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  “Your mother and sister aren’t coming,” my father said, with a wink. “It’s just us men today.”

  Us men! I was beside myself with excitement as we made our way into the theatre, blazing with lanterns and filled with smells. His big hand gripped mine as the patrons called out to him, sprawling in their boxes with bentos and bottles of sake laid out in preparation for a good long afternoon’s entertainment ahead. When my father told them I was his son, they studied me with approval, remarking on my dark eyes and declaring that I had the ferocious glower of a Danjuro myself, which made my father’s face crinkle with pleasure.

  We took our place in the centre of the hall and he set out some rice crackers to nibble on. The national anthem played at a deafening volume, then there was a loud bang and the lights went out. I seized my father by the arm and he laughed uproariously as a cloud of smoke billowed on the stage. I smiled at him in bashful excitement and we settled back to watch the play.

  There were flashing lights, sudden explosions, the wail of horns and voices and clouds of colourful smoke. As the actors came onto the stage, men cried out Banzai! and the audience all roared with approval. At the climax, the clappers rang out and the audience exploded, pounding the sides of their boxes as the actors pulled their faces into ferocious, cross-eyed tableaux. Afterward, everyone spilled out into the light of the bustling evening to eat and drink amongst the stalls and shops, and I rubbed my eyes as if emerging from a dream.

  Later, somehow, it all went wrong. A few years after that, rice was being rationed and the fishmonger had gone out of business, and, finally, my father was forced to close the restaurant. The women from the neighbourhood association came round the next day, and asked him to donate his grills to the military as they were made from such good iron. Let’s send just one more plane to the front!

  Then the real tragedy occurred. The fire raids began, and the theatres were shut down and my father’s last pleasure in life was taken away. His call-up papers arrived soon after that. On the evening of his purification ceremony, we ate a solemn meal of sea bream and red rice. Afterward, my father put a lid on his ancient pot of sauce and sealed it with wax. He wrapped it up in oilcloth and placed it in a cedar box, which he stood in the alcove underneath the family altar. As we stood before it, he put his hands on my shoulders, rubbing them over and over.

  “Take care of that until I get back, Hiroshi-kun, do you hear me?” he said.

  I nodded. He pointed at the box.

  “That’s our only family treasure.”

  My father heaved his kit bag onto the train at Ueno Station the next day. He was going to report at the Yokosuka air-naval base. He squatted down on the platform and embraced me tightly as the platform guard blew his whistle.

  “Remember what I told you,” he whispered.

  I nodded.

  “I promise, Father,” I said.

  “I’m counting on you, Hiroshi-kun!”

  There was a shriek from the locomotive as the wheels began to turn. The train pulled away from the platform. He leaned out of the carriage window for a moment, and waved his fighting cap.

  And then he was gone.

  Koji shrieked as something writhed violently on the end of his fishing line. I leaped up and quickly wound the string around my arm as it veered from side to side. The taut line angled up, and I prayed that it wouldn’t snap as I staggered backward, heaving as hard as I could. There was a sudden splash, and then, there it was! A dark, shining eel, coiling and writhing on the bank. Koji hollered in triumph as we dangled the spiraling creature into our bucket, spluttering with delighted revulsion as slimy water flicked in our faces. We dropped it into the pail, where it whumped away with a dull clanging noise. We covered it up with a plank of wood, and together we hoisted it up. We triumphantly carried it down the canal toward the river as the water sloshed back and forth.

  The light was just fading as we met the other children at Ueno Station. They crowded around us excitedly when they saw that we had actually caught something. When I slid the plank away, they gasped. The eel was curled up like an evil black snake in the bottom of the pail. Aiko leaned over, very warily. Suddenly, the thing wriggled and flicked water into the air, and she screamed and fell onto her backside. The children cackled with laughter as Tomoko helped her up. Aiko began to wail as Tomoko brushed her down.

  “Cheer up, Aiko-chan! You won’t be bellyaching when Hiroshi’s cooked the eel for our dinner.”

  Tomoko glanced at me, amused.

