THE LANTERN BOATS an utterly gripping and heart-breaking historical novel set in post-war Japan (Historical Fiction Standalones) Read online

  THE

  LANTERN

  BOATS

  An utterly gripping and heart-breaking historical novel set in post-war Japan

  TESSA MORRIS-SUZUKI

  Joffe Books, London

  www.joffebooks.com

  First published in Great Britain in 2021

  © Tessa Morris-Suzuki

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental. The spelling used is British English except where fidelity to the author’s rendering of accent or dialect supersedes this. The right of Tessa Morris-Suzuki to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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  ISBN: 978-1-78931-746-6

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  AFTERWORD AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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  GLOSSARY OF ENGLISH USAGE FOR US READERS

  PROLOGUE

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  15 August 1951

  It was dark by the time the crowd gathered on the banks of the Sumida River, but night did nothing to lift the oppressive heat that hung over Tokyo. Lightning danced on the horizon. No sound of thunder, though. Only the deafening chorus of cicadas and the rising murmur of human voices.

  They came from all directions: down muddy lanes between the wooden tenements and warehouses, across patches of wasteland still dotted by the scorched foundations of bombed buildings, and around the concrete walls of the new factories sprouting from the ashes. The stench of the river rose to meet them. Some of the children had created their own lantern boats from paper and bamboo or scraps of tin, and carried them in cupped hands. Others queued in front of the makeshift stalls where the miniature boats could be bought for a few yen.

  The mood was an odd mixture of excitement and sadness. Little boys darted between the adults’ legs, trying to find the best vantage point, and infants squealed with delight as they were lifted on to their fathers’ shoulders. Street vendors with handcarts were selling shaved ice and octopus dumplings on skewers.

  But many faces were sombre. Three days ago, they had welcomed the souls of the dead back into their lives with displays of lanterns outside doorways, temples and graveyards. Now they were sending them away again for another year, down the river and out into the darkness.

  So many dead. Parents and children killed in the firebombing raids that had obliterated neighbourhoods. Husbands or brothers who had gone to China or Burma or New Guinea and never come home again. Sons who had flown exploding planes into the sides of American warships. Six years since all that had ended. Six years that had passed like a dream.

  They took up bamboo brushes and wrote the names of the dead in ink on the paper shades that rose from the little boats like sails. Some added words like ‘hope’ and ‘peace’. Then, one by one, the candles were lit, the boats were launched, and their flickering flames started to drift out into the current, which carried them slowly south towards Tokyo Bay. Soon the Sumida had become a river of lights. The reflections of hundreds of flames danced in its oily surface, as the spirits of the dead departed downstream.

  The people on the bank watched them for a while. Then the lights dwindled into the distance and the crowd began to disperse. A warm wind was blowing now, and a few drops of rain started to fall.

  But the flickering paper lanterns continued to sail past the eyeless walls of factories and the skeletal shapes of cranes on the dockyard, until gradually their flames were extinguished by the wind or the swell that rose as they approached the bay. At last, just three or four brave survivors remained, their lights catching the crests of wavelets.

  And it was these last lantern boats that illuminated the other shape that was now drifting with them, mostly submerged: a bulky dark shape. Their light picked out a bubble of sodden cloth, just visible on the surface of the water, and the feathery fronds of hair that spread out around the head. Now and again the twisted hands, tied together with rope, protruded from the river, and then disappeared again into the gentle rocking of the waves. Frayed ends of twine trailed behind like waterweed.

  The river was entering the bay now, and the lights of the city were growing more distant. There was no one there to watch the scene. Even if there had been, the last of the candles had burned so low that it would have been difficult to recognize the drifting patch of darkness as a human body. There was something almost peaceful about the unhurried way it rose and fell on the swell as, accompanied by the last of the lantern boats, it floated away and vanished into the endless sea of forgotten lives.

  CHAPTER 1

  Five months earlier

  As the boat inched towards land, harbour lights began to appear through the evening mist on the rim of the sea — blurred at first, but growing clearer. They flickered like stars in the cold air. Over the past two years, their boat had travelled along this stretch of Japan’s northern coastline five or six times, and on each visit, Kamiya Jun had noticed how the night-time landscape was changing. In places where there were once pools of darkness scooped out by American bombers, new lights were now shining. He gazed at his homeland: always out of reach, a shoreline seen from the deck of a boat that moved through its own silent world.

  There was hardly a breath of wind. They were heading not for the harbour itself, but further north, to the remote sea lake that they had used before, safely hidden from the eyes of the Japanese coastguard and the occupation forces. Once their craft drew level with the lighthouse at the northern end of the harbour, the other deckhands, Orlov and Chen, moved swiftly through the boat, dimming the hurricane lamps one by one, until just one remained glowing in the wheelhouse. The beam of the lighthouse pulsed through the darkness, finding nothing but the loneliness of the sea. Three swans flew in formation through the finger of light and then disappeared in the direction of the Asian continent. They flew as though they knew where they were going. For a moment, Jun watched, and envied them.

