Fireflies

by Ben Byrne

  We hunted about for the address near the tall, sooty shopfront of the Matsuzakaya department store. As I looked at its shuttered windows and barred doors, I felt a stab of guilt. My mother had brought me there four years ago, on my sixteenth birthday, to buy my first real kimono. It was woven from beautiful green silk and embroidered with golden peonies. I’d had to sell it to buy rice back in June.

  Next door to the Matsuzakaya was a low, white building that had clearly been used a communal bomb shelter. A large sign in English hung outside, freshly painted in pink and white.

  “There it is, Satsuko!” Michiko said, tracing the letters in the air with her finger. “Oasis — of — Ginza,” she pronounced. “We’re here!”

  We walked down a flight of dingy steps. The underground shelter had been transformed into a cheap cabaret, with a small dance floor and a little wooden stage with chairs and tables set up. Red streamers and paper lanterns decorated the cracked earthen walls, and American and British flags were tacked up at jaunty angles.

  “Very nice,” said Michiko, nodding approvingly. A scratchy jazz record was playing on the gramophone, and a very tall and solemn-looking American man was turning slowly around in the middle of the room. A tiny girl appeared, clinging onto him — she could barely clasp her arms around his back.

  Mr. Shiga’s office was in an old storage cupboard piled high with buckets for water relays. He looked at us haughtily over the rims of his spectacles, and told us how lucky we both were.

  “Only the best kind of girls get to work here,” he said. “This place has got class.” He coughed heavily and spat into his handkerchief. “So you’d better keep our guests happy. And you’re not just here to spread your legs either.”

  He explained that, aside from the usual services, we were to encourage the Americans to spend their dollars on drinks and dances and snacks.

  “And don’t let them palm you off with yen!” he said.

  Dabbing at his lips, he quickly went through the financial arrangements, which didn’t seem very fair to me. The Oasis would take practically half of everything we earned, though we were still expected to pay for our own makeup and clothing and any medical treatment that might be necessary. But it was a sign of how desperate I had become that I just knelt meekly before him. Anything seemed better than the International Palace.

  We took great care making ourselves up that night, in the cramped dressing room filled with perfume and perspiring flesh. The girls were fanning each other, slumped on the floor in their underclothes. Michiko sprinkled powder on the back of my neck and brushed it until my skin was as smooth and white as china.

  “Why, Satsuko,” she said, pulling my obi tight around my waist, “you look just like a real geisha!”

  I laughed at the thought. But when we looked at ourselves in the mirror, I saw that I really did look quite pretty, even next to Michiko, who was so stunning.

  Years before, I recalled, my mother and I had dressed up together before going to watch the summer fireworks over the river. We’d painted our faces and glued silk petals to our combs. After things had started to go badly for Japan, though, there’d been no makeup or jewellery anymore. Skirts had been banned, and the busybodies from the National Defence Women’s Association went around spying, scolding you in public for any hint of rouge. Abolish desire until victory!

  I remembered how, soon after I’d reported for war work, Mr. Ogura had ordered all the girls out into the yard one morning. He told us we were to unpick every colourful thread from our clothes, one by one. After that, it was nothing but shapeless khaki trousers for us. No colour but National Defence Colour!

  “Whatever would Mr. Ogura say if he could see us now, Michiko?” I said.

  She applied a last dusting of powder to her nose. “I think he’d keel over, Satsuko, just like he did when the emperor made his speech.”

  We slid open the door to the cabaret. It was already filled with American officers from the army and navy, with girls perched on their knees, pouring their beers and lighting their cigarettes.

  As we walked out into the damp, smoky room, a thought struck me. “Michiko,” I asked. “How was it that you persuaded the boss to move us here in any case?”

  She gave a low laugh. For a moment, she had sounded just like one of the vulgar types we’d been working with until so very recently. It was a nasty laugh, of the kind that asks: isn’t the answer obvious?

