Fire Flowers Page 4

  Soon enough, though, the yakuza gangs had decided to move in. Now the wasteground beneath the overhead train tracks was just like a real market, with electric lights and speakers chirping music and peddlers selling everything from saucepans to kimonos, blankets to bicycles. There were noodle shops and counter bars, and the place was patrolled day and night by the flashy toughs who worked for Mr. Suzuki, the market boss, who you could see making his rounds every evening in his pale grey silk suit, a felt fedora tilted over his bullet-shaped head.

  We called it the American Sweet Shop. GIs came along to swap their B-rations for whisky and fake antiques, and we shined their shoes and scrounged for their chocolate and chewing gum. Kids stole things from their pockets and some of the older girls took them off into the shadows under the railway arches. But I’d promised myself early on I’d never break any laws, no matter how tough things got. My father would have been ashamed of me.

  Instead, I became a cigarette boy. The yankiis all smoked like crazy—American cigarettes at that—and if you followed them for long enough, you could collect up a pile of butts and wrinkle out the tobacco into new two-sen smokes. You’d then palm these off onto some poor Japanese, who’d smoke them right down to the last cardboard embers.

  The sailor lifted his massive hand and flicked his smouldering cigarette to the ground. I pounced, but suddenly he moved, and I slammed into his leg. It was as thick as a tree trunk, and I sprawled there, stunned for a moment. Then, from nowhere, another cocky boy jumped in and scrabbled for the cigarette himself.

  “Get off!” I shouted, grabbing him. “This is my patch!” I twisted the boy’s arm, and we grappled and thrashed together on the ground. Above us, the laughing sailors goaded us on, ducking and weaving behind their giant ebony fists.

  My hand gripped the boy’s throat as I pinned him to the ground. But then, as I slapped his terrified face, I got a shock. It was Koji, the grandson of Mrs. Oka the pickle seller—he’d lived right next door to us in Asakusa.

  “Koji?” I said, letting go of his neck. “Is that really you?”

  Koji nodded, wiping away snot and tears with dirty little fists.

  “Don’t you remember me?” I asked.

  He grimaced. “What happened to your face?”

  The thick welts on my cheeks had gone hard now, like the rubber on bicycle tires.

  “I got burned.”

  His eyes grew wide. “You look creepy!”

  I shrugged. “What happened to your granny?”

  He thrust out his bottom lip.

  “Oh. I’m sorry. Did I hurt you?”

  He shook his head sulkily.

  “Hungry?”

  “Starving to death!”

  Over at one of the busy wooden stalls in the market, I counted out a few copper coins from my pocket. We had just enough to share a bowl of cold noodles, and as we stuffed them into our mouths, he told me about some other kids he’d come across since the war had ended. There were quite a few of us Asakusa lot around, it seemed, all in the same boat.

  “Nobu’s here,” he said.

  “Really?”

  He nodded. Nobu was a ten-year-old boy from the Senso school—his dad had run the fishmonger on the corner of Umamichi Street, where my own father had bought eels for our shop.

  “Little Aiko-chan, too.” Aiko was Nobu’s little sister, I remem­bered, a funny smudge of a girl who’d attended the elementary school on the corner.

  Koji glanced around and lowered his voice.

  “Shin’s here, too,” he murmured. “You know, the boy from Fuji High School?”

  I groaned. “Trust him to be here!”

  I knew Shin alright. A local bully with a square jaw, he’d been one of the tenement gang up near Sengen Shrine. His father had been a fireman, covered in tattoos, who’d lived on a barge on the Okawa, and my mother said he’d sold Shin’s sister Midori, one of the neighbourhood beauties, to the Willow Tree teahouse to become a trainee geisha when she was just eleven years old. Shin had taken after his dad, though—always fighting dirty in the battles we waged in the back streets, throwing chunks of glass on the sly and striding around in a pair of rolled up khaki trousers he swore he’d taken off the body of a crash-landed American pilot.

