Fire Flowers (32 page)

San Francisco seemed almost Japan-like, I thought, as I studied the photographs in the magazine for the hundredth time. Brightly painted wooden houses stood up on the hills and fishing boats were docked at the bustling wharves. There were forests and mountains in the distance, and Mrs. Ishino had once told me that other Japanese people lived there too, so I might still be able to buy miso and
katsuobushi
whenever I had a craving for Japanese food, or felt homesick for Tokyo.

Not that there seemed much chance of that. The magazines were so glossy and the colours so startlingly rich that I wondered if the sun might somehow be brighter in America than it was in Japan. The pages were packed with pictures of healthy-looking men playing baseball and tennis and golf, lounging by swimming pools and smoking cigarettes, whilst neat, smiling housewives in bright calico dresses stood next to refrigerators laden with meat, churned yellow butter, and glass bottles of orange juice. There were advertisements for everything and anything, from syrup to stockings, spectacles to hats. Silk gloves, leather shoes, bedsheets, perfume, whisky and wedding rings. Everyone was happy, and judging from the way America looked in the magazines, that was hardly surprising.

I sighed and placed the magazine down. I walked over to the open doorway. The sky was grey and the street outside was full of churned mud. Children ran half-naked past the shanty houses, and a toothless man walked slowly past with hollow eyes, his clothes loose upon his body.

 

The idea that I might go to America started as a joke. One evening, as we sat at the counter, Hal-san was telling me about his old college in New York, which sounded similar to the castle-like buildings of the Imperial University. Just at that moment, he caught my eye.

“Would you like to live in America someday, Satsuko?” he said.

My heart rose to my throat. For a moment, I thought he had actually asked me to go away with him, just as casually as he might ask me to the cinema. I started to stammer. Then my cheeks flushed as it dawned on me, that, of course, he had just been asking the question in a general kind of way.

I tried to laugh. America certainly sounded wonderful, I said, but I couldn't speak English very well, and of course, I'd miss all of my friends. He put his hand on my wrist and stroked it gently and I wondered if he wasn't a little bit drunk.

“We could find you a teacher,” he murmured.

I laughed again, more cynically this time. Teaching you English was something they all promised to do.

“Cat, sat, mat,” I muttered. “How are you? How do you do?”

It was a stupid thing for him to have asked, and I was annoyed at him for suggesting it.

But then I saw that he was looking at me quite seriously. For a moment, I let myself imagine what it might be like, living far away in a foreign country. A house beside a shady park that stretched all the way to the ocean. I could grow daikon and burdock in the garden. The days would come and go. Hal would go off to work at his newspaper every morning, and I would visit the beach, listening to the seagulls, as our children played around me in the sunshine.

 

Posters were appearing all over Tokyo with Michiko's beautiful face upon them. Everyone was looking forward to her new film. The cinema magazines reported that the action was to take place in the burned-out streets of the city itself, and I found myself watching out for the film crew whenever I visited the market.

For weeks, I had been convincing myself that I should write to Michiko and tell her where I was living. But as I pictured her, lounging in her glamorous apartment, surrounded by clothes and magazines, I wondered if she would even open a letter from me. She might fling it from her in terror when she saw my name, repelled by the thought of any contact with this spider from her past.

But finally, one afternoon, I sat down to write in any case, intending to keep the note brief and to the point. I gave her my address, and told her that I was working in a restaurant again, that I had several warmhearted companions and that life was full of possibilities.

“I was so thrilled to see you on the screen last month, Michiko,” I wrote, “when my American and I visited the cinema together.”

I stared at the words I had just written. My American? My heart started to patter, as I picked up the pen once more.

“Yes, Michiko, it's true. I too have found an ‘only one,' as you yourself did last year. I very much hope that you will have the chance to visit us. Please do not be too embarrassed to come. I admit that I was upset when you moved away, but I know now that it was all for the best. After all, you were simply choosing to live, Michiko, in the only way you knew how. Just as we must all try to live.”

I started to feel quite emotional. The images from the magazine were still fresh in my mind. It was at this point that I may have got carried away.

