The Gift of Rain

by Tan Twan Eng

Genres: Historical Fiction; World War II; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Penang, 1939. Sixteen-year-old Philip Hutton is a loner. Half English, half Chinese and feeling neither, he discovers a sense of belonging in an unexpected friendship with Hayato Endo, a Japanese diplomat. But when the Japanese invade Malaya, threatening to destroy Philip's family and everything he loves, he realises that his trusted friend has been harbouring a devastating secret.

Release date: May 5, 2009

Publisher: Hachette Books

Print pages: 336

Sample

For my parents, En vir Regter AJ Buys wat my geleer het hoe om te lewe.





“I am fading away. Slowly but surely. Like the sailor who watches his home shore gradually disappear, I watch my past recede. My old life still burns within me, but more and more of it is reduced to the ashes of memory.”

The Diving Bell & the Butterfly, Jean-Dominique Bauby

BOOK ONE

Chapter One

I was born with the gift of rain, an ancient soothsayer in an even more ancient temple once told me.

This was back in a time when I did not believe in fortunetellers, when the world was not yet filled with wonder and mystery. I cannot recall her appearance now, the woman who read my face and touched the lines on my palms. She said what she was put into this world to say, to those for whom her prophecies were meant, and then, like every one of us, she left.

I know her words had truth in them, for it always seemed to be raining in my youth. There were days of cloudless skies and unforgiving heat, but the one impression that remains now is of rain, falling from a bank of low-floating clouds, smearing the landscape into a Chinese brush painting. Sometimes it rained so often I wondered why the colors around me never faded, were never washed away, leaving the world in moldy hues.

The day I met Michiko Murakami, too, a tender rain had dampened the world. It had been falling for the past week and I knew more would come with the monsoon. Already the usual roads in Penang had begun to flood, the sea turning to a sullen gray.

On this one evening the rain had momentarily lessened to an almost undetectable mist, as though preparing for her arrival. The light was fading and the scent of wet grass wove through the air like threads entwining with the perfume of the flowers, creating an intricate tapestry of fragrance. I was out on the terrace, alone as I had been for many years, on the edge of sleep, dreaming of another life. The door chimes echoed through the house, hesitant, unfamiliar in a place they seldom entered, like a cat placing a tentative paw on a path it does not habitually walk.

I woke up; far away in time I seemed to hear another chiming, and I lay in my chair, confused. For a few moments a deep sense of loss immobilized me. Then I sat up and my glasses, which had been resting on my chest, fell to the tiles. I picked them up slowly, wiped them clean with my shirt, and found the letter which I had been reading lying under the chair. It was an invitation from the Penang Historical Society to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War. I had never attended any of the society’s events but the invitations still came regularly. I folded it and got up to answer the door.

She was a patient woman, or she was very certain that I would be at home. She rang only once. I made my way through the darkened hallways and opened the heavy oak doors. I guessed her to be in her seventies, not much older than I was. She was still beautiful, her clothes simple in the way only the very expensive can be, her hair fine and soft, pulled back into a knot. She had a single small valise, and a long narrow wooden box leaned against her leg.

“Yes?” I asked.

She told me her name, with an expectation that seemed to suggest that I had been waiting for her. Yet it still took me a few seconds to find a mention of her in the vastness of my memory.

I had heard her spoken of only once before, by a wistful voice in a distant time. I tried to think of a reason to turn her away but could find none that was acceptable, for I felt that this woman had, ever since that moment, been set upon a path that would lead her to the door of my home. I took the gloved hand she offered. With its scarce flesh and thin prominent bones it felt like a bird, a sparrow with its wings wrapped around itself.

I nodded, smiled sadly, and led her through the house, pausing to put the lights on as we passed each room. The clouds had brought the night in early and the servants had already gone home. The marble floors were cold, absorbing the chill of the air but not the echo of our footsteps.

We went out to the terrace and into the garden. We passed a collection of marble statues, a few with broken limbs lying on the grass, mold eating away their luminosity like an incurable skin disease. She followed me silently, and we stopped under the casuarina tree that grew on the edge of the small cliff overlooking the sea. The tree, as old as I, gnarled and tired, gave us a small measure of shelter as the wind shook flecks of water from the leaves into our faces.

“He lies across there,” I said, pointing to the island. Though less than a mile from the shore, it appeared like a gray smudge on the sea, almost invisible through the light veil of rain. The obligation to a guest, however unsettling her presence, compelled me to ask, “You’ll stay for dinner?”

