Fire Flowers Read online

  “We own this ward,” she said, staring at me with startled eyes. “You’ll pay your share like everyone else.”

  The point jabbed into my flesh and I screamed. She pulled it away, and I fell sobbing to the ground. The other girl was pulling things from my bag now, like a fox devouring a chicken. The fat one wore my stole around her own neck, and was stroking it as if it was a kitten.

  The woman in the crimson frock squatted down. Her knife was long and thin—the kind used to slice up fish.

  “I’ve seen you,” she said, in an empty voice. “I’ve seen how you look at us.”

  Frantically, I shook my head.

  “You really think you’re any better that us?”

  The knife touched my neck, and my entire skin crawled. A humiliating seepage flooded my thighs and she smiled as drops leaked against the ground. “See? You’re no different after all.”

  The world swam before my eyes and I fainted dead away.

  When I came to, the women were disappearing beneath the iron struts of a railway underpass, animal shrieks echoing behind them. I staggered to my feet. My blouse was torn and my stockings shredded. My mouth was swollen and numb, and as I touched my lips, my fingers wetted with dark blood.

  Something lay on the ground in front of me. I reached down to pick it up. It was a large card—like a visiting card. Ornate, emblazoned with a red satin peony, it was inscribed with hand-painted words: Ketsueki Sakura Gumi.

  The Blood Cherry Gang.

  So it seemed we really were to have equal rights in Japan. Women would be able to vote and men no longer allowed to divorce us whenever they chose, and now we even had our own lady gangsters to terrorize us, just as the men had had the yakuza all this time.

  The Blood Cherry girls were already notorious, it seemed. The rumour went that they had all made a blood pact, that their leader, Junko—the woman in the crimson frock—had once been the famous geisha “Willow Tree,” the mistress of Akamatsu, the ace fighter pilot. They were witches in human form; they were kitsune, fox spirits, who could bewitch men and even shift shape. All superstitious nonsense, of course, but enough to send a shiver down my spine when I recalled my nightmarish meeting with them.

  I took a taxi home from the Oasis every night now, despite the expense, too frightened to walk anywhere alone. The gang was made up of the very worst kind of pan-pan and worked the area between Yurakucho and the Kachidoki Bridge, which they now claimed as their own territory. Dressed in lurid clothes, their faces garishly painted, they demanded the right to organize all the girls in the surrounding streets, which, of course, meant harassing them and stealing from them whatever they could. And it was my bad luck that these girls, for some unfortunate reason, had decided that I needed to be punished.

  I was squatting in the filthy lavatory shed outside the Oasis when I felt a sharp pain, as if hot needles were passing through me. I didn’t need to guess what it was. The other girls had worried about it often enough.

  The doctor confirmed my suspicions as he made his rounds the following week. I was distraught. Mr. Shiga would be informed and I wouldn’t be able to work for weeks. Money would have to be found for medicine—which wasn’t cheap, only available on the black market—and during that whole time I wouldn’t earn a single sen.

  When Mr. Shiga summoned me to his office, I got down on my hands and knees and begged him to advance me a loan. To my horror, he dismissed me on the spot.

  “You’ve been an embarrassment for months now, Takara-san,” he said. “Just look at yourself. You’re spent.”

  Stunned, I packed up my makeup and my collection of trinkets and walked out of the old bomb shelter for the last time. When I got home, I filled the pail from the standpipe in the street. Inside, I undressed and slowly sponged myself down. I studied myself for a long time in the mirror. Mr. Shiga was quite right. Hollow sockets stared back at me, and my hair was lank and brittle. A red sore glowed at the side of my mouth and my belly was swollen, my ribs showing beneath my breasts, shrunken now like old gourds. I looked like a ghost.

  Wearily, I wrapped up my beautiful green kimono, and took it back down to the Shimbashi market.

  “Back already, dear?” the old lady clucked. She smoothed out the fabric and counted a few notes and coins into my palm. Confused, I asked if she had made some kind of mistake: it was less than half what Michiko had paid just a few weeks before.

  “Take it or leave it, dear,” she said, her nose wrinkling. “There’s plenty more like you about.”

