Fire Flowers (9 page)

“What I mean is, if you can't have the real thing, you have to settle for its substitute. If you can't find food, you'll have to settle for articles about it. That's what you'll sell in your magazine. But you're missing a trick, sensei—the most important fantasy of all.”

“Please enlighten us, obasan.”

“Sex.”

Stiffly, I asked her what she meant.

“Well. It used to be the only thing that was free, didn't it? But not any more! Think of those trollops in the back alleys. They hoard it up like stingy peasants do rice, and only dole it out to those who can afford it.”

I thought wistfully of Takara-san and the gaudy girls on the Ginza, rushing over to grasp the uniformed arms of the American GIs.

“Where's the average man to find comfort nowadays? His wife's most likely dead, and the only girls around are sluts. If he's only got two yen, and a girl costs twenty, whatever is he to do?”

 

I took Mrs. Shimamura at her word, and jam-packed our new magazine with every possible fantasy—epicurean, erotic, or otherwise—that might appeal to the ordinary Japanese man, so lately oppressed by frustrated desires. I wrote three stories interspersed with Nakamura's drawings and cartoons—the usual erotic, grotesque nonsense we had grown up with.

The first dealt with a soldier who, on returning home, finds that his wife has taken up with his neighbour. Soon enough, he is incapable of arousing himself in any other way than by spying on them from behind a screen.

The second was a more monstrous variation on the theme. A man is forced by circumstance to take work in a brothel, mopping the stained floors and laundering the sheets. He learns that a new girl, a real beauty, is to start work the next day. An uncanny thought occurs to him, and he hides himself under her bed that night. The next day, the presumed beauty comes in with an American soldier. They throw themselves onto the bed and start heaving and cavorting. Aroused, the man's fingers creep into his pants, and, as the bed rattles and shakes, the girl approaches the heights of her ecstasy, and he cannot help but participate in her delirium. “With the roar of a mountain lion,” the American completes, and leaves the room.

The man hears the girl dressing. He sidles out from underneath the bed, intent upon presenting her with a diabolical proposition. As he emerges, she shrieks.

He gasps, clutching at his chest. The girl is his own daughter.

The cover was a master stroke, lovingly drawn and coloured by Nakamura. A woman suns herself on a beach, wide hips, jutting breasts,
plus ça change
. But look closer. This is no Japanese bathing beauty. She is a Westerner. An American lady, with just a wisp of hair emerging beneath her navel—for the first time, I was certain, on the cover of a Japanese magazine. The wife of one of the generals, perhaps? Of MacArthur himself? All of this, and more, available to anyone now for just three yen. This, I sensed instinctively, was the true essence of democracy.

The second half of the magazine was more considered and less obscene. Inspired by the house painters, “The Dish I Most Lament” was a feature based upon a series of interviews I conducted at various stations along the Yamanote Line, in which I asked ordinary citizens to describe the meal for which they felt most nostalgic. The reactions were astonishing. Some shook their heads furiously and marched away; one man even punched me on the nose. Others simply froze, then began to reel off a list of dishes as if they were reading from a long menu unfurling in their minds—sea bream cooked in chestnut rice; bubbling stews of chicken and burdock; hot fried tempura and fat slivers of bonito . . . Others smiled, with that dreamy, faraway look I had seen on the faces of the house painters, and talked of cold buckwheat soba from a temple in Kyoto; itawasa fish cakes from a famous shop in Nihonbashi . . . They talked of tofu and oden, horsemeat and clams. But most of all, they talked of miso. Miso, miso, always miso soup, prepared each morning by the hands of once beloved, now departed mothers and wives.

Sometimes I had to stop them talking, as my eyes would be blurry with tears. Their smiles would falter, and the wind would gust past us along the street. The interviewees would look at me bitterly then, as if I had robbed them of something precious. More than anything, I realized, it was our lost past that was the most captivating daydream. In those days of the dried cod, of the rotten sweet potato, it was the most painful fantasy of all.

