Fire Flowers (17 page)

I felt the tremble of iron rivets. Another train was passing along the track high above and sparks flew down from the rails. Passengers hung from the side, peering down the embankment. There were shouts. The other soldier clasped his friend by the neck, pulling him away. The GI resisted for a second. He stared down at me, then swung his boot again, straight into my belly. It lifted me from the ground, and I collapsed in agony, struggling to inhale. The train screeched off along the rails as the soldiers disappeared beneath the tracks, their shadows jerking up along the brick wall behind them.

My head was ringing. I couldn't get up. Tomoko stood a few yards away. She struggled to pull up her monpe as I crawled toward her.

“Tomoko? Tomoko-chan?”

Dread spread from my stomach to my fingertips. She clutched her arms around her body and began to shiver. I reached out to touch her but she jerked violently away with a whimper.

“Tomoko?” I said. “Tomoko-chan!”

The rain poured down around us, saturating our thin rags, as she shook against the iron column.

I clambered to my feet and forced myself to walk back toward the children. It was dark now, and the lights of the market were bright smears in the rain. The children stared at me as I approached. The zinc bucket was still there, perched unevenly on the ground. With a sudden fury, I kicked it as hard as I could with my bare foot.

It reverberated with a dull clang and the water slopped onto the ground.

There was a movement and the black shape of the eel slithered forward. It shivered up the slope and waved over the broken slabs and gravel until it reached the edge of the bomb crater, flooded with icy, dark water. It paused for a second at the edge, then slid in. The silhouette hovered at the surface, as if stunned. Then it slipped away, writhing, and disappeared down into the blackness.

P
hilopon. Drug of the hour. Glint in the eye, pulse in the vein. Saviour of the downtrodden. Sacrament of the lost. Bright white light to the woe-struck, the lice-ridden, the starry-eyed artists: the stupefied, raving philosopher-poets of the burned-out ruins.

Mrs. Shimamura's bar swirled for hours each evening now, the intellectuals variously mournful and long-faced or else frantic and electrified, circling sections of the newspapers spread out on the bar, their eyes shining with morphine and methyl.

We came together as drunks or tramps do—to hold each other up in swaying arms. The bar was a sanctuary to which we retreated to comfort ourselves with raw, amniotic liquor, to keep our minds numb and distracted with absurd toasts and peculiar drinking games. What conversation there was now was of rashes, blisters, coughs, ticks, rations, hunger, thirst, and cold. Mostly though, we just drank, night after night, holding our glasses aloft and crashing them together—
shoo shoo shoo!—
before tipping the fluid down our throats. Glass after glass, until the light compressed into pinpricks and we slumped facedown on the bar. The bright stars of Japan's literary firmament. We were nothing now but slurred aphorisms and pulmonary complaints.

Everything was so bleak and petrified in Tokyo that winter that it was no surprise that many of us began to supplement our meagre diet of rotgut and sweet potato with the small, crystalline Philopon pills we'd fed upon during the last days of the war: those little tablets of courage that had steeled our nerves against the battery of Australian and American guns, that had kept us feverish and alert through those long nights of grisly carnage. A glut of the drug flooded the city sometime in December: thousands upon thousands of green ink bottles appearing in pyramids at the black markets, passing from hand to chafed hand in the cramped, leaky bars. Before long it seemed as if the whole city was munching the pills like sardines, washing them down with tears and tiger's piss in an attempt to blunt the teeth that gnawed at our bellies; to propel our battered bodies through the freezing streets, the cluttered train compartments.

 

Prior to this, I had developed another, more sinister addiction. Those evenings when I had reached my alcoholic peak, as it were, my mind illuminated by stars, I would board a tram to the Ginza, alighting near the American PX and the Oasis cabaret. There I would take a place on the curb on the side of the avenue, beside the peddlers with their straw mats of figurines and fountain pens, and watch as the Americans crammed down the staircase of the brothel. Once in a while, I would be rewarded with a glimpse of Satsuko Takara, as she performed her shamming routine outside, pulling at sleeves and enticing officers to enter. Sometimes, I would spot her as she left, hours later, buttoning up her raincoat as she strode away into the dawn like a departing angel.

