by Nigel Barley
* * *
Professor Tanakadate sketched the cross-section of a perfect volcano in the margins of his annual report. It was a mere doodle that indicated his mood and his distraction—a moodle perhaps. The final draft would be sent to the administrative office. He had no idea who read it, if indeed anyone did but, if he failed to submit a document, some sort of automatic and unstillable cry for food was generated within the hungry bureaucratic machine. Ignoring it was futile and this was no time to attract attention. His pencil gathered a large pool of magma at the side of ‘Visitor Numbers’ and disgorged it dramatically through the cone of the introductory section. Last year he had asked Pilchard to write the report and have it translated but the young man had regarded it as a work entirely of fiction and felt challenged to supply as implausible an account of the Museum and Gardens’ doings as possible. Under ‘Staff Changes’ he had noted that Mr Dagama had been devoured by a carnivorous plant, leaving behind only his hat and a shoe, and that one of the under-gardeners had been dismissed for public self-pollination. He had then illustrated ‘Current Research’ with a botanically impeccable image of the Gardens’ Amorphophallus titanum that had indeed produced its towering, carrion-reeking and steaming phallic flower during the year. But he had added and fluently detailed an entirely imaginary programme leading to the cultivation of vast acreages of beef-, pork- and chicken-flavoured varieties of the plant, with the hope of an as yet undeveloped, cheese-flavoured version, as a contribution to the city’s food supply. The Professor had unwisely signed it, unread, and now lived in fear of its being taken up by some higher authority. He sighed and picked up a letter from the desktop, hastily written on thin, translucent paper. It was from his wife in distant Nagasaki, full, he could tell, of deliberately distracting cheery tittle-tattle—equally a work of fiction. The baker just round the corner, had retired, though he was still young, and gone off to a hot-water spa. They had eaten lovely, fresh duck meat on Saturday while the sounds of construction at the Mitsubishi shipyard showed that our glorious Imperial Navy was ever-growing. In other words, food shortages were hitting them hard, there was no bread to be had, the bankrupt baker had been conscripted despite his crippled leg and the ducks had all died. Meanwhile, the shipyard was being bombed, now within range of American forces. The whole world floated and bobbed on a sea of lies. There was no mention of his little daughter, which was a relief. If there had been good news about her, he would really have worried.
There was a knock at the door. Young Captain Oishi entered, bowed.
‘Tanakadate-sensei.’ He accepted the offered chair.
The Professor shouted for tea, accepted a vestigial cigarette in exchange. ‘There is so little tobacco in these now that it seems like the waste of a match. What brings you to the Gardens, Captain?’ One of the undergardeners bustled in with overstewed, guava leaf tea, plonked it down, left. ‘I am afraid it comes with condensed milk and sugar. They save it specially for me, denying themselves, so I cannot complain.’
The Captain smiled. ‘Thank you, sensei. I have learned to take it this way. In answer to your question, I am here to film the American plane that crashed near the northern end of the Gardens and exhibit the charred corpses of the crew. I am relieved that no damage was done to your Orchid House, just a few native homes destroyed. The film will be shown in the cinemas We have to prove that the enemy aircraft are not invulnerable. In fact, of course, being pressurised, they fly faster and higher than our fighters and we have no modern anti-aircraft guns on the island, so we can only hope to catch one occasionally by sheer good fortune. They have devastated the offshore islands with firebombs and mined the channel. Already, supply ships have been lost and food will become scarcer. I am afraid we are now in the situation the British were in at the start of the war. It is much easier to attack than to defend and we cannot be everywhere at once.’
The Professor tapped the letter on his desk. ‘It seems to me that there is something very childish about warfare. It is like two little boys in boots, taking turns to kick each other on the shins. They are raiding Nagasaki. Thank God my family are in a little valley away from the Mitsubishi shipyards and so are safe.’ Oishi nodded.
The Professor sighed again. ‘It is a lovely spot amongst the ricefields, with a little river and a big meadow where the schoolgirls can do their spear practice after school.’