  9

  ERO GURO NANSENSU

  (OSAMU MARUKI)

  Japan appeared, like an emerald set in glittering blue, as our troop ship sailed at last along the winding shore, the peaceful coastline. But the soldiers sensed something amiss as soon as we clambered down the gangplank to the damaged harbour: the shops were empty, the populace unwilling to meet our eyes. From the dock, I watched as three old warhorses, their ribs showing through wan hides, were led stumbling from the dark hold of the ship, unused to the bright light of day. A young man in a grubby vest approached the stableman immediately to haggle for their withered flesh.

  We were shunted toward Tokyo in a cramped train full of poisonous smells and sour faces. The city had clearly taken a smashing. Its ribs were showing too; its carcass was open to the sky. Tokyo Station swarmed with fellow returnees wrapped in thick greatcoats, lying in clumps, or drinking, red faced and angry in the squalid stalls around the plaza. The eyes avoided us here too, I noticed, and I longed to shed my woollen winter uniform, writhing now with lice. But the evening was bitterly cold, and so I buttoned my drab overcoat to the collar, pulled my fighting cap down, and, overcome with an almost exquisite weariness, began to trudge, disorientated by the burned-out streets and unfamiliar vistas, toward Asakusa, town of rainbow lanterns and sleepless sparrows: my spiritual home.

  My letters to my honourable mother had gone unanswered for several months. Finally, I had received a curt note from her fellow harridans at the National Defence Women’s Association, informing me that Madame had died of tuberculosis three weeks before, despite an almost complete excision of her lung. It seemed of little use, then, to return home now. With my mother gone, the main house would revert to the distant Osaka branch of her family, and I held out little hope of much assistance from them. They had long ago let me know how much they disapproved of my dissolute lifestyle, even after I had received my red call-up papers.

  “Across the sea, corpses soaking in water!” the radio had sung. “Across the mountains, corpses heaped upon the grass!”

  “Congratulations on being called to the front, honourable son,” my mother had wept. “Your family is so proud of you.”

  I wandered up the shabby remains of the Ginza. The stores were mostly shuttered and those that were not lay empty and bare. As I passed the ravaged edifice of the Matsuzakaya, an Occupation bus stencilled with the name of an American city roared up on the other side of the road. It expelled a group of boisterous soldiers, who raced over to a low cabaret that had been set up next door. Painted girls in cheap kimonos advanced upon them. They squealed and clutched at their arms, tugging them through the door of the club like kappa imps dragging wayfarers down into the marsh.

  I stopped suddenly and screwed up my eyes. One of them seemed very familiar. The short hair, the white oval face, dark eyes that I once knew intimately —

  Satsuko Takara. The girl who had once appeared to me the embodiment of a beautiful Asakusa Park sparrow. My brief affair with whom had so scandalized my mother. The girl whose lovely face had hovered in my mind during all those nights of malarial horror in New Guinea.

  Look at her now. In her prancing colours, hovering on the dimly lit street. How had she ever fallen so low? Never had she been a zubu, a bad girl, like the crop-haired nymphs who hung stockingless around the Asakusa theatres. She had been a delight, a sweetheart. No more, no less.

  I writhed with embarrassment as I recalled my mother’s coldness to her on the day of my leaving ceremony, when Ta
kara-san had visited our house, only to be turned away, weeping, at the side door. I had listened from upstairs to my mother scolding her for her impudence — intent upon packing my cases, too cowardly to descend.

  A sharp feeling of guilt flared inside me as I studied her from the darkness. Lice crawled beneath my cap, and I felt a hopeless sense of destitution. How would I appear to her now, I thought, even if I were to approach her? A frail ghost with hollow cheeks, returning so broken by war?

  I smiled grimly as I watched. At last she claimed her prey: a boyish American with spectacles and a thatch of wiry hair. As she dragged him down the steps, I turned and strode quickly northward. If a girl as proper as Satsuko Takara had fallen to such depths, I thought, then things must truly be bad.

  ~ ~ ~

  To comfort myself, I took a detour via Kanda, intending to then follow the river to Asakusa-bashi and walk up the Sumida from there. Most of the booksellers were gone, their volumes apparently incinerated in the conflagrations of March. But Ota Books was still standing, and I browsed inside in a forlorn attempt to get warm. To my surprise, I found a copy of Crime and Punishment on the shelf, the first I’d seen in years. I flipped open the frontispiece and saw the ex libris stamp of the Sorbonne University. A pit opened in my stomach. Another one of my dreams the war had put paid to.

