Fire Flowers (3 page)

She wrenched open her bag and gestured inside: three tiny potatoes wrapped up in a handkerchief.

“Three little potatoes,” I said. “Michiko, really?”

“It's not my fault!” she said. “Those farmers are worse than thieves!”

She'd bartered away her favourite summer dress, she said, and this was all she'd received in return. It was extortion, pure and simple.

My stomach was gnawing away now, and I wracked my brain to think if there was anything we could use to make gruel. But I knew it was useless. I'd swept between the floorboards two days ago for the last grains of rice bran, and we'd already eaten whatever it was that was down there.

There were a few stalls set up by the station now, but they didn't seem to be selling anything useful except for some kind of rough booze. A couple of old men were already reeling, and one of them shouted something obscene to Michiko. But she just shouted back that she was surprised he could think of anything like that at a time like this, that he should be ashamed of himself, sitting there swilling rotgut while the rest of the city was starving to death.

A little farther on, she suddenly stopped. She put her hand on my arm.

“Satsuko,” she said, pointing. “Look.”

Nailed to the charred stump of a telegraph pole was a large printed sign. “To the New Women of Japan,” it began, rather grandly. Michiko started bobbing up and down and tugging at my sleeve, the way she always did when she was excited.

“Look, Satsuko,” she said. “It's jobs for office ladies. We could do that!”

I read the sign with an uneasy feeling. It certainly did mention work for secretaries, but it also referred to “the Contin­gency of the Occupation,” and I felt sure that this must be something to do with the Americans. They'd be here soon, I realised. Large and boisterous, swaggering through the streets and shouting. The idea of working up close to them made me shudder.

But Michiko had a dreamy, faraway look on her face, which I recognized from whenever she would emerge, starstruck, from the cinema.

“New Women of Japan, Satsuko,” she said, her voice growing breathy. “Just think. That could be us!”

I groaned and tried to pull her away. But she just stood there, right where she was.

“Michiko,” I said. “Please. I'm hot and tired. Please just let's go home.”

The starstruck look vanished. “And what are you going to sell for us tomorrow, then, Satsuko? The teakettle?”

A hard lump formed in my throat. This was unkind, and she knew it, as the copper teakettle was now almost the only thing I had to remember my mother by.

“I don't know.”

She laid her hand on my arm again, her face softening.

“Satsuko,” she said. “We only have three potatoes to eat today. Whatever are we to do?”

She could be surprisingly grown-up sometimes. I knew in my heart that she was right, that we should follow up the information on the sign. But just then, as I thought of the Americans again, another shiver passed through me. Michiko just gripped my arm, though, and the dramatic look came back into her eyes.

“Just think of it, Satsuko,” she whispered. “New Women of Japan!”

 

We dressed up as prettily as we could for our interview, in neat woolen skirts and white blouses I'd pressed beneath our mattress the night before. We never seemed quite able to get all the ash and dirt out of our clothes anymore, but in any case, these outfits were much better than the baggy
monpe
trousers we normally wore, which made us look so hopeless and unattractive. The address was for a building up on the Ginza, which seemed like a hopeful sign, but when we got there, the place didn't seem quite so elegant after all—the roof had partly collapsed, and, inside, cracked paint was peeling from the walls.

An arrow pointed us up a shabby staircase to a lobby, where a large crowd of women were already gathered.

“Do you think we're too late?” I said. I noticed, to my unease, that some of the other women wore bright makeup, and looked like quite vulgar types.

“Michiko!” I whispered. “Are you sure this is the right place?”

“Well,” Michiko murmured. “I suppose it can't be easy for anyone to find work right now. Not with things the way they are.”

Just then, a door at the end of the corridor burst open. A very young girl rushed out and ran headlong into me. Tears were streaming down her face and I tried to steady her, but she pushed me aside, and clattered away down the staircase.

“Michiko!” I hissed. “Whatever could have made her so upset?”

“Perhaps she wasn't quite right for the job?” Michiko said. “Don't worry, Satsuko, we'll be just fine.”

