100 Years of Vicissitude

by Andrez Bergen

  Which brought me to another point—if Kohana were here, with me, and this was her memory, where was the real Tomeko? Was she also dead, but elsewhere? If so, why were they separated?

  Or was Tomeko alive, living up the real world, sans sister, at an age most people only dream of reaching?

  Tomeko.

  I looked harder at her. Either this girl lacked life because Kohana wasn’t standing right here feeding it to her, or Kohana’s memories faded, the further she stepped away from them.

  Alternatively, it was my doing. If I were a flesh-and-blood person, Tomeko surely wouldn’t stare through me like this. She’d bother to put in an effort, and there would be far more, I don’t know—oomph? Why bother performing when you’re alone at a table in a place like this? If I were Tomeko, I’d lay an egg too.

  ‘Stop her.’

  I think I jumped.

  Tomeko’s lips moved, while her gaze, following Kohana and Shashin, had not changed at all. The swing was too loud for me to be certain of what she said—but she had spoken.

  I leaned forward, as puzzled as I was disturbed.

  ‘What did you say?’

  Right then, Kohana squeezed in between her sister and me.

  ‘Oh my gosh, I’d forgotten how much he takes out of me,’ she said, as she sat down to my right. I could feel the heat radiating from her. ‘The man can move. He’s the Devil on the dance floor.’ She took up another drink, sipped, and stared into space. ‘And elsewhere,’ she muttered.

  ‘Another cad you fell in love with?’

  ‘Not at all. I couldn’t stand him. But Tomeko…’

  Kohana held out a hand and touched her sister’s impassive face. The sister didn’t notice. All of her attention was focused on Shashin, who had found a new, less able-footed partner with whom to tread the boards.

  ‘Tomeko what?’ I asked.

  ‘Tomeko was infatuated. Just like all the other women here. You can see that. She was nineteen, and she still hadn’t lost her virginity.’ Kohana polished off her drink in a flash. ‘Tonight, Shashin will take advantage. He has a charming concept of seduction, very smooth—you’d like him. He dances a girl off her feet, gets her drunk with the cheapest of kasutori, whisks her home to play some records, and then he tends to beat them up.’

  I started. ‘You’re joking?’

  ‘I wish I were.’ Kohana’s voice sounded sad, but I was horrified. ‘It’s all a part of his foreplay,’ she pasted.

  ‘Good Lord, then we have to stop him!’

  ‘How?’

  ‘How? You appear to be interactive in this memory—tell your sister. Just damned well warn her.’

  ‘You really think she’ll listen to me? Look at her face, Wolram. Right now, she’d let him tear off her dress. Which he does do, by the way, though at a latter point in the evening, when Tomeko is no longer willing.’

  ‘He rapes her…?’

  ‘Mm-hmm.’

  ‘But his illness. It’s infectious. You’re not going to—Wait.’

  The words froze in my throat as I glared at the woman. What was it I believed I’d heard Tomeko utter? ‘Stop her’? This was insane.

  ‘All of this has happened before, and you’re going to sit back and allow it to happen again. Aren’t you?’

  ‘P’raps.’

  Kohana lit herself a cigarette, crossed her legs, and leaned back.

  ‘Do you despise your sister that much?’

  ‘Oh, Wolram.’ I never thought to hear a patronizing tone swing back my way. ‘It’s just a memory. We can’t change anything—what happens, happens. Deshō?’

  I almost punched her on the nose. ‘You could at least try. You could do that much.’

  Kohana smiled. A bitter, hateful, offensive-looking thing it was. I never thought I’d be so disgusted in her.

  ‘This is Tomeko we’re talking about. What do I care? Or you? Since when did you sprout a conscience? Martyrdom is out of style.’

  24 | 二十四

  Not that I was in a blind rush to forgive Kohana her sins, but she shoved us into the next scene without so much as a by-your-leave, or at the very least a tea break between adventures—stuff guaranteed to make me more ticked off.

  We were in a small, tidy room, with paper-lined shōji screens surrounding us. It looked like it might be the same place that I’d seen Pop in bed with Kohana, but this time someone was lying on the floor, outside the sheets.

