Dragon Dance Page 7

  It took another half an hour to go through the remaining questions. Ichiro was sharp, quick to see how different pieces of information fitted together. She had asked him once if he had thought about becoming a journalist. He had laughed at the idea, rather too loudly for Martine’s liking. Only later had she found out that Ichiro already had a clear ambition: he was utterly determined to become a doctor. His mother had died of breast cancer just before his tenth birthday. You didn’t need to be a psychoanalyst to see the connection. Already there was a toughness about him, the same hard core of certainty that his father had.

  When they had finished, Martine went back to the living room. Makoto emerged from the kitchen, his hands wrapped around three large bottles. “Beer,” he said.

  It wasn’t a question—in fact, it was more like a command, and Martine knew better than to argue. After all, this amber liquid, with its swirls of froth and spectrum of flavors from the bitter to the honey-sweet—this was Makoto’s pride and joy. Not just the liquid itself, but also the shape and color of the bottle, the design of the label, the little gasping sound when you eased off the [51] wire-framed cap, the trickling sound as the beer flowed over the heavy glass lip—all had been meticulously planned. This particular brand, the premium brew, was based on a recipe developed by Belgian monks in the fourteenth century. Makoto had spent months scouring Europe for exactly the right ingredients. The launch was due next month, and these bottles were from a test batch.

  Martine tilted her glass to the correct angle. Makoto poured for her, then for his mother and himself. The color was good—warm and golden, gleaming with thousands of tiny bubbles. They clinked glasses and drank. Martine let the full, rich taste flood her mouth and felt it tingle against the sides of her tongue. Eight-percent proof—no wonder those monks always looked so jolly.

  Makoto was watching her keenly. A word of disapproval and he would be crushed—though of course he would rather die than show it.

  “Excellent,” said Martine, smacking her lips. And she meant it. The stuff produced by the big Japanese breweries all tasted the same, looked the same, and cost the same. Makoto’s beer was in a class of its own. Martine had never been much of a beer drinker—she preferred good champagne—but the quality of Makoto’s product was unmistakable.

  Makoto’s mother had prepared dinner and now they all sat down to eat together. For Martine, this was an ambivalent experience. The food—sukiyaki with soft, creamy tofu, shirataki noodles, and Kobe beef sliced so thin you could almost see through it—was excellent, but the amount she was expected to eat was daunting. Makoto’s mother kept loading her bowl with mountains of meat and vegetables.

  “You must eat more tofu,” she said sweetly. “You have too much stress at work. Tofu is exactly what you need to clear up your complexion.”

  “You’re very kind.”

  “I expect you have constipation too. I did when I was your age.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really. Too much sitting down in the seiza position. But don’t worry—I’ve prepared fresh persimmons, the very best thing for constipation.”

  “Thank you very much,” said Martine. Makoto was staring into the middle of his bowl, but the sides of his eyes were crinkled up.

  “And for vitality nothing is better than a raw egg. Please take another one.”

  The little basket of eggs was extended. Martine hesitated, but there was no choice really. She couldn’t refuse the egg, any more than she could refuse the plates of baked clams, noodles, and grilled prawns that were sitting waiting on the side table.

  “That’s right,” said Makoto’s mother, eyeing Martine as she broke the egg into her bowl. “Two raw eggs every day and you’ll soon be feeling young and healthy again!”

  Martine nodded politely as she chewed.

  [52] Makoto’s mother had moved in with her son five years ago, shortly after his wife died. She was seventy-five years old, but with her alert eyes and strong posture she looked fifteen years younger. Every day she cycled to the sports center, where she swam a few slow and stately lengths in the public pool, her spectacles perched on her nose, her hair tied back in a bun. She went to the cinema once or twice every week, and knew more about movies—from obscure European art-films to Hollywood blockbusters—than the Tribune’s main reviewer. For decades she had headed her own school of tea ceremony, which, according to Makoto, had been in constant and bitter dispute with schools of other styles. Even now she still gave lessons to a few favored pupils.

  “Have some more miso soup. The seaweed will make your hair stronger and take away some of that grease.”

  “Thank you,” said Martine with a smile. From the first time they met—over a year ago now—she had realized that she was going to be tested. Makoto’s mother was unfailingly warm and friendly, but she had yet to reconcile herself to the presence of this strange foreign woman. Sometimes Martine wondered whether her son had, either.

  After dinner Makoto and Ichiro cleared the table, and Martine and the old lady washed the dishes. That was the usual division of labor. Makoto’s mother was from an old samurai family in Kyushu, and she had been brought up to believe that men should never enter the kitchen. Martine didn’t mind playing along. In fact it was fun in a strange kind of way—just as long as it was understood that playing along was what she was doing.

  Ichiro lugged in the sukiyaki pan, his biceps straining under his T-shirt. He set it down on top of a wooden stool.

  “Not there,” snorted the old lady. “Haven’t you got any common sense? It’ll leave a mark.”

  Ichiro muttered an apology, shifted it onto the kitchen table, and scurried out again. Makoto, in his usual hurry to be finished, dropped a fistful of cutlery onto the table. A ceramic scoop rolled off and clattered to the ground.

