by Lily Chan
The policeman looked at her kindly from beneath bushy brows. “It must have been very scary, Fukuyama-chan.”
The local paper ran an article on how the café was saved by a nine-year-old girl. Mother beamed and hung it in the café where everyone could see. The principal praised Toyo at the school assembly. Her teacher cut out the article and taped it to the class window.
Toyo felt like a star. She beamed stars to the sky.
Mother taught Toyo to bow and greet customers, carry jugs of tea so they wouldn’t spill, fill up bowls of sugar cubes and mop up tables.
During the next New Year celebrations, Toyo was dressed in a red kimono and placed at the entrance of the café like a good luck charm.
“Irashaimase,” she chimed, and bowed and offered up her red handbag for New Year donations.
The customers exclaimed, “Oh, it’s Toyo’s little café. How pretty you are!”
By the end of the night the handbag bulged with money. Men drinking sake laughed and crammed yen notes down her sleeves until she felt like a stuffed doll, the notes crinkling under the kimono as she moved.
Toyo’s classmates were eager to hear what had happened at the café. As she recounted the incident, her tongue began to do strange things. She listened to herself in bewilderment as the story grew embellishments. New characters appeared, demanding attention, waving banners. The sequence of events altered with each retelling.
Now Toyo ran to Shingo-san’s place next door. Shingo-san made sushi, fresh sushi for lunch and dinner, his knives lined up and gleaming. Shingo-san said it was rude of the painter to smash furniture and brought out one of his huge knives. “This should be enough to frighten him.”
Toyo demanded a second opinion. She and Shingo-san went across the road to the Katana Man. The Katana Man, upon hearing of Toyo’s dilemma, drew out his own sword, a magnificent shard of steel.
Toyo found herself strung between Shingo-san and the Katana Man, attempting to calm them down, and finally convinced them that calling the police was the best idea.
Her classmates asked, “And what was it like when the judge read out your name? How did you feel?”
He had said she was a brave girl. Toyo blushed as the story drew to a close; she told her classmates that everyone had stood up and clapped and Mother stood up and clapped and Toyo stood there, puzzled and shy, because she didn’t think she had done anything brave at all.
gotoretto (ii)
Toyo sent long letters to her handsome cousin. She wrote to him about school, her friends, the café’s customers, her favourite cake.
Mother disapproved of his gift. “These pink coral pieces are expensive. He should sell them in Nagasaki to support the family. He must have liked you very much to give it to you.”
Toyo glowed. She had wrapped the coral in a cloth and hidden it in her bag, sensing that the scary uncle would have bellowed if he had seen it, would have thought she was a thief.
Mother received a letter from Gotoretto. Toyo’s handsome cousin had had an accident and was in hospital. Toyo bit her fist and twisted it in her mouth. His body limp like a dead fish, flesh split apart and bones shattered. She unwrapped the pink coral and oiled it as if he were the pink coral and the oil would make him better.
He was never quite the same after the accident. He was delirious; words spun out of his lips in a long twisted chain, and then he stopped speaking, as if the words had run out and he were empty inside.
boys and snakes
A boy cycled past Toyo’s window every evening. His long legs turned the pedals and his hair flew in the wind. He turned his head and smiled at her as he sailed past. She almost fell over from the loveliness of his smile.
Another boy lived across the road. He built toy aeroplanes. His workshop was lined with cut-outs of bodies traced in paper, evolving into constructions of cardboard, wood, glue and nails with graceful wingspans. The aeroplanes hung from the ceiling in a sunshine world, casting shadows as they twirled.
Toyo watched him bending over his desk, his slender hands tracing lines on paper, and fell in love with the Boy Who Loved Aeroplanes.
He went to the war dressed as smartly as a boy going to a new school, cap tilted jauntily, uniform immaculate, shoes shining. He saluted them from the train station with a grin.
