Fireflies (9 page)

Giggling came from the staircase. Tomoko and Aiko were stepping carefully down. I stared at them in surprise. They wore old, embroidered kimonos, rolled up at the hem to stop them from tripping. They had found some powder and makeup too, and had painted their faces white and lips red, like clumsy geisha.

Shin clapped his hands and started to sing a dirty song, but I shot him a ferocious look and he trailed off.

Tomoko came over and sat down. As I looked at her, I could hardly speak. She didn't look like a child to me anymore. She seemed like a fresh, delicate bud, about to burst into bloom. We sat around the grill, and she and Aiko served us water from a teapot in saké cups. As she leaned over to fill my cup, my hand started to shake so much that I spilled water onto the floor.

Koji grabbed the teapot and swigged from it. He started reeling, shouting in a slurred voice that he was drunk. He tumbled over as the other children cackled. I glanced at Tomoko. She had her arm around Aiko and was smiling at Koji like a proud mother. She caught my gaze and held my eye.

I remembered the bump of her chest beneath my hand as we stood on the coupling on the train back to Tokyo; the warmth of her cheek as we lay together on the station floor. I felt an acute, guilty pleasure as she came over and sat next to me, a faint smile on her face. She took my hand and gently pressed it between her own.

It was a soft, wonderful pressure, warm and enclosing. It could have only lasted a few seconds, but it seemed to capture the strange, magic vividity of those past months entirely.

I leaped up with a short, braying laugh. I pulled my hand away.

“Right,” I shouted. “Everybody up. It's time for bed.”

The children groaned as I hopped around, kicking at their legs.

“Come on. We're not here on holiday, you know.”

The children trudged sulkily upstairs to the rooms where Tomoko had laid out the blankets: “Cherry-Blossom” for the boys, “Ivy” for her and Aiko. I rubbed my eyes, my heart whirling.

“Well, goodnight,” I said.

Tomoko and I bowed to each other shyly, then we went to curl up in new blankets. The mattress was deliciously soft after all those months on the cold, hard stone, but as I lay there, I hardly even noticed. My heart was pounding so hard that I was terrified the others would hear. From the other side of the sliding wall, Aiko whispered something, but Tomoko gently shushed her, and their lamp was soon extinguished. Reluctantly, I blew out our own. I closed my eyes, picturing Tomoko in my mind as I fell asleep. Her clumsily painted lips. The pale skin of her throat. The soft swell of her kimono.

12

ENGLISH-SPEAKING PEOPLE

(SATSUKO TAKARA)

The sign I had tacked up for Hiroshi on the wall of Tokyo Station was tattered now, the ink terribly smeared from the rain. I stood shivering in my thin coat as a group of ex-soldiers huddled around a refuse fire nearby, playing flower cards. An old woman squatted beneath a sign of her own, and gave me a sympathetic smile.

“Don't give up hope!” she mouthed, fumbling with her prayer beads. Not many people came to look for their lost relatives anymore. In fact, we were the only two here today.

I smiled back, faintly.

What would her expression be like, I wondered, if, instead of my grey dress and sweater, I had been wearing my night time clothes, my face plastered white and my lips red? What would Hiroshi himself think, even if he did miraculously appear? To discover that his big sister was nothing now but a shameless American butterfly?

It had been weeks since my last trip here, and I felt dreadfully guilty for neglecting my duty to him. They were bringing up children's bodies from the tunnels every morning now, desperately thin and blistered with smallpox. That afternoon, I'd taken his photograph around the main railway stations, holding it up in the faces of the filthy men and women. They squinted for a moment, then sucked their rotten gums before shaking their heads. As I looked at them all, stretched out on their mats across the ticket hall, I felt completely hopeless. Perhaps I should simply accept the fact that he was gone.

I walked back into the station to take the train back to Shinagawa. A swarm of filthy brats were clamouring around the passengers disembarking onto one of the long-distance platforms. They slipped their little hands into the travellers' coat pockets as they took down their suitcases, while others grubbed about on the floor like insects, clutching for the cigarette butts that the waiting passengers dropped.

My heart froze. There, right in the middle, I could see Hiroshi. I started to run, my heels skidding on the marble floor.

“Hiroshi!” I screamed. “Hiroshi-kun!”

I thrust my way onto the platform, barging through the crowd of passengers. When I finally reached him, he was scrabbling around someone's feet. I seized his arm, rubbing the dirt from his face with my handkerchief.

The boy shook me off, swearing horribly in a strange voice. As I looked at his face, I realized that it wasn't Hiroshi at all. The boy squinted at me as I tried to catch my breath.

“Miss?” he spat, turning. “You can wipe this if you want.”

He was holding his penis in his filthy hand, a gleeful expression on his face. I gasped, spun on my heel, and hurried away as fast as I could.

