by Ben Byrne
“Where is he?” I asked above the din. Sally stared at me in astonishment.
“I thought you were his friend!”
“What happened?”
“Haven’t you heard? Where have you been?”
“Heard what?”
“Mark’s been arrested. They’re saying he’s some kind of subversive!”
I wondered if he’d still been wearing his Japanese robe as the burly MPs stormed through the screen door. Seizing him by the arms, dragging him from his wicker chair. The ballroom was heavy with smoke and the furore of relentless gossip and confusion. I crept away, helpless, behind the curtain and lay down on the carpet.
I walked over to Mrs. Ishino’s the next morning. The place was a wreck. The curtain was gone from the entranceway and chairs were tipped over on the floor. Big tin signs were nailed to the wall, warnings scrawled in red paint over the front of the building: “Off-Limits to Allied Personnel. VD.”
Upstairs, my room had been trashed. Everything was gone. My notes, my cameras, even my typewriter. All that was left were a few ripped paperbacks and the zinc pail on the floor, overturned, water saturating the tatami. This, then, was the reason for the untimely visit from the public health inspectors. For my extended interview with Wanderly and Ohara. Just another thing to add to my conscience. With a prayer on my lips, I knelt down in the corner of the room, pulled up the mat and prised up the floorboard.
The cigar box was still there. I picked it up and held it in my hands, my eyes closed, breathing in the smell of cedar and tobacco. Then I stuffed it deep into my jacket. Downstairs, I paused in the wreckage and took one last look around. I scribbled a hopeless note for Satsuko: the name of my ship and the time of its sailing. I took out most of the remaining yen notes from my wallet and left them in a useless stack on the splintered bar.
Over the rail of the USS New Mexico, I gazed down as Japanese girls hugged their American boyfriends, as kisses, tears, and fervent promises were exchanged. The ship gave a great mournful bellow as the massed turbines cranked up. The last of the lovers hugged each other and the men hastened up the gangway as it was pulled home. On the dock, the girls waved white handkerchiefs, calling out in plaintive, high-pitched chorus to the GIs who jostled around me on deck, shouting out wild endearments, pledges of eternal love and return.
The horn gave a deep bellow, and a quickening vibration pulsed through the deck as the chains drew up the anchor. With a great shudder, the ship began to pull unmistakably away from the quay. Another high-pitched wail came from the assembly below; the men around me whistled and shouted. A sea of handkerchiefs fluttered up and down, and my eyes searched the crowd restlessly for Satsuko. Up and down, up and down the handkerchiefs went, every one a love story, every one a heartbreak.
No part of me wanted to leave. And yet, here I was, suddenly on the deck of a vast, oceangoing ship, Japan drifting irrevocably away from me. A yawning gulf opening up, a chasm that grew wider, deeper, and more achingly lonely with every inch that we pulled out to sea.
The island was finally lost beyond the carved sapphire horizon as the lonely screams of seabirds gusted around me in the sky. I went below deck and climbed onto my bunk. A young, ratlike man in uniform lay on the bed beneath mine, his leg in a plaster cast. He was reading the funny pages of the Stars and Stripes, chuckling to himself.
“Going home, huh?” he said, without looking up. I grunted forbearingly, but he carried on talking. “Old Nippon sure is a swell place. No place like home though. Say, where’s home for you, fella?”
I willed him to shut up. I desperately wanted to be left alone in my despair, as if the banality of his conversation might somehow impinge upon the purity of my bitterness.
“New York,” I muttered.
“New York, huh? You don’t say . . . ”
He appeared to contemplate the feasibility of human beings inhabiting New York City for a while, and then, apparently satisfied, he began to speak again, his voice brimming with knowing locker-room insinuation.
“Say. How about those Jap girls, huh? Sure are cute, ain’t they?”
Satsuko’s face arose before me—her dark, harrowing eyes.
“Foxy little geisha girls . . . You ever have one of them? Huh? You ever have one of them little geisha girls?”
