused one last time.

His bravado be damned!

Once in the car, he keyed the starter and eased out of there whereupon her anger at last erupted. She alone was in turmoil, not he and not the bodies he had left behind to which she refused to be connected. She was isolated while he attended to the rules of the road and frequently glanced at all three mirrors. She could not lance the horror that stifled her and she could not keep up with him.

"Drop me here!"

Simple: step out and retake her life. The prospect of her own apartment or merely a street corner where she was able to walk in any direction she chose struck her as infinitely more desirable than their present course and anything else he might have in mind.

"If you wish, but what then? The rest of them could be just behind us." His eyebrows rose at what could not be more self-evident as they fled from the bloodied park.

She held her tongue, deciding that any reference to recent events might impair his mental balance. Bizarre as the circumstance was, she had needed his assessment to put it into perspective. Silence alone, however, would not keep her options open. She was not about to give herself over completely to his violent frames of reference.

"Keep going!" The grating tone of her command relieved her from feeling helpless and dependent.

They drove another five minutes. The car mirrors reflected for an unconscionable amount of time what went past and what came on behind them: sections of car and truck, human parts, shards of metallic light, cuts of road. The world had become a butcher shop. They credited all of it and none of it: this chaos of raw material alluding to and promising a present that would be innocuous once again. However much they drove, they could not keep one step ahead of recent time. And there was wonderment that in their progress they should be sliding back and the oncoming world with them.

Suddenly they turned off the road, lurched down a ramp, and passed beneath a sheer cliff of rust-stained balconies, roosts for great prehistoric birds, and into the underside of an apartment building whose hell-gate angled open.

Yellow splotches of light in the cement ceiling pooled at their long-awaited arrival like the eyes of spinster aunts. The car's bucking front beams slid into the first vacant spot where the engine cut out. Dark haze settled over the wall in front of them, its interlocked cement blocks impenetrable and full of dull assessment.

"Come on!" He got out and led her to another sedan – a moil of blue metal in a jaundiced shroud – that pointed outwards ready to go. They sat motionless inside it, his gun flat beneath his hand on his right leg. When the garage door opened and the daylight came in as though it entered a cave, his hand clenched tighter. A bespectacled couple, that was all; their rumbling over the entrance's drain vents continued to echo as they rolled past oblivious of a presence. Yoko waited for one more car and then they were back in the world.
11

_The Geisha Satoko_

Yukio sets his pen into its holding cup. He leans his head back and closes his eyes. This writing life took more out of him than being in the ring. Bood is immersed in his own meditations, and no sound comes from Miyeko's quarters. He rises and goes to run a bath. While it fills, he chooses a kimono, the rose one he decides, lined as it is against the evening chill. He lays it over the back of a chair and lowers himself into the water careful not to create a wave. Once bathed and dried, he wipes steam from the mirror and examines himself - his loin cloth and kimono whose obi he ties with care. The green eyes give him away, never mind their gibbous shape.

He looks in at his mother and retreats when he sees that she is peacefully seated on her little round cushion. As for Bood, he shrouds the cage with a night patch of black velvet cloth.

"Sleep! Sleep!" He feels he must utter something before he leaves the house.

The raked sand of their small zen garden to the side of the path collects the last of the twilight's strained silver; boulders in the shapes of mountains rise in the dark and float on shadow sludge. In the heights of the sky above his head, a light purple obscurely burns. Before him the horizon has merged upon the darker outlines of the city. The fluorescent light in the tall buildings makes him think of the disappeared sun processed and packaged. The West still glows. He sniffs the air and continues onto the pavement, pleased at his choice of kimono for the day's warmth has gone. To look at him, he knows, is to believe the ground must tremble beneath his feet, but his sandals scrape softly and an aura of gentleness eases his way. He recalls the great arcs of salt that once purified his place of combat.

Reflecting fondly on this practice, he would like to exercise its talismanic powers now. If he is to be a spectacle, then go all the way! Yet again he wonders at his life, and self-consciousness uncoils from his belly. Perhaps he should return home and change into civilian dress, but he has every right to make a splash, and tradition requires it of him. A world comes into flower when the nature of things is realized. Why not be a rogue wave? Does it not belong more than whatever it uproots? Passersby are startled at his approach but remain respectful. Some bow to him. In return, he showers them with bemusement and mild disdain.

At Yukio's intended destination, the geisha Satoko methodically applies layer upon layer of alabaster to her face until she comes to the final light brushing. She leaves the nape of her neck untouched. Next she applies white to her upper lip and a single stroke of red across the lower that does not fully cover the bottom flesh but edges just past the corners. She has only to touch up her hair that is in mild disarray due to a brief sleep. As always, her custom-made pillow has saved her hours of labour. Working at the mirror, she ponders what kimono to wear and what songs to sing, what music to play and on what instruments. What will suit the occasion, what mood will make her approach flexible? Once answered, more questions confront her. She tries out looks and phrases that might be touchstones for greater variety and improvisation. She tilts her head to the side and puts on a sympathetic moue before she formulates a stream of coordinated words. Once there had been such mastery! Nature alone could rival her. She surveys again the entertainments that this particular client favours and then she decides to set them all aside. Yukio Washington is adaptable. Graceful spontaneity will make him graceful and spontaneous in turn. She leaves herself free to pick and choose. He is not a difficult client, but there are cultural differences that make for ripples in the water. A little more inspiration is called for, that is all. Eventually, they achieve a harmony that is unique to them. As with all writers – she has known one or two of them, and he is a sumo in addition! – he is uncomfortable in society, but he does appreciate her!

In the streets of Hiroshima, Yukio is formidable in his dress, a mountain! Satisfyingly, his sandals slap down upon the world. Evening breezes have yet to penetrate his lined kimono. He is warm, and molten in his depths. He passes a temple, the stylized sea-wave of its roof an illustration, and bows his head out of respect for whatever might be within its shelter. Beyond the open door, votive candles flare in the darkness where vague shapes slide by each other performing the practical tasks of communion. He admires the self-containment of the scene. Humble candles and devotion make for a holy darkness. The effect stays with him. Lofted high in the sky, the moon draws his eye along silver beams widely cast. Isolated up there, it is a childhood friend that has never grown up and is forever issuing innocent invitations to enter into play. As he pays further attention, the orb becomes limpid and perfect, a thing made of the cries of angels for this city, or so he hazards. In such saccharine realms of poetry, he slaps, slaps, slaps his way to his geisha.

Satoko awaits him. The whole of the evening is reserved, and she enjoys waiting. It is magical to be the focal point in all this perfection she has achieved. The slightest movement of her head or hand increases the charm and is inseparable from it. She is, in every part of her, whether still or in motion, the played notes of a musical score, the brush strokes in a painting, the lifespan of a butterfly whose chrysalis is no more – abandoned and shrivelled to nothing on the forest floor. How these moments last!

Yukio has joined the flow of pedestrians and traffic coursing along the high-banked channel of the commercial street where there is little to distract from the lofty purposes of buying and selling, except for the narrow band of sky that requires craning one's neck. Even then the second tier of commerce would snag one's gaze: noodle and sushi and sake shops, martial arts emporia, tea and herb and video and live sex spots. Every few feet, a club distinctly throbs, the patrons clustered outside like exotic animals waiting to be selected for the privilege of display. He has spent his evenings in these places – a favoured client he has bestowed status – his ego solar and awhirl in silk-draped flesh.

The crowds raggedly part; here and there one of the men bows, the ladies sidestep and back away. Their painted toes seem to observe him; their eyes are nervously paralyzed. One or two of the men look to approach but freeze instead. It is comical and tragical at once. He would laugh if the rules permitted him. Clumsily he bends his head side to side. He does not want to intimidate and it is, after all, effortless to express who he is, basking in himself and ingratiating merely with his bulk. He scatters his acknowledgments, and keeps a courteous distance as he welcomes the recognition. He is grateful not to be swarmed or to have his sleeve pulled and is overbearing with the opportunistic who swiftly retreat. They are humbled and regretful.

A wizened shopkeeper proffers a bowl filled with raw fish, steamed tofu, and some rice balls darkly wrapped in toasted nori, and he accepts. They exchange appreciative bows and he downs the repast in the shelter of the shop's awning. When he comes upon the roasted almond or the morsel of umeboshi plum buried inside a ball of rice, he grunts his approval, in the way that he has learned. On finishing he bows deeply once again and accepts the warm cup of heated saki that she thrusts at him with spinsterish intensity. He swallows it in a mouthful and beams with a satisfaction directed only at her but evident to all who look on.

He takes a few more paces and another shopkeeper hands him a nut-filled, rice-cake sweet that he downs with a show of deep respect. When they begin to vie for the maintenance of this great body and the wellbeing of one who has raised the nation to great heights, he waves them off. Sufficient unto himself, he has not come out to be fed. Gone are those days when the populace provided in just such a manner for one of his kind although the tradition and the impetus live on in the minds of these lesser beings, as they regard themselves. When an especially importunate crone thrusts herself forward insistently, he yields for her sake and for yet another cup of warm saki. He goes against form, clasping her thin-boned head between his hands (how he could crush it!) and planting a kiss upon the antique brow. She squeals and backs away with bows flurrying lower and lower. At last, he feels able to laugh at himself and at them all before he carefully executes a quick bow of departure. He turns away. There are those who continue to hold to their breasts the cakes, the fish, the rice balls, the tumblers of saki; and they are proud as he passes by. They are proud of their devotion and their offerings that the god rejects.

He allows the engorged street lights to deflect his attention to the storefronts where he doesn't look beyond the whizzing colours, the exposed pulses, the hot and cold clusters, the serpentine glows, and the rivulets of lava, the mounting columns of cheap diamond and pearl jewellery. Arrows stab out their imperatives: ASCEND! DESCEND! Up or down, the stairway leads to a heaven-like hell for the earth-bound, whose punishment is a state of mind that goes in as silk and comes out as leather. The air that enrobes those who submit to their impulse and heed the directive is itself seamless with their minds. It twists about their doubts, as in ancient times when silk cloth acted as supple body armour slowing the passage of piercing arrows and preventing fatal entrance to the organ. His own step falters despite going on as he does.

His geisha is hiding the years. He tells himself that it does not matter. For him, the youth on the street are no more than migrating geese, and are capable of hurting and fleeing in quick sequence. He knows an ill-considered move of his will make him a species of ogre or object of ridicule. For all their beauty, they have negligible effect on him. They lack history and all they do is titillate. Satoko knows more of the world seated at a mirror, her indispensable tool for stopping time in its tracks.

He stops at a small table that is set out on the pavement. A perspicacious waiter has placed two round-bottomed chairs together for him. All the other waiters and the customers politely pretend he is not there; someone is but not he. He orders a bowl of miso soup from the waitress whose upper body undergoes a paroxysm of shuddering to her shoulders when she departs. It does not bother him unduly, knowing that he is a lot to take in for these insular people. His speech, his accent, his appearance do not entirely convince. She brings him the thin soup of fermented bean paste, sliced onion, and dark green seaweed. Her composure has returned and she waits a moment for him to render judgment. When he partakes, postures stiffen, side-looks come his way. Again he does not mind. He has become used to belonging and not belonging. He asks himself if it makes him more realistic in outlook and less subject to illusion. He is aware of how much effect he has on those about him, no differently in the end than when growing up in the mountains of New Hampshire.

He has finished his soup and sits reconciled to the stares, the theatrical fear and astonishment of passersby. He belongs as visitors from elsewhere do not, with a natural right to be there. He gathers his strength to shift himself. His large-sized flesh had not been simply thirsty for soup but for rest. At times it does not move on its own and he has to wait for it not to be flesh but in that state of grace that enables it to rise and shift from location to location, resting place to resting place, despite its increasing preference for inertia. Until he moves on, he is a monument to himself in that place that, for the time he is there, is he. It compensates him to be so.

Momentarily, he is up and on his feet, delicately watchful not to overturn table and chairs. His thigh muscles, hands and fingertips balance him while, from his kimono, he extracts a bill and secures it under the soup bowl. The proprietor hurries toward him, flapping his hands, telling him to keep his money, the "honour" is too great, but he bows and waves him off in the American manner of largesse consciously rendered. The confluence of the two cultures allows him to slip free of the diminutive man's striving to afford him the privileges of a lord or a samurai of old.

At Satoko's apartments, Yukio is a supplicant at the door, awaiting admittance to all that lies beyond, mindful of the parameters he must respect. With the base of his palm, he signals his arrival, banging lightly on the teak wood. The shivering of the solid door frame embarrasses him. No time at all passes; just as soon as the reverberations settle, he hears the medieval sound of the bolt sliding back and there she is deferentially bowing.

He tells her that it is a beautiful evening and that he does not wish to disturb her.

"The evening will be empty without your presence." Her eyes flicker upward. She moves to let him in with a sideways gesture of the hand.

"You are saying that I fill the evening!" He smiles at his own joke and thanks her; he bends his head to enter and steps onto the deep black mahogany floor that shines from centuries of hand-polishing. The glow of the rice paper walls, soft hidden lights glazing their surface, has settled upon it. Satoko has burned incense prior to his arrival; its fugitive scent hovers in the air. She forms a graceful arc like a crane seeking for something in the water where it stands. He lifts his feet for her to remove his sandals and she places them in a lidded receptacle by the door and leads him barefooted across the floor's rich blackness.

As with previous times, he draws in his breath. In the room they have entered, the rice paper mural directly across from him shows a blossoming cherry tree, its full branches hanging over a smoothly surfaced pool on whose irregular banks maidens wash each other's feet, comb each other's hair, and pay no heed to the old man seated in the shade, wearing a little square cap, with a walking staff at his side, gazing not at them but at the fall of water ribboning down from an unseen source apparently located somewhere in the above amassed clouds.

At the far end of the room, charcoal embers are glowing in the slate-coloured hibachi. A kettle is steaming there. Loaded with cushions, tatami mats border the low oblong table in the center of the room. He settles cumbersomely down, seating himself sideways and stretching out his legs, while Satoko banks silk cushions against his back. Once this task is completed, she fetches the kettle and seats herself on her ankles opposite to her client. She takes a shallow basket from the table's concealment and removes a dark jade teapot, two matching cups, and a measuring spoon. A second basket that she withdraws contains an array of teas in small labeled tins. She chooses an orange-infused sencha and measures out the leaves into the pot and then pours the lightly simmered water over them.

Two or three minutes of meditative silence pass. When she deems the steeping of the tea to be accomplished, Satoko gives the contents of the pot a gentle swirl and pours modestly into her cup. She tastes for bitterness. Finding none, she fills his and then tops off her own. They drink in silence and, once he has emptied his cup, she pauses for a moment absentmindedly before refilling it. She takes no more for herself.

"What is it?" He dares to ask the question while feeling that he is breaking protocol. It might have been better to keep his concern to himself and discreetly let her recover. Her lapse of attentiveness embarrasses them both. How to interpret it? How to explain it?

Her apology comes in a murmurous rustle of sound as from a forest floor. A light pink colouring, more felt than seen, pushes through her alabaster-layered cheeks.

"Forgive me. It is my first verse that I am trying to remember. This has never happened before. Yes, now I have it." A meek expression accompanies her words. The lines she had tried to recall do not fill her mind in full as they should but the phrases do now appear haltingly to her. Her lips purse and her head contritely bends to acknowledge the fault. Yukio's tender smile conveys his indulgence and support, but certainly the evening has taken on an air of frailty and, were he to be truthful, evidence of damage, but this he refrains from baldly stating to himself on so fleeting a mishap.

"Yes, then let me hear it!" His urging permits her to begin.

Obediently, with a return of grace, she brings out her samisen, also lodged under the table, and presses her fingertips to the frets high up the arm of the instrument, her right hand simultaneously plucking at the strings. She has chosen "Autumn Song," whose melancholy notes speak of the mortality that fills time's wake and of how the past cannot be found in the present. He looks at the paint on her face and he sees that it will not support the illusion forever. He is reminded of himself and how he could not continue any longer to stand before the encircling spectators should they become hectically disdainful and as inattentive as baboons scratching themselves.

Satoko's head bends over the samisen, her black, carefully wrought clouds of bunched hair partially overhanging her face, their shadow wasting her cheeks. Cradling the instrument, she recites,

Fish no longer climb the streams

and still the waters flow

down the mountainside.

When the eye of the sun closes

and the land is dark and cold,

an ocean of stars gives no warmth.

The jaguar's bones

are the lyre

that plays in the distant wind.

Without this paint

can you see

what lies beneath the skin?

What can be said

when my sleeve is wet with tears?

What can be said?

She stops her recitation. Real tears have welled and she blinks them away, dampening her lashes; minute shards in her eyes glisten. Her face's planes are smooth and white, her mouth is firm, a straight red stroke beneath the white of her upper lip. He casts his eye from the darkly immaculate somber hair to her kimono that covers from the neck down. Its stitch-work outlines mythical golden beasts whorled like seashells and tinges with red the fires of their released breath. The effect would have been overpowering and hackneyed had these dragons not been miniature in size. The overall result is aggressive but feminine. Deep sleeves conceal her long fingernails.

"What is it?" And, again, with a hint of hopelessness, "What is it?"

She focuses on him as if for the first time. The paint beneath her puffed out eyes has slightly caked and fissured.

"Have I wasted my life?" From the broadness of her expression and the way she speaks she could have posed her question to anybody at all. The urgency and despair in her voice shake him as much as the appeal.

"How can you say that?" His response comes immediately. It does not require thinking. The suggestion that all of her efforts of so many years have been for nothing shocks him.

"You have given me great pleasure." Weak, he realizes. His entertainment and pleasure are not in question here. "And your many other clients." He compounds the error, with a real sense of futility.

She does not give him a chance to redeem himself. He doubts it, but possibly she has not heard him, for she disregards his words and speaks instead, unusually, of herself.

"I have no one to blame. When I was a young girl, I chose this life. There was nothing else that interested me. I was obsessed with myself, that was all. I was fourteen and I had the choice to do anything I wanted. My parents could afford it and they left me to choose. They knew how unhappy I could be. One of my aunts was a geisha and I greatly admired her. On her visits to the house, she introduced me to the "arts," as she called them, but it was in play. I would practice on my own before a mirror with the boxes of paint she left me and my combs. I would memorize poetry and compose songs. When my cousins visited, I would play at being their little geisha. If I had not found the world so terrible, I might have set it all aside, but it captivated and freed me. Any other life would have been an enslavement, or so I imagined.

"Now, though, it is only paint and artifice, and the world that I found terrible, have I helped it? And I, when I remove my paint, am less than what the world has become. Soon I shall give no pleasure and I shall have no part in the world that I have shunned."

Is it for the first time that Yukio notices how young Satoko's voice sounds, as if the years have not strengthened it? He tries a different tact.

