Fire Flowers Read online

  Ward seemed cheerfully nonplussed by the whole affair. He scribbled briefly into his leather notebook, then slammed it shut.

  “Well, I guess that’s enough for one day. How about we get ourselves a drink?”

  “That would be grand.”

  The night’s first hookers stood shivering against the trees at the edge of the park, scuttling out in pursuit of the GIs who sauntered along in pairs. All were very young—their breasts hardly made a bump in their sweaters—and they wore motley woollen skirts and dowdy jackets. Not many were pretty, but there was a certain sharp eroticism in the air that sprang from their brazen approach. After brief negotiation, they pulled their man off into the melding shadows, and, as the sun went down, the edges of the park came furtively alive with the faint, mingled caterwaul of swift, preprandial copulation.

  A girl in a grubby yellow dress skipped over and slid her arm through Ward’s, as if we were all out for a pleasant Sunday afternoon promenade.

  “Okay, Joe—very cheap!” she promised, swinging his arm from side to side.

  “No, sweetheart,” Ward said. “I’m not your john. Get on home.”

  She frowned. “Very cheap—”

  He raised a thick finger in warning, and she dropped his arm, glaring at him. She peeled off along the path with a muttered curse, and Ward watched her go.

  “And so the country is truly conquered,” he said, gloomily.

  “At least we pay for it. Unlike our Russian buddies.”

  He glanced at me sharply. “What good capitalists we are.”

  The windows of the Dai-ichi building were still lit, the teams of bright young men burning the midnight oil as they drew up their plans for Japan’s future. Down in the plush bar of the Imperial Hotel, the strictly temporal reigned. An old Japanese band played soft Ellington covers, while colonels in well-cut uniforms lounged in armchairs, enjoying the first drinks of the weekend. The waiter brought us whisky and I sipped at mine gratefully.

  “So, Lynch,” Ward said, settling back. “How goes life at the Stars and Stripes?”

  I shrugged.

  “That well, huh?”

  “Should I be diplomatic, Ward?”

  “No need.”

  “How should I put it? It’s not quite what I visualized when I decided to become a reporter.”

  “What did you visualize?”

  I considered the question. The eyes of the correspondents at the press club had been shrewd as George Weller told his uncanny story. As he’d slumped in his chair afterward, he’d seemed both noble and pathetic.

  “Something more than ‘The Touristic GI.’”

  Ward nodded as he slid a large cigar from his breast pocket. He puffed away, squinting at me through the smoke.

  “Something eating you, Hal?”

  As on the train, I felt encouraged to confide in him. I told him of my hunt through the archives; of the MPs searching the train at Himeji Station; of the trembling girl at Ueno who’d fled from the ruins of Hiroshima.

  He stared at me for a long moment, then studied the glowing embers of his cigar.

  “I’m afraid I’m not a psychologist, Hal.”

  I hesitated. “I never implied that you were, Mark.”

  He pointed his cigar at me. “But you must understand that what you witnessed from up there was the greatest feat of destruction in all human history.”

  “What’s your point, Ward?”

  He jabbed the air with the cigar for emphasis.

  “The fall of Troy. The sack of Rome. The Mongol Horde. Nothing compared to what happened here. The destruction we achieved in the space of, what, six months? It’s no wonder you’re a little . . . stunned.”

  I was grateful for his tact. “Shell-shocked” was no longer the current expression in any case.

  “What’s your take on Disease X, Ward?”

  He raised his heavy eyebrows. “You heard Weller. He’s a strong reporter.”

  “You think they’re still dying?”

  Ward shrugged. “Who knows? You can see why SCAP would want to keep it quiet. It’s embarrassing, to say the least. Sinister at worst. Especially if it turns out we knew it would happen all along.”

  “There was an article in the New York Times. A man named Laurence—”

  “William Laurence?”

  “That’s him.”

  Ward shook his big head. “Man’s a stooge.”

  “He is?”

