The Street of a Thousand Blossoms (35 page)

Hiroshi placed a wet towel over his face and leaned back. In the ring tonight, he hadn’t really thought about any of the seventy
kimarite
moves; his body just seemed to take over with an instinctive sureness that surprised him. Sitting up, he let the towel slip into the water.

Hiroshi lay down but couldn’t sleep. He imagined all the upper-ranked
sekitori
wrestlers laughing at him, so excited over one win, with so many tournaments still ahead of him. They’d slap him on the back, pull on his belt, and tease him, their voices low and rough. “Do you think one match makes you a champion?” Hiroshi knew it didn’t. What Tanaka-oyakata had told him was true, his career was only beginning and the road was long. He must learn from his mistakes, grow faster and stronger if he were to become a champion. Yet this match was his first taste of real victory, and he drank it in. The other wins had been too easy, but Kobayashi was his equal.

As the snores of the other wrestlers grew louder, Hiroshi shifted on his futon. He would be up and training again in a few hours. He closed his eyes and saw again the smiling faces of his
obaachan
and
ojiichan
after the match. Kenji stood proudly beside them. Only then did Hiroshi fall asleep.

By late March, the biting winds that whipped through the mountains had finally calmed, and ice thawed in pale rays of sunlight that made everything appear as fragile as glass. While the snow melted, Akira resumed his regular schedule, eager to see Kiyo waiting for him every afternoon on the rutted road that led up to the house. During the week and on Saturday mornings, she returned to school down in the village.

Akira walked up the sodden path, skirting the icy water that streamed down in muddy rivulets. The air smelled of fresh pine, wet earth, and the wood fires that burned nonstop in the big, dark, sloped-roof houses.

“Akira-san! Akira-san!” Kiyo called out to him on this clear Sunday morning.

Her voice echoed down through the trees and Akira smiled and waved. There was no one else to hear her on the mountain road today. Mostly, the people of Aio kept to themselves. Other than old Tomita-san, who had brought him up from the station in his cart, the couple he rented his room from, and Emiko and Kiyo, Akira had few friends in Aio. “That’s just the way people are here,” Emiko had told him. “They keep to themselves.” Akira respected the wish to keep a polite distance. But Emiko and Kiyo had changed him. For the first time in years, he anticipated and worried about the needs of others. It was a responsibility he took for granted back in Tokyo.
There were even moments when he felt he could love and take care of Emiko and Kiyo, just like any husband and father. But alone in his room, when Akira closed his eyes and his hand reached down to find release, the smiles he saw half-cloaked in an alley’s darkness were on the faces of other men.

Akira watched Kiyo taking careful steps down the slope toward him, as she angled her body sideways along the narrow dirt path. This shortcut was steep and faster than walking around the curve of the main road, but now her
tabi
socks and sandals were covered in mud. For a moment he felt as a father might feel waiting for his child, that hard piece of ice in the middle of his stomach slowly melting.

“Come on, I have a surprise for you,” Kiyo said, happy and excited as she reached him. “It’s your turn to seek it out.” She took Akira’s hand and led him away from the main road, along another muddy path that led up a steep incline toward the rocks.

“I should see if your mother needs more wood,” he said, following her off the path. “Where are we going?” he asked.

“You’ll see,” Kiyo answered.

The path led up the hillside through a wooded area of tall pine trees that left the world in half-shadow. Patches of ice formed islands on the ground. Hot and sweaty with the climb, his feet slipping on the soft, muddy earth, Akira was glad when they came out of the trees at the top of the path into a clearing. It seemed the whole world was melting around them. He heard the crackling sound of ice thawing from above, water streaming. Akira looked up at the steep incline that led through the rocks. “And what will I see here?” he asked.

Kiyo laughed. “Just wait,” she said.

Following, he noticed how much taller she’d grown during the winter months. Now that spring had arrived, her plain maroon kimono looked too short, exposing her ankles and wrists. It made him suddenly wonder what sort of a young man Kenji had grown into. He imagined him tall and thin, too serious and always capable.

“Over here!” Kiyo called out, all legs and arms as she hurried up the rocky trail. Akira must buy her a new kimono. There was still money in the tin from his years of mask making, and he required very little for his simple needs. Perhaps he could take Emiko and Kiyo shopping for a kimono down in Oyama, where he could also buy more charcoal and drawing paper. He looked up to see Kiyo impatiently waiting for him in the middle of the muddy path, the mountainside rising all around her. The sun beat down on them as he reached her.

“It’s in there,” she said, pointing down to a narrow, dark crevice between two large rocks. She appeared so slight against the towering mountain.

