The Cake Tree in the Ruins

by Akiyuki Nosaka

  “Mama!” he murmured. He felt as scared and helpless as a child.

  As if in answer, a girl appeared and, sobbing, cried out as he had done, “Mama!”

  Steve was about to make a run for it, but then realized that she was only about six or seven years old. She looked so sad that he asked her, “Hey, what’s up?”

  Of course he spoke in English, but the little girl seemed to understand, for she sobbed, “Mama’s gone.”

  Steve didn’t know any Japanese, but he understood her perfectly. “Cheer up!” he said, stroking her hair. “She’ll be back soon.”

  “No, she won’t. She’s dead, and our house burnt down.”

  Steve was at a loss how to comfort her. Hundreds or even thousands of people must have burnt to death in those flames. The little girl didn’t seem to have any qualms about Steve being American, and she sat quietly beside him clutching her doll.

  If he stayed here, it would only be a matter of time before he was discovered. On the other hand, he couldn’t just abandon the little girl. Most importantly, he had to find food and water. The war would soon be over, and he wanted to stay alive until then. He glanced around, wishing that he had a pair of wings.

  “Um, there’s a bigger shelter farther up,” the little girl told him, as if reading his mind.

  When he went to check it out, he found that it extended much farther back into the mountain, and was well kitted out with emergency food rations. That in itself meant that people would surely come, but if he hid himself away right at the back, nobody was likely to notice anyone there in the darkness unless they were specifically looking.

  Steve and the girl decided to make their nest there. The girl’s father had been a pilot, and had died in battle two years before, so she was an orphan.

  “When the war ends, I’ll take you to America with me.”

  “America? But that’s a bad country isn’t it?”

  “No, no, it really isn’t.”

  And so he did his best to describe America to her. As he told her about the wide-open plains, deserts, huge rivers, skyscrapers and cars everywhere, pieces of the life he’d once led in America all those years before began coming back to him.

  Everyone from the ruined town had fled to the countryside, and nobody came to check up on the air-raid shelters. In all the chaos, even if one of the POWs had gone missing, they’d probably assumed he’d been burnt to death. Many people must have been reduced to mere lumps of charcoal, and an American body would be indistinguishable from a Japanese one.

  Steve and the little girl became as close as brother and sister. From time to time she would go down to the spring to fetch water in a charred bucket. When at night she cried for her mother, Steve would hold her close and sing her to sleep with American lullabies. The war seemed far away, and the two of them thought only of going to America.

  And then it was 15th August. The girl went to fetch water as usual, and happened to overhear an elderly couple passing by say angrily, “The war’s over. Japan lost.”

  “What? Is the war over?” asked the girl. She didn’t really know what this meant, but if it was true then she’d be able to go to America. That’s what Steve was always telling her. “Well, I guess I can go to America, then.”

  “Don’t be silly, America’s coming here.”

  “No, no—my friend said he’d take me to America!”

  Wondering what she was talking about, the old man questioned her further, and finally realized that there must be an American POW hiding in the old air-raid shelters.

  Now that they had lost to America, it might cause problems if it became known they’d been mistreating POWs. He rushed to tell the military police and the local policeman, who were quite taken aback and decided to go and fetch him.

  Hearing the noise of the big procession making its way to the mountainside, and not knowing the war had ended, Steve thought he’d finally been discovered and immediately took to his heels, heading into the mountains at a sprint.

  “Hey, the war’s over! We can go to America!” the little girl called after him in Japanese, but Steve could no longer understand her.

  “The war’s over. It’s ended!” called out the townspeople in unison.

  But Steve ran deeper and deeper into the mountains, as if pursued by their voices, and that was the last anyone ever saw of him.

  THE CAKE TREE IN THE RUINS

  The 15th of August 1945

  TWO MONTHS AFTER the B-29s firebombed the town, the ruins had been taken over by rampant weeds. There was no longer any prospect of any more air raids, so the people living in the shelters or makeshift shacks, constructed from corrugated iron balanced over any walls left standing, were looking altogether more cheerful.

  Immediately after everything had burnt down, schoolchildren had been out retrieving pieces of metal and patching up the roadside shelters, so that the ruins had been tidied up after a fashion. Now, though, they were lying neglected once again. When it rained, water ran through the streets gouging out the soil into mini-ravines and forming small lakes, and causing the shelters to cave in. With the weeds running riot over everything, it was hard to believe that this had once been a densely populated town.

  Families in these ruins lived like primitives, scavenging for any pieces of charred wood that could be used as fuel, and fetching seawater from the beach. Of course there was no electricity, so once the sun went down all they could do was sleep.

  Depending on your perspective this could be considered a very healthy lifestyle, but then there was no escaping the lack of food. Daily rations had been reduced from 350g to 320g and consisted not of rice but of defatted soy flour or maize, and even then usually arrived late.

  It was possible to purchase food in the countryside, but everything had been destroyed in the fires so nobody had anything to offer in exchange. Even if you did have any money it was hardly worth the paper it was printed on, while workmen’s outfits were in high demand—rubber-soled split-toed boots, work gloves, gaiters, that sort of thing.

