You Think That's Bad (20 page)

But when he heard from Edamasa again, the pull was too
strong, and when he was sent out to buy rice one morning, he left a note stating he wouldn't return until he'd succeeded in the motion-picture business or died trying. When he telephoned from Tokyo a week later to let them know he was safe and settled into a place where they could reach him, Ichiro came to the phone but his father and grandmother did not. Ichiro said his mother still hadn't recovered from the effrontery of the note.

So he was surprised to receive his father's invitation to lunch. They arranged it for the day of his father's arrival, but that morning the truck had broken down on some location shooting for which Tsuburaya had volunteered in the hills and he found himself stranded out of town.

The day his truck broke down and his father arrived at the capital was September 1, 1923, and a few minutes before noon his father was still expecting him for lunch when the Great Kanto Earthquake brought the Imperial Hotel's chandelier down onto the table before him. He said he'd just lifted his water glass away from his place setting when it was as if a giant had stamped it flat. He stood up with his pant leg open at the knee like a haversack. Something in the shattered and telescoping table had lashed open his lower thigh.

The moment before, he'd been peering over at the lunch room's little indoor pond, where dull carp drowsed in the tepid water. Then there was a rumbling and the first shock, a vertical jolt. At the second jolt, the chandelier came down, and the floor began to pitch and rock so that the heavy parquet snapped and ricocheted like fireworks, and after he'd stood he was unable to run and got thrown onto his side. From there he saw the office concern across the street collapse into a dust cloud so intense that it was as if the hotel windows had been permanently chalked with yellow.

Out on a side street, he managed to tie his tattered pant leg around his thigh, casting around for his son, and with every jolt the hotel and an adjacent bank flexed like buggy whips and cracks appeared along their walls, from which window casings and marble avalanched into the street. He said that with each shock it was
as if the earth had been pulled out from under him. Where was Eiji? Where was his son? He ran, searching, as the concussions changed to undulations. And then it appeared to be over, though every few minutes the aftershocks were sufficient to knock to him to his knees.

He found himself in a little park, panting. Sparrows under a stand of orange trees seemed somehow to have been grounded, hopping about, for all the freneticism of their wings achieving only a few feet of altitude before fluttering back into the dirt. He was weeping, he realized, in fear for his son. Should he go back? All avenues in that direction had been blocked by massive slides of debris.

All of this he'd related to Ichiro the last time Tsuburaya saw him. Only the oval of his face had been spared the salve and the bandages. Tsuburaya had wondered if the doctors had applied the same cooling paste his father had used on his burns. He said hello to his father, who then directed him and his grandmother to wait outside the ward. His grandmother went off to berate the overworked medical teams from the Relief Bureau, but he held his ear to the open door.

“Keep him away from me,” his father said, and Tsuburaya couldn't fully register what he'd just heard. His father went on to tell his uncle that within a minute the city had been cut off from everything, the water and gas mains ruptured, the telegraph and telephone wires down. The trolley rails where he crossed them had sprung upward after snapping. He'd called for Eiji and in response heard cries in all directions. And then he noticed the rice-cracker shop already on fire, the smoke rising into the still, hot air. There seemed to be no one present, no one making an effort to put out the flames.

Later Tsuburaya thought that he'd probably heard more of his father's voice that day than he had for the previous five years. He was crying for his father's pain and because of his banishment from the room. Every so often Ichiro asked if the pain was very bad
and never received an answer. When his grandmother returned, she whispered something and tried to pull Tsuburaya away from the door, but he tore his elbow away with such ferocity that she never tried again.
You should go back into that room
, he told himself. Instead he stood where he was and listened.

Everything had been destroyed and the gas mains shattered just as lunch fires were being lit in hibachis and stoves all over Tokyo, in hotels and lunch counters and apartments and factory work stations from Ota to Arakawa. All of those braziers scattered their coals onto tatami mats on crooked old streets and alleys just wide enough to provide sufficient drafts. His father saw firemen—their water mains now dry—trying to use nearby moats and canals. He said those not trying to pull the trapped from the rubble did their best to put out the fires, but there were too many of them, and almost no water. Then the wind picked up.

