“From you?” She raised her finger coquettishly to her lips. “Probably not.”
I opened the door. “One of these days I would like to go on a picnic with you. Can you believe that?”
Takuo tittered in the manner of a Geisha girl, hands in front of her mouth, almost as if she was embarrassed at this unseemly display of humour. “I am a married woman!” she said. She then ruined the effect by giving me the most brilliant smile, and I fluttered my fingers as I walked into the gloom of the warehouse
I think our warehouse might once been used for army stores, but these had long since gone. Instead, all about the high walls and stretching the length of a tennis court were the hundreds of box kites that we had so lovingly constructed for the Japanese Imperial Fleet. I did, I suppose, feel some little pride as I walked in and inspected my handiwork of the previous three months; though, even before Little Boy, I was aware of the futility of it all.
High in the walls were a few dirty windows. The dust spangled as the weak sunlight glimmered through the murk. After the brilliant sunshine, it took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust. I was surprised to find that one of the other kite-makers, Motoji, was already hunched over his work-bench, softly sawing off lengths of bamboo.
He had the radio on and was listening to the glib patter of Masanobu Furuta, one of Hiroshima Radio Station’s ‘sweetsounding voices of reason’. Furuta possessed, said the newspapers, a voice ‘which calmed our anxieties’. I could not stand the man.
“Good morning,” I called out to Motoji. “Enjoy yourself yesterday?”
“I came here to work,” said Motoji, peering up at me over the tops of his little round glasses. His brow was drawn and furrowed, and he had an almost perpetual stoop, the mark of a man who had spent too long indoors. And what a low-slung weasel of a man he was. Motoji was one of the few kitemakers who came from Hiroshima, and I had met him three months earlier. As it was, I think I would only have needed two minutes with him to have come up with a complete character analysis.
The war seemed to have cemented all the most loathsome aspects of his personality. Under the mantle of the war effort, this stifling killjoy was able to vaunt himself as the most ardent patriot. Eating the most frugal food was proof that he was a patriot; arriving early to work and leaving late was proof that he loved his country; and working on Sundays meant he was a devout nationalist who worshipped the Emperor.
There were many like him, though thankfully I rarely came into daily contact with them. To me, Motoji was nothing more than a hamster on his wheel, blindly scurrying onward, onward, because that was his masters’ bidding.
I laughed as I sauntered through the warehouse, my fingers stretching out to trace over the kite-frames. I have always loved the feel of the parchment-dry paper of a new kite.
“You know what they say – a day away from the warehouse is a day wasted.”
“That is so,” Motoji replied, ignoring my irony.
I stopped by the door at the far end and called out to him. “Tell me, Motoji. Do you think any of your kites will ever be used in action?”
“Without doubt. They will help us to ultimate victory.” He stood up to look at me, his round shoulders continuing in a smooth curve from his neck.
“And where are the ships on which your kites are going to
fly?”
“They are out fighting on the oceans. We are making more of them as we speak. Our armaments factories are working through the night.”
“Strange how none of the ships ever put in to Hiroshima anymore,” I goaded.
“The fighting spirit of the people lives on,” he said, as if repeating some hallowed piece of wisdom.
“Is that another line you are spouting from that rag
Chugoku Shimbun
?”
“It is,” he said, toying with the saw in his hands. “It is a paper that I am proud to buy. You would do well to read it.”
“So that they can tell me about all the fleets of Yankee ships that we have sunk?”
“The Yankee ships have been sunk. I know it.”
“So I can read more uplifting stories about the life and times of a Kamikaze hero? So I can garner more delicious recipes for grass soup?”
Motoji bristled, the saw quivering as it flexed between his fingers. “That is disgraceful,” he said. “You are a disgrace. You are disloyal to your country and you are a disgrace to your Emperor.”
I could have said more, but I saved my breath. I could not be bothered. It would have been easier to talk a pig into denying his constant appetite for food. Yet there were so many like Motoji, people for whom it was easier to believe the government’s lies than to deny the evidence of their own eyes. How cleverly our leaders had dressed up the war effort, as if it was our patriotic duty to believe in Japan’s ultimate victory, and that to doubt it for even a moment was tantamount to treason.
