The Street of a Thousand Blossoms Read online

  While most of the able-bodied men had been drafted, women of all ages filled the streets. The poor became poorer and begged on the streets for scraps of food. Women stood on corners asking other women for stitches to be added to a family member’s sen’ninbari, their thousand-stitch belts made from long pieces of woven cloth. His obaachan explained that grandmothers, wives, even small daughters rallied around the popular talisman, which was thought to protect a soldier from harm. Each stitch embodied the woman who stitched it. When enough stitches were gathered, the cloth belts were distributed to troops to protect them from being killed. While the protective belt gave each soldier a renewed sense of courage, it also filled the women back home with the hope that their loved ones would return safely to them.

  In the swarm of bodies standing outside the boarded-up Takahara dry-goods store, Hiroshi thought he saw Mariko and turned shyly away. He hadn’t seen her in months. Ever since the bombing of Pearl Harbor, she’d stopped practicing her cello out in the backyard. Just before the start of the Pacific War she’d been accepted into the Tokyo Symphony, and it was rumored that she was engaged to marry another member of the symphony, a viola player, until he had been called up to fight. When Hiroshi turned back to search the faces for hers again, she was gone. He remembered his obaachan saying that Mariko was one of the many single women working in factories to replace the men. He couldn’t imagine the same long, thin fingers that played the cello so beautifully sorting oily aircraft parts, or packing munitions in an assembly line.

  Hiroshi stopped abruptly when he heard the yelling, though raised voices were common enough on the streets these days. All too often, voices rose with a frantic edge, and he could usually distinguish the degree of trouble by how loud the voices were. Across the road he saw two women waiting in line, fighting over a piece of dried squid. It fell to the ground as they clawed at each other and a third woman snatched it from under their noses and ran. He heard the thud of boots, the clink of the swords against their legs, before he heard the breathless shouts of “Stop now!” from the kempeitai, as the crowd quickly scattered. But the desperate women paid little attention. Hiroshi knew this would anger the military policemen and move them to cruelty as they roughly pulled the women apart and slapped them hard across their faces. The blood rushed to Hiroshi’s head as he backed up and turned away from the pleading women, their screams cut short by more slaps. His heart hammered in his chest, not so much from fear as from anger. He would have been arrested if he had interfered. Always, the same questions turned over in his mind. Who did they think they were? What made them change from regular men to the kempeitai, men who seemed just as bad as the enemy?

  When the rationing began in 1940, it wasn’t so difficult for Hiroshi’s obaachan to still put food on the table with sufficient rice to provide sustenance. But after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the American embargoes stopped everything. Now, a full year later, Hiroshi couldn’t remember the last time they had had any meat or fresh fish to eat. He and Kenji ate more and more slowly, trying to make what little they had in their bowls last longer. He’d never felt this way before, this hollow gnawing in the middle of his stomach, the dull throb of hunger. There’d never been a time when his grandparents hadn’t kept them safe and well fed. Now, Hiroshi watched the pinched expressions on his grandparents’ faces and felt everything was being rationed: even joy and happiness came to them in small doses now, while fear and dread of the war and their increasing hunger weighed heavily on everyone’s minds.

  Most mornings, while his obaachan waited in ration lines, Hiroshi’s ojiichan procured whatever he could on the black market through friends at the bar. Sometimes, he would get lucky and return with a few real eggs or cans of marinated eel. Still, it never seemed enough, and when the Pacific War began, it had dwindled to next to nothing. Hiroshi could see that the failure had discouraged his grandfather, who appeared frail and lost; his eyes blank and lifeless. He spent more and more time up in the watchtower, alone.

  But while his ojiichan grew more remote, his grandmother couldn’t stop moving. On one warm April morning, as Hiroshi hurried home to retrieve a forgotten schoolbook, he saw his obaachan leaving the house carrying one of her favorite kimonos—the pale green silk with a flowing pattern of purple irises—which she quickly tucked into a furoshiki.

