by Ben Byrne
“Really, Mrs. Ishino?” I said, pouring oil into the pan. “Do you really think any of them are sensitive?”
Mrs. Ishino let out an exasperated noise.
“Why not find out, Satsuko?” she said, stamping out of the kitchen. “It might not be such a bad idea to have a foreigner looking after you these days!”
I spluttered with laughter as she marched out. As I slid the potatoes into the spattering oil, I pictured the American sitting beside me in the cinema, gazing up in bemusement at the screen.
Men in short sleeves had been bustling around the cinemas on the Rokku as we stepped down from the tram in Asakusa that afternoon. Several of the theatres had reopened along the wide avenue now, their brickwork stained by black smoke. Banners for new shops fluttered on bamboo poles in the brisk spring breeze, and cinema posters were mounted on billboards, mostly showing Western men in cowboy hats and blonde women with large bosoms.
Just past the old Paradise Picture House, a big painted sign on the side of the wall advertised a new Japanese film. When I saw it, my jaw fell. I grasped hold of the arm of the American. Up there, larger than life, was Michiko.
The resemblance was unmistakable. But the American misunderstood my expression. He walked over to the booth and bought two tickets for the film. Still stunned, I tried to explain that it would be in Japanese, that he wouldn’t understand a thing. But he just shrugged and smiled, took my hand and led me inside.
There was only one row of seats left at the front of the damaged theatre and as we took our places, the audience standing behind us seemed restless and agitated. The light flickered onto the screen and my stomach tightened. The thought of seeing Michiko again—and in such a manner! My eyes widened as the names of the actors blazed up on the screen. There it was: Michiko Nozaki.
The film began. Almost straightaway, she appeared. Wearing a white, pleated skirt, casually twirling a summer parasol—I almost clapped my hands in delight. As I settled back in my seat to watch the film, I couldn’t stop smiling. The American squeezed my arm and offered me a hard candy from a paper bag.
I could hardly remember the plot afterwards. It was a simple love story, all faintly ridiculous. Michiko was the true star of the film. Her beauty simply flooded from the screen. The audience jostled behind us whenever she appeared, sighing and murmuring with delight when she flashed that eager, encouraging smile I knew so well.
Her leading man was very handsome, with sharp cheek- bones and piercing eyes. I glanced up at the American, who was quite unaware of my emotions as he munched away on his snacks. He looked rather handsome himself, I thought, and I squeezed the tiniest bit closer to him.
Toward the end of the film, there was a shock. At the height of the drama, the man grabbed hold of Michiko, accusing her of covering up a crime. She tore herself away with tears in her eyes, but he rushed over and took her in his arms. She turned, half-resisting. And then, quite openly, he leaned forward and kissed her.
A gasp came from the audience. He had kissed her! Full on the lips, in public—just like that. Of course, we had never seen anything like it on the screen before, and the audience shouted in astonishment. My American laughed, quite bewildered by it all.
As the crowd poured out of the cinema into the spring sunshine, he took my arm and we walked together through the streets of Asakusa. Men were going by with sandwich boards advertising new shops, and some of the stalls on Nakamise Arcade had reopened, selling flimsy mirrors and trinkets to the passing soldiers.
Cherry blossom hung from the scorched trees that leaned over Asakusa Pond, more like a flooded bomb crater now. We sat on a bench and gazed at the flowers for a while, and I pointed out the scorched patch that had once been Hanayashiki Park with its golden horses, the mound of rubble on the other side that had once been my old high school.
“Where did you live, Satsuko?” he asked, quite suddenly.
I frowned, and waved my hand vaguely in the direction of Umamichi Street, on the far side of the temple precinct.
He fell silent for a long time, deep in thought. Perhaps he really was different from the other Westerners. Darker, somehow, more brooding. I knew so little about him. Where had he fought during the war? Had he been a pilot, up there in one of the planes?
It was a question that none of us girls ever asked. I might have seen him one night, as he flew low across Tokyo. His handsome face beyond the quilted nose of the cockpit, the glass glinting with the light of the fires raging below.
