by Ben Byrne
“I needed to fetch the pot, you see,” he said, frowning. “Father was counting on me.”
“Of course.”
He drew his arms around his legs. I gazed down at him, wondering 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. “Let’s not mention anything that has happened.”
He stared at me for a moment, then nodded.
I walked over to him, and leaned down, holding out my hand.
“Please, brother,” I said. “Will you come with me?”
~ ~ ~
As we approached Mrs. Ishino’s shop, I saw that something was 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 that covered the girls’ rooms at the International Palace.
Sobbing came from the back of the bar. Mrs. Ishino was slumped over, 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 played a mournful fragment of “The Apple Song” over and over again.
Hiroshi’s eyes were so wide that I was terrified he would bolt. I wouldn’t have blamed him. But instead, he sat down 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 then, as the rain blustered in through the open doorway. I heard a soft knock. A voice called my name.
Standing there, 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. 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 buffing the boots of American soldiers in Ueno Plaza; a four-car train travelling through the countryside. Above the bar was a photograph he’d hung there specially: a portrait of a tough-looking gangster, dressed in a three-piece suit, scowling away beneath the big sign at the Ueno Sunshine Market.
Michiko had barely asked a single question, that night. She had stepped over the threshold, calmly taking in the wreckage of the bar.
“Aren’t you going to introduce me, Satsuko?” she asked, gesturing at Hiroshi.
“This — this is Hiroshi-kun.”
“Your brother?” she asked, staring at me in amazement.
I nodded. “Well, well,” she said, and 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. “Why don’t you fetch everybody’s things and come along with me.”
Every afternoon that summer, on her return home from filming, she brought us gifts: slabs of chocolate; summer clothes for Hiroshi; fish, rice, and vegetables for the rest of us. I cooked our meals in the evenings and we all ate together at her Western dining table of her luxurious apartment. It was all hers now, her admiral having been sent back to America following some scandal. Mrs. Ishino, who had fallen quite in love with Michiko by then, told stories of Tokyo theatres of the past, of the glory days when she had danced in the cabarets and operettas. Michiko told us all about the antics of the actors and stagehands, about her famous leading man Kinosuke, and the screenwriter, who she said always looked so tragic.
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 on that day, breathless with excitement.
“Hollywood — well!” Michiko said, a familiar look coming in her eyes. “Wouldn’t that be the dream.”
My chopsticks hesitated over my dish. “Really, Michiko?” I said. “Doesn’t it seem a very lonely place, despite all its glamour?”
Michiko raised a quizzical eyebrow.
“Really, Satsuko?” she said. “I’m surprised. Didn’t you once write to me to say that you were intending to go away to America yourself? San Francisco, wasn’t it?”
Silence fell. Hiroshi glanced at me. Mrs. Ishino cleared her throat and served herself 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?”
We all laughed politely. Michiko’s eyes narrowed, and held 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 a matter which I couldn’t brush over, 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?
On the morning before the gala premiere, 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, and to have one last look for our father’s pot. It 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 again. The sound of sawing and hammering came from the temple precincts and little cedar prayer plaques were hanging in bundles from the gates in honour of the Star Festival. We bought our own little plaques, and wrote 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?” I murmured. 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 firefly season, soon, I thought. There might be a hunt down by the banks of the Sumida. Bright fireworks would fill the sky above Tokyo throughout those hot, summer nights and we would light fires, 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 non-fiction 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
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
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
Author photograph: Ben Byrne
BEN BYRNE was born in 1977 and studied Drama at the University of Manchester. He later moved to San Francisco, where he worked for several years as an international consultant, ethnographic filmmaker, and musician, and during which time he travelled often to Japan. He returned to England to dedicate himself more fully to writing, and his short fiction has appeared in Litro magazine. Fireflies is his first novel. He lives in London.
About the Publisher
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