Fireflies

by Ben Byrne

  I’d seen it so many times, from the air. Coming in at dawn at 30,000 feet, my palm automatic on the worn shutter crank of my K-22 camera. Japanese cruisers floating out at sea; the white line of surf crashing upon the shore. The black highways and silver railways, the glistening web of canals and rivers; the dense formations of huddled houses, temples, barracks, and factories. I knew the whole country, I thought, from above. I’d processed it all inch by inch, shrunk it down to frozen impressions in the silver nitrate crystals of nine-by-nine film. Lugged the camera cylinders over to General LeMay’s Quonset hut for the daily photo briefing at thirteen hundred hours. Glanced at the big prints up on the walls, labelled with arrows and statistics. The circled primary targets. The shaded inflammable zones. Photographs I’d shot over the past six months. Japanese cities. Before and after.

  By the night of the Tokyo raid back in March, the city was as familiar as a framed map. We floated up above the Superforts, their fuselages tapering like artists’ brushes, the guide fires already blazing below. Then, the world was a maelstrom of noise — flurries of bombs screaming down, glimmering pinpricks of light erupting, merging, and melding as the fires took hold. An endless blast of heat and a deep glow as the smoke billowed up. The next day, when we flew back to photograph the damage, it was all just burned ruin and collapsed buildings. Scarred swathes of rubble, still shimmering with heat waves.

  My last photo run: to a city by the coast, to map out a bombing approach. Down below, I’d seen a bustling metropolis, busy streets and market buildings. A harbour full of fishing boats delivering their silvery catch at the docks.

  When we had returned a week later, Lazard thought we were lost. He simply couldn’t recognize the place. The valley was ravaged, eerie and desolate. The buildings swept clear, the estuarial rivers glistening down to the sea through the char, like tear tracks across a blackened face.

  The nights since my discharge, my mind seemed to be trying to process those thousands of images. As if in my dreams, I could develop them, arrange them into some kind of sequence. I still felt myself flying in my sleep, acutely aware of the vast distance between me and the earth.

  I needed to make landfall soon, I thought. I needed to see the world from ground level again.

  The launches banged alongside the ship and we squinted to see who would make up the Imperial delegation. An old Japanese man with a cane swung himself forward, followed by his cronies — delegates in absurd silk top hats and frock coats. Then came the generals, drab and squat. They made a grim, surly bunch as they stood huddled on the swaying deck, surrounded on all sides by Allied men in blinding white uniform. A silence hovered over the ship, threaded through with the whir of movie cameras, punctuated by the click of lenses and the puff of flashbulbs.

  The door to the bridge cabin swung open.

  General Douglas MacArthur. Emerging from the doorway, collar open, shoulders square. He loomed in front of the Japanese men, hands on hips, and I was put in mind of my father, the stern headmaster, drawing his belt from around his waist.

  After his sonorous opening remarks, he gestured to the Japanese to come forward. One by one, in profound silence, they bent over to sign the documents. In a few short moments, Japan had surrendered unconditionally to the supreme commander of the Allied powers.

  The general made a fine speech, full of noble sentiment and good intention. Next to me, the Associated Press man was doodling an obscene picture in his notebook. I looked out toward Japan as the seagulls cawed above us in the sky. The sun had burned through the cloud. It was a fine day.

  All of a sudden, a horde of Superforts and Hellcats and Mustangs filled the air. I lurched forward, almost tumbling from the turret. They swarmed toward the coast in echelon after echelon, wings glinting in the morning sun. The crew on the upper decks were all hollering now, grinning, slapping each other on the back. Down below, the Allied generals and admirals shook hands and congratulated each other. I took a deep breath as the planes roared toward Tokyo like a flock of furious birds.

  The war is over, I told myself, dumbly. It’s all over.

  And we are alive.