“What’s in there?” he asked.

“A gift for you.”

Akira smiled. In her excitement, she’d given away the hiding place. In all their previous games of hide-and-seek, Kiyo was always the one seeking the small gifts he delighted in giving her. All during the long, cold winter, he imagined her wandering around the house alone, with school so haphazard when it snowed. How did she contain her spirit? “All right,” he said, bowing to her slightly. He walked up to the slim crevice between the rocks, knelt down, and squeezed his left hand into it, feeling for whatever Kiyo had hidden there. He faintly heard the sound of water running down the rocks above, the melting snow carrying stray stones, and as he felt the icy trickle against his hand, he imagined this was what darkness felt like. His fingers touched a piece of cloth, closed tightly around it, and pulled it forward.

At the same moment, he heard a rushing sound coming down the mountain, and looked up to see a river of water and mud, felt the rocks shift. It rushed over him so quickly that his head thumped against the ground as the mud and water drenched him. He shouted at Kiyo to run as a second wall of mud and rocks buried him. Akira struggled for breath, his arm twisted where he knelt against the rock, his left hand in terrible pain. He spat mud and tried to move, but his hand was pinned, the pain excruciating. He heard a scream not his own. It was Kiyo, somewhere beyond the mud wall, digging through the rocks and sludge.

In his darkness, his head began to spin. Akira found a pocket of
air and took another deep breath, pressed his forehead to the rock, and closed his eyes. He saw his father’s angry red face as he soaked in the
ofuro
. Then Sato, at the door of his shop, the slight smile on his lips the day he left, never to return. Now it was Kenji who peered through the darkness as through the shop window, a boy who loved the masks as much as he did. Didn’t that mean something? Hadn’t Akira done some good in his life? Would Kenji understand that he had had to leave, had had to flee the war, find his way to Aio to help Emiko and Kiyo? There had been no other choice.

Akira’s head rolled back, the pain cold and remote, his fingers numb. Later, he would remember hearing more voices, especially Emiko’s as she tried in vain to dig away the rocks and mud from his pinned hand. She smelled of sweat and wood smoke, her breathing frantic. He looked into her mud-splattered face and saw her fear. Akira tried to smile and say something to put Emiko at ease, but the sound escaping his bared teeth scarcely sounded human. In response, she only grunted as she dug at the mud around him, pushed and pushed at the rocks. It should hurt more, he kept thinking to himself, but instead, it felt as if his entire body were going numb. Emiko screamed for Kiyo to run for help. He tried to tell her not to scream, for Kiyo was frightened enough, and the neighbors didn’t like to be disturbed. But the air felt squeezed out of him and his eyes closed again before the words left his lips.

Akira awoke with a start, gasping for air. It took a moment for his head to clear, his heart to calm, his eyes to focus on the high dark beams and above them the steeply pitched roof, tipped together like praying hands. Daylight filtered through the windows and a fire was burning low in the hearth. He turned his head from where he lay in the corner of the long room but saw no sign of Emiko and Kiyo.

Just before awakening, Akira had dreamed he was drowning in a lake. Every time he grabbed for the rocks right in front of him, he slid back into the cold water. When his breath gave out and water filled his lungs, his eyes snapped open to the dimness of the room.
With relief, he gulped the smoke-tinged air, but when he tried to sit up, he screamed in pain. Something like fire shot through his left arm, up from the bandaged stump where his left hand had been.

Kenji had just stepped out of the architectural studio when he glimpsed Mika Abe walking across the campus. He hadn’t seen her since last semester’s drawing class. She was dressed in Western clothing and was with a girl he casually knew from another first-year class. His heart raced as he paused a moment to remember the other girl’s name: Sachiko. The path they were taking led straight to a crowded, open plaza where students met after classes and hovered in small groups, dismantling their day, talking politics, planning where to meet in the evening. If he hurried and circled around them on an outside path, he could double back and walk toward them. Kenji hoped to find an introduction to Mika through Sachiko. He had nothing to lose.

As Kenji raced down the path, he remembered the alleyways he used to run down as a boy, past the rows of identical wooden houses that lined the narrow streets. The confused maze of winding alleyways wound around like a puzzle when he was younger, until he looked up to see his
ojiichan
’s tall, narrow watchtower, and he was instantly comforted and never frightened of getting lost.

Now, he looked up and saw the tall buildings, cold and nondescript, a few flowering trees added for color, and he felt suddenly lost. In the distance, Mika and Sachiko walked leisurely, lost in conversation, allowing him to pass them with ease and circle back in their direction. Kenji sucked in several deep breaths and kept his gaze lowered as he walked toward them.