  Also belying the tidiness was something spilled from a one-litre bottle, without a label. I could smell the fumes of rotgut liquor a mile off.

  ‘Tomeko, you stupid idiot.’

  Kohana rushed over and lifted the other girl up, into a sitting position. There was bruising around her face, she had a swollen eye, and smeared makeup framed the damage.

  ‘Is she all right?’ I asked, kneeling next to them. I wasn’t sure what exactly I should do, let alone could.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Kohana said as she looked her sister over.

  ‘What do you mean, you don’t know? This is your memory—correct?’

  ‘I don’t know! Baka—stupid, stupid girl.’

  ‘Shashin’s handiwork?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then I’m not sure we should be blaming her. You could have stopped this.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘Just saying.’

  Kohana pulled open the torn gown, presumably to check the other girl’s body for injuries, so I quickly looked aside. The bottle on the floor gave me something to mull over.

  ‘There’s so much bruising, and she’s bleeding from the vagina,’ I heard her sum up. ‘No, not that time of the month. Tomeko needs a doctor. I know someone. We have to take her there.’

  ‘Why are you so interested in saving her now?’

  Kohana wavered. ‘I went through a moment of absolute madness last night, Wolram. Forgive me.’

  ‘Forgiven. Now, let’s get help.’

  Before I knew what was happening, we were rushing with Tomeko through crowded streets. Well, to be honest, I did a lot of that rushing. It was up to Kohana to carry along her swooning sister.

  ‘Doke—Get out of my way!’ Kohana yelled at a sleazy-looking man, who had started pestering her.

  I placed myself between them, just as the man lost interest.

  ‘You know, at one point I thought we were supposed to be incorporeal beings,’ I spoke up, as we zigzagged through pedestrians, bikes, rickshaws, trams, and heavily laden carts.

  Having passed over an arched, classical Japanese bridge, we struggled past a theatre marquee that had big bold kanji letters and a hand-painted picture of a samurai.

  ‘But I have two questions for you: number one, why am I so damned afraid of passing straight through someone? And secondly—how is it that you’re able to physically hold your sister?’

  ‘Wolram, you pick your fine moments for a quiz,’ Kohana muttered, her breath labouring. ‘Question one doesn’t deserve my time—you answer it. Number two, well, these are my memories, so I suppose they’re occasionally interactive.’

  ‘Convenient,’ I said suspiciously.

  ‘Whatever. I’m kind of busy right now. Why didn’t you ask me this when you saw me dance with Shashin?’

  Tomeko’s head lolled. The unswollen eye, caked with mascara and specks of dried blood, opened. Her head rolled forward, and she peered straight at me. It was like looking back at a broken Kohana—and yet also not.

  ‘She can see me.’

  ‘She’s delirious.’

  We passed a woman in a brown cotton kimono, lugging along a small mountain of rice in a circular wooden bucket. There were dozens of bamboo poles on either side of the street, leaning under the weight of gaudy banners. A performing monkey in a sailor suit swung between the poles above various stalls that sold things I couldn’t begin to fathom.

  The loud sounds of a familiar jazz song drowned out everything—‘Yes, that’s “Tokyo Boogie Woogie” by Shizuko Kasagi; you heard it last night,’ Kohana shot at me befor
e I could think to ask—and we weaved around a big, vulgar-looking building in ruins, that Kohana said had been the Asukusa Opera—and where opera had rarely been performed. On the other side of the road, beyond low buildings, I made out a five-storey pagoda.

  Constantly in our way were raffish men, rowdy children, destitute beggars, and glossed-over women in polished coiffure. Parasols, straw hats, boaters, wigs and shoulders were everywhere.

  Idiotic as it sounds, I felt like we were being followed—so I told Kohana.

  ‘That’s ludicrous,’ she replied, vocalizing my own doubt in eloquent fashion.

  Finally, on a corner where there was a sandal-maker’s shop and a grocery with snapping turtles in a pool out the front, we turned into a quieter alley and arrived on the doorstep of one Dr Hirayama. It said so, on the little wooden plaque outside his house. I don’t know when I picked up the talent, but apparently I could now not only comprehend the spoken version of the language, but had learned how to read Japanese as well.