  Mr. Ota shuffled out, armed with a feather duster. I greeted him hopefully. He stared at me as if I were a stranger. I asked if any of the old haunts or bars were still open — the Café d’Asakusa perhaps, the Dragon, or the Montmartre — but he told me that all but the Montmartre had been destroyed in the air raids. As he hobbled outside to bring in the boxes, I quickly slid the novel into my overcoat — the pocket flaps at least were conveniently large. I followed him outside.

  What a relief it was, when I finally turned down a ruined alley and saw a red lantern glowing in front of Mrs. Shimamura’s shop. I paused in the street and stared, a lump swelling in my throat. The light was like a glowing beacon, a forlorn torch to welcome me home. I pulled aside the curtain at the entrance, and there it was, almost unchanged since the old days. The big map of the Paris arrondissements was still up on the wall, and there, polishing glasses behind the counter, was Mrs. Shimamura herself, wearing her famous white dress; though, as I came closer, I saw with dismay that her old rolls of fat had shrunken now to wrinkled folds of skin.

  She didn’t know me either, at first. As I took my old stool up at the bar, I wondered if I could truly have appeared so altered.

  “Obasan,” I said. “Forgive my presumption. But might you extend a note of credit to a returning soldier — and to a lifelong, loyal patron?”

  She stared at me with a dim flicker of amused recognition in her eyes.

  “Regrettably, sensei,” she replied, “since the war ended, there have been so many hundreds of hungry and thirsty patrons, crawling about the city seeking notes. Perhaps sensei would better off talking to his friend Nakamura-san, whom he must surely recognize sitting at the end of the bar?”

  I turned and saw him, hunched over the counter with a drink and a sketchpad. It was him all right, though he seemed almost a skeleton now. Nakamura and I had been in the same French literature class at Keio; we had even once thought about producing a Sensationalist pamphlet together. But while my stories had withered on the vine, his drawings had won so much acclaim that he had been hired by the noted magazine, Manga, at the outbreak of the Pacific War. I remembered his cartoons well. They grew more and more barbarous as the war progressed. Allied soldiers being bayoneted to death by loyal children of the emperor; aircraft carriers being destroyed by whizzing Zero fighters; not to mention his celebrated masterpiece, The Annihilation of Britain and America . . .

  Naturally, I was overjoyed to see him sitting there, just as in the old days. As I slid over to him, he gave a sickly smile and quickly turned over his pad to hide whatever it was he was drawing. I asked him what there was to drink nowadays, and he told me that the only thing available was a rotten blend of distilled shochu dregs mixed with aviation fuel to give it a kick. I mulled this over for a few moments.

  “Well,” I remarked, philosophically. “The emperor himself has told us that we must endure the unendurable, after all.”

  I politely inquired whether Nakamura was still producing illustrations for Manga. He gave a ghastly grin, showing many broken teeth, and called to Mrs. Shimamura to pour us two glasses of the house spirit, in order to welcome me home. I thanked him politely and poured the drink into my mouth.

  For a moment, I thought my throat was going to explode. I somehow managed to swallow the poisonous stuff, and promptly felt as if my eyes were bleeding. I tugged at Nakamura’s sleeve to see what he was drawing. He tried to hide the pad, but I gripped hold of it until the paper tore.

  My, my. What an evolution. No foreign barbarians here: instead, a Japanese soldier (who bore a remarkable likeness to Nakamura himself) bowing down in thanks to a titanic American with a colossal pair of scissors, who was triumphantly snipping the man free of the chains that tied him to a pile of tanks and bombs. I laughed long and hard at this, and told Mrs. Shimamura that we’d better have two more glasses of her awful liquor to celebrate Nakamura-san’s new career. I banged my glass against his.

  “Well, Nakamura,” I said, “‘À l’oeuvre on reconnaît l’artisan.” I poured the horrid stuff into my throat, and instantly slid from the chair.

  ~ ~ ~

  Painful waves beat relentlessly against the quick of my brain. A sensation of helplessness — paralysis.

