Dark Lanterns

by Zoe Drake

  Hearing the booming voice through the barge's planks, but not enough to comprehend the words, Yoshi threw aside the blanket and stood up in the darkness. He fumbled and felt his way to the hatch. When he pushed it, it wouldn't give. He pushed again, the wooden cover refusing to budge, as if the soaked wood had jammed on its hinges.

  "Yoshi? Yoshi?" came Shunsuke's voice, real urgency in it now." "I'm here," Yoshi called back, as loud as he could.

  Seconds later, the barge's structure shuddered from the impact of many pairs of heavy boots landing on the deck. Yoshi sucked in his breath. The noise of the siren was supplanted by the roar of a gas-powered engine coughing into life nearby.

  "Hello? Hello?" Yoshi tried to raise his voice above the noise of the engine. "Let me out!"

  "It's the planes," Hideo started to whine. "The planes will be here soon, we've got to go home!"

  "Shut up." Shunsuke twisted his head around, scowling, as if he was expecting American troops to burst out of the tiny alleyways and run towards him. "If Yoshi's smart, he would either start for home now or duck into one of the shelters around here."

  "We've got to look for him," Taeko said firmly. "He might get lost and get too scared to think straight."

  "But there's no time!" Almost in tears, Hideo grabbed Shunsuke's sleeve, his nails almost penetrating the skin. "Shunsuke, we've got to go home, we've got to go home!"

  With a curse, the older boy shook Hideo away, and looked up and down the street again. Taeko stepped closer to the boy, her soft brown eyes seeking his. "Shunsuke. You know we can't go back without Yoshi. If anything happens to him, the teachers and the wardens will say that it's our fault. And anyway, he's the youngest. He needs somebody older and stronger to look after him."

  Shunsuke sucked in breath, nodding his head resignedly. "All right. We'll go over to the Ogawa's house, it's the biggest and closest. He might have gone there." Their school coats had padded hoods designed to protect young ears from bomb-blasts, and the three grimly slipped them now over heir heads. Calling Yoshi's name, this time in rising desperation, the children turned away from the direction of the river, further into the knot of tiny streets.

  Under the sonorous approach of the B29s, the city held its breath.

  April, fifteen years ago.

  Japan suffered one of the worst urban fires in postwar history when the New Sakura Hotel, built just one year before, burned to the ground. The cause of the fire remained unknown but the owner was held responsible, as he had ordered corners cut to save construction costs, and had failed to install basic safety equipment. This act of creative accounting resulted in thirty-three dead, another thirty-nine injured, and the owner receiving a prison sentence.

  For years the building remained an empty, burned-out shell, despite the soaring real-estate values of the times. Most companies practiced a selective amnesia when it came to that particular part of the city. The residents of the area held regular ceremonies at temples and shrines to pray for the victims of the fire. Despite that, all kinds of rumors circulated, rumors of things seen and heard inside the blackened walls. It was even hard to employ security guards at the plot of land. Some would quit in less than a week - refusing to give a coherent reason why they left their jobs.

  And so it remained, until Kasai Heavy Industries purchased the site, and Kasai himself had announced that his personal fortune-teller had told him "It was what the spirits wanted."

  *

  Minamoto walked apprehensively into the tent, trying to ignore the heads as they turned in his direction, fat necks straining against the collars of their starched white shirts, uniformed secretaries staring at the ground in their prescribed demure roles. Inside the tent were five ranks of white, plastic folding chairs, facing a small wooden stage erected specially for the occasion. The stage was bare except for a microphone stand and a diminutive altar, its inner contents screened by blue and white curtains. Kasai was standing in front of the microphone, coming to the end of a typically long-winded speech thanking his cronies for attending.

  At two minutes before twelve, Kasai finished and stepped down, to take his place on one of the seats in the front row. After a few moments, the scattered conversations ceased as Akiyama entered the tent, flanked by several assistants wearing plain white robes. He held the ceremonial flask of rice wine in his hand, his spine straight and his jaw set. Minamoto looked for the conspiratorial spark that he had glimpsed five minutes before, but there were no clues in the old man's expression - just the resolution of someone with a job to be done.

