Fireflies (14 page)

~ ~ ~

Dr. Hiyashida had studied medicine at the University of Heidelberg and spoke good English. He had come to Hiroshima from Osaka to make a special study of radiation disease. Shamelessly, he told me that he hoped his thesis would glean him a position on the medical council.

“You weren't here yourself on the day of the blast?”

“No,” he said, frowning. “And now there are no more than a few A-Bomb cases still in the hospital. It is most unfortunate.”

The inside of the hospital was a shambles. The window frames were warped, the glass gone. An icy wind blew in from the hills, visible in the distance.

“How are conditions now?”

“Improving,” he said, apparently without irony. “We have more medicine now, vitamins and plasma. But we still need more operating tables, X-Ray machines.”

Patients wrapped in bandages were lying on mats on the floor, sleeping or reading miniature books.

“You see?” he said in a frustrated whisper as we passed amongst them. “Few of them have any interesting symptoms any longer. They just say they feel empty and listless. They complain of tiredness and melancholy. I find that difficult to ascribe to radiation. After all, who ever heard of a bomb causing melancholy?”

Further on, in another ward, he kept his more “interesting” cases — the more grotesquely injured victims of the bomb that I guessed he hoped would form the notable chapters of his thesis. I felt acutely awkward as he strode from one patient to another, ordering them to display their symptoms, as if they were performers in a circus freak show.

One young man raised his shirt to expose his midriff. It was covered with the same thick, rubbery colloidal scars that the victims in Weller's photographs had shown. Another man had the striped pattern of the yukata he'd been wearing burned into his skin by the flash. The doctor urged me to take photographs — “For your newspaper!” — and he poked and prodded his patients, snapping at any of them who appeared too listless or embarrassed to respond. I grew irritated. He put me in mind of a particularly difficult superior officer I had known during my service, and I felt an incipient wave of hatred for the man.

I walked ahead, noticing an old woman, her white hair pulled into a bun, sitting on the edge of her bed. I asked the translator to politely inquire whether I might talk to her. Dr. Hiyashida rushed over and took her arm, shaking it, which made me so angry that I almost struck him. I ordered him to leave us, and he slunk back to the doorway, glancing at us every now and again with a sulky look.

She had been beautiful once, that was clear. Her eyes were almost pure black, and her nose was still a soft, elegant curve. But her face seemed to have slid an inch or so around her skull, like a loose mask, and her skin was etched with a deep web of lines and whirls, as if she had been supernaturally aged by many hundreds of years.

She spoke in a low voice, almost without intonation. She had been a dance instructor, she said, though she'd had very few students left by the end of the war. She had arrived at her studio in the centre of the city at around eight o'clock on the morning of the blast. She had been walking along the corridor on the first floor, where she had paused for a moment to open a window to let in some air, glancing as she did so up at the mountains, thick with green against the blue summer sky.

There was a flash. An explosion of glass pitched her backward. She tumbled in the air with the last thought that a bomb had landed directly upon her. When she awoke, she was pinned face down in the darkness, her mouth full of plaster. The floor above her had collapsed and she lay there for several days until men dug her out of the ruins. Outside, the city was flattened. Drops of oily black rain were falling from the sky.

Barefoot and dressed in rags, she made her way along the river to the park where hundreds of women and children lay dying. Some were vomiting up their innards; others had flesh peeling off. She saw two of the women from her neighbourhood association squatting by a fire, and hurried over to them. When they saw her, they turned their faces away, aghast. The next morning, she went to a pool in the river and looked at her reflection.

She closed her eyes, and gestured with an elegant hand toward her face. Her brows looked as if they had been pushed in by the thumbs of a sculptor, and her lips were almost entirely smudged into her face. She made an almost imperceptible noise and hunched back over. As I left, I happened to glance at the chart on the edge of her bed. I felt an uncanny prickling on my scalp. The old lady was just twenty-five years old.

On the other side of the room, I saw two old men lying side by side in bed. One sat up and smiled vaguely as the translator and I came over. His scalp was bare and blotchy and his arms were as thin as twigs. As with the girl in the photographs that Weller had showed us, his withered chest was speckled with red liver spots. The other man was asleep and his breath came in rasps.