  I felt at a complete loss. Then, from over by the railway arches, there was a flash of colour. This was the heart of Blood Cherry territory. I quickly stepped behind the old woman’s table, laden with kimonos, as unfamiliar girls headed toward the market.

  Somehow, in the light of day, they seemed different. Glowing with life, they scoured the stalls, biting apples and flinging the cores over their shoulders. They barged their way through the dreary crowd in their bright Western dresses the colour of bruises, picking out whatever they fancied and flicking banknotes under the noses of the peddlers. As I stood there, hiding, I felt a sudden stab of realization. They really were different from me.

  They were honest. All this time, I’d let Michiko and the managers fill my head with sheer nonsense—we weren’t common prostitutes, no, we were Butterflies, Foreign Consorts, modern-day Okichis! But we were all just whores, plain and simple. At least these girls admitted it.

  In one fell swoop, they’d cast away the twisted ideals, the slogans and the lies we’d been fed for so many years, the deceit which had brought our country to the brink of ruin. So much for honour. These girls were the lowest of the low, and they just didn’t care.

  These were the New Women of Japan, I thought angrily, not us. No happy endings for them. No imperial palaces, no tragic affairs like Kyoto geishas. They would smoke and spit and sell themselves for the last penny, until one day they would collapse in the gutter: dead and honest, and free.

  The next day, I washed, dressed in my brightest clothes and painted my eyes in vivid colours. I took the Yamanote Line to Shimbashi and walked in the direction of Tokyo Bay, past the old, abandoned market, toward the dull steel arches of the Kachidoki Bridge. The sky was pale and blustery, and there was a reek of fish. I examined the card that the Blood Cherries had left.

  The house was a big, broken-down mansion that must have belonged to some merchant at one point. A girl dressed in a short green skirt opened the door. She wore a sprig of clover in her hair and her eyelids were shaded with silvery-green powder, like the wings of some exotic butterfly.

  I bowed meekly as she showed me through to a gutted hall. The place looked like an enormous, smashed-up doll’s house. Landings jutted out from the walls, splintered stairs and ladders led up through holes in the collapsed ceiling. Dozens of girls lounged about in their underclothes on the bare flag- stones with cigarettes in their mouths, playing flower cards and swigging from a large bottle they passed between them. Piles of clothes were scattered all around and a large mirror stained with verdigris was ratcheted to the split wooden panelling of one wall.

  Underneath the staircase, a gaudy little shrine had been set up, decorated with star-shaped scraps of silver paper and burning candles. Torn-out pictures of angels had been pasted in a circle on the crumbling plaster, and in the centre, a carved statue of Jesus Christ was splayed upon a wooden cross. He was naked but for a loincloth, his head turned away, as if he couldn’t bear to look at the world.

  The plump girl was kneeling before it, hands clasped, mumbling to herself. Junko stepped forward from a large, dark hole in the wall, steadying herself as she came toward me. Her face was smooth and white, framed by tight black curls, and she wore an enormous pair of round sunglasses. Little prickles, like bedbug bites, lined the white skin of her inner arms.

  “Did you know that Maria-sama was a virgin when she gave birth to Jesus Christ?” she r
asped. She waved at the fat girl. “Yotchan over there believes that if she prays hard enough, Jesus Christ will make her a virgin again!”

  She laughed, her neck wrinkled and sagging beneath thick powder.

  “How old-fashioned!” she spat. “Relying on a man for everything.”

  She smiled tightly and took off her sunglasses. Her eyes shrank as she looked at me.

  “You’ve come to work for me now, is that it?”

  I nodded.

  “They always do.”

  She held up bony fingers in front of my face, counting them off. “Eight yen a time. That’s the standard rate. Four goes to us. Two more for food and drink. You work out the rest.”

  Two yen. It really wasn’t much. A packet of cigarettes alone cost twenty. But I bowed my head, feeling a painful itch between my thighs and a sharp desire for one of my little pills.

  Junko came very close and pressed her fingernail against the skin of my cheek.

  “Holiday season for the yankiis,” she mused. “Plenty of work for a pretty girl like you.”