I tormented myself with the thought of her, down in that secret cellar, American hands sliding over her back and along her pale thighs. I recalled the brief hours we had spent on a straw-filled mattress in the Victory Hotel, the night before I was sent to war. A victory of sorts. My last. The Americans had polluted her now, just as they had polluted me. One night, I stood with a grubby girl at the back of a ruined building, my eyes brimming with tears as I handled her, urgently trying to imagine her Satsuko—

It was no use. They had taken my very manhood.

 

Philopon came not a moment too soon. A glimmer of life came back into my eyes, my spirits leavened. Lazarus clambered from his tomb. I still drank, of course, until I collapsed, but the periods of consciousness between now grew more animated and urgent, my actions more sprightly and vital.

Night after night, I sat on my mattress, attended by a flask of shochu and a vial of Philopon, and wrote, until the tiny room was littered with balled-up clumps of paper, the air clotted with ink fumes. I wrote stories inspired by the strange articles that filled that day's newspapers: the grandmother murdered by her grandson on his return from Manchukuo; the blind children found living in the sand dunes of Izu. My stories were macabre, catastrophic, stygian. They were also unreadable, I realized. Yet I thought, perhaps, they might represent a kind of literary self-immolation, a spiritual disembowelment that might somehow purify me, and set me free from the past.

One evening, I came upon a writer I was somewhat familiar with, tottering on his stool at the bar. He was breathing heavily, giving occasional tubercular rasps into his silk handkerchief. His conversation became increasingly feverish as the evening drew on, his pen scribbling faster as he yelled out choice epithets to us all. At last, he leaped up, seized the arms of his nearest companion and dragged him off into the night. After he had left, I found his notebook on the bar amidst the confusion of newspapers. As I flicked through it at random, I found a page of dislocated words, which together seemed to form a kind of occult, chemical sutra:

 

Morphine. Atromol. Narcopon.

Pantapon. Papinal. Panopin.

Atropin. Rivanol. Philopon.

 

Philopon. Could we have survived the winter without it? Philopon was the true hero of our age, our Eucharist. In the paralysis that followed surrender, it was the rod that kept our spines stiff, the glue that kept flesh adhered to our bones.

The special attack pilots, in those last, surreal days of war, had tied emblazoned bands around their foreheads, and, together with their brother officers, had sung the national anthem and offered
banzai
to the emperor. They toasted each other with ceremonial sake, just as samurai had once sprinkled it upon their swords on the eve of battle. Then, however, they had ingested Philopon, before climbing into their flying machines and roaring off into the suicide of the setting sun. What modern men they had been.

Philopon was the crystalline symbol of our new age. Who needed an emperor when we had MacArthur? Who needed sake when we had Philopon? From the emerald paddy we had been transported to the laboratory, from the bloody field of battle to the dissection tank. We had traded fireflies and lanterns for the flood lamp and the phosphorus shell, kabuki for cabaret, rice for amphetamine. Who needed tatami in the age of concrete? What use was steel in the age of plutonium? Goodbye, Nippon, goodbye! Farewell Amaterasu—hello America! And welcome, Japan, welcome: to the bright, white chemical age!

I
vaulted down from the train as a dozen other people, mainly women, trudged over to the station building. They eyed me with frank hostility as I approached. I was aware of how conspicuous I was in my uniform. The train gave a piercing whistle and lumbered away. I lingered, watching it disappear along the tracks. An acute, heavy silence descended.

The roof at one end of the narrow ticket hall had caved in. Riveted iron beams hung down from the brickwork and rubble was heaped high on the floor. The other end was bare but for a solid desk, at which sat a guard, his moustache bristly beneath his peaked cap. He gasped audibly when he saw me, springing to his feet and bobbing there for a second, as if unable to decide whether to salute me or not. I extracted my crumpled train ticket from my pocket. He shrank away as I tried to press it into his hand.