  Over by the Ueno Plaza steps, children were shrieking like monkeys as a pair of GIs revved the engine of their jeep. They clutched at their sleeves, grabbing for the packets of caramels the soldiers tossed out to them. I spotted Shin straight away. He was nearly as tall as me now, and wore no sandals or shirt, just his torn old pair of khakis. As the jeep spun off, he sprinted after it and leaped up onto the bumper. He clung on and rode along the avenue for a second before toppling off and tumbling into the dirt. With an idiotic grin, he picked himself up and hobbled back toward us, elbows streaked with blood.

  He grimaced when he saw me. “What does he want? He’s even uglier than before.”

  I gave him a withering look.

  Scabs covered his knees and his front teeth were broken. I remembered how, after our schools had been evacuated to the countryside, us Asakusa lot had been given all the heavy jobs in the village, digging octopus holes and cutting fodder for the local garrison’s horses. Shin, meanwhile, had wormed his way in with the straw-sandaled village boys by pilfering our barley rations to trade for their silver rice.

  Shin sneered. “I bet you want to join my gang now, don’t you? Not so high and mighty now, are you? Well, it just so happens that you can’t. Not unless I say so.”

  “Your gang?” I said. “How long have you been in charge?”

  He frowned, counting on his fingers. “Ever since—” Every­one went quiet. Ever since March, he meant. The night when Tokyo had burned.

  “You must be making pots of money, I suppose?”

  He waved a hand at the departing jeep.

  “We can always scrounge from the yankiis!”

  The children giggled. They were filthy and crusted with dirt. Their shirts were just rags, their hair matted. They would never last another month with Shin in charge, I thought.

  “Do you really think they’ll always be this generous? What about when winter comes? It’s October already. Chewing gum won’t be much use then!”

  Shin gave another moronic grin and shrugged.

  The children looked up at me nervously.

  “Listen,” I said. “Here’s what we can do.”

  Later that night, Shin and Nobu and I loitered for a few hours outside the Continental Hotel, where the American officers were billeted. We collected a big pile of butts from the ash cans, and back at the station, Koji ground them up in his prize shell casing—a real beauty from a Type 89 discharger. We rolled new smokes from licked twists of newspaper, and the next morning, Aiko took them around the station to sell. When she got back, we had enough money to buy three whole seaweed-wrapped rice balls. We stuffed them into our mouths on the spot—grinning at each other, flecks of rice stuck to our chins.

  I never learned exactly what had happened to Koji, Aiko, Nobu and Shin on the night of the raid back in March. It somehow became one of the rules, early on, that we were never allowed to talk about such things. I was still so ashamed of myself that I could hardly bear to even think about that night. The whole city had been on fire as I’d sprinted back toward our house, leaving Satsuko alone in the dark water of the canal. I only made it a dozen yards before the cotton quilt of my air defence cowl caught on fire. I screamed as I tried to pull it off, but it stuck to my cheeks, and there was a smell like roasting pork, which I grasped must be my skin burning. I staggered into a pit shelter by the side of the road, and sat there all night long, the ground vibrating beneath my feet, the air filled with sirens and planes and the stink of smoke as I sobbed in the darkness.

  By the time the fires had burned out, my face was already blistering. I stumbled back up the charred street to the Yoshiwara canal, to
the iron ladder where I’d left Satsuko the night before. The water below was full of floating corpses, drowned or asphyxiated, bobbing in the water amongst the blackened chunks of sodden timber.

  It was good not to be on my own anymore. I missed my family more than I cared to admit, and I didn’t know what I would have done without the company of the other children. It felt almost like a big game sometimes, as if we’d all run away from school together. We lit refuse fires in the Plaza and danced around in GI hats made out of folded newspapers. We played destroyer-torpedo in the broken-down houses and built forts in the bomb craters from charred planks and twisted strands of metal. We even marked out a baseball pitch in the wasteground at the back of the station, where we held tournaments with the other gangs, gambling for bullet casings and bomb fragments.