‘Spear practice?’
‘Yes, they practise killing American invaders.’
‘With spears?’
‘Well, sharpened bamboo poles really. The good thing is that my daughter learns something about bamboo and its habitats.’
The Captain shook his head wonderingly. ‘Is that what we have come to? I am sorry. Spears sound so primitive. The future surely lies in the air. Balloons are the future. Which reminds me, Professor. I wonder if I might use the gardens to launch some test flights of my balloons where no one can see. Teething troubles. I need a place of peace and privacy. For research purposes only.’
Professor Tanadatake did not really want to think about his little daughter, with her flying pigtails, facing a huge, heavily-armed, gum-chewing, American GI in single combat. Perhaps they would even be black GIs who—they were told—ate their rice raw and slept in rudimentary nests in trees. Surely such a confrontation could never really happen? Spear practice must be seen as a military form of exercise only. A poor man’s akido.
‘Of course. Ask Dr, Pilchard to help you. He has some experience of using weather balloons to study wind-pollination in the upper atmosphere. But why do your duties include film-making? Do you not plan to rejoin General Yamashita in the Philippines? I understood you were very close.’
The Captain blushed. He had not liked Yamashita and the world of green and khaki that he represented. ‘Indeed, the General is like a father to me, always slapping me and shouting at me for my own good.’ He laughed gratefully. ‘The new commander, General Itagaki, is a very different man. Since I am not attached to his staff, he does not know I exist. I sit in my office and the telephone never rings. So I do little jobs for the intelligence section and, in return, I see all the latest intelligence. But, between us, the news is not good. My General has withdrawn his forces to the north of the Philippines. He has no air cover, no fleet support against the invaders. The Americans call their progress a ‘meatgrinder advance’ since they are paying in blood for every inch of ground and no survivors are left after their passage. General Yamashita will soon have the honour to die for the nation. I must remain here and carry out his final orders.’ He sipped tea and grimaced at the mix of sour tannin and sugar. ‘And look after his baggage.’
‘His baggage?’
Oishi rolled his eyes, sighed and laid down the clumsy, barbarian cup with its gross, ugly handle. ‘The General always has so much heavy baggage. He collects things, you see.’
The Professor’s mind flashed to the gold he had taken from the Museum. ‘Yes. That I have seen.’
After the Captain had left, Professor Tanakadate turned to more immediate concerns. His shoes were worn through and he set one on the table top and examined it. Carefully, he drew around it in a last inch of pencil stub and cut out an insert in old lino—filched from the Cluny Road house and representing genteel parquet flooring—to patch the hole, slipped it on and tapped his foot experimentally. It would do. Then, heavy-hearted, he returned—slipshod and pernickety—to his report. It was too short, too undramatic but the ‘Research’ section could now be padded out. ‘Staff, under the direction of Dr Pilchard, participated successfully in a joint research project with the aim of transforming the Gardens into a state-of-the-art weather balloon-launching facility and valuable on-going links with eminent collectors in Dai-Nippon were established and consolidated.’
* * *
HK hoped to God no one would see him. He had been totally taken aback when Lily had said to him, quite casually, as she brushed her hair, ‘If you want to contact the Malayan Peoples’ Anti-Japanese Army I can fix it.’ First, he had not realise
d that he had been so open, that she knew so much. And then, it had been as if his mother had suddenly offered to turn his banana money into American War Bonds with full loss indemnity overnight. He had avoided all further mention of it until the news of VE Day. The Japanese newspapers shrugged off the German surrender as the removal of an encumbrance, an act that brought new focus and efficiency to the war but no one was fooled. The British, Americans, Australians, Dutch, French were coming back as landlords and would not be pleased at what their tenants had been up to with the fixtures and fittings. There were rumours of coups and assassinations in Tokyo and some said the Americans had repeated their success with Yamamoto and shot down a plane full of high-ranking commanders. Everywhere was prevarication and faction, a sense of people waiting for the proper moment to switch loyalties. And, for the first time, he had been reading things, books, the naked power of ideas. They were intoxicating, like someone used to well-watered wine who encounters neat brandy for the first time. Abstract nouns did not just name things out there in the world. They actually had the power to conjure them into existence, to carve reality into different joints of meat so that, for the first time, it trembled on the edge of intelligibility. It had started as a necessary preparation for dealing with the MPAJA. He would master their arguments, refute them, convert them. But as he worked his way through the pamphlets and magazines supplied by a discontented cousin in the Penang motor trade, he began to relish the pungent phrases, the deliberately inverted view of all he had previously known and felt himself grow. Revolution was a revelation. Loh Ching was not his intellectual superior after all, but merely a stupid victim of false consciousness. He was not even a free man, simply a running-dog of imperialist capitalists, a lackey. It was deeply comforting.
