The Street of a Thousand Blossoms Read online

  His grandmother turned slowly, as if she had suddenly lost all strength, and braced herself against the wooden table. “What you don’t understand, Hiro-chan, is that there are many ways to see,” she said.

  Kenji padded into the kitchen a moment later. They stood and watched as his ojiichan swung once, twice, each time connecting with wood, a grunt coming from deep inside him. His ojiichan was tired, straining to lift the hammer, blow after blow, cracking the last of the main beams with a final booming strike. Hiroshi heard a faraway dog barking and knew the entire neighborhood must be awake.

  “Shi oeru,” his obaachan said to them. “Now it is finished.”

  His ojiichan’s hands trembled as he dropped the sledgehammer to the ground, stepped back, and bowed very low toward the watchtower. Hiroshi didn’t move. He was reminded of being a little boy and knocking down all his blocks with one clean sweep of his arm. The watchtower had stood for all these years, a symbol of his childhood and his grandfather’s strength. Silently, they waited for the fall.

  What Hiroshi would always remember was how the watchtower refused to fall. There would never be any explanation. It only happened when the kempeitai arrived to tear it down, and their voices rose to a frantic pitch as they scrambled away from the area of the weakened tower. Only then did the support beams suddenly creak and splinter, give in to the weight as the watchtower bowed to the ground. And not in pieces like his childhood blocks, but as a whole—like a body slowly falling.

  Fortitude

  By late spring, Hiroshi and Kenji began digging an air-raid shelter where their ojiichan’s watchtower once stood. Unlike all the slit trenches Hiroshi and his classmates dug along the roads, this was his most ambitious undertaking yet, a hole in the ground large enough to accommodate all four of them. An underground room with walls carved out and held up by pieces of wood scrap, and a roof made from a piece of corrugated metal he found behind Fukushima-san’s boarded-up sembei rice cracker store. For days, he and Kenji dug, deeper and deeper, excavating dirt and rock, and building up a three-foot dirt wall on all four sides. Every morning his muscles were so sore he could hardly lift his arms, and Kenji moaned at the thought of digging again. But by the end of the week, the air-raid shelter, a three-by-six rectangular pit, was complete.

  The air-raid sirens screamed with more frequency now; at least once a week in the early hours of the morning, the Americans targeted strategic spots—airports, factories, and munitions warehouses—mostly located outside of Tokyo’s residential areas. Still, every time the sirens blasted, the family dragged themselves from their futons and into the shelter, listening for the dull thuds of bombs falling in the distance, feeling the rumble of the earth beneath their feet, waiting until the all-clear signal sounded, and wondering how much longer it would be until the bombs reached Yanaka.

  Akira Yoshiwara

  Akira Yoshiwara packed only what he needed. He reached up for the tin behind the paints and pulled out the envelope of yen notes and slipped it into his pocket. It was an already hot August morning when Nishihara, one of the young artists, came stumbling into the shop just after dawn, breathless and fearing for his life. Most of the artists had been rounded up by the kempeitai, and he had escaped, just barely, only to come and warn Akira that they were on their way to take him in for questioning. There was no time to spare.

  “How did they find out?” Akira asked.

  Nishihara shrugged and poured water into a clay cup, drinking it down too quickly. “They’ve been watching us from the beginning,” he said, coughing.

  The stupidity of it all, Akira thought, though he kept silent. He’d gotten caught up in their youthful exuberance, and his own belief that the war was senseless. Now, it had caught up with him, and after Otomo Matsui had used his influence to keep him from being drafted, he packed the ivory cat given to him by Matsui, his set of chisels, and an unfinished Okina mask in the middle of his bag of clothes, a reminder that he needed to return to finish it. He looked around the small shop, bright in the sunlight, where he had lived and worked for the past fifteen years. At first glance, it might have appeared just as bare and empty as when he first entered it, but Akira knew otherwise; the past three years had brought Kenji—and new life—to it.

  He thought of how the boy would come and find the door locked and him gone. Kenji was the perfect protégé, but now Akira might never know the outcome of his talent. He had also been the closest person Akira had to a family.

