Читать книгу Made In Japan - S. Parks J. - Страница 13

Seismological measurement of Fukushima earthquake magnitude 9 on the Richter scale

Birdsong came from the same deck that the folk music had the night before. Breakfast was laid out as self-service, and Hana and Jess ate rice and then wedges of sliced white bread, twice the size of a paperback and half as nutritious, that they covered in sugared orange jam. Between mouthfuls they discussed their plans for the day and then headed out.

Before they reached the station Jess pointed out the dormant neon nightclub sign.

‘Try it? There’s no commitment.’

Hana could see she was never going to take no for an answer.

Jess ran down to the basement, leaving her at the sign.

She quickly returned.

‘Emiko – the manager – can see you at the end of the week.’ She couldn’t have been more pleased with herself.

Hana didn’t want to be ungrateful, ‘I’ll see,’ was all she said.

Jess drew her towards the rail tracks.

‘Come to Ziggy’s to meet my good friend Miho.’

And they headed up the main street with its tiny stores; pottery spilling towards the fresh noodle makers calling beside loud carousels of ‘anime’ covers for any accessory.

Hana waited patiently in a din of local music as Jess fingered lollipop pens and fake-fur key rings with ears. All this from the home of Zen, she thought, as she waited too long under the awning of sound. She considered her new companion a little critically but in the assault of the unfamiliar she was already attached to her.

‘Have you chosen yet?’ Hana was surprisingly irritable given they had met so recently.

Jess emerged manga-eyed with a cartoon bag of irresistibles and she was back on message. ‘It’ll be fun and it’s the only temp job a foreigner will get in Tokyo.’

She was as short as a haiku poem but without the poetry.

‘And the clients?’ hana was worried about dodgy clubs.

‘It is tame. It’s safe,’ she reassured.

Hana’s nose wrinkled. She was far from convinced.

‘Remember I worked here all last summer.’

‘How did you find it?’ Hana twisted at her woven bracelet.

‘The homestay. Ukai, the old man, once had a share in the business that owned a chain of clubs across the city. Apparently did very well property dealing in the eighties. That was until a big deal in Guam nearly ruined him. It’s why Noru takes in foreigners. The house is their only remaining asset and the old man isn’t as well connected as he was.’

‘So they were an important family?’

Jess surprised Hana by laughing, as if the idea were ludicrous. ‘Well, let’s say influential. They’re Etahin.’

‘Etahin?’ Hana hadn’t a clue.

‘Low class,’ Jess said confidentially. Hana threaded her cotton art bag over her shoulder, engaged. Jess knew Noru and the family quite well. So they had hit hard times and Noru was whittled away by the workload and the responsibility. This all seemed to mitigate against an early move from the homestay; they would probably be relying on the income?

‘And the old man’s health has taken a dive since last year,’ Jess added unsentimentally, as if she could hear Hana weighing up her decision. And that swayed it. Hana saw she shouldn’t really contemplate moving homestay now, leaving them so early on.

On the way to the café Jess explained that she had worked with the same volunteer group as last year.

‘Yes, straight down from Fukushima.’

‘Same charity programme?’ Hana asked.

‘Same programme with the same volunteer group’ Jess conceded proudly.

Hana turned in admiration. And a memory suddenly flew to mind. One weekend last month she and Tom had walked along Regent’s Canal, and, after getting drenched in an English monsoon, once home Hana had used old newspaper to stuff Tom’s wet boots as they dried. Later, when making supper she had unfurled the paper to catch the vegetable parings, smoothing the corners until she was disturbed by a photograph under a headline. It was of a large merchant ship, a cargo vessel, resting incongruously on a landscape of debris: afloat on shards of wood, sections of wall, severed concrete platforms and flimsy girders. A sea of detritus. The bric-a-brac of a town destroyed. The vernissage of a ship – resting on kindling, once houses and stores, garden fences and schools – that had now been washed clean and was drying in the sun. The caption read Tō hoku – After the tidal wave. Across the hulk was a great expansive sky of hopeful blue on a cloudless, unthreatening day; well after the force of nature had taken its random hit on the Japanese coastline. There were no harrowing details. It was majestic; a great feat of engineering resting on the fragments of a community. It presented like a life raft to a culture, the ship ashore resting easily back on the land where it had first been constructed. A huge piece of flotsam cut it loose from its securing lines by the nihilistic force of a tidal wave. It seemed to be a monument to the survival of something grander than destruction and, like a sorrow, rested heavily on the obliterated scene of what once was. In some way she did not understand, it belonged to her. She felt a kinship then with Japan that she had never before felt with such intensity. She too was a survivor of her own family tragedy.

‘That was in Fukushima,’ Jess reconfirmed.

Hana snapped out of her reverie and was immediately honest with her. ‘I couldn’t do it. You’ve seen so much.’

‘We get to see the wastelands.’ Jess conceded. ‘But you rebuild.’

Jess bordered on glib and Hana gave way to a creeping skepticism. She eyed her petite figure. Jess would be particularly ineffective in rebuilding the havoc she had seen.

‘You. You are rebuilding?’ Hana offered tentatively.

‘I don’t have a truck license,’ Jess drawled amusingly. ‘We counsel. We don’t get close to the affected communities or their grief, but we counsel the counsellors. To be more accurate, we organize their entertainment: films, music nights. As they are the ones who work with the families, day in day out and they need a programme of events to take their minds off what they have seen and heard. They need to be fresh to counsel the survivors. Many have nothing left to hold on to but the promise of that counselling.’

It was a serious choice for a summer programme. Jess held on to Hana’s admiration.

‘Last year I was also teaching at Berlitz Language School.’ She let this slip casually, as if looking for more approbation.

And it struck Hana that the promised bottom line – the huge amounts of money Jess earned out here – was the result of more hours than she had explained.