"You know, Satoko, that the same could be said of me. I have spent my entire life with sumo, giving entertainment to others, with little regard for anything else. You could easily accuse me of having been too full of myself and more concerned with the impression I made than what I contributed. And what do I do with myself now in my retirement? I write romances for the wives of business men, who rarely see their husbands. These books do no more than tranquillize them." He stops, aware that he has spoken a partial truth and that his latest work has taken a different direction than usual, but he is astonished at what has happened. After all of these years, the two of them have spoken their minds with the result that their relationship is shattered. No, it is completely dissolved by these revelations that have brought into the open what was most private. What is he thinking? That his half-truths can support hers?

"Perhaps you should go. I am sorry. I should have known how this would end." She cannot fathom how she has come to betray herself and her client like this but, in the depths of what she has done, her composure returns eggshell-like, restoring her sense of equilibrium. Meant to reassure, the slightest smile cuts into the porcelain obscuration.
12

The Dawning Sky

Normally, at the end of a session, Yukio would go out into the night, his spirit replete with the cultured entertainment that an evening with his geisha has provided him. He would take the poetic sentiments and the strains of musical accompaniment that she has served to him along with tea and other delicacies as memories vibrant in his being. Her unfailing regard for him throughout the evening would make him buoyant. All of this he would take with him to one of the city's houses where he would choose a girl from those available, using different criteria of the moment but rarely out of pure and simple lust. An expression of sadness might be what decides him and in the small rudely decorated room they would lie together and they would speak of other things than her life in this place. Possibly, he would ask her to play her favourite music and to tell him what films she has seen and what was her life before this. He might describe his experiences in the streets and his memories of America and, when the sadness would leave her, only then would he have her satisfy him and he would be gentle with her so that the pleasure she shows, however slight, is real.

"I want you to be happy. I want you to be happy."

This evening – it is still early – he knows that he does not want to leave, not like this, knowing that it would be impossible to return, with the artifice forever broken as it would be if it could not be restored in some manner, not as artifice but as a more real expression of what lay underneath. As well, in such a state as he is, he could not expect to take himself to one of the city's houses, could he? The thought repels him. If he leaves, it would all be over and, if he stays, it could not be the same as before, but in what manner can he stay? His compassionate regard falls on Satoko as from a distant sun.

Her eyes remain lowered after she has requested him to leave. Surely she is of two minds, and it would be possible to persuade her. He had always been able to master his desires in the past, with the thought that he could satisfy them later in one of his houses and with the image of Satoko subject to his will. Up until now, he has submitted to the protocol, seeking no distinction between himself and his geisha's other clients. He knows that she treats all in the same manner with grace and refinement and regard whatever their differences in character and appearance. And yet now, at this critical juncture, when the facade has begun to fail her, she has chosen him to confide in. When her doubts eat away at it, she appeals to him.

Instead of going, he waits and, as he waits, an intimacy arises between them in all simplicity as between children, or animals and birds, woven from the finest silk of sympathy, and, since they are not animals or birds or children, a further understanding comes to them that their eyes communicate.

The sleeve of her kimono lifts and her hand reaches out, tentative, unsure, the translucent turquoise of her nails. He swallows her hand in his. It sits there and trembles; a sea creature whose delicate beauty protects it from being crushed. He draws her to him, sliding his other hand into her kimono sleeve to her forearm and pulling her with both hands across the table; out of the ocean of herself she gasps with an indrawn breath. She seeks him with her open mouth, mermaid or fish twisting in a coil of seawater. He gathers her to him and she cries out, she gasps, and he presses the soft shape of her to his breast, his hands sinking into bunched silk that slides over the hardness of his fists. Her back arches, she pushes against him, her hands cat-like upon his chest, and he cannot distinguish her skin from her kimono. He cups her neck and draws her to him so that they might study each other's faces. When he plunges under the silk cloth, he finds that she wears nothing beneath it and he draws it up to her waist with an appetite in his mouth. He looks down at her, easing her back to the table with his great weight that holds her to him. Her legs are apart and she has rested her head on one arm. The image of him is contained within her eyes open or closed. Her other arm she has flung fitfully to the side.

The moon's rising has belled the air and all is silvery black at the window. With the taste of her in his mouth, he draws her kimono down – an act of modesty to be swept aside in a moment. Looming over her expressionless face and closed eyes, he asks himself what he has done and there is no answer that comes to his mind. The light shimmering across the damp creases of her white-thick eyelids and the gap between her painted lips indicate sentience. He raises his eyes to what the old man in the mural looks towards – an invisible rent in the nature of things – that is bestowing abundance upon him.

With purposeful hands, Satoko pulls at the ends of his kimono sash and undoes his loincloth. She slides down and under him and with her fingertips alone she lightly turns him on his side and cocks his leg so that his member is fully bared and thrust out. Holding it with her two hands, she tongues it and she draws at its tip. His hands are in her hair and at her ears and about her shoulders under the kimono and she rises up arching and releasing her sash and unwrapping herself. Over he goes and she climbs above him, swings her leg over and lowers herself carefully, holding him with one hand, smoothly and achingly fitting herself to him.

After their lovemaking a camaraderie sets in. They have removed to her private chambers and what charms him most is her modest discipline throughout their further intimacies and what delights him is the healthy pallor and smoothness of her skin and the bright sparkle of her eyes. The dark clouds of her hair have reshaped into a rain-filled tumble about her head. On her face, the paint has smudged and smeared as though caught in a storm. At times, there are tears in her eyes; the earlier tears held back have found new cause. He says nothing, but he submits his own look to hers. He stays until dawn, and then reluctantly leaves, casting backward glances that amuse them both. A melancholy tilt to her head meets his final glance with a shadowing of expression. She no longer smiles and no longer brightens the room's dim yellow lighting or the still dimmer greys of the sky's depths swept up to her window.

"I'll see my way out. I'll see my way out." He smiles reassuringly and, once he is at the door, she rushes after him and clings to him before she allows him to slip away. He hears the door close and he does not turn back.

When they lay in each other's arms, instead of the personal exchanges to be expected, he recounted to her the events of his day so powerful had they been. She listened closely to his reasons for being in the park and to his astonishment when he heard later, on the news, what had taken place there after he and his friend Jovo left. He was incorporating the events in his latest work, he said. He had particularly noticed the two young people seated across the fish pond for they resembled closely two of his characters whose narrative arc was still unknown to him. He would include the details of the gun shots and of the bodies falling about the park and how the young man threw his companion into the water as far out of harm's way as he could, and that he then drew away the attackers whom he had not managed to fell at once.

What to make of the synchronicity, though, between his attempt to resuscitate in contemporary form the ancient tales of lovers and their mistresses and the events of the day? And was it love once more upending the world or the many fired bullets?

Finally, he laughed at himself and Jovo, who had unwittingly moved out of harm's way, as if by instinct, he postulated. To have been a direct witness to what came next might very well have dampened his imaginative interest.

He realized as he wended his way beneath the dawning sky and through the clarifying streets, taking note of those still about from their night's entertainments and those readying their little part of the city for the coming day, that nothing more had been said of what set this past evening on its course. And how her life only seemed separate from that of these ordinary people going about their mundane tasks! The newsworthiness of his communications had neglected further discussion and he felt responsible for this neglect and he would have gone back were not the new day drawing him on and knitting her story into itself.
13

Yoko

Mura looks about her. Yoko's tastes if she is to go by the surroundings run to the Western and shiny and petrochemical-based. Perhaps this furniture comes with the place, she considers, giving her lover with a gun the benefit of the doubt. One of his hoodlum pals has handed it on to him. She draws her gaze away from an armchair with built-in cup holder stolidly planted in front of the fifty inch TV. A grating laugh comes from the kitchen. How many have keys to this place? She imagines the talk: "Yoko is always good for a saki. Let's bring some girls!" He is rattling about back there, speaking unintelligibly into his phone as though he has to hide from her what she has witnessed. She has removed her wet things and is stalking the room in the leopard-print bathrobe that he threw to her. Sighting the remote, she tries the TV: anime, soaps, wrestling, Lost, game show, game show, bomb cloud, local news with a mere glimpse of the yellow-taped park, cameras, ambulances, the momentarily raised eyebrows of the announcer, and then on to the next item that does not register at all with her, and she turns off the set.

How ridiculous she feels! So ridiculous that it is overwhelming her rage.

That morning she had been performing one of her pieces – one of her pious little pieces she thinks now – how childish it all seems and yet how she misses it! She had been at the Peace Memorial with her troupe of performance artists doing one of their familiar routines, as it happened the very one that had engaged the attention of Yoko on a previous day. She recalled seeing him approach in his dapper linen suit and highly polished shoes, looking exactly what he turned out to be with his intimidating tattooed head: a suave and elegant hit man, and she had promptly taken a spritz bottle from her shoulder bag and sprayed him with light red mist accompanied by sparkling eye contact. She froze, aghast, with the second bottle extended toward him that should have been the one containing the dyed water.

"I am so sorry!"

He didn't allow her to finish her apology. A look of ferocity came over him as he propelled her by the elbow to a nearby bench. With a twist of his tattooed head, he invited her to park herself there and, to her consternation, listen as he informed her that "someone could get hurt pulling a stunt like that."

"It's performance art. Even the minimum level of violence is unacceptable." She had stammered her explanation. "I handed you the wrong bottle."

He gave her a dubious look.

"Performance art?"

The question hung there. From the corner of her eye, she could see a number of the troupe bunched together like soldiers and walking in place on the sidewalk, disrupting the smooth progress of the pedestrians. So far, those finding this obstacle in their path were showing good humour. Such antics had become familiar in the vicinity of the Peace Memorial and its visitors from around the world, an appropriate stage for their performances of "disruptive art" as they had termed these pieces for the critics' sake. Her friends would be no help. This tough guy might even feel further threatened should she call them over.

"It's a vegetable dye. It should come out at the dry cleaner. I was supposed to be the one on the receiving end after I sprayed you with water. It's meant to start a dialogue about the consequences of violence unintended or otherwise. We usually try to do it to the tourists so that they will have something to talk about from their time here."

It all sounded very lame to her as she looked at his seemingly blood-splattered clothes. Why had she been so bold as to direct her performance at someone who was obviously local and dangerous? For one thing, they had met before and he presented a challenge. She decided to give him a different, more powerful example of what it was all about.

She told him the story of the Chinese artist, Zhang Huan, who had covered himself in honey and fish oil and had sat in front of an outdoor latrine for twenty-four hours while the flies feasted on him. "It was meant as a rebuke of the government's one-child policy that has caused the death of hundreds of thousands of female babies by parents desperate for a boy. 'Here I am,' the artist is saying, 'willing to feed the most humble of creatures and the leaders of our nation will not give life to their own people.' Zhang Huan is our inspiration."

"That is quite a story. Flies and honey in a public latrine! But it did no good, did it? That policy is still in place."

She was relieved that he had engaged the subject.

"Yes, it is, but, twenty years later, the story is still being told and it will be told long after these leaders are gone."

He looked at her musingly, with a hint of respect. "And I remember you."

Now here she is in his apartment after a shoot-out and suddenly she is at peace, the hard- edged peace of the guiltless in the center of bloody events. She is placated and relishes it when he comes from the kitchen carrying a tray. Despite all, he is still dapper, his jacket no more than scuffed at the elbow, one shoe abraded at the toe and on the outward side. His head, however, is showing signs of being unshaven and she uses this neglect as a prompt for what she does. Deliberately, she swings her hand and clears the tray mindful of the tea pot and its scalding contents. She is aware that she is contravening her own principles, but she feels herself in a different world and her spritz bottle stratagems are inadequate to the task of expressing herself. She regrets having to break this personal taboo.

Yoko does not react. He coolly accepts the logic of events and does not question if it is more "performance art". Here is but a small part of the larger world that includes those he has shot. They continue to have presence for him; they have not been, along with their bodies, annihilated. Something urges him to draw a line and not respond to her in kind. He goes on his knees and collects the broken tableware, the battered lopsided sandwiches; he fetches a towel and mops at the carpet. Luckily the pot has not broken. As the material world is restored to its former condition, it delivers forbearance and solace. It is the world they must grapple with as much as their internal one. This has been his lesson since childhood constantly to be studied and learned.

Yoko's father having died young, his mother had raised him alone. At the age of six, his dissolute uncle who possessed little of moral character to transmit to his nephew had presented him with a little samurai sword under the notion that this gift contained all the injunctions necessary for the attainment of true manhood whose essence, appearances to the contrary, was inarguably lodged within his own self. His mother needed a man and, luckily for all involved, Yoko was of an age where his natural sympathies had yet to be poisoned so that when he came upon them one day he did not feel the hatred and thirst for vengeance that one might expect had he been a year or two older or a Danish prince. His uncle was not a brutal man. Still, the sight of his self-satisfied face as he thrust between his mother's legs in dust-filled sunlight on her cot next to the lit stove had been straightaway aggravated in Yoko's mind by the coos of pleasure he heard. These vibrated like the sound a partridge will make in its nest in the woods from where Yoko had, in fact, just come. His mother's transformation appalled him and delivered the unavoidable blow to his feelings. Oddly enough, thought of his father's death acted as a salve on the wound that might otherwise have putrefied. Also, as to the matter of his own inherent character, it had prodded him towards being something of an independent little man. The loss of one parent had served to distance him from the other.

He had meant to surprise, coming in like that, with a wild flower posy that he had picked for her instead of spending the morning hours exploring the seashore as he had declared that morning. Now he retreated before the dismissive look that his uncle gave him, ceding territory that was obviously no longer his. He went back outside, leaving the door ajar, with two options immediately available to him whose ultimate significance he did not see at the time. First, he had thought that there was little for him to do but wait somewhere and sulk and feel sorry for himself – he had in mind settling down in temporary exile at the boulder by the roadside gate. It had previously served him well when he was in a funk, but it had seemed insufficient somehow to his present needs. He had been able to draw strength and resolve from it, but now it lacked the greater purpose that he had formerly detected. Something had been taken away from him, some part of his soul that drew power from the world about him. He chose not to sit by his boulder at the gate reduced to a supplicant for membership in this new order of domestic bliss. He would go down to the seashore, as he had earlier declared, but he would not play. Instead he would establish territory that would be his or wander, endlessly if need be, like a lost soul. He would take his sword imbued with his own purposes and he would not feel sorry for himself. With it, he would meet whatsoever came his way. His sword, after all, was more than a gift from his uncle. The shining metal of its curved blade with its powerful engraved insignia of sun and tiger was a thing unto itself, something that could, in wonderful irony, be turned against his tormentor.

Had someone passed Yoko on the narrow trail this person would have reasonably thought him dementedly intent on some bloody deed and would have missed entirely his confusion.

A few hundred meters to one side of the cottage, a playing field's worth of concrete foundation supported the fish plant where his father would take his sea catch. The dried blood of corrosion flared across the sheet metal walls where the waves had thrown back the murky effluent that drained from a discharge pipe into the sea. Along with it they had thrown back his lost father for such was the mercy the waters had shown him. The sight had always been there and he paid it no more heed than he did the rest of the town that attached to the plant as if to an exposed and prefabricated essential organ. He was conscious of his being outside this communal body, independent of its functions, as he clambered down to the seaweed-littered strip of beach where the ocean dried its laundry, and he did not much mind the occasional washed up tire or any other kind of detritus identifiable or not. The water dragged and crawled its way in homage to his feet and he would have answered in kind if he had known how. Here, he could turn his back to the town's shameless perimeters and set his sights on seeing how far he could go against the salty wind that blew as much from the sun as the sea – somehow these two indissolubly linked. This great breath rustled the shore grasses and made another element entire for him to move in that was more than simply air. Distant creatures, rioting beyond the horizon in a glare of light, and unknown waters exhaled pungent swells and currents and he was ready with his sword should one of them fright him from the direction he had taken.

Onward he pushed skirting and scrabbling over the rounded seaweed-encrusted rocks that had long ago colonized the sands and littered them like so many reproductions of his mother's washed scalp. A part of his mind puzzled over this association but came to no conclusion. Here and there gulls questioned him with their beady eyes and he had no answers for them and he never expected to. All in all they showed this crab-like, obviously earthbound creature a supreme and wary contempt. They would, he knew, should harm befall him calmly stalk over or flutter down from a low height and dig their beaks into his still seeing eyes. He waved and thrust his sword and that scared them off, that is, if their calm retreat represented a show of fear. The arch of their wings as they lifted backwards and away filled him with an awe that cloaked his bravado most stylishly.

On his previous excursions, this seemingly endless mining of the way with obdurate rocks set cheek by jowl into the sand had eventually halted his further explorations. It was a no-man's-land, with no easy foothold, that would leave one stranded if one ventured too far and where bones were liable to be broken. Now, however, he persevered, yielding to his inner drive on hands and knees, thrusting his sword ahead of him, scrambling to his feet when he reached a patch of bare sand, and then onto the rocks again. Only a quadruped, cow or donkey, would be more ungainly and accident-prone. Or a centaur! At least he might be in the ascendancy should the mythic creature come stumbling his way. He looked but empty air hung over the daunting terrain. What life was in sight wheeled in the sky above; there was little here for even a unicorn to feed upon that he could see.

His morale faltered as he neared a bend in the shoreline, weary with the scratches he had accumulated at the prospect of more of the same, but then he positively bounded from rock to rock when he sighted the cleared stretch of sand. - Some kind and fastidious soul had tended to this region! - He might have continued forever upon it had not a set of stairs directed him, stairs that climbed the low cliff that had long been hemming him in. Having overcome one challenge, he accepted that here was the next, for these steps swayed underfoot. Winds had sheared the railing to a treacherous angle, the whole of it thrillingly unstable. Upwards he climbed holding on for balance, not support, having given himself over to whatever might be.

When he arrived at the cliff top, it was the country estate of Count Matsugae that met his gaze although it would be years before he was to know its original ownership. In the middle distance sat a derelict villa of a combined Western and Japanese style, fronted by a broad and deep terrace, with woods encroaching upon its two visible sides. It must afford a splendid view of the ocean whose deep punished blue spread beyond the cliff edge, and of the morning sun that would rise like a great yellow planet to nudge this one in brotherly fashion into the new day. Rampant green-black vines crawled up the walls and across the shuttered windows. Something had fallen from the sky and punched holes in the roof or, to his thinking, a giant's fingers angrily had poked there. He kept his distance, warned off by a barely contained darkness that seeped from the pores of the place, a close mist holding to it and guarding against penetration.

Skirting to the right on a weed-filled track, he entered an arched tunnel that bored into the woods like the path of some panicked and fleeing creature. The light that fell through the deep interlaced canopy of treetops jabbed, mocked, and warned. As he entered this glitter-dark wormhole, a vision came to him of the villa's former occupants, brilliantly attired and coiffed, going to and fro between an other-worldly accommodation and their earthly estate. When he looked back over his shoulder, the sky above the stark ruin was empty, and so he went on.

