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

The sound comes.

The air and the earth reverberate. The voices rise. Somewhere very near, over a wall or behind a gate, there are men who spend their lives in beauty, shaven-headed boys growing up in the service of silence. And he is not dead. He has not fallen, not yet, and there is another day beginning. As always, he lies still while the sound pulses through his ribs and his skull, and then he sits up, hugs his knees in the dark. Behind the shutters, the sky will be paling; another day closer to leaving Japan.

Makiko must have just slipped back to the main house, because he burns his fingers on the teapot and steam rises when he lifts the saucer-lid of the cup of miso soup. Cubes of tofu bob above the green seaweed and in the other bowl his rice is topped with a fried egg. He tucks his feet under his knees and edges forward to the table, pours tea and sips his soup while the tea cools. He is glad to be without witnesses while he eats an egg with chopsticks. He should write to Ally, try to tell her about Kyoto in the snow, about days that begin with ringing in the dark and with green tea in a grey bowl. He must take home some green tea but he knows it won’t taste the same on the other side of the globe. He might write to Makoto: I must thank you again for your hospitality and for the privilege of your introduction to this beautiful country. I hope the new bridge progresses? He should write also to his mother, and probably to De Rivers who will like to have a description of the workshops where his acquisitions, his silks and his inlaid wood, are being made. Beautiful girls bow over their work as delicate fingers coax gold thread through the bright satin. But it is men, so far, who do this work, men with stooped shoulders and hands stained and calloused by years of stitching and dyeing.

Tatsuo is taking him to a market today, a place where second-hand goods are sold. De Rivers wants a chest or a cupboard, something he can use to hold the carved toggles and medicine boxes Tom is to buy. None of your modern rubbish, he says. Something really old, something that was sitting under one of those curved roofs when the country was still closed, something that belonged to one of those samurai lords with two swords and a topknot. Tom has already explained, more than once, that ancient Japanese furniture is a contradiction in terms, but it’s not what De Rivers wants to hear. I hope you do not mean to suggest that the inducement you have been offered for this work is insufficient, and look forward to hearing that my orders have been fulfilled. Tom is not without hope that he may find a chest, and understands exactly why someone would want to fill it with the toggles meant to fasten a purse to the wearer’s clothing. Although he has noticed an almost complete absence of personal mannerisms, of fidgeting, in the Japanese, the toggles seem conceived for fiddling and stroking, for touching as a man might finger his keys or the small change in his pocket. They are palm-sized, made always of cool and shiny wood or ivory, and shaped as amulets or familiars, small animals or homuncules, occasionally lucky beans or fruit. As Japanese men assume Western garb, there is less call for such devices. He has so far refrained from buying anything for himself, not wanting a part in De Rivers’ greed, not wanting to behave as if Japan is something that can be bought and taken home in the hold of a ship, but there is great attraction in the idea of walking the streets of Falmouth and London, sitting in his chair at home, with a netsuke in his pocket. Since he must indeed return.

The soup has cooled while he did his best with the egg. He tries to drink it, but the lukewarm salty fluid reminds him too much of having a cold. He pours more tea and sips: it has brewed too long and turned bitter. Tatsuo should be here in a moment, but he will start his letters while he waits. No point in sitting idle in an empty house.

The sky has cleared, and sits like a blue bowl upturned over the mountains ringing the city. Black cobbles are beginning to show through the snow like rocks breaking the surface of a pond, but the swooping roofs and tiled walls are still quilted white. As they walk, the sun comes over the mountaintop, plain and swift as the turning tide, and before his eyes shadows form and strengthen on the ground and the ice crystals begin to sparkle in the snow. He screws up his eyes; it is too bright.

At first the streets were quiet, shutters still closed and only a few men hurrying, collars turned high and footsteps muffled by snow, their wraps blots of indigo in a black and white scene. Now there are pairs of women under the paper umbrellas and the occasional bundled child holding its mother’s hand, and then squealing and two small boys conducting a snowball fight across the street, getting in the way of an elderly woman shuffling cautiously down the middle where the snow is thin. He has not seen much play, he thinks, or at least not much of what can be recognised as childhood.

‘Tatsuo?’ he asks. ‘Do the children play sports here? Ball games, races?’

Tatsuo checks his pace. ‘It is a new thing in the schools. They make exercises, to build strength.’

Of course, sword-fighting, wrestling, the traditional ways that must be upheld in the face of change. ‘But for fun?’ he asks. ‘For pleasure?’

Tatsuo shakes his head, uncomprehending or perhaps pushed beyond what