The Street of a Thousand Blossoms

by Gail Tsukiyama

  “There’s something I want to tell you.” He smiled, seeking the vibrant thirteen-year-old girl he’d come to love. Instead, he saw traces of the woman she would become in the curve of her eyebrows, the thin, tragic lips.

  Kiyo leaned in and then pulled away from him, her eyes brimming with tears. “It’s my fault,” she whispered.

  She smelled of outside, of earth and trees and the cold. Akira lifted his bandaged arm from under the blanket and felt a sharp stab of pain. “This?”

  She nodded.

  “I didn’t know you could cause an avalanche,” he teased.

  A small smile. “You know what I mean, Akira-san, if I hadn’t brought you up there, then …”

  “Kiyo-chan, I wouldn’t have gone if I didn’t want to. It was an accident. Avalanches can happen any time, at any moment. How could you or I have known?”

  Kiyo lowered her gaze and hiccupped. She shrugged.

  He touched her cheek with his right hand. “So, it was an accident. There’s no blame. Do you understand?”

  Another hiccup. “Hai,” she answered.

  “There’s only one thing I need to know. Then I hope we won’t speak of this ever again.”

  “What is it?” she asked, wiping her nose with the sleeve of her kimono.

  “What did you hide for me between the rocks?”

  Kiyo looked at him, still teary. “It was mochi that I made myself. They were wrapped in a furoshiki.”

  Akira remembered touching the cloth that contained the mochi, a sticky rice delicacy pounded soft by Kiyo, until it was as smooth as flesh, then shaped like small eggs and filled with red bean paste. When he was a boy, it was one of his favorite treats, and he tasted again the sweetness on his tongue.

  “Last one,” Kiyo said, leaning over and placing the log squarely on the block.

  Akira nodded. Concentrating all his strength in his right arm, he raised the axe and, with a calculated swing, hit the block of wood, splitting it in half. He stepped back, dropped the axe, and wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand.

  “Pretty good,” Kiyo said, collecting the wood to carry back to the house.

  “Next time, you’re chopping,” he teased. He squatted next to her and stacked the wood against his left forearm, surprised as always that his hand was missing. At least the rest of his arm was still good for something.

  “Then what will you do?” Kiyo asked.

  “I’ll supervise.”

  She laughed, and turned when Emiko called from the house. “I have to go. I have to study for a test tomorrow.” Kiyo made a face.

  He smiled. Since school had resumed in the village again after winter break, he saw less of her during the day. “Go then, I’ll bring the rest up.”

  She bowed and hurried up the path toward the house.

  At the door Emiko lifted some of the wood from his arms and invited him in. Akira bowed and entered. Despite the months he had convalesced in her house, he once again acted with the formality of a guest. Those days when Emiko had bathed his face with cool water and sat with him until his fever broke now seemed far away. Her touch had been that of a mother with her child, a nurse, someone who healed. One night, he’d awakened to see her sleeping by the fire, her lips parted as if she had stopped talking in midsentence, and something close to love moved through him. Was it love? Or had he confused it with the comfort they found in each other’s company? He closed his eyes and fell into a deep sleep.

  Akira stacked more wood by the hearth and placed another log on the fire. His cot in the corner of the room had been put away, every trace of his three-months’ stay gone.

  “Kiyo-chan seems to be enjoying school,” he said. In the flickering light of the fire, Emiko’s face looked young again, still filled with hope.

  “Hai, as much as she fights it, I believe she’s also enjoying it.” Emiko smiled.

  “She’s so bright,” he said.

  They heard Kiyo’s footsteps and fell silent. A vegetable stew bubbled and sputtered in an iron pot above the fire, but Emiko poured his tea without asking if he would stay to eat with them. He had turned her down too many times, preferring to return to Nazo and the barn, fearful of Emiko becoming too attached, himself, too. Akira drank down the rest of his tea and stood.

  He bowed. “Domo arigato. I must get back to the barn.”

  Emiko smiled politely. “Hai.” She bowed back, without rising.