Because there was no single point of origin neither was there a single advancing front of fire, and no one knew where to go or what was safe. Everyone who could headed to the river, and along its banks the mobs were increasingly herded toward the bridges, where they were crushed or tipped over the side until the bridges themselves caught fire. His father struggled toward anyone who resembled his son until he was knocked into the water by a handcart, and there he stayed alive by keeping submerged until oil from ruptured storage tanks ignited upstream, the fire cascading at him along the surface. He scrambled out just ahead of its arrival.

Beside the Yasuda Gardens he pitched himself into a broad, bare lot that had been the site of the Army Clothing Depot, where uniforms were stored for shipment. Its size and location along the river promised more safety—across its twelve acres there was very little to burn—and thousands poured into it all through the afternoon, as everywhere else became more and more of a conflagration. They came singly and in groups, some pulling carts piled with outlandish goods, and found places for themselves. Patients from nearby hospitals were carried in on stretchers. Everyone was
polite, settling down shoulder-to-shoulder to wait. They watched the fires surrounding them burn. The crush was so pronounced that he gave up the notion of hunting the crowd for his son.

Someone behind him complained that he'd forgotten his chess set. The bitter taste of smoke in the air intensified. He wished he'd had some lunch.

And then, across the river, starbursts of sparks and flame seemed to be climbing the columns of smoke high into the clouds. He asked the man beside him for the time, and the man told him it was a little after four. The wind was intensifying, and from the west they could hear the sound of a huge airplane flying low across the river. Was it a rescue mission? It was flying toward them, but in that direction the sky was enveloped in black. And then he saw it wasn't the sky but a column so wide it seemed to cover the horizon, and that it was spinning and shot through with fire. Debris crossed its face and reappeared again. By then they could hear nothing else.

It seemed to detonate everything on the other side of the river before it came across. It swept away the barges. It blew apart the School of Industry. It drew river water forty feet up into the funnel before it sheared off as steam. By the time it hit the Clothing Depot it sounded like gargantuan waterfalls crashing together.

Two policemen agape on a refugee's cart were blown away. Tsuburaya's father was knocked down and blasted along the ground until his hand caught onto something. A teenaged girl on fire flew by over his head. Human beings all around him were sucked into the air like sparks. He shut his eyes against the wind and heat. A tree was wrenched from the ground, roots and all, before him, and he crawled into the loose earth and was able to breathe. Some ruptured water mains there had created a bog, and he tunneled into the mud.

When he revived, the backs of his hands had been burned to the bone. Everyone was gone. The skin atop his head was gone. His ears were gone. Something beside him he couldn't recognize was still squirming.

At their store that evening, two hundred and twenty kilometers away, Tsuburaya's grandmother reported that the columns of smoke and cloud carried upward by the convection currents made everyone wonder if a new volcano had been born. An intense red glow spread across the southern horizon.

His father said he remembered only fitful things afterward. Someone carried him somewhere eventually. An army cart in one of the burned-out areas stopped to pass out cupfuls of water to refugees. A riderless horse stood in the road too badly burned to move. Bodies looked like black rucksacks except for the occasional raised leg or hand. He remembered a shirt like his son's under a cascade of lumber. A functioning well with a long queue beside it. He died soon after he mentioned the well, describing the water he so enjoyed from it.

