The Street of a Thousand Blossoms (19 page)

After tossing and turning most of the night, he had no more dreams. Yoshio lay still in bed, listening to Fumiko’s steady breathing. On their futons, they hadn’t said a word to each other in the dark. And in the stillness, Yoshio’s decisions were made; the sudden dismantling of their lives would begin with the tower, followed by the departure of Fumiko and his grandsons to the safety of the countryside. They would evacuate to Nagano, to stay with his niece Reiko’s family until it was safe for them to return. Yoshio swallowed his fear, filled his darkness with the light of his grandsons, his many years with Fumiko. He knew the house, knew the alleyways, the small corners and crevices of this world he loved. It was too late for him to adapt to a new place again. He would stay in Yanaka, alone.

When the first whispers of morning arrived, Yoshio rose quietly from the futon into the cold darkness of late winter. He took each step up to the tower with steady purpose, and stood silently gazing up toward the sky. He imagined the light slowly revealing each detail of the world around him. He had built the tower to honor his daughter, Misako, and for the boys, only to realize that in the ensuing years, it had become his place of refuge. The watchtower stood just above the real world, where he mourned the past and welcomed the future. Now, it, too, would be gone and the future felt bleak.

Yoshio made his way down the steps and back into the kitchen. He knew every piece of the tower, had quickly determined which of
the support beams to weaken first in order to bring it down. He took eleven steps, turned to the right, and knelt down. By the window was the second wood plank he had loosened, hollowing out the earth underneath. Now his fingers dug still deeper into the dirt, until he touched the cloth he’d wrapped the sledgehammer in, lifting its solid weight with both hands.

Yoshio slipped back out the kitchen door. He stroked the wooden beams for one last time, felt for the joints, and carefully removed the wooden pegs that held them together. If he weakened the crossbeams in the right place, he judged, the tower would collapse within itself, out of harm’s way. Yoshio took a deep breath, stood to the right of the first beam, and swung hesitantly as the sledgehammer connected with a dull thud against the wood. He pulled back and swung again. With each swing, Yoshio felt lighter, just like when he heard the
Joya-no-Kane
, the traditional New Year’s gong being struck, each toll dispelling an evil hindrance, a malicious thought from his heart and mind, each swing carrying with it a private wish that he could never explain to Kenji.
Death to Okata!
He swung hard, hearing the wood crack.
Death to the kempeitai!
Yoshio swung again harder, crashing into the beam, revitalized with a strength long diminished by age and hunger.
Death to this imperial war!
His blood raced. Sweat clung to his back. He swung once more, heard the groan of the wood splintering. He paused a moment, swaying from side to side, then stepped over to the second beam, anxious to finish before his strength failed. With each blow, the watchtower creaked and shifted. Yoshio felt a long, sharp moan throughout his body as each evil hindrance left him, floated up and away into the early morning light.

Hiroshi woke with a start—a rhythmic pounded echoed through his dream and into his waking. At first he thought it was his own heart pounding, but the thumping reverberated through the entire house. Kenji had thrown his comforter over his head and didn’t stir. The windows were blacked out and Hiroshi couldn’t tell whether
it was light or dark outside. He flickered through the possibilities of an air raid or earthquake as he rushed downstairs to the kitchen. The pounding grew louder. His
obaachan
stood motionless at the window, pushing aside the blackout curtain as the early morning light filtered in.

“What is it?” Hiroshi asked. His voice was hoarse, still dazed with sleep.

“The tower,” she whispered.

Hirsoshi hurried to the window and saw his grandfather swinging a sledgehammer, striking the support beams that held up the watchtower.

“He’ll hurt himself.”

His grandmother reached out and grabbed his arm. “Hiro-chan, listen to me,” she said firmly. “Your
ojiichan
needs to do this himself.”

Hiroshi looked to his grandmother but she remained quiet.
“Obaachan
, you must stop him. He can’t even see what he’s doing,” he pleaded.

His grandmother turned slowly, as if she had suddenly lost all strength, and braced herself against the wooden table. “What you don’t understand, Hiro-chan, is that there are many ways to see,” she said.

Kenji padded into the kitchen a moment later. They stood and watched as his
ojiichan
swung once, twice, each time connecting with wood, a grunt coming from deep inside him. His
ojiichan
was tired, straining to lift the hammer, blow after blow, cracking the last of the main beams with a final booming strike. Hiroshi heard a faraway dog barking and knew the entire neighborhood must be awake.

“Shi oeru,”
his
obaachan
said to them. “Now it is finished.”

His
ojiichan’s
hands trembled as he dropped the sledgehammer to the ground, stepped back, and bowed very low toward the watchtower. Hiroshi didn’t move. He was reminded of being a little boy and knocking down all his blocks with one clean sweep of his arm. The watchtower had stood for all these years, a symbol of his childhood and his grandfather’s strength. Silently, they waited for the fall.