  In front of the stage, the priest handed the flask to the assistants, and climbed the three steps to stand before the altar. Lifting his arms, he brought his dry, long-fingered hands together twice. Clap. Clap. Harsh, percussive sounds to awaken the spirits and announce the presence of their acolytes.

  "Shubatsu- no-gi," Akiyama intoned, signaling the first of the nine steps of the Ji Chin Sai - the ceremony to purify the land and call upon its spirits for harmony. Minamoto listened as Akiyama described the descent of the ancestor spirits to Earth in the Koshin-no-gi.

  Reaching the end of the chant, Akiyama drew the curtains aside on the altar and tenderly picked up the ceremonial staff. The staff was a long bamboo stick with a cluster of paper streamers at one end, cut in the shape of the sacred Sasaki leaves. Turning and descending from the stage, the priest held the staff above those present, shaking the paper leaves like a shaman's fetish as he intoned the archaic language of the rite. The businessmen lowered their heads as they silently received the scrutiny of the ancestors. His head also down, Minamoto listened intently, becoming aware of something beyond the old man's words. There was something else ... something just at the edge of his hearing ... he closed his eyes to concentrate. There was something. An echo, a faint, sibilant muttering in the tent, as if there were many people whispering at once, not just the priest. A flaw in the microphone? Perhaps Kasai's preparations had not been that meticulous after all.

  Climbing back onto the wooden platform and returning the staff to its former position, the priest chanted the first words of the Tamagushi Honten, signaling the crucial part of the ceremony. He was going to offer the sacred Sasaki sprig to Kasai.

  With his left hand raised slightly above the right one, Akiyama held the green end of the sprig, faced the altar, and raised the sprig to cheek level. He bowed once more, and turned towards Kasai, extending his right hand, palm turned upwards.

  Kasai stood, as he prepared to join the priest on the stage and accept the offering.

  "As we stand in the presence of the ancestors-"

  "TAEKO, SHUNSUKE, HIDEO - "

  Minamoto jerked in shock, looking wildly around the tent. The hesitant muttering had returned, louder that before, and with it an unearthly crackling, like wood being snapped apart by giant hands.

  Minamoto looked upward and saw the fabric of the tent's ceiling sag and split, as vivid orange tongues penetrated from the center.

  "Fire," he managed to yell. "The tent's on fire!"

  The massed ranks of the business community broke their respectful silence, crying out in alarm as they turned and fled for the small entrance flap. Elbows stabbed, hands grabbed at briefcases and handbags, spectacles fell from faces as bodies collided against each other.

  Minamoto stayed by the entrance, urging everyone out, extending a hand to pull people along if they stumbled. Smoke and floating ashes began to sting his eyes and catch at his throat.

  Leaving the tent at last, Minamoto glanced at the knot of people gathered on the construction site, coughing, mobbing brows with limp handkerchiefs, trying to regain their senses. "Where's Kasai? And Akiyama?"" he called. Nobody answered. He turned back to the tent. It was crowned by swirling crimson flames now, and there were sparks in the air — but not coming from the tent. Minamoto realized they were falling from the sky itself - lights, like burning snow, falling lazily upon the tent and the earth around it.

  Shaking his head to regain his senses, he ran to the entrance o
f the tent. Thick, gray clouds swirled from the flap. A figure suddenly lurched out of the smoke, its arms and torso alive with flames that writhed like snakes, its head a blackened, smoking mass.

  Kasai and Minamoto screamed together.

  *

  Stuck on the fire-fighter's barge as it pushed off and chugged slowly south, Yoshi didn't see the Flowers of Edo bloom in the night sky, their terrible radiance illuminating the city below. The residents of Tokyo stopped in their air-raid drills, staring upwards like children watching fireworks, mesmerized by a ferocity that they had never even imagined.

  In wartime, the people of Tokyo had been discouraged at using communal shelters. Families had been drilled at staying at their homes, protecting them from fires in case of bombing. They had been formed into bucket-brigades, ferrying water from nearby wells and canals, trained to work together as local neighborhood units. They thought that living in Tokyo, where buildings of stone and brick were rarities, they were used to the dangers of fire.

