Butterfly's Shadow

by Lee Langley

  And he learned that Yasuko, too, had been devious, that the why of her presence in Tokyo was to try and reassemble a fragmented family, pay respects to the dead, pull the surviving pieces together.

  ‘I have an uncle. A schoolteacher. He works all hours and he can’t feed his family. Black market is a criminal offence, but there’s no food, Joe. He may end up killing himself.’

  One of her cousins had been an officer in the Emperor’s army, present whereabouts unknown.

  ‘My mother hopes he’s dead. Traditionally it would, of course, be more honourable to be dead.’

  ‘This morning you said we’re spies. I walk around making notes in my head. Today I give them a present of half a hot dog and they respond with a traditional thank-you. But will our presence, our observation, change all that?’

  ‘It could.’ She shrugged. ‘But don’t be too sure. Group harmony versus individuality? The old ways are pretty strong.’

  He was unconvinced. ‘At SCAP we have these brainstorming sessions. We feel they should be more like us. But when does “a little more” become too much? How long will it be before the old ways are abandoned, the new world calling payback time? Perhaps we should try to be a little more Japanese.’

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ she said.

  After that it became easy to tell her the story of his mother and father. Or at least some of the story. She said,

  ‘How come you’re still in Tokyo? You should be hightailing it to Nagasaki.’

  ‘I’m leaving tomorrow on the train. Suzuki will be able to tell me more.’

  ‘Suzuki?’

  ‘My great-uncle’s widow.’

  ‘The men in your family surely seem to have had a thing for Japanese women.’

  They spent the night in a patched and tattered house in the district of the floating world where escape was still possible, where soft girls and loud music blotted out reality for those who could afford black market fantasy. And they, too, floated for a while in tentative exploration until fantasy was abandoned and the force of truth took hold. They stripped each other bare, slippery as eels, her scarlet mouth blurred and swollen, heat fused their bodies, sent the blood coursing between them with a sense of arching, of piercing; an ecstasy of escape.

  Wrapped together, the futon thin beneath their bones, they lay watching the sky spin slowly out of darkness through the dirty glass of the window.

  They had not slept and now it was almost dawn.

  She poured water into a wooden bowl and washed him attentively. He sponged her body clean of sweat and semen.

  ‘You have perfect feet,’ he observed, drying her toes, kissing the high, narrow arch. He cupped her small breasts. ‘Perfect all over, in fact.’

  ‘You know what they say about the Japanese body: fine from head to hips, then we have these short legs.’

  ‘Perfect,’ he said firmly, ‘like my hair.’ He could tell her now how she had scared him on that first encounter at Tule Lake.

  She laughed and said that was her way of dealing with important things: to be stern.

  ‘I was important?’

  ‘Of course. I watched you every day in the mess hall. I spilled stuff down my blouse because I wasn’t paying attention to my food.’

  ‘I searched for you, to say goodbye, that last day before I left for the language training camp. I looked all over.’

  ‘I had some kind of bug, and I can tell you that camp hospital was no place for a sick person to be. I made an official complaint but those sons of bitches couldn’t care less.’

  He felt a vast tenderness for her, for her fierceness; Yasuko was a paper shrew, self-protective. There was no taming to be done here. Disarmed, captivated, he wanted only to try and banish the shadow of pain from her small, questioning face. She looked younger when she laughed.

  He caught an early train, picking his way through hundreds of blanket-wrapped figures asleep on the station floor, a few hookers hopelessly teetering up and down outside on their cork-soled platform shoes, seams drawn up the backs of teastained legs to simulate the stockings they occasionally managed to barter from a friendly GI.

  One, with tired eyes and hair tortured into a frizzy bush, called out as Joe passed, ‘Hi, kid. You got cheese? Kraft Velveeta?’

  He reached into his pocket for a packet of gum and handed it over with a muttered ‘Tsumaranai mono desuga.’

  Startled, she responded with an instinctive bow and gabbled phrase of thanks. They exchanged a grin. ‘Hey, Johnny,’ she called after him, ‘you good American. Learning fast!’

