by Lily Chan
two letters
A local farmer delivered a wagon of green apples to the temple and the matrons distributed them to the children. Toyo penned a letter to the local village newspaper and it made the second page, complete with her careful calligraphy and the kanji characters she could remember from class:
The Apple and I.
To the good farmer who delivered apples to the Buddha temple. I held my apple for a long time. I did not want to eat it, for then it would disappear. I rested the apple against my cheek, cool green and gleaming against my skin. Finally, after a long time, I took a bite. Then another, and another. It was delicious. I treasured every bite. I ate every bit of the apple until only two black pips remained, lying before me. I was sad that the apple was gone, but at the same time I could feel it in my mouth, the taste on my tongue, resting in my body, becoming part of me.
The children studied geography, grammar, kanji and maths. They wrote on recycled notebooks with cheap pencils that snapped in their hands. They dreamed of inari sushi, tempura udon, potato curry, pickles, rice, oranges, apples and grapes. Their stomachs did all the thinking.
Toyo wrote:
Dear Mother. I hope you are well.
It is very cold at the temple and for the last few days the snow is three feet high.
Everyone has lice and I am very itchy everywhere.
They feed us breakfast and lunch but I always feel hungry.
I wish I could have dinner.
Sometimes we are so hungry we eat ice.
I hope to see you soon. Please visit if you can.
Love from Toyoko
She slipped the letter up her sleeve. They marched in orderly rows to the school. No one wanted to be at the front. The walkers in front had to break the first layer of snow, feel it seep into their toes and ankles, past the flimsy cloth barrier of their socks. All day their feet would sit in sodden casings.
Toyo, Yuki and a gaggle of friends lagged behind. Toyo pretended to slip on the ice. Yuki reached down to help her up.
“Come along now, girls,” the teacher snapped.
“We’re just helping Toyo, she slipped,” they chorused. Toyo performed a convincing little stagger. The teacher turned her back and at that moment they struck. Operation Post Letter. Shielding Toyo with their bodies, they shuffled towards the post box and she slid the letter in. Then they ran to join the procession. With a pilfered stamp licked on with a hungry tongue and sealed with thin fingers, the letter flew to Osaka on her yearning.
Three days later a bevy of women led by Toyo’s mother descended on the temple. Mother did not hug Toyo. She told Toyo to take off her clothes. The mothers undressed the children, boiled their clothes in huge vats and stirred the water with long sticks. Eggs came bobbing to the surface like sea froth. The children’s scalps were massaged with oils; lice pinned, squirming, on the ends of needles and combs. Miso soup was doled out with generous servings of rice.
Mother’s eyes were red, her mouth a thin line which wobbled at times, as if she were trying to press down sobs.
“I’m taking you home,” she said.
sugar
The ruptured bowels of Osaka greeted Toyo on her return. A gigantic god had consumed the city and violently excreted it in clumps of wood, rocks, dirt and charcoal. Toyo and her mother disembarked at a station and walked for an hour through fields of flattened rubble. The shops and schools and roads were gone. People fossicked under clumps of seared wood; carried their only possessions in cloth bundles.
Toyo’s bag was heavy and dragged at her wrist; she wondered if she should abandon it. It was full of clothes she did not need. She suddenly realised that perhaps Mother, too, carried her only belongings and the two of them were no different from the tired people they had passed on their way. She clutched her bag closer to her, afraid.
Mother stopped before a plot of land, the wooden planks twisted and black, a chair and a table poking out of the ground. It took a while before Toyo recognised their home. This was the café. She began to howl.
Mother hugged her. “I’ve saved something good.”
She dug up a tin box from what had once been the garden and opened it with a flourish. It had been full of sugar. Mother had wrapped the precious granules in cloth, but the sugar was no longer white; it had melted into blackened mush. The curse of black had stained everything.
They retreated to her friend Yuki’s home in Ishikawa-ken. The house was a sprawling wooden affair with three floors and a creaky corridor leading to the stairwell. Toyo leaned against the creaking spots, making the house sing until Mother told her not to make unnecessary noise.
Toyo and her mother’s belongings were pitiful in comparison to the house’s cutlery, crockery and furniture and the hearth over which a giant stone vat sat. Toyo felt strange deferring to Yuki’s household members, but as days passed, the strange gradually became familiar.
Toyo and Yuki slept in one room; Kayoko and Yuki’s aunt in another; and Yuki’s mother and father downstairs, next to the kitchen. They kept to their own spaces, revolving around each other in quiet necessity. They were grateful for what they had, hoped for things to get better, and passed on whispers of who had survived, who had not, and the best place to scavenge for food or to trade goods for rice and vegetables.
Before the war the city folk had considered themselves more sophisticated than their country counterparts. Now the cities had been turned inside out while the countryside was relatively untouched. Farmers’ wives could afford to wear expensive kimonos and richly embroidered cloth, traded in exchange for root vegetables, rice and meat.
“We all have to make do in times like this, and help whoever we can,” Yuki’s aunt said in response to Mother’s expressions of gratitude.
