Fire Flowers Page 2

  By the night of the Tokyo raid back in March, the city was as familiar to me as a framed map. We floated up above the Superforts, their fuselages tapering like artists’ brushes, guide fires already blazing below. Then, the world became a maelstrom of noise—flurries of bombs screaming down, glimmering pinpricks of light erupting, merging and melding as the inferno took hold. An endless blast of heat, a deep glow as smoke and flames billowed skyward. The next day, when we flew back to photograph the damage, it was all just gutted buildings and burned out ruin. Scarred swathes of cauterized rubble, shimmering with heat waves.

  My last photo run: to a city by the coast, our mission, to map out a bombing approach. Down below lay a bustling metropolis, busy streets and market buildings. A harbour full of fishing boats delivering their silvery catch to the dock.

  When we returned a week later, Lazard thought we were lost. He simply couldn’t identify the place. The valley was ravaged, eerie and desolate. The buildings swept clear, the estuarial rivers glistening down to the sea through char, like tear tracks across a blackened face.

  Those nights since my discharge, my mind seemed to be trying to process those thousands of images. As if in my dreams, I could develop them, arrange them into some kind of sequence. I still felt myself flying in my sleep, acutely aware of the vast distance between me and the earth.

  I needed to make landfall soon, I thought. I needed to see the world from ground level again.

  The launches banged alongside the ship and we all peered down to see who would make up the delegation. An old Japanese man with a cane swung himself forward, followed by his cronies—delegates in absurd silk top hats and frock coats. Then came the generals, squat and drab. They made a grim surly bunch as they stood huddled on the swaying deck, surrounded on all sides by Allied men in blinding white uniform. One question hovered in the air: where was the Emperor?

  Silence fell over the ship, threaded through with the whir of movie cameras, punctuated by the click of lenses and the puff of flashbulbs.

  The door of the bridge cabin swung open.

  General Douglas MacArthur. Emerging from the doorway, collar open, shoulders square. He loomed over the Japanese men, hands on hips, staring down, and I was put in mind of my father, the stern headmaster, about to draw the belt from around his waist.

  After his sonorous opening remarks, the general gestured to the Japanese to come forward. One by one, in profound silence, they bent over to sign the documents. In a few short moments, the Empire of Japan had surrendered unconditionally to the supreme commander of the Allied Powers.

  The general made a fine speech, full of noble sentiment and good intention. Next to me, the Associated Press man doodled an obscene picture in his notebook. I looked out toward Japan as the seagulls cawed above us in the sky. The sun had burned through the cloud. It was a fine day.

  All of a sudden, a horde of Superforts and Hellcats and Mustangs filled the air. I lurched, almost tumbling from the turret. They swarmed toward the coast in echelon after echelon, wings glinting in the morning sun. The crew on the upper decks were all hollering now, grinning, slapping each other on the back. Down below, the Allied generals and admirals all shook hands and congratulated each other. I took a deep breath as the planes roared toward Tokyo like a flock of furious birds.

  The war was over, I told myself, dumbly. It was all over.

  And we were alive.

  PART TWO

  THE WITHERED FIELDS

  September 1945

  5

  NEW WOMEN OF JAPAN

  (Satsuko Takara)

  Michiko had gone off to the countryside along with half the city to barter with those stingy peasants for food, and I was sitting outside Tokyo Station beneath a sign I had written for Hiroshi, my little brother. The station looked like an old, broken-down temple now, covered with signs and banners addressed to lost friends and relatives, all flapping in the wind like prayer flags. Crowds of people studied them, hoping to read their own names, or sat meekly against the walls, hoping that their loved ones might somehow miraculously turn up.

  My own sign I’d hung two days after the huge fire raid back in March. It told my brother I’d gone to stay with Michiko, my friend from the war work dormitory, in her eight-mat tenement house in Shinagawa, and that I promised to wait for him here at Tokyo Station every day at noon. But it had been six months already since then, and still, he hadn’t appeared.

  The ground had been baking hot beneath my bare feet the morning after the raid, my hands dreadfully burned from the night before. I’d stumbled out of the irrigation ditch by the Yoshiwara Canal and picked my way across the smoking ruins of Asakusa. The whole city had been burned to the ground, it seemed. The wooden teahouses and matchstick tenements had all gone up in smoke and the theatres and picture palaces were just blackened shells. Shriveled bodies lay scattered along the roadways, and sooty figures went by with charred bedding on their backs or pushing bicycles piled with their remaining possessions.

  Our old alley had run parallel to Kototoi Avenue, between Umamichi Street and the Sumida River Park. But the whole area had simply been levelled now, with only the odd brick building still standing. After flailing across the cinders for some time, I finally found the square concrete cistern that had once stood in front of Mrs. Oka’s shop, our neighbour the pickle seller. It had been cracked wide open by the heat, and a naked man was slumped dead inside. My family’s restaurant, with its sliding doors and creaking wooden sign, was gone. The whole alley had been incinerated, leaving nothing but two heaped ridges of ash.

  There was no sign of Hiroshi. As I hunted about in the ruins, I pictured him the night before, surrounded by fire on the bank of the canal, shouting that he would come back. My fingers fell upon a scrap of charred blue cloth. It was from my mother’s kimono, I thought.

