Fireflies

by Ben Byrne

  I remembered the blocked-out article in the London Express.

  “He’s still here?”

  “Not for long. MacArthur’s throwing him out. But I’ll introduce you if you like.”

  A blast of cold air met us as we approached the revolving door. It spun about, expelling a group of staff muffled against the cold. A tall Japanese man in a camel coat glanced at us through round spectacles, then placed a hand on the arm of a hawk-like general in an immaculately cut uniform and with hair parted in dark waves, a monocle screwed into his eye socket. The Japanese man muttered something into his ear, and the general stared at Ward for a moment. Ward stared back, rocking on his heels. The general held out his overcoat to a boy and marched into the bar, his subalterns skittering behind him.

  Ward’s nostrils flared.

  “Buddy of yours?” I asked, as he shoved his way through the door. The cold air outside stung my cheeks.

  “Major General Charles Willoughby,” he said, as he gestured to the doorman for a cab. “G2. Chief of Intelligence. Shady character.”

  The doorman blew a whistle, and a taxi veered toward us in the road.

  “Born Karl Weidenbach in Heidelberg, Germany. ‘My own dear fascist,’ MacArthur calls him.”

  The doorman opened the cab and I buttoned up my collar in preparation for the brisk walk back to my hotel. I thought agreeably of my cozy room at the Continental, the old woman who would bring up a little brazier of charcoal whilst I poured myself another drink.

  “How do you know him?” I called.

  “Willoughby?” he called back as he clambered inside. He threw his cigar butt onto road and stamped on it. “He’s just an old pal.”

  The door slammed shut. The taxi drove off along the road, smoke pouring out into the bitter night.

  ~ ~ ~

  I met Burchett two days later. The room, on the second floor of the press club, was ripe with the aroma of men in close confinement, the unmade beds were draped with newspapers and damp underwear. He was packing his kitbag with stacks of notebooks and clippings. He wasn’t British, I realized, but a blunt, amiable Australian with a cynical and amusing manner.

  “Lucky you caught me. They’re slinging me out next week. The bastards.”

  He was impressively cheerful. The men at SCAP had removed his press accreditation a month before, a fact which he ascribed to the article he had written, with a typewriter on his knees, in the ruins of Hiroshima, just a few days after we had landed. When I told him I was curious, he raised his eyebrows.

  “Oh, you are? Well you’re in the minority. I bet they’re still dropping like flies. If there’s any left of them, that is. We’d not hear a dicky-bird about it in any case.”

  “How did you get down there?”

  “How? I got the bloody train like anyone else. Caused quite a stir, I don’t mind telling you. Bunch of army samurai chappies didn’t quite take to me.”

  He described how he had landed with the first parties of marines on a beach near Yokosuka. As soon as he had entered the surreal wreckage of Tokyo, he’d rushed to the station and boarded the first train toward Hiroshima. The carriage had been packed with Japanese officers, bitter and glowering — it had been the day of the surrender signing aboard the Missouri — and he’d been the only white man on the train but for an old German priest.

  “Drank some of that saké stuff with them though. Seemed to calm things down a bit. Just goes to show, doesn’t it?”

  “What about Disease X, Burchett? This radiation disease?”

  His face became suddenly serious. “Atomic Plague. That’s what I called it. At first the locals thought it must have been caused by some kind of poisonous gas from the bomb.”

  He described stumbling across a makeshift hospital on the outskirts of Hiroshima, scores of people lying on rush mats, deteriorating almost before his eyes.

  “Came in complaining of sore throats. Days later, their gums were bleeding. Then their noses, then their eyes.” After that, he said, their hair began to fall out. The doctors, desperate, injected them with vitamins, but the flesh rotted away around the puncture points.

  “Gangrene,” Burchett said, his nose wrinkling with the memory. “You can smell it a mile off.”

  Some died soon after. Others held out for a while longer, complaining of an overwhelming inertia, a strange, heart-breaking malaise. Then they died too.

  Burchett let out a long sigh. “And that, sir, is more or less the size of it.”

  “Who else knows about this?”

