Fire Flowers Read online

  I walked inside to take the Yamanote Line back to Shina­gawa. A swarm of filthy brats were clamouring around the passengers disembarking onto one of the long-distance platforms. They slipped their little hands into the travellers’ pockets as they took down their suitcases, grubbing about on the floor like insects for the cigarette butts that they dropped.

  My heart froze. There, right in the middle, I could see Hiroshi. My heels skidded on the marble floor as I ran toward him.

  “Hiroshi!” I screamed. “Hiroshi-kun!”

  Barging through the emerging passengers, I thrust my way onto the platform. As I reached him, he was scrabbling around someone’s shoes. I seized his arm and pulled him up, rubbing the dirt from this face with my handkerchief.

  “Hiroshi!”

  The boy shook me off, swearing horribly in a strange dialect. My heart sank in confusion—I couldn’t understand my mistake. It wasn’t Hiroshi at all.

  “I’m sorry—”

  The boy squinted at me as I caught my breath.

  “Miss?” he spat, turning. “You can wipe this if you want.”

  He was holding his penis in his filthy hand, a gleeful expression on his face. I gasped and spun on my heel, hurrying away as fast as I could.

  When I reached our tenement alley, I paused at the door of our tiny wooden building. There was a radio playing inside—a sentimental children’s song that I hadn’t heard for years. In fact, the last time I could remember hearing it had been at the old merry-go-round in Hanayashiki Park, with Hiroshi and my mother, one Sunday when I’d gone to visit on my monthly day off from the factory.

  Come, come, come and see

  Furry friends beneath the tree

  In the autumn moonlight

  At Shojo-ji Temple!

  The song brought back all sorts of memories. I stood there in the alley for a moment, lost in thought. Finally, I slid the door open. Michiko was sitting by the low table with her ear close to the speaker of an ornate radio set. She had a look of intense concentration on her face.

  “Michiko!” I hissed, but she waved an urgent hand to the floor beside her and gestured at me to be quiet. The song carried on. But though the tune was familiar, I realized that the words were quite different to those I remembered. In fact, they were in English:

  Come, come, everybody

  “How do you do?” and “How are you?”

  Won’t you have some candy?

  One, and two, and three four five . . .

  Michiko was trying to mouth along to the words.

  Let’s all sing a happy song

  Tra-la, la la la!

  She looked up at me in excitement.

  “I’m learning English!” she whispered. A man’s voice began to speak from the radio and she turned back with what she clearly thought was a studious expression, which mainly involved frowning and nodding at everything the man said.

  Another one of Michiko’s crazes! I thought, as I sat down beside her. But, as I listened, the programme really did seem quite fun. The presenter’s name was “Uncle,” and it was the same man who had translated the Emperor’s speech into common language back in the summer. Now, it seemed, he was going to teach the Japanese people how to speak English.

  Uncle was very kind. He explained that the lessons wouldn’t be like school. In fact, they would be more like us playing a game together through the radio. This sounded very pleasant, and so we sat there, fascinated, and after a while, even I tried to repeat some of the English words back. I found myself smiling and nodding as the theme song came on at the end. It was funny, I thought—the new words were already standing in for the old ones in my memory.

  “Satsuko!” Michiko exclaimed, after the programme had ended. “We can listen to this and become proper English speakers. Just imagine.”

  We already knew some English, of course, from our dealings with the Americans, but I didn’t think that any of it would have been especially suitable for polite company.

  “‘How are you? How do you do?’” Michiko said, imitating Uncle’s manly voice. Suddenly, in a fit of laughter, she leaped up, took my hands in hers, and spun me around the room.

  “‘How are you? How do you do?’” she sang.

  Finally she let go of my hands and sighed. “Just think, Satsuko,” she mused, as she poured water into the teakettle. “Now we really will be ‘New Women of Japan.’”

  I suddenly remembered what I had wanted to ask her. “The radio, Michiko. Where did you get it from? Surely you didn’t buy it yourself?”