Her look of distress. Of fury.
Take me. Please—
I buried my face in my blanket with an uncertain noise, my hands over my ears.
Throughout those dog days of summer, I walked the New York streets like a hunted animal. It seemed almost overwhelming in its banality. Cabs went up and down Lexington Avenue. Steam rose from the manhole covers. Old women walked their poodles in Central Park and messenger boys sprinted between the office buildings. At five-thirty sharp, men in suits poured out from the skyscrapers into the bars by Grand Central Station, before hurrying off to their air-conditioned lives of domestic bliss.
The city was like an impenetrable fortress. The world might lie in ruins, but it was business as usual in New York, heir to the postwar world, its citizens engrossed in their buying and selling, eating and drinking, their greatest victory this vast, blithe antipathy—this insurmountable wall against which I pounded my head. I stopped in the middle of the streets as the crowds rushed past, clutched onto walls for support. The cars and the people went by like an endless zoetrope, and it was all moving so fast that I was terrified of stepping into the current, of being swept away entirely.
I was standing outside the 42nd Street subway station one evening when a chubby man asked me for a match for his cigarette. As I held out my lighter, he made an amiable remark on that evening’s performance by the Brooklyn Dodgers. A sudden, liquid fury passed through me. Before I knew it, I was clinging onto his shirt, shaking him furiously.
I saw myself suddenly from above—a madman, gripping onto another like some desperate succubus. I slowly forced myself to release him. He sprinted off up Broadway, clinging onto his hat as he glanced back at me in terror.
I walked all across Manhattan that night. The next morning at the boardinghouse, I settled up with Mrs. D’Annunzio and told her I’d be leaving later on that week. Something had to change. Something had to give.
At a photography studio in Murray Hill, I methodically worked up my Hiroshima prints. As I stood in the dim red light, leaning over the enlarger and counting off the seconds, the trip came back to me in vivid bursts. The lonely train guard in the ruined station. Snowflakes, hovering in the air outside the police station. As the images swelled in darkening hues from the developing fluid, I stared once again into the eyes of the aged dance teacher; studied the faint, fragile smile of the railway man, who thought that the wind would come and carry him away like a feather. It occurred to me that they would all now, most likely, be dead. As the prints hung dripping on the line, I felt a profound affinity, as if I, like them, were now just a ghost, a restless shadow on the fabric of the world.
I packed sets of the prints into envelopes and over the course of the next few days delivered them personally, with a short typed note and full release, to the offices of TIME, Atlantic Monthly, LIFE and Harper’s. Then I knew that I needed to rest. I went up to Vermont and rented a cabin in the White Mountains. I fished and swam in the nearby lake, chopped wood, took long walks in the forest. I retired early and lay in bed, listening to the wind in the pines and thinking of Satsuko.
Gradually, I felt my strength start to return. The great perpetual roar that had been in my ears for so long was slowly beginning to fade.
Every other day, I hiked the five miles to the village to pick up groceries at the mom-and-pop store. They had the occasional magazine there, and one morning, I arrived to find that month’s edition of the New Yorker on the rack. The cover showed a typical Manhattan summer scene: a cartoon of cheerful citizens playing games in the park. As I leaned down to pick it up from the stand, I noticed a strip of paper bind
ing the magazine, printed with an editorial message.
“Hiroshima,” it read, in underlined type. “This entire issue is devoted to the story of how an atomic bomb destroyed a city.”
A strange, distant sensation coursed through me. I paid the old lady and walked away up the street, reading. The whole magazine had been given over to a piece by a correspondent whose name I didn’t recognize: John Hersey. A writer who’d just returned from Japan. It followed the stories of five survivors of the A-Bomb, from the moment of the blast until now, more than a year later, when the city had finally been opened up again. I sat outside my cabin that morning and read the magazine from cover to cover, over and over again.