They had set out in the constant, needling rain that stitched the days together as soon as the morning rush started up. Lily was very smart today, modern hairstyle, black and white print dress with puff sleeves, ivory makeup and red lipstick. As a lover of American movies, HK had known to cunningly splash his numberplates, divorcee-fashion, with mud to conceal them but now the same rain that made his windscreen dirty washed them clean again. There were patrols everywhere and, on the bridges, they did not just look at the number plates, they jotted the numbers down in notebooks, shielding them under their sodden raincapes. Overhead, thunder grumbled melodramatically in a sky that swirled like a bad oyster and, once they were clear of the city and heading northwest, they met battle-stained heavy artillery pieces rolling southward with hair-triggered, frightened troops astride them and had to show HK’s special pass to get through. The wet road hissed suspicion under the worn tyres and in the grim military traffic, HK’s flashy American saloon stuck out like a tutu on an elephant. He wanted to give up but Lilly soothed.
‘It’s not far now, darling, but we shall have to walk from here. We daren’t take the car. Pull in behind that bamboo.’ She kicked off her elegant shoes into the well under the dashboard and was out of the door, even before he had put on the handbrake, barefoot, the mud squeezing up between her toes and laughing in the rain that tasted like stale sweat. HK had no choice but to follow, grabbing his hat and ditching jacket and tie onto the back seat and crackling clumsily through the scabby stems as Lily splashed, still giggling, up the track, like a child playing in a storm drain, oblivious to her wet hair. He panted after her, slipping and sliding on his smooth, leather soles and they went for some twenty minutes before she paused and grinned round at him, her soaked dress offering an X-ray of stylish underwear and he teetered up to her laughing and then realised the green bushes on either side were suddenly melting into men in olive uniforms with young, hard faces and that horrible, arrogant chink of loose metal that betokens armed force. Their eyes held a hunger that he thought, at first, might be lust inspired by Lily. Then he saw that it was just that. They were simply hungry. More men appeared behind and drove them, like silent sheepdogs, up the path, where finally an older man in civilian dress stepped out from the trees. Despite his shabby dress, he bore an unmistakable air of authority, like a senior consultant in a hospital who sloughs off the sad vanity of white coat, stethoscope and title to become plain ‘Mr’ in a worn tweed suit. He held out his arms to Lily. She ran to him and they kissed with disconcerting passion on the lips. HK froze and watched, feeling the stale, fishy breath of the man behind him on his neck, making his hair stand on end, half in expectation of a blow.
‘Lily!’ The man held her at arm’s length and looked at her an enchanted smile on his face. HK moved up to them anxiously and the man eyed him, with a curl of the lip, over Lily’s shoulder as HK held out his hand.
‘Introduce me, Lily. Is this your uncle? Your father? How do you do.’
She half-turned to look at him and laughed with a squeeze of bitterness in the sound.
‘Would I kiss my father like that? What are you thinking? That would be most improper.’ She blushed. ‘HK this is my husband.’
HK gulped. His mouth gaped. On this journey, he had been taken for a ride. But wait. He considered himself a modern man. After all, had he not seen the plays of Noel Coward, at the Victoria Theatre, in the company of Erica and with gin and tonics served at the interval? And the embarrassment, surely, was entirely for the husband in a situation like this. Yet there was the man smiling at him with every appearance of triumphant friendliness. He set his shoulders and smiled back.
