The noodle shop was crowded. As always, most of the customers were men. Businessmen, young and old, students. There were just a few women, sitting in pairs or alone, facing the wall. Through the window I could almost smell the food, the chopped spring onions, the small pieces of meat, the barley tea. I pushed the door open and entered with Lily close behind. The toe of her shoe clipped my heel twice as we walked. I wished she would step out beside me but I knew she liked to hide. She’d done the same thing when we were apartment-hunting, pushing me into the firing line and cowering in my shadow. I searched for Teiji’s face but could not see him. His uncle nodded at me from behind the counter. It wasn’t a look of open hostility but I knew he was suspicious. He always looked straight into my eyes for a couple of seconds then averted his stare to some stain on the floor, or the back of a chair. I thought it was a sad look, but I didn’t know why he should be sad. I wondered what he had thought of Sachi, the strange actress.
I said konnichiwa in a cheery voice and led Lily past him to the only empty table. Once we were seated I realized that I had my back to the kitchen. This was no good because I would not be able to look out for Teiji, to thrill at a glimpse of his muscles as he wiped a surface or opened a cupboard before seeing me and coming to join us. I was about to ask Lily to change places but before my mouth was open I sensed Teiji’s presence close behind me. It was a kind of warmth, a pull, and I leaned back in my chair to let my head touch his chest, like a magnet snapping onto another. Lily looked up, beyond my head and back at me. I couldn’t tell what she thought of him, though she seemed a little shy. She waited for me to speak. Lily was the first friend I’d introduced to Teiji. It gave me an odd feeling of sharing a deeply personal secret. I confess, I wanted her to like him.
“This is Teiji,” I said, still not looking.
“’Ello.”
Teiji greeted her, brushed my hair with his fingertips. He went back into the kitchen, promising to join us in a moment.
“He’s very cute,” Lily whispered with an encouraging nod. Cute. It was close to insulting but she intended it as a compliment so I forgave her. I wanted Lily to like Teiji but I had not expected her to understand him. Teiji’s world was too distant from hers.
He appeared again with two hot bowls of noodles and placed them on the table. His camera was around his neck, hanging by its old leather strap. I was sure it hadn’t been there when he stood behind me. I plucked disposable chopsticks from the pot on the table but Teiji put his hand around mine and steered it back. He disappeared, then came back with lacquer chopsticks that, I guessed, he and his uncle used. Teiji once told me that they ate together most evenings. Sometimes it was midnight before they were both free to sit at the table, but still one would wait for the other, however hungry he felt. Teiji’s uncle liked to talk about things he’d noticed during the day, a bird on the windowsill, a customer’s gold tooth. Teiji would listen and eat.
“Wow. We’re getting the posh treatment.” Lily picked up the chopsticks and peered at them as if they were made of ivory. I am still finding it difficult to remember Teiji’s words and so I will recount what I believe he may, or must have said that day.
“Enjoy your noodles. I’ll come and talk to you when I can, but I have to serve these customers first.”
Lily poked the noodles around the bowl. She knew how to hold her chopsticks but not how to grip slippery food. I was glad because her concentration rendered her silent for at least twenty minutes and so I was allowed to let my thoughts wander while I slurped from my own bowl. I turned every now and then to see what Teiji was doing. He moved around the shop clearing tables, wiping them. Although he performed each task efficiently, his thoughts were clearly elsewhere. His eyes were full of something that was not tables nor damp cloths. I hoped it was me but it was hard to tell. I finished my noodles and watched Lily as she fought her way toward the bottom of her bowl. We were startled by a flash and both turned at the same time. Of course, I should have known by then. I should have known exactly what it was and not even blinked.
