Butterfly's Shadow (38 page)

Behind him a voice says, ‘Well look who’s here. The boy with perfect hair.’

She is dressed in what looks like some kind of uniform, eyes concealed by dark glasses, her polished ebony hair longer than he recalls, lipstick scarlet, and she is actually smiling up at him, albeit quizzically, not much more than a curve of the lips. ‘Well they say if you stand on this corner –’

Joe says, ‘Hi, Yasuko,’ trying to sound cool and unsurprised, aware that he is beaming at her idiotically. Understandable, forgivable, surely, to show he is pleased to see a familiar face here in this place of sorrow and numbed pain, but he is prepared for her to be sharp with him.

‘What are you doing in Tokyo?’

‘I’m writing the new constitution,’ she says, and now she does smile. ‘Well, I think the idea was I’d make the coffee but I’m lousy at coffee-making, so they’re letting me help out in the office. Seeing as I can type and handle statistics and speak the lingo. And since we’re giving women the vote. So that’s in my favour.’ She tilts her head and studies him over the dark lenses.

‘We’re bringing them democracy, Joey, no inequality based on race or family origin. No unlawful detention. They couldn’t
set up a Tule Lake here. Doesn’t that make you feel proud? Feel
good
? Is my sarcasm too heavy?’

She glances around at the ruined cityscape.

‘You know what all this was? Revenge for Pearl Harbor. A case of overkill, would you say?’

Passers-by stare at her, suspicious, some hostile: a Japanese girl, immaculate and elegant with scarlet nails and lips.

‘What about you?’ she asks. ‘Why are you here?’

‘I’m with the re-education unit, interpreter stuff—’

‘Interpreter! When could you speak Japanese?’

‘I did a language course back home. I’m here to do adult teaching. Liaison, they call it.’

‘You’re a spy, basically.’

‘No—’

‘It’s okay. I am, too. We all are.’

‘We?’

‘Outsiders. Foreigners. You don’t need to be a yellow-haired Yank to be a
gaijin
. You know that. Ask the Koreans. We’re all spies, but for different reasons. SCAP and his boys want to find out what makes these people tick, get inside their heads and then change them.’

We, she said.

He has a class to set up: teachers to be introduced to the new constitution, indoctrinated in democracy; she has telegrams to send. They agree to meet later.

He suggests a rendezvous at the Ernie Pyle Theater.

‘You mean the Takarazuka. All this renaming, you’re such cultural imperialists.’

You.
For a moment she is on the other side of the divide. For a moment he sees the old Yasuko, mouth grim, face stony.

He says hastily, ‘We might take in a movie.’

‘Why not. Oh, I saw
The Maltese Falcon
again. It’s not bad.’

She moves off, calls back over her shoulder, ‘That last line you love so much. From Shakespeare? It’s a misquotation.’

He watches her go, the slim figure slicing through the shabby
crowd, walking fast in her tiny flat shoes. Why was he here? she had asked. He had been devious. He had told her the what, not the why. He had not said: to track down my mother. Paralysed by an undefined fear.

Later, they ate dinner in a dimly lit restaurant on the outskirts. Waiters moved between the tables replenishing glasses, removing plates; steaming dishes arrived from the kitchen. Yasuko glanced about, her face shadowed with something resembling grief.

‘Yasuko? Are you okay?’

‘I hate this place. They make me sick, these people.’

‘What people?’

‘All of us. We can afford to leave food on our plates when people outside are starving. There’s a joke going around: “What do good parents share with their children? Malnutrition.” I hate myself for being here.’

And he learned that Yasuko, too, had been devious, that the why of her presence in Tokyo was to try and reassemble a fragmented family, pay respects to the dead, pull the surviving pieces together.

‘I have an uncle. A schoolteacher. He works all hours and he can’t feed his family. Black market is a criminal offence, but there’s no food, Joe. He may end up killing himself.’

One of her cousins had been an officer in the Emperor’s army, present whereabouts unknown.

‘My mother hopes he’s dead. Traditionally it would, of course, be more honourable to be dead.’

‘This morning you said we’re spies. I walk around making notes in my head. Today I give them a present of half a hot dog and they respond with a traditional thank-you. But will our presence, our observation, change all that?’