The old man spoke so softly that I could barely hear. He smiled and made tiny gesticulations to illustrate his story. Sir would never believe it, he whispered, but they'd both worked on the railroad as labourers until just six months before. They'd been brawny and tough back then, with full heads of hair — wives, mistresses! They'd both been working on the tracks that morning, when the man had noticed the far-off glint of “Mr. B” in the sky, but they'd assumed it was just the weather plane and ignored it. There'd been an air raid warning earlier that morning, and it had passed without incident.

“Hiroshima was lucky, we used to say. The Americans didn't want to touch it.”

He'd never been on a plane himself, he said, but as he'd looked at the silver glint in the sky, he'd wondered what Japan must look like from above.

“How beautiful it must be to fly, sir,” he murmured, “to see the whole country stretched out beneath you.”

He'd watched the plane as it passed. He'd put his hand above his face to shield his eyes from the dazzling sun. That was the moment.

There was a flash. There was no sound. He felt something strong and terribly intense and there was a pulsing of colour as he was hurled forward. He lay splayed on the ground with fragments of stone like teeth in his mouth. He thought he was dead.

Great crashes came from all around and he saw train carriages tumbling across the ground like toys, as an immense cloud rose up and blotted out the sun. Then, all around, debris and dust began to rain violently down from the sky.

He fell silent, staring into space.

“How do you feel now?”

He drew in a breath, then let out a long sigh. He rubbed his hands together dreamily, as if he were washing them. Last year, he said, he'd used his hands every day. Flinging a pick, hammering rivets, laying track. His body had been all muscle. He held up his shaking hands for me to see, then laughed. He didn't even think he could lift a glass of beer now. He felt so light that he thought he might float off into the wind like a feather. I took his photograph and thanked him. He gave a trembling smile and bowed, pressing his hands against his forehead as if in prayer.

As we left the ward, Dr. Hiyashida shook his head and crossed his hands behind his back. “Awkward cases, these A-Bomb people.”

~ ~ ~

Darkness was seeping from the hills and I needed to catch the train back to Tokyo. It was the only passage for two days and the idea of being stuck here in this strange city at night filled me with a baffling fear. Dr. Hiyashida insisted that one of the hospital ambulances drive me to the station and this at least I gratefully accepted. I told myself I should be wary of encountering army personnel, although, in all honesty, it was the thought of traipsing back across that mournful wasteland in the dark that filled me with dread. What I desired more than anything was to be back in my room in Tokyo, a brazier smouldering away on the floor, a large glass of whisky in my hand. Dr. Hiyashida waved me off at the hospital gate, the translator having now departed. He promised to send me a copy of his thesis when it was published. He urged me to be sure to mention his name “in your newspaper.”

“I'll make sure I do,” I called back.

The driver of the ambulance was a handsome young man of around twenty. To my surprise, he spoke English too — his parents had been Christians, and he'd been taught German and English by the monks at the church school, though the English lessons had come to an end several years earlier. He'd lost both of his parents in the blast, he said, but he himself had survived largely unharmed, a feat which he ascribed — admirably, under the circumstances, I thought — to “God's grace.” All he'd suffered were some small burns that wouldn't seem to heal. Out of thanks to God, he had now dedicated his life to helping the sick and the injured.

As we drove along the dark, wide gravel road, he recounted some of the grim stories and grotesque myths that had persisted in the wake of the blast. The bomb had been the size of a matchbox, they said. The bomb had been tested on a mountain range in America, which it had destroyed entirely. Some other stories had a ghastly ring of truth. A group of soldiers had wandered lost in the park that night, holding each other's hands in a macabre line, their eye-sockets empty, their eyeballs having melted down their cheeks. A whirlwind had torn through the city a few hours after the blast, uprooting trees and sucking dead bodies up into the sky.

I pictured the old man as he lay on his hospital bed, the dreamy look in his eyes. He'd been imagining what it would be like to fly, thinking how beautiful the world must seem from up there.

Poor devil.

I asked the driver if he'd suffered any effects of radiation disease himself.

He said he didn't know. He'd lost some hair, but it had grown back. Far worse were the headaches he got at night, the inertia that sometimes pinned him down for days.

He frowned, then carried on in a low, confidential tone.

“The worst of it is that the women's menses have stopped. There are fears over whether they will ever begin again. My wife and I were only married last year, and we so want to have a child one day.”

It was pitch black by the time we reached the station and I said goodbye to the boy with a fervent handshake. The snow was coming down in steady drifts now, and in the ticket hall, the shivering inspector made me understand through sign language that the train would be delayed.