  Walking down the path to the barn, Akira paused to watch the sunset. He’d been in Aio for almost five years. Another man might have already married Emiko, cared for her and Kiyo as a husband and father would, but he wasn’t like other men. As the sun dropped below the mountains, the light fell to gray shadows. He walked quickly to the barn and swung the door open to a drafty darkness, the sharp smell of mold and decay. “Nazo,” he whispered, and then waited in the dark. He had stayed in Aio because Emiko and Kiyo were the closest he’d ever come to a family.

  Knowledge

  Haru sat in the quiet library and flipped through the book of plants until she found what she was looking for. She laughed out loud when she spotted the drawing and realized it was little more than a weed, Pteridium aquilinum, a bracken fern. Haru glanced up to catch a warning frown from Miyayama-san, the school librarian. She bowed her head in quick apology then returned her gaze to the drawings in the book. With its triangular-patterned bright green leaves, the fern would always be the most beautiful plant in the world to her. After all, it was the first sign of life she saw pushing its way out of the ashes after the firestorm.

  Haru excelled in her studies. Unlike Aki, she was curious about everything, other countries, politics, how books were written, what made plants grow through ashes. While most of her sixteen-year-old classmates focused on boys, Haru sat in the library during part of her lunch and read. Usually, she had the cool, dark room all to herself, along with Miyayama-san, who never seemed to leave. Haru looked up when she heard the whine of the door opening. One of her schoolmates, Setsuko-san, hurried in and took the seat across from her at the long wooden table.

  “I have a report to finish,” she whispered to Haru.

  Haru nodded.

  Setsuko laid her books out one by one for show, then leaned forward and asked, “I’ve always wanted to ask you, what’s it like to have so many young rikishi right next door at the stable? They seem so … so strong.” She smiled, looking down at the books in front of her.

  The question surprised Haru. She rarely thought about them in that way. For as long as she could remember, the sumotori her father trained were as much a part of her everyday life as her father and Aki were. Of course, she saw the rikishi more often than she admitted to Setsuko, mostly at a distance, coming and going, wearing yukata kimonos or, sometimes, just their mawashi belts. When she met a rikishi in the courtyard, or at the stable, she bowed quickly and was on her way. They were always her father’s students. When her school resumed and she stopped cooking for the wrestlers, she saw less of them, especially Fukuda, who had since left, the only sumo she thought of as a friend.

  She smiled at Setsuko-san and said, “We don’t see them that often. Our lives are pretty separate from theirs.”

  “Are they as big as they look in magazines?”

  “Some of them,” Haru answered. “Some aren’t that big, just strong.”

  “I don’t know what I’d do if I ever met one,” Setsuko whispered. Haru shrugged.

  “Do you think I could come over and meet a rikishi sometime?”

  “I’m afraid there’s very little chance. They keep to a rigid schedule of practice,” she said, annoyed at Setsuko’s persistence. She wanted to return to her reading.

  “Girls, please be quiet!” Miyayama-san scolded.

  For once, Haru was grateful for the scolding. She watched the light in Setsuko’s eyes dim before she looked down at her books.

  The Masks

  The masks returned to Kenji at night. In his dream there was a bare stage, the wooden bridge to be cross
ed, and the pine tree painted on the backdrop. Then slowly, the beating of the drums, the high-pitched lament of the flute, the murmuring chorus, as one by one costumed Noh actors came forward until Kenji could reach out and almost touch their masks. Every time he tried, he awoke.

  In his last year of college, Kenji was working part-time in an architect’s office as an errand boy. Twice a month, he was sent out to pick up balsa wood for models at a lumber company not far from the university. Every firm was vying to rebuild Tokyo, which at last had regained her footing. Kenji scarcely noticed the American soldiers now, their presence blending into the new landscape of building and growth. Since the war in Korea began last month, in June, steel production had increased in the Japanese factories, and for the first time since Kenji was young, Japan was thriving.

  While he waited at the counter of the dusty office for his order of balsa wood, he picked up a block of Japanese cypress the color of pale, dry grass. It was nearly five years since he’d held such beautiful wood, the kind Yoshiwara-sensei used for making masks. He ran his hands over its smooth planes, breathed in the subtle, sweet scent, and imagined the face trapped within. His life was so different now, studying architecture, which Kenji found abstract and distant. Lines measured and drawn on paper led to scale models constructed by others; he admired the finished structures, but had little part in building them.