Where brambles choked his path, he laid them low with the flat of his sword and crossed over. He proceeded with his weapon held out and upright before him. When he had a sense that he was coming to the very end of the tunnel, he spied a figure who stood dark and menacing with sword upraised in a similarly threatening manner to his. Yoko continued to ply onward. He didn't turn and flee because the thought to do so didn't enter his mind, and it wasn't because he was brave that it didn't. He went forward as though hypnotized or drawn on by an intriguing force. His destiny awaited him. Here was why he had ventured with his sword into the world and, for a moment, awareness returned to him of what he had left: his uncle smirking in the arms of his rapturously cooing mother.

The closer he came, the easier it was for him and the more magnificently mysterious, for the figure grew larger and larger while it remained motionless in the same spot. Slowly he lowered his sword as he received the figure's benediction for not having turned and fled. The samurai warrior stared off above his head, and Yoko gazed in awe as he circled the statue in its blessed splash of sunlight, draped, gauntleted, and helmeted, in weathered metal body armour, forever trying the character of whosoever should dare to come this way. He proceeded no further and, when he returned home on the path he had taken, he cared not what awaited him.

"We shouldn't go out for awhile."

Yoko holds up the teapot and scans its contours. Satisfied, he directs a steady gaze at her. "Unless you want to. Yourself, I mean."

She ignores him. Like hairline cracks in a teapot's glaze, hidden flaws have surfaced to mar her composure. She would like to think that he is responsible but the cause must lie deep within herself.

"So this is where you live." She knows it is not, but she has surmised that all his residences must be temporary and partial, and so it might as well be what he would call home.

"One place. Look, this is no time for a fight. Let me try one more time." He goes back to the kitchen, leaving her to mull over her cloud of emotion. After ten minutes he returns with a restocked tray and the thought that there is no better move after a destructive event than to put it to rights. At least, the idea of it shimmers between them in the grey air of this apartment.

He imagines that she is plotting her next move and is rewarded when she brightens up on seeing the food. It suggests a world restored. The still heavily present recent past is beginning to relinquish its hold. Ocean currents are dragging a great beached tanker off the reef, its liquid cargo spreading about it. They must have been a bad lot, willing to kill like that in a public place, she thinks.

"They deserved it, I suppose?" She munched on her sandwich.

He answers carefully. "It was not a matter of deserving anything. There was a gambling debt. Not ours but we were settling it." He shrugged. "It's not easy getting to the one on top, and I was the next best thing." He is weary after the deeds of the day, an untethered hollowing spreads inside him, and he stretches on the couch, and puts his head in her lap. He places an arm across his eyes.
14

Boss Ayakura

Satoko's appearance was more immaculate than ever if this were possible. How sharp were the lines! How the strip of rouge glistened! How smoothly lay the final coat of alabaster! To Yukio's eye, she had emerged from a salon with a single mote of dust yet to find her. Nature alone in the deepest pristine jungle could present its creatures so finely. She had stepped out of a painting to infuse and subtly transform the world about her. Or did these impressions come from his joy in being with her once again? He allowed his gaze to linger.

She had retreated swiftly before him and now sat expectantly at the low table on tatami mat, having first arranged his pillows for him. A smile momentarily etched onto her face as from an invisible stamp or incising tool. To have as his own this perfection! This work of art that lived and breathed! The aesthetic display of tea being prepared was a sweet and fine discipline to his desires, but he had not long to wait. As soon as he raised the cup to his lips, her hands went fluidly to her hair and removed the ebony sticks that held the mass of it in place, so that it hung about her white face like a storm cloud brought down with the snow. Next they went to the kimono's bindings and loosened the top half of the cerulean blue filled with white flamingos. Her shoulders drew together and her deft fingers crossed at the neck, pulling the garment down. She raised her eyes and focused on a point in the air between them, as if she were privy to his thoughts and was showing modesty and restraint in the face of his arousal at her _dé_ shabill _é_. Whatever emotion preoccupied her she kept to herself, smiling delicately when he put down his tea, a light glancing across her face like the reflection of a lure cast into the water. Her eyes dilated before a devouring whale that thought perhaps her tumbling lacquered hair was seaweed; he will not crack her porcelain skin, and went to her lips that are now twisted to one side.

He gathers her in his arms and pulls aside the Genji screen; lays her gently on the pillowed couch. The bottom half of her kimono is up as he exposes her privates. He takes hanks of her disheveled hair in his fist, mounting her in a tableau of fabled beasts coupled together. His eyes cast down to the red wound he makes in her, each thrust a deeper cut for his unblinking gaze.

He looks into her eyes, at her mouth, in the same way as he has done with those girls in the city's "houses".

Draped in his open kimono, he hangs over her, light as a cloud, billowed against gravity; structurally designed to prevent a catastrophe, he is. This whimsical thought diverts him while occupying the apparently limitless space beyond her tight grip. The gash is all, he thinks, as he continues his efforts to avoid breaking her helplessly arranged limbs that are doll-like. Looking into the dark split of her mouth, the black half-moons of her eyes rolled back in egg white, he wonders what she is without her extremes of artifice. With one hand he would like to wipe her clean of alabaster paint; with the other, he would like to hold her like this forever.

His great bulk has trapped the heat between them. Bood would be quite at home in this rain forest's humidity with sweat glistening and shimmering her silver-white skin under aqueous film. Her under-thighs raised and pushed back, he held her in a cradle at the nape of her neck and small of her back, his weight rested he knew not how, and drew her to his final thrust. Her eyes had closed as will happen to a doll when you tilt its head.

Satoko rose quickly and went to run a bath. Her manner was endearingly modest as she left the room, her kimono gathered in well-behaved folds about her, her head slightly down under the burden of her hair, profile showing as she passed through the door.

The large square sunken bath was set into the floor of the anteroom. The terra cotta tiles that bordered it became rich with colour from wet feet and splashing water. Recesses in one wall held neatly folded towels. While the water ran, she repaired her face as well as she might, dabbing with a cloth before a large mirror. Despite her ministrations, she could not deny the knowledge she had not yet shared that had contributed to her outcry of the previous day. Painfully aware of ulterior motives, she contemplated what haunted her.

She padded back to him. The bath would provide an appropriate setting to her divulgences, she imagined, and, if not, then out of the bath – whatever should move her to make them. Yukio's eyes were closed, his great form expanding and contracting with each breath. She hesitated in order not to disturb. There was a ringing of the doorbell and so she hastened to answer although her first impulse had been to ignore it. She would hurry whoever it was away, but she felt the beating of her heart menacing her as she crossed the low-lit entrance room.

"Why do you take so long?" Boss Ayakura's eyes narrowed at the manner of her dress, the hurriedly tied kimono.

Apparently the moon had accompanied him, intrusively hovering over his shoulder, an idiot witness. She felt spied upon and violated and, if it had been anyone else, she would have promptly closed the door in his face.

"What are you doing here?" She looked at her visitor as something insubstantial. He was spectrally dark. May he take the hint and waft away! She added to the rebuff by tilting her head slightly to the side. The dim starlight silting his eyes had taken countless light years to arrive here at her doorstep. She looked suspiciously toward it, unresponsive, in order to identify its source and its nature. All light is not the same and these churned motes emerging so completely out of darkness caused a chill inside her that a deeper tilt of the head strove to conceal. He was working and struggling with his fury in order to make the most of it and she readied herself for whatever might come.

"Satoko!"

The sound of her name filled all space and the breath that had formed it warmed the air about her. The quick intelligence of the unwanted visitor left him with no recourse but to retreat. Boss Ayakura bowed to Satoko and to Yukio, who filled the room behind her.

"I see that I must wish you a good night." He ended his even appraisal of whom he was up against with an unspoken declaration of intent.

As the door closed, Satoko remembered the running bath.

"Hirohito Ayakura is head of the Ayakura clan."

She was soaping Yukio's back, bending to the task as if she were washing a car. The murmur of her voice caressed him as did her hands.

"It is not my practice to show favours to one when I am still intimate with another and I have tried to bring an end to it but he ignores my refusals. Please do not ask me why I began with such a man. He has not been cruel with me and I can only say that I was mesmerized and overwhelmed. I did not realize how easily one might be swallowed whole. This is why I spoke the other day, but not all of the reason. I can no longer give myself to him. Before he came into my life, I flew and I sang, and now I wait for a snake to devour me.

"It is true that I have looked to you as a way out."

She poured ladles of water down his back, causing it to shine as though caught in a mirror. Now that she had confessed he was inaccessible to her however much she might gaze upon him or touch his smooth skin. She felt more swallowed up than ever before, but not in the bowels of that particular snake; it was her efforts to escape that entangled her.

"I am ashamed."

He felt the breath of her whisper on his shimmering back after the last ladle of water. She no longer touched him and he heard a cascading sound as she took herself out of the bath, and he turned his head to see her robed figure slip from the room. He rose himself, unsure what was to be done, other than clumsily to go after her.

"I do not blame you."

He was, of course, aware as was everyone else in the city and the country of the Ayakura clan. Like other groups of its kind, it operated beneath the law, not drawing attention to itself unless it was crossed. It held a definite role in the life of the city and of the country, operating in areas that society as a whole could not countenance all the while tacitly accepting that they existed and would continue to exist, the appetite for them being what it was. Now and then, when the underworld's abuses of common decency and accepted practice were flagrant, there would be arrests in order to calm the outcries and to bury the implications of complicity that would come from doing nothing. Otherwise day to day life flowed on as always; it was a polluted river that stretched far back in time but, in truth, the desires of the immediate future fed it.

These clans trace their roots back to the samurai, ancient defenders of the nation, who were disciplined in mind and body. They gave up their lives as naturally as a snowflake melts. Like the snowflake, once formed, they are whole unto themselves. Yukio could well understand the attraction for a geisha who equally traced her lineage into the storied past. Satoko's other clients would have been businessmen, doctors, lawyers, politicians, tourists, all looking to be entertained but numb to what lay beyond the present moment. Ayakura, with his heritage, would have reached back to the original legends and made credible claims. The skills of the samurai included not only the martial arts but also the literary, visual, and musical – they engaged in these as well as in war. The geisha must have been their perfect counterpart. What attitudes might Boss Ayakura have been capable of projecting? Whatever his tastes, Yukio doubted that he was more than a run of the mill, contemporary crime boss. However briefly, had he not seen the man?

The next day, Yukio visits the sumo stable. He is looking for the rejuvenation it brings him to be among the warriors of the flesh, seated together at their bowls of thick sumo stew and their mugs of beer, calling for more, grunting and growling over their memories. They are a force that is neither man nor god, demigod perhaps. Considering themselves favoured by the presence of a retired champion, the active wrestlers give space to him.

"Yukio Washington, have you come looking for advice?"

"From you lot! Is that why I am unable to stay away?"

"Ah, it must be the ladies again."

"Remember, in the bed as in the ring. Don't let her push you out of it."

"Make the ground shiver beneath her."

"The mattress you mean!"

A relative youngster looked up from his bowl of stew. "I was in the ring last night!"

Some laughter and the drinking of more beer.

"Tell your exploits to Yukio. He'll make you famous and himself rich."

"Yukio, I have one for you, _The Sumo's Wife_."

"Never mind the sumo's wife, _The Sumo and Everyman's Wife_. All the women in Japan are reading him. They buy his books along with their menstrual pads. That way they can be sure to mop up their tears when they are having a good cry."

Despite this familiar ribbing, he knows they admire his success and he feels awkward before their self-conscious respect.

"Yukio! Come down to earth! Did you see what happened on TV the other day? You should write about that. Bullets flying. Bodies everywhere. And two low-lifes on the run!"

"I was in that park with Jovo as it happens. I heard about it later on the news."

He does not tell them of his encounter with Boss Ayakura, but they must sense something.

"You know where to look, Yukio, if you need help, with the ladies or with Jovo."

"Especially Jovo."

"All I need right now is more of that stew."

Darkness leaned into the remainder of the evening, where no sunken sun could keep it at bay. It pressed the last silver and rose over the edge of the world. Again it was the end of things and the duties of remembrance were staking their claim over the defrocked land. Without that clear and religious light of day, the smallest star held more significance and was more companionable than whatever else intruded on this particular planet Earth.

Yukio and Satoko remained seated in the garden, immersed in the scent of the plum trees that were still in blossom hovering above them like an immanent genie of suggestion: here be, so close, the promised sweeter realms. These recalled them to each other; intimate in the gloom, they finished the last drops of their honeyed tea.

"He has come again, then?"

Her voice is a soft murmur as she communicates what she knows will be barely tolerable to him.

"Yes, he is a long-standing client and it is not easy to cut these ties."

"There is pleasure in it?"

"He does like my playing. I shall not deny a certain suspense in entertaining a man like that. Yes, pleasure of a kind is a part of it."

Yukio chose a compassionate note to sweeten his bitterness.

"He likes everything, I am sure."

A pause. More had to be said before he took her home. He waited. The meeting with his mother had gone well. Both ladies had been discreet and soft-spoken as was to be expected, but Satoko had yielded to an impulse at parting and her embrace had touched his mother.

She at last spoke.

"I know little about him. No more than the person told me who referred him – a politician he was."

Her words flowed away from Yukio as if she intentionally steered their course to slide around obstacles.

"Very little. And he is always well-behaved. It seemed best to see him when asked."

"Yes, of course it was best. Do you still see your politician?"

"No, when he lost the election and had to resign, he stopped coming. It is usually the way. I am not used to dismissing my clients. To have someone lose face. Sometimes it is worse than continuing to see them. Most know what is expected of them. Unlike you, but then you are an American, you are from the Wild West."

"You are wrong. I am from New Hampshire. The mountains of New Hampshire. They are in the east, the north-east of the country."

"It is still the Wild West to us."

The darkness was now complete; it had absorbed them, disembodying their voices.

"Our motto is, 'Live free or die!'" he conceded.

"Yes, even here we have heard it. The blossoms above us" - again she changed course - "are neither free nor dead. They are compelled to be themselves. What more should we ask of them?" She waited.

"But you can be whatsoever you wish." He would have liked to take his words back.

"I cannot be what I am not. ... And I do not wish it."

"Neither do I."

Without another word, they rose together and moved through the night garden as if formed from darkness themselves.
15

Zhang Huan

Mura awoke from a dream of careening cars and bullet-riddled bodies. She and Yoko were fleeing through the streets of Hiroshima after a bloody shoot-out, inextricably tied to consequential futures whether these were to be shared or separate. Adding to her feeling of helplessness, her short dress had hiked well up and she felt soiled in it; her legs did not feel to be her own. She had gone to sleep with the blanket of the day's events over her and, against all reason, it had served her as a cover. Awake now, the memory of these events had decayed into something more real than what it recalled. She thought of refuse that rides over the tides and settles on the shore little resembling what it had been. Even murder and mayhem rots in time. The apartment felt empty and it surprised her when Yoko wandered in out of the kitchen where he had been drinking the coffee he still carried, not to disturb her, he said. Apparently he had become aware that she was awake.

From the beached and worn look of him, he had not slept much. He extended the cup to her, and she drank from the hot black liquid that half-filled it and returned the dregs to him.

""What do you think of this face?" He was looking into the cup's bottom, perhaps at his dim murky reflection, or just a further darkening of the oily sheen that failed to serve as a mirror.

"It could be improved." Her flippant reply came without thinking, and then she realized, without fully believing it, what he was saying. It was as if a page had been turned from tragedy to comedy. His face died before her eyes and something new hovered there to take its place.

"I'm glad you think so, because I'm going to have to do something about it. And I shall need your help."

A face that would cease to exist. She had awakened with their destinies linked, and yet how much further along he was than she! But for the challenge he had posed her, she might have stubbornly resisted this bonding; instead, her eye crisscrossed his face, marking and shading like a photo-shop tool. The strong, relentless lines frustrated her, their softness due to lack of sleep and not something to go under a surgeon's knife.

"We shall take a photograph. And see what we can come up with."

"I want you to make the final choice."

"Why is that?"

"I had no part in it to begin with and I would like it to stay that way."

Yoko was not about to sever himself completely from his original identity. His new appearance would be a given that he had to live with just as his present appearance had been. He kept to himself the image that now dominated his thinking. The boldness of Zhang Huan, as she had described to him, seated cross-legged before a public latrine, his honey and fish-oil covered body swarming with flies, had displaced his samurai warrior as inspiration. If he was to save himself, he required additional stratagems to those of his childhood, not that he had any idea as to where these initial steps over yet more treacherous sand might ultimately lead.

"All right then. I shall be in charge of the looks department. A nice touch – having the girl decide what will be her lover's new face."

She felt light inside, trembling like a bird deep within at her unexpected commitment.

"Come, let's see what can be improved!"

Lying full length beside her, like a soldier on supine duty, Yoko looked into her eyes. He knew that he would never have come to his decision alone. Unknowingly, she had given him the idea, but there were other concerns now in her mind, and all thought receded before them.

Dr. Onshiro Ogata looked from Yoko to Mura and back again. The young these days! This was his first coherent thought and he was inclined politely to decline his services were it not for their determined air. From their manner, some weighty reason lay behind their request to make adjustments to a face that needed no correction whatsoever. It was the girl who finally convinced him.

"Of course, there is nothing wrong with his face as it is, but we would like to make it less aggressive. Not outrageous or alien. We want it to be natural. In fact, strong natural lines are what we are looking for, perhaps a softening in the cheek bone and a rounding of the chin. Nothing artificial in the look, the less artificial the better."

Despite himself, he was intrigued. He had, of course, experience of persons who sought alterations to their features for reasons other than to delay the effects of age and self-indulgence. There were those who wished to correct the harsh treatment that birth or life itself through some accident or other had delivered to them. But he had seen no such clients as the ones now before him. Perhaps this was what the ones who were simply dissatisfied sounded like. Obviously, however, here was no case of envy at others' good fortune, and he found himself willing to entertain the request all the while looking from one to the other.

Mura showed him a print-out of what they had in mind. He studied it against the young man's face. A scar, nothing obvious, no more than three centimeters, ran alongside the right eye. And it was not the removal of this but the eyes they wanted that caught his real attention. They had been westernized and the lips, he saw, had been fattened.

"And you've rounded the nose and squared the chin, I see." A mental picture came to him of the soft but chiseled features of Marlon Brando in _The Wild Ones_ , a favourite old film of his from the American cinema of the 40's and 50's. Humphrey Bogart. James Cagney. Somehow, with James Dean, it all spiralled away, in his mind at least. On consideration, their request seemed innocuous from the point of view of aesthetics.

He caught himself nodding his head at the overall effect, but he still could not fathom the reason for it all.

"Why exactly do you want to do this?" Without a satisfactory answer, he could easily decline his services.

Again it was the girl who spoke. "His appearance has been somewhat westernized as you see. He is an artist and it is important for the image he wishes to present. At the moment he looks like a Japanese gangster, doesn't he? Someone who carries a gun." She mimed, laughing into her hand, and looked disapprovingly at Yoko, whose face showed no emotion. They waited for the plastic surgeon to rebuff the request, but he wanted to show himself knowledgeable of these things. One could never tell with these artists whom they were fooling, but inevitably someone was fooled – he had his own ideas. The thought of being credited for the make-over was tempting, however, if only he knew with whom he was dealing. Still, one could never be sure where it might all lead.