  “Ah! The radio,” she said. “It is handsome, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It certainly is. I wonder where it could have possibly come from?”

  “It was a present,” she replied. “Isn’t it splendid?”

  “Another present, Michiko? Anyone would think you had a rich old man off somewhere!”

  But she just smiled mysteriously, as if she hadn’t heard, and then poured out the tea, still humming away to herself: “How are you? How do you do?”

  The afternoon was gloomy as I walked through the ruins of Asakusa. I had promised myself that I would visit the site of our old home and light some incense for my parents; and for Hiroshi, now that it seemed likely that he was gone.

  Empty brick shells were all that were left of the trinket stalls along the Nakamise Arcade and a cat scuttled along the low, broken walls to escape the first streaks of rain. At the end of the arcade, the Senso Temple had more or less vanished. All that was left now was a big gravel precinct set with the charred stumps of the ginkgo trees, and craters full of muddy water, crinkling in the drizzle. Sadly, I turned and walked toward Umamichi Street.

  How dismal it all was now! I thought. Even when I’d been a girl, there’d been kaminari-okoshi sweets and bear paw charms. Fortune-tellers and jazz dancers and troupes of actors. Overhanging stalls painted with bright scenes from the kabuki which sold wood prints and postcards and windup toys. Pots billowing with fragrant steam and mouthwatering smells from the yakitori sellers as they brushed their smoking skewers with delicious sauces, the serving girls running between the tables as the oil lanterns bathed the street with a soft, rosy glow.

  The war had sucked all of the colour away. All that was left now were hovels of rotten planks and sagging tarpaulin, the streets all churned to muck.

  I finally found the square cistern in the middle of our alley. But I couldn’t make out the site of our home anymore. Eventually, I found a burned patch a little way on, which I thought must be about right. I wedged my sticks of incense into the black mud. It took me a whole box of matches to get them lit. Water dripped down my neck as I stood up to say a prayer.

  The sky seemed to turn several shades darker. All of a sudden, rain hurtled against my umbrella, and I had the intense feeling that I wasn’t welcome there. It was if my mother and father were standing behind me, ashamed and angry, hissing at me to go away. The impression grew so vivid that I became quite frightened. I hitched up my skirt and hurried away down the alley, stopping only to glance back at the incense sticks, still just about smoldering in the rain.

  The tram was packed on the way back to Shinagawa, the windows misted with grimy condensation. An ex-soldier was squashed up against me, a short man of about forty. The brim of his army cap poked into my nose and I could tell by the dirt on his neck and the sour smell that he hadn’t washed for quite some time. I closed my eyes, hoping that Michiko would be home by the time I got back.

  A cold hand grasped me between the legs and I froze. The man in the cap was staring at my shoulder, his lips writhing beneath his dirty moustache. His hand clasped me firmly, squeezing, and I shut my eyes, burning with shame. Tears welled up in my throat as his fingers gripped harder.

  I suddenly opened my eyes again. What right did he have to do this? I thought. Did he think he could touch me without paying? Who did he thin
k he was?

  I jerked my shoulder violently into his face.

  “Pervert!” I shrieked. “You filthy pervert! Think you can just grab anyone you want?”

  The passengers jostled around us, happy for the diversion on such a rotten day.

  “Who do you think you are?” I said. “Are you such a hero? You couldn’t even win the war. You should be ashamed of yourself!”

  The man stared at the floor. His face was twitching and, at that moment, I didn’t know whether I felt hatred or pity for him. The tram shuddered to a halt, and I elbowed my way out and jumped down into the wet street. As the tram clanked off, the passengers stared back at me through little rubbed windows in the condensation.

  I had left my umbrella on the tram in all the confusion, with the result that I was quite soaked by the time I got home. When I went inside, the house was cold and empty. Michiko was nowhere to be seen.

  I let out a sob. I took the bottle of whisky from the cupboard and poured myself a cup. The fiery liquor soothed my heart, and I sat on the floor, stock-still, listening to the rain as it thrashed against the roof.

