Konomi’s a unique one. Outspoken, pretty but not in the conventional way; she’s…alluring, despite her little limp, souvenir from the war. Kid can’t stay away from her. It’s refreshing, the honesty of a kid living with his whole self. These days everyone’s complaining about the spot we’re in, how we were “deceived by the Emperor.” But is anyone asking why? Think about it. We didn’t like being deprived of food, thoughts, choices; we didn’t want to be in the line of fire; we didn’t enjoy killing our fellow men, starving them, torturing them, denying them their homes, families, their right to exist. So why did we do it? Because we lost touch with our humanity and opened our minds to chatter. Before we knew it the strings of other minds had taken hold of our own, and suddenly we were marching to the drum that was drumming the loudest while our hands waved the flag foisted upon us and our mouths hinged open to swallow whatever we were being fed. Once you start, there’s no stopping. We marched faster. We waved bigger flags. We built our empire, sacrificed our children. We did all this—and lost everything. So now what? How do we go on?
The kid, though, never lost his humanity. Is he frustrated? Hunger’s an irritant, and so is pain. Look at his body. Perfect picture of this country, if I can get him on film. Is he resentful? He has reasons to be, his family gone, and he’s what, fourteen? Not that I’d know—he won’t talk about his past, says he’s nobody. How sad is that? Is he vengeful? Like I said, the kid’s whole. His mind doesn’t float like oil on top of his watery heart. He lives for one thing: love. We all know what that is, but do we live by it? It didn’t keep my parents from sacrificing my brother to the war. Not that it matters—everyone’s gone. Naturally, it’s hard loving a woman who thinks of you as a kid brother. Konomi knew that. So she made herself scarce, and the kid’s been moping since. Don’t believe me? That’s your problem.
Today, April 29, we were pretty excited when he came around asking if he could help with May Day. We told him to show up and march. Did he seem agitated? He did not. Did he mention some murder—some assassination—plot? He did not. You come to us because we’re Party members, and you think we’re extremists. But, tell me, what’s wrong with food for the masses? Security for the workers? Equality and justice for all? Sure, the Party’ll go after the mighty, but are we stupid enough to get violent? That stuff’s for film. Not that we love this democracy with its double standards rolling back our freedom until—what? We become docile subjects of the American empire?
Q: You were seen at Occupation Headquarters on the afternoon of April 29, 1947. What were you doing there?
Slipping out of the press, he chased the trolley swaying like an old milk cow down the pitted track. Clasping the railing, he swung onto the metal ledge. Inside, the trolley was packed, the old and the young, the fortunate and the less, compressed into one somnolent mass. Once upon a time, when the country still picnicked in flowering parks, he’d been part of the crush, maneuvering to protect his mother, who had to protect their lunch. Now he clung to the railing, breathing in the bitter dust wafting from the wasteland.
All month, he’d feared finding Konomi’s body—or worse, never finding a trace—but to think she’d been working for the Americans. Furukawa had spun some story about an infiltration plan organized by Ōtsuka, his now dead right-hand man, to gather information about the Occupation’s movements against the Party. Konomi volunteered, securing a job at Occupation Headquarters. This was a month ago, Furukawa had said, which fit the timeline of her disappearance. Three weeks in, Furukawa “caught wind” that Konomi and Ōtsuka had “turned.” He was vague, but his eyes, which he kept fixed on the body, were bitter. Then he’d told the boy where to find her.
The tracks smoothed; buildings began assembling into blocks of shops and offices, and at last he glimpsed the Imperial Palace moat. He jumped off, the momentum tumbling him into a school of jinrikisha pulled by leathery men half the size of their white customers. He crossed the intersection, and there it was: the concrete behemoth that now housed Occupation Headquarters, its stark columns made almost majestic by the wide boulevard and the wider mirror of the Palace moat spread beyond it. Surveying the sweep of steps rising to a row of doors, recessed and heavily guarded, he looked for the JAPANESE ONLY sign Furukawa had mentioned. A flock of glances alighted on him, and he moved on, gaze lowered, as soldiers passed, trading language lessons with spirited women who looked resolutely away from him.
