James slammed the door. He ran around and slid behind the wheel. “It’s dangerous out here,” O’Beronne whimpered as the engine roared into life. “I was safe in there…”
James stamped the accelerator. The car laid rubber. He glanced behind him in the rearview mirror and saw an audience of laughing, whooping hookers. “Where are we going?” O’Beronne said meekly.
James floored it through a yellow light. He reached into the backseat one-handed and yanked a can from its six-pack. “Where was this bottling plant?”
O’Beronne blinked doubtfully. “It’s been so long…Florida, I think.”
“Florida sounds good. Sunlight, fresh air…” James weaved deftly through traffic, cracking the pop-top with his thumb. He knocked back a hefty swig, then gave O’Beronne the can. “Here, old man. Finish it off.”
O’Beronne stared at it, licking dry lips. “But I can’t. I’m an owner, not a customer. I’m simply not allowed to do this sort of thing. I own that magic shop, I tell you.”
James shook his head and laughed.
O’Beronne trembled. He raised the can in both gnarled hands and began chugging thirstily. He paused once to belch, and kept drinking.
The smell of May filled the car.
O’Beronne wiped his mouth and crushed the empty can in his fist. He tossed it over his shoulder.
“There’s room back there for those bandages, too,” James told him. “Let’s hit the highway.”
FLOWERS
OF EDO
AUTUMN. A FULL MOON floated over old Edo, behind the thinnest haze of high cloud. It shone like a geisha’s night-lamp through an old mosquito net. The sky was antique browned silk.
Two sweating runners hauled an iron-wheeled rickshaw south, toward the Ginza. This was Kabukiza District, its streets bordered by low tile-roofed wooden shops. These were modest places: coopers, tobacconists, cheap fabric shops where the acrid reek of dye wafted through reed blinds and paper windows. Behind the stores lurked a maze of alleys, crammed with townsmen’s wooden hovels, the walls festooned with morning glories, the tinder-dry thatched roofs alive with fleas.
It was late. Kabukiza was not a geisha district, and honest workmen were asleep. The muddy streets were unlit, except for moonlight and the rare upstairs lamp. The runners carried their own lantern, which swayed precariously from the rickshaw’s drawing-pole. They trotted rapidly, dodging the worst of the potholes and puddles. But with every lurching dip, the rickshaw’s strings of brass bells jumped and rang.
Suddenly the iron wheels grated on smooth red pavement. They had reached the New Ginza. Here, the air held the fresh alien smell of mortar and brick.
The amazing New Ginza had buried its old predecessor. For the Flowers of Edo had killed the Old Ginza. To date, this huge disaster had been the worst, and most exciting, fire of the Meiji Era. Edo had always been proud of its fires, and the Old Ginza’s fire had been a real marvel. It had raged for three days and carried right down to the river.
Once they had mourned the dead, the Edokko were ready to rebuild. They were always ready. Fires, even earthquakes, were nothing new to them. It was a rare building in Low City that escaped the Flowers of Edo for as long as twenty years.
But this was Imperial Tokyo now, and not the Shogun’s old Edo anymore. The Governor had come down from High City in his horse-drawn coach and looked over the smoldering ruins of Ginza. Low City townsmen still talked about it—how the Governor had folded his arms—like this—with his wrists sticking out of his Western frock coat. And how he had frowned a mighty frown. The Edo townsmen were getting used to those unsettling frowns by now. Hard, no-nonsense, modern frowns, with the brows drawn low over cold eyes that glittered with Civilization and Enlightenment.
So the Governor, with a mighty wave of his modern frock-coated arm, sent for his foreign architects. And the Englishmen had besieged the district with their charts and clanking engines and tubs full of brick and mortar. The very heavens had rained bricks upon the black and flattened ruins. Great red hills of brick sprang up—were they houses, people wondered, were they buildings at all? Stories spread about the foreigners and their peculiar homes. The long noses, of course—necessary to suck air through the stifling brick walls. The pale skin—because bricks, it was said, drained the life and color out of a man…
The rickshaw drew up short with a final brass jingle. The older rickshawman spoke, panting, “Far enough, gov?”
