The Laws of Evening: Stories

T
HE
N
AKAZAWAS
were in China barely a week when they first heard the drumming of a prisoner procession. They were sitting side by side on the hard seat of their new Western-style garden bench. Although it was twilight and turning cool, the ornamental wrought iron retained the sun’s rays, reminding Masae of a frying pan slowly losing heat. Turning her head toward the sound, she stared at the concrete wall as if seeing through to the dirt road on the other side.

Clearly a small drum, it lacked the booming resonance of taiko festival drums back home.
Tan tan tantaka tan, tan tan tantaka tan,
it tapped in precise staccato, flat and toylike, as if someone were hitting the drumhead with chopsticks. Moments later, like an afterthought, came the scuffling sound of many feet, and a man’s cough less than ten meters away. The Nakazawas sat unmoving in the dusk. Out of habit, Masae’s thoughts darted to their baby girl: indoors…noise didn’t wake her…good. Above the wall, in sharp contrast to the black silhouette of a gnarled pine branch, the sky glowed an intense peacock blue. It seemed lit up from within, some of the white light escaping through a thin slit of moon.

“Ne, what’ll they do to them?” Masae asked her husband, Shoji, once the drumbeats began to fade.

“Shoot them, most likely,” Shoji said. He shifted forward on the hard iron seat and leaned down to tap his cigarette with a forefinger, once, twice, over his ashtray in the crabgrass. “Some might get sentenced to hard labor.”

Masae turned her entire body to face her husband’s profile. Its familiar contours, now shadowed by nightfall, took on for an eerie instant the cast of some other man: hollowed cheeks, eyes peering from deep sockets. “Araa—” She sighed with a hint of reproach. Granted, these things happened in occupied countries and they had known about the prison camp before their move; still, they could do without such reminders while relaxing in their own garden. Masae wondered what people back home would think of this. In their old Hiroshima neighborhood, mothers went to great lengths to shield their children from unpleasantness, even pulling them indoors so they wouldn’t watch two dogs circle each other in heat. Last winter, naturally, the neighborhood children had been spared any specific details of the Pearl Harbor incident. “I think,” she now told her husband, “this is not a good location.”

“H’aa, not so good,” Shoji said. He sounded humble; normally he would have been quick to point out that the company had chosen this house. They sat silent in their walled-in garden, on the bench which had by now lost all its heat. Masae could sense a faint shift in their relations. The drumbeats still rang faintly in her ears, like the aftermath of a gong. In the mock orange bushes behind them, a cricket began to chirp—slow, deliberate, unexpectedly near.

“Ochazuke might taste nice,” Masae said, “before bed.” Comfort food from home: hot green tea poured over leftover rice, flavored with salty flakes of dried bonito and roasted seaweed.

“Aaah! Masae, good thinking!” Shoji said, rising. His hearty exclamation was absorbed efficiently, like water by a sponge, into the silence of the Tai-huen plains.

The Nakazawas lived two kilometers from the main town, which was so small it had only six paved streets. If Masae looked out from the nursery window on the second floor (for she rarely ventured past the garden walls), she saw the dirt road leading straight into town. To her left were hills: wheat-colored, eroded over centuries to low swells on the horizon. Dark wrinkles wavered down their sides, as if the land had shriveled. Right behind those hills, the Japanese Army had built a labor camp for Chinese prisoners of war. On the other side of the dirt road, a flat expanse of toasted grass stretched out to a sky that faded in color as it approached the earth, from strong cobalt blue to a whitish haze. Somewhere past that skyline was the great Pun’An Desert.

Shoji was not in the Army. He managed a team of surveyors. His company back home, a construction conglomerate, had targeted this area because there was talk of building a railroad; Tai-huen might become a crucial leg in the Japanese trade route. Similar foresight in the Canton and Hankow provinces, which had come under Japanese rule four years ago, in 1938, was paying off now in housing commissions. “The faster we take the measurements,” Shoji kept repeating to Masae, as much for his own benefit, she felt, as hers, “the faster we go home. Next April, that’s the goal. Maybe June. No longer than that.” He worked late most nights in the Japanese tradition, flagging a bicycle-ricksha in town to bring him home over the long dirt road in the moonlight.