"I would like to see your work one day," Dr. Ogata's words rolled about like marbles in his mouth. "Now, perhaps, I can take some pictures myself."

Normally, he would have made no personal comment fearful that anything he might say would make a client uncomfortable and unnecessarily self-conscious but, in this instance, Dr. Ogata broke his rule. He wanted to make an impression upon these two self-described artists, as he accepted them to be, for who else would come up with such a story?

"The look reminds me of the American actor Marlon Brando. You do not know his films? Here, let me write the name down for you!"

He was gratified to see that they were intrigued and did not mind possibly lacking the originality that so many people vainly believed themselves to possess. Dr. Ogata's artistic pretensions, outside his work, extended no further than comparing people's faces in general to snowflakes: different and yet the same. For him, once his clients left the office, like snowflakes they melted away. In the winter he would laugh to think that the rustling at his window was, in fact, these same patients seeking his services once again, and it pleased him because, of course, it might be.

To distance Yoko from his former life, they first moved into Mura's apartment where, like the gangster he had been, he holed up until they found new accommodations. He ventured out under wraps, as it were, solely for the next course of treatment, with a broad-brimmed hat low over his face and eyes hidden behind large round sunglasses. "Just like a film director." Much of their time was, in fact, spent watching movies that Satoko would rent or that they would download. Among these were the Marlon Brando pictures that their plastic surgeon had recommended. "I like his style" had been Yoko's response to Mura's comments on some of his more recent mannerisms adopted from the actor. "It makes it easier to accommodate myself to myself. I have a right to an attitude, I think."

Mura assumed responsibility for his wardrobe. "The street look but, these days, it has to be expensive." She chose whatever did not type him: pricey T-shirts, floppy linen jackets and pants, loose designer jeans and conservative running shoes, silk shirts and fine cotton pants, casual slip-ons. His hair she insisted he grow just long enough so that combed or uncombed it remained in fashion.

One morning, over breakfast, he smiled at her and said, "It's easy to take." They shared thoughts on scenes in the Brando films: the biker's iconic confrontation with society in _The Wild Ones_ , his manipulation and betrayal as a boxer in _On the Waterfront_ , the vulgar Stanley Kowalski's muscle-bound shredding of all pretensions in _A Streetcar Named Desire_ , the turning away from tyranny and toward a vision of paradise in _Mutiny on the Bounty_. He kept to himself the advice in _The Godfather_ to use a loud gun in a public place.

They moved to a high-rise and every month or two they moved again each time with instructions for the security desk to allow no visitors. They would choose one of the highest floors for the added feeling of safety it gave them. There was also the factor of the view that became more and more compelling despite the not infrequent sound of a bird crashing into the plate glass windows drawn as it was by the continuation of sky and cloud reflected there. Massed flights came across the outrider mountains, wheeling to the city on broad and vast intercontinental winds, where the wondrous spectacle of stately towering mausoleums with their graphed, entombed skies awaited them.

These were no more than modest residences compared to the flagrant instance of the Indian billionaire who had constructed a fifty storey tower for himself and family complete with helicopter pad and private ambulances. However, Mura felt it keenly to be so directly in the path of nature like this. "It is the same as putting a shopping mall on a migration route." Yoko was more sanguine.

"Think of it as renting space in a fortress and that's what we need right now." In fact, his memories of childhood had reawakened. Lofted into the sky like this, it was as though the path he had early chosen for himself had led to this place. Now that he lived with clouds and sky slung out to beyond the mountains the effect was of a catapult having fired him here in the wink of an eye. So willful can the mind be in its erasure of passages of time.
16

Miné and Makiko

As a child, spurred by nothing in particular beyond abiding animus for the grunting of his uncle between his mother's legs, Yoko had often disappeared from the house by the sea only this time for good.

At the train station, he purchased a ticket for Tokyo, the closest city, from the savings he had accumulated in his negotiations with his uncle to show an untroubled countenance and make himself scarce as his contribution to the domestic joys. In a fashion, he was pimping his mother, but it did not occur to him, and the thrashings on the maternal bed would have continued nonetheless. If he had to articulate it, he would have claimed that his monetary advantage did little to cover a loss that he did not care to put into words. His early abandonment of parent and home showed it only too well.

He had no idea to what he was headed. All of the passing scene was distinct in the train window, but it ended immediately in a blur and he could not see beyond it. The one image that remained clear and sharp in his mind was of his little samurai sword that he had purposefully left behind, to all appearances negligently, under his bed. He had no wish to make a statement. It was as if the sword traveled with him of its own accord. How else was he to interpret the strength of the image? An abandoned sword had taken the place of all that he had had and, no matter what, the thought of it would persist.

He arrived in Tokyo in the afternoon and walked through the vast space of the train station still with no idea where to go. The interior of the building must have been built to trap a cloud or to house a mountain peak that might emerge at any moment out of the floor. Other thoughts drowned in the sounds typical of such a place but new to him. Bellows swelled upwards from the bowels of the earth that were the nesting place of the train engines and jarred him skittishly from his path before the roars should show their face. The incoherent swirling of human speech above his head made him feel that he had strayed into a sea whose tides were unknown to him. From the depths he marked a flight of birds in the heights of the dome, whether caught or resident there, he did not hazard a guess, but the sight brought home the question: what would be his lodging place? His young mind had looked upon this need as an abstraction that lay somewhere beyond the abstraction of the world that he had been passing through. For what it was worth, those birds were the first real things to register with him, and the sight of them made him more attentive as well as dispirited, for he was not a bird able to rise above it all, was he? He would not have said "no" given the chance to join them.

With his slim resources, he had to decide whether to obtain accommodations for the next day or two or stretch out his funds. He chose the latter as soon as he set foot on the crowded sidewalk outside the train station where a fear hit him that he would not be able to feed himself beyond a few days. He should husband his means until he had established a foothold. Had he been more sophisticated he might have chosen differently and taken a room. Who knew what might come along? Eventually his resources would run out on the street. But he was as if trapped in a dome and not free to come and go as he pleased through recognized exits. And so he found himself a park to sit in that was ironically filled with birds hopping about his feet looking for a hand-out and then flying off to another bench. There an elderly gentleman rustled open a brown paper bag and commenced to cover the ground before him with crumbled rice cake. Prettified with trimmed bushes and concrete-edged pools, the park was desolate to Yoko. The dully flat paths curved evenly not at all like the ways he was used to treading when out of doors and headed for the beach or the wilds of the cliff top.

Once he found this spot, he did not venture far from it. It felt safe and known and the rest of the city was only more of the same: shop-lined streets and their saliva-inducing goods with something lurking beyond that threatened him. He saw no evidence of sympathy as he stumbled over the concrete curbs and into traffic. He would get completely snared, energies drained, and himself no further ahead. That night he returned to the train station and bought himself a sandwich from a vending machine. His birds were nowhere in sight and, from the quiet, the trains themselves appeared to be roosting. He curled up on a bench with his head on his small suitcase, wondering what would happen if he were noticed, but weren't there others scattered here and there in the vast waiting room? Little of it was real or pertinent to him. He closed his eyes and sleep took immediate hold. Sometime later – five minutes or five hours – the velvet darkness that had him oblivious changed character and now clawed at and shook him into ragged wakefulness. Consciousness flowed back into him when his eyes opened upon a uniformed figure in the dimmed electric light who barked when he showed himself sensible.

Yoko took his suitcase and carried it with him through the streets that seemed, with little traffic, to be themselves parked like sporadically lit trolley cars. The still burning lights failed to overwhelm completely the scattering of brighter, stronger stars in the city's night sky. Avoiding the cruising cars, he found his way back to the park. There he concealed himself beneath a bench where he shivered and slept until the slap of shoe leather alerted him to the arrival of a milky grey morning and to the hard reality of being no more than alive deposited where he was. Equally he might have been wrapped around a bush, curled in a tree, or laid out on a ledge. There was nothing to separate him from everything else or anyone without a roof. The thought of it gave him some strength to take care of his ordinary needs.

He relieved himself in the bushes. Having been chased away from the train station, he dared not go back. He threw water over his face from one of the pools that embellished the park and saw his obscure reflection held in a dark silver grasp. He lost all sense of his deteriorating appearance, staying where he was. His short excursions outside the park took him no farther than to a bank of vending machines where he would buy an apple, soup, crackers, a soft drink. Everyday he looked more and more the urchin, pathetically hunched over himself on the edge of the bench. The country-cut of his hair administered by his mother had become heavy and matted, his morning ablutions did not reach beyond the front of his face, and his clothes had acquired a smell in addition to the polished thick soiling that came from sleeping on the ground. The regulars who passed through the park on their way to work or to the shops had begun to notice him and to turn their eyes away or to stare sharply. He, in turn, recognized them and established rhythms of the day according to their coming and going.

What he most waited for and attended to each morning and afternoon was the appearance of the schoolgirls who gaily entered the park and idled along the path in their sailor uniforms with satchels on their backs. Their shiny leather shoes clicked the pavement like miniature horses' hooves. With their heads together, they secretively communed and, at the last moment, they would cast side-long glances at him. Phantom-like he accompanied them, his body left behind on the bench, until they exited the park whereupon he would dissipate into the surrounding atmosphere and find himself waiting once again on the bench for the school day to end or to begin again.

One afternoon, two of these girls lured him with an extra show of interest. Their bold faces dared some response or other and then they went on as if conscious only of themselves, giggling and laughing, and he knew he had to act or be contemptible in their sight.

He trailed after them, his battered little suitcase outlandishly in hand as though he had set out on his travels instead of being drawn away from his bench by the most tenuous reason: a challenging glance his way. When the time came, he would assert himself in some, at present, unclear fashion; that was all he had in mind to do. So far passivity had brought him nothing. He would insinuate himself by all means possible into the world of that flirtatious look. It had bestowed presence upon him in this alien city and he meant to take advantage of the moment while it lasted. He would not be intimidated by how peremptorily this status could be withdrawn if, in fact, it had not already been. Young though he was, he understood it to be their prerogative. Had he not experience in mankind's mutability?

After a single glance back, giggling all the while, they ignored him. He was heartened not to have suffered an immediate rebuke. It appeared to him that he participated in an unfolding conspiracy. A piece of theatre was being written and enacted from moment to moment wherein he did not mind playing the part of the fool, not while everything was in flux and other roles possibly more heroic awaited him. The girls' nonchalance spoke of complicity and, when they stopped to disappear into a shop, he did not awkwardly linger at a distance but drew up to the door and waited suitcase in hand. The time had come for all to declare themselves.

When the door swung open, his brow popped up and he was ready for speech, but it was a man in a suit who brushed past him with head lowered. From his perspective, Yoko glimpsed a face that carried the shadow of itself. Before the girls finally reappeared, more shame-faced men clutching packages to their chests lurched past him only to assume a more purposeful and harmonious gait when they merged with the pedestrian flow.

As he was looking after one of these shifty figures, he felt himself under inspection and turned about to find the bemused and mocking gaze of the two schoolgirls upon him.

"You live in the park?"

The directness of the question both thrilled him and made him wary. He looked from one to the other, to discern which was the more sympathetic, the less bold. Both were extraordinarily pretty, flowers in spring, with soft smooth skin, their large eyes full of laughter and – what most intrigued him – sparks as from hidden fireworks at play in their depths. Already the two girls were triumphant. He felt diminished in stature although they were all of the same height. They must be older than him. He ignored the question to avoid initial embarrassment, and countered with one of his own that was equally demanding.

"What are you doing in a shop like that?"

The magazine displays in the window had caused him to recall what he had witnessed between his mother and uncle on a hot, door-closed afternoon.

"If you like, we'll show you." The same girl made the invitation. Her friend's smile dared him, and her eyebrows were raised, her eyes steady and limpid. A wash of unorthodox pleasure lit that face with a challenge and opened that mouth in expectation of something but of what he could not say.

Yoko did not know how to respond and stood for a moment, suitcase in hand, searching how he might casually accept the invitation.

"Would you like to find out?" Now the girl with the open mouth chimed in, rephrasing the question and making it easier for him to answer.

"Yes, why not?" Whatever he had agreed to, for now at least, he had found himself a place in the world. After his mother's and uncle's doings, he could face anything. The thought that perhaps it was these that had kept him in that park swept through his mind as he and the two schoolgirls walked away from the window of variously displayed, shameless couples.

The girls' trade in soiled underwear struck him, just as it did them, to be the most risible enterprise he could imagine. They had led him away to a MacDonald's and, over fries and a coke in a back booth, had instructed him to have a look under the table.

"Go ahead! Go on!"

Unable to resist their suppressed laughter and goading words, he bent down and peered into the shadowed half-light toward where they sat. They had spread their legs apart and hiked their pleated dresses well up to show pristine white underwear. His gaze crawled at once over both their legs, glowing silkily like clouds at dusk. Both of the girls wore charcoal grey stockings turned down at the knees. He had an urge to move forward and would have liked to stay under that table, but nothing felt more awkward, and he had no idea what he might stay to do. Besides, however more enlightened he was than a moment ago, he still did not have an answer to his question.

Miné and Makiko were happy to tell everything to this obviously harmless street urchin and possible recruit into their little underworld that was so much more fun than anything else in their schoolgirl lives. Here was someone upon whom they might practice their new-found powers. It had been Miné who had overheard a group of other girls boasting among themselves as to who received more for her soiled panties – it depended upon the time of the month and various other olfactory conditions – and speculating to what use these undergarments were put. "The men wear them!" From the subdued frothy giggling that broke out, it was not the first time they considered this possibility. "I don't want to think about it!"

"Let's follow them!" Miné had urged her friend Makiko, who agreed that they simply had to verify what Miné had heard.

Proudly the girls answered all of his questions in the most forthcoming and deliberate manner. In case self-consciousness on their part might inhibit them, he made sure to contribute to the conversation as much as he could.

"You're not embarrassed?"

"How could we be! You have seen what there is in the window! And the proprietor is very pleased to see us."

"He always asks us, 'Do come back! Do come back!'" Miné seemed quite satisfied with this show of favour.

"And now he wants to take photographs!" From Makiko's tone, the thought of being regarded as photogenic pleased her to no end. A dreamy, flattered look also came over Miné. The memory of what he had just seen under the table floated across Yoko's mind followed by an odd swelling in his throat.

"And you do it every day."

"When we feel like it."

"We don't always need the money."

"We do what we want" Makiko looked over his shoulder as she speculated upon the extent of their freedom.

"And what do you do?" Although not unkind, the challenge in Miné's eyes indicated that the time had come for him to make his case. He allowed himself to think for a moment and then gave it his best.

"I am new in Tokyo. I came by train from the seaside where I had enough of things as they were and, you are right, I have been living in that park." He ended there for he had the sudden feeling that anything else he might add would only diminish him. He took a sip of his coke and waited.

"Why did you choose to come here?" To his mind, neither girl needed a definite response to Miné's question. His having "had enough of things" should have been sufficient to satisfy their curiosity and so he merely offered a facial shrug and took another sip of his coke. Back home, he had learned all about the usefulness of evasive answers.

They did not seem to mind the rebuff. He read respect in their eyes and speculation as to what his reasons might be.

"Then you have nowhere to stay."

The din of the MacDonald's sounded in Yoko's ears. He did not want to say, "the park." But what else was there?

"It's okay." He gave another slight shrug as he too looked over their shoulders at all of the options available to him. Behind the two girls was the back wall of the restaurant.

His show of independence did not convince Miné and Makiko.

"Why don't you come with us, back to the shop?"

How agreeably Miné nodded approval of Makiko's suggestion!

He soon learned that there had been more to their earlier overtures than simple flirtation. The proprietor of the shop had asked them if they knew anyone who might run errands for him. "Maybe," they had answered insouciantly. "We'll see." The two delinquent schoolgirls had seized the opportunity to flaunt themselves before Yoko, taking advantage of his condition to turn him into a confidante and admirer.

Yoko would probably have done anything within reason that the girls suggested and nothing could have been more acceptable in his present circumstances than to look into a position where he might be in daily contact with them. A bell above the door announced them, and the customer at the cash register turned his head away at the sound of it. Once his peripheral vision had identified the nature of the entrants, he remained frozen in place. He gripped his purchases to his chest and observed them intently and narrowly, his gaze raking over them. With clenched teeth and set jaw, he made a little bow for the sake of propriety before abandoning the store with his frustrated desires intact, the means of their shameful release clutched to him.

"Makiko! Miné! You are back! And you have brought a friend!"

Yoko cast an aggressive glance about him at hearing the girls' real names called out like this. Even to his innocent ears it was folly.

He was not sure which one he liked the most, although he did favour Miné. Both girls alternated between looking pleased with themselves and a little abashed. It was as though they were in thrall to some power that they felt they could command.

Yoko had difficulty believing that it resided in the curled figure of the shopkeeper who came around from the cash register and stood before them in the pose of a supplicant filled with admiration for his benefactors. His bent posture showed off the widely spaced, clumped strands of hair that he had combed over to conceal a bald patch. Darkness ringed his sleep-deprived eyes but he did not appear tired. Yoko was to learn how little he left this establishment that was larger than met the eye with rooms in the back and a spacious upper floor. Perhaps the girls were in thrall to the power that this person had liberated in them. This was a conjecture to dwell upon. The proprietor's gauntness seemed to further increase upon inspection. He called himself 'Uncle' and he possessed an internal thermostat that allowed him to infinitely adjust the degree of warmth and pleasure that he exuded. At the moment, it was set at "welcoming" and "reassuring."

"Welcome, young man! Welcome! And so you have found someone for me, have you?"

Uncle turned to the girls but, to go by his smile, he was quite sure that he had read the situation correctly.

"This is Yoko. He is new in Tokyo."

Makiko spoke first although Miné seemed the more intent and also prepared to be equally spontaneous. Whatever the differences between the two girls, it was obvious that they regarded each other's thoughts as readily interchangeable, and Miné was quite prepared to put herself forward if need be. Yoko had quite fallen under their charms and did not care to make any distinction between them. Makiko wore her hair in a bob cut that suited her heart-shaped face and clever eyes. Miné's westernized pony tail gave an added freshness and immediacy to her rounded features so like a spring plum in their translucence.

Yoko maintained a silence, his expression somewhat grim. Uncles' show of warmth did not take him in, reminding him of his own uncle's compensatory gifts, and once again he saw something he could make use of. Apparently the world was not so different in the big city from the countryside. The way that things were unfolding was, he could not help but conclude, the way of the world, not that a thermostat controlled the warmth that came from Yoko when his gaze strayed to Miné and Makiko.

"He needs a place to stay." Miné embroidered her confiding tones with a golden thread of command, enchanting Yoko and, to all appearances, Uncle.

"Not a difficulty! Not a difficulty, my sugar!"

Uncle shifted his half-lidded eyes from Miné to Yoko, finally fixing their semi-gaze upon him. "Come with me! We will speak about it. Until tomorrow, girls! Don't forget!"

