because I can smell . . . a herb with a name I can’t remember. She is sunburned shiny orange. Between us is a basket of persimmons. Not watery Tokyo persimmons – these are persimmons from tales. Persimmons worth risking the wrath of enchanters to steal. I drool – I have eaten nothing but crap for a day and a half. ‘I propose a barter,’ says Mrs Persimmon. ‘One persimmon for your dream.’
Embarrassing. ‘Was I mumbling?’
She keeps her eyes on her stitches. ‘I collect dreams.’
So I tell her my dream, leaving out the fact that Anju is my sister. Her knitting needles make the sound of swords clashing on a distant hill. ‘I will not be short-changed, young man. What did you omit?’ So I admit that Anju is my twin sister. Mrs Persimmon considers. ‘When did she leave, this unfortunate?’
‘Leave where?’
‘This side, of course.’
‘This side of . . .’
‘Life.’ No, her knitting needles make the sound of a blind man’s stick.
‘Nine years ago. How did you know?’
‘I shall be eighty-one on Thursday week.’ Her mind is wandering, or mine is plodding. She yawns. Tiny, white teeth. I think of Cat. She unpicks a stitch. ‘Dreams are shores where the ocean of spirit meets the land of matter. Beaches where the yet-to-be, the once-were, the will-never-be may walk amid the still-are. You believe I am an old woman hoary with superstition, and possibly deranged to boot.’ I could not have put it that well. ‘Of course I am deranged. How else could I know what I know?’
I am afraid of offending her, so I ask what she thinks my dream means.
She smiles toothily. She knows I am patronizing her. ‘You are wanted.’
‘Wanted? By . . . ?’
‘I do not give free consultations. Take your persimmon, boy.’
Miyazaki is toytown after Tokyo. At the bus station I go to the tourist information office to ask about the clinic where my mother is staying. Nobody has heard of it, but when I show the address I am told I will need to get on a local bus headed for Kirishima. The next one is not for over an hour, so I go to the station bathroom, clean my teeth, and sit down in the waiting room drinking a can of sweet cold coffee, watching the buses and passengers come and go. Miyazaki people amble. The clouds are in no hurry and a fountain makes rainbows under palm trees. A retired dog with cloudy eyes comes to sniff hello. A very pregnant mother tries to control a clutch of floppy, spring-heeled children. I remember my persimmon – my grandmother says pregnant women must never eat persimmons – and peel it with my penknife. I get sticky fingers, but the fruit is pearly and perfect. I spit out shiny stones. One of the boys has just learned to whistle but he can only do one tune. The mother watches the kids leap along the plastic seats. I wonder where their father is. Only when they start playing with a fire extinguisher does she say anything: ‘If you touch that, the bus men will be angry!’ I go for a walk. In a gift shop still with its unsold 1950s stock I find a bowl of faded plastic fruit with smiley faces. I buy it for Buntaro to get him back for my Zizzi key-holder. At a Lawsons I buy a tube of champagne bombs and read magazines until the bus arrives. I should be nervous, I guess, but I lack the energy. I don’t know what day it is, even.
I expect a smartish institution with carparks and wheelchair ramps on the outskirts of town – instead, the bus follows a lane deep into the countryside. Over a thousand yen later a farmer on the bus points me down a country road and tells me to walk until the road becomes a track and the track runs out. ‘Can’t miss it,’ he insists, which usually spells disaster. A hillside of pines sheers up on one side; on the other, early rice is being harvested and hung out to dry. I find a big, flat, round stone on the track. Crickets trill and ratchet in Morse. I put the stone in my backpack. The cosmos is flowering mauve, magenta and white. All this space. All this air. I walk, and walk. I begin to worry – after twenty minutes I can see the end of the lane, but there is still no clinic in sight. Comic-horror scarecrows