Inheritors

by Asako Serizawa

  Q. You were at Occupation Headquarters. Thwarted, you headed to the American Embassy. You were planning to assassinate General MacArthur. Are you trying to jeopardize our country? Answer me!

  If asked, the boy would’ve told them he was fifteen, the son of dissident parents, not especially determined himself, not during the war, which meant: he’d had friends; his grades were good but not outstanding; he’d had a crush on his pretty teacher with a face like a powdered confection. He would’ve said he was happy, despite his journalist father who drew the eyes of the Tokkō thought police, who regularly came to the house to slurp his mother’s tea before breaking the warm skulls of her porcelain cups. He would’ve said it was the most brutally simple time of his life, everything beyond the hour irrelevant, poised to be dashed by bombs or another emergency draft.

  Then, one March night five months before Surrender, everything changed. The sky filled with American B-29s, and the city was in flames, his neighborhood gone, his home indistinguishable from the sea of rubble spread in all directions, charred carcasses indistinguishable from other carbonized flotsam, the whole world black and blistered and peeling like the parts of his own face and body that had caught the gale, its whipping heat gouging his nose and decimating his lungs while chemical sparks, like a phalanx of bees, attacked his body. Worse had been the pain afterward, the hell of his body fighting the necrotic invasion, and the horrendous thirst that raked his throat, the dry clicks and clacks of his esophageal muscles driving him insane. He was found and treated by self-organized survivors, as much as treatment was possible in that context; by the time new skin patched his body, welding its contiguous parts, his world was dotted with white soldiers. And for the first time, remembering his father’s secret desire for defeat, the boy had felt a prickle of what he identified as vindication, a tentative hope.

  And now?

  He’d point at the ruins, the spill of tin shanties flapping with laundry, a cruddy efflorescence of life reclaiming itself. Look around, he’d say, voice inflated with visions of a true democracy not yet born. Over the last two years, those who’d chosen to survive had survived, despite the odds; now it was time to rise and live. The Americans had strode in with their big guns and white ideals, visionary but also deeply patronizing, selling liberty with one hand while suppressing rights and freedoms with the other. How long did they expect them, the devastated, to foot the bill for their lavish lifestyles and housing projects when millions were still homeless and starving? How long must they participate in the farce of a capitalist democracy that subordinates human lives for a healthy profit? Look, he’d say. The moment for revolution was beginning to blow over; history was beginning to write itself, smoothing over the cracks, building over the rubble, erasing all traces of the destruction, the raw amniotic space that had been rent at the cost of eighty million lives. Everywhere cranes were appearing, their metallic arms reaching for the sky, while pile hammers pounded the earth, laying the foundation for a country soon to be encouraged to forget this moment, this interregnum where everything lay in suspension, the known world sundered, the unformed future challenging everybody to reassess themselves, reimagine their lives, refracted by grief but not lost. Already, on the heels of the pacifist constitution ghostwritten by the Americans to safeguard the interests of the Western world, Japan was being urged to remilitarize; ex-soldiers were being mined for their combat experience in China and Korea. Soon the corporate beneficiaries of the war, still sucking on the bones of the dead, would feast on a new war, and Japan’s recovery would begin this way: supplying the American demand for combat vehicles and equipment that would further split and burn the countries across the Sea of Japan.

  Despite everything, his parents had believed in the possibility of a new future; he too had wanted to believe—to wrest from the destruction the seeds that might still make their lives count.

  WITNESS #6: FURUKAWA

  TELEPHONE CALL, TOKYO METROPOLITAN POLICE DEPARTMENT, APRIL 30, 1947, 10:00

  Like my men told you when they dropped off the kid at your station: he showed up at the press. I was out; when I got back, my pal Ōtsuka was…Well, you saw the body. Tied to a chair the way you pigs like to do it. A real blow to our Party. Ōtsuka had been complaining about the kid coming around, demanding information—where MacArthur went at what time, that sort of thing. Never thought he’d actually attempt anything. Then again, kid has it rough, with that face. He must hate our Liberators who slaughtered his family. So, listen, I did you a favor; I found the kid before he made his attempt. In return, it’d be nice if you released some of my comrades who were only exercising their democratic prerogative to protest. I’d come give this testimony in person, but I assume you won’t guarantee my safety or my rights as a free citizen to leave your pigsty once I step in, am I right?

