Fire Flowers (8 page)

She gave a low laugh. For a moment, she sounded just like one of the vulgar types we'd been working with until so very recently. It was a nasty laugh, of the kind that asks: isn't the answer obvious?

J
apan appeared like an emerald set in a diadem of glittering blue, and our troop ship at last sailed close to the winding shore, the peaceful coastline. But the soldiers sensed something amiss as soon as we clambered down the gangplank to the damaged harbour: the shops empty, the populace unwilling to meet our eyes. At the dock, three old warhorses, their ribs showing through wan hides, were led stumbling from the dark hold of the ship, unused to the bright light of day. A young man in a grubby vest immediately approached the stableman to haggle for their withered flesh.

We were shunted toward Tokyo in a cramped train full of poisonous smells and sour faces. The city had clearly taken a smashing: its ribs were showing too, its carcass was open to the sky. Tokyo Station swarmed with fellow returnees wrapped in greatcoats, lying in clumps, or sitting drinking, red-faced and angry at squalid stalls surrounding the plaza. Civilian eyes avoided us here too, I noticed, and I longed to shed my winter uniform, writhing now with lice. But the evening was bitterly cold, and so I buttoned my woolen overcoat to the collar, pulled my fighting cap down, and, overcome by an almost exquisite weariness, began to trudge, disorientated by burned-out streets and unfamiliar vistas, toward Asakusa, town of rainbow lanterns and sleepless sparrows: my spiritual home.

My letters to my honourable mother from the camp on New Guinea had gone unanswered for many months. Finally, I had received a crumpled note from her fellow harridans at the National Defence Women's Association, which informed me that Madame had died of tuberculosis three weeks before, despite an almost complete excision of her lung. It seemed of little use, then, to return home now. With my mother gone, the main house would revert to the distant Osaka branch of her family, and I held out little hope of much assistance from them. They had long ago let me know how much they disapproved of my “dissolute lifestyle,” even after I had received my red call-up papers.

“Across the sea, corpses soaking in water!” the radio had sung that day. “Across the mountains, corpses heaped upon the grass!”

“Congratulations on being called to the front, honourable son,” my mother had wept. “Your father would be so proud of you!”

I wandered up the shabby remains of the Ginza. The stores were mostly shuttered and those that were not lay empty and bare. As I passed the pockmarked edifice of the Matsuzakaya, an Occupation bus stenciled with the name of an American city roared up alongside me. It expelled a group of boisterous soldiers, who raced over to what seemed to be a low cabaret further along. Painted girls in cheap kimonos advanced upon them, squealing and clutching at their arms, tugging them through the door of the club like kappa imps dragging wayfarers down into the marsh.

Suddenly, I started. One of them seemed very familiar. The short hair, the white oval face, the jet-black eyes that I once knew so intimately—

Satsuko Takara. The girl who had once appeared to me the embodiment of a beautiful Asakusa Park sparrow. I hobbled over to the other side of the road before she could spot me, a jeep blaring its horn as it swerved in its path.

From the opposite curb, I stood and stared across the road. Satsuko Takara. My brief affair with whom had so scandalized my mother. The girl whose face had hovered before me during all those nights of malarial horror on New Guinea.

Look at her now. In her prancing colours, hovering on the dimly lit street. However had she ever fallen so low? Never had she been a
zubu,
a bad girl, like the crop-haired nymphs who hung stockingless around the Asakusa theatres. She had been a delight, a sweetheart. No more, no less.

I writhed with embarrassment as I recalled my mother's coldness to her on the day of my leaving ceremony. Takara-san had visited our house, only to be turned away weeping at the side door. From upstairs, I had listened as my mother scolded Takara-san for her impudence—intent upon packing my cases, too cowardly to descend.

A sharp feeling of guilt flared inside me as I studied her from the darkness. Lice crawled beneath my cap, and I felt a hopeless sense of destitution. Thank Heaven she hadn't seen me. How would I appear now, anyway, even if I were to approach her? A frail ghost with hollow cheeks, returning so utterly broken by war?

