The Street of a Thousand Blossoms (3 page)

That night after dinner as Hiroshi sat bent over his schoolwork, his grandmother came into the dining room and sat on the tatami mat across from him, pouring each of them a cup of green tea. It was his grandparents, Yoshio and Fumiko Wada, who kept the spirit of his
parents alive, long after three-year-old Hiroshi and his eighteen-month-old brother, Kenji, were orphaned. His
obaachan
often stopped whatever she was doing, washing clothes or preparing his grandfather’s favorite sticky rice, to tell Hiroshi stories of his parents and how they had saved his life. “You are a child of good fortune,” his
obaachan
whispered, so that the gods wouldn’t hear her and return to take him away, too. “They loved you and your little brother more than life.” She always sighed as if the ache of their deaths could be expelled.

When she began to speak, he looked up from his books, drank down his tea, and listened to his
obaachan’s
story.
“Your mother and father were so happy to get away to Kyoto for their first overnight trip since you were born,”
she began, her voice clear but calm in the small dining room.
“And still, they wanted to take you with them. You were just three years old. Kenji was eighteen months and I insisted that he stay with your
ojiichan
and me. It was the last evening of the Lantern Festival at Miyazu Bay. They wanted to show you the red lanterns glimmering on the dark water like fireflies, where the spirit ships welcomed ancestors back to the human world. It was a warm and still summer night and your mother wore her red-flowered summer kimono. Who could have known that the spirits would take your mother and father back into their world with them?”
His
obaachan
swallowed. Her pause was like a sorrow she could never voice.
“Everyone felt festive in the calm, unusually dark night. The water gleamed the color of black pearl. Some men with a fishing boat offered to take spectators out into the bay to float among the lanterns. What possesses people to do what they do? Your mother and father stepped onto that boat, with you squirming in your father’s arms. Too late they realized that the men steering the boat were drunk, that they’d been drinking sake all afternoon and should never have taken people out on that dark night. They went out too far, away from the shore, away from the lighted lanterns, away from all that was safe. In the blindness of that night, the boat struck rocks. The wood snapped and cracked. The boat ripped apart like shoji beneath their feet, separating your parents onto opposite halves of the deck. The boat sank in minutes—just enough time for your quick-thinking father to place you in an empty fish barrel. You floated on the waves, crying after him, while he dived into the dark waters in search of your mother, who had
never been a strong swimmer. Just beyond them, a wall of floating lanterns blocked the view of what was happening; your screams were lost in the revelry. When the other boats came to the rescue, all eight passengers were found drowned that night in Miyazu Bay, all except you, Hiroshi, floating in your fish barrel, and the young captain of the boat. They told us that water had just begun to seep into the barrel.”

“What happened to the captain?” Hiroshi asked. He pushed his books aside and looked down at his grandmother’s thin, blue-veined hands that never seemed to stop moving.

“His body was never found,” his
obaachan
answered. She sat for a moment in silence; Hiroshi felt bitterness cut through the air between them. “I prayed the spirits of the dead had taken him that night, forgetting to leave his body behind.”

At the end of his grandmother’s story, Hiroshi stood and stretched. He took a deep breath, and went to study the black-and-white photograph of his parents, Kazuo and Misako, that sat on the
tokonoma
, the recessed shelf in his grandparents’ living room. Misako had been their only daughter. He saw himself in his father’s tall, heavyset build, his dark, almost brooding features, while Kenji was a daily reminder of his delicate mother with her liquid, faraway gaze. He wondered whether his parents might have lived if he hadn’t been with them that night. Those precious moments given to him might have saved their lives. The thought stabbed at the side of his brain until his head ached. Which was worse, he asked himself—having them taken from him, or not remembering them at all, like Kenji? The answer tilted one way, then the other, never finding balance.

Where are they now? Hiroshi sometimes wondered, though he never said the words aloud. Were they watching from the heavens? Did they know when he and Kenji were bad? When he was a little boy, it all seemed too large and confusing. What he remembered felt less and less tangible.

As Hiroshi grew older, his own memories of that night blurred with the distance of a dream. He began to hear slight discrepancies
in each version of his
obaachan
’s story. He never asked how she could know so much. He never questioned any of the differences—the change in time, the shade of darkness in the night, the color of his mother’s kimono or his father’s shoes. He liked the way she reinvented his parents, brought them back to life. Bits and pieces of their existence returned to him, his father’s arms holding him tightly, his mother’s lovely, smiling eyes upon his face, the darkness of that night, the red lights, the slapping of water all around him as he floated light and ethereal. His
obaachan
always began the story with a great burst of energy, her voice rising and falling like waves, lapping slowly to shore almost in a whisper as she came to the end. He sat back transfixed, wanting only to hear it again, while his younger brother, Kenji, covered his ears or left the room, preferring to be as far away as possible. But his
obaachan
, tired and spent, always needed to lie down afterward.