  Also, I’d keep an eye on that kid’s friends. I wouldn’t be surprised if they put him up to this in the first place…

  Q. Who’s Furukawa to you? Who else is involved? Look at me!

  In his dream, he walks with her in a city that’s both this city and not. He’s older, she’s the same, strolling alongside him with a little torque dimpling her clomping gait. The city is quiet; purple clouds gather in the indigo evening, rain bruising a sky that never weeps. Always a storm is brewing, dusting the sediments that have fossilized the bones of all the cities that have come and gone, wrecked by their failure to imagine a viable future.

  This city, built on the ruins of others, is hatched with scars, and as they walk they wade their fingers through the green and yellow grass sprouting in the grafts.

  At the city limits, they come to a wall that has cycled through eons of demolition and rebuilding. Today it lies in destruction, marking an end—or is it a beginning?—they cannot decipher. As usual, they climb over the wall to rest beneath a tree, its leafless tines offering only the memories of past canopies that have sheltered others who, like them, have lain here, spine to root, and because it is his dream, she lets him trace the topography of her body, disfigured by the same chemical that had seared his face and annihilated his home, welting those parts of his world that had refused to burn. By now, she, like him, has adjusted to her new self, the alien grip and pull of her skin, which she feels most keenly on her lip, trembling the muscles that inevitably blind her, an icepick headache every three days. Once upon a time, she, like him, had taken her body for granted; now she’s resigned to a cohabitation in which she’s housebound, servile to a self that had always served her. He touches her drooping lips; her face clears. But even in his own dream he cannot undo what has been done; he can only hope to salvage his dream when he awakes.

  In another part of the city, twelve kilometers away, his hero who has used him is hunting his comrades, unable to distinguish peace from war, friend from foe, past from present, because for him, nothing has changed, one oppressor replaced by another, and there is no end to the storm of frustration blinding the eye of his fearful heart.

  WITNESS #7: THE RŌJIN

  TOKYO METROPOLITAN POLICE DEPARTMENT, MAY 3, 1947, 14:00

  Eh? Covered in boils, you say? There are hundreds of him in the Heavenly Curtain House of Dump, all mottled-faced Jean Valjeans, Product of a Defeated Japan. I myself may not be much to look at, with all but my two front teeth missing and half my nose restored with this piece here whittled from the finest spruce, but I’ve traveled to and fro, lived my share of tragic lives, seen my share of tragic sights, heard my share of tragic stories—from murder to love-suicide to the great fires dropped from the sky, forever transforming us into centipedes, wrapped in our foreigners’ castoffs. High in the sky, there is a chirruping bird…Know that song?

  It’s from forty or fifty years ago, before our country embarked on this stormy path that elevated war to page one, money matters to page two, relegating vital affairs such as gardening and women’s topics to page four. But you say you want to hear the true goings-on in the street
s today? For a small donation, I’ll tell you the latest about a lonely bean sprout biding his time while two students and a woman bicker about the fate of a locked-up boy fabled to have attempted the life of a foreign general come to lead the people with counterfeit coins.