I clicked the metal door shut behind me and walked into the small common room that adjoined the main warehouse. Shinzo and I would occasionally have lunch there. It had a few bamboo chairs and a low table, as well as the sacred picture of our Emperor Hirohito, his chest dripping with medals, braid and bejewelled honours. How singularly out of place all that gilt and gold looked on our mild-mannered Emperor. With his wisp of a moustache and thick pebble glasses, Hirohito gave every appearance of being an earnest academic. And indeed he was – before the war, he had been a world expert on marine microbiology.
Actually, though once I may have sneered at Hirohito and everything he stood for, I do now admire the man. From the very first, he had been against the war. Just before Pearl Harbour, Hirohito had read out a poem to that blood-thirsty band of warmongers that ruled our country:
‘When I regard all the world
‘As my own brothers
‘Why is it that its tranquillity
‘Should be so thoughtlessly disturbed?’
Wise words from the great man. Not that anyone listened to him but, in the end, Hirohito did manage to bring about a speedier close to the war – and I have always been grateful for that. If he had not, I would have been shot dead, and what a tragic end that would have been for a man who had just survived two atomic bombs.
You may wonder what I was doing at the warehouse so early on a Monday morning when I had little interest in making kites. The reason was simple enough: I was there to nose round the foreman’s office. Like Motoji, our foreman was another upstanding Japanese patriot, but the difference with Major Akiba was that he had power with it. He was a short thug of a man in charge not just of our kite-making operation but the entire complex. With his smooth, waxen face and trim little moustache, he was a blistering cauldron of rage. Even for a civilian like me, he could make life very unpleasant.
Akiba is now dead and so I will strive to be fair to the man. He was a typical product of Japan’s ‘no surrender’ school of army training. There were thousands like him and I do not doubt that I would have loathed them too. I was so sick of the daily diet of lies fed to us, and Akiba and his ilk were all part of the system which kept the entire 100 million population under heel.
I do not especially blame Akiba; he was doing just exactly what he had been trained to do. But I certainly did not have to like him either. For the past three months I had been in almost daily contact with that barking martinet, with his shrieked orders and his eye-watering petty sanctions, and I had come to loathe the man.
So that morning, while he was off for some meeting at Hiroshima’s old castle, it was the perfect opportunity for me to delve and pry. I have always been a snooper; perhaps I should have become a journalist.
I walked across the common-room and lifted the Emperor’s portrait off the wall. Behind it, just as I expected, was a little hole which contained the key to Akiba’s room. It had never once occurred to the brute that one of his staff might venture into his office.
I took the key and carefully replaced the picture, before letting myself into Akiba’s office. Should have taken the trouble to lock the door behind me. Or perhaps not, seeing as how events turned out.
Just as you would expect from a disciplinarian like Akiba, his corner-office was immaculate. The room was high and airy, with two spectacular walls of windows that stretched from waist height all the way up to the ceiling. As befitted someone of Akiba’s rank, they were cleaned weekly. Behind his wooden desk was a view of the entire city of Hiroshima, and beyond it the cocooning embrace of the mountains.
For the moment, I ignored the four grey filing cabinets that were standing against the wall underneath another picture of the Emperor. If Akiba had anything of value, he would keep it in his desk. I pulled up the sturdy wooden chair and made myself at home. He didn’t have the imagination to lock his desk; it was beyond his comprehensionthat someone might dare to rifle through his personal possessions. How little he knew me.
I hit gold with the first drawer that I opened. It was a broad drawer, a full 40 centimetres wide, and I had thought it might contain some of Akiba’s more personal jottings. But as the drawer squeaked open, I realised with delight that it was his personal drinks cabinet. It contained not one but two bottles of Sake, as well as a single cut crystal glass. Why have two glasses when you had no intention of ever sharing your drink?
