Fire Flowers (29 page)

I pictured a ship, somewhere mid-Pacific, sapphire waves crashing against the hull. An editor's office in New York, overlooking the Hudson. Snowflakes touching the glass, shivering away to nothing.

“They won't let me back in, Ward.”

“Probably not.”

He considered the glowing end of his cigar. “Anything special keeping you in Japan, Hal?”

I pictured my drafty room in Nihonbashi. My mess of blankets, the typewriter on the battered desk. Mrs. Ishino leaning over the bar and pouring me another glass. The serving girl, Primrose—Satsuko—sat at a side table, with her scarred hands and a red plastic peony in her hair.

“I guess not.”

He suddenly grinned, shaking his head.

“My goodness, Hal. You really are a dark horse. You know that? A real dark horse.”

He rested his big paw on my shoulder and looked me straight in the eye.

“Just remember me when you get your Pulitzer, okay?”

 

I took a long walk home along the river, past dark fields of ruin. When I ducked past the curtain, the place was busy.

Satsuko-san wandered over as soon as I sat down, as if she just happened to be passing. She opened up a beer and poured it into two glasses.

“
Cheers
,” she pronounced, smiling at me.

“Cheers,” I replied.

We exchanged pleasant banalities for a while, the familiar patter about food in Japan and in America, and she gave polite gasps of surprise and admiration as I regaled her with a list of the exotic dishes I had tried in her country. There was a lull in the conversation. Her lips moved, silently, as if she were phrasing a question in her mind. She looked back up at me with a very serious expression. Slowly, she asked: “Do you have pet?”

I laughed.

“Well, yes, I do. Or rather, I did once . . . ” I found myself telling her about Finn, the adored glossy red Irish setter I'd had as a boy.

“When I was young, I used to sleep with my head on his fur. Like it was a pillow. You know—pillow?”

She looked startled. “You go sleep?” she asked, mimicking slumber.

“No, no. Not yet.”

Finn had gone lame as I'd gotten older. One winter morning, just after my twelfth birthday, I was awakened by a distant noise. My breath billowed in the air as I came downstairs. The glass door of my father's gun cabinet hung open, one of the rifles missing. I creaked open the door and touched the smooth metal barrel of its twin. At that moment, my father came tramping back in, holding shotgun and shovel. There was sweat on his brow, and a frail scent of sulphur.

“You have any pets, Satsuko-san? A dog?”

She smiled.

“Cat,” she pronounced with a look of satisfaction. “We feed—” She slithered her hand through the air.

“Eels?” I asked, in a moment of inspiration.

“
So
.” She made a snapping movement with her mouth. “Eel head.”

A great wave of warmth and sympathy coursed through me. I felt curiously privileged to have this fragmentary glimpse into her past, into her life before all of this began.

I started to laugh and she looked at me in surprise. Then, slowly, to my delight, she began to laugh too. Not the giggle of a whore, eager to please, but the genuine laugh of a live woman, with a childhood and a past, who considers her reflection in the mirror, and nods with wistful acceptance.

Finally I stood up, fully intending to head upstairs.

“You sleep now?” she asked.

“I'm going to try.”

She placed her cool hand on my wrist. Her eyes were candid.

“You want take me?”

I hesitated, the delicate pressure of her fingers upon my skin.

“Maybe another time.”

The corners of her lips turned down sulkily. She crossed her arms.

“Well,” I said. “Goodnight.”

I lay fully clothed on my bed, cursing myself as I pictured the inevitable events unfolding below. Men arriving, the gramophone playing, couples swaying back and forth. Satsuko leading another man to the back room. What exactly was I trying to prove? I pictured her smooth, slim body as she pulled her dress over her head, the glimmer of light in her jet black eyes. I almost got right up and headed back downstairs to ask her to come up after all. But before I knew it, I had fallen dead asleep.

T
he water was just coming to a boil as I dropped the scrubbed potatoes into the pan. From the crates piled up in the narrow kitchen, I took cans of spiced meat for sandwiches and tins of dried egg to mix bowls of gluey omelette for the night ahead—those simple snacks that the Americans seemed to find so delicious. They kissed their fingers and applauded as I set down bowls of chipped potatoes and greasy fried egg sandwiches. A far cry from eel liver soup and
unagi-don
!