Toyo missed him. She listened to the radio every evening, twiddling the knob till the reporter’s crisp tones chopped through her room. The Japanese were always winning. Their planes and ships were the best in the world. Their soldiers were dedicated to driving away foreign vermin. She imagined the red-faced, hook-nosed gaijin advancing in hordes like rats, their eyes glittering. The Japanese army swarmed through them in neat khaki uniforms, and the Boy Who Loved Aeroplanes led them all, brandishing the beloved flag.
Mother marched in with the flag of authority and turned the radio off.
Toyo dreamed about the Boy Who Loved Aeroplanes. He shot down enemy planes as easily as a boy burned ants with a magnifying glass. The world arched beneath him like a big blue cup.
She also dreamed of snakes. Snakes terrified her.
Once she foraged for grass to feed her pet rabbits in an empty lot down the street. As she plucked grass, a snake slid past her with its cold dead gaze and slippery scales layered one on top of the other. She yelped and ran all the way home; her chest pounded inside her like a bomb. She never returned to the lot. Her pet rabbits were reduced to a diet of sparse sidewalk weeds and carrot tops.
During the war the rabbits were reduced to rabbit soup.
the samurai war
There were rules to be followed, protocols to observe, traps to avoid, a language hidden behind the spoken one. Mother dissected conversations and motives, traced the shadows of people’s thoughts. She taught Toyo to do the same.
Toyo was occasionally permitted to sit in the café – if she was good, Mother let her have warm milk with cocoa powder and froth on the top – and watch people pass by in the street. Their shadows tangled with the shop fronts, the racks of merchandise, the signage; when they fell across the pavement, across furniture and objects, they took on the vague form, somehow, of these things.
Crab-like, Toyo edged past the samurai into the Katana Man’s shop. A dozen clustered in there, dressed in dark robes, their hair tightly bound, talking to each other and picking up katanas. Some of the samurai turned the blades to the side, flicking the steel with their fingernails and creating a ringing sound that made her flinch. They leaned in towards each other, their brows gleaming, their noses sharpening like beaks.
Toyo watched from the corner of the shop as the samurai rushed into the enemy castle to wreak revenge on their lord’s killer, their faces blank with anguish. They rushed like a black storm and whipped swords from their waists into silver arcs, into a forest of blood and hacked cries. She pressed her hands to her mouth. She thought about kaki fruit her mother sliced for breakfast and their flesh punctured by her mother’s knife and slices falling onto the table, onto the floor.
As Toyo walked home from school, she passed long queues waiting to receive ration coupons. People lined up next to buildings and blocked access to shops, the low hum of conversation punctuated by the shuffling of feet. At another pick-up point, people redeemed coupons in exchange for food.
Toyo was curious. She joined the line; received a coupon. She followed the crowd and lined up again to receive a bowl of rice gruel. She carried it home, taking care not to spill the oily soup in which the rice grains swam. In the kitchen she poured it into a saucepan, heated it up and took a mouthful. Immediately she spat it out; the rice was too soft and pulpy, the soup like stale water.
When Mother returned, she saw the remnants of the gruel in the saucepan.
“Did you bring this home, Toyo? You have to eat it all now. That is not our food to eat but now you have brought it here, you have to eat it.”
&n
bsp; Each mouthful was a stone. Toyo felt nauseated. Grey clumps slid down her throat, congealed at the base of her stomach. This was the gruel her classmates and their families lined up for every week. She had wanted to be included in the masses, in this city-wide queue, but now she could not fathom relinquishing her diet for theirs.
There were no surprises for dinner or lunch after the rations were distributed. Cloth bags of green beans, potatoes and cabbages were held carefully by the recipients on their walk home. Increasingly people made daily trips to the countryside to find food and bring it back on the train, hidden inside bags and cloth-wrapped bundles. Soy sauce, sugar, salt, pickles and other condiments were scarce.
