The Street of a Thousand Blossoms Read online

  “Is it worth the lives of so many?” his grandfather asked, his voice low.

  Kenji watched Tokuda-san lean forward, his face inches away from his grandfather’s. “It’s what our divine emperor believes, and what we as a nation must also believe. Yoshio, you’re beginning to sound like one of those young hikokumin.”

  Kenji held his breath. He didn’t know how his ojiichan would react to being called a traitor. He thought Tokuda-san a stupid, insensitive old man. It was widely known that the son of Uncle Taiko’s cousin, the painter Wadao Miyami, had refused to paint propaganda art for the war effort and was imprisoned as a traitor. A month ago, the kempeitai came for him in the middle of the night and he remained in prison, awaiting trial.

  Then Uncle Taiko cleared his throat and said, “All this talk is making me thirsty. It’s my turn to buy.”

  “There’s nothing left to buy, no rice for sake,” Tokuda-san then said, his voice lighter. “Isn’t that right, Yoshio?”

  Kenji saw his grandfather’s slow smile as he took a breath and released it. “No, there’s very little left.”

  By late fall, as the war intensified, the government allowed some theaters and movie houses to stay open, as long as they showed movies made by the Home Ministry. His ojiichan called them propaganda films, false illusions of what was really happening. Kenji asked him what he meant, but his obaachan shook her head and answered, “Don’t listen to everything your ojiichan says. He has a mind of his own.” Yes, Kenji thought, with admiration at his singular strength, his ojiichan never let anyone sway his thoughts. He spoke his mind at the bar; he built the wooden watchtower with his own hands, and bravely faced the loss of his sight.

  Kenji began to pay closer attention to the life around him. He noticed that in the past few months, men who weren’t customers had been coming to the mask shop to see Yoshiwara. He knew they weren’t actors by their darting gazes, their soiled, thin cotton kimonos bought cheaply from small side-street shops off the ginza, the agitated movements of their hands. Mostly, they were abrupt and sullen, whispering to Yoshiwara and then leaving quickly.

  “Who are they?” Kenji asked, the last time they’d come to the shop.

  “Acquaintances,” Akira Yoshiwara answered, without looking up from his work.

  “Not actors?”

  Yoshiwara laughed. “No, not actors,” he said. “Other important characters in the theater of life. They’ve come to tell me that the kempeitai have been sending their military police to theater performances. If they see or hear something they don’t like, anything deemed unpatriotic, the show is stopped.” Yoshiwara shook his head. “They’ve been closing down more and more theaters.”

  “But the Noh plays are centuries old! The stories are classics.”

  “It makes no difference, the human condition doesn’t change. They can read something into anything, if they want to.”

  Kenji nodded. So these men were agitators, the kind that he heard his ojiichan and his friends speak about at the bar.

  “They make you unhappy,” Kenji said. He didn’t like the way they looked, their bleak, serious stares. After visits from these men, Kenji saw Yoshiwara turn quiet, returning to his masks, saying little the rest of the afternoon.

  Yoshiwara’s gaze turned serious. “They’re art students. They remind me that there’s a world outside of this room,” he said, holding an unfinished mask in front of his face.

  Kenji stared hard at him and asked, “Will you have to go fight soon?”

  Yoshiwara lowered the mask. “It’s nothing you need to worry about.”

  “But everyone is leaving.”

  “I won’t.” Yoshiwara smiled.

  Kenji continued. “But sensei, my ojiichan says everyone of age will be called up before this war ends.”

  Yoshiwara rose from his stool. “Kenji, like the men you’ve asked me about, I don’t believe in this war.”

  Kenji was stunned. He knew his old ojiichan wasn’t happy with the war, but he’d never heard younger people speak such words aloud. He didn’t understand. If it wasn’t the right thing to do, why was the entire Japanese nation behind it? He remembered Yoshiwara receiving a letter one day, which he quickly read and tore up, mumbling angrily to himself that he would never leave his shop. Kenji started to ask what was wrong, but Yoshiwara turned away and began working on a new mask, putting an end to the subject.

