by Ben Byrne
Slowly, I got to my feet. I could hardly believe how grown-up he looked. He wore a collared shirt and smart woollen trousers. But his face was covered with thick, swirling welts, and I felt a stab in my heart as we stood there in the tunnel, in silence.
Finally, he spoke.
“Big sister,” he said, his voice deep. “You’re alive.”
A sob rose in my throat. “And you,” I whispered.
He bowed his head, and placed his palms formally together.
“Please forgive me,” he murmured.
Tears filled my eyes. “Forgive you?”
He knelt on the ground and touched his forehead solemnly to the concrete. “Please forgive me. For leaving you alone that night.”
I saw him, silhouetted by fire. I desperately shook my head, unable to speak. He finally sat down cross-legged on the ground.
“I needed to fetch the pot, you understand,” he said, frowning. “Father was counting on me.”
“Of course.”
He drew his arms around his legs. I wondered what could possibly be passing through his mind.
“Did you find it, Hiroshi-kun?” I finally asked.
He shook his head.
“Well. Perhaps we might go to look for it together one day.”
He glanced up at me.
“Are you still in pain?” I said, gesturing to his face. His cheeks looked angry and shiny in the streetlight. He shook his head again.
“Hiroshi-kun—” I started. He glanced at me. “Please, Hiroshi-kun,” I said. “There’s no need for us to talk about anything that has happened.”
He stared at the ground, and nodded.
I walked over to him, and held out my hand.
“Please, brother,” I said. “Will you come with me, now?”
As we approached Mrs. Ishino’s shop, something was very wrong. On the wall outside there were scrawled letters and tin signs, just like the Americans had put up outside the Oasis.
Inside, it was as if a typhoon had swept through the place. Chairs had been thrown aside, streamers pulled down, and broken glass littered the floor. I shivered as a memory came to me—of how the Americans had torn away the little curtains outside the girls’ rooms at the International Palace.
Mrs. Ishino was slumped over at the back of the bar, her thick arm hugging a bottle of shochu. On the table was the photograph of her husband in his flying jacket, the glass shattered in the frame. The gramophone was playing a mournful fragment of “The Apple Song” over and over again.
Hiroshi’s eyes were so wide that I was frightened he would bolt. I wouldn’t have blamed him. But instead, he sat on a stool as I shook Mrs. Ishino and tried to pour water down her throat. There was the sound of a motorcar in the alley outside.
The whole scene had the feel of a dream, as the rain blustered in through the window. I heard a soft knock. A voice called my name.
Standing there by the doorway, dressed in a pleated white skirt and wool sweater, was Michiko.
The workmen tottered on a ladder in the alley and I called out in direction as they hoisted up the sign with the name of our new shop painted upon it in large crimson letters: Twilight Bar. Inside, two carpenters were sanding down the new counter and there was a strong smell of paint and sawdust. Hanako and Masuko were sitting with Mrs. Ishino, poring over the shopping list for our opening week. Hiroshi stood with them. He had all kinds of connections at the market now, he said, and could get food especially cheap, though I didn’t care to know how.
Several of his photographs were framed on the newly painted walls. Shoeshine boys buffed the boots of American soldiers in Ueno Plaza; a packed four-car train travelled slowly through the countryside. Opposite the bar was a photograph he’d hung in pride of place: a portrait of a tough-looking gangster, dressed in a three-piece suit, scowling away beneath the big illuminated sign at the Ueno Sunshine Market.
Michiko had barely asked a single question that night. She had calmly stepped over the threshold, taking in the wreckage of the bar.
“Why, Satsuko. Aren’t you going to introduce me?” She gestured at Hiroshi.
“This—this is Hiroshi-kun.”
“Your brother?” she asked, staring at me in amazement. I nodded. She walked over to him and pushed the hair out of his eyes. She really is a good actress, I thought.
“Satsuko,” she said, taking one last look around. “I think perhaps you should fetch everybody’s things and come along with me.”
We stayed all summer at her luxurious apartment. It was all her own now, Michiko having bought it after her admiral had been sent back to American following some scandal.
Every afternoon, on her return home from filming, she brought us gifts: slabs of chocolate; summer clothes for Hiroshi; fish, rice and vegetables. I cooked our meals in the evenings and we all ate together at her Western dining table. Mrs. Ishino had fallen quite in love with Michiko by then, and told stories of Tokyo theatres of the past, of the glory days when she had danced in the cabarets and operettas. Michiko regaled us with the antics of the actors and stagehands, gave us the gossip about her famous leading man Kinosuke.
One evening, the conversation turned to the subject of Hollywood. The film My Darling Clementine had just opened, and Hiroshi had come back from the cinema earlier that day, breathless with excitement.
“Hollywood—well!” Michiko said, a familiar look coming into her eyes. “Wouldn’t that just be the dream.”
My chopsticks hesitated over my dish. “Really, Michiko?” I said. “I should think it would be a very lonely place, despite all its glamour.”
Michiko raised a quizzical eyebrow.
“Really, Satsuko?” she said. “I’m surprised at you. Didn’t you once write to tell me you were intending to go away to America yourself? San Francisco, wasn’t it?”
Silence fell and Hiroshi glanced at me curiously. Mrs. Ishino cleared her throat and helped herself to some more rice.
“What on earth made you think that, Miss Nozaki?” Mrs. Ishino asked pleasantly. “Why would a girl like Satsuko-chan possibly want to go to America?”
I laughed politely. Michiko’s eyes narrowed, holding my own for a second.
“Please excuse me,” she said. “I was thinking of someone else entirely.”
