You Think That's Bad

by Jim Shepard

  Early in the war they’d brought Hajime to see the rare birds and animals that had been added to the Ueno Zoo after the conquests in the south. Tsuburaya remembered the days being perpetually sunny. Hajime had also loved the rooftop pool of the Matsuzakaya department store, where shoppers were treated to mock battles between electrically controlled models of the Japanese and Allied fleets while the store’s customer service manager talked about the need for consumer restraint. Plaques bearing the phrase “Honor Home” were in the windows of every house that had a father or son off at the war, and Masano had joked to her friends that only her husband’s age had held him back, and that national mobilization was never a problem if all that was asked of men was that they cast off parents, wives, or children before going off to war.

  But by that point he was already working in the Special Arts Department at Toho. The ten major studios had been forced to consolidate into just three, all making mostly war films in order to promote national policy and strengthen the country’s resolve. The rooftop display had given him the idea for the miniatures photography for Toho’s first drama about the China war, Navy Bomber Squadron. And the climactic battle sequence had gone off so well that he’d then been given responsibility for the scene in which the Chinese primary school, once destroyed, turned out to have been a secret armaments depot. Those sequences had resulted in his first screen credit for visual effects, though the sight of the bombed Chinese school seemed to cripple Masano’s enjoyment at the premiere.

  Had they ever been closer, though? The ongoing national emergency had seemed to revive her sense of all that she still had to lose, and nearly every night her face found his in their bed once they had extinguished the light. Every family was urged to start the day at the same hour with radio calisthenics, and during the first six months after Pearl Harbor there were nothing but victories to report, so the radio made for good listening. Hajime found it hilarious to watch his parents huff and sweat. More and more disappeared from public life to exist only in private, the way before the war the censors had edited out of foreign films all instances of socialism or kissing.

  Accounts of each battle were concluded with a rendition of Ifukube’s Naval March. But then as the war turned, announcements of this or that territory’s strategic importance were reversed, and its loss apparently meant nothing, whereas its capture had been wildly celebrated the year before. Hajime spent even longer hours in school undergoing mandatory vocational and military training. And Masano was further saddened at the eradication of neighborhood birds by the heavy guns of an artillery training division billeted nearby.

  Tsuburaya told her one night that it was just like Japan to go to war with the nation upon whom she was most dependent for the raw materials essential to prosecuting that war. Modern warfare began in the mine and continued in the factory, feeding on coal and steel and oil, and ninety percent of the oil Japan consumed before the war was imported, nearly all of it from the United States. She seemed to find this point even more painful than he did.

  They were told that Leyte was the battle that would determine the fate of the nation. Once Leyte was lost, it turned out that Luzon was the key. After Luzon, Iwo Jima. After Iwo Jima, Okinawa. “Well, apparently the mountain moves,” Masano answered, a little bitterly, when he remarked to her about it. She was especially demoralized by a newspaper account of the destruction of Okinawa’s capital, and the printed photo of their narrow and hushed streets from all those years ago shelled into rubble.

  By then there were no pleasures. Food was miserable, lovemaking was impossible, there was no time even for reading, and they constantly feared that even at his age Hajime would be called up. Dinners were rice bran, fried in a pan, which looked like custard but made Hajime cry when he ate it. Movie production had come to a halt due to a lack of nitrate for film stock. Workers at Toho were serving as labor volunteers in the countryside, helping farmers and returning each night with a few sweet potatoes for their work.

  And then came the raids. Hajime demanded to be taken to a public exhibition of a B-29 in Hibiya Park, where the bomber had been reconstructed from the parts of various downed aircraft and was displayed alongside one of Japan’s latest interceptors. The fighter looked like a peanut beside a dinner plate. Such was the Americans’ nonchalance by that point that they dropped leaflets the day before detailing where and when they would strike. Aloft, these leaflets resembled a small, fleecy cloud, but as they fluttered down they dispersed over the city.

  The fire raid on March ninth centered on the area hit by the 1923 earthquake, the trauma that had separated him forever from his father. The one on the tenth extended the destruction. The next morning they returned to acres of ruin where their homes had been. Block after block was burned flat, with lonely telephone poles erect at odd angles like grave markers, leaving only ash and brick and the occasional low shell of a concrete building. Where the desolation wasn’t complete, the neighborhood associations were still holding air-defense drills and doing their best to resettle those bombed out of their homes.

  The only topic of conversation by then was food, or the failure of the rationing system. Everyone spent their days foraging. They were told to collect acorns for flour because they had the same nutritive value as rice. They ate weeds and boiled licorice greens and bracken ferns. And then they heard that as the result of an attack by a very small number of B-29’s, the city of Hiroshima had been considerably damaged. And that the Emperor would be addressing the nation by radio for the first time in history.

  When Tsuburaya mentioned by way of offering encouragement that they’d completed the first month of shooting, Masano said in response, “You take as much time as you need to. Whatever your lack of interest, our routine is going to continue as it has.”

  He was taken aback. She’d caught him struggling into his rain shell and preoccupied with the problem of the high-tension wires the monster was to destroy on his way into Tokyo. She was at their kitchen table working on a gourd that was supposed to afford the sparrows some protection from rats. The gourd would hang from a nail under the eave outside their front door.