Every August, during the Obon festival, when they went to the crowded Yanaka cemetery to honor the spirits of the dead, Hiroshi looked at the two stone slabs with his parents’ names written in bold, black characters, but he refused to believe they could be there, buried in the hard, cold ground. They were floating, he thought, if not in water then in the air, all around them. The drifting fog of burning incense made his eyes water. His
obaachan
placed bowls of rice, vegetables, fruits, and sweet cakes in front of the graves for the spirits to eat. At the sight of the gravestones, Kenji pursed his lips, jabbed at the dark earth with his foot, and remained silent throughout their
obaachan’s
chanting prayers. It was the only time Kenji ever held Hiroshi’s hand, squeezed tight in a sweaty grip. He never let go until they were back home.

They lived on the street of a thousand blossoms, one of the narrow lanes not far from the Kyo-ou-ji temple, in a row of similar two-story
wooden houses with a courtyard in front, a square of land in the backyard, slanting roofs, and jutting eaves. Though the houses were right next to each other, their wooden fences and blooming walls of thick bamboo provided each house with a separate intimacy. A string of wind chimes hung by Hiroshi’s front gate next to a faded red metal mailbox, and when a brisk wind stirred the chimes, a chorus of tinkling filled the air like hurried voices.

What did set his grandparents’ house apart from the rest in Yanaka was the soaring addition his
ojiichan
had built after Hiroshi’s parents drowned. The
tenshukaku
was added onto the back of the house, off the kitchen, a wooden watchtower with a staircase that wound twelve feet above the surrounding rooftops to a deck at the top. It was covered with an identical slanting roof and jutting eaves.

As a little boy, Hiroshi remembered his
ojiichan
, before he retired, returning from work as the
toji
, the brewery master at the Hanku Sake Factory. He changed his clothes and worked at building the tower board by board, fitting the wooden pegs in place—the rhythmic pounding a part of Hiroshi’s childhood. He watched wide-eyed, as if it were a game his
ojiichan
was playing, just like the building blocks he and Kenji stacked one atop another. But at the end of the day, their blocks came crashing down, while his
ojiichan
slowly added to the tower’s height like a child growing taller.

“Why?” he remembered his grandmother asking one night when his
ojiichan
finally came in. It was dark and chilly and his grandfather’s skin looked gray from the cold, his eyes half-closed as he sat in the warmth of the kitchen.

“It’s to observe the life around us,” he answered at last, and sipped from his hot tea.

“What life? What do you suppose you’ll see up there, old man?” she muttered, a tenderness slipping in at the edge of her words.

“My eyes may be failing,” he answered, “but Hiroshi and Kenji have so much to see. Misako would have wanted that for them.” His voice rose in strength at the mention of his only daughter’s name.

Hiroshi thought about his mother every time he climbed the stairs up to the tower. Not only did it become a place for the boys to observe the world around them, but a space where they built imaginary
worlds. The tower became the Himeji Castle, nicknamed the White Heron Castle, that soared into the sky. Other times it was a sailing vessel in the middle of an endless sea, but always it was a place of comfort and dreams. Perched high among the clouds, Hiroshi and Kenji could be gods or samurais, each finding his own kind of solace.

One night, when Hiroshi was eight years old, long after the boys were supposed to be asleep, he heard low murmurs and a girlish laughter coming from up in the tower. He might have mistaken the laughter for that of a stranger, if he hadn’t heard it before, far away in the back of his memory. He stole out of bed and made his way quietly up the stairs, only to spy his grandparents together, watching the night sky, his
ojiichan
leaning over and whispering something that made his
obaachan
laugh again—high and girlish—a sound he suddenly recognized as his mother’s laugh. She was there with them. And for a moment, Hiroshi felt a tingling sensation, his mother close by, hovering in the air just above them.

When neighbors complained or made a disparaging remark about the height of the tower and the obstruction of sunlight in their courtyards, his
ojiichan
met their disapproving gaze with a smile and a bow of his head as if in apology. Then he leaned over and whispered to his grandsons, “Yes, but we are that much closer to the heavens.”

Kenji had been a frail and quiet baby. His grandparents always took great care to keep him from catching a cold or becoming too hot under the quilted comforters. He lay in his basket and always seemed to be searching for something with his dark, distant gaze.
Neko-no-me
, Cat-eyes, his
obaachan
called him. “You are the small cat that will survive the fire,” she whispered to him lovingly. “While your big brother, Hiroshi, will live by his head, you will live by your heart.” It was something Kenji heard his grandmother say many times when he was growing up. But he wanted to know why he was the one who lived by his heart. Why couldn’t he be more like Hiroshi? He put his
hand over the left side of his chest, felt the dull thumping through his shirt, and smiled.