Fire Flowers (34 page)

N
ot long after breakfast, I felt suddenly very sick. I dashed to the latrine outside, where I retched up the miso soup and pickles I had just eaten. Dizzily, I looked down at the filth, swamped by the smell of rot and sewage. As I shuffled back inside, Mrs. Ishino emerged from her parlour room at the back of the bar, wearing a plain kimono. She saw straightaway that something was the matter. She ushered me onto a stool at the counter and asked me what was wrong.

When I explained what had happened, she fell silent. She looked at me closely.

“How long, Satsuko?” she asked. “Since your last cycle?”

I puzzled it through, doubtfully. All of our cycles had been highly erratic for some time, just like everything else, so it was very hard to keep track. But I suspected that it had been several months now, at least.

Mrs. Ishino picked up my hand and squeezed it.

“Please don't worry, Satsuko,” she said. “I'm convinced that Lynch-san is a good man.”

I stared at her for a moment as I grasped what she was saying. Then I burst into tears.

 

Sheets of typewritten paper were piled up on Hal's desk next to his typewriter, socks and shirts draped over the back of his chair. The futon was still on the floor, the blanket crumpled up where we had left it that morning. There was a faint film of dust on the windowsill, and I drew my finger through it absently. A battered pigskin suitcase stood in the corner of the room. A curious feeling came over me. I knelt down beside it and pushed the hasps. The locks flicked open.

A couple of vests were balled up inside, and there was a smell of mildew. Beside the vests were newspapers, and as I spelled out the title, I recognized the name of the paper that Hal had worked for. I leafed through the copy on the top. Photographs of men and soldiers, as usual. Carefully, I began to study the names typed beneath the pictures, with a tingle of expectation. Wouldn't it be lovely if I found Hal's name written there? Toward the end of the stack, I flipped over a front page. My finger paused. There it was! “Harold Lynch.”

I studied the large, blurred photograph above it. A group of street children were playing a game of baseball on a patch of wasteground.

I screamed.

A boy with a disfigured face held a charred plank as another boy flung a ball of rags toward him. It was Hiroshi. Unmistakably, I thought, as I brought the page close to my face and stared at the blurred dots of the image. Despite the tangled hair, the disfigured face, it was him.

I started to feel very faint. It was my brother. He had that earnest look of concentration on his face, just like when he and my father had thrown baseballs in Ueno Park, the same excited tension in his eyes as when he'd gazed at the cinema screen of the Paradise Picture House, when we'd gone to watch a film together on a Sunday.

I realized that I was softly moaning. All this time. Hiroshi.

I stood up and placed the newspaper upon the desk. I held my palm over my belly. There was the faintest swelling beneath the cotton. Hopeless images flashed through my mind. The boiled bodies being hoisted on a hook from the Yoshiwara canal. My hand-drawn sign at Tokyo Station, smeared from the rain. The horrible urchin on the railway platform, exposing himself to me. I closed my eyes. What if Hiroshi had seen me, I thought, standing outside the Oasis, my face plastered white as I clutched at the arm of another passing GI?
Come in, yankii! Very cheap!

Into my mind's eye came the pictures of America from the magazine. The smiling families in their motorcars, the advertisements for soap, for lacework wedding dresses. The photographs of San Francisco, the white city rising between green hills, thousands of miles away, far away beyond the ocean.

Before I knew it, I was clawing at the thin, rough newspaper, tearing the photograph from the page. Urgently, I ripped it into shreds. I heaved open the window, and flung the fragments of paper into the air outside. They fluttered for a moment, like falling blossoms, then drifted randomly down, scattering into the muddy puddles in the alley below.

 

Election posters were pasted up all across the city, painted with doves and slogans. That week, the ration fell, and the Imperial Plaza grew crowded every day with gaunt men and women waving placards and chanting. A rumour went around that the grain ship from America had sunk, that there was only enough food left for a few days. Prices shot up at the black market, and gunfights broke out in the streets. Men dangled out of the windows of the office buildings, using magnifying glasses to light their cigarettes with the weak rays of the spring sunshine.

