Tokyo Ueno Station

by Yu Miri

  I heard the sound of a lawn mower somewhere nearby.

  The smell of freshly cut grass hit me.

  Then, the smell of someone making instant ramen in their tent.

  A sparrow startled at something and suddenly flew off, like a handful of beans scattered at Setsubun to cast out evil.

  The hydrangeas were in bloom. The lighter blossom surrounding the smaller, darker center resembled a demon’s face.

  Things like that always made me feel lonely when I was alive.

  Now, noises, colors, and smells are all mixed up, gradually fading away, shrinking; I feel if I put out my finger to touch it, everything will disappear, but I have no fingers to touch with. I can no longer touch, not even one hand to the other in prayer.

  If I don’t exist, I can’t disappear either.

  “Mr. Prime Minister.”

  “I am, of course, aware of the various opinion polls going around. But since its formation in September last year, this government considers that, for victims of this disaster, the most important things are reconstruction, battling the consequences of the nuclear accident, and the revival of the Japanese economy. These are our priorities, and I am determined to take all measures necessary to provide genuine aid to victims of the disaster.”

  Raindrops suddenly began to fall, wetting the roofs of the huts. They fall regularly, like the weight of life or of time. On nights when it rained, I couldn’t stop myself from listening to the sound, which kept me from sleeping. Insomnia, then eternal sleep—held apart from one by death and the other by life, brought closer to one by life and the other by death, and the rain, the rain, the rain, the rain.

  It rained on the day that my only son died.

  *

  “Today at 4:15pm the Crown Princess gave birth to a son at the Imperial Hospital. Mother and child are doing well.”

  —

  It was the 23rd of February, 1960. I heard the announ­cer read the news exultantly over the radio.

  Not long after, they broadcast the sounds of the cheering crowds gathered in front of Nijubashi Bridge and the Tōgū Palace, red and white lanterns in their hands, beating drums, singing the national anthem, and chanting, “Long live the emperor!”

  The fireworks continued to explode outside, twenty or thirty times, I think, and then they started going off over by Kashima Town Hall, boom, boom, boom…

  Setsuko had gone into labor the morning of the day before.

  It was a horrible labor, unlike the birth of our daughter Yoko two years before. She was in agony for nearly an entire day, and my mother told her over and over again in our dialect, “It happens, honey, everything’s gonna be fine, the baby will be here before night falls,” but her voice began to tremble and the anxiety became apparent in her eyes. At the end of the second day, Setsuko was writhing in pain, her crimson face framing gritted teeth. I went to her parents’ house in the same village for advice, and they told me to go and fetch Imano Toshi, a reputable midwife in Kashima.

  I went back to my parents’ house to tell them I was going to go fetch a midwife. My mother said nothing; my father’s face was grave. On the radio, a different announcer revealed that the Imperial Prince had just met his son for the first time. “Congratulations to His Majesty the Crown Prince, and to Her Majesty the Crown Princess. The people of this nation rejoice at the sight of the young prince, their voices crying passionately for his long life. We give our sincere congratulations.” I saw in the dim reflection of the windowpane in the darkened room that I was the only one crying. I knew that we did not have enough to pay the midwife and that there was no time to borrow the money, not that anyone would have lent it anyway. I swallowed hard, my mouth flooded again with saliva, and the noise of the radio grew faint. I swallowed again and no longer heard even the silence.

  My mother and father vanished from my sight; I ran outside. But as I ran I thought about money. The phrase repeated in my mind: I don’t have a single sen, I don’t have a single sen.

  We were at our very poorest when Kōichi was born. I helped my dad out gathering clams in Kita­migita Bay, but the money instantly went to pay off our outstanding debts with the moneylender, the hardware store, the rice and sake merchants, and after that there’d be nothing left.

  To keep us all fed, my mother and Setsuko would go out every day from spring to autumn, except when it was raining, planting rice, potatoes, pumpkins, and greens to harvest and bring home.

  And in the winter, my mother and Setsuko would knit sweaters for everyone in the family. We could only afford cheap yarn and thread so the sweaters quickly developed holes, but the women would repair them neatly. I liked watching the movement of their hands as they worked: my youngest sister Michiko holding the unraveled yarn stretched between her hands as my mother and Setsuko took it and wound it into balls. Michiko would try to badger them into singing something, which Setsuko never would do, being a shy woman of few words, but my mother would sing a lullaby in dialect. When Michiko asked her where she learned it, she said warmly, “I learned that one when I went off to be a nanny for a sake merchant. I must’ve been seven or eight.” When I realized that the words of the song were about how looking after children isn’t as easy as you might think, my eyes stung and I felt a lump in my throat.

  Bill collectors came to our door year-round.

  We’d send my youngest brothers, still just kids, to tell them nobody was in, but the collectors didn’t buy that.

  “Now, don’t lie to me, boys. Where’d they go? When’re they coming back?”

  “They said they didn’t know when they were coming back,” my brother said, snot dripping from his nose.

  “Are you sure your mamma’s not home? I just want a word with her.”

  My brother began to cry. “Mamma’s gone to Haramachi. She’s not home.”