  This wasn’t how things would always be, he assured her. Soon the shooting and even postproduction would be over.

  “I’ll continue to maintain your household and raise your child, whatever happens between us,” she told him.

  “What does that mean, ‘whatever happens between us’?” he asked. He was shaken, the notion of yet more separation like a fear of the dark.

  “Akira’s very proud of you,” she answered. “And his brother. Do you know what he said to me before he left for school? He said he understood why neither of you liked him.”

  “Do I need to stay home?” Tsuburaya asked her, and set down his work satchel. “Do we need to talk about this now?”

  “He’s nine years old and he sounded like me,” she said.

  He unbuckled his rain shell in contrition, pained at her attempt to keep her composure. “I’ll talk to him this evening,” he told her. “Hajime will talk to him as well.”

  “It’s one thing if it’s just myself,” she said. “But I can’t watch this happen to him, too.”

  “I’ll go see him now,” he said. He had his driver wait outside Akira’s school, but the boy’s classroom was empty when he finally found it. The instructor in an adjacent room said he thought the class might have gone off on a nature walk.

  When Tsuburaya was twenty-two, his father took the train to Tokyo for business and left his grandmother and Ichiro in charge of the store. The idea seemed to be that he might partner up with a larger distribution chain. But he might also have been trying to exert some influence on his son.

  Tsuburaya had by that point given up his dreams of aviation, and after serving in the Imperial Infantry had returned to the store, uncertain of his future. Before his call-up, a chance encounter had led to his training as a cameraman for Edamasa, the famous director, whom he’d worked for until his conscription notice had arrived. Back at home, he stocked
shelves and took inventory. His father claimed his son’s choices were his own, but his grandmother hectored him to give up dreaming about movies and airplanes and to give some thought to his family and especially his father and uncle, who shouldered the burden of the family business alone.

  But when he heard from Edamasa again, the pull was too strong, and when he was sent out to buy rice one morning, he left a note stating he wouldn’t return until he’d succeeded in the motion-picture business or died trying. When he telephoned from Tokyo a week later to let them know he was safe and settled into a place where they could reach him, Ichiro came to the phone but his father and grandmother did not. Ichiro said his mother still hadn’t recovered from the effrontery of the note.

  So he was surprised to receive his father’s invitation to lunch. They arranged it for the day of his father’s arrival, but that morning the truck had broken down on some location shooting for which Tsuburaya had volunteered in the hills and he found himself stranded out of town.

  The day his truck broke down and his father arrived at the capital was September 1, 1923, and a few minutes before noon his father was still expecting him for lunch when the Great Kanto Earthquake brought the Imperial Hotel’s chandelier down onto the table before him. He said he’d just lifted his water glass away from his place setting when it was as if a giant had stamped it flat. He stood up with his pant leg open at the knee like a haversack. Something in the shattered and telescoping table had lashed open his lower thigh.

  The moment before, he’d been peering over at the lunch room’s little indoor pond, where dull carp drowsed in the tepid water. Then there was a rumbling and the first shock, a vertical jolt. At the second jolt, the chandelier came down, and the floor began to pitch and rock so that the heavy parquet snapped and ricocheted like fireworks, and after he’d stood he was unable to run and got thrown onto his side. From there he saw the office concern across the street collapse into a dust cloud so intense that it was as if the hotel windows had been permanently chalked with yellow.

  Out on a side street, he managed to tie his tattered pant leg around his thigh, casting around for his son, and with every jolt the hotel and an adjacent bank flexed like buggy whips and cracks appeared along their walls, from which window casings and marble avalanched into the street. He said that with each shock it was as if the earth had been pulled out from under him. Where was Eiji? Where was his son? He ran, searching, as the concussions changed to undulations. And then it appeared to be over, though every few minutes the aftershocks were sufficient to knock to him to his knees.

  He found himself in a little park, panting. Sparrows under a stand of orange trees seemed somehow to have been grounded, hopping about, for all the freneticism of their wings achieving only a few feet of altitude before fluttering back into the dirt. He was weeping, he realized, in fear for his son. Should he go back? All avenues in that direction had been blocked by massive slides of debris.

  All of this he’d related to Ichiro the last time Tsuburaya saw him. Only the oval of his face had been spared the salve and the bandages. Tsuburaya had wondered if the doctors had applied the same cooling paste his father had used on his burns. He said hello to his father, who then directed him and his grandmother to wait outside the ward. His grandmother went off to berate the overworked medical teams from the Relief Bureau, but he held his ear to the open door.

  “Keep him away from me,” his father said, and Tsuburaya couldn’t fully register what he’d just heard. His father went on to tell his uncle that within a minute the city had been cut off from everything, the water and gas mains ruptured, the telegraph and telephone wires down. The trolley rails where he crossed them had sprung upward after snapping. He’d called for Eiji and in response heard cries in all directions. And then he noticed the rice-cracker shop already on fire, the smoke rising into the still, hot air. There seemed to be no one present, no one making an effort to put out the flames.

