The Street of a Thousand Blossoms (20 page)

The following morning Kenji hurried down the back alleyways to the mask shop. The air was already hot and still. He wanted to tell Yoshiwara-sensei he was leaving for the countryside in six days. In his schoolbag, he carried
The Book of Masks
to return to his teacher. Even as the war spun around him, Yoshiwara worked on creating his masks. He paid little attention to the hardships or to the orders given by the
kempeitai
, other than putting up blackout curtains. When the sirens blared, Yoshiwara simply closed the curtains and went back to work. So far, he’d been lucky the bombing never reached Yanaka.

Besides the thought of leaving his grandparents, Kenji dreaded not working at the mask shop every afternoon, with its intoxicating smells of cypress wood and paints, the rhythmic lull of the sanding. The intricate painting of the masks had become his passion. Day by day, he learned a little more from his sensei, what Yoshiwara called the “hidden secrets” that would make him a mask artisan of distinction—the slight arch of an eyebrow, the thickness of the lips, or just how deep a furrow should cross the forehead. “Remember this, Kenji, there are many people out there who can make a mask,” Yoshiwara told him, “but not many who can make a mask come alive.”

Kenji pushed at the door and was surprised to find the mask shop locked. The sun beat down hot and unrelenting on the quiet alleyway. He rapped lightly on the door and waited. In the three years he’d been apprenticing with Yoshiwara, his sensei had never been away from the shop for more than an hour or two, and only to buy paints or do a quick errand. Kenji knocked again, hard and loud this time, but all that greeted him was silence. He walked to the front of the shop and peered through a crack in the closed curtain, past the empty display window that once held the masks that still mesmerized him, and into the shadowy shop. He suddenly felt again like that boy who longed to hold those brilliant masks in his hands. After three years, he saw in his reflection that nothing had changed. Beyond the
curtain was the same spare, dusty room, the same desire to be on the inside looking out.

Kenji was about to turn away when a slip of white paper wedged into the corner seam of the glass caught his eye. He reached for it, unfolded the note, and recognized his sensei’s writing, the quick, elegant strokes in black ink that told Kenji he was gone. He stepped back slowly in disbelief. How could his sensei leave without telling him? Then, not knowing what possessed him, he picked up a rock and threw it at the window, shattering glass as he turned around and ran.

The next afternoon when Kenji stopped by the mask shop again, he found the shop had been broken into and the door left ajar. The remnants of the
kempeitai
were everywhere, boot prints in the wood dust, the shop stripped of everything, his sensei’s equipment, the wood shelves, and even the clay teacups they drank from. The little left behind was in ruins, as if Akira Yoshiwara and his mask shop had never existed.

Kenji’s hope of seeing his sensei again grew just as empty. As each day turned to dusk, Kenji felt increasingly sure that his teacher was gone for good; that the war had finally caught up with him. He wrapped Yoshiwara-sensei’s
Book of Masks
in an old sweater and packed it in the bag he was taking to the countryside. Each night before he dropped off to sleep, he invented explanations that placed his sensei out of harm’s way: Yoshiwara had left for the safety of the countryside. He had gone to visit his family, though Kenji never heard him speak of any. Or maybe he had been commissioned to carve a brilliant new mask in another district, and there was no time to leave him details. These thoughts were followed by a darker possibility. The
kempeitai
had heard that Yoshiwara was an agitator and had come to arrest him, but he had managed to get away before they came, or why else the note?

Kenji grieved for his sensei and all the masks that might never be made. He saw them when he closed his eyes, felt the smoothness of the wood in his hands as his head spun with uncertainty. The last time
he’d seen Yoshiwara, Kenji was hurrying out of the shop, late to go home again, knowing his
obaachan
would be worried. His sensei barely looked up from his work, and said as he always did,
“Ashita
. Tomorrow, then.” But then he glanced up and added, “Or the tomorrow after that.” Kenji wondered now how many tomorrows it would be. Or, did it have something to do with
him?
Kenji had never voiced these thoughts aloud, though they swam in the back of his mind. What was it about him that made the people he loved vanish into thin air?

Akira Yoshiwara parted ways with the young artist Nishihara at the train station. Separately, they could better blend into the crowd. The air was thick with humidity, making him wish he could peel away his skin. The noise of the station was unbearable—the chaos of frantic voices, metal grinding against metal, the nervous heat of desperation as he merged with the crowds and kept away from the
kempeitai
patrolling the platform. Nazo pushed against the cloth bag he carried and Akira loosened the tie just enough for the cat to stick his head through. “Not yet,” he said, as Nazo struggled to climb out. “As soon as we’re on the train,” he reassured, and the cat relaxed, narrowing his eyes at all the movement around him. Akira touched his pocket to make sure he had his money and travel voucher, bought at ten times the normal price. Still, he was lucky to get one on such short notice. It would have taken days if he hadn’t had the money to expedite things. When the man at the ticket counter had asked, “Where to?” he’d answered, “The mountains,” not caring where the train would eventually take him as long as it was far away from Tokyo.

