Fireflies

by Ben Byrne

I pictured the hammering on the screen door, the burly MPs storming in. Seizing him by the arms, dragging him from his wicker chair. The ballroom hung heavy with smoke and the furor of relentless gossip and confusion. I crept away behind the curtain and lay down on the carpet.

  When I stumbled over to Mrs. Ishino’s the next morning, the place was a wreck. The curtain was gone from the entranceway; chairs scattered about on the floor. Big tin signs were nailed to the wall, and warnings were scrawled in red paint over the front of the building: “Off-Limits to Allied Personnel. VD.”

  I rushed upstairs. My room had been trashed. Everything was gone. My notes, my cameras, even my typewriter. All that was left were a few ripped paperbacks and the zinc pail on the floor, overturned, saturating the tatami. This, then, was the reason for the untimely visit from the public health inspectors. For my extended interview with Wanderly and Ohara. Just one more thing to add to my conscience. With a prayer on my lips, I knelt down in the corner of the room and prised up the floorboard. My heart flooded with relief.

  The cigar box was still there. I picked it up and held it in my hands, my eyes closed, breathing in the cedary tobacco smell. Then I stuffed it into my jacket. Downstairs, I paused by the bar. I scribbled a hopeless note for Satsuko: the name of my ship and the time of its sailing. I took out most of the remaining yen notes from my wallet and left them in a useless stack on the splintered bar.

  ~ ~ ~

  Over the rail of the USS New Mexico, I gazed down as Japanese girls hugged their American boyfriends, as kisses, tears, and fervent promises were exchanged. The ship gave a great, mournful bellow as the massed turbines cranked up. The last of the lovers hugged each other and the men hastened up the gangway as it lifted. On the dock, the girls waved white handkerchiefs, calling out in plaintive, high-pitched chorus as the GIs jostled around me on deck, shouting out wild endearments, pledges of eternal love and return.

  The horn gave a deep bellow, and a quickening vibration pulsed through the deck as the chains drew up the anchor. Then, with a great shudder, the ship began to pull unmistakably away from the dock. Another high-pitched wail came from the assembly below; whistles from the men around me; shouts and applause. A sea of handkerchiefs fluttered up and down, and my eyes searched restlessly amongst them for Satsuko. Up and down, up and down the handkerchiefs went, every one a love story, every one a heartbreak.

  No part of me wanted to leave. And yet, here I was, on the deck of a vast, ocean-going ship, Japan drifting irrevocably away from me. A yawning gulf opening up, a chasm that grew wider, deeper, and more achingly lonely with every inch that we pulled out to sea.

  The island was finally lost beyond the carved sapphire horizon. The lonely screams of seabirds gusted around me in the sky.

  I went below deck and climbed onto my bunk. A young, rat-like man in uniform lay on the bed beneath mine, his leg in plaster cast. He was reading the funny pages of the Stars and Stripes, chuckling to himself.

  “Going home, huh?” he said, without looking up. I grunted forbearingly, but he carried on talking.

  “Old Nippon sure is a swell place. No place like home though. Say, where’s home for you, fella?”

  I wanted him to shut up. I desperately wanted to be left alone in my despair, as if the banality of his conversation might somehow impinge upon the purity of my bitterness.

  “New York,” I muttered.

  “New York, huh? You don’t say . . . ”

  He appeared to contemplate the feasibility of human beings inhabiting New York City, then, apparently satisfied, he began to talk again, his voice brimming with knowing, locker-room insinuation.

  “Say. How about those Jap girls, huh? Sure are cute, ain’t they?”

  I saw Satsuko in my mind’s eye. Her harrowing eyes.

  “Foxy little geisha girls . . . You ever meet one of them, huh? You ever have one of them geisha girls?”

  The look of distress, of fury.

  Take me.

  I buried my face in my blanket with an uncertain noise, my hands over my ears.

