The Street of a Thousand Blossoms (32 page)

They were no less proud of Kenji the scholar, as Yoshio called him, who had been accepted into Tokyo University. Yoshio was thrilled that Kenji was studying architecture, though Fumiko was fully aware he had chosen it for their sake, not his own. She knew he’d have been much happier spending his life carving Noh masks, lost in the magical world of the theater. Still, it wouldn’t harm Kenji to be
an artisan with an education. For Yoshio and her, the past was past; the future belonged to their grandsons.

Hiroshi helped Fukuda put the last of the equipment away, and then swept the practice room while his young friend gathered the rest of the towels. While Fukuda chattered on about what kind of stew they would be having for lunch later, Hiroshi still felt Tanaka-oyakata’s impatience at practice that morning, his sharp, terse scolding that cut through the thick air of the room. “No, no, no, keep your knees bent!” he had yelled at Hiroshi. Even Daishima had kept a low profile.

The first postwar professional sumo match was held in the gardens at the Meiji Shrine in western Tokyo. Hiroshi had easily won his matches, though it felt no different from the practice rounds he’d been doing for the past year. The wrestlers were novices and young. The next major tournament of the year, the September
honbasho
, would take place in a few months’ time. It was an important one for several of the young wrestlers, including Hiroshi. If he fought well, he would be in line to advance to the next level, the Jonidan Division. But this particular tournament carried another kind of pressure: Hiroshi would be wrestling a young sumo named Kobayashi from the nearby Musashigawa-beya. As Tanaka-oyakata drummed into him during practice, Kobayashi was an up-and-coming wrestler who shared many of Hiroshi’s distinctions: the same upper-body strength and the ability to move quickly. A wrestler of such caliber would test Hiroshi’s skills and they would both be watched closely. Tanaka had barely paid attention to earlier matches, confident his
sumotori
would win. This time, Hiroshi felt his
oyakata’s
anxiety, tied to his own hopes of raising his ranking and making Tanaka-sama proud.

“What do you think?” Fukuda’s voice interrupted his thoughts. As always, his conversation each morning was centered on food. “What
kind of
chanko
do you think Haru-san has made today?” he asked again. He hadn’t suffered as much from the severe food shortages during the war as everyone else had because his father was a farmer who had hidden away some of his rice crop when the war began. Every year, he stored away the same amount so the military wouldn’t be suspicious. It was his hope that his son could stay healthy and strong and become a
sumotori
.

Until there were enough
sumotori
at the stable to do all the chores, Tanaka’s older daughter, Haru, prepared some of the food. She was fifteen, very pretty, and already accomplished at the things her mother would have done as
okamisan
of the stable. After she cooked the
chanko
in the main house, Hiroshi or Fukuda would carry it over to the stable. Hiroshi would never forget the first time he’d seen Haru and her bandaged hands. Although she seemed fine now, she still hid her hands in the folds of her kimono or the pockets of her jacket. She always seemed shy around him.

“I think Haru-san’s making you a special
Mizutaki chankonabe
, with lots of fresh fish and tofu, onions, cabbage, shoyu, sugar, and plenty of sake,” Hiroshi teased, shaking away the morning’s practice. Food was still scarce during the occupation and
Mizutaki
was Fukuda’s favorite. Hiroshi remembered playing the same game with Kenji during the war when there was so little to eat that they filled their stomachs with talk and dreams.

“
Mitzutaki chankonabe
over steaming bowls of rice,” Fukuda added, rubbing his round stomach.

Hiroshi threw a dirty towel at him and laughed. “You need to finish all the laundry first.”

Haru chopped the last of the turnips and threw them into the
chanko
. Even in the heat of summer, she liked cooking for her father’s wrestlers. And though it was only temporary, just during the school break until classes began again, it gave her something to do each day. She had volunteered for the job when the young wrestler who had done the
cooking suddenly decided last month that the rigorous training and difficult life of a sumo weren’t for him. Haru stepped in before her father assigned cooking duty to either Fukuda or Hiroshi, who both already had enough to do.

Haru looked down at her hands. The skin on her fingers and palms had thickened as they healed, and now the only sign of a scar was just below the thumb on her left hand, where the soft pad of skin and flesh puckered to a small rise. She couldn’t help touching it with her other fingers. It was the only telltale sign of the fire, and barely noticeable if you didn’t look closely, which only Haru did. She opened and closed her hands, felt the skin pull tight. She had to look hard to find the lines on the palms of her hands that should tell whether she had long life, good health, love, or fortune in her future. Sometimes she wondered if this meant her very life would be forever shrouded and obscure, unreadable by even the best of fortune-tellers.

At times, Haru still felt a sharp burning in her palms and the tips of her fingers, and suddenly the three years disappeared and she was twelve years old again, hooking her arm through Aki’s as they ran and ran, their eyes stinging, lungs burning, running through the thick, acrid smoke back to the stable, running fast so that her little sister wouldn’t see the burned bodies writhing in agony, pleading for water. Haru dragged Aki along, heavy as an anchor. All the while, the burns on her hands were so painful she could barely stand it.