  Then he felt a sharp jab in the back. ‘Stop stargazing, boy,’ muttered Orlov, ‘we’ve got work to do. Get those boxes up on to deck. C’mon. Move it.’

  When Jun had joined the boat’s crew
two years earlier, the top of his head barely reached the level of the hulking Russian seaman’s shoulders. He had grown a couple of inches since then, and his muscles had become harder, but Orlov was still more than twice his weight, and still insisted on calling him ‘boy’.

  The air in the hold of the boat was thick with the fumes of diesel and tar. Jun groped his way through the dark to find the wooden crates, stacked four deep on either side. Not so heavy this time. No one ever told him what cargo he was handling, so he’d learned to guess the contents by the size, shape and weight of the sacks and boxes that he hauled up and down the boat’s companionway. These crates were made of roughly cut wood, and a splinter from the first one that he lifted stabbed deep into his left thumb. Gritting his teeth against the pain, he hauled the case halfway up the steps and passed it to Orlov, whose broad, sweaty face peered down from above, filling Jun’s nostrils with vodka fumes. Sixteen crates in all, large but not very heavy, packed tight with bags of something soft. There was no rattling sound when the boxes were shaken.

  A half-moon had appeared between the clouds by the time Jun clambered back on to the deck, rubbing his aching shoulders and trying to extract the remains of the splinter from his skin. The moon traced a long pathway across the sea. In its light, he could just make out the characters stamped on the wood of the crates: ‘Snow Brand Milk Powder’. The ‘powder’ part at least, he guessed, was correct.

  The boat was closer to shore now. The smell of the sea changed as they approached land. Jun caught a whiff of rotting fish, seaweed and forest vegetation. The lights of the harbour had vanished. There was nothing to be seen except the outlines of low wooded hills, black against the blue-grey of the moonlit sky. Here and there a lamp shone in the window of a fisherman’s cottage whose outline was softened by the snow piled on its roof and around its walls. They were approaching the most dangerous part of their voyage.

  ‘Captain wants to see you. Now,’ said Orlov, jerking his thumb in the direction of the bridge.

  Jun felt his stomach tighten as he opened the rickety door and entered the confined and stuffy wheelhouse. He couldn’t imagine the reason for the summons — surely nothing good.

  The captain stood with one hand on the wheel, staring out to sea.

  ‘I have a little mission for you, Kamiya,’ he said, without turning his head.

  ‘Yes, Captain,’ replied Jun. This was not what he was expecting.

  The captain must have been almost sixty, and the hair on the back of his head was thin, with the pale skin of his scalp showing through its greasy strands. In a bar in Vladivostok, Jun had once heard someone address him as ‘Captain Li’, but doubted that this was his real name. Generally, he was just called ‘The Captain’. He seldom spoke, and when he did, his voice was oddly light and high-pitched. If you heard him talk without seeing his face, you might think that you were hearing a woman’s voice. It was said that he had spent most of his life in Manchuria, and had served as some sort of police officer with the old Manchukuo government.

  As he waited for the captain’s orders, Jun remembered a stormy summer night, not long after he joined the boat’s crew. He’d started to feel stifled and queasy in his bunk around midnight, and stumbled up towards the deck for some air. When he pushed open the hatch and peered out into the gale that roared above, he saw the black figures of the captain and young Endo, a loudmouthed seaman who was starting to get under everyone’s skin, locked together in a struggle in the stern of the boat. The captain had his hands around Endo’s throat. The howling of the wind drowned any sound that either man might be making, and for seemingly endless minutes their bodies staggered silently back and forth from port to starboard as the boat rolled in the swell. Then Endo’s head flopped awkwardly to one side, and the captain lifted him easily on to the rail of the boat and toppled his limp body over the side. Jun, fighting back the nausea that rose in his throat, quietly closed the hatch above his head and beat a hasty retreat into the bowels of the boat. He didn’t hear the splash of the body as it entered the water. The next morning, the captain was calm and silent as ever. Endo was never seen again, and no one commented on his absence, or even mentioned his name. After a week or so, Jun began to wonder if he had dreamed the whole thing.

  ‘I’ve a package for you to take to Misawa,’ said the captain slowly, waving one hand in the direction of a bundle wrapped in black cloth underneath the chart table. ‘You know where that is, right? Misawa. Just east of Aomori. We’ll put you off the boat when we reach land. Listen carefully to what I’m about to say. I’m not going to write it down for you, and I’m not going to say it twice. Get off the boat as soon as we’ve finished unloading the boxes. The men who’ll meet us onshore have a truck. They’ll take you as far as Aomori — probably not into town, but somewhere nearby. Find your own way to Aomori Station. Only ask the way if you have to. If anyone wants to know your name, it’s Saito. Saito Tomio. Here.’

