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Mandala Road

Wimbledon Publishing Company

1

Before sleep comes, the woman drifts into dream. As she makes her way about a garden, gathering herbs, she picks out dream forms in the glistening dew on the grasses at her feet and in the bright swirls of light rising around her. Her eyes, black as obsidian, dart after the elusive figures as she wanders on through the forest of eternity.

2

The morning the first oleanders came into bloom, Shizuka brought Asafumi a notebook that had belonged to his grandfather. It was the old-fashioned kind, bound with threads around the spine on the outside, with pages wider than they were tall. The threads were soiled, and the paper had grown woolly, its edges worn and dog-eared. Inscribed in thick black brushstrokes on the cover was the label "Medicine Kit Register," accompanied by the date: April 19, 1947.

His grandfather, Rentaro, had been a medicine peddler.

Beginning in the Edo Period, men from Toyama had travelled far and wide, selling medicines of every kind out of distinctive five-tiered wicker baskets they carried in large cloth-wrapped bundles on their backs. Rentaro's generation, born shortly after the turn of the twentieth century, had stretched their legs beyond Japanese shores – across the East China Sea to the Asian continent, to the countries and islands of the southern tropics, and even across the Pacific.

As a child, whenever Asafumi visited his grandfather's house, which always smelled of damp straw, a black-and-white photograph displayed on top of the tea cupboard used to catch his eye. It pictured seven medicine peddlers, all dressed alike in derby hats and knickerbockers as they stood in front of a cluster of mandala flowers. Behind the shrubs' large, white, trumpet-shaped blooms spread a palm grove that looked rather like a crowd of long-necked people with dishevelled hair. The peddlers stood with their gaitered legs braced firmly, as if determined to show the languorous tropical landscape around them that they meant business. Six of the men were obviously very young, no more than twenty or so, and the white, high-collared shirts they wore with coat and tie made them look as stiff as six-year-olds on their first day of school. The seventh man was older, obviously the leader, wearing round glasses and sporting a moustache; a gold chain dangled from his watch pocket, and he stared at the camera with every ounce of authority he could summon.

But spoiling any gravity the men conveyed were the massive cloth bundles tied to their backs, with two corners of the dark wrapping cloths knotted horizontally across their chests. The bundles were obviously of considerable weight, for all seven men stood with both hands gripping the fabric in front of their chests like begging dogs, their lips set firmly with the effort of remaining upright. Altogether, the heavy-laden band of peddlers from Japan looked more like a delegation from the Planet of the Toads who'd just arrived in a land of eternal sunshine. They were not merely comical; one actually felt sorry for them.

Rentaro had explained that the picture was from when he used to sell medicines in Malaya. Asafumi promptly began boasting to his playmates that his grandpa had gone all the way to the Himalayas to sell his goods.

There in the Himalayas they had trees with flowers like white trumpets, and lots of palm trees, too, he declared. There were flowers as big as washbowls, and some that were shaped like birds-of-paradise. They had trees that looked like they were in flames when they bloomed, trees that ran with white milk, and trees that produced all kinds of weird fruits and nuts. There was fruit that had jiggly, jelly-like stuff around the seed, and fruit shaped like a star; fruit that tasted like gyoza and butter, and nuts that tasted like lunch buns. His friends listened wide-eyed as he repeated what his grandfather had told him. When some smarty-pants pointed out that the Himalayas were covered in snow all year round and palm trees couldn't possibly grow there, Asafumi was unfazed. Just look up there, he replied, raising his hand toward the mountains. The Tateyama Range was always covered with snow, too, but their own town at the foot of the mountains still got plenty hot in the summertime, didn't it? And besides, he added, his grandfather had seen it all with his own eyes.

In his mind, he pictured the Himalayas as a land of endless summer surrounded by white-capped mountains. A place where strange plants were constantly in bloom and trees bent low with exotic fruit. If someone had asked him then where he thought heaven might be, he would have named the Himalayas without a moment's hesitation.

Asafumi was forever trying to get new stories out of Rentaro with which to impress his friends. But the old man's recollections invariably shifted from flowers and fruit to women, and once he got onto that topic, he'd get stuck there like a fly on flypaper and never move on.

"And the women of Malaya, they're really something else," he'd say with a faraway look. "So passionate, so frisky. Go to bed with them and it's like dipping your pecker in warm kudzu sauce. Pure heaven. Put your thing in once and you're a goner. There's no escape."

Forgetting his grandson was even there, Rentaro would toy with his teacup as he dreamily extolled the virtues of Malayan women, on and on, until finally he sank into a sea of memories and fell silent. Then nothing could induce him to speak up again. He remained submerged in the vast ocean of his past, lips clamped shut as tight as a clam.