  55

  Again a train heading for an unknown destination. He swayed, lulled by the rhythm, the sound of steel on steel like a fast drum riff, but what old song could he sing this time to the percussion backing of wheels on track?

  From the train window he watched the countryside slide past, aware of the smallness of things here. The variety. Tiny streams, delicate trees nodding over chasms, hillsides glittering with waterfalls. No acres of American wheat or prairie grasslands stretching out unbroken to the flat horizon. With most of the land too mountainous to cultivate, this was farming in miniature, an oddly shaped rice field next to a vegetable patch, ingenious planting, every inch of soil packed tight with crops of one sort and another. What would these people make of the beet fields of America, cultivated so skilfully by the Issei and Nisei, great expanses of dull green stretching for mile after flat mile . . . ?

  He was alone in a compartment reserved for Occupation forces, while the rest of the train was crowded with locals – “indigenous personnel”. Face pressed to the glass he allowed himself to let go, pulled by the train towards an area of pain he had spent a lifetime re-creating, clutching at old memories, fed always by the sense of loss.

  And then the letter had arrived, the rug of bereavement had been pulled from under him.

  No dead mother after all, just a faraway woman who had divested herself of unwanted ballast and sailed on without the inconvenient child. Or so he had thought, hating the woman, the memory of silk and soft, curved cheek, until Nancy redrew the picture.

  When, two changes and many hours later, he heard the announcement, the destination named, he felt he was stepping into dream territory.

  Nagasaki. Did it really exist?

  He got off the train and saw her at the end of the platform: a small, stocky woman with a square face, in a dark robe something between a kimono and a dress. Suzuki.

  She trotted up the platform, clogs noisy, and stopped a yard away from him, her expression solemn. She bowed formally, and he did the same. Then, laughing, they found themselves involved in an awkward, shaky hug.

  ‘Welcome to Nagasaki,’ she said, in careful English.

  ‘How did you know I’d be on this train?’ he asked, in Japanese.

  She beamed with relief. ‘Ah! So I don’t need to try and remember my English.’

  She glanced at the train. ‘It’s the only one today.’

  ‘I was planning to get another message to you once I was here.’

  He looked down at the top of her head, the thinning grey hair, the creased brow. Lines criss-crossed her face; a net spun by time. She was wizened, like a fruit that has dried into age.

  He reached into his bag, brought out a traditionally gift-wrapped parcel and handed it to her with a small bow. She bowed, murmuring traditional thanks. A pause.

  ‘I suppose I should call you Joey.’

  Her hands fluttered, plucking at her sleeves.

  ‘You must be . . .’ a mental calculation, ‘twenty-three. You look . . . more mature.’

  He laughed. ‘Older, you mean. That’s the army. The war.’

  There was a pause.

  How do you ask the big question – the one too raw, too important, to be incorporated into the pattern of an emotional reunion? It would, Joe felt, be very un-Japanese to blurt it out, splintering the veneer that overlay the cracks in the social façade.

  He said, blurting it out, ‘She died, didn’t she.’


  The platform was deserted now and shadowy, their two figures caught in a shaft of sunlight. A breeze, sweeping the track, caught up scraps of waste paper and sent them whirling in the air like dancing butterflies.

  ‘It may comfort you to know that it happened in the moment of the blast. She would not have suffered.’

  Would not have suffered? He stared down at her.

  She took his arm, as though to prevent him leaving. ‘When you see the house, you will understand.’

  A cycle rickshaw took them through town, past collapsed and flattened buildings, breached walls and doors that opened on to the emptiness of vanished rooms. The road climbed, leaving the harbour behind.

  The natural amphitheatre of the town lay below them now. He could see the shell of the Catholic church standing, blackened, insubstantial, like a sketch for a solid structure, its toppled dome half buried in the ground. A stone bridge spanned the river, its arches reflected in the water like spectacles. Compared with the wasteland of Tokyo, Nagasaki was still recognisably a city.