  He wrote a quick note for Kenji to find. “I must leave. No time to explain. Perhaps another day.” He didn’t write his name or anything else the kempeitai might use to find him. That done, nothing else mattered, except … “Nazo,” he called. He heard something from the other room and hurried back there. Nazo sat on the counter, waiting.

  “We have to go now,” he said, as if talking to another person.

  Nazo watched him, not moving. It was his right of refusal, though he had no say in the matter. Akira Yoshiwara scooped the cat up with one hand, grabbed his bag, and followed Nishihara out the door, locking it behind him. He left the note for Kenji wedged in the corner seam of the front window. Early on, the boy had spent so many hours standing there, gazing at the masks, it now seemed the right place, and one the kempeitai might miss in their abrupt way of seeing and not seeing. Akira knew there was only a slight chance Kenji would find the note before the military police arrived. Even so, he believed that life was made up of chances.

  Vanished

  The decision for Kenji and Hiroshi to leave for the countryside was settled. They would leave at the week’s end in the midst of the lingering heat. The week before, Kenji had heard his obaachan’s raised voice coming from the kitchen, bringing him and Hiroshi downstairs to witness a rare argument between his grandparents. Usually their disagreements were settled with a quick, sharp word that reverberated through the room and landed with finality. This time, the words streamed from his grandmother’s lips as if she’d been waiting all these years to release them. “Don’t be foolish, old man; do you think I would leave you here alone?” Her eyes blazed, her mouth snapped open and closed like a turtle’s at his suggestion of her leaving Yanaka without him.

  “I’m not a child,” his ojiichan answered.

  “A child would have more sense,” she added.

  His ojiichan cleared his throat and remained silent.

  Kenji’s obaachan would stay in Yanaka with his ojiichan and that was that. He could see the sweat glisten on her forehead. “Iie,” she said again, calmer and more definite. “No, not without you.” Her gaze moved past his ojiichan and out the window to the empty space where the tower had stood. “This is my home, too. The boys will be fine with Reiko-san.” It was final then, like a door slammed shut. His ojiichan sat back looking thoughtful, the shadow of a smile on his lips.

  The following morning Kenji hurried down the back alleyways to the mask shop. The air was already hot and still. He wanted to tell Yoshiwara-sensei he was leaving for the countryside in six days. In his schoolbag, he carried The Book of Masks to return to his teacher. Even as the war spun around him, Yoshiwara worked on creating his masks. He paid little attention to the hardships or to the orders given by the kempeitai, other than putting up blackout curtains. When the sirens blared, Yoshiwara simply closed the curtains and went back to work. So far, he’d been lucky the bombing never reached Yanaka.

  Besides the thought of leaving his grandparents, Kenji dreaded not working at the mask shop every afternoon, with its intoxicating smells of cypress wood and paints, the rhythmic lull of the sanding. The intricate painting of the masks had become his passion. Day by day, he learned a little more from his sensei, what Yoshiwara called the “hidden secrets” that would make him a mask artisan of distinction—the slight arch of an eyebrow, the thickness of the lips, or just how deep a furrow should cross the forehead. “Remember this, Kenji, there are many people out there who can make a mask,” Yoshiwara told him, “but not many who can make a mask come alive.”

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bsp; Kenji pushed at the door and was surprised to find the mask shop locked. The sun beat down hot and unrelenting on the quiet alleyway. He rapped lightly on the door and waited. In the three years he’d been apprenticing with Yoshiwara, his sensei had never been away from the shop for more than an hour or two, and only to buy paints or do a quick errand. Kenji knocked again, hard and loud this time, but all that greeted him was silence. He walked to the front of the shop and peered through a crack in the closed curtain, past the empty display window that once held the masks that still mesmerized him, and into the shadowy shop. He suddenly felt again like that boy who longed to hold those brilliant masks in his hands. After three years, he saw in his reflection that nothing had changed. Beyond the curtain was the same spare, dusty room, the same desire to be on the inside looking out.

  Kenji was about to turn away when a slip of white paper wedged into the corner seam of the glass caught his eye. He reached for it, unfolded the note, and recognized his sensei’s writing, the quick, elegant strokes in black ink that told Kenji he was gone. He stepped back slowly in disbelief. How could his sensei leave without telling him? Then, not knowing what possessed him, he picked up a rock and threw it at the window, shattering glass as he turned around and ran.

