Fire Flowers Page 20

  “Yes, yes, you are,” I said. “They were stolen from me this afternoon by two urchins, no doubt paid by you—”

  A heavy hand fell on my shoulder and twisted me around. Beneath a felt fedora, glittering little black eyes stared at me—the sharp yakuza boss who ran the place.

  “What’s the problem here?”

  I stuttered, acutely aware of the pincerlike grip around my arm, the bulging muscles beneath the man’s pale silk jacket.

  “Those are my shoes,” I managed to say. “This man has stolen them from me.”

  “Oh yeah?” the man slurred, picking them up and looking at them with a bored expression. “Well, they look like a pretty common style to me. There must be thousands like them in Tokyo. Don’t you think you’ve made a mistake?”

  “I should hardly think so. I had them on my feet not two hours ago.”

  He rubbed his forehead with a pained expression. “Look, mister, I think you’ve made a mistake. There’s no need to be making wild accusations in public.”

  “But it’s true,” I said frantically. “Two children stole them from me this afternoon!”

  “Look, mister,” he said, squaring up. “You’ve made a mistake, now calm down.”

  “But they’re mine!”

  There was a piercing pain in the socket of my right eye, as his knuckle crunched against bone. I collapsed onto the ground, my vision black on one side, my head ringing.

  “You’ve made a mistake, mister,” said the tough, looming above me. “So forget about it now. Either buy something or push off.”

  He strolled away, wringing out his fist.

  I slowly picked myself up. My glasses were dangling from my ears, smashed and useless. I could still see the dim, reflective red glow of my shoes upon the table, the man standing over them protectively.

  “Alright then, damn you,” I said. “I’ll buy them back. But look. I can only afford a hundred.”

  I took out all the money I had left from my pocket, and laid it in a pile on the table. The man straightened up, as if I had offended him.

  “One hundred!” he said, haughtily. “Outrageous. Don’t you know these are Oxford brogues—they’re made in London! I couldn’t take anything less than three.”

  I almost started to sob as I looked helplessly down at my numb feet. The last of the newspaper clung to them in soggy strips, and my toes were raw and shrivelled, as if they’d been steamed.

  The man grew more sympathetic.

  “Look,” he said. “A pair of these wouldn’t suit you anyway. They’re far too fancy. But I’ll tell you what I can do. I can sell you a good pair of boots for fifty yen.”

  Good heavens, no, I thought, not boots again, not after all this time.

  He reached beneath the table to pull out a hulking pair of army boots and laid them heavily down upon the table.

  I recognized the smell straight away—the rancid odour of rotten soybeans. I picked one up, fingering the chafed cowhide, poking my finger through the familiar holes. Wearily, I pushed fifty yen in coins across the table to the man, who pocketed it neatly. I bent down and tugged the boots back onto my feet.

  “Look!” the man said cheerily. “A perfect fit. You’re lucky after all.”

  Wordlessly, I strode away from the market as the darkness and rain fell about me. As I trudged back home along the mucky street in my old, detested army boots, I had the curious feeling that they had somehow magically engineered the whole affair, that they possessed some supernatural power. That now, reunited with me again, they were finally content, and were smiling in secret triumph.

  22

  THE YOSHIWARA

  (Satsuko Takara)

  My ward was on the top floor of the crumbling grey venereal hospital, up five worn flights of stone stairs. Once the most notorious building in the busiest pleasure district of all Japan, chunks of plaster were missing from the walls and you could see the brickwork and horsehair beneath. The high-ceilinged hall was lined on each side by thin straw palliasses, the ­patient’s belongings laid out beside them: wiry blankets, envelopes of tea, tangled strips of dried cod.

  Every morning, we were given a bowl of rice gruel and set to work cleaning the never-ending wards and corridors. The tarry smell of the carbolic soap reminded me of the International Palace, and the chemicals turned my hands bright red and as scaly as snakeskin.