As I poured the water into the sink, Mrs. Ishino sidled into the kitchen through a big cloud of steam.

“Well?” she asked, pinching my arm. “What did you think?”

I frowned, concentrating on the potatoes as they tumbled into the draining basket.

“What did I think of what, Mrs. Ishino?”

“What did you think of the Westerner, of course!”

The American who slept in the attic room upstairs had taken me to the cinema that afternoon. I shrugged.

“I'm sure I don't know, Mrs. Ishino,” I replied. “Does he really seem that different from the rest of them?”

Mrs. Ishino frowned as she considered the question. “Don't you think, Satsuko-chan? More the ‘sensitive type,' I would say.”

“Really, Mrs. Ishino?” I said, pouring oil into the pan. “Do you really think any of them are sensitive?”

Mrs. Ishino let out an exasperated noise.

“Why not find out, Satsuko?” she said, stamping out of the kitchen. “It might not be such a bad idea to have a foreigner looking after you these days!”

I spluttered with laughter as she marched out. As I slid the potatoes into the spattering oil, I pictured the American sitting beside me in the cinema, gazing up in bemusement at the screen.

Men in short sleeves had been bustling around the cinemas on the Rokku as we stepped down from the tram in Asakusa that afternoon. Several of the theatres had reopened along the wide avenue now, their brickwork stained by black smoke. Banners for new shops fluttered on bamboo poles in the brisk spring breeze, and cinema posters were mounted on billboards, mostly showing Western men in cowboy hats and blonde women with large bosoms.

Just past the old Paradise Picture House, a big painted sign on the side of the wall advertised a new Japanese film. When I saw it, my jaw fell. I grasped hold of the arm of the American. Up there, larger than life, was Michiko.

The resemblance was unmistakable. But the American misunderstood my expression. He walked over to the booth and bought two tickets for the film. Still stunned, I tried to explain that it would be in Japanese, that he wouldn't understand a thing. But he just shrugged and smiled, took my hand and led me inside.

There was only one row of seats left at the front of the damaged theatre and as we took our places, the audience standing behind us seemed restless and agitated. The light flickered onto the screen and my stomach tightened. The thought of seeing Michiko again—and in such a manner! My eyes widened as the names of the actors blazed up on the screen. There it was:
Michiko Nozaki.

The film began. Almost straightaway, she appeared. Wearing a white, pleated skirt, casually twirling a summer parasol—I almost clapped my hands in delight. As I settled back in my seat to watch the film, I couldn't stop smiling. The American squeezed my arm and offered me a hard candy from a paper bag.

I could hardly remember the plot afterwards. It was a simple love story, all faintly ridiculous. Michiko was the true star of the film. Her beauty simply flooded from the screen. The audience jostled behind us whenever she appeared, sighing and murmuring with delight when she flashed that eager, encouraging smile I knew so well.

Her leading man was very handsome, with sharp cheek- bones and piercing eyes. I glanced up at the American, who was quite unaware of my emotions as he munched away on his snacks. He looked rather handsome himself, I thought, and I squeezed the tiniest bit closer to him.

Toward the end of the film, there was a shock. At the height of the drama, the man grabbed hold of Michiko, accusing her of covering up a crime. She tore herself away with tears in her eyes, but he rushed over and took her in his arms. She turned, half-resisting. And then, quite openly, he leaned forward and kissed her.

A gasp came from the audience. He had kissed her! Full on the lips, in public—just like that. Of course, we had never seen anything like it on the screen before, and the audience shouted in astonishment. My American laughed, quite bewildered by it all.

As the crowd poured out of the cinema into the spring sunshine, he took my arm and we walked together through the streets of Asakusa. Men were going by with sandwich boards advertising new shops, and some of the stalls on Nakamise Arcade had reopened, selling flimsy mirrors and trinkets to the passing soldiers.

Cherry blossom hung from the scorched trees that leaned over Asakusa Pond, more like a flooded bomb crater now. We sat on a bench and gazed at the flowers for a while, and I pointed out the scorched patch that had once been Hanayashiki Park with its golden horses, the mound of rubble on the other side that had once been my old high school.

