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Copyright
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Harper
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2017
www.harpercollins.co.uk
1
Copyright © S. J. Parks 2017
Cover layout design ©HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017
Cover photographs©Piyato/Shutterstock (front cover), hit1912/Shutterstock (back)
S. J. Parks asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books
Ebook Edition © May 2017 ISBN: 9780008201029
Source ISBN: 9780008201012
Version: 2017-08-17
‘The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is’
−Susan Sontag
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Author’s Note
About the Author
About the Publisher
Prologue
The irony is that I am the one left to explain. I should commit it to paper, but I am no good with words. No one talks of shame any more, but when I walk out with this newborn, that is what I will feel. This child will want to know it all, and to understand it, and I doubt I will ever be able to bring myself to tell the truth.
It is evening, and in the thin dusk I am trying to gather and collect my thoughts. The senbei cracker fragments lie across the desk beneath the light that the evening has lent me. The blown rice will not be marshalled easily into my cupped hand. I do know now that he will not come. I know that he will not visit me again. The hot chocolate from the vending machine is too sweet and enough time has elapsed that the excuses are brittle and dried. A small sesame seed on my tongue brings a sudden burst of taste. ‘Etahin,’ so he had said.
The temple bell across the grounds sounds gently.
I should be the one to explain.
Naomi
The teahouse, Japan, 1989
Chapter 1
‘Architects spend an entire life with this unreasonable idea that you can fight against gravity‘
−Renzo Piano
Heathrow Airport, July 2012
Wednesday 18.45. Hana Ardent clipped into her seat belt early, as if to secure misgivings she held over travelling on her own. Two men fed the locker above her head as the other passengers politely squeezed past them in the aisle. She eyed them with the interest of one settling in for the long haul – in this case, flight BA4600 to Tokyo. Eleven hours and forty minutes, enough time to accommodate her entire week’s lectures. That’s if she were to attend them all.
If she could choose her companion for the journey it would not be the business traveller but the man in the maroon woollen. It was holey and not entirely clean and it held for her some comfort, as if he might live on the same edge of domestic chaos that she inhabited. He was a little older than her, possibly late twenties, and some part of his life must have necessitated this apparent neglect. By the time they touched down in Haneda International she would surely have discovered the answer. That Hana could have no say in the matter of her fellow travellers, even though she had paid a fortune for her economy ticket, riled her. She should make it into a game. Then again, perhaps not.
Against the window seat, following the indecisive summer light skittering across the tarmac, she traced the line of the ailerons at the edge of the wing. A cloud shift darkened the metal span, making it appear suddenly less resilient. Just like her determination to go. It was not as if she had ever been forbidden to make the journey, but she knew it was against her wishes, against her last wishes, though of course it had not been put in to so many words.
Ed introduced himself as he toyed with a loose thread on what must have been a favourite jumper. He explained he lived in Tokyo, was relatively new to his company and made so many trips he had to fly economy. There was, he said wearily, nothing special for him in an international flight. As he leaned back in his seat and focused his pale-grey eyes, shot with what might have been premature cynicism, he did nothing to calm her nerves. She checked her seatbelt. The line of flesh folded over the thin fabric at her waist was a little testament to her need for comfort food. Hana had dressed for the flight and might appear perhaps as a girl trying to stave off the onset of woman. Her thin tribal shirt complemented the scarf tied, Frida Kahlo-style, around her head, swaddling those of her thoughts that had a propensity to wander off. She was defenceless in the face of all things creative and still trying on a persona for size but hadn’t finally decided. Once he had settled, there was nothing between them but his wool and her thin sleeve of batik cotton.
It was her first trip to Japan she told him and she shared her excitement as the plane circled London and she drew him into a search for identifiable landmarks around her home in Dalston. But there was no sign of the Georgian terraces with tall, confident windows, built to see and be seen, and brick, that unmistakable colour of London rain. As the plane rounded the city sprawl, she didn’t notice his stolen glances for the playing fields of his West London Grammar.
‘So Hana means flower.’
He would have guessed she must be half Japanese. She knew she had chatted too much even before the engines drowned her out as they fought against gravity. Ungenerously, he shifted a scuffed leather document case to his knees decisively. But she carried on, telling him that her mother had lived in Tokyo in 1989.
‘A lot went on that year.’ He seemed obliged to tell her and rewarded her blank look with a catalogue. ‘Tiananmen. The fall of the Berlin wall. Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest.’
Hana laughed at his mock gravity and continued the game, adding a great earthquake to the list, which he claimed not to remember. He seemed tired of their first steps of acquaintance as he slipped the sheaf of documents from his case. She shouldn’t have talked so much.
He was returning from a business trip, he apologized.