She nodded. Then, in a swift movement that belied her age, she knelt on the wet earth and brought her head to rest on the grass. I left her there, bowing to the grave of her friend. For the moment we both knew silence was sufficient. The things to be said would come later.

It felt strange to cook for two, and I had to remind myself to double the quantities of ingredients. As always—whenever I cook— I left a wake of opened spice bottles, half-cut vegetables, ladles, spoons, and various plates dripping with sauces and oil. Maria, my maid, often complains about the mess I leave. She also nags me to replace the kitchen implements, most of which are of prewar British manufacture and still going strong, if rather noisily and with great cantankerousness, like the old English mining engineers and planters who sit daily in the bar of the Penang Swimming Club, sleeping off their lunches.

I looked out to the garden through the large kitchen windows. She was standing now beneath the tree, her body unmoving as the wind shook the branches and scattered a shower of glittering drops onto her. Her back had retained its straightness and her shoulders were level, without the disconsolate droop of age. Her skin’s suppleness fought against the lines on her face, giving her the look of a determined woman.

She was in the living room when I came through from the kitchen. The room, to which I have never made any changes, was wood-paneled, the plaster ceiling and cornices high and dark. Black marble statues of mythological Roman heroes held torches that only dimly lit up the corners of the room. The chairs were of heavy Burmese teak and covered in cracked leather, their shapes deformed by the generations that had sat on them. My great-grandfather had had them made in Mandalay when he built Istana. A Schumann baby grand piano stood in a corner. I always kept it in perfect tune, although it had not been played for many years.

She was examining a wall of photographs, perhaps hoping to find his face among them. She would be disappointed. I had never had a photograph of Endo-san; among all the photographs we took, there was never one of him, or of us together. His face was painted in my memory.

She pointed to one now. “Aikikai Hombu Dojo?”

My eyes followed her finger. “Yes,” I said.

It was a photograph of me, taken at the World Aikido Headquarters, in the Shinjukku district of Tokyo, with Morihei Ueshiba, the founder of aikido. I was dressed in a white cotton gi— a training uniform—and hakama, the traditional black trousers worn by the Japanese, staring intently at the camera’s eye, my hair still dark. Next to my five foot eleven inches, O’ Sensei, the Great Teacher, as he was called, looked tiny, childlike, and deceptively vulnerable.

“You still teach?”

I shook my head. “Not anymore,” I replied in Japanese.

She named some of the people she knew, all high-ranking masters. I nodded in recognition at each name and for a while we talked of them. Some had died; some, like me, had retired. Yet others, though in their late eighties, continued to train faithfully as they had for almost all of their lives.

She pointed to another photograph. “That must be your father,” she said. “You have his face.”

The monochrome photograph of my family had been taken by our driver just before the war. We were all standing in front of the portico and the light of the sun and the sea made my father’s blue eyes paler, his teeth brighter. His carefully combed white hair seemed like part of the glare of the cloudless sky.

“He was very good-looking,” she said.

We were standing around him: Edward, William, and Isabel from his first marriage, and I from his last, each of us carrying his face in one feature or another. There was a timeless quality to our smiles, as though we would always be together, laughing, loving life. I remember the day still, from across the distance of the fleeting years. It was one of the rare moments when I had felt I was part of my family.

“Your sister?” she asked, moving to another photograph. I nodded and looked at Isabel on the balcony outside her room, her rifle in her hand, cheeks sucked in with determination as the lights from below seemed to lift her up. I could almost feel the soft wind that ruffled her skirts.

“Taken at the last party we ever had,” I said. “Before the war wrecked everything.”

The rain had stopped, and I suggested to Michiko that we have our meal out on the terrace. She insisted on helping me lay the table, and I rolled back the canopy to open the sky to us. We sat beneath a patch of stars, flickering seeds in a furrow in the clouds.

She had a hearty appetite, despite the simplicity of the meal I had made. She was also entertaining; it was almost as though we had known each other all our lives. She took a sip of the tea I had served, looked surprised, and lifted the cup to her nose. I watched her carefully, wondering if she would pass my test.

“Fragrance of the Lonely Tree,” she said, correctly identifying the brew which I had specially imported from Japan. “Harvested from tea plantations near my home. One could not obtain it after the war as the terraced fields had been destroyed.”

At the end of the meal she held up her wineglass and made a graceful gesture to the island. “To Endo-san,” she said softly.

I nodded. “To Endo-san.”

“Listen,” she said. “Do you hear him?”

I closed my eyes and, yes, I heard him. I heard him breathe. I smiled wanly. “He’s always here, Michiko. That’s why, wherever I go, I always yearn to return.”