It painted a picture of fractured lives, of souls caught outside of time. It depicted citizens shocked and confused, still struggling to comprehend the thing they had witnessed in those bright, searing seconds that fine August morning. I recognized much of the description: the points of reference, the landmarks and cardinal points. Then, toward the end of the article, I gave a great cry of vindication. To my fierce delight, the story began to talk of radiation disease, of “Disease X.” The story documented its victims, its symptoms and its causes. And it presented it all as medical fact. Not as propaganda. Not as a bargaining tool. Not as “horseshit.”
The story went on until the very last page. There were no pictures. But after the words, they would come, I thought. My pictures.
A tranquillity descended upon me as I reread the article in the silence of my cabin. It was done now, I thought. It was over.
That evening, I sat on the bank of the lake and looked up at the moon as it slowly rose above the treetops. The water lapped against the shore and a million stars stretched out against the sky. I thought about Satsuko with a terrible ache in my heart. Where would she be tonight? What cramped back room, what urgent back alley? I broke down and shook with tears for a long time; one man, alone in a forest, beneath the starry sky.
Finally, my sobs subsided, and all that was left was the freshness of the night around me. A cool breeze sprang up and the tops of the trees sighed as they waved back and forth in the moonlight. I stood up and brushed myself off, then walked back through the wood to my cabin. I took off my shirt and climbed into my narrow bunk. Within moments, thank God, I had fallen into a profound and utterly dreamless sleep.
36
ONE WONDERFUL DAY
(Osamu Maruki)
Wrap!” Kano cried, as if pronouncing a wonderful blessing over the assembled cast and crew, crowded now below the edge of the soundstage. Michiko Nozaki stood for a second, her hand frozen in tableau. Slowly, her face dissolved into that wonderful, trademark smile of hers, and she flung out her arms and rushed down the steps toward Kano, kissing him on both cheeks in the French manner. Kinosuke, her leading man, strode over and spun her about in his arms. Hoots and catcalls came from the crew as she emerged from his embrace, blushing and breathless. Only then did she notice me and hurry over.
“Sensei!” she said. “You’ve come to see us at last.”
She pecked me chastely upon the forehead. Kinosuke slid a brawny arm around her waist and held up his other hand in the air.
“Well, then,” he called, “I propose now that we all offer a heartfelt banzai—”
Disconcerted noises came from the crew and he stopped himself with a chuckle.
“Excuse me—perhaps I should propose instead that we offer ‘three cheers’—to our director, Kano. That we might express our respect and gratitude to him from the bottom of our hearts.”
He turned solemnly and touched his hands to his forehead. An appreciative purr came from the rest of the crew and Kinosuke raised his fist in the air: “Hip, hip, hooray!”
Kano smiled, his face half-hidden behind a pair of thick American sunglasses.
“Thank you,” he said. “Though it is I who should really be expressing my thanks. To our stars—” He gestured at Kinosuke and Michiko, and everyone applauded enthusiastically. “—the artists—” He turned to the smocked designers, who held up their paint brushes and grinned. “—and to the crew.” He waved up at the lighting box, from which bright bulbs flashed.
“You must all be very tired!” he said. “But there is just one more ‘thank you’ I would like to add, one that has perhaps so far gone unexpressed in the production of this picture. I would like to dedicate this film to its true creator.”
Michiko Nozaki’s bright eyes fell upon me. I tingled with pride, and bashfully bowed my head as Kano raised his hands.
“To Tokyo. To the city, and to the spirit of its people.”
My head jerked back up.
“To a city that will one day emerge from the ashes again, as it has so many times in the past.”
Heavy applause came from all around as I cleared my throat.
“I have expressed before the idea that a city cannot simply rebuild itself like some robotic automaton. Its true spirit lies in the hearts and the habits of its people.”
The crew nodded earnestly.
“This is to what we pay tribute today. And as long as the spirit of Tokyoites lives on—gruff and arrogant as it may be—so will their city survive. Thank you for your hard work!”
Everyone began to applaud. We moved forward, and then, abandoning all dignity, we flung our arms around each other and began to laugh out loud.
