Fire Flowers (20 page)

As the kettle boiled, I felt queasy. I thought urgently of my vial of pills in the dresser.

“It's kind of you to visit, Michiko,” I said as I poured out the water, “what with all your new distractions.”

My stomach suddenly heaved.

“But I've missed you, Satsuko!” she said.

“Do you know,” I said, inhaling sharply, “I was at the cinema just last week. An American film. There was an actress who somewhat resembled you—could it be possibly be Ingrid something?”

“Ingrid Bergman?” she cried, clapping her hands. “How clever you are, Satsuko! I think so too. There's a definite resemblance.”

I turned away, swallowing bile.
Could I politely ask her to leave?
To my relief, Michiko waved away her tea in any case.

“Satsuko,” she said, “please forgive me. I must go now. My piano is to be delivered at any moment.”

“Please come again, Michiko. You're always very welcome.”

“As soon as I can. Oh, and before I forget . . . ”

She took a box wrapped in red crêpe de chine from her bag and placed it on the table.

“Michiko-san,” I stammered. “Honestly, I've no need for gifts. I'm doing perfectly well . . . ”

“Please accept it, Satsuko,” she begged, kneeling in front of me. “You really must.”

A horn blared outside. Before I could respond, Michiko had scuttled to the door and pulled on her fur coat. She whipped out her mirror and applied a last, rapid puff of powder to her face. Then, with a wave of her gloved hand, she was gone.

The powder hovered in the air, pungent and flowery. Suddenly, I gasped, reaching for the pail. I heaved up the milky contents of my stomach, my eyes blurry with tears as I clung onto its cold metal rim.

When I had finally recovered, I slid over to the table and held up the package Michiko had left. Several silk bows and ribbons criss-crossed the box and I fumbled with them for some time, until I gave up and ripped open the red tissue paper.

Oh, Michiko
, I thought.

A fur stole lay in the box, taken from a white fox or some other expensive animal. It was so beautiful that tears sprang into my eyes. The fur was the softest thing I had ever felt in my life, delicate and supple and luxurious. I held it against my cheek for a long time. Then I lay back down on the futon and drifted away, lost in its fleecy softness for the rest of the afternoon.

 

A Joe with a pockmarked face was fast asleep on top of me, snorting violently in my ear. He had been celebrating his birthday that night and his cronies had strong-armed him into swallowing one bottle of beer after another. With an effort, I heaved him onto the floor and rang for Mr. Shiga. The man's companions finally came to fetch him, deciding first to dress him back to front in his uniform, which was just the kind of childish joke the Americans seemed to continually enjoy playing upon on another.

So I wasn't in an especially good mood as I waited in the cold drizzle for a tram that never came. Eventually I decided that it would be just as well to walk to Shimbashi Station and take the overground train back from there. I drew my fur stole close around my neck and walked off into a slanting wind.

It was deep winter now and I wondered how they survived, the pan-pan girls. Rows of them were sheltering in the low tunnels beneath the railway line, each with a leg bent up, cigarette smoke curling around them in wisps. I quickened my step, dodging the icy pools of water as I went.

A crunch of footsteps came from the shadows. I glanced over my shoulder. A knot of girls were walking fifteen paces behind me, silent in the darkness. I focused intently on the lights of the station, a hundred yards ahead, as my heart began to beat faster. The footsteps were coming closer. I suddenly hitched up my skirt in panic, about to run, but already they were behind me—

A fist struck my face and I sprawled to the ground.

Voices chorused above me, brutal and shrill. A tooth was loose on my tongue, my mouth full of blood. Thin, strong hands grabbed my arms and heaved me to my feet. I was trembling helplessly. Three women stood in front of me, and I saw the fat girl in the purple dress who had spat at me the week before. She stank of tobacco and sour sweat as she stepped forward and slapped me as hard as she could. Then she hawked and spat at me once again, her chewing gum catching in my hair.

“Where have you been tonight, you bitch?” she demanded. I gulped. “Still think you're better than us?”

Her fingers dug into my wrist, and she twisted it until I cried out in pain.

“You American whore!” she screamed. “I should stab you in the heart right here and now!”

