The PEN O. Henry Prize Stories 2012

by Laura Furman

  Kunugi, I recalled, had always had bushy eyebrows. Now, he still had the long, slender face, but he must have plucked his eyebrows, for he had only a spider’s leg–shaped brow over each of his narrow eyes. He had a mustache the shape and size of the German dictator’s.

  Would you like tea? I asked, taking up my kettle and feeling the side of it for warmth. I would have to refill it from the communal tap in the hall.

  He shook his head and removed a silver flask of brandy.

  We need you, he explained, pulling out the cork stopper and taking a sip.

  Me?

  He held out the flask. I took a small nip.

  He continued: To come up with a cartoon character, like Mickey Mouse, only Japanese. But as entertaining as Mickey Mouse! We want to make cartoons better than the Americans. We can make wonderful Japanese films, but we have failed to come up with any entertainment between the news and the films. We can’t show these disgusting foreign cartoons.

  He took back the flask. So you, Ohta-kun, you will work on a new cartoon character, a Japanese cartoon character that will make our pure race forget all about enemy characters.

  He had thought of me because of the work I had done for the Weekly National, my caricatures and illustrations, what I considered my minor work but that had turned out to be the only work of mine that anyone knew. That kind of cartoon had come easily to me, pen and ink, bold lines, simple figures; I could capture a street scene or a rural village in three dozen strokes. But I knew nothing about animated characters.

  Kunugi left me a card with the name and address of the Information Bureau, a consolidation of various government offices under the aegis of the Home Ministry in Kasumigaseki. When I turned up, I saw that I was actually at the old Communications Ministry, which had now been turned into a branch of the military. I presented my card to the vast guard kiosk, where soldiers in crisp green uniforms stood before a gray-painted sheet metal wall with small green and red blinking lights shaped like tiny, nipple-less breasts. They took my card and my identification card, filled out a form on onionskin paper, and rolled that into a leather-capped bamboo tube which they dropped into a pneumatic cylinder beside them. With a shhhhhoooop, the bamboo tube was sucked away. And I stood waiting.

  There was a thumping sound and one of the guards opened the returned tube, removed the onionskin, and read out my name, saying I was to go to an office on the second floor.

  I found the office, slipped off my shoes, entered, bowed, and said my name. I looked up discreetly and saw through a thick haze of tobacco smoke a half dozen men in civilian clothes seated at desks in the vast, open room. I shuffled over to the desk that faced all the other desks, where the bucho would sit in a civilian office, which this seemed to be. I said my name and a man with a round face, small nose, sideburns, and eyeglasses looked up at me over his steel-frame rims.

  Ohta, I said.

  Ebitsubo, he said. He had a protuberant fleshy growth on the side of his forehead. The skin flap was angled slightly downward and looked like a tiny dolphin trying to jump out of his head.

  I explained that Kunugi had told me to report here, that I was to be given more instructions. Ebitsubo studied the card I gave him.

  I’ve never done this before, I explained.

  He looked surprised. Really?

  I bowed. My mistake. I’ve drawn, of course, and drawn cartoons. But never an animated cartoon.

  Don’t worry, he assured me. First, come up with the character. When you do, our writers will help you with appropriate scenarios.

  He indicated this room full of men leaning back in their chairs and smoking. The writers, presumably all underemployed now that their magazines and newspapers had voluntarily suspended publication.

  He removed a key on a string from around his neck and opened his top drawer, taking out some tickets which had Prince Konoe’s face on them. I had never seen these before.

  Are these some kind of money? I asked.

  He shook his head. They were vouchers, I could exchange them for certain goods.

  Food?

  He shook his head.

  Art supplies. Paint. Paper.

  He told me I could also work here, if I liked.

  I told him I had my own office, at the university. But could I get additional ration coupons?

  He said no, that could not be arranged.

  We were advancing everywhere, in Burma, the Dutch East Indies, New Guinea; Manila had fallen.