  Later Tsuburaya thought that he’d probably heard more of his father’s voice that day than he had for the previous five years. He was crying for his father’s pain and because of his banishment from the room. Every so often Ichiro asked if the pain was very bad and never received an answer. When his grandmother returned, she whispered something and tried to pull Tsuburaya away from the door, but he tore his elbow away with such ferocity that she never tried again. You should go back into that room, he told himself. Instead he stood where he was and listened.

  Everything had been destroyed and the gas mains shattered just as lunch fires were being lit in hibachis and stoves all over Tokyo, in hotels and lunch counters and apartments and factory work stations from Ota to Arakawa. All of those braziers scattered their coals onto tatami mats on crooked old streets and alleys just wide enough to provide sufficient drafts. His father saw firemen—their water mains now dry—trying to use nearby moats and canals. He said those not trying to pull the trapped from the rubble did their best to put out the fires, but there were too many of them, and almost no water. Then the wind picked up.

  Because there was no single point of origin neither was there a single advancing front of fire, and no one knew where to go or what was safe. Everyone who could headed to the river, and along its banks the mobs were increasingly herded toward the bridges, where they were crushed or tipped over the side until the bridges themselves caught fire. His father struggled toward anyone who resembled his son until he was knocked into the water by a handcart, and there he stayed alive by keeping submerged until oil from ruptured storage tanks ignited upstream, the fire cascading at him along the surface. He scrambled out just ahead of its arrival.

  Beside the Yasuda Gardens he pitched himself into a broad, bare lot that had been the site of the Army Clothing Depot, where uniforms were stored for shipment. Its size and location along the river promised more safety—across its twelve acres there was very little to burn—and thousands poured into it all through the afternoon, as everywhere else became more and more of a conflagration. They came singly and in groups, some pulling carts piled with outlandish goods, and found places for themselves. Patients from nearby hospitals were carried in on stretchers. Everyone was polite, settling down shoulder-to-shoulder to wait. They watched the fires surrounding them burn. The crush was so pronounced that he gave up the notion of hunting the crowd for his son.

  Someone behind him complained that he’d forgotten his chess set. The bitter taste of smoke in the air intensified. He wished he’d had some lunch.

  And then, across the river, starbursts of sparks and flame seemed to be climbing the columns of smoke high into the clouds. He asked the man beside him for the time, and the man told him it was a little after four. The wind was intensifying, and from the west they could hear the sound of a huge airplane flying low across the river. Was it a rescue mission? It was flying toward them, but in that direction the sky was enveloped in black. And then he saw it wasn’t the sky but a column so wide it seemed to cover the horizon, and that it was spinning and shot through with fire. Debris crossed its face and reappeared again. By then they could hear nothing else.

  It seemed to detonate everything on the other side of the river before it came across. It swept away the barges. It blew apart the School of Industry. It drew river water forty feet up into the funnel before it sheared off as steam. By the time it hit the Clothing Depot it sounded like gargantuan waterfalls crashing together.

  Two policemen agape on a refugee’s cart were blown away. Tsuburaya’s father was knocked down and blasted along the ground until his hand caught onto something. A teenaged girl on fire flew by over his head. Human beings all around him were sucked into the air like sparks. He shut his eyes against the wind and heat. A tree was wrenched from the ground, roots and all, before him, and he crawled into the loose earth and was able to breathe. Some ruptured water mains there had created a bog, and he tunneled into the mud.

  When he revived, the backs of his hands had been burned to the bone. Everyone was gone. The skin atop his head was gone
. His ears were gone. Something beside him he couldn’t recognize was still squirming.

  At their store that evening, two hundred and twenty kilometers away, Tsuburaya’s grandmother reported that the columns of smoke and cloud carried upward by the convection currents made everyone wonder if a new volcano had been born. An intense red glow spread across the southern horizon.

  His father said he remembered only fitful things afterward. Someone carried him somewhere eventually. An army cart in one of the burned-out areas stopped to pass out cupfuls of water to refugees. A riderless horse stood in the road too badly burned to move. Bodies looked like black rucksacks except for the occasional raised leg or hand. He remembered a shirt like his son’s under a cascade of lumber. A functioning well with a long queue beside it. He died soon after he mentioned the well, describing the water he so enjoyed from it.

  In the years following his death Tsuburaya talked to historians and scientists and survivors. The historians informed him that over four thousand acres of Tokyo had burned, ten times the acreage of the Great Fire of London’s, and that a hundred thousand people had perished, a hundred times the number consumed in the Americans’ San Francisco fire. The scientists informed him that the updraft that produced the columns his grandmother witnessed had caused a gigantic vacuum near the ground and the surrounding air had swept in to fill it before being drawn upwards itself, resulting in a furnace four thousand acres wide and an updraft that generated tornadoes as it pulled the fire up into it: fire tornadoes. And the survivors told him stories like the ones his father had related. Though of course once Masano and Tsuburaya had endured the fire raids at the end of the war, he no longer needed to turn to others for that sort of understanding. “Smoke Tsuburaya,” she’d said to herself one night as they’d hurried down the steps to a shelter. He’d had less trouble than others negotiating a safe route through the fires, since he knew from his father’s experience which way to go.