What Hiroshi would always remember was how the watchtower refused to fall. There would never be any explanation. It only happened when the
kempeitai
arrived to tear it down, and their voices rose to a frantic pitch as they scrambled away from the area of the weakened tower. Only then did the support beams suddenly creak and splinter, give in to the weight as the watchtower bowed to the ground. And not in pieces like his childhood blocks, but as a whole—like a body slowly falling.

By late spring, Hiroshi and Kenji began digging an air-raid shelter where their
ojiichan’s
watchtower once stood. Unlike all the slit trenches Hiroshi and his classmates dug along the roads, this was his most ambitious undertaking yet, a hole in the ground large enough to accommodate all four of them. An underground room with walls carved out and held up by pieces of wood scrap, and a roof made from a piece of corrugated metal he found behind Fukushima-san’s boarded-up
sembei
rice cracker store. For days, he and Kenji dug, deeper and deeper, excavating dirt and rock, and building up a three-foot dirt wall on all four sides. Every morning his muscles were so sore he could hardly lift his arms, and Kenji moaned at the thought of digging again. But by the end of the week, the air-raid shelter, a three-by-six rectangular pit, was complete.

The air-raid sirens screamed with more frequency now; at least once a week in the early hours of the morning, the Americans targeted strategic spots—airports, factories, and munitions warehouses—mostly located outside of Tokyo’s residential areas. Still, every time the sirens blasted, the family dragged themselves from their futons and into the shelter, listening for the dull thuds of bombs falling in the distance, feeling the rumble of the earth beneath their feet, waiting until the all-clear signal sounded, and wondering how much longer it would be until the bombs reached Yanaka.

Akira Yoshiwara packed only what he needed. He reached up for the tin behind the paints and pulled out the envelope of yen notes and slipped it into his pocket. It was an already hot August morning when Nishihara, one of the young artists, came stumbling into the shop just after dawn, breathless and fearing for his life. Most of the artists had been rounded up by the
kempeitai
, and he had escaped, just barely, only to come and warn Akira that they were on their way to take him in for questioning. There was no time to spare.

“How did they find out?” Akira asked.

Nishihara shrugged and poured water into a clay cup, drinking it down too quickly. “They’ve been watching us from the beginning,” he said, coughing.

The stupidity of it all, Akira thought, though he kept silent. He’d gotten caught up in their youthful exuberance, and his own belief that the war was senseless. Now, it had caught up with him, and after Otomo Matsui had used his influence to keep him from being drafted, he packed the ivory cat given to him by Matsui, his set of chisels, and an unfinished
Okina
mask in the middle of his bag of clothes, a reminder that he needed to return to finish it. He looked around the small shop, bright in the sunlight, where he had lived and worked for the past fifteen years. At first glance, it might have appeared just as bare and empty as when he first entered it, but Akira knew otherwise; the past three years had brought Kenji—and new life—to it.

He thought of how the boy would come and find the door locked and him gone. Kenji was the perfect protégé, but now Akira might never know the outcome of his talent. He had also been the closest person Akira had to a family.

He wrote a quick note for Kenji to find. “I must leave. No time to explain. Perhaps another day.” He didn’t write his name or anything else the
kempeitai
might use to find him. That done, nothing else mattered, except … “Nazo,” he called. He heard something from the other room and hurried back there. Nazo sat on the counter, waiting.

“We have to go now,” he said, as if talking to another person.

Nazo watched him, not moving. It was his right of refusal, though he had no say in the matter. Akira Yoshiwara scooped the cat up with one hand, grabbed his bag, and followed Nishihara out the door, locking it behind him. He left the note for Kenji wedged in the corner seam of the front window. Early on, the boy had spent so many hours standing there, gazing at the masks, it now seemed the right place, and one the
kempeitai
might miss in their abrupt way of seeing and not seeing. Akira knew there was only a slight chance Kenji would find the note before the military police arrived. Even so, he believed that life was made up of chances.

The decision for Kenji and Hiroshi to leave for the countryside was settled. They would leave at the week’s end in the midst of the lingering heat. The week before, Kenji had heard his
obaachan’s
raised voice coming from the kitchen, bringing him and Hiroshi downstairs to witness a rare argument between his grandparents. Usually their disagreements were settled with a quick, sharp word that reverberated through the room and landed with finality. This time, the words streamed from his grandmother’s lips as if she’d been waiting all these years to release them. “Don’t be foolish, old man; do you think I would leave you here alone?” Her eyes blazed, her mouth snapped open and closed like a turtle’s at his suggestion of her leaving Yanaka without him.

“I’m not a child,” his
ojiichan
answered.

“A child would have more sense,” she added.

His
ojiichan
cleared his throat and remained silent.

Kenji’s
obaachan
would stay in Yanaka with his
ojiichan
and that was that. He could see the sweat glisten on her forehead.
“Iie,”
she said again, calmer and more definite. “No, not without you.” Her gaze moved past his
ojiichan
and out the window to the empty space where the tower had stood. “This is my home, too. The boys will be fine with Reiko-san.” It was final then, like a door slammed shut. His
ojiichan
sat back looking thoughtful, the shadow of a smile on his lips.