Fire Flowers (2 page)

The countryside was clearly fraught with terrors I'd never even imagined in my cosy Tokyo bedroom. The supernatural creatures I knew only from kabuki plays I'd watched with my father became suddenly, terrifyingly conceivable as night fell: luminous families of fox spirits roaming abroad to bewitch me; kappa trolls lurking in the streams, intent upon dragging me down to their watery lair . . . All were now eerily palpable in the murmur of the wind across the fields, in every whimper and shriek of the night animals in the forest.

Before long, I began to grow faint, and finally, I began to hallucinate. My mother would run out from the trees at dusk, her arms outstretched, her hair on fire. Scarecrows would wave from the fields, and there would be my burly father, standing in his
happi
coat and chef's apron, grinning and beckoning to me. One night, I was crossing a high wooden bridge over a narrow river when I heard a faint voice calling my name.

Hiroshi! Hiroshi-kun!

I leaned over the rail. There, in the flowing stream, was my sister Satsuko. Crying and pleading with me to come back to her, just as she had on the night of the fire raid, when I had run away and left her to die in the oily water of the Yoshiwara canal.

I collapsed into a shed at the edge of an orchard as the moon shone down through the broken planks. I awoke suddenly in the night to see a broad-shouldered farmer looming over me, cursing as he lifted his staff. As he swung, I darted out between his legs. I sprang through the moonlight and hid amongst the crooked, haunted trees.

The sky was glowing pink and orange the next day as I found myself walking alongside a train track. Before long, a battered locomotive came creaking along the rails. I leaped up onto a coupling and gripped onto the side of the carriage as it trundled on through the countryside.

Before long, the fields gave way to a patchwork plain of ruins. A river grew wide beside us and I realised that I was being dragged inescapably back to Tokyo. The train finally shuddered to a halt at Ueno Station and I slid down and made my way into the cavern of the ticket hall. Throngs of men and women in torn and buttonless shirts lay on rush mats on the floor, their mouths slowly opening and closing like dying fish. Down the steps, in the subway, I curled up on a patch of damp by the wall of a cistern. Dead to the world, I fell asleep, alone amongst the clammy crowd that filled the tunnels and passageways like an army of hungry ghosts.

T
he long white chimneys of the Mark 7 guns still pointed up at the sky. Seamen and airmen thronged the decks of the
Missouri
, spilling over the rails, straining to see the action. I was perched on the ledge behind the rear three-gun turret, holding my Leica camera, legs dangling above the white caps of Third Fleet captains who flocked the deck below. Before them was a triangular space, set with a single table. Upon it lay fountain pens and the documents of surrender.

On the far side of the deck, on a platform behind a rail, the official photographers hunched over Arriflexes and squinted through Speed Graphics, holding up light meters to check exposure one last time. I wasn't one of them—yet—and was instead wedged between an Associated Press correspondent and a petty warrant officer from Alabama, who kept muttering, “Boy, oh boy,” like it was some kind of prayer.

A sudden swell of excitement rippled across the ship. Japanese launches were coming alongside the
Missouri
—desperately puny next to our gargantuan hull. Our admirals and generals swiftly stiffened into order below. The solitary table, with its two neatly arranged chairs, looked suddenly as simple and as menacing as a gallows.

I had arrived at Sagami Bay the week before, shortly after my discharge from the 3rd Reconnaissance Squadron. My fellow crewmen had left a booklet on my bunk, entitled
Going Back to Civilian Life,
which I assumed was ironical, alongside a pamphlet,
Sex, Hygiene & VD
, which I opened to read a terrifying warning:

“Japanese women have been taught to hate you. Sex is one of the oldest weapons in human history. The geisha girl knows how to wield it charmingly. She may entice you only to poison you. She may slit your throat. Stay away from the women of Japan, all of them.”

Scrawled below was a message from Lazard, our navigator, in clumsy handwriting:
That means you, Hal!!!