Osaka had been lucky. Yuki’s aunt was aghast after passing through Nagasaki in the aftermath of the atomic bomb. She recounted tales of humans, dogs, cats and horses rushing into the nearest water to escape, only to be boiled into bloated carcasses. Strips of fat floating on oily rivers. The stink. The flies. She had circles under her eyes. She had seen people digging up vegetables fried in the heat of the explosion, trying to eat them and vomiting. Rats, attracted by the smell of breast milk, eating away at a baby’s face.
Mother told Toyo about a time when the bombs were dropping over Osaka. She was running to a shelter, trying to avoid the fragments of wood and stone flying through the air, when the man running in front of her was struck by a large sheet of metal. His head was cut clean off and fell on the roadside, rolling away, but his body kept running, the legs pumping up and down for at least ten metres, before it, too, collapsed. Mother ran past the body. When she reached the bomb shelter, she put her head between her legs and tried not to vomit.
For weeks afterwards, Toyo dreamed of headless men roving the streets like giant spiders, their arms reaching out to stroke her. There was no resolution. Nobody would come and save her. Her mother ran by, shouting, “Come, Toyo, the bomb shelter is nearly full! They won’t take us if you don’t make it in time!”
In some versions her mother, too, was headless, and Toyo ducked and weaved to avoid the knife-sharp fragments hunting for her own head.
In Ishikawa-ken Toyo learned how to catch locusts and roast them over an open fire. She speared the fried insects on a chopstick, dipped them in soy sauce, felt their bodies crunch under her teeth and hungrily thought they tasted like prawn crackers or the light batter of tempura.
One summer night she went downstairs for water. The adults were still up, clinking sake bottles. Flickering light danced over a pot of aromatic soup, thick broth that was ladled into a bowl.
“Drink up!” said Yuki’s father, thrusting the bowl into her hands.
She sensed the adults watching her. Ever conscious of the right protocol, she presented a satisfied face after swallowing the last drops of the peppery white broth.
“Thank you, Uncle!”
“Did you like that? Would you like another serving?”
An earnest nod.
“Do you know what the soup was made of?”
“Um … radish?”
“Snake!” the adults laughed in a raucous chorus.
Toyo yelped, falling backward, and the empty bowl clattered to the ground. She spent the night in fitful prayer, images of a snake spirit pressing against her eyes.
The war was over and hordes of people retreated to the countryside to lick their wounds. The adults talked about the end of the war with a mixture of weariness and shame.
The children did not feel ashamed. They searched for food. They planted radishes, cabbages, cucumbers, mushrooms and onions in the fields. They chased the birds away. They liked this much better than running to the bomb shelter. The air-raid sirens had ceased, and in their absence the silence was pervasive, filling their dreams, smelling like fresh milk.
the red slippers
Toyo was tall and fair, while Yuki was squat and dark. As they walked together down the streets of Ishikawa-ken, the neighbours would point to them and laugh.
“Split you two in half, mix you up and you’d be the perfect girl. Just the right height and complexion!”
On the radio, cute Namiki Michiko sang the apple song.
Yuki and Toyo joined in the chorus: “Apple’s loveable, loveable’s the apple!”
Toyo crunched on apples with great delight. She remembered the wagon of green apples that a farmer had donated to the temple, and tears came to her eyes.
Toyo hungered for horror films and gothic novels; they tantalised and horrified her and she couldn’t stop until the endings uncoiled beneath her petrified gaze. At night she was frightened by her reflection and began to cover the mirror with an embroidered cloth “to keep the dust off, Okaasan”.
Mother wasn’t fooled. “I don’t understand why you indulge in something that scares you.”
Mother seemed kinder while they lived at Yuki’s house. She still pressed Toyo to stop making noise or to sit and eat with particular manners or to address her elders with respect, but now the rules did not appear arbitrary or draconian, instead serving a purpose, delineating social boundaries. Their lives had changed, and Mother had changed too.
The one time she shouted was during a dreamy afternoon in which Toyo imagined she could smell cake baking in an oven. Remembering the pantry of the café, which had once been the pinnacle of her sensory enjoyment, she asked Mother, “When can we eat cake again? I miss it so much.”
Mother’s eyebrows arched into steep black ledges, and Toyo wished she could take back her thoughtless words.
“There are people dying from starvation, Toyo. There is not enough food. Everyone is doing their best to find something to eat every day. And here you are, asking for cake!”
Every night Toyo and Yuki packed their favourite clothes into suitcases in preparation for escape from evil demons, samurai lords and lusty pirates. They were princesses fleeing from arrows, spiked pits, trapdoors, demons.
Toyo donned her beloved red slippers with soft canvas soles and little green birds flying across the toes and ascended the stairs of the castle, her hair coiled on top of her head in a royal coronet. Yuki flitted from princess to maid, fanning Toyo with a hastily folded fan.
Sometimes Toyo sported the low voice of a prince, riding in on his white stallion to fight the armies of evil. She stroked her invisible moustache and strutted about the room, shoulders thrown back.
Eventually one of their mothers would poke her head into the room. “Sleep. Now. Girls.”
Toyo woke to the sound of people running. People pounded down the rickety wooden stairs of their three-storey building.
“Hurry, hurry!”