She took my hand in hers and again I felt its birdlike fragility. When she spoke her voice was full of sorrow. “My poor friend. How you have suffered.”

I pulled my hand away carefully. “We have all suffered, Michiko. Endo-san most of all.”

We sat without speaking. The sea sighed each time a wave collapsed on the shore like a long-distance runner at the finishing line. I have always felt a greater affinity with the sea at night. It is magnificent during the day, the waves strong and loud, slamming onto the beach, propelled by the force of the entire ocean behind it. But when night comes that force is spent, and the waves roll to the shore with the detachment of a monk unfurling a scroll.

Then, softly, she began to tell me about her life. She spoke in a rapid, natural mixture of Japanese and English, the two interlacing like colored threads, spinning her tale.

“I am a widow new to my white robes. My husband, Murakami Ozawa, departed earlier this year.”

“My condolences,” I said, unsure where she was leading me.

“I had been married to Ozawa for fifty-five years. He owned an electronics company, a well-known one. His death made my world, my whole life, suddenly senseless. I was set adrift, and I closed myself up in my home in Tokyo, shutting out the world. I spent my days in the spacious gardens, walking barefoot across the pebble fields, spoiling the neat circles created by Seki, our gardener. He never complained, but only created the patterns again, day after day,” she said, a lost look in her eyes.

She could find no strength to pull herself out of her grief, she told me. Outside, the company’s board was frantic, for she had been bequeathed the controlling shares by her husband. She shut them all out and took no calls. The servants stirred the silences of her home with fearful whispers.

But the world intruded. “I received a letter from Endo-san,” she said, and her movement of looking away from me, as though she had been distracted by the glimmer of dew in the grass, was so unforced that anyone else would have thought it natural.

I was grateful for her kindness, although I managed to absorb her news with greater equanimity than she had given me credit for. “When did he send it?” I asked.

“Over fifty years ago, in the spring of 1945,” she said, giving me a smile. “It came out of the past like a ghost. Can you imagine its journey? He had written about his life here, and he had written about you.”

I let her fill our glasses. I had visited Japan often enough to know she would feel insulted if I had poured.

“I will tell you how we met,” she said after a while, as though she had been mulling over the decision for some time.

“Endo-san worked for his father, who owned a successful trading business. In fact, he was already running the business, traveling around China and to Hong Kong. He spent his evenings teaching in the aikijutsu school in our village. As the daughter of a samurai I was expected to be proficient with the sword, and in unarmed combat—bujutsu—above all other arts. Unlike my sisters I enjoyed bujutsu more than my music and flower-arranging lessons.

“At that time aikijutsu was just a fledgling art; it had not evolved into the aikido of today. My father was not impressed with it, but when I saw the class, and the movements, I knew I had found something precious. I think you know what I felt: it was as though my heart, long held in darkness, had turned to catch a glimpse of the warmth and light of the sun.”

She laughed softly. “I soon began to treasure the time I spent with Endo-san. My school friends teased me terribly about my feelings for him. But still I dreamed and dreamed, and wrapped myself in clouds of make-believe.

“As the eldest son he was expected to take over the company from his father one day. He was very often away from the country. On his return he brought me gifts, from China, Siam, the islands of the Philippines, and once even a woven headscarf from the mountains of northern India.

“We began to see each other regularly. We would walk along the beach, gazing out to the Miyajima Torii Shrine, and I often met him for tea in the pavilion in the park, feeding the ducks and the obedient lines of ducklings in the lake. I think those were the happiest days I can remember.

“My initial infatuation matured into something deeper and more permanent. My father, who was a magistrate, did not approve of our friendship. Endo-san was of course very much older than me, and his family, although originally of the samurai class, had been relegated to the status of merchants, a very low position on our social order, as you may know. His father had decided to turn the family’s various farms and properties into commercial concerns. They were wealthy, but not acceptable to the aristocracy.”

I leaned forward, not wishing to miss anything. Endo-san had given me only a cursory description of his childhood and he had never fully revealed his background. During the years when I lived in Japan I had tried to conduct my own inquiries, but without much success, as the documentary records had all been destroyed. But now, hearing it from her, from one who had been there, my curiosity was stirred once again.

She saw my interest and continued.

“The fact that Endo-san’s father was a disgraced court official was very much talked about in our village. But that did not bother me at all. In fact, my feelings for him were strengthened and I often said very rude things to his family’s detractors.