Casually dismissed, Miné and Makiko turned on their heels. "We won't!" Their charm went out of the shop with them. "See you, Yoko!"

Yoko watched them leave while Uncle continued to appraise him.

"Yes, back here. Have a seat! You must be hungry." He was nothing if not ingratiating and solicitous at once. He had to make a living and this was how he went about it.
17

Uncle

Uncle found a cubbyhole for him in one of the storerooms in back, a space behind a stack of cardboard boxes where he could sleep and conceal himself if need be. His duties were not arduous. They mainly consisted of delivering product to whoever was too embarrassed or too frail to come in person to the shop. As well, he ran other minor errands for Uncle, who preferred to leave the premises as little as possible. In time, Yoko assisted in the actual operating of the business.

The highlight of his days was the arrival of Miné and Makiko. They always took a proprietorial interest in him. He would listen for the ring of the door bell when they showed up early in the morning to change their undergarments and again in the afternoon when they came from school to deposit the soiled results and collect their fee. The rest of the time he worked toward a goal that was completely unclear to him but surely had to be there. One thing he knew: his independence meant something other than the mere attainment of adulthood. He grew up well before that distant stage arrived.

His growing pains early developed into a hard realism. On anyone of his deliveries he could be carrying the plastic-bagged undergarments of either Makiko or Miné in his hands and exchanging them for 5,000 yen that he adamantly awaited from the slow-wit at the door. Whatever their appearance, these customers inevitably had about their countenances a soiled look and a moistness in the mouth that their tongues brought to dry lips. They skulked in the shadow of the doorway as they reached for their parcel.

It was his response to the photography sessions that determined the future bent of his character. These presented the first real hurdle for him: seeing Miné and Makiko posed by Uncle with their legs apart to reveal a tantalizing v shape of white material. Each day he spread their legs a little wider, hiked up their school tunic a little higher. Eventually he undid a button of their blouse and then another. Yoko was under strict orders to mind the store, and push a broom about in case an inquisitive inspector should show his face, but Miné had whispered to him, "Watch for us, Yoko!" At every session he stole to the back and, from the vantage of the door left ajar by Uncle that he might keep an ear on the doings out front, protectively eyed them. Really, he had Miné to thank for getting him over this hurdle by appointing him as their guardian. As the girls willingly exhibited themselves according to Uncle's escalating instructions, he reasoned to himself that they had the right to make their own choices.

At the slit in the door, Yoko vowed that he himself would not prey upon the girls. As he watched their pleated dresses pushed up, their knee-stockinged legs drawn apart and their knees bent and shimmering with light from the overhead bulb, he set aside his rising desires. He distanced himself from lust and anger with thought of the trust the girls had placed in him. Besides, however smitten and enraged he was, his mercenary part in things kept him firmly in his place, a conflicted admirer from afar. And then, real temptation never came his way. After that first incident of show-and-tell in the restaurant booth, Miné and Makiko no longer flirted with him. Their subsequent proper conduct, however, could not help but frustrate and render him crestfallen.

Two years passed and, surrounded as he was, Yoko had become an active consumer of titillation. He moved about the store in a cloud of images that served all his physical needs. Miné and Makiko's visits continued in accord with the girls' sporadic inclinations. Sometimes they would not appear for a week. Whether or not they were disgusted with themselves he could not decide or they simply had better things to do. His emotional emptiness lasted until such time as the doorbell sounded and, confidentially chattering, they stepped into the shop. Their naughtily innocent expressions settled on nothing for very long, including him. When he was their target, it was as though a shard from a bursting heaven wounded him.

He was doing his sentry duty one afternoon observing his darlings' limbs being arranged, their clothing adjusted when Uncle leaned forward between the two girls on the couch to whisper something into both their ears. The girls smothered their laughter behind their wrists but the next moment their arms were about each other and, with Uncle back at his camera, they began to kiss and further to disassemble each other's clothing and to cast sly looks at the camera's lens. Some consideration moved Uncle at this point to come over to the door and shut it. So he had known all along that he was there! Yoko strained to hear anything that might be a summons for help but, beyond the wood of the door, all was silent with the silence of a being preoccupied with itself. Finally Yoko retreated. He went outside the shop and stood in the doorway where he watched the flow of traffic and pedestrians in the arcade-like street. Overhead a train rumbled and then another on the same line that had brought him here to the same kind of scene that he had fled.

He said nothing when the girls exited the shop and pushed by him with their careless goodbyes. If they had looked closely, they would have seen his eyes blinking to silicify the thin film across them before it betrayed him with tears.

"Are you okay?" Miné turned to him, a mélange of mockery and concern, her tone formulated for a small boy whose ice cream has fallen to the ground. For Yoko, that was his loss. Miné and Makiko had been the double scoop of ice cream that he had balanced in a cone in his outstretched hands these past two years. It had now fallen at his feet. The two girls departing down the street did not know that they took his heart with them and that it was a vanishing entity.

Yoko showed less devotion to his duties. He became delinquent, with the air and look of a hoodlum, gaming in the evenings and hanging out in the neighborhood. The nature of his employment brought him favor with those who haunted the doorways and chose the arcades to test their motor skills. His saving grace was to emulate the accomplishments of others; even Uncle's polite civility with customers and his discipline were not lost on him. Onto the strong sense he had of himself he grafted the strengths that he found no matter where.

With the arrival of the internet, the trickle of schoolgirls, before and after classes, turned into a gushing pubescent stream. Yoko minded the store and kept order among them as Uncle worked his camera in back. He handed out fresh panties at the beginning of the day and took in the fragrant results at the end. The trade in these increased steadily but the supply soon exceeded the demand.

The growing hunger for images of schoolgirls exhibiting themselves in ever increasing states of abandon became the real opportunity. These were the days of abundance and satisfaction, for the market was worldwide and the authorities had yet to clamp down. The uproar was not long coming and, when it did, operators such as Uncle simply changed tactics and placed young-looking eighteen-year-olds into school tunics and presented them in every possible sexual activity not excluding in some instances the use of animals.

Uncle assigned Yoko to scour the city's clubs for recruits and it devolved upon him to be their partner before the camera. He had been a year feasting at this banquet and was beginning to be sated and drained of interest. He found that it took work to develop the required appetite for a stranger's skin.

One day, Uncle took Yoko aside. Over the years the lack of sunlight had rendered the proprietor's skin translucent like drying slime, the covering of a creature who spends time in a vessel of unmentionable liquids. He relied upon a regular change of clothes to make himself presentable, a bundle of dry-cleaning delivered to him once a week. Persons in his company focused on the healthy sheen of his freshly laundered shirt rather than on the trapped and poisoned light in the exposed clammy skin. He had suffered a blow to the side of his head where a bruise puffed out with the hues of boiled aubergine and burned pepper. Such tonalities! Uncle thrust a gun at him.

"Take this in case they come back! I don't need to explain things, do I?"

For the first time, Yoko felt stirrings of respect for the man beyond the grudging recognition of his capacities, a regard for his character that would not be pushed around. He took the gun, left the shop, and found a taxi that dropped him off well beyond the city limits. As if in a sharply focused dream, he hiked across a field, the scrub grass making for rough ground beneath his city shoes. Memories, once distant, were crowding the horizon like watchful specters that, after all, had never left him. He made his way to a treed copse, green and dark, muffled with bushes and nettle that he delicately waded through to the wood's depths. He had only the six rounds in the gun and these he fired off so that he knew he could and, with the percussive sound in his ears and acrid smell in his nose and lungs, he got back to the taxi he had had wait. The field crows and the birds in that wood continued to wheel in the sky as they drove off. On the way back, life itself told him to be pleased that he had not hesitated and had known what to do when Uncle handed him the gun.

Uncle must not have learned his lesson. The business went on as usual and, one afternoon, Yoko heard sounds of protestation coming from the shop. He had the gun hidden behind his back when he stood in the doorway appraising the scene before him. One of the assailants had Uncle by the throat with one hand while, with the other, he pushed the barrel of a gun to his ear. The second man lounged nonchalantly to the side with a look that said, "What can you do, old man?" Uncle's wide open eyes, like two eggs in a frying pan, proclaimed stubbornness and fear at the same time. The ivory of his skull showed through the humid skin that his black-dyed swept-over hair did little to cover.

"Let him go!"

Yoko had his gun pointed at the head of the man threatening Uncle. His hand did not waver and he felt calm; his voice was quiet. He was conscious of being as much interested in his own feelings of self-control as in what was going on. He had few perturbations, exposing himself to danger like this and being so forthright. Doing what he had to do gave him serenity. He would even admit to enjoying himself and he saw something very similar in the response of the two men. Their deliberateness and evident calculation as to the consequences of various courses of action were at one with his own show. This pleasant moment of excitement and suspense was lost on Uncle, who was imagining a bullet in his head.

"The next time we come, if he is not happy to do as he should, we will kill him, and we will kill you."

The one with the gun spoke these words to Yoko and then both men left the shop without having looked at each other.

That same day Yoko slid the gun back to Uncle across the counter. From now on he would have to "shuffle for himself" and Yoko walked out of this soiled panties establishment for the last time. He was nineteen years old; he had a small suitcase under one arm and a bundle wrapped in a lounging hakama under the other.
18

The Yakuza

Yoko rented a small room in a cheap walk-up hotel where girls stood outside. That same evening he set out to enlist with the sort of men that had separated him from Uncle. He knew where to look. The sheathes of tattoo emerging at their necks and wrists as if they had flayed serpent's skin and stretched it to the utmost tension and suppleness about their limbs and torso identified them. They were loud and they overspent. One ran across them in the street and in the bars, strutting and posing in their Hugo Boss, and one moved out of the way not fearfully but as a matter of course. They garnered a lot of respect. Society was not clean – everyone knew it – and someone had to run its dark side. Better that these forces be familiar and rooted in the culture of the past.

The violent history of Japanese society and the codes of behavior that gave form to this violence found their present expression in the Yakuza, the tattooed lords of the underworld. However corrupted they have become, society permits them roles that go back deep into the past to the ancient samurai who penned verses and songs after their battles and slaughters. Unlike the regularly unleashed forces of destruction from nuclear disasters to tsunamis to earthquakes upon this volcanic island nation, the Yakuza managed society's underlying darkness, allowing it to indulge its impulses, and give it the feeling of control over the chaos in its nature.

With little trouble, Yoko ran into just the ones who had been rousting Uncle, elegantly slumped at the bar of a nearby whiskey club. Turning a faded metallic sheen toward him, their eyes appeared to have been plucked and fitted into their sockets from a peacock's tail. He saw less light there than was in their drinks. He found himself immediately content and excited to be in their presence, looking for their earlier drama to start up again.

It seemed he had learned to be ready either to die or to live. The two were inseparable and the life he was choosing required this readiness.

The men of the Yakuza lifted their lacquered gaze upon Yoko, who dared to take the stool beside them. They appraised him in a slow and insouciant manner, absorbing the presence of someone they had threatened who had unexpectedly found a way to them. On principle, their raised eyebrows signaled that they were affronted that he should so deposit himself and he shrugged on seeing it, calling for the black arm-banded bartender to replenish their drinks including the same for himself. He was not muscled and sinewy like them. These two resembled segments of a python chopped and fashioned into human shape; snake skin showed at their open collars, faces extruding from it like baked serpent meat.

For his part, Yoko's attitude presented him as the person who had dared to stand against them. Beyond this, he allowed the haunting depths of his scouring the seaside, climbing the cliffs, witnessing the thrashing bodies in the afternoon light, carrying his suitcase to the train station, and working for Uncle to speak for him.

"I've left him. You should have an easy time of it now."

"Smart move, kid." The one farthest from him raised his glass. "Thought better of it, did you?"

"One favor was all I owed him."

At this, the other man nodded.

"Thanks for the heads-up. We won't have to look out for you and your gun." They laughed out loud, having sized him up sufficiently, and lifted their amber-lit tumblers of whiskey in a mild salute that bordered on ridicule and took swallows. Yoko presumed upon them no longer, downed his drink and got up to leave.

He made a deep bow and half-turned away.

"Wait! Sit down!"

The far one's tones were guttural. He was half-drunk and contented, for this was how he preferred to do business – in front of a mirror at a bar where passive rows of duskily lit bottles turned his thoughts to the heady essence of girls at the end of the night.

As the evening progressed, Yoko amused the two Yakuza soldiers with the stories of his apprenticeship in Uncle's soiled panties business. After their last drinks, they herded him along like a newly captured horse. Girls awaited, patient girls who knew the pay-off would be handsome. Attendant upon them while they bathed and sweated out their whiskey in a sauna, their soft hands replenished the loss of intoxication with cold beers and expert caresses. Life was good and sweet and dangerous and burst out at every moment like a wild geyser of expensive liqueur.

"You gave back the gun, a mistake, but we'll find one for you. And do something about your look!"

"Take your time. Don't embarrass anyone."

Yoko noted that the girls were not favoring his immaculate skin with the same dedication they gave the inked sheathes of Honda and Isao.

These two had told him little about themselves, acting as if they did not have to.

They kept their promise about the gun and they gave him the name "Ice-breaker" – Yoko the Ice-breaker – for what his role would be. He had expensive business cards advertising "Management Services" printed up to leave at targeted establishments – those like Uncle's to begin with, and then he graduated to certain high-class bars, luxury massage parlors for the moneyed elite, top-rung hotels, whatever of this sort had newly opened and awaited the Yakuza's services. After a little talk with the management on his part, Honda and Isao would pay a visit should further convincing be necessary. Once a month, he picked up the payments in a neat briefcase. His tailored appearance provided for the public face of the interaction; his gun within the opened case reminded the client of the serious business they conducted.

He worked out at a gym, kept his hair trimmed short and had the air of an athlete with his light step and relaxed bearing. He undertook his responsibilities with a serenity and a confidence reminiscent but far in advance of his childhood shakedowns of his uncle. For the most part the envelopes would be ready for him without fail. If not, he would smoothly bow and depart with the words "as you wish" hanging in the air above the flow of excuses and attempted explanations. Shortly thereafter, Honda and Isao would show up either at the home or at the business establishment of the client. Without uttering a word, they would deliver a blow with closed fist to his face whereupon Yoko would pay a return visit. His professional manner and understated attitude brought him favor and, in time, he was invited to become a full-fledged member of the clan of which his and his partners' extortionate activities represented merely the blossoming of a small branch.

This particular tree from which their branch extended, unlike the trees in nature, converted darkness rather than sunlight in order to bloom. It inverted growth with its roots groping at the sky above.

Yoko did not think of such things. Life was pleasant and relaxed. He spent his ample spare time at the gym and the sauna; he dined out and he enjoyed a sixteen mat apartment on a side-street off one of the main strips. He began to read. First, he looked up Bushido after Honda had made passing reference to the cultural and historical roots of their clan. In the bookstore, he came across histories and stories and novels about the samurai. Honda had laughed when he caught him one day waiting for them in a restaurant with his nose buried in a piece of cheap pulp fiction that featured the Yakuza. Gangsters blazing away at each other illustrated the cover. It was then that he gave him a brief history lesson.

"Our past is honorable. We have respect in society because we protect it and we rule it. We have fought its enemies and given our lives. Bushido is the code that rules us. Read about it if you are going to read."

Honda's words astonished Yoko especially with Isao sitting idly by. The latter was looking out the fly-specked window as if it were the most normal thing for his fellow thug to speak like this and as familiar to him as the sunlight breaking against the soiled glass. Yoko saw a wave-glistened ocean sea wall. In this greasy establishment of the type that they seemed to prefer, they were at one with the world. He tucked the book he had found in the second-hand section into his jacket pocket and made a mental note of Honda's advice. The sight of the thoughtful lines and the sinewed cords of emotion appearing on his face and transforming him into an intelligent and sensitive creature stayed with him. Never again did he look upon Honda simply as the human serpent that he had until then perceived him to be. The difficult decisions that marked the path he had embarked upon had changed him in appearance and in character. Yoko's mind opened to the strength and determination it took when knowing ahead of time what one would become with each step solely in one's own service. The eyes, face, and bearing would always express the state of being that resulted from these choices. As for what might undo or redeem such a state, if one had no experience of an epiphany, where was the hope? Were the experiences of childhood sufficient to safeguard him on the way he was going?
19

Elevation

Word had come into Tokyo that the Hiroshima branch of the clan would appreciate some additional muscle. The night life there had been exploding for years and rivalries had consequentially increased. A sociologist had to contemplate with irony how a city boasting the highest number of night-clubs in the world per square footage of real estate had, not too many years ago, been atomically bombed. This is a people, the conclusion would have to be, getting on with life in the wake of annihilation and dancing on ground zero. "You can't expect us to turn the entire city into a memorial!"

Yoko, Honda, and Isao together boarded the bullet train to Hiroshima. Its speed flattered their self-regard. They were tough and dangerous and this marvel of technology existed to serve them. The countryside rushed past like the contents of a burst dam and they tunnelled through it in their space-and time-machine, Hiroshima in the future and Tokyo in the past. They exchanged chat about brands of whiskey ("Never drink anything that hasn't been aged twelve years or more!" – on this point, Honda and Isao solemnly agreed), last night's girls, and references to the Boss's proclivities.

"He's Godzilla in human form."

"He has an appetite for everything."

"Except opposition."

"He spits it out."

"After he chews it up."

"He always wins on the horses."

Yoko had shaved his head and was contemplating what to do next for his image. The clan expected something visible of him that would express his loyalties. He ran his hand over the soft skin of his scalp enjoying the texture of it. Before day's end, a roughness would already catch on the palm of his hand, but now it was soft like handmade paper. He accepted his initial aversion to the idea of tattooing himself to have been immature; he now felt ready to bow to peer pressure and begin the process that would proclaim him. The time he had taken made it as much his own decision. To do what he had in mind, however, he would have to compromise with the method. The traditional hand-held needles and ink favoured by members of the clan took years to achieve the final full-body result and would be inadequate for what he had conceived.

Their new Hiroshima Boss had his own well-defined ideas as to how these arrivals might best serve his interests. Always careful for his person, Boss Takemoto would shuffle his protection detail like a pack of cards. It was not long before he rotated these newcomers closer to him, but not too close. Unlike Honda and Isao, who soon bridled at no longer being independent agents and bolted back to Tokyo, Yoko decided to stick it out and see what came of these changed horizons. He would take a break in Hiroshima, perhaps get his tattooing done here, and be ready for the trip back to the big city. Above all he wouldn't take himself too seriously. He paid daily visits to a small tattoo parlour hidden away in the Hondori District, recommended to him by one of the Boss's lieutenants.

"If you can stomach the other clients, that is. What can you do these days?"

It soon became apparent to Yoko that clan rivalries were more intense here than in Tokyo, as though the city were not big enough for the competing interests. And then, once there is bad blood, what is life worth? The soul, if there be such a thing, is no more than a stink in the nostril. Because he was still new, Yoko was perhaps more cautious than the others when the three men came bearing Boss Takemoto's winnings in a black leather briefcase.