  ~ ~ ~

  Throughout those dog days of summer, I walked the New York streets like a hunted animal. It seemed almost overwhelming in its banality. Cabs went up and down Lexington Avenue. Steam rose from the manhole covers. Old women walked their poodles in Central Park and messenger boys sprinted between the office buildings. At five-thirty sharp, men in suits poured out from the skyscrapers into the bars by Grand Central Station, before hurrying off to their air-conditioned lives of domestic bliss.

  The city was like an impenetrable fortress. The world might lie in ruins, but it was business as usual in New York, heir to the postwar world, its citizens engrossed in their buying and selling, eating and drinking, their greatest victory this vast, blithe antipathy — an insurmountable wall against which I pounded my head. I stopped in the middle of the streets as the crowds rushed past, clutching onto the walls for support. The cars and the people went by like an endless zoetrope, and it was all moving so fast that I was terrified of stepping into the current, of being swept away entirely.

  I was standing outside the 42nd Street subway station when a chubby man asked me for a match to light his cigarette. As I held out my lighter, he made an amiable remark on that evening’s performance by the Brooklyn Dodgers. A sudden, liquid fury passed through me. Before I knew it, I was clinging onto his shirt, shaking him furiously.

  I saw myself suddenly from above — a madman, gripping onto another like some desperate succubus. I slowly forced myself to release him. He sprinted up Broadway, clinging onto his hat, glancing back at me in terror.

  I walked all across Manhattan that night. The next morning, at the boarding house, I settled up with Mrs. Dannunzio and told her I’d be leaving later on that week. Something had to change. Something had to give.

  ~ ~ ~

  At a photography studio in Murray Hill, I methodically worked up my Hiroshima prints. As I stood in the dim, red light, leaning over the enlarger and counting off the seconds, the trip came back to me in vivid bursts. The lonely train guard in the ruined station. Snowflakes, hovering in the air outside the police station. As the images swelled in darkening hues from the developing fluid, I stared once again into the eyes of the aged dance teacher; saw the faint, fragile smile of the railway man, who thought that the wind would come and carry him away like a feather. It occurred to me that they were all now, most likely, dead. As the prints hung dripping on the line, I felt a profound affinity, as if I, like them, were now just a ghost, a restless shadow on the fabric of the world.

  I packed sets of the prints into envelopes and over the course of the next few days delivered them personally, with a short typed note and full release, to the offices of TIME, Atlantic Monthly, LIFE, and Harper’s. Then I knew that I needed to rest. I went up to Vermont for a couple of weeks and rented a cabin in the White Mountains. I fished and swam in the nearby lake, chopped wood, took long walks in the forest. I retired early and lay in bed, listening to the wind in the pines and thinking of Satsuko.

  Gradually, I felt my strength begin to return. The great, perpetual roar that I had lived with for so long was finally starting to fade.

  Every other day, I hiked the five miles to the village to pick up groceries at the mom-and-pop store. They had the occasional magazine there, and one morning, I arrived to find that month’s edition of the New Yorker on the rack. The front showed a typical Manhattan summer scene: cheerful citizens playing games in the park. As I leaned down to pick it up from the stand, I noticed a strip of paper around the cover, printed with an editorial message.

  “Hiroshima,” it read, in underlined type. “This entire issue is devoted to the story of how an atomic bomb destroyed a city.”

  A strange, distant sensation coursed through me. I paid the old lady and I walked away up the street, reading. The whole magazine had been given over to a piece by a correspondent whose name I
didn’t recognize: John Hersey. A writer who’d just returned from Japan. It followed the stories of five survivors of the A-Bomb, from the moment of the blast until now, more than a year later, when the city had finally been opened up again. I sat outside my cabin that morning and read the magazine from cover to cover, over and over again.

  It painted a picture of fractured lives, of souls caught outside of time. It depicted citizens, shocked and confused, still struggling to comprehend the thing they had witnessed in those bright, searing seconds that fine August morning. I recognized much of the description: the points of reference, the landmarks and cardinal points. Then, toward the end of the article, I gave a great cry of vindication. To my fierce delight, the story began to talk of radiation disease, of “Disease X.” Hersey documented its victims, its symptoms, and its causes. And presented it all as medical fact. Not as propaganda. Not as a bargaining tool. Not as “horseshit.”

