your great-uncle learning how to play the piano as well as my united brain, nerves and muscles will allow wouldn’t have seemed very worthwhile.’ Cat walks in at this point. ‘Maybe the meaning of life lies in the act of looking for it.’ Cat laps water in the thirsty moonlight.
‘So much space!’ Buntaro yells into a telephone on a windy morning. ‘What do you do with all this space? Why did I never come here years ago? The plane took less time than my dentist. Do you know when I last took a holiday outside Tokyo?’
‘Nope.’ I stifle a yawn.
‘Me neither, lad. I arrived in Tokyo when I was twenty-two. My company made transformers, and they sent me up for training. I get off the train at Tokyo station, and twenty minutes later I find the exit. Would I ever hate to spend my life living in this hell-hole! I think. Twenty years on, look at what I did. Beware of holidays in paradise, lad. You think too much about what you never did.’
‘Does everyone in paradise get up so early?’
‘The wife was up before me. Strolling on the beach, under the palm trees. Why is the ocean so . . . y’know . . . blue? You can hear the waves crash from our balcony. My wife found a starfish washed up. A real, live starfish.’
‘That’s the sea for you. Is there, uh, anything specific you wanted to talk to me about?’
‘Oh, yeah. I thought I’d run through your problems.’
‘Which ones, uh, did you have in mind?’
‘Your problems with the shop.’
‘Shooting Star? There are no problems.
‘None?’
‘Not one.’
‘Oh.’
‘Get back to paradise, Buntaro.’
I try to get back to sleep – I was talking with Ai until after three a. m. – but my mind is moving up its gears. Fujifilm says 07:45. Cat laps water and leaves for work. The morning plugs itself in. I doodle blues chords for some time, smoke my last three Lucky Strikes, eat yoghurt – after spooning out a mould colony – and listen to Milk and Honey. A kite of sunlight settles on Anju.
For two days she was classed as missing, but nobody was cruel enough to tell me not to give up hope. True, tourists go missing on Yakushima all the time, and often turn up – or get rescued – a day or two later. But locals are never so stupid, not even local eleven-year-olds – we all knew knew Anju had drowned. No goodbye, just gone. My grandmother had aged ten years by the following morning, and looked at me as if she scarcely knew me. There was no big scene when I left that day. I remember her at the kitchen table, telling me that if I hadn’t gone to Kagoshima, her granddaughter would still be alive. Which I thought – and think – is only too true. Being surrounded by Anju’s clothes and toys and books was unbearable, so I walked to Uncle Orange’s farmhouse and my aunt cleared a corner for me to sleep in. Officer Kuma called round the evening after to tell me that the search for Anju’s body had been called off. My Orange cousins are all older girls, and they decided I needed nursing through my grief – they kept saying it was okay to cry, that they understood how I felt, that Anju dying wasn’t my fault, that I had always been a good brother. Sympathy was also unbearable. I had swapped my sister for one never to be repeated goal. So I ran away. Running away on Yakushima is simple – you leave before the old women stir and the fog goes home seawards, tread quietly through the weatherboarded alleyways, cross the coast road, skirt the tea-fields and orange orchards, set a farm dog barking, enter the forest and start climbing.
After the head of the thunder god vanishes into the ocean, I skirt the ridge above my grandmother’s house. No light is on. An autumn morning, when rain is always ten minutes away. I climb. Waterfalls without names, waxy leaves, berries in jade pools. I climb. Boughs sag, ferns fan, roots trip. I climb. I eat peanuts and oranges, to make sure I can disappear high and deep enough. Leech on my leg, creeping silence, day clots into grey afternoon, no sense of time. I climb. A graveyard of trees, a womb of trees, a war of trees. Sweat cools. I climb. Way up here, everything is covered in moss. Moss vivid as