On his third pass, he saw Konomi.
WITNESS #3: KONOMI
TOKYO METROPOLITAN POLICE DEPARTMENT, APRIL 29, 1947, 20:00
I don’t know what those guys Kiyama and Sato told you, but you should know, they aren’t real Communists. They talk the talk, but all they care about is their “revolution of the flesh.” A fine idea—stripping off false ideologies to get back to our human values—but inviting people to literally strip? Pretty convenient. Not that they’re bad guys—they’ve help me and the boy—but I’m through with them, trust me.
That boy’s different. Half his body burned, covered with boils, and he still cares. I’ve known him a year now, and he’s never said a word about his family. Do you know why? Because he survived. The least you can do for a boy like that is give him food, medicine, a job. Instead, all you do is round them up, like our Liberators round us up, any woman, to randomly test us for VD. We had proper lives once, you know. Tell me, how many requisitioned family homes did you renovate this month to accommodate “American living standards”? If they think throwing chocolate and chewing gum from their jeeps is sweetening anyone’s life, they’re wrong.
Threaten me all you want, but that boy’s not a murderer. He looked after my father, changing his clothes, wiping his spit and blood—how many people would do that, risking their own health at a time like this? Maybe he hung around a couple of Communists. So what? He’s a decent human being, unlike you lackeys, never lifting a finger for any of us, your own people, while you pant and jump for the next new powers that be. How can you live with yourselves?
So here’s your chance. Let the boy go. If he was at Occupation Headquarters or the American Embassy, it’s because he was looking for me. I disappeared on him. I’m not proud of it, but when my father died, I got to thinking about my future. Now I clean toilets for the Americans—who else has a job to give these days? But that boy didn’t need to know. Nobody needs to know. How should I know how he tracked me? I don’t see what the murder has to do with this. Did you just say assassination plot? That’s the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard.
Q. On April 29, 1947, you were also seen at the American Embassy. What were you doing there?
Konomi was skinnier, all bones beneath a blue dress cinched at the waist in a style he’d never seen on her, her feet, like a film star’s, pecking the pavement in Western-style heels instead of clomping along in her trademark geta. He hadn’t believed Furukawa, but this was definitely Konomi emerging from Occupation Headquarters, and the sight clipped his heart. Since they’d met at her stall the previous spring, they’d spent almost every hour together, selling her omusubi and busting anyone who gave her trouble. After the police crackdown and the black market’s dissolution, he moved into her shanty to help her look after her father while she trawled her new market to sell the only thing left to her. Not that Konomi advertised herself; in fact, she chose her customers, shy white soldiers not much older than himself. It burned him, the crawling hours, the pitching fear, the mess of gratitude snarling into anger every time she returned safely. But he also knew it burned her, this self-flagellation, justified every time she exchanged her grubby notes for the supply of penicillin she needed for her father’s tuberculosis.
One evening seven months earlier, they were on their way to collect their share of kitchen scraps from a restaurant owner Konomi knew. Near the service alley, they saw the usual mobile food stall crowded with sundry people, two GIs squeezed in among them, slurping from bowls like the others. As they shimmied by, he saw a wallet neg
lected on the counter below the GI’s busy elbow, the leather supple like the one his father used to carry. He slipped his hand over it—and that was it. He woke days later sore to the bones in what appeared at first to be a tent, Konomi’s voice mingling with Kiyama’s and Sato’s. Instead of shaming him, the students invited him to stay with them at the shelter, and knowing how much this would lighten Konomi’s load—she had to bribe her shanty manager, who counted not just her father but the boy among her sick—he did. The arrangement suited them all: he helped the students with Party errands and cared for Konomi’s father when she needed him to. He found himself relaxing, his days clarified with purpose—until Konomi disappeared.