  Suzuki glanced up and caught him staring at the scene, and for a moment she saw it through his eyes: almost, it seemed, Nagasaki had got off lightly. She felt a need to set the record straight.

  ‘Certain buildings, made from concrete and steel, withstood the blast, some protected by the hillside. Traditional dwellings of wood disappeared. Neighbourhoods for a mile around the explosion were completely destroyed. Consumed.’

  She touched his arm and pointed to the tall wooden telephone poles that lined the street: he saw that they were scorched on the side facing the explosion.

  ‘Fifty thousand people died that day. Many more, later. Even now it continues: diseased, they sicken.’

  The rickshaw creaked on, uphill. Again Suzuki touched Joe’s arm, and pointed to a crumbling stone tower set back from the road. Burnt and warped, almost liquefied into its surroundings, a clock face, the twisted hands standing at 11.02.

  ‘The moment of the explosion.’

  Later she would tell him how it had been, that day, when she came back.

  Settling the girls in their temporary home away from town, further down the coast, she had heard the far-off sound of a plane. She went to the door and looked up, shielding her eyes: the sky was overcast but in a parting of the clouds she saw a distant shape like a dark fish hovering. There was a flash, a glare, brighter than any lightning and then the thunder, a sound so deep it unsettled the ground beneath her feet like the tremor of an earthquake. There was a shift in the air, an onrushing. Then silence.

  When Suzuki reached the outskirts, at first she could see nothing, the smoke and the fires too thick. But the boiling wind that hurled people and animals into the air like toys did one thing: it lifted the smoke. And then she saw that the whole area was strewn with corpses and the near-dead. Bodies clogged the river, some flung by the force of the explosion, others who had crawled into the water to try to quench the burning that split and blistered their skin, only to drown. The living stumbled unsteadily through the rubble, reaching out as though blinded; naked, their hair and clothes aflame. Liquid dripped from their hands, as if they had emerged from the river. Puzzlingly, they appeared to be draped in rags. Then she saw that what looked like rags were strips of shredded skin, fluttering from their arms. The liquid dripping from their hands was blood.

  She would tell Joey none of this; she was not sure she could speak the words. He could read about it in books. Books were already being written, dissertations prepared; artists would paint pictures. The cycle rickshaw was climbing higher, slowly zigzagging towards the house Suzuki had shared with Henry. The rules of hospitality were rigid: Joe must rest after the journey, eat, sip some tea. Then she would take him to the place where he was born, on the other side of the harbour.

  Henry’s house lay beyond iron gates, square, solid.

  ‘This was the American side of town,’ Suzuki told him. ‘These houses stood firm on strong foundations.’

  She showed him into a large room and disappeared to prepare his refreshment while Joe stood, looking around him at the room, where Nancy’s uncle had lived and raised a family and died peacefully before the bombs fell. There was a view over the bay and surrounding hills.

  As he turned away from the window he was startled to find a young girl standing in the doorway, watching him.

  ‘You must be Joey.’

  ‘Yes. And you are?’

  He spoke in Japanese; she responded in English.

  ‘Mayu. We talked many times about you.’

  Of course, she was Henry’s daughter, it would be natural for her to speak English, yet there was something ungiving about the tone.

  ‘We?’ he asked.

  ‘My mother and I. And Cho-Cho.’

  He felt a strange constriction around his heart, not a pain, more an intimation of pain. This child had talked about him with his mother.

  ‘She used to tell us stories. About when she was young.’

  He found he was pressing a hand to his chest, easing the not-pain, trying to breathe normally.

  He said, ‘You know more than I do.’

  She nodded. ‘Of course. She told us everything.’

  Suzuki, pausing in the door with a tray, heard the last phrases. She said rapidly, ‘Mayu was a favourite of your mother’s. Cho-Cho used to say that when Mayu grew up she would be an example of the Japanese New Woman. Free to control her own life. She would have been so happy that women will have the vote now.’

  Suzuki knelt to place the tray on a low table.

  ‘When you have rested after your journey, we will go to your mother’s house—’

  ‘What’s left of it,’ Mayu murmured.