  Still without turning his head, the captain fished in the pocket of his bulky grey jacket, pulled out a battered seaman’s identity card on a leather strap, and held it at arm’s length for Jun to take. There was a photograph pasted to the card which didn’t look particularly like him, but was so blurred that it could have been almost anyone. The name on the card was Saito Tomio; the date of birth, 22 December, seventh year of Showa. Eighteen years old — just six months older than himself. Jun knew better than to ask what had become of the real Saito Tomio.

  ‘Catch the local train from Aomori to Misawa. Get off the train there and go to the barber’s shop immediately across the road from the station. You can’t miss it. There’s only one. Find Mr Kitazawa in the barber’s shop. Kitazawa, OK? Old bald guy, missing a finger on his left hand. Make sure it’s him. Tell him you have a gift from Captain Endo. Kitazawa will give you an envelope in return. Once you’ve done that, go straight back to Misawa Station and wait for a man in a grey van to come and pick you up. He’ll ask you if you’re waiting to go on the fishing trip, and when you say yes, he’ll take you back to the spot where you landed. We’ll give you twenty-four hours, and be back to pick you up in the late evening. Can’t say what time exactly. We’ll signal with a lamp as we come in: three flashes, then a pause, then two flashes. We’ll come for you, but you may have a long wait. Got that?’

  ‘Yes, Captain’.

  Misawa. Of course he knew Misawa, in his dreams if not in real life. His mother and father had lived in a little village just south of Misawa before heading north to the colony of Karafuto, chasing the fantasy of a better life. Father was just a vague memory, but for some reason Jun could still hear the sound of the old man’s wheezy voice telling him a story about the Kabushima Shrine, on an island offshore from his home village: how the gulls with their sea-cat cries circled in their tens of thousands above the shrine, and how the local people always rejoiced when the gull droppings fell on their heads as they visited the shrine, because that was a sure sign of good fortune to come.

  ‘Gull shit,’ Father used to say with a breathy laugh, ‘that’s what made them happy!’

  Maybe the old guy had missed out on those blessed droppings — he’d certainly missed out on the good fortune.

  Jun wondered if there might be a chance to snatch a few extra hours and travel a little further: perhaps he could see the fields that his grandparents had farmed, the lanes where his father played as a child. He might even hear the clamour of the sea-cat gulls over the Kabushima Shrine . . .

  As though reading his thoughts, the captain turned his head for the first time and looked Jun straight in the eye. His eyes, as Jun had noticed before, were surprisingly pale, a goldish hazel colour, and there was a twitch in his left eyelid. ‘Don’t take detours. Don’t stop along the way. Don’t talk to anyone. And don’t even think about opening that parcel, or the envelope that Kitazawa gives you. You may imagine you’re on your own, but we’ll know where you are and what you’re up to every step of the way. If you’re scared of the Japanese police, believe me, you should be ten
times as scared of us. Take a wrong step and . . .’ The captain shrugged. His face was completely expressionless but for the tremor in his eyelid, which made it look as though he was winking.

  ‘Got it?’ he repeated.

  ‘Yes, Captain,’ said Jun.

  The captain fished in his pockets again and produced a small purse, heavy with coins. ‘Spend as much as you need, but not one sen more, right?’

  Jun dropped the purse into the inner pocket of his own coat. He guessed that this was more money than he had ever touched in his life. Then the captain carefully lifted the wrapped bundle from under the chart table and placed it into Jun’s hands. It was surprisingly heavy. The object inside the knotted black cloth felt round and hard, as though made of metal.

  ‘If you drop this or lose it,’ said the captain softly, ‘you’re dead. Understood?’ Again the little wink of his left eye.

  ‘Yes, Captain,’ said Jun.

  * * *

  When they reached the narrow entrance to the sea lake, the sound of the engine dropped to a low throb. They glided into the darkness of the water beyond, keeping close to the shore, where the forest met the sea. There were no waves, but they could hear the slop of water against stone. Jun stood next to Orlov and Chen on the deck, ready to unload the boxes as soon as their boat touched shore. The palms of his hands were sweating slightly, and his heart gave an odd beat as he heard the sound of another engine behind them — a second boat, also moving slowly and cautiously along the coast. They stood in complete silence for a while, listening to the movements of the strange vessel, and then the tension in the air dissolved as the shadowy shape of the other boat passed harmlessly across the entrance to the lake, heading further north, probably on some mission like their own.