The Street of a Thousand Blossoms (22 page)

More than anything, Aki wanted to go home. She didn’t like being in the countryside, almost four hours from Tokyo in the village of Ikaruga, away from her parents and living in a boardinghouse, southwest of Nara, with the rest of her classmates. Under the Group Evacuation Law, students were rotated out to the countryside every six months. They’d been there for five months since October, the winter months dark and desolate. Even though Haru was with her, her sister slept in another room with the older girls and she hardly saw her except at their evening meals. During the day, there were classes and work in the fields or factories to provide more food and supplies for the military.

Occasionally, she heard the roar of the planes overhead in the afternoon and looked up to see the scattering of big metal bugs swarm the sky, dark and menacing. And then they were gone. Recently, the roar of the planes came just after sunrise, waking the girls from a
deep sleep, as they were hustled, cold and groggy in their
monpe
pants and cotton padded headgear, toward the air-raid shelters. When the siren went off again, signaling the all clear, they trudged back to their beds, sometimes forgetting to take off their padded headgear as they fell back into an anxious sleep before the morning bell rang.

During the afternoon, Aki and her classmates worked in their assigned groups to clear the fields, while Haru worked in a mosquito-net plant near the school they attended in the mornings. Aki didn’t like her group, which was made up not only of her classmates but also village students. They were rough and without manners, and often got her entire group into trouble. If one student from their group had to be disciplined, they all were. Aki hated it when they were made to line up in two rows facing each other. Upon the teacher’s command of “Now!” they took turns slapping each other across the face, once or twice, sometimes more, depending on the teacher. The first time Aki felt the sting of a slap across her cheek, she pulled back and slapped the boy across from her just as hard, and saw the pink welt of her handprint spreading across his cheek.

“I want to go home,” Aki whispered to Haru at dinner.

“We can’t go home yet.”

“Why?”

Haru pushed her hair away from her eyes. “We have to stay for six months until the next group of students comes.”

Aki had lost track of how long they had been in Ikaruga but it seemed too long already. “How much longer?”

She didn’t tell her older sister that sometimes she cried at night because she was so unhappy. Some of the teachers in Ikaruga were abrupt and mean, always looking over their shoulders as if someone were sneaking up behind them. Aki thought they had moved to the
countryside to be safe, but instead, she was frightened by the strict, unfair discipline, all the open space around her, and by the thundering planes that flew overhead toward the big cities where people like her parents and the sumo stable were.

“It won’t be much longer,” Haru said.

“How much?”

“One more month,” Haru answered. She pointed to Aki’s bowl and made her eat all of her sweet potato. “Then we’ll go home, I promise.”

Aki smiled, poked at the sweet potato with her chopstick. She was tired of eating the same thing night after night and never feeling full. Slowly, she finished eating as Haru watched her. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had rice or soba noodles. It made her happy to think that soon she wouldn’t have to work in the fields any longer, or sleep in the room with all the other students, or be watched day and night by the teachers. Aki wanted it to be like before the war, back at the sumo stable, where she was free to run about and watch her father train the big boys to be
sumotori
. That night, lying on her cot, she began counting the days until they returned home, just as she counted the seconds before she heard the next roar of thunder and knew how far away it was.

Six months ago, in August, when Kenji had arrived in the village of Imoto in the Nagano prefecture he had been disappointed that the mountains he saw from the train were mere shadows looming in the distance. The village itself was spread out on the flatlands, small farms dotting the landscape, their fields a muddy mess against the endless gray sky. Most of what they grew, the barley and sweet potatoes, was given to the military. Still, Kenji relished the calmer, slower pace in the countryside.

Aunt Reiko was waiting on the platform, thin and dark-haired, with streaks of gray that made her appear older than Kenji had imagined. She waved when he stepped from the train. He put down
his suitcase, and bowed low upon meeting her. He hoped to see traces of his
okasan
in his aunt, since they were blood cousins and not far apart in age. He searched for some resemblance, but the woman who stood before him looked nothing like the photo of his mother. Her thin shoulders were stooped as if she carried a great weight, and her hands were rough and red from farmwork. But once he looked into her eyes, he saw a glint of youth and beauty, eyes that could bring life to the most inanimate mask. And when she spoke, her voice was open and straightforward, drawing him in.

