as surprised? Is she as nervous as I am now? Okayama exit. Smoke unravelling from factory stacks. Monkfish hums a tune over and over again. Vehicles rule the highways, not their drivers – trucks change drivers as easily as oil. The visits our mother made to Yakushima were torture. Between the time she dumped us and the day Anju drowned she turned up about once a year. Fukuyama exit. Flame licking the corner of a mist-field. Land cleared of trees in a week, levelled in a month, asphalted in an afternoon – forgotten ever since. Cracked, greened, smothered and uprooted. Lines and wires, sagging and tautening from pole to pole, fingers of speed jamming on a loose-strung guitar. My grandmother refused to see her, so we always stayed at Uncle Pachinko’s in Kamiyaku – the main port – the night before. We always wore our school uniform. Aunt Pachinko took us to the barber’s especially. Everybody knew, of course. She took a taxi from the ferryside, even though Uncle Pachinko’s house is less than ten minutes on foot. She would be shown into the best room, returning our aunt’s small talk with a savage attention to pointless detail. Hiroshima exit. Monkfish turns off the wipers. Hoardings advertise a bank that crashed many months back. Mountains, marching back years to the Sea of Japan coast. Non-coloured suburbs of rerun cities. Uncle Tarmac told me years later – after a six-pack of beer – that Uncle Pachinko made our mother visit, as a condition of the allowance he sent her. He meant well, I guess, but it was wrong to force us together. We answered the questions she asked. Always the same questions, ducking the hazardous topics: What subjects did we like best at school? What subjects did we like least at school? What did we do after school? We spoke in the manner of inspector and inspected. No glimmer of fondness. Tokuyama exit. This is where Subaru Tsukiyama, my great-uncle, spent his final weeks in Japan. He would not recognize Yamaguchi prefecture today. A golf-range hacked out of a hill, shrouded in green netting. Micro-figures swing. I re-remember the mailman virus, and wonder if it is still spreading Kozue Yamaya’s ugly news. It feels nothing to do with me, now. Visible consequences are iceberg tips: most results of most actions are invisible to the doer. A dirty rag of bleached sky – the morning forgets it was raining, as suddenly as a child forgetting a sulk she planned to last years. Anju would have been more chatty with our mother, I think, but she sensed my distrust and she clammed up too. Our mother chain-smoked. Every image I have of her is dim with cigarette smoke. Aunt Pachinko never asked her questions about herself, at least not in front of us, so all we knew was what we overheard behind partitions. Then she took the late afternoon jetfoil back to Kagoshima, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Once, she stayed two days – that must have been when Anju saw our mother tempura her ring – but the extended visit was never repeated. Yamaguchi exit. A tree moves by itself on a windless hillside. The mountains level out. She was away for Anju’s funeral. Gossip, the island blood sport, reported that she flew to Guam for ‘work’ the day before Anju died, without leaving an emergency telephone number. Other stories did the rounds, too, less sympathetic ones. I armoured myself in three-inch thick indifference towards her. The last time we met – and the only time without Anju – I was fourteen. It was in Kagoshima, at Uncle Money’s old place. Her hair was short and her jewellery was garish. She wore dark glasses. I was there under orders. I guess she was, too. ‘You’ve grown, Eiji,’ she said when I shambled into the room and sat down. I was determined to be disagreeable. ‘You haven’t.’ Aunt Money hurriedly said, ‘Eiji’s rocketed up over the last months. And his music teacher says he’s a natural guitar player. Such a pity you didn’t bring your guitar, Eiji. Your mother would have loved to have heard you.’
I spoke to the bridge of her glasses. ‘A mother? I don’t have one of those, Aunt. She died before Anju drowned. I have a father somewhere, but no mother. You know that.’
My mother hid herself with cigarette smoke.
Aunt Money poured tea. ‘Your mother has come a long way to see you, and I think you