‘How do you do?’ he repeated, suavely. ‘I should like to talk to you about workers’ control of factories.’
* * *
Above the clouds over the city of Kokura two silver B-29 aircraft circled peacefully. From 32,000 feet below they were silent and all but invisible in the thick cloud. Small groups of planes were usually for reconnaissance only and ignored by the ill-supplied Japanese air force to save fuel. Kokura did not know how lucky a city it was. Three days earlier, it had been designated an alternative target for the first atomic bomb, ‘Little Boy’, should Hiroshima be overcast. But it was August and Horoshima’s citizens were blessed with a bright and sunny day. At the central tram terminus, at the moment of detonation, a female employee was wrestling with the difficult electrical contacts as she turned the tram around. You were not supposed to do that on your own in case the power cables got snagged. As the entire city was vaporised about her, she emerged miraculously unscathed and assumed that this was something she had done through her disregard of tram regulations. When she learned that it was in fact a terrible secret weapon unleashed by the enemy, she felt nothing but the greatest possible relief. After all, she might have been disgraced and dismissed.
Now, three days later, the residents of Kokura were still not feeling particularly lucky. Part of the cloud cover was the result of a huge pall of smoke from a recent incendiary raid by American bombers that had raged through the ancient wooden houses and torn the heart out of their city. But it saved them from receiving ‘Fat Man’, a bomb of much improved design, on their heads, for the flight-commander, running short of fuel, diverted to nearby Nagasaki where his bombardier applied the aiming skills he had recently acquired over Singapore. It seemed, at first, that Nagasaki too was cloudy, preventing visual targeting of the bomb and various other packages of instruments, as well as a letter to a noted Japanese physicist who was urged to convince the authorities of the threat posed by the present weapon. This ensured that he would be promptly arrested and held incommunicado as a collaborator. A radar-guided attack was one alternative, or they might just ditch the weapon in the sea on the way back to their base on the Marianas Islands where it would make a fine splash. And then there came a sudden break in the cloud cover and the bomb was released, twirling, into a shaft of redemptive Old Testament sunlight. 43 seconds later, at a height of some 1500 feet, it exploded some two miles off target, above the Urakami Valley, destroying the cathedral and many of the Christians who lived around it, traditionally the people who acted as mediators between Japan and the dangerous outside. One man had survived the Hiroshima bomb and been evacuated
to the hospital in Nagasaki, arriving just in time to meet the second atomic bomb. Owing to the unusual topography of the city, he survived that too, making him either the luckiest or unluckiest man on the face of the planet, while a small, residential valley, running north east, was shielded by high hills except where the blast waves, five in number, ricocheted off the slopes in walls of volcanic heat that melted rock back to lava. Worst hit was a little settlement with a river running through it and a large meadow in which little girls had practised to receive their invaders with bamboo spears.
* * *
‘It’s time.’ The string vest commando cracked his knuckles and worked his jaw. Other dark forms lurked at the back of the shelter, shouldering up bags, eyes gleaming out of blackened faces. Electricity crackled in the air. ‘The Nips are being kicked out of Burma. Our lads’ll be back here any day. It’s time even if it means missing the life-drawing classes just as I was getting interested.’ Corporal Higgins knew he needed to be brave. He sat up straight and fought to keep the trembling out of his voice. He reached out and gripped Dong-ju’s hand.
‘We’ve talked about it. You know he’s Korean, not Japanese. He didn’t volunteer. They conscripted him by force. He just wants to go home like us.’ He was sweating too much. Dong-ju tried to smile but his face couldn’t quite manage it and the mouth fell apart. String vest splayed a huge, gnarled hand over the top of his head and applied just enough pressure to be threatening, as if it were a melon he might choose to crush at any moment. The trio looked like some sort of old-fashioned mind-reading act in a music hall.
