A few women muffled their laughter; the crowd held its breath, fear slowly loosening into a nervous curiosity. Finally, the soldiers’ hands slid from their rifle barrels. “Okay.” They smiled warily. “Tomodachi.” They returned a thumbs-up.
Tomodachi. Friend. What a word to use, Masaharu thought. He turned to his wife. An odd expression was crossing her face, the soft light he knew well skewed by it. He glanced at her hands; they were resting on her bundle as still as polished stones. A chill climbed to the base of his head.
“Will you be late tonight?” she asked, startling him.
“You know Tomita,” he grumbled, and pulled on his cap.
* * *
—
THEY PARTED at the gate. Masaharu took a few steps, then slid into the milling crowd, looping his way back. Spotting her familiar shape, he wondered at himself. Should he visit Tomita after all? He picked his way after her, picturing Tomita’s room, trapped in the quiet of a house its widowed owner had begrudgingly let him. There was no way he’d be there, cooped up on a clear Sunday. Which meant, given his own luck these days, there was a chance his wife could run into him. Would Tomita know to cover for him? She disappeared into the day. Masaharu quickened his pace.
Outside, business was in full swing, the sundry peddlers vying to entice the GIs in search of cheap souvenirs. Melted green glass, uniforms looted from military stockpiles, pipes assembled from antiaircraft shells: these days everything sold as defeat curios—even missing limbs, thought Masaharu, dodging an ex-soldier displaying his stump for alms. Beside him, a brassy woman in a Western-style dress lit a cigarette no doubt supplied by one of her American customers. She languidly appraised him as he passed. The unglamorousness of her life was evident on her skin, rough with makeup that did little to mask her plight, but even for Masaharu, who’d never been one to buy his pleasure, the knowledge that he’d been stripped of that privilege rankled him. He looked away, fixing his gaze on his wife’s head swinging this way and that as she peered at every sooty orphan. Masaharu thrust his hands into his pockets.
The fact was, no matter how she might feel, they had searched for Seiji, scouring the Tokyo streets strewn with dead wires and glowing cinders, clumps of blackened bodies spoiling in the heat. And at first he’d been hopeful too, angling and digging for information, glad for once to be a journalist, which had brought nothing but trouble for his family. But as the days passed, and the damage became clearer, he found himself wavering. True, Seiji’s missing body was a hopeful sign in the midst of the dead and dying who continued to fill the school grounds where they’d begun volunteering, stoking the pyres and gathering the bones. But unlike his wife, who seemed bolstered by the task, Masaharu couldn’t subsist on hope alone, savoring stories of unlikely reunions, perilously sweetened by the words of Seiji’s teacher, who’d once come running, claiming to have spotted him blistered but alive.
Spring turned to summer, and the sun, unimpeded by roofs and trees, began hammering down, chipping away at their collective morale already worn by the maddening buzz of the flies, the ripening stench of the corpses, the dips and flares of hope unbearable in the heat. Even his wife sank into a stupor, a prickle of desperation showing in her new, unfocused irritability. And yet, for her, the future continued to hover like an open road; that Seiji could appear on it haunted her. They stayed on, the unadmitted skipping away like a stone.
Then, one night, as he watched the bonfire cremate the latest B-29 carnage, his wife appeared beside him, her face lit by the heat of the dead. “Do you believe Mori-sensei really saw him?”
The question startled him; it was the closest she’d come to expressing any doubt. He picked up his rod and poked at a half-charred body still too waterlogged to burn. Like so many others, this corpse too had gorged on a river or pond, disbelieving that it had roasted to death. “I suppose nothing’s impossible,” he said carefully. “But in terms of Mori…” He didn’t rehash the teacher’s recent disappearance, her madly shorn hair scattered like a parting gift in front of their makeshift tent.
“And you?” his wife asked. “What about you? Do you think Seiji…”
Masaharu gazed at the crackling pyres glowing like mystical landing lights. “All I can say for myself is that I’m glad it wasn’t you.”
Instead of shunning him, she had touched his arm and left to pack their things.
* * *
—
DRAWN BACK by the noisy street, Masaharu noted with a start that the distance between them had shrunk. He slowed and wiped his face with the handkerchief he realized he’d taken from his wife. Should he or should he not seek out Tomita? He felt sheepish slinking after her like a mole.
At an intersection, his wife paused. Looking left and right, she turned onto a narrower street flanked by shuttered businesses, where only one store flushed with prewar colors. His wife stopped and joined the gathered crowd. Masaharu eased into the throng.
Lacquered mirrors and combs, elaborate entertainment kimonos—he couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen such luxuries openly displayed. No doubt they were props consigned for resale by high-class geishas and actors, but even with the discount, which was probably considerable, he couldn’t imagine who could afford them. Perhaps a popular yōpan prostitute catering to foreign servicemen. Why his wife, of all people, had to gawk like every other woman was another matter. Behind him a camera clicked, and a foreign reporter scribbled in a notepad. Masaharu could already picture the headline—WAR-TORN WOMEN SEDUCED BY COSMETICS—his wife’s face splashed beside it. He pushed into the crowd, craning to see what she was so captivated by. To his shock, his eyes locked with hers in the window’s reflection. He jumped back, lunging into an open doorway behind him.
Had she seen him? The bell above the missing door tinkled as he flattened himself against the inside wall of what had obviously been a confectioner’s, its broken counter once full of delicate sweets. He peered around the empty window frame. The crowd was shifting, newcomers replacing the old; his wife was gone. He rushed into the blinding street.
* * *
—
HAD HE known the consequences, would he have pursued her? This was a question Masaharu would find himself asking from time to time until the end of his life. Looking back, he’d retrace these steps, searching for those moments when he might have turned back, behaved differently.
But here was the end of the intact street; beyond it, a vast wasteland, rusty girders grazing in the ruin. Masaharu shook out his wife’s handkerchief and wiped the grit that had accumulated around his mouth. Ahead, his wife was negotiating a path someone had cleared in the rubble. She disappeared behind a block of crumbled buildings. He hurried after her.
To his surprise, he found himself emerging onto one of the main thoroughfares bisecting the city’s amusement district. Once closed by the government, the district was bustling again, its shuttered storefronts gaudily made over in Western style, the now segregated bars and dancehalls thriving despite postwar shortages. Tawdry gangsters, inebriated GIs, rich businessmen profiteering from the war: the streets were lively, petty spats constantly in the making. Masaharu picked his way through the crowd, avoiding groups of hollering soldiers snatching at passing women. Ahead, his wife picked up her pace. Waving to a pack of street kids clearly familiar to her, she crossed the street and disappeared in front of a rickshaw bearer, deftly avoiding a pair of swaggering soldiers whose height and girth reduced Masaharu, not a small man, to the size of an adolescent. He widened his stride, resisting the urge to run.