  One afternoon, as I trudged back from work, my back aching from scrubbing and polishing the floor of the dining hall, I found a plump lady laying out her things by the mattress next to mine. When I knelt down and introduced myself, she smiled, dimples appearing in her cheeks. Ishino was her name, she said, in a husky voice, she ran a restaurant down in Nihonbashi. There was something familiar about her face, I thought. It was as if I’d seen her on a forgotten theatre poster, many years before.

  “Help yourself!” she said, holding out an earthenware jar. “Pickled plums. Nothing like them to keep the doctors away.”

  I almost gasped as I tasted the sour juice for the first time in years. Mrs. Ishino spread a mat between our mattresses and laid out some rice crackers and dried seaweed, urging me to help myself. As I nibbled away, she glanced toward the door, and pulled a small flask from beneath her kimono jacket.

  “Have a nip of this as well, dear,” she said, handing it to me quickly. “Nothing like it for the cold.”

  It was strong and she nodded at me to take another sip. As the liquid reached my belly, it made me dizzy, and I started to smile.

  Mrs. Ishino told me her story as we ate, kneeling on the ground like a comic raconteur on the stage. The day before, she said, the police had paid a visit to her bar in the middle of the night. I might not have heard, but they were enforcing new regulations now. In any case, they had carted her off to the hospital, along with the two girls who worked for her, Masuko and Hanuko. It was all very awkward. The doctors had performed their usual tests, and Masuko and Hanuko had been given the all-clear and sent home. But Mrs. Ishino herself had been unexpectedly diagnosed with something very unpleasant, and was obliged to stay on.

  “And I know exactly who’s responsible, Takara-san!” she said, waving her finger at me in a menacing fashion. “And he’ll be for it when I get out of here, you just mark my words!”

  I clapped my hand over my mouth, trying desperately not to laugh. But Mrs. Ishino just took a long swallow from her bottle, and burst into loud peals of laughter herself.

  The patients wore padded kimonos of faded grey-green as they slouched on the floor. Some got on with piecework they’d been given to pay for their treatment, stitching trousers and dresses from strips of old uniform, or painting dolls as souvenirs for the hospital shop. It was shivering cold on the ward, yet they insisted on opening the tall, cracked windows in the late afternoon, when they would clamber up onto the sills to look out over the road below. It was like the cinema for them, as they hung there, screeching like vultures at anyone who passed. They saved their loudest chorus for any American soldiers, who waved up even as the girls made vulgar gestures.

  Those first nights, after my diagnosis, I lay there, parched and desperate for one of my pills. I thrashed and shivered with feverish nightmares, my blanket soaking wet. But finally, after several weeks, I began to feel calm once again. My terrible dreams began to fade. One morning, when I awoke, I felt fresh, as if snow had fallen while I had slept. I realised that the suffocating spirits that had haunted me for so long had finally left my side.

  There was a glint in Mrs. Ishino’s eye as she sat down on her mattress that morning. A frayed towel hung over her shoulder and her hair was wet from the bathhouse.

  “Good news, Satsuko-san,” she said, as she tugged a comb through her hair. “I’m finally escaping at the end of this week. I’ve been given the all-clear.”

  Her news took me aback. I realised I’d become quite used to her comforting, matronly presence at my be
dside each day as I woke.

  “Well. I’m certainly very pleased for you, Mrs. Ishino.”

  She gave a sly smile. “And that’s not all,” she said.

  “Oh?”

  “I’ve heard a message on the wind that you’ll be getting out of here too, Satsuko-san!”

  I glanced at her in alarm. Despite the stink of the bedpans, the vulgarity of the patients and the backbreaking work, the gloomy ward had become something of a refuge, a place where I could hide away from the world and all its horrors.

  Mrs. Ishino twisted her hair into a knot and knelt down beside me. “Satsuko-san, I wonder if I could ask you something.”

  “Anything you like, Mrs. Ishino!”

  “I hoped that you perhaps you might consider coming to work for me. When you get out of here, I mean. The shop could always do with another pretty girl. Someone who’s worked in the trade before, you know.”

  For a moment, my heart leapt, as I pictured myself in the old days, working at my father’s restaurant—going back and forth amongst the tables with a big bottle of sake on my back, my skirts hitched up, serving dishes and joining in all the banter . . .