‘It could.’ She shrugged. ‘But don’t be too sure. Group harmony versus individuality? The old ways are pretty strong.’

He was unconvinced. ‘At SCAP we have these brainstorming sessions. We feel they should be more like us. But when does
“a little more” become too much? How long will it be before the old ways are abandoned, the new world calling payback time? Perhaps we should try to be a little more Japanese.’

‘Speak for yourself,’ she said.

After that it became easy to tell her the story of his mother and father. Or at least some of the story. She said,

‘How come you’re still in Tokyo? You should be hightailing it to Nagasaki.’

‘I’m leaving tomorrow on the train. Suzuki will be able to tell me more.’

‘Suzuki?’

‘My great-uncle’s widow.’

‘The men in your family surely seem to have had a thing for Japanese women.’

They spent the night in a patched and tattered house in the district of the floating world where escape was still possible, where soft girls and loud music blotted out reality for those who could afford black market fantasy. And they, too, floated for a while in tentative exploration until fantasy was abandoned and the force of truth took hold. They stripped each other bare, slippery as eels, her scarlet mouth blurred and swollen, heat fused their bodies, sent the blood coursing between them with a sense of arching, of piercing; an ecstasy of escape.

Wrapped together, the futon thin beneath their bones, they lay watching the sky spin slowly out of darkness through the dirty glass of the window.

They had not slept and now it was almost dawn.

She poured water into a wooden bowl and washed him attentively. He sponged her body clean of sweat and semen.

‘You have perfect feet,’ he observed, drying her toes, kissing the high, narrow arch. He cupped her small breasts. ‘Perfect all over, in fact.’

‘You know what they say about the Japanese body: fine from head to hips, then we have these short legs.’

‘Perfect,’ he said firmly, ‘like my hair.’ He could tell her now how she had scared him on that first encounter at Tule Lake.

She laughed and said that was her way of dealing with important things: to be stern.

‘I was important?’

‘Of course. I watched you every day in the mess hall. I spilled stuff down my blouse because I wasn’t paying attention to my food.’

‘I searched for you, to say goodbye, that last day before I left for the language training camp. I looked all over.’

‘I had some kind of bug, and I can tell you that camp hospital was no place for a sick person to be. I made an official complaint but those sons of bitches couldn’t care less.’

He felt a vast tenderness for her, for her fierceness; Yasuko was a paper shrew, self-protective. There was no taming to be done here. Disarmed, captivated, he wanted only to try and banish the shadow of pain from her small, questioning face. She looked younger when she laughed.

He caught an early train, picking his way through hundreds of blanket-wrapped figures asleep on the station floor, a few hookers hopelessly teetering up and down outside on their cork-soled platform shoes, seams drawn up the backs of teastained legs to simulate the stockings they occasionally managed to barter from a friendly GI.

One, with tired eyes and hair tortured into a frizzy bush, called out as Joe passed, ‘Hi, kid. You got cheese? Kraft Velveeta?’

He reached into his pocket for a packet of gum and handed it over with a muttered ‘
Tsumaranai mono desuga
.’

Startled, she responded with an instinctive bow and gabbled phrase of thanks. They exchanged a grin. ‘Hey, Johnny,’ she called after him, ‘you good American. Learning fast!’

Again a train heading for an unknown destination. He swayed, lulled by the rhythm, the sound of steel on steel like a fast drum riff, but what old song could he sing this time to the percussion backing of wheels on track?

From the train window he watched the countryside slide past, aware of the smallness of things here. The variety. Tiny streams, delicate trees nodding over chasms, hillsides glittering with waterfalls. No acres of American wheat or prairie grasslands stretching out unbroken to the flat horizon. With most of the land too mountainous to cultivate, this was farming in miniature, an oddly shaped rice field next to a vegetable patch, ingenious planting, every inch of soil packed tight with crops of one sort and another. What would these people make of the beet fields of America, cultivated so skilfully by the Issei and Nisei, great expanses of dull green stretching for mile after flat mile . . . ?

He was alone in a compartment reserved for Occupation forces, while the rest of the train was crowded with locals – “indigenous personnel”. Face pressed to the glass he allowed himself to let go, pulled by the train towards an area of pain he had spent a lifetime re-creating, clutching at old memories, fed always by the sense of loss.