  Unfamiliar people, distant relatives, I supposed, were going back and forth with handcarts now. They picked out fragments of bone and piled up any goods that had escaped the flames. I dug about in the char for a while, but found nothing but my mother’s battered old copper teakettle. By then the pain in my hands had became agonizing, and I went off to find a relief station, where a doctor gave me Mercurochrome and bandages.

  I searched for Hiroshi for hours after that, at Kasakata police station and at Fuji High School, where the injured lay lined up on mats in the playground. But my brother had vanished. As evening fell, I finally returned to the Yoshiwara canal, where he had left me the night before. I started to shake. Troops were fishing out bodies on a big hook suspended from a truck, piling them up in a heap on the bank. I knew I should look for Hiroshi amongst them, but the truth was that I couldn’t bring myself to search amongst those slippery mounds of flesh, all pink and boiled.

  A train wheezed into the station, windows boarded over with planks. Passengers clambered down from the carriage roofs, and spilled out of the building clutching knapsacks and bundles of whatever it was they’d been able to scrounge from the farmers. Policemen walked up and down, eyeing the crowd for contraband, poking their packages with bamboo nightsticks—as if we didn’t have enough to worry about.

  Soon enough, Michiko appeared. Her dress was wrinkled, her shoes were covered in mud, and she looked exhausted. Quietly, I asked if she’d had any luck in the countryside.

  She wrenched open her bag and gestured inside: three tiny potatoes wrapped up in a handkerchief.

  “Three little potatoes,” I said. “Michiko, really?”

  “It’s not my fault!” she said. “Those farmers are worse than thieves!”

  She’d bartered away her favourite summer dress, she said, and this was all she’d received in return. It was extortion, pure and simple.

  My stomach was gnawing away now, and I wracked my brain to think if there was anything we could use to make gruel. But I knew it was useless. I’d swept between the floorboards two days ago for the last grains of rice bran, and we’d al
ready eaten whatever it was that was down there.

  There were a few stalls set up by the station now, but they didn’t seem to be selling anything useful except for some kind of rough booze. A couple of old men were already reeling, and one of them shouted something obscene to Michiko. But she just shouted back that she was surprised he could think of anything like that at a time like this, that he should be ashamed of himself, sitting there swilling rotgut while the rest of the city was starving to death.

  A little farther on, she suddenly stopped. She put her hand on my arm.

  “Satsuko,” she said, pointing. “Look.”

  Nailed to the charred stump of a telegraph pole was a large printed sign. “To the New Women of Japan,” it began, rather grandly. Michiko started bobbing up and down and tugging at my sleeve, the way she always did when she was excited.

  “Look, Satsuko,” she said. “It’s jobs for office ladies. We could do that!”

  I read the sign with an uneasy feeling. It certainly did mention work for secretaries, but it also referred to “the Contin­gency of the Occupation,” and I felt sure that this must be something to do with the Americans. They’d be here soon, I realised. Large and boisterous, swaggering through the streets and shouting. The idea of working up close to them made me shudder.

  But Michiko had a dreamy, faraway look on her face, which I recognized from whenever she would emerge, starstruck, from the cinema.

  “New Women of Japan, Satsuko,” she said, her voice growing breathy. “Just think. That could be us!”

  I groaned and tried to pull her away. But she just stood there, right where she was.

  “Michiko,” I said. “Please. I’m hot and tired. Please just let’s go home.”

  The starstruck look vanished. “And what are you going to sell for us tomorrow, then, Satsuko? The teakettle?”

  A hard lump formed in my throat. This was unkind, and she knew it, as the copper teakettle was now almost the only thing I had to remember my mother by.

  “I don’t know.”

  She laid her hand on my arm again, her face softening.

  “Satsuko,” she said. “We only have three potatoes to eat today. Whatever are we to do?”

  She could be surprisingly grown-up sometimes. I knew in my heart that she was right, that we should follow up the information on the sign. But just then, as I thought of the Americans again, another shiver passed through me. Michiko just gripped my arm, though, and the dramatic look came back into her eyes.

  “Just think of it, Satsuko,” she whispered. “New Women of Japan!”

  We dressed up as prettily as we could for our interview, in neat woolen skirts and white blouses I’d pressed beneath our mattress the night before. We never seemed quite able to get all the ash and dirt out of our clothes anymore, but in any case, these outfits were much better than the baggy monpe trousers we normally wore, which made us look so hopeless and unattractive. The address was for a building up on the Ginza, which seemed like a hopeful sign, but when we got there, the place didn’t seem quite so elegant after all—the roof had partly collapsed, and, inside, cracked paint was peeling from the walls.

  An arrow pointed us up a shabby staircase to a lobby, where a large crowd of women were already gathered.

  “Do you think we’re too late?” I said. I noticed, to my unease, that some of the other women wore bright makeup, and looked like quite vulgar types.

  “Michiko!” I whispered. “Are you sure this is the right place?”

  “Well,” Michiko murmured. “I suppose it can’t be easy for anyone to find work right now. Not with things the way they are.”