  Now Kenji smiled at the vision of a face slowly emerging from this cypress—brow, eyes, nose, cheeks—all shaped and defined by his own hands. The face looked like Mika Abe, the girl from his drawing class, a face he longed to touch, to hold, to—

  The clerk returned with a wrapped bundle. “Shall I add that to your order?”

  Kenji shook his head, replaced the block of cypress on the counter, and felt the dream of the night before descend on him again. Its weight made his shoulders slump. Like the Noh masks he could never quite touch, Mika Abe was beyond his reach. Yoshiwara-sensei had vanished. The war was lost. Four years wasted. And next year Kenji would graduate from Tokyo University with a degree in architecture. So what use was a block of cypress?

  His throat ached as he signed for the balsa.

  The Trunk

  Aki was bored. Rain had fallen for three continuous days before turning into a thick mist of summer fog. As if trapped in a dense cloud, she spent the afternoons inside doing her chores, but, at twelve, her housekeeping skills hadn’t improved. She halfheartedly swept the floors and dusted the tables before going to look for Haru, who always seemed busy with the household accounts, or helping her father with the stable, or reading book after book, even during these precious summer weeks when they were out of school.

  This afternoon, Haru was in the dining room, the account books spread on the glossy black lacquer table. Aki stopped at the open door, but didn’t speak. Why interrupt her sister’s concentration? Haru would barely glance up, absorbed as usual by columns of black numbers, to say in her distracted voice that she would be just a little longer before finding something for them to do. But hadn’t she been promising Aki the same thing since she was a little girl?

  Across the courtyard, her father was in an entirely different world, preparing his wrestlers for the next tournament in September. When Aki was little, she liked to watch the big boys practice. Even during the war, she followed her father into the vacant practice room and watched him stare at the empty ring. When she surprised him by inching up behind him and clapping her hands, he always smiled and picked her up. That precious closeness seemed a long time ago. Nowadays, she didn’t see her father until dinner. Afterward, he went to visit friends at a teahouse, or crossed the courtyard to the stable, where the light glowed in his small upstairs office until late at night. Aki no longer followed him.

  Instead, she turned back to her room and glimpsed the storage closet at the end of the hallway. Aki hadn’t looked in it for years and wondered if she might find something interesting there. She felt the hairs prickling on the back of her neck as she slid the door open. On the two top shelves were remnants of their childhood, games and toys, and old clothes. Below the shelves, an extra futon sat on top of a red lacquered trunk. What was in there? She pulled the futon off and the silver and gold mosaic inlay of a phoenix immediately caught her eye and made her heart jump. It looked strangely familiar. She remembered seeing the same trunk years ago when her mother was alive. Aki was four or five and had found her mother looking through it, lovingly touching the things inside.

  “What’s in there?” Aki had asked.

  “Memories,” her mother had said, smiling at her.

  “Can I see?”

  Her mother closed the lid slowly. “When you’re a little older, I’ll show you and Haru-chan everything.”

  Aki knelt, running her fingers over the uneven surface of the mosaic tiles, imagining her mother doing the same. She tried to lift the cover, but it was locked and her anticipation turned to frustration. As she stole into her father’s room to look for the key, a twinge of sadness filled the hollow of her stomach. She hadn’t been here since her mother’s death almost five years ago, but nothing had changed. Her eyes searched the room quickly until she saw a clay bowl on the second shelf of the tokonoma. Two keys lay inside. She grabbed them both and hurried back to the trunk.

  It was the second key that turned the lock. Aki raised the cover. Under layers of milky rice paper lay the most beautiful kimono she’d ever seen. She lifted it out of the trunk to see white peonies soaring upward from the hem, their pale petals a stark contrast to the vibrant red and gold of the silk material. She felt its softness and tried to imagine her mother wearing it as a young apprentice geisha. Underneath more paper, she found the wide black obi. Beautifully embroidered with gold thread, it felt heavy in her hands. Beneath that were two more kimonos, green and blue, but neither as opulent as the red one, and a pair of tall wooden sandals. Aki reached for the sandals and stepped up into them, wavering unsteadily. She laughed and caught herself as she almost stumbled taking a step. She couldn’t imagine how anyone could walk in them. In a separate wooden box were her mother’s hair decorations, silver combs, and makeup. And, at the bottom of the trunk was a framed black-and-white photo of her mother as a beautiful young maiko wearing the very same silk kimono with peonies.

