Radiance (17 page)

“Why do you care so much about that old fox shrine?” Yoshiko said.

“I like to pray for the souls of the dead,” she told her aunt, to see if she would be frightened.

“Better pray for yourself,” Yoshiko answered tartly. “You’re the one who stole my lipstick. Everyone knows.”

“Speak about what you remember.”

“I remember so much.”

“Tell me about the bombing.”

All right, she thinks. All right. She looks towards the window and sees Mama pinching her lips. She knows Keiko is about to do something bad, and she holds her breath, waiting.

August is easy to remember.

As summer thickened around them, they sat on the veranda, the shape of the castle in the distance. Crickets buzzed like electricity in the garden wall. One night the rains poured down. But it is early morning now. August
6
.

“Come inside,” Keiko’s mother says.

“I am happy here.”

“I need your help.”

“Why?”

“You ask too many questions, Keiko-chan. Come now.”

Keiko goes sullenly.

She wears only her white undershirt and underpants. She has not dressed yet because she plans to tell her mother that she is sick, so that she will not have to go to school and yet again do the gruelling jobs schoolgirls have been allocated: the teachers give each of them a government-issued burlap bag, and send them to the town centre, where they have to fill the bags, again and again, with rubble from torn-down houses. They carry them to the middle of the roads and dump them, creating new mounds of rubble. These will act as windbreaks and firebreaks if the town is firebombed. Osaka has been firebombed. Tokyo has been firebombed.

“I am sick,” Keiko says to her mother.

She stands in her underwear, her skin goosebumped. Her mother puts down her needle and looks at Keiko closely.

“I need your help,” she says again. A needle with an eye too fine for her to thread. She is sewing the button onto her cotton blouse.

Keiko takes the thread and licks it, then tries to put it through the needle. She could do it easily, but if she is too quick, her eyesight as keen as ever, her mother will know she isn’t sick.

But she cannot help herself; she must please her mother. And so she licks the thread, and finds the tiny hole and threads it through.

Already on the Ota River, there are beggars along the shore digging for edible weeds. It is early, yet so hot a rash is appearing behind Keiko’s knees and beneath her mother’s watch strap.

“I am sorry you are sick,” Keiko’s mother says, for it is her belief that if she pretends to believe her daughter, her daughter will grow more truthful with time. Keiko knows that sometimes her mother visits the Inari shrine and asks this exact thing, shaking the wooden box that holds the
omikuji,
hoping for a shred of paper that will answer her prayers, then attaching it with the others to the pine tree, so that it rattles in the wind. You can hear these wishes of mothers as you cross the bridge.

“If you are well enough, I want to ask you to do something, Keiko. I want you to deliver your grandfather’s lunch to him when you go downtown with the other girls. He forgot it.”

“My stomach feels bloated. I’m dizzy, Mama. I think I may fall down.”

Mama sighs. “Then fetch me the lunch box from the kitchen and leave it on the foyer steps, so I don’t forget it. I will take it to him myself. We cannot have your grandfather go hungry all day.”

Keiko walks slowly down the hall. She is remembering the conversation she heard the day before: her grandfather talking to Yoshiko in the garden. Yoshiko said she could not bear the heat. She said it in a whining way; it was so like her to whine of heat when people were dying in the war, and Keiko knew that her grandfather thought so too, that Yoshiko’s whining would make him think of his son, Keiko’s father, dead in Manchukuo. Keiko strained her ears to hear Ojii-chan’s reply.

“It is not so hot. Already one can feel the edge of winter, as the poem says.” Keiko did not know which poem and she was sure Aunt Yoshiko didn’t know either.

“Poems can indeed be fanciful,” Yoshiko exclaimed. “But in truth the air is so hot, it feels as though it could catch fire.”

“Yes, but underneath I smell the snow.” Keiko imagines him raising his nose and sniffing.

More than once Keiko has heard Yoshiko telling Taro that Ojii-chan makes up stories and then ends up believing them himself. Keiko hates her for this, and so this morning walking along the quiet hallway in her underwear, Keiko sniffs for the snow. Later, when Grandfather returns from the town, she will tell him that she, too, has a good nose for winter. He will like that, especially as she is the one who gets heat rashes, not Yoshiko.

Last night her mother rubbed a pink ointment on Keiko’s skin. It was cool, like milk. She had Keiko stand in the doorway to the garden, where the breeze was strongest, then she dabbed the lotion all over her skin with a kerchief. Keiko was not allowed to wriggle or drops would stain the tatami mat.

