In a Flash

by Donna Jo Napoli

My eyes keep returning to that ragged boy. He scratches his neck and looks back at the line behind him. Naoki! He’s thinner and so much more grown-up. But it’s Naoki. I search the line around him for Hitomi. I don’t see her.

  Karo-chan presses against my side. “Don’t stare,” she whispers.

  “Don’t you see who that is?”

  “Don’t stare! People will know you’re not blind.”

  She’s right. But Naoki has noticed me. He looks from me to Karo-chan and back. The way he feels about the war…No, I can’t let him know it’s us. I can’t take that risk.

  Naoki steps out of line and walks toward us hesitantly.

  I squeeze my hands together and turn my back on him. But I want to talk to him so much. I have to! I turn again.

  But something has happened; the whole line is breaking up. The shop ran out of food. So we scurry with Obasan and most of the people around us to the Matsuya department store nearby. I tell myself not to look back, but I do. Naoki’s gone.

  At Matsuya the line also gets cut off before we’re served. By this time all I want is our radish greens at home. And a chance to think about Naoki. But Obasan takes us to Fujiya, and we finally have lunch. Noodles! In a broth with a suspicious-looking seaweed and costing eighty sen, a fortune. But noodles! We slurp them down.

  When we get home, the neighbor is in our yard. She has chopped down the camphor tree. She stands over it with an axe, puffing hard. Obasan smells the oily air and sighs. The neighbor lifts her head defiantly. “Your tree threw morning shade on our vegetables, and morning is the most important time. It’s our right to make a neighbor take down trees or walls. Everyone has to have a garden. That’s our patriotic duty. It was my right to fell this tree.”

  I loved the camphor tree. I loved how we put its leaves in our bath to make the water smell fresh and strong and good. I loved how it made me think of Aiko. And somehow of Nonna. But food is food. The neighbor woman is as skinny as we are.

  The neighbor looks around. “That plum tree has to go, too.”

  I think of Obasan’s haiku. “We could give you plums,” I say. “They will make up for the small shade that tree throws. And plums can be dried for use all winter.”

  “Dried and salted…or pickled and rolled in a rice ball.” The neighbor swallows, and through the gauze I watch the knob of her throat rise and fall. “I get half the plums.”

  “All right,” Obasan says.

  “Half. Not one less.”

  “Half. And leave the tree you cut down. It is mine.”

  “You can’t cut it up. You can’t use an axe without seeing.”

  “I’ll get help. It’s my tree. Leave it.”

  “It will cost you to get help.” The neighbor woman stands tall. “I’ll chop it into pieces for you, if you give me half the wood.”

  “Next time you want to do something to my home—to any part of it, the land or the building or my family…” Obasan puts one arm around me and one around Karo-chan. “Next time, ask first. We are neighbors. That is the courtesy neighbors give one another.”

  The woman drops her head. “I’m sorry. You went out, all three of you, and I thought it was an opportunity to do it without a disagreement. I’m sorry.”

  “Chop the tree up. But take only one quarter of the wood.”

  “Agreed.”

  We go inside.

  “We’re your family,” says Karo-chan. “You said so. You stood with your arms around us, just like Papà did the last time we were with him. This is your home. And this is our home. And when Papà joins us, it will be his home. Right?”

  Obasan puts a hand on Karo-chan’s arm. “We do what we can.”

  “But it will be his home, too. We can do that. Right?”

  “We can try.”

  I kiss Karo-chan’s cheeks. “Family is family.”

  Karo-chan goes to our bedding, takes out Lella, and doesn’t ask again.

  4 JUNE 1944, TOKYO, JAPAN

  The professor stomps into our laundry. “My villa,” he says to Obasan, “it’s been vandalized by the intellectual thieves.” He places his dirty laundry on the counter. “Forgive me. I am beside myself today.” He bows.

  Obasan bows. “Tea?”

  The professor walks in a circle, like an animal tethered to a stake. I worry he will wear a ring in the old tatami mats. “At least a dozen villas were sacked. Those stupid, stupid boys.”