Teiji had captured us in his lens. Snap. He smiled, turned and went back to clearing tables. He had taken a photograph of Lily and me together. He gave it to me a couple of weeks later. He’d wrapped it in a piece of carefully folded newspaper. I kept that too. I read both sides of it again and again to decipher some message of love. On one side was an article about the recent rise in domestic abuse, on the other were that day’s foreign exchange rates. I could make a link, if I tried, but I knew none was intended. Still, it had been folded by Teiji’s dextrous hands, for me. I was glad that he hadn’t made a copy of the photograph for Lily. That meant that it was intended as a picture of me with Lily as an extra, not a picture of the two of us as equals. I was ashamed of my delight in such a childish triumph, but not enough to make me change that feeling. Nor was my shame sufficient to lead me to the photography shop and have it copied for Lily, though I knew even then that she would have liked it. I still have that picture, in a box where I put things that I don’t want to keep but cannot throw away.
It seems to Lucy now that the photograph marks the start of the trouble. I could look at the picture and think, this is the moment where it went wrong, the point at which it was already too late. Before the shutter clicked. After the shutter clicked. A split second in between when a seismic shift occurred that could not be felt on the earth’s crust. It would eventually result in an earthquake so huge that it couldn’t be measured on either the Richter scale or the Japanese earthquake scale. In fact the photograph shows nothing but Lily and Lucy sitting at a table; it was the taking of the photograph, not the image it stole, that started the rumbling. And I don’t have a photograph of the photograph being taken. Yet the picture shows what was happening in the moment it was taken and so it has become a representation of itself. I should have understood this at the time.
But I didn’t. My head was full of Sachi.
Other customers came and left, staying just long enough to have their noodles and pay for them. It was a functional place, after all. But Lily wanted to talk and we chatted through the afternoon, mostly about her apartment. She was delighted with her new home and gave me all the credit, as if I’d built it for her with my own hands. She told me of all the little things she’d bought—a mosquito-killing machine, a rice cooker. I listened but I was not enjoying myself in this uncomfortable clashing of my life’s zones. I wanted to get Lily out of the shop, but Teiji was there. I couldn’t leave him. My fingertips twitched, as they do when I’m annoyed, and I kept them pressed hard against the table leg.
At about five o’clock Teiji finished work and suggested we go for a beer together. I willed Lily to refuse, but knew she wouldn’t. Since meeting Lucy she seemed to have no need for other friends.
“I think Lily wants to get back home.”
“No, no. I’d love to go for a drink. Is there a bar near here?”
Teiji nodded. I was irritated but the only way out would be for me to go home alone. I wanted to be with Teiji so I couldn’t leave. Teiji seemed happy for Lily to join us. I wondered if he was afraid of being alone with me, scared that I would start to ask about Sachi again.
We walked out into daylight and Teiji led us to an izakaya, a large bar with long low tables and tatami floors. We slipped off our shoes and stepped up into the dark room. Several waiters shouted their welcomes to us and one led us to a corner table. Teiji and I sat at one side, Lily at the other. We ordered large bottles of beer and a bowl of salty green soy beans. When the food and drink arrived, Lily’s eyes were shining.
“Have you been out much in Tokyo, Lily?” I asked, knowing that she hadn’t.
“Not really. I’m working in the bar almost every afternoon and evening. I don’t like to go out with colleagues all the time either so . . . Now I’m living by myself, though, it’s a bit lonely sometimes. Not that I don’t like my apartment or anything, I love it.” She smiled gratefully at me. “The other people I meet are all teachers, you know. You’ve met some of them, of course. Bob’s nice. I don’t think we’ve got much in common, though. I mean, you’re a translator, I know, but you’re different. Maybe it’s because we come from the same place.”
I explained to Teiji, through a tense jaw, that Lily and I were from the same part of the same county. This seemed to interest him, though he was fast becoming drunk and unfocused, as was Lily. It takes more than a couple of glasses of beer to affect Lucy and so I drank heartily to catch up with them. Teiji said to Lily, “You don’t seem like other foreigners in Japan.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. I think you weren’t so ready to come here. Perhaps you were happier at home.”