  ‘He’s a provincial man, from Onomichi in Hiroshima,’ Kohana advised, right before he knocked. ‘A stuffed-shirt, but he expressed—in his own way—a certain degree of affection for Tomeko, so he should be able to help.’

  ‘Why does it feel like we’re playing this by ear? Don’t you know?’

  The door partially opened, and a tall, handsome man examined the two women on his doorstep—from top to bottom. Then he opened the door wider.

  ‘Kohana-chan. What happened to you? What are you doing here?’

  ‘Hirayama-sama, I need your assistance.’

  The man looked both ways, up and down the street, as if afraid his visitors’ presence might unsettle the neighbours. Heaven help him if he knew there was a ghost.

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t help you at all. I’m a paediatrician,’ he said. ‘I specialize in children, not adults.’

  Tomeko is basically a child, I found myself thinking.

  Someone whispered on the other side of the door, and Hirayama looked annoyed. ‘Get back inside, Fumiko. This is none of your business. Go!’

  ‘Charming fellow, isn’t he?’ I muttered.

  ‘I’m very sorry. As I say, I can’t help—you must leave.’ Then he slammed the door.

  ‘I have a mind to go through and give this place a good haunting. He strikes me as the kind of arse that would refuse hospitality to his own mother.’

  Kohana stared at some point on the other side of the alley, and then she brightened. ‘There’s always O-tee-san.’

  ‘Whom?’

  ‘O-tee-san. He’s an artist.’

  ‘Wouldn’t we be in too much of a rush to go look at pictures?’

  ‘No, no, he’s a good friend of mine, very diplomatic and caring—and he’s studying to be a doctor, while drawing comics on the side.’

  ‘A medical student?’

  ‘He can help, I’m sure.’

  ‘How about a real hospital, with a bona fide doctor?’

  ‘I thought you didn’t like them?’

  A valid point. ‘Even so.’

  ‘I can’t. If I go to a hospital, they’ll report the matter to the police, it will leak out to the press, and our geisha career will be over. This is my life, Wolram, as restrictive as it can be. We wouldn’t survive outside it.’

  So it was we took up trudging again, back out on the main, busy street. Tomeko was pushing unconscious, but at least she walked. We detoured down another alley and entered the large space of a shrine, or temple. It ended up being both.

  ‘Sensō-ji,’ Kohana said, as she paused to catch her breath. ‘It’s the most famous temple in Tokyo, but as you can see, most of the place is in ruins. Asakusa Shrine, over there, was lucky. Remember? It survived the blitz. Who knows how?’

  In the shade of the pagoda, which I could now make out to be heavily damaged, we passed a few stickers, slapped willy-nilly on the walls of a half-burned hall.

  ‘What are those things? Some kind of local business propaganda, or is there a more profound intention?’

  Kohana was preoccupied, looking this way and that. If I didn’t know better, I’d say she was lost. Still, she found the time to glance at the objets d’art I was pointing out.

  ‘Those? They’re votive stickers.’

  ‘And my question remains unscathed.’

  ‘Votive stickers are stuck up in sacred places, like this temple, for religious purposes.’

  ‘Fair enough. So what about that one? It says moshi—“if”—followed by a Roman alphabet question mark. What kind of religious message does this impart?’

  ‘If?’ Kohana closer inspected the sticker I pointed out. ‘I’m not really sure. Then again, I don’t pretend to be an authority.’

  ‘There’s a refreshing change.’

  Kohana again turned a circle, holding Tomeko up. I’ll give her full marks for energy and persistence.

  ‘This is off. It’s like my memories of Asakusa have started to collide—much of this area is the rowdy, risqué place I first encountered before the war, when I was a child. It took years to recover from the 1945 bombing, and in all honesty, never really recovered at all. It was nowhere near this hectic in 1948. The whole area was redesigned in the post-war period—so I’m getting confused as to which way is which.’

  ‘But this is just a flashback. The Kohana in the memory—the one you’re playing now—would not have had the same concerns, surely.’

  ‘Makes you wonder how honest these memories truly are.’

  We left the grounds of the shrine, where things became compacted again. Sandwiched amid music halls, snack vendors, and the occasional movie house, were what I took to be vaguely concealed brothels—and business looked brisk. Between these retailers, plastered on the remaining inches of wall space, hung peeling posters of erotic, more often grotesque, nonsense.