  The next afternoon when Kenji stopped by the mask shop again, he found the shop had been broken into and the door left ajar. The remnants of the kempeitai were everywhere, boot prints in the wood dust, the shop stripped of everything, his sensei’s equipment, the wood shelves, and even the clay teacups they drank from. The little left behind was in ruins, as if Akira Yoshiwara and his mask shop had never existed.

  Kenji’s hope of seeing his sensei again grew just as empty. As each day turned to dusk, Kenji felt increasingly sure that his teacher was gone for good; that the war had finally caught up with him. He wrapped Yoshiwara-sensei’s Book of Masks in an old sweater and packed it in the bag he was taking to the countryside. Each night before he dropped off to sleep, he invented explanations that placed his sensei out of harm’s way: Yoshiwara had left for the safety of the countryside. He had gone to visit his family, though Kenji never heard him speak of any. Or maybe he had been commissioned to carve a brilliant new mask in another district, and there was no time to leave him details. These thoughts were followed by a darker possibility. The kempeitai had heard that Yoshiwara was an agitator and had come to arrest him, but he had managed to get away before they came, or why else the note?

  Kenji grieved for his sensei and all the masks that might never be made. He saw them when he closed his eyes, felt the smoothness of the wood in his hands as his head spun with uncertainty. The last time he’d seen Yoshiwara, Kenji was hurrying out of the shop, late to go home again, knowing his obaachan would be worried. His sensei barely looked up from his work, and said as he always did, “Ashita. Tomorrow, then.” But then he glanced up and added, “Or the tomorrow after that.” Kenji wondered now how many tomorrows it would be. Or, did it have something to do with him? Kenji had never voiced these thoughts aloud, though they swam in the back of his mind. What was it about him that made the people he loved vanish into thin air?

  The Mountains

  Akira Yoshiwara parted ways with the young artist Nishihara at the train station. Separately, they could better blend into the crowd. The air was thick with humidity, making him wish he could peel away his skin. The noise of the station was unbearable—the chaos of frantic voices, metal grinding against metal, the nervous heat of desperation as he merged with the crowds and kept away from the kempeitai patrolling the platform. Nazo pushed against the cloth bag he carried and Akira loosened the tie just enough for the cat to stick his head through. “Not yet,” he said, as Nazo struggled to climb out. “As soon as we’re on the train,” he reassured, and the cat relaxed, narrowing his eyes at all the movement around him. Akira touched his pocket to make sure he had his money and travel voucher, bought at ten times the normal price. Still, he was lucky to get one on such short notice. It would have taken days if he hadn’t had the money to expedite things. When the man at the ticket counter had asked, “Where to?” he’d answered, “The mountains,” not caring where the train would eventually take him as long as it was far away from Tokyo.

  It wasn’t until Akira finally stepped off the train with Nazo in Oyama, hundreds of miles northwest of Tokyo in the Japanese Alps, that he relaxed. From the one-room train station, he emerged into the cool, thin air, which he breathed in hungrily. He walked through the small town of low wooden houses and narrow streets, framed by the tall mountains. Despite the quiet simplicity of the place, Akira felt unsettled. He paid an old man named Tomita with an ox and cart to take him farther up into the mountains, to the village of Aio, where the old man was returning. The madness of the war made him want to completely disappear.

  As the cart moved slowly up the mountain road, the air grew cooler, and the outskirts of the town gave way to a rutted road bordered by pine trees that blocked the sun and left the slow-moving cart in dark shadows. It felt as if he were stepping into another world, that Tokyo, the mask shop, and the war itself had all been a dream. Akira lifted Nazo out of the bag, set him unsteadily on the bed of the rough wood cart, where the cat hesitated, then lay down and stayed there for the rest of the journey, his claws gripping tightly to the wood. As the cart rounded the bend, Tomita pointed up the mountain. “See there?” he asked. “In the trees?” Akira stared hard among the large pines, until the dark outlines of houses with tall, pitched roofs appeared, nestled among them. The old man turned back and grew talkative, telling Akira they were called “praying hands” houses because of the appearance of the thatched gable roofs. “They’re said to resemble two hands pressed together in Buddhist prayer,” he added, with a toothless grin. He made a sucking sound and shook his head. “If you ask me, it’s for a more practical reason. It’s to keep the snow from piling up during the winter.” He waved his hand downward. “Slides right off the roof.” The old man laughed to himself. His family had lived in Aio for hundreds of years and very little had changed. “What brings a young man alone to a place like Aio?” Tomita eyed him and waited for an answer.