Sake! How I love the stuff, and, even now that I am in my nineties, I still treat myself to a daily tot. In the latter days of the war, good Sake was fantastically difficult to come by. It could not be bought for love nor money. Some friends back in Nagasaki had attempted to distil their own rice spirit, but it was so rough that the headache had kicked in long before I’d felt even remotely inebriated.
But this Sake, I could see from the label, was of the very best quality Kamoizumi. As stated earlier, it was in my nature to snatch up every gift the very moment it passed me by. Though perhaps I did have a tingle of what was about to befall us, for I was suddenly possessed by the most reckless abandon. I poured out three fingers into Akiba’s cut-crystal glass and, leaning back on his chair, I kicked my big seaman’s boots up onto the polished desk. I delighted at the sight of those ugly old boots on his black-lacquered desk; how that pompous piece of puffery would have exploded if he had seen me!
I had a stunning view of the Tenma River, the water so dazzling it might have been carpeted with jewels. I took a long sip of the Sake, holding it in my mouth before letting it razor down the back of my throat. It had been so long since I had tasted decent Sake that I had quite forgotten its soft kick, which seems to mainline those intoxicating earthy fumes straight to your brain.
How blissful it was to sit there with a glass of Akiba’s Sake in my hand, making myself at home in his spit-polished office. Was this, I wondered, how my indignant little master liked to spend his evenings, admiring the view and quietly filling out the interminable paperwork that came with rank?
In another drawer, I found, of all things, a number of red onions. I ate one of them there and then, stuffing the wispy peelings into my pocket. And even six hours later, as I tried to dig Sumie out of the rubble, I could still smell the onion on my breath; just a tiny reminder of my life before Little Boy.
I found some personal files and was leafing through them. There was one with Motoji’s dour face clipped to the cover. Along with all his service details, there was a single word summary at the top: ‘Diligent’. I snorted in derision.
My own file, complete with a similarly wan photo, was a little further down the pile. Akiba had used two words, not one, to sum me up: ‘Lazy. Insubordinate.’ Perhaps he knew me better than I thought. I helped myself to more Sake, delighting in the rainbow hue of the cut crystal.
It was just after 8am and I was gazing out over the port waterway that once had been so brimful of activity. An old man was rowing across the river, squat arms as rhythmic as a marionette. His wife was with him at the back of the boat, trawling for their supper. Like many of the people I saw that day, I never found out if they survived the bomb. They were just another fleeting glimpse of humanity before Hiroshima’s slate was wiped clean.
Akiba was into the room so fast that I did not even have time to get my boots off his desk. One moment I was staring out over the dock and the next the door had exploded open and striding into the office was Akiba in all his martial grandeur. I was so startled that I dropped the glass of Sake. It smashed on the floor as I whipped my boots off the desk.
Akiba, small and perfectly turned out in his crisp khaki uniform, was so wild with rage that he could barely speak. Behind him, cringeing in the common room like some malign toad, I could just make out the hunched figure of Motoji.
I quickly got to my feet. I still had one of the files in my hand. I returned it to the desk and then, not knowing what else to do, stood to attention.
“You!” Akiba shrieked, slowly stalking the desk towards me. “You dog! You devil!”
I continued to stand at attention, eyes lightly focused not on Akiba but on the wall ahead of me. I wondered what, if anything, to say.
Akiba cracked me across the face with the swagger stick that he carried for effect. “Get out from there! Get away from my desk! Get away! I could shoot you on the spot!”
I moved around the desk and was about to quit the room. “Close the door!” he screamed past me. Then to me: “Stand there! Stand there! Don’t move!” He was pacing now, up and down by the window, backwards and forwards, slapping his swagger stick into the palm of his hand. He was so agitated that he was still wearing his army cap.
He suddenly noticed the shards of cut-crystal grinding beneath his boots and howled with rage. “My glass!” he said. “You drank my Sake! You broke my glass!”
He was more annoyed by that than anything else. He started thrashing me about the head with his stick. “You will pay for this! Dog! You piece of filth! You whoreson!” He was stamping his feet with rage as he lashed at me over and over again. “I will see you court martialled for this. I will have you shot! I will shoot you myself, you treacherous cur!”