A steam whistle echoes from the dock.  As the rain begins to fall, the boundary between the sky and the river surface melts into the evening. It is just a vague time in crepuscule, when no one can distinguish whether the ship is heading towards Tokyo Bay or the island is drifting out into the open ocean. 

“You’re not from this island, are you?”

The only café on the island. Madame Mitsouko spoke to a young stranger in wet overalls who had just stepped off the local bus and invited him into the entrance hall. Introducing himself as Cricket, he replied that he had started working at the shipyard on the island the previous month.

This island, located on a sandbar in the Arakawa River, north-west of Tokyo, was once known as Drifting Island, because the stream course frequently shifted until riverbank reinforcement works were completed 50 years ago. Before the bridge was built over the river and the Japan Railway Station was constructed, it is said that ferries used to operate to Drifting Island from the terminal on the banks of the Arakawa River during the primrose season, right up to the 1920s. In the new millennium, high-rise apartment blocks line along the bank on the island like a mirage. 

The shipyard workers finish the job and gather at the café for their supper. An upright piano stands beneath the stairs leading to the mezzanine, its keys note depressive heavy tone due to the humidity of the early summer rainy season, awaits the tuner visiting once a year. With pints in hand, one of the men in their overalls is trying to play Mozart’s piano solo piece «Ah, vous dirai-je, Maman» with one finger, but what emerges from the rusty strings is a cacophony that sounds like the growl of a wild beast. Laughter bubbles up out of each glass. Madame Mitsouko brings over a cheese omelette and a glass of red wine to Cricket, who is sitting alone at the small single-seater table next to the piano. From the cleavage of her bent upper body wafts the perfume of Guerlain’s Mitsouko, which gave the café its name. Cricket is reminded of the nostalgic yet overripe peach scent that used to be hidden in the drawer of his late grandmother also named Mitsou’s dressing table in the wooden house where he had grown up. As the last note, a musty phantosmia of cinnamon and oakmoss lingers in his nostrils.

“Oh dear, I wonder if that my boy is still looking for her?”

Standing beside the single-seater table, Madame refills his glass with wine from the decanter, points to the pavement outside the window. 

“You see, the kitten my son found in the bushes over there last summer has gone missing. She was always with him, whenever he was sleeping or going out, though. My poor boy might have lost sight of her at the edge of the island, or in the end of the world…”

Madame sighs, tears welling up in her eyes. The bus stop at the tip of her index finger, the boy in a chocolate-coloured raincoat waves under the shadow of his umbrella looks just like a clumsy sparrow searching for its nest. The light of a streetlamp has gone out. As he snaps out of his reverie, changes to the freshwater fish swimming through the drizzle, on his way home to the café.

Is she still alive? She lives within you, and her insouciant kitten’s frolics that once diverted you now compel you: you fulfilled your obligation through your painstaking melancholy.[*]

As the closing hours of the café late at night, the steam whistle signaling its return to the dock echoes again in distance. Just as the workers are about to home each flat after their meal, Madame’s son comes back. Every time the café door opens and closes, the scent of the sea, carried on the night breeze swirls in the air. The nectar-robbing insects which inhabit the brackish marsh at the edge of the island stuck to the boy’s back are hovering in the café, and stealing away the ephemeral light of the chandelier bulbs one by one. After mooring Drifting Island, Madame Mitsouko sinks the Anchor of Time into the darkness beyond the horizon, where the sun must be yearning for the ocean.

…

hiromi suzuki is a poet, fiction writer, artist living in Tokyo. Her writing has appeared in 3:AM Magazine, RIC journal, Berfrois, Minor Literature[s], The Dodge and various literary journals on-line.


Quotation:

[*] Rainer Maria Rilke, Preface for ‘Mitsou’ by Balthus (Balthazar Klossowski) 1919 / Translation by Richard Miller