by Ben Byrne
We called it the American Sweet Shop. The GIs came along on Friday nights to swap their B-rations for whisky and fake antiques. We shined their shoes and scrounged chocolate and chewing gum; kids stole things from their pockets and some of the older girls took them off into the shadows under the railway arches.
I was a cigarette boy. The yankiis all smoked like crazy — American cigarettes at that — and if you followed them for long enough, you could easily collect up enough butts to wrinkle out the tobacco into new two-sen smokes. You could then palm these off on some poor Japanese, who’d smoke them right down to the last cardboard embers.
The sailor lifted his massive hand and flung his smouldering cigarette into the air. I pounced, but suddenly, he moved, and I slammed into his leg, as thick as a tree trunk. I sprawled there, stunned, for a moment. From nowhere, another cocky boy jumped in.
“Get off!” I shouted. “This is my patch!” I twisted around and grabbed the boy, and we grappled and thrashed on the ground as the laughing sailors goaded us on, ducking and weaving behind their giant fists.
My hand was around the boy’s throat and I pinned him to the ground. But then, as I slapped his terrified face, I had a sudden shock. It was Koji, the grandson of Mrs. Oka, the pickle seller who’d lived next door to us in Asakusa.
“Koji?” I said, letting go of his neck. “Is that you?”
The boy nodded and wiped away his snot and tears with dirty little fists.
“Do you remember me?” I asked, brushing him down.
He grimaced. “What happened to your face?”
The thick welts on my cheeks had gone hard now, like the rubber on bicycle tires.
“I got burned.”
His eyes grew wider. “You look creepy!”
I nodded. “What happened to your granny?”
He thrust out his bottom lip.
“Oh. Sorry. Did I hurt you?”
He shrugged.
“You hungry?”
“Starving!” he said.
He started to grin as we went over to one of the busy wooden stalls in the market. I counted out a few copper coins from my pocket, and, as we shared a bowl of cold noodles, he told me about some of the other kids he’d come across since the war had ended. There were quite a few of us Asakusa lot, it seemed, all in the same boat.
“Nobu’s here,” he said, and I nodded. This was a nine-year-old boy I knew from the Senso school. His dad had once owned the fishmonger, on the corner of Umamichi Street, where my own father had bought the eels for our shop there, before the shortages.
“Little Aiko, too.” This was Nobu’s younger sister, I remembered, a funny little thing who’d gone to the elementary school next to ours.
Koji glanced around and lowered his voice.
“That boy Shin’s here, too,” he whispered. “You know, the one from Fuji High School?”
I groaned. “Trust him to be here!”
I knew Shin alright. A local bully with a big square jaw, he’d been part of the tenement gang up near Sengen Shrine. His father had been a fireman, covered in tattoos, who’d lived on a barge on the Okawa. He’d sold Shin’s sister Midori, one of the neighbourhood beauties, to the Willow Tree teahouse to become a trainee geisha when she was just eleven years old. Shin had taken after his father though, always fighting dirty in the battles we held in the back streets, throwing chunks of glass on the sly and striding about in a pair of rolled up khaki trousers that he swore he’d taken off the body of a crash-landed American pilot.
By the Ueno Plaza steps, the children were shrieking like monkeys as a pair of GIs revved the engine of their jeep, tossing packets of caramels into their grabbing hands. I spotted Shin straight away. He was nearly as tall as me now, wearing a torn pair of shorts. As the jeep spun off along the avenue, he sprinted after it in bare feet. He leaped up onto the bumper and rode along for a second before toppling off and tumbling into the dirt. He picked himself up with an idiotic grin and hobbled back toward us, his elbows streaked with blood. When he saw me, the grin vanished.
“Don’t tell me you’re here!” he said, squinting at my face. I recognized his thick lips and hooded eyes. “You’re even uglier than before.”
“Look who’s talking.”
There were scabs on his knees and his front teeth were broken. I remembered how, after our schools had been evacuated to the countryside, us Asakusa lot had been given the heavy jobs, digging octopus holes and cutting fodder for the local garrison’s horses. Shin, meanwhile, had made alliances with the straw-sandalled village boys, pilfering our barley rations to trade for their silver rice.
“I suppose you want to join my gang now, don’t you?” Shin sneered. “Not so high and mighty now, are you? Well, it just so happens that you can’t. Not unless I say so.”
“And how long have you been in charge?”
He frowned as he counted on his fingers. “Ever since —”
Everyone went quiet. Ever since March, he meant. The night when Tokyo had burned.
“You must be making pots of money, I suppose?”
He waved blithely at the departing jeep.
“We can always scrounge from the yankiis!”
The other children giggled. They were filthy. Their shirts were torn and their hair was matted. They wouldn’t last another month with Shin in charge, I thought. I stepped closer.
“Do you really think they’ll always be this generous?” I said. “What about when winter comes? It’s October already. Chewing gum won’t be much use to you then!”
Shin shrugged and gave another idiotic grin. The other children looked up at me nervously.
“Look,” I said. “Here’s what we can do.”