 

ERO
, as we named the magazine, was an instant hit. Convinced of its appeal, Mrs. Shimamura funded the first printing. By the end of the day, all of the copies we had placed with the booksellers and newsstands had sold out. With the profits, we printed another issue, which itself sold out by the end of the week. It seemed we had struck a peculiar vein.

My financial issues were thus temporarily solved. But I was troubled by the fact that in just five days, my erotic stories had sold a hundred times more than all my literary scribblings had in a decade. Even more disturbingly, while in the past I had agonized over every word and punctuation point, these stories had flowed from my pen like water. I had written them all in one night, in fact, one after the other, sitting up in my room with an inkstone and a bottle of liquor. I wondered if something had fractured in my mind during those malarial months of horror in the jungles of New Guinea.

What irony that I, who fancied myself the Japanese Tolstoy, an Oriental Zola, should find my métier in pornography. That the first thing I should write on my return from the inferno of war should be sensual and erotic!

M
y compatriots glanced at me curiously across the dining room of the Continental Hotel as I attempted to lever chunks of rice into my mouth with chopsticks. A small bowl of gelatinous fish swamped in brown paste lay on my table, alongside a slippery white cuboid of tofu and a pot of green tea. The boy had been delighted when I'd asked him for a “Japanese-style” breakfast that morning, but I was now envying the toast and powdered eggs being devoured by the other staff and officers around me.

I had thrown myself into my new Japanese life with vigour, keen to get under the skin of the place. I scoured the markets for books in translation and pored over whatever I could find—folktales, samurai dramas, medieval literature. I undertook a dozen Japanese lessons with an old professor in his chrysanthemum garden in Shibuya, as a sickle of silver moon swelled to a peach in the clear fall sky. I sat cross-legged through six baffling hours of a white-masked Noh play in a dusty, empty hall, as time slowed to a crawl, and the pain in my thighs grew ever more excruciating.

Dutch was still sore at me for landing him in hot water.

“Give this one to Lynch,” he would simper at editorial meetings. “He's swell at human interest!”

My assignments so far had included a horticultural show by the Allied Women's Flower Arranging Society and a boxing tournament between the 5th Cavalry and a team of British marines.

In the meantime, I tramped the Tokyo streets, taking photographs of the ruined city and its inhabitants. A bald man in a shanty washing glasses from a bucket. The watchman of the metal mountain up past the Ginza, smoking his pipe amidst the clutter of radiators, bicycles and temple bells.

I was up at Ueno one day, exploring the stalls of the black market. Men chopped slivers of meat with cleavers, unloaded wooden crates of fish from handcarts. Behind the station, a team of tattered children were playing a makeshift game of baseball on a patch of wasteground. A serious looking boy, his face disfigured by burns, was standing against a broken-down section of wall, holding up a charred plank. Another boy in khaki pants flung a ball made of rags, and the scarred kid whacked it, hard. A piece of wood splintered off and he raced around a diamond marked by piles of gravel, the other children hollering in encouragement. I pulled up my Leica and started to fire off shots. The boy tore back just in time to make the home run, sliding along the gravel in a great cloud of dust. The other children cheered and screamed as he rolled home. Then they spotted me. Instantly they abandoned their game, and came galloping toward me in a dusty herd.

I hurled candy bars, of which I now kept a provident supply in my coat pocket, as they swarmed me, shrieking with delight. To give them a treat, I decided to photograph their portraits, and had them scribble their names in my notebook.

“All from Tokyo, right?” I asked, in my new, broken Japanese. “You—Tokyo?”

The scarred boy pushed forward. His hair was thickly matted and he wore dirty blue serge trousers rolled up at the hem.

“We—Tokyo,” he said in wavering English, gesturing to himself and the others. Then he pointed. “She—no.”

Another little girl was standing a few paces behind him, apparently too shy to come over.

“Oh? Where's she from?”

The boy nodded. “Yes. She—Hiroshima,” he said.

I hesitated, intrigued. “Is that so?”

The girl wore a blue canvas jacket and was very frail. An old metal water canteen hung over her shoulder.

I leaned down and beckoned to her, but she barely dared look at me. I offered her a malted milk ball from my pocket, but she quickly shook her head. The other children gathered closely around us.