As I say, she really was a very good actress.
But there was one matter which I couldn’t brush over, of course, one that became harder for me to conceal as the summer went on, however much I might try to do so behind loose-fitting cotton dresses. Finally, Mrs. Ishino took me to one side and said that we would have to make preparations for any eventuality.
Certain officials, she said, could be persuaded to draw up certain documents, if the right gifts were slipped up their sleeves. She assured me it was for the best, that it would avoid all sorts of complications later on. She returned later that week with a stamped marriage certificate, with my name upon it. The other name was that of a twenty-five-year-old man, who had apparently been born in Gunma Prefecture. Mrs. Ishino told me that he had died soon after his return to Japan from Manchukuo.
“Your husband, Satsuko. A lightning affair. Poor soul.”
My child would have a father, then, on paper at least. But I agonized over what the child would look like. Would the eyes be charcoal black, like mine? Or would they be sky blue?
In the meantime, Michiko had insisted that we were all to be the guests of honour at the gala premiere of her new film. That morning, Mrs. Ishino helped dress me in my green and gold summer kimono, and Hiroshi and I took the tram up to Asakusa. We had promised to light some incense for our parents in the ruins of our old shop, as well as have one last look for our father’s pot. The neighbourhood was as busy as it had ever been, men in shirtsleeves going to and fro on bicycles in the warm afternoon sunshine. The Nakamise Arcade leading up to the Senso Temple was bustling with stalls,
and the sound of sawing and hammering came from the temple precincts. Cedar prayer plaques were hanging in bundles from the gates in honour of the Star Festival, and we bought our own little plaques, writing our secret requests on the back in the hope that they would be answered by the Goddess of Mercy.
We bought the incense and then walked rather solemnly toward Umamichi Street. Flags fluttered, advertising new restaurants, theatres and vaudeville shows.
“Look!” Hiroshi said suddenly. Up above the shell of a building was a billboard advertising Michiko’s new film, her painted face beaming out.
“The old neighbourhood’s really coming back to life, isn’t it, Hiroshi?”
He made a noise of assent. I studied him. He was so much taller now, his eyes so alert. I wondered what he could have possibly gone through during those long months when we’d been apart. I wondered if we would ever talk of it. Probably not, I thought. Not at least until we were very old.
We found the square cistern, and stepped into the rubble of our old shop, overgrown now with feverfew and stalks of wild sugar beet. Hiroshi poked about for a while, but found nothing but a few blackened fragments of ceramic. I looked at him in question. He gave a rueful smile and shook his head.
I placed the incense in the centre of the patch and he bent down to light it. We both clasped our hands and bowed our heads as the fragrant smoke twisted up around us.
I felt the child inside me, then, for the first time, kicking gently inside my belly. I gasped, imagining the little feet and toes, the tiny mouth and ears, as it lay curled inside my womb. It would be an autumn child, I thought, just as I had been myself. At that moment, the image of my mother came into my mind. I felt, quite intensely, that she was standing beside me, stroking my hair with her hand. I raised my head. The sunlight fell in my eyes, and I felt my father there too—they were both standing quietly behind me, one hand on each of my shoulders.
Cicadas were whirring loudly as we walked back to the street. I noticed a sign advertising a summer matsuri and I wondered out loud how lavish the processions might be this year, whether the men would still heave portable shrines up to the temple.
“It’s strange,” Hiroshi murmured. “I was just thinking the same thing.”
It would be firework season soon, I thought. Bright flowers would burst in the sky above Tokyo through those hot summer nights and we would light candles, offer prayers and food to the spirits of the dead, set lanterns adrift upon the water. There would be so many offerings this year that the river would be like a galaxy of floating stars.
Autumn would draw in, and before long we would prepare to go up to Asakusa together to listen to the ringing of the New Year’s bell. The child would be with us by then, I thought—my baby.
Winter would deepen then slowly dissolve. The days would lengthen once more.
Before long, there would be plum blossom.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This novel was inspired and informed by numerous works of nonfiction and fiction, of which I am particularly indebted to the following:
Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II by John W. Dower
Japan at War: An Oral History by Haruko Taya Cook and
Theodore F. Cook
Japan Diary by Mark Gayn
Hiroshima by John Hersey
The Japan Journals: 1947–2004 by Donald Richie
Democracy with a Tommygun by Wilfred G. Burchett
Further reading:
Modern Japanese Literature: From 1868 to the Present Day by Donald Keene
The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa by Yasunari Kawabata
The Setting Sun by Osamu Dazai
Confessions of a Mask and Runaway Horses by Yukio Mishima
Confessions of a Yakuza by Junichi Saga
The Sea and Poison by Shusaku Endo
The Children and The Makioka Sisters by Junichiro Tanizaki
A Drifting Life by Yoshihiro Tatsumi
The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, Issa by Robert Hass
Onward Towards our Noble Deaths by Shigeru Mizuki
The author would like to thank the following people for their help, advice, and support during the writing of this book:
Will Eglington
Pete Harris
Kieran Holland
David, Gordon and Sally Mitchell
James Parsons
Carrie Plitt and all at Conville Walsh
Averil Conor Sinnott
Jo Unwin
Susan Watt
Janie Yoon, Sarah MacLachlan and all at House of Anansi
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ben Byrne was born in 1977. He studied drama at the University of Manchester and later lived in San Francisco, New York and Tokyo, working as a consultant, ethnographic filmmaker and musician. He returned to England to dedicate his time more fully to writing, and his short fiction has appeared in Litro magazine. Fire Flowers is his first novel.