In another part of the city, twelve kilometers away, his hero who has used him is hunting his comrades, unable to distinguish peace from war, friend from foe, past from present, because for him, nothing has changed, one oppressor replaced by another, and there is no end to the storm of frustration blinding the eye of his fearful heart.
WITNESS #7: THE RŌJIN
TOKYO METROPOLITAN POLICE DEPARTMENT, MAY 3, 1947, 14:00
Eh? Covered in boils, you say? There are hundreds of him in the Heavenly Curtain House of Dump, all mottled-faced Jean Valjeans, Product of a Defeated Japan. I myself may not be much to look at, with all but my two front teeth missing and half my nose restored with this piece here whittled from the finest spruce, but I’ve traveled to and fro, lived my share of tragic lives, seen my share of tragic sights, heard my share of tragic stories—from murder to love-suicide to the great fires dropped from the sky, forever transforming us into centipedes, wrapped in our foreigners’ castoffs. High in the sky, there is a chirruping bird…Know that song?
It’s from forty or fifty years ago, before our country embarked on this stormy path that elevated war to page one, money matters to page two, relegating vital affairs such as gardening and women’s topics to page four. But you say you want to hear the true goings-on in the streets today? For a small donation, I’ll tell you the latest about a lonely bean sprout biding his time while two students and a woman bicker about the fate of a locked-up boy fabled to have attempted the life of a foreign general come to lead the people with counterfeit coins.
Big waves, small waves endlessly rolling on
Ceaselessly echoing the sound of the sea
From time to time, that tune drifts in through the holes in my brain, its refrain like a message from another world where I was surely a priest or a great judge or an important town crier…
Q. I’ll ask you one more time. What were you doing on the afternoon of April 29, 1947?
On April 29, he’d woken in the predawn, curled against a concrete step, spine pressed against the back door to a restaurant he didn’t recognize. He wasn’t hurt, just stiff, his shoulders and hips locked, his toes a clump of marbles. A pinprick pulse ticked above his eye; later, the pulse would root and bloom, beating like the heart of a bulimic flower disgorging its scarlet petals, but right now he was functional, better than functional, the day soft and pliable. Around the corner, a shutter lifted, the ruckus of metal and keys evicting the night. In five hours, he’d greet the roaming rōjin; in six, he’d visit the students; in seven, he’d meet Furukawa. But right now the day’s, the night’s, the week’s, the month’s logistics were not yet a concern. Across the street, someone muffled a giggle. At this hour, night still loitered in the streets, children were still pimping their sisters for the Occupation troops, used condoms still floated in the gullies, but the sun was leaking over the horizon, the panpan prostitutes were collecting their mixed infants, the patrolmen were rousing the drunks. It was early, and he’d been woken by a dream. It was his first proper dream in months. Kiyama, Sato, and Konomi with his parents at his old home, waiting to surprise him. He never got to see the surprise, but he’d felt their warmth, a white cocoon that continued to cocoon him now as he walked down the half-lit street toward the Sumida River moving like a serpent, its oily back spangled orange and yellow, the ghost of the fire that had once raged over these waters leaping to lick the bodies that had tumbled toward it. Usually, he beat at these sparks of memory that threatened to consume him, but today he let them flare, a conflagration of feelings.
That March night, just before the air raid, he’d been restless, hunger and irritation goading him to leave his house after curfew to knock, like his peers, on his rich classmate’s door. Nobody had liked that classmate, an arrogant brat who’d sailed on the coattails of his military father, but since the air raids began the brat had surprised them, siphoning food from his parents’ pantry and doling it out to anyone desperate enough to break curfew and risk arrest. Word was the brat wept the whole time, jumping at every sound, but he never confirmed this, his first and only foray cut short by the air raid siren, its red wail, like a sinking foghorn’s, mourning the coming end. In many ways, he never left that moment, halfway between his classmate’s house and his own, his stomach frozen midplunge as he realized what was happening. Of course he’d run, thoughts of his parents blotting the map of the air raid shelters they’d taken pains to imprint in his brain. But he never made it home; the whistling sky opened faster than he could run, and his neighborhood erupted. And for the first time he witnessed the calculus of the universe express itself with an algebraic simplicity even he understood: in his selfishness, he’d disregarded his parents’ one rule—never leave after curfew—and they’d been taken from him.
He’d never questioned this logic, not until this edge of daybreak, with the reddening sky, reminiscent of another time, stopping him in his tracks. Because he’d gone there, hadn’t he? Weeks later, when he finally had the strength, through the charred streets to his old school, his family’s emergency rendezvous point. The largest concrete structure in the area, the school was still standing, its battered face encircled by a necklace of rubble. Oddly, the gates were intact, the metal grates swung open, a lone woman absurdly directing a line of survivors through them.
At first he didn’t recognize her, her frazzled hair standing on end. Then he did, the gentle tilt of her head giving her away. For a moment, he was riveted, the mirage of his pretty teacher springing his heart. When she looked up, her eyes leapt, her yapping hands turning apologetic as she detached herself from the gates to hurry toward him. But something was wrong; there was a shadow on her face, even though there were no trees left, nothing to cast shade. She smiled, and her hair lifted, an unlikely flash of summer, just before he saw what it was: a split in her face, her left side as lovely as ever, her right denuded of eyebrow and eyelash, her skin, once the envy of every girl in class, wormy with welts. She was a few steps away when her mouth opened. What words, what news, would she impart? His world narrowed to the shape of her lips, the sound of his parents’ fate held there; his body jerked back. One step, two steps. Then he was running, his teacher’s confused shouts dissolving into a commotion of noise before they had the chance to cohere in his ears. But what had she said? He strained to hear the ghost of her words tunneling back through the static of time. Because she’d said something. Her urgent voice lifting not in pain, he realized now, but wonder, perhaps even joy, as his body retracted and his mind swiveled, away from her face, away from the school, away from the line of survivors emitting a putrescence he’d finally, finally, recognized as death.
FOUR
THE VISITOR
He came around noon, this man, this soldier, who called himself Murayama. At first I thought he’d come, like so many in those months after the war, to beg for food, or inquire after the whereabouts of someone I may or may not have heard of, but this soldier, this Murayama, had come clutching a piece of paper, looking for our son, Yasushi.