  The lights of the market glowed, and spattering flecks of black on the brickwork of the railway embankment marked the start of rain. GIs went to and fro in their rain capes amongst the stalls to haggle for stockings and trinkets for the night ahead. Shin was showing off now, dipping the tip of his finger into the water to goad the eel while Koji and Nobu watched warily over his shoulder.

  Aiko’s high voice piped up. She pointed over toward the far railway arches. Two GIs were walking along in the shadows. We had four last cigarettes left—should she go and ask if they would buy them?

  “I’ll go!” Tomoko said, brightly.

  Aiko handed her the remaining cigarettes and Tomoko sprinted off. I sat down on the gritty bank. The children were daring each other to touch the eel, jerking back whenever it moved. A train rumbled up on the tracks as I closed my eyes, smiling to myself.

  Some instinct made me look up. Through the drizzle, one of the distant soldiers was looming over Tomoko, pulling her toward him. I leaped up. Tomoko ducked away, but then, with a quick movement, the soldier grabbed her. There was a scuffle, and then, somehow, her monpe were around her knees. The man pulled her toward the iron struts of the railway bridge and she cried out as he pushed her up against the column.

  The world melted as I tore toward them, a sharp stone in my hand, my mind filled with a piercing roar. Tomoko stood pinioned to the wall, the soldier pressing one hand beneath her chin as the other pulled at his open trousers. He suddenly turned and saw me. Tomoko dropped just as I leaped into the air and swept the stone down hard toward his forehead. His brawny arm shot up and struck me in the jaw and I crashed down into a heap of charred, wet timber. I looked around desperately for a weapon. My fingers fell upon a piece of rusted pipe and I started to swing it as the man hovered in front of me. His shirt was billowing from his fly, and he was breathing heavily.

  A sudden wave of fear came over me as the man came closer. I swung wildly with the pipe, but to my horror, he caught it with one fist and ripped it from my hand. He grabbed me by the scruff, and I screamed and flailed at him as he slapped me with his hand, swearing. His companion grabbed his shoulder, but the man bellowed and he shrank away. I was hoisted slowly upward. The veins in his neck bulged and I could smell his beery breath. Sweat and blood and rain were dripping from his brow—I’d caught him, I thought, with a glancing satisfaction. I kicked out wildly. He slammed his left fist into my eye—there was an explosion of pain and I collapsed onto the ground. A boot stood by my head, smeared with mud, the laces looped and tangled around the ankle. I was deaf except for a far-off ringing in my ears.

  I felt the tremble of iron rivets. Another train was passing along the track high above and sparks flew down from the rails. Passengers hung from the side, peering down the embankment. There were shouts. The other soldier clasped his friend by the neck, pulling him away. The GI resisted for a second. He stared down at me, then swung his boot again, straight into my belly. It lifted me from the ground, and I collapsed in agony, struggling to inhale. The train screeched off along the rails as the soldiers disappeared beneath the tracks, their shadows jerking up along the brick wall behind them.

  My head was ringing. I couldn’t get up. Tomoko stood a few yards away. She struggled to pull up her monpe as I crawled toward her.

  “Tomoko? Tomoko-chan?”

  Dread spread from my stomach to my fingertips. She clutched her arms around her body and bega
n to shiver. I reached out to touch her but she jerked violently away with a whimper.

  “Tomoko?” I said. “Tomoko-chan!”

  The rain poured down around us, saturating our thin rags, as she shook against the iron column.

  I clambered to my feet and forced myself to walk back toward the children. It was dark now, and the lights of the market were bright smears in the rain. The children stared at me as I approached. The zinc bucket was still there, perched unevenly on the ground. With a sudden fury, I kicked it as hard as I could with my bare foot.

  It reverberated with a dull clang and the water slopped onto the ground.

  There was a movement and the black shape of the eel slithered forward. It shivered up the slope and waved over the broken slabs and gravel until it reached the edge of the bomb crater, flooded with icy, dark water. It paused for a second at the edge, then slid in. The silhouette hovered at the surface, as if stunned. Then it slipped away, writhing, and disappeared down into the blackness.

