The Heat of the Sun

the air, and something, perhaps a gossamer insect, brushed my face. Beside a cabinet of lacquered teak leaned a
samisen, that strange slender banjo-like instrument played in Japanese prints by delicate young women with downcast eyes. I had never seen a real one before.
    ‘Hello?’ I said again, and heard a sound of humming. Shadowy against a screen stood a ghostly, kimonoed figure with hair heaped high, turning a fan in an upraised hand.
    ‘Ah, but he come – American come.’ She snapped the fan from her face and stepped towards me. This was no ghost, but a woman all too real – her hair unravelling, her face
seamed and sagging beneath its mask of make-up. Her teeth were poor and there was sourness on her breath as she looked up at me, slapped my arm with the fan, and said, ‘Come,
American.’
    We stepped into a chamber that stood open to the garden. I was back on the veranda where I had begun; a tea table had appeared, arranged neatly with a peculiar large metal vessel, porcelain
bowls, and cups without handles. Cherry blossoms splayed from vases nearby, and on a plinth stood a telescope, a dark, tapering cylinder banded in brass. On each side of the table was a flat, pale
cushion. The old woman descended with surprising grace to one, and gestured to me to take the other.
    Clumsily, I lowered myself. The woman’s face was grotesque, the paint thick as a clown’s, the eyes yolky and rimmed in red. She dipped the ladle into the teakettle; I sipped the
bitter, steaming tea. The ceremony would have proceeded in silence, but from time to time the old woman hummed or let slip a muttered phrase, sometimes in Japanese, sometimes English:
‘American here?’ or ‘Ship in harbour?’ or ‘Sharpless-san, he fix Mr B. F. Pikkerton, no?’
    ‘You’re the girl’s maid,’ I said. ‘Suzuki.’
    And all at once the old woman, as if in response to her name, leaped up and rushed to the plinth. Jamming an eye to the telescope, she called out words I could not understand and beckoned to me
excitedly.
    Her fit was over almost as soon as it had begun. Leaving the telescope spinning, she resumed her place and carried on sipping tea. She only muttered, as if it were expected, ‘Mr B. F.
Pikkerton, he no come today.’
    The longer I sat with Suzuki, the stranger the scene became. Gently, she picked out a song on the samisen. Her voice, to my surprise, was beautiful, and I listened as in a trance, wishing I
could understand, but before the song was over she flung down the instrument and covered her face. Her shoulders heaved. I went to her, but when I stole an arm around her she flared, screaming and
clawing at me, shrieking out curses until I escaped ignominiously. As I slithered down the stony steps from the veranda I barked my shin, and braved further blows as I scrambled back for my
ashplant.
    The rickshaw-puller waited for me outside.
    ‘Koshi-byo?’ he said, and I nodded, but only because I did not know how to tell him to take me back to the consulate. Something wet coursed down my cheek, and I dabbed at it with my
handkerchief: Suzuki’s nails had drawn blood. I had left behind my hat and shoes. Blankly, I watched the rickshaw-puller’s brown, bent back, its jutting vertebrae suggestive of some
ancient, stubbornly persisting form of life – something repellent, reptilian – as we jolted down from Higashi Hill.
    In town, spidery entanglings of wires meshed the sky like a net, as if to keep the citizens trapped; the streets were dirty, crowded, reeking. Everything was as it had been before – but
no, it was not.
    Cries filled the air. There was a thunder of feet.
    The chaos, even as it descended, seemed unreal: unreal, the loud report, like a shot; unreal, the crowds pushing, flooding out from the alleys, filling every space between rickshaws, bicycles,
automobiles; unreal, the shouting, the blasting of horns.
    Young men pressed from all directions, jostling and angry. Fists punched the air; words screamed from flung-back throats. Where had the riot come from? How had it erupted? All at once it was
there, and I was in the middle of it.
    I cried out to the rickshaw-puller, but he paid me no heed, struggling as best he could to liberate us from the fray. Something slammed the side of the rickshaw, sending it rocking. I gripped
the arc of the canopy, wondering if I dared jump into the street. Could I make it to the sidewalk? But on the sidewalk, there was only the same swarming, angry