The Street of a Thousand Blossoms (10 page)

“I don’t think he likes women,” Mako leaned over and whispered to Hiroshi.

“How would you know?” Hiroshi stifled a laugh.

“Look at the way he moves, dragging that foot behind him, swinging his hips from side to side.”

Hiroshi waited until Hirano-sensei turned around again. “You don’t need two good feet to like women,” he whispered back.

“Just as long as something else down
there
works,” Mako said, laughing.

Hiroshi shook his head at Mako and smiled. He hadn’t paid much attention in the classroom since the war began. After a morning assembly, their days were filled with fire drills and marching in formation. His sensei’s fervor for the war was carried over to their assignments of writing new slogans for each campaign. Their classroom walls were lined with phrases such as “Until victory is achieved, deny one’s self” or “The invincible imperial forces will walk the path of victory.” Most of the students made fun of Hirano-sensei behind his back, but Hiroshi understood how ashamed he must feel, teaching among women, unable to fight for his country. No wonder Hirano-sensei couldn’t stop talking about the war; living his nation’s victories made them his, if only through words.

As was his habit, forty-year-old Sho Tanaka rose early, careful not to wake his wife, Noriko, as he slipped quietly through the house. Down the hall, his daughters, five-year-old Aki and eight-year-old Haru, still slept. Not until he slid shut the door to their living quarters and walked across the courtyard did he resume his regular stride. His tight muscles awakened as he quickened his step, and he remembered how it felt to work his body beyond endurance. He breathed in the mildness of the early June morning.

Sometimes, in the thirty feet from his house to the sumo stable, he could almost make himself believe that the war hadn’t changed anything. But when he entered the stable through the side door, he found the building eerily quiet. Six months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, most sumo stables had closed. The fifteen- and sixteen-year-old boys were sent to work in munitions and aircraft factories, and most of the low-level
rikishi
over eighteen were drafted to fight for their emperor. But Yokozuna Futabayama was still the reigning champion, and with only a handful of top-ranked wrestlers left, including Kitoyama, the Katsuyama-beya hadn’t been completely shut down.
And with Kitoyama’s continual victories came the assurance that he wouldn’t be called to fight.

Now, Sho Tanaka’s main concern was Noriko and the girls, and keeping their lives as close to normal as he could. He had always dreamed of one day telling his own sons of the honor and greatness that came from sumo. Instead, Noriko had borne him two daughters, Haru and Aki, whose names meant “spring” and “fall”; and far from being discontent, he loved his daughters for their beauty and the lightness of their movements, so different from the sturdy rowdiness of the boys he worked with every day. It was true that at first they hadn’t been the sons he had wished for, but he came to treasure them more.

Tanaka slid open the door to the now silent
keikoba
and stepped onto the dirt floor of the training area. It was already six in the morning, late by training standards. Ordinarily, it would have been a flurry of activity. The youngest and lowest-ranked wrestlers, wearing their dark-colored canvas
mawashi
belts, would already have been exercising for an hour and a half. Each boy came to the stable as young as thirteen with the unrealistic dream of becoming a
yokozuna
, but only a minuscule percentage of
sumotori
ever reached the status of grand champion. Most would never even reach the halfway mark, that of the Juryo Division, which meant they would finally graduate from the apprentice stage and be considered
sekitori
, or professional wrestlers, who received a monthly salary from the sumo association. Still, Tanaka hoped to provide the inspiration to make them work harder. By eight o’clock in the morning, the higher-ranked wrestlers in their white
mawashi
belts would enter the
keikoba
for practice.

Tanaka was careful not to disturb the
dohyo
, outlined in white. Many of the
rikishi
were just boys when they arrived at the stable, their first time away from home, just as he had been so many years ago. If he closed his eyes, he could conjure up the activity that once flourished every morning in the now quiet room—the smack of flesh against flesh, the low grunts of the
rikishi
at their morning stretches,
and the sound of his irritated voice when a boy moved without thinking. “Not just your body. All your senses must be alert to your opponent. No move should ever be wasted!” Tanaka remembered the stinging blows of his own coach’s bamboo stick across his back and legs when he was a young
rikishi
. No mistake went unrewarded, leaving a raised welt for days. As
oyakata
, he refused to beat his
rikishi
, hoping their pride and desire to win would be enough, knowing that sometimes it wasn’t. Tanaka shook his head, remembering. It was a shame about the Matsumoto boy. Hiroshi—Matsuda-san’s protégé—whom he was finally persuaded to visit at the school, never had the chance to enter the stable because of the war. His talent and speed were evident, and there was something about the lightness with which the boy moved that reminded Tanaka of all the best wrestlers. It didn’t happen often; not once in the past few years had he felt in his bones that a boy’s raw talent could be shaped into a champion.

“Otosan,”
a small voice rang out.

Tanaka turned to see his younger daughter, Aki, standing in the doorway. “What are you doing up so early, Aki-chan?”

“I heard you get up,” she said.