“My father felt that I was spending too much time with Endo-san, and I was forbidden to see him.” She shook her head. “What obedient children we were. There was no question of ignoring my father’s commands. I cried every night, for it was a terrible time for me.

“It was also a terrible time for Japan. To survive, we had become a military nation; you are a scholar of Japan, so you know what it was like. Oh, the endless chanting and shouting of war slogans, the violent clashes between the militarists and the pacifists in the streets, the frightening marches and demonstrations—I hated all of them. Even in my deepest dreams I heard them.

“Endo-san’s father disagreed with the military and made his opinions widely known. This was seen as acting against the emperor, a crime of treason. His father was sent to prison and the family was ostracized. Endo-san’s views reflected his father’s, although he was more subtle in expressing them. Still, there were attempts on Endo-san’s life, but he remained obdurate. This, I think, was due in part to his sensei.”

I nodded. Endo-san had studied under O’ Sensei Ueshiba, a well-known pacifist who was, paradoxically, one of the greatest Japanese martial artists of all time. I recalled the first time I met O’ Sensei. The man was then in his late sixties, suffering from illness, just a few months from death; yet he had thrown me around the training mats until I could not breathe, my head dizzy from the falls, my joints sore where he had locked me.

I told Michiko this and she laughed. “I too was thrown around like a rag doll by him.”

She stood up and walked out into the night, then turned back to me and said, “One day, a few months later and after Endo-san had been away for some weeks, I met him again. I was on my way home from the market, and he came up behind me and told me to meet him on the beach, where we had sat so often. I went home, pretended to my mother that I had left something at the market, and then ran all the way to the beach.

“I saw him first. He was facing the sea. The sun looked as if it had leaked its color into the sea, into his face and eyes. When I reached him, he told me he was leaving Japan for a few years.

“‘Where will you go?’ I asked him.”

“‘I do not know yet. I wish to see the world, and find my answers,’ he replied.”

“‘Answers to what?’ I asked.”

“He shook his head. Then he told me he had been having strange dreams, dreams of different lives, different countries. He refused to tell me more.

“I told him I would wait for him, but he said no, that I should live the life that had already been written for me. To attempt to do otherwise would be foolish. We were not meant to be together. My future was not with him.

“I was so angry with him, talking like that. I told him he was baka—an idiot. And you know, he only smiled and said that it was true.

“That was the last time I saw him. Later I heard that he had been sent by the government to some place in Asia, some country I had never even heard of—Malaya. It was very puzzling, I thought then, that a man so opposed to Japan’s aggressive military policies should have accepted service with the government.

“But as I have said, I never saw him again, even when he came back for a short visit. I could not, however much I longed to. My father had arranged a marriage for me, and I was being taught how to take care of my future husband and run his house. Ozawa, like Endo-san, was involved in his family’s company, which was then making electronic equipment for the war.”

She paused, and in her face made translucent by memory I saw the girl she had once been and I felt a faint sadness for Endo-san, for what he had thrown aside.

“I have never stopped thinking of him,” she said.

I pushed back my chair, feeling tired by the conversation, disturbed by the emotions her arrival had awoken within me.

“May I stay here for the night?” she asked.

I was disinclined to allow another person to unsettle the structure of my life, which had been laid out carefully over the years. I had always appreciated my own company and the few people who had tried to breach my barrier had always been hurt in the process. I looked out to the sea; there was no guidance from Endo-san but that had never stopped me from asking him. It was late and the taxi services in Penang were notoriously bad. Finally I nodded.

She was aware of my reluctance. “I apologize for causing you inconvenience,” she said.

I waved her apologies away and stood up, wincing at my stiff joints, hearing the expected pops and cracks in them—the symptoms of age and the lack of training. Old injuries sent their repetitive messages of wear and pain, urging me to surrender, which I always refused to do.

I started to clear away the remains of our meal, stacking the plates into little piles.

“You have no picture of him?” she asked as she helped me carry the plates to the kitchen.

I saw the faintest expression of hope in her eyes, like a weak flaring star, and I shook my head. “No. We never took any,” I replied, watching the flare sink into the ocean.

She nodded. “Neither did I. Our village did not have cameras at the time he left Japan. It is so ironic, really—my husband’s company now produces some of the most popular cameras in the world.”

I led her up the stairs to one of the more serviceable guestrooms. It had been Isabel’s room. After the war I had had the bedrooms redecorated, in an attempt to start anew, and sometimes I wondered if I should have bothered. I only see the rooms as they were, hear them as they used to sound, and smell them as if it were still fifty years ago. Someone once asked me if Istana was haunted and I had replied, why yes, of course, naturally so. It is no wonder that I seldom have visitors.