A muscle tightened in his jaw. I should hate him, I thought, for what he had done. But as we sat there in silence together, he took my scarred hand and held it between his palms. For a moment, as the breeze blew blossom onto the surface of the dark water, it felt as if the sky was exhaling, as if the earth itself were silently offering up flowers for the souls of the dead.
The potatoes hissed and sizzled in the pan as Masuko came into the bar and switched on the radio. My ears pricked up straightaway.
“Who Am I?” was a programme which had come on the air that month. It featured displaced persons from all over the Japanese Empire who had lost their memories during the war, and now, on their return home, were trying to discover exactly who they were and where they had come from. The presenter interviewed them in the hope that someone out there might recognize their voice or recall some clue about them.
“Can you remember anything about your childhood, sir?” he was asking, as Masuko turned up the volume. “The village festivals, perhaps, or where you went to school?”
A man’s voice crackled in reply. “I can’t remember much of anything, sir, just that we lived in the countryside. Our teacher was Matsukawa-sensei. He was so strict! I remember he beat me once when I lost one of the buttons of my school uniform . . . ”
Masuko laughed out loud as I took the pan from the heat and walked through to the bar in my apron. She was a short girl, as chirpy as a sparrow, with a lovely hint of the south in her voice. We’d quickly fallen into an enjoyable routine together, visiting the market for vegetables in the morning, cleaning the bar in the afternoon, and gossiping about Mrs. Ishino and what we referred to as her “mysterious past.”
Masuko certainly found the show very entertaining, though for all the wrong reasons. A sly smile played on her wide lips as we listened to the next segment.
“And now for some success stories,” announced the presenter. “Last week the loyal wife of Mr. Kawachi heard her husband’s voice on our programme, and boarded a train straightaway from Kobe to come to our studio and collect him. They are now reunited in joy in their marital home.”
“What rubbish!” cawed Masuko. “I bet Mrs. Kawachi’s just some old hag who can’t find herself a husband. She heard his voice on the radio and thought that a man without a memory would do her nicely!”
I gave a thin smile. But the truth was that I listened intently to every minute of the show, my stomach quivering as the men began to speak. What would it be like, I wondered, if Osamu’s voice suddenly emerged from the crackling radio? If he had been lost somewhere in the South Seas, falsely reported dead by his colleagues? Would I have telephoned the radio studio if I heard him? Even now?
My memory of him was fading, I realised. The picture of us together in my mind was frozen in time, ageing, like an old photograph.
Young boys spoke too sometimes, telling tales of lost mothers and fathers. Tears had welled in my eyes one afternoon as an Osaka boy described losing his family in the fire raids, just nights after I had lost my own. I’d been flooded with hopeless guilt. What would I do if Hiroshi’s voice suddenly, miraculously came out from the speaker?
“I lost my sister, Satsuko Takara, on the night of the Great Tokyo Fire Raid, but can remember nothing more. My only wish is to see her again . . . ”
Perhaps I had given up the search too soon? Mrs. Ishino told me I’d performed my filial duty, that I must simply get on with my own life now. B
ut so many of us were still lost, it seemed, so many still struggling to find their way back home.
I sighed as Masuko switched off the radio. She began polishing ashtrays and laying them out on the tables and I went back to the kitchen to salt the fried potatoes. After a while, I heard footsteps coming from upstairs. I put my head back around the door. The American was sitting at the bar, reading his book. He glanced at me in surprise and I smiled at him shyly. His face lit up as his deep blue eyes gazed directly into mine. He slid a match into the pages to mark his place and placed the book down upon the counter.
26
LA BOHÈME
(Osamu Maruki)
I spent much of spring in a state of dissolution, my vow to seek out Satsuko Takara blurring steadily away to transparency in countless glasses of kasutori shochu. I had relapsed into torpor, paralysis, as if the natural cords between motivation and action had been entirely severed.