  “You don’t say. Well, tell ’em I’ll be back,” the collector grumbled as he left.

  I was relieved that he left, of course, but at the same time I thought what a thing of sin poverty was, that there could be nothing more sinful than forcing a small child to lie. The wages of that sin were poverty, a wage which one could not endure, leading one to sin again, and as long as one could not pull oneself out of poverty the cycle would repeat until death.

  These attacks and retreats by bill collectors were interrupted only during the fifteen days when all the houses were decorated with pine branches for the new year. On New Year’s Eve my family, all ten of us, would go to Shoen-ji Temple in Kashima to hear the bell ring in the new year, and the next day, we would give very meager envelopes of money to my brothers and sisters before playing some traditional games. Kite-flying, badminton, card games, pin the tail on the donkey…

  February was always the most difficult time of the year.

  Ten days before Kōichi was born, some officials from the tax office trampled through our house, attaching red slips of paper to almost everything. They didn’t touch the rice cooker or table, of course, but they marked the chest of drawers, the radio, and the clock.

  “You’re doing us a favor, you know, taking all this old shit away,” my father spat, drunk on cheap hooch. I felt pathetic waking up and eating meals in a house full of repossession notices.

  I can’t remember if that day, the day that Kōichi was born, was before or after they took everything away.

  What I do remember is how cold it was, how the snow danced in the wind as I ran, and how I pressed my face close to the nameplate on the house to make sure it really said Imano before knocking on the door. I remember that I did not ask how much it would cost and that she didn’t say anything about money either; I remember the white cap that she put on when she entered our house, her white apron, the black trumpet-shaped stethoscope she put to Setsuko’s big belly; I remember listening to the radio in the living room while I waited, hearing a cry and then, her voice as she told me: “It’s a boy, congratulations. And
born the same day as the prince—what a blessing.”

  I leaned to look at the futon and saw Setsuko cradling a baby to her chest. He had already begun to nurse.

  But the first thing I saw was not the baby, it was Setsuko’s arm, bent like a sickle, muscles defined and skin tanned from working in the fields.

  The midwife, who had spoken in standard Japanese all this time, repeated her congratulations in our dialect, and Setsuko laughed, her whole body shaking with laughter, which made her grimace with pain. She let go of the baby and put her hands to her face, which was covered with sweat despite the cold, and then smiled again.

  Her smile broke the tension, and I dared then to look at the baby’s face.

  I was a father looking down at his son for the first time, and yet I felt like a baby looking up at his mother’s face. Suddenly, I wanted to cry.

  As he was born on the same day as the Crown Prince’s first son, I decided that we would call him Kōichi, borrowing the first character of the prince’s name for the first of his own.

  —

  “The smell must be awful, though.”

  “Well, I keep it in the entrance hall.”

  “That doesn’t mean it doesn’t smell.”

  “True. But I’m used to it now. I’ve almost forgotten it’s there.”

  The woman, in her mid-thirties, held a soda bottle in one hand and the leads for three toy poodles in the other, as she spoke to a slightly plump woman around the same age. The white dog had a red lead, the grey one a pink lead, and the brown one a blue lead.

  “It must be expensive to feed three dogs,” said the plump woman. “What do you give them?”

  “I cook up a mix of rice and chicken tenders or lean beef in a big pot, and when they get hungry, I heat some up and give it to them, but they can get sick if they don’t get enough vegetables so I throw in some radish or carrot, or some lettuce. Anyway, I give them a lot of greens.”

  “I swear, they eat better than people.”

  “Honestly. I mean, all I need is a bread roll.”

  “Do bread rolls still exist? Like the kind you get in a cafeteria?”

  “I found some in a little bakery on a backstreet.”

  The clip-clop of their shoes rang out. When one of them stepped on a fallen leaf, there was a rustling sound, too. I can no longer hear sounds or voices with my ears. But I feel like I’m listening closely. I can’t watch people anymore, either. But I feel like I’m watching intently. And I can’t speak about what I hear or see anymore. But I can talk to people. The people in my memories, whether they’re alive or dead—

  “Almost time for the morning glory market, isn’t it?”

  “It’s Friday and Saturday the week after next.”

  “Kototoi Street is going to be absolutely wild.”

  “I heard there’s going to be about a hundred stalls.”

  A group of elderly people in baseball caps and straw hats gather around an art student, sitting on a little stool on the pavement, painting a watercolor of a tree. They all have their hands stuck in their pockets or linked behind their backs, or their arms folded over their chests.

  Nobody is carrying an umbrella. The pavement is dry.

  Today is going to be one of those days where it rains on and off.

  Today…

  One day…

  It was raining that day. I kept my head down to keep the cold rain off my face, looking down as the water bounced off the pavement around my wet shoes like oil popping in a frying pan, the rain beating down on me, my shoulders hunched, walking, in the rain.

  “All the girls are going to be wearing summer kimonos with morning glory patterns.”

  “Girls these days don’t wear kimonos.”

  “But they do! It’s such a pretty sight.”