“Yeah, this’ll do,” said one passenger, piling out. His name was Encho Sanyutei. He was the son and successor of a famous vaudeville comedian and, at thirty-five, was now a well-known performer in his own right. He had been telling his companion about the Ginza Bricktown, and his folded arms and jutting underlip had cruelly mimicked Tokyo’s Governor.
Encho, who had been drinking, generously handed the older man a pocketful of jingling copper sen. “Here, pal,” he said. “Do something about that cough, will ya?” The runners bowed, not bothering to overdo it. They trotted off toward the nearby Ginza crowd, hunting another fare.
Parts of Tokyo never slept. The Yoshiwara District, the famous Nightless City of geishas and rakes, was one of them. The travelers had just come from Asakusa District, another sleepless place: a brawling, vibrant playground of bars, Kabuki theaters, and vaudeville joints.
The Ginza Bricktown never slept either. But the air here was different. It lacked that earthy Low City workingman’s glow of sex and entertainment. Something else, something new and strange and powerful, drew the Edokko into the Ginza’s iron-hard streets.
Gaslights. They stood hissing on their black foreign pillars, blasting a pitiless moon-drowning glare over the crowd. There were eighty-five of the appalling wonders, stretching arrow-straight across the Ginza, from Shiba all the way to Kyobashi.
The Edokko crowd beneath the lights was curiously silent. Drugged with pitiless enlightenment, they meandered down the hard, gritty street in high wooden clogs, or low leather shoes. Some wore hakama skirts and jinbibaori coats, others modern pipe-legged trousers, with top hats and bowlers.
The comedian Encho and his big companion staggered drunkenly toward the lights, their polished leather shoes squeaking merrily. To the Tokyo modernist, squeaking was half the fun of these foreign-style shoes. Both men wore inserts of “singing leather” to heighten the effect.
“I don’t like their attitudes,” growled Encho’s companion. His name was Onogawa, and until the Emperor’s Restoration, he had been a samurai. But Imperial decree had abolished the wearing of swords, and Onogawa now had a post in a trading company. He frowned, and dabbed at his nose, which had recently been bloodied and was now clotting. “It’s all too free-and-easy with these modern rickshaws. Did you see those two runners? They looked into our faces, just as bold as tomcats.”
“Relax, will you?” said Encho. “They were just a couple of street runners. Who cares what they think? The way you act, you’d think they were Shogun’s Overseers.” Encho laughed freely and dusted off his hands with a quick, theatrical gesture. Those grim, spying Overseers, with their merciless canons of Confucian law, were just a bad dream now. Like the Shogun, they were out of business.
“But your face is known all over town,” Onogawa complained. “What if they gossip about us? Everyone will know what happened back there.”
“It’s the least I could do for a devoted fan,” Encho said airily.
Onogawa had sobered up a bit since his street fight in Asakusa. A scuffle had broken out in the crowd after Encho’s performance—a scuffle centered on Onogawa, who had old acquaintances he would have preferred not to meet. But Encho, appearing suddenly in the crowd, had distracted Onogawa’s persecutors and gotten Onogawa away.
It was not a happy situation for Onogawa, who put much stock in his own dignity, and tended to brood. He had been born in Satsuma, a province of radical samurai with stern unbending standards. But ten years in the capital had changed Onogawa, and given him an Edokko’s notorious love for spectacle. Somewhat shamefully, Onogaw
a had become completely addicted to Encho’s sidesplitting skits and impersonations.
In fact, Onogawa had been slumming in Asakusa vaudeville joints at least twice each week, for months. He had a wife and small son in a modest place in Nihombashi, a rather straitlaced High City district full of earnest young bankers and civil servants on their way up in life. Thanks to old friends from his radical days, Onogawa was an officer in a prosperous trading company. He would have preferred to be in the army, of course, but the army was quite small these days, and appointments were hard to get.
This was a major disappointment in Onogawa’s life, and it had driven him to behave strangely. Onogawa’s long-suffering in-laws had always warned him that his slumming would come to no good. But tonight’s event wasn’t even a geisha scandal, the kind men winked at or even admired. Instead, he had been in a squalid punch-up with low-class commoners.