  PART TWO

  The Withered Fields

  September 1945

  5

  NEW WOMEN OF JAPAN

  (SATSUKO TAKARA)

  Michiko had gone off to the countryside along with everyone else to try and barter with those stingy peasants for some food, and I was sitting outside Tokyo Station beneath a sign I had written for my little brother, Hiroshi. The station was like an old, broken-down temple now, covered in handwritten signs and banners addressed to lost friends and relatives, all flapping in the wind like prayer flags. Crowds milled about, searching for their own names, or sat meekly against the walls in the hope that one of their loved ones might magically reappear. I had hung my own sign here a few days after the fire raid, telling my brother that I was now living with Michiko, my friend from the war work dormitory, in her eight-mat hovel in Shinagawa. I promised to wait for him here at Tokyo Station every day at noon. But it had been six months since then already, and still he hadn’t appeared.

  The ground had been baking hot beneath my bare feet, the morning after the raid, and my hands were dreadfully painful from being burned the night before. I’d crawled out of the irrigation ditch by the Yoshiwara canal and stumbled across the smoking ruins of Asakusa. The whole city had been burned, it seemed; the wooden tenements and teahouses had all gone up in smoke, and the theatres and picture palaces on the Rokku were burned-out shells. Shrivelled bodies were scattered along the roads and sticking out of the shelters. Coal-black people went by with charred bedding on their backs, pushing bicycles piled with their remaining possessions.

  Our alley ran parallel to Kototoi Avenue, between the Senso Temple and the Sumida River Park. But the whole area east of the river was in ruins now, with only the odd brick building still standing. After flailing across the cinders for some time, I finally found the cracked, square concrete cistern near Umamichi Street that had once stood in front of Mrs. Oka’s pickle shop. A half-naked man was slumped dead inside. My family’s restaurant, with its sliding wooden doors and creaking sign, was gone. The whole alley had been incinerated, leaving nothing now but two heaped ridges of ash.

  There was no sign of Hiroshi. I thought of him the night before, surrounded by fire on the bank of the canal, calling to me. Not far away, I found a charred piece of blue cloth. I pictured my mother in her cotton kimono, stumbling toward us along the blazing street.

  Unfamiliar people, distant relatives, I supposed, were arriving now with handcarts. They picked out fragments of bone from the corpses and piled up any household goods that remained. I dug about in the char for a while, but found nothing but my mother’s battered old copper teakettle. Then the pain in my hands became agonizing, and I had to go off to find a relief station, where a doctor gave me Mercurochrome and bandages.

  I searched for Hiroshi for hours after that, at the Kasakata police station and up at Fuji high school, where the injured lay on mats lined up in the playground. But my brother had vanished. Finally, in the evening, I returned to the Yoshiwara canal, where he had left me the night before. I started to shake. Troops were fishing out bodies on a big hook suspended from a truck, piling them up in a heap on the bank. I knew I should look for Hiroshi amongst them, but the truth was that I couldn’t bring myself to search amongst those slippery mounds of flesh, all pink and boiled.

  ~ ~ ~

  A train wheezed into the station, its windows boarded over with planks. Passengers clambered down from the roofs of the carriages, and a crowd spilled out of the station carrying knapsacks and bundles of whatever they’d managed to scrounge from the farmers. Policemen with bamboo nightsticks walked up and down outside the station, eyeing the crowd.

  Soon enough, Michiko appeared. Her dress was wrinkled, her shoes were covered in mud, and she looked exhausted. I asked her quietly if she’d
been able to find anything in the countryside. She wrenched open her bag and gestured inside: three tiny, shrivelled potatoes, wrapped in a handkerchief.

  “Three potatoes. Michiko, really,” I said.

  We’d had practically nothing to eat all week and I knew there was nothing left in the house now, nothing at all.

  “It’s not my fault,” she said. “Those farmers are worse than thieves!”

  She’d bartered away her favourite summer kimono, she said, and this was all she had received in return. It was extortion, pure and simple.

  I wracked my brain, wondering if there was even any rice bran we might make into gruel. But I knew it was useless. I’d swept between the floorboards two days ago, and we’d already eaten whatever it was that was down there.