~ ~ ~

When I reached our alley, I paused by the door of our tenement shack. There was a radio playing inside — a sentimental children's song that I hadn't heard for years. In fact, I could last remember hearing it with Hiroshi and my mother, at the old merry-go-round in Hanayashiki Park, one Sunday on my monthly day off from the factory.

Come, come, come and see

Furry friends beneath the tree

In the autumn moonlight

At Shojo-ji Temple!

The song brought back all sorts of memories. I stood there in the alley for a moment, lost in thought.

I slid open the door. Michiko was sitting at the table with her ear close to the speaker of an ornate radio. She had a look of intense concentration on her face.

“Michiko!” I hissed, but she waved an urgent hand to the floor beside her and gestured at me to be quiet. The song carried on. But though the tune was familiar, I realized that the words were quite different. In fact, they were in English.

Come, come everybody

“How do you do?” and “How are you?”

Won't you have some candy?

One, and two, and three four five
. . .

Michiko was trying to mouth along to the words.

Let's all sing a happy song

Tra-la, la la la!

She looked up at me in glee.

“I'm learning English!” she whispered excitedly.

A man's voice began to speak from the radio and she turned back with what she clearly thought was a studious expression, which mainly involved frowning and nodding at everything the man said.

Another one of Michiko's crazes
! I thought, as I sat down on the other side of the table. But, as I listened, the programme did seem quite fun. The presenter's name was “Uncle,” and it was the same man who had translated the Emperor's speech into common language back in the summer. Now, it seemed, he was going to teach the Japanese people how to speak English.

Uncle was very kind. He explained that the lessons wouldn't be like school, in fact, they would be more like us playing a game together through the radio. We sat there, fascinated, and after a while, even I tried to repeat some of the English words back to him. I found myself smiling and nodding as the theme song came on at the end. The new words were already standing in for the old ones in my memory.

“Satsuko!” Michiko exclaimed, after the programme had ended. “We can listen to this and become proper English speakers. Just imagine.”

We already knew some English, of course, from our dealings with the Americans, but I had a feeling that none of it was especially suitable for polite company.

“‘How are you? How do you do?'” Michiko said, imitating Uncle's manly voice. Suddenly, in a fit of laughter, she leaped up, took my hands in hers, and began to spin me around.

“‘How are you? How do you do?'” she sang, over and over.

Finally she let go of my hands and sighed. “Just think, Satsuko,” she mused, as she poured water into the teakettle. “Now we really will be ‘New Women of Japan.'”

I suddenly remembered what I had wanted to ask her. “The radio, Michiko. Where did you get it from? Surely, you didn't buy it yourself?”

“Ah! The radio,” she said. “It is handsome, isn't it?”

“Yes,” I said. “It certainly is. I wonder where it could have possibly come from?”

“It was a present,” she replied. “Isn't it lovely?”

“Another present, Michiko? Anyone would think you had a rich old man off somewhere!”

But she just smiled mysteriously, as if she hadn't heard, and then poured out the tea, still humming away to herself: “How are you? How do you do?”

~ ~ ~

The afternoon was gloomy as I walked through the ruins of Asakusa. I had promised myself that I would visit the site of our old home, to light some incense for my parents, and for Hiroshi, now that I'd decided that he was gone.

The white-haired American officer had taken Michiko off for the day. The night before, she'd joined the band on the stage, a red plastic rose in her hair. She'd smiled into the piano player's eyes, then sung into the silver microphone in her birdlike voice, pausing every now and then to throw out little expressions that she'd learned from Uncle English. The officer sat below her, his legs spread wide, laughing and clapping along.

Empty brick shells were all that were left of the trinket stalls along Nakamise arcade. A cat scuttled along the low, broken walls to escape the streaks of rain. At the end of the arcade, the Senso Temple had more or less vanished. All that was left was a big gravel precinct, charred stumps of the ginkgo trees and craters full of muddy water, crinkling in the drizzle. I shook my head sadly as I turned to walk toward Umamichi Street.

How dismal it all was now!
I thought. Even when I'd been a girl, there'd been
kaminari-okoshi
sweets and bear paw charms. Fortune tellers, jazz dancers, and troupes of actors; the overhanging stalls painted with bright scenes from the kabuki, selling wood prints and postcards and wind-up toys. Pots billowing with fragrant steam and the mouth-watering smells from the
yakitori
sellers as they brushed their smoking skewers with delicious sauces, the serving girls running between the tables, the oil lanterns bathing the street with a soft, rosy glow.

The war had sucked all of the colour away. All that were left now were hovels of rotten planks and sagging tarpaulin, the streets all churned to mud.

