Signs for Lost Children by Sarah Moss (top ten ebook reader TXT) 📕

Makoto took him to a tea-house in the city where he had to sit on his feet for most of the afternoon while a man in an exquisite kimono spent hours making bitter tea in a surprisingly crude grey bowl and Tom, who had hoped to be seduced by the experience as the authors of the books he’s read were seduced, felt like a gorilla obliged to attend a ball at Buckingham Palace. Uncomprehending, unclean and finally enraged.

‘But perhaps we should rather press on? I am sure your mother is eager to see you, and doubtless will have tea in readiness.’

Makoto glances back, smiles. ‘This is a country place. Not the full ceremony, I promise, only a pot of tea and a plate of sweets. But you like the old Japanese houses, yes? This one is nearly three hundred years old. The same building.’

Tom uses the roots of a tree as steps up a steep part, glad that Makoto persuaded him to send most of his luggage back to the city by road and rail.

‘The same family?’

‘Naturally.’

The tea-house is set back from the path, almost overwhelmed by the trees clustering close around it, the ends of their branches meshing over its wooden roof. Fallen leaves lie thick against its wooden walls, as if the forest is slowly taking back its own. The building does not look as if it has been holding off the trees for three centuries, and if Makoto had not been there—not that he can imagine Makoto not being here—Tom would probably have taken it for some kind of hut or shed and walked on. The wooden screens are pushed back so Tom can see in to a bare earth floor with low platforms around the walls and a fire burning in a pit in the middle. He checks the roof again; there is no chimney.

‘Here,’ says Makoto. ‘We keep our boots on, this time.’

There is a pair of stone dogs or wolves, one each side of the doorway. Tom hasn’t seen or heard any wolves; the Japanese government has almost finished exterminating them. The bounty for a dead one is more than a year’s wages for a rural labourer. He stops to look.

‘Inari,’ says Makoto. ‘Foxes.’

Tom nods. He’s read about this. ‘To keep off evil spirits?’

‘Not evil, I think. Difficult. Can one say, tricky?’

‘Yes. Mischievous?’ Tom suggests.

‘Something like that.’

Cornish piskies, Tom thinks, the Hidden People of rural Scotland, the invisible beings who hide the tool you need for the job in hand and finish the end of the flour that was going to do tomorrow’s loaf. He strokes the nose of the nearest fox. ‘They hide things, perhaps knock over cups or jars?’

‘In old stories. Superstitions and women’s tales. Come, our host is waiting.’

A figure comes out of the darkness at the back of the tea-house, a white-haired man in a dark tunic and leggings, barely as high as Tom’s shoulder but holding himself straight and loose as a boy. Everyone bows, and then the man comes over to Tom and touches his tweed jacket, looks up into his face where, he knows, a bronze stubble is blooming like rust. Just grow a beard on your travels, the ambassador’s secretary told him, that’s what everyone does, but Tom thinks a ginger beard is more than any Japanese child could be expected to countenance.

‘He asks if your jacket is silk,’ Makoto says.

‘Wool,’ says Tom. ‘Baa.’

But of course the owner of a Japanese mountain tea-house has never heard a sheep, has not recognised Tom’s bleating as different from the other sounds coming out of his mouth.

The old man carries a cast-iron kettle to the fire in one hand and hangs it from a chain suspended from the roof beam. Tom stretches out his legs. It feels odd to sit indoors in his boots and his feet are cramped and hot inside the leather and lacing.

‘Is there any thought of introducing sheep here?’ he asks Makoto. Most of the upland he has seen is forested, but if railways and mining, if lighthouses and telegraphs, why not sheep?

Makoto shakes his head. ‘I have not heard of it. It would hurt our silk manufacture and there is no demand for mutton.’

Tom remembers a story in Brunton’s memoir, about a team of European engineers who came upon a cow belonging to a Buddhist monastery on one of the islands. They tried to buy it and were refused on the grounds that foreigners were known to kill and eat such beasts and this was a sacred animal, raised by monks who refuse all harm. The engineers tried harder, offered more money, and eventually gave their word that the cow would be treated with respect and not killed, that they wanted it only for the milk. They drove it over the hill into the next bay and slaughtered it below the tideline before rowing back to their ship with the dinghy full of excellent beef. The Japanese, Brunton complains, lie all the time, often for no reason.

The kettle steams and rumbles. The old man comes forward again, carrying a tray holding a teapot and a plate of the inevitable sweets. There must be a woman somewhere in a back room, pounding and rolling rice dough.

‘You are thinking that sheep farming should be tried?’ asks Makoto.

Tom shakes his head. The man lifts the kettle from its hook in one hand and fills the teapot. The steam and the scent of green tea rise in the gloom, and Tom is suddenly thirsty.

‘No. I know nothing about it. I think the climate may be too hot. And sheep would change your landscape.’

He tries to imagine these hills stripped of their woods, turned to bare heath. There would be no heather or gorse. Of what could Japanese houses be built, without trees?

Makoto nods, watching the old man’s hands lifting and pouring. ‘We were taken out on the—moors, you say? To see the purple flowers. Very beautiful.’

Tom wants to see Britain from behind Makoto’s eyes, to see