Fireflies

by Ben Byrne

  A lump formed in my throat. “I had always hoped . . . ”

  “There is a childlike simplicity to your work.”

  “You don’t say?”

  “Oh yes,” he murmured. “And now, as never before, we must return to a state of simplicity.”

  I was dizzy as Kano himself poured me another large drink. I felt absurdly pleased with myself. I had started out the evening as a pornographer and a literary flop, and now looked set to end it the pioneer of a new naïf school. The room began to glitter around me and I felt a great warmth toward everyone there.

  “I’d like you to write something for me,” Kano was saying, his figure blurring in and out of my vision. “Something about the men and the women of the Tokyo streets. You’re the expert, after all.”

  Mrs. Shimamura drew up a stool.

  “How much?” she demanded.

  “Mrs. Shimamura, please,” I protested, “Sensei, you must ignore her.”

  But Kano was smiling, and he casually named a sum that made my jaw drop. Mrs. Shimamura jotted figures on a piece of paper, crossing out numbers and totting them up as she murmured to herself.

  “That’s five months’ rent — overdue now, if you please — shochu, food, breakages . . . Well, sensei, I think that should do nicely to start with.”

  She stood up and put out her hand, Western-style. Kano shook it with a smile as the rest of his disciples gathered their things.

  “He’ll start on it first thing tomorrow, sensei, don’t worry,” promised Mrs. Shimamura. “I’ll make sure he does.”

  “Please do,” smiled Kano. “And thank you Maruki-sensei. I look forward to reading your work.”

  As I stood up, I felt the floor sway beneath me.

  He bowed formally. “Maruki-sensei. Please write it from the heart.”

  The heart, I thought — the heart, of course. I started to slip toward the floor, and felt Mrs. Shimamura’s hand underneath my armpit, more to soften my landing than to raise me up again. As I rested my cheek against the hard wood, I was vaguely aware of Kano and his party hovering just above me. His words came to me as if through water.

  “Just look. We’re all at the bottom now. Isn’t it glorious!”

  Metallic laughs echoed from all sides.

  “After all — it’s only after one collapses that one can learn to stand on one’s own two feet.”

  ~ ~ ~

  The next day, I took myself to Asakusa to watch Kano’s famous “kiss film,” in order to gain some understanding of his style. The damaged theatre was packed to the rafters, most of the seats having been removed, and I squirmed through an excited crowd to stand behind the sole remaining row of chairs at the front of the auditorium. Before me was the glossy head of a Japanese woman who sat next to a tall, handsome Western man. As the projector rolled, the screen lit up. The woman turned to whisper something into the foreigner’s ear.

  A bolt of shock.

  It was Satsuko Takara. Her hair cut to a bob, the light of the screen playing upon the curve of her cheek. The shape of her mouth as she smiled up at the man, the obsidian eyes with long lashes that threw into relief the glittering pupils. She turned back to the screen and rested her hand lightly upon the man’s well-clothed leg. A man, I realized with growing astonishment, that I also recognized: last seen on the Yurakucho tram, reading a newspaper, wearing a glossy pair of chestnut Oxford brogues.

  I felt a ridiculous sense of wounded pride, and, at the same time, a dismal, masochistic satisfaction. To be so justly punished for my hopeless vacillation, my weakness, my impotent conceit.

  She was gazing at the screen as the American put his big arm around her. After a while, she rested her beautiful head upon his shoulder.

  With a rueful smile, I pushed my way back through the crowd. The spring sunshine was bright as I walked slowly back to the Montmartre, my heart spinning with hopeless desires. When I got home, I marched straight upstairs. I locked the door and took out my notepad and pen.

  ~ ~ ~

  I wrote the script entirely from the heart, as Kano had asked me to do. I poured every atom of my being into its pages, scribbling away until long in the night.

  I infused the story with “childlike simplicity.” I captured the spirit of the times. From the crystalline vials of Philopon pills, to the dimpled tangerines at the market, I employed every image I had seen on my long voyages around the Yamanote Line that winter, every encounter I had witnessed on my solitary peregrinations through the freezing streets. The American, with his moulded camera case and shoes. The urchins outside the bathhouse. Satsuko Takara, standing poised outside her brothel, the night I returned home, broken from war.