  He snorted. “Brass are doing a bloody good job to make sure no one does.”

  “And do you have photographs?”

  “Ha!” he barked. “Did have!”

  My stomach tightened. “There’s no photographs?”

  “Therein lies a tale,” he said. “After I got back to Tokyo, I was ordered to visit a military hospital. No doubt to check I wasn’t glowing. Two days later, my camera disappeared from my kitbag. Along with my notes, my typewriter, and five rolls of film. ‘Sorry Mr Burchett, must have been that shady chap on the other side of the ward.’ All very mysterious.”

  My head began to swim. “There’s not a single image of what you’ve been describing to me?”

  He shook his head.

  It seemed astonishing, terrifying, that an entire city and its inhabitants could disappear without a trace.

  “Unless you chaps took any snaps for posterity. Or the Japs did. Even so, I doubt we’ll be seeing any of those at the flicks any time soon.”

  Wild thoughts swirled around my head.

  “Anyway. Need to pack up now, old chap. Getting shipped back to the mother country in the morning. Oh, for London in the winter.”

  He gave a theatrical shudder and I wished him luck.

  “Good luck yourself, mate,” he said, looking me straight in the eye. “Believe me, you’re going to bloody well need it.”

  ~ ~ ~

  My dreams that night were relentless and harrowing. Standing on a desolate plain, the wind howling around me. An inferno swept from the horizon, fireballs pelting down from the sky. A ruined schoolhouse, a stench of rotting meat. The assembly hall piled with skeletal bodies. A little girl, her mouth agape, her body covered in welts.

  Endless corridors, men in pursuit. A door to an office. Behind the desk, a chair. My father. A shotgun barrel in his mouth, still open in a ghastly smile. His brains thickly smeared on the wall behind.

  ~ ~ ~

  Three days later, I woke early. In the pale light of dawn, I sliced off the Stars and Stripes blazon from my jacket and sewed on my lieutenant’s epaulettes once again. My knapsack was bulging. I’d visited the PX the night before, packed my bag with chocolate, tins of Spam, a bottle of Crow, and two cartons of Old Golds, along with ten fresh rolls of 35mm Kodak film.

  I travelled in the Japanese section of the train, despite the insufferable crush. People blankly made way for me and my uniform, and I squeezed myself into a cramped seat by the cracked window. Babies hoisted on women’s backs swung perilously close to my head. The carriage was filled with the tang of unwashed bodies and wet wool. The windows were mostly gone and cold blustered through the carriage all the way.

  The inspector looked at me in mortification after examining the ticket I’d had a Japanese boy buy for me at the station. Brow furrowed, he rubbed his hat back and forth over his bald head. I held my fingers to my lips in question, and his eyes lit up. I handed him the first of my packets of cigarettes, a five-dollar bill folded inside. After a moment of shameful deliberation, he gave a sickly grin, slid both into his pocket, and politely clipped my ticket.

  The train stopped often throughout the night, halting in lonely tunnels, shunting into sidings for what seemed like an eternity. Snow whirled outside and there were clangs and shouts as men tried to restart the engines. The passengers pressed their faces to the win
dows to watch, their breath freezing against the broken glass. There was the lonely sound of metal being hammered in the darkness as handcarts of coal were hauled up to the locomotive.

  Later on, we passed through Kyoto, where most of the passengers disembarked. A few hours later, I recognized the white alabaster of Himeji Castle up on its hill, pale in the light of a bright full moon. I fell into a troubled sleep against the comforting bulk of a large, warm woman who sat beside me, my pack drawn close against my knees.

  I was awoken by the woman jabbing me in the ribs, repeating Japanese words in a loud, obstinate voice. I tried to crawl back into the drowsy shelter of my dreams, but she poked me again, hard, and I sat up, rubbing my eyes.