“Michiko,” I said, feeling suddenly nervous. “I think perhaps it's best if we try to find some other kind of position elsewhere.”

She narrowed her eyes and growled: if I had any idea of where we could go, then I should go right ahead and tell her.

So we carried on waiting for several hours, until finally a secretary came out and gestured toward me. Michiko gave my hand a little squeeze and I followed the corridor to the door.

Behind a heavy desk sat two men as unlike each other as they could possibly be. One was thin and very handsome, his hair slicked back like a movie star. The other was a fat pig of a man, with fleshy jowls and cherry stone eyes that looked me up and down.

“Miss Takara,” said the handsome man, brightly, glancing at his list. “An Asakusa girl, no less! Please sit down.”

The interview man started pleasantly enough. The handsome man asked me which school I had attended and what my father's profession had been. When I told him that my father had owned an eel restaurant, that I'd been a serving girl, he seemed very pleased, he even said he might remember the place—after all, it had been quite famous if you knew Asakusa at all.

The fat man squinted at me. “No doubt, at school, Miss Takara, you were taught the glorious history of our noble country?”

I wondered whether this might be a trap. Before my class had been sent off for war work with the Student Attack Force, it had been drilled into us that Japan was blessed, that our emperor had descended from the sun goddess Amaterasu and that Japan had a special responsibility to preserve harmony across the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. But I wasn't sure if this was still the case, so I just stayed silent and bowed my head.

The handsome man smiled. “Don't worry, Miss Takara. It isn't a test.”

Moving his chair aside, he pointed up at a large painting mounted on the wall. It showed a very beautiful woman from the Edo period, dressed in a pink and white kimono, who knelt at the feet of a fierce-looking Western man with a big white moustache and a red waistcoat. The sea lay a little way beyond them, black-flagged ships sailing back and forth on the waves.

“I wonder,” he said, “if you are perhaps familiar with this famous lady?”

As I looked at the painting, her name came into my mind: Okichi. The story was familiar enough. In fact, I distantly remembered an operetta about her, which had been all the rage when I was a little girl. My father had even owned the recording on a gramophone disk.

“Okichi-sama,” the pig-man pronounced, to my annoyance, as I'd been about to reply. He explained that Okichi had once lived in Shimoda, on the Izu peninsula, in the previous century, and how, when the foreign barbarians had first landed there and forced Japan to open up to the outside world, she had been presented to the American ambassador as “a consort.”

“A peace offering,” the handsome man added. “And a clever way to keep an eye on the foreigners!”

I gazed at him uncertainly, wondering where all of this was leading.

The fat man leaned forward. “Do you know what a consort might be, Miss Takara?”

My cheeks coloured. I gave a faint nod.

“Okichi,” he went on, his voice swelling now, just like the radio bulletins, announcing a victorious battle, “sacrificed her body for the Japanese nation! Just as our soldiers sacrificed theirs. Now the barbarians will soon land again, Miss Takara.” He raised a pudgy finger in the air. “Japan will need a new generation of Okichis. Honourable women who are prepared to sacrifice their own bodies. To act as a breakwater. A seawall which will protect the flower of our womanhood from the savage tide of their rapacious lust.”

Silence fell.

“Your sign,” I said, swallowing. “It mentioned office ladies—”

“Regrettably Miss Takara, all of our back office positions have now been filled,” the handsome man said. “But there are plenty of other positions still available. Fine positions. Noble positions. For patriotic women who are prepared to act as ‘consorts' for our foreign guests, once they arrive.”

My cheeks were burning as I stood up to leave.

“You would be paid, Miss Takara,” said the fat man. “With an allowance for clothing. And for food.”

Just then, I felt very faint. My head swam and my legs began to fold. I scrabbled for the desk to stop myself from falling.

The handsome man leapt around the table and caught me, helping me back into the chair.

“Please don't upset yourself, Miss Takara,” he said. “But why not at least consider our offer?”

My heart was pounding as they stared at me. I saw myself, sitting in a café with a burly American. What would it be like, I wondered, to be intimate with a foreigner? His body covered in hairy bristles, stinking of sweat and cigarettes . . .