  Someone was pounding on the door. I was no longer in a stockade cell on a poisonous island, I realized, nor in the dark bowels of an oceangoing ship. I was somewhere I knew well, somewhere as intimately familiar as the womb. Slowly, it dawned on me, with exquisite relief. The room above Mrs. Shimamura’s shop, reserved for customers to sleep off their night’s excesses. The banging came again, and my panic rose as the door opened.

  Mrs. Shimamura poked her head through the door.

  “Time to go, sensei. I’ve laid out your breakfast.”

  The thought of the crowds swelling around Tokyo Station stabbed my heart with fear.

  “Obasan, perhaps I could ask you . . . ”

  “Don’t be a pain, sensei —”

  “Please, obasan —”

  Disgusted with myself, I broke into sobs. “For just a few days, obasan. Please. I beg you.”

  Mrs. Shimamura’s face crinkled as I knelt before her. She hesitated for a moment. I sensed victory.

  Kind and noble obasan. She would let me stay — for just a few days. I was expected to carry out several duties in the bar. I was not expected to sit around the place pickling myself in saké lees.

  I carried on kneeling in gratitude as she strode from the room, then sunk back into the soft blankets and closed my eyes.

  I thought of the crowds at the station, the waves of refugees casting about and crashing against each other. They were far away now. Here, I was safe, hidden upon my lifeboat, bobbing about on a quiet inland sea. The sky was flowing with the stars of the Milky Way.

  ~ ~ ~

  The artists who had survived the war were emerging now from the cracks, crawling like valiant cockroaches to the refuge of Mrs. Shimamura’s saloon. Every night, around the hour of the dog, the bar filled up with the various writers, journalists, and assorted poets I had known before the war, as well as the usual students and hangers-on.

  My greatest need now was for money. I was one of the few of them who had no private income of my own. I discussed the matter with Nakamura and Mrs. Shimamura one afternoon. What was the role of a writer in a world that had collapsed so entirely? How should he respond to such devastation? And how, I thought gloomily, was he ever to scratch a living? Every crevice had been swept already, it seemed, the dust rolled out into dough.

  The following morning in Kanda, I was browsing Mr. Ota’s booksh
op again, wondering if I dare steal a bound copy of Zola’s L’Assommoir. Two painters were working at the building next door, and I overheard the drifting words of their conversation. To my surprise, they were discussing the meals they had once enjoyed most at this time of year. Toasted mochi filled with chestnut jam! The crispness of the shell, the wonderfully sweet paste within . . . The other waxed lyrical about the pressed mackerel sushi he had eaten as a young man in Osaka — the vinegar tang of the silver-blue fish! The rice plump and sweet on the tongue! My mouth began to water. I recalled a strange pining that I’d had for persimmons as we had sailed on our long voyage back to Japan, a craving that had seemed, at times, almost overwhelmingly intense, the memory of the fragrant juice, the soft, mottled flesh transporting me back almost beyond childhood . . .

  I strolled over to the men and studied them as they worked. Their faces did not seem bitter or weathered, I thought, despite the cold. Rather, they were radiant, transported, transcendent even. They were dreamily happy, lost in the innocence of their memories. A thought struck me. I had a sudden inkling of what I might write.

  ~ ~ ~

  Nakamura and Mrs. Shimamura agreed straight away that the plan was a good one. We would sell fantasies.

  Mrs. Shimamura summarised things very cogently. She poured a glass of her clear spirit and pointed at it.

  “Look,” she said, “if you can’t afford saké, you have to settle for this.”

  I agreed, reaching for the glass, but she snatched it up and tipped it against her lips, swallowing with a grimace.

  “What I mean is, if you can’t have the real thing, you have to settle for its substitute. If you can’t find food, you’ll have to settle for stories about it. That’s what you’ll sell in your magazine. But you’re missing a trick, sensei — the most important fantasy of all.”

  “Please enlighten us, obasan.”

  “Sex.”

  I asked her what she meant.

  “Well. It used to be the only thing that was free, wasn’t it? But not any more. Think of those trollops in the back alleys. They hoard it up like stingy peasants do with rice, and only dole it out to those who can afford it.”