When they finally reached the sumo stable, Haru slumped onto the step at the front gate, her raw hands raised as if she were begging. Yellow pus oozed from the burned flesh, caked with mud where she had soothed them in the dirt of the trench all night. Aki ran back and forth, trying to find something that might comfort her, water or a blanket. The fire had consumed part of her father’s sumo stable, though the house and the building that housed the
keikoba
still stood.

“It’s my fault, it’s my fault,” Aki repeated over and over, touching her singed hair, the raw patch on the back of her head.

Haru shook her head, her words stopped by unbearable pain,
thinking,
How could this war be your fault?
But she didn’t have the strength even to whisper the words.

When the smoke had cleared, Haru heard her sister cry out,
“Otosan!”
and run to him as he appeared through the wall of smoke. Haru looked up but she couldn’t stand. So she waited, palms throbbing, and watched as her father, covered in black filth, picked Aki up and held her tight. Then he saw Haru and knelt down in front of her, his eyes like two bright stars in the dark night. “Haru-chan,” he whispered, pulling her close. At last, Haru allowed herself to cry.

It took months for her hands to heal from infections, first on one finger and then another. By the time the bandages were removed, most of the nerves had been affected, leaving her hands numb. Since then, Haru had felt distant from everything in her life, with the exception of her father and Aki. The fire dulled her vision, too. Nothing would ever be as hot and bright again. Even though Haru excelled in her studies, she didn’t really feel connected to the pencil that touched the paper.

Haru looked up when she heard Aki sliding the door open to let Fukuda in. She smiled to think how much food the
rikishi
consumed in one sitting: the
chankonabe
, which was a mainstay stew made from a variety of ingredients, as well as the many bowls of rice, the beer, the tea. Before the war and occupation, her mother had shopped with the wrestler on
chanko
duty, stopping at one market after another. Now, Haru went by herself or with Aki, buying whatever was most reasonably priced, mostly root vegetables and an occasional piece of salted fish. In earlier, more prosperous days, the stew pot was filled with generous pieces of beef, chicken, or pork; squid, crab, or shrimp. There would also be side plates of pickled vegetables, fried fish or chicken,
sashimi
, sweet potatoes, and salad. Today, however, they would have a broth instead of a stew.

Haru’s hair clung to her sweaty forehead. She lifted the lid from the big iron pot and added a dash of shoyu for taste, and then hesitated before adding more. She watched as the vegetables bubbled in the thick, fragrant broth.

“Fukuda-san is here for the
chankonabe!”
Aki called out. Haru knew her sister would bow and smile and then return to their room, to flip through her magazines or read a book. At twelve, Aki had become too self-conscious to watch the big boys practice at the stable, and except for going to the market with Haru, she kept mostly to herself.

Haru turned back to the pot of
chankonabe
and dropped in a fistful of udon noodles to fill up their stomachs. In the past few weeks, food had become more abundant and reasonably priced. If she were lucky, maybe she could buy half a chicken, or perhaps even a whole one at the end of the week.

Fukuda came lumbering down the hall into the kitchen. The young wrestler filled the room with a playfulness long missing from the stable. Hiroshi, who was older and more serious, made Haru feel less comfortable than did Fukuda, who was closer to her age. Fukuda seemed more like a brother than one of her father’s
sumotori
, more easygoing than the others.

“A
soppu dakki chankonabe
, with udon,” she told him.

Fukuda bowed. “We’re lucky to have you cooking for us, Haru-san,” he said.

Haru smiled. She took down a bowl and scooped some noodles and broth into it. “Here,” she said, knowing he would be eating last, after all the other
rikishi
. “Just a taste.”

Fukuda bowed again, a smile on his wide, open face. He balanced the bowl in both of his hands, blew on it, took a few measured sips, and then slurped the noodles down.

Aki sat at her desk and touched the small bald scar on the back of her head where the hair no longer grew, a reminder of the firestorm that had caused worse hurt than this scar. No one ever noticed it now, since her long hair covered the spot, but to Aki, it was like an open wound. The imperfection felt hard and smooth, about the size of a small prune plum.

She turned the page of her magazine, unconsciously feeling for
the hairless patch. Haru often teased her about the habit, saying that she’d only make it bigger if she continued to pick at it. But Aki thought otherwise. Despite its traumatic origin, the scar provided her a strange reassurance of her survival, and she couldn’t stop feeling for it, making sure it was still there.

The summer heat was stifling. Aki wondered how Haru could stand being in the kitchen every day, cooking
chankonabe
for her father’s wrestlers, but then her sister did everything without complaint. Aki could never keep up,
ichi, ni, san
… always three steps behind. She tried to quash the flicker of discontent and keep it from becoming a point of meanness. She loved her sister, she did, but with Haru busy every day with shopping and cooking for the sumo stable, the summer seemed endless, each day blending into the next. Sometimes Aki dreamed that her mother was still alive, that it wasn’t her body that Hiroshi had found by the river after the firestorm. That it was all a mistake and her mother would one day return to them. It made Aki feel better to imagine that, to touch the smooth patch on the back of her head and hope that when her mother returned to them, her hair would grow back again in the same spot.