Hana was left to survey the mood-board of Southern England – earth tones, fading to the shadows of a Sandra Blow sketch – and she busied herself with the intricacies of weaving a plait. She could see he was well-defended in a carapace of media; pads and pods and luxury headphones, which, she supposed, kept him reassuringly locked in some sort of solipsism. She liked his choice of his music. Easy Classical. She listened until the strains that came secondhand were too much effort to hear and she drifted back to Japan where she hoped she could paint over the outline sketch of her own past. In a matter of a few hours she would brace herself and prepare for a new perspective and then touch down on what would be another side of her.
When her hands left her hair she felt his eyes across her shoulder. The soft hair braid lay like a gift of intimacy between them. It was quite contrary to her intentions.
She read the open page. Clause 5. iv. Pursuant to any change in market conditions the vendor shall …
A lawyer? She wouldn’t have guessed. They would have no currency to exchange whatsoever. She opened the cover of her own book but had no inclination to read it and closed it again.
‘So your first trip?’ He seemed no longer able to concentrate on the merger documents.
She narrowed her almond eyes and nodded. She had never had the opportunity to go back.
‘Family?’
So simple a question but not so easy to answer. There was no family, no relatives, in fact; no one to visit. There never had been; how easily small openings in conversation could hit a nerve. A stewardess of an over-painted age stopped to offer drinks and Ed leaned in to pass her one as he asked how long she would be away.
Knowing that after the flight they would leave as strangers, she recognized an open opportunity to tell him anything she liked – a gift. What truths you could tell a stranger when a friend might pass judgment. A license to download. And so, without editing or exaggerating, she could talk to him more freely.
‘Six weeks or so. I’ll be teaching primary in the autumn,’ she began, applying the free lip balm generously.
Ed’s firm had sent him out to live in Tokyo the year before and he would probably stay another couple. So she might know someone on arrival – someone who would speak the language who she could call on if she had a problem. She weighed up whether he would offer to take her round. It was more likely they would leave the flight as they had begun, as strangers.
‘There was lot of work after the Oshika Peninsular incident.’
The reference sailed passed her until he explained.
‘Tohoku. The Great Eastern Earthquake.’ He hammered it home: ‘Last year the earth shifted almost a foot.’
She was wide-eyed. Her lips parted.
A foot – virtually the space she took up in her seat. It shocked her.
He drew attention to her book, changing the subject.
‘The Pillow Book?’ The spine was pristine.
For some reason, she did not want to mention that this love story was a departing gift from Tom. She and Tom had been together since school and lately she had wanted to ask him what she really meant to him but had never managed to bring it up. She thought she loved him but she had not yet learned to love herself. They were kind of cut adrift together. She had left him behind to finish his dissertation and house-sit the flat that was now hers.
‘From a friend.’ She tapped the cover casually.
Ed tried again – ‘Visiting friends here?’
She shook her head. But hoped for a place to stay, where her welcome would be whispered over rustling kimono silk, where a bamboo waterspout played over samisen music and delicacies on celadon-turquoise porcelain perfectly fitted her hand.
In reality she was travelling towards a void where she would know no one. And because she was part Japanese she felt foolish, as if she had been left standing waiting too long on a street corner. Hers was a history of carelessness. How reassuring it would be to say she was headed somewhere familiar.
‘And so your parents …?’ he asked.
She stopped him with a look.
She had lost her mother quite recently, and the words would still not come.
At her response he looked away and mouthed his apologies.
‘I‘ve arranged a kind of homestay, sort of hostel.’
Ed was well trained in the art of disguising when he was unimpressed but the edge of his mouth curled down; Hana ignored it.
Four hours in and green tea was offered. Ed passed across the plastic cup.
‘Sen no Rikyū would be upset. The Zen Master of simplicity.’
Hana’s eyebrows quizzed him.
‘Founder of the tea ceremony would have banished plastic.’
‘You’ve been to one?’
‘The whole ritual is played out very slowly. At half tempo.’
After a pause she interrupted him ‘My mother lived in Shimokitazawa.’
‘Nice area. You must have great photos.’
Of course there were photos. Photos of boots slipping from her tiny feet, on yellow-wellington days, bright enough to scare the wildlife halfway across the South Downs, where they spent rented weekends. But she had never seen a single photo from her mother’s time in Japan. Not a photo, not a face, found among her possessions to suggest she had ever lived there. Hana shook her head.
‘What did she do in Tokyo?’
She hadn’t told her very much. ‘Well … she did work on a … a teahouse.’
The seat-belt sign bleeped – turbulence – and as the plane bucked, half his green tea escaped across her jeans. As his apologies tumbled out he pushed his napkin softly against her thigh until they both looked up suddenly as if as each of them had been called from opposite ends of the plane. She liked his reserve. She trivialized the accident and holding his napkin to her jeans and continued.
‘I’m not a great traveller.’
He touched her sleeve with genuine concern.
Aware that she responded to his attention, they fell into an abrupt silence.