Each night Masae watched for her husband from the nursery window as she sang their daughter, Hiroko, to sleep. Hiroko, two years and nine months come the end of summer, was already developing her own idiosyncrasies. She fell asleep in one position only: curled up on her left side, right arm slung over the right half of her tiny bean-stuffed pillow, head burrowed under its left half. Masae didn’t see how she could breathe, but she knew better than to tug away the pillow even if Hiroko was asleep.

Tonight, cranking open the window to feel the night breeze, Masae drew in a deep breath. With the climate so dry, the air had no real smell other than that of the dusty wooden sill over which she leaned. But Masae loved that instant when her face, dulled from the heat of day, first came into contact with the night air. She savored it so fully that if the cool breeze were a feather brushing her cheek, she could have counted its strands.

Two months ago, after the first enemy prisoners passed by, Masae had kept all the windows locked. Since then her vigilance had waned, but only slightly—enough to open a window, but not to leave it unattended. Even Koonyan, their heavyset maid who came two afternoons a week, still unnerved her; the girl never spoke, merely taking in Masae’s Japanese orders without any expression. Recently Masae dreamed that Koonyan turned toward her and revealed a face without features, as smooth and blank as a stone. She admitted this to Shoji, with a self-deprecating little laugh. “Nothing to be afraid of,” he told her. “Hoh, behind that face she’s busy thinking about her little pet birds!”

Shoji’s wry comment referred to a company function two months ago, which they had attended shortly after the prisoner procession. It was a Western-style welcome dinner held in their honor, at someone’s home in the main town. Masae was seated beside the company interpreter, an elderly Japanese man who had studied Chinese classics at Kyoto University. Shoji sat across the table from them, his chin partially obscured by a vase of thick-petaled indigenous flowers. Last year a prisoner had escaped, the interpreter told them with a lilting Kansai accent. This Chinese man had hidden in the dark on someone’s tiled roof, lying flat as a gyoza skin while the Army searched for him in the streets; he might have gone free if not for the Army’s German shepherds. “See,” Masae told her husband across the flowers, “it pays to play it safe!”

“But they’re not overly antagonistic toward us,” the interpreter had reassured them, “compared to other occupied provinces I’ve seen. Tai-huen’s been under one warlord or another for dynasties. Here their focus is on small things, pet birds, for example. Every household has a pet bird in a bamboo cage.”

“Aaa, well, they’re peasants,” Shoji said benevolently. He had studied global geological theory at Tokyo University, which held as much prestige as the interpreter’s alma mater, and he was proud of his large-scale understanding of things.

“True, but it’s not just that, I think. Sometimes the small focus is necessary. I myself find it crucial.”

“Yes—no doubt.” Shoji shot Masae a quick glance of confoundment over the flowers. It occurred to her that these fleshy petals might be indirectly related to a cactus species.

“Yes, it’s crucial.” A quality of sorrow in the interpreter’s voice, deeper somehow than mere sympathy for the Chinese, threaded its way to Masae’s sensibility through the muted clinks of silverware around her. “The immensity of this land…”

At her window now, looking out over the darkening plain for the jiggling light of Shoji’s ricksha lantern, Masae let her thoughts drift out toward the Pun’An Desert. She had never seen a desert; she imagined it much like these plains except hotter and bleaker, stripped of its occasional oak trees and the comforting motion of rippling grass. An endless stretch of sand where men weakened, and died alone. Masae, being from Hiroshima, had grown up by an ocean that drowned thousands in storm seasons. Yet as a child she had sensed the water’s expanse as full of promise—spreading out limitless before her, shifting, shimmering, like her future. She and her schoolmates had linked elbows and stood at the water’s edge, digging their toes into the wet sand and singing out to sea at the tops of their voices: songs such as “Children of the Sea” or, if their mothers weren’t around, the mountaineering song that Korean laborers sang, “Ali-lan.” She remembered the tug of her heart when, on the way to school, she had followed with her eyes a white gull winging a straight line out to sea. But those were the impressions of youth. Masae was now at midlife, midpoint—Hiroko had been a late child—and for the first time she sensed the inevitability of moving from sea to desert.

