Fireflies

by Ben Byrne

  “I’ll go!” Tomoko said, brightly.

  Aiko handed over the remaining cigarettes and Tomoko sprinted off. I sat down on the gritty bank. The children were daring each other to touch the eel, jerking back whenever it moved. A train rumbled up on the tracks as I closed my eyes and smiled to myself.

  Some instinct made me look up. I glanced through the drizzle, and saw one of the distant soldiers looming over Tomoko, pulling her toward him. I leaped up. Tomoko resisted, but then, with a quick movement, the soldier grabbed her. There was a scuffle, and, somehow, her monpe were around her knees. The man pulled her toward iron struts of the railway bridge and I heard her cry out as he pushed her up against the column.

  The world melted as I tore toward them, a sharp stone in my hand, my mind filled with a piercing roar. Tomoko stood pinioned to the wall, and the soldier had one hand beneath her chin as the other pulled at his open trousers. He suddenly turned and saw me and dropped Tomoko just as I leaped into the air and swept the stone down hard toward his forehead. His brawny arm shot up and struck me in the jaw and I crashed down into a heap of charred, wet timber. I looked around desperately for a weapon. My fingers fell upon a piece of rusted pipe and I started to swing it as the man hovered in front of me. His shirt billowed from his fly, and he was breathing heavily.

  I felt a sudden wave of fear as the man approached. I swung wildly with the pipe, but to my horror, he caught it with one fist and ripped it from my hand. He took me by the scruff, and I screamed and flailed at him as he slapped me with his hand, swearing at me. His companion came up and grabbed his shoulder, but the man bellowed at him and he shrank away. I was hoisted slowly upward. The veins in his neck bulged and I could smell his breath. Sweat and blood and rain were dripping from his brow. I must have caught him, I thought, in grim satisfaction. I kicked out wildly. He slammed his left fist into my eye — there was an explosion of pain and I collapsed onto the ground. A boot stood by my head, smeared with mud, the laces looped and tangled around the ankle. I was deaf except for a far-off ringing in my ears.

  I felt the tremble of iron rivets. Another train was passing along the track above and sparks flew down from the rails. Passengers hung from its side and peered down as it passed. There were shouts. The other soldier clasped his friend by the neck, pulling him away. The GI resisted for a second. Then he swung his boot straight into my belly. The boot lifted me from the ground, and I collapsed in agony, struggling to inhale. The train began to screech along the rails as the soldiers disappeared beneath the tracks, their shadows jerking along behind them.

  I tried to stand. My head was still ringing. Tomoko stood a few yards away. She struggled to pull up her monpe as I crawled toward her.

  “Tomoko? Tomoko-chan?”

  Dread spread from my stomach to my fingertips. She clutched her arms around her body and began to shiver. I reached out to touch her but she jerked violently away with a whimper.

  “Tomoko?” I whispered. She didn’t respond. “Tomoko-chan!”

  The rain poured down around us, saturating our thin rags. Her silhouette shook against the iron column.

  I got up and walked unsteadily over toward the children. It was dark now, and the lights of the market were bright smears in the rain. The children stared at me as I approached. The zinc bucket was still there, perched unevenly on the ground. With a sudden fury, I kicked it as hard as I could with my bare foot. It reverberated with a dull clang and the water slopped onto the ground.

  There was a movement and the black shape of the eel slithered forward. It shivered up the slope and waved over the broken slabs and gravel until it reached the edge of a flooded bomb crater, frigid with dark water. It paused for a second at the edge, then slid in. The silhouette hovered at the surface, as if stunned. Then, it slipped down, writhing, and disappeared into the blackness.

  15

  PHILOPON

  (OSAMU MARUKI)

  Philopon. Drug of the day. Glint in the eye, pulse in the vein. Saviour of the downtrodden. Sacrament of the lost. Bright white light to the woe-struck, lice-ridden, starry-eyed artists: the stupefied, raving philosopher-poets of the burned-out ruins.

  Mrs. Shimamura’s bar swirled for hours each evening now, the intellectuals variously mournful and long faced or else frantic and electrified, circling sections of the newspapers spread out on the bar, their eyes shining with morphine and methyl.