Toyo did not long for food; she was fed on imperial rice and steamed buns delivered from a factory operated by her mother’s government contact. When her classmates spoke longingly of mackerel and fried chicken, of satay sauce and soft tofu swimming in spring onion and sesame seeds, she grew quiet and stayed still, as though she were a mouse about to be sprung by a hawk, petrified lest her shadow betray her.
the plane
Toyo turned ten just as winter was beginning to melt into spring. On warm evenings Mother slid the doors open to let in the breeze. Toyo soaked her feet in a tub of water and Mother cleaned and patted each toe dry. The cicadas hummed a duet with Mother:
Toyo loved her grammar class. She eagerly waited for the teacher to walk in. She revelled in an hour of gazing at his flawless profile, his straight nose and determined chin. His eyebrows were as well-groomed as his accent.
She and her friends were devastated when he left for an inter-district transfer. The replacement teacher was old and fat and all the kids called him “Gut”. He mopped his gleaming forehead with a handkerchief, spitting out particles and nouns like cigarette butts.
Sometimes Toyo daydreamed that her handsome teacher would return to the school and greet her with joy. “Ah, Toyoko!” he would exclaim. “I missed you!” And then he would swing her up into the sky with those dark eyes trained on her adoring face.
Toyo kicked off her school shoes, flung the heavy bag off her shoulders and stretched back against the tatami floor. A little ditty kept ringing through her mind with squelching sound effects.
The doors were open to let in the spring air. The sun was bright but not too bright; there was not a wisp of cloud in the blue cusp of sky, and Toyo felt a luxurious yawn emanating from her mouth, an exhalation of pure contentment.
A black speck hovered above the horizon. It looked like a fly squashed on the windowpane, except that it came lower and closer, seeming to soar straight to her, a magnet on an invisible string, almost touching the telephone lines and rooftops. Dreamily she watched the plane, gleaming black, dip nearer. The engine thrum reverberated in her ears. There were no bomb sirens. It was a Nippon plane. Surely. Patrolling over Osaka.
A moment came when the plane flew so close that she could see the pilot’s face. His red skin, pointy nose, sunken eyes and the angles of his face were too sharp and strong to belong to any Japanese. She froze. His eyes were light blue and intent, hunting for the vulnerable parts of a city suffused with afternoon drowsiness.
Now her thoughts were a clatter of kitchen knives and the blades whirred and chopped. She wailed but could not hear her own voice over the engine thrum. She tumbled from the chair and lay face down, trying to bury herself in the floor.
Like a big-nosed metal dog, the plane headed straight for her. She shut her eyes; she always did this during a horror film. The blackness seemed to take a form, enfold and shake her to bits, her ears packed with sound.
Would it hurt to die like this would it hurt would it the missile hit her as she screamed.
Kayoko came home and found Toyo imitating an ostrich. She dropped her bags of shopping.
“What are you doing, Toyoko? You should have been in the bomb shelter.”
Blotched and puffy, Toyo sat up. “I’m not dead?”
“The American hit a warehouse down the block. Fire engines are putting out the fire now.”
“I’m not dead!”
“The Nippon airforce shot him down.”
“Oh, Okaasan, I was so scared. The plane flew straight to me, to this house. I thought he’d hit me.”
Concern and irritation warred on Mother’s face. “Well, I told you to go to the bomb shelter. Now soak this rice in water. I walked a long way to get it.”
The Boy Who Loved Aeroplanes returned from the war on a stretcher with a bullet lodged in his spine. His mother no longer lingered in the café to talk with Toyo’s mother. She scuttled from the shops to the hospital, curled over and ashen.
When Toyo went to visit, she barely recognised him, breathing in slow gasps, melting into the bed. His eyes were two bruises.
She wanted the Boy Who Loved Aeroplanes to tell her about traction, speed, wing span, engine size and air flow. She wanted to see the planes taking off and landing on his makeshift runway. She wanted to see the sunlight divide into a kaleidoscope as it hit the metallic finishes and dance over his face.
The boy’s hands lay still in the coffin-bed, empty of flight. In her dreams the pilot’s face elongated into a gleeful rictus. He fired red bullets into her chest till she burst into flame.
the train
The bombs hit Osaka like rain.