“You—Hiroshima?” I asked.

She glanced at the scarred boy, then gave a tiny nod of assent.

“You have—mother? Father? Okasan? Otosan?”

She stared awkwardly beyond me, as a faint wind ruffled her short hair.

The scarred boy broke in: “Her mother—sick. Send her—Tokyo.”

“Her mother was sick?”

Tears welled in the girl's eyes. All of a sudden, she said something in a strained voice. I turned to the boy.

“What did she say?”

He wiped his forehead with his fist, frowning. “Bomb— fall,” he said. He made an explosive noise and threw up his hands. “Every people—sick.”

“Sick? You mean dead?”

He frowned, apparently at his linguistic limit. He shook his head. “No die. Sick.”

“The bomb? The bomb made her mother sick?”

He nodded triumphantly. “Sick. Dead. So,
desu
.”

A memory came into my mind. The surrender issue of
LIFE
, back in September, with MacArthur's face glaring from the cover. A set of photographs of Hiroshima was printed inside, shots of mangled factories, crinkled trees, taken from ground level. There'd been no images of any surviving population.

The other children were scampering about now, hurling stones across the wasteground. The scarred boy was staring intently at my Leica. As a reward for his efforts at translation, I took the leather strap from around my neck and handed him the camera. He examined it with a fierce and concentrated delight, then held it to his face and began to swoop gently around, like a regular Robert Capa.

I smiled as I watched. Finally, I prised it away from him. He gave me a solemn look of thanks, bowing low. A sudden grin broke out on his face and he turned and ran back to his game.

Dutch grudgingly printed the picture a week later. I guessed I was now forgiven. It showed the earnest boy holding his makeshift bat as the ball of rags flew toward him: “The Tokyo Little Leagues,” the caption read.

 

Eugene's interest in Japanese culture was of a different hue to my own. One evening, he asked me to join him and his new friend Bob McHardy, a cartoonist at the paper, at a bar called The Oasis next to the new Postal Exchange by the Ginza Crossing. At the entrance, yum-yum girls coaxed men inside, while laughing GIs lined up at a booth next door, which hair-raising VD posters evinced to be an army prophylactic station.

Downstairs, Eugene sat at a table with McHardy, who had a girl perched on his knee, running her fingers through his curly blonde hair.
Good God
, I thought. She was a knockout. She should have been starring on some cinema screen instead of servicing doughboys down here by the hour.

Another girl, dressed in a kimono, was perched on the chair beside Eugene. She was pretty too, young and neat, with porcelain skin and jet-black eyes.

“Harold, meet Primrose,” Eugene winked. “She's a swell sort.”

Primrose refilled Eugene's glass every time he took a sip and laughed at practically everything he said. As I drank my lukewarm beer I couldn't help but picture the gangly boy I'd roomed with in college. Just look at him now. Eugene sprawled on the chair with an air of easy and wanton debauch, as Primrose stroked his face and patted his thigh.

McHardy went off to dance with his exotic creature and I told Eugene about an idea I'd been toying with. I wanted to see more of the country, and thought we might try writing some touristic reports, about places the average GI might like to visit on leave.

“It would give us a chance to do some travelling ourselves, Gene. Get out of Tokyo.”

“Well, sure,” he said. “I guess . . . ”

Primrose had taken off Eugene's glasses now and placed them upon her own nose and was generally distracting him. As she reached over to pour more beer into his glass, I noticed that her palms were damaged—they appeared smooth and shiny in the low light, as if they'd been polished.

“Come on, Gene. It'll do you a world of good.”

Eugene seemed very uncertain. Primrose put the bottle back down, and for a split-second, I felt her hands touching my face, passing over my back. She caught my eye, and gazed back at me.

A new song came on the gramophone. With a delighted gasp, she hopped up and tugged at Eugene's hand.

“What do you think, Gene?” I said.

“Why don't you talk to Dutch about it?”

“I will.” Beer drained, I stood up.

“You're not staying?”

“Uh-uh.”

Primrose wiped her forehead in comical fashion. I saw now how pretty she was, and felt dumb to be leaving so soon.