  “Sure.” Ward screwed the remains of his cigar into the ashtray. “He’s on the army payroll. He’s their cheerleader for the bomb.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yes I am.” He nodded, then swallowed the remains of his drink with a grimace. “Are you interested in chasing this, Lynch?”

  In my mind’s eye, I saw the sparkling inland sea, temple roofs, fishing boats unloading their catch at the silver harbour.

  “Maybe so.”

  “Might help you sleep at night.”

  I laughed. “I doubt it.”

  The place had filled up now. Tables of military men brayed and drank, and I gestured to a passing waiter for the cheque.

  “Did you ever meet Wilf Burchett?” Ward asked, as we stood for our overcoats. “The reporter who went down to Hiroshima after we landed?”

  I remembered the blocked-out article in the London Express.

  “He’s still here?”

  “Not for long. MacArthur’s throwing him out. But I’ll introduce you if you like.”

  A blast of cold air met us as we approached the revolving door. It spun about, expelling a group of staff muffled against the cold. A tall Japanese man in a camel coat glanced at us through round spectacles, then touched the arm of a hawklike general. He wore an immaculately cut uniform, his hair parted in dark waves, a monocle screwed into his eye socket. The Japanese muttered something into his ear, and the general glared at Ward for a moment. Ward stared back, rocking on his heels. The general thrust out his overcoat to a boy and marched into the bar, his subalterns skittering behind him.

  Ward’s nostrils were flared.

  “Buddy of yours?” I asked as he shoved his way through the door. The cold air outside stung my cheeks.

  “Major General Charles Willoughby,” he said, as he gestured to the doorman for a cab. “G2. Chief of Intelligence. Shady character.”

  The doorman blew a whistle, and a taxi veered toward us in the road.

  “Born Karl Weidenbach in Heidelberg, Germany. ‘My own dear fascist,’ as MacArthur calls him.”

  The doorman opened the cab and I buttoned up my collar in preparation for the brisk walk back to my hotel. I thought agreeably of my cosy room at the Continental, the old woman who would bring up a little brazier of charcoal whilst I poured myself another drink.

  “How do you know him?” I called.

  “Willoughby?” he called back as he clambered inside. He threw his cigar butt onto the road and stamped on it. “He’s an old pal.”

  The door slammed shut. The taxi drove off along the road, smoke pouring out into the bitter night.

  I met Burchett two days later in the guest room on the second floor of the press club, the air ripe with the aroma of men in close confinement, unmade beds draped with newspapers and damp underwear. Burchett was packing his kit bag with stacks of notebooks and clippings. He wasn’t British, I realised, but a blunt, amiable Australian with a cynical and amusing manner.

  “Lucky you caught me. They’re slinging me out next week. The bastards.”

  He was impressively cheerful. The men at SCAP had removed his press accreditation a month before, a fact which he ascribed to the article he had written, with a typewriter on his knees, in the ruins of Hiroshima, just a few days after we had landed. When I told him I was curious, he raised his eyebrows.

  “Oh, you are? Well, you’re in the m
inority. I bet they’re still dropping like flies. If there’s any of them left, that is. We’d not hear a dicky bird about it in any case.”

  “How did you get down there?”

  “How? I got the bloody train like anyone else. Caused quite a stir, I don’t mind telling you. Bunch of army samurai chappies didn’t quite take to me . . . ”

  He described landing with the first parties of marines on a beach near Yokosuka. As soon as he entered the surreal wreckage of Tokyo, he rushed to the station and boarded the first train toward Hiroshima, looking for a scoop. The carriage had been packed with Japanese officers, bitter and glowering—it had been the day of the surrender signing aboard the Missouri—and he’d been the only white man on the train but for an old German priest.

  “Drank some of that sake stuff with them though. Seemed to calm things down a bit. Just goes to show, doesn’t it?”

  “What about Disease X, Burchett? This—radiation disease?”

  His face became suddenly serious. “Atomic Plague. That’s what I called it. At first the locals thought it must have been caused by a kind of poisonous gas from the bomb.”