On the landing halfway up the stairs, she stopped, her eyes drawn to the wall where a hole had been gouged out.

“Isabel, my sister. She shot at someone here,” I explained. I had never had the scar in the wall covered up.

At the entrance to the room I gave a bow to Michiko and she returned a deeper one. I left her and walked slowly through the house, locking the doors, closing the windows, putting out the lights one by one. Then I made my way to the balcony outside my room. It was the same room I had always had from the moment I was born. I felt a sense of time stretching back, curving beyond sight like the shoreline of an immense bay. How many people in this world can say they have had the same room from birth and, in my case, probably until death?

The high winds had swept the clouds from the sky. It was turning into a crisp, clean night, and the layers and layers of stars above me added an immeasurable depth to the darkness. I thought about the letter Michiko had received from Endo-san. Fifty years! It would have been written four years after the Japanese invaded Malaya, toward the end of the war. The chaotic conditions of countries at war, the paranoia, the seas constantly patrolled by battleships and aircraft, all could have accounted for the letter getting lost. Fifty unimaginable years stretched out like a vast piece of fraying, sun-bleached cloth fluttering in the wind. Had it been that long?

Sometimes it had seemed longer.

Under the ancient light of a thousand stars I made out Endo-san’s island, sleeping in the swaying embrace of the waves. I have resisted all offers to buy that fragment of land and have kept it clean and as it was, with his little wooden house beneath the trees, the clearing where we used to practice, the beach where my boat would always touch land.

Memories—they are all the aged have. The young have hopes and dreams, while the old hold the remains of them in their hands and wonder what has happened to their lives. I looked back hard on my life that night, from the moments of my reckless youth, through the painful and tragic years of the war, to the solitary decades after. Yes, I could say that I had lived my life, if not to the full then at least almost to the brim. What more could one ask? Rare is the person whose life overflows. I have lived, I have traveled the world, and now, like a worn-out clock, my life is winding down, the hands slowing, stepping out of the flow of time. If one steps out of time what does one have? Why, the past of course, gradually being worn away by the years as a pebble halted on a riverbed is eroded by the passage of water.

A beam from the lighthouse farther up Moonlight Bay lit up the night. Here it came again, and again, and again. When I was a boy, my father, in the rare moments when he had not been too busy with work, told Isabel and me its history. I could even remember the name of the man who guarded the lighthouse then—Mr. Deepak, whose wife jumped off the lighthouse and hit the rocks below when she found out he had been unfaithful to her. Mr. Deepak was long dead now, yet the lighthouse lived on, a lonely sentinel of the sea still carrying out its archaic duty even in this modern age.

I left the balcony and went into my room and tried to get some sleep. That night, as always, I asked to dream of Endo-san.

The following morning, unlike all the mornings of the past five years, I decided to train again. I found my gi, neatly pressed by Maria, in a cupboard. It was my favorite piece, and a slight trace of perspiration, which could never be completely washed away, teased my nose as I unfolded it.

I had converted two rooms on the ground floor of Istana into a dojo, a Place of the Way, when I started teaching. The floor was paneled with Japanese pine, polished to a perfect gloss then covered with thick training mats. Fresh lilies were placed daily in a small vase in the tokonama, the shrine in a little alcove that also held a portrait of O’ Sensei Ueshiba. A wall of mirrors faced a row of high glass doors that opened out to the lawns and beyond them to the sea.

I had limited my class to ten students and had seen them obtain their higher grades, then open their own schools. We had often traveled to seminars and conventions around the world, giving exhibitions and classes, and learning from other masters. My former students used to call me occasionally, trying to tempt me back to that world. But I refused, and told them I had removed myself from the River and the Lake, adopting the Cantonese phrase “toi chut kong woo,” used to describe warriors who had voluntarily left their violent world to seek peace.

Sitting in the seiza position, buttocks resting on my heels, I began to meditate. It came back to me slowly as I sat there feeling the morning sun warm my face. After twenty minutes I picked up my bokken, raised it horizontally in both hands, and bowed to O’ Sensei. Then I bowed to the wooden sword and practiced my cuts.

The bokken is used in training, when a real katana sword is impractical and dangerous. That does not mean it is not an effective weapon. Some swordsmen I have met actually prefer it to the metal blade, and Miyamoto Musashi, the Sword Saint of Japan, was well known for going to duels armed only with two wooden swords against a live katana.