  They had no idea how useless their precautions were.

  The B29s were not dropping regular explosives. They were dropping M-69 incendiaries, containing jellied petroleum. When the bombs hit solid ground, the detonators ignited, and the flaming semi-liquid substance sprayed outwards. Everything that it touched burned. Wood. Clothes. Skin.

  It was the prototype of napalm.

  As the wind fanned the flames before it, the chaos spread, burning debris and white-hot ash raining down on every building within reach. As the fire took hold, the translucent paper windows of each house lit up from within, glowing like magic lanterns. Ten minutes was all it took to destroy a house entirely.

  Shunsuke, Taeko and Hideo found themselves in the middle of a screaming crowd, as the people abandoned their houses and belongings. The bloated B29s continued to ease their bulk across the sky and drop their cold metal seeds. The harsh spring winds had turned into an inferno of superheated air that sucked the air out of frantic lungs, that seared with its smoke, that sent charred timber pinwheeling through the sky onto roofs and fragile heads below.

  The main thrust of the people was towards the two canals, and the areas where parks had been converted into makeshift firebreaks. The three children found themselves crushed into a tiny alleyway jammed with screaming, clawing strangers. The three of them tightened their grip on each other's hands to stop being knocked down or pulled away. Glowing embers fell on them like rain.

  Near to Taeko, a mother was carrying a blanket-wrapped baby on her back. Taeko screamed as the bundle of clothing began to smolder, but there was no way the mother could hear her.

  As the fiery wind swirled around the knot of people struggling to move forward, the women's shoes and the men's puttees and trousers began to burn first. They shouted and screamed even harder, stamping to put the flames out. In her panic, Taeko could see Hideo gasping for breath in his padded coat, so she reached out and pulled his hood back, pulling her own off at the same time. Hideo's hair ignited first, giving Taeko time to realize her mistake. Then her own hair was on fire, the butterfly hairclip beginning to melt.

  All those trapped in the street were already dead, but they were still moving. Burning fiercely from the legs upwards, their arms reached out to touch each other and the walls of the houses, like sleepwalkers, feeling their way onwards.

  Only Shunsuke made it to the river. His face black with ash, streaked with tears of pain and rage, he threw himself into the steaming water. He clung onto the bank. Around him things were bobbing and floating in the water, some of them moving, some of them screaming, some of them slipping past still and silent. The smoke blew along the river, a thick pall moving faster than the current. Shunsuke struggled to draw breath as the air grew fouler. His breathing grew more and more ragged until his eyes rolled back in his head, and his face at last slipped under the water.

  When the fire fighters finally went below, giving up their futile efforts, they found Yoshi cowering in a corner, gripping his stinking blanket for comfort. Silently, one of them picked him up and took him up to the top deck. Flames danced in the thick black miasma that hung close to the ground. The bombing had stopped.

  The city had gone.

  Yoshi thought for a moment that the barge had sailed to a different place entirely, that the old Tokyo was still present but just somewhere else, not in the black heaps of shells and cinders that crumbled inwards as he watched.

  He thought that his friends could still be there somewhere, still running through the streets, and if he strained his ears he might still hear Taeko's voice, "Mo ii-yo?"

  "Taeko?" he called softly. "Shunsuke? Hideo?"

  *

  "Taeko. Shunsuke. Hideo." Yoshitaka Akiyama's voice was firm, chanting the names louder and louder, his eyes tightly shut, his face a mask of concentration. As the flames swirled around him, he stood oblivious, his back poker-straight, his hands clasped together in front of him. "I am here. I am ready."

  Outside, Minamoto whipped off his coat and thrust it at Kasai, knocking him over. It had been a long time since he'd been on the newspaper's first aid course, but he could still remember the basics. Rolling the businessman in the dirt, Minamoto smothered him with his coat, until the flames released their grip and had subsided into stinking wisps of smoke.

  Kasai grimaced and grunted in pain. Peering at the businessman's face, Minamoto noticed that it didn't seem to be as bad as he'd feared; nearly all the hair and skin was still there.