  My office in an old stone building on the Geidai campus was always cold. I had a kerosene heater but couldn’t find any fuel for it, so I was reduced to burning charcoal in a ceramic kiln that emitted a terrible stench and gave me frequent headaches. After looking through historical material in my almanacs, the Heian period Kozanji Temple scroll with its anthropomorphic frogs and rabbits became my inspiration. I had proposed a dozen characters, including a tanuki, a badger, a deer, a pair of monkeys, and a sympathetic ape in a samurai headdress. Ebitsubo had rejected them all; I had not even heard from Kunugi. But as long as I worked on this project, I continued to receive my vouchers, and could exchange these at a poor rate for food coupons or could sometimes trade them for currency that I used to buy food from the street vendors. I spent most of my time using my new art supplies to work on my own drawings, street scenes I observed: an old woman in prayer before a street corner shrine, boys watching soldiers, a Korean selling sweet potatoes from a metal drum.

  I had come down to the Azabu area to purchase more charcoals, paint, ink, and paper. The woman who ran the art supply store didn’t seem happy about the vouchers, and explained she wouldn’t make change for them. I agreed and took my supplies, wrapped in rice paper and twine.

  Vendors were selling black market goods from wooden crates: Manchurian oranges, Vietnamese peaches, and salted fish from Korea. One well-fed man even had a dozen bars of Dutch chocolate for sale, terribly expensive; all of this, I assumed, the spoils. I pulled my padded cotton coat tight around me and made my way to the Keihin line. The first two trains each had just one car that wasn’t reserved for the military and were immediately overwhelmed with passengers. As I waited on the platform under a cloudy spring sky, I was surprised by a loud and vigorous whining, like the amplified howl of a cat. I looked at my fellow passengers, and then, at once, we all realized what this was: an air raid siren.

  We did not know where we were supposed to go, so we stepped back from the platform and began briskly walking in the general direction of the exit. As we were waiting at the top of the stairs, we heard quick, short, sharp percussive thumps, like the cylindrical fireworks we used to ignite in the summer. There were a few screams, and then from behind me I felt a shove and then suddenly the space around me filled up with other people’s shoulders, elbows, and hips as we were pushed down the stairs. Ahead of me, I saw a head disappear as someone must have fallen, and then as I was jostled I felt beneath my feet soft contours of a human body. I continued with the mass of people until we were all in the tunnel below where we stood, now noticing that after those first few explosions, they had ceased. We had panicked for nothing.

  A few days after the Honshu bombing, the first time in history that our homeland had been attacked by foreigners—a dozen or so criminal American bombers—Kunugi came to see me again.

  He now wore a crisp-looking military uniform, khaki, with shiny bronze medals and badges on the front and a cap on his head with a five-point star insignia inside an imperial cross.

  I asked him about a rumor I had heard: that much of the university would soon be closed down. Only the hard science departments would remain open. The rest of the faculty and student body would enlist or voluntarily go to work in factories.

  He didn’t answer. Instead, he said I had to redouble my efforts. Morale was low after the bombing.

  I would offer you tea, I said, but I don’t have any.

  He made a perfunctory bow. I heard from Ebitsubo you haven’t come up with anything satisfactory.

  I told him I had b
een trying, but that this wasn’t my natural form, cartoon animals. Perhaps you should find someone else, I suggested.

  He slapped me.

  Do your duty, he shouted, for your Emperor.

  My cheek stinging, I quickly opened a folder and showed him some of my characters, careful to hide my personal work. I showed him my latest effort, a cat who wears a military uniform and flies a fighter plane.

  Kunugi lit a cigarette and flipped past my army cat, and before I could stop him he came to a drawing I had done of the scene on the train station stairwell during the bombing, the terrified faces, the guilty looks we all shared down in the tunnel. He paused at the drawing and then turned back to my militarized feline.

  This isn’t bad, he said, bring it to Ebitsubo and see what he says. Here, he handed me real ration coupons. Keep working.