At that moment a deep and quickening sense of dignity passed over me, a feeling such as I had never had before in my entire life. I embraced them all, trying not to weep. My colleagues; my comrades; my friends.
I sat at my usual spot at the counter of the Montmartre, drinking Scotch, tapping the stiff toe of my russet Oxford brogue against the stool. I wondered about the reviews that would appear in the cinema magazines the next week. Dreamy and melodramatic, they would say. Inaccurate—naive.
I shook my head. The critics, for once, did not concern me. I only hoped that I had perhaps managed to capture something of the peculiar spirit of the times—the spirit of the burned-out ruins. Of the curious resilience of human hearts in the face of chaos and destruction; of our potential to rise again from tragedy, to cast off the burden of time as a butterfly shrugs off its chrysalis.
The gala premiere performance was held, at Kano’s insistence, in the ruins of an old theatre in Shinjuku that he had regularly visited as a child. The roof was still mostly open to the sky and battered chairs were lined up in the amphitheatre to face an improvised canvas screen. Michiko Nozaki sat down in the front row, chattering to the friends she had brought along. A matronly lady sat on one side of her, and on the other was a teenage boy, smartly dressed in long shorts and a white shirt. Beyond him was another woman, and as I gazed down, in the last light of dusk, she turned, so that for a moment, I could clearly see her face.
Such a strange and curious thing.
Satsuko Takara wore a flowing cotton summer dress, her hair pinned and fastened with a simple comb. How odd, how fateful, for her to appear right now, just moments before the drama that was so inspired by her was to be enacted. Would she recognize something of herself up there on the screen?
A profound sense of humility and providence coursed through me. Here, for surely the last time, was my heaven-sent chance. I swore that I would go down to her after the film had ended. That I would offer her the hand of companionship again. That I would ask, if I was not too ashamed, for her forgiveness.
The lights went out and the projector began to whir. A thick beam of smouldering light hit the screen, and the symbol of a torch flickered onto the canvas. The name of the film appeared in stuttering ideograms, followed by the name of Kano, then of myself. With an excited murmur, the audience settled back in their seats.
It was like nothing I had ever dreamed of. A new world came into being for me as Michiko Nozaki appeared on the swaying screen and her birdlike voice emerged from the speakers. Everyone in the crowd seemed to sense it too,
and a sound rose from the auditorium like a soft, collective sigh.
Up above, the beautiful face turned this way and that, smiling and nodding, her skin translucent, her eyes glistening. With the blurry backdrop of the ruined city behind her, she began to run down a narrow alley of low tenement houses . . .
The audience gazed at the screen as, above them, stars glimmered in the sky. With spectacular longing in my heart, I closed my eyes, willing myself to cling tightly to that beautiful image forever.
Wonderful faces, shining over and over with light.
37
THE STAR FESTIVAL
(Satsuko Takara)
Michiko skipped along a street of low wooden houses, dodging puddles in her path and throwing her hands this way and that like a dancer. Blurry ruins were painted behind her, distant buildings and a smudgy sky. She stopped at the edge of the stage and put her hands on her hips, and flashed her beautiful smile. With a flouncing curtsy, she skittered off to one side, where handsome Mr. Kinosuke stood holding a lacquer box of powdered mochi cakes. She pinched his nose, giggling, and promptly popped one into her mouth.
Hiroshi stood on a crate, squinting through the view finder of the camera, supported by Mr. Mogami the cinematographer, who was spinning him smoothly around to film the action. The film made a sound like a flittering clock as it whirred through the contraption. The director, Mr. Kano, stepped forward and raised his hand.
“Cut! Cut!” he called.
The rest of the assembled actors and stagehands laughed and clapped as Hiroshi opened his eyes. He blinked in the bright stage lights, a bashful smile slowly growing on his face.
I came to, lying in the tunnel beneath the railway arch that night, overwhelmed by an almost unbearable sense of excruciating shame. My kimono was soaked, my crimson nails chipped. Hiroshi’s eyes were still wide as he stared at me.