I gasped as she shoved me and I stumbled backward. She seized my bag from the floor and began to rifle through it. Another woman stepped in front of me. Tall, dressed in a crimson frock, her eyebrows were painted high up on her forehead, giving her a puzzled expression. She grasped a clump of my hair and twisted it until tears sprang into my eyes. Her voice came in a low rasp.

“What are you doing here, anyway? You know this is our patch.”

I gasped in pain, unable to speak. In the darkness, her other hand moved. A cold, sharp point suddenly pressed against my lip and nose.

“We own this ward,” she said, staring at me with startled eyes. “You'll pay your share like everyone else.”

The point jabbed into my flesh and I screamed. She pulled it away, and I fell sobbing to the ground. The other girl was pulling things from my bag now, like a fox devouring a chicken. The fat one wore my stole around her own neck, and was stroking it as if it was a kitten.

The woman in the crimson frock squatted down. Her knife was long and thin—the kind used to slice up fish.

“I've seen you,” she said, in an empty voice. “I've seen how you look at us.”

Frantically, I shook my head.

“You really think you're any better that us?”

The knife touched my neck, and my entire skin crawled. A humiliating seepage flooded my thighs and she smiled as drops leaked against the ground. “See? You're no different after all.”

The world swam before my eyes and I fainted dead away.

When I came to, the women were disappearing beneath the iron struts of a railway underpass, animal shrieks echoing behind them. I staggered to my feet. My blouse was torn and my stockings shredded. My mouth was swollen and numb, and as I touched my lips, my fingers wetted with dark blood.

Something lay on the ground in front of me. I reached down to pick it up. It was a large card—like a visiting card. Ornate, emblazoned with a red satin peony, it was inscribed with hand-painted words:
Ketsueki Sakura Gumi
.

The Blood Cherry Gang.

 

So it seemed we really were to have equal rights in Japan. Women would be able to vote and men no longer allowed to divorce us whenever they chose, and now we even had our own lady gangsters to terrorize us, just as the men had had the yakuza all this time.

The Blood Cherry girls were already notorious, it seemed. The rumour went that they had all made a blood pact, that their leader, Junko—the woman in the crimson frock—had once been the famous geisha “Willow Tree,” the mistress of Akamatsu, the ace fighter pilot. They were witches in human form; they were
kitsune,
fox spirits, who could bewitch men and even shift shape. All superstitious nonsense, of course, but enough to send a shiver down my spine when I recalled my nightmarish meeting with them.

I took a taxi home from the Oasis every night now, despite the expense, too frightened to walk anywhere alone. The gang was made up of the very worst kind of pan-pan and worked the area between Yurakucho and the Kachidoki Bridge, which they now claimed as their own territory. Dressed in lurid clothes, their faces garishly painted, they demanded the right to organize all the girls in the surrounding streets, which, of course, meant harassing them and stealing from them whatever they could. And it was my bad luck that these girls, for some unfortunate reason, had decided that I needed to be punished.

 

I was squatting in the filthy lavatory shed outside the Oasis when I felt a sharp pain, as if hot needles were passing through me. I didn't need to guess what it was. The other girls had worried about it often enough.

The doctor confirmed my suspicions as he made his rounds the following week. I was distraught. Mr. Shiga would be informed and I wouldn't be able to work for weeks. Money would have to be found for medicine—which wasn't cheap, only available on the black market—and during that whole time I wouldn't earn a single sen.

When Mr. Shiga summoned me to his office, I got down on my hands and knees and begged him to advance me a loan. To my horror, he dismissed me on the spot.

“You've been an embarrassment for months now, Takara-san,” he said. “Just look at yourself. You're spent.”

Stunned, I packed up my makeup and my collection of trinkets and walked out of the old bomb shelter for the last time. When I got home, I filled the pail from the standpipe in the street. Inside, I undressed and slowly sponged myself down. I studied myself for a long time in the mirror. Mr. Shiga was quite right. Hollow sockets stared back at me, and my hair was lank and brittle. A red sore glowed at the side of my mouth and my belly was swollen, my ribs showing beneath my breasts, shrunken now like old gourds. I looked like a ghost.