The next night, for the third night in a row, Hiroko demanded that her mother read
Tomo-chan Plants Her Garden.
Masae sat on a floor cushion before the dark nursery window while Hiroko perched on her lap and turned the pages when told. Each page showed, with predictable monotony, yet another brightly colored fruit or vegetable ballooning up magically from its seed, hovering above it like the genie in their Arabian Nights book. They certainly looked nothing like the meager produce their maid brought home from the open-air market: desert vegetables, Masae thought. The big daikon radishes, for example. She was serving them raw, as all Japanese women did in the summer, finely grated and mounded on a blue plate to suggest the coolness of snow and water. But these radishes had no juicy crunch. They were as rubbery as boiled jellyfish and required rigorous chewing. Shoji didn’t seem to notice—he was often exhausted when he came home—and lately Masae fancied that he was absorbing the radishes’ essence. Since they had come to Tai-huen, something about him had shrunk in an indefinable way, as if an energy that once simmered right below the surface of his skin had retreated deep into his body.

Yet Shoji denied having any troubles, and laughed shortly at what a worrier she was. As long as Masae could remember, Shoji’s laughs had been too long—about two ha-ha’s past the appropriate stopping point. They had always irritated her, those laughs, but lately Shoji stopped way before that point, as if to conserve them. She missed his long laughter now, the thoughtless abundance of it.

“The End,” Masae concluded, slowly closing the book. Hiroko squirmed on her lap, and Masae could sense the wheels in her mind starting to turn, thinking up new questions about the story in order to postpone her bedtime. To deflect the questions, Masae picked Hiroko up and carried her to the window, upon which their faces were reflected in faint but minute detail, as if on the surface of a deep pool. The child’s head gave off the warm scent of shampoo.

“Way out past those lights,” she told her daughter, cranking open the window with her free hand, “is the desert, hora!” Their reflections twisted and vanished; coolness flowed in around them. A wild dog howled in the distance.

“What’s a dizzert?”

“Lots of sand, nothing else. No people. No flowers.”

“Ne, how come?” This, turning around to squint up at her mother.

“It’s too dry for anything to grow.”

Hiroko digested this in silence; then, “Are there rice balls?”

“No. There’s nothing out there in the desert.”

“What about milk?”

“No.”

“What about”—she twisted in Masae’s arms to peer back at the nursery—“toys?”

“
No
.”

“How come?”

Masae drew a deep breath. At such times she felt she was floundering in a churning river. She longed for Shoji—or any adult, for that matter—with whom she could follow a narrow stream of rational thought to some logical end.

“Mama told you why, remember?” she said. “You already know the answer. Yes, you do.”

“The dizzert lost all its seeds!” Hiroko cried, tonight’s story fresh in her mind. “You got to get some seeds. And then you can grow things.” Masae agreed, and left the matter alone.

After Hiroko fell asleep, she returned to the window. The stars neither glimmered nor winked; they lay flat on the sky in shattered white nuggets. The town lights were yellower, a cozy cluster of them glowing in the distance with a stray gleam here and there. She imagined blowing the lights out with one puff, like candles.

Seeds. As a girl Masae had read a book on deserts, how it rained once every few years. After the rain, desert flowers burst into bloom only to die within two days, never seen by human eyes. Such short lives, ignorant of their terrible fate. She had wondered at the time how a seed could be trusted to stay alive in the sand; wouldn’t it just dry up from years of waiting? In the driest, bleakest regions of the desert, who was checking whether flowers still bloomed at all? Aaa, Masae thought, this is what comes of keeping company with a child.

But one fact was indisputable; the Pun’An Desert was expanding. Shoji had mentioned it, only last night: spreading several centimeters each year, according to the latest scientific report. Killing the grass in its path like a conquering army. Wasn’t it reasonable, then, that seeds
were
actually dying in this part of the world, leaving fewer and fewer of them to go around? An inexplicable sense of loss overwhelmed Masae. When Shoji’s ricksha lantern bobbed into view, its light refracted through her tears and gleamed brighter than any evening star.