  There were a few stalls set up by the station now, but they didn’t seem to be selling anything useful except for some kind of rough booze. A couple of old men were already reeling and one of them shouted something vulgar to Michiko. But she just shouted back, saying that she was surprised he could even think of anything like that at a time like this, that they should be ashamed of themselves, sitting there swilling rotgut while the rest of the city was starving to death.

  A little further along the street, she stopped quite suddenly and put her hand on my arm.

  “Look,” she said, pointing.

  There was a large sign nailed to the charred stump of a telegraph pole. “To the New Women of Japan,” it said, grandly. Michiko started bobbing up and down and tugging at my sleeve, the way she always did when she was excited.

  “Satsuko,” she said, “it’s jobs for office ladies. We could do that!”

  I read the sign with an uneasy feeling. The advertisement certainly was for secretaries, but it also mentioned “the Contingency of the Occupation” and I felt sure that this was something to do with the Americans. They’d be here soon, large and boisterous, swaggering through the streets and shouting. The thought of working right up close to them made me shudder.

  But Michiko had that dreamy, faraway look on her face, which I recognized from whenever she emerged, star-struck, from the cinema.

  “New Women of Japan,” she said, in a breathy voice. “Just think, Satsuko. That could be us!”

  I groaned in protest and tried to pull her away. But she just stood right where she was.

  “Michiko,” I said, “Please. I’m hot and I’m tired. Let’s please go home.”

  The star-struck look vanished. “And what are you going to sell tomorrow, then, Satsuko? The teakettle?”

  A hard lump formed in my throat. This was unkind, and she knew it, as the copper teakettle was now the only thing I had to remember my mother by.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  She laid a hand on my arm, and her face softened.

  “Satsuko,” she said, “we only have three potatoes to eat today.”

  She could be surprisingly grown up sometimes. I knew in my heart that she was right, that we really should answer the advertisement. But when I read it again, another shiver passed through me. Michiko just gripped my arm, though, and the dramatic look came back into her eyes.

  “Just think, Satsuko,” she whispered. “New Women of Japan!”

  ~ ~ ~

  We dressed up as best we could for our interview, in neat skirts and white blouses that I’d pressed beneath our futon the night before. We never seemed able to get the ash and dirt out of our clothes anymore, but these outfits were better, in any case, than the baggy monpe trousers we normally wore, and which made us look so hopelessly unattractive. The address was for an elegant building up on the Ginza, which seemed like a hopeful sign, but when we got there, I saw that the roof of the building had fallen down. Inside, cracked paint was peeling from the walls.

  We followed an arrow pointing up the shabby staircase to a lobby, where a large crowd of women were already gathered.

  “Do you think we’re too late?” I said, noticing, to my unease, that some of the other women wore bright makeup. They looked like quite vulgar types.

  “Are you sure this is the right place?” I whispered.

  “Well,” murmured Michiko, “it can’t be easy for anyone to find work right now, not with things the way they are.”

  Just then, the door at the end of the corridor burst open and a very young girl rushed out. Tears were streaming down her face and she ran headlong into me. I held out my arms to steady her, but she pushed me aside and clattered down the staircase, sobs drifting up behind her.

  “Michiko!” I hissed. “What on earth could they have said to make her so upset?”

  “Perhaps she wasn’t experienced enough,” Michiko said. “Don’t worry, Satsuko, we’ll be alright.”

  “Michiko,” I said, feeling suddenly nervous. “I think perhaps it might be best if we were to try to find some other kind of position elsewhere.”

  She narrowed her eyes and growled: if I had any idea of where we could go, then I should go ahead and tell her right there and then.

  So we carried on waiting and before long, a secretary came out and gestured at me. Michiko gave my hand a little squeeze and I walked along to the door. Inside, behind a heavy desk, sat two men, as unlike each other as they could have possibly been. One was thin and very handsome, his hair slicked back like an American film star, while the other was as fat as a pig and had little cherry stone eyes that looked me up and down.