"Boss Ayakura is always losing at cards."

The rivals exchanged jokes in the elevator. When the doors slid open – cheap zinc-lined affairs – they rattled as they gave them egress from their forced humour. Yoko noted the three men's increased air of buoyancy compared to the initial dead flatness of their arrival. A careful choreography and a swimming motion to their tread betrayed them as if they were set to rise from the depths of the ocean. Why this lightness if they were about to hand over some of the clan's fortune?

The bag was to be placed on the square wooden table in front of the office where one of Boss Takemoto's men would open it, count the money, and then take it in. If their tension had had a sound, it would have been that of cicadas before a rainfall. The note of expectancy signalling money was in the game came from the Takemoto side. A cell phone rang. One of Ayakura's men received permission to answer the call. A few guttural affirmatives drew everyone except Yoko's attention. He never stopped watching the one with the briefcase at the table.

His shadow turned more than he did but Yoko already had his pistol in the small of his back. Peripherally he saw the third Ayakura man move while the one he held insisted on completing his turn. He shot into him and pushed him aside and then shot into the other one who was now at the opened briefcase and reaching toward the guns that were in it. It is always difficult to take out a Boss and these men were doing it under compulsion. No matter. The shooting did not stop until Takemoto's men had fully discharged their weapons, and nothing remained to be done but call the 'cleaners'.

As for Yoko's subsequent elevation, however highly regarded is natural merit, it did not come to him coated in sentiment. Boss Takemoto's lips formed a thin straight crease that inverted the pleat line in his trousers; seemingly black soot from the tiny furnace holes of his nostrils had seeded the pores of his face. The short-cropped hair at his forehead and at the nape of his neck repeated the straight line of his mouth. A military shave laid bare the skin around the ears half-hidden by heavy cheekbones. Welcoming Yoko into the inner sanctum, his voice had been neutral with undertones of rawness and betrayal. Bestow favour without undue emotion, for who knew when goodwill would have to be retracted. Boss Takemoto based all of his actions on some principle or other.

Yoko had to cross a vast space in order to reach the Boss's private office.

"So it wasn't the best after all that went back to Tokyo."

"They like to do things differently, nothing personal, Boss. And they missed the big city. Their mommas are there," he added staying loyal to Honda and Isao and excusing them.

A thin smile. "Attachment is one thing. You will find it not wise. Loyalty is something else entirely. What produces it?"

Yoko shrugged. He thought of his loyalty to Miné and Makiko and suspected that the reasons for it did not apply here.

"Betrayal. That's what. Loyalty and betrayal go together. I watch out for loyalty but I bet on betrayal. Remember that!"

Again he thought of Miné and Makiko. "You don't make it easy, Boss."

"Loyalty never is."

Boss Takemoto's expressionless stare sent him on his way. During his few moments in the office, he had not out of respect closely appraised the Boss's walls. Armoured samurai leaped at the viewer, swords aloft, grape eyes looking to be plucked; or they merely posed stiffly for the benefit of a future that would survive them. All of them glared fiercely at the perishable nonentity that would stand before their image.

One of Takemoto's lieutenants ushered him back to the outer realm and its scattered array of armchairs at one end and a lengthy steel conference table with cushioned steel-framed chairs at the other. The placement of samurai swords on the walls showed there to have been scant concern for their arrangement and a bank of windows came close to registering offence at having to look out upon a slice of brick and glass with blue on the top that could only claim to be sky. Was it, in fact, the company the windows had to keep or their surroundings that gave Yoko a distinct sense that they possessed auditory capacities. The interview remained with him.

Yoko glanced at the girl in the seat next to him. A white sheet covered most of her and she winced at each prick of the needle. When the tattoo artist turned aside, he saw the outline of a galloping, apparently wild horse in an exposed square of her torso. It was riderless and realistic with none of the stylized exaggerations one has come to expect from such renditions.

She glanced, in her turn, at the work on his shaved head where an army of ants appeared to crawl over the raw skin. Her eyes widened and then slipped uncomfortably away.

"What is it?"

"I'm sorry?" She avoided answering his inquiry.

"My name's Yoko."

"Mura." She abbreviated it.

"You like horses."

"There is no animal like them. Yes, I do. They are simply the best."

He considered the assertion and was unable to disagree.

"They are magnificent."

The next time he came, she was having more work done elsewhere on her torso.

"Another horse?"

"More ants for you?"

"That's what it looks like, I guess."

"May I see?" She leaned over for a closer look. "'Honour. Truth. Fidelity. Honour. Truth. Fidelity.'" She read carefully striving to absorb the meaning of this display.

Her eyes went to his. Momentarily vulnerable, he felt the whites of his own eyes as he returned her look. The concern that he saw there he didn't care to understand, and then she looked away.

"Someday you'll have to tell me about it."

It took him a moment to answer.

"Sure, one day."

Six months later, they saw each other again when she sprayed him with that spritz bottle.
20

_Why We Destroy Each Other_

From their perch in the sky, Mura and Yoko gazed upon the citizens in the streets below shunting to their innumerable ends: the appointments and diversions that had no aim or meaning they could claim beyond what the pigeons entertained on the city's ledges. Both humans and pigeons acted out as if they had chosen for themselves their daily ration of purpose. Had this malaise found its own way to their island country? Was it native to it, or had it come from across the ocean and settled upon them like the fall-out from a great bomb? Perhaps it was the very fall-out itself and its effect came not from an ocean away but from the overwhelmed and submissive people and their acceptance of it.

"It is general to humanity. On the whole, humanity is no different from these pigeons, seeking its own ends in complete disregard to all else." The words came from Mura and, in his present state of mind, they made all the sense in the world to Yoko, who had had to turn himself inside out because of where his life had led him.

The thin steel of the mullions framed the city's towers and the sky, and it was as though the two of them grazed among these high-rises in blue-pastured cloud. They thought on the disparities between the streets below that were bare of nature's presence and movement and their own high, accommodated island.

"Wouldn't it have been wonderful if the city had been built with as little disruption of the natural world as possible just as we are up here?"

"How do you mean?"

"Imagine what it would have been like if original trees had been left to stand, if streams had been allowed to flow and not be buried under cement, if the rise and fall of the land – its topography – had been preserved instead of leveled. Our cities would have been so much more expansive and alive had they been allowed space for natural water systems and for whatever grows on the land. The birds and the wild animals would be among us and not driven to extinction. Our economies would be less about consuming and more about building our lives in harmony with nature and a greater world wherever possible. It is easy to flatten the land and cement it over and fill it with prefabs. It's an entirely different world with different interests when one respects it and allows it to be itself. Capitalism should be tame and the world should be wild. If we don't do something, the same will be done to the sky."

She spoke to him in an unnecessary whisper, looking out over the city and into the clouded blue interspersed among the tallest buildings and the greater ocean of it above the flat, squared roofs.

"Yes, it would be nice." Yoko was thinking of his days spent on the rock-strewn beach, climbing his way to the cliff-tops, the confrontational gulls wheeling about him. These images would rise in him at moments like this in his life when he had to assess his real attitudes. Bidden and unbidden they would come. He knew exactly what she meant even though he had never articulated it to himself and he urged her to go on with her ideas.

Mura had grown up in this city and, although she had not witnessed it, its destruction was as much a part of her consciousness as were the repeated apocalyptic events that visited Japan itself. Hiroshima had been rebuilt and was magnificent compared to what it had been before. Unlike with tsunamis and earthquakes, there was little fear of a repeat event from the sky, and yet there were greater bombs than the one that had fallen waiting to be used everywhere and nothing of any particular difference than had been in the past to prevent its happening again. Countries punish their perceived enemies without distinction and protect their own. Other cities whose citizens pursue their lives with little regard for the world outside them are no different from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Anyone of them is a candidate for similar destruction, not because of any culpability or special deserving on their part but merely for geopolitical reasons.

"There is nothing to prevent the decision-makers from exercising their choice except ourselves."

"They bombed Dresden. They will find a reason to do whatever it is that they want."

"Yes they will, but we can draw lessons from what has happened. We can reassess the way we live. I am not saying that we brought this destruction upon ourselves but that those who dropped the bomb had no real choice. And we would have done the same to them. Another would have done the same to another."

He continued to protest. "But they didn't have to fire-bomb Dresden. They could have chosen another city. If Hiroshima had been somehow exceptional, it would have made no difference. Instead, its value as a target would have increased."

"Even Dresden was no more than an extreme example of man's talents and priorities. Otherwise it was essentially the same as the rest in its disregard of other life systems."

"You are saying that there could be a kind of city that they would choose not to bomb?"

"Think of a city whose inhabitants respect more than each other and their own interests. Its destruction would not be a crime against humanity but a crime against life. They might not bomb such a city.

"There is no moral reason for humanity to continue, if its ends are limited to itself. And this is how we must stop seeing ourselves. This is why we destroy each other. If we disregard the life around us, why should we not be equally disregarded?"

She told him what she had in mind as they sat on the couch overlooking the city, absorbed in the sky. Her head rested on his shoulder and she had her legs crossed over his so that she curled about him. She spoke of wild horses filling the streets and running with their manes and tails flaring. He looked at her and she turned her face to him with triumph that she had brought the conversation to this point.

"How many horses?"

"Thousands would be nice."

"Yes, that will make the news."

"I thought you'd like something that would make a bigger splash than sitting outside a public latrine covered in honey and fish oil! I once saw a young girl on a horse, here in the city. I was driving by in a taxi. It was downtown at a main intersection and the girl and her horse stood waiting at the corner on the sidewalk as if their presence were the most natural thing in the world. And it was. There was nothing strange about it, other than its being wonderful and different, that is. If anything was strange. it was the city itself in comparison. I doubt that any other sight on these streets has been as interesting or fascinating, before or since."

He had, like the rest of the world, seen horses and camels being ridden into Cairo's Tahir Square among the demonstrators there, the riders lashing at the crowds with their whips before they were finally pulled down and summarily beaten. These images in the year 2011 had appeared everywhere and become part of the collective memory. Mura was speaking of something different.

"You want to fill the city with wild horses?"

"Yes."

By the end of their talk, the sky had changed before them, dusk spreading over the late afternoon. In the distance, lightning stabbed like the mind of a painter at the settling dark and at the sinking sun – dry lightning that stalked above the horizon – and it was as though it were slaughtering a sea creature, the black ink of an octopus gushing in a wave across the land. The wild torpor of its death blossomed above it, and the lightning ceased, and a shroud unfolded to cover the remains.

Night's descent was putting them on notice.

The storm-filled caves of black clouds in the middle distance, darker than the rest of sky, mouthed incomprehensibly. A veiled electrical discharge tinged the sky above them; while the ocean released phosphorescence from a mother ship's dimensional shift, and a gravitational disturbance raised the water where porpoises would be glowing in the chemically lit pools.

"When we do it, I'll call the man from _The New York Times_."

"Yes, he at least should be interested."

"It's an idea, isn't it?"

Yoko's jeans were the colour of the clouds as were the apartment windows' mullions. The black cotton hugged him from the waist to the ankles. He was bare-chested, bare-footed; thickly corded blood vessels across the instep fed his toes' prehensile gnarls. Mura was his warmth against the air conditioning, the silk feel of her padded robe upon his skin. He would slip it open. She would tell him, "Be quiet!" if he didn't leave his mind elsewhere, and he enjoyed the discipline.

"Do you think he will kneel and kiss your hand?"

"More likely yours."

"Forget it, then."

"He called Zhang Huan 'Maître', on bended knee."

"Maybe the world will pay attention."

"Just shut up for a moment, would you?"

She moved inside her caterpillar's sheathe.

"I liked his piece with the donkey and the high-rise."

"I give up."

Her eyes had closed and were shivering under their lids like a bird's when a shadow falls over it at night.
21

_The Prodigal Son_

Yukio awoke looking at his girth and he quickly heaved himself to his feet.

"Where is she, Bood? Where is she?"

The bird turned away and he headed off to the garden to find her.

She called to him from somewhere above his head and he saw her feet at the top of a ladder. After a moment a hand reached down clutching sprays of cherry blossom that he accepted, and he waited while she cut some more, holding onto the ladder, hearing the sound of the snippers.

"Miyeko will like these." Her voice came muffled from the blossom-filled branches. He was happy to be reminded of the harmony and friendship that had taken hold between his mother and Satoko. His trepidation had proved groundless and he suspected that his mother was relieved that someone had come into his life. He wondered how much he owed these calm waters to their respectful and considerate natures and how much was due to a genuine sympathy. He felt that this past year they had been getting to know each other gradually step by step. Satoko has tea with his mother in her quarters and the two of them sit barely speaking but, when Satoko makes to withdraw, Miyeko helps with the tea things and does not let her go without a word or two, as his lingering near the corridor has shown him. Satoko passes him with a whisper.

"It is all right. We are getting along."

She descended the ladder, clutching a further little harvest to her chest. Dark and streaked with silver, her hair hung straight down. She wore light, parchment-coloured garden pants that reached to above her ankles and a blouse of a soft blue, the casual ensemble gently touching her figure. His eyes traced the delicate tendons in her feet as she descended. No make-up obscured her face. She smiled at him when she reached the ground. He delighted in her modest and yet apparent beauty neither marred nor threatened by the fine age lines and fading flesh tones. Here was the beauty of time's passage. She pretended to be oblivious of his admiration but it was impossible to conceal the pleased, demure glow. He encircled her with his arm, and the gesture was protective as much as anything else.

*

Yoko exited the Tokyo train station, wearing a pair of pilot Ray Bans, gold-rimmed and amber-tinted, a white blue-banded fedora over his regrown hair; his suit was unbleached linen, on his feet canvas slip-ons. Out on the street, he hailed a taxi and gave a destination that was not the destination. He enjoyed the misdirection of the ride and, after he got out in the busy square he had chosen, he climbed into another taxi that a red light had arrested and gave the address he required. The driver's eyes lingered in the rear-view mirror for an instant with a curiosity that was natural enough. It was not an unknown address. The headquarters of the various Yakuza clans were public knowledge and publicly advertised. Signs at the front identified the buildings' occupants. Still, visitors such as himself might wish to conceal who they were from anyone on the street. Police, journalists, political operatives, or rival clan members could be surveying who walked in and out of those doors, although the notoriety would thrill some ego-driven types.

The aluminum plaque secured into the pale yellow brick wall read MATSUGAE INC. That was all, but it sufficed. Had the culture been one degree different in the United States of America, one might similarly have found CORLEONE INC. Yoko undertook to swagger a bit in memory of Marlon Brando in _The Godfather_. He paused at the glass door for a moment and then strolled in, his minor theatric as much for the camera beneath the overhead lintel as for interested observers on the street. Keiko, the receptionist, peered up at him as blankly as her all-knowing plump and greasy face allowed.

"Yes?"

The word as she pronounced it throttled the space between them, squeezing the air out of its invisible neck. Besides her unwelcoming demeanour, she possessed a button beneath her desk that would expediently call in reinforcements to prevent further entry.

"Hey Keiko! Get some of the boys to escort me up, would you?" He nodded as he moved past her to the single elevator. It would not be unoccupied when its doors opened. From the side of his eye, he saw her hand go under the desk.

His laugh was gentle and mocking. Four men appeared, full body tattoos on permanent geyser duty at the neck. Three of the men he knew. The fourth was a stranger, a replacement for himself? There was also, he sensed, a presence behind himself. Doubtless it was Yoshitaka, summoned from his lair to the right of the entrance where he monitored the camera and the street outside. A disgraced police officer, chronically in a state of debt that was possibly the reason for his bad breath and his corpulence, he was fit for little more than this kind of duty. No matter, for all his weaknesses, he would put a bullet in your back as certainly as he would go for lunch. His liver-spotted skin had escaped the tattooist's needle.

Accompanying his laugh, Yoko had slightly drawn down his glasses so that he could see over the top and be seen. He kept his hands raised in mid-air as he spoke.

"Yes, you'll find one there."

Yoshitaka hunted out the weapon that caused Yoko's jacket to hang down on his right side.

A clicking sound. "Where did you get this" The words came attended with noisome breath. He half-turned his head.

"That's right, Yoshitaka. It's my gun. How are you doing, fat man?" He lowered his glasses further and peered at him knowingly. "Still minding the store, I see."

Yoshitaka searched his eyes. Yoko's name was on his tongue but he daren't say it. Eyes can't lie, but they won't tell you everything.

"Go ahead! We'll figure this out later."

"Mibuchi! How are you doing? Juro. Gitaro. It's been awhile."

His familiarities made for an awkward passage into the elevator.

"Come on!" He made the first move and soon all six of them had crowded in.

"Is that you, Yoko?"

Yoshitaka's formidable breath combined with his lack of a recent bath caused everyone to ration their intake of air.

"I thought I'd drop by. Pick up what you owe me while here. My hundred thousand yen." He let out a low rasp of air through his set teeth. Yoshitaka's face flexed.

"Okay! Okay! It must be!" He surrendered his doubts but not his puzzled expression. "You were on the lam. So now you've come back to us!"

Yoko spoke not a word more but indulgently swayed during the rest of the elevator's laborious climb, sniffing the familiar soup-mix of colognes, feeling the floor's indestructible synthetics under his feet that no amount of shoe leather would wear down.

The door opened onto the floor that required one of the men to punch in a code fully to access. Here all was soft lighting that shimmered across panelled walls and reflected off an inlaid floor. Italian leather sofas bookended double mahogany doors. To the left, another elevator, its door constructed of sliced and polished dark stone, led to private quarters as Yoko knew. They sat down and blankly looked at a Klimt on the opposite wall next to the elevator that had brought them. One of the mahogany doors opened and a girl little more than school-age entered with a shy confidence. Legs that had yet to fill out showed beneath her short, pleated dress. She wore a closely fitted blazer; her straight hair ended in an outward curl at her shoulders. Each step she took would make a flounce. She carried a folded robe slightly extended in her hands as she approached him.

"Pleathe remove your clothe!" Her charming lisp was not unintelligent.

He knew the security procedure, and so he relieved her of the robe, and went to a door that she indicated. The large cubicle must have once served as storage space for cleaning implements. It had been set up as a changing room with hooks along one wall, a narrow bench, and a full-length mirror. Two security cameras eyed him at opposite corners of the ceiling. He changed into the robe and slipped on a pair of slippers from an assortment that lay under the bench.

"Thith way, pleathe!" The girl directed him when he left the cubicle.

They crossed the anteroom under the eyes of his seated escorts and she ushered him through the double mahogany doors into a cavernous former factory space not dissimilar to what he had found in Hiroshima. Windows banking the far side of it offered an immediately disappointing view of grimed, small-paned industrial windows. These descended precipitously from the flat roof where a fussy installation of aluminum duct boxes and goose-neck air vents further rudely obscured the squared off sky. This collection appeared permanently attendant to their task of dispatching whatever noxious congress of elements came their way. More overstuffed leather sofas lined the flanking walls with an abandoned air for convenings not purely social; abandoned but for one equally filled presence whom Yoko immediately recognized alertly dominating half of a sofa.