  The other girls had abandoned their games now and crowded in front of the big mirror, painting their faces and trying on different pieces of clothing.

  “Well, then,” Junko said, “time to get ready.”

  Nervously, I prepared myself behind the scrum of girls. After half an hour, Junko clapped her hands, and the girls gathered in a wide circle, turning to face each other. One of them pulled me in, stretching out her tongue. All the other girls were doing the same, placing little tablets into each other’s mouth as they stared into each other’s eyes. The girl beside me gave me my tablet, and I felt my heart pounding as it dissolved. The big bottle of shochu went around the circle and I took a deep swig, washing the pill down my throat.

  The girls held each other’s hands. We stepped forward and swooped them into the air. Banzai!

  Excited and nervous, the girls streamed toward the door. As I passed, Junko gripped my wrist.

  “You see?” she hissed. “You were one of us, all along.”

  The night was freezing and there were patches of black ice on the ground. The girls were dressed in all the colours of the rainbow, their hair styled in rumpled permanents, their lips swollen like dark petals. Restless from the pills they had taken, they screeched out vulgar comments to nervous passersby.

  Junko walked beside me with Yotchan following. The faint smell of the sea drifted toward us from the nearby bay, and as we passed the pale green roofs of Hongwan Temple, girls peeled away down side streets. Junko prodded me in the back to indicate that I should carry on. My throat was very dry and my heart was beating fitfully as I thought about the night ahead.

  The streets grew busier as we crossed the Ginza and turned north toward Yurakucho, following the brickwork of the over-ground train track. Deliverymen rode by on bicycles, their baskets piled high, and Americans strode muffled up against the cold, grinning and clapping hands with each other.

  “Over there,” Junko commanded. We were at the back of Yurakucho Station. She pointed to a low-slung tunnel beneath the train tracks and I went in and leaned against the cold, glazed tiles. Junko stood beneath a nearby streetlamp in a freezing cloud of mist.

  Soon enough, an elderly Japanese man approached, peering into the tunnels like a nervous crab. His breathing was heavy as he inspected me through his glasses.

  “How much?” he asked.

  “Eight yen, sir,” I said. “Worth every penny.”

  He grunted and wrenched my arm so violently that I cried out.

  “Not so rough!”

  “Hurry up,” he said, already unbuttoning his trousers.

  Junko was standing against the streetlamp as he pushed me deeper into the low tunnel. Her arms were folded, and her face was filled with triumph.

  Headlights blazed white. Sirens blared and there was a roar of engines as military trucks careened wildly toward us. The old man thrust away my hand and hobbled off as fast as he could. Jeeps screeched to a halt on each side of railway track, men leaping down from the cabs, searchlights flashing in bright beams. Women ran out of the tunnels like rats from their holes, screaming as American and Japanese police caught hold of them. They hauled them by the waist and swung them into the open-backed trucks as if they were sacks of rice.

  I was blinded for a second as a truck veered toward me, its wheels sliding across the icy gravel. Two Japanese policemen leaped out, advancing upon me with torches. I gasped as one of them grabbed my wrists and jerked so hard that my arms nearly came out of their sockets. The other gripped the collar of my dress, and I heard the fabric tear as he dragged me toward the back of a truck like an animal.

  “What are you doing?” I shrieked. “Get off me!”

  “We’re clearing up tonight,” the policeman snapped. “You whores are giving Japan a bad name.”

  Us? I thought, speechless with rage, despite myself. Us, giving Japan a bad name?

  “How dare you,” I cried. “We’re the only honest ones left!” I kicked at his leg, but he shoved me heavily into the back of the truck and I tumbled onto the cold, rumbling metal floor.

  As I pulled myself up, I could smell cheap perfume. Girls were perched on the narrow benches that lined each side of the truck bed. All of them were pan-pan and they had covered their faces with their hair in shame.

  “Where are they taking us?”