And he had been rescued by a famous commoner, which was worse. Onogawa couldn’t bring himself to compound his loss of face with gratitude. He glared at Encho from under the brim of his bowler hat. “So where’s this fellow with the foreign booze you promised?”
“Patience,” Encho said absently. “My friend’s got a little place here in Bricktown. It’s private, away from the street.” They wandered down the Ginza, Encho pulling his silk top-hat low over his eyes, so he wouldn’t be recognized.
He slowed as they passed a group of four young women, who were gathered before the modern glass window of a Ginza fabric shop. The store was closed, but the women were admiring the tailor’s dummies. Like the dummies, the women were dressed with daring modernity, sporting small Western parasols, cutaway riding-coats in brilliant purple, and sweeping foreign skirts over large, jutting bustles. “How about that, eh?” said Encho as they drew nearer. “Those foreigners sure like a rump on a woman, don’t they?”
“Women will wear anything,” Onogawa said, struggling to loosen one pinched foot inside its squeaking shoe. “Plain kimono and obi are far superior.”
“Easier to get into, anyway,” Encho mused. He stopped suddenly by the prettiest of the women, a girl who had let her natural eyebrows grow out, and whose teeth, unstained with old-fashioned tooth-blacking, gleamed like ivory in the gaslight.
“Madame, forgive my boldness,” Encho said. “But I think I saw a small kitten run under your skirt.”
“I beg your pardon?” the girl said in a flat Low City accent.
Encho pursed his lips. Plaintive mewing came from the pavement. The girl looked down, startled, and raised her skirt quickly almost to the knee. “Let me help,” said Encho, bending down for a better look. “I see the kitten! It’s climbing up inside the skirt!” He turned. “You’d better help me, older brother! Have a look up in there.”
Onogawa, abashed, hesitated. More mewing came. Encho stuck his entire head under the woman’s skirt. “There it goes! It wants to hide in her false rump!” The kitten squealed wildly. “I’ve got it!” the comedian cried. He pulled out his doubled hands, holding them before him. “There’s the rascal now, on the wall!” In the harsh gaslight, Encho’s knotted hands cast the shadowed figure of a kitten’s head against the brick.
Onogawa burst into convulsive laughter. He doubled over against the wall, struggling for breath. The women stood shocked for a moment. Then they all ran away, giggling hysterically. Except for the victim of Encho’s joke, who burst into tears as she ran.
“Wah,” Encho said alertly. “Her husband.” He ducked his head, then jammed the side of his hand against his lips and blew. The street rang with a sudden trumpet blast. It sounded so exactly like the trumpet of a Tokyo omnibus that Onogawa himself was taken in for a moment. He glanced wildly up and down the Ginza prospect, expecting to see the omnibus driver, horn to his lips, reining up his team of horses.
Encho grabbed Onogawa’s coat-sleeve and hauled him up the street before the rest of the puzzled crowd could recover. “This way!” They pounded drunkenly up an ill-lit street into the depths of Bricktown. Onogawa was breathless with laughter. They covered a block, then Onogawa pulled up, gasping. “No more,” he wheezed, wiping tears of hilarity. “Can’t take another…ha ha ha…step!”
“All right,” Encho said reasonably, “but not here.” He pointed up. “Don’t you know better than to stand under those things?” Black telegraph wires swayed gently overhead.
Onogawa, who had not noticed the wires, moved hastily out from under them. “Kuwabara, kuwabara,” he muttered—a quick spell to avert lightning. The sinister magic wires were all over the Bricktown, looping past and around the thick, smelly buildings.
Everyone knew why the foreigners put their telegraph wires high up on poles. It was so the demon messengers inside could not escape to wreak havoc amongst decent folk. These ghostly, invisible spirits flew along the wires as fast as swallows, it was said, carrying their secret spells of Christian black magic. Merely standing under such a baleful influence was inviting disaster.
Encho grinned at Onogawa. “There’s no danger as long as we keep moving,” he said confidently. “A little exposure is harmless. Don’t worry about it.”
Onogawa drew himself up. “Worried? Not a bit of it.” He followed Encho down the street.