It wasn’t until Akira finally stepped off the train with Nazo in Oyama, hundreds of miles northwest of Tokyo in the Japanese Alps, that he relaxed. From the one-room train station, he emerged into the cool, thin air, which he breathed in hungrily. He walked through the small town of low wooden houses and narrow streets, framed by the tall mountains. Despite the quiet simplicity of the place, Akira
felt unsettled. He paid an old man named Tomita with an ox and cart to take him farther up into the mountains, to the village of Aio, where the old man was returning. The madness of the war made him want to completely disappear.

As the cart moved slowly up the mountain road, the air grew cooler, and the outskirts of the town gave way to a rutted road bordered by pine trees that blocked the sun and left the slow-moving cart in dark shadows. It felt as if he were stepping into another world, that Tokyo, the mask shop, and the war itself had all been a dream. Akira lifted Nazo out of the bag, set him unsteadily on the bed of the rough wood cart, where the cat hesitated, then lay down and stayed there for the rest of the journey, his claws gripping tightly to the wood. As the cart rounded the bend, Tomita pointed up the mountain. “See there?” he asked. “In the trees?” Akira stared hard among the large pines, until the dark outlines of houses with tall, pitched roofs appeared, nestled among them. The old man turned back and grew talkative, telling Akira they were called “praying hands” houses because of the appearance of the thatched gable roofs. “They’re said to resemble two hands pressed together in Buddhist prayer,” he added, with a toothless grin. He made a sucking sound and shook his head. “If you ask me, it’s for a more practical reason. It’s to keep the snow from piling up during the winter.” He waved his hand downward. “Slides right off the roof.” The old man laughed to himself. His family had lived in Aio for hundreds of years and very little had changed. “What brings a young man alone to a place like Aio?” Tomita eyed him and waited for an answer.

“Illness,” Akira answered. It was the first thing that came to his mind. “I’ve come to the mountains to recuperate.”

Tomita nodded.

Akira had no idea if he believed him or not, but he was too far away from anyone or anything to care. The old man finally stopped the cart at the edge of the village, directed Akira to find a room at the second-to-last wooden building among a small cluster of others.
“Behind the sake shop, they usually have a place to rent,” he said. He clicked his tongue and continued up the hill.

As he stepped down from the back of the wooden cart, Nazo safely back in the cloth bag, Akira Yoshiwara saw a woman sitting by the side of the dirt road in front of the small dry-goods store. Her worn kimono, once the color of persimmons, was faded to a pale pinkish hue. She wore a dark scarf on her head and leaned forward over a wooden box. He mistook her for an old woman, until she looked up and the brightness of her eyes told him otherwise.

“Turnips?” she asked, in a voice so filled with youth and hope, he thought it came from someone else.

He followed her gaze to the wooden box, where there were two lone turnips. The pungent scent of decay drifted upward. Upon a closer look, he saw the brown spots of rot already staining the bottom of the box.

“I’ll take both of them,” Akira finally said. He reached down and dropped several yen coins into the box. Then he picked up the turnips and walked toward the buildings, leaving the woman behind.

The night before they were to leave for the countryside, Hiroshi shook Kenji awake as they lay on their futons. Kenji was just drifting off to sleep and he pulled away from his brother, irritated.

“I won’t be going to Nagano with you,” Hiroshi whispered. “I’m staying to work in a munitions factory with Mako and Takeo, right outside of Tokyo in Chiba. That way, I can still watch over
ojiichan
and
obaachan.”

Kenji turned to face Hiroshi, suddenly wide awake. In the darkness of their room, he could barely make out his brother’s shadow facing him.

“Then I’m staying, too.” Kenji insisted.

Hiroshi paused. “No,” he said. “They need to know that you’ll be safe in Nagano.”

“What about you?”

He felt Hiroshi’s hand rest on his shoulder. “One of us has to stay,” he answered. “They’ll need help here, just in case of an air-raid attack or evacuation.
Obaachan
can’t handle everything alone.”

“Then why can’t we both stay?” Kenji asked. He hated the way his voice sounded, childish and demanding. Couldn’t Hiroshi see? It was hard enough being separated from his grandparents after Yoshiwara-sensei’s disappearance, and now even Hiroshi was abandoning him.