Martin Edmond


Three Views of Cipangu

I
Visitor's Book

When we were leaving the cemetery for the second time I went again into the house where the Visitor’s Book is kept. We’d signed it the day before—Mayu wrote peace in the comments section and I wrote heiwa. There was a plastic folder full of sheets of paper on which were written the names of the 1555 servicemen buried here; when I picked it up, a small, mildewed, unsealed envelope fell out. It had a name on the front: Wilfred Greaves; and, inside, a photograph of him. He was an Englishman, a minor functionary in the RAF; captured in Singapore, he died of malnutrition, beriberi and nephritis in a camp near Hiroshima on March 4, 1943. The picture was a colourised print made after a black and white image. Just head and shoulders. A bluff, blond fellow with blue eyes and a wide easy smile. Dead these seventy-six years. There’s something strange about the phrase: We will remember them. Who are ‘we’ and who is ‘them’? Who placed the picture of Fred Greaves here? Are they still alive? If not, who remembers them? And so on. The cemetery was created by the Australian War Graves Unit in 1945 and is now administered by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, HQ in Maidenhead, Berkshire, responsible for overseeing the remains of the millions who died overseas in both twentieth century world wars, with reliquaries in 153 countries. There are six immaculately kept lawn cemeteries set amongst plantings of magnificent trees, landscaped into the side of a hill in such a way as to block out entirely the surrounding cityscape of Hodogaya, west of the great seaport of Yokohama. First of all the Brits; then, to the south of them, the Aussies; further along the same path, the Kiwis and the Canadians. Then, retracing your steps and walking up a flight of stone steps behind the Brits, the Indians; beyond them, up some more steps, a sixth cemetery in which are the graves of 171 people who died during or after the Occupation. Some of them were babes who did not survive long in this world; some were women, presumably wives; many of the servicemen died in the early 1950s, perhaps en route to, or from, the Korean War. There was an Admiral and an Air Marshall; also the grave of the man who oversaw this place from 1952 to 1986. His name was Len Harrop, MBE, and his plaque said: If you seek his monument, look around you. He died, aged 95, in 2011. Many of those from United India (including Pakistan and Bangladesh) were seamen off the SS Nankin, which left Melbourne in April 1942 with a cargo of munitions as well as some civilian passengers aboard, headed for India. She was captured by a German raider and, after several transfers, those aboard her ended up in Yokohama, officially prisoners of the Germans but under the jurisdiction of the Japanese. Other lascars (sic) were off a vessel called the MV British Motorist, an oil tanker sunk in Darwin Harbour, also in 1942; how they came to be here I do not know. Later, while the raider which had taken her was re-fuelling, and moored alongside her in Yokohama Bay, a fire broke out and the munitions aboard the Nankin blew up, taking the raider and a large chunk of the docks with her. There was a raggedy tree in the Indian section which may have been a tamarind; in the Australian section, gum trees and Bangalow palms; where the New Zealanders and Canadians are buried, two spindly maples and a young, healthy kauri which, no matter how many times I tried, I could not properly photograph; though I did get some evocative close-ups of the bark. The morning was hot and humid. Cicadas stridulated. On the paths, small spiral-shelled snails left behind trails of mucous then stalled, perhaps when yesterday’s rain stopped. Iridescent slaters trundled to and fro. On the lawns, peaceful doves grazed; up above the ubiquitous crows cawed. A big dark butterfly, with blue lights in its black wings, went by. Dragonflies like small electric birds buzzed into the trees. In the Australian section a man with a watering can and a sponge on a stick was washing the plaques, one by one; as Mayu photographed them, one by one. She has done the same with the graves of Japanese war dead interred in Cowra. There are flowering plants between each plaque; the lavenders laved their scent upon the morning, the crimson roses glowed in the heavy clouded air. Whenever I see the phrase Known Unto God, I tear up, even though I know it isn’t true. The night before, in the Taiwanese restaurant in Chuka-gai that Mioko took us to, a barn owl was tethered by one leg near the cash register. We heard its hooded cry sound as we ate our onions. It had a name but I have forgotten it; and two tricks: it could grasp in its beak a soft toy shaped like its own head and return it to a simulacrum of a nesting hole; and pick up a little bell and ring it; except, last night, it kept dropping the bell and so it never rang. Never send to ask . . . I did a google search for Wilfred Greaves but nothing much came up. Aircraftman second class in the Volunteer Reserve; died in his early twenties. Greaves of course recalls graves; and also grief. At the rear of the British section was a small mausoleum in which there was an altar upon which stood a black oblong metal box containing the remains of 355 Commonwealth, American and Dutch men who died as POWs in Japan and were cremated; 71 of their names are unknown. The box did not look large enough to hold all those bits of ash and bone and tooth; and where are their souls? On the wall above that strange black box, in handsome carved capitals, these words were written: There be of them that have left a name behind them that their praises might be reported and some there be that have no memorial. But their righteousness hath not been forgotten and their glory shall not be blotted out. I don’t rightly understand this either though I think I know what it is trying to say. Yuenchi Park used to be a children’s playground; maybe even a fairground, with a Ferris wheel; which was resumed to make the cemetery. The first day there I saw a mother and her young daughter, out of her pram, wandering down the pathways through the trees; on the second, an elderly man in a canvas hat studying the information boards. Otherwise it was just us; the two workers; and the corbies; whose barbarous cries I can still hear sounding above me here in Yoyogi as I write.

