What the Fire Never Took

One long climb puts the whole city in a single frame: the pale roofs and long walls of the castle on its hill, the dark green of the garden pressed against them, the market a low grey roof among taller buildings, and beyond the river the short wooden grid of the teahouse street, with the sea flat and silver past all of it.

What survives in Kanazawa is not really the monuments. Monuments exist in plenty of places, rebuilt in concrete after the war and perfectly respectable. What survives here is ordinary. A market that still sells fish to the people who will cook it. A craft with living customers. A street where somebody is practising upstairs because there is work that evening. The city kept its habits as well as its buildings.

Weather came in off the Sea of Japan the way it does here nearly every day, arriving first as a smell and then as a wall, drumming on the tiled roofs and running off the deep eaves in ropes. There is a saying in this city that you may forget your lunch box, but never your umbrella. Polly waited it out under an eave with her feathers pressed flat.

When the rain thinned, she went out low over the water, west into the grey. Behind her the poles were stacked in a garden shed waiting for the first of November, the crab boats were tied up until winter, and somewhere down a side street the gold was still being beaten thinner, one steady stroke at a time.