  ‘Shouldn’t you get a taxi, or a rickshaw?’ I suggested.

  ‘And where do we get the money to pay for it? I left my bag at our house.’

  ‘I have a gun.’ I flashed the Webley-Fosbery.

  ‘Put that away!’

  To my mind, it appeared as if Kohana were now soaking up the atmosphere of the place, not pursuing any purpose of getting her sister to help. She breezed along at a lethargic pace, taking in the sights, with a vague smile. I was about to lob a cantankerous remark her way, when that smile reworked itself into a furrowed brow.

  The reason for the frown had just walked by us—a man in a dark kimono and baggy pants, with a small ponytail folded up on top of a head that was closely shaved. He had a sword tied around his waist.

  ‘That’s odd,’ Kohana murmured. ‘I don’t remember seeing him at the time. A samurai would have stuck out like the proverbial sore thumb, since the wearing of a katana in public was outlawed by the Haitōrei ruling, fifty years before I was born.’

  ‘The Haitōrei ruling?’

  ‘Similar to the eighteenth-century Act of Proscription in the UK, forbidding Highlanders the right to carry swords or wear their tartans.’

  ‘I can’t say I know that one either—but I get the gist.’

  I also felt a chill. There was a massive shadow that progressively covered the street, and something blotted out the sun.

  We both peered up to see a dirigible, some two hundred metres in length, passing overhead. It narrowly missed the pagoda.

  Around it buzzed clumsy, blocky airplanes that looked like they were made out of logs. When I squinted to see them better, I realized their building materials were giant matchsticks.

  ‘Interesting,’ I remarked. ‘I say, they wouldn’t want to venture too close to any naked flame, would they?’

  ‘Look at the name of the airship,’ Kohana cut in, bypassing my jest. ‘It’s written up there, see, right there, on the fuselage.’

  I followed her directions. With my dubious vision, I could make out tall capital letters that read ‘GRAF ZEPPELIN’.

  ‘Still more interesting.’

  ‘P’raps, but this is all wrong. The Gra
f Zeppelin came to Japan on only one occasion—before I came out of my mother’s interior, kicking. Sure, just a few months prior, but I never saw the thing. I have no idea what it’s doing here. This is not my memory.’

  ‘Wait—conceivably it is. Remember the big photograph at your father’s house?’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Think, Kohana.’

  ‘I don’t have time to think.’

  ‘You’ve been blocking your father out of everything we’ve seen and done thus far. Possibly your memories of him are beginning to seep into proceedings. Take a closer look at the airplanes up there.’

  Kohana sighed loudly. ‘Oh, I see. His models. Well, this is getting inventive. They can fly, but are as out of reach as when they dangled from the ceiling.’

  ‘When do I get to meet the old terror?’

  ‘Hopefully? Never.’

  She scanned about, as if making sure. My attention was on the blimp.

  25 | 二十五

  We ended up hailing a cab.

  It was a primitive taxi-cycle that took us from Asakusa—‘O-tee-san will pay for it,’ Kohana decided—as Tomeko had turned worse and was unable to walk.

  The three of us crowded into the dilapidated back seat, behind the driver.

  ‘I don’t like this,’ I muttered, a feeling of panic in my veins. ‘Is it safe?’

  ‘Safer than flying.’

  ‘In 1948? I thinks planes were safer than you suppose.’

  As we sped along over bumpy streets, Kohana gazed at the reconstruction going on around us. ‘I first met O-tee-san last year,’ she said, ‘when I was dressed as a man.’

  ‘I see.’

  She glanced over. ‘You do? I was expecting some kind of flippant remark. This isn’t surprising?’

  ‘If I expressed surprise at all your yarns, I doubt we could make room for regular conversation.’

  ‘Oh.’ The girl turned her head and watched the road ahead. ‘There was a reason I was dressed in men’s clothes—I was trying to entice a visiting German stage actor, named Franz.’

  ‘And were you successful in this enterprise?’

  ‘Sadly, not at all. Franz was a strikingly handsome man, but he preferred other strikingly handsome men. Probably, I was too short and too skinny.’