An Exquisite Sense of What Is Beautiful Read Free

with a palm to her elbow.
    ‘Do all Japanese women dress like this?’ Edward asked.
    ‘Och. Are you still going on about that wee sword? Aye, so I believe. That’s how they dress over there. In Japan.’
    Japan. If Edward ever reflected on his childhood, it was the only word he could actually hear his father saying in his aural memory. Of course, there had been many conversations between them, pleasant ones mostly, for his childhood had been a happy one until the shadow of the Second World War appeared. But these conversations were all vague noises to him, more a recollection of the overall sound of his father’s voice rather than any particular words said. Yet the word ‘Japan’ remained intact as an entity unto itself, a vocal insect trapped in an amber of sound. He could recall the exact tone and timbre in which it was articulated. Japan. A baritone with a Scottish burr roughed up at the edges by tobacco and malt. Japan. This clue. This signpost. As if his father’s sole existence in this world was to no more purpose than to point him eastwards with this one word.
    Japan. The name of that country had meant nothing to him at the time. A group of islands on the right-hand side of the map that hung in his school classroom. It was not coloured pink like the rest of the Empire, but remained unshaded, anonymous, like the large mass that was China. In fact, Edward thought Japan was part of China until a small part in the chorus of a school production of
The Mikado
opened him up to a world of Lord High Executioners, Celestial Highnesses, women with knitting needles in their hair, schoolgirls with names like Yum-Yum, Pitti-Sing and Peep-Bo.
    This participation in
The Mikado
was just one of the benefits of his senior secondary school. At eleven years old, he had been streamed away from an education by belt and Bible, deemed ‘ excellent at English’ and eligible to spend five years pursuing a Leaving Certificate and the possibility of a university education. It was a time for studying, reading newspapers, listening to the radio as the Germans marched on Europe. And suddenly Japan was there too. And this Japan had a face, but it wasn’t the face of three little maidsall contrary, come from a ladies’ seminary with knitting needles through their hair. This was a cruel face. Fuelled by comic books and newspaper propaganda. He trembled as these Oriental warriors in their airplanes sunk His Majesty’s warships, as they scurried through Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore, Sumatra, Borneo, Ceylon and Burma. The map was changing colour. The pink-shaded countries of Australia and India were threatened. And he was threatened too. As the Japanese and Germans advanced so did his age towards enlistment. Passing time closed around him like a death, like the nights of the dark winter of 1944. But then, there was light. The Germans were in retreat, the British recaptured Mandalay and Rangoon, the American forces landed in Okinawa. And then there was blinding, extraordinary light. Followed by a terrifying heat, branding its victims with its deathly radioactive shadow. First Hiroshima . And then Nagasaki.
    The news then was all about numbers, numbers, numbers. Edward heard them tumbling from the radio every night in that disembodied voice. First there were those numbers coming out of Europe. Those many millions. And now these numbers from Japan. When did a number just become a number and no longer a human being? After ten, twenty, a hundred deaths?
    ‘How can we kill so many people?’ he asked his father. His mother had gone to lie down with the splitting headache that always seemed to coincide with the evening news.
    ‘We didn’t kill anyone, lad. It was Truman and the Yankee bombers that did it.’ His father tapped his pipe hard on the wooden chair-arm as if to drive a wedge right through the wartime alliance.
    ‘But they’re talking about over one hundred thousand dead. In five days. Almost all civilians.’
    ‘It’ll bring the war