by Ben Byrne
The dough of the bun was sticky in my fingers. I urged myself to go over and give it to her. Here it was, I thought. The magical token that might somehow break the awful spell upon her, that might give her back the ability to speak again . . .
From nowhere, an image came into my mind. Bodies writhing behind the gate of the Imperial Plaza; my hand wet and sticky in my pants.
Aiko stood beside me, her eyes wide.
“Look what you’ve found, Hiroshi,” she cried. “Will you give it to Tomoko?”
Tomoko glanced up as she heard her name spoken. The welts on my cheeks throbbed. I gave a short laugh.
“Tomoko?” I said. “Why should I?”
“But you always save bean jam for Tomoko,” insisted Aiko.
Tomoko stared at me. I felt like I was standing on the edge of a cliff, and there was an impossible drop between us. I laughed again, the sound shrill in my ears. Without knowing why, I stuffed the bun into my mouth and took a big, wolfish bite, chewing with my mouth open like a peasant as Aiko watched me in fascinated horror.
The dough was so dry that it made me gag. I almost choked, and spat out what was left. Aiko stared at the remains, as if she was about to cry. Tomoko turned and bent over, her arms by her side. My eyes filled with sudden tears. There was a shout. Koji appeared from the alleyway and held up his little fists in triumph.
“Come and look at what I’ve found,” he hollered. “I’ve found a real feast!”
I paused for a second, then rushed after him down the alley. There was a gap beneath a wooden fence and we climbed through into the yard of what must have once been a teahouse. Crates of rubbish and empty bottles lay on the ground and a stench came from an old latrine shed.
“Look!” Koji crowed. He pointed at the empty bottles and crates. There were piles of obvious morsels between them: apple cores, fish bones and mouldering pumpkins. The children scrambled toward them and I was just about to follow when suddenly I saw something from the corner of my eye.
“Stop!” I shouted. “Stop right now.”
As my eyes adjusted, I saw the sleek corpse of a rat, twitching between the crates. Another appeared, then another, both dead, unmoving — their mouths open, their wiry tails coiled, tiny sharp teeth bared in pain. I poked one with my foot but it didn’t move. I tipped it over.
Its puffy flesh was writhing with maggots. I gagged.
“Get away!” I hollered. Don’t touch anything.”
Koji’s face fell and his frail chest heaved up and down.
“Get away now!”
The children stood there, as if unable to believe that we would be leaving all of this food behind.
“Now!” I shouted. One by one, they slid back under the fence. As we gathered in the darkness of the alley a terrible tiredness came over me. It would be best just to go home, I thought. It really had been the most ominous night.
“Right,” I muttered. “Back to camp. No dawdling.”
The children whinged in frustration.
“Be quiet!” I yelled. “I can’t stand it!”
Icicles hung from the eaves of the tenements as we crept through the back streets like a clan of goblins. We had just reached the wasteground at the back of Ueno station when I heard a commotion behind me. I spun around, my fists raised in fury.
My heart stopped.
Tomoko lay on the ground as the other children stood above her and tried to pull her up. She shivered uncontrollably, as if she was having a fit. Aiko started to scream as I rushed over and knelt down in the earth beside Tomoko. Her hand was gripping onto something tightly and I tried to prise open her stiff fingers. She started to choke.
I thrust my fingers into her mouth and tried to wrench out whatever it was she had eaten. But she writhed violently from side to side, vomit seeping from her mouth. She suddenly retched and half-eaten fragments of fruit emerged. There, in the moonlight, were the black teardrops of apple pips on her glistening chin.
She gave an awful bark and her back arched and her limbs thrust out. She stared straight up at me and gripped onto my hand. Her eyes were filled with tears. She seemed to shake her head, and then started to gasp. She froze, and then her whole body rose up, as if a terrible pain were passing along her spine. She shuddered and sank back down again. She stared at me as a fine, white froth leaked from her lips.
Her fingers slowly released their grip on my own. She slumped to the ground. A strange gargling sound emerged from deep within her body, and I fell backward.
Her features seemed to soften. She was gazing up at an uncertain point high above, as if toward some distant star, far away in the sky.
