The family’s only entertainment was listening to the radio. Takuya sometimes joined them in the living-room to listen to the day’s broadcast. There were programmes providing details about soldiers returning from overseas, and others for people seeking information on the whereabouts of family members in the armed forces. One interview with an economist made Takuya feel quite uncomfortable sitting in the living-room with Fujisaki and his family.
The economist forecast that Japan was on the verge of a food crisis of cataclysmic proportions, stating that the official current allocation of rice to each individual was barely enough to avoid starvation, and that when this absolute minimum requirement was calculated for the total population, the amount was almost twice the size of the previous year’s total rice harvest. From this he deduced that at least ten million people would starve to death, and that most of them would be living in urban areas. He went on to say that no rice had reached Tokyo and other big cities for the last twenty days, and closed by saying that city residents must be prepared to eat grass to avoid starvation.
From around that time on, Fujisaki and his father both became increasingly taciturn. After dinner they either played games or sat silently reading the newspaper, neither one looking at Takuya. Takuya had no choice but to excuse himself as soon as the family had finished eating dinner.
More often than not, Takuya spent his evenings sitting in the little room at the back, squashing the fleas crawling over his clothes. Most of those he dispatched were a pinkish colour, gorged with blood which spilt out on to his fingernails as he crushed them. Occasionally he would hold a piece of underwear up to the electric light and find lines of delicately formed eggs, like tiny rosary beads, sitting neatly inside the stitching. He pierced each of them individually with a needle before going on to check the next piece of clothing. Other times, after he had got under the covers on his futon, he would take the pistol out of his rucksack and caress it in the semi-darkness. He wiped the barrel with a cloth and tested the tension of the trigger with his index finger. When he held it up to his nose, he could just detect the faint smell of gun oil.
In May, the opening of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East proceedings against Class A war criminals received daily coverage in the newspapers.
The attitude of the Fujisaki family to Takuya grew colder with each passing day. He had asked them to put him up for four or five days when he first arrived on their doorstep, but that was now more than three weeks ago. Though he was supposedly working to earn his keep, pulling the cart to the warehouse three times a week would hardly make the Fujisakis regard him as anything other than a freeloader. Almost certainly they would be reading the newspaper coverage of the war crimes trials, and by now could only see Takuya as an increasingly unwelcome guest.
On his way to the box wholesaler’s warehouse one day in mid-May, as he guided his cart down a gentle slope in the middle of the ruins Takuya noticed two policemen walking up the road towards him. He regretted having pushed up the peak of his service cap so he could wipe the sweat off his brow, but he could hardly pull it down over his eyes now, so he simply trudged forward, looking at the ground as though he were tired out.
He edged the cart farther over to the other side of the road, away from the approaching policemen, his heart pounding furiously and cold sweat pouring down his neck.
The two policemen approached Takuya and his cart and then passed by, but just as he thought he was in the clear he heard one of the men say, ‘You, there. Stop.’
Takuya felt the blood drain from his face, leaving him white and chilled. His first thought was to drop his cart and run for his life, but his feet were anchored to the spot. He turned half round sheepishly.
The closer of the two policemen stepped over to the cart and put one hand on the folded cardboard boxes. Bending over slightly, he lifted up each box in turn to look in the gaps between them.
‘Where are these going?’ he said, moving round in front of the cart. Takuya pulled the job slip from the inside pocket of his jacket, which was stuffed down in the load of cardboard boxes. He realised that the policeman was only checking to see if the load included any controlled goods, but all the same he was afraid that he might get a clear look at his face. The scar on his left cheek from where he’d cut himself on a branch as he fell from a tree as a child was still clearly visible, and the thought that this might give him away started a wave of panic which threatened to overcome him.
‘Anything besides boxes on the cart?’ asked the policeman, casting only a cursory glance at the paper before switching his gaze back to Takuya’s face.
‘No, nothing else,’ said Takuya in a muffled voice.
The other policeman had by now moved round to the front of the cart. ‘You’re as white as a sheet, and the sweat’s streaming off you. Something wrong with you?’ he said, with a suspicious look in his eyes.
‘Yeah … I came back from China with tuberculosis, but I have to work to buy food,’ said Takuya, pursing his parched lips.
‘Tuberculosis?’
‘Yeah.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Higa Seiichi.’
‘Higa?’ said the policeman in a sceptical tone.
‘Higa,’ said Takuya, tracing the characters out on top of the cardboard boxes. ‘From Okinawa. It’s a common name there.’
‘Okinawa?’ replied the policeman, apparently happy to leave it at that. The stern look had melted from his face as he ran his eyes once more over the cart and its load.
Satisfied that all was in order, he turned back to Takuya. ‘You went white as a sheet when you saw us coming. So we thought something was amiss. If you’re just ill, we won’t hold you up any longer. On your way,’ he said, and nodded to his colleague that they, too, should be off.
Takuya picked up the bar at the front of the cart and stepped off down the slope, feeling another deluge of sweat stream down his face. The policemen had probably mellowed at the mention of Okinawa, the only part of the Japanese homeland where combat had taken place. Shirasaka’s advice had paid off in an unexpected way.