  The script became a love story, as is so often the case. But it was one far removed from the frustration and obscenity that made up the dreary leitmotifs of ERO. Much of the action would take place overground, I decided. The city itself would play a starring role. As I wandered the streets of Tokyo that spring, I saw the first cherry blossom on the scorched trees, the flash of fresh-cut cedar among the houses, green shoots sprouting in the charred black soil. Could there be hope here still, I wondered, despite all the death and ruin?

  I cannot pretend that the script was not sentimental, even melodramatic at times. But Kano was overwhelmed when I showed it to him. It made him weep to read, he said. We were required to submit it to the American censors, and it emerged back a few weeks later, thick with blue pencil, shaved of some limbs, but still with its heart intact.

  The day after, we set out from the white warehouses of the Toho Studios with a young and excited crew to film the first scenes in the streets of the city. And it was there, in those burned-out ruins, that for the first time I saw our new star in the flesh, as she practised her lines outside a broken-down house. The actress who I knew straight away would come to define our age, who would capture the hearts of an entire generation of cinema-goers: the glorious, the exquisite, the unmistakable Michiko Nozaki.

  27

  FRATERNIZATION

  (HAL LYNCH)

  The flats beside the river park were strewn with rubble, and all that was standing were charred telegraph poles and tin shelters from which emanated wisps of smoke and the scent of charcoal. Faint outlines showed where houses had once stood. There was nothing inside now but strands of rusted iron, broken tiles, shards of crockery. Satsuko led the way through the labyrinth of soot.

  I’d asked her if she would take me to see her old neighbourhood. She had seemed terrified for a moment, as if a ghost had appeared before her. But then she looked up at me, searchingly, and finally she nodded, apparently resolved.

  We walked in silence through the char, negotiating mounds of earth and ditches filled with brambles and weeds. There was a quality to Satsuko that I couldn’t quite define. Behind the frank warmth she exuded as she sat beside me at the bar, as she poured my beer and we talked about the little things, there was an aura of profound tragedy, and yet, endurance. She was an enigma to me, I accepted, but not fatally inscrutable, as so many of my countrymen tediously asserted the Japanese to be. However short our common frontier, however deep our hinterlands, I felt a curious bond with the dark-eyed girl, as she sat in her woollen skirt and white blouse and dealt out playing cards between us on the counter. We had established a wonderful shelter of banality, a soothing, subtle sanctuary of the trivial and the everyday within which we both seemed tacitly content to hide. I flattered myself that we were more than just another man and woman cast together by the great currents of the world. That the flashing sensation I sometimes had when I was with her was correct: that I understood her, and — even more puzzling — that she understood me. But the nights of fire that lurked on the borders of my dreams lay between us, still, and I’d decided that I needed to see the site of her home — the place of her ruin — if I were to hope to fathom her mystery; if I wished to salvage something of myself.

 
We reached a canal, and walked halfway over a green, iron-riveted bridge. She leaned over and looked down at the concrete bed, streaming with shallow water. She pointed upstream.

  “Factory,” she said. “Chemical.”

  I nodded, imagining the explosion. She stood there, slim-waisted and willowy as she gazed out. Along the banks of the channel were lumberyards, wet, black ash soiling their cobblestones. Frail stacks of wood stood like piles of burnt matchsticks, waiting to be blown away. Further upstream, a set of lock gates were warped and splintered. She pointed, making a swimming motion with her arms.

  “Swim? You used to swim there?”

  She nodded. “Children. I. My brother.”

  I pictured boys and girls diving into the water, ducking and playing hide-and-seek as they swam around the timber barges. From the other side of the canal came the faint sound of children chanting in unison. We walked on past a schoolyard and finally came out onto a wider avenue. A little further down, by the entrance to a furrowed alleyway, she stopped. She clasped her arms over her chest, and I saw that she was scared and was trying to summon up courage. I attempted to take her hand, but she pulled it away and shook her head. She took a deep breath and strode forward.