  Big waves, small waves endlessly rolling on

  Ceaselessly echoing the sound of the sea

  From time to time, that tune drifts in through the holes in my brain, its refrain like a message from another world where I was surely a priest or a great judge or an important town crier…

  Q. I’ll ask you one more time. What were you doing on the afternoon of April 29, 1947?

  On April 29, he’d woken in the predawn, curled against a concrete step, spine pressed against the back door to a restaurant he didn’t recognize. He wasn’t hurt, just stiff, his shoulders and hips locked, his toes a clump of marbles. A pinprick pulse ticked above his eye; later, the pulse would root and bloom, beating like the heart of a bulimic flower disgorging its scarlet petals, but right now he was functional, better than functional, the day soft and pliable. Around the corner, a shutter lifted, the ruckus of metal and keys evicting the night. In five hours, he’d greet the roaming rōjin; in six, he’d visit the students; in seven, he’d meet Furukawa. But right now the day’s, the night’s, the week’s, the month’s logistics were not yet a concern. Across the street, someone muffled a giggle. At this hour, night still loitered in the streets, children were still pimping their sisters for the Occupation troops, used condoms still floated in the gullies, but the sun was leaking over the horizon, the panpan prostitutes were collecting their mixed infants, the patrolmen were rousing the drunks. It was early, and he’d been woken by a dream. It was his first proper dream in months. Kiyama, Sato, and Konomi with his parents at his old home, waiting to surprise him. He never got to see the surprise, but he’d felt their warmth, a white cocoon that continued to cocoon him now as he walked down the half-lit street toward the Sumida River moving like a serpent, its oily back spangled orange and yellow, the ghost of the fire that had once raged over these waters leaping to lick the bodies that had tumbled toward it. Usually, he beat at these sparks of memory that threatened to consume him, but today he let them flare, a conflagration of feelings.

  That March night, just before the air raid, he’d been restless, hunger and irritation goading him to leave his house after curfew to knock, like his peers, on his rich classmate’s door. Nobody had liked that classmate, an arrogant brat who’d sailed on the coattails of his military father, but since the air raids began the brat had surprised them, siphoning food from his parents’ pantry and doling it out to anyone desperate enough to break curfew and risk arrest. Word was the brat wept the whole time, jumping at every sound, but he never confirmed this, his first and only foray cut short by the air raid siren, its red wail, like a sinking foghorn’s, mourning the coming end. In many ways, he never left that moment, halfway between his classmate’s house and his own, his stomach frozen midplunge as he realized what was happening. Of course he’d run, thoughts of his parents blotting the map of the air raid shelters they’d taken pains to imprint in his brain. But he never made it home; the whistling sky opened faster than he could run, and his neighborhood erupted. And for the first time he witnessed the calculus of the universe express itself with an algebraic simplicity even he understood: in his selfishness, he’d disregarded his parents’ one rule—never leave after curfew—and they’d been taken from him.

  He’d never questioned this logic, not until this edge of daybreak, with the reddening sky, reminiscent of another time, stopping him in his tracks. Because he’d gone there, hadn’t he? Weeks later, when he finally had the strength, through the charred streets to his old school, his family’s emergency rendezvous point. The largest concrete structure in the area, the school was still standing, its battered face encircled by a necklace of rubble. Oddly, the gates were intact, the metal grates swung open, a lone woman absurdly directing a line of survivors through them.

  At first he didn’t recognize her, her frazzled hair standing on end. Then he did, the gentle tilt of her head giving her away. For a moment, he was riveted, the mirage of his pretty teacher springing his heart. When she looked up, her eyes leapt, her yapping hands turning apologetic as she detached herself from the gates to hurry toward him. But something was wrong; there was a shadow on her face, even though there were no trees left, nothing to cast shade. She smiled, and her hair lifted, an unlikely flash of summer, just before he saw what it was: a split in her face, her left side as lovely as ever, her right denuded of eyebrow and eyelash, her skin, once the envy of every girl in class, wormy with welts. She was a few steps away when her mouth opened. What words, what news, would she impart? His world narrowed to the shape of her lips, the sound of his parents’ fate held there; his body jerked back. One step, two steps. Then he was running, his teacher’s confused shouts dissolving into a commotion of noise before they had the chance to cohere in his ears. But what had she said? He strained to hear the ghost of her words tunneling back through the static of time. Because she’d said something. Her urgent voice lifting not in pain, he realized now, but wonder, perhaps even joy, as his body retracted and his mind swiveled, away from her face, away from the school, away from the line of survivors emitting a putrescence he’d finally, finally, recognized as death.