He smiled and bent to pick her up. His older daughter, Haru, always more independent, was past the age of wanting to be carried. He was amazed at how light and fragile Aki felt in his arms, how soft and delicate her pale skin was against his fingers. She was the child they almost lost, sickly and small as a baby; twice she had soaring temperatures that made her skin turn a rosy pink, burning up from within. She was still so tiny. They held vigil at the hospital, and he and Noriko lit incense and prayed to the gods at a small temple down the street. Day and night, the murmuring chants had filled him with a heavy grief. Then days later, her fever broke and Aki had been healthy ever since, though always frail in his eyes. Even now, he couldn’t smell the pungent, sweet incense or hear the low rumble of chanting without a shiver passing through his body.

“Where are the big boys?” she whispered into his ear, then pulled away and cupped her small palms against the scratchy black stubble on his cheeks.

“They’ve gone for a little while.”

“Will they be back?” she asked.

The
rikishi
treated his family with the greatest respect, and Noriko had made a special effort to get to know each boy when he entered the stable. To Tanaka, sumo was more than sport and years of hard training. Sumo was family. Sumo was history. Sumo was community. That was what Tanaka missed most now.

“Hai,”
he whispered back in her ear. “They’ll be back.”

Since the Pacific War began, Kenji’s world had grown frenzied. At school, he studied ethics and composition, listened to the increasing fervor of his teachers’ lectures on militarism and nationalism, marched in step to martial music during physical education, and then hurried after school down the alleyways, his heart racing for fear of reaching the mask shop and finding it deserted. What if Akira Yoshiwara were no longer there? What if he’d been called up to fight, as so many of the younger men had already been?

The once quiet streets of Yanaka were now filled with tumult, from the kempeitai-organized rallies, to the slogans of national devotion plastered on walls—Kenji’s favorite being “Luxury is the enemy.” He thought America was. Women cheered at train stations as men left for the front, only to turn to tears once the train was out of sight. Newspapers and magazines were filled with victory reports. The capture of Singapore and Bali by the invincible imperial forces blared constantly from radios. A manic feeling seemed to speed the very pulse of the town.

Kenji stopped at the door of the
sembei
rice cracker store. Even Fukushima-san, the owner, who appeared much too old to fight, had been drafted. Women from the neighborhood associations were visiting his shop this afternoon, congratulating him on being able to serve his nation, and leaving him small sums of farewell money. Kenji watched as Fukushima bowed low, saying to them, “I am truly the fortunate one, to serve our emperor and country.”

The only place Kenji heard any conflicting views about the war was at the corner bar with his
ojiichan
and his friends. As the men huddled around the battered wooden table where they had met for thirty years, there was little room for secrets. His grandfather’s brother had been killed years ago at Mukden, and Kenji could see that his
ojiichan
disapproved of what his old friend Tokuda-san was saying.

“So, Yoshio, you don’t agree this war will make Japan a world power?” Tokuda-san ran his hand through his gray hair and sat back on the wooden stool.

His grandfather smiled and looked right at his old friend, his cloudy eyes revealing nothing. “It saddens me to think that war must be the means to power,” he answered.

“Would you rather we sit back and allow America and all the other Western nations to strangle our culture, and that of our neighbors, just as they’ve done for centuries?”

Kenji listened as their talk turned hard and serious, watched his
ojiichan
’s face grow stern, as it did when he and Hiroshi were bad. The set stare reminded him of one of Akira Yoshiwara’s masks.

“Is it worth the lives of so many?” his grandfather asked, his voice low.

Kenji watched Tokuda-san lean forward, his face inches away from his grandfather’s. “It’s what our divine emperor believes, and what we as a nation must also believe. Yoshio, you’re beginning to sound like one of those young
hikokumin.”

Kenji held his breath. He didn’t know how his
ojiichan
would react to being called a traitor. He thought Tokuda-san a stupid, insensitive old man. It was widely known that the son of Uncle Taiko’s cousin, the painter Wadao Miyami, had refused to paint propaganda art for the war effort and was imprisoned as a traitor. A month ago, the
kempeitai
came for him in the middle of the night and he remained in prison, awaiting trial.

Then Uncle Taiko cleared his throat and said, “All this talk is making me thirsty. It’s my turn to buy.”

“There’s nothing left to buy, no rice for sake,” Tokuda-san then said, his voice lighter. “Isn’t that right, Yoshio?”

Kenji saw his grandfather’s slow smile as he took a breath and released it. “No, there’s very little left.”

By late fall, as the war intensified, the government allowed some theaters and movie houses to stay open, as long as they showed movies made by the Home Ministry. His
ojiichan
called them propaganda films, false illusions of what was really happening. Kenji asked him what he meant, but his
obaachan
shook her head and answered, “Don’t listen to everything your
ojiichan
says. He has a mind of his own.” Yes, Kenji thought, with admiration at his singular strength, his
ojiichan
never let anyone sway his thoughts. He spoke his mind at the bar; he built the wooden watchtower with his own hands, and bravely faced the loss of his sight.