WITNESS #4: PROF. ISHIKAWA
TOKYO METROPOLITAN POLICE DEPARTMENT, APRIL 29, 1947, 21:30
Really, there’s no need for this. I wasn’t “sniffing around” your station; I have an interest in the youth, who I first laid eyes on last July at the Ueno market. A dirty slip of a thing, covered in rags and boils, he looked as though he’d risen out of the ruins like a prophet of our new era, teeth bared for survival but with a sneer that promised to make a mockery of even his own defeat, if it came to it. One has to admire the energy, the unbridled animal determination emanating from his pores, petrifying even the blackguards of the blackest market. I didn’t suspect then that he and a young woman who tended a stall there were close. Half-starved, I was greedy for a taste of life, and he, the pustular youth, charged into my path as the agent of my punishment.
I assure you, my value to you is indisputable. For example, I can confirm that today, April 29, the youth was not only at the shelter but also at the very site of your investigation: the old printing press. For I am no ordinary witness; I’ve been following him for months.
I was never a strong man. I’d given up physical pursuits for a life of the mind, sacrificing my muscles and bones to feed what I believed to be the higher calling. Especially after defeat I clung to this belief. For isn’t it the mind that endows humankind with the faculty of memory, without which there can be no historical awareness, no accountability? Yet in mere months, tossed into a dog-eat-dog hell, we the defeated have forgotten all our values except the needs of our bodies. Indeed, dawn has broken over our ruined country, but far from illuminating a new society repentant of modernity’s excesses, it has revealed the modern brutality of our civilization, consumed as ever by how to profit off another human’s back.
It is in this context that I became keenly aware of a young woman minding a stall at the Ueno market. She wasn’t a classical beauty, a limp in her step and her lips trembling ever so slightly, but, supple and alive, she catalyzed my reunion with my body. I began buying her exorbitant pellets of rice, my parched fingers reaching like a tongue to skim her palm opened to take my coins…
On the last day of July, circumstances lured me to reach for more…Suffice it to say I was thwarted by the youth. Humiliated, I beat my retreat, but the youth was not done. I was halfway up Ueno Hill when I saw him loping toward me with feral speed, and in a flash he was upon me. I fought as never before, his flesh and mine locked in a mortal struggle until I, with my flaccid muscles, pinned him down. I cannot describe my elation! As my fingers pressed into his windpipe, engorging his face, I experienced what can only be called ecstasy. I saw the Truth. In my desperate greed for survival, I was choking none other than the suffering Redeemer incarnate.
Let it be known I released my grip and suffered his fists upon my face. Over the following weeks, unable to forget, I roamed the area for another glimpse of him. I finally found him walking with the market woman, the two bumping along like besotted cousins before disappearing into what appeared to be a block of tents but turned out to be a welfare shelter that even the likes of me, debased as I was, dared not enter.
Luck, however, favored me; I heard the woman’s voice, and from the gaps in the flimsy panels I saw the pair enter a tent occupied by two young men—students I recognized from my university. It did not take me long to understand that the youth and the students had made this place their home. Where the woman lived, I never learned, but the four convened daily, and I became attached to their shapes moving like a family behind the tarpaulin. Then, a month ago, the students received a visitor. A small fellow in a stuffy suit. The woman was there too, but not the youth. Two days later, the woman stopped showing up. After that, the youth began coming and going unpredictably. There was no doubt he was looking for her. I never saw the visitor again.
Today, April 29, the youth appeared at the shelter around noon. He was agitated, barging into the students’ tent and instigating an excited conversation before dashing back out. I followed him. This is how I ended up at the old press. The youth knocked, then tried the door and disappeared inside. He stayed perhaps a half hour before reemerging and leaping onto a tram. I lost him then, but my attention was riveted to the figure who’d emerged with him. A droopy fellow with a wilted profile who stared after the youth with a hateful yearning I recognized: it was my own face, the animal face of a broken soul.
Let us remember the Messiah comes in many guises. Whether He’ll lead with the steps of a man or the hoofs of a beast, what’s certain is that the youth are the inheritors of this earth. Whereas you and I are trapped, you in your uniform, I in mine in a manner of speaking, the youth is of a new species rising from the ashes to lead the world of today into what we, with our lost heads and craven spirits, cannot begin to imagine. You mark my words.