“I wasn’t happy at home, but it’s true, I’m different from the other Westerners I meet. They’re brainier.”
Neither of us refuted the observation, but Teiji stared at her thoughtfully.
“You were a nurse in Britain? That takes skills not many people have.”
“Perhaps.”
“You must be very patient, and very practical.”
“I do try. I don’t always get it right of course. I miss the hospital though, lots.”
“But working in a bar. That’s not so bad, is it? I think it’s a good kind of work. The noodle shop gives me all the time I need for thinking because my body just gets on with the job by itself.”
“I’m so bad at bar work. I have to concentrate all the time, otherwise I’d be even worse.”
They talked more, but I have no idea where the conversation went next. I was surprised by Teiji. He’d never told me about his love for mopping floors and washing up. We didn’t discuss such mundane notions. We talked about typhoons, volcanoes, about the light on a winter morning. Mostly, I think, we didn’t talk. And that was my favorite thing. Not talking. Not feeling the need to fill up beautiful and valuable silences with unnecessary noise.
Lily was a chatterbox. I’d wanted her to make me ordinary in front of Teiji—talking about everyday things—so he’d forget my act of treachery. Instead, in taking on Teiji in conversation, she was making him into something ordinary. I didn’t like it—for me Teiji was made of magic—so I didn’t listen. I settled into thinking about Lily in her white uniform, tending to patients in a hospital ward. She would have seen deadly illnesses, bloody injuries, grief. From nowhere the seven brothers marched into my mind with their fishing nets, and then Noah’s final trip to the hospital with his blood-matted curls, though he was almost dead. The doctors and nurses rushed and fought to save his life. They fought with all their might, but they lost. And somewhere from the battlefield a nurse was coming to take Lucy away, a beautiful nurse with crinkly eyes.
“Did you ever have to deal with dead children?” The question slipped out.
Teiji stared at me. He looked as if something had stuck in his throat. Lily was unfazed.
“Yes. Dead everything, really. It’s my job. That doesn’t make it easy when a kid dies, but—” She sipped her beer and frowned.
“But?”
“I can’t remember what I was going to say. This beer’s gone right to my head. I’m pissed.”
“Me too.”
If Teiji was alarmed by my question, he soon recovered. He was now laughing. His face was pink from the alcohol. He looked as if he’d been tickled. I had never seen him even slightly tipsy before and I felt confused. He was relaxed and his smile was sweet but it was different from the smile I knew. I touched his cheek with the backs of my fingers. His skin was burning. He took my wrist to keep my hand in place.
“You’re very hot, Teiji.”
“Yes. I have too much to drink and then I boil up. I need air to cool me down again. Let’s go somewhere else for the next drink. I’d like to sit in the park.”
“Is there a park near here?” Lily practically squealed.
“Not especially near,” Teiji replied, “but it’s nice outside. We can walk.”
Night had fallen while we were in the bar. In Yoyogi Park we sat on plastic bags from a convenience store and stacked cans of beer around us. We opened packets of small rice crackers with tiny dried fish and spread them on the grass. The lights from the city twinkled through the high trees. Lily watched and began to sing.
“Sometimes I walk away, when all I really wanna do—”
“You’ve got a nice voice.” My compliment was genuine. Her singing voice was rich and pure, without a trace of the whine she used when she spoke.
“Thanks—is love and hold you right. There is just one thing I can say . . .”
“This is a perfect summer evening.” I lay back on the grass and let the insects feed on my blood.
“It’s all right. Can’t you see—the downtown lights.”
“Downtown lights,” Teiji murmured. “In every city in the world. I’d like to see London’s downtown lights.”
Lily piped up, “So would I. I’ve only been to London twice and both times I was there in the daytime. But I’ve never seen city lights like Tokyo’s before. So big and so bright. All those big words everywhere, flashing on and off. What I like best is when city lights are shining on water, you know, when it’s raining, or if there’s a river in the city. I love that.”
