This man was an expert at beating about the bush, even in a language that wasn’t his own, so I didn’t pursue my unanswered question. After all, he’d simply painted on a wooden board a name that had been given to millions of people around the world.
“How was your day?” I said, changing the subject. “You look very elegant.”
“Thank you. I am waiting for my niece. We arranged to have a drink together before she goes to climb mountain for ten days. I do not want Mizuki to see me drunk and take this memory of me to the peak of mountain.”
“Is she going to climb Mount Fuji?”
Okamura took off his glasses, looking very surprised, and peered at me out of eyes that seemed sunk deep in the depths of a valley.
“That is silly. First, you can only climb Mount Fuji in summer. And anyway, my niece, she is serious climber of mountains. At Mount Fuji there is queue of thousands of people who go from one mountain hut to next. The path from first to the fifth station has asphalt. I need to say more? From there to tenth hut is harder. But it is like big department store in sales, except you are very high and you have breathing problem for altitude sickness.”
This image of masses of suffocating people bore little resemblance to the pure, sublime view I’d had from the train. No doubt some things were better seen from a distance.
A melancholy-sounding song was now playing in the bar. Okamura half closed his eyes as if trying to salvage some memory from the past. “The last time I climbed that mountain, I was with my wife, not long before she died. She was not well, but she was still strong to climb, so we took bus from Kawaguchiko, the nearest town. It left us at fifth station. We needed whole day to get to top, although we both were using two walking sticks because it rises 1,400 meters in only six kilometers.”
“What’s it like at the peak?” I suddenly felt a thrill of interest.
“The view is wonderful. You can see the ocean, the Fuji five lakes and Tokyo far away. When we reached highest point I took last photo of us smiling. When we descended from Mount Fuji, our life also went down.”
The wistful song had ended, but the bar owner didn’t put on any more music, as if—despite the foreign language we were using—she understood that we were talking about something important.
A tear seemed about to fall from one of Okamura’s sunken eyes. “The best things in life also end.”
“But you’re still working.” I was trying to shift the conversation into happier terrain. “Do you like your job?”
“My business also is going down. Like me. I am salesman and accountant of a printing company. Now, with digital technology, well, our production it is half, and again half of that. It is miracle we can still afford paper.”
He pronounced the word “paper” like someone mentioning a product from faraway times, like parchment in ancient Egypt. That reminded me of the postcards in my trouser pocket.
“Do you know, by any chance,” I said, pulling them out, “where this address is?”
Okamura put on his scratched glasses again and held the address with the number twenty-seven close to his face. He looked nervous and shook his head. Then he looked at the stamp with the four women and the telescope and scratched at the edge of the postmark with the nail of his index finger, whereupon the stamp lifted with surprising ease. Then he looked at me accusingly and snapped, “I am old man, but I am not fool. Do you think is amusing to make joke of tired and alone printer?”
“I don’t understand what you mean. I don’t know what kind of address this is but, if I have offended you, please . . .”
“There is nothing here that I can read.”
“But it’s written in kanji . . .”
“With signs that do not have meaning because the way they are together. The same thing with postmark.” He looked angrily at me through his thick lenses. “They don’t mean anything?” I couldn’t understand what was going on.
Okamura took a long swig of his beer, trying to calm down. He put the postcard on the bar, looked at me warily and said, “That is not Japanese or any language. Apart from number twenty-seven, it is mess of signs written together by one completely ignorant person. It does not make sense whatever.”
“But . . . wait a minute.” I took back the postcard with the picture of the cat feeling totally perplexed. “This looks as if it has been printed. How is it possible that—”
“This is made with one person’s printer in home,” he interrupted. “Someone has made this stupid thing with Photoshop. The stamp they print with postmark. All is false.”
I was so shocked that I didn’t notice the door opening and a girl walking in—although she would become someone I would never be able to erase from my memory.
Postcards That Traveled Down Fourteen Steps
The first thing I thought when I saw Okamura’s niece was that she was beauty incarnate. She must have been about thirty and was wearing jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and sneakers. Her black hair was simply pulled back in a ponytail—yet she radiated sensuality and elegance.
Mizuki was quite tall, and her face was slightly angular. I guessed she was the daughter of an American father and Japanese mother. Her features were East Asian, but the bold, unflinching gaze was pure West Coast—a girl who’d grown up never being told to lower her eyes.
I forgot about the postcard for a moment and bowed my head in the direction of the newcomer, who broke the local rules by holding out her hand for me to shake. It was somewhere between the traditional Japanese bowed greeting and the kiss on each cheek that we give in the south of Europe.
Once I’d recovered from her appearance, my eyes went back to the postcard. Now I understood everything and I wanted to throttle Titus.