  “Every year, I buy two plants and I think they’re going to bloom, but then I have to practically convince them to do it. Morning glories are from much further south, and you have to put them somewhere very sunny, but in the daytime their leaves start drooping like a dog’s ear, so you have to give them some rainwater or the leftover water from washing rice. Then, during the summer, when the blooms start to fade, I pinch them off, so when the plant blooms for the last time in September, it will give me seeds for the next year.”

  A cyclist stopped by the side of the road.

  They stopped right in front of the Statue of Times Forgotten, the memorial to the victims of the firebombing of Tokyo, so perhaps it was someone who’d lost family then.

  One night, while we were queuing to buy tickets for a scalper, Shige told me about it.

  “The American firebombing of Tokyo began at eight minutes past midnight on the 10th of March, 1945. Over three hundred B-29s flying at low altitude dropped 1,700 incendiary bombs on the most densely populated, working class part of the city. A fierce north wind was blowing that night, which soon turned the fire into a tsunami of flames, engulfing the streets. The highest death toll was reportedly at Kototoi Bridge, where people living on either side of the river had assumed safety lay across the water. People ran with children in their arms or on their backs; they escaped on bicycles; pushed carts full of their most treasured possessions or elderly family members… Then the flames from the Asakusa side of the river started to leap, and those who were on fire tried to cross to the other side. By morning, the bridge was covered with burned bodies. 7,000 people were temporarily buried in Sumida Park, on both sides of the river, and 7,800 were brought to Ueno Park and buried here. In just two hours that night, over 100,000 people lost their lives, but there’s not a single public monument to them anywhere in the city, nothing like the Peace Parks in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

  Next to the bicycle in front of the Statue of Times Forgotten, a skinny man in his sixties bobbed down, checking his reflection in the bike’s mirror as he shaved. Using a large pair of gardening shears, he scraped at his beard. He looked trim in his black t-shirt and white trousers, but the tent, saucepan, umbrella, and flip-flops piled on to the bike’s luggage rack, in addition to the wet clothes and towel pinned to the basket, suggested that this man was homeless after all. Was he shaving because he found some work as a day laborer? At his age, engineering or construction work was out of the question, but one could possibly earn a thousand yen a day cleaning office buildings on Saturdays, mopping the hallways and lobbies from the first floor to the tenth, waxing them once dry.

  The Statue of Times Forgotten depicts a woman carrying a baby boy in her right arm while her left hand rests on the shoulder of a little girl. The little girl is looking up and pointing at the sky to the right, and the baby looks up to the right, too, but the mother faces straight ahead.

  As we waited in line for the ticket office to open, Shige told me more about the firebombing of Tokyo. Unlike when he’d told me about other places in Ueno Park, like the Great Buddha or the Shimizu Kannon temple, he spoke as if he were desperately trying to chase away the fear and sadness he was grappling with, and I wondered if he, as a survivor of the bombardment, had come upon the corpse of someone from his own family here. Perhaps he had made his life here in the park, in a tent, as a result. But it was winter; I was cold, and my lips were so dry that I could barely speak, and I didn’t want to attempt to find out whether my guess about Shige was right.

  “The 10th of March was Armed Forces Day, and the next day was a Sunday, so many of the children who had been sent away from their homes to stay in the countryside, sleeping in temples or hotels, had come back to the city on the ninth for the holiday weekend. Many of the bodies found in Ueno Park were the burned, blackened corpses of parents and children, still clinging to each other.”

  Each time I saw the Statue of Times Forgotten, I felt like I was being forced to face those times gone by. Yoko and Kōichi were only two years apart, so there must’ve been a time when they looked just like this. I was never home because I was away wor
king, so I didn’t take any pictures of the children. I never had my own camera, either.

  I have only one picture of Kōichi, a tiny photo of him from his student card when he was at technical school learning to be a radiographer. When we had it enlarged for his funeral, his face was blurry, as if he were behind frosted glass.

  Like it was someone else completely.

  But it really was Kōichi that died.

  After the Tokyo Olympics ended, the wave of urbanization reached the Tōhoku region and Hokkaido, bringing with it public works projects such as building new highways, railways, parks, and riverbank protection structures, as well as the construction of schools, hospitals, libraries, and other public facilities. When Tanikawa Athletics Co. Ltd., the company I worked for, opened up a branch office in Sendai, I was transferred there to work on site at construction projects, building baseball stadiums, tennis courts and other athletic facilities.

  That day it had rained since I awoke. I was digging out the future site of Sukagawa City Hall’s tennis court with a pickaxe.

  When I returned to my room that night, I had a call from work. “Mr. Mori, your wife called to tell you that your son is dead,” they said.

  Just a few days earlier, Setsuko had called to say that Kōichi had passed the national radiology exam, so I assumed there must’ve been a mistake; but when I called home, she told me that Kōichi had been found dead at the flat where he lodged, on his futon as if he were sleeping, and that the police were carrying out an autopsy because they suspected his death might be unnatural.

  It was raining.

  My daughter Yoko’s husband, who was from Sendai, picked up Setsuko first at the house in Yazawa, then drove to Sukagawa to get me.