  “Illness,” Akira answered. It was the first thing that came to his mind. “I’ve come to the mountains to recuperate.”

  Tomita nodded.

  Akira had no idea if he believed him or not, but he was too far away from anyone or anything to care. The old man finally stopped the cart at the edge of the village, directed Akira to find a room at the second-to-last wooden building among a small cluster of others. “Behind the sake shop, they usually have a place to rent,” he said. He clicked his tongue and continued up the hill.

  As he stepped down from the back of the wooden cart, Nazo safely back in the cloth bag, Akira Yoshiwara saw a woman sitting by the side of the dirt road in front of the small dry-goods store. Her worn kimono, once the color of persimmons, was faded to a pale pinkish hue. She wore a dark scarf on her head and leaned forward over a wooden box. He mistook her for an old woman, until she looked up and the brightness of her eyes told him otherwise.

  “Turnips?” she asked, in a voice so filled with youth and hope, he thought it came from someone else.

  He followed her gaze to the wooden box, where there were two lone turnips. The pungent scent of decay drifted upward. Upon a closer look, he saw the brown spots of rot already staining the bottom of the box.

  “I’ll take both of them,” Akira finally said. He reached down and dropped several yen coins into the box. Then he picked up the turnips and walked toward the buildings, leaving the woman behind.

  The Countryside

  The night before they were to leave for the countryside, Hiroshi shook Kenji awake as they lay on their futons. Kenji was just drifting off to sleep and he pulled away from his brother, irritated.

  “I won’t be going to Nagano with you,” Hiroshi whispered. “I’m staying to work in a munitions factory with Mako and Takeo, right outside of Tokyo in Chiba. That way, I can still watch over ojiichan
and obaachan.”

  Kenji turned to face Hiroshi, suddenly wide awake. In the darkness of their room, he could barely make out his brother’s shadow facing him.

  “Then I’m staying, too.” Kenji insisted.

  Hiroshi paused. “No,” he said. “They need to know that you’ll be safe in Nagano.”

  “What about you?”

  He felt Hiroshi’s hand rest on his shoulder. “One of us has to stay,” he answered. “They’ll need help here, just in case of an air-raid attack or evacuation. Obaachan can’t handle everything alone.”

  “Then why can’t we both stay?” Kenji asked. He hated the way his voice sounded, childish and demanding. Couldn’t Hiroshi see? It was hard enough being separated from his grandparents after Yoshiwara-sensei’s disappearance, and now even Hiroshi was abandoning him.

  His brother took his time answering, and when he did, Kenji thought he sounded older, more like a father than a brother. “Ojiichan sees the future in us. You and I. If anything were to happen to us, there would be no future.”

  Kenji was glad it was too dark for Hiroshi to see he was straining against tears. “Isn’t that why we’re being sent to the countryside? To be safe.”

  “Hai, but I need to know that they will be safe here, too,” Hiroshi said. “Kenji, try to understand that this is for the best.”

  Kenji was embarrassed by his selfishness. How could he not understand that Hiroshi would always be the Ayakashi, the warrior protecting his family?

  “Hai,” he answered, his voice strong and clear.

  Train schedules were erratic. On the warm, August morning he was to leave, Kenji watched his obaachan light the thin, fragrant stick of incense in front of his parents’ photo, praying softly for him to have a safe journey. At fifteen, he’d never been farther from Yanaka than central Tokyo, and even then, never alone. He anticipated leaving with fear and excitement, a bittersweet edge that coated his stomach. He had assumed, like his grandparents, that Hiroshi would be going to Nagano with him. Instead, he would be going alone.