"Masahiko!"

The eyes narrowed in response.

"Bear!" He raised a hand to him.

They continued on toward an arrangement of ponderous armchairs about a low table, crossing the large square of ash-soiled Persian carpet these partially occupied, and came upon Boss Matsugae concealed in one of them and turned toward the bank of windows. He was clad, like Yoko, in a powdery blue silk robe. In addition, however, his dress displayed violently abstract gold embroidery. It looked to have been run through a machine whose gears had stripped in the stitching. Yoko knew that an expert hand had crafted it. Boss Matsugae did not acknowledge him immediately and, when he finally did, he felt like the next course in a meal that the man regularly sat down to.

Yoko submitted to the neutral appraisal of his hair and facial features.

"So, it's you."

"Yes, Boss. Only a father would know me."

Boss Matsugae showed no appreciation of the compliment, absorbing it proprietorially in the manner of a reptile the appearance of the sun from behind a cloud. He gestured for Bear to come over. "Say hello to Yoko!" The invitation made the big man now feel licensed to speak.

"You disappeared, Yoko. It takes time to make yourself pretty, I guess."

"If you say so, Bear."

Bear stood on the other side of Boss Matsugae.

"You did good work, Yoko. So we hear. Don't listen to him."

Boss Matsugae waved off the exchange with an uncharacteristic chuckle. If he showed too much pleasure, he risked being mistaken for one of them. He liked to see such initiative as Yoko's. Truth be told, it inspired him.

"But it has been some time."

He waited to hear why he had been left adrift like this, not the treatment for a Boss. It lacked the appearance of respect. And appearance was all. In the world as it is what else could be hoped for? One hardly dared look too deeply.

"When asked about you, I had no answer."

Yoko found it difficult to speak to the Boss nonplussed as he was.

How to say what he had to say? As he sat there, he had to go over it all again. He had to explain it to himself once more. A girl – Mura – had come along and turned the logical progression of his life with its natural sequence of events inside out. But then, was it so unusual? Had he not already once lost and found himself beside the incoming waves of the sea. His spirit that had filled the sky would always be with him and beyond him. It would always be capable of transformation. What had the clan to do with his treks along the cliff top, his confrontation with the samurai warrior who had towered above him in the woods? Perhaps everything. He did not know. Here he was once again delivering himself up to them.

He described the events that brought about his disappearance and he told them about his new look. "Not to be recognized." Although little of this had to do with why he was here, it kept him familiar to them. Perhaps one thing could lead to another.

"Boss, between you and me..." His expression asked that they might continue in a more confidential manner. He waited. The Boss bent his head and, with a movement of his index finger, directed Bear to retire.

"Go and have a piss!"

"I would stay, piss or no piss." Bear's nod to Yoko contained a warning as he heaved himself up.

Stonily, Boss Matsugae waited. As head of the clan, Yoko should hide nothing from him. This contract alone would sanction Yoko's telling him the whole story, or most of it, emphasizing in tone and manner that what he asked for would be in both their interests.

Boss Matsugae started with surprise at the very beginning of his tale. Yoko left out the matter of his uncle and his mother, going immediately to that moment of confrontation in the woods with the samurai warrior. He embellished his story by describing the figure as reappearing later in his dreams and urging him to his present life. Boss Matsugae only half-listened.

"Your village, where was it? ... The villa – describe it to me!"

Boss Matsugae said nothing of the samurai statue. His expression hardened and he seemed to focus on another space and another time. Much of it was beyond his own powers of recall. He kept to himself that Yoko was describing the ancestral estate of the Matsugae family, lost for generations, and now derelict according to Yoko's description.

He had always imagined the loss to be complete and irreversible, the Ayakuras luxuriating in what they had won and holding it to themselves with an iron grip. His thoughts had turned away from it all, and had frozen as had the intervening time into a wall of ice.

He could no longer ignore what he was hearing as Yoko continued to speak.

"Hold it! You want to fill Hiroshima with horses because some Chinese covered himself in honey and fish oil?"

"Actually, the idea didn't come from him, Boss. Not entirely. I met a girl who helped me a lot after the shooting," he added as if this should explain everything. "It's the sort of thing she does."

He realized as he spoke that, unlike Boss Takemoto's quarters in Hiroshima, there were no renditions of the ancient warriors on Boss Matsugae's walls. Instead, paintings hung on them, Western paintings that he did not recognize and so he could not make the solid cultural reference that he had in mind for his argument and had to take a new tack.

He paused for permission to continue. He took Boss Matsugae's narrowed but not uninterested gaze to be it.

"She told me about this artist." Yoko allowed his look to sweep over the paintings. "Like any other artist, he was making a statement. In his case it was against the government. 'Look at me!' he was saying. 'I am willing to feed even flies while you let your own children die.'" Boss Matsugae snorted dismissively.

"The 'one child' policy."

He waited satisfied that he had so easily grasped what on the surface was to his mind pure idiocy. Boss Matsugae had, in fact, heard of this event. It had come up in considerations of what was happening out there in the world of art and what was worth acquiring. Until now, he had not understood it. If anything, it had angered him as possibly undermining the value of his acquisitions. Yoko's explanation could not help but cause him to reconsider. The paintings on his walls took on an added dimension.

"So you've decide to become an artist, is that what you're saying?"

"As I said, Boss, I met a girl."

"A girl. And she won't be satisfied unless you fill the city with horses? Wild horses, you said? How's that going to help our business?"

Yoko saw that this was Boss Matsugae's roundabout way of saying that he didn't understand. He also well knew that risk and reward would be part of the discussion. He had to make it all as palatable and inviting as possible.

"We can always call it a samurai thing, Boss. It's protecting society while keeping control. It will capture the world's attention and bring honour to the Yakuza."

"What are you talking about? Protect society how?" Boss Matsugae did not now mind showing that he had failed to grasp the practical side of the idea.

"You're right, Boss, it's also an artist thing. It's creating a world that no one will want to bomb." There, he had said it, as hard and direct as he could, without any flimflam or compromise, but even so, it called for derision and he expected it.

"Wild horses are going to stop people from bombing each other?"

"It's a statement, Boss, and, who knows, maybe it will change the direction of things."

"It's the craziest thing I've heard, Yoko, in a long time. Usually I'm just asked to deliver the horse's head." Boss Matsugae snort-laughed. He hated to say it but somewhere along the line he had been hooked. If he looked carefully, he would have to concede that he himself was responsible for having been drawn in. The pride he had felt at grasping that Chinese artist's intent had been the cause. The power of that act was something he understood and it was always gratifying to exercise power. And then, business was business. More immediately, Yoko suited his needs. The clan wars that had begun in Hiroshima had spread to Tokyo. Who better to finish them than Yoko, unrecognizable and knowing the terrain? He wanted what only one such as he Boss Matsugae could provide, and why not? So he thought for, with power, one will think like this. He felt refreshed. In the north of the country, he knew, there were such horses, or so he had heard, but not many: Kandachime – "to stand in the cold" – at Cape Shiriya, on the tip of Shimokita Peninsula. He would have to look elsewhere.

"Yoko, bring this girl to me!" If he were to get what he wanted, he would have to turn the one who had turned his man. "And one other thing before you go."

As Yoko had thought, it wasn't going to be easy.

*

Yukio and Satoko are locked together on the hardwood floor. Without cushions, it is a discipline. Her legs have striven to encircle him but cannot meet, her heels digging into his back as though she has mounted a bull from the front. He is cross-legged, clasping the small of her back, his hold on her keeping him straight. He is into her to the root. Intermittently, he raises and lowers her; she leans her head stiffly backward and he attends to the look on her face, drinking in a glow that they both share and transforms them. She tightens about him. He is aware that his eyes brightly shimmer. Grasping him around the neck, she pulls herself in and bites into his pendulous earlobe, drawing blood.

"Mm."

Yukio is unsure what is pain and what is pleasure. What is real beyond this.
22

_Pigeon With Green Peas_

"I can't absorb it all."

Yoko thought in silence for a moment. Seated outside at a Starbucks, they were nursing two large lattés, Mura just arrived from Hiroshima. It was mid-afternoon, the traffic extreme, the sidewalk crowded. The fullness and complexity of Tokyo seemed to be a set built just for them. At their table, with their plans, they were roped off from it all as long as their coffee lasted. They could always have another and, instead of grandiose schemes, they could stay here and pursue small ends although what exactly these might now be he could not have said. He looked at the young people going by who had let loose on themselves with metal and ink, scissors and credit cards. Had they created their own jungle to replace the ones long vanished – a jungle of the mind otherwise invisible on the sidewalk or street, certainly not to be seen in this roped off enclosure, this café corral?

"Tell me again, what was his reaction?"

The way she cocked her head lightened his mood. They proposed nothing less than to shift the universe, remake the world, nudge it off its axis and she unabashedly put her innocence on show. So much to be done. Or was there? Once decisions were made and power started to flow, it should be a matter of scheduling, no more. And Twittering. She had told him about that. And YouTube. Most of all, he knew it would be about the people of Hiroshima. It would be about the city itself.

"It's difficult to say. Like all of them he has a thing for the past. Maybe that's why they're criminals in the present. In fact, they're a lot like us. They don't like the world as it is." He laughed. "They have a distaste for the world, and for themselves. It surprised me. He seemed to take up the idea. I don't know why. Normally he would have thrown someone like me out. Maybe I caught him at a weak moment. These things happen."

"What kind of a weak moment?"

"I don't know, but he wants to meet you."

"Me! Why?"

Yoko shrugged.

"He wants the full picture, I expect. It's not the sort of thing you ask."

He thought of Boss Matsugae as he looked at Mura dressed in a loose silk top that hung on her like a street-urchin's rag. Her intelligent, clear-complexioned face had nothing woeful about it and he had little fear as to the outcome of such a meeting. The dynamics of it intrigued him as he visualized the two of them together. Could she convince Boss Matsugae as she had convinced him? The worry she showed, he knew, would not lessen her capacity to stand her ground.

"There's just this one thing ... anyway let's wait until you meet him. By the way, he's seen _The Godfather_."

Yoko kept to himself Boss's final words: "Remember, I don't owe you."

Boss Matsugae sat in a leather, metal-studded armchair in his inner sanctum; smoke rose from a fat cigar in an ashtray beside him. With his eyes lingering on Mura as on someone desired but unattainable, inspired words came to him that he must have last encountered in his readings as a schoolboy. To his further credit his appearance let slip no hint that it had ever been other than as expansive as it now presented.

"My ancestors had good reason to locate their castles and their redoubts in the most inaccessible parts of the island on cliffs that towered above the ocean whose waves rose against the stone walls – waves that at times were tsunamis." His guttural eloquence sculpted these monstrosities out of the air. "It is only in such places that one finds extreme beauty." He spoke as one who knew and he swept away everything else with his hand holding the cigar. (He never thought that to ask permission for the possibly offensive indulgence might ingratiate him.) When he pronounced the word "beauty," a hard glassy light settled on his face, for only he understood its meaning.

"Today, everything is spoiled, none can say different. Everything is lost." His expression became murky. "In the past, my ancestors scorned the petty lives of those who lived in their little worlds. If they got in their way, they cut them down without a thought. Worthless lives. They scorned the lives and the deaths of those who mudded up the world." Boss Matsugae had not taken his eyes off Mura. She maintained her aspect of closely listening and did not flinch.

"And now ... " His snort was audible. "They are everywhere and they need to be cut down again. You are right." He stared at her, his face having taken on the aspect of being her champion. Before she could answer, a laugh that found no exit sounded in the cave of his throat.

"You don't need to tell me, it's their idea of themselves that you want to change. You want to improve them and the world." He had not been able to help himself. Power had got the better of him, and so, with an expression of regret, he came to a stop nodding his head as one who was well familiar with the presumptions of which he spoke.

Mura's gaze did not waver. It also took in Bear, who had been permitted to attend but had to stand. She could make out nothing from his inscrutable expression and hunched posture. He stood there as an entity ready to inflict damage.

Boss Matsugae clapped his hands, causing everyone but Bear to start. It might have been the signal for the wholesale slaughter of the general populace to begin. The schoolgirl look-alike entered through a side door and waited just past the threshold. Mura appraised her, for the first time feeling a surge of doubt at even being here. But here she was. And bemusement seemed the better option. The look-alike left to get the "refreshments" that Boss Matsugae ordered. Yoko slouched indifferently in his chair. Boss Matsugae took an impervious draw on his cigar and waited.

"What is it you want from Yoko?" Mura had intuited why she was here. She saw that, in Boss Matsugae's mind, what they were asking was greater than Yoko's services so far. Otherwise he would have granted the favour.

"Nothing he hasn't done before."

Yoko's hand came up in protestation but, instead of speaking, he let it fall.

Amusement shook Bear's malignly hanging suit.

"He's out of that game."

Mura thought Yoko had raised his hand to her, but she ignored it.

"Then what is he doing here? What are you doing here?"

Even and dismissive, Boss Matsugae looked from one to the other. Mura forced herself to speak. She shifted her ground.

"I see you are a lover of fine paintings, Mr. Matsugae. You have a Matisse. A Modigliani. Isn't that Picasso's _Pigeon With Green Peas?_ They do look nice on your walls."

Everyone's eyes followed hers, from painting to painting, and then to Boss Matsugae, who looked only at Mura, dangerously back in the game. Unlike Yoko, she knew the paintings had been stolen. These works of art graced Boss's inner sanctum and wantonly advertised that he was a man of taste.

She turned in her seat.

"And a Van Gogh! _Poppy Flowers_. How exquisite! Thirty or forty million dollars if you could sell it."

Boss Matsugae's mouth showed a thin Modigliani line at the threat that her recognition of these paintings implied.

"And to think no one was interested while he was alive, except for his brother Theo. Was it out of despair that he shot himself?" A consciously naïve expression momentarily showed on her face. "Think of what he might have produced if the world weren't blind, as you say, Mr. Matsugae. It will pay forty million dollars to own what it can at last see. But does the world see it? The work of an afternoon, probably followed by a visit to his whore, it deserves to be in a museum, where everyone can enjoy it, don't you think?"

"It belongs where it is. They should have secured it. Forty million dollars of security if that's its value. What do you think, Bear?"

"It won't get away from me, Boss, not for forty million."

During this moment of levity, the 'schoolgirl' returned with a tray of glasses and a bottle of green liqueur.

They had their drinks in silence. Boss Matsugae half-finished his and put it down.

"You decide how much your wild horses are worth to you." He rose from his chair and followed after the departed look-alike. Bear escorted Mura and Yoko to the exit. Unlike them, he seemed not at all weighed down.

*

Time itself released the last of the blossoms from the plum trees. The surrounding stone wall of the garden and the buildings beyond were alone left to arrest the flow of air beneath the formless blue sky.

"It's not a crime."

Yukio waited for Satoko's reply.

It came like a pronouncement from the bench.

"He is killed. He doesn't just die."

"No, but he has chosen this life. He expects to be killed as much as he expects to live. It is not a crime for him. It is business."

"A business expense! It is a crime for the one who commits it. Your character is no longer a mobster."

"Yes, that is one thing. Conscience can be a problem even when one is in the right."

"It can also be perverse and make the wrong feel right."

"Yes, the perverted conscience is more of a factor than is generally admitted."

A breeze that had overcome all obstacles wafted to them as from a hidden fan that had been turned on, carrying the blossoms in its flow and dropping them in its wake.

He took advantage of the moment to strengthen his argument.

"This breeze cannot help but carry off the blossoms. They are weak and their time has come."

Satoko would have none of it.

"As for this breeze, it must act as itself. Unlike your character, it has no choice in the matter."

"Choice falls by the wayside where there is a moral imperative. It is no longer a dispute between yes and no but a question of how."

Satoko bent her head, troubled, for she feels herself implicated in these considerations. Is his talk an argument that might turn on the matter of her client Mr. Ayakura? Had she complained too much of his treatment?

The breeze was short-lived. And Satoko was not far wrong in her fears.

The nattily dressed figure of Ayakura, laying down cash with ringed fingers, the faded gems of his eyes set in milky orbs, his tailored suit a poisonously dark raiment, all of this Yukio imagined as he aired his characters' existential challenge. The man's every movement and breath changed the world for ill. And a woman like Satoko is drawn in and is harmed.

The oily slur of Ayakura's head, as he remembers it, grieves Yukio and he remains mute when he makes to rise.

"Just a walk. I'll be back soon."

He is a dark cloud as he moves off.

"I'm sorry. I need to think."

Thick arms, thicker expanse of belly, stretched epidermal sheath, all contribute to his thoughts, for he could easily tear off the man's limbs. His fingers would like to speak for him.

A slow-moving storm through the streets, he is heedless of his path, aiming his wanderings nowhere, down scabbed avenues dementedly sutured with traffic, the distant sky at bay before him, the human flood miraculously breaking about him as usual. He hunches, looks askance, looks down, finds himself in a park and crosses it. No vegetation that he can see relieves his way. Spiky teenagers in metal-laced jeans and oil-rag T-shirts clump together forming bushes themselves. They are rooted on stone pediments, burning with unassailable ecstasy. He sees it in their godly, berry eyes. There is no possibility to connect and so he sidles past unable to satisfy the urge to communicate. Here the sky is less remote, an efflux above them. The raging in his mind quietens. Once through the humble, disreputable park, he hails a taxi.

The garden is now empty. She would be inside. He feared that he would not find her and he examined himself on his approach. As he worked the door handle, he looked for a cause that she might be gone. The door opened like the cover of a book releasing a bird-wing of trapped shadow.

She looked up when he came in, at ease on the overstuffed couch, and smiled over her samisen. She began to play. There had been no sound as he walked up the path. Had she waited for him?

She commenced with "Horses Of Spring," delighting in it, as he deliberated at the threshold on his part in this musical world.

He found a way through the thicket of notes and sat down on the sofa, safe beside their source, sinking heavily into the cushions. Normally it would have been the armchair but he wanted to make a statement and so here he was not minding that he felt vulnerable and diminished. Had he left part of himself somewhere else for the sake of words on a page that he could not apply to his own life?

Silently, Bood observed all from its perch, everything apparently fixed in its proper place in the bird's little mind. The late afternoon light served as its personal ambiance and mantle as it listened to the music.

Yukio imagined the pieces of his argument neatly fitted for all time in this bird's mind. He hardly thought it had a brain.

There had been a man in the street who did not belong. He ought to go out again and investigate. He settled more deeply beside Satoko. Draped over her thin shoulders, her hair hid the finely aged face. He let his look slide across her lightly flowered, palely crimson kimono. Impudent Bood squawked in its lethargy, a bird tired of collecting dust.
23

_The Hit_

The tofu in Ayakura's plate wobbled. A pat of umeboshi paste topped the raw white curd garnished with sea salt and dark nori flakes. A train had again rolled by, a repeated sign of his slide. His wife had withdrawn to the back rooms leaving him in relatively serene solitude. She raised the children and attended to the rest of the domesticities. As for his personal pleasures, these were his affair. He did prize her availability however. A brief look at her amid his thrashings would suffice to put a stamp on the final spasm and he could turn his eyes away. She showed no aversion to these marital perquisites. Wanting for little and maternally occupied with her brood of daughters - he hardly reckoned them his - she would not be complaining endlessly within her claque of fellow sufferers, not his wife.