  “Hiroshi, are you all right?” she asked, her voice rising with concern.

  “I’m fine, obaachan. I just forgot a book. Where are you going with your kimono?”

  She paused and then asked, “Is a kimono’s beauty more important than food on the table?”

  It took Hiroshi a moment to realize what she was saying. One by one, she was selling her best kimonos—for more rice, canned food, powdered eggs, half a dozen sweet potatoes, and some precious salted fish and miso. He also knew there would be penalties if she were caught by the kempeitai; another woman’s small rice ration was taken away when she was caught selling her kimonos on the black market. His grandmother’s courage frightened him, made him want to hover over her and protect her. He glanced down at the furoshiki clutched tightly in her hand, and grieved for the soft touch of the kimono’s silk, the vibrant colors and bold patterns of his grandmother’s youth. He silently vowed to get them all back for her, each and every one.

  If his ojiichan had found solace in the stars, his obaachan put her energy into the soil. By the spring of 1942, it became mandatory that each household in the neighborhood plant a vegetable garden to supplement the rationing. The neighborhood associations were given seeds to distribute to each of the households under their jurisdiction, while the kempeitai made rounds to make sure each family was doing its share, taking advantage of the opportunity to make off with the best vegetables. Every square foot of dirt was tilled and planted, with hopes of producing enough food for the neighborhood.

  As the demand for food increased, Hiroshi watched his grandmother kneeling by the patch of earth in the front courtyard, while she hummed the folk songs that she sang to them as children.

  “It reminds me of my childhood,” she said, instructing Hiroshi to water each sprouting plant. “Not too much,” she directed.

  “I didn’t know you were such a gardener.”

  “Your great-grandmother had the gardener’s touch. I believe she could bury a pebble and something would bloom from it.” She rubbed the dirt from her hands and pushed herself up from the ground.

  Hiroshi helped her to her feet. “Just think what her daughter will grow with real seeds,” he said.

  She looked at him and smiled, then reached up and patted his cheek. “How did you grow so tall and strong? With so little to nourish …”

  “Because of you,” he said, laughing. “You have the gardener’s touch.”

  Hiroshi liked working in the garden, digging down into the earth and dropping the small seeds, always amazed that with a bit of watering, the strong stems would rise from the plot of dirt no larger than a tatami mat. It gave him hope that miracles could still happen. Funny how he’d paid no attention to that patch of earth before, and now it produced vegetables that the kempeitai picked over, leaving only some spinach and the few turnips that graced their table. He felt overwhelmingly proud the first time they sat down to eat their own wilted leaves and soft turnips.

  And while he and Kenji often helped their obaachan in the garden, Hiroshi knew his ojiichan was frustrated that he couldn’t do more. His eyesight was failing, shadows now, Hiroshi thought. It seemed his ojiichan was disappearing more and more into his own world. The last time his grandfather tried to help, he accidentally stepped on some newly sprouted shoots. He heard the distress in his grandmother’s voice as she said, “No, Yoshio, no! Perhaps you should stand over here.” She took his arm and led him away like a small child. Now every bright spring morning, when Hiroshi went up to the tower to fetch his grandfather down to help in the vegetable garden, his ojiichan refused. He never ventured near it again.

  By the warm summer evenings of 1942, they ate in silence. Hiroshi list
ened to the empty clink of the bowls and decided he had to do something to appease their hunger. He watched his obaachan ladle a watery stew made of the last of the turnips and carrots on top of his half bowl of rice and felt whatever happiness he’d had slowly dissipate. His obaachan placed the bowl in front of him, her gaze avoiding his. Hiroshi remembered her wide smile when he was a little boy, as she told him how each bite of food would make him bigger and stronger, filling his bowl with choice morsels of fish, chicken, and thin slices of beef. He remembered the laughter, the buzz of all their voices humming through the kitchen. Now as his obaachan hardly ate, he knew she was saving her little bit of rice for him and Kenji.

