The Phoenix Tree

‘Maternal,’ she said and left it at that. After all, as a Japanese, he should appreciate there were some matters that were ‘family’.

Chapter Three (#ulink_36ce7b29-22e0-57d5-be24-c52ed3b670c7)

1

It took Kenji Minato only five weeks to reach home. None of the contacts along the route wanted to hold him longer than was necessary. Those outside Japan and Germany knew how badly the war was going; they were planning escape routes of their own. Minato had managed to limp out of the desert to a dirt road where he had been picked up by a Mexican farmer who had charged him fifty dollars to drive him the two hundred miles to Hermosillo. It was almost as much as the farmer would earn in six months and he was not going to ask any questions of an enemy who was willing to pay so much. Mexico was officially at war with Japan, but not so the farmer.

Minato had gone on by bus to Mexico City and from there by plane to Caracas. There he had been put aboard a Swedish freighter that was bound for Lisbon. From the Portuguese capital he had been flown to Berne with a mixed bag of diplomats, couriers, businessmen and an exiled king’s mistress going shopping in Zurich. There were two other Japanese on the flight, but they ignored him; he was not sure whether they knew who he was or whether they considered him socially inferior. He had been given a new wardrobe in Mexico City, but it was cheap and ill-fitting, as if spies on the run should not expect to be well-dressed. He longed to be back in naval uniform.

From Berne he travelled by no less than seven trains to Istanbul. On each leg of the journey he met other Japanese; these were more sociable, though none of them told him what their jobs were and he told them nothing of himself. But the number of Japanese travelling told him what he already knew, that the war was not going well. His fellow-travellers had a look of defeat about them.

He went all the way from Istanbul to Tokyo by plane, through Tashkent, Alma Ata: it was strange to see that the Russians were not yet at war with Japan. He stopped in Peking for two days when he had to wait for a seat on a plane, sleeping at the military airdrome and in his waking hours watching the military brass, none of them looking happy or victorious, trooping aboard the aircraft. He was closer to home than he had been in six years and suddenly he was more depressed than he had been in all that time. When he finally flew in over the huge bronze statue of Buddha at Kamakura and landed at Atsugi air base he felt it was more than just the end of a journey.

He was met by Lieutenants Sagawa and Nakasone. At the naval academy they had been close friends; but now they seemed like strangers. They bowed formally to him and he to them; then on an impulse he put out hands to both of them. They welcomed the intimacy, as if they had wanted proof that he had not changed. Did they know how one could be so insidiously corrupted in America?

‘You must be glad to be back.’ Haruo Sagawa hadn’t changed, Minato decided. He still looked as he always had, a man so afraid of being thought vulgar that he had gone to the other extreme, primness. He had a round soft face and a mouth that was continually pursed. He still sounded as if he were preaching: ‘There is no place like one’s own country.’