In the years following his death Tsuburaya talked to historians and scientists and survivors. The historians informed him that over four thousand acres of Tokyo had burned, ten times the acreage of the Great Fire of London's, and that a hundred thousand people had perished, a hundred times the number consumed in the Americans' San Francisco fire. The scientists informed him that the updraft that produced the columns his grandmother witnessed had caused a gigantic vacuum near the ground and the surrounding air had swept in to fill it before being drawn upwards itself, resulting in a furnace four thousand acres wide and an updraft that generated tornadoes as it pulled the fire up into it: fire tornadoes. And the survivors told him stories like the ones his father had related. Though of course once Masano and Tsuburaya had endured the fire raids at the end of the war, he no longer needed to turn to others for that sort of understanding. “Smoke Tsuburaya,” she'd said to herself one night as they'd hurried down the steps to a shelter. He'd had less trouble than others negotiating a safe route through the fires, since he knew from his father's experience which way to go.

“Do you think he knew I was listening?” he'd asked his uncle on the morning his family had returned home from his father's deathbed. He'd shamed himself by weeping so much on the train that his grandmother had finally taken a seat opposite him.

“I don't think he gave it any thought,” Ichiro answered.

At the sound bay, everyone was very excited about the roar Ifukube had come up with. Tsuburaya had charged him with the task of creating for the monster's cry something melancholy and ear-splitting—“Try producing
that
combination,” Ifukube had complained when given the instructions—and he'd spent two weeks sorting through recordings of wild animals before he'd finally given up and settled on drawing a heavy work glove across the strings of a contrabass and manipulating the sound in an echo chamber. The result was hair-raising. The entire production team was beside itself with happiness. He had also overlaid a recording of a taiko drum with an electronically altered mine detonation to produce the monster's footfalls.

Halfway through the shooting Honda told Tsuburaya that he was using many more close-ups of the monster's face than he'd thought he would, because its dilemma was becoming more real to him. Man had created war and the Bomb and now nature was going to exact its revenge, with tormented Gojira its way of making radiation visible. That's why he'd insisted that its skin be thick and furrowed like the keloid scars of the atomic survivors.

Tanaka was uneasy, in fact, with how often the movie referenced the war. And he worried that the long shots of the burned-out city would recall for everyone the newspaper images of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In the rushes of the final scenes, Honda noted how sad Gojira looked when he turned from the camera.

“That's the way I made the mask,” Tsuburaya reminded him.

“No,” Honda said. “The face itself is changing through the context of what we've seen him go through. By the time the movie ends he's like a hero whose departure we regret. The paradox of fearsomeness and longing is what the whole thing's about.”

“I wouldn't know about that,” Tsuburaya told him.

“It's like part of
us
leaving,” Honda said. “That's what makes it so hard. The monster the child knows best is the monster he feels himself to be.” After Tsuburaya didn't respond, he added, “That's why I love those shots of the city after the monster's gone. All that emptiness, like a no-man's land in which eloquence and silence are joined. If you don't have both, the dread evaporates.”

That was true, Tsuburaya conceded. He volunteered that he was particularly proud of the shots of the harbor at night before the creature's eruption from the sea: all along the waterfront, silence. Silence like thunder.

Akira was turned to the wall in his sleep when Tsuburaya got home. One foot hung over the pallet, exposing an impossibly thin ankle. He left for the boy a little maquette that the team had used to model Gojira's head, standing it on the floor next to his mat.

Masano had apparently taken to mounting amulets throughout the house where their influence was desired, against pestilence at the doorway or against storms on the ceiling. The house was dark and still. Tsuburaya went through some old production notes at his desk. Atop one of the shot lists he found some gingko leaves and a note from Akira. His instructor at school had told him they kept the bookworms away.

“I'm a bad father,” Tsuburaya told Honda before his unit got started the next morning. His friend seemed unfazed by the news, so he added, “A bad husband, too.”

“Supposedly the cat forgets in three days the kindnesses of three years,” Honda answered.

They shot the scene of the creature crashing through the rail yards at Shinagawa. The suit's rubber feet were continually torn up by even the thinnest steel of the model rails, and shot after shot after shot proved unsatisfactory. Some of their work was as repetitive as a carpenter's hammering. But the house still had to be built.