And then the letter had arrived, the rug of bereavement had been pulled from under him.

No dead mother after all, just a faraway woman who had divested herself of unwanted ballast and sailed on without the
inconvenient child. Or so he had thought, hating the woman, the memory of silk and soft, curved cheek, until Nancy redrew the picture.

When, two changes and many hours later, he heard the announcement, the destination named, he felt he was stepping into dream territory.

Nagasaki. Did it really exist?

He got off the train and saw her at the end of the platform: a small, stocky woman with a square face, in a dark robe something between a kimono and a dress. Suzuki.

She trotted up the platform, clogs noisy, and stopped a yard away from him, her expression solemn. She bowed formally, and he did the same. Then, laughing, they found themselves involved in an awkward, shaky hug.

‘Welcome to Nagasaki,’ she said, in careful English.

‘How did you know I’d be on this train?’ he asked, in Japanese.

She beamed with relief. ‘Ah! So I don’t need to try and remember my English.’

She glanced at the train. ‘It’s the only one today.’

‘I was planning to get another message to you once I was here.’

He looked down at the top of her head, the thinning grey hair, the creased brow. Lines criss-crossed her face; a net spun by time. She was wizened, like a fruit that has dried into age.

He reached into his bag, brought out a traditionally gift-wrapped parcel and handed it to her with a small bow. She bowed, murmuring traditional thanks. A pause.

‘I suppose I should call you Joey.’

Her hands fluttered, plucking at her sleeves.

‘You must be . . .’ a mental calculation, ‘twenty-three. You look . . . more mature.’

He laughed. ‘Older, you mean. That’s the army. The war.’

There was a pause.

How do you ask the big question – the one too raw, too important, to be incorporated into the pattern of an emotional reunion? It would, Joe felt, be very un-Japanese to blurt it out, splintering the veneer that overlay the cracks in the social façade.

He said, blurting it out, ‘She died, didn’t she.’

The platform was deserted now and shadowy, their two figures caught in a shaft of sunlight. A breeze, sweeping the track, caught up scraps of waste paper and sent them whirling in the air like dancing butterflies.

‘It may comfort you to know that it happened in the moment of the blast. She would not have suffered.’

Would not have suffered?
He stared down at her.

She took his arm, as though to prevent him leaving. ‘When you see the house, you will understand.’

A cycle rickshaw took them through town, past collapsed and flattened buildings, breached walls and doors that opened on to the emptiness of vanished rooms. The road climbed, leaving the harbour behind.

The natural amphitheatre of the town lay below them now. He could see the shell of the Catholic church standing, blackened, insubstantial, like a sketch for a solid structure, its toppled dome half buried in the ground. A stone bridge spanned the river, its arches reflected in the water like spectacles. Compared with the wasteland of Tokyo, Nagasaki was still recognisably a city.

Suzuki glanced up and caught him staring at the scene, and for a moment she saw it through his eyes: almost, it seemed, Nagasaki had got off lightly. She felt a need to set the record straight.

‘Certain buildings, made from concrete and steel, withstood the blast, some protected by the hillside. Traditional dwellings of wood disappeared. Neighbourhoods for a mile around the explosion were completely destroyed. Consumed.’

She touched his arm and pointed to the tall wooden
telephone poles that lined the street: he saw that they were scorched on the side facing the explosion.

‘Fifty thousand people died that day. Many more, later. Even now it continues: diseased, they sicken.’

The rickshaw creaked on, uphill. Again Suzuki touched Joe’s arm, and pointed to a crumbling stone tower set back from the road. Burnt and warped, almost liquefied into its surroundings, a clock face, the twisted hands standing at 11.02.

‘The moment of the explosion.’

Later she would tell him how it had been, that day, when she came back.

Settling the girls in their temporary home away from town, further down the coast, she had heard the far-off sound of a plane. She went to the door and looked up, shielding her eyes: the sky was overcast but in a parting of the clouds she saw a distant shape like a dark fish hovering. There was a flash, a glare, brighter than any lightning and then the thunder, a sound so deep it unsettled the ground beneath her feet like the tremor of an earthquake. There was a shift in the air, an onrushing. Then silence.