  “Miss Takara,” said the handsome man, glancing at his list. “Please come in.”

  I smiled sweetly.

  He started by asking where I’d grown up and what my father’s profession had been. When I told him that I’d been a serving girl in my father’s eel restaurant, he seemed very pleased; he even said he might remember the place — after all, it had been quite famous if you knew Asakusa at all.

  The pig-man’s eyes narrowed. “And what do you know of our country’s noble history, Miss Takara?” he demanded.

  I hesitated, worried that this might be a trap. Before we’d been sent off for war work with the Student Attack Force, our class been taught that the emperor had descended from the sun goddess Amaterasu, and that the Japanese people had been uniquely blessed with a special responsibility to preserve harmony across the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. But I wasn’t sure if this was still the case, and so I stayed silent.

  The handsome man smiled. “Don’t worry, Miss Takara,” he said. “It’s not a test.”

  He moved his chair aside, and pointed up at a large painting mounted on the wall. It showed a very beautiful girl from the Edo period, dressed in a pink and white kimono. She was kneeling at the feet of a fierce-looking Westerner with a big white moustache and a red waistcoat. The sea lay a little way beyond them, black-flagged ships sailing back and forth upon the waves.

  “I wonder,” he said, “if you are familiar with this famous lady?”

  As I looked up at the painting, I had a distant memory of an operetta that my father had once told me about. The fat man stared at me. I had the sudden feeling that my interview wasn’t going very well.

  “This is Okichi-sama,” the man said. He explained that Okichi had once lived in Shimoda, on the Izu peninsula. When the foreign barbarians had first forced Japan to open up to the outside world, she had been presented to the American ambassador as a “consort.”

  I looked at them uncertainly.

  “A kind of peace offering,” explained the handsome man, “and a clever way to keep an eye on the foreigners.”

  The fat man leaned forward. “Do you know what a consort might be, Miss Takara?”

  My cheeks coloured. I gave a faint nod.

  “Okichi,” he went on, his voice swelling now, like the radio bulletins of victorious battles during the war, “sacrificed her body for the Japanese nation. Just as our soldiers sacrificed theirs. Now the barbarians are about to land again, Miss Tak
ara.” He raised a thick finger in the air. “Japan will need a new generation of Okichis, Miss Takara. Honourable women who will act as a breakwater, a seawall, to protect the flower of our womanhood from their rapacious lust.”

  An image came into my mind of the vulgar women cackling in the hallway. I swallowed.

  “Your advertisement,” I murmured. “It mentioned office ladies —”

  The handsome man grinned. “Regrettably, Miss Takara, all of the back office positions have now been filled. But there are other positions remaining. Fine positions. For noble, patriotic women, who would be prepared to act as ‘consorts’ for our foreign guests, once they arrive.”

  My cheeks were burning as I stood up to leave.

  “You would be paid, Miss Takara,” the fat man called behind me. “With an allowance for clothing. And for food. Think of your duty to Japan.”

  I felt suddenly faint and clutched at the desk to steady myself. The handsome man hurried to help me back into the chair.

  “Please don’t upset yourself, Miss Takara,” he said. “But please do consider our offer.”

  The men were staring at me. I tried to picture myself, sitting in a café with a burly American. There came an image of one, lying naked on my bed. What would it be like, I wondered, to be intimate with a foreigner? The bristly body, the smell of sweat and cigarettes . . .

  The truth was that I wasn’t completely innocent. The night before Osamu had been sent away to the South Seas, after his farewell party, we’d gone off to a hotel for a short time together. I wasn’t ashamed. After his horrible mother had told me what had happened to him, I was glad that I had given him at least that comfort in his brief life.

  I thought of the three wrinkled potatoes in Michiko’s handkerchief, how we’d devoured the last one that morning.

  “Well, Miss Takara?” said the handsome man. His words seemed to come from a very long way away. “We’re counting on you. Will you help us?”