Free Dreams of Speaking by Gail Jones Page A

day to full-time painting. Michael doesn’t think so, but I’m determined to prove him wrong.
    Take care, big sister. Send me a cute Parisian story about your life. And thank you for the wooden toys. At the moment they’re on a shelf, a little like art objects, but the children will grow, I’m sure, to see their attraction.
    Yours,
    Norah

    Across the sky, superimposed, were the vapour trails of jet planes. Alice stood on windy Pont Marie, tilted her head, and looked up at the white lattice trails of international air travel. She was vaguely shocked that the territory of the sky could be so marked by transit, but also thrilled at the design, at the modern writ so ethereally. Below her, tourists passed beneath the bridge on a broad open boat. It appeared sturdy, like a workers’ vessel, having the look of faux antiquity. The river was jade-coloured, rippled. Alice saw someone on the deck pause and take her photograph, as if she were a Frenchwoman-on-a-bridge, a genuine spectacle. She waved, and the photographer looked up, embarrassed, and turned immediately away.
    Alice was walking to meet her new friend, Mr Sakamoto. They were to lunch at a small bistro on the Left Bank, and wouldtalk, he said emphatically, about this buzzing world. Alice moved through the cobbled streets with an air of anticipation, as if he were forty years younger, and her secret assignation.
    Mr Sakamoto would raise his glass of red wine.
    â€˜The difficulty with celebrating modernity,’ he declared, ‘is that we live with so many persistently unmodern things. Dreams, love, babies, illness. Memory. Death. And all the natural things. Leaves, birds, ocean, animals. Think of your Australian kangaroo,’ he added. ‘The kangaroo is truly unmodern.’
    Here he paused and smiled, as if telling himself a joke. ‘And sky. Think of sky. There is nothing modern about the sky.’
    â€˜Vapour trails,’ responded Alice, pretending to miss his point.

5
    Hiroshi Sakamoto was born in Nagasaki, in 1934, into a wealthy family who lived on the south-eastern hillside of the city, overlooking the harbour. Below, they could see ships of many nations on the turquoise water and the day-to-day arriving and leaving of vessels of commerce and trade. Further out, there were small fishing boats dotted around the bay; these too swept in and out, regular and irregular as the weather permitted. The view extended to promontories, sky, to the horizon of the ocean. They could see rain approaching in blue veils and clouds mass and unfurl. It was expansive and mobile; it was a view that encouraged journeying. Up and down the steep slopes of the hillside moved figures, sedan chairs and heavy carts, so that one could believe one sat high upon a world of relentless labour.
    Hiroshi’s father, Osamu, had inherited a fortune, being the only heir to a centuries-old saki business. The raking and cooling of rice, the smell of fermentation, the rituals of purifying water and the appeasement of spirits, these were all encoded so thoroughly in Osamu as a child that no one would imagine that his interests would turn to the production of steel. Although he maintained the saki business, almost purely for sentimental reasons and the tremor of nostalgic pleasure whenever he smelled rice at its final stage and saw womenbent with large fans above steaming trays, he was seduced by industrial manufacture and the intricacy of machines. In the late 1920s he visited America with a translator in tow, and saw there the production-line assembly of motorised vehicles, welders and machinists contriving the engines of aircraft, and women with nimble hands, each producing a little component of a Wurlitzer wireless. Although he found America crass, ugly and with no civic decorum, when he returned to Nagasaki Sakamoto-san told his associates: ‘I have seen the future, and it works,’ and set about establishing a chain of factories in the Nagasaki prefecture.