II
A Ladder of Rain

We went swimming in the caldera, in a bay on the northern shore, where a set of orange buoys were disposed, in a rough quadrilateral, to make a place safe from boaties, fisher folk and water skiers. You change in two small sheds across the road from the base of the jetty then walk out upon it until you reach a set of iron steps leading down into the lake; which was a clear brown colour above a bottom of round stones, which soon gave way to soft, slightly slimy sand from which grew banks of feathery weed. It was a warm cloudy day and, once you slid into the water, warm there too. Mayu, who has been swimming here since she was a girl, has a routine which involves breast-stroking out to the buoy at the south-eastern corner of the rectangle then progressing back and forth upon the southern line several times before back-stroking back to the jetty. I set out to traverse the three sides of the rectangle but only got as far as the south-western buoy before drifting on a diagonal back to the shore. While I was free-styling along I saw below me a silver fish, the shape and size of a small snapper, gently fibrillating its fins as it rested in a glade of the weed forest. On a private jetty, parallel to the public one, right at the end, there was a statue of dog, cut out of sheet metal, with its head cocked and turned towards a derelict boatshed further round the lake. The placard around its neck had kanji characters upon it but you would have had to swim to it from the water side to read what it said; casual access to the jetty was denied. It looked as if the dog was waiting for the return of a fisherman who would never come again; but that may be fanciful. After our swim we drove on around the lake, down secret winding roads, through dark green cedars and pale green larch trees, in yellowy light, back to the village. Because of the book I was reading—God’s Crucible, by David Levering Lewis—I had a Bowie song in my head: Watching them come and go / The Templars and the Saracens / They’re travelling the holy land / Opening telegrams. I don’t know what that means, do you? Sounds right though. And your prayers / They break the sky in two / Believing the strangest things / Loving the alien. After a short rest we drove to a restaurant in Myoko for lunch and then on to a hotel where we had afternoon tea and, after that, an onsen. I had been twice before to this particular place but today the women’s and men’s baths had been switched around (a regular occurrence) and I was alone where previously Mayu and Yoshie had bathed. The water was extremely hot in the inside pool so it was difficult to stay in for any length of time; nevertheless, I could feel the heat infiltrating those aching joints—my right ankle, both knees, my left hip, my left thumb—which constitute a permanent reminder of mortality; or rather of the decrepitude that precedes mortality. The mist had come down from the mountain again, shrouding everything in uncertainty, the suggestive atmos of a thriller; the cars looming out of the murk were gleaming expensive Mercs and Beamers and Lexuses; but the people we saw infrequently in the streets were just shop-keepers or artisans or farmers going about the business of life. I am no closer to inventing the noir plot I wish to elaborate as a means of writing about this place in all of the evocative detail it demands; and, on the drive back home, began to wonder if I should approach the matter diaristically, with no attempt at fictional creations; like an I-novel. Invention, after all, is not my strong suit; or not on the macro level. I am able at times to take the real, in a sentence or a paragraph, towards the possible or the improbable. One of the words I looked up today is ‘untoward’. I had always thought it was a nautical term, having to do with an impedance in the progress of a vessel towards its destination; but no. Or not exactly. ‘Weard’ is the root, meaning a turning, in a certain direction—‘towards’, ‘backwards’, ‘onwards’. Later it was used to indicate a positive orientation, a willingness to learn, to contribute, or just to be. To weard, to turn, to make a propitious move. An ara or a tao. Hence the actions of those people who showed no such willingness to do so came to be described as untoward. So maybe here is the master metaphor I am looking for: could I write the diary of an untoward? A way towards a way that is not the way? Like the photo I took out the hotel window of a ladder in the rain: secured horizontally to the wall of a semi-derelict building, it was going nowhere fast.