  Adults were better at enduring these conditions, but it was really tough on growing children, especially since it was the grown-ups who had gone to war in the first place while the children were simply innocent victims. For those children between the ages of five and ten in 1945, it really was a miserable existence—they had never eaten anything tasty, while however hungry the grown-ups were now they could remember eating their fill of delicious food in the past.

  They would reminisce about the tasty eel in such-and-such a restaurant, and the mouth-watering tempura in another, especially the shrimp and vegetable fritters. Having really indulged themselves in the past, now that life was a bit tough they could reconcile themselves to going without.

  However, the children didn’t even have memories to sustain themselves with. Rice had been rationed since 1941, sugar was hard to come by, the cakes and candies that had once flooded into the ports had vanished, and by the end of the war the only sweets available were dried bananas and sweet potatoes.

  In order to survive, the children formed gangs to go scavenging for the tomatoes, cucumbers, pumpkins and other vegetables people had started growing in the ruins. They knew it was wrong to steal, but survival was more important to them, and they could sniff out exactly where tomatoes were turning red or pumpkins were swelling up nicely.

  “Hey, what’s this tree?”

  One day, they came across a single tree growing vigorously amidst the ruins. While the weeds were flourishing, all the trees had been burnt down and any that had somehow escaped the worst of the flames had been cut down for firewood, so it was quite impossible for there to be any healthy trees left standing. Yet this tree was full of vitality, stretching its leafy branches up to the blue sky. Indeed, it seemed to be growing before their very eyes.

  “Why here?”

  “This is where that big house once was. I used to come here to collect cicadas.”

  “But everything must have burnt down.”

  “There were a l
ot of trees in the garden. It must be one of those.”

  “But the leaves aren’t even a little bit dried up.”

  Some trees surrounding a shrine a short distance from the ruins had survived, but all their leaves had been scorched by the heat from the flames. Yet the leaves on this mysterious tree in the ruins of the big old house seemed to be sprouting one after another with fresh green growth.

  “Mmm. It smells nice.”

  “Yeah, and those leaves look quite tasty.”

  “Don’t be silly, since when did anyone ever eat tree leaves?”

  The children all knew as well as any botanist what plants they could or couldn’t eat, but they had never heard of tree leaves being edible, however tasty they might look. Well, apart from persimmon leaves, which were dried to make a flour that tasted slightly sweet.

  One of the boys reached out and grabbed a leaf from the mysterious tree and crammed it into his mouth. He munched on it for a moment and then exclaimed loudly, “Waaah! Yum!” The boy who had been so sure that tree leaves were inedible also picked off a leaf and put it his mouth, then all of a sudden all the children were scrambling up the tree and hanging off branches to get at the leaves. A branch snapped off, releasing a sweet fragrance. The children were stunned.

  “Hey, look at that!” said one, pointing at the place where the branch had broken. The age rings were clearly visible, as they should be, but strangely the sweet smell seemed to be emanating from just that point.

  “It’s soft!”

  “Soft?”

  “Yes, soft.”

  He touched the tree and then put his finger in his mouth, and was instantly transfixed. Seeing this, the others all wordlessly followed suit, timorously touching the scar on the tree trunk and then licking their fingers. It was soft and sweet.

  When they finally came to their senses, they realized this soft sweetness on their tongues was unlike anything they had ever tasted before. Everything they had eaten until now had felt coarse in their mouths, and had tasted salty. Boiled wheat-bran dumplings felt like sand, defatted soy was just like gravel, and there really were often little bits of grit mixed in with the rice gruel.

  All the children started breaking off branches and gobbling them up. The tree looked just like any other ordinary tree with hard branches, but the moment they put a piece into their mouths, it melted on their tongues and an indescribably sweet taste spread through their entire bodies.

  “This must be a bread tree,” said one.

  They had all read about a tree in the South Seas that had bread as its fruit, which the local people could eat to their hearts’ content, and they had all thought how wonderful it would be to have such a tree in Japan. However, this tree wasn’t a bread tree—far from it. Bread was a real treat for these children, even if the only bread they’d ever tasted was black and went off really quickly. This tree, though, was far, far sweeter. It couldn’t possibly be bread.

  “Maybe it’s a cake tree.”

  “A cake tree?”

  All of the children had forgotten what cake was—or rather they had never even known. They had only heard about it from the old women, who muttered things like, “You poor darlings. In the old days we had things like sponge cake, and bean jelly, but you’ve never had a chance to eat such treats, have you?”

  “Is that what it is? I had no idea cake was so scrumptious!”

  And even though a moment ago they had thought they were fit to burst, they suddenly felt hungry again and broke off some more branches. And however many branches they snapped off, the tree remained as thick and bushy as ever.

  The old house the children were talking about had been the biggest in the whole area. A sickly boy of eight had lived there alone with his mother, having lost his Papa early on. They were rich and, had it not been for the war, they wouldn’t have lacked for anything. When food became scarce, his mother would go all over town in search of provisions. Being a sickly child, he would get a terrible tummy ache and come out in a rash after eating the coarse food they received on rations.