  Michiko was probably off at some expensive restaurant or inn with her rich new lover, I thought, whoever he was. I started to feel quite sorry for myself and poured myself another large cup of whisky. Then, though I tried to resist, my thoughts drifted to Osamu. I remembered the time he’d taken me to a comic show at the Café D’Asakusa, how the students had howled with laughter and he’d held my arm encouragingly as I tried to smile at the jokes. I pictured the look of disbelief on his face the day he had received his call-up papers. He’d trembled and stammered—his mother could have applied for exemption for him, he said, he was an only son! I thought of his body, thin and muscular, in the back room of the Victory Hotel, after he’d come to my house on the night of his leaving ceremony. I wished now that I had let him do what he had wanted to much earlier. I’d been with so many others since then, after all! If I had given in sooner, then I’d have those times to remember now as well, not just that solitary night, when he’d shuddered with joy once before falling asleep next to me. The next day, we were waving them all off at the station, the soldiers wearing their thousand-stitch belts wrapped tight around their bellies. His horrid mother had stared at me as the women from the Defence Association cheered and the train pulled away. Congratulations on being called to the Front!

  I wondered if memories were like precious porcelain that should only be brought out on special occasions, whether they were like fruits that lost their lustre if they spent too long in the sun. If that was the case, I told myself, I would have to be careful how often I thought of Osamu now. Or of my parents, or Hiroshi, for that matter. I didn’t want my memories of them to shrivel away like withered flowers. They were the only thing I had left of them now, after all. Except the charred scrap of my mother’s kimono. And the teakettle, of course . . .

  The door slid open and Michiko came crashing in. She tumbled amongst the pots and pans, making a terrible racket. Then she started to sing so loudly that I was terrified she would wake the neighbours.

  “Michiko,” I hissed, “be quiet!”

  She stumbled toward me.

  “Satsuko,” she wailed. “Satsuko, help me. I’m so drunk!”

  She slumped down onto the floor and clasped me around the neck, giggling.

  “He’s in love with me!” she shouted. “He wants me to be his only one!”

  I clamped my hand over her mouth. I was sure I didn’t want to hear her secrets, least of all in the middle of the night. Viciously, she bit my finger and burst into laughter. Then she slid over, waving her head from side to side.

  Suddenly, she sat bolt upright and made an odd sound. She rushed over to the door and heaved it open. The she fell onto her hands and knees, and was retchingly sick into the alley outside.

  The next morning, when I awoke, Michiko was already up. She was wearing a pale green dress as she hovered over the stove. A delicious smell was rising from a pot.

  When she saw me, she knelt down in front of our futon, pouting unhappily.

  “Please forgive me, Satsuko, for my juvenile behaviour last night. It must have been very distressing for you.”

  I admitted that she had seemed rather drunk, but said that she should think no more about it. She smiled, and bowed again.

  “Thank you, Satsuko,” she said. “Now. Please come and eat your breakfast.”

  She took the lid from the pot on the stove with a flourish, and I cried out. A silver fish, a herring, I thought, was bubbling away in a sauce of miso and sake. The aroma was just wonderful. I glanced toward the door to check it was closed—the neighbours would have been madly jealous if they could have smelled the food.

  “Wherever did it come from, Michiko?”

  She raised her eyebrows and put her hands in the air, performing a little swaying dance. Then she drew an envelope from inside her blouse and handed it to me.

  “Look.”

  I gasped. The envelope was full of money, an astonishing amount, more than we could have possibly earned even if we’d worked at the Oasis for months.

  “Whatever are you going to do with it?” I asked. “Save it up?”

  She gave a short laugh. “No, Satsuko. First we are going to have our breakfast. Then I’m going to get some sleep. And then, you and I are going shopping.”

