The Heat of the Sun

unless at the fact that it had taken so long to come to light. But of course: I could avoid
it no longer. On the afternoon of August 8, I asked my driver to take me to the top of Higashi Hill.
    My heart beat hard as the cab climbed. How could so many years have passed? How could I have grown so old? I closed my eyes. The afternoon was hot. A fly buzzed against the back windshield, and
I wanted to tell the driver to stop and let it out. The motion of the cab made me feel sick; but then the cab slowed, gravel crunched under the tyres and I let my eyes open.
    That the house would still be there was more than I had dreamed. The place was neither dilapidated nor altered in ways that I could see; still it stood in its fecund gardens, gazing down to the
harbour. I hauled myself from the cab, and looked back at my driver, who had alighted as well. He smiled, gestured for me to go ahead, then bent with a scooping hand into an open back door,
endeavouring to release the trapped fly.
    Summer caressed me and scents were strong as I moved through the gardens. Unreally, I ran a hand down the warm trunk of a cedar; I touched the flesh of ferns; light flickered over paving stones
in a dance of shadows and sun; none of it was real, and nor was the man I saw when the path turned: an old Japanese man – a gardener, I assumed – hunching his coppery, naked back over a
bed of azaleas. His hands were knotted and his head was bald. Trimming stalks, he hummed a little. I moved closer. The old man had not heard me, but my steps were slow and soft.
    I wondered if I could make him understand me. I wanted to ask him who lived here now.
    I cleared my throat and tried.
    He did not turn.
    I tried again.
    ‘He’s deaf,’ came a voice behind me. ‘He likes to say it was the bomb. Just old age, really.’
    I turned, and was sure I was dreaming.
    ‘Trouble,’ I said. ‘You’re alive!’
    I can hardly say he had not changed. He was an old man, like me; hooded folds half-concealed his eyes; his hair was white; when he smiled, as he did then, his face pleated into a thousand
wrinkles and his teeth had acquired the brown-ivory patina of age. Yet somehow, strangely, he defied time. He was still what he had always been. He was still my Trouble.
    ‘You aren’t surprised to see me?’ I said.
    He shrugged. ‘I’ve been waiting.’
    ‘For forty years?’
    ‘Don’t flatter yourself. We get the papers even here, you know. I read about your delegation. Come into the house,’ he added. ‘Or doesn’t a busy man like you have
time for tea?’
    As we passed the gardener, Trouble bent down, laying a hand on the old man’s back. The face turned to look at his, and Trouble, enunciating clearly, said something in Japanese. The
gardener nodded to him, then to me, and smiled, but I knew by then that he was not a gardener.
    ‘Isamu,’ I said.
    Shaken, I let Trouble lead me up to the veranda. A sparse tatami room stood open to the outdoors. We sat on mats at a little low table. Isamu joined us, and a girl who looked like a young Suzuki
served us green tea.
    ‘Of course, hardly any of this is original,’ said Trouble, gesturing around him. ‘We’ve replaced so many walls and beams, it’s a whole new house, really.’
    ‘But still the old house,’ said Isamu, whose deafness, I gathered, was not complete.
    Much of our conversation that day was trivial. We were three old men whose lives had been and gone; there was little left for us but to enjoy the garden and wonder whether there would be rain
soon. Yet I learned much. Isamu had married after the war, though his wife was dead now; the girl who served us tea was his daughter. Until his retirement, he had been a Mitsubishi executive;
Trouble had given English lessons and translated business documents. In old age, the two men were comfortable, but not rich. Prince Yamadori, executed by the Americans as a war criminal, had left
his nephew nothing; Yamadori’s title had been stripped from him, his assets confiscated.
    Still the war, and its bitter end, loomed over them. Vividly but calmly, Trouble spoke of those desperate days after the bombing, when thousands of dying refugees crowded the roads around the
harbour, many of them blind or mutilated hideously, all of them struggling uselessly to flee.
    ‘We cared for them,’ he said, ‘as best we could. But it was never enough.’
    He looked into the distance, and I thought: he’s changed. But of course he had changed. When I had last