Fireflies Read online

  I wistfully thought of Takara-san and the gaudy girls on the Ginza, rushing over to grasp the arms of the American GIs.

  “Where’s the average man to find comfort nowadays? His wife’s most likely dead, and the only girls around are sluts. If he’s only got two yen, and a girl costs twenty, whatever is he to do?”

  ~ ~ ~

  I took Mrs. Shimamura at her word, and jam-packed our new magazine with every possible fantasy — epicurean, erotic, or otherwise — that might appeal to the ordinary Japanese man, so lately oppressed by frustrated desires. I wrote three stories interspersed with Nakamura’s drawings and cartoons — the usual erotic, grotesque nonsense we had grown up with.

  The first dealt with a soldier who, on returning home, finds that his wife has taken up with his neighbour. Soon enough, he is incapable of arousing himself in any other way than by spying on them from behind a screen.

  The second was a more monstrous variation on the theme. A man is forced by circumstance to take work in a brothel, mopping the stained floors and laundering the sheets. He learns that a new girl, a real beauty, is to start work the next day. An uncanny thought comes into his mind, and he hides himself under her bed that night. The next day, the presumed beauty comes in with an American soldier. They throw themselves onto the bed and start heaving and cavorting. Aroused, the man’s fingers creep into his pants, and, as the bed rattles and shakes, and the girl approaches the heights of her ecstasy, he cannot help but participate in her delerium. “With the roar of a mountain lion,” the American completes, and leaves the room.

  The man hears the girl dressing. He sidles out from underneath the bed, intent upon presenting her with a diabolical proposition. As he emerges, she shrieks. He gasps, clutching at his chest. The girl is his own daughter.

  The cover was a master stroke, lovingly drawn and coloured by Nakamura. A woman suns herself on a beach, wide hips, jutting breasts, plus ça change. But, this is no Japanese bathing beauty. She is a Westerner. An American lady, with just a wisp of hair emerging beneath her navel — for the first time, I was sure, on the cover of a Japanese magazine. The wife of one of the generals, perhaps? Of MacArthur himself? All of this, and more, now available to anyone for just three yen. This, I sensed instinctively, was the true essence of democracy.

  The second half of the magazine was more considered. Inspired by the house painters, “The Dish I Most Lament” was based upon a series of interviews I conducted at various stations along the Yamanote Line, in which I asked ordinary citizens to describe the meal for which they felt most nostalgic. The reactions were astonishing. Some shook their heads furiously and marched away; one man even punched me on the nose. Others simply froze, then began to reel off a list of dishes as if they were reading from a long menu unfurling in their minds — sea bream cooked in chestnut rice; bubbling stews of chicken and burdock; hot fried tempura and fat slivers of bonito . . . Others smiled with that faraway look I had seen on the faces of the painters, and talked of cold buckwheat soba from a temple in Kyoto; itawasa fish cakes from a famous shop in Nihonbashi . . . They talked of tofu and oden, horsemeat and clams, but, most of all, they talked of miso. Miso, miso, always miso soup, prepared each morning by the hands of once beloved, now departed mothers and wives.

  Sometimes I had to stop them talking, as my eyes would be blurry with tears. Then their smiles would falter and the wind would gust past us in the street. The interviewees would look at me bitterly then, as if I had robbed them of something precious. More than anything, I realized, it was our lost past that was the most captivating daydream. In these days of dried cod, of the rotten sweet potato, it was the most painful fantasy of all.

  ~ ~ ~

  ERO, as we named the magazine, was an instant hit. Convinced of its appeal, Mrs. Shimamura funded the first printing. By the end of the day, all of the copies we had placed with the booksellers and newsstands had sold out. With the profits, we printed another issue, which itself sold out by the end of the week. It seemed we had struck a peculiar vein.

  My financial issues then were temporarily solved. But I was troubled by the fact that in just five days, my erotic stories had sold a hundred times more than all my literary scribblings had in a decade. Even more disturbingly, while in the past I had agonized over every word and punctuation point, these stories had flowed from my pen like water. I had written them all in one night, in fact, one after the other, sitting up in my room with an inkstone and a bottle of liquor. I wondered if something had fractured in my mind during those long, malarial months of horror in the jungles of New Guinea.