20
SILENT NIGHT
(HAL LYNCH)
The festive season was upon us. In celebration, SCAP hoisted two Christmas trees outside headquarters with a ten-foot banner across the façade: “Merry Christmas!”
After I got my marching orders, part of me considered leaving Japan. I’d go back to New York, I thought, get on the GI Bill and return to Columbia. Join one of the big agencies or magazines or dailies and make a living snapping mobsters and sports stars. Or I’d move to some honest-to-God small town, a Knoxville or a Jacksonville, take a job at the local paper and cover the high school football games, the petty brawls and larcenies that came to the county court each week. I’d arrive at the office bright and cheery in my gleaming new Cadillac every morning, settle down with a Southern girl and raise a litter of my own . . .
Then I thought of Christmas dinner with my mother and my aunts in the depths of a New England winter — the empty plate laid for my father, his sullen portrait glaring down from the wall. The snow falling silently outside, as if it were passing over the very edge of the earth.
So I decided to stay in Tokyo, to get drunk, and to see what the new year would bring. The men that still haunted the Continental were subdued now, almost meditative, resigned to another Christmas away from home. Most of the boys who’d seen action were already back home, their feet up in front of their well-deserved hearths in Lexington and Harrisburg and Worcester and all the other countless villes and burghs that make up the vertebrae of our nation. Those left behind walked the halls in their socks, wrote letters, played rummy and whist, busying themselves with innumerable small tasks to while away the time.
On Christmas Eve, SCAP organized a party. There was to be a dinner, a movie show, and then a performance by “native musicians.” I pictured the overheated hall, the red-faced officers in their paper party hats attacking their tinned turkey and eggnog. Douglas MacArthur standing up to make some flowery speech as the officers slumped over their trifles. It was all too god-awful to contemplate, and so, early in the evening, I wrapped up warm and headed out into the streets, alone.
~ ~ ~
It was bitterly cold, and everyone had their hats pulled down over their foreheads, mufflers pulled up to their eyeballs. I hitched a ride to Shinjuku on an infantry truck, but the driver got lost and took an unaccountable detour and we passed through the abandoned districts, the shantytowns of the old city. The water that flooded the bomb craters had turned to ice, and old pieces of metal and timber were frozen within, sticking out like the limbs of witches. Between the craters, clumps of people huddled around miniature braziers, burning paper, kindling, pieces of old furniture — anything that could hold a flame. Their hands cast flickering shadows over orange faces as they stared into the fires. They didn’t look up as we passed.
The Infantry finally let me off outside the brightly lit, newly covered market by Shinjuku Station, where groups of fresh, excited young GIs were swapping their cigarette ration for beer and whisky. I did the same and took a couple of nips right there to warm myself up. Then I wandered the streets with no particular goal in mind. Tacked to a newly cut telegraph pole was a handbill advertising a concert. Handel’s Messiah. This intrigued me, so I asked a man for directions to the theatre. As I str
ode up the street, a couple of kids ran past me, frosted white from head to toe, as if they’d been rolled in sugar. I wondered whether this might be some strange Japanese seasonal custom, but then the rumble of a truck came from around the corner with GIs hanging from both sides, pumping out a great, whirling mass of white powder like a blizzard of fine snow — DDT. Folks were hurrying along after the truck to get disinfected as the powder drifted down and settled in restless shoals on the frozen ground.
I finally found the old theatre. Elderly couples in Western dress were walking inside as I paid my entrance fee to a beaming young woman. The roof of the amphitheatre was mostly gone, the building open to the sky. From a slat seat above the stalls I looked up to see a silver needlework of stars. Down below, the orchestra and choir sat on metal chairs, their breath emerging in glistening clouds. A couple of GIs were scattered solitary in the aisles, huddled up, clutching their arms for warmth. Everyone was shivering, so I had the bright idea of passing the whisky around. I tapped the shoulder of the man beneath me, who glanced at his wife, and then took the bottle with a murmur of surprise and gratitude. After he took a sip, I gestured for him to pass it on. It went steadily around members of the audience, who directed glances of appreciation in my direction, before it finally returned to me with barely a sip remaining.