Half the nation was here already, it seemed, in the spirit form of Third Fleet battleships—the
South Dakota
, the
New Mexico
, the
West Virginia
, the
Boston
. They had an awesome look of brute magnitude as they lay anchored together upon the deep indigo water. I spent two days photographing destroyers and carriers as they steamed along the coast. An infinite number of cruisers and transports ferried between them, everyone out on deck, scrubbing and painting and polishing in preparation for our triumphant entry into Tokyo Bay. Beyond the fleet lay the green coastline of Japan, the ghostly shape of Mount Fuji sloping up in the distance, tiny white clouds balled beside it.

It was close enough to swim if you'd been so inclined. Through telescopes and binoculars we watched as old men and women immersed themselves in the water, children splashing in the surf, unhurried and apparently uninterested in the armada that lay before them, the greatest fleet ever assembled. At dusk, we watched the sun set over Japan, the mountain cast into silhouette, the ocean glittering with gold.

I'd seen it so many times, from above. Flying in at dawn at 30,000 feet, my palm automatic on the worn shutter crank of my K-22 camera. Japanese ships out at sea; a white line of surf marking the shore. The black highways and silver railways, the glistening web of canals and rivers; the dense formations of huddled houses, barracks and factories. I knew the whole country, I thought, from above. I'd processed it all inch by inch, shrunk it down to frozen impressions in the silver nitrate crystals of nine-by-nine film. Lugged the cylinders over to General LeMay's Quonset hut for the daily photo briefing at thirteen hundred hours. The big prints on the walls, labeled with arrows and statistics. Circled primary targets. Shaded inflammable zones. Photographs I'd taken of Japan over the past six months. Japanese cities. Before and after.

By the night of the Tokyo raid back in March, the city was as familiar to me as a framed map. We floated up above the Superforts, their fuselages tapering like artists' brushes, guide fires already blazing below. Then, the world became a maelstrom of noise—flurries of bombs screaming down, glimmering pinpricks of light erupting, merging and melding as the inferno took hold. An endless blast of heat, a deep glow as smoke and flames billowed skyward. The next day, when we flew back to photograph the damage, it was all just gutted buildings and burned out ruin. Scarred swathes of cauterized rubble, shimmering with heat waves.

My last photo run: to a city by the coast, our mission, to map out a bombing approach. Down below lay a bustling metropolis, busy streets and market buildings. A harbour full of fishing boats delivering their silvery catch to the dock.

When we returned a week later, Lazard thought we were lost. He simply couldn't identify the place. The valley was ravaged, eerie and desolate. The buildings swept clear, the estuarial rivers glistening down to the sea through char, like tear tracks across a blackened face.

Those nights since my discharge, my mind seemed to be trying to process those thousands of images. As if in my dreams, I could develop them, arrange them into some kind of sequence. I still felt myself flying in my sleep, acutely aware of the vast distance between me and the earth.

I needed to make landfall soon, I thought. I needed to see the world from ground level again.

The launches banged alongside the ship and we all peered down to see who would make up the delegation. An old Japanese man with a cane swung himself forward, followed by his cronies—delegates in absurd silk top hats and frock coats. Then came the generals, squat and drab. They made a grim surly bunch as they stood huddled on the swaying deck, surrounded on all sides by Allied men in blinding white uniform. One question hovered in the air:
where was the Emperor?

Silence fell over the ship, threaded through with the whir of movie cameras, punctuated by the click of lenses and the puff of flashbulbs.

The door of the bridge cabin swung open.

General Douglas MacArthur. Emerging from the doorway, collar open, shoulders square. He loomed over the Japanese men, hands on hips, staring down, and I was put in mind of my father, the stern headmaster, about to draw the belt from around his waist.

After his sonorous opening remarks, the general gestured to the Japanese to come forward. One by one, in profound silence, they bent over to sign the documents. In a few short moments, the Empire of Japan had surrendered unconditionally to the supreme commander of the Allied Powers.

The general made a fine speech, full of noble sentiment and good intention. Next to me, the Associated Press man doodled an obscene picture in his notebook. I looked out toward Japan as the seagulls cawed above us in the sky. The sun had burned through the cloud. It was a fine day.

