The Street of a Thousand Blossoms (12 page)

Now, since the start of the Pacific War, Ayako spoke more of Kyoshi, who had been killed fighting at Mukden. His death, she told Fumiko, seemed like another life. “I was another person, just a girl. I don’t know if he’ll recognize me in the other world now,” she said, pouring another cup of tea for Fumiko. “How will he know it’s me looking so old?” Ayako asked, and then pulled out a worn sepia photo of her first husband, a thin, good-looking young man.

“I’d like to believe that we’ll all meet again, that we’ll see each other as we did during our best times,” Fumiko said, sipping her tea.

“He didn’t want to go,” Ayako continued. “We were married less than a year when he was called to serve in the army. I remember he said to me, ‘Aya-chan, I’m not a soldier; I’m a husband, a farmer. I want you always to remember me in that way.’ I thought it would only invite bad spirits for Kyoshi to speak like that and I quickly made him stop. But it was too late. All these years, I have honored his wish. I will always remember him as my husband and a farmer.”

Fumiko cleared her throat. She couldn’t imagine what it would have been like to lose Yoshio in Mukden. “You have had the good fortune to have a family, to have such a fine daughter in Mikiko.”

“Ah yes, but like a foolish old woman, I still think about the family I might have had with Kyoshi,” Ayako said. “And what of Masaru, will he be waiting for me in the other world, also?”

Fumiko looked up and smiled but didn’t have an answer for her friend. She never thought what it might be like for Ayako to have both of her husbands waiting for her in the other world. Would they know each other? Would they be standing side by side waiting for her?

Masaru was a mild-mannered man whose talent for baking cream cakes was known throughout Yanaka and beyond. He was already forty when they married, and had died in 1938, at the age of sixty-four. Since then, Ayako had run the bakery with her daughter, whose husband had left for the front two months ago. Mikiko and Juzo were the joy of her friend’s life. Together, mother and daughter baked
kasutera
three times a week, or until they could no longer get enough sugar and eggs to continue.

Ayako took down bowls from the shelf above the sink. “Have some soup.”

Fumiko shook her head. “No, it’s for your lunch.”

“There’s more than enough.”

She watched her friend ladle the soup into three bowls and place one in front of her. For a moment, Fumiko closed her eyes and wished she could share this with Yoshio and the boys. It felt somehow a betrayal that she should savor it when they had none. If she could pour it into her pocket and take it home with her, she would.

Then, as if Ayako knew what she was thinking, she said, “Yoshio and the boys will be fine. You need to keep up your strength to help care for them.”

Fumiko smiled, sipped the fragrant soup, and felt the salty warmth slip down her throat. As a child, she had disliked soup. Her mother used to tell her how the broth held all the ingredients to make one strong in body and spirit. Fumiko would slowly sip her soup as her mother told her the story of the woman who was so poor she collected stones off the Izu peninsula in order to make soup for her family. She would boil the stones in water for hours, and, magically, each night her family filled their stomachs with a soup tasting of salted fish and seaweed, or miso, or red bean—each night it would be different, yet no less filling. Fumiko had loved that story and couldn’t wait to drink her soup each night afterward.

“Besides,” Ayako said, breaking into her thoughts. “I have a little something else for you to take home.” She opened a cabinet and pulled out a package wrapped in thin brown paper. “I’ve saved the last
kasutera
for you,” she said, smiling.

Fumiko put down her bowl, and then, like Juzo, she stood up and bowed very low to her friend.

At dinner that night, Fumiko smiled sadly and said, “I’m afraid this will be the last of the
kasutera
. Ayako can’t get any more fresh eggs, not even through the black market. She tried to bake with powdered
eggs from Shanghai but the
kasutera
didn’t taste the same. She hopes to start baking bread for sandwiches starting next week.”

“Ayako will always find a way to stay in business,” Yoshio said. “She has the strength of ten.”

Fumiko nodded. She watched as they all ate their
kasutera
slowly, relishing each bite. Yoshio looked up and caught her eye, his smile a little sad as he swallowed his last bite of cake.

