Butterfly's Shadow (35 page)

Once again to be in a world
of white rice.
The fragrance of the plums.

White rice! A memory. These days they get by on barley and potatoes; weeds. They gather and grind acorns.

Official bulletins told them sawdust could usefully supplement flour in a proportion of one to four when making dumplings. Once again they were eating silkworms, harvesting nourishment from sea grasses, trapping snails, frogs, grasshoppers. Fish had vanished. Eggs were but a memory, the hens too scrawny and listless to lay, until they went under the knife, giving up flesh, blood, gizzards, bones. Some said feathers could be stewed.

The government had been bullying them for years. Ministerial orders littered the landscape the way over-ripe fruit had once dropped from trees: one edict prohibited the production and sale of luxury goods, and overnight a whole range
of what made life bearable for the well-to-do vanished from the shelves. Cho-Cho folded up her fine silk garments, stroking each one gently as if soothing a child before turning out the light. Then she put them away in a trunk, along with her glove-soft shoes, wrapped in tissue.

‘Oh, Suzuki,’ she sighed, ‘my beautiful French shoes!’

How could she continue to wear them now? Clogs had been designated ‘patriotic’; nothing else was seen on the street as people patriotically clacked their way to work on wooden platforms.

She missed her elegant footwear, the sensuous pleasure of fine fabric touching her skin; she felt that in some way she was being punished. Her sense of despondency shocked her: was she then so trivial, so frivolous, that mere lack of luxury was so important? She saw that Suzuki did not grumble; she had not complained even when widowed, but then Suzuki was always so busy, finding creative ways to extend the life of clothes, mending, patching, passing down garments from older to younger siblings; cooking or cleaning or worrying about one or other of her children. Without such distractions, Cho-Cho had only herself to think about, and she saw that solipsism was not comforting at a time like this.

Worse was to come. Offering restaurant menus above a strictly fixed price could land you in jail; it now cost her more to provide a meal than she could charge a customer. She closed the restaurant.

As the weather sharpened into wintry cold the Nagasaki black market cost of coal rose to almost 50 per cent above the official price. ‘And the problem,’ as Suzuki pointed out, ‘is that you can’t find any at the official price.’

Above all, Cho-Cho missed Henry, missed their talks, their arguments, the letters he received from America that had linked her vicariously to her child. After Henry died, Oregon had drifted away like a floating island, not quite real. There had been a note from the American woman, the blonde wife, widow, stepmother. She seemed friendly and Cho-Cho had
replied, but then came Pearl Harbor, and information vanished into a void – personal information, anyway. Official information was plentiful: official broadcasts celebrating victories by the Imperial forces and exhorting the populace to work harder, sacrifice more for the glory of the Emperor. There were also detailed accounts of terrible losses by the Americans, and although Cho-Cho knew that America was far from the war zone, she also knew that armies swallowed up young men from farms and peaceful cities and spat them out on to the battlefield. She found herself praying to the Methodist God as well as to Shinto
Kami
without much faith in either.

She was teaching again, instructing the young, running air raid drills, she was a
shis
, a woman getting by in a man’s world, but a man’s world was for getting killed in: a boy was safe only until the qualifying birthday, then came military service. She had become one of a grim sisterhood of women whose sons were of an age to take their place in the firing line.

She knew what an American soldier looked like: steel helmet, gun and bayonet, the snarling caricature of the propaganda posters. But she had not learned to hate the enemy: behind the gun, beneath the helmet what she saw was a child with blue eyes. She told herself he would be safer as an American soldier; Henry’s books had taught her how the West valued human life; the army would care about its men. A Japanese soldier did not exist as an individual, simply as part of a patriotic force. But any soldier’s fate was finely balanced: death or survival, the choice not his to make.

Where would he be sent to face warfare? If he survived, would she see him one day, walking up the path from the harbour, golden and American, like his father?

Trundled in boxcars from one combat zone to another, expendable pawns, with new recruits arriving daily to step into dead men’s shoes, Nisei GIs were not long-lived.

Now, heading north-west on foot, they seemed always to be climbing, clawing their way through a landscape rising before them like an endless cliff, slogging through France.

He was learning that maps are instruments of time. It took three days to cross a river, storm a hill. It took a week to battle their way to and claim the dot on the map which was once a town and was now a place of ruins.

They took La Bruyères, street by street, house by house, room by room. Booby-trapped doors, snipers, mines, the smoke and screech of mortars, crack of gunfire. Men fell as they advanced, gaining a yard, losing it . . . When at nightfall they collapsed, exhausted, Joe saw how many had been lost; some who had become friends lying in the mud alongside fallen Germans, uniforms indistinguishable, caked with clay, dark with blood.

They squatted and slumped, the limping remnants of the 100th and the 442nd snatching a breathing space. The hutmates of Tule were scattered: Kazuo could be at the bottom of a ditch somewhere along the way; Ichir
was in a field hospital the last time Joe heard.

Pausing to gulp water or chew a soggy chocolate bar, the men swapped bleak jokes, checking the current acceptable
level of ‘vacation wound’, an injury bad enough to get a man away from the front.

‘How about death?’

‘Death could be good. No way you’ll get ordered to advance if you’re dead.’