At the table at the back of the bar, Mrs. Ishino was drinking a glass of clear liquor. She was in a sentimental mood. Masuko had found the disc of a Puccini opera that morning while we'd been out shopping, and the soprano was warbling away now from the gramophone.

“Madame Butterfly!” Mrs. Ishino said, pointing at me and laughing. “Do you know we used to dance to that, Satsuko, here in Tokyo?”

Her arms swayed in the air.

“So many rules, Satsuko! They shut us down because Lieu- tenant Pinkerton was an American.”

I pictured the huge portrait of Okichi, the maidservant presented to the Americans in the Edo period, framed on the wall of the sooty building on the Ginza at my interview all those months ago.

“What happened to your husband, Mrs. Ishino?”

She glanced at me abruptly. I had always been too shy to ask about her mysterious past. I thought she would tell me now.

She shuffled over to the phonograph, and lifted the needle-arm from the disc. The music stopped. She took a stool around to the other side of the bar, climbed up, and reached for the picture on the wall above the bottles on the top shelf—the framed photograph of a handsome man in a flying jacket. Masuko and I had long ago decided that the man must have once been Mrs. Ishino's lover. She clambered back down and placed the photograph on the table between us.

“Lieutenant Ishino,” she said, touching her fingertip to his face. She swallowed her drink and wiped her mouth. “We were childhood sweethearts, though he was a year younger than me. Can you imagine?”

I bowed my head.

“He chose to die.”

I looked up sharply. She nodded, staring at me.


“Yes, Satsuko. He did. He was stationed over at the Tsuchiura airfield. My dance school had been closed down by then. Planes used to pass over the city every day and I'd always jump and wave, imagining that it was him up there, looking down at me.”

She stared at the empty glass.


“What happened to him?” I whispered.

“He came back home one night, last April, without any warning. It was raining, I remember. I'd been asleep when I heard knocking at the door. There had been an air raid earlier, and it was still pitch-black. I could only just see him on the doorstep.”

“He'd come to visit?”

“He said he'd been given overnight leave. He'd been selected as group leader for a special mission. He didn't know when it would happen, only that it would be soon.”

She swallowed, and I saw tears in her eyes. She looked at me.

“I knew there was only one reason men were given overnight leave back then, Satsuko. He knew he was going to die. He had come back to say goodbye.”

I felt a hard lump in my throat.

“We held onto each other all through the blackout that night. I begged him to try to get out of it somehow—what was the point of dying? I asked. But he refused. It was his duty, he said. He asked me to forgive him. He left at around five in the morning, without telling me where he was going. ‘Look for me in the spring,' he said. Those were the last words he spoke to me.”

I felt myself starting to cry. Mrs. Ishino opened up the frame and removed the glass. She slid another photograph from behind the first. It showed the same man, in his flying jacket, standing beside a Zero fighter. Around his forehead he wore a headband, emblazoned with the rising sun.

“Eiji flew the lead airplane. He took off just after six a.m. He's smiling. Look.”

She pointed at his face and stared at the photograph for a long time.

“Why, Satsuko?” she said. “Why is he smiling?”

She wiped her eyes and went to the bar and poured out another glass of liquor.

“Did you know one of his friends tracked me down last winter, Satsuko?” she called. “Eiji had written me a letter. Do you know what it said? He implored me to forgive him. He asked me to live purely and honourably after his death.” She laughed bitterly, gesturing around at the wooden tables and chairs. “Honourably! What chance did I have, after what he had done? After he went off to fly his plane into some American ship? After he left me here alone?”

She let out a sudden sob, and I rushed over and put my arm around her as she shook with tears.

“For what, Satsuko? Why did my husband choose to die?”

I drew her close as she spoke.

“I'll never forgive him for that, Satsuko, never. No one should ever choose to die.”

She turned to me and held my hands tightly in hers, tears trickling down her cheeks.

“You see, Satsuko?” she said. “We can choose to live, now. Don't you see, Satsuko? You must choose to live!”

 

My fingers were clumsy as I helped Hal button his shirt. Protests were slated all across the city that day, and he was going along to take photographs. In a quiet voice, I asked him to meet me at Asakusa Pond later on that evening.