I finally found the square cistern in the middle of our alley. But I couldn't make out the site of our home anymore. Eventually, I found a burned patch a little way on, which I thought must be about right, and I wedged my sticks of incense into the black mud. It took me a whole box of matches to get them lit and water dripped down my neck as I stood up to say a prayer.

The sky seemed to turn several shades darker. All of a sudden, the rain began to hurtle against my umbrella, and I had the intense feeling that I wasn't welcome there. It was if my mother and father were standing behind me, ashamed and angry, hissing at me to go away. The impression grew so vivid that I became quite frightened. I hitched up my skirt and hurried away down the alley, stopping only to glance back at the incense sticks, still smoldering in the rain.

The tram was packed on the way back home, the windows misted with grimy condensation. An ex-soldier was squashed up against me, a short man of about forty. The brim of his army cap poked into my nose. I could tell by the dirt on his neck and the sour smell that he hadn't washed for quite some time. I closed my eyes and hoped that Michiko would be there by the time I got back.

A cold hand grasped me between the legs and I froze. The man in the cap was staring at my shoulder, his lips writhing beneath his dirty moustache. His hand clasped me firmly and squeezed and I shut my eyes, burning with shame. Tears welled up in my throat as his fingers gripped harder.

I suddenly opened my eyes again.
What right did he have to do this?
I thought.
Did he think he could touch me without paying? Who did he think he was?

I jerked my shoulder violently into his face.

“Pervert!” I shrieked, “You filthy pervert! You think you can just grab anyone you want?”

The passengers jostled around us, happy for the diversion on such a rotten day.

“Who do you think you are?” I said. “Are you such a hero? You couldn't even win the war. You should be ashamed of yourself!”

The man stared blankly at the floor. His lips fluttered and, for a moment, I didn't know whether I felt hatred or pity. The tram shuddered to a halt, and I elbowed my way through the crowd and jumped down into the wet street. As the tram clanked off, the passengers stared at me through little rubbed windows in the condensation.

I realized I had left my umbrella on the tram in all the confusion, so I was quite soaked by the time I got home. When I arrived, the house was cold. Michiko was nowhere to be seen.

I let out a sob. I took the bottle of whisky from the cupboard and poured myself a cup. The fiery liquor soothed my stomach, and I sat on the floor, stock still, listening to the rain as it thrashed against the roof.

Michiko was probably off at some expensive restaurant or inn with her rich new lover, I thought. I started to feel quite sorry for myself and I poured myself another large cup of whisky. Then, though I tried to resist, my thoughts drifted to Osamu. I remembered the time he'd taken me to a comic show at the Café D'Asakusa, how the students had howled with laughter. I remembered the look of disbelief on his face the day he had received his call-up papers. He'd trembled and stammered — his mother should have applied for exemption, he said; he was an only son after all. I remembered his thin, muscular body in the back room of the Victory Hotel, after he'd come to our house on the night of his leaving ceremony. I wished now that I had let him do what he had wanted much earlier. I'd been with so many others since then, after all. If I had given in to him sooner, I would have those times to remember now as well, not just that solitary night, when he'd shuddered with joy once before falling asleep next to me. The next day, we'd waved them all off at the station. The soldiers wearing their thousand-stitch belts, sewn with good luck tokens, wrapped tight around their bellies. His mother refusing to look at me, and the women from the Defence Association cheering as the train pulled away:
Congratulations on being called to the Front!

I wondered if memories were like precious porcelain that should only be brought out on special occasions; whether they were like fruits that lost their lustre if they spent too long in the sun. If that was the case, I told myself, I would have to be careful how often I thought of Osamu now. Or of my parents; or Hiroshi, for that matter. I didn't want my memories of them to shrivel away like withered flowers. They were the only thing I had left of them now, after all. Except the charred scrap of my mother's kimono. And the teakettle, of course . . . 

The door slid open and Michiko came crashing in. She tumbled amongst the pots and pans, making a terrible racket. Then she started to sing so loudly that I was terrified she would wake the neighbours.

“Michiko,” I hissed, “be quiet!”

She stumbled toward me.

“Satsuko,” she wailed. “Satsuko, help me. I'm so drunk!”

She slumped down onto the floor and clasped me around the neck, giggling.

“He's in love with me!” she shouted. “He wants me to be his only one!”

I clamped my hand over her mouth. I was sure I didn't want to hear her secrets, least of all in the middle of the night. Viciously, she bit my finger and burst into laughter. Then she slid over, waving her head from side to side.

Suddenly, she sat bolt upright and made an odd sound. She rushed over to the door and heaved it open. The she fell onto her hands and knees, and retched in the alley outside.

~ ~ ~

The next morning, when I awoke, Michiko was already up. She was wearing a pale green dress, standing over the stove, from which a delicious smell was rising.