Teiji put his arm round me and with his other hand reached for a beer and snapped it open, handed it to me, kissed the side of my neck. I thought of Sachi’s neck, long and soft.
“Singing is good,” Teiji announced. “It’s like breathing from a deep place, not your lungs but your spirit. I don’t know any English songs, though, except the Beatles and I haven’t learned the words to those.”
I’d never heard him sing before, nor say that he wanted to. But then, I’d never heard his speech slur with drunkenness before, either.
“Teach me a Japanese song.” Lily was standing now, swaying a little as she sipped from her can. “I want to learn a Japanese song.”
Teiji closed his eyes and I thought he was drifting off into his own world. After a few seconds he opened them, smiled at Lily.
“All right. I’ll teach you an easy one. Everyone in Japan knows this song.”
And, slowly, the three of us sang “Ue o Muite Arukou” together. Lily couldn’t grasp the words but sang loudly with meaningless approximations and didn’t listen when I tried to translate the meaning for her.
Ue o muite
Arukou . . .
“Walk with your face upward,” I chipped in.
Namida ga koborenai you ni . . .
“So as not to let the tears fall . . .”
Omoidasu, haru no hi . . .
Hitori botchi no yoru.
“When, on a lonely evening, you are reminded of a spring day.” I repeated the last line in my head. “Or is it the other way round? It’s difficult to translate.”
Lily didn’t mind what the lyrics were, but she sang several times.
“I’m really too drunk.” Teiji opened another can of beer and started the next verse of the song.
“Let’s walk around. The night is beautiful.” Lily spun on her heels and giggled.
We collected our things and began to walk. As we stood I noticed that Teiji had left his camera on the ground. He never forgot his camera. I picked it up and slung it round my neck. I would produce it when he noticed it was missing. Lily started to sing again and Teiji tried to correct her mistakes.
Behind them, I slipped the lens cap off the camera, raised the camera to my eye and, though it was harder to focus my own eyes than it was to focus the lens, I managed to catch them both in the square of the viewfinder. The flash was bright but they continued walking and singing as if they’d noticed nothing. I put the camera away and chased after Teiji. Suddenly it seemed vital that I return it to him.
Now I have changed my mind and I see that it was probably this photograph in Yoyogi Park, rather than the one in the noodle shop, that was my downfall. Or else Lucy is too superstitious, looking for clues in everything when in fact there are none in anything.
In the early hours of the morning we were walking the streets, following a road uphill toward Teiji’s apartment. Lily kept falling to the ground and saying she would sleep on the pavement and we were not to worry. Each time, we picked her up between us and hauled her a few steps farther. Lily was not heavy but alcohol had depleted Teiji’s usual strength and coordination. He kept walking into me and I found I was doing most of the work. Teiji spotted a small trolley at the side of the road, the kind used for moving boxes around a warehouse or unloading goods from a van. He motioned for me to follow him. We lifted Lily onto it and pushed her farther up the road. Her head rolled backward and her red tuft of hair hung over the side of the platform. Her legs and arms seemed to fall in every direction. She looked like a crushed spider. The sky was the prickly darkness of early morning just before dawn.
Five minutes later Lily was walking again and I was lying on the trolley. By the time we reached the top of the street, the sky was lighter and now I was pushing the trolley with Teiji and Lily squashed on it together. I stopped to rest and enjoy the view. Ahead of me, between the buildings on the almost empty road, the sun hung in the sky, a huge pink ball, swelling and glowing before my eyes. I pushed the trolley to an alley that ran between two shops, wedged it against a wall so it couldn’t slide around, and collapsed on top of Lily and Teiji. My head was full of the noise of our voices singing in the park, and the dawn chorus.
How could I have known, in the midst of that cacophony, the size of the silence that would soon fall upon Tokyo, upon Lily, Teiji, and Lucy?