Later that night, Shin and Nobu and I loitered for a few hours outside the Continental Hotel, where the American officers were billeted, and collected a pile of butts from the ash cans. Back at the station, Koji ground them up in his prize shell casing — a real beauty from a Type 89 discharger — and together, we rolled the new smokes into licked twists of newspaper. Aiko took them around the station the next morning. When she got back, I realized we had enough money to buy three whole seaweed-wrapped rice balls. We stuffed them into our mouths on the spot, grinning at each other with flecks of rice stuck to our chins.
“It’s good that we’re all back together, now, isn’t it?” Koji remarked one evening. We were sitting up in Ueno Plaza, where some other kids had lit a refuse fire. Koji had just been showing off, a newspaper hat on his head, staggering around like a drunk GI, with Aiko pretending to be his giggling Japanese girlfriend.
It was true. It was a real relief not to be on my own any more. I missed my mother and father and sister more than I cared to let on, and I don’t think that I could have survived without the company of the other children. It almost seemed like a big game sometimes, as if we’d all run off on holiday together. We played destroyer-torpedo in the broken-down houses, built forts in the bomb craters from charred planks and twisted bits of metal. We’d even made a baseball pitch in the wasteground at the back of the station, where we held tournaments with the other gangs, gambling for bullet casings and bomb fragments.
What a liberation from the war! Those days of writing comfort letters to the soldiers until your fingers cramped, marching up and down the playground, shouting songs. Children of the Emperor!
I never discovered exactly what had happened to Koji, Aiko, Shin and Nobu on the night of the fire raid back in March. It became a rule, early on, that we weren’t ever to talk about it. I was still so ashamed of myself that I could hardly bear to think about that night. The whole city had been on fire as I’d sprinted back toward our house, leaving Satsuko alone in the dark water of the canal. I’d only made it a few dozen yards before the cotton quilt of my air defence cowl caught on fire. I screamed as I tried to pull it off, my skin smelling like roasting pork. I staggered into a pit shel
ter by the side of the road, where I sat all night long, the ground vibrating beneath my feet, surrounded by the sounds of sirens and planes and the stink of smoke as I sobbed in the darkness.
By the time the fires had burned out, my face was already blistering. I stumbled back up the charred street to the Yoshiwara canal, to the iron ladder where I’d left Satstuko the night before. The water below was full of floating corpses, drowned or asphyxiated, bobbing in the water amongst the blackened chunks of sodden timber.
The children sometimes cried out at night, at the station. I’d wake to see their faces glistening with tears. But it became another rule that you couldn’t let anyone see you cry. If you did, the others had to sit on you, as if you were a sack of rice. I thought that if anyone were to start crying, then someone else would follow, and soon enough, we’d all be crying our eyes out and no one would be able to stop. We might go on crying forever, I thought, until we ended up like empty cicada shells, having cried ourselves away entirely.
~ ~ ~
I was playing with my metal soldiers one morning when Aiko bustled over to me. She hovered in front of me for a few minutes until, finally, I asked her what was the matter.
She frowned.
“Can people live in holes?” she asked.
“What do you mean?” I said.
Shyly, she told me that she had met a teenage girl the day before, who was living in a hole outside the station.
“You mean the slit bomb shelter?”
There were plenty of single-person earthwork shelters scattered across the city, though none of them had been much use to anyone during the fire raids. They’d been more like miniature stoves then. You still had to be wary of going inside, just in case there was a baked, rotten corpse stuck down there.
“What’s she doing in there?” I asked.
“She lives in it!”
“Really?”
Aiko nodded, biting her lip
“Is she nice?”
“She’s my friend.”
“I see.”
The girl had been sent to Tokyo from Hiroshima, Aiko said, in the Chugoko region, out on the Seto Inland Sea. Her mother had packed her off to stay with relatives a month or so earlier, but when the girl had disembarked at Tokyo Station, there’d been no one there to meet her. So she’d just wandered off on her own until she finally found herself here at Ueno.
I didn’t know much about Hiroshima people, only that their city had been very badly bombed, just days before the end of the war. It had gone up with just one blast, people said. I remembered thinking how unlucky they’d been, not to have made it through.
Aiko’s face was crumpled up in sympathy, and I could tell that she’d taken a shine to the girl. It was hardly surprising. It couldn’t have been much fun hanging around with us boys all the time.
“Can she come and join us, big brother?” she asked, with a pleading look on her face. “Please?”
I felt a tingle of pride. No one had ever called me big brother before. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing to have another girl in the gang, I thought. She could always help out with the selling work.
“Why don’t you bring her over to meet us later on today?” I said.
Aiko’s face lit up and she clapped her hands together.
“Thank you big brother!” she said. “Thank you, thank you!”
~ ~ ~
Tomoko. The name itself was enough to send a delicious shiver down my spine. She wore a blue canvas jacket, a battered metal water canteen hung over her shoulder. Her hair was cut very short, almost like a boy’s, and fell just beneath her eyes, so that she blew it out of the way whenever you spoke to her. Her face was quite round, but she was terribly thin from her journey from Hiroshima to Tokyo. She was thirteen years old and as shy as a borrowed cat.