I wandered around the back of the station to the railway sidings. A long chain of carriages was tipped over on its side, the wood scorched. There was a low hill nearby, and partway up, exactly one half of a
torii
arch marked the entrance to what had once been a temple. Nothing remained now but the broken stones of the votive pool, which was still bubbling with water from some mysterious spring, and the stumps of what must have once been enormous cedars. Beyond them I found a mound of rubble, and atop it, two perching Buddhas, about to topple. The face of one was sheared away. The other gazed at the ground, his hands resting in his lap, a silent, secretive smile on his face.

As I walked back down the hill, soft snowflakes brushed my face and settled between the tracks and along the rails. I stood on the lonely platform and watched the snow fall until finally, with a distant glow, a train approached the station. When it pulled in, I clambered up into an empty compartment where I took a hard wooden seat by the window. With numb fingers I slid the whisky bottle from my knapsack and took a long swig as the train jerked into motion. I craned my head out of the window as the train gathered speed, and I watched as the station passed into the distance and snow whirled silently in the black sky. For a second, there was a faint glimmer of light somewhere far out on the plain. Then came a scream of wind as we plunged into a tunnel, and it was gone.

17

THE BLOOD CHERRY GANG

(SATSUKO TAKARA)

The Ginza was crowded with American GIs wearing fur hats and thick gloves. They slid along the frosty avenue and flung little icicles at each other, bellowing with raucous laughter. I didn't even notice the plump streetwalker girl until she had almost barged into me. Wearing a violet dress and reeking of liquor, she peered at me and cursed. Then she spat full in my face.

I stood there speechless as she started screaming. Her face was twisted with rage. Who did I think I was, she shouted, with my airs and graces? Was I superior to her?

“You're just a whore like me!”

It was awful. People stopped to stare, the faces of the Japanese men twitching with spiteful glee, the Americans folding their arms and sniggering as they watched the show.

I stepped past them down the avenue, wiping my face with my handkerchief as the dreadful girl hurled insults behind me.

There seemed to be nothing but streetwalkers in Tokyo that night, lurking in the shop doorways, darting out like crabs to grab passing men. They really were a wretched mob, I thought, their makeup smeared, their bare legs puckered from the cold. Perhaps I did think I was in a class above them, like that floozy had said. Girls such as I drank Scotch in cabarets, while they swigged shochu dregs in dead-end alleys. Allied captains reserved my company in orderly private rooms, while hideous old men pummelled them in the storefronts and frozen bomb craters.

Michiko had despised them, of course. She called them harlots and tarts, filthy
pan-pan
. While she, of course, was a modern-day Okichi, a courtesan, a handmaiden of Genji.

It just went to show, I thought, as I hurried home. People always needed someone else to look down upon, no matter how far they'd fallen themselves. After all, even the dogs that roam in the streets and eat trash have hierarchies of their own.

~ ~ ~

The next morning, when I woke up, I felt very odd. Rain was dripping into the pail, and I felt as if there was a great weight pressing upon my ribcage, as if I were a butterfly pinned to a card. It was so cold that I could see my breath. When I finally dressed, I felt dizzy, and had to lie back down again.

Late in the afternoon, I was still on the futon, staring up at the stained ceiling. After a while, I began to have the uncanny sensation that someone else was there in the room with me. The feeling grew stronger and stronger, until I became convinced that my mother was sitting over on the tatami by the table, looking at me. I closed my eyes tightly and hid my face in the blanket, but the feeling grew so intense that suddenly, I spun around and looked.

And there she was. Sitting on the floor, staring at me with her lashless eyes. Her blue kimono was scorched around the edges, her hair all burned away. All of a sudden, there was a terrible smell of char in the room and I started to scream and fainted.

When I came to, she was gone. But I could still picture her, staring at me grimly, smouldering in accusation, and I knew that the reason she had returned from the other world was to punish me for having betrayed our family by becoming a prostitute.

I wondered if I should return to our alley and light more incense, but I doubted if that would help. Over the following days, I set out once more to search for Hiroshi at the schools and the railway stations, hoping that by finding some trace of him, I might somehow quiet her restless spirit. But it was useless. There were no graves I could visit, no fragments of bone that I could inter.

I grew frightened that Hiroshi's ghost, or Osamu's, might visit me now as well. Sometimes, when I left the Oasis, I thought I saw a pale figure standing on the other side of the avenue, gazing at me. I imagined that it followed me through the crowd, solemn eyes upon me as I strode through the streets. But whenever I turned to look, the figure was gone.