Trains departed to country refuges, black slugs fat with children and suitcases. In the carriage Toyo sat next to her friend Yuki and clutched her lunchbox with its trays of pickles and rice balls. Through the window she saw Mother’s face in the ocean of crying mothers, all of them waving frantically.
The train puffed and steamed and blew its whistle. Toyo waved goodbye to Mother, who grew smaller and smaller and disappeared, replaced by stations, apartments, roads, the green hills and rice fields of the countryside, where farmers looked like gods with straw-hat haloes and sun wrinkles. Further still, the trees were black skeletons encased in ice.
She greeted the first snowflakes with joy, catching them through the window and watching them melt on her palms. The snow was beautiful until she began to shiver. She unpacked clothes and an overcoat from her suitcase and piled on the layers. By the time the train chugged into the last station, she resembled a tubby stuffed doll, her cheeks red with the cold.
She held Yuki’s hand. She began to feel scared. Finally the train stopped and regurgitated its horde of children. The matrons marched them to a Buddhist temple at the top of a hill; its empty spaces were lined with rows of thin mattresses.
Toyo could not sleep. She stared at the black roof until the darkness descended and became palpable, sinking into her eyelids, and she flinched upwards with her hands and grasped at the blackness.
The snow fell and fell. During the day the statues of the Buddha were serene. At night they were menacing in their silence and the path to the toilets became an obstacle course past the outer temple where the monks stacked empty coffins. The path deterred children from the trip and they wet their beds instead. Rows of empty coffins waited hungrily for ghosts, corpses and small children with full bladders.
Winter meant three feet of snow, the cursed crystals seeping into their shoes as they trudged back and forth from the village school.
Toyo’s clothes always felt damp. Itchy rashes developed on her skin. She was too embarrassed to tell anyone until they began to multiply. In her armpits, across her chest and tummy, in between her legs, down her shins and knees and ankles. Yuki came with her to the matron, who dismissed them with a nonchalant shrug.
“Well, what do you expect, girls? You’ve been wearing the same clothes for three weeks. There’s bound to be lice.”
She hurried off to separate a pair of howling boys fighting over a wooden toy.
Toyo and Yuki examined the lining of their knickers and shirts and discovered thousands of white and yellow eggs like intricate beadwork. The girls
spread out their blankets and mattresses and inspected the tiny white worms crawling through the fleece. Toyo wanted to vomit. Lice crawled on her scalp, wriggling through clumps of hair.
The children became subjects in the Kingdom of Itchiness. They fought the urge to scratch and tear newly formed scars. Brown scabs, pus eruptions and oozing blood dotted the landscape of their skin. The itching was incessant, like a mosquito buzzing in their ears. On her mattress Toyo would fall into a half sleep, waking every few minutes to crush some lice with her fingernails and flick them to the side.
Swaddled in all their clothes, the children slept sandwiched between suitcases to garner a modicum of warmth. At meal times they waited in line for boiled rice and dried onion flakes floating in watery miso soup. As the days went by, they began to look less like children and more like stray cats. Their eyes darted from one serving to another, hunger sharpening their claws. If one child’s serving seemed bigger, they were pushed and pinched for the rest of the afternoon.
Toyo could feel her own claws growing in the long hours of the night, when her stomach panged and tried to eat its own lining. She knew that if she looked in a mirror, she would see the glowing face of a cat, yellow and lean.
Three weeks after arriving at the temple, Toyo dug into the bottom of her suitcase for a pair of socks. Instead she found a bundle of rice balls wrapped inside a handkerchief. She had forgotten that Mother packed an extra lunch for the train journey.
She ran to Yuki and whispered in her ear and they met at their hiding spot, next to the room of coffins. Toyo unwrapped the rice balls carefully, the handkerchief clinging to the grains. They chomped into them and almost broke their teeth; the balls were frozen solid. The coagulated grains oozed white liquid and exuded a sickly milky odour. The girls broke open the remaining rice balls, but they were all rotten. Every single one.