You Think That's Bad (19 page)

Tanaka came by to see the last part of the shot and reported that Mori had taken to calling what they were doing “suitmation.”

“How'd the boy work out?” he asked Honda, half-teasing.

“I haven't heard any complaints,” Honda told him in response. And Hajime pretended to be too absorbed in sealing the rush canisters to have heard what they said.

Masano was asleep when Tsuburaya was finally dropped off after the first day of shooting, and asleep when he left the next morning. Toward the end of the second day, an assistant informed him during a break that she'd telephoned to let him know that Hajime would be joining them for dinner that night.

His son was lugging film cans to the processing wagon while
Tsuburaya read the note. “You're dining with us tonight?” he called to him.

“That's what I'm told,” Hajime answered.

They rode home together. It was still bright out and the dining table was flooded with a quiet white light from the paper windows. Masano collected Imari porcelain and had set out for the occasion her most prized bowls and cups.

Seeming even more grim than usual, she asked how their days had been. Tsuburaya told her his had gone well. Hajime smiled like a guest in someone else's home, and Akira seemed beside himself with joy at his brother's unexpected presence, though even he seemed to register the tension. For appetizers there were a number of variations on raw radishes, Hajime's favorite, including some involving three kinds of flavored salts. Masano had begun believing more and more fiercely in the purifying usefulness of salt.

There was a silence while they ate, except for Akira smacking his lips. When they finished, Masano cleared the table and served, for dessert, more radishes, pickled and sugared. She asked if they had anything to tell her.

“Do you have anything to tell your mother?” Tsuburaya asked the older boy.

Hajime seemed to give it some knit-browed thought. “It's nice to see you?” he finally offered.

She sat back with her arms folded and watched them exchange looks. “I've tried to give our son some direction; a little instruction,” she finally remarked. “But you know what that's like. It's like praying into a horse's ear.”

“I've taken Hajime on as my camera assistant,” Tsuburaya told her.

“Yes, I thought that might be the situation,” she answered, and even Akira acknowledged the extent of her anger by hunching his shoulders. “The Personnel Department called, needing information,” she added.

He'd provided their oldest son with a job, and a good one, Tsuburaya reminded her. That seemed cause for celebration, and not complaint.

“As you say, I have no cause for complaint,” Masano told him. But something in her shoulders once she'd turned away left him so dismayed that he found he no longer had the heart to argue. They sat facing each other like mirror images of defeat.

“Thank you for this excellent meal,” Hajime told her.

“Thank you for coming,” Masano answered. Tsuburaya put his hand atop hers, at the table, and she let him leave it there.

But she didn't speak to him again until later that night, when he threw off his covers in the heat. She said then that as a young woman she'd felt anxious about seeming awkward when she tried to express herself. And that until she'd met him, she'd feared it had something to do with being too self-centered. And that their letters—their feelings—had helped her understand that something else was possible.

“Remember how thrilled we'd be when we saw my name in the credits?” Tsuburaya asked her.

“I read some of those letters today,” she told him. In the dark he couldn't see her face. “They're such strange things. So full of connection.”

“Hajime can work for Toho and remain a loving son,” he told her.

“I need to sleep now,” she explained, after a pause. And after another pause, she did.

He departed earlier than usual for the studio the next day, and at his driver's horn-blowing, he raised his head from his work to find his car in a great migration of bicycles ridden by delivery boys, bakery boys, and messenger boys, some of them negotiating astonishing loads: glaziers' boys balancing great panes of glass, soba boys shouldering pyramids of boxed soups, peddlers' boys with
pickle barrels, all weaving along at high speed. When a toddler in a tram window reached out to touch one, the cyclist veered away down a side street.

Honda greeted him that morning with Ifukube's score, which he played for everyone on the upright piano. No surprises there. Ifukube had spent the war composing nationalist marches, and what he'd presented to Honda was a mishmash of some of his favorites. Apparently he hadn't even looked at the rushes. “Close your eyes and you're back on the home front,” Tanaka called acidly from the hallway while Honda was playing it.