Mr. Shiga must have noticed that I was on edge, because one night he summoned me to his office.

“Takara-san,” he said, “if you can't get a grip on yourself, then you're fired. Your gloomy face is causing our customers discomfort.”

I gave a shrill laugh and bowed and apologized, asking him to forgive me. I tried to explain that I was just very tired.

He opened the drawer of his writing desk and took out a small green bottle, which he held up to the lamp.

“Take one of these each evening, Takara-san, before you come to work.” He shook a small white pill into his palm, and placed it in front of me. “Our noble troops were given these at the end of the war to revive their stamina. You may find they help.”

Later that night, I swallowed one of the tablets shortly before I went to sit at a table of American sailors. I realized that my mind was quite calm, that I felt pretty and sparkling. Their conversation seemed very amusing, and I began to chatter coquettishly away in broken English, an unusual confidence and excitement quivering all through my body. It was quite extraordinary. The Americans gazed at me and made jokes with their friends on the other tables. They all asked me to dance one after the other, and in a few hours I had earned more for tea dances than I normally did lying down on my back.

Some of the other girls were in the dressing room when I finished my shift. They smiled when I showed them the bottle of magical pills.

“We've all been taking them for weeks now,” they laughed. “They really are amazing!”

The pills had the added benefit, they said, of stopping you from getting hungry, so you wouldn't get too fat, either. We all laughed at that one: none of us were anything but skin and bones in any case.

From then on, I swallowed a chalky pill as soon as I arrived at the Oasis. It fizzed inside me as I dressed and painted my face. The Americans gave me swigs of whisky, and I felt as if I was on a glowing merry-go-round as they twirled me across the dance-floor. Finally, I took a yen taxi home, still wide awake, but then I just drank more whisky, and the room would spin deliciously around me as I sank down into a deep, dreamless sleep. And then, even if my mother, or my brother, or Osamu did come and visit me from beyond the grave, I was always too dead to the world to notice.

~ ~ ~

I dreamed that I was far out on the Pacific Ocean, on a battleship, ploughing through the waves. My father was tucking me into a bunk, but the blanket wouldn't quite stretch. He climbed into the bunk beside me, and I was ashamed, but then he turned around, and he was Osamu. There was a loud explosion, a clanging alarm, and sailors were running through the galleys — we had been struck by a torpedo, the boat was sinking, and I was deep beneath the ocean, the sea water pouring into my lungs —

Michiko was leaning over me, holding an empty glass. Water was dripping down my cheeks. She smiled. “Satchan!” she said. “I thought you'd never wake up. Really, you should be ashamed of yourself.”

I glanced at her groggily as she shivered out of a thick, luxurious looking white fur coat, which she hung from the nail on the wall.
She's put on weight
, I thought. She had a nice sleek look: a pink flush in her cheeks. As she laid out tins on the table, I saw a flash of silver around her wrist.

She sat down and stretched herself out. As I clambered over to make some tea, she launched straight away into a tirade about her admiral.

“Such demands, Satsuko,” she wailed. “I sometimes think I would have been better off at the Oasis.”

I smiled thinly, glancing at the thick fur coat.

“He won't keep away. He treats me like I'm a prisoner!”

“That must be very unpleasant for you, Michiko,” I agreed.

She gave a sad nod. “But he loves me, you see, Satsuko. He's going to tell his wife in America that he's leaving her.”

I stifled a laugh. “And marry you, Michiko?” I asked. “Is that really likely?”

“He's very wealthy,” she said airily, ignoring the question. She took a small, jewelled mirror from a leather purse and applied an invisible dusting of powder to her face.

“And you'll never guess, Satsuko,” she said, dramatically.

“What's that, Michiko?”

She cleared her throat and stood up. With one hand against her breast, she sang the notes of an ascending scale in a pure clean voice.

“Very melodic, Michiko.”

“Do you think so?” she said, with a proud smile. “I'm learning how to act as well.”

She had persuaded her admiral to pay for lessons with some old stagehands from the Minato Theatre, and had even managed to cajole him into buying her a piano. In fact, she said, it was to be delivered later on that very day.

As the kettle boiled, I felt quite queasy and thought instinctively of my vial of pills in the dresser.

“It's kind of you to visit, Michiko,” I said, as I poured the water into the pot, “what with all your new distractions.”

My stomach suddenly heaved.

“But I've missed you so much, Satsuko!” she said.