  From then on, Kenji worried. What if someone from the neighborhood associations heard Yoshiwara and told the kempeitai? He would be accused of being a hikokumin and taken away to prison like Uncle Taiko’s nephew. Kenji never asked about the men again, and tried instead to concentrate on the masks.

  Each evening before dinner he ran upstairs to his and Hiroshi’s room, slid the door closed, and studied from the book of masks Yoshiwara had given him. He heard Hiroshi and his ojiichan downstairs listening to a sumo match on the radio, his obaachan in the kitchen taking bowls down from the shelf. Since the Pacific war had started, fewer and fewer matches were being played, though the remaining bouts were broadcast with bravado. Kenji read on. Tomorrow there would be another set of questions from his sensei. He always tried to imagine what they would be ahead of time. “How many Noh plays have been written?” About two hundred and fifty, he answered in his head. “What are the five categories they’re grouped in?” Kenji was ready; they were God, man, woman, madness, and the demon. A roar of voices came from downstairs, cheers for Yokozuna Futabayama, who was still the undefeated champion. Even though Kenji didn’t pay much attention to the sport, he was happy to hear Hiroshi and his ojiichan find such pleasure amid the war. He turned from page to page with the greatest care, and marveled at the intricate drawings. He studied how the simple strokes of the chisel could add subtle frown lines to the forehead of a Ko-omote, a young girl’s mask, changing it to an older female, a Zo-onna mask. Each drawing was masterfully done, not one detail forgotten. He turned the page and read on. “The Kyogen masks are mostly demons and trickster animals, like the raccoon dog, used in plays that offer comic relief between the drama of two Noh plays …”

  He stopped reading and dreamed of the first mask he would complete on his own—a Ko-omote, like the one Yoshiwara-sensei had taken him through step by step. Her simpler, smooth features would be less complicated. The greater depth would be left to the actor behind the mask to bring alive. Yoshiwara-sensei wanted him to know everything about Noh before he was allowed to make a mask. The more Kenji read, the more he felt the need to begin. But what if he wasn’t meant to be a mask artisan? It was one thing to want to do something, another to have the required skill. “A living thing,” he whispered to himself and closed his eyes. That was how the wood felt in his hands, like something he was bringing to life. His hand closed around an imaginary chisel and he could feel it move through the wood in clean, confident strokes…

  “Kenji-chan,” his obaachan called, breaking into his thoughts. “Come down to dinner!”

  Kenji opened his eyes. “Hai, obaachan,” he answered, closing the book and tucking it carefully under his futon. The sharp stab of hunger returned. He heard the roar of his grandfather’s voice as Futabayama must have won yet another match, and followed it like happiness to the kitchen.

  Fumiko Wada

  Each morning since the Pacific War began nine months ago, Fumiko Wada waited in long lines just to obtain a cup of rice, a bit of tofu. She stood with all the other women hoping this was the morning there would be more food for them to purchase with their ration coupons. Sometimes, an unexpected shipment of dried fish or seaweed came in and the women pushed forward like a violent wave, eager to purchase some before the box was empty. Such difficult times made Fumiko creative, tucking small pieces of salted fish or pickled vegetables into the middle of rice balls. She watched the faces of Yoshio and her grandsons at dinner as they bit into the small surprise. But over time, the rice balls became smaller and smaller with nothing in the middle but a bit of red bean. Soon, she stopped making the rice balls and put the mea
ger scoops of rice into bowls, hoping it might appear more, or she made omoyu, a rice porridge, which consisted mainly of a watery soup.

  Later, when there wasn’t any rice, sweet potatoes became their mainstay, or an occasional kasutera, a thin, loaf-sized sponge cake, made of sugar, eggs, and cake flour. It was always Yoshio’s favorite, and a luxury she brought home from her friend Ayako-san’s bakery. Through barter and trade, Ayako’s bakery stayed open and flourished. Long lines formed outside her bakery before dawn when the rich smells of baking bread and kasutera filled the neighborhood. Ayako set aside a cake or two for her every week. In return, Fumiko took apart several kimonos and sewed them into monpes for Ayako and for her daughter, Mikiko. As the war progressed, women were ordered to wear the wide-legged pants and a top instead of kimonos for more mobility. Most women wore khaki or muted-colored monpes now. Any clothing that had overly bright colors or a sense of frivolous elegance was prohibited. She also stitched together several of the cotton padded head coverings they were supposed to wear in case of air raids as protection from falling debris. Fumiko had been an expert seamstress since she was young, and was happy to have a way to repay Ayako for her kindness.

