The Heat of the Sun

wondered if this act involved the same characters as
the first.
    Then somebody took Goro’s place and tried to help me.
    ‘It’s a different play, you realize.’ Yamadori’s voice, hot against my ear, was barely loud enough for me to make out the words. Onstage, an actor in a golden cape
writhed sinuously, holding aloft a sword that sparkled in the lights. A Noh performance, Yamadori explained, consists not of one play but of a set of plays, demonstrating successively the harmony
that attains in the world of the gods, the dissensions of man, then man’s repentance, his redemption, and the glory of defeating all that stands in the way of peace. ‘This is the fall
we’re seeing now. But it isn’t all, you see. There’s more to come.’
    The actors stamped and leaped, thumping out a ritual dance; the stage throbbed like a drum skin, and Yamadori continued, ‘The play confuses you because you want it to tell a story, but it
wants to evoke a mood. See how even in this violence of conflict there is colour, beauty, life? And infinite grace. Think of the story as something that happened long ago. Forget the story. We know
what happens next: always the same transience, the beauty of moments passing.’
    The resoundings ceased abruptly; there was applause, and Yamadori said quickly, ‘Temple of Shofuku-ji. Tomorrow at two.’
    Abruptly, he was gone, and Goro appeared once more. Furious, frightened, I wanted to ask him what arrangement he had come to with Yamadori, what bribe had made him leave me like this, but Goro,
at once, was laughing loudly over the second entr’acte. Resentfully I studied his jutting larynx, his thousand pleated wrinkles, his yellow teeth with their many gaps.
    All I cared about was what happened next.
    In the morning I dismissed Goro and made my way about the town alone. Filling in time, I wandered along canals, sat on a bench by the harbour and drank too much Japanese beer
over lunch in a restaurant with flyblown windows and meticulous table-settings. What awaited me at Shofuku-ji I could not imagine, but I felt as if I, and not Le Vol, faced criminal charges. I
feared I was being watched. In the restaurant I looked suspiciously at the other diners; none looked back at me.
    Shofuku-ji appeared deserted. Set back from the street over a wooden bridge, the temple gathered about it an air of quietness. A gold-painted gable, catching the sun, flashed like a signal as I
ascended stone stairs. I found myself in a broad, dark hall. I moved carefully, but the varnished floors, sleek as violins, thrummed at the smallest movement.
    ‘Prince Yamadori?’ I said, emerging into a courtyard lined with pale gravel. A gong, bronze and immense, glimmered by the far wall. In the centre of the wide space, an old man in
orange robes raked the stones with meditative calm. As I approached, he did not look up.
    ‘I was told to come,’ I said, my voice low.
    The old man kept raking, face averted, head down. I touched his arm and he giggled; he was senile, or perhaps had acquired so great a tranquillity that every reaction was at tortoise-speed. The
bent head rolled towards me, revealing eyes sleek with yellow film. ‘Sharpless-san?’ he said at last, and pointed to the shrine that lay across the courtyard.
    Shadowy eaves overhung the entrance. Inside, sweetness hovered on the air. Light, pale and smoky, seeped through high lattices and, from the dark back wall, above an altar laid with flowers,
loomed a Buddha, impassive and vast. Prostrate before the statue was a solitary saffron form. A peculiar composure filled me, and I thought how I had misjudged what awaited me.
    ‘Trouble,’ I said, when the saffron form rose. If his blondness appeared incongruous against the Zen robes, I did not consider it. There was a rightness to him, a naturalness, as he
came towards me.
    He smiled. ‘I see you’ve met the Bonze.’
    ‘Bonze?’ Hovering outside was the old man, still holding the rake.
    Trouble said, ‘You knew he was my great-uncle?’
    ‘How could I know that?’
    Moments later the raking resumed, the languorous scrape... scrape . Trouble and I were meeting in a dream: it did not seem strange that we had not said hello, not shaken hands, not
embraced.
    He led me out of the shrine. We would walk in the gardens, he said, and explained that his great-uncle, now a servant, had once been a priest of this temple, but gave it up after Trouble’s
mother died. ‘He’d denounced her, you see.