Already past eighty by this time, his mind was beginning to fail. He might recall certain scenes and foods and women from his travels, but he could no longer identify which of the seven young men in the photo was him. When Asafumi went to get the picture for him, he would put on his reading glasses and hold it up for a closer look. Almost right away he would stab a shrivelled index finger at one of the figures and say, "That's me." But then Asafumi would point his own finger to confirm, "This one here?" and he'd say, "No, the next one over." Asafumi would ask again, "So this is you?" only to have him insist that he was the one on the end. Since the faces in the picture all looked pretty much alike, Asafumi himself could not tell, and in the end Rentaro went to his grave without ever reliably identifying which of them he was.

It was only after his grandfather had died and he'd gone on to junior high that Asafumi learned the difference between Malaya and the Himalayas. Reminded of the picture, he asked his parents about it, but it had apparently been mislaid in the confusion surrounding the funeral.

Sitting cross-legged on the veranda, he began turning the pages of the notebook labelled "Medicine Kit Register." The handwriting was in a style popular during the Meiji Era, with strokes like tangled vines, and he might as well have been trying to read Sanskrit. He managed to make out the name of Oyama Village, along with several personal names, but the medicines and old-fashioned numbers that accompanied them were impossible to decipher.

The object he held in his hand was the vaunted Toyama medicine peddler's most precious business asset – his sales register. It was in notebooks like this that each peddler recorded the names and addresses of his customers – all the homes where he had placed his medicine kits, along with the makeup of the family who lived there, a running tally of what drugs they had used, and the payments received. Asafumi was aware that there were people who specialized in buying and selling these valuable registers.

He looked up at Shizuka, who'd been standing there watching him in her shorts, her bare legs planted on the ground like the two tips of a draftsman's compass.

"Where'd you find this?" he asked.

"In the shed," she said, pointing her chin toward the overgrown garden behind her.

Beyond the place where the purplish-pink oleanders bloomed stood a dilapidated shed that Rentaro had used for storage after moving into this house in retirement. Thinking of the lost photo, Asafumi asked if she'd seen anything else that might have belonged to his grandfather. She thought for a moment before giving her head a single quick shake sideways.

"I think I'll go and see," he said, stepping off the veranda and into a pair of sandals.

"There really wasn't anything else," she said, sounding a little peeved that he didn't seem to trust her.

"Yeah, I know," he said as he headed through the narrow opening next to the oleander bushes.

The slender, olive-coloured leaves ruffled, and the sweet smell of the freshly opened flowers swept his cheeks. He moved on through the fragrant air into the swirl of vegetation beyond.

The property on which his grandfather's old house stood wasn't actually all that big, but the garden was so thick with bushes and shrubs of all sizes that you felt you could easily get lost if you weren't careful. In the middle of it all, a single giant tree with a tall gray trunk spread its limbs overhead, and the ground was covered everywhere with a variety of grasses, herbs, and flowers. But besides the oleanders, the only plant Asafumi could identify by name was a fig tree. Otherwise, the yard was a dense tangle of unusually shaped leaves, vines, and flowers he'd never seen before, flourishing and declining in their turn. A few stepping-stones were visible among the plants, but there were no discernible paths, and years of neglect had allowed everything to become so overgrown, with roots and branches and leaves tightly enmeshed, that it was almost impossible to make one's way between one plant and the next. The single exception was the narrow track resembling an animal's trail through the woods that had been worn between the house and the storage shed, starting next to the oleanders.

Pushing through the branches pressing in on both sides, Asafumi made his way toward the small building that had become almost completely hidden in green ivy. Although they referred to it as a shed, it was in fact a proper post-and-beam structure of substantial size – with a slate roof to boot. He stepped through the door Shizuka had left standing open. A small window let in enough light for him to make out such things as a foot-warmer, a table fan missing a blade, bundles of newspapers and magazines, an ancient potbellied stove, and a battered old tea cupboard. Items left behind by the most recent occupants of the house appeared to be mixed at random with older objects from his grandfather's day, but Shizuka had obviously done some straightening up, for everything was now in a neat pile to one side. Coming in behind him, she reached around his shoulder to point.

"It was in that," she said.

Sitting on top of the tea cupboard was a rectangular tin box with rounded corners, just large enough to hold the notebook. Colourful yellow, purple, red, and white flowers decorated the outside, but patches of the paint were worn away, revealing rusty metal underneath. Neither the flowers nor the particular colours were recognizably Japanese. Thinking that it must originally have been a box of sweets from overseas, Asafumi lifted the lid to look inside. Except for the dried-out shell of an insect about the size of an adzuki bean, it was empty – just as Shizuka had said. He traced his finger around the rim of the rusting tin.

"I suppose Saya must have had it," he said.

Shizuka gave him an uncomprehending look. It suddenly occurred to him that he hadn't ever told his wife about Saya.