“I hope, in any case, you will be able to come to visit before too long, though I know how busy you must be with your cinema activities. Because very soon, Michiko, my American will be taking me away from Japan. We will be going to live in San Francisco, and I may not return for a long time. So you see, Michiko, it is not only film stars like you that can have exciting romantic adventures!”

My heart was in my mouth as I sealed the note and copied out the address of Michiko's studio from the back of a film magazine. I couldn't quite believe what I had written. But as I handed the letter to the postmaster, I felt as if the flimsy note was a votive plaque that I was hanging at a shrine, a hopeless prayer that I dreamed might somehow come true.

 

When Hal came back to Mrs. Ishino's that evening, he seemed worried and drew his fingers through his thick hair. My stomach tightened as I went to make him a sandwich. I poured him a drink. After a while, he seemed to relax.

Later on, casually, I took down Mrs. Ishino's atlas, and opened it up to the map of America. His eyes lit up and he laughed. Taking my hand beneath his own, he drew my finger to the eastern side of the country.

“New York,” he said, pointing at himself. “The Empire State.”

I smiled and shook my head. I drew his hand back to the other side of the map again.

“No empire. San Francisco,” I said.

He started to laugh again, that warm, glorious laugh that poured from his chest.

“You want to live in San Francisco, Satsuko?” he said.

I smiled. “Yes. You take me.”

“You want me to take you to San Francisco?” he said, sweeping his fingers through his hair. “Sure! Why not? Let's go to San Francisco. We'll take the next boat!”

I couldn't quite tell if he was joking or not. He shook his head with a faraway smile. He gazed at me for a second, then looked away, rubbing my hand over and over again.

We went up to his room soon after. His body was strong and taut and I felt a great, piercing sense of relief sweep through me. In the middle of the night, I woke up and gazed at his smooth, white skin, his chest moving softly up and down. I wondered whether I should slip downstairs to my room, but the nest of blankets was so cozy, and there was such a gentle warmth emanating from his body, that I just lay beside him, clasping my hands around his broad chest, and fell away into a deep sleep.

When I woke in the morning he was already getting ready to leave. I lay there dozing for a while, taking pleasure in the sound of him washing and getting dressed. Just before he left, he leaned down over the futon and kissed me on the forehead. For a moment I could smell the musky scent of his cologne on his smooth cheeks. Then the door closed and I lay there in a shaft of spring sunlight, breathing in the scent of the sheets, watching the motes of dust dance in the air. I thought that I should probably get up and go on with my work quite soon, but then I told myself I should stay for a little while longer, that I deserved to be happy, just for this short time. And so I lay there, smiling secretly to myself, stretched out on the bed like a satisfied cat.

F
rom the top of the old railway bridge, I scanned the market through the sight of my sniper rifle:
Captain Takara—deep behind enemy lines.

Slowly, I swept from side to side, as the huge American flag flicked on its pole, casting a shadow over the GIs who were ambling amongst the stalls below.
Easy targets
, I thought.
One bullet each. Aim for the heart—

There was a flash of colour as the three girls flounced toward the market. I fumbled with the aperture of my Leica and urgently twisted the rangefinder. Through the lens, I focused on the stocky one in the middle, the one they called Yotchan.

I could almost make out the shadow that curved between her breasts.
Fire!

I pressed the shutter and the flutter lens closed.
Bull's eye!

A hand cuffed me on the back of the head and I spun around. Mr. Suzuki was laughing at me, hands on his hips. The shoulder holster of his pistol showed beneath his grey silk jacket.

“Getting some cute pictures, are you, little shit?” he said. “No wonder you spend so much time up here.”

My cheeks began to throb.

“Put your dick away. It's lunchtime.”

Mr. Suzuki wasn't a man to argue with. The market boss had almost killed me two weeks before, when I'd gone to the station to drum up portrait business. I'd spotted him at the mouth of the market, looking up and down the road as if he was waiting for someone. The grey felt fedora was pulled low over his forehead, and a white silk handkerchief ruffled from his breast pocket.