  He’d stumbled across a makeshift hospital on the outskirts of Hiroshima, scores of people lying on rush mats, deteriorating almost before his eyes.

  “Came in complaining of sore throats. Days later, their gums were bleeding. Then their noses, then their eyes.”

  After that their hair began to fall out. The doctors, desperate, injected them with vitamins, but the flesh rotted away around the puncture points.

  “Gangrene,” Burchett said, his nose wrinkling with the memory. “You can smell it a mile off.”

  Some died soon after. Others held out for a while longer, complaining of an overwhelming inertia, a strange, heart-breaking malaise. Then they died too.

  Burchett let out a long sigh. “And that, sir, is more or less the size of it.”

  “Who else knows about this?”

  He snorted. “Brass are doing a bloody good job to make sure no one does.”

  “And do you have photographs?”

  “Ha!” he barked. “Did have!”

  My stomach tightened. “There’s no photographs?”

  “Therein lies a tale,” he said. “After I got back to Tokyo, I was ordered to visit a military hospital. No doubt to check I wasn’t glowing. Two days later, my camera disappears from my kit bag. Along with my notes, my typewriter, and five rolls of film. ‘Sorry Mr. Burchett, must have been that shady chap on the other side of the ward.’ All very mysterious.”

  My head began to swim. “There’s not a single image of what you’ve been describing to me?”

  He shook his head.

  It seemed astonishing, terrifying—that an entire city and its inhabitants could disappear without a trace.

  “Unless you chaps took any snaps for posterity. Or the Japs did. Even so, I doubt we’ll be seeing any of those at the flicks any time soon.”

  Wild thoughts swirled around my head.

  “Anyway. Need to pack up now, old chap. Getting shipped back to the mother country in the morning. Oh, for London in the winter.”

  He gave a theatrical shudder and I wished him luck.

  “Good luck yourself, mate,” he said, looking me straight in the eye. “Believe me, you’re going to bloody well need it.”

  My dreams that night were relentless and harrowing. Standing on a desolate plain, the wind howling around me. An inferno swept from the horizon, fireballs pelting down from the sky. A ruined schoolhouse, a stench of rotting meat. The assembly hall piled with skeletal bodies. The little girl from Ueno, her mouth agape, her body covered in welts.

  Endless corridors, men in pursuit. A door to an office. Behind the desk, a chair. My father. A shotgun barrel in his mouth, still open in a ghastly smile. His brains thickly smeared on the wall behind.

  *

  Two days later, I woke early. In the pale light of dawn, I sliced off the Stars and Stripes blazon from my jacket and sewed back on my lieutenant’s epaulettes. My knapsack was bulging from a visit to the PX the night before, packed with chocolate, tins of Spam, a bottle of Crow, and two cartons of Old Golds, along with ten fresh rolls of 35mm Kodak film.

  I travelled in the Japanese section of the train, despite the insufferable crush. People blankly made way for me and my uniform, and I squeezed myself into a cramped seat by the cracked window. Babies hoisted on women’s backs swung perilously close to my head. The carriage was filled with the tang of unwashed bodies and wet wool. The windows were mostly gone and cold blustered through the carriage.

  The inspector looked at me in mortification after examining the ticket I’d had a Japanese boy buy for me at the station. Brow furrowed, he rubbed his hat back and forth over his bald head. I held my fingers to my lips in question, and his eyes lit up. I handed him the first of my packets of cigarettes, a five-dollar bill folded inside. After a moment of shameful deliberation, he gave a sickly grin, slid both into his pocket, and politely clipped my ticket.

  The train stopped often throughout the night, halting in lonely tunnels, shunting into sidings for what seemed like an eternity. Snow whirled outside and there were clangs and shouts as men tried to restart the engines. The passengers pressed their faces to the windows to watch, their breath freezing against the broken glass. There was the lonely sound of metal being hammered in the darkness as handcarts of coal were hauled up to the locomotive.

  Later, we passed through Kyoto, where most of the passengers disembarked. A few hours later, I recognized the white alabaster of Himeji Castle up on its hill, pale in the light of a bright full moon. I fell into a troubled sleep against the comforting bulk of a large, warm woman who sat beside me, my pack drawn close against my knees.