3

Beyond the undulating stretch of blue loomed the shadow of land. Aboard the repatriation boat, the Japanese returnees crowded the deck for a first glimpse of their homeland, jostling like ants on the remains of a night-laugher. Among them stood Saya, keeping a tight, sweaty grip on the hand of her seven-year-old boy as she gazed at the approaching dark landmass that was foreign soil to her.

After nearly a month at sea, the crisp, freshly laundered short-sleeved dress she'd put on in Singapore looked like a soiled washrag. Her hair, done up in a knot so as to hide its natural curl, had grown greasy, and her light brown skin was grimy, too. Her armpits reeked, and an over-ripe smell came from between her legs.

She could shade her face and figure, but she could do nothing about the female odours her body sent out from inside – smells that attracted the other sex. "This is to protect yourself in case you run into men on the rut," her brother had said as he slipped her the parting gift she now kept hidden in her hair – a tiny finger-hole knife with a hooked tip. It had been his own trusty companion until then. People carried such knives somewhere on their heads for the moment when they might need to slit an enemy's throat.

And it had in fact come in handy. One evening during the long journey from Malaya, a man she'd overheard talking about the clothing store he ran in Kuala Lumpur forced her into the shadows of a passageway. Saya quietly drew the knife from her hair, slid an index finger through the hole, and pressed it to his throat. With an edge that could make short work of the man's scraggly beard, one tiny flick of the blade would send blood spurting from his sagging chin as well.

"This one much harder and sharper than man-sword in trousers," she said in her slightly broken Japanese. The man began quaking as if he'd walked through a shower of leeches.

Holding her brother's knife in front of her, she slowly backed out of the dark and hurried back to her spot in the hold. After that, the fellow had settled for eying her from across the room with a mixture of lust and hatred; he never bothered her again.

Beneath a sky tinged with the colours of the rising sun, a blast from the ship's horn shook the air. Frightened, the boy pressed closer to her side. Because he spoke little Japanese, she had told him to keep quiet on the ship or they'd both get thrown to the giant alligators in the sea, and he had been surprisingly well-behaved ever since. He communicated with her entirely by touch, making his desires known to her simply by the way he clung to her or gripped her hand. Saya released the boy's sweaty palm to wipe her own hand on the skirt of her dress before taking his hand in hers again.

Islands large and small hovered dimly in the violet-blue merging of sea and sky. The former Imperial Navy transport vessel, carrying nearly a thousand demobilized soldiers and more than two thousand civilians, spewed black smoke from its stacks as it glided slowly among the soft, tree-covered islands, its bow cutting through the calm waters of the Inland Sea toward a pier still veiled in morning haze. Small villages came into view here and there along the jagged shoreline on either side, with tiny fishing boats clogging their ports like clumps of seaweed. Saya knew the ship was headed for a much larger port named Hiroshima. She'd heard people near her in the hold saying that the city had been hit by something called an atomic bomb, which had destroyed everything as far as the eye could see in an instant and killed untold numbers of people. But she noticed no signs of any such catastrophe as the ship steamed past a small peninsula that reached out into the ocean like a bent arm and entered the port.

Boats tied up to a quiet pier formed a bold horizontal line along the edge of the water. A small steam-powered vessel abruptly broke from this line, kicking up a white wake as it made straight for the ship.

"It's coming this way! A boat's coming this way!" Excited cries erupted all around and the crowd pressed against the rail: a woman with a baby tied to her back and tears streaming down her face; a breathless man standing with his mouth agape; a child jumping up and down in an effort to see; soldiers in tattered uniforms, staring grimly toward the pier – some on crutches, others missing an arm. Looking like a ragtag army of homeless tramps with their grimy clothes and greasy hair, the assemblage of men and women on deck rippled with both thrill and apprehension.

Saya stared fiercely at the land before her across the water, glinting in the morning sunlight, as it continued to get nearer.

This was Japan. The country spoken of with such bitter hatred and anger back in Malaya. There was no way of knowing what lay in store for her here. It was like stepping for the first time into a part of the jungle where a leopard or a python or a scorpion might lie in wait at any turn, and the slightest rustling of leaves, the faintest sound on the ground, or the tiniest whiff of something in the air could be clues for staying out of danger. Every nerve in her body was on alert. She turned her head gently back and forth to feel the weight of the knife in her hair.

"The medicine man said a magic spell over it to help it cut down evil spirits," her brother had told her when he gave it to her. "Keep it with you, and it'll protect you from most any danger."

"But in that case, you need to keep it," Saya replied.

A broad smile spread across his brown cheeks. "Don't forget, my name is Kekah. I have the bite of a savage dog. Let any evil spirit come near me and I'll rip it to shreds with my teeth. So don't worry about me. Take it."

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Excerpted from Mandala Road by M. Bando, Wayne P. Lammers. Copyright © 2004 M. Bando. Excerpted by permission of Wimbledon Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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