  Just then, a door at the end of the corridor burst open. A very young girl rushed out and ran headlong into me. Tears were streaming down her face and I tried to steady her, but she pushed me aside, and clattered away down the staircase.

  “Michiko!” I hissed. “Whatever could have made her so upset?”

  “Perhaps she wasn’t quite right for the job?” Michiko said. “Don’t worry, Satsuko, we’ll be just fine.”

  “Michiko,” I said, feeling suddenly nervous. “I think perhaps it’s best if we try to find some other kind of position elsewhere.”

  She narrowed her eyes and growled: if I had any idea of where we could go, then I should go right ahead and tell her.

  So we carried on waiting for several hours, until finally a secretary came out and gestured toward me. Michiko gave my hand a little squeeze and I followed the corridor to the door.

  Behind a heavy desk sat two men as unlike each other as they could possibly be. One was thin and very handsome, his hair slicked back like a movie star. The other was a fat pig of a man, with fleshy jowls and cherry stone eyes that looked me up and down.

  “Miss Takara,” said the handsome man, brightly, glancing at his list. “An Asakusa girl, no less! Please sit down.”

  The interview man started pleasantly enough. The handsome man asked me which school I had attended and what my father’s profession had been. When I told him that my father had owned an eel restaurant, that I’d been a serving girl, he seemed very pleased, he even said he might remember the place—after all, it had been quite famous if you knew Asakusa at all.

  The fat man squinted at me. “No doubt, at school, Miss Takara, you were taught the glorious history of our noble country?”

  I wondered whether this might be a trap. Before my class had been sent off for war work with the Student Attack Force, it had been drilled into us that Japan was blessed, that our emperor had descended from the sun goddess Amaterasu and that Japan had a special responsibility to preserve harmony across the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. But I wasn’t sure if this was still the case, so I just stayed silent and bowed my head.

  The handsome man smiled. “Don’t worry, Miss Takara. It isn’t a test.”

  Moving his chair aside, he pointed up at a large painting mounted on the wall. It showed a very beautiful woman from the Edo period, dressed in a pink and white kimono, who knelt at the feet of a fierce-looking Western man with a big white moustache and a red waistcoat. The sea lay a little way beyond them, black-flagged ships sailing back and forth on the waves.

  “I wonder,” he said, “if you are perhaps familiar with this famous lady?”

  As I looked at the painting, her name came into my mind: Okichi. The story was familiar enough. In fact, I distantly remembered an operetta about her, which had been all the rage when I was a little girl. My father had even owned the recording on a gramophone disk.

  “Okichi-sama,” the pig-man pronounced, to my annoyance, as I’d been about to reply. He explained that Okichi had once lived in Shimoda, on the Izu peninsula, in the previous century, and how, when the foreign barbarians had first landed there and forced Japan to open up to the outside world, she had been presented to the American ambassador as “a consort.”

  “A peace offering,” the handsome man added. “And a clever way to keep an eye on the foreigners!”

  I gazed at him uncertainly, wondering where all of this was leading.

  The fat man leaned forward. “Do you know what a consort might be, Miss Takara?”

  My cheeks coloured. I gave a faint nod.

  “Okichi,” he went on, his voice swelling now, just like the radio bulletins, announcing a victorious battle, “sacrificed her body for the Japanese nation! Just as our soldiers sacrificed theirs. Now the barbarians will soon land again, Miss Takara.” He raised a pudgy finger in the air. “Japan will need a new generation of Okichis. Honourable women who are prepared to sacrifice their own bodies. To act as a breakwater. A seawall which will protect the flower of our womanhood from the savage tide of their rapacious lust.”

  Silence fell.

  “Your sign,” I said, swallowing. “It mentioned office ladies—”

  “Regrettably Miss Takara, all of our back office positions have now
been filled,” the handsome man said. “But there are plenty of other positions still available. Fine positions. Noble positions. For patriotic women who are prepared to act as ‘consorts’ for our foreign guests, once they arrive.”

  My cheeks were burning as I stood up to leave.

  “You would be paid, Miss Takara,” said the fat man. “With an allowance for clothing. And for food.”

  Just then, I felt very faint. My head swam and my legs began to fold. I scrabbled for the desk to stop myself from falling.

  The handsome man leapt around the table and caught me, helping me back into the chair.

  “Please don’t upset yourself, Miss Takara,” he said. “But why not at least consider our offer?”

  My heart was pounding as they stared at me. I saw myself, sitting in a café with a burly American. What would it be like, I wondered, to be intimate with a foreigner? His body covered in hairy bristles, stinking of sweat and cigarettes . . .

  The truth was, I wasn’t completely innocent. The night before Osamu had been sent away to the South Seas, he’d visited my house after his leaving party, and we’d gone off to a hotel together for a short time. I wasn’t ashamed. After his horrible mother told me he was dead, I was glad that I had given him at least that comfort in his short life.

  “Well, Miss Takara?” said the handsome man. I stared at him, thinking of the three potatoes in Michiko’s handkerchief. We’d devoured the last one before coming along that morning. My head began to swim again, and his voice seemed to come from very far away.