  We came together as drunks or tramps do — to hold each other up in swaying arms. The bar was a sanctuary to which we retreated to comfort ourselves with raw, amniotic liquor, to keep our minds numb and distracted with absurd toasts and peculiar drinking games. What conversation there was now was of rashes, blisters, coughs, ticks, rations, hunger, thirst, and cold. Mostly though, we just drank, night after night, holding our glasses aloft and crashing them together — shoo shoo shoo! — before tipping the fluid down our throats. Glass after glass, until the light compressed into pinpricks and we collapsed face down on the bar. The bright stars of Japan’s literary firmament. We were nothing now but slurred aphorisms and pulmonary complaints.

  Everything was so bleak and petrified in Tokyo that winter that it was no surprise that many of us began to supplement our meagre diet of rotgut and sweet potato with the small, crystalline Philopon pills we’d been fed during the last days of the war: those little tablets of courage that had steeled our nerves against the battery of Australian and American guns, and kept us feverish and alert through those long nights of grisly carnage. A glut of the drug flooded the city sometime in December, and thousands upon thousands of green ink bottles appeared in pyramids at the black markets, passing from hand to chafed hand in the cramped, leaky bars. Before long it seemed as if the whole city was munching the pills like sardines, washing them down with tears and tiger’s piss in an attempt to blunt the teeth that gnawed at our bellies; to propel our battered bodies through the freezing streets, and the cluttered train compartments.

  ~ ~ ~

  Prior to this, I had developed another, more sinister addiction. Those evenings when I had reached my alcoholic peak, as it were, my mind illuminated with stars, I boarded a tram to the Ginza, alighting near the American PX and the Oasis cabaret. There I took a place on the curb on the other side of the avenue, between the peddlers with their straw mats displaying figurines and fountain pens, watching as the Americans crammed down the staircase of the brothel. Infrequently, I would be rewarded with a glimpse of Satsuko Takara as she performed her routine outside, pulling at sleeves and enticing the officers to enter. Sometimes, I would see her leave, hours later, buttoning herself into her coat as she strode away into the night.

  I tormented myself with the thought of her, down in the secret cellar, American hands sliding over her back and along her pale thighs. I pictured the brief hours we had spent on a straw-filled mattress in the Victory Hotel, the night before I was sent to war. A victory of sorts, for me. My last. The Americans had polluted her now, as they had polluted me. One night, I stood with a grubby girl at the back of a ruined building, my eyes brimming with tears as I handled her, urgently trying to imagine her as Satsuko —

  It was no use. They had taken my very manhood.

  ~ ~ ~

  Philopon came not a moment too soon. A glimmer of life came back into my eyes, my spirits leavened. Lazarus clambered from his tomb. I still drank of course, until I collapsed, but the periods of consciousness between grew now more animated and urgent, my spirits more sprightly and vital.

  I sat on my mattress, accompanied by a flask of shochu and a vial of Philopon, writing until the tiny room was littered with balled up clumps of paper, the air clotted with ink fumes. I wrote stories inspired by the strange articles that filled that day’s newspapers: the grandmother, murdered by her grandson on his return from Manchukuo; the blind children found living in the sand dunes of Izu. My stories were macabre, catastrophic, stygian. They were also unreadable, I realized. Yet I thought, perh
aps, they might represent a kind of literary self-immolation, a spiritual disembowelment that might somehow purify me, and set me free from the past.

  One evening, I came upon a writer I was somewhat familiar with, tottering on his stool at the bar. He was breathing heavily, giving occasional tubercular rasps into his silk handkerchief. His conversation became increasingly feverish as the evening drew on, his pen scribbling faster as he yelled out choice epithets to us all. At last, he leaped up, seized the arms of his nearest companion and dragged him off into the night. After he had left, I found his notebook on the bar amidst the confusion of newspapers. I flicked through it at random, until I found a page of dislocated words, which together seemed to form a kind of occult, chemical sutra:

  Morphine. Atromol. Narcopon.

  Pantapon. Papinal. Panopin.

  Atropin. Rivanol. Philopon.

