The Year of Rice and Salt

Eventually they came into 'a narrow strait between tall hillsides, and as the wind was shooting up this strait – the Inner Gate, Kiyoaki presumed – they let down the sail and rode the current, shifting their rudder to keep in the fast part of it, which curved with the bend around the tall hills to the south, beyond which they were through the narrows and thrust out onto the broad expanse of Golden Bay, now a rocking foam streaked brown bay, ringed by green hills that disappeared into a ceiling of low grey cloud. As they tacked across to the city the clouds thinned in a few bands over the tall ridge of the northern peninsula, and weak light fell onto the hive of buildings and streets covering the peninsula, all the way up to the peak of Mount Tamalpi, turning certain neighbourhoods white or silver or pewter, amidst the general grey. It was an awesome sight.

The western side of the bay just north of the Gold Gate is broken by several peninsulas extending into the bay, and these peninsulas were covered with buildings too, indeed among the city's busiest districts, as they formed the capes of three little harbour bays. The middle of these three was the largest, the commercial harbour, and the peninsula on its south side also served the Japantown, tucked among the warehouses and a working neighbourhood behind them. Here, as their sailors had said, the floating docks and the wharves were intact and functioning normally, as if the central valley were not completely flooded. Only the dirt brown water of the bay revealed that anything was different.

As they approached the docks, the monkeys on the rowing boat began to look agitated. It was a case of from flood to frying pan for them, and eventually one slipped overboard and struck out swimming for an island to the south, and all the others immediately followed with a splash, picking up their conversation among themselves where they had left off.

'That's why they call it Monkey Island,' their pilot said.

He brought them into the middle harbour. The men on the dock included a Chinese magistrate, who looked down and said, 'Still flooded out there I see.'

'Still flooded and still raining.'

'People must be getting hungry.'

'Yes.'

The Chinese men climbed onto the dock, and thanked the sailors, who got out with Kiyoaki and Peng ti and the baby. The tillerman joined them as they followed the magistrate to the Great Valley Refugee Office, set up in the customs building at the back of the dock. There they were registered – their names, place of residence before the flood, and the whereabouts of their families and neighbours, if known, all recorded. The clerks gave them chits that would allow them to claim beds in the immigration control buildings, located on the steep sided big island out in the bay.

The tillerman shook his head. These big buildings had been built to quarantine non Chinese immigrants to Gold Mountain, about fifty years before. They were surrounded by fences tipped with barbed wire, and contained big dormitories with men's and women's sides. Now they housed some of the stream of refugees flowing down into the bay on the flood, mostly displaced valley Chinese, but the keepers of the place had retained the prison attitude they had had with the immigrants, and the valley refugees there were complaining bitterly and doing their best to get cleared to move in with local relatives, or to relocate up or down the coast, or even to return to the flooded valley and wait around the edges until the water receded. But there had been outbreaks of cholera reported, and the governor of the province had declared a state of emergency that allowed him to act directly in the Emperor's interests: martial law was in effect, enforced by army and navy.

The tillerman, having explained this, said to Kiyoaki and Peng ti, 'You can stay with us if you want. We stay at a boarding house in Japantown, it's clean and cheap. They'll put you up on credit if we say you're good for it.'

Kiyoaki regarded Peng ti, who looked down. Snake or spider: refugee housing or Japantown.

'We'll come with you,' she said. 'Many thanks.'

The street leading inland from the docks to the high central district of the city was lined on both sides by restaurants and hotels and small shops, the fluid calligraphy of Japanese as common as the blockier Chinese ideograms. Side streets were tight alleyways, the peaked rooftops curving up into the rain until the buildings almost met overhead. People wore oilcloth ponchos or jackets, and carried black or colourful print umbrellas, many very tattered by now. Everyone was wet, heads lowered and shoulders hunched, and the middle of the street was like an open stream, bouncing brownly to the bay. The green hills rising to the west of this quarter of the city were bright with tile roofs, red and green and a vivid blue: a prosperous quarter, despite the Japantown at its foot. Or, perhaps, because of it. Kiyoaki had been taught to call the blue of those tiles Kyoto blue.