That afternoon two full sequences were filmed. After Honda approved the second, he asked if Tsuburaya had come up with anything to conceal the wires for the attacking jets. Tsuburaya showed him on the Moviola the little test he'd conducted, and Honda was stupefied and overjoyed: what had Tsuburaya done? Where had the wires gone? Tsuburaya explained that he'd hung and flown the models upside down, then had inverted the image. The wires were still there, but no one noticed them
below
the aircraft instead of above. Honda wanted to call some others in and make a fuss about it, but Tsuburaya reminded him that if time and budget were the main walls around the moviemaker, it was his job to help punch through them. “So we can get on to other things,” Honda agreed. And Tsuburaya could imagine Masano's response, had she heard.

Early in the war they'd brought Hajime to see the rare birds and animals that had been added to the Ueno Zoo after the conquests in the south. Tsuburaya remembered the days being perpetually sunny. Hajime had also loved the rooftop pool of the Matsuzakaya department store, where shoppers were treated to mock battles between electrically controlled models of the Japanese and Allied fleets while the store's customer service manager talked about the need for consumer restraint. Plaques bearing the phrase “Honor Home” were in the windows of every house that had a father or
son off at the war, and Masano had joked to her friends that only her husband's age had held him back, and that national mobilization was never a problem if all that was asked of men was that they cast off parents, wives, or children before going off to war.

But by that point he was already working in the Special Arts Department at Toho. The ten major studios had been forced to consolidate into just three, all making mostly war films in order to promote national policy and strengthen the country's resolve. The rooftop display had given him the idea for the miniatures photography for Toho's first drama about the China war,
Navy Bomber Squadron
. And the climactic battle sequence had gone off so well that he'd then been given responsibility for the scene in which the Chinese primary school, once destroyed, turned out to have been a secret armaments depot. Those sequences had resulted in his first screen credit for visual effects, though the sight of the bombed Chinese school seemed to cripple Masano's enjoyment at the premiere.

Had they ever been closer, though? The ongoing national emergency had seemed to revive her sense of all that she still had to lose, and nearly every night her face found his in their bed once they had extinguished the light. Every family was urged to start the day at the same hour with radio calisthenics, and during the first six months after Pearl Harbor there were nothing but victories to report, so the radio made for good listening. Hajime found it hilarious to watch his parents huff and sweat. More and more disappeared from public life to exist only in private, the way before the war the censors had edited out of foreign films all instances of socialism or kissing.

Accounts of each battle were concluded with a rendition of Ifukube's Naval March. But then as the war turned, announcements of this or that territory's strategic importance were reversed, and its loss apparently meant nothing, whereas its capture had been wildly celebrated the year before. Hajime spent even longer hours in school undergoing mandatory vocational and military training. And Masano was further saddened at the eradication of neighborhood
birds by the heavy guns of an artillery training division billeted nearby.

Tsuburaya told her one night that it was just like Japan to go to war with the nation upon whom she was most dependent for the raw materials essential to prosecuting that war. Modern warfare began in the mine and continued in the factory, feeding on coal and steel and oil, and ninety percent of the oil Japan consumed before the war was imported, nearly all of it from the United States. She seemed to find this point even more painful than he did.

They were told that Leyte was the battle that would determine the fate of the nation. Once Leyte was lost, it turned out that Luzon was the key. After Luzon, Iwo Jima. After Iwo Jima, Okinawa. “Well, apparently the mountain moves,” Masano answered, a little bitterly, when he remarked to her about it. She was especially demoralized by a newspaper account of the destruction of Okinawa's capital, and the printed photo of their narrow and hushed streets from all those years ago shelled into rubble.