But now her mother is expecting Keiko to put the lunch box by the door, and then Mama will go downtown with it and find Ojii-chan and give him his forgotten meal. Keiko would have liked to be the one that handed it to him. Still, the lie was worth it. Keiko hates clearing rubble with the other schoolchildren. Perhaps she will tell her mother she is sick tomorrow too.

This is why her mother calls her Kitsune-chan, little fox child: it is the slyness in her. Also because she cried so much as a baby, nothing could soothe her. Keiko’s mother said her real child must have been stolen away and replaced by a fox baby, and that was why Keiko had colic and couldn’t sleep. Once Keiko asked her if this was really true, and Mama held her for a long time, and said of course not; but this morning, when Keiko lied about feeling dizzy, she saw the corners of her mother’s lips bend in disapproval, as though her daughter were that fox child after all.

Now they have started—the crickets beside the stone wall that separates her grandfather’s large garden from Takahura-san’s. They are loud in the morning, singing
kana-kana-kana
just
before the sun hits the wall. As soon as it slashes across the stone, they are silenced. But this is their hour now. Keiko slides open the hall screen, listening. She can hear tree frogs too, and her mother moving in their sleeping room, sliding open the cupboard where she stores their mattress.

If Grandfather were at home right now, he would have a story about why the crickets stop singing when sun hits the stones. He explains things, and not the way Taro explains things, painstakingly, until they are all dried out, and not the way Yoshiko explains, as though Keiko is in her way. Ojii-chan answers all her questions as though they are the most important questions anyone could think of: the real questions that sit in the shadows in the hall, and under the garden wall.

Perhaps she will be punished for her lie after all: her skin has started to really itch, and her head is filling with the sound of the crickets, rubbing their legs together. Her skin may itch all day long, and by the end of the day it will be as though Keiko is walking outside herself, looking at the girl with the patches of roughened skin. Then her mother will know she was really sick, and she will be sorry for doubting her. That will show them.

Keiko pads in her underwear and undershirt down the three steps to the kitchen. “Do make sure the hibachi is out,” Yoshiko said this morning. “Yesterday you left for school and did not check, and the house could have burnt down. Luckily, your mother returned early and noticed. She does not need these extra worries.” Yes, it is out. She picks up the black lacquered bento box sitting on the table in front of the hibachi. Returning to the hallway, which is suffused in soft light, she sees the low cupboard where the medicines are kept. She reaches in and brings out the bottle of pink lotion and pours it into her palm, rubbing it behind her knees. Then she reaches deep into the cupboard. Far at the back she finds a small wooden box: Burns Goldenloaf Cheese, the box says, in
English. There is a picture of a Dutch girl on the side of the box, which is neatly made, with dovetailed joints at the corners. This is where Keiko keeps the things she takes from Yoshiko, small things that her aunt will want later. Not being able to find these things is bound to bother Yoshiko immensely, and perhaps even make her lose her mind. So far Keiko has her comb, and the blue cotton sash of
her yukata,
and her cherry-red lipstick. Yoshiko asked Keiko pointedly about the lipstick, but Keiko looked shocked: “Yoshiko-san,” she said. “You know I am not allowed to wear lipstick.”

“You might have taken it anyway.”

“Grandfather says that if many things go missing, evil spirits are taking them.”

Keiko was pleased to see that Yoshiko looked alarmed. “You tell too many silly stories, Keiko,” she said.

Now Keiko slides the Goldenloaf Cheese box to the back corner of the cupboard, pulls the medicine bag into its place, then slides the door closed. A final time she peeks into the kitchen and checks the hibachi. Everyone is afraid of fire. The enemies drop gasoline bombs because they know that Japanese cities are made of wood. “We live in a matchbox,” Yoshiko said about Grandfather’s house. “We are waiting to die.”

Keiko hates her.

In fact, she has put a curse on Yoshiko. It wasn’t hard—you do it by making a bad wish while rubbing something that belongs to the hated person. Keiko used Yoshiko’s lipstick. She didn’t wish for her to die; she was afraid to do that. Instead, she wished for her to break out in the rash that plagued Keiko, and also, while she was at it, she wished for Yoshiko to become ugly.

Dr. Carney wrote down the words
Yoshiko’s face,
then glanced up at Keiko, lying in the bed.

“Does this issue feel important to you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Later her face wasn’t burnt. But yours was.”

