The Year of Rice and Salt

They walked through alleys to a big merchant house and chandlery in the warren of Japantown, and the two Japanese men – the older named Gen, they learned introduced the young castaways to the proprietress of a boarding house next door. She was a toothless old Japanese woman, in a simple brown kimono, with a shrine in her hallway and reception room. They stepped in ber door and began to shed their wet raingear, and she regarded them with a critical eye. 'Everyone so wet these days,' she complained. 'You look as if they pulled you off the bottom of the bay. Chewed by crabs.'

She gave them dry clothes, and had theirs sent to a laundry. There were women's and men's wings to her establishment, and Kiyoaki and Peng ti were assigned mats, then fed a hot meal of rice and soup, followed by cups of warm sake. Gen was paying for them, and he waved off their thanks in the usual brusque Japanese manner. 'Payment on return home,' Gen said. 'Your families will be happy to repay me.'

Neither of the castaways had much to say to that. Fed, dry; there was nothing left but to go to their rooms and sleep as if felled.

Next day Kiyoaki woke to the sound of the chandler next door, shouting at an assistant. Kiyoaki looked out of the window of his room into a window of the chandlery, and saw the angry chandler hit the unfortunate youth on the side of the head with an abacus, the beads rattling back and forth.

Gen had come in the room, and he regarded the scene in the next building impassively. 'Come on,' he said to Kiyoaki. 'I've got some errands to do, it'll be a way to show you some of the city.'

Off they went, south on the big coastal street fronting the bay, connecting all of the smaller harbours facing the big bay and the islands in it. The southernmost harbour was tighter than the one fronting Japantown, its bay a forest of masts and smokestacks, the city behind and above it jammed together in a great mass of three- and four-storey buildings, all wooden with tile roofs, crammed together in what Gen said was the usual Chinese city style, and running right down to the high tide line, in places even built out over the water. This compact mass of buildings covered the whole end of the peninsula, its streets running straight east and west from the bay to the ocean, and north and south until they ended in parks and promenades high over the Gold Gate. The strait was obscured by a fog that floated in over the yellow spill of floodwater pouring out to sea; the yellow brown plume was so extensive that there was no blue ocean to be seen. On the ocean side of the point lay the long batteries of the city defences, concrete fortresses which Gen said commanded the strait and the waters outside it for up to fifty li offshore.

Gen sat on the low wall of one of the promenades overlooking the strait. He waved a hand to the north, where streets and rooftops covered everything they could see.

'The greatest harbour on Earth. The greatest city in the world, some say.'

'It's big, that's for sure. I didn't know it would be so..

'A million people here now, they say. And more coming all the time. They just keep building north, on up the peninsula.'

Across the strait, on the other hand, the southern peninsula was a waste of marshes and bare steep hills. It looked very empty compared to the city, and Kiyoaki remarked on it.

Gen shrugged: 'Too marshy, I guess, and too steep for streets. I suppose they'll get to it eventually, but it's better over here.'

The islands dotting the bay were occupied by the compounds of the imperial bureaucrats. Out on the biggest island the governor's mansion was roofed with gold. The brown foam streaked surface of the water was dotted with little bay boats, mostly sail, some smoking two strokes. Little marinas of square houseboats were tucked against the islands. Kiyoaki surveyed the scene happily. 'Maybe I'll move here. There must be jobs.'

'Oh yeah. Down at the docks, unloading the freighters – get a room at the boarding house – there's lots of work. In the chandlery too.'

Kiyoaki recalled his awakening. 'Why was that man so angry?'

Gen frowned. 'That was unfortunate. Tagomi san is a good man, he doesn't usually beat his help, I assure you. But he's frustrated. We can't get the authorities to release supplies of rice to feed the people stranded in the valley. The chandler is very high in the Japanese community here, and he's been trying for months now. He thinks the Chinese bureaucrats, over on the island there,' gesturing, 'are hoping that most of the people inland will starve.'

'But that's crazy! Most of them are Chinese.'

'Yeah sure, a lot are Chinese, but it would mean even more Japanese.'

'How so?'