  To save money, I walked the six kilometers from my office to Kasumigaseki to show my army cat to Ebitsubo. He was now alone in the vast office. Not only were the writers gone, but so were their chairs and desks, all of it, the men and material, apparently requisitioned for the war effort.

  He looked at my latest illustrations.

  I stood in the empty office. Who was going to write these stories? I wondered. Who would produce them?

  You’re just like the rest, Ebitsubo said.

  That surprised me: the rest? There were others working on this project?

  Your character is well rendered, attractive, and anthropomorphic, but he lacks a certain cuteness, something that makes you root for him. Mickey Mouse is successful because you want him to overcome obstacles. A cat is a lazy predator who sleeps all day. A mouse is seen as industrious.

  He had a point. Perhaps I can just draw a mouse? I suggested.

  The others have tried, Ebitsubo explained, cheap copies that only remind you of Mickey.

  No, I would have to come up with something more compelling.

  We had lost numerous ships, aircraft, and airmen at some speck of an island near Hawaii, though the whole engagement was presented as a success because we had taken two frigid little specks off Alaska. Paper, paint, ink, all the supplies I still had access to were now so scarce that I could trade them for rice, tea, flour, soy sauce, and cabbage and still have enough to work on my own illustrations. Without the vouchers from special branch, I would have starved.

  I was forced to leave my office when the university did shut down. And like most of the remaining faculty, I received my draft papers. I was surprised the army would take a forty-three-year-old with a spot on his lungs. I removed my boxes and what remained of my supplies, setting them on a cart with wooden wheels I had borrowed from the janitor, who himself had enlisted. I rolled what I could across to my Ueno flat, just one room with a kitchen.

  Kunugi summoned me one morning, a runner in uniform showing up at my flat, panting and handing me a note ordering me to appear.

  When I did report to Kunugi’s office, a vast, third-floor suite of a downtown hotel that had been requisitioned by his special branch, he asked me about my work, how much longer would I need?

  Behind him was a scroll by Kyoto artist Hashimoto Kansetsu, frolicking monkeys on a cypress tree. In the warm breeze, the monkeys were undulating at me. In the alcove below the monkeys were what looked like very good examples of Tang dynasty pottery figures and an elaborate, gold laquerware box.

  I told him I had been drafted. That I had just a few days.

  Before I reported at the prefectural army headquarters, I spent two days moving several crates of my illustrations back to the cellar beneath my old office building on campus, a huge, damp stone-walled space that was to have doubled as our bomb shelter. Already, the campus had a deserted feeling, as the unkempt gardens were starting to go a little wild. Within a few months, the grounds would be put to use for agriculture, neat little rows of vegetables growing where students had once crossed the courtyards.

  The lieutenant who looked at my draft notice seemed disappointed at the medical report he had in front of him. The doctors had correctly ascertained the weakness of my lungs, which had been even more depleted by my taking up smoking again.

  We can’t do much with you, he said, at your age, in your condition. You’re not suitable for the front.

  I nodded. That was fine with me. I had heard, however, that those deemed unfit for fighting were sent to even worse units, diggers, builders, pavers, units fed minimal calories and assigned the work unfit for the warriors.

  The lieutenant went through his files and then looked again at my letter. He seemed surprised by what he found.

  There has been a special action, he said, you’ve been assigned to special branch. Maybe they can make some use of you. (Kunugi? I wondered.)

  And so he stamped my forms, told me to report within twenty-four hours to Fort Akagi for my military training, and gave me a coupon for a meal at the commissary.

  I survived the war, spending a few months continuing my feckless attempts to come up with a comical yet inspiring cartoon character under the auspices of Kunugi and Ebitsubo. I kept trying until the special branch was disbanded in 1943. (Another artist, a painter from Kyodai, had in the meantime come up with Inu Nora, the stray dog who joins the army and becomes a hero.) I lost touch with Kunugi, and without his tutelage, I worried that I would be given arduous duty. Instead, I was assigned by the military to help design currency for occupied territories before that program too was ended, and I worked the last year of the war in a munitions factory in Kawasaki until that was bombed. I spent the last few weeks of the war living in a trench just outside Yokosuka naval base, subsisting on the food the naval officers discarded, ferns we gathered, and pine needles we battered and roasted.

