Fireflies

by Ben Byrne

  It must have been some kind of inn once, I thought, though it had obviously been abandoned now. By the front door, the welcoming statue of a tanuki in a pilgrim’s hat had toppled over. One of his arms had broken off, though he carried on grinning demonically nonetheless.

  The padlock on the front shutters was flimsy and when I hammered it with a rock it quickly sprung open. Beyond the vestibule, ancient pillars of twisted wood supported the low ceiling of a reception hall. Dark patches showed where the rain had seeped in. As I stepped over the threshold, an eerie feeling came over me. I hoped there were no dead bodies inside.

  The air was musty and slivers of light fell from cracks in the boarded-up windows. As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, my stomach quivered. Woodblock prints of almost-naked ladies were hung up on the walls. I climbed a wooden staircase to find a hallway, with rooms and nameplates set off to one side. “Peony,” “Cherry-Blossom,” “Ivy,” and “Chrysanthemum.” I put my hand to the door of “Peony” and quickly slid it aside.

  A dark shape hit my face and I crashed backward. There was a heavy flutter and I gazed up to see a huge black moth, powder thick on its wings like sparkling coal dust.

  Light fell into the corridor as I tugged the rotten boards from the windows. Down below was a secret garden with a palanquin in one corner, its fabric rotted away. It must have been a real high-class place, I thought — a retreat for the top brass during the war.

  The tatami was frayed in the rooms, and in “Chrysanthemum,” there was a charred patch where someone had lit a fire. But as I opened the cupboards, I found futons and sheets and blankets and pillows. An amazing idea suddenly occurred to me.

  ~ ~ ~

  Night had fallen by the time I got back to the station. A group of soldiers had penned the kids into a corner, and were snoring away with hairy overcoats pulled over their faces. I stepped over their bodies and shook the children awake.

  “Get ready to leave,” I said. “First light. We’re breaking camp.”

  They didn’t grasp my meaning at first.

  “Where are we going?” Aiko asked, rubbing her eyes. “Isn’t this where we live?”

  “Not any more. I’ve found somewhere else. A fortress.”

  “Are there other children?” Koji asked hopefully.

  “No. Not yet. But it’s a secret. Don’t whisper a word to anyone. Promise!”

  Shin snorted and rolled over. Koji frowned uncertainly. But Tomoko ran her fingers through her matted hair and knelt down in front of me.

  “Hiroshi-kun,” she said, “thank you. Please don’t trouble yourself. I’ll have the children ready to leave first thing in the morning.”

  In the middle of the night, I woke suddenly to see white lamps bobbing across the sleeping bodies. Spirits, I thought, floating above the corpses of the dead. Then I realized that the lights were electric torches. Policemen and doctors were pulling back people’s heads and inspecting their faces in the pale beams. Every so often, they tugged somebody up and dragged them away into the darkness. A rod of light needled toward us and I shook the children awake. I hustled them to their feet as the figures came toward us. We hurried outside into the freezing night as the frost prickled its way across the iron-hard ground.

  ~ ~ ~

  The house stood silent and ghostly in the morning mist. My heart flooded with relief. I’d almost convinced myself it would have disappeared overnight, like some enchanted foxes’ palace. I led the children over the gap in the wall and on through the garden. They started to rub their eyes and laugh. They couldn’t quite believe it.

  “It’s not really ours, is it, big brother?” Koji said. He pulled off his sandals and slid across the tatami of the reception hall.

  “It is now!” I shouted.

  I ran inside and the others came after me, letting out loud whoops and war cries as we slid crazily along the floor, tripping and tumbling into a hysterical heap.

  We got to work cleaning the place up straight away. The children took cloths and buckets from the kitchen, while I pulled away the last rotten boards from the windows. As daylight flooded the hall, I saw how run down the building actually was. The wooden walls were splintered and the paper screens were torn. But for the rest of the day, we swept the floors and pushed rags up and down the corridors with our shirts off. Clouds of dust smothered Aiko and Tomoko as they beat the futons, while Koji and Nobu splashed each other with suds and had a sword fight with their broomsticks.