  “They are uneducated,” says Obasan as she prepares the tea. “Perhaps not stupid, just uneducated.”

  “They stole food,” says the professor. “And the police couldn’t care less. One policeman asked me if this vandalism meant I wouldn’t be able to eat waffles anymore. The snide fellow! I haven’t had waffles in over a year. They broke my Western records—all my jazz. And they destroyed my books!”

  Obasan gasps. “Your beloved books.” She sighs. “Those boys have been forced into factory labor. All day long. Every day. Is it any surprise they hate scholars and anyone who makes a living from something other than working with their hands?”

  It dawns on me: that’s what happened to us in Fujiko’s family cabin at the foot of Mount Fuji. The intellectual thieves must have noticed Fujiko’s big spending at the black market in Hakone and her refined language, and decided she was a scholar. It wasn’t the police at all.

  “Tokyo is disintegrating,” says the professor. “So many children work in factories that schools have more teachers than children.”

  “Please sit,” says Obasan, bowing.

  He sits. “That’s the worst part—what’s happening to the children. When the government turned all the golf courses into public gardens, I hired neighbor children to plant potatoes and cabbages and rhubarb on a small section of it. They tend the plot for me. It’s appalling to hire children, but I do it because they’re so poor. And you know what?”

  Obasan pours the tea for the professor and then for herself. She doesn’t answer.

  “They know everything about gardening. Children younger than the younger of your two girls behind the screen over there.”

  Karo-chan and I know all about gardening, too. And we love it.

  “Their days are spent gardening instead of studying. It’s wrong.”

  Obasan sits, waiting for the professor to bow and thank her and take his teacup in both hands and sip.

  “Your girls shouldn’t be sewing all day. They should be in school.” The professor jumps to his feet again. This is awful behavior—the tea is already poured. “It’s wrong that any children should even live in Tokyo now.” He’s walking in that circle again. “Children were supposed to have been evacuated last August, and here it is June of 1944 and they’re still here. There’s no food in Tokyo. They should be in the countryside, with farming relatives. Farmers are the only fat people left. Why are your two girls still here?”

  Will he come over to us? Karo-chan and I pull the gauze sashes down over our eyes. My heart beats like crazy.

  “Your clean laundry is ready, Sensei.” Obasan is on her feet now, too. She bows. “Please find it on the shelf.”

  The professor stops short. He folds his arms one over the other. “You must have many reasons why the girls are here. It’s not my concern.” He bows. “I’m sure your tea is delightful. I wish my worries would settle and allow me to enjoy it properly.”

  “I understand.” Obasan bows. “These are not trivial worries.”

  “I have behaved this morning in a way unusual for me. I have no excuse. But perhaps I have an explanation. The ration of only six cigarettes a day for men is fewer than half what I need. I waste time searching for a decent smoke and pay absurd sums on the black market. I am not myself.”

  “I need no excuse. No explanation,” says Obasan. “We know each other too well for that.”

  “Thank you for the laundry. Thank you for listen
ing. If there’s anything left from this money”—he puts a handful on the counter—“please consider using it to allow the girls a day off from work.”

  “You are most generous.” Obasan bows.

  “The next time, I will bring you a box of tea, to help make up for my failure to enjoy this fine tea you prepared today. Tea from the Kumamoto prefecture. I remember how you loved it as a girl. You said it tasted like mountains.”

  Obasan gasps. “You’ll never find it in Tokyo. Not these days.”

  “Yes, I will.” The professor bows again and leaves.

  Karo-chan counts the money. “What will we spend it on?”

  Obasan feels the money and puts some into her money box. “The rest is yours. You decide.”

  “I want to go back to Fuji Ice,” says Karo-chan.

  “But I get to decide the route we walk,” I say.

  So Karo-Chan and I pull the gauze sashes over our eyes again, and the three of us walk the route I’ve been thinking about all week. It isn’t far, and my memory serves me well, because soon we pass the little home I recognize, even though I was there only once.