  Mrs. Ishino was studying me. It dawned on me that this wasn’t the trade she meant. She’d mentioned that her bar was popular with “a certain kind of American.”

  The picture faded as she took my hands in hers. “Why not come and join us, Satsuko-san? It’s not such a bad place. You’re sure to get on with the other girls. You could do much worse, you know.”

  I knew that she was right. The comfort stations had all been shut down, in any case. There’d been too many Americans going back home to their wives with unfortunate conditions. The only other place to go now would be the streets.

  The thought of the broken-down mansion in Tsukiji, the drugged girls in their livid dresses, made me shudder. I took a deep breath, pulled together my kimono and knelt down on the floor in formal thanks. After all, it didn’t seem that I could stay here any longer.

  Mrs. Ishino herself came to collect me in a taxi on the day of my discharge. She made comforting noises as the doctors stamped my forms and wrote my name in the ledger.

  As I walked out into the bright spring sunshine, I blinked.

  “Look,” I said, pointing.

  Opposite the hospital, the first plum blossom had budded white against a row of scorched trees.

  23

  THE HOLIDAY CAMP

  (Hiroshi Takara)

  Plum blossom sprouted prickly white all over the trees in the Yushima Tenjin shrine. Bundles of wooden prayer plaques covered the racks outside so I guessed that the snobby students at the Imperial University must be having their examinations. A crowd of GIs were gathered in the garden beyond the arch and I wandered toward them to find out what they were looking at.

  Beneath a blossoming plum tree, a Japanese girl stood dressed as a geisha. She wore a purple and crimson kimono and held a tasselled parasol over her shoulder, a gold fan hiding her face. The soldiers were all pointing cameras at the girl, squinting through the viewfinders, and the air was full of the exciting sound of the shutters clicking and film whirring. The girl shook the fan delicately, then snapped it shut.

  Satsuko.

  The girl looked so much like my sister that my heart actually stopped. I saw her treading water in the fiery canal; I almost felt the flames scorching my cheeks. One of the GIs called out and she shifted. Her eyes fell upon me, and my heart filled with terror.

  There was no sign of recognition in her white-powdered face. I struggled to recognize the wide, deep black eyes of my sister as she turned her head, raising the fan again in another pose. Her nose was not quite right I realised—and she was much shorter that my sister, stocky even. An awkward sense of guilt and relief flooded my heart. Satsuko was dead, after all.

  Down by the woman’s feet was a cardboard sign scribbled with clumsy English: Genuine Japan Geisha Girl. Photograph—1 Yen. There was a little tin can next to the sign, already filled with banknotes. She started spinning her parasol, pouting and pushing out her chest in a way that no real geisha would ever have done. Her face was as wooden as a doll’s as the soldiers pulled her into position by her kimono sleeve, pushing their cameras right up in her face.

  I thought of the tall American in the trench coat, who’d taken photographs of us that day by our baseball pitch. I remembered how I’d held the solid bulk of his camera in my hands, and how, for a moment, I’d caught Tomoko in the rangefinder, the twin images of her shy face blurred and sharp. There must be a photograph of her, somewhere, I thought. Perhaps I could track down the American somehow, ask him for a copy . . . Then, at least I would have something to remember her by.

  A soldier was squatting in front of me. All of a sudden, I shoved him as hard as I could, and he fell over onto the gravel. I leaped on him, grasped hold of the camera and pulled, the man gasping and clutching at his throat as the leather strap garrotted him.

  The strap snapped, and I tumbled backward, managing somehow to keep hold of the camera. I sprinted away through the garden, angry voices hollering behind me. A second later, heavy, crunching footsteps came hot on my heels.

  Nearly stumbling in front of a bus, I sprinted across the avenue. As I ran alongside the university walls, horns blared—the soldiers were trying to hold up the traffic and negotiate their way to the other side. I spun around the corner and slipped through the famous Red Gate. Students and professors were coming out of the buildings and shouted at me as I dodged around them. I ran out past the quadrangle and through the back gate at the other side, then slid down against the wall, completely out of breath. As I pulled the camera out from beneath my shirt and examined the elegant dials and embossed serial numbers, my heart started to pound even harder. It was a Leica, just like the one that trench coat had used. I slid it into my canvas satchel, a fantastic idea forming in my mind.