  15

  PHILOPON

  (Osamu Maruki)

  Philopon. Drug of the hour. Glint in the eye, pulse in the vein. Saviour of the downtrodden. Sacrament of the lost. Bright white light to the woe-struck, the lice-ridden, the starry-eyed artists: the stupefied, raving philosopher-poets of the burned-out ruins.

  Mrs. Shimamura’s bar swirled for hours each evening now, the intellectuals variously mournful and long-faced or else frantic and electrified, circling sections of the newspapers spread out on the bar, their eyes shining with morphine and methyl.

  We came together as drunks or tramps do—to hold each other up in swaying arms. The bar was a sanctuary to which we retreated to comfort ourselves with raw, amniotic liquor, to keep our minds numb and distracted with absurd toasts and peculiar drinking games. What conversation there was now was of rashes, blisters, coughs, ticks, rations, hunger, thirst, and cold. Mostly though, we just drank, night after night, holding our glasses aloft and crashing them together—shoo shoo shoo!—before tipping the fluid down our throats. Glass after glass, until the light compressed into pinpricks and we slumped facedown on the bar. The bright stars of Japan’s literary firmament. We were nothing now but slurred aphorisms and pulmonary complaints.

  Everything was so bleak and petrified in Tokyo that winter that it was no surprise that many of us began to supplement our meagre diet of rotgut and sweet potato with the small, crystalline Philopon pills we’d fed upon during the last days of the war: those little tablets of courage that had steeled our nerves against the battery of Australian and American guns, that had kept us feverish and alert through those long nights of grisly carnage. A glut of the drug flooded the city sometime in December: thousands upon thousands of green ink bottles appearing in pyramids at the black markets, passing from hand to chafed hand in the cramped, leaky bars. Before long it seemed as if the whole city was munching the pills like sardines, washing them down with tears and tiger’s piss in an attempt to blunt the teeth that gnawed at our bellies; to propel our battered bodies through the freezing streets, the cluttered train compartments.

  Prior to this, I had developed another, more sinister addiction. Those evenings when I had reached my alcoholic peak, as it were, my mind illuminated by stars, I would board a tram to the Ginza, alighting near the American PX and the Oasis cabaret. There I would take a place on the curb on the side of the avenue, beside the peddlers with their straw mats of figurines and fountain pens, and watch as the Americans crammed down the staircase of the brothel. Once in a while, I would be rewarded with a glimpse of Satsuko Takara, as she performed her shamming routine outside, pulling at sleeves and enticing officers to enter. Sometimes, I would spot her as she left, hours later, buttoning up her raincoat as she strode away into the dawn like a departing angel.

  I tormented myself with the thought of her, down in that secret cellar, American hands sliding over her back and along her pale thighs. I recalled the brief hours we had spent on a straw-filled mattress in the Victory Hotel, the night before I was sent to war. A victory of sorts. My last. The Americans had polluted her now, just as they had polluted me. One night, I stood with a grubby girl at the back of a ruined building, my eyes brimming with tears as I handled her, urgently trying to imagine her Satsuko—

  It was no use. They had taken my very manhood.

  Philopon came not a moment too soon. A glimmer of life came back into my eyes, my spirits leavened. Lazarus clambered from his tomb. I still drank, of course, until I collapsed, but the periods of consciousness between now grew more animated and urgent, my actions more sprightly and vital.

  Night after night, I sat on my mattress, attended by a flask of shochu and a vial of Philopon, and wrote, until the tiny room was littered with balled-up clumps of paper, the air clotted with ink fumes. I wrote stories inspired by the strange articles that filled that day’s newspapers: the grandmother murdered by her grandson on his return from Manchukuo; the blind children found living in the sand dunes of Izu. My stories were macabre, catastrophic, stygian. They were also unreadable, I realized. Yet I thought, perhaps, they might represent a kind of literary self-immolation, a spiritual disembowelment that might somehow purify me, and set me free from the past.