By then there were no pleasures. Food was miserable, lovemaking was impossible, there was no time even for reading, and they constantly feared that even at his age Hajime would be called up. Dinners were rice bran, fried in a pan, which looked like custard but made Hajime cry when he ate it. Movie production had come to a halt due to a lack of nitrate for film stock. Workers at Toho were serving as labor volunteers in the countryside, helping farmers and returning each night with a few sweet potatoes for their work.

And then came the raids. Hajime demanded to be taken to a public exhibition of a B-29 in Hibiya Park, where the bomber had been reconstructed from the parts of various downed aircraft and was displayed alongside one of Japan's latest interceptors. The fighter looked like a peanut beside a dinner plate. Such was the Americans' nonchalance by that point that they dropped leaflets the day before detailing where and when they would strike. Aloft, these leaflets resembled a small, fleecy cloud, but as they fluttered down they dispersed over the city.

The fire raid on March ninth centered on the area hit by the 1923 earthquake, the trauma that had separated him forever from his father. The one on the tenth extended the destruction. The next morning they returned to acres of ruin where their homes had been. Block after block was burned flat, with lonely telephone poles erect at odd angles like grave markers, leaving only ash and brick and the occasional low shell of a concrete building. Where the desolation wasn't complete, the neighborhood associations were still holding air-defense drills and doing their best to resettle those bombed out of their homes.

The only topic of conversation by then was food, or the failure of the rationing system. Everyone spent their days foraging. They were told to collect acorns for flour because they had the same nutritive value as rice. They ate weeds and boiled licorice greens and bracken ferns. And then they heard that as the result of an attack by a very small number of B-29's, the city of Hiroshima had been considerably damaged. And that the Emperor would be addressing the nation by radio for the first time in history.

When Tsuburaya mentioned by way of offering encouragement that they'd completed the first month of shooting, Masano said in response, “You take as much time as you need to. Whatever your lack of interest, our routine is going to continue as it has.”

He was taken aback. She'd caught him struggling into his rain shell and preoccupied with the problem of the high-tension wires the monster was to destroy on his way into Tokyo. She was at their kitchen table working on a gourd that was supposed to afford the sparrows some protection from rats. The gourd would hang from a nail under the eave outside their front door.

This wasn't how things would always be, he assured her. Soon the shooting and even postproduction would be over.

“I'll continue to maintain your household and raise your child, whatever happens between us,” she told him.

“What does that mean, ‘whatever happens between us'?” he
asked. He was shaken, the notion of yet more separation like a fear of the dark.

“Akira's very proud of you,” she answered. “And his brother. Do you know what he said to me before he left for school? He said he understood why neither of you liked him.”

“Do I need to stay home?” Tsuburaya asked her, and set down his work satchel. “Do we need to talk about this now?”

“He's nine years old and he sounded like me,” she said.

He unbuckled his rain shell in contrition, pained at her attempt to keep her composure. “I'll talk to him this evening,” he told her. “Hajime will talk to him as well.”

“It's one thing if it's just myself,” she said. “But I can't watch this happen to him, too.”

“I'll go see him now,” he said. He had his driver wait outside Akira's school, but the boy's classroom was empty when he finally found it. The instructor in an adjacent room said he thought the class might have gone off on a nature walk.

When Tsuburaya was twenty-two, his father took the train to Tokyo for business and left his grandmother and Ichiro in charge of the store. The idea seemed to be that he might partner up with a larger distribution chain. But he might also have been trying to exert some influence on his son.

Tsuburaya had by that point given up his dreams of aviation, and after serving in the Imperial Infantry had returned to the store, uncertain of his future. Before his call-up, a chance encounter had led to his training as a cameraman for Edamasa, the famous director, whom he'd worked for until his conscription notice had arrived. Back at home, he stocked shelves and took inventory. His father claimed his son's choices were his own, but his grandmother hectored him to give up dreaming about movies and airplanes and to give some thought to his family and especially his father and uncle, who shouldered the burden of the family business alone.