  Shin, though, came over to me with a sly look on his face.

  “What’s so funny?”

  He sniggered. “I suppose you know what this place used to be, don’t you?”

  My cheeks throbbed. I’d taken down the pictures of the ladies the day before, and hidden them at the bottom of a cupboard upstairs.

  “An inn, I would have thought,” I said. “Some kind of high class place.”

  He gave a low laugh, then made a circle with his thumb and forefinger and thrust the index finger of his other hand through it repeatedly.

  “My father told me all about it.”

  By the end of the afternoon, the rooms were airy and the blankets fresh and clean. Nobu found a small bathhouse beyond the kitchen with a big cedar tub, and a smaller, family bathroom set off to one side. Part of the roof was missing and most of the tiles were cracked. I heaved the handle of the pump, and there was a great gasp of pipes from deep within the building, but nothing came out of the faucet except a long, spindly insect.

  There was a shout. “Hiroshi-kun! Come and look!” Nobu had discovered a large copper boiler with dials and an oil burner. After a few experiments, we managed to get it to hold a flame. As I turned a wheel, we heard gushing and the clank of machinery, and wisps of steam began to rise from the boiler. I went to the pump and tried the handle again. With a tremble of metal, a stream of water started to emerge, lukewarm at first, but growing gradually hotter.

  We marched in triumph back to the hall, where the other children were lying exhausted on the tatami.

  “Thanks for all your hard work,” I announced. “You’re all very tired. But now as a reward, we’re all going to have a real bath now, in our very own sento!”

  We all raced to the bathhouse. Tomoko and Aiko took the smaller room, while us boys took the big one. We started to sing Koji’s dirty version of the Air Raid song — Cover your ears! Close up your bum! — as we sat on the stools and scrubbed ourselves, the cedar tub gradually filling up.

  The filth on our bodies was just incredible. It had been over a year since any of us had washed, and the tiles soon became covered in grimy suds. But then it was just bliss as we sank into the big pool of steaming water, groaning like old folk at a hot springs resort. We heard the girls shrieking with delight in the other room. They must have climbed into their bath at exactly the same moment.

  As we lay there soaking, I looked up at the sky through the damaged roof. White clouds were passing overhead, and I imagined that we really were at an onsen up in the mountains. After our bath, we’d dress in elegant clothes and dine on floats suspended over the river . . . I heard Tomoko’s soft laugh from over the wall and closed my eyes. I pictured her bobbing in the water, her hair wet and stuck to her forehead. Her taut white skin; dark peaks on the bumps of her chest . . .

  “Look out!” hollered Shin. “He’s lifting the tent up!”

  I saw to my horror that I’d gone stiff and I was peeping out of the water. I crashed my fists into the bath.

  “Damn you!” I shouted, desperately hoping that the girls hadn’t heard him. I got out of the tub and wiped myself down.

  Shin was still guffawing, and even Nobu had a little smile on his face.

  “Thinking about little Tomoko, I bet!” Shin crowed.

  “Shut up,” I hissed.

  “A fat chance you’d have with her anyway, monster. Your ugly face would drive anyone off.”

 
; “Shut up!”

  I lifted the wooden plug. Koji wailed as the water began to slurp away down the drain. I glowered at Shin, who was still smirking to himself.

  “That’s enough,” I said. “It’s not funny anymore.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Tomoko held Aiko’s hand as they emerged from their bathroom. Her hair was damp and she smelled fresh. My stomach squirmed at the thought that she might have overheard Shin’s idiotic talk.

  “We’ve found some old clothes upstairs,” Tomoko told me. “We’re going to dress up and pretend that we’re staying at a real inn!”

  Aiko was trembling with excitement. She tugged Tomoko’s hand and they both laughed as they raced upstairs.