“Where did you live, Satsuko?” he asked, quite suddenly.

I frowned, and waved my hand vaguely in the direction of Umamichi Street, on the far side of the temple precinct.

He fell silent for a long time, deep in thought. Perhaps he really was different from the other Westerners. Darker, somehow, more brooding. I knew so little about him. Where had he fought during the war? Had he been a pilot, up there in one of the planes?

It was a question that none of us girls ever asked. I might have seen him one night, as he flew low across Tokyo. His handsome face beyond the quilted nose of the cockpit, the glass glinting with the light of the fires raging below.

A muscle tightened in his jaw. I should hate him, I thought, for what he had done. But as we sat there in silence together, he took my scarred hand and held it between his palms. For a moment, as the breeze blew blossom onto the surface of the dark water, it felt as if the sky was exhaling, as if the earth itself were silently offering up flowers for the souls of the dead.

 

The potatoes hissed and sizzled in the pan as Masuko came into the bar and switched on the radio. My ears pricked up straightaway.

“Who Am I?” was a programme which had come on the air that month. It featured displaced persons from all over the Japanese Empire who had lost their memories during the war, and now, on their return home, were trying to discover exactly who they were and where they had come from. The presenter interviewed them in the hope that someone out there might recognize their voice or recall some clue about them.

“Can you remember anything about your childhood, sir?” he was asking, as Masuko turned up the volume. “The village festivals, perhaps, or where you went to school?”

A man's voice crackled in reply. “I can't remember much of anything, sir, just that we lived in the countryside. Our teacher was Matsukawa-sensei. He was so strict! I remember he beat me once when I lost one of the buttons of my school uniform . . . ”

Masuko laughed out loud as I took the pan from the heat and walked through to the bar in my apron. She was a short girl, as chirpy as a sparrow, with a lovely hint of the south in her voice. We'd quickly fallen into an enjoyable routine together, visiting the market for vegetables in the morning, cleaning the bar in the afternoon, and gossiping about Mrs. Ishino and what we referred to as her “mysterious past.”

Masuko certainly found the show very entertaining, though for all the wrong reasons. A sly smile played on her wide lips as we listened to the next segment.

“And now for some success stories,” announced the presenter. “Last week the loyal wife of Mr. Kawachi heard her husband's voice on our programme, and boarded a train straightaway from Kobe to come to our studio and collect him. They are now reunited in joy in their marital home.”

“What rubbish!” cawed Masuko. “I bet Mrs. Kawachi's just some old hag who can't find herself a husband. She heard his voice on the radio and thought that a man without a memory would do her nicely!”

I gave a thin smile. But the truth was that I listened intently to every minute of the show, my stomach quivering as the men began to speak. What would it be like, I wondered, if Osamu's voice suddenly emerged from the crackling radio? If he had been lost somewhere in the South Seas, falsely reported dead by his colleagues? Would I have telephoned the radio studio if I heard him? Even now?

My memory of him was fading, I realised. The picture of us together in my mind was frozen in time, ageing, like an old photograph.

Young boys spoke too sometimes, telling tales of lost mothers and fathers. Tears had welled in my eyes one afternoon as an Osaka boy described losing his family in the fire raids, just nights after I had lost my own. I'd been flooded with hopeless guilt. What would I do if Hiroshi's voice suddenly, miraculously came out from the speaker?

“I lost my sister, Satsuko Takara, on the night of the Great Tokyo Fire Raid, but can remember nothing more. My only wish is to see her again . . . ”

Perhaps I had given up the search too soon? Mrs. Ishino told me I'd performed my filial duty, that I must simply get on with my own life now. But so many of us were still lost, it seemed, so many still struggling to find their way back home.

I sighed as Masuko switched off the radio. She began polishing ashtrays and laying them out on the tables and I went back to the kitchen to salt the fried potatoes. After a while, I heard footsteps coming from upstairs. I put my head back around the door. The American was sitting at the bar, reading his book. He glanced at me in surprise and I smiled at him shyly. His face lit up as his deep blue eyes gazed directly into mine. He slid a match into the pages to mark his place and placed the book down upon the counter.