  Kunugi, whom I had come to think of as the ultimate survivor, was ordered to command a unit in Okinawa. But somehow, through connections, he was able to postpone that duty until after the island fell to the Americans.

  I heard a few months after the capitulation that Kunugi had been killed in the Tokyo firebombings during the spring of 1945.

  After the war, I retook my position on campus, though now teaching illustration instead of painting. I had a different office, this one on the first floor, a perpetually damp room that smelled of mold and cat urine, but it came with a small stove so it could be heated up to an almost bearable temperature in winter. My health was fading, my lungs wheezing like leaking bellows, and I could no longer walk the many kilometers across the city that I used to. But I was so happy to be teaching again, to have students who were eager to learn figure drawing, illustration, and rendering. Our university had merged with a music college, and I only had a dozen lice-infested candidates that first year of the occupation, enrolled as much for the free lunch as for the education, but then every year a few more students joined as we shook off our long, artless Imperial nightmare.

  Our old university buildings were made of stone, and so had come through the firebombings while the surrounding neighborhoods charred to cinders. Miraculously, my crates of work were charred but had survived. A few years later, when there was some interest in looking back at how we lived during the conflict, a prominent Ginza gallery arranged a show of my wartime illustrations. I was grateful they sent a car for me, a rarity in those days, and when I arrived, I was astonished at the crowd. Nearly a hundred attendees, and a few newspaper reporters were there to interview me.

  Near the end of the evening, when I was tired and seated on a bench near the front of the gallery, an old woman approached me, short gray hair tied up beneath a furoshiki, her slender body wrapped in layers of gray and brown cotton and wool. Up close, I could see she had fine features, almond-shaped eyes, a small, shapely nose, the kind of sharp characteristics that a few years ago would have been described approvingly as “pure Japanese.”

  She said my name.

  I nodded.

  She said she was Kunugi’s widow and that she was pleased that I was showing my work.

  My husband often spoke about you as classmates.

 
I bowed slightly.

  He said you were a real artist. He said it was important that a real artist like you survive the war.

  She looked around the gallery. I expected her to compliment my work.

  But she had already told me what she came to say.

  Ann Packer

  Things Said or Done

  “BY THE WAY,” my father says, “I’m probably dying.” Except for sleep, we’ve been together nonstop for the last thirty hours, ever since we met at the Hartford airport yesterday morning, but he has chosen this moment to unburden himself: this moment, when we’re carrying folding chairs through a windowless corridor in a neighborhood community center in Berkeley, California. Well, I’m carrying folding chairs, my elbows sticking out as the bottoms of the chair backs dig into my curled fingers, while he is empty-handed, strolling back toward the storage room.

  “Sure, ignore me,” he calls when I don’t respond.

  “You’re probably dying,” I call back.

  Up ahead, the once homely rec room is growing more festive by the minute. Three young women with bare feet wind garlands of flowers up the frame of a makeshift gazebo, and five neat rows of chairs are arranged on the linoleum floor, with a center aisle for the bridal procession.

  “My piss smells like raw meat,” he calls. “Plus I’m always tired. I’m thinking kidney disease.”

  “Sounds right,” I call back.

  I enter the room and set the chairs down for a moment. In the dry California air, my hair, which is curly enough, frizzes with static, and I find a clip in my pocket and pin a section away from my face. Beyond the grimy clerestory windows puffs of cloud float across the sky. It’s a crisp September day, auspicious for a wedding. The groom is my middle-aged brother, the bride a very pretty twenty-three-year-old girl who was until recently an intern in his lab at the University of California. Her name is Cressida, but on the plane yesterday my father began referring to her as “Clytemnestra,” and because I made the mistake of objecting, he won’t give it up.