  What irony that I, who fancied myself the Japanese Tolstoy, an Oriental Zola, should find my métier in pornography. That the first thing I should write on my return from the inferno of war should be sensual and erotic!

  10

  THE TOURISTIC GI

  (HAL LYNCH)

  My compatriots glanced at me curiously across the basement dining room of the Continental Hotel as I attempted to lever chunks of rice into my mouth with my chopsticks. A small bowl of anonymous, gelatinous fish swamped in brown paste lay on my table, alongside a slippery white cuboid of tofu and a pot of green tea. The boy had been delighted when I’d asked him for a “Japanese-style” breakfast, but I was now envying the morning toast and powdered eggs being devoured by the staff and officers around me.

  I had thrown myself into my Japanese life with vigour, keen to get under the skin of the place. I scoured the markets for books in translation and studied whatever I could find — children’s folk tales, samurai dramas, medieval literature. I undertook a dozen Japanese lessons with an old man in his chrysanthemum garden in Shibuya. I even sat cross-legged through six long, baffling hours of a Noh play in a dusty, empty hall, the pain in my thighs growing more excruciating by the second.

  Dutch was still sore at me for landing him in hot water.

  “Give this one to Lynch,” he would simper at editorial meetings. “He’s swell at human interest.”

  My assignments so far had included a horticultural show by the Allied Women’s Flower Arranging Society and a boxing tournament between the 5th Cavalry and a team of British marines.

  In the meantime, I tramped the Tokyo streets, photographing the city and its inhabitants. A bald man washing glasses from a bucket in a shanty. The watchman of the metal mountain up past the Ginza, standing amidst piles of radiators, bicycles, and temple bells.

  One day I was up at Ueno, exploring the stalls of the black market. Men chopped slivers of meat, squatted beside standpipes, unloaded wooden crates of fish from hand-carts. Behind the station, I came across a team of tattered children playing baseball on a patch of wasteground. A grubby boy, his face disfigured by burns, was standing against a broken-down section of wall, holding up a charred plank. Another boy in short pants flung a ball made of rags. The scarred boy whacked it hard. A piece of wood splintered off and he raced around a diamond formed of piles of gravel. The other children hollered in encouragement, their faces as filthy as his, as I pulled up my Leica and fired off shot after shot. He tore along, making it back just in time for the home run, sliding along the gravel in a great cloud of dust. The children cheered and screamed. Then they spotted me. They instantly abandoned their game, and came galloping toward me in a herd.

  I hurled candy bars, of which I now kept a provident supply in my coat pocket. They swarmed me, shrieking with delight. To give them a treat, I decided to take their portraits, and had them scribble their ages in my notebook.

  “All from Tokyo, right?” I asked, in my broken Japanese. “You — Tokyo?”

  The scarred boy pushed forward. His hair was thickly matted and he wore dirty brown serge trousers rolled up at the hem.

  “We — Tokyo,” he said in wavering English, gesturing to himself and the others. Then he pointed. “She — no.”

  I noticed another little girl standing a few paces behind him, apparently too shy to come ove
r.

  “Oh? Where’s she from?”

  The boy nodded. “Yes. She — Hiroshima,” he said.

  I paused. “Is that so?”

  The girl wore a blue canvas jacket and was very frail. I leaned down and beckoned to her, but she barely dared look at me. I offered her a malted milk ball from my pocket. She quickly shook her head. The other children gathered around us.

  “You — Hiroshima?” I said to her.

  She glanced at the scarred boy, then gave a tiny nod of assent.

  “You have — mother? Father? Okasan? Otosan?”

  She stared awkwardly beyond me. A faint wind ruffled her short hair.

  The scarred boy broke in: “Her mother — sick. Send her — Tokyo.”

  “Her mother was sick?”

  Tears were welling in the girl’s eyes. All of a sudden, she said something in a strained voice. I turned to the boy.

  “What did she say?” I asked.

  He wiped his forehead with his fist, frowning. “Bomb — fall,” he said. He made an explosive noise and threw up his hands. “Every people — sick.”

  “Sick? You mean they died?”

  He frowned, apparently at his linguistic limit. He shook his head. “No die. Sick.”