  Nobu found an old pair of spectacles and sat on the stool of the office. In a wheedling voice, he pretended to greet the guests. Koji rolled up a cone of newspaper and put it on his head, then sat cross-legged on the floor with a broom in his hands and plucked the strings of an imaginary shamisen. Shin tied a blue rag around his head as if he was a chef and, on a hibachi from the kitchen, toasted the rice balls we’d brought with us from the station.

  Giggling came from the staircase. Tomoko and Aiko were stepping carefully down. I stared at them in surprise. They wore old, embroidered kimonos, rolled up at the hem to stop them from tripping. They had found some powder and makeup too, and had painted their faces white and lips red, like clumsy geisha.

  Shin clapped his hands and started to sing a dirty song, but I shot him a ferocious look and he trailed off.

  Tomoko came over and sat down. As I looked at her, I could hardly speak. She didn’t look like a child to me anymore. She seemed like a fresh, delicate bud, about to burst into bloom. We sat around the grill, and she and Aiko served us water from a teapot in saké cups. As she leaned over to fill my cup, my hand started to shake so much that I spilled water onto the floor.

  Koji grabbed the teapot and swigged from it. He started reeling, shouting in a slurred voice that he was drunk. He tumbled over as the other children cackled. I glanced at Tomoko. She had her arm around Aiko and was smiling at Koji like a proud mother. She caught my gaze and held my eye.

  I remembered the bump of her chest beneath my hand as we stood on the coupling on the train back to Tokyo; the warmth of her cheek as we lay together on the station floor. I felt an acute, guilty pleasure as she came over and sat next to me, a faint smile on her face. She took my hand and gently pressed it between her own.

  It was a soft, wonderful pressure, warm and enclosing. It could have only lasted a few seconds, but it seemed to capture the strange, magic vividity of those past months entirely.

  I leaped up with a short, braying laugh. I pulled my hand away.

  “Right,” I shouted. “Everybody up. It’s time for bed.”

  The children groaned as I hopped around, kicking at their legs.

  “Come on. We’re not here on holiday, you know.”

  The children trudged sulkily upstairs to the rooms where Tomoko had laid out the blankets: “Cherry-Blossom” for the boys, “Ivy” for her and Aiko. I rubbed my eyes, my heart whirling.

  “Well, goodnight,” I said.

  Tomoko and I bowed to each other shyly, then we went to curl up in new blankets. The mattress was deliciously soft after all those months on the cold, hard stone, but as I lay there, I hardly even noticed. My heart was pounding so hard that I was terrified the others would hear. From the other side of the sliding wall, Aiko whispered something, but Tomoko gently shushed her, and their lamp was soon extinguished. Reluctantly, I blew out our own. I closed my eyes, picturing Tomoko in my mind as I fell asleep. Her clumsily painted lips. The pale skin of her throat. The soft swell of her kimono.

  12

  ENGLISH-SPEAKING PEOPLE

  (SATSUKO TAKARA)

  The sign I had tacked up for Hiroshi on the wall of Tokyo Station was tattered now, the ink terribly smeared from the rain. I stood shivering in my thin coat as a group of ex-soldiers huddled around a refuse fire nearby, playing flower cards. An old woman squatted beneath a sign of her own, and gave me a sympathetic smile.

  “Don’t give up hope!” she mouthed, fumbling with her prayer beads. Not many people came to look for their lost relatives anymore. In fact, we were the only two here today.

  I smiled back, faintly.

  What would her expression be like, I wondered, if, instead of my grey dress and sweater, I had been wearing my night time clothes, my face plastered white and my lips red? What would Hiroshi himself think, even if he did miraculously appear? To discover that his big sister was nothing now but a shameless American butterfly?

  It had been weeks since my last trip here, and I felt dreadfully guilty for neglecting my duty to him. They were bringing up children’s bodies from the tunnels every morning now, desperately thin and blistered with smallpox. That afternoon, I’d taken his photograph around the main railway stations, holding it up in the faces of the filthy men and women. They squinted for a moment, then sucked their rotten gums before shaking their heads. As I looked at them all, stretched out on their mats across the ticket hall, I felt completely hopeless. Perhaps I should simply accept the fact that he was gone.