  “Watch what you’re doing,” said Martine sharply. “Those things chip easily, you know.”

  She was aware of the old lady giving a firm nod of approval. Makoto got down on his hands and knees to retrieve the scoop from under the table. Martine made sure that nobody was watching, then gave him a dig in the buttocks with the side of her foot.

  After they were finished, Martine took a tray of tangerines and rice crackers into the main room. As she sat down, she caught Ichiro stealing a glance up her skirt. She stared at him furiously and he looked away at once, his complexion a little darker than usual.

  Martine sat and munched her cracker, one leg crossed over the other. [53] Having a relationship with Makoto meant having a relationship with his mother and son—she had known that from the start. Still, she hadn’t realized all the implications. Usually Ichiro treated her as a big sister, the kind of person who would help him with his homework. Occasionally, when he came home late from school and saw her chatting and laughing with his father, he looked at her as if she were an intruder, his eyes blazing and his jaw set hard. And then again, sometimes he looked at her as a woman: Martine found that the hardest to deal with.

  Makoto was very sensitive about the situation, which was why the number of times they had spent the whole night together could be counted on one hand. Makoto would never consider sleeping over at Martine’s place. It might be well past midnight, he might have a train to catch at seven the next morning—it didn’t matter. He insisted on waking up in his own apartment and seeing his son’s face before he went off to school. And for Martine to stay at Makoto’s apartment, to sleep in the big bedroom with his dead wife’s photo staring at her out of the black frame, to waltz off to the shower in the morning with a towel wrapped around her waist—well, nobody was ready for that either.

  So the relationship had its frustrations, which had to be negotiated with tact and patience. But it had its excitements too.

  Makoto sat down, cradling another glass of premium beer in his hands. Martine listened as he described the difficulties of getting his products onto the shelves of the major supermarkets. Apparently the big beer companies were putting pressure on retailers, threatening to remove their discounts
if they stocked any micro-beers. It was a familiar story. Ever since Makoto had set the company up, the beer companies had been trying to run him out of business. They got the banks to shut down credit lines without any warning. They got the Ministry of Agriculture to quarantine his imported hops and barley, the Ministry of Health to make unplanned hygiene checks, the Ministry of Finance to conduct lengthy investigations into his tax affairs. They had even offered him money to close down operations, but Makoto had sailed through it all with steely determination.

  The old lady was flicking through a movie magazine, pretending not to listen to their conversation. Ichiro was sitting at the table trying to fix a radio-controlled helicopter, one of his most prized possessions. With his hair hanging over his eyes and lips pursed in concentration, he had reverted to boyishness again.

  Makoto finished his tale of intrigue. “So what about you? Have you dug up any good scandals or financial disasters?”

  Martine took another mouthful of beer. It was good stuff. The more you drank, the more you wanted to drink. “Not this week, not yet anyway. But I did manage to interview a Japanese national hero.”

  [54] “Impossible. There aren’t any national heroes these days, only national villains.”

  “Well, this one considers himself a national hero, that’s for sure, and so do his fans. I’m talking about the singing politician.”

  “Nozawa?”

  “That’s right. He’s launching a political party to help promote his new CD. Or he’s launching a CD to help promote his new political party. It’s hard to know which.”

  Both Ichiro and the old lady looked up from what they were doing. Nozawa’s name was enough to attract their attention.

  “Tell me,” said Martine. “What is so fascinating about this guy? Even people who oppose everything he stands for actually seem to like him. Why is that?”

  There was a moment of silence. Makoto looked, uncharacteristically, as if he were struggling for an answer. It was the old lady who spoke first.

  “Nozawa is a kind of genius, I think.”

  Martine glanced at her in surprise. “A genius? Really? But I was talking to him just a couple of hours ago, and he seemed totally ordinary.”

  “That’s the point,” said the old lady, her face slightly flushed from the beer. “He’s a genius at appearing ordinary. He knows how ordinary people feel, and he knows how to communicate with them. Ronald Reagan was the same. I saw his movies when they were first released—awful, all of them. But he had a way of talking that was so clear and friendly. Afterward all you remember is that friendly face, not the silly story made by the scriptwriters.”

  There was a glint in her eye, as if she wanted to goad Martine into an argument.

  “And you call that genius?”

  “It’s an instinct. Every entertainer wants to do something like that, but hardly any of them can. All these big movie stars today—you put them in a stupid movie and they just look stupid. You don’t remember anything.”

  Makoto broke in. “My view is slightly different. I think Nozawa is more like Eva Peron. What he does is give us stress relief. For so many decades we were diligent and hardworking, intent on catching up with the West, smiling and bowing, trying to be respectable, all that boring stuff. Now we’re showing that we can be as crazy as anyone. And if you look at history, you can see that’s much more natural. We’ve always been crazy. We like taking things past the limit, everyone together—nationalism, pacifism, industrialism, disco dancing, Italian food, whatever comes into fashion.”