  One evening, I came upon a writer I was somewhat familiar with, tottering on his stool at the bar. He was breathing heavily, giving occasional tubercular rasps into his silk handkerchief. His conversation became increasingly feverish as the evening drew on, his pen scribbling faster as he yelled out choice epithets to us all. At last, he leaped up, seized the arms of his nearest companion and dragged him off into the night. After he had left, I found his notebook on the bar amidst the confusion of newspapers. As I flicked through it at random, I found a page of dislocated words, which together seemed to form a kind of occult, chemical sutra:

  Morphine. Atromol. Narcopon.

  Pantapon. Papinal. Panopin.

  Atropin. Rivanol. Philopon.

  Philopon. Could we have survived the winter without it? Philopon was the true hero of our age, our Eucharist. In the paralysis that followed surrender, it was the rod that kept our spines stiff, the glue that kept flesh adhered to our bones.

  The special attack pilots, in those last, surreal days of war, had tied emblazoned bands around their foreheads, and, together with their brother officers, had sung the national anthem and offered banzai to the emperor. They toasted each other with ceremonial sake, just as samurai had once sprinkled it upon their swords on the eve of battle. Then, however, they had ingested Philopon, before climbing into their flying machines and roaring off into the suicide of the setting sun. What modern men they had been.

  Philopon was the crystalline symbol of our new age. Who needed an emperor when we had MacArthur? Who needed sake when we had Philopon? From the emerald paddy we had been transported to the laboratory, from the bloody field of battle to the dissection tank. We had traded fireflies and lanterns for the flood lamp and the phosphorus shell, kabuki for cabaret, rice for amphetamine. Who needed tatami in the age of concrete? What use was steel in the age of plutonium? Goodbye, Nippon, goodbye! Farewell Amaterasu—hello America! And welcome, Japan, welcome: to the bright, white chemical age!

  16

  AFTERMATH OF THE ATOM

  (Hal Lynch)

  I vaulted down from the train as a dozen other people, mainly women, trudged over to the station building. They eyed me with frank hostility as I approached. I was aware of how conspicuous I was in my uniform. The train gave a piercing whistle and lumbered away. I lingered, watching it disappear along the tracks. An acute, heavy silence descended.

  The roof at one end of the narrow ticket hall had caved in. Riveted iron beams hung down from the brickwork and rubble was heaped high on the floor. The other end was bare but for a solid desk, at which sat a guard, his moustache bristly beneath his peaked cap. He gasped audibly when he saw me, springing to his feet and bobbing there for a second, as if unable to decide
whether to salute me or not. I extracted my crumpled train ticket from my pocket. He shrank away as I tried to press it into his hand.

  In broken Japanese, I asked him the way “to the city.” He tugged at his moustache for a second, then beckoned for me to follow him through a pair of splintered wooden doors. He pointed. A desolate plain stretched for several miles until a heavy ridge of rugged mountains. About halfway across, hazy outlines marked an isolated outcrop of buildings. Nothing else was standing but charred spindles of telegraph poles marking vanished avenues.

  “Hiroshima desu,” the guard said, staring at me with watery eyes.

  I heard a cry. A policeman, his nightstick dangling against his leg, hurried over from a corrugated hut, a rusted bicycle leaning against its side. I twisted my shoulder to make sure he could see my epaulettes of rank, and he halted and glowered for a moment, before finally twisting his hand against his forehead.

  I pointed toward the buildings in the distance.

  “Hiroshima?” I asked, quite aware of how ridiculous the question sounded.

  He seemed torn between his misgivings and instinctive submission to my authority. Eventually, in painfully slow English, he asked: “Why you go Hiroshima?”

  I took out a folded piece of paper upon which Burchett had scribbled an address.

  “Hospital?” I asked.

  He studied the paper, then conferred with the train guard. Finally, he raised his hand and wriggled his fingers in the general direction of the ruined buildings.

  “Thank you, gentlemen.” I gave them a curt nod and slung my bag over my shoulder.

  As I started to walk down the track, footsteps followed and I felt a tap on my shoulder. The policeman held his fingers to his lips with a cringing motion. I split another pack of Old Golds from the carton in my bag and tossed it to him. He bowed, then strode as imperiously as he could back to his shack.