  I walked back into the station to take the train back to Shinagawa. A swarm of filthy brats were clamouring around the passengers disembarking onto one of the long-distance platforms. They slipped their little hands into the travellers’ coat pockets as they took down their suitcases, while others grubbed about on the floor like insects, clutching for the cigarette butts that the waiting passengers dropped.

  My heart froze. There, right in the middle, I could see Hiroshi. I started to run, my heels skidding on the marble floor.

  “Hiroshi!” I screamed. “Hiroshi-kun!”

  I thrust my way onto the platform, barging through the crowd of passengers. When I finally reached him, he was scrabbling around someone’s feet. I seized his arm, rubbing the dirt from his face with my handkerchief.

  The boy shook me off, swearing horribly in a strange voice. As I looked at his face, I realized that it wasn’t Hiroshi at all. The boy squinted at me as I tried to catch my breath.

  “Miss?” he spat, turning. “You can wipe this if you want.”

  He was holding his penis in his filthy hand, a gleeful expression on his face. I gasped, spun on my heel, and hurried away as fast as I could.

  ~ ~ ~

  When I reached our alley, I paused by the door of our tenement shack. There was a radio playing inside — a sentimental children’s song that I hadn’t heard for years. In fact, I could last remember hearing it with Hiroshi and my mother, at the old merry-go-round in Hanayashiki Park, one Sunday on my monthly day off from the factory.

  Come, come, come and see

  Furry friends beneath the tree

  In the autumn moonlight

  At Shojo-ji Temple!

  The song brought back all sorts of memories. I stood there in the alley for a moment, lost in thought.

  I slid open the door. Michiko was sitting at the table with her ear close to the speaker of an ornate radio. She had a look of intense concentration on her face.

  “Michiko!” I hissed, but she waved an urgent hand to the floor beside her and gestured at me to be quiet. The song carried on. But though the tune was familiar, I realized that the words were quite different. In fact, they were in English.

  Come, come everybody

  “How do you do?” and “How are you?”

  Won’t you have some candy?

  One, and two, and three four five . . .

  Michiko was trying to mouth along to the words.

  Let’s all sing a happy song

  Tra-la, la la la!

  She looked up at me in glee.

  “I’m learning English!” she whispered excitedly.

  A man’s voice began to speak from the radio and she turned bac
k with what she clearly thought was a studious expression, which mainly involved frowning and nodding at everything the man said.

  Another one of Michiko’s crazes! I thought, as I sat down on the other side of the table. But, as I listened, the programme did seem quite fun. The presenter’s name was “Uncle,” and it was the same man who had translated the Emperor’s speech into common language back in the summer. Now, it seemed, he was going to teach the Japanese people how to speak English.

  Uncle was very kind. He explained that the lessons wouldn’t be like school, in fact, they would be more like us playing a game together through the radio. We sat there, fascinated, and after a while, even I tried to repeat some of the English words back to him. I found myself smiling and nodding as the theme song came on at the end. The new words were already standing in for the old ones in my memory.

  “Satsuko!” Michiko exclaimed, after the programme had ended. “We can listen to this and become proper English speakers. Just imagine.”

  We already knew some English, of course, from our dealings with the Americans, but I had a feeling that none of it was especially suitable for polite company.

  “‘How are you? How do you do?’” Michiko said, imitating Uncle’s manly voice. Suddenly, in a fit of laughter, she leaped up, took my hands in hers, and began to spin me around.

  “‘How are you? How do you do?’” she sang, over and over.

  Finally she let go of my hands and sighed. “Just think, Satsuko,” she mused, as she poured water into the teakettle. “Now we really will be ‘New Women of Japan.’”

  I suddenly remembered what I had wanted to ask her. “The radio, Michiko. Where did you get it from? Surely, you didn’t buy it yourself?”

  “Ah! The radio,” she said. “It is handsome, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It certainly is. I wonder where it could have possibly come from?”

  “It was a present,” she replied. “Isn’t it lovely?”