He stroked my hair and held my scarred palms to his lips. He kissed them, then kissed me goodbye and walked out the door.

I listened to his footsteps going down the stairs and I walked over to the window. As he emerged from the door down below, I held my hand over my belly and he strode away up the alley.

I spent most of the day preparing. Mrs. Ishino and I walked to the bathhouse, where she soaped me and scrubbed my back. Afterward, she rubbed a special almond-smelling salve onto my hands. Back at the bar, she took me into her cluttered parlour room. A spring mattress lay on a Western-style brass bedstead, with horsehair bursting from its seams. A row of ivory-coloured ballerina shoes were draped on a rail along the wall. She sat me in front of the mirror and spent several hours combing and arranging my hair, painting my neck and face before she carefully helped me on with my clothes. We decided upon the green and gold kimono my mother had given me, which I had finally bought back from the pawnbroker after several months of saving.

Mrs. Ishino stood behind me and pulled tight my embroidered brocade sash. As I looked in the mirror at my reflection, I saw that she really had done an expert job. My neck was pale, my cheeks were pink, and my hair was beautifully styled and pinned up with a mother-of-pearl comb.

She would come with me as far as the Asakusa tram stop. Evening was darkening outside and I became suddenly nervous and started to tremble. Mrs. Ishino made me drink a glass of whisky and told me that everything was going to be all right. She stroked my wrist as I drank the fiery liquid down. Then she looked up at the clock on the wall. It was six o'clock. She pinched my cheek and said that it was time to go.

U
eno Station was swarming with people arriving on packed trains from the towns and villages outside the city, all decked out in their best spring suits and kimonos, wearing sashes and aprons and holding up painted banners and placards:
Mothers for the Rice Ration! Railway Men for Reform!

I watched them warily. The demonstrations had better not interfere with our big night out. Beneath my shirt was an envelope of cash as thick as my finger that Mr. Suzuki had given me that morning. He'd told me to scrub up at the bathhouse, to get my hair cut, and to buy a collared shirt and a tie.

“Get yourself nice and relaxed, kid,” he said. “Then you won't be so nervous later on.”

As I boarded a tram for the Ginza, I looked down at my new watch. Five hours to go. At eight o'clock, I was going to meet Mr. Suzuki at his office at the market. From there, he was going to drive us both over to Shinjuku himself, in his luxury black Daimler with the brown leather seats.

 

As I sat in the barber's chair, and the old man fussed around me with his comb and scissors, I wondered why Mr. Suzuki liked me so much. Maybe it was because I was from Asakusa. Maybe he'd just liked my dad's eels. Every night, after the market closed for business, I sat with him in his office as he went over the accounts in his oilskin ledger and totted up the day's profits. When he'd finished, he had me check the numbers while he took a square bottle of whisky from the iron safe in the corner of the hut and poured himself a glass, full to the top. With a sigh, he'd loosen his collar, put his feet up on the desk, and shove the cigarette box toward me.

“You and me, little shit,” he'd say. “We're like two badgers from the same hole.”

My real job, I sometimes thought, was to listen. As he worked his way through the bottle of whisky, he told me violent stories from the market: about vendors who hadn't paid their dues, about the vicious Formosan gang who'd blasted him in the shoulder. The American officers who double-crossed him and were worse than crooks, the bastards who'd taken all the reconstruction contracts by paying out bribes, the lying politicians in the Diet, General Douglas Fucking MacArthur, and all the other pigs and snakes who were making Mr. Suzuki's life a misery, keeping him from his only true pleasures in life, which, it was clear, were gambling and women.

Asakusa was like his great lost love. “You should have seen it, little shit!” he roared one night, as the bottle got close to the end. “Nowhere else ever came close.”

He told me about the Casino Folies, the Russian dancers who kicked their legs right up into the air; how, when he'd been a kid, there had been two Bengal tigers kept in a cage at Hanayashiki Park. But it was the games of flower cards he'd run up in the old abandoned house by Sengen Shrine that seemed to be the pure land of paradise for him. His eyes sparkled and his hands fluttered when he talked about them, as if he was still rattling ghostly dice cups.