The Street of a Thousand Blossoms (13 page)

Most mornings, while his
obaachan
waited in ration lines, Hiroshi’s
ojiichan
procured whatever he could on the black market through friends at the bar. Sometimes, he would get lucky and return with a few real eggs or cans of marinated eel. Still, it never seemed enough, and when the Pacific War began, it had dwindled to next to nothing. Hiroshi could see that the failure had discouraged his grandfather, who appeared frail and lost; his eyes blank and lifeless. He spent more and more time up in the watchtower, alone.

But while his
ojiichan
grew more remote, his grandmother couldn’t stop moving. On one warm April morning, as Hiroshi hurried home to retrieve a forgotten schoolbook, he saw his
obaachan
leaving the house carrying one of her favorite kimonos—the pale green silk with a flowing pattern of purple irises—which she quickly tucked into a
furoshiki
.

“Hiroshi, are you all right?” she asked, her voice rising with concern.

“I’m fine,
obaachan
. I just forgot a book. Where are you going with your kimono?”

She paused and then asked, “Is a kimono’s beauty more important than food on the table?”

It took Hiroshi a moment to realize what she was saying. One by one, she was selling her best kimonos—for more rice, canned food, powdered eggs, half a dozen sweet potatoes, and some precious salted fish and miso. He also knew there would be penalties if she were caught by the
kempeitai;
another woman’s small rice ration was taken away when she was caught selling her kimonos on the black market. His grandmother’s courage frightened him, made him want to hover over her and protect her. He glanced down at the
furoshiki
clutched tightly in her hand, and grieved for the soft touch of the kimono’s silk, the vibrant colors and bold patterns of his grandmother’s youth. He silently vowed to get them all back for her, each and every one.

If his
ojiichan
had found solace in the stars, his
obaachan
put her energy into the soil. By the spring of 1942, it became mandatory that each household in the neighborhood plant a vegetable garden to supplement the rationing. The neighborhood associations were given seeds to distribute to each of the households under their jurisdiction, while the
kempeitai
made rounds to make sure each family was doing its share, taking advantage of the opportunity to make off with the best vegetables. Every square foot of dirt was tilled and planted, with hopes of producing enough food for the neighborhood.

As the demand for food increased, Hiroshi watched his grandmother kneeling by the patch of earth in the front courtyard, while she hummed the folk songs that she sang to them as children.

“It reminds me of my childhood,” she said, instructing Hiroshi to water each sprouting plant. “Not too much,” she directed.

“I didn’t know you were such a gardener.”

“Your great-grandmother had the gardener’s touch. I believe she could bury a pebble and something would bloom from it.” She rubbed the dirt from her hands and pushed herself up from the ground.

Hiroshi helped her to her feet. “Just think what her daughter will grow with real seeds,” he said.

She looked at him and smiled, then reached up and patted his cheek. “How did you grow so tall and strong? With so little to nourish …”

“Because of you,” he said, laughing. “You have the gardener’s touch.”

Hiroshi liked working in the garden, digging down into the earth and dropping the small seeds, always amazed that with a bit of watering, the strong stems would rise from the plot of dirt no larger than a tatami mat. It gave him hope that miracles could still happen. Funny how he’d paid no attention to that patch of earth before, and now it produced vegetables that the
kempeitai
picked over, leaving only some spinach and the few turnips that graced their table. He felt overwhelmingly proud the first time they sat down to eat their own wilted leaves and soft turnips.

And while he and Kenji often helped their
obaachan
in the garden, Hiroshi knew his
ojiichan
was frustrated that he couldn’t do more. His eyesight was failing, shadows now, Hiroshi thought. It seemed his
ojiichan
was disappearing more and more into his own world. The last time his grandfather tried to help, he accidentally stepped on some newly sprouted shoots. He heard the distress in his grandmother’s voice as she said, “No, Yoshio, no! Perhaps you should stand over here.” She took his arm and led him away like a small child. Now every bright spring morning, when Hiroshi went up to the tower to fetch his grandfather down to help in the vegetable garden, his
ojiichan
refused. He never ventured near it again.

By the warm summer evenings of 1942, they ate in silence. Hiroshi listened to the empty clink of the bowls and decided he had to do something to appease their hunger. He watched his
obaachan
ladle a
watery stew made of the last of the turnips and carrots on top of his half bowl of rice and felt whatever happiness he’d had slowly dissipate. His
obaachan
placed the bowl in front of him, her gaze avoiding his. Hiroshi remembered her wide smile when he was a little boy, as she told him how each bite of food would make him bigger and stronger, filling his bowl with choice morsels of fish, chicken, and thin slices of beef. He remembered the laughter, the buzz of all their voices humming through the kitchen. Now as his
obaachan
hardly ate, he knew she was saving her little bit of rice for him and Kenji.