My bokken was about three and a half feet long, made by a craftsman in Shikoku famous for his skills with cedar. I used to practice five thousand cuts daily, through the top and sides of the opponent’s head, cutting through his upper body, splitting him in half, from left shoulder to right hip, the arms moving without thought, cutting so precisely that there was not even a whisper as the wood sliced through the air. This particular morning I lost count when I reached two thousand, but my body knew, and I gave myself to it, seeing nothing, but aware of everything. Light filled my vision; lightness filled my being, embodying the principle that had been absorbed into me:

Stillness in Movement,

Movement in Stillness.

When I had finished I found Michiko facing me in her training uniform. I brought my sword out before me and bowed to it before placing it back on its wooden stand. Wordlessly we practiced with each other, using just our bare hands. Due to my seniority in rank I insisted on being the nage, the person defending and throwing. As the attacking uke, she had to trust me not to injure her or use excessive force. Endo-san used to tell me that trust between a pair of training partners was the foundation of aikido training, for without it the uke would be fearful of creating the attack necessary for perfecting the techniques.

She was extremely proficient, her ukemi falls soft and graceful, her hands never seeming to hit the mats in absorbing the force of my throws, but to stroke them gently, like a leaf settling down to the ground before being lifted lightly again by the merest flick of a breeze. She was nowhere near my level, but then very few people are. I was taught by a master and have had the experience of actually using my skills. In turn I became a Shihan, a teacher of teachers. Is that not the way of the world?

She expected me to switch roles and allow her to be the nage, as was the custom, but I shook my head and she did not protest. By the time we finished we were both soaked in perspiration, our breathing rapid, hearts hammering wildly as we sought to exert control over them.

“You are as good as people have said,” she remarked, wiping her face with a towel.

I shook my head. “I used to be better.” Long inactivity had eroded my sharpness. But what did I need those skills for now? At seventy-two, who was going to fight me?

She read my thoughts. “Your mind is still very strong,” she said. “That is what training is for.”

I noticed in the morning light how thin she was but refrained from asking about her health. Aikido trains a person to look and sense beyond the surface and, through the physical contact of training with her, I had felt that she was not well.

We had a light breakfast of porridge and dumplings on the terrace, beneath a bower of bean-vines. Maria came out with a tray of Boh tea. “Maria, this is Madam Michiko. She’ll be staying with us for a while.”

Michiko raised an eyebrow at me.

“Surely you don’t need to stay in a hotel?” I asked, as Maria began complaining about the mess in the kitchen and I waved her away. “Stay here. Go to your hotel and pick up the rest of your things,” I went on, enjoying the look of surprise on her face, knowing I had unbalanced her by anticipating her intentions.

I wanted to find out more about her childhood, about the life she had led with Endo-san. She was also good company. It had been a while since I had talked so candidly with another person. “You’re most welcome to stay for a few days,” I said. “I must ask you this, however: what is it you really want from me?”

“Will you take me to his home? To the little island he wrote about?” she asked.

It was a request I had expected and feared. I leaned back in my rattan chair. It was getting quite warm. Unlike the day before, there was not even a wisp of cloud above us.

“No,” I said, finally. “I can’t do that.” I was not willing to allow anyone else into that part of my life I had shared with Endo-san.

“Then I would like to know what happened to Endo-san,” she said, absorbing my refusal with a greater grace than I had delivered it, echoing the quality of her ukemi.

“He is dead. Why do you wish to bring it up? What’s the point?”

“He is not dead, here,” she tapped her temple softly. She remained silent, and then she continued, “Something else came with the letter he sent.”

She went inside the house and returned with a narrow box. Its presence had disturbed me from the moment I first saw it the evening before. I should have recognized the shape and length of it immediately but the wrapping had deceived me. Now I knew instantly what it held and I struggled to keep my composure.

She tore away the cardboard covering, and placed the box on the table. “You may open it.”

“I know what it is,” I said, my eyes hardening. But I reached out and opened the box and lifted Endo-san’s Nagamitsu sword from the bed of cloth on which it had been resting. I had seen him using it so often, but it was the first time in my life that I had ever touched it. It was a simple yet elegant weapon, and the black lacquered scabbard protecting it, so cool and smooth in my hand, was plain, without any form of decoration. It was almost identical to mine, one of a pair forged by the famed swordsmith Nagamitsu in the late sixteenth century.

“It was terribly neglected and rusted when I finally received it. I had a retired swordsmith restore it.” She shook her head. “Not many people know how to do it now. It is such a rare work, perhaps Nagamitsu’s greatest creation. The swordsmith was quite honored to work on it. He spent seven months polishing, oiling, cleaning. He refused to accept any payment at the end.”