In broken Japanese, I asked him the way “to the city.” He tugged at his moustache for a second, then beckoned for me to follow him through a pair of splintered wooden doors. He pointed. A desolate plain stretched for several miles until a heavy ridge of rugged mountains. About halfway across, hazy outlines marked an isolated outcrop of buildings. Nothing else was standing but charred spindles of telegraph poles marking vanished avenues.

“Hiroshima desu,” the guard said, staring at me with watery eyes.

I heard a cry. A policeman, his nightstick dangling against his leg, hurried over from a corrugated hut, a rusted bicycle leaning against its side. I twisted my shoulder to make sure he could see my epaulettes of rank, and he halted and glowered for a moment, before finally twisting his hand against his forehead.

I pointed toward the buildings in the distance.

“Hiroshima?” I asked, quite aware of how ridiculous the question sounded.

He seemed torn between his misgivings and instinctive submission to my authority. Eventually, in painfully slow English, he asked: “Why you go Hiroshima?”

I took out a folded piece of paper upon which Burchett had scribbled an address.

“Hospital?” I asked.

He studied the paper, then conferred with the train guard. Finally, he raised his hand and wriggled his fingers in the general direction of the ruined buildings.

“Thank you, gentlemen.” I gave them a curt nod and slung my bag over my shoulder.

As I started to walk down the track, footsteps followed and I felt a tap on my shoulder. The policeman held his fingers to his lips with a cringing motion. I split another pack of Old Golds from the carton in my bag and tossed it to him. He bowed, then strode as imperiously as he could back to his shack.

I surveyed the blank plateau before me: a hardened, empty desert. The sky was swirling with heavy cloud that obscured the ridge of mountains in the distance, and flakes of snow were drifting down. I took a deep breath and started to walk, my footsteps crunching upon the earth.

Tokyo didn't come close
, I thought,
even at its worst
. There, at least, the remnants were identifiable—the broken frames of buildings, hewn chunks of masonry and cauterized brick. Here, any human vestige, any recognizable form had been ground into abstraction. The landscape was moulded from pulverized fragments as fine as sand, and thick, gravelly dust formed strange, surreal hummocks and formations, solidified now by the rain. It was a wasteland.

Every so often, a bicycle creaked toward me. The riders wore cloth masks over their mouths and turned their handlebars to steer around me in a wide arc as they passed.

I began to detect a vague tang in the air—a bitter, acrid smell I couldn't place. I followed the shadowy outline of what must have once been a streetcar track, the overhead lines swept clear away. Fifty yards away, in a solitary heap, lay the twisted metal frame of a destroyed trolley.

Up ahead was a high step to a stone bridge. A stream of pungent water trickled at the bottom of the channel. Corpses of fish and mangled bicycles cluttered the riverbed. I took out my camera, and started to take shots.

For a long stretch after the bridge, though, there was nothing to document. No broken-down houses, no graves, no signs of settlement whatsoever. Just a vast expanse of thick, reddish-brown dust, punctuated by clumps of bushy yellow grass and spiky, poisonous-looking shrubs. The light was hazy and grey, the sun a pale, far-off disk, and I had the feeling of walking on the surface of a distant planet. Time seemed somehow disjointed, as if I was floating through a dream landscape. There was no sound of birdsong or human activity; no trees or vegetable gardens. The place was poisoned, stricken, dolorous.

By the banks of another, much wider river, a shattered dome loomed, resembling the frame of an observatory. I recalled the umbrella roof of the central market building from my aerial photographs, and realized I was coming close to the hypocentre. Clumps of plaster still dangled from the curving struts of the dome, and plants were growing in the ruins—tendrils of dying morning glory that spiraled amidst the broken tiles; tangles of thorny herbs and small yellow broom-like flowers that clutched at the blackened brick. There were signs of life on the other side of the river now as well. A man led horses, pulling a cart laden with furniture while others went by on bicycles.

I picked my way out of the dome and walked over to the bank. Fifty feet to my left, I saw it. The big, white bridge that I'd proposed as a primary target. The cement structure was askew, as if it had been shoved from its supports. The stone itself seemed ancient. As I crossed the bridge, I was put in mind of mythical tales of rivers to the underworld. Fields of lost souls on the other side.