Fire Flowers (25 page)

It was a run-down tenement area and two children were tormenting a cat outside the building. As I approached, the cat went mewling away and the children slunk off—glancing, I noticed with helpless pleasure, at my bronze beauties as I ducked underneath the curtain.

The place must have been old-fashioned even before the war. Against the wall of the entrance hall was a row of wooden compartments with slotted hatches in which to store one's valuables, and a scrawny woman dozed away in a booth, her neck a mass of chicken skin. I unlaced my Oxfords, with some relief now, admittedly, and placed them in a compartment. I rapped a ten-sen piece on the counter and the woman yawned and waved me over to the male changing room.

The place was deserted but for the trickling sound of water, a faint mould growing over an engraved relief of furiously bayonetting soldiers along the wall. As I peeled off my clothes, I was appalled by the odour of my body. I piled my coat, shirt and underclothes into a basket. Covering my nether regions with a hand towel, I slid open the door to the bathroom.

The air was dank and there was a chemical smell. But steam rose appealingly from the main pool and I shivered in anticipation at the thought of climbing in. I took a wooden bucket, filled it from the tap, and then, on my low stool, began to soap and rinse myself with the deliciously hot water. The hue of the bubbles that ran off down the drain was disturbingly grey. My body was speckled with a patchwork of sores and bites from legions of ticks and fleas and the rampages of bedbugs. It was horrifying. I made a solemn vow to myself that I would track down one of the American trucks that were criss-crossing the city blasting out insecticide, and subject myself to a frosting.

Eventually, I seemed more or less clean enough, and I slipped into the big, steaming pool. I moaned with pleasure—it was utterly divine. I placed my hand towel on my head, and submerged my body in the hot water. After a minute, I opened my eyes.

What a startling sight. Somehow, I hadn't noticed how pale and shrunken my body had become. My skin was as white as tofu and my rib cage seemed to have sunk entirely into my chest. What a transformation had occurred since I had been called to the front. What an old man the war had made of me.

I sighed and sank back into the water. I mustn't feel sorry for myself, though, I thought, picturing Mrs. Shimamura's kindly face with affection. After all, didn't it seem now as if things might finally be on the up? The magazine went from strength to strength; it kept at least some flesh adhered to my bones. Perhaps I could fatten myself up a little. Cut back on my daily doses of shochu and Philopon, regain some of my prior sturdiness . . .

My thoughts drifted to Satsuko Takara, and I felt an acute sense of shame. The last time I had gone to the Ginza in the hope of glimpsing her outside her cabaret, she had not appeared, though I waited, shivering, until dawn. Perhaps she was dead now, I thought. Perhaps those visions of her on the street had been heaven-sent driftwood, to which I should have tightly clung.

I thought of the night when I had taken her to the anarchic revue at the Moulin Rouge, when she had laughed along as heartily as the students, even though she was just a shopgirl by trade.

A shopgirl. What did that matter, in any case? The war hadn't cared much for class, had it? The careful social gradation my mother had ruthlessly applied to every facet of her universe, from the pattern of a kimono belt to the arrangement of a teacup. What a mockery death had made of it all. Of rank, of ancestry. As if our blood type had mattered as the crimson poured from our veins; as if the bone fragments of a lowly private could be distinguished from a general's as they sluiced into the sinking mud of that tropical hell.

And if Satsuko Takara was a fallen woman, wasn't it I who was to blame? The man who had taken her virginity, as if it were a prize, the day before going to war?

I would find her again, I thought. I would seek her out, wherever she was in the city. There was little hope that we might rekindle our lost, unlikely love, such as it had been. The war had slaughtered my romantic capacities in any case. Yet, I might apologize to her for my failings. Make some small recompense.

I emerged from the bath feeling entirely cleansed. I dressed in my clothes, overwhelmed by their tarry stench of cigarette smoke and sour sweat. I vowed that I would make a bonfire, burn them all up in a great blaze. I'd buy myself a new set entirely, before going on my search for Takara-san.