  I was awoken by the woman jabbing me in the ribs, repeating Japanese words in a loud, obstinate voice. I tried to crawl back into the drowsy shelter of my dreams, but she poked me again, hard, and I sat up, rubbing my eyes.

  The carriage was almost empty now, and, outside, the first light of dawn lent a rose-grey tint to the horizon. We were passing down onto an immense, bleak plain, rugged mountains looming in the distance. The wheels screamed on the rails as we slowed on our approach to a shattered station. The train shuddered to a halt. The platforms were gone, and there was a sharp drop from the train to the compacted dirt below. A solitary wooden sign was nailed to the wall of a battered brick building and I struggled to identify the ideograms as the woman, still jabbing her finger into my side, began to intone the syllables, over and over, in a strange, mellifluous voice:

  “Hiroshima, desu, Yankii. Yankii—Hiroshima desu.”

  14

  UNAGI

  (Hiroshi Takara)

  From where Koji and I sat on the stone bank of the canal, Fuji-san was just visible beyond the ruins of the city, its peak sprinkled with snow. We had set off that morning with our bamboo fishing rods, crossed the Kototoi Bridge and made our way up to the lock with its little castle keep. Our lines were hooked with chicken gizzards, dangling now in the black depths of the water, the slick surface glistening with rainbow whirls of oil. We were fishing for eels.

  My father’s shop had sold eel, of course. The rich, sweet aroma had infused my childhood. The shop had been popular with the patrons of the theatres and cabarets that lined the streets of Asakusa, a regular haunt of the stagehands, theatre managers and actors who came in at odd times of the day for snacks and a glass of sake between shows. My father was a true fan of the kabuki himself—the rough-and-tumble style popular in Tokyo back then, and prints of the Danjuros, the famous dynasty of actors, were plastered all over the walls. He liked nothing better than to banter with the customers about famous performances of the past, cracking jokes in that gruff, smart way that Tokyo people liked, steaming and grilling the strips of eel all the while. He brushed them with a thick secret sauce from his famous pot—an earthenware thi
ng he’d inherited from his own father, bound with wire, sticky and smeared from generations of service. As he stood there, surrounded by smoke and fire, he looked almost like a character from a kabuki play himself. One of the wilier, earthier types.

  Ours was an old-fashioned shop in that the live eels were kept in a big glass tank at the front by the street. My mother skinned them on a block: she pinned them through the head and tore away the slimy skin with a swift movement, pulling out the backbone and slicing the fillet into strips in an instant. Sometimes I pressed my face up against the glass and watched the animals flap their fins and slip around each other, glistening like they’d been freshly coated with lacquer. My father once told me that every eel in the world was born in the same place, out in the middle of a distant ocean. I dreamed about the place sometimes, the sea crashing as the glassy elvers drifted away, to be tugged apart from each other by the ocean currents.

  The first day my father took me to the Kabuki Theatre was the day after the Pacific War had broken out. Our headmaster had gathered us in the assembly hall of my school, and we’d nudged each other, trying not to laugh, because Sensei had tears streaming down his cheeks.

  “Children,” he said, his voice wavering. “Japan has entered the great war against America and Britain at last!”

  Banzai!

  We were thrilled, of course—we could hardly believe that Japan had actually gone and done it. Our country was going to annihilate the enemy. That afternoon, our teacher unrolled a huge map of the Pacific Ocean and we pinned it up on the classroom wall. We spent the lesson searching for Honolulu, and stuck on a little rising sun flag when we finally found it.

  The next morning, my mother was washing my father with warm water from the cedar tub. She passed the cloth over his muscly back, then toweled him down and helped him dress in his yukata. She arranged my clothes and brushed my hair as the radio burbled away with another excited report of the glorious attack. I noticed that she and Satsuko were still dressed in their normal work coats and aprons.

  “Why aren’t you getting ready, mum?” I asked.