  The carriage was almost empty, and, outside, the first light of dawn lent a rose-grey tint to the horizon. We were passing down onto an immense, bleak plain, rugged mountains looming in the distance. The wheels screamed on the rails as we slowed on our approach to a shattered station. The train shuddered to a halt. The platforms were gone, and there was a sharp drop from the train to the compacted dirt below. A solitary wooden sign was nailed to the wall of a battered brick building and I struggled to identify the ideograms as the woman, still jabbing her finger into my side, began to intone the syllables, over and over, in a strange, mellifluous voice:

  “Hiroshima, desu, Yankii. Yankii — Hiroshima desu.”

  14

  UNAGI

  (HIROSHI TAKARA)

  From where Koji and I sat on the stone bank of the canal, we could just about see Fuji-san, its peak sprinkled with snow, off in the distance beyond the ruins of the city. We had set off early that morning with our bamboo fishing rods, walked over the Kototoi Bridge and up to the lock with its little castle keep. Our lines were hooked with chicken gizzards, dangling now in the depths of the black water, the slick surface glistening with rainbow whirls of oil. We were fishing for eels.

  My father’s shop had sold eel, of course. The rich, sweet aroma had infused my childhood. The shop had always been popular with the patrons of the theatres and cabarets that once lined the streets of Asakusa, and it was a regular haunt of the stagehands, theatre managers, and actors who came in at odd times of the day between shows for some snacks and a glass of saké. They bantered with my father, who was a true fan of the kabuki himself — of the rough-and-tumble style popular in Tokyo back then. Prints of the Danjuros, the famous dynasty of actors, were plastered all over the shop walls, and he liked nothing better than to chat about famous performances of the past, cracking jokes in that gruff, smart way that Tokyo people liked, all the while steaming and grilling the strips of eel. He brushed them with thick sauce from his famous pot, an earthenware thing he’d inherited from his own father — bound with wire, sticky, and smeared from generations of service. As he stood there, surrounded by fire and smoke, he almost looked like a character from a kabuki play himself, one of the wilier, earthier types.

  Ours was an old-fashioned shop in that the live eels were kept in a big glass tank at the front, by the street. My mother skinned them on a block: she pinned them through the head, and tore away the slimy skin with a swift movement; she pulled out the backbone and sliced the fillet into strips in an instant. I used to press my face up against the glass and watch the animals flap their fins and slip around each other, glistening like they’d been freshly coated with lacquer. My father had once told me that every eel in the world had been born in the same place, out in the middle of a distant ocean. I dreamed about the place sometimes, the sea cloudy, as the transparent elvers drifted away, to be tugged apart from each other by the ocean currents.

  The first day my father took me to the Kabuki Theatre in Ginza was the day after the Pacific War had broken out. Our headmaster had gathered us in the assembly hall of my school, and we’d nudged each other, trying not to laugh, because Sensei had tears streaming down his cheeks.

  “Children,” he said, his voice wavering. “Japan has entered the great war against America and Britain at last!”

  Banzai!

  We were thrilled, of course — we could hardly believe that Japan had actually gone and done it. Our country was going to annihilate the enemy. In the classroom that afternoon, our teacher unrolled a huge map of the Pacific Ocean and pinned it to the wall. We spent the lesson searching for Honolulu, and stuck on a little rising sun flag when we finally found it.

  The next morning, my mother washed my father with warm water from the cedar tub. She passed the cloth over his muscular back before she towelled him down and helped him dress in his yukata. Then she arranged my clothes and brushed my hair as the radio burbled away with another excited report of the glorious attack. I noticed that she and Satsuko were still dressed in their normal work coats and aprons.

  “Why aren’t you getting ready, mother?” I asked.

  “Your mother and sister aren’t coming,” my father said, winking at me. “It’s just us men today.”

  Us men! I was beside myself with excitement as we made our way into the theatre, which was blazing with lanterns and filled with smells. His big hand gripped mine as the patrons called out to him, sprawling in their boxes with bentos and bottles of saké laid out in preparation for a good long afternoon’s entertainment ahead. When my father told them I was his son, they studied me with approval and remarked on my dark eyes, declaring that I had the ferocious glower of a Danjuro myself. My father smiled with pleasure.