Down below, the conductor tapped his stand and counted two silent notes in the air with his baton. Then the voices began to fill the frozen night and there was an exhalation from the audience. We all sank back into our seats, watching and listening as the exquisite voices of the choir billowed up into the sky in clouds of tiny diamonds.
I pictured the notes floating up, rising high above the ruined city, above the men and women who lay shivering in their shacks and hovels far below, huddled together around their flickering fires, silently staring into the flames and wondering what the future would bring. The voices flowed out across the night, and I thought about the folks back home in America, the Christmas trees lit up and the children scampering about in the snow as their mothers stood in the doorways, calling them in for dinner. I saw men and women all across the world, reunited after all these long years of war, mothers hugging sons, girls embracing sweethearts, fathers with tears in their eyes as they welcomed their children home, home from the war, back home to where they belonged, at last, for war was over — and they were alive.
I saw stricken refugees trudging across the plains of Europe, frozen and weary as they settled down by their campfires, snowflakes whirling around them, holding each other’s hands as they haltingly began to sing. I saw solemn glasses being raised to lost fathers and brothers and sons — to the ones who had not returned — and I heard prayers of requiem and the sob of quiet mourning float up into the sky, mingling with the precious, holy notes of the chorus. I heard the great, melancholy music float out across the world, over the shattered cities and the bombed-out ruins, the fields of carnage and the tangled remains of the living and the dead, the terrible music that floated through the darkness that shrouded our silent, injured world that Christmas night, as far below, its men and women all sat huddled together in front of their fires, staring into the flames, and wondering what the future would bring.
~ ~ ~
When the concert ended, I applauded the orchestra for a long time, my hands numb within my gloves. I climbed down the steps to congratulate the conductor, then presented another bottle of whisky to the members of the orchestra, who smiled and bobbed their heads in thanks. I bowed back, and we all laughed and took sips, trembling with cold. The rest of the audience quietly departed.
There were few people on the streets as I headed for the station, and those who were out looked grim and unhappy. I offered the bottle to people at random, but most veered away, and I realized that I was drunk. Only one fellow took it — he unscrewed the cap, took a big swig, then grinned and gave me a thumbs up: Merii Kurisamasu!
I finally reached the station. The chemical truck had just passed and dashes of white powder were drifting about in the air. Time for bed, I thought.
Then, from nowhere, a group of elegant old ladies in colourful kimonos were tugging at my sleeve, their eyes twinkling, their faces as wrinkled as walnuts. They must have been freezing near to death, but their hair was styled to perfection, their kimono belts exquisitely tied, and they were bowing and smiling for all they were worth.
“Please, please,” they asked me in English, “can we sing with you?”
I couldn’t quite understand. Then one of them explained — they were Christians, she said, and this was the first Christmas they had been allowed to celebrate for several years. This made me pretty emotional and so I said yes, of course they could, in fact, we would all sing together, and we took each other’s arms. And then, this bold young man, and these delightful, wrinkled women whose country I’d helped raze to the ground, well, we all stood there together outside of a ruined train station as flakes of DDT floated down from the sky like snow, and then, God help me, we began to sing “Silent Night.”
PART THREE
Après Guerre
January 1946
21
YEAR OF THE DOG
(OSAMU MARUKI)
Mrs. Shimamura sang along to the radio as she washed the glasses. The inane and mournful chorus of “The Apple Song” was playing for the tenth time that day. She picked up the glasses one by one from the basin, twisting them this way and that so that drops of water flicked away from the rims, then swaddled them in the dishcloth and rubbed them vigorously, as if drying a child in a towel.
Her dimples had returned, I thought, as I watched her from my seat at the bar. I had my head in the pages of a story by the master, Jiro Tanizaki, my old idol, from his erotic, grotesque period. Once again, I revelled in his description of a lurid children’s game, a leg bruising blue beneath sharp slaps. Ever since the end of the war, I had felt a jolt of excitement whenever I read the story, an odd pleasure in the thought of a sudden, stinging palm striking my own numb flesh.