  “The bomb? The bomb made her mother sick?”

  He nodded fervently. “So, desu.”

  A memory came to my mind. The surrender issue of LIFE, back in September, MacArthur’s face glaring from the cover. There’d been a set of photographs of Hiroshima, shots of mangled factories. Toward the end, there’d been a brief reference to reports from local doctors, stories of failing appetites and bleeding gums amongst the surviving population.

  The other children were scampering around now, hurling stones about the wasteground. The scarred boy was staring intently at my Leica. As a reward for his efforts at translation, I took the leather strap from around my neck and handed the camera to him. He examined it with a fierce and concentrated delight, then held it to his face and began to swoop gently around, like a regular Robert Capa.

  I finally managed to prise it away from him, and he gave me a solemn look of thanks. With a polite bow, he ran back to his game.

  Dutch grudgingly printed the picture a week later. I guessed I was now forgiven. It showed the little boy earnestly holding his makeshift bat as the ball of rags flew toward him: “The Tokyo Little Leagues,” the caption read.

  ~ ~ ~

  Eugene’s interest in Japanese culture was of a different strain to my own. One evening, he asked me to join him and his new friend Bob McHardy, a cartoonist at the paper, at a bar called the Oasis, next to our new Postal Exchange by the Ginza Crossing. At the door, yum-yum girls were coaxing men inside, while laughing GIs stood in line at a booth, where the hair-raising VD posters revealed it to be an army prophylactic station. Downstairs, Eugene sat at a table with McHardy, who had a gorgeous girl perched on his knee, running her fingers through his curly blonde hair. I felt a twinge of guilty lust: she should have been kicking up her heels on the stage, I thought, or starring on a cinema screen.

  Another girl, dressed in colourful kimono, was perched on the chair beside Eugene. She was young and neat, with smooth porcelain skin and jet-black eyes.

  “Harold, meet Primrose,” Eugene winked. “She’s a swell sort.”

  Primrose refilled his glass every time he took a sip and laughed at practically everything he said. As I drank my lukewarm beer I couldn’t help but picture the gangly boy I’d roomed with in college. He’d been the kind of kid to have sand kicked in his face on the beach. Look at him now, I thought. Eugene sprawled on the chair with an air of easy and wanton debauch, and I felt a stab of envy as Primrose stroked his face and patted his thighs.

  McHardy went off to dance and I seized the chance to tell Eugene about an idea I’d been toying with. I wanted to see more of the country and thought we might try to write some touristic reports about places GIs might like to visit on leave.

  “It would give us a chance to do some travelling ourselves, Gene. Get out of Tokyo.”

  “Well,” he said. “I guess . . . ”

  Primrose had taken off his glasses and placed them upon her own nose and was generally distracting him. When she reached over to pour more beer into Eugene’s glass, I noticed that her palms were damaged. They were smooth, shiny in the low light, as if they had been polished.

  “Come on, Gene. It’ll do you a world of good.”

  Eugene seemed very uncertain. As Primrose lifted the bottle, I imagined for a split-second her smooth hands touching my face, passing over my back. She saw me staring, and gazed back at me for a second.

  A new song came on the gramophone and, with a delighted gasp, she hopped up and tugged at Eugene’s hand.

  “What do you think, Gene?” I said.

  “Well, why don’t you talk to Dutch about it?”

  “I will.” I drained my beer and stood up.

  “You’re not staying?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  Primrose wiped her forehead in comical fashion. She grasped hold of Eugene’s arm and tugged again. I saw now how pretty she was, and felt a stab of doubt about leaving.

  Primrose dragged him over to the dance floor.

  “Suit yourself,” Eugene called, waving his free hand. I watched them for a while, then strode uncertainly up the steps to the bustling street outside.

  ~ ~ ~

  Dutch was enthusiastic about my idea, just as I’d suspected he would be.

  “It’ll be real human interest, Dutch. Aimed square at your average GI.”

  He beamed. “Attaboy. What’ll we call it?”

  “How about ‘The Touristic GI’?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Sounds appealing.”