  Philopon. Could Japan have survived the winter without it? Philopon was the true hero of our age, our Eucharist. In the paralysis that followed surrender, it was the rod that kept our spines stiff, the glue that kept flesh adhered to our bones.

  The special attack pilots, in those last, surreal days of war, had tied emblazoned bands around their foreheads. Together with their brother officers, they had sung the national anthem and offered banzai to the emperor. They toasted each other with ceremonial saké, just as samurai had once sprinkled it upon their swords on the eve of battle. Then, they had ingested Philopon, before climbing into their flying machines, and roaring off into the suicide of the setting sun. What modern men they had been.

  Philopon was the symbol of our new age. Who needed the emperor when we had MacArthur? Who needed saké when we had Philopon? From the emerald paddy we had been transported to the laboratory, from the bloody field of battle to the dissection tank. We traded fireflies and lanterns for the flood lamp and the phosphorus shell, the kabuki for the cabaret, rice for amphetamine. Who needed tatami in the age of concrete? What use was steel in the age of plutonium? Goodbye, Nippon, goodbye! Farewell Amaterasu — hello America! And welcome, Japan, welcome: to the bright, white chemical age!

  16

  AFTERMATH OF THE ATOM

  (HAL LYNCH)

  I vaulted down from the train, as a dozen other people, mainly women, trudged over to the station building. They eyed me with frank hostility as I approached; I was aware of how conspicuous I was in my uniform. The train gave a piercing whistle and as it lumbered away, I lingered, watching it disappear along the tracks. An acute, heavy silence descended.

  The roof at one end of the narrow ticket hall had caved in. Riveted iron beams hung down from the brickwork and rubble was heaped high on the floor. The other end of the hall was bare but for a solid desk, where a guard sat, his moustache bristly beneath his peaked cap. He gasped when he saw me, sprang to his feet, and bobbed there for a second, as if unable to decide whether to salute me or not. I extracted my crumpled train ticket from my pocket. As I tried to press it into his hand, he shrank backward.

  In broken Japanese, I asked him the way “to the city.” He tugged at his moustache for a second, then beckoned for me to follow him through a pair of splintered wooden doors. He pointed.

  The desolate plain stretched for several miles to a heavy ridge of rugged mountains. About halfway across, hazy outlines marked an isolated outcrop of buildings. Nothing else was standing but charred spindles of telegraph poles that marked long-vanished avenues.

  “Hiroshima desu,” the guard said, staring at me with watery eyes.

  I heard a cry and turned to see a policeman, his nightstick dangling against his leg as he hurried over from a corrugated hut, inside of which was a table and a solitary chair. A rusted bicycle was leaning against its side. I made sure he could see the epaulettes of rank on my shoulder, and he stopped and glowered for a moment, before finally twisting his hand against his forehead.

  I pointed over toward the ghostly buildings in the distance.

  “Hiroshima?” I asked, quite aware of how ridiculous the question sounded.

  He seemed torn between his misgivings and instinctive submission to my authority. Eventually, in painfully slow English, he asked: “Why you go Hiroshima?”

  I took out a folded piece of paper upon which Burchett had scribbled an address.

  “Hospital?” I asked.

  He studied the paper, then conferred with the train guard. Finally, he raised his hand and wriggled his fingers in the general direction of the ruined buildings.

  “Thank you, gentlemen.” I gave them a curt nod and slung my bag over my shoulder.

  As I started to walk down the track, I heard footsteps and then felt a tap on my shoulder. The policeman held his fingers to his lips with a cringing motion. I split another pack of Old Golds from the carton in my bag and tossed it to him. He bowed, then strode as imperiously as he could back to his shack.

  I surveyed the blank plateau before me. It was like a hardened, empty desert. The sky was swirling with heavy cloud that almost obscured the ridge of mountains in the distance, and snow was drifting down from the sky. I took a deep breath and started to walk, my footsteps crunching upon the earth.