  We walk a few steps beyond, and I pretend to trip. I squat. “Please, may we rest awhile here?”

  Obasan and Karo-chan squat as well. We huddle, like cats.

  The house is like any other: wood and paper. There’s a large vegetable garden out front. Greens I don’t know. But I recognize sweet potato leaves. Children are tending it. All of that is normal. But what’s odd—what’s so totally different—is the number of children. There are so many. Closer to the house is a pile of old bicycles. Children sit there, guarding it and chattering.

  My eyes examine them one by one. They are small, so it’s silly to search. But I do anyway. No one is Naoki.

  “That’s a new language,” says Karo-chan.

  “Korean,” says Obasan. “They come here to work in the factories.”

  “Don’t they have factories in Korea?” asks Karo-chan.

  “They don’t come here by choice.”

  Karo-chan doesn’t ask what that means. “It sounds funny. The air smells funny, too.”

  “They make different food,” says Obasan.

  “Their cooks must be awful.”

  Obasan laughs. “I wouldn’t know. I never tasted it. I stand in the ration lines and listen to them whisper to each other, but I don’t speak Korean, so I can’t ask how they prepare things. I know they have different spices.”

  A child in the garden shouts. A few go running into the house. I want to stand to see what the fuss is all about. But I’m supposed to be blind. I stay in my squat. Children come out of the house with jars. They pick things from the garden dirt and put them into the jars.

  “Beetles,” says Karo-chan. “They’re collecting beetles.”

  “To eat,” says Obasan.

  “Koreans eat beetles?”

  “So do Japanese now. We will, too, if it comes to that. We will mash them and roast them. Maybe I’ll add some ginger.” Obasan laughs and stands. “Can we go now, Simo-chan? Have you seen what you needed to see?”

  “What were you looking for?” asks Karo-chan.

  “An old friend.”

  “Naoki?”

  Could she actually remember that this used to be Naoki’s home? “Yes.”

  “I saw him.”

  “What? Where?”

  “Three boys crossed the street up there and went down the block. That way. I think one was him. But it was when you first tripped. So they’re gone by now.”

  “Can we go that way, Obasan?”

  “This is your treat. You decide. But I need to be back at the laundry by early afternoon.”

  We turn the corner where Karo-chan says. Up ahead three boys are painting on a postbox. When they see us, two run off. But one is Naoki. My Naoki. My cheeks heat. He walks backward away from us for a few steps, looking keenly at us. Then he turns on his heel and follows the others. He’s barefoot, and the bottoms of his feet are caked with dirt.

  We walk past the postbox, but we cannot stop and linger. Still, I see enough. Big, fast strokes in red paint of skinny children. Naked. Starving. A boy with the flag wrapped around his belly and a woman glowering down at him. She holds a gun.

  “What is it?” asks Obasan. “What do you see?”

  I’ve stopped asking her how she always knows when I’m upset. I describe what we saw.

  “We must walk quickly,” says Obasan. “Rakugaki is an offense. Someone is bound to have seen the boys doing those scribbles. Someone will tell someone, who will tell someone, and soon the police will come.”

  But we’re too late; a policeman runs toward us in high black boots. “Stop!” he shouts. He points at the postbox. I don’t turn my head. Neither does Karo-chan. We are professional liars by now. “Who did that?”

  Obasan bows. “Did what?” she asks, and her voice sounds weak and old. She is also a professional liar.

  “That.” He points. “That rakugaki.”

  “We cannot see it,” says Obasan.

  “Did you hear them talking? Do you know the scribblers?”

  “We heard only each other,” says Obasan.

  “You must have heard them run away. Which direction did they go?”

  “My nieces were chattering,” says Obasan. “Loudly. As young girls do.”

  “This sort of criminal behavior is bad for public morale,” says the policeman.

  “Ah,” says Obasan. “Do you want to describe the rakugaki to us?”

  “No!” The policeman bows. “You may leave.”

  We walk another block.