  The story went on until the very last page. There were no pictures. But after the words, they would come, I thought. My pictures.

  A tranquility descended upon me as I reread the article in the silence of my cabin. It was done now, I thought. It was over.

  That evening, I sat on the bank of the lake and looked up at the moon as it slowly rose above the treetops. The water lapped against the shore and a million stars stretched out against the sky. I thought about Satsuko with a terrible, throbbing ache in my heart. Where would she be tonight? What cramped back room, what urgent back alley? I broke down and shook with tears for a long time; one man, alone in a forest, beneath the starry sky.

  Finally, my sobs subsided, and all that was left was the freshness of the night around me. A cool breeze sprang up and the tops of the trees sighed as they waved back and forth in the moonlight. I stood up and brushed myself off, then walked back through the wood to my cabin. I took off my shirt and climbed into my narrow bunk. Within moments, thank God, I fell into a profound and utterly dreamless sleep.

  36

  ONE WONDERFUL DAY

  (OSAMU MARUKI)

  “Wrap!” Kano cried, as if pronouncing a wonderful blessing over the assembled cast and crew crowded below the edge of the soundstage. Michiko Nozaki stood for a second, her hand frozen in tableaux. Slowly, her face dissolved into her wonderful, trademark smile. She flung out her arms, and rushed down the steps toward Kano, kissing him on both cheeks in the French manner. Kinosuke, her leading man, strode over and spun her about in his arms. Hoots and catcalls came from the crew as she emerged from his embrace, blushing and breathless. Only then did she notice me and hurry over.

  “Sensei,” she said. “You’ve come to see us at last!”

  She pecked me chastely upon the forehead as Kinosuke strolled over. He slid his brawny arm around her waist and held up his other hand in the air.

  “Well,” he called, “I propose now that we all offer a heartfelt banzai —”

  Disconcerted noises came from the crew and he stopped himself with a chuckle.

  “Excuse me — perhaps I should instead say that we offer ‘three cheers’ — to our director, Kano. That we might express our respect and gratitude to him from the bottom of our hearts.”

  He turned solemnly and touched his hands to his forehead. An appreciative purr came from the rest of the crew as Kinosuke raised his fist in the air: “Hip, hip, hooray!”

  Kano smiled, his face half-hidden behind a pair of thick American sunglasses.

  “Thank you,” he said. “Though it is I who should really be expressing my thanks. To our stars —” He gestured at Kinosuke and Michiko, and everyone applauded enthusiastically. “— the artists —” He turned to the smocked designers, who held up their paint brushes and grinned. “— and to the crew.” He waved up at the lighting box, from which bright bulbs flashed in gratitude.

  “Thank you, all of you,” he said. “But there is one more ‘thank you’ I would like to add, one that has perhaps, regrettably so far gone unexpressed in the production of this picture. Without saying any more, I would like to dedicate this film to its true creator.”

  I felt an expectant tingle of pride and bowed my head as Kano raised his hands.

  “To Tokyo. To the city, and to its people.”

  My head jerked back up.

  “To a city that will, one day, emerge from the ashes again, as it has so many times in the past.”

  Heavy applause came from all sides.

  “I have expressed the idea before that a city cannot simply rebuild itself like some robotic automata. Its true spirit lies in the hearts and the habits of its people.”

  The crew nodded earnestly.

  “This is what we pay tribute to today. As long as the spirit of Tokyoites lives on — gruff and arrogant as it may be — so will their city survive. Thank you everyone for your hard work!”

  We stamped our feet and applauded. We flung our arms around each other. At that moment a deep and quickening sense of dignity came upon me, such as I had never felt before in my entire life. I embraced them all. My colleagues; my friends; my comrades.

  ~ ~ ~

  I sat at my usual spot at the counter of the Montmartre, drinking Scotch, tapping the stiff toe of my russet Oxford brogue against the stool. I wondered about the reviews that might appear in the cinema magazines the next week. Dreamy and melodramatic, they would say. Innacurate — naive.