  What a liberation from the war! Those days of writing comfort letters to the soldiers until your fingers cramped up, marching around the playground singing patriotic songs. Children of the Emperor!

  But the children still cried out at night, at the station. I’d wake to see their little faces glistening with tears. So I made it another rule that you couldn’t ever let anyone see you cry. If you did, the others had to sit on you, as if you were a sack of rice. I thought that if anyone were to start crying, then someone else would follow, and soon enough, we’d all be crying our eyes out and no one would be able to stop. We might go on crying forever, I thought, until we ended up like empty cicada shells, having cried ourselves away entirely.

  I was playing with my metal soldiers at the station one morning when Aiko bustled over. She hovered in front of me for a few minutes, humming away, until, finally, I asked her what was the matter.

  She frowned.

  “Can people live in holes?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  Shyly, she told me that she had met a teenage girl the day before, who was living in a hole outside the station.

  “You mean the slit bomb shelter?”

  There were plenty of single-person earthwork shelters scattered across the city, though none of them had been much use during the fire raids. They’d been more like miniature stoves then. You still had to be wary of exploring them, just in case there was a baked, rotten corpse stuck inside.

  “What’s she doing in there?” I asked.

  “She lives in it!”

  “Really?”

  Aiko nodded, biting her lip

  “Is she nice?”

  “She’s my friend.”

  Aiko explained that the girl had been sent to Tokyo from the city of Hiroshima, out on the Seto Inland Sea, in the Chugoko region of Japan. Her mother had packed her off to stay with relatives a few weeks before, but when the girl had disembarked at Tokyo Station, there’d been no one there to meet her. So she’d wandered off on her own until she found herself here at Ueno.

  The story sounded common enough. There were lost and orphaned kids all over the place now, sent to Tokyo from other towns or returning from far-flung parts of the Japanese Empire. They wandered about forlornly, clutching onto the little white urns that contained their parents’ remains.

  I didn’t know much about Hiroshima people, though. Only that the city had been very badly bombed, right before the end of the war. They’d been pretty unlucky, I thought—just a few more days and they’d have made it through.

  Aiko’s face was crumpled in sympathy and I could tell she’d taken a shine to the girl. It was hardly surprising. It couldn’t be much fun for her, hanging about with us grimy boys all the time.

  “Can she stay with us, big brother?” Aiko pleaded. “Please?”

  I felt a tingle of pride. No one had ever called me big brother before. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing to have another girl in the gang. After all, she could always help Aiko out with the selling work.

  “Why don’t you bring her over to meet us later on today,” I said. “I’ll make a decision then.”

  Aiko’s face lit up and she clapped her hands together. “Thank you, big brother!” she said. “Thank you, thank you!”

  Tomoko. The name alone was enough to send a delicious shiver down my spine. She wore a blue canvas jacket, a battered water canteen slung over her shoulder. Her hair was cut very short, almost like a boy’s, and fell just beneath her eyes, so she blew it nervously out of the way whenever you spoke to her. Her face was quite round but she was terribly thin from her journey from Hiroshima to Tokyo. She was thirteen years old and as shy as a borrowed cat.

  That night, she slept on the floor with us in our corner of the ticket hall, Aiko-chan curled up next to her. Just as I was drifting off, something flicked against my ear. I looked up to see Shin leering over me.

  “What do you want?” I said.

  “I was thinking,” he said, scratching the side of his nose.

  “That makes a change.”

  His thick lip trembled. “Listen,” he said. “Don’t you be so proud. You might have learned all the big words at your fancy school but I’m still Shin from Sengen Alley.”

  I sat up, a bit ashamed of myself for having been rude. Perhaps he had been a bully in the old days. But all sorts of things had changed since then.

  “What’s the big idea, then?” I asked.

  He jerked his thumb toward Tomoko.

  “You know—there’s another way a girl like that could make us some money.”

  I leaped to my feet and stared him down with white eyes. I was furious that I’d ever felt sorry for such a bastard. I held my fist under his chin until he shrank backward.