Wearily, I wrapped up my beautiful green kimono, and took it back down to the Shimbashi market.

“Back already, dear?” the old lady clucked. She smoothed out the fabric and counted a few notes and coins into my palm. Confused, I asked if she had made some kind of mistake: it was less than half what Michiko had paid just a few weeks before.

“Take it or leave it, dear,” she said, her nose wrinkling. “There's plenty more like you about.”

I felt at a complete loss. Then, from over by the railway arches, there was a flash of colour. This was the heart of Blood Cherry territory. I quickly stepped behind the old woman's table, laden with kimonos, as unfamiliar girls headed toward the market.

Somehow, in the light of day, they seemed different. Glowing with life, they scoured the stalls, biting apples and flinging the cores over their shoulders. They barged their way through the dreary crowd in their bright Western dresses the colour of bruises, picking out whatever they fancied and flicking banknotes under the noses of the peddlers. As I stood there, hiding, I felt a sudden stab of realization. They really were different from me.

They were honest. All this time, I'd let Michiko and the managers fill my head with sheer nonsense—we weren't common prostitutes, no, we were Butterflies, Foreign Consorts, modern-day Okichis! But we were all just whores, plain and simple. At least these girls admitted it.

In one fell swoop, they'd cast away the twisted ideals, the slogans and the lies we'd been fed for so many years, the deceit which had brought our country to the brink of ruin. So much for honour. These girls were the lowest of the low, and they just didn't care.

These were the New Women of Japan, I thought angrily, not us. No happy endings for them. No imperial palaces, no tragic affairs like Kyoto geishas. They would smoke and spit and sell themselves for the last penny, until one day they would collapse in the gutter: dead and honest, and free.

 

The next day, I washed, dressed in my brightest clothes and painted my eyes in vivid colours. I took the Yamanote Line to Shimbashi and walked in the direction of Tokyo Bay, past the old, abandoned market, toward the dull steel arches of the Kachidoki Bridge. The sky was pale and blustery, and there was a reek of fish. I examined the card that the Blood Cherries had left.

The house was a big, broken-down mansion that must have belonged to some merchant at one point. A girl dressed in a short green skirt opened the door. She wore a sprig of clover in her hair and her eyelids were shaded with silvery-green powder, like the wings of some exotic butterfly.

I bowed meekly as she showed me through to a gutted hall. The place looked like an enormous, smashed-up doll's house. Landings jutted out from the walls, splintered stairs and ladders led up through holes in the collapsed ceiling. Dozens of girls lounged about in their underclothes on the bare flag- stones with cigarettes in their mouths, playing flower cards and swigging from a large bottle they passed between them. Piles of clothes were scattered all around and a large mirror stained with verdigris was ratcheted to the split wooden panelling of one wall.

Underneath the staircase, a gaudy little shrine had been set up, decorated with star-shaped scraps of silver paper and burning candles. Torn-out pictures of angels had been pasted in a circle on the crumbling plaster, and in the centre, a carved statue of Jesus Christ was splayed upon a wooden cross. He was naked but for a loincloth, his head turned away, as if he couldn't bear to look at the world.

The plump girl was kneeling before it, hands clasped, mumbling to herself. Junko stepped forward from a large, dark hole in the wall, steadying herself as she came toward me. Her face was smooth and white, framed by tight black curls, and she wore an enormous pair of round sunglasses. Little prickles, like bedbug bites, lined the white skin of her inner arms.

“Did you know that Maria-sama was a virgin when she gave birth to Jesus Christ?” she rasped. She waved at the fat girl. “Yotchan over there believes that if she prays hard enough, Jesus Christ will make her a virgin again!”

She laughed, her neck wrinkled and sagging beneath thick powder.

“How old-fashioned!” she spat. “Relying on a man for everything.”

She smiled tightly and took off her sunglasses. Her eyes shrank as she looked at me.

“You've come to work for me now, is that it?”

I nodded.

“They always do.”

She held up bony fingers in front of my face, counting them off. “Eight yen a time. That's the standard rate. Four goes to us. Two more for food and drink. You work out the rest.”