  By late October, the mornings grew colder. After hours of waiting in ration lines, Fumiko visited the bakery, where she would sit with Ayako over a cup of hot tea, just as she had for the past forty years. Even the war couldn’t change this ritual. Ayako felt the same and left Mikiko at the counter to sell whatever baked goods were left to the long line of women and children waiting.

  Fumiko shook her head. “Maybe we should meet later,” she said, seeing the length of the line. She knew how tempers flared when food ran out—women stealing from each other, pushing and shoving to get a share of the food, taking whatever they could in order to feed their families. And she couldn’t blame them one bit.

  “Don’t worry,” Ayako whispered. “Miki-chan knows how to gently turn them away when we run out of anything to sell.”

  Fumiko watched Mikiko bow respectfully to the next woman in line then followed her friend to the small kitchen in the back. On the stove a pot of soup boiled. She smelled seaweed and the sweet scent of miso, and her stomach clenched. On the floor, Mikiko’s five-year-old son, Juzo, was playing with his metal trucks. When he saw Fumiko enter with his grandmother, he stood up and bowed low to her.

  “Juzo, what a good boy you are.” Fumiko smiled. She bent down and touched his cheek. With all the bad in the world, there was this child before her, a spark of joy for her dearest friend, who had lost so much in her life. Still, Ayako always saw the good in things. “Between us,” she often said, “we have three boys.”

  Ayako Sugihara was Fumiko’s first and oldest friend in Yanaka. She had told her grandsons they had met the moment she stepped off the train in Yanaka from Hakodate, newly married to Yoshio. “Ayako was standing on the platform, as if she were waiting for me,” Fumiko remembered. “Actually, she was waiting for her new sister-in-law, whom she’d never met, and had mistaken me for her. You can imagine how surprised I was to have this young woman bowing to me with such respect. I bowed back low and we’ve been great friends ever since.”

  “Where was her sister-in-law?” Hiroshi asked.

  Fumiko smiled. “Ayako later found her. But they’ve never gotten along well. I was the lucky one. I was the first one to receive her friendship. I don’t think my life here would mean so much without it.”

  But the boys had already lost interest.

  Besides, Fumiko knew that the strength of her friendship with Ayako was based on things she couldn’t tell her grandsons. She found Ayako a remarkable woman, to have survived the deaths of two husbands, along with their shared pain of each having lost a child. She always believed the gods had them meet for a reason. While both of Ayako’s husbands died before her, it was their mutual understanding and grief that came from the death of their children that bonded their hearts and spirits.

  A year before Yoshio and Fumiko arrived in Tokyo, Ayako had come to Yanaka from a small village near Kobe to marry. By the age of twenty-four she was already a widow, and the arranged marriage with Masaru the baker was to be her second. While her family rejoiced that her fortune had changed, that Ayako would have another chance at love and a family, she felt numb to everything and everyone. Ayako’s child with her first husband, Kyoshi—a son—had been stillborn. After his death and her marriage to Masaru, six years went by and she remained barren. They had long given up on having children when Mikiko was conceived.

  Now, since the start of the Pacific War, Ayako spoke more of Kyoshi, who had been killed fighting at Mukden. His death, she told Fumiko, seemed like another life. “I was another person, just a girl. I don’t know if he’ll recognize me in the other world now,” she said, pouring another cup of tea for Fumiko. “How will he know it’s me looking so old?” Ayako asked, and then pulled out a worn sepia photo of her first husband, a thin, good-looking young man.

  “I’d like to believe that we’ll all meet again, that we’ll see each other as we did during our best times,” Fumiko said, sipping her tea.

  “He didn’t want to go,” Ayako continued. “We were married less than a year when he was called to serve in the army. I remember he said to me, ‘Aya-chan, I’m not a soldier; I’m a husband, a farmer. I want you always to remember me in that way.’ I thought it would only invite bad spirits for Kyoshi to speak like that and I quickly made him stop. But it was too late. All these years, I have honored his wish. I will always remember him as my husband and a farmer.”