The stonelike buildings seemed brutal and featureless. There were no homey reed blinds or awnings in those outsized windows, whose sheets of foreign glass gleamed like an animal’s eyeballs. No cozy porches, no bamboo wind chimes or cricket cages. Not even a climbing tendril of Edo morning glory, which adorned even the worst and cheapest city hovels. The buildings just sat there, as mute and threatening as cannonballs. Most were deserted. Despite their fireproof qualities and the great cost of their construction, they were proving hard to rent out. Word on the street said those red bricks would suck the life out of a man—give him beriberi, maybe even consumption.
Bricks paved the street beneath their shoes. Bricks on the right of them, bricks on their left, bricks in front of them, bricks in back. Hundreds of them, thousands of them. Onogawa muttered to the smaller man. “Say. What are bricks, exactly? I mean, what are they made of?”
“Foreigners make ’em,” Encho said, shrugging. “I think they’re a kind of pottery.”
“Aren’t they unhealthy?”
“People say that,” Encho said, “but foreigners live in them and I haven’t noticed any shortage of foreigners lately.” He drew up short. “Oh, here’s my friend’s place. We’ll go around the front. He lives upstairs.”
They circled the two-story building and looked up. Honest old-fashioned light, from an oil lamp, glowed against the curtains of an upstairs window. “Looks like your friend’s still awake,” Onogawa said, his voice more cheery now.
Encho nodded. “Taiso Yoshitoshi doesn’t sleep much. He’s a little high-strung. I mean, peculiar.” Encho walked up to the heavy, ornate front door, hung foreign-style on large brass hinges. He yanked a bellpull.
“Peculiar,” Onogawa said. “No wonder, if he lives in a place like this.” They waited.
The door opened inward with a loud squeal of hinges. A man’s disheveled head peered around it. Their host raised a candle in a cheap tin holder. “Who is it?”
“Come on, Taiso,” Encho said impatiently. He pursed his lips again. Ducks quacked around their feet.
“Oh! It’s Encho-san, Encho Sanyutei. My old friend. Come in, do.”
They stepped inside into a dark landing. The two visitors stopped and unlaced their leather shoes. In the first-floor workshop, beyond the landing, the guests could dimly see bound bales of paper, a litter of tool chests and shallow trays. An apprentice was snoring behind a shrouded wood-block press. The damp air smelled of ink and cherry-wood shavings.
“This is Mr. Onogawa Azusa,” Encho said. “He’s a fan of mine, down from High City. Mr. Onogawa, this is Taiso Yoshitoshi. The popular artist, one of Edo’s finest.”
“Oh, Yoshitoshi the artist!” said Onogawa, recognizing the name for the first time. “Of course! The wood-block print peddler. Why,
I bought a whole series of yours, once. Twenty-eight Infamous Murders with Accompanying Verses.”
“Oh,” said Yoshitoshi. “How kind of you to remember my squalid early efforts.” The ukiyo-e print artist was a slight, somewhat pudgy man, with stooped, rounded shoulders. The flesh around his eyes looked puffy and discolored. He had close-cropped hair parted in the middle and wide, fleshy lips. He wore a printed cotton house robe, with faded bluish sunbursts, or maybe daisies, against a white background. “Shall we go upstairs, gentlemen? My apprentice needs his sleep.”
They creaked up the wooden stairs to a studio lit by cheap pottery oil lamps. The walls were covered with hanging prints, while dozens more lay rolled, or stacked in corners, or piled on battered bookshelves. The windows were heavily draped and tightly shut. The naked brick walls seemed to sweat, and a vague reek of mildew and stale tobacco hung in the damp, close air.
The window against the far wall had a secondhand set of exterior shutters nailed to its inner sill. The shutters were bolted. “Telegraph wires outside,” Yoshitoshi explained, noticing the glances of his guests. The artist gestured vaguely at a couple of bedraggled floor cushions. “Please.”
The two visitors sat, struggling politely to squeeze some comfort from the mashed and threadbare cushions. Yoshitoshi knelt on a thicker cushion beside his worktable, a low bench of plain pine with ink stick, grinder, and water cup. A bamboo tool jar on the table’s corner bristled with assorted brushes, as well as compass and ruler. Yoshitoshi had been working; a sheet of translucent rice paper was pinned to the table, lightly and precisely streaked with ink.
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