  Martine nodded. It was rare for her to ask Makoto’s opinion on a subject related to her work, and even rarer for him to give a straight answer. He had little interest in current affairs, and an even contempt for modern politicians of all affiliations and all nationalities. His personal heroes were Churchill, [55] Lincoln, and the sixteenth-century military commander Oda Nobunaga. He never spoke about them, but Martine had noticed that together they occupied a six-foot-high bookcase in his study.

  “And what about the songs?”

  Makoto gave a snort of contempt. “These days they’re terrible—pompous, sentimental, crude, full of idiotic slogans. I really can’t bear to listen to such rubbish!”

  Another surprise. Makoto, usually so cool and ironic, sounded agitated, almost angry.

  “These days? You mean, there was a time when you actually liked them?”

  Makoto looked at her oddly and hesitated before speaking. “Well, yes. In the old days his music was very different. It was fresh and honest and full of hope. Of course we were young then too.”

  “We”—that was also uncharacteristic. Martine though about letting it rest, but her journalistic instinct got the better of her.

  “Tell me more,” she said gently.

  The old lady was watching them like a bird, head twitching from side to side. Ichiro seemed to be totally absorbed in his repair work, but, checking his hands, Martine felt sure he was busily unscrewing a rotor he’d only just screwed in.

  Makoto poured himself another beer, and held it up to the light to examine the consistency of the head.

  “It was a different world then,” he muttered, gazing at the cascading bubbles. “Japan was full of energy, everything moving forward. When Nozawa’s first album came out, we were in our final year at university. Sachiko gave it to me as a birthday present. We even went to see him play in a tiny theater in Ikebukuro. He performed for nearly three hours, just with guitar and harmonica—the whole audience was spellbound.”

  Martine didn’t say anything. The idea was somehow difficult to grasp. Makoto always seemed so tough-minded and mature, so detached from the fads and enthusiasms of the zeitgeist. It was hard to grasp that he had once been an idealistic young student, the type that would take his girlfriend to a folk club. But of course he had, and he had gone on to marry that girl. He had also joined one of Japan’s most prestigious trading companies, a natural destination for elite students burning with patriotic ambition.

  “I still have that album somewhere. I’ll get it for you, if you want.”

  Now it was Martine’s turn to flush. “No, that’s all right. I mean, please don’t take the trouble ...”

  But Makoto was already on his feet. “It’s no trouble. Actually I want you to see it.”

  He disappeared into his study, leaving a strained silence behind him. The [56] old lady flicked over a page in her movie magazine. Ichiro was now screwing back the same rotor that he had just unscrewed. Martine refilled Makoto’s glass, then the old lady’s, then her own. The bubbles danced to the surface, forming a dense and buoyant head.

  Two minutes later Makoto was back, holding a dog-eared LP sleeve. It hadn’t taken long to find. Martine wondered if he kept it close at hand, perhaps with other precious items that he would take out and gaze at when he was alone in his study. You had to know this man well before you glimpsed the core of sadness within him. Their relationship had been three months old before Martine had even heard about Sachiko. Until then Makoto had never mentioned the subject, and she had assumed he was divorced.

  “Take a look,” said Makoto, handing her the LP. “It’s a souvenir from a country that no longer exists.”

  The cover photo showed a young couple walking down a Shinjuku back-street hand in hand. They were looking into each other’s eyes and smiling. The girl, stunningly beautiful, was wearing velvet bell-bottoms and a floppy hat with a feather in it. The man had a guitar case hoisted over one shoulder, and was wearing a pair of jeans covered in patches and an Afghan coat that reached down to his ankles. He had long hair flowing over his shoulders, and a soft, feminine face.

  “He doesn’t look like the same person,” said Martine, genuinely surprised.

  “He isn’t the same. But then none of us are.”

  The old lady gave a little chuckle. “You know, Makoto used to look just like that. He had the same hairstyle, the same kind of jeans. He even asked me to sew on some patches for him—there were no holes, he just wanted so
me patches.”

  Martine glanced at Makoto, who was trying his best to look unembarrassed. “You had hair down to your shoulders?”

  “Of course, we all did in those days. I even had one of those coats.”

  Martine stared at him in amazement. “You mean you used to wear an Afghan coat?”

  “Sure.”

  “Have you still got it somewhere?”

  “Of course not. Those things weren’t made to last more than a year or so.”

  That was a pity. Martine would have given a month’s salary to see Makoto walking down the street in an Afghan coat. It occurred to her that Makoto was almost exactly the same age as Nozawa, and about the same height and build. In his Afghan and shoulder-length hair, he must have looked much the same as Nozawa did on the album cover. In fact, even now there was something of a resemblance in the set of the jaw and the deep-set eyes, alert and wary.

  [57] She handed the album cover back to Makoto. There were coffee rings on the back, and the paper was yellow and faded.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I’m glad you showed it to me.”

  Makoto nodded and took it back to his room.

  Martine sat back and finished her beer. Something new had happened between them, though she wasn’t quite sure what. Anyway, Makoto’s premium beer was excellent. She felt the soothing warmth radiating from the pit of her stomach and gently bathing the inside of her skull. The room was strangely bright. She realized that for some reason she was smiling.