  Shin’s hoarse voice was bellowing from inside as I paused outside the entrance to the inn, my hand on the wooden screen door. I slid it open a crack, and peered into the darkness. The children were all kneeling on the tatami of the reception hall, clearly engrossed in some kind of game. Nobu, Koji and Aiko had their heads bowed low and were whimpering as Shin strutted up and down before them, a blanket around his shoulders.

  “Take me, sir,” Koji said. “Please!”

  Aiko jerked up her head. “No, sir! Take me!”

  “What’s in it for me?” Shin asked, in a strangled voice, as if he was an aristocrat. “You.” He pointed at Nobu.

  “I’ll do anything you like, sir,” Nobu pleaded.

  Shin waved his muddy straw sandal in Nobu’s face. “Kiss my feet then.” Puckering his lips, Nobu gave his foot an unhappy peck.

  Shin spun around and squatted over Nobu’s head, gripping his shoulders as he spread his bandy legs. “Eat my shit!”

  Nobu brayed like a donkey and pulled away. “No, sir!” he shouted. “Please don’t make me!”

  I heaved aside the rattling door and rushed into the hall.

  “What’s going on?”

  Shin’s face froze. Slowly, he began to give his wide, idiotic grin, showing the broken teeth behind his thick, curling lips.

  “Well now, big brother’s home at last,” he said. “Got any treats for us today?”

  “Shut up.”

  “Bean jam buns? Or is it apples again?”

  I felt as if he had punched me in the stomach. Tomoko’s body had lain for hours in the wasteground, as we struggled to dig down into a frozen bomb crater to inter her. Pale and blanched in the moonlight, her body had been withered away almost to a skeleton, black apple pips glistening on her chin.

  “We were just playing a game,” Koji stammered. The other children stared at me nervously. Shin slapped his hand over Koji’s mouth. “Shut up! It’s none of his business!” he shouted.

  “What’s none of my busin
ess?”

  “It’s none of your business!” Shin’s face was red and he was furious.

  Koji struggled to pull Shin’s hand away. “Why don’t you just tell him?” he whined. “Just tell him!”

  “Tell me what?”

  Aiko was bobbing up and down as she piped up: “About the holiday camps! The holiday camps!”

  An eerie feeling passed through me as I heard the phrase.

  “What’s this?”

  Aiko was nodding earnestly. “The holiday camps, Hiroshi-kun. We’re going away to be adopted.”

  The hair prickled up on the back of my neck. I sat down cross-legged on the floor.

  “You had better tell me what this is all about. Please.”

  Slowly, they all sat down on the floor in front of me.

  “Well,” Aiko began, “I don’t really know—”

  “It was the Americans, wasn’t it?” Nobu said. “It was their idea—”

  “One at a time.”

  Koji frowned, tracing a vague shape with his finger in the dust on the floor.

  The Americans, he began, had apparently decided to set up holiday camps in the countryside, for all the Japanese children who had lost their families during the war.

  “Just like us!” Aiko said, excitedly.

  Some of the camps were in noble houses by the seaside, Koji continued, some of them up in the mountains, in old monasteries, but all of them had warm beds and three meals a day, hot rice and soup with them all. You could choose whether you wanted to help out on the farm, digging the fields or feeding the animals, or you could go back to school and have lessons with the teachers. There were all sorts of toys and games, model airplanes for rainy days, activities and trips to the countryside or the beach, swimming galas, running races, butterfly collecting—

  Koji was panting as he trailed off. The other children were gazing at him like they were hypnotized.

  It all sounded so marvellous that, for a second, I let myself imagine that it was true. I pictured us all, miles and miles away from Tokyo, racing along a shimmery beach, splashing and diving amongst the blue waves. For a moment, I imagined Tomoko, standing by a rock pool. Wearing a white swimming cap, the skin brown and sunburned around her shoulders.