  Two days later, at six in the morning, a protesting Eugene and I picked our way through the crowd at the station to embark upon our journey to Himeji, a castle complex out near Kobe, having stocked up on tins of spam, sandwiches and bottles of beer from the PX the night before.

  Japanese people crammed into the carriages, fighting for standing room on the steps, as women shoved parcels in through the broken windows. With relief, we found the carriage reserved for Allied personnel and clambered into a compartment. It was empty, though hardly luxurious. Most of the windows were cracked and the seats were busted, springs jabbing up through the fabric. But as the locomotive gave a whistle and started to tug us out of the station, I felt a thrilling trepidation to be escaping the safe, fairy-lit toy-town of Little America and heading out into the wilds of Japan at last.

  We jolted through the ruined fringes of the city and out into the countryside. Green paddies stretched along each side, figures in conical hats stooped over in the fields as they had, no doubt, for centuries. We ate our sandwiches as the huge, wide slopes of Mount Fuji came into view, ice-cream white against a cold blue sky. I examined its flanks and conical tip, recalling the view of the mountain from above — we’d used it so many times as a mustering point before the fire raids that it seemed intimately familiar.

  The perspective shifted; my stomach lurched. The world took on a sudden, febrile intensity, thudding engines pulsing in my inner ear.

  My head was between my legs. Eugene laid a hand on my shoulder.

  “Hal? Are you alright?”

  I nodded, taking deep breaths until the thudding floated away. Eugene was staring at me.

  “Are you sick?”

  “It’s a little stuffy in here.”

  I stepped over to the other side of the compartment and hoisted down the cracked pane of glass, concentrating on the flat paddies and a stream that wound beneath a low, scenic ridge. I heard Eugene opening two bottles of beer behind me. I took one from him gratefully.

  “Here’s mud in your eye,” he said.

  We clinked bottles and drank. Presently, I took a private glance be
hind. The huge mountain was gone, smeared away into mist.

  A little narcotic rivulet trickled pleasantly around my brain. Eugene told me tales of the parallel life he had been living over the past few years, since I was drafted and had joined 3rd Recon. He’d applied to the newspaper almost on a whim, it seemed. Before that, he’d been working at his father’s law office in Manhattan, excused from service due to his terrible eyes. Japan was his big adventure now. I joshed him about his “girlfriends” in Tokyo and he coloured, smirking.

  “Come on, Hal. Don’t tell me you haven’t succumbed to the delights of baby-san?”

  The question lacked nuance. Before we’d been sent to Saipan, there’d been henna-tattooed skin and plump Indian flesh in a mud shack at Kharagpur; a dose from my favourite girl at the Phoenix House in Chengtu. Always with a vague sense of brutality, as if I were a marauding barbarian.

  “And how is Primrose, Eugene?” I asked, picturing the dark, candid eyes of the girl in the club. “Still blooming, I hope?”

  “You should learn to loosen up a little, Harold.”

  “And how often do you find yourself frequenting these establishments, Eugene?”

  He adjusted his glasses, a trifle uncomfortably. “Most nights, I guess.”

  As the train followed the line of the coast, the air grew cold and the ocean wind blew in through the cracks in the windows. We were just starting to shiver when the porter brought a small, hot brazier of charcoal, which he set on the floor between us before folding down our bunks. Dusk fell, and we squeezed into our narrow berths and tried to fall asleep under short, thin blankets.

  The clattering of the train permeated my dreams, transforming itself into the pounding of aerial bombs. I was alone in a house I somehow knew from my childhood, a place that was at once intimately familiar, yet vastly lonely. The continual whoosh and blast of explosives came from outside and I felt an inexplicable sadness, as a child might feel when he is utterly abandoned. A glass door of a rifle case hung open by the wall. A single lamp burned by the stair. A knock sounded at the door and I knew with instinctive fear who it would be. I hesitated for what felt like an endless time, then opened it. The disfigured Japanese boy was standing there, holding his baseball bat, like some strange oriental cherubim, his frail girlfriend beside him. Each took one of my hands and together they led me outside into the blazing city. Then we were flying high up above a night landscape, the villages and towns below all razed to the ground. We went still higher, miles above the earth, and then we were flying amidst some strange, ethereal hinterland, surrounded by ancient, deserted cathedrals of the night . . .