One Morning Like a Bird Read Online Free Page A

well with Mitsubishi. ‘And Sawa? Her back? Hmm.’
        Now it’s Uncle’s turn to ask questions. ‘Oh, much the same,’ says Father, though Yuji cannot tell if he is speaking of himself or Mother, or everything. ‘This year will be better, perhaps. I might try my luck at a little farming, like you. I could buy some chickens, keep a pig.’ He laughs. ‘If we have food shortages, I can make my fortune.’
        There is a long pause while Uncle speaks. He is the younger brother and not, therefore, not strictly, the one to be proffering advice to the head of the family, but Yuji hopes that is exactly what he is doing. If Father has the subtler brain, the one best suited to the play of abstracts, the framing of elegant questions, the exegesis of documents whose difficulty is like a glass surface thick as a fist, it’s Uncle Kensuke who has inherited Grandfather’s common sense.
        ‘Well,’ says Father, ‘well, we’ll see.’ Then he laughs the same unhappy laugh at what is evidently a question about Grandfather. ‘The model? Oh, yes, it still goes on, I believe.’
     
     
    That night Yuji wakes out of a dream. Not one of the fire dreams – he’s been spared those for almost half a year – but some troubling dream whose details disperse in the instant of waking, leaving only an atmosphere, a sense of ominous approach, of struggle. And what comes to comfort him as he lies in the frigid small-hours stillness of his room is the memory of Uncle Kensuke’s farmhouse above Kyoto, and of Uncle himself, always more artist than farmer, hoisting sheets of silk and linen from the vats in the floor of the dyeing barn, where all through the cold season the indigo leaves lie steeping in a brew of wood ash and lime and sake. Men’s urine, too, if Hiroshi is to be believed.
        It is so many years now since that summer – the invalid nephew sent to get clean air in his lungs, to become a proper boy with a boy’s vigour – it still surprises him how much he has kept of it, that it was not all swept from his mind the moment he returned to Tokyo and saw Father pushing through the tattered crowd at the station, ash on his shoes, ash on the cuffs of his trousers. Instead, it has survived, like something improbably fragile salvaged from the chaos of a ruined house, though time has coloured it with a thin wash, a binding glaze, so that the shadows under the pine trees and the smoke from the saucer of smouldering chrysanthemums, the black of Asako’s hair, the grey of storm clouds, are all faintly indigo now. Even the moon of that summer, westering over mountain villages and lonely farmhouses has, in memory, some blush of indigo, as if it, too, once hung dripping over the vats in the barn.

5
    Two days later he rises from his bedding an hour before first light, breakfasts in the kitchen on a handful of yesterday’s rice, a mouthful of cold tea, then steps over the sleeping Miyo, puts on his boots, scarf and ‘peach-bloom’ trilby, slides the front door to the width of his shoulders, and posts himself, quietly as he can, into the dark of the front garden.
        Most of the snow has melted but the air is cold as pond water colder now than when the snow was there. He hurries to the end of the street, pushes up the sleeve of his coat to check the luminous dial of his watch, then turns onto the main road, the north–south that runs in front of Imperial and on towards Kanda. When he has walked some two hundred yards, he stops and slowly retraces his steps. A one-yen taxi passes, a woman in the back, her powdered face lit for an instant by the flare of her cigarette. Then an old man goes by, hauling a white cow on a length of rope, muttering to it his complaints about the world while the beast pours steam through its nostrils. At last, coming towards him, he hears the quick scuff and tap of the footfall he has been listening for. A shadow appears, hesitates at the sight of him, then comes closer.
        ‘So it’s