I stood in front of the mirror; combed my hair; gave my teeth a quick scrub with my finger. I might even visit a teahouse on the way home, I thought. I felt more refreshed than I had in years.

As I emerged from the changing room, a sudden panic struck me. The scrawny old woman in the vestibule was asleep, her head tilted backward, a line of drool dangling from her mouth. The door to the compartment where I had left my shoes was open. I rushed over. The latch was up. The compartment was empty.

I seized the woman and shook her violently. She stared at me in dull incomprehension.

“Where are my shoes?” I demanded. “Why have you moved them?”

“I haven't moved them anywhere, sir,” she complained, “Why should I?” She'd been right there, she said, keeping an eye on things all this time.

I had a sudden vision of the two boys outside. With choking trepidation, I darted out. The street was empty. Back inside, the woman was looking vexed, sucking at her lips and shaking her head.

“Oh sir!” she moaned. “Those two dirty children! They were playing right outside! They must have noticed sir's hand- some shoes, and taken it into their heads . . . ”

Oh, it was wicked, sir! Those dirty, wretched, evil little shrimps. Scampering about right by the entrance, she had told them to clear off, but she must have just dozed away for just a second. Oh sir! Whatever must the honourable gentleman think? Such nasty urchins. What a wicked place Japan had become, that two innocent little children could do such a shameful thing!

Methodically, I opened every other compartment as she prattled away, praying that I had somehow been mistaken, that I would open a wooden hatch to see amber contours glinting calmly back at me.

It was to no avail. They were all empty. I felt a hard lump in my throat, an intense sensation of loss, as if someone close to me had died. Wretchedly, I went back outside and looked up and down the street. It was no use. The area was deserted. The shoes were gone.

 

I shuffled from the bathhouse with bales of newspaper wrapped around my bare feet. They grew sodden and bitty as I negotiated the puddles, and soon threatened to disintegrate altogether. People passed by with smiles on their faces.

I stubbornly filed a complaint at the police box. The officer on duty rolled his eyes as he wrote out a form. He suggested that I go down to the nearby black market and search for them there—that was where most of the stolen goods in the area ended up, he said.

If he knew that, I asked myself sullenly, as I prowled up and down the aisles at the market, then why didn't he do some- thing about it? Icy water had risen up the legs of my breeches now, and my feet were almost naked. It was dark by the time I found a stall selling shoes on the very edge of the market. It was just as the officer had suspected. My Oxfords were sitting there, in pride of place upon the trestle table.

I pointed at them. “Those are mine.”

The stunted stallholder squinted up at me.


“Four hundred,” he said. He glanced down at my naked feet. “Perfect for a gentleman like you.”


“Four hundred? What are you talking about? I paid three for them just this afternoon.”

He shrugged. “Take it or leave it.”

“But they're mine!” I shouted. “They were stolen from me this afternoon.”

The man came a little closer. “So I'm a thief, am I? Is that what you're saying?”

“Yes, yes, you are,” I said. “They were stolen from me this afternoon by two urchins, no doubt paid by you—”

A heavy hand fell on my shoulder and twisted me around. Beneath a felt fedora, glittering little black eyes stared at me—the sharp yakuza boss who ran the place.

“What's the problem here?”

I stuttered, acutely aware of the pincerlike grip around my arm, the bulging muscles beneath the man's pale silk jacket.

“Those are my shoes,” I managed to say. “This man has stolen them from me.”

“Oh yeah?” the man slurred, picking them up and looking at them with a bored expression. “Well, they look like a pretty common style to me. There must be thousands like them in Tokyo. Don't you think you've made a mistake?”

“I should hardly think so. I had them on my feet not two hours ago.”

He rubbed his forehead with a pained expression. “Look, mister, I think you've made a mistake. There's no need to be making wild accusations in public.”

“But it's true,” I said frantically. “Two children stole them from me this afternoon!”

“Look, mister,” he said, squaring up. “You've made a mistake, now calm down.”

“But they're mine!”

There was a piercing pain in the socket of my right eye, as his knuckle crunched against bone. I collapsed onto the ground, my vision black on one side, my head ringing.