Then I was seized with a bout of the stunning, virulent malaria that had tortured me in New Guinea, and while the cherry blossoms blushed along the canals, I spun in and out of high fever, harrowed by visions of green chasms and purple corpses.
Thus it was not until the end of April that I had the energy, or the application, to take up my pen once more. I dedicated my convalescence to writing a novella, which, I was convinced, would capture the elusive spirit of our times. It followed the transmission, in excruciating stages, of a mysterious virus from an American soldier to a young Japanese artist. I felt it by far my most compelling work to date, and I confidently submitted it to several of the leading literary reviews of the day, entitled simply, “The Germ.”
It proved too avant-garde to be published. “Obtuse,” the responses noted. “Incoherent.” But this was just further proof, I realized, of something I was rapidly coming to understand.
Men were starving to death in the Tokyo streets, our nation knelt grovelling before an army of occupation. This was no time for deep examinations of the human condition. What was needed now was diversion and distraction: American pinups and bare-knuckle wrestlers; baseball games and “The Apple Song” piped through countless speakers. It was an age for fairy tales, for the rabbit in the moon.
I received the last of my rejection notes in the morning, and was slumped drunk by midday, the manuscript of “The Germ” crinkling to cinders in the stove. When I awoke later that evening, I felt maudlin and out of sorts, and I reached in my drawer for a faithful tablet of courage. As it dissolved beneath my tongue, a cheery chemical abandon erupted into my bloodstream. The room seemed suddenly claustrophobic, and I slipped downstairs to immerse myself in the comforting waters of the demimonde.
The bar was busy. A haze of acrid smoke lapped the walls, the revelries already in full swing. Two editors from a leading review of the day were sitting in an advanced state of disrepair at the counter, dribbling over their glasses.
In the centre of the room was a clique I didn’t recognize. They were celebrating, and I hovered nearby on the off chance they might offer me something to drink. At the centre of the party was a man with a goatee beard, wearing dark, round glasses and a wine red beret. The young people at his table refilled his glass each time he took a sip, laughing uproariously at every word he said.
“Who’s that?” I asked Nakamura, who had appeared by my side. He was grinning drunkenly, and seemed very pleased with himself.
“You’re behind the times, sensei,” he said. “That’s Kano, the famous film director.”
“Oh,” I murmured. “Well, the cinema . . . ”
I had heard of the man, of course—his “kiss” film had been the talk of Tokyo for weeks. One could hardly enter a room without overhearing allusions to his genius, his “distillation of the modern spirit.”
“Why don’t you come and meet him?” Nakamura suggested.
“You’re acquainted with him, I suppose?”
“Oh yes,” he said, grinning. “He wants me to work on his next film. Just some sketches for scenery, you understand . . . ”
That wily old raccoon. Taking advantage of my illness to cozy up to film directors . . . Several of Nakamura’s new cartoons had been published in the Asahi Shimbun that month. He had even started to ramble about founding a new magazine, devoted entirely to manga.
“Well,” I said, “perhaps I’ll drop over later. Though I haven’t much time for cinema people.”
“Come on, Maruki,” he said, gripping my arm. “Don’t be such a snob.”
“Nakamura, not now, please . . . ”
“Come on,” he said bluntly, and I smelled the booze on his breath. “It’s his birthday. And he’s buying.”
With a sigh, I let Nakamura draw me over to the table, sharply aware of the Philopon now off on its gleeful spirals around my bloodstream. Most of the men at the table were young, with slick hair and gaudy shirts, shrieking with laughter. None looked up as we approached, and I found myself considering them resentfully, when, to my embarrassment, Nakamura suddenly shoved me forward and I banged into the table.
“Maruki-sensei!” he announced, sniggering. “The famous, talented writer!”
The group looked up at me askance. I tried to back away, cursing Nakamura for his boorishness, but Kano held up his hand. He took off his dark glasses and turned to me with a twinkle in his eye.
“We were just discussing our traditional Japanese culture, Maruki-san. Whether it still has any place at all in a modern nation. What is your view?”