  Tokyo didn’t come close, I thought, even at its worst. There, at least, the remnants were identifiable — the broken frames of buildings, the hewn chunks of masonry and cauterized brick. Here, any human vestige, any recognizable form had been ground into abstraction. The landscape was moulded from pulverized fragments as fine as sand, and thick, gravelly dust formed strange, surreal hummocks and formations, hardened now by the rain. It was a wasteland.

  Every so often, a figure on a bicycle creaked toward me. The riders wore cloth masks over their mouths and turned their handlebars to steer in a wide arc as they passed.

  I began to detect a vague tang in the air — a bitter, acrid smell I couldn’t place. I followed the shadowy outline of what must have once been a streetcar track, the overhead lines swept clear away. Fifty yards from me, in a solitary heap, was the twisted metal frame of a destroyed trolley. I saw a narrow river up ahead and a high step to a stone bridge. As I peered over the side, I saw a trickle of pungent water at the bottom of the channel. Rotted corpses of fish and dozens of mangled bicycles cluttered the riverbed. I took out my camera, and began to take shots.

  For a long stretch after the bridge, though, there was nothing to document. No broken-down houses, no graves, no signs of settlement whatsoever. Just a vast expanse of thick, reddish-brown dust, punctuated by clumps of bushy yellow grass and spiky, poisonous-looking shrubs. The light was hazy and grey, the sun a pale, far-off disk, and I had the feeling of walking on the surface of a distant planet. Time seemed somehow disjointed, as if I was floating through a dream landscape. There was no sound of birdsong or human activity; no trees or vegetable gardens. The place was poisoned, stricken, dolorous.

  By the banks of another, much wider river, a shattered dome appeared, like the frame of an observatory, surrounded by a sunken wall. I recalled the umbrella roof of the central market building from my aerial photographs, and realized I was coming close to the hypocentre. Clumps of plaster still dangled from the curving struts of the dome, and plants were growing in the ruins — spiralling tendrils of dying morning glory creeping amidst the broken tiles; tangles of thorny herbs and small yellow broom-like flowers that clutched at the blackened brick. There were signs of life on the other side of the river. On an avenue parallel to the bank, a man led horses pulling a laden cart, while other men went by on bicycles.

  I picked my way out of the dome and walked to the bank. Fifty feet to my left, I saw it. The big, white bridge across the river that I’d proposed as a primary target. The cement structure was askew, as if it had been shoved from its supports. The stone itself seemed ancient. As I crossed the bridge, I recalled mythical tales of rivers to the underworld, the fields of lost souls on the other side.

  Shanties stood beyond the road with lines of laundry stru
ng between them. Down by the river, women were scrubbing clothes in wooden tubs, and children splashed about in bathing caps.

  I was so absorbed that I didn’t notice the rumble of the army convoy until it was almost upon me. I turned and froze, gazing at the silhouettes in the back of the trucks through the cloud of dust raised by the heavy wheels. I wondered whether I should run, but some instinct told me to stay and so I stood rigid, my hand held up in stiff, formal salute. I spotted British markings on the sides of the vehicles. My panic turned to relief as the cheerful troops in the back started to wave, thumbs held up in salute as they rumbled past. The friendly sound of a horn blared out, and I watched as they disappeared in a cloud of red dust, my heartbeat slowly subsiding.

  I strode along the avenue toward a tall building that looked as if it had once been a five- or six-storey office block. On entry, I found that the impression was illusory. Only the outer shell was still standing. The interior walls had collapsed. The ground was gutted and charred, full of nothing but rubble and emptiness.

  Further along, another tall building seemed solid and undamaged. People came and went through its main doors. As I approached, some glanced up, stopped in their tracks, and stared at me. But most just looked through me, or turned away. I pushed through the entrance into a large, high-ceilinged hall, where desks of clerks were flipping through ledgers and stamping forms, counting out coins and notes for people lined up before them. As I glanced around at the blackened walls, I noticed a huge clock hung at the end of the room. I glanced at my own watch. The hands of the clock had been frozen in time.

  I raised my Leica, the image of the clock sharpening as I focused the lens. I felt a hand pulling at my arm. For a second, I thought that I was being robbed, and I raised my fists as I spun around. Two policemen stood before me, one cowering while the other stepped gingerly forward and attempted to grasp me again.