The truth was, I wasn't completely innocent. The night before Osamu had been sent away to the South Seas, he'd visited my house after his leaving party, and we'd gone off to a hotel together for a short time. I wasn't ashamed. After his horrible mother told me he was dead, I was glad that I had given him at least that comfort in his short life.

“Well, Miss Takara?” said the handsome man. I stared at him, thinking of the three potatoes in Michiko's handkerchief. We'd devoured the last one before coming along that morning. My head began to swim again, and his voice seemed to come from very far away.

“Well, Miss Takara? We're counting on you. Will you help us?”

I
hitched a ride from Yokohama to Tokyo in a jeep with two lieutenants from the 5th Cavalry. Eyes front, they chewed gum rhythmically as they drove. They'd been first into Tokyo, they said, and things were already improving.

Through the rangefinder of my camera, the city seemed utterly obliterated. Fields of rubble sprouted with tall weeds. Ruined factories held from collapse by mangled girders. Abandoned trucks lay on bricks, lichened with orange rust. All the way to Tokyo, along the dirt road, men and women in rags heaved handcarts piled with refuse, swallowing our dust.

The road grew wider as we entered the centre of the city and we veered around deep potholes, edifices rising on each side. Grand once, now licked black, their windows were boarded up, great chunks of masonry torn from their structures. Crowds swarmed the avenue: Japanese women in baggy pants with bundles on their backs; men in battered fedoras and grubby summer shirts. Tall GIs strolled along like stately giants or laughed as Japanese men in split-toe shoes tugged them along in rickshaws. At an intersection of curving streetcar lines, an old man haltered an ox, his cart laden with steaming churns, surrounded by fat flies.

I hopped down beneath the cobweb of overhead electrics and unfolded my map. This, then, was the Ginza—once the grandest avenue in the Orient, its Fifth Avenue, its Champs- Élysées. I drew in a great breath of Tokyo air: smoke and fish guts and sewerage. I wiped the filthy perspiration from my brow.

The
Stars and Stripes
office was housed in a grand old embassy building. Wide concrete steps led up to the doorway, and inside, acres of wooden paneling covered the walls of a high-ceilinged newsroom. Desks were laid out in neat rows, each with a telephone and a gleaming Smith-Corona or Remington. Young men in uniform were typing away and glanced up at me as I entered. They grinned, as if welcoming me to some private members' club.

At the back of the room I spotted a familiar face: Eugene, my old college roommate, the myopic show-off who'd encouraged me to apply to the newspaper in the first place. Skinny as a rake, his curly hair now officially out of control, Eugene leaned back on his chair, an affected green visor shielding his eyes as he spiked stories from a big pile. He whooped when he saw me, leaped up, and proceeded to perform some kind of Indian war dance before bounding over and seizing my arm.

“This—is—it, Hal!” he hollered, hopping back and forth. “The place where we will make our names!”

Oh, boy. He still wore the same round wire spectacles I remembered from Columbia, six years ago, when this “making our names” business had been his obsession. He'd drawn up strategies for us to achieve it in any number of ways—writing for the
Spectator
, acting in amateur theatricals. Finally, under the spell of the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, whose portrait he'd plastered above the desk in our dorm room, he had decided that we would become photographers. For weeks we'd roamed the docks at Red Hook and the tenements of the Lower East Side with our Box Brownies in dogged pursuit of the “decisive moment.” Eugene had even gone as far as setting up a darkroom in a storage cupboard beneath the faculty buildings, before he got distracted by a book on how to draw for the funny papers. He'd ditched his camera soon after that. I'd kept hold of mine.

“Hello, Gene. Looks like you're all settled in.”

“Sure I am,” he said, leading me to a door affixed with a scrawled card. “John Van Buren,” it read. “Editor-in-Chief.”

“Okay, let's take you to meet Dutch. He's going to give you your press pass. That's your golden ticket, see. Your get-out-of-jail-free card. It's signed by MacArthur himself. It means you can go anywhere you want and talk to anyone you want.”