That night, she slept on the floor next to us in our corner of the ticket hall. Just as I was drifting off, someone flicked my ear. I looked up to see Shin leering over me.
“What do you want?” I said.
“I was thinking,” he said, as he scratched the side of his nose.
“That makes a change.”
His thick lip trembled. “Listen,” he said. “Don’t you be so proud. You might have learned all the big words at your fancy school but I’m still Shin from Sengen Alley.”
I sat up, ashamed of myself for having been rude. Perhaps he had been a bully in the old days. But all sorts of things had happened since then.
“What’s your big idea, then?” I asked.
He jerked his thumb toward Tomoko.
“There’s another way a girl like that could make us some money, you know.”
I leaped to my feet and stared him down with white eyes, furious that I’d ever felt sorry for such a bastard. I held my fist under his chin until he shrank backward.
“What does it matter?” he whined. “We wouldn’t be the only ones!”
“Don’t you touch a hair on her head,” I whispered. “Don’t you even dare.”
“What?” he said. “Want to save her for yourself, monster?”
My clenched fist stopped a hair’s breadth away from his eye socket. Finally he shrugged and rolled away.
“Suit yourself.”
~ ~ ~
Tomoko didn’t say much, at first. In fact, I sometimes wondered whether she’d actually forgotten how to talk on her long journey across the Kansai plain. But then, one afternoon, she came over to us through the ticket hall, holding up a tattered magazine.
“I’ve found something,” she said in a faint voice.
She was holding a torn copy of Women’s Club, a magazine that my mother used to read. I wrinkled up my nose, but she opened it anyway to show us an article. I squinted at the title: “Let’s Eat Grasshoppers!” it said.
“Well. Let’s hear it then,” I said, nodding in encouragement.
Tomoko blew her hair out of her eyes. Shyly, she began to read.
“Not only is the countryside full of grasshoppers, but despite what some might think, they are in fact quite delicious to eat and are very nutritious, being packed full of vitamins.”
Koji made a sour face and Shin, not to be outdone, retched loudly.
But the idea didn’t seem like such a bad one to me. We were all just skin and bones, after all. Even if we didn’t eat the grasshoppers ourselves, we could always try selling them back here at the market. I’d seen people selling buckets of frogs before; some even sold snakes.
“Well. Maybe we’ll go on a grasshopper hunt tomorrow then,” I said. “First thing.”
The other children started to make excited noises, but I quickly dashed their hopes.
“Just us older ones, of course. Me — and Tomoko. Shin, you can stay here and look after the little ones. You’re in charge.”
My heart was in my mouth as the children grumbled away. I snatched a glance up at Tomoko. Her cheeks were glowing. She was smiling at me.
~ ~ ~
It was a cold morning, beautifully clear and bright, as we jumped down from the Tobu Main Line train, just past Shiraoka up in Saitama prefecture. The fields were all crunchy with frost and mottled leaves were floating down from the trees, slowly, as if they couldn’t bear to land. We’d borrowed some little bamboo cages from an old man at the market to make homes for our grasshoppers, but though we hunted about in the fields for hours on end, as the magazine suggested, it finally became clear that we wouldn’t be needing them. There were no grasshoppers to be found.
“I wonder where they all could have gone,” Tomoko sniffed.
“Perhaps it’s because it’s autumn now,” I said. “Or perhaps other people have already taken them.”
We wandered along a winding path that led through the fields, as the dew melted and a warbler called out from the trees. It must have its nest nearby, I thought, and I wondered if I should try t
o search for its eggs. I looked up. Tomoko was standing by a little shrine set with offerings just off the path, her eyes closed as if she were saying a prayer.
The stories I’d heard about her city swirled through my head. As we carried on walking, I finally plucked up the courage to ask her the question that had been puzzling me.
“Tomoko,” I said. “I was wondering. Why was it that your mother sent you to Tokyo in the first place? Do you really have relatives here?”
She stopped suddenly, and gave me a strange look.
“She was sick,” she murmured.
“Sick?”
She nodded. A wrinkle appeared on her forehead. “Not straight away,” she said. “After.”
I frowned. “What do you mean?” I asked. “What was wrong with her?”
She opened her mouth as if to speak, then shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “Something to do with her blood.”
“Couldn’t your father help?” I asked. “What did he do?”
“He was a doctor,” she said. “At the naval hospital.”
“So why couldn’t he help, then?”
She stared blankly at the ground.
“What was it like?” I blurted. “Is it true what they say? That it all went up with just one blast?”
Tomoko held her hands tightly against her sides. She suddenly looked as if she was about to cry. Idiot! I thought, cursing myself. This kind of talk was against the rules.
I strode on down the path, squirming with embarrassment. After a while, I heard Tomoko’s footsteps. I hardly dared look at her as she fell into step beside me.
“So what about you, Hiroshi-kun?” she asked. “What about Asakusa? Was it really as exciting as all the songs used to say?”
I glanced at her in relief, thankful to be changing the subject. “Haven’t you ever heard of the Sanja Matsuri?” I asked. “It used to be the best festival of them all!”