  “What does it matter?” he whined. “We wouldn’t be the only ones!”

  “Don’t you touch a hair on her head,” I whispered. “Don’t you even dare.”

  His lips peeled back to show broken teeth. “I get it. Want to save her for yourself, ugly?”

  My clenched fist stopped a hair’s breadth from his eye socket. He froze for a second, then shrugged and rolled away.

  “Suit yourself,” he muttered.

  Tomoko didn’t say much, at first. In fact, I sometimes wondered whether she’d actually forgotten how to speak on her long journey across the Kansai plain. But one afternoon, she came over to us through the ticket hall, holding up a tattered magazine.

  “I’ve found something,” she said, in quiet voice.

  Tomoko was holding a torn copy of Women’s Club, a journal that my mother used to read. I wrinkled up my nose, but she opened it anyway to show us an article. I squinted at the title: “Let’s Eat Grasshoppers!” it said.

  “Grasshoppers?” Koji exclaimed.

  It wasn’t such a surprise. The newspapers had been full of similar stories that month, making suggestions as to how people could find alternate sources of nutrition.

  “Let’s hear it, then,” I said, nodding in encouragement.

  Tomoko blew her hair out of her eyes. Shyly, she began to read.

  “Not only is the countryside full of grasshoppers, but despite what some might think, they are in fact quite delicious to eat and are very healthy, being packed full of vitamins . . . ”

  She trailed off as Koji made a sour face and Shin, not to be outdone, retched loudly. But the idea didn’t seem so bad to me. We were all practically starving. Even if we didn’t eat the grasshoppers ourselves, we could always try to sell them back here at the market. I’d seen people selling buckets of frogs before, some even sold snakes.

  “Perhaps we’ll go on a grasshopper hunt tomorrow, then,” I said. “First thing.”

  The children made excited noises, but I quickly dashed their hopes.

  “There’s no reason for us all to go, of course. Just us older ones. Me—and Tomoko, as it was her idea. Shin, you can stay here and look after the little ones. You’re in charge.”

  The children grumbled away, and I stole a glance at Tomoko. Her cheeks were glowing. She was smili
ng at me.

  It was a cold morning, marvelously clear and bright, as we jumped down from the Tobu Main Line train just past Shiraoka, up in Saitama prefecture. The fields were crunchy with frost and mottled leaves were floating down from the trees, slowly, as if they couldn’t bear to land. We’d borrowed some little bamboo cages from an old man at the market to make homes for our grasshoppers. But though we hunted about in the fields for hours on end, as the magazine suggested, it finally became clear that we wouldn’t be needing them. There were no grasshoppers to be found.

  “I wonder where they all could have gone,” Tomoko said with a sniff.

  “Perhaps it’s not the right season anymore,” I said. “Or perhaps they’ve all been eaten already.”

  It was still a beautiful day though, and we wandered for a while along a winding path that led through the fields as the dew melted and a warbler called out from the trees. It must have its nest nearby, I thought, glancing up the branches, and I wondered if I should try to search for its eggs.

  There was a jangling rattle from up ahead. Tomoko was standing by a little shrine set with offerings beside the path, the bell rope swaying. Her eyes were closed, and her head was bowed in prayer.

  She looked up and clapped her hands—once, twice.

  I began to walk towards her, but as she turned to face me, I hesitated. Her eyes were glistening. I desperately hoped that she wasn’t crying. It would have been unthinkable for me to try to hit on her, here.

  I cleared my throat. “Tomoko-chan. I hope you’re not feeling unwell?”

  She shook her head.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “I was just thinking of my mother. She always said a prayer if ever we passed a shrine out in the countryside.”

  Two statuettes of fox spirits stood on each side of the shrine, dressed in aprons of red cotton. As I gazed at Tomoko, a strange thought occurred to me.

  “Tomoko. Is it really true that your mother sent you away to Tokyo?”

  Tomoko looked away as her face screwed up. It all became terribly clear.