As Takuya manoeuvred the cart down the gentle incline, he chastised himself for the stupidity of his behaviour with the police. It was pathetic that losing his composure had obviously made them suspicious and led to their questioning him. Since being warned by Shirasaka in Fukuoka that he should flee, he had been back home and then on to Shoodo-shima after travelling through Osaka, and had caught sight of policemen on any number of occasions, but never had he been as intimidated as today. The incident with these two policemen brought home how much his nerve had weakened in this last month on the run. If he panicked every time he came across the police, it wouldn’t be long before he gave himself away and was arrested. He longed somehow to instill in himself the backbone he had before the war ended.
Takuya recalled the policeman’s intent gaze as he asked the questions. Although the glasses he’d borrowed from Fujisaki might have helped obscure it from view, the officer must have caught at least a fleeting glimpse of the scar on Takuya’s cheek. Slipping the net this time didn’t necessarily mean he’d be so lucky next time round, because the policemen could surely match what they had seen of his face today with the ‘Wanted’ posters they no doubt had on the wall back at the police station. If one of them did happen to see a resemblance, it wouldn’t be difficult to go one step further and trace Takuya to Fujisaki’s place through the box wholesalers. Suddenly the idea of Kobe as a safe haven was eclipsed by that of its being a trap ready to snap shut.
On the way back to the factory after dropping off his cart-load of boxes at the warehouse, Takuya observed something that made him uncomfortable. To avoid the spot where he’d been questioned by the police, he took a detour through the busy streets near a bustling black market, where he saw a young American soldier with a Japanese girlfriend. The American was very tall, well over six feet, but the lithe young woman with him was also of impressive height for a Japanese.
She wou
ld have been twenty-one or twenty-two, had attractive, clearly defined features and a figure that suited the western clothes she was wearing. Her conservative make-up suggested that she was no streetwalker. On the contrary, she was probably from a good family. The two approached at a leisurely pace, her fingers entwined in his.
Forgetting his fear of American soldiers, Takuya watched the young woman, mesmerised. There was no mistaking the fact that she was delighted to be out walking with an American soldier. To Takuya, who had never seen Japanese couples holding hands like this in public, there was something lewd and inappropriate about the way the American and the young woman were behaving. But her relaxed smile made it clear that she paid no heed to the disapproving eyes turned their way.
Takuya could not understand how a young woman of her obvious breeding could have become familiar with an American soldier in the first place. It was inconceivable to him that someone who could surely manage an admirable match among her own should want to be seen walking hand in hand with a low-ranking American soldier. The couple walked past Takuya, the young woman leaning against her suitor.
Disheartened with the world, Takuya pulled his cart along the road between two lines of buildings that had been spared the ravages of the fire-bombing. There seemed to be an increasing number of people walking out on the streets.
Upon taking half a dozen more steps, he caught sight of another American soldier and his Japanese date. This couple were approaching on the footpath on the other side of the street, both laughing out loud at some private joke. Her showy clothes and garish make-up pointed clearly to her being a prostitute. The tall American had his arm round her shoulders, while his much shorter girlfriend had hers round his waist.
Takuya picked up his pace as he left the city centre and came back out onto the road between two broad expanses of burnt-out ruins.
That night he told Fujisaki that he wanted to move on to another city and asked if he would help him find a job. Fujisaki nodded, the relief on his face unmistakable.
Takuya took the following day off from work, saying he had a fever. He lay in his room, visualising over and over again the American soldier walking with his tall Japanese girlfriend. He tried to understand how this woman could walk hand in hand so jovially with someone who just nine short months ago had been the enemy. Had she forgotten that the Americans had destroyed Kobe and most other cities of any size in Japan? Had her anger with the American military for dropping atomic bombs on Japan and killing and maiming countless civilians already disappeared? It was to be expected that such bitterness would diminish with the passage of time, but surely the degree of fraternisation she displayed was unnaturally premature. But then again, the US military wanted for nothing, so associating with them would be beneficial in more ways than one. Maybe this explained her intimacy with the American, but somehow it had seemed more innocent than that, free of any ulterior motive. The faint, portentous rumble he had heard from the blast of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The horrific damage report from Ohmura air base after he had tracked the flight path of the two B-29s headed for Nagasaki. Obviously, the young woman had already stopped thinking about the tens of thousands who had died in those two attacks.
The thought of staying in Kobe and seeing many more scenes of such fraternisation was too much to bear. He wasn’t just on the run, he thought, he was still at war. The feeling of the sword in his hand as its blade cut into the American airman’s neck was still fresh in his mind, and the woman’s name that the man had repeated over and over again as he sat there waiting in the bamboo grove still rang in his ears. That in the context of the same conflict there could be such a difference between himself and this woman baffled him. It was almost as though she had purged herself of all recollection of the war as she walked holding hands with the tall American.
Takuya had skipped breakfast and lunch that day, but his hunger pangs were so strong by late afternoon that he joined the family in the living-room for the evening meal of rice gruel.
