The Street of a Thousand Blossoms (11 page)

Kenji began to pay closer attention to the life around him. He noticed that in the past few months, men who weren’t customers had been coming to the mask shop to see Yoshiwara. He knew they weren’t actors by their darting gazes, their soiled, thin cotton kimonos bought cheaply from small side-street shops off the
ginza
, the agitated movements of their hands. Mostly, they were abrupt and sullen, whispering to Yoshiwara and then leaving quickly.

“Who are they?” Kenji asked, the last time they’d come to the shop.

“Acquaintances,” Akira Yoshiwara answered, without looking up from his work.

“Not actors?”

Yoshiwara laughed. “No, not actors,” he said. “Other important characters in the theater of life. They’ve come to tell me that the
kempeitai
have been sending their military police to theater performances. If they see or hear something they don’t like, anything deemed unpatriotic, the show is stopped.” Yoshiwara shook his head. “They’ve been closing down more and more theaters.”

“But the Noh plays are centuries old! The stories are classics.”

“It makes no difference, the human condition doesn’t change. They can read something into anything, if they want to.”

Kenji nodded. So these men were agitators, the kind that he heard his
ojiichan
and his friends speak about at the bar.

“They make you unhappy,” Kenji said. He didn’t like the way they looked, their bleak, serious stares. After visits from these men, Kenji saw Yoshiwara turn quiet, returning to his masks, saying little the rest of the afternoon.

Yoshiwara’s gaze turned serious. “They’re art students. They remind me that there’s a world outside of this room,” he said, holding an unfinished mask in front of his face.

Kenji stared hard at him and asked, “Will you have to go fight soon?”

Yoshiwara lowered the mask. “It’s nothing you need to worry about.”

“But everyone is leaving.”

“I won’t.” Yoshiwara smiled.

Kenji continued. “But sensei, my
ojiichan
says everyone of age will be called up before this war ends.”

Yoshiwara rose from his stool. “Kenji, like the men you’ve asked me about, I don’t believe in this war.”

Kenji was stunned. He knew his old
ojiichan
wasn’t happy with the war, but he’d never heard younger people speak such words aloud. He didn’t understand. If it wasn’t the right thing to do, why was the entire Japanese nation behind it? He remembered Yoshiwara receiving a letter one day, which he quickly read and tore up, mumbling angrily to himself that he would never leave his shop. Kenji started to ask what was wrong, but Yoshiwara turned away and began working on a new mask, putting an end to the subject.

From then on, Kenji worried. What if someone from the neighborhood associations heard Yoshiwara and told the
kempeitai?
He would be accused of being a
hikokumin
and taken away to prison like Uncle Taiko’s nephew. Kenji never asked about the men again, and tried instead to concentrate on the masks.

Each evening before dinner he ran upstairs to his and Hiroshi’s room, slid the door closed, and studied from the book of masks Yoshiwara had given him. He heard Hiroshi and his
ojiichan
downstairs listening to a sumo match on the radio, his
obaachan
in the kitchen taking bowls down from the shelf. Since the Pacific war had started, fewer and fewer matches were being played, though the remaining bouts were broadcast with bravado. Kenji read on. Tomorrow there would be another set of questions from his sensei. He always tried to imagine what they would be ahead of time. “How many Noh plays have been written?” About two hundred and fifty, he answered in his head. “What are the five categories they’re grouped in?” Kenji was ready; they were God, man, woman, madness, and the demon. A roar of voices came from downstairs, cheers for Yokozuna Futabayama, who was still the undefeated champion. Even though Kenji didn’t pay much attention to the sport, he was happy to hear Hiroshi and his
ojiichan
find such pleasure amid the war. He turned from page to page with the greatest care, and marveled at the intricate drawings. He studied how the simple strokes of the chisel could add subtle frown lines to the forehead of a
Ko-omote
, a young girl’s mask, changing it to an older female, a
Zo-onna
mask. Each drawing was masterfully done, not one detail forgotten. He turned the page and read on. “The Kyogen masks are mostly demons and trickster animals, like the raccoon dog, used in plays that offer comic relief between the drama of two Noh plays …”

He stopped reading and dreamed of the first mask he would complete on his own—a
Ko-omote
, like the one Yoshiwara-sensei had taken him through step by step. Her simpler, smooth features would be less complicated. The greater depth would be left to the actor behind the mask to bring alive. Yoshiwara-sensei wanted him to know everything about Noh before he was allowed to make a mask. The more Kenji read, the more he felt the need to begin. But what if he wasn’t meant to be a mask artisan? It was one thing to want to do something, another to have the required skill. “A living thing,” he whispered to himself and closed his eyes. That was how the wood
felt in his hands, like something he was bringing to life. His hand closed around an imaginary chisel and he could feel it move through the wood in clean, confident strokes…

“Kenji-chan,” his
obaachan
called, breaking into his thoughts. “Come down to dinner!”