She watched him contemplate the ceiling vents. They were a good way into the journey and the air was stale.
‘You’ve done some miles then.’
‘Yes. A lunar mission only takes three days,’ he complained. ‘That’s half a million kilometres.’ She could tell he was the sort to be making constant calculations.
‘We’d be about a third of the way right now,’ he offered.
‘To the moon?’
‘Yes. You’ll find Japan as familiar – and you might as well be travelling through time too.’
It was effectively what she wanted to do: travel through time; find a piece of her mother; find a piece of her own history. She had always accepted the thin yarn of a story her mother had offered, and over the years she had darned and patched it until it fitted her needs. This was how they had always lived together, patching and making do.
Hana woke on the descent over the daytime Pacific to find her head lay on Ed’s shoulder. She smiled sleepily at the intimacies of the flight; his stomach filled with her untouched dinner, which he had tidied away. The honesty of their conversation.
She was not embarrassed until Ed opened his eyes and she shifted quickly to a safer distance.
‘You ‘ve got the address for the homestay – right? I’m really sorry – I would offer … but I’m going in the opposite direction.’
She was disappointed. She had imagined she would have a guide – at least to the centre of town.
‘But we should hang … definitely,’ he added.
It was such a little offer – she wouldn’t press him on it.
The plane dipped sharply sending her body temperature up until she felt a little sick. Below were the rice paddy fields and from this height it seemed there was little change in what she had left behind.
‘You okay?’
‘I’m fine.’
He was, she thought, genuinely concerned. She slumped forwards, fighting what might have been too embarrassing.
When they disembarked she was met in the terminal by a bank of chilled air laced with the smell of fast food. In the café, large, red, paper lanterns radiated a warm light. It was the red of the morning sun that rose early in the east. Her mother had talked about Amaterasu, the Goddess of the morning sun who created night and day and painted the Japanese landscape. It was part of their personal folklore and her mother had said she was her goddess: strong, creative and forgiving. And now on arrival, though she wasn’t a tourist as such she didn’t feel any immediate sense of belonging; this was a new world to her.
In the queue they said a simple goodbye. She opened her British passport at the photograph where her own almond eyes were lost to the stamps and seals that ward off counterfeiters. Her name, with its distinct spelling, somehow promised she would finally learn the truth about her own identity.
As he left beyond the visa line, she waved, touching the pocket where she had put his meishi business card. And so he left her between the no man’s land of duty-free and the threshold of Japan to find her way into the centre.
She marched blindly, past the bilingual signs of welcome and the helpful English guidance into town, to find the taxi ranks. It was too much for her to work out even in her own language. Luggage in tow she ignored the helpfully positioned tourist information desk and, in an ill-judged move, got into a yellow cab.
As the cab drove off, Ed’s card lay behind in the plane, forgotten amongst the collected crumbs beneath the armrest that had divided them.
Chapter 2
‘Entreat me not to leave thee or to return from following after thee; For whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; your people shall be my people’
−Ruth, to Naomi (Ruth 1:16-18, King James Bible)
Hana’s cab hurtled to join the writhing snake of traffic on the elevated section of the Tokyo expressway. It followed the contours of the Sumida River into downtown Tokyo where it split into so many tributaries, running off to Ginza, Chiyoda Ku and Tsukiji.
It hurt as she watched the taxi-meter move faster than the city as they drove across it. Beneath the highway they ventured into back streets, where the air was already thick with the smell of yakitori, so strong it might be an impediment to the karaoke drifting through alleys, eventually getting lost and petering out. Once they reached Shimokitazawa the noise of the traffic gave way to the random calls from the pachinko parlour as the car slowed to the pace of the footfall.
The end of the afternoon was still hot when she clambered out on the unfinished road at the top of a inauspicious residential cul de sac. As she counted the yen notes into the driver’s stark white gloves he must have read her surprise at the fare because he dropped his head in an apologetic bow. The empty street was pockmarked with the shadows of air-con units and laced with scrambled utility wires that looked as if they had been restrung in haste.
She stuffed the change into her pocket. Her jeans had crusted from the spilt tea and felt as pleasant as if someone else had worn them before her. Her mind went back to Tom, alone in her flat. Would Sadie keep him company? Sadie had borrowed her jacket and had only just returned it in time before she left and she could never quite be relied on. What was she doing here in Tokyo and where the hell was she? It was it was a long way from home.
The taxi left and as the dust settled at her feet, a regret that she should have come at all gently settled. Shimokitazawa: a quiet residential suburb that the guidebook promised as a ‘suburb of film café’s, low-key nightlife’ with ‘hundreds of reasonable restaurant choices’. Not that she had any money left after her cab ride. She consoled herself that at least the budget homestay rates had been agreed in advance; she had chosen the homestay program to save on costs but also for a chance to live with a Japanese family.