All of a sudden, a horde of Superforts and Hellcats and Mustangs filled the air. I lurched, almost tumbling from the turret. They swarmed toward the coast in echelon after echelon, wings glinting in the morning sun. The crew on the upper decks were all hollering now, grinning, slapping each other on the back. Down below, the Allied generals and admirals all shook hands and congratulated each other. I took a deep breath as the planes roared toward Tokyo like a flock of furious birds.

The war was over, I told myself, dumbly. It was all over.

And we were alive.

 

 

M
ichiko had gone off to the countryside along with half the city to barter with those stingy peasants for food, and I was sitting outside Tokyo Station beneath a sign I had written for Hiroshi, my little brother. The station looked like an old, broken-down temple now, covered with signs and banners addressed to lost friends and relatives, all flapping in the wind like prayer flags. Crowds of people studied them, hoping to read their own names, or sat meekly against the walls, hoping that their loved ones might somehow miraculously turn up.

My own sign I'd hung two days after the huge fire raid back in March. It told my brother I'd gone to stay with Michiko, my friend from the war work dormitory, in her eight-mat tenement house in Shinagawa, and that I promised to wait for him here at Tokyo Station every day at noon. But it had been six months already since then, and still, he hadn't appeared.

The ground had been baking hot beneath my bare feet the morning after the raid, my hands dreadfully burned from the night before. I'd stumbled out of the irrigation ditch by the Yoshiwara Canal and picked my way across the smoking ruins of Asakusa. The whole city had been burned to the ground, it seemed. The wooden teahouses and matchstick tenements had all gone up in smoke and the theatres and picture palaces were just blackened shells. Shriveled bodies lay scattered along the roadways, and sooty figures went by with charred bedding on their backs or pushing bicycles piled with their remaining possessions.

Our old alley had run parallel to Kototoi Avenue, between Umamichi Street and the Sumida River Park. But the whole area had simply been levelled now, with only the odd brick building still standing. After flailing across the cinders for some time, I finally found the square concrete cistern that had once stood in front of Mrs. Oka's shop, our neighbour the pickle seller. It had been cracked wide open by the heat, and a naked man was slumped dead inside. My family's restaurant, with its sliding doors and creaking wooden sign, was gone. The whole alley had been incinerated, leaving nothing but two heaped ridges of ash.

There was no sign of Hiroshi. As I hunted about in the ruins, I pictured him the night before, surrounded by fire on the bank of the canal, shouting that he would come back. My fingers fell upon a scrap of charred blue cloth. It was from my mother's kimono, I thought.

Unfamiliar people, distant relatives, I supposed, were going back and forth with handcarts now. They picked out fragments of bone and piled up any goods that had escaped the flames. I dug about in the char for a while, but found nothing but my mother's battered old copper teakettle. By then the pain in my hands had became agonizing, and I went off to find a relief station, where a doctor gave me Mercurochrome and bandages.

I searched for Hiroshi for hours after that, at Kasakata police station and at Fuji High School, where the injured lay lined up on mats in the playground. But my brother had vanished. As evening fell, I finally returned to the Yoshiwara canal, where he had left me the night before. I started to shake. Troops were fishing out bodies on a big hook suspended from a truck, piling them up in a heap on the bank. I knew I should look for Hiroshi amongst them, but the truth was that I couldn't bring myself to search amongst those slippery mounds of flesh, all pink and boiled.

 

A train wheezed into the station, windows boarded over with planks. Passengers clambered down from the carriage roofs, and spilled out of the building clutching knapsacks and bundles of whatever it was they'd been able to scrounge from the farmers. Policemen walked up and down, eyeing the crowd for contraband, poking their packages with bamboo nightsticks—as if we didn't have enough to worry about.

Soon enough, Michiko appeared. Her dress was wrinkled, her shoes were covered in mud, and she looked exhausted. Quietly, I asked if she'd had any luck in the countryside.