  We took our place in the centre of the hall and he set out some rice crackers to nibble on. They played the national anthem at a deafening volume, then there was a loud bang and the lights went out. I seized my father by the arm and he laughed uproariously as a cloud of smoke billowed on the stage. I smiled at him in bashful excitement and we settled back to watch the play.

  There were flashing lights, sudden explosions, the wail of horns and voices and clouds of colourful smoke. As the actors came onto the stage, men cried out Banzai! and the audience all laughed. At the climax, the clappers rang out, and the audience roared their approval, pounding the sides of their boxes as the actors pulled their faces into ferocious, cross-eyed tableaux. Afterward, everyone spilled out into the light of the bustling evening to eat and drink amongst the stalls and shops, and I rubbed my eyes as if emerging from a dream.

  A few years later, a tragedy occurred. Rice was being rationed, the fishmonger had gone out of business, and my father was forced to close the restaurant. The women from the neighbourhood association visited the next day, asking him to donate his grills to the military as they were made from such good iron. Let’s send just one more plane to the front!

  Then came the final blow. The fire raids began, and the theatres were shut down. His call-up papers arrived soon after that. On the evening of his purification ceremony, we ate a solemn meal of sea bream and red rice. Afterward, my father put a lid on his ancient pot of sauce and sealed it with wax. He wrapped it up in oilcloth and placed it in a cedar box, which he stood in an alcove in the corner of the room, underneath the family altar. As we stood before it, he put his hands on my shoulders and rubbed them over and over.

  “Take care of that until I get back, Hiroshi-kun, do you hear me?” he said.

  I nodded. He pointed his finger at the pot.

  “That’s our only family treasure.”

  My father heaved his kitbag onto the train at Ueno Station the next day. He was going to report at the Yokosuka air-naval base. He squatted down on the platform and embraced me tightly as the platform guard blew his whistle.

  “Remember what I told you,” he whispered.

  I nodded.

  “I promise, father,” I said.

  “I’m counting on you, Hiroshi-kun!”

  The train pulled away from the platform. There was a shriek from the locomotive as the wheels began to turn. He leaned out of the carriage window for a moment and waved his fighting cap.

  And then he was gone.

 
~ ~ ~

  Koji shouted as something writhed violently at the end of his fishing line. I leaped up and quickly wound the line around my arm as it veered from side to side. The taut line angled up, and I prayed that it wouldn’t snap as I staggered backward. I heaved as hard as I could. There was a sudden splash, and then, there it was! A dark, shining eel, coiling and writhing on the bank. Koji hollered in triumph as we dangled the spiralling creature over our bucket, spluttering with delight and revulsion as slimy water flicked in our faces. We dropped it into the pail, where it whumped away with a dull clanging noise.

  Finally, the creature became calm, and we covered the bucket with a plank of wood. Together, we hoisted it up, and triumphantly carried it down the canal toward the river as the water sloshed back and forth.

  The light was just failing as we met the other children at Ueno Station. They crowded around us excitedly when they realized that we had actually caught something. When I slid the plank away, they gasped. The eel was curled up now, like an evil black snake in the bottom of the pail. Aiko leaned over, very warily. Suddenly, the thing wriggled and flicked water into the air, and she screamed and fell onto her backside. The children cackled with laughter as Tomoko helped her up. Aiko began to whine as Tomoko brushed her down.

  “Cheer up, Aiko-chan! You won’t be bellyaching when Hiroshi’s cooked the eel for our dinner.”

  Tomoko glanced at me, amused, as Aiko grumbled away. I smiled back. I remembered my father at that moment, standing over the cedar tub as my mother massaged the bunched muscles of his shoulders.

  The lights of the market glowed, and spattering flecks of black on the brickwork of the railway embankment marked the start of rain. GIs went to and fro in their rain capes to haggle for stockings and trinkets for the night ahead. Shin was showing off now, dipping the tip of his finger into the water to goad the eel while Koji and Nobu watched warily over his shoulder.

  Aiko’s high voice piped up. She pointed over toward the far railway arches. Two GIs were walking along in the shadows. We had four last cigarettes left — should she go and ask if they would buy them?