  15

  Day and Night

  1950

  When Hiroshi stepped onto the dohyo during the last match of the January honbasho, he knew that winning the tournament would put him within reach of the Juryo Division and becoming a professional sekitori wrestler. The difference between upper and lower ranks was said to be day and night, heaven and hell. After the match, he remembered the smooth coolness of the clay beneath his feet just before he charged his opponent and shifted his body to the right at the last moment, hitting the wrestler hard on his left side to throw him off balance. Hiroshi quickly took advantage by charging again and knocking the wrestler out of the ring before he had time to right himself. Within seconds, he was assured the tournament win.

  Two weeks before the Haru Basho, the spring tournament in March, Tanaka-oyakata called Hiroshi into his office. Piled on his desk and the floor of the small room were the bundled stacks of tournament ranking sheets called banzuke.

  “Ah, Hiroshi,” Tanaka-sama said, looking up from the papers on his desk. “Here’s something I’d like you to look at.” He turned the ranking sheet around for Hiroshi and pointed down the side of one crowded column.

  Hiroshi bowed. His heart raced as he leaned closer to the desk. His name, Takanoyama, written in small, perfect characters, was circled on the right side of the sheet, below the top level of wrestlers. Underneath were his hometown, Yanaka, Tokyo, and his rank in the Juryo Division. He had been promoted to a sekitori wrestler.

  “Did you know?” Hiroshi asked. His gaze lingered on the ranking sheet in happiness.

  “I thought the Sumo Association might promote you after your wins at the Hatsu Basho in January. But nothing is ever certain.”

  Hiroshi took a step back
and steadied himself. At twenty-four, he had reached a rank many other sumotori only dreamed of. It left a sweet taste on his tongue.

  Tanaka smiled, ran his hand across the top of his shiny head, and said nothing.

  Hiroshi bowed. “I’m honored.”

  “You’ve earned it.”

  Hiroshi bowed to his oyakata again. “Arigato gozaimashita. If it weren’t for your training—,” he began.

  Tanaka-oyakata cut him off. “My training wouldn’t mean a thing without your skill and diligence. Remember, Hiroshi-san, success is not handed to you. You must work hard for it and you must never dishonor what you’ve achieved.”

  “Hai, Oyakata-sama.” He bowed, remembering his less than honorable behavior with Daishima.

  The benefits of his new rank included wearing a white mawashi belt during practice and a silk one during tournaments, and making tegata, the autographed handprints for his fans. As a Juryo-ranked wrestler, he would now fight fifteen tournament matches instead of seven. He could hardly wait to tell his grandparents that his sekitori salary came with bonuses that would also allow him to provide for them financially.

  “And Hiroshi,” Tanaka-oyakata added, “your apprentice will be the new boy, Sadao.”

  Hiroshi celebrated his promotion at the Sakura teahouse, hosted by Tanaka-oyakata. It was the first time he’d been in a geisha teahouse, and everything about it fascinated him, from the large sakura tree in the small courtyard to the front door and entrance hall, where a large brush painting hung. A maid led them past several immaculate tatami rooms of differing sizes to a larger back room with a long table surrounded by cushions. The shoji panels were hand painted with scenes of Mount Fuji, and slid open to a quiet garden. Three other sekitori wrestlers joined them, but Daishima remained conspicuously absent. The door to the room slid open and two geishas, who had been kneeling just outside, entered, and bowed to them. Hiroshi had never seen a geisha up close before. He watched, fascinated, as they moved in small, graceful steps, carrying plates of yakitori, pickled cabbage, grilled fish, sake, and beer. They filled the room with their sweet perfumes and light chatter. A geisha named Momiko danced for them, telling a story with each movement she made. Afterward, when she leaned close to Hiroshi and poured him more sake, the sleeve of her purple and white kimono brushed against his arm and he blushed at her touch. The other sekitori watched and teased him. “It looks as if Sekitori Takanoyama has found himself a new admirer.” Momiko glanced up at him and looked away. He gazed at her pale, white skin, her long, thin neck, and wasn’t quite sure who admired whom.