  He rose to a kneeling position. Most of the guests were at the far end of the site, trying to open the gates. Many of them were looking upwards in panic, some jerking and brushing spasmodically at their clothes. Minamoto looked upwards, and gasped. It wasn't a hallucination, The air was sparkling, things in it glowing, like phosphorescent creatures in the night sea.

  Turning, he saw that the wreckage of the tent was almost gone. "The priest," he murmured. As a section of fabric finally pared away and slid to the ground, he could see, through the swirling smoke, into the tent.

  It wasn't possible, he told himself.

  The priest was still at his altar, his back turned to Minamoto, his head bowed in prayer. He seemed not to notice or care about the fire that blazed around him. And ... someone ... the reporter could make out three small figures, like children ... glowing like the sun ... they held out their arms to the priest to support him, as he began to take slow, shuffling steps forward.

  "He said this is a fault line," Minamoto babbled to the heedless Kasai, "You tried to build something on a fault line, but not a fault line in the ground. A fault line in time. How many people have died here?" The reporter shook his head, beaten by the madness without and within. "How many fires have there been?"

  Minamoto had enough time to register the body of the priest flashing like a strobe light before the explosion hit him. A concussive wave of light and sound knocked him to the ground, slamming the breath out of his lungs. When he lifted his head from the gravel, to the groans of the semi-conscious businessman beside him, his head was ringing with the emptiness of silence.

  The construction site was empty, apart from the two of them, and a smoking crater that held what looked like charcoal.

  I have never liked crows. Big, ugly, brutes, living on the trash that human beings throw away or leave behind. I consider them the cockroaches of the air. They are omnivores by nature, feasting on everything they can - but they become frantic if there is meat, ripping open garbage bags and leaving the rotting food scraps scattered across the sidewalk.

  They are everywhere in Tokyo. They stare and caw at passers-by from ledges and power-cables during the day, and at night, they roost in the parks, the cemeteries, even the trees surrounding the Imperial Palace. They gather and plot in their nests made from waste plastic, coat hangars stolen from balconies, animal hair from Ueno Zoo. They are intelligent; they work together in packs; and they attack human beings during the early summer, when their fledglings are hatched but still in the nest.

  They are dar
k, angular creatures, a peculiarly loathsome amalgam of huge wings, gaping beak, and unflinching eyes. I have heard stories that they try to imitate the voices of human beings, that they have attacked and killed pigeons and small cats. I would not be at all surprised.

  Are there any who see beauty in crows? Yes. Professor Sakurai would be one. But then, his madness was the same madness, the big, black emptiness in the eyes of birds, the unflinching eyes that they turn upon you, as they roost upon the buildings above.

  Sakurai's eyes were like that, once. I still shudder to think about it. His eyes, above the crude jutting beak, the mass of feathers covering his skull.

  The darkness in the eyes of birds.

  I saw enough of crows in my former part-time job, as a security guard working in a big Tokyo department store, in the middle of Shinjuku. I've left now, and have taken a more ordinary way of working through my MA course, working nights in a FamilyMart. The department store job was good enough while it lasted. What the Japanese think of as a security guard is different from other countries, I believe. In the USA they probably all carry guns and have those wires trailing out of their ears. Here, perhaps the most taxing responsibility is making sure the traffic cones are lined up straight in the parking lot. That means it's the perfect job for senior citizens, and young people working their way through college.

  In the late summer, the rooftop beer gardens were still open but approaching the end of the season, and my main responsibility was to patrol that area, just in case people got too drunk and inconvenienced other customers. No danger of falling, however; the rooftop was surrounded by a tall wire fence. No danger of anyone falling, I thought.

  I don't particularly find heights troublesome. I'm a post-graduate student of physics at Meiji University; what heights and tall buildings always reminded me of, up to this point, was my father trying to demonstrate what had happened at the Tower of Pisa, how objects always fall with the same rate of acceleration. He was a science teacher, or had been until he retired. He was overjoyed when I left our little town by the Japan Alps and came to study at Tokyo as an undergraduate. Before that, he hadn't objected at all to my mother imposing curfews, and the personal tutor that she had hired out of her own housekeeping money.