I wondered if it was a trap, noticing the shining eyes, the arch smiles. Someone pushed a glass of shochu toward me and I drained it. As I looked at their smug faces, I felt a sudden wave of recklessness—inspired, no doubt by the combination of shochu and amphetamine now pulsing through me. I’d throw their superiority right back in their faces.
“I think our ‘magnificent culture’ has all turned to piss, sensei,” I said, turning on my heel, deciding that I would march straight out to another, less condescending watering hole.
To my surprise, a peal of high laughter came from Kano. Quickly, the rest of his disciples followed suit.
I turned. Kano was smiling at me.
“Thank you, Maruki-san,” he said. “You see, we’ve just returned from the theatre.”
I felt a tinge of doubt. “Well, the kabuki, of course—” He cut me off. “Actually, I was thoroughly bored by it all.”
A smile played on his lips. The heads of the others swivelled toward him, like acolytes waiting for a sutra to drop from the mouth of the Buddha.
“Is that so?”
He smiled. “Don’t misunderstand me, Maruki-san. I have always been a great fan of the theatre, ever since I was a boy. But so much else has been lost that it seemed somehow meaningless to me. Hence my boredom.”
“I see,” I muttered, not quite following.
“It was as if one was attending a birthday party, surrounded by all sorts of delightful guests, and treated to all manner of delicacies, only to be told that the host had just died.”
The acolytes chuckled, though none had any clue what he was talking about, clearly. Kano took a cigarette from a packet in his side pocket—French, I noticed, they must have cost a fortune—lit it, then blew out the smoke in a tangled ring.
“And then. Just think. I visited the urinal.”
There were snorts of laughter. Kano was smiling dreamily. “I thought to myself—how many thousands must have pissed here on this same spot in the past? How many generations have passed water here over the decades, the centuries, even? How many gallons of sake and shochu have drained away; how many fathers and sons have stood here, aiming, shivering with the same primordial satisfaction? That most universal, absent-minded moment of pleasure, when even the most sophisticated man approaches the divine simplicity of the Buddha . . . The smell was overwhelming, and yet I stood there, inhaling the fumes, thinking to myself—how wonderful! How delightful! And th
en—do you know what I thought? I thought, This is it. This is the true smell of culture. This is where the soul of a nation truly resides.”
The disciples shook their heads at such erudition. Mrs. Shimamura approached the table carrying two large bottles of sake. Kano looked at me directly. “Culture’s a pretty sorry thing if it lives in a few temples and monuments, isn’t it?”
I nodded.
“But it’s always still there, you see? In the habits, the manners, the customs of the people. They can’t be destroyed, Maruki-san. The way people talk. They way they laugh. And, yes—the way they piss. And so thank you, sensei, you are indeed correct. Our magnificent culture has indeed all been turned to piss. And that, if I may say so, is where it’s always been. When everything else has been stripped away—that is where any culture finds its true essence.”
Loud and enthusiastic applause burst from all sides of the table, there was a hammering of feet upon the wooden floor. I hardly knew where to look. Kano raised his glass, and proposed a toast: “To a true scholar of the modern age!” Another large glass appeared in front of me. With an unsteady grin, I raised it to the assembled company and tipped it down my throat.
Room was made for me at the table. Mrs. Shimamura set down bottles and snacks, glancing at me in amusement. Soon enough, I felt relaxed and cheerful. Every so often, someone would bang the table and stand up and declare that they were “off to analyze our true culture” and everyone would laugh as the man went outside to urinate in the alley.
I found myself sitting next to Kano. He pushed his cigarettes toward me in an encouraging manner. The tobacco was delicious, and he talked to me in a conspiratorial way, as if we were both men of the world.
“And how are you surviving these morbid times, Maruki?” he asked politely.
“Well,” I said, hesitantly, “I print a small journal. Nothing of any great consequence, you understand.”
Mrs. Shimamura was leaning over the table, wiping away a spillage.
“Oh?” Kano inquired.