  “Do you still want to go to Fuji Ice?” I ask Karo-chan.

  “The food is still good there. And we still have money,” she says.

  So we walk the rest of the way in silence.

  18 JUNE 1944, TOKYO, JAPAN

  Two weeks later, the sirens sound; I’m half-awake. They wail as I sit up and shake Karo-chan awake. Obasan is already putting on her day clothes. We strap on our helmets without talking. Air-raid alerts happen a few times a week.

  Tokyo has concrete shelters—maybe in the rich neighborhoods. Other people use cave-like shelters dug into one of Tokyo’s many hills. A few go to basements in the rare Western-style buildings that have them. But most people can’t go into those places.

  The government recommends that ordinary people gather in clothes cupboards within our homes. But people say they are frightened of being aboveground. And who has cupboards big enough to fit a family? They trudge to a bokugo—an open-pit shelter, nearly two meters deep. Some people have dug a bokugo beside their home, so they just step outside and into the pit. But we don’t have enough land for both a bokugo and a garden—and we need the garden. So we go to a bokugo down the block, beside the street.

  Two women and three small children are already there when we arrive. We climb in and squat, heads bent over; that’s what the radio tells everyone to do. Two more women come, supporting an old man between them. This bokugo is already full. Another woman comes with a baby. We squish together so that the woman and her baby can fit. Karo-chan sleeps crammed between Obasan and me.

  Finally the sirens sound again, and everyone trudges home. As we walk, dawn comes sweetly over the horizon, as though this could be any peaceful day, anywhere. It feels unreal, that anything can still be so pretty.

  Once inside, we fall onto our futons. By the time we wake again, it’s nearly noon.

  “Ha,” says Karo-chan. “The professor hasn’t come yet. He’s later than us.” She’s right; it’s Sunday, and the professor is as regular as a calendar. “He must have spent all night in a shelter, too.”

  “It wasn’t all night. It was just a few hours before dawn,” I say. “And I’m grateful he hasn’t arrived yet. His complaints tire me.”

&nbs
p; “Look who’s grumpy,” says Karo-chan.

  “I’m not grumpy. What’s the point of complaining when there’s nothing anyone can do to make things better?”

  Obasan rubs her palm on her forehead. “You’re giving me a headache.”

  Karo-chan whispers into my ear, “Some people do things to make life better. Have you forgotten making manga?”

  Fujiko and Kotsuru and Sanae.

  And Naoki. He scribbles on postboxes. The woman pointing a gun at the boy. A shiver shoots up me. Naoki has changed. Making rakugaki out on the street is even more dangerous than making manga in a cabin.

  I hear the ambassador: Resistance matters. I know, I know. But I’m not brave like that. I never want to run in fear again.

  The professor finally shows up and drinks tea with Obasan. He really did bring her that special tea last week, and he refuses to let her make it for him. So they drink ordinary tea.

  Karo-chan and I are behind the screen. She calls out to the professor, “Were you in a bokugo?” She gives me a challenging look, daring me to scold her for being so rude. “Is that why you’re late?”

  “I don’t go to a shelter when the siren sounds,” he says.

  “Where do you go?”

  “I stay in bed.” He sips his tea. “I’m late today because I got tangled in a crowd out in front of a hotel. They’re training for air raids. They think training will save them from firebombs.” He takes another sip. “Nothing can save us from firebombs.”

  Obasan pours him a second cup of tea as he says, “Can we turn the radio on, please?”

  The radio says we should sharpen our bamboo spears. American bomber planes are coming soon, and Japan will blast them out of the sky. But some American soldiers will drop over Japan in parachutes. It’s everyone’s duty to kill them before they kill us.

  “Nonsense.” The professor turns off the radio. “I was wrong. It’s a mistake to listen. After what happened on Friday, how can they expect anyone to believe them?”

  “We have not received news for a few days,” says Obasan. “What happened on Friday?”

  “A disaster. Forty-seven American planes attacked Yawata in Kyūshū and only two were shot down.”