Q. You were seen at Occupation Headquarters. You were seen at the American Embassy. Were you planning to attack General MacArthur?
Pecking down the boulevard with a fluency that impressed and frightened him, Konomi headed, as Furukawa had said she would, toward another Occupation building: the American Embassy. Should he show himself? He panned the busy street full of soldiers and military police. He slunk along, hoping she’d turn onto a side street, but the hulking Embassy soon rose before them, and Konomi stopped. Exchanging words with the guards, she disappeared through the gates.
Was Furukawa right? People came and went from the many offices in Occupation Headquarters, but the Embassy, currently housing the American general, was closed. He rubbed his temple; a dull pulse the size of a barley kernel rolled beneath his finger. He knew that since the Americans began cracking down on Party members, the Party, increasingly unnerved by what it saw as the Occupation’s authoritarian slide, had begun to agitate; with the ghost of their ineffectual wartime resistance still heavy on their minds, everyone agreed they had to take measures. Furukawa, who favored an armed revolt, gathered his supporters. Konomi and the students, critical of violence even as a means to a revolutionary end, joined the opposition. It was a heated situation, but it was when Furukawa proposed involving the Party’s Soviet comrades that everything shifted.
The pulse in his temple grew to the size of a pebble. What if Furukawa was preparing a full-on, possibly Soviet-backed, military coup? Would Konomi, a diehard pacifist, risk working with the Americans to stop him? This morning when he greeted the rōjin, the old man had told him what he then told Furukawa: that he’d seen Furukawa with Konomi. What the boy didn’t tell Furukawa was that the rōjin had heard them arguing. Was Furukawa mobilizing against his opposition? He pictured Ōtsuka’s curled body, the shock of his pulped face. Furukawa never admitted to killing him, but his bitterness had been real. The boy stood. A sharp pain crazed his skull. Then he was out, dragged away by someone trailing the smell of hot paper and printing ink.
WITNESS #5: PROPRIETOR, THE HEAVENLY CURTAIN HOTEL’S HOUSE OF HOPE
TOKYO METROPOLITAN POLICE DEPARTMENT, APRIL 29, 1947, 22:00
He’s a nice kid, that one. Covered in boils, but who can judge people by their faces these days? Take my place: The Heavenly Curtain Hotel’s House of Hope, The Fortieth Welfare Hostel in trust to, and under the management of, the Greater Tokyo Federation of Non-Luxury Hotel Associations. On the face of it, you�
�d think it a respectable establishment, with such a grand name and endorsement. In reality, it’s a clapboard bunkhouse extended and divided by oiled curtains, also used as roofing to protect our guests from the heavens above. Hence, Heavenly Curtain Hotel’s House of Hope. Not to be mistaken for a shelter, mind you. As classifications go, we’re a Welfare Hostel, which might lead you to believe there’s a social security program in place to support the residents and their place of shelter, such as it is. But let me assure you: there is not, despite our Compassionate Occupiers, the Mighty Democratic Vanguards of the New World. This is the sort of place I run, just to be clear.
The kid’s a regular, as regulars go at Heavenly Curtain. He looks to be thirteen or fourteen, kind to the maimed and touched, unlike certain other guests who stay by the hour, despite the lack of privacy, if you get my meaning. Can’t complain, though. They pay my Federation fees.
As for the boys, they’re regular boys, twenty-two or twenty-three—students, I hear. The girl too. Talks tough but you can tell she’s from a good family. She lives with her dad—consumptive. It’s nice to see these youngsters taking in a kid like that, putting a shine back in his eyes. Some days you can see the man he’ll be.
Kids are a different breed these days. One minute, they mug you at knifepoint; the next, they shatter into the five-, ten-, fifteen-year-olds they were when their world fell apart; a week later, they disappear, sometimes forever. But this kid? He’d never hurt a soul, I don’t care what evidence you think you have. He’s honest, quick to help. I keep telling him that one day when I have a real hostel for people getting back on their feet, he can work for me. If I were you, I’d haul in the man who came poking around this evening, asking about the students. A slinky sort. Smelled like a stack of newspapers…
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