Kenji opened his eyes.
“Hai, obaachan,”
he answered, closing the book and tucking it carefully under his futon. The sharp stab of hunger returned. He heard the roar of his grandfather’s voice as Futabayama must have won yet another match, and followed it like happiness to the kitchen.

Each morning since the Pacific War began nine months ago, Fumiko Wada waited in long lines just to obtain a cup of rice, a bit of tofu. She stood with all the other women hoping this was the morning there would be more food for them to purchase with their ration coupons. Sometimes, an unexpected shipment of dried fish or seaweed came in and the women pushed forward like a violent wave, eager to purchase some before the box was empty. Such difficult times made Fumiko creative, tucking small pieces of salted fish or pickled vegetables into the middle of rice balls. She watched the faces of Yoshio and her grandsons at dinner as they bit into the small surprise. But over time, the rice balls became smaller and smaller with nothing in the middle but a bit of red bean. Soon, she stopped making the rice balls and put the meager scoops of rice into bowls, hoping it might appear more, or she made
omoyu
, a rice porridge, which consisted mainly of a watery soup.

Later, when there wasn’t any rice, sweet potatoes became their mainstay, or an occasional
kasutera
, a thin, loaf-sized sponge cake, made of sugar, eggs, and cake flour. It was always Yoshio’s favorite, and a luxury she brought home from her friend Ayako-san’s bakery. Through barter and trade, Ayako’s bakery stayed open and flourished. Long lines formed outside her bakery before dawn when the rich smells of baking bread and
kasutera
filled the neighborhood.
Ayako set aside a cake or two for her every week. In return, Fumiko took apart several kimonos and sewed them into
monpes
for Ayako and for her daughter, Mikiko. As the war progressed, women were ordered to wear the wide-legged pants and a top instead of kimonos for more mobility. Most women wore khaki or muted-colored
monpes
now. Any clothing that had overly bright colors or a sense of frivolous elegance was prohibited. She also stitched together several of the cotton padded head coverings they were supposed to wear in case of air raids as protection from falling debris. Fumiko had been an expert seamstress since she was young, and was happy to have a way to repay Ayako for her kindness.

By late October, the mornings grew colder. After hours of waiting in ration lines, Fumiko visited the bakery, where she would sit with Ayako over a cup of hot tea, just as she had for the past forty years. Even the war couldn’t change this ritual. Ayako felt the same and left Mikiko at the counter to sell whatever baked goods were left to the long line of women and children waiting.

Fumiko shook her head. “Maybe we should meet later,” she said, seeing the length of the line. She knew how tempers flared when food ran out—women stealing from each other, pushing and shoving to get a share of the food, taking whatever they could in order to feed their families. And she couldn’t blame them one bit.

“Don’t worry,” Ayako whispered. “Miki-chan knows how to gently turn them away when we run out of anything to sell.”

Fumiko watched Mikiko bow respectfully to the next woman in line then followed her friend to the small kitchen in the back. On the stove a pot of soup boiled. She smelled seaweed and the sweet scent of miso, and her stomach clenched. On the floor, Mikiko’s five-year-old son, Juzo, was playing with his metal trucks. When he saw Fumiko enter with his grandmother, he stood up and bowed low to her.

“Juzo, what a good boy you are.” Fumiko smiled. She bent down and touched his cheek. With all the bad in the world, there was this child before her, a spark of joy for her dearest friend, who had lost so
much in her life. Still, Ayako always saw the good in things. “Between us,” she often said, “we have three boys.”

Ayako Sugihara was Fumiko’s first and oldest friend in Yanaka. She had told her grandsons they had met the moment she stepped off the train in Yanaka from Hakodate, newly married to Yoshio. “Ayako was standing on the platform, as if she were waiting for me,” Fumiko remembered. “Actually, she was waiting for her new sister-in-law, whom she’d never met, and had mistaken me for her. You can imagine how surprised I was to have this young woman bowing to me with such respect. I bowed back low and we’ve been great friends ever since.”

“Where was her sister-in-law?” Hiroshi asked.

Fumiko smiled. “Ayako later found her. But they’ve never gotten along well. I was the lucky one. I was the first one to receive her friendship. I don’t think my life here would mean so much without it.”

But the boys had already lost interest.

Besides, Fumiko knew that the strength of her friendship with Ayako was based on things she couldn’t tell her grandsons. She found Ayako a remarkable woman, to have survived the deaths of two husbands, along with their shared pain of each having lost a child. She always believed the gods had them meet for a reason. While both of Ayako’s husbands died before her, it was their mutual understanding and grief that came from the death of their children that bonded their hearts and spirits.

A year before Yoshio and Fumiko arrived in Tokyo, Ayako had come to Yanaka from a small village near Kobe to marry. By the age of twenty-four she was already a widow, and the arranged marriage with Masaru the baker was to be her second. While her family rejoiced that her fortune had changed, that Ayako would have another chance at love and a family, she felt numb to everything and everyone. Ayako’s child with her first husband, Kyoshi—a son—had been stillborn. After his death and her marriage to Masaru, six years went by and she remained barren. They had long given up on having children when Mikiko was conceived.