“The blankets, what should –”
“Out this way!”
Rubbing sleep from her eyes, she rose from her bed. Yuki was gone, her futon indented with the shape of her body. Toyo peeked out into the corridor and opened a sliding door. A roar of flame leaped at her, like a huge beast. She screamed, scrambled backward and slammed the door. The fire was breaking down the house with its hungry tongues, licking and crushing the rafters.
She ran down the stairs – Yuki, running up, almost collided with her on the first floor. “Toyo, come on!”
They huddled with the crowd outside. Toyo felt as if she were floating on some distant stream, as if her arms and legs were moving on their own. She watched the fire travel down the street, jumping from one wooden building to the next. People threw furs, treasures and heirlooms through the upper-storey windows. A chain of people threw buckets of water at spurts of fire.
A woman sobbed and wailed and threw herself to the ground before a burning house.
“Aaaahhhh!” she cried. “All my money is gone!”
People gathered around the woman and her three children.
“Where is the money?” piped Yuki, stepping forward.
“In a silver tin on top of the kitchen cupboard.”
“I’ll get it for you,” said Yuki.
“It’s too dangerous.”
“I’m a fast runner. How do I get to the kitchen?”
The woman vacillated, but then sobbed, “Straight down the corridor, and it’s first on your left.”
Toyo wanted to stop Yuki, but her body would not move. She watched Yuki sprint into the woman’s house. It was like her dream of the gaijin pilot firing bullets into her chest. She could not move. She wanted to shout, but her voice hid inside her and would not crawl out. The burning house crackled. Timber splintered. Toyo bit her lip. Finally Yuki emerged, her eyes gleaming, cradling the silver tin in her shirt. Her cheeks were ruddy from the heat. The woman wept, hugging and kissing Yuki.
Sorting through blackened wood clumps in the morning, Toyo found her exquisite red slippers had shrunk to a miniature size. They were the perfect size for one of her dolls. She held the slippers to her chest and wept again.
the stage (i)
Toyo and Kayoko moved to Himeji, a town to the west of Osaka that had emerged from the war still intact. The local high school had re-opened its doors and Toyo was duly enrolled. Their new home, which Kayoko had arranged to rent on credit, was a small two-storeyed wooden house tucked in a laneway.
A year passed before Toyo stopped waking up, listening for footsteps, the roar of fire. Sometimes she dreamed that she was on an island sinking into an ocean of fire, the flames licking her bare toes as she tried to scramble up and reach for the claws of giant birds flying overhead. She jumped and jumped, but the birds remained just out of reach, feathers scraping her face and leaving black marks.
Himeji was famous for the gigantic Shirasagi-jo, the white heron castle with its ivory walls crowning the hilltop and its grey-blue rooftops like curved wings about to take flight.
To Toyo, the castle became a symbol of her country’s resilience, for a bomb had fallen on its white heart but failed to detonate. It stood intact and majestic on the horizon, greeting her every morning as she walked to school.
A kimono, kept well, could last three generations. Every respectable family had an heirloom kimono embroidered by hand, folded with tissue paper and stored in a scented wooden kiri drawer to keep out moths. Flying cranes, flowers, plants and dragonflies burst from the seams.
For her thirteenth birthday, Toyo received a little bag made from scraps of kimono cloth. Kayoko had sewn it with neat black stitches; she had a knack for sewing. She had saved a box of kimonos from the Ishikawa-ken fire and now they hung in her shopfront along Himeji’s main street. Word of Kayoko’s second-hand kimonos spread, and women came with gleaming eyes to stroke the silk layers and bargain with vegetables, pickles and rice. Kayoko threaded the yen coins onto a string around her neck. She slept with the notes tucked under her shi
rt.
In order to supplement her income, Kayoko set up a yakitori stall nearby. She obtained chicken offal and meat scraps from the Himeji abattoir, threaded them onto bamboo skewers with capsicum and green onion, and grilled them over charcoal. Covered in a thick sauce of soy, sugar and salt, the skewers had to be rotated evenly until they were delicately roasted. Kayoko moved along the charcoal grill like a pianist, turning the rows of skewers with gloved hands. People flocked for a cheap snack in the afternoons, hunger nipping at their ankles. The stall-side wastebasket resembled a hedgehog shedding its bamboo spikes. Dogs loitered for falling scraps. Yen coins clinked together in Kayoko’s bag, slung around her waist.
Toyo would help out at the stall after school. The people merged into a single entity, multiple hands and heads reaching for skewers and delivering coins. Smoke flew into her hair, her eyes, from flickering coals.
As business grew, the yakitori stall made more money weekly than the kimono store did in a month. Kayoko purchased higher-grade chicken to chop into bite-sized morsels. She needed three more hands, two more feet. She was exhausted and happy. Yoshino came down to Himeji to help out. Kayoko paid her an allowance, settled the rent, and bought food and furniture. A blue bicycle, brand new, perched owl-like in the entranceway next to the shoe rack. Toyo was delighted and cycled up and down the laneway, clutching the handlebars. Kayoko replaced her old favourite jazz albums and purchased a record player that was placed reverently on a cabinet.