  Nobody answered. Through the canvas flaps, I could see lights and decorations and Americans crowding the Ginza. We came to a juddering halt by the Continental Hotel, as a line of staff cars dropped off men and women in dinner dress. As the truck jerked forward, a sleek American sedan pulled up, and a bellboy rushed over, saluting as he opened the back door. A man in white dress uniform climbed out, holding out a hand to his companion. A petite Japanese woman emerged, taking a second to smooth the black velvet of her cocktail dress as she handed the bellboy a white fox coat.

  “Michiko!” I screamed, leaping up. “Michiko!”

  For a second, I thought she had heard me. She cocked her head to one side. Then, as the officer took her hand, she stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. His hand slid down her back and he guided her up the red-carpeted stairs toward the lobby.

  The truck pulled away, the figures shrinking as we accelerated up the avenue.

  We crossed the Kanda River and turned onto the Edo Road. We would pass through Asakusa next, I thought, picturing the Sumida Park to one side of the road, the charred remains of my neighbourhood on the other. As we passed the Kototoi Bridge, an ominous feeling came over me. I had an sudden inkling of where we were being taken.

  The Yoshiwara canal was dark, the water low. As we crossed the bridge, I had a vivid memory of Hiroshi, standing on the high bank as I floundered down there, fire pelting from the sky.

  I groaned and pulled my hair over my face. Thank heaven he couldn’t see me now, I thought. Thank heaven he was dead.

  The truck crunched to a halt. The canvas flaps were pulled aside to show a huge, solitary building with flat grey walls lit by floodlights. Women shouted and screamed as policemen hauled them from the trucks, and I climbed down, shivering in the freezing night. American soldiers and Japanese doctors herded women toward a gatehouse, and from high above came an eerie shrieking. I gazed up at the towering building, shielding my eyes. Women were leaning out the windows on each level, waving and howling. We swarmed toward the building as truck after truck rolled up to deliver yet more girls, and the women called down in a dreadful chorus, their hair falling wild about their shoulders, tattered white gowns swaying in the wind. It was as if they were a horde of screaming souls, welcoming us to hell.

  18

  PUBLIC RELATIONS

  (Hal Lynch)

  The corridors of the Continental were quiet and the peace of the Sabbath reigned throughout the building. A smell of roasting chicken drifted from the basement dining
room and from the recreation hall came the echoing tap of an eternal game of ping-pong. I locked my door and heaved my knapsack onto the bed and retrieved my rolls of film. Jittery and exhausted, I needed to sleep, but felt a deep and anxious need to develop my photographs straight away.

  I figured I could use the darkroom in the basement of the newspaper office without being disturbed, so I took a taxi without changing my clothes. As I’d hoped, the newsroom was empty, the building silent.

  I felt a tightening in my stomach as I drew the first spool of glistening negatives from the reel. On the train, I’d been gripped by an irrational fear that something would have gone wrong with the exposure, that radioactivity in the city would have somehow damaged the film, that all I would be left would be blank prints and uncertain memories. But now the tiny scenes threaded out in miniature under the red glow of the safety lamp, mute testament to all that had occurred.

  Once the negatives were dry, I lined up the paper beneath the enlarger head and fed the strip through. I exposed the paper to the light, ticking off the seconds until they were done. One by one, I shook the sheets in the developing fluid. Slowly, the mysterious images welled back into existence.

  As the pictures hung there, dripping on the drying line, a deep sensation of loneliness washed over me. The mangled pile of bicycles in the riverbed. The curving ribs of the ruined dome. The silent Buddha, smiling enigmatically as snowflakes settled upon his head. I recalled a strange story the ambulance driver told me, of how people’s shadows had been seared into the stone of the bridge at the moment of the flash, and as I looked into the ancient eyes of the dance instructor, the frail, smiling face of the withered railwayman, I had a sudden comprehension of the deep, lingering malaise the victims had complained of, the terrible void that had developed within them, as if a cancer had consumed some vital part of their souls.

  While the prints dried, I went upstairs to the empty newsroom. At my desk, I fed a sheet of carbon paper into the drum of a Smith-Remington. I stared at the blank page for what seemed like an eternity. Then, almost without thinking, I began to press my fingers on the keys and a confusion of words and letters slowly clicked out onto the page.