  Suzuki, embarrassed, said rapidly, ‘Well of course, like everything else, the damage . . .’

  This girl was his cousin. He wondered at the chill he sensed, and set out to win her round.

  ‘So my mother must have told you about how she and my father met and got married,’ he said.

  ‘That’s right,’ Mayu said tranquilly. ‘So desu ne. She told us how he rented her. For a while.’

  From Suzuki, a small cry as she folded into herself, bowing over the tray of green tea and plate of sweet bean paste dumplings. The girl held Joe in her level glance for a moment, smiled, and left the room.

  So here it was, the dirty little secret that was his patrimony. He was descended from a hooker and a sailor looking for a good time in a foreign port. As so often in the past, Joe waited for some spontaneous emotion to seize him. And as in the past he remained empty.

  He did not feel betrayed: his life had been built on hypocrisy to maintain a semblance of family respectability, but also with kindness, to protect him. But he could not endure further protection; he wanted information, he wanted the truth. He saw that Suzuki could not be trusted here.

  ‘Is there someone I could talk to, someone else who knew her?’

  Suzuki thought for a moment, shaking her head doubtfully.

  ‘So many are no longer with us . . .’

  Then she clapped her hands, remembering.

  ‘Isha!’

  ‘Doctor? Her doctor?’

  ‘Yes, yes. For many years.’

  ‘Where do I find him?’

  The building was no more than a wreck; but broken windows had been patched, the door repaired and, inside, the lobby was clean and polished. The waiting room seethed with distress. People perched cautiously on stools, huddled in chairs; some had only the floor. They held themselves carefully, arms bandaged, some with faces swathed in gauze covering. Joe glimpsed skin marked with burns, unhealed sores. The patients made no noise, their pain taken for granted.

  Among them, as at Tule, he loomed. But worse, he stood out in his health, his lack of scabs and surgical dressings. Through gaps in the boarded-up window he could see melted metal, blasted walls and a burnt city; the truth that bore out Oppenheimer’s words when he witnessed the first explosion of his invention: Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds, . .
.

  After just a few minutes he heard his name called out by the receptionist.

  He said, protesting, ‘Others are before me—’

  ‘You are a visitor; please go through. Dr Sato will see you now.’

  Joe paused in the door of the surgery. The thin, grey-haired figure behind the desk rose and bowed.

  ‘Good morning. I hope you didn’t have to wait too long.’ A trace of American in the delivery.

  Joe said, ‘I feel bad, coming in ahead of other people. You have a busy day.’

  ‘All days are busy, Pinkerton-san. We have unusual circumstances: my patients all suffer from the same sickness. Bomb poison, they call it; these are among the lucky survivors.’ He studied Joe for a moment, silver eyebrows raised questioningly. ‘What can I do for you?’

  He felt guilty again: taking up a doctor’s time while outside the door, the urgent needs of the sick awaited attention.

  ‘I was told – I was hoping you could answer some questions about my mother. About Cho-Cho-san.’

  Dr Sato’s pale hands shuffled papers on his desk. Questions about Cho-Cho. A lifeless girl carried in on a stretcher; his first experience of a botched suicide.

  This was not the time to recall that day.

  ‘I knew Cho-Cho-san for many years.’

  For a long time she had refused to speak to him except to answer medical enquiries: he formed part of the unwanted rescue team, ‘saving’ her from her desired end. Gradually she accepted that, welcome or not, a doctor was occasionally needed. Much later, he had become a friend.

  There came a day when, formally, tentatively, he had suggested that if he ceased to be her doctor, he could offer her care and attention of a rather more personal nature. She responded impatiently: as a medical expert he was useful to her. As a friend, she valued him.

  But as a husband? A shake of the head.

  Recalling that day he said aloud, ‘Gankomono!’

  Startled, Joe repeated, ‘Stubborn?’

  Dr Sato, equally startled, said, ‘You understand Japanese. Ah. I meant the word in its positive use: your mother was . . . an independent spirit. I should have said she had dokuritsushin.’