  We walked down a row of incinerated buildings until we reached a square concrete cistern. She stopped and frowned.

  “This. I think —”

  She crossed an invisible threshold onto a patch of ground, littered with ash and broken glass. I hesitated at the boundary. Weeds had sprung up, as high as my thigh. She closed her eyes, held out her arms, and then gently spun about, like a little girl in a daydream. I watched as she stood there, the field of rubble stretching to the river beyond, and I imagined her that night, the air quivering, as the planes roared over in a great metallic typhoon.

  She turned to face me. She sprinkled her fingers in the air to mimic falling bombs.

  “My house,” she said. “Burn down.”

  I nodded. On the map, the whole of the Asakusa ward had been shaded the darkest of blacks. Inflammable Area — Grade 1.

  She was standing, her arms extended, palms down, as if measuring the space around her. She pointed into the air. “My mother —”

  I frowned. “Your mother’s room?”

  “So.”

  She turned and pointed again. “There, my brother —”

  “Your brother’s room?”

  “So.” She frowned and touched a finger to her nose. “My room also.”

  “What happened to your mother, Satsuko?”

  She held her hands up, waving her fingers around her head.

  “Fire.”

  I swallowed. “And your brother?”

  She looked down at the ground and slowly shook her head. It was then that I stepped over the threshold. I walked to her and took her hands in mine. When she looked up, her eyes were streaming with tears.

  “Satsuko —”

  What could I say? Please forgive me, Satsuko? I’m sorry, Satsuko, for burning down your house? For killing your mother and your brother? I rubbed my thumbs against her smooth palms, as if, like some saint of old, I could miraculously heal the scars.

  “Satsuko —”

  She looked up at me, sobbing. She thrust her face into my shoulder and I held her shaking body in my arms. Then she lifted up her face to mine, tears wet upon her cheeks. I pulled her forward and clasped her frail torso. As our cheeks pressed against each other, I imagined the two of us together like this, that night, silhouetted on the blackened plain, the chemical works burning like a livid green candle behind us, as rivulets of fire streamed across the sky.

  Finally, we drew apart. The wind gusted around us, ruffling the feathery fronds of the weeds. I gripped her hand in my own, and, together, we picked our way out of the rubble and walked back toward the avenue.

  Our shadows cast long in the afternoon sunshine as we strolled among the bustling crowds on our way to the train station. Satsuko drew closer. Western men and Japanese girls occasionally passed us, the men briefly glancing at me with expressions of awkward complicity. I put my arm around Satsuko’s waist. I imagined the two of us, walking together along Fifth Avenue, Christmas shopping in the December snow, at the Metropolitan Opera, drinking cocktails before a concert. The pompous looks of disdain from the fur-coated women; the envious eyes of the patrician men in their dinner suits. I was still smiling when a jeep pulled up beside us by the scaffolded gate of the Senso Temple. A press card was wedged behind the windshield.

  Eugene took off his aviator sunglasses as he clambered out the door. Japan had filled him out — there was a mottled fleshiness to his face, a hint of gut beneath his khaki shirt.

  “Hal,” he exclaimed, holding out his hand. “I didn’t know you were still here!”

  “Hello, Gene. Where else would I be?”

  He hesitated. “I figured you’d gone back to New York.”

  “Not yet.”

  He glanced at Satsuko and his eyebrows raised in lewd question. I pictured her for a moment in her cheap kimono, tugging him onto the dance floor of the Oasis. I felt a stab of panic that he might recognize her. I looked at Satsuko. Primrose. Her face betrayed nothing.

  “Gene, this is Satsuko.”

  He grinned and saluted.

  “Hello Satsuko.”

  Satsuko nodded demurely, and drew closer to me.

  “Working on something, Gene?” I asked, pointing at the Speed Graphic around his neck.

  He rolled his eyes. “The monks here,” he said, jerking his thumb toward the temple. “Apparently they keep prize chickens.”