Like their grandparents, he and Kenji learned to battle their hunger in different ways. Lying on his futon at night, Hiroshi slowly came to see that the war and rationing were depleting not only their bodies but also their spirits. He saw that when there was so little, everything mattered, and even fantasies provided nourishment. While Kenji lost himself in his theater books, Hiroshi dreamed of sumo, of what it might have been like to enter the Katsuyama-beya and become a champion. Sometimes these small hopes and dreams helped to divert his thoughts from his empty stomach.

On other nights, he and Kenji lay on their futons in the dark and faced their hunger head-on; they would remember something they particularly loved to eat, describing it so vividly that Hiroshi’s mouth watered and his stomach ached from the want of it. Kenji was especially good at description.

“Hiro,” Kenji whispered from his futon. “Tonight, if there were no war, we would have eaten
obaachan
’s sukiyaki. The bowl would be steaming hot with the shoyu, sweet rice wine, cabbage, rice noodles, carrots, and chunks of tender chicken still boiling to the top. You would have eaten three bowls of rice and
ojiichan
would have teased you about leaving something for the rest of us.”

“So then,” Hiroshi added, “
obaachan
would return to the kitchen and bring out a plate of pork cutlets, fried crunchy the way you like them.”

“And more steaming rice, with layers of marinated eel on top. Red bean cake, for dessert.”

“And
orenji,”
Hiroshi added. Just saying the full, round word “oranges” made his mouth water. He tried to remember the last time a wedge of sweet juice exploded in his mouth. Then he groaned at the dearth of such food, and the hunger that clenched at his stomach. A sourness rose in his mouth and he covered his head with his comforter.

It began with persimmons. Afterward, the stealing became easier, though much more dangerous. Hiroshi had stolen a dozen rotting persimmons from the yard of their neighbors the Odas. The
kempeitai
had taken all the rest, leaving all the rotted fruit scattered on the ground. Such waste seemed careless and arrogant, even though his grandparents might have done the same thing prior to the war. By late 1942, nothing could be taken for granted and the idea of waste filled Hiroshi with anger. Before the Odas dared to come out, he climbed over the fence and took as many as he could carry, at least a dozen. Three for each of them. That’s the way he thought now; it was always “how many were left?” and “how long would it last?” until the rice was gone, until the miso ran out, until they were reduced to eating turnip soup. He would make it up to Oda-san another day, he thought, as he ran with the decaying fruit in the pocket of his outstretched T-shirt, sticky and wet against his stomach, as the juice ran down his arms and hands, and the sickly sweet smell stayed with him for days after.

Long before the war, the tall persimmon tree with its large leaves bloomed brilliant shades of yellow, orange, and red in the Odas’ yard every fall, the dangling fruit like shiny lanterns. The children in the neighborhood called it the
kurisumasu tsuri
, the Christmas tree. Now the real gift was the smile on his
obaachan’s
face as she caressed each one of the rotting, sticky fruits. She then made a persimmon pudding out of them, never once asking where they came from.

After the persimmons, he stole a can of pickled vegetables, snatched from a black marketeer when he turned his back, a few carrots left in someone’s vegetable garden, and a container of fresh tofu from Okata-san, their neighbor down the block, who was rumored to be a puppet of the
kempeitai
. Early on, Okata volunteered to lead the neighborhood association. No one suspected he would betray his friends and neighbors for extra ration coupons, or a carton of cigarettes. It was said he had turned in a neighbor for having as little as a cup more of the allotted rice.

Hiroshi was exhilarated when he set the tofu in front of his grandmother. Stealing from Okata felt better than any wrestling match he’d ever won. His
obaachan
watched him, a glint of fear in her eyes. “No more,” she said softly. And Hiroshi nodded, because he knew it would put her mind at ease. But he wouldn’t promise to stop stealing if it was the only way he could help them survive. So he told her a funny story, to tease her out of her seriousness. “You look as if I’ve come home with the lowest grade in the class,” he said easily. Gradually, she smiled, but not before pleading with him again to be very careful.

Every night as they lay on their futons, Hiroshi whispered a new story to Kenji. He had stolen from Okata again, and not just anything but a box of New Year’s
mochi
, sticky rice with red bean in the middle, given to Okata by the military police for his exemplary service as head of the neighborhood association. “I heard everything,” Hiroshi said. “I was waiting just outside his kitchen window. When Okata showed them out, I took the box of
mochi
off the table and walked right out.” Hiroshi snickered and spread his body full length on his futon. “He shouldn’t leave his back door open.”

Kenji could feel his brother smiling in the dark. With Hiroshi next to him in their small room, it felt like the safest place in the world. How could everything change so quickly? The once vibrant streets of Yanaka had turned gray and drab, the bright-colored cloth
banners hanging from shops torn down, replaced with blackout curtains or black inked-out windows. Everyone walked around like hungry ghosts, while he moved carefully down the alleyways to the mask shop. But what Kenji hated most of all was the noise—the air-raid sirens that blasted in the early hours of the morning and brought them outside, shivering as they squeezed into a makeshift air-raid shelter, the high, scratchy voices that came over the radio, the whimpering ones begging for food in the streets, and the low, worried whispers between his grandparents that hummed through the house like persistent flies.