She took it from my hands. “Can you recall the last time you saw Endo-san using it?” she asked.

I looked away. “Too well,” I whispered, trying to block the sudden rush of memories, as though the sword itself had cut a gash in the dike I had built. “Only too well.”

She looked up at me and a hand covered her mouth. “I did not mean to cause you pain. I am truly sorry.”

“I’m late for a meeting,” I said, getting up from the table. I was stunned to realize that, despite my years of training, I was disoriented. Her visit, our conversation, the appearance of Endo-san’s sword—I felt their combined assault upon me. What made it more difficult was that these were not tangible opponents I could throw off. I stood still for a moment, trying to find my balance again.

She faced me. “I am not here to cause you harm. I truly wish to know.”

“I’ll take you to your hotel,” I said, and walked into the house, leaving her holding the sword.

Chapter Two

I drove the black Daimler into Georgetown and dropped her at the Eastern & Oriental Hotel on Northam Road. Traffic was already heavy on the roads and along the streets office workers hurried to work from the food stalls, carrying their breakfasts, packets of nasi lemak—coconut rice and sweet curried anchovy paste—wrapped in banana leaves and newspaper. Motorcyclists, the bane of Penang traffic, sped by recklessly as I turned into Beach Street. I let the Sikh doorman park my car and walked up to my office.

Hutton & Sons had occupied the same building for over a century. The company was founded by my great-grandfather, Graham Hutton, still a legend in the East. It was a shadow of its former glory, but still remained a respectable and profitable concern. During the war, a corner of the gray stone building had been torn away by a bomb and the shade of the restored stone could not be matched to the original. It still appeared like a patch of new skin over a wound. As I sat down at my desk, I was aware once again that this company was as much Endo-san’s as it was my family’s. Had it not been for his influence the business would have been swallowed up by the Japanese. How many times did he shield it from them? He never told me.

I read the various reports, facsimiles and e-mails that had come in during the weekend. The company still traded in the goods it had been founded upon—rubber, tin, agricultural goods grown in Malaysia. We owned a few reputable hotels, prime real estate, and three shopping malls in Kuala Lumpur as well. We operated mines in Australia and South Africa and held extensive interests in shipyards in Japan. Due to my knowledge of the Japanese language and my acceptance of its culture, I was one of the rare few that had foreseen and taken advantage of the spectacular rise of the post-war Japanese economy. Hutton & Sons was still a privately owned company, a fact that I was proud of. There was no one to tell me what to do and no one to answer to.

Even so, my life was regimented: breakfast at home, a pleasurable drive along the coastal road to work, lunch wherever it took my fancy, then back to work in the office until five in the evening. I would go for a swim at the Penang Swimming Club, have a few drinks, and then drive home.

I felt old, and it was not a very pleasant feeling. The world goes by, the young and the hopeful, all head for their future. Where does that leave us? There is the misconception that we have reached our destinations the moment we grow old, but it is not a well-accepted fact that we are still traveling toward those destinations, still beyond our reach even on the day we close our eyes for the final time.

I had ended my classes five years earlier, and had sent my last student to another teacher. My engagements abroad had been pruned considerably and the annual pilgrimages to Japan had ceased. I had also made tentative enquiries as to the sale of the company, and the response had been favorable. I was preparing for my final journey, cutting away all obligations, all moorings, as ready to sail out as a seafarer just waiting for the right wind.

I was surprised at my maudlin feelings, which I thought I had put away years ago. Perhaps it was meeting Michiko, meeting another person who had known Hayato Endo-san. The feelings evoked by the unexpected appearance of Endo-san’s katana refused to settle, and it was with an effort that I pushed them away and went to work.

When lunchtime came around my mind was already straying and I felt ready to leave my office for the day. I informed Mrs. Loh, my secretary of many years, and she looked at me as though I had been stricken with a sudden illness.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“I’m fine, Adele.”

“You don’t look fine to me.”

“How do I look then?”

“Something is worrying you. You’re thinking of the war again,” she said.

After close on five decades with me she knew me well. “You guessed correctly, Adele,” I sighed. “I was thinking of the war.

Only the old people remember now. And thank God their memories are so unreliable.”

“You did a lot of good. And that, people will always remember. The older folk will tell their children and grandchildren. I would have starved to death if it hadn’t been for you.”

“You also know a lot of people died because of me.”

She could not find a ready reply and I walked out, leaving her to her memories.