Fujisaki’s father asked if Takuya would be interested in going to Himeji. He explained that the owner of a company making matchboxes had set up a temporary office in Kobe to arrange the purchase of building materials needed to rebuild his burnt-out factory in Himeji. He went on to say that when he had telephoned this man about a job he had been told that, if Takuya was a good, reliable worker, he’d be prepared to take him on.
‘What did you say about me?’ asked Takuya.
‘I told him that your name is Higa, and that you’re a returned serviceman originally from Okinawa. I said that I’d given you some work as a favour to a friend.’
Takuya thanked Fujisaki’s father and asked him to go ahead with the introduction. The chance to leave Kobe could not have come at a better time, he thought.
It was raining the next day.
Takuya left the house with the simple map that Fujisaki’s father had drawn for him. Rain dripped steadily off the peak of his cap, and he could feel the collar of his shirt becoming uncomfortably damp from the water trickling down his neck. His glasses kept clouding over, but he felt exposed without them, so there was no way he would take them off just for the sake of being able to see properly.
Fujisaki’s father had mentioned a temporary office, but the factory chief was obviously just renting the premises of a vacant shop, whose old wooden sign above the door, paint flaking off at the edges, proclaimed it to be a fish shop. A desk was placed squarely in the middle of the concrete floor.
When Takuya stepped inside and announced himself, the glass door at the back of the room slid open and a diminutive man with close-cropped grey hair poked his head out to peer at Takuya. When he explained that he had come on the introduction of Fujisaki’s father, the man, who was maybe fifty-five or fifty-six years old, stepped down on to the concrete floor and sat at the desk, pointing to a low stool for Takuya to sit on.
When asked about his background, Takuya said that he had been born in Okinawa and that after finishing high school he had joined the army, first being posted to Manchuria and then moving on to Kyushu as part of an air defence unit. He said he had finished the war as a lance-corporal and was twenty-six years old.
‘Where are your parents?’ the man asked.
Takuya replied that they were still living in northern Okinawa. The central and southern areas of Okinawa had been the scene of intense fighting, so he thought that saying his parents were alive, but in the north, seemed a more natural response.
The man explained that the preparations for rebuilding his factory in Himeji were all but complete. ‘I’ll give you a job. We’re taking all the stuff I’ve collected here back to Himeji tonight by truck. Might be a bit rushed, but there’s space for you on the truck. Can you go with us?’ he asked.
‘Yes, I can,’ replied Takuya, without a second’s hesitation.
‘OK. Then be back here by late this afternoon. Regarding your wage, we’ll feed you, so how does six yen a day sound?’ he asked.
‘That’s fine,’ said Takuya. It was more than enough, he thought. His younger brother was getting almost four hundred yen a month, but had said that he was doing pretty well if he had more than one hundred and fifty yen left after food costs were covered.
Takuya expressed his gratitude, bowed and left the ‘office’. The man seemed likeable. He might be running a factory, but he seemed quite down-to-earth, much more humble than Takuya had expected for a man in his position. The fact that Himeji wasn’t as big a city as Kobe meant that food would probably be more readily available, and being able to leave that very day was a stroke of luck. The rain began to ease off, with only an odd drop disturbing the puddles here and there.
The promise of a steady income eased Takuya’s mind, and he thought that this might be an opportune time to do some shopping with the money he’d been given by his father. If possible he wanted to buy some new clothes and rid himself of the army issue he’d been wearing since leaving his parents’ house in Shikoku.
Takuya trudged off toward t
he station. He knew clothes weren’t cheap, but he thought he could at least get a new hat. Coming out on to a crowded street, he turned right and followed the flow of pedestrians until he found himself in the middle of the black market, a collection of shacks reinforced with old pieces of corrugated iron. Most of the stalls were selling food, tobacco or soap, and there was no sign of any clothing for sale.
After searching about ten minutes, he found a stall selling shoes. There were leather boots of the kind worn by officers, Air Force pilots’ shoes and infantrymen’s shoes lined up in rows on sheets of newspaper, along with what looked like virtually worn-out low-cut civilian shoes. In one corner of the display there were several hats piled one on top of the other. Takuya stepped over to that part of the table and began looking through the hats. Most of them were military caps of one kind or another, but there was one that was a bit different, the sort of hat mountaineers would wear. He picked it up and tried it on. It was quite a good fit.
‘How much is this?’ he asked the young hawker who was sitting, legs splayed, on an apple box behind the display table. Takuya almost fell over when the young man replied, ‘Eighty yen.’ How could one hat be worth the equivalent of two weeks’ wages at the job he was about to start? ‘You can’t make that a bit cheaper, can you?’ he said to the hawker.
‘It’s almost new. This isn’t cheap synthetic fibre, it’s one hundred per cent cotton. OK, I’ll do you a favour and knock the price down ten yen. That’s the best I can do. Look how thick the material is. This is a quality product here,’ he said, still perched self-assuredly on his apple box. The manner of this well-built young man reminded Takuya of the haughtiness of pilots just out of cadet training, who were known for carrying themselves as though they were a cut above everyone else.
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