“Do you know,” I said, inhaling sharply, “I was at the cinema just last week. I saw an American film that starred an actress who resembled you. Could it be Ingrid something?”

“Ingrid Bergman?” she cried, clapping her hands. “How clever you are, Satsuko! I think so too. There's a definite resemblance.”

I turned my face away, swallowing bile. I wondered if I could politely ask her to leave. But, to my relief, she waved away her tea in any case.

“Satsuko,” she said, “please forgive me. I really must go. My piano is to be delivered at any moment.”

“Please come again, Michiko. You're always very welcome,” I said.

“As soon as I can. Oh, and before I forget . . . ”

She picked up a package wrapped in red crêpe de Chine and placed it on the table.

“I've no need for gifts, Michiko,” I stammered. “I'm doing perfectly well . . . ”

“Please accept it, Satsuko,” she begged, kneeling in front of me. “You really must.”

A horn blared outside. Before I could respond, Michiko had scuttled to the door. She whipped out her mirror and applied a last, rapid puff of powder to her face. Then, with a wave of her gloved hand, she was gone.

The powder hovered in the air, a pungent flowery smell. Suddenly, I gasped, reached for the pail and heaved up the pitiful milky contents of my stomach. My eyes were blurry with tears as I held onto its cold metal rim.

After several minutes, I slid over to the table. I took the package Michiko had left me and held it on my lap. There were several silk bows and ribbons criss-crossing the package and I fumbled with them for some time, until finally I gave up and just ripped open the red tissue paper.

“Oh, Michiko,” I said.

A fur stole lay in the box, taken from a white fox or some other expensive animal. I lifted it out. It was so beautiful that I felt tears spring into my eyes. The fur was the softest thing I had ever felt in my life, delicate and supple and luxurious. I stood up, and held it against my cheek for a long time. Then I went over and lay back on the futon, and drifted away, lost in its fleecy softness for the rest of the afternoon.

~ ~ ~

A Joe with a pockmarked face was fast asleep on top of me, snoring loudly in my ear. He had been celebrating his birthday that night and his cronies had strong-armed him into swallowing one bottle of beer after another. With an effort, I rolled him off onto the floor and rang for Mr. Shiga. When the man's friends came to take him away, they snorted with laughter and put his clothes on back to front, which was just the kind of childish joke the Americans seemed to continually enjoy playing upon one another.

So I wasn't in a very good mood as I waited in the cold drizzle for a tram that never came. Eventually I decided that it would be just as well to walk to Shimbashi Station and take the overground train home from there. I drew my fur stole close around my neck and walked into a slanting wind.

It was deep winter now and I wondered how they survived, the pan-pan girls. Several were sheltering under the low arches of the overground railway line. They stood on either side of the short tunnels, each with a leg bent up, cigarette smoke curling in wisps. I quickened my step, dodging the icy pools of water as I fingered the stole around my neck.

I heard a light crunch of footsteps and a shadow lengthened beside me. I glanced back. A group of women were walking about fifteen paces behind me. I sped up, focusing on the lights of the station, a hundred yards ahead. The footsteps came closer. My heart started to pound in my chest. A voice in my head screamed at me to run, and I hoisted up my skirt. A fist struck me and I collapsed onto the ground.

There was a shrill chorus of voices around me. A tooth was loose on my tongue and my knees were torn. Thin, strong hands seized my arms and pulled me up. Three women surrounded me, and in the darkness, I recognized the stout girl in the purple blouse who had spit at me the week before. My fur stole was draped around her neck. I smelled cheap tobacco and sour sweat as she stepped forward. She slapped me as hard as she could. She hawked and spat at me once again, and I felt chewing gum caught in my hair.

“Where have you been tonight, you bitch?” she demanded. She slapped me hard again and I yelped. “Still think you're better than us?”

I shook my head, but she grabbed my arm and twisted it.

“You American whore!” she screamed. “I should stab you in the heart right here and now!”

I gasped as she shoved me. She seized my bag and began to rifle through it. Another, very tall woman stepped in front of me. Dressed in a crimson frock, her eyebrows were painted high up on her forehead, giving her a permanent puzzled look. She reached for a clump of my hair and twisted it around until tears sprang into my eyes.

“What are you doing down here anyway?” the tall woman whispered. “You know this is our patch.”

I tried to shake my head, gasping in pain. Her other hand moved quietly in the darkness and I felt a sudden cold, sharp point between my lip and my nose.