“You must be Kenji-chan.” She bowed to him. “And this is your uncle Toki,” she said, smiling.

A short and stocky man with close-cropped hair stood next to her. When he turned, Kenji saw that his right arm was missing.

Uncle Toki looked Kenji up and down and grunted. He pointed at his suitcase. “Any more?” he asked.

“No,” Kenji answered.

“Then come,” he said, turning around abruptly. “There’s work to do.”

Aunt Reiko smiled shyly and touched Kenji’s arm lightly in reassurance. “We are terribly happy that you’re here,” she said softly.

Kenji was wrong; he was sure there was a resemblance to his mother, after all. He picked up his suitcase and followed her outside. The station was no more than a one-room wooden building, and beyond it, a small village surrounded by flat brown fields.

At the edge of the village was a burned-out building. Kenji caught up with his aunt. “Was that building bombed?” he asked, pointing to the charred frame. He knew the Americans had increased their bombing raids now that they had captured the Mariana Islands.

Aunt Reiko shook her head. “Imoto has been untouched by the war so far. Except…,” she began, then stopped with a glance at her husband, Toki.

Kenji remembered his grandparents saying that his uncle had lost his arm during the fight for the Philippine Islands. What must it have felt like to wake up and have your arm missing? He wondered if the arm were still somewhere in the Philippines, withered down to the bone, once white, now darkened by time and dirt and neglect. Or
if the wound, now healed to a shiny-scarred nub, still hurt with a phantom pain that throbbed and ached constantly.

“This fire began from lightning,” Aunt Reiko said.

“Lightning?” he repeated, catching the last of his aunt’s words.

“A dry storm. We never did have rain that night, just the lightning and thunder.”

Kenji glanced back at the building, imagined the thin veins of light coming closer, touching down on the building, which exploded into flames. Uncle Taiko, his
ojiichan
’s friend from the bar, had once told him that lightning without rain signified impending disaster. Kenji felt a stab of uneasiness but nodded to his aunt and kept the rest of his thoughts to himself as he followed along. It was lightning that had destroyed the building. If only Japan could harness lightning as its secret weapon, he thought, perhaps then they really could win the war.

The farmhouse is brighter than I expected. I’m sure it’s Aunt Reiko’s touch that fills each room. I was greeted with a piece of art just as I walked into the entrance hall—a raku vase with muted colors and fine lines. It surprised me, leaving the vase out on display with no fears of it being confiscated by the
kempeitai.
And what a breath of fresh air! Not one officer in sight since arriving in Imoto
. Kenji wrote down his first impressions of Imoto in his notebook, hoping to share them later with his grandparents and Hiroshi. But on his first evening at the farmhouse, he knew as soon as his pen touched the paper that it was Yoshiwara-sensei he was writing to.

Aunt Reiko and Uncle Toki had two children, Kenji’s second cousins, an older daughter who was married and living in a village nearby, and a younger son, Hideo, who at sixteen was a year older than Kenji. After a few strained days of getting to know each other, they fell into a quiet rhythm working together in the fields and going
out to harvest fodder for the military horses that were starving like everyone else.

Hideo doesn’t talk much
, Kenji wrote,
but neither do I. Yet in some strange way, we seem to understand each other. It’s no wonder, with his father, Uncle Toki, so abrupt and angry; I’d be afraid to say anything, too
. He noted that his cousin was shorter and more compact, resembling his father’s side, while he had grown taller and thinner in the past months.

Kenji was fortunate to have his own small room, which used to belong to Hideo’s now married sister. He put down the pen, stood up from the desk, and rubbed his hands. In less than a month, his were as rough and red as his aunt’s. And his fingers were always cold and stiff, as if the blood no longer traveled to the tips. It brought to mind Yoshiwara-sensei opening and closing his fists after a long day of working on a mask. Kenji did the same now, remembering the warmth of the wood as he sanded each mask with light, even strokes. He carefully took out
The Book of Masks
, still wrapped in his sweater, his fingers growing warmer as they traced the dark lines of each mask.