I ran over and held up my Leica in question.

“Sir—”

I didn't get a chance to finish.

“You want me to break that thing in your fucking face?” he snarled.

I backed off right away—I got the message all right. He glared at me, a faint squint in his eye. A memory came to me then, of an afternoon long ago, years before the Pacific War had even broken out.

Back in the days when our shop had been open, my mother sometimes asked me to deliver box lunches to especially important customers in the neighbourhood. One afternoon in July, a huge order had arrived just after midday. It was the busiest time of the year—the real dog days when the line snaked all the way down the alley, with everyone desperate to eat their fill of unagi-don to revive their flagging spirits.

My father glanced at the name card. He gave a low whistle and wiped the sweat from his brow. Politely, he told the customers out front that there would be a short delay in serving them, and tightened the cloth around his head. He piled up charcoal on the grill, and started frantically brushing the sizzling strips of eel with sauce from his pot as fast he could, calling to my mother to pile them onto rice in our best lacquered boxes.

As she loaded the parcels into the carriage of my delivery bicycle, she grasped my arm and wiped my face with her sleeve. “Go as quick as you can,” she said. “And keep a civil tongue in your head!”

When I reached the address on the card, in a row of tenements up by Sengen Shrine, I thought I was lost. There was nothing there but an abandoned house with broken shutters, stray cats stretched out asleep on the roof. Then, from inside, I heard faint voices—shouting out numbers, intriguing rattles and slams. Nervously, I tapped on the door. A moment later, a half-naked man slid it open, waving a silk fan against his upper body as he squinted down at me. The rippling torso was completely inked over with colourful tattoos.

Now, Mr. Suzuki stepped toward me.

“Do I know you?” he said, his voice slurring like a proper yakuza.

I bowed my head. There was no way he could remember me, I thought, not a chance.

“What the fuck happened to your face?”

“I got burned, sir,” I said.

“You don't say.”

He peered at the camera around my neck. “You know how to use that thing?”

I nodded.

“So come over here.”

On the other side of the station, a huge sign was hoisted up alongside the overground train track. Made of high-powered electric lightbulbs, it spelled out the name of the market, so that people could see it for miles around. Mr. Suzuki stood underneath it, and tipped his hat over his eye, almost daintily.

“Be sure you get the sign in the picture,” he said, jerking his thumb into the air.

As I twisted the lens, his blunt face came into focus. A ribbed, crescent-shaped scar dimpled one of his cheeks.

“And make it a good one, kid,” he called. “I might not be here so long.”

I stifled a grin. This was exactly the kind of thing that gangsters were supposed to say! I held up my hand in a professional manner, and pressed the shutter firmly. He strode back over and roughly pulled the camera from around my neck, grunting as he turned it about in his clumsy hands.

“You really know how to use this?”

“It's not so hard, sir.”

He stared at me for a moment. Then he draped the camera back around my neck. “Hungry?”

My eyes lit up as he jerked his head toward a stall just inside the market. Clouds of fragrant steam were billowing from the pots and my mouth started to water. The spry old chef welcomed us in like royalty: he hurried out to wipe down our stools and poured a frothing bottle of beer into a glass he set on the counter in front of Mr. Suzuki.

“Make yourselves at home, young sirs,” he said as he bustled around his pots and pans. “You're very welcome!”

“What filthy soup are you using today, granddad?” Mr. Suzuki drawled.

“Dog and crow, sir.” The man giggled and stirred the big metal vat on his makeshift stove with a long ladle. Mr. Suzuki grunted.

“Two of those, then, granddad. Extra chives, extra jewels, hard-boiled egg.”

“Coming right up!”

As I shovelled the almost unbearably delicious noodles into my mouth, I wondered what Mr. Suzuki could possibly want with me. A lot of the other street kids were going into the gangs now, but I didn't want to be any part of the yakuza, even if I had stolen the camera. My father would have been ashamed of me. Even so, it was pretty exciting to be sitting next to a real live gangster. People going past glanced at me with interest, and I cocked my head casually, as if eating with Mr. Suzuki was something I did every day of the week.