I smiled grimly as I watched, tormenting myself with the vision. At last she claimed her prey: a boyish American with spectacles and a thatch of wiry hair. As she dragged him down the steps, I turned and strode quickly northward. If a girl as proper as Satsuko Takara had fallen to such depths, I thought, then things must truly be bad.

 

To comfort myself, I took a detour via Kanda, intending to follow the river to Asakusa-bashi and then walk up the Sumida from there. Most of the booksellers were gone, their volumes apparently incinerated in the conflagrations of March. But Ota Books was still standing, and I browsed the shelves for a while in a forlorn attempt to get warm. To my surprise, I found a copy of
Crime and Punishment
on the shelf—the first I'd seen in years. I flipped open the frontispiece and saw the
ex libris
stamp of the Sorbonne University. A pit opened in my stomach. Another one of my dreams the war had put paid to.

Mr. Ota shuffled out, armed with a feather duster. I greeted him hopefully. He stared at me as if I were a stranger. I asked if any of the old haunts or bars were still open—the Café d'Asakusa perhaps, the Dragon, or the Montmartre—but he told me that all but the Montmartre had been destroyed in the air raids. As he hobbled outside to bring in the boxes, I quickly slid the novel into my greatcoat—the pocket flaps at least were conveniently large.

What a relief it was, when I finally turned down a ruined alley and saw a red lantern glowing in front of the Montmartre—Mrs. Shimamura's bottle shop. A lump swelled in my throat. The light was like a glowing beacon, a lonely torch to welcome me home. I pulled aside the curtain at the entrance, and there it was, almost unchanged since the old days. The big map of the Paris arrondissements was still up on the wall, and there, polishing glasses behind the counter, was Mrs. Shimamura herself, still wearing her famous white dress; though, as I came closer, I saw to my dismay that her cheeky rolls of fat had shrunken now to wrinkled folds of skin.

She didn't know me either, at first. As I took my old stool up at the bar, I wondered if I could truly have appeared so altered.

“
Obasan
,” I said. “Forgive my presumption. But might you extend a note of credit to a returning soldier—and to a loyal, lifelong patron?”

She stared at me, a dim flicker of amused recognition in her eyes.

“Regrettably, sensei,” she replied, “since the war ended, there have been so many hundreds of hungry and thirsty ghosts, crawling about the city seeking credit notes . . . Perhaps sensei would better off talking to his friend Nakamura-san, whom he must surely recognize sitting at the end of the bar?”

I turned. Hunched over the counter sat a skeleton with a drink and a sketchpad. It was him all right! Nakamura and I had been in the same French literature class at Keio; we had even once thought about producing a Sensationalist pamphlet together. But while my stories had withered on the vine, his drawings had won so much acclaim that he had been hired by the noted magazine
Manga
at the outbreak of the Pacific War . . . I remembered his cartoons well. They grew more and more barbarous as the war progressed. Allied soldiers bayoneted to death by loyal children of the emperor; aircraft carriers destroyed by whizzing Zero fighters; not to mention his celebrated masterpiece, “The Annihilation of Britain and America.” . . .

Naturally, I was overjoyed to see him sitting there, just as in the old days. As I slid over to him, he gave a sickly smile and quickly turned over his pad to hide whatever it was he was drawing. I asked him what there was to drink nowadays, and he told me that the only thing available was a rotten blend of distilled shochu dregs mixed with aviation fuel to give it a kick. I mulled this over for a few moments, and then remarked, philosophically, that the emperor himself had told us that we must endure the unendurable, after all.

I politely inquired whether Nakamura was still producing illustrations for
Manga
. He gave a ghastly grin, displaying many broken teeth, and, as I hoped, called to Mrs. Shimamura to pour us two glasses of the house spirit, in order to “welcome me home.” I thanked him politely and poured the drink into my mouth.

For a moment, I thought my throat was going to explode. I somehow managed to swallow the poisonous stuff, and promptly felt as if my eyes were bleeding. I tugged at Nakamura's sleeve to see what he was drawing. He tried to hide the pad, but I gripped hold of the paper and tugged, until suddenly it tore.