  I shook my head. The critics, for once, did not concern me. I only hoped that I might have managed to capture something of the peculiar spirit of the times, the spirit of the burned-out ruins. Of the curious resilience of human hearts in the face of chaos and destruction; of our potential to rise again from tragedy, to cast off the burden of time as a butterfly shrugs off its chrysalis.

  We held the gala premier performance, at Kano’s insistence, in the ruins of an old theatre in Shinjuku that he had visited regularly as a child. The roof was still mostly open to the sky and battered chairs were lined up in the amphitheatre to face an improvised canvas screen. Michiko Nozaki sat down in the front row, whispering to a friend she had brought along. A matronly lady sat on one side of her, and on the other was a teenage boy, smartly dressed in long shorts and a white shirt. Her friend turned her head.

  What a strange and curious thing.

  Satsuko Takara wore a flowing cotton summer dress, her hair pinned and fastened with a simple comb. Would she recognize herself up there on the screen? I wondered. In the character who owed so much to my imagination of her?

  With a profound sense of humility and providence, I swore that I would go to her after the film had finished. That I would offer the hand of friendship again. That I would, if I were not too ashamed, ask for her forgiveness.

  The lights went out and the projector began to whir. A thick beam of smouldering light hit the screen, and the symbol of a torch flickered onto the canvas. The name of the film appeared in stuttering ideograms, followed by the names of Kano, and then of myself. With an excited murmur, the audience settled back in their seats.

  It was like nothing I had ever dreamed of. A new world came into being as Michiko Nozaki appeared on the swaying screen, and her bird-like voice emerged from the speakers. Everyone in the audience felt it too, and their breath seemed to emerge in a soft, collective sigh.

  Up above, the beautiful face turned this way and that, smiling and nodding, her skin translucent, her eyes glistening. With the blurry backdrop of the ruined city behind her, she began to run down a narrow alley between rows of low, tenement houses . . .

  The audience gazed at the screen. With spectacular longing in my heart, I closed my eyes, willing myself to cling tightly to that beautiful image forever.

  Wonderful faces, shining with light.

  37

  THE STAR FESTIVAL

  (SATSUKO TAKARA)

  Michiko skipped along a street, low wooden houses set to each side, dodging puddles in the path and throwing her
hands this way and that like a dancer. Blurry ruins were painted behind her, distant buildings and a smudgy sky. She stopped at the edge of the stage and put her hands on her hips. She flashed her beautiful smile at the cast and crew. With a flouncing curtsy, she skittered off to one side, where handsome Mr. Kinosuke stood holding a lacquer box of powdered mochi cakes. She pinched his nose, giggling, and promptly popped one into her mouth.

  Hiroshi stood on a crate, squinting through the viewfinder of the camera, supported by Mr. Mogami, the cinematographer, who was spinning him smoothly around to film the action. The film made a sound like a flittering clock as it whirred through the contraption. The director, Mr. Kano, stepped forward and raised his hand.

  “Cut! Cut!” he called.

  The rest of the assembled actors and stagehands laughed and clapped as Hiroshi opened his eyes. He blinked in the bright stage lights, a bashful smile growing on his face.

  ~ ~ ~

  I tried not to think of the excruciating shame that I felt as I came to, lying in the tunnel beneath the railway arch. My kimono was soaked, my crimson nails chipped. Hiroshi’s eyes were wide. I could hardly believe how grown up he looked. He wore a collar shirt and smart woollen trousers. I felt a stab in my heart. Coursing across my little brother’s face, were thick, swirling welts.

  Slowly, I got to my feet. We stood there in the tunnel for a long time, barely able to look at each other.

  Finally, he spoke.

  “Big sister,” he said. His voice was deep, now. “You’re alive.”

  A sob rose in my throat. “And you,” I whispered.

  He bowed his head, and placed his palms formally together.

  “Please forgive me,” he murmured.

  Tears filled my eyes. “Forgive you?”

  He knelt on the ground, touching his forehead to the concrete. “Please forgive me, sister. For leaving you alone that night.”

  I saw him, silhouetted by fire. I desperately shook my head. He finally sat back cross-legged on the ground.