A cold draft gusted in from the doorway. I gulped back my drink and shuddered, feeling a kind of sordid torpidity settle upon me. I studied the cover of the book. Tanizaki would still be writing, I thought, he would still be slogging away. Wasn’t it at times of just such extremity and extenuation that art truly flourished? Tokyo eviscerated, a foreign army parading the streets — what would Tolstoy have made of it? Maupassant?
And yet here I sat, my lice-ridden overcoat draped over my shoulders, scribbling fantasies for the lost and the lonely. Hunched over my foul rotgut, tormented by constipation, a cough racking my lungs, my toes dissolving into the mouldy morass of my boots. Keening around a decent woman like Mrs. Shimamura like a camp dog, whining for scraps and sympathy. A wave of disgust washed over me, and my hand instinctively reached to my pocket for the tablets I kept there for such moments of despondency. I popped one into my mouth, and bit down on it.
I felt a sharp crack and a shooting pain screwed all the way up the front of my face. I urgently probed my mouth with my tongue. There was a gap next to my front incisor, the rotten gum spongy like dank vegetation. I tasted rotten, metallic blood and spat the split remains of my tooth and the dissolving Philopon pill into my cupped hand: a swirl of blood and saliva, the amphetamine fizzing into tiny bubbles, the decayed tooth a black pearl.
Whatever next? I thought. Would my eyeballs dim with rheum, the last of my hair fall out? The dull ache in my liver seemed to pulse and flare. I felt utterly destroyed.
“It’s all gone,” I muttered. “Everything’s gone.”
Mrs. Shimamura came over to me and put her tender, matronly arms around my neck. To my disgust, I began to sob into her bosom.
“There, there,” she said. “Stop being such a baby.”
She turned to the bar, and poured me a glass from her private supply. Then she folded her arms and became stern.
“Now, sensei. Don’t go getting yourself so ups
et about everything. You don’t have it so bad. You’re no worse off than a million others. So pull yourself together.”
She turned back to her sink of dishes and started crooning again. I shrugged meekly, and went off for a lie-down upstairs.
~ ~ ~
There were many things that I pined for in those days following the war. Things that I fleetingly craved with an urgency I had never known before in my life. Persimmons were one of these, as for some reason, later on, were tangerines. I had always been partial to persimmons, of course, but tangerines I had never had any particular feelings about one way or another, until, on my return to Japan, quite suddenly, their dimpled, waxy skin, their tart sweetness, and, more than anything, their bright orange colour began to exert a powerful hold on my imagination. I could spot them from a hundred yards off, amongst the covered stalls and booths of the black market. Beyond the cups and spoons cast from melted fuselages, the muddled heaps of cast-off army garments: the tangerine vendor, his vivid fruit wrapped in newspaper at the back of a handcart. Cruelly, their price shot up almost as soon as they became more widely available; they all came via the American Postal Exchange, descending to us from the gods, as it were. And so they were to remain, perpetually hoisted just beyond my reach.
What I longed for most of all, however, was a really decent pair of shoes. Since my repatriation from the green hell of the camp on New Guinea, I had worn my hobnailed army boots day and night, as did most of the other returnees from the battlefield. After countless miles of trudging, swelling and shrinking, the cowhide had welded to my feet, so much so that it was now an effort to remove them. But they repulsed me. They were a badge of shame, a decrepit symbol of servitude to a suicidal ideal. They were uncomfortable as well: the metal heel rims had worn away, the seams had long since split, and icy water leaked in around my toes whenever I stepped in one of the freezing puddles that lurked across the city. I cursed them every time my heel scraped through the worn sole, every time the sodden laces squeezed the fragile bones of my foot. I had heard that certain black market shops sold looted officer’s boots — high, elegant cavalry affairs cut from soft leather or European kid. But the thought of their buttery smoothness made me nauseous: they reeked of everything I despised. Perhaps, I thought, I could revert to wearing split-toe tabi and wooden clogs, as some of the other writers had done. But for all their homely charm, they seemed fundamentally feudal to me, and, after all, they were hard and uncomfortable, and so very cold in winter.