My, my. What an evolution. No foreign barbarians here: instead, a Japanese soldier (who bore a remarkable likeness to Nakamura himself) bowed in thanks to a titanic American with a colossal pair of scissors, who was triumphantly snipping the man free of chains that tied him to a pile of tanks and bombs. I laughed long and hard at this, and told Mrs. Shimamura that we'd better have two more glasses of her awful liquor to celebrate Nakamura-san's new career. I banged my glass against his.

“Well, Nakamura,” I said, “‘
À l'oeuvre on reconnaît l'artisan
.'” I poured the horrid stuff into my throat, and instantly slid from the chair.

 

Painful waves beat relentlessly against the quick of my brain. A sensation of helplessness—paralysis. Someone was pounding on the door. I was no longer in a stockade cell on a poisonous island, I realised, nor in the dark bowels of an oceangoing ship. I was somewhere I knew, somewhere as intimately familiar as the womb. Slowly, it dawned on me—with exquisite relief. The room above Mrs. Shimamura's shop. Reserved for customers to sleep off their night's excesses. The banging came again, and my panic rose as the door slid open.

Mrs. Shimamura poked her head into the room. “Time to go, sensei. I've laid out your breakfast.”

The thought of the crowds swelling around Tokyo Station filled my heart with fear.

“Obasan, perhaps I could ask you . . . ”

“Don't be a pain, sensei—”

“Please, obasan—”

Disgusted with myself, I broke into sobs as I knelt before her. “For just a few days, obasan. Please! I beg you.”

Mrs. Shimamura's face crinkled. She hesitated for a moment. I sensed victory.

Kind and noble obasan. She would let me stay—for just a few days. I was expected to carry out several duties in the bar. I was not expected to sit around the place pickling myself in sake lees.

I stayed on my knees as she strode from the room. I sank back into the soft blankets and closed my eyes. The crowds at the station, the waves of refugees casting about and crashing against each other . . . They were far away now. Here, I was safe, hidden upon my lifeboat, bobbing about on a quiet inland sea. The sky was flowing with the stars of the Milky Way.

 

The artists who had survived the war were emerging now from the cracks, crawling like valiant cockroaches to the refuge of Mrs. Shimamura's saloon. Every night, around the hour of the dog, the bar filled up with various writers, journalists and assorted poets I had known before the war, as well as the usual students and hangers-on.

My greatest need now was for money. With my mother dead, I was one of the few of the intellectuals with no private income of my own. I discussed the matter with Nakamura and a yawning Mrs. Shimamura one afternoon. What was the role of a writer, I asked, in a world that had fractured so entirely? How could he ever respond to such devastation? And how, I gloomily thought, was he ever to scratch a living? Every crevice had already been swept, it seemed, the dust rolled out into dough. We truly were distilling the dregs.

The following morning in Kanda, I was browsing Mr. Ota's bookshop again, wondering if I dared steal a bound copy of Zola's
L'Assommoir
. Two painters were hoisted up alongside the building next door, working upon its restoration, and, as they slopped whitewash on the brickwork, I overheard the drifting threads of their conversation. To my surprise, they were discussing meals they had once most enjoyed at this time of year. Toasted
mochi
filled with chestnut jam, one enthused. The crispness of the shell, the wonderfully sweet paste within . . . The other waxed lyrical about the pressed mackerel sushi he had eaten as a young man in Osaka—the vinegar tang of the silver-blue fish! The rice plump and sweet on the tongue! My mouth began to water, and I recalled a curious pining that I'd had for persimmons, as we sailed on our long voyage back to Japan from the South Seas, a craving that had seemed, at times, almost overwhelmingly intense, the memory of the fragrant juice, the soft, mottled flesh transporting me back almost beyond childhood . . .

I strolled over to the men and studied them as they worked. Their faces did not seem bitter or weathered, despite the cold. Rather, they were radiant, transported, transcendent even. They were dreamily happy, I realised, lost in the innocence of their memories. A thought struck me. I had a sudden inkling of what I might write.

 

Nakamura and Mrs. Shimamura agreed straight away that the plan was a good one. We would sell fantasies.

Mrs. Shimamura summarised things very cogently. She poured a glass of her clear spirit and pointed at it.

“Look,” she said, “if you can't afford sake, you have to settle for this.”

I agreed, reaching for the glass, but she snatched it up and tipped it against her lips, swallowing with a grimace.