  FOUR

  THE VISITOR

  He came around noon, this man, this soldier, who called himself Murayama. At first I thought he’d come, like so many in those months after the war, to beg for food, or inquire after the whereabouts of someone I may or may not have heard of, but this soldier, this Murayama, had come clutching a piece of paper, looking for our son, Yasushi.

  I did not not trust him, my eyes wandering from the scrap of paper he’d apparently followed here to the gaunt face lowered in a deferential manner rarely seen these days. Gripping his satchel, he spoke politely, and as flooded as I was with questions, I did not immediately ask them, his presence like a beaten dog’s, weary and shamefaced, his whole shrunken person so darkened by what I assumed was the tropical sun that he appeared like a photographic negative backlit against the bright street. Instead, I told him that Yasushi hadn’t returned from the war, and though Murayama’s eyes flashed at this news, he never once attempted to peer past the wooden gate I had opened just wider than a crack despite my husband’s parting caution each morning, and after a moment I found myself leading him into the front room, excusing myself to rummage for some tea leaves and a small bowl of millet noodles, which was more than I could offer. Whatever this man could tell me about our son I wanted to know—or so I told myself. Turning him away was unbearable.

  The paper was brown, shiny with wear, and I resisted looking at it as I poured the tea, embarrassingly weak, and urged the noodles, taken from my evening portion, toward him. In this room, softly lit by the midday sun sifting through the osmanthus tree rustling outside the sliding glass doors, he seemed less shrunken than coiled, his muscles humming with such nervous energy I began having second thoughts. Calculating the time I had before my husband’s return in the evening, I focused on how I should nudge him out. For even then I knew I would keep the visit to myself. In retrospect, I can only say that it was a guarding instinct at work, though I cannot say for whom.

  Murayama did not speak right away. Instead he gazed around the room, bare now except for the pale ornamental vase my husband had sent from Harbin during his tenure there. Like everything else, I did not expect the vase to stay, its delicate color soon to be given up for a sack of grain or a few stalks of vegetables, but for the moment it cheered the room, its quiet shape attracting the eye and settling the soul, though it did not seem to have this effect on Murayama. Seeing that he’d withdrawn into himself, I got up and slid the glass doors open.

  The air outside was still, the sky abuzz with cicadas clamoring as though to convince everyone it was summer, a hot one, to be appeased only by k
ites and watermelons, both of which had been conspicuously missing from the season for some time. In fact it was hard to believe it was already July, almost a year since surrender, and yet the stream of returning soldiers and refugees seemed only to be increasing, bringing new hopes and difficult tidings to those in perpetual waiting. Until now, I had been repeating to myself that even if Yasushi had survived, he may not want to return to this house he’d once found so intolerable as to run away. But now? I sat back down and glanced again at the creased paper placed at the edge of the low lacquered table.

  Murayama, for his part, seemed to have forgotten me, and again I urged the tea and noodles toward him. To my surprise, he met my gaze. This man, this soldier, knew Yasushi, and the knowledge, like a sudden clap, shifted the curtain of air between us, and for a moment I could feel my son’s presence, his shape, his face, almost visible, until Murayama moved, and the moment released itself.

  Picking up his chopsticks, Murayama bowed and began to eat, chewing the noodles, sipping the broth, his movements measured as though heeding the advice of someone who’d once told him to slow down, eat with care, and he confessed as much, explaining that his mother had enforced it. “The good thing is it helps with the hunger,” he said, adding that the last time he’d eaten properly was two days ago, when he discovered that his home, indeed most of Nagoya, had been razed by the firebombs.