That was true.

“As well, if you had told the truth, and gone downtown to clear rubble, and deliver your grandfather’s lunch box, you would have died that day. You see that, don’t you? Your dishonesty saved you.”

She muttered something and Dr. Carney asked her to speak up. Her face was to the window. To encourage her to focus on the story, he rose and pulled down the blinds.

When she spoke, this is what she said:

Yako. Genko. Shakko.

“What is that?”

“Kinds of foxes. My grandfather knew them all.”

“Ah.”

“And then there are the
reiko.”

“What are those?”

“Ghost foxes.”

“And what else?”

“Bakemono.”

“Explain.”

“He said they were real. Foxes that could turn into women. It happened all the time.”

“Real?”

“Real.”

This was funny for some reason, and they both laughed. “Have you met any foxes?” Dr. Carney asked.

A pause. She turned her face to the closed blinds.

“What are you thinking now?”

“I’m resting.”

Keiko sits down in the foyer on the wooden step, cool against her bare legs, the bento box on her lap. She is still thinking about what
Yoshiko said: they do live in a matchbox. The floor is made of stone in the foyer, but the floors in the rest of the house are wood, covered in tatami matting. The walls are wood, covered in screens of fine paper, and the heavy doors leading into the front garden are made of the cypress from the Aomori Prefecture. They are Ojii-chan’s pride and joy, with their striping in the grain that looks like women’s hair. Sometimes he stands by the doors, absentmindedly fingering the grain, taking pride in them with his fingertips. You might think that since his son’s death he would stop caring about the grain of his doors, or about the depth of the moss in the garden, which is yellow now from lack of water, but which before the war was far deeper than Mr. Takahura’s, but Grandfather cares more now, or talks about these things more, as though his son’s death has made him want to fill his mind with the things he owns. It would be easy to hate him because of this. If it were Yoshiko being this way, Keiko would hate her. But instead, Keiko wishes that she could turn her grandfather’s moss green, fill it until it sponged out, full of beads of water. But that would take a miracle; in Hiroshima right now, there is not enough fresh water for the people, let alone animals or plants.

Why did he forget his lunch box? She shakes it. He must have been sitting where Keiko is now sitting, lost in thought, putting on his shoes, not noticing that he didn’t have the lunch box beside him. Thinking about his son, perhaps, lost in grief. After his shoes were on he must have stood, and opened the doors, taking pleasure in the solidity of the wood, then closed the doors behind him. Keiko opens the box and looks inside. Three rice balls, some pickled cabbage and radish, and a small piece of last night’s eel. It is a bad lunch, but better by far than anything Keiko’s mother or Yoshiko pack for themselves, or for her. War rations. Once, Keiko complained to her mother and she went to the cupboard and slid it open. “Make meat appear,” she said, “and I’ll pack your lunch
full of it.” Keiko was ashamed to have complained. But even now she is hungry.

Briefly Keiko imagines taking her grandfather’s lunch to him. She could tell her mother she was well enough after all and get dressed quickly, then run to the bus stop beside the bridge, take the next bus downtown. She imagines him looking up, hot and hungry, a shovel in his hand, as she clambers over the firebreak, the lacquered box shining in her hand. He smiles—not the open-mouthed smile he used to use with her father, but a smile with closed lips, as though he were smiling and sad at the same time. He thanks her formally, because other men are nearby, some of whom may not have granddaughters who are so devoted. He does not wish to shame them. But some of the other men whisper that she is Kitigawa-san’s granddaughter.
Look, she is only ten, but she has come all the way downtown on the bus, alone, to deliver his lunch.

The brass clock in the alcove strikes the hour. Eight is when the schoolgirls are supposed to gather in the playing field. After that they are given their shovels and burlap bags. Some of them, to impress the teachers, talk loudly about what they would do to defend their homes against attackers, how they would use their father’s swords, or sharpened bamboo poles, thrusting them through the hearts of the enemy. In Okinawa, the American soldiers picked up babies and threw them from the cliffs, this is what a girl told her. To be safe, Keiko came home from school and cut down a piece of bamboo, using her father’s knife, then sharpened herself a bamboo spear. Grandfather found her in the garden, and he was not happy, not because they might be attacked by Americans, but because she had cut down his twenty-year-old bamboo. He looked as though she had done it to hurt him, but not wanting her to see how upset he was, he went inside and closed the screen. Keiko could only stand there, holding her father’s pearl-covered knife in her hand.