“You've made a mistake, mister,” said the tough, looming above me. “So forget about it now. Either buy something or push off.”

He strolled away, wringing out his fist.

I slowly picked myself up. My glasses were dangling from my ears, smashed and useless. I could still see the dim, reflective red glow of my shoes upon the table, the man standing over them protectively.

“Alright then, damn you,” I said. “I'll buy them back. But look. I can only afford a hundred.”

I took out all the money I had left from my pocket, and laid it in a pile on the table. The man straightened up, as if I had offended him.

“One hundred!” he said, haughtily. “Outrageous. Don't you know these are Oxford brogues—they're made in London! I couldn't take anything less than three.”

I almost started to sob as I looked helplessly down at my numb feet. The last of the newspaper clung to them in soggy strips, and my toes were raw and shrivelled, as if they'd been steamed.

The man grew more sympathetic.

“Look,” he said. “A pair of these wouldn't suit you anyway. They're far too fancy. But I'll tell you what I can do. I can sell you a good pair of boots for fifty yen.”

Good heavens, no
, I thought,
not boots again, not after all this time
.

He reached beneath the table to pull out a hulking pair of army boots and laid them heavily down upon the table.

I recognized the smell straight away—the rancid odour of rotten soybeans. I picked one up, fingering the chafed cowhide, poking my finger through the familiar holes. Wearily, I pushed fifty yen in coins across the table to the man, who pocketed it neatly. I bent down and tugged the boots back onto my feet.

“Look!” the man said cheerily. “A perfect fit. You're lucky after all.”

Wordlessly, I strode away from the market as the darkness and rain fell about me. As I trudged back home along the mucky street in my old, detested army boots, I had the curious feeling that they had somehow magically engineered the whole affair, that they possessed some supernatural power. That now, reunited with me again, they were finally content, and were smiling in secret triumph.

M
y ward was on the top floor of the crumbling grey venereal hospital, up five worn flights of stone stairs. Once the most notorious building in the busiest pleasure district of all Japan, chunks of plaster were missing from the walls and you could see the brickwork and horsehair beneath. The high-ceilinged hall was lined on each side by thin straw palliasses, the ­patient's belongings laid out beside them: wiry blankets, envelopes of tea, tangled strips of dried cod.

Every morning, we were given a bowl of rice gruel and set to work cleaning the never-ending wards and corridors. The tarry smell of the carbolic soap reminded me of the International Palace, and the chemicals turned my hands bright red and as scaly as snakeskin.

One afternoon, as I trudged back from work, my back aching from scrubbing and polishing the floor of the dining hall, I found a plump lady laying out her things by the mattress next to mine. When I knelt down and introduced myself, she smiled, dimples appearing in her cheeks. Ishino was her name, she said, in a husky voice, she ran a restaurant down in Nihonbashi. There was something familiar about her face, I thought. It was as if I'd seen her on a forgotten theatre poster, many years before.

“Help yourself!” she said, holding out an earthenware jar. “Pickled plums. Nothing like them to keep the doctors away.”

I almost gasped as I tasted the sour juice for the first time in years. Mrs. Ishino spread a mat between our mattresses and laid out some rice crackers and dried seaweed, urging me to help myself. As I nibbled away, she glanced toward the door, and pulled a small flask from beneath her kimono jacket.

“Have a nip of this as well, dear,” she said, handing it to me quickly. “Nothing like it for the cold.”

It was strong and she nodded at me to take another sip. As the liquid reached my belly, it made me dizzy, and I started to smile.

Mrs. Ishino told me her story as we ate, kneeling on the ground like a comic raconteur on the stage. The day before, she said, the police had paid a visit to her bar in the middle of the night. I might not have heard, but they were enforcing new regulations now. In any case, they had carted her off to the hospital, along with the two girls who worked for her, Masuko and Hanuko. It was all very awkward. The doctors had performed their usual tests, and Masuko and Hanuko had been given the all-clear and sent home. But Mrs. Ishino herself had been unexpectedly diagnosed with something very unpleasant, and was obliged to stay on.