  His mother took his late Papa’s clothes to the countryside to exchange them for rice, and to the coast where she could get fish. However, everyone knows that sweet fare provides the best nourishment for sickly children, cake being the most effective of all, and so she went to great lengths to acquire wheat flour, eggs and sugar. Recalling the taste and fragrance of the cakes they had enjoyed together with Papa, she turned her hand to baking.

  She also pulled strings to acquire extra ingredients like caramel and chocolate. By this time, the sweets that had been available to all children in peacetime were reserved for the military. This was understandable, since caramels were the best for sustaining soldiers exhausted from the fierce fighting, and chocolate was distributed to pilots to help keep them awake.

  When his mother managed to get hold of some chocolate, she would spread it melted on bread and decorate it like a proper cake before giving it to her son to eat. She would dig out old magazines and follow their recipes to make sponge cakes, cream puffs and pies. She wasn’t a very good cook, but the boy appreciated her efforts and joyfully ate the burnt cakes and cream puff shells that tasted of soap.

  But she wanted her son to be able to taste all the cookies, pound cakes, eclairs, rum babas and other cakes she remembered eating long ago. And then she heard rumours that the German manager of an old cake shop had decided, now that he would inevitably be put out of business once the firebombing started, to make his last ever cake for his customers to enjoy. It was as if he’d read her mind! She rushed out to the shop.

  Of course it was a secret and he was only sharing the cake with the customers who had been with him since before the war. Upon hearing her desperate pleas, however, the baker’s plump wife sold her a piece with a kindly smile and said, “Don’t worry, we’ll all be able to eat such delicacies again one day.”

  The cake was a Baumkuchen, with layers that resembled the growth rings on a tree. Even before the war, Baumkuchen had been rather hard to find, so Mama was overjoyed to take some home to her son. “This cake really looks like a tree, doesn’t it? But it’s so delicious!” she told him, remembering the time she had eaten it with Papa in a cake shop in Karuizawa. It had come with a dollop of cream then, but that was out of the question now when it was impossible even to find milk.

  “It lasts for a very long time, so let’s take our time over eating it.” She gave the boy a little piece every day, almost as if it were medicine. The way things were going, she never knew what was going to happen next, but she felt a little better now that her son had at last been able to taste something truly exquisite.

  And when at length they were down to the very last piece, instead of eating it the boy decided to save it. He emptied out the box where he kept all his treasures—things like a marble, a sword guard and the spring from a clock—and put the piece of Baumkuchen in there. Every now and then he would secretly open it up and smell the deliciously sweet fragrance that never faded, and it always revived the delicious taste for him. After three months the piece of cake was quite dry and had begun to break up into hard little crumbs, but still the fragrance remained undiminished.

  And eventually the air-raid warning sounded. The mother ushered her son into the shelter in the garden and told him, “You’ll be safe as long as you’re in here. I have to look after the house.” He watched as she went back to the house, looking brave in her air-raid hood and baggy work trousers, a bucket hanging from one arm. He never saw her again.

  She perished in the flames that swept through the town. The shelter in the garden became very hot inside, but the boy survived and, when everything had fallen quiet, he fearfully poked his head outside and looked around. Nothing was left. It never occurred to him that his mother might be dead, though, and so he waited for her inside the shelter.

  Whenever he felt lonely or hungry, he would gaze at the crumbs of Baumkuchen, now black with mould. As he smelt the faint, sweet fragrance, he could feel the warm softness of his
mother’s skin.

  She had told him that Baumkuchen was a German word that meant “cake tree”. He wondered rapturously what a cake tree would be like. Did it have chocolate flowers? Maybe its fruit would be cream puffs. And then it occurred to him that the stale crumbs in his box were like seeds. He remembered seeing his mother planting flower seeds in the garden, and so he dug some holes in the earthen floor of the shelter and carefully planted a crumb in each.

  The mice and lizards and other little creatures that had come to the shelter to escape the flames all seemed to be hungry, and had curled up around the boy, hardly moving. “If this cake tree grows big, I’ll give you all some,” he told them.

  Every day he watered the seeds and waited for them to sprout. Then, after so many days had passed, the earthen floor began to bulge and swell, and a small sprout popped out. “Yes! It’s sprouted! It’s a cake tree!” the boy cried in delight. It was just a tiny shoot, but it instantly filled the shelter with a sweet fragrance.

  As he watched, the little sprout grew taller and formed leaves. He couldn’t take his eyes off it. It really was a cake tree, but at the same time it reminded him of his mother and he couldn’t bring himself to eat it.

  As the cake tree grew from a sapling into a mature tree, beside its roots in the shelter the little boy died. Eventually the shelter too collapsed, leaving just the magnificent tree soaring up into the summer sky.

  None of the children who came across the mysterious tree in the garden of the old house ever knew the story of how it came into being. Keeping it secret from the grown-ups, they would gather round it daily and eat their fill. However many branches they tore off, it always grew more and was ever thick with leaves.

  On 15th August, the war the grown-ups had started finally ended. The whole of Japan had been burnt to the ground and everyone was hungry, but amidst the ruins stood just one cake tree. It was always surrounded by children gorging themselves on its delicious leaves and branches, but the grown-ups passed right by without ever even noticing it was there.