  Fumiko cleared her throat. She couldn’t imagine what it would have been like to lose Yoshio in Mukden. “You have had the good fortune to have a family, to have such a fine daughter in Mikiko.”

  “Ah yes, but like a foolish old woman, I still think about the family I might have had with Kyoshi,” Ayako said. “And what of Masaru, will he be waiting for me in the other world, also?”

  Fumiko looked up and smiled but didn’t have an answer for her friend. She never thought what it might be like for Ayako to have both of her husbands waiting for her in the other world. Would they know each other? Would they be standing side by side waiting for her?

  Masaru was a mild-mannered man whose talent for baking cream cakes was known throughout Yanaka and beyond. He was already forty when they married, and had died in 1938, at the age of sixty-four. Since then, Ayako had run the bakery with her daughter, whose husband had left for the front two months ago. Mikiko and Juzo were the joy of her friend’s life. Together, mother and daughter baked kasutera three times a week, or until they could no longer get enough sugar and eggs to continue.

  Ayako took down bowls from the shelf above the sink. “Have some soup.”

  Fumiko shook her head. “No, it’s for your lunch.”

  “There’s more than enough.”

  She watched her friend ladle the soup into three bowls and place one in front of her. For a moment, Fumiko closed her eyes and wished she could share this with Yoshio and the boys. It felt somehow a betrayal that she should savor it when they had none. If she could pour it into her pocket and take it home with her, she would.

  Then, as if Ayako knew what she was thinking, she said, “Yoshio and the boys will be fine. You need to keep up your strength to help care for them.”

  Fumiko smiled, sipped the fragrant soup, and felt the salty warmth slip down her throat. As a child, she had disliked soup. Her mother used to tell her how the broth held all the ingredients to make one strong in body and spirit. Fumiko would slowly sip her soup as her mother told her the story of the woman who was so poor she collected stones off the Izu peninsula in order to make soup for her family. She would boil the stones in water for hours, and, magically, each night her family filled their stomachs with a soup tasting of salted fish and seaweed, or miso, or red bean—each night it would be different, yet no less filling. Fumiko had loved that story and couldn’t wait to drink her soup each night afterward.

  “Besides,” Ayako said, breaking
into her thoughts. “I have a little something else for you to take home.” She opened a cabinet and pulled out a package wrapped in thin brown paper. “I’ve saved the last kasutera for you,” she said, smiling.

  Fumiko put down her bowl, and then, like Juzo, she stood up and bowed very low to her friend.

  At dinner that night, Fumiko smiled sadly and said, “I’m afraid this will be the last of the kasutera. Ayako can’t get any more fresh eggs, not even through the black market. She tried to bake with powdered eggs from Shanghai but the kasutera didn’t taste the same. She hopes to start baking bread for sandwiches starting next week.”

  “Ayako will always find a way to stay in business,” Yoshio said. “She has the strength of ten.”

  Fumiko nodded. She watched as they all ate their kasutera slowly, relishing each bite. Yoshio looked up and caught her eye, his smile a little sad as he swallowed his last bite of cake.

  5

  Hunger

  1942–1943

  Every day after school, Hiroshi walked home through the Yanaka ginza. Even before he reached the Kyo-ou-ji temple, he heard the bells, the low moans of chanting that hummed through the neighborhood, and breathed in the sharp sting of incense. A funeral was being held. Since the war began, steady streams of the dead were returned to families in Yanaka. Hiroshi saw his obaachan shake her head and lament all the spirits of the missing that would never find their way back to their loved ones. “Obake,” she whispered. Ghosts. The first person killed from Yanaka whom Hiroshi knew was the sixth-grade teacher’s husband. He remembered the simple coffin draped with the Japanese flag that came off the train, the same red sun that blazed on the sash across his chest as he stood on the auditorium stage just before he left for the war. Whereas it seemed to glow with heat as he stood before the crowd to say goodbye, the same red sun now hid itself in shadows as the coffin was carried into the station.