He did appreciate this solitary repast, unencumbered by her presence, and the deep respect evident in her retreat. His gaze sidled hawk-like over the parts of the city that interested him: the port where goods landed from China, Hong Kong, Canada, and America. It flew to the banks and government buildings, those that were in the hands of his rivals and those where his alliances still held sway, and, finally, hovered reluctant and obsessive above archipelagos of cloudy green. He would like to dive into those treetops with talons outstretched and uncover the secrets beneath the skin of things there. Where did she take her silk-clad self? How could she leave his flowers to wither on her doorstep?

Breakfast concluded, he met fat Kobo, who waited for him in the apartment hallway. One should not get attached to one's bodyguards, for this unnecessary increase in weight is the result. Stretched thin as he was, he was in no position to replace him.

A shift of the eyes and minimal bow sufficed for greeting on Kobo's part. At least his broad back could take a bullet and he would toss Ayakura out of the way of a threat.

Outside, the black Lexus reflected what light it could not fully swallow. It was his light. The car, however, absorbed its owner and they drove off as silently as if they were still parked, seamless with the world, velvet passing through velvet.

He sat like a king hunched on his toilet; he excreted memory. Satoko. Satoko. Satoko. Unhardened memories flaccid and lifeless. Himself like an over-ripened plum under the sun of her, he clumsily drops into the world pulling her down with him. The plum draws the sun down. They sweetly rot together on the ground: plum and sun.

He blinked and flipped on the overhead light. Lifted the flap of the envelope handed to him by Kobo with its photographs. She converses under a wind-blown tree with one who is looking off into the distance. Her words have carried his thoughts elsewhere. What can she want with the size of him? How does not the impurity of his face repel her? He recognized who it was, of course; had been attendant at many a match. Respect filled his chest like heartburn. He would have to medicate it.

That night the Lexus stopped beside Satoko's heavy front door. Boss Ayakura got out swaying like a tree in the wind from the effects of the saki he had drunk. At the core, he was quite sober. Unnecessarily, he motioned for the car to move away and wait for him just down the street as usual. Once more, he looked at his watch. Such was the shine he had on that shadows parted for him. When Satoko answered his ring, it took her a moment to show interest and to welcome him.

She moved aside, bowed rapidly, an avoidance of his person that caused him to look sharply at her and then to look around for whoever else was in the room. They were like ghosts together or, rather, like the abandoned shells of ghosts. He bared his teeth while she stared at an invisible line that ran between them at the height of his midriff.

"Well! Play!"

His imperious tone proclaimed that only he understood what was necessary.

She withdrew to a cushion, unsure, mechanical, and puppet-like, lacking all of her fluid grace, and drew her samisen to her. The mural renditions of the four seasons dominated the room. His eye ranged from one to the other indifferently. The tune she played stifled and did not satisfy him. It seemed alive with antagonism and dissonance.

He drummed the table with his fingers and came to a decision. At the door, he summoned Kobo.

He motioned with his head and Kobo set to rending the rice-paper walls, tearing them apart like thin ice beneath a heavy foot. When done, the bodyguard looked about in case something should have escaped him.

Satoko had half-risen, her dismayed features puffed out. Then she collapsed back onto the pillow, her mouth open in that painted face.

As they left, Kobo threw her a look of wrathful bewilderment.

Ayakura continued to plot the full revenge of his loss of illusion. In the musty smell of his wife's bed, after the drive through the haunted, night-gutted streets, he recoiled at what he had to settle for, but the more that he pried at her legs, the more he determined that the lower half of her served for all women. The next morning he was obdurate and timeless: eyes smeared with ash and cinder, a simian aristocrat with wrists dark and hairy, loss in his face and the satisfaction of more of it to come.

He called in Kobo and issued his orders. They had been splinters in his mind, and they left a rawness now that they were finally extracted.

With mental legerdemain, the hit man skimmed up the surface of the street and, concealed under the thin lift of it, slid himself across. A papery figure he escaped notice in a shedding of himself as unremarkable as a flake of soot falling away or a divestiture of sunlight when shadow comes. Who peers at it?

Giving the order, Kobo had shown consternation, the hit man recalled, his eyes like wet rock as he identified the mark with a self-absolving intonation.

Camouflaged as shadow, his leg indistinguishable from asphalt, and the movement of things playing along his limbs, he deflected the inattentive eye. At times he fooled even himself and a wind might have blown him away.

When he was where he wanted to be, it was as though a recent calamity had deposited him there, distracted, without consequence. Some infidelity fateful only to himself had abandoned him. He became innocent and attentive. What had he to do in that spot? Nothing, and he became nothing.

His final solid concealment issued from the barrel of black metal soundless until too late. At the receiving end, where everything had been solid, all became fluid. Yukio's rapidly less viable hand clawed at what lay beneath the unreality that was all that remained after the bullet struck.

The self-vanishing in that garden was not unlike the hit man's own disappearing act, and then a wailing sounded as of a hatched cuckoo bird. Satoko bent over Yukio, one hand pushed into the bleeding hole where it remained until a stretcher appeared and a batting took its place. Passersby had to help with the weight of him and, after they worked their way through the gate, its top hinge hung free as much of a blight as the blood upon her and the ground. She followed into the gleaming ambulance where their turn had come to be the ones hurtling and shrieking through the city.

*

Jovo sat at the bottom of the garden where he had set a chair for himself by the repaired, newly painted gate, making sure that the street was empty of hoodlums, and that the ordinary prevailed. He examined minutely each manifestation of it, not excluding the uniformed schoolchildren and the dogs on their leashes – it kept him from dozing off. Yukio would bring tea and a chair, sit with him, and thank him, while castigating himself.

"I should have taken care of it. It wouldn't have come to this if I had protected her properly."

Weak-hearted though Jovo now was, he liked still to place himself before danger. Satoko treated him like a brother, and he was happy that he found her company a pleasure and no more, and no compulsion directed him beyond this purity of service. When, at last, a thought came as to how he might add to it, he rose like a bird plump with eggs looking for its nest.

Sufficient time had passed for Yukio to recover, and so Jovo took himself off to the headquarters of this particular Ayakura clan. He had donned a ceremonial kimono emblazoned with fighting storks. The receptionist's shock at the sight of him delayed her pushing the button under her desk and he proceeded to the elevator, catching her abrupt movement from the corner of his eye.

He went to the top floor.

Fat Kobo was approaching the elevator when the door slid open. Shunning false pride and pulling out his gun at the appearance of this kimono-clad tsunami of flesh, he managed to get off two shots before the wave of silk-covered flab struck him and broke his neck. He lay buried beneath the aged sumo, feeling the last shudders of his pierced heart.
24

_Performance Art_

A beautiful war raged in the sky, as it can rage nowhere else.

From her vantage in the high-rise, so close to the heavens, Mura felt the expanse of her island country beneath her, heaving, settling, and sighing in its cushions of darkness, its sea-tossed borders. Lightning's flare carved out mountainous slabs of the night and the city, and dropped them into abysses. Singed and blinded flocks of birds wheeled away from bursts of thunder and followed after the fall.

Mura read her pondering writ large upon the sky, but this anticipated crime of theirs meant nothing there and would melt away leaving as much trace as the flights of birds.

Their rationalizations, however, had not convinced her.

Finally, it had come down to Yoko. "This is what I have done. And now it might as well be for something worthwhile. He will be killed no matter what." He did not say that this was his first contract. Mura insisted that she would accompany him.

They had gone for a walk that afternoon and had seemed to encounter an excessive number of the obese, the small-eared, the sexually confused. Anyone of these mutations could self-detonate at any moment, or release sarin gas.

Or fly airplanes out of the sky. Or indiscriminately splice genetic material.

Anyone else could. They felt as though their minds might explode.

"We'll have to do it in the open. It's not going to be possible to get to him otherwise."

"Kill him in public, you mean." Mura felt that she would lose herself if she indulged in euphemisms in order to avoid the graphic truth, but was she not simply aping the politicians and "opinion makers" who, since 9/11, had begun to call for "killings?" She did not remember hearing this language before the towers fell in New York City. Had she completely succumbed to the forces that such voices on both sides had unleashed? Between the two of them, only Yoko still seemed to be an independent agent.

"There's no other way to be sure we succeed."

"No way to 'get to him.'" She drove his words back at him.

Yoko's platinum-tinted hair bobbed above her as he bent down.

"No."

The concession pained him and he retreated from it. He understood that she needed to dwell on things. Once, it had been the same with him.

"We shall have to follow him and be ready. You may not know when it's about to happen, but you're right that there'll be less suspicion with the two of us."

She pressed against him, feeling a cold pleasure at the contact.

One damson-skinned night, Boss Ayakura was dressed for an evening out. Yoko and Mura followed behind, attendant upon an opportunity for a killing, excited despite their car's degraded status next to the black Lexus. The world waited upon a death. It would be a world of their own making. They dangled after. Peering through the car's windshield, Mura imagined ramming the other, shooting it out and getting it done.

"Look, it's the stadium."

The building became more solid once she identified it.

They rolled past the Lexus, peripherally noting the disembarkation of the passengers. As they were looking for a parking spot, the dark car slipped its temporary moorings.

"Don't worry. I know where they'll sit."

Apparently issuing out of the night, crowds streamed by. Street lamps released light from their fogged confines.

"Tickets! Tickets! Best seats!"

She let go of his hand that she had compulsively grabbed. He was selecting two tickets from a squid-like creature who knew something about their needs and, having supplied them, moved away. She took his hand again and they merged with the throng, helping to thicken it at the entranceway where light blazed and burned colour into all of them. Scarves flamed turquoise, red, and blue. Eyes protectively glowed deep amber. Blood simmered in lips. Autumn faces curled at their singed edges. And then were they sparks off their blinking eyes or did fire petals vanish into the dark? Once past the turnstiles the two assassins had freedom to roam.

From on high, they spied Boss Ayakura in white silk scarf, conferring with a tout leaning in from the aisle. The lord of the underworld was holding a Dixie Cup in one hand. They took seats that looked down upon him in the assemblage. The matches began; the contestants raised and drove down first one leg and then the other, lofted pixie salt into the air, finally, mythic as minotaurs, rushed and collided in the circle of sand. The spectators ate and gossiped, drank hot cupfuls of saki, swallowed sweet-cakes, and ignored much of it, preparing and saving themselves for when the Big Boys went at each other.

Mura has panicked and finds herself mentally broadcasting a description of herself and Yoko: " ... a girl and a fella – he has bleached hair – she is dressed like the girls these days – no self-respect – they are everywhere ... ." She feels to be coming apart in wet papier mâché layers.

Yoko is giving evidence of enjoying himself, drinking and eating, thrusting food and drink at her, pointing out the gangsters, the movie people, catcalling with the best of them, at one with the bad behaviour, the distorted transports of these spectators.

"I don't know! I don't know!"

Did she say it or only think it? She held on to whatever he had handed her, while fearing she might retch.

An extra timbre to the announcement of the final matches draws the collective attention, and a pressure in the air causes the crowd to simmer and bubble and fume like thick sumo stew in the arena bowl. Yoko has left his seat and now moves, platinum-haired and harmless in the slow tidal throe, as unremarkable as a souvenir, buoyed above the seated spectators like a sea horse in brine.

Mura has gone into shock, caught in a rising wave where she struggles against its belly's undertow. A loud explosion reaches her. Another explosion. Another. The wave settles about her and swiftly retreats, leaving behind the detritus of gasping little worlds and shards of void in its wake.

Yoko looks about him at the open-mouthed faces stranded and not knowing if they had survived some calamity. He shrugs a slight apology for inflicting this disturbance upon them. As he remounts the stairs, all heads turn to his progress. He passes Mura indifferently, and she is paralyzed and does not know to follow him.

At the exit, no one challenges him and he goes into the night towards approaching sirens beneath a jury of stars He tosses the wrapped gun into a recycling bin.

Mura takes his cue, enters the circle of calm that expanded about him, and acts as though all is normal; she is counterintuitive and descends the stairs, sliding through the gathered onlookers. Then she retreats and rises against gravity through the flotsam and jetsam of the crowd. She does not articulate it, but now she has the knowledge of how you kill someone. You just do it with no skulking or running to get away. The two bodies had slumped there to be examined like abandoned goods whose ownership is purely speculative.

She had looked for where the bullets had gone in, but blood had flowed all over. The bodies were now meat; she could not identify them in any other manner and she did not feel as bad as she had expected. Numbness brought a species of liberation and she easily walked away from everything.

Yoko was shaving his head when Mura returned.

"You give them every chance to catch us and they don't! What more can be asked?" His triumph was understandable but she was struck by the pleasure in his voice. The admonitions of courage and honour had begun to reappear on his scalp.

"Never run, except from a bullet!"

He was exultant. His thoughts had gone back to the shootout in the park.

"Run to it. It doesn't matter. That's when you duck, and weave, and fuck them off."

He grinned murderous joy.

She could not match his exaltation, but watched him borne above himself as though he held mouthfuls of sky between his jaws.

And then he carried her off.

They were all loin and, at dawn, the blue was incomprehensible to them and they could taste it, tear at it, and float in it, split apart. Wild horses filled the sky's depths.

Yoko had seen the aged sumo wrestler seated beyond Boss Ayakura, his eyes fixed upon the Yakuza lord. Had he been this paralytic with rage the entire evening? When Yoko approached along the row, the huge figure half-rose, alarmed, to push the gun he held level away. With a look at Yoko's face he settled back. What did he see there?

As for Mura, on her descent, she recognized the sumo wrestler from the park. Yukio Springborne, a.k.a. Washington, had looked into her eyes when she came down to examine the bodies. She saw that she was not a complete stranger to him.

After the headlines, the killing of a Yakuza boss faded from public interest and entered the dark waters of unfinished police business where other murders, rapes, and intrigues soon buried it under a thick coat of tout _ç_ a change. The question of its significance turned upon the shift in the underworld's power structure with no thought, at least in public, for the assassin's identity.

Convinced for a time by what he had witnessed in the stadium not to pursue further his novel of a young lady and her lover with a gun, Yukio eventually changed his mind upon the later appearance of thousands of wild horses in the streets of the city. Satoko brought him the newspaper. An "art installation," the critic from New York called the phenomenon, "of Renaissance proportions," at the same time voicing his dismay that its creators had chosen to remain anonymous. When asked, the aging Zhang Huan modestly disavowed all responsibility with a smile. Whenever hooves sounded outside, as they often did in the following days, Yukio and Satoko went, together with Miyeko, to the foot of the garden and stood there transfixed at the gate. Years later, after the Yakuza had ceased to exist in Hiroshima and were on the wane in Tokyo and elsewhere, Yukio, much aged and his mother long dead, returned to his book and finished it.

The wild horses ran through the streets of Hiroshima in herds, they clustered together or separated into groups and wheeled away on independent paths. In the beginning, the traffic had set them running and cars and horses froze each other in place. All over the city, men in trucks had left bales of hay and barrels of oats; they had opened the hydrants. The horses made instant alliances or galloped alone. Their reflections in store windows immobilized them as did much of the alien city. They gathered in parks and milled about the Peace Memorial. They halted before the school children who instantly calmed them.

Stately and gorgeous, they astounded every one. The high curve of their necks swept upward in velvet-sheathed flesh and sinew to the deep wedge of their heads and back down into the muscled bodies on tall and tapering legs. They ran and ran on their unshod hooves, weightless the sound of them striking the ground. When they stood and sniffed the air, captured wind arched high their thick manes and tails.

The city welcomed the wild horses just as its early citizens once welcomed the mounted samurai and their descendants welcomed the blossoms of spring. They fed and accommodated them. Gradually, they broke open the streets that lay over hidden streams, built bridges and allowed the water to flow and lakes to form. They purchased buildings and razed them to the ground for pasture land. They planted trees and left them to grow and reseed. They allowed the land to rise again. The air freshened and daylight reassumed the golden tones of old. At night, the galaxies and constellations stretched more brightly over the muscular reaches of forest that wound through the city.

After the hit, Boss Matsugae spirited Yoko and Mura away to his recovered estate where they lived in great guilt and under the forgiveness of the horses they had shipped in from the abattoirs of the 'Wild West'.

Yoko had the staircase to the beach rebuilt and periodically he descended it and made his way to his now elderly mother and uncle. He said nothing of his childhood as he brought them provisions from the estate's gardens and accepted tea of them.

None of that past mattered anymore, and he hoped that the same would be true of his own actions. He had but one enduring thought: who could bomb such a city as Hiroshima was today? Throughout what remained of his life, no answer came his way.

At night, a deep darkness would hover at the cliff edge but, when the sky was clear, moonlight glazed the flanks of the ocean and splayed images of stars rode there. The horses would pause and look and would wander at times into the woods where a threatening figure on a tower would startle them. They would rear on their hind legs and paw the air until they determined there was no immediate danger. On an otherwise ordinary night, they heard a loud bang and then another come from the Matsugae villa; it made them shiver which caused the air to eddy about them. Other than that perturbation, whoever drove away shortly afterwards, headlights bucking above the rough road hidden in darkness, had no greater effect upon their world.

*****

### About the Author

At an undetermined age, the grandfather of Paul Xylinides fled Russia's civil wars in the early 20th century and arrived in Greece where he fashioned a name for himself that was unique and yet of its place. Xylinides, translating as one occupied in some fashion or other with wood (ξύλο), now supplies the _nom de plume_ for the author. He owes the sentiment of this borrowed name to a man whose choices in the face of historical upheaval and existential threat ultimately provided for the existence of himself and others. He died leaving no other record than his forged identity

A youthful reading of _Crime and Punishment_ decided Paul Xylinides on his life's path as a writer. He knew he had aimed high seeking ultimately to produce works that looked to engage readers as Dostoevsky had him and countless others.

_The Wild Horses of Hiroshima_ contains at least two crimes, one in the name of war and another in the service of humanity. The greater one is historical, the lesser one should remain fictional. Its sole purpose is to dramatize the argument that humanity requires a broader vision of itself that encompasses the whole of life in order to achieve its fullest potential and avoid present threats of complete destruction.

Wherever we find ourselves vast historical winds have deposited us and we remain either subject to their reach or within their unrelenting grip. Our study must be to free ourselves.

Paul Xylinides resides in Montreal, Canada, and studied at McGill University, M.A. (English Literature).

Mentor: David G. Taylor, painter, teacher, writer (DavidGeorgeTaylor.com).

Also by the author: _AN AMERICAN POPE_

For further information on upcoming publications, visit PaulXylinides.com

Follow the author on Twitter: @xylinides

Follow the author on Facebook: Facebook.com/paulxylinides

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