  “Huh. Sounds like Dutch. Human interest?”

  “Can’t all be hotshots like you, I guess, Hal.”

  I studied his face. Acne had erupted across his cheeks and thin hairs were growing on his upper lip, as if he’d just now entered adolescence. Satsuko excused herself, and walked over to browse a stall. Eugene watched her appraisingly, then gave a low whistle. He turned back to me with a triumphant leer.

  “So you finally succumbed to yellow fever, Hal. After all your innoculations. Maybe you’re human after all.”

  I forced a smile. “It’s not like that, Gene.”

  “Oh no?” He squinted back at her. “What is she? An imperial princess?”

  “She’s just an ordinary girl.”

  He laughed. “She’s got her claws into you, Hal. All of them try sooner or later, trust me. They all want to see New York. She ask you to marry her yet?”

  “No.”

  “So what’s the deal, then Hal? Angel with a broken wing?”

  “Does it matter?”

  He shrugged. “I guess. I’m glad you’ve found yourself a piece at last. Do you good.”

  My fist tightened involuntarily. “She’s not a piece of anything, Eugene.”

  My house, she’d said, staring at me with tears in her eyes. Fire.

  His eyes widened. “Is this what they call penance, Hal? Atonement for your sins? Or is it just good old Catholic guilt?”

  I felt a sudden rage and moved forward.

  He jumped back, fear in his eyes. Then suddenly his face became wreathed in a smile. Satsuko had wandered back over. She put her arm in mine and I felt her fingers squeeze my own.

  “Well, it was good to see you again Hal,” Eugene said. “You two look swell together. Mind if I take a snap?”

  My rage slowly ebbed as he held up the camera. Satsuko combed back an invisible wisp of hair and smiled up at him. I waited for the flicker of the shutter behind the lens.

  “Smile!”

  ~ ~ ~

  When we got back home that night, we went straight upstairs. I shut the door and when I turned around, she was naked. It was cold in the room, and she stepped lightly over to me, putting her arms around my neck. I rested my chin on her head for a moment, rubbing the ridges of her spi
ne beneath my fingertips. She looked up at me, and I kissed her gently, feeling the soft warmth of her lips on mine, her small tongue darting timidly into my mouth. I quickly undressed, and she led me over to the futon and I blew out the light and pulled the covers over us.

  Moonlight was falling into the room as we lay there, very close, holding each other tenderly. Haltingly, she moved around until she was lying on top of me and pressed against my ribcage. I felt her hand move, and then her chin tilted upward and she gave a small gasp. Her pale belly was trembling in the darkness, black tresses of hair falling down over dark-tipped breasts. She placed both of her hands on my chest and, with a deep sigh, pushed down. Slowly, she arched her back, and I could see the indentations of her ribs rippling like shadows beneath her breasts. Her eyes closed and her cheeks flushed and finally, with a moan, she twisted her hips and gasped. Her breath came out slowly, in shivers. She gazed at me, and I heard her whisper my name; in the darkness, I could see her black eyes glistening with blurry stars; the smeared reflections of faraway fires.

  28

  AN ONLY ONE

  (SATSUKO TAKARA)

  America.

  I couldn’t remember ever having even seen a map of the United States before. But Mrs. Ishino had an old atlas of the world on her shelf, and I sat with it now at the back of the bar, spelling out the unfamiliar names of the cities and rivers and prefectures, trying to commit them to memory.

  New York, where Hal-san had studied, was famous, of course, and so was Chicago, with its skyscrapers and gangsters and jazz cabarets. But what about Nebraska? Utah? Albuquerque? Half of the names were unpronounceable, even if I had been able to speak English fluently. I closed the atlas in frustration. The thought of America was becoming an obsession. I was worried that I would bore Hal silly by asking him about it. I picked up the wrinkled magazine that someone had left on the bar earlier that week. There was a long feature with a set of colour photographs of California inside. While New York and Chicago might have been exciting places to visit, I’d decided it was California that was the place for me.