Every day after school, Hiroshi walked home through the Yanaka
ginza
. Even before he reached the Kyo-ou-ji temple, he heard the bells, the low moans of chanting that hummed through the neighborhood, and breathed in the sharp sting of incense. A funeral was being held. Since the war began, steady streams of the dead were returned to families in Yanaka. Hiroshi saw his
obaachan
shake her head and lament all the spirits of the missing that would never find their way back to their loved ones.
“Obake,”
she whispered. Ghosts. The first person killed from Yanaka whom Hiroshi knew was the sixth-grade teacher’s husband. He remembered the simple coffin draped with the Japanese flag that came off the train, the same red sun that blazed on the sash across his chest as he stood on the auditorium stage just before he left for the war. Whereas it seemed to glow with heat as he stood before the crowd to say goodbye, the same red sun now hid itself in shadows as the coffin was carried into the station.

While most of the able-bodied men had been drafted, women of all ages filled the streets. The poor became poorer and begged on the streets for scraps of food. Women stood on corners asking other women for stitches to be added to a family member’s
sen’ninbari
, their thousand-stitch belts made from long pieces of woven cloth. His
obaachan
explained that grandmothers, wives, even small daughters rallied around the popular talisman, which was thought to protect
a soldier from harm. Each stitch embodied the woman who stitched it. When enough stitches were gathered, the cloth belts were distributed to troops to protect them from being killed. While the protective belt gave each soldier a renewed sense of courage, it also filled the women back home with the hope that their loved ones would return safely to them.

In the swarm of bodies standing outside the boarded-up Takahara dry-goods store, Hiroshi thought he saw Mariko and turned shyly away. He hadn’t seen her in months. Ever since the bombing of Pearl Harbor, she’d stopped practicing her cello out in the backyard. Just before the start of the Pacific War she’d been accepted into the Tokyo Symphony, and it was rumored that she was engaged to marry another member of the symphony, a viola player, until he had been called up to fight. When Hiroshi turned back to search the faces for hers again, she was gone. He remembered his
obaachan
saying that Mariko was one of the many single women working in factories to replace the men. He couldn’t imagine the same long, thin fingers that played the cello so beautifully sorting oily aircraft parts, or packing munitions in an assembly line.

Hiroshi stopped abruptly when he heard the yelling, though raised voices were common enough on the streets these days. All too often, voices rose with a frantic edge, and he could usually distinguish the degree of trouble by how loud the voices were. Across the road he saw two women waiting in line, fighting over a piece of dried squid. It fell to the ground as they clawed at each other and a third woman snatched it from under their noses and ran. He heard the thud of boots, the clink of the swords against their legs, before he heard the breathless shouts of “Stop now!” from the
kempeitai
, as the crowd quickly scattered. But the desperate women paid little attention. Hiroshi knew this would anger the military policemen and move them to cruelty as they roughly pulled the women apart and slapped them hard across their faces. The blood rushed to Hiroshi’s head as he backed up and turned away from the pleading women, their screams cut short by more slaps. His heart hammered in his chest, not so much from fear as from anger. He would have been arrested if he had interfered. Always, the same questions turned over in his mind. Who did
they think they were? What made them change from regular men to the
kempeitai
, men who seemed just as bad as the enemy?

When the rationing began in 1940, it wasn’t so difficult for Hiroshi’s
obaachan
to still put food on the table with sufficient rice to provide sustenance. But after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the American embargoes stopped everything. Now, a full year later, Hiroshi couldn’t remember the last time they had had any meat or fresh fish to eat. He and Kenji ate more and more slowly, trying to make what little they had in their bowls last longer. He’d never felt this way before, this hollow gnawing in the middle of his stomach, the dull throb of hunger. There’d never been a time when his grandparents hadn’t kept them safe and well fed. Now, Hiroshi watched the pinched expressions on his grandparents’ faces and felt everything was being rationed: even joy and happiness came to them in small doses now, while fear and dread of the war and their increasing hunger weighed heavily on everyone’s minds.