But the gold braid had ways of trumping the blackest joke. Dragging themselves to attention, the men got the message: a battalion of Texas Guard was trapped in the forest nine miles to the east, without food and water, surrounded by Germans.

The general’s words were read out, loud and clear.

‘Two previous rescue attempts have failed.’ Then the punch-line. The battalion was to be rescued, ‘at all costs’.

At all costs?

Otishi murmured, ‘When a Spartan soldier was issued with a shield he was ordered to come back
with
it or
on
it.’

Joe glanced around. ‘No shields.’

‘Same order.’

It took five days and eight hundred casualties to rescue two hundred and eleven men.

The Germans were dug in, camouflaged, waiting. The 442nd hacked its way through frozen undergrowth thick as jungle; machine-gun fire burned through the yellow haze. Progress was yard by yard, snaking forward, belly in the mud. Cresting a low ridge they were exposed for a fatal moment and the mortars erupted. Joe was sent flying by the blast. He rolled, grabbing at exposed roots, undergrowth. Up ahead, through the swirling dust of the explosion, a bloody uniform sprawled, twisted. He crawled closer, chanting the front-line mantra, ‘You’re okay kid, you’ll be okay.’ Crouching to drag the wounded man out of the line of fire, he peered into the unconscious, dirt-caked face and saw it was Otishi.

Hold on, you’ll be okay kid, hold on;
shielding the shattered body with his own, yelling for a stretcher.

He tries to lift the sodden body and
Jesus Christ, oh Christ
– Otishi’s helmet tilts and his brains spill down his face and over Joe’s hands.

Before the war Cho-Cho had cajoled and bullied girls to emerge from their invisibility, take charge of their own lives. She was aware that today’s women, sweating in coal mines, steel mills and factories to support the war, looked back yearningly to those inactive years.

She and Suzuki too found comfort in looking back, to the days when Cho-Cho and Henry sparred light-heartedly about tradition and women’s rights; when all three lived at ease in the glow of affection, even if Suzuki gave more than she received. Now they were equals, two women alone in different ways, warming hands and feet at a tiny charcoal burner.

They had been lucky, so far, in Nagasaki. While other cities large and small were bombed and burned, they had remained virtually untouched. A recent raid on the shipyards and Mitsubishi works had caused alarm: some of the bombs had hit the hospital and medical school.

A few days later Suzuki trotted up the hill to Cho-Cho. Parents were worried: there might be more raids. They were evacuating children, ‘Just in case. Making up groups. I’m taking the girls. Come with us.’

‘I’d rather stay here.’

Cho-Cho’s small, wood-framed house was across the harbour, further away from the docks, and long ago she had constructed a cellar. She promised to use it. If the planes came, she would be safe in her cellar.

There was an odd sense of waiting: perhaps more raids were
on the way. Or perhaps talks were going on, somewhere at the centre of power, and decisions were being weighed. Perhaps – a tentative thought – despite the martial exhortations, peace was being sought. How long could they hold out? How many more would be sacrificed?

Meanwhile, she rolled another sheet of paper into her typewriter and began another letter, to join the rest in the embossed metal box on the desk.

‘
My dear Sachio . . .
’

On 6 August something unimaginable occurred in Hiroshima. She listened, incredulous, to the reports: this was not an air raid, it was an apocalypse. People began arriving in Nagasaki, fleeing the nightmare, their bodies hideously burned, some blinded, others maimed, barely alive. All over the country leaflets, not bombs, fell from the skies: the American president warned the Japanese people, ‘if they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air the like of which has never been seen on earth’.

No leaflets were dropped over Nagasaki. Through some bureaucratic error they were not warned. In Nagasaki life went on as usual.

On the morning of 9 August, shortly before 8 a.m., an airraid warning sounded. Cho-Cho prepared to honour her promise to Suzuki and go down to the cellar, but no planes appeared and half an hour later she heard the siren. All Clear.

She watered plants wilting in the intense heat. She tapped out the last page of a letter to Joey and placed it in the metal storage box. Then she washed some clothes, wrung them out and dropped them into an enamel bowl. Outside the house, even with an overcast sky, they would soon dry.

The time was just coming up to eleven. She stood on the threshold for a moment, watching a bird searching without success for worms. Even worms were in short supply now, put to good use in kitchens. She was preparing to hang up a towel
when she heard the sound of an approaching plane. Looking up, she saw two bombers – by now everyone could recognise a B-29. They were some way off, and high, possibly on a reconnaissance flight. As a small statement of defiance she decided she would continue to hang up the clothes. If the planes came lower, she would retreat to the cellar.

She threw the towel over the line and glanced back over her shoulder as a dark, bulky shape dropped from the plane like an egg from a hen. There was thunder. A flash that cracked open the sky. The world roared. Went white.

One night when they still had the house and the electric kitchen; when they were doing all right, but doubts of another sort encroached, and she and Ben sat talking, Nancy had said, ‘We did the right thing,’ touching his hand, ‘didn’t we, Ben? Joey’s happy here. What sort of life would he have had in that place?’

But Ben’s reply seemed to be part of a different conversation: ‘What must it have been like, for her, knowing nothing of him?’

At the time Nancy had closed her mind to the question. Now, with the wisdom of hindsight, she knows better. How would it have been for her, knowing Joey was out there in the world, growing up, being changed by it, and knowing nothing of him?