  The Matsuzakaya department store might have been burned out, but the Mitsukoshi had reopened and I felt a glamorous thrill as we stepped through its wide doors. The shop had always been famous for its opulence and luxury, and even its wrapping paper had seemed beyond the reach of a family like mine. But there wasn’t much opulence or luxury left now, I thought, as we wandered amongst the empty shelves and rails. An icy draft was blowing through the place and rubble crunched underfoot, beneath the torn carpet. The staff stood shivering in their uniforms—they didn’t look quite so haughty anymore.

  They scuttled after Michiko as if she were a noblewoman visiting from her country estates, as she picked out a dress here and a shawl there, telling the attendant to wrap them and have them delivered to our house. But when she gave them our address at the counter, they looked at us suspiciously. After all, Shinagawa wasn’t the kind of place that anyone would have associated with nobility. From then on, I had the distinct feeling they were giving us looks and muttering behind our backs. It was as if they knew there was only one way girls like us could afford to shop at the Mitsukoshi.

  “Please can we go now, Michiko?” I whispered uncomfortably. Michiko glanced at the assembled staff. A mischievous gleam came into her eyes.

  “Yes, Satsuko,” she said in a loud voice. “Perhaps you’re right. Let’s leave all this rubbish behind and go down to the Shimbashi blue-sky market instead. After all, there’s so little to buy here!”

  And she flounced through the door as they bowed down low, their faces frozen. As soon as we got outside, she burst into laughter.

  “Those stuck-up prigs!” she cried. “No one looks down on me anymore, Satsuko!”

  In fact, there wasn’t a great deal to buy at the Shimbashi blue-sky market that day either. Michiko finally had to be content with some sheer silk stockings and a floral scarf that the old woman claimed was from Paris. But then, just as we were leaving, we passed another stall, piled high with old, elegant kimonos.

  I froze. Right on the top was something I recognized intimately. A beautiful green kimono, embroidered with golden peonies—the very kimono that my mother had bought me on my sixteenth birthday, and which I’d been forced to sell months before to buy rice.

  I leaned over to touch the hem with my fingertips, remembering at once how fine the stitching was, how delicate the embroidery. All sorts of memories and feelings passed through me then. Michiko must have noticed my expression, because the next thing I knew she was airily asking the stallholder how much it cost.

  “D
on’t be silly, Michiko!” I said, but she shushed me and asked the stallholder again. As I suspected, the price was many, many times more than I had been paid. But without even bargaining, Michiko simply snapped out four hundred-yen notes from her purse and handed them over.

  “Michiko,” I begged. “Please! Don’t be ridiculous!”

  But the woman was already wrapping the kimono in colourful crêpe paper and tying it with a ribbon. Michiko wordlessly took it from her and handed it to me.

  Then I started to cry, for the first time in many months. As I stood there, shaking with sobs, I pictured my mother, helping me dress in the kimono for the first time, with such a look of pride in her eyes. I remembered how Osamu had noticed me wearing it at the Spring Festival, how he had strolled over to compliment me, blinking with embarrassment. Then I saw the face of his horrible mother, the day I’d gone to her villa, trembling with nerves, to ask if there’d been any news of him from the South Seas. Her mouth had puckered, as if she’d sucked a sour apricot.

  “Dead,” she hissed. “Shot in the stomach. Now get away from here, you slut.”

  I was sobbing so much now that the woman who owned the stall sidled round and took my arm, patting it affectionately until I had recovered.

  Later on that evening, after dinner, Michiko brushed my hair and made me try on the kimono again. It was as beautiful as I remembered, though quite loose around my shoulders now. I hadn’t noticed quite how thin I’d become. Michiko insisted on painting my face and then held up a mirror so that I could see my reflection. Then she took out a small vial and began to scrape a bright red paste onto my fingernails. To my horror, they began to turn crimson.

  “What on earth are you doing, Michiko?” I said.

  “Don’t be so old-fashioned, Satsuko!” she said. “It’s just nail rouge. One of the Americans gave it to me. It’s very modern.”

  Suspiciously, I let her paint them all. Afterward, as I admired the colour, she poured us both some whisky and we giggled together for some time before going to bed.