III
Silk Road

Although I’ve been calling this place Kurohime, that is just the name of the railway station and the mountain; the village is actually Kumakura, ‘Bear’s Larder’ or similar. There are bears around here; Mr T, the muso who lives over the road, saw one drinking from the river last summer. It ran away; so did he. Monkeys too—we saw some macaques today on the way to the recycling plant. And one night something, probably a badger, was snuffling round under the tatami room where we were sleeping. We found footprints in the dust beneath the house next morning. The Japanese badger is a mustelid with racoon eyes; it’s nocturnal, heard but not often seen. Though the house is tight against the weather, sometimes you find small green frogs in the bathroom; the ones I caught and let go had their moist skins covered in dust. There are larger brown ones hopping around outside; and the snakes that eat both kinds slithering through the bear bamboo. Yoshie showed me two shed skins she has collected; for luck. Shinanomachi is the name of the greater town, which includes Kumakura, Nojiriko (the caldera) and a dozen other places, all villages from olden times. I always find directions difficult to intuit in the northern hemisphere though I’ve just about got it right now; the principles behind the disposition of the municipal buildings continue to elude me. I’ve been to the Town Hall, the Library, the Hospital, the Council Offices and still I cannot say how they sit in relation to each other or to the town as a whole. I think it is because modern infrastructure has been laid down over an old rural area where houses related to their surrounding fields, with their shrines, and to other houses, more than they did to roads or grids or railways or whatever. Also I’ve been to the Temple and to the house of the Poet Issa, which stands on Highway 18, the Royal Road. In the Edo period gold mined on the island of Sado was carried down here in wagons to the court of the Tokugawa Shogun. There’s a magnificent tollway which takes the same route from the coast but something about the Royal Road makes you feel, when you are out upon it, that you are breathing an older air. To the north west, before you come through the tunnel, heading towards Kumakura, on the left stands the Victoria Hotel. It’s long and narrow, four or five storeys high, painted pink, with a balustrade along the front upon which numbers of grey-ish white neoclassic statues stand. Venuses, Putti, Atlases, Apollos, Virgins with Child and so forth. It is a love hotel, hence the colour. Not necessarily for illicit liaisons; many of the places around here (there are some very large houses) are home to three or four or even five generations. Couples, therefore, in order to get away from the crowd, check into the hotel for an hour or two so they can make love in private. Teenagers, too, may escape parental scrutiny here. It’s 8000 yen (about $100.00) for an overnight stay, less for a ‘rest’ of a couple of hours; weekend rates are higher. On the other side of the tunnel, heading east and south on the Royal Road, there’s another hotel, standing eight storeys tall at a fork in the way. This was built by some entrepreneur, probably in the 1990s, in expectation of a boom that never came. Though it was completed, and furnished (there are curtains in all of the windows), no-one ever stayed there nor ever will now. Outside reception, weeds grow the height of a man; there are trees masking the lobby windows; inside, who knows, wild animals may have taken up residence in the rooms. It is as J G Ballard a sight as I have seen; although derelict dwellings are everywhere. They sag back into the earth, festooned with creepers, their rooves collapsed by winter snow, their windows blinded by webs and vines. If you drive on further, past the main drag leading down to the station, with its shops mostly shuttered (because, as in the West, people go to supermarkets now), you will see a neon sign that says Silk Road. It’s a Pachinko Parlour; the day I visited there were a dozen vehicles parked in the car park and the same number of men, under sparkly lights, playing at machines in the enormous room. The game resembles pinball, but only vaguely. You purchase steel balls and insert them in an aperture at the top; they drop down, past various possible ‘cups’, through the playing field until (no win) they exit at the bottom. Any actual win returns to the player more steel balls; which are thus both bet and reward. Gambling is illegal but Pachinko is a grey area; you can exchange your balls for tokens (‘prizes’) which may then be redeemed for cash at a nearby establishment, owned and operated by the parlour where you won them—and so it goes. The Pachinko industry is said to generate more gambling revenue than those in Las Vegas, Singapore and Macau combined, though that seems unlikely; eighty percent of the owners are Korean. I asked the hostess who greeted me if I could photograph that strangely spangled ceiling, that cacophonous interior; but she became anxious and indicated that she would have to go and ask her boss; so I said, no, don’t worry. Outside, on the facade, were aqua camels on a yellow and orange ground; two aqua domes on the roof and, between them, another neon sign; which, because I have not been here at night, I have not seen lit up. We went to pick up Mayu’s new pink suitcase from the Black Cat depot, to which it had been despatched after she ordered it online in Tokyo last Saturday night; and then further into the afternoon. At the onsen the cherry trees, which were bee-loud with blossom last time I was here, were now all leaf green. Yellow daisies flowered amongst carpets of morning glory. Swallows dived and swooped in the grey sky, from which heavy rain fell intermittently, while thunder rumbled in the hills. I had a talk with a man called Hiro, who is a petro-chemical engineer specialising in natural gas production, and who has visited 153 countries. He told me about a lobster he ate, washed down with white wine, in Sydney in 1995. His skinny shanks and his humorous silver-haired wife, who insisted on ringing the bell at the vacant reception desk, remain in mind. The rain is pouring down again in Kumakura, dinner is almost ready. It must be some other kind of silk road I am upon, as seductive and as delusive as the one on I saw on Highway 18 today.

Martin Edmond's most recent book is a ficcione called Isinglass; from UWAP in Perth.
 
 
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