I headed out into the sunshine. On the steps of the entrance I paused, watching the funnels of ships sticking out over the rooftops of the buildings. Weld Quay was within walking distance. The godowns would be busy at this time: stevedores unloading cargo—gunnysacks of grains and spices and boxes of fruit—carrying them on their naked shiny backs, as coolies had done two hundred years ago; workers repairing ships, their welding tools flashing sparks of white light, bright as exploding stars.

Every now and then a ship sounded its whistle, a sound so comforting to me whenever I was in my office, for it had never changed in the past fifty years. The briny scent of the sea at low tide, mixed with the smell of the mudflats steaming in the sun, wafted through the air. Crows and gulls hung in the sky like a child’s mobile toy over a crib. Sunlight bounced off the buildings— the Standard Chartered Bank, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, India House. A constant flow of vehicles went around the clock tower donated by a local millionaire to commemorate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, adding to the noise. I have never seen the light of Penang replicated anywhere else in the world—bright, bringing everything into razor-sharp focus, yet at the same time warm and forgiving, making you want to melt into the walls it shines on, into the leaves it gives life to. It is the kind of light that illuminates not only what the eyes see, but also what the heart feels.

This is my home. Even though half of me is English I have never hungered for England. England is a foreign land, cold and gloomy. And the weather is worse. I have lived on this island all my life, and I know I want to die here too.

I started walking, moving through the lunchtime crowds: young clerks laughing with their lovers; office workers talking loudly with one another; students carrying large bags, pushing each other in mock fights; street peddlers ringing bells and shouting their wares. A number of people recognized me and gave me a slight, if uncertain smile, which I returned. I was almost an institution myself.

I decided not to go home yet. I crossed Farquhar Street and entered the cool shaded grounds of St. George’s Church. The wind rustled the old angsana trees and made the shadows on the grass waver. I sat on the moss-covered steps of the little domed pavilion in the church grounds as the sounds of the traffic faded away. Birds called, and a jealous crow swooped in and broke up their singing. For a while I was at peace. If I closed my eyes I could have been anywhere on earth, at any time too. Perhaps Avalon, before Arthur was born. That had been one of my favorite stories when I was a child, one of the few English myths I liked, which had seemed almost Oriental in its magic and tragedy.

I opened my eyes reluctantly. Forgetfulness was one luxury I could not buy. I pushed myself up and went out of the churchyard. I started to walk faster, to prepare myself for tonight. I knew what was coming. It would be hard, but finally, after all these years I welcomed it. The opportunity would never come again, I realized. There was no time left. Not in this particular life anyway.

She was already at Istana when I got back from the Club, lying on a deck chair by the pool, her head covered by a large Panama hat. She was staring at Endo-san’s island, and there was an undisturbed stillness in the air, as though she had not moved for a long time. A book lay on the table next to her, open flat on the glass surface, waiting to be closed by her again. I watched her from inside the house. She opened her bag, took out a bottle of pills, and swallowed a handful of them.

I could feel the effects of the drinks I had consumed. The Club had been full of the usual crowd—noisy drunken Indian litigators retrying lost cases, and fat Chinese tycoons shouting into their phones to their stockbrokers. There were also the usual ancient British expatriates, leftovers from the war who had stayed on in the country they had come to love. At least they did not try to fight the war with me again today, or castigate me for the role I had played in it.

I asked Maria to leave dinner ready for us, and went for a shower. By the time I came downstairs the servants had gone home and we were all alone. A freshly grilled fillet of stingray marinated with chilli, lime, and spices on a large piece of fresh banana leaf lay on a plate on the table, and Michiko’s eyes were drawn to it. Maria always made the best ikan bakar—it was the Portuguese blood in her, she always told me. I started to pour a bottle of wine but Michiko stayed my hand. From a rustling package she produced a stout-looking bottle.

“Sake,” she said.

“Ah. Much better,” I replied, handing her two thimble-sized porcelain cups. She warmed the sake in the kitchen and poured deftly and we each drank it down in one swallow. The taste ... I had forgotten the taste. I shook my head. Too many drinks in one day.

This time we were much more at ease with each other, as though we had known each other all our past lives. I liked her laughter: it was light, airy, and yet not frivolous. Unlike many Japanese women I had met, she did not cover her mouth when she laughed, and I knew she truly found what I said amusing. A woman who was not afraid to show her teeth, whether in joy or in fury.

The sake went well with the meal, taking the edge off the spicy sauce. The fillet was tender, and our chopsticks se. . .