  Like their grandparents, he and Kenji learned to battle their hunger in different ways. Lying on his futon at night, Hiroshi slowly came to see that the war and rationing were depleting not only their bodies but also their spirits. He saw that when there was so little, everything mattered, and even fantasies provided nourishment. While Kenji lost himself in his theater books, Hiroshi dreamed of sumo, of what it might have been like to enter the Katsuyama-beya and become a champion. Sometimes these small hopes and dreams helped to divert his thoughts from his empty stomach.

  On other nights, he and Kenji lay on their futons in the dark and faced their hunger head-on; they would remember something they particularly loved to eat, describing it so vividly that Hiroshi’s mouth watered and his stomach ached from the want of it. Kenji was especially good at description.

  “Hiro,” Kenji whispered from his futon. “Tonight, if there were no war, we would have eaten obaachan’s sukiyaki. The bowl would be steaming hot with the shoyu, sweet rice wine, cabbage, rice noodles, carrots, and chunks of tender chicken still boiling to the top. You would have eaten three bowls of rice and ojiichan would have teased you about leaving something for the rest of us.”

  “So then,” Hiroshi added, “ obaachan would return to the kitchen and bring out a plate of pork cutlets, fried crunchy the way you like them.”

  “And more steaming rice, with layers of marinated eel on top. Red bean cake, for dessert.”

  “And orenji,” Hiroshi added. Just saying the full, round word “oranges” made his mouth water. He tried to remember the last time a wedge of sweet juice exploded in his mouth. Then he groaned at the dearth of such food, and the hunger that clenched at his stomach. A sourness rose in his mouth and he covered his head with his comforter.

  Persimmons

  It began with persimmons. Afterward, the stealing became easier, though much more dangerous. Hiroshi had stolen a dozen rotting persimmons from the yard of their neighbors the Odas. The kempeitai had taken all the rest, leaving all the rotted fruit scattered on the ground. Such waste seemed careless and arrogant, even though his grandparents might have done the same thing prior to the war. By late 1942, nothing could be taken for granted and the idea of waste filled Hiroshi with anger. Before the Odas dared to come out, he climbed over the fence and took as many as he could carry, at least a dozen. Three for each of them. That’s the way he thought now; it was always “how many were left?” and “how long would it last?” until the rice was gone, until the miso ran out, until they were reduced to eating turnip soup. He would make it up to Oda-san another day, he thought, as he ran with the decaying fruit in the pocket of his outstretched T-shirt, sticky and wet against his stomach, as the juice ran down his arms and hands, and the sickly sweet smell stayed with him for days after.

  Long before the war, the tall persimmon tree with its large leaves bloomed brilliant shades of yellow, orange, and red in the Odas’ yard every fall, the dangling fruit like shiny lanterns. The children in the neighborhood called it the kurisumasu tsuri, the Christmas tree. Now the real gift was the smile on his obaachan’s face as she caressed each one of the rotting, sticky fruits. She then made a persimmon pudding out of them, never once asking where they came from.

  After the persimmons, he stole a can of pickled vegetables, snatched from a black marketeer when he turned his back, a few carrots left in someone’s vegetable garden, and a container of fresh tofu from Okata-san, their neighbor down the block, who was rumored to be a puppet of the kempeitai. Early on, Okata volunteered to lead the neighborhood association. No one suspected he would betray his friends and neighbors for extra ration coupons, or a carton of cigarettes. It was said he had turned in a neighbor for having as little as a cup more of the allotted rice.

  Hiroshi was exhilarated when he set the tofu in front of his grandmother. Stealing from Okata felt better than any wrestling match he’d ever won. His obaachan watched him, a glint of fear in her eyes. “No more,” she said softly. And Hiroshi nodded, because he knew it would put her mind at ease. But he wouldn’t promise to stop stealing if it was the only way he could help them survive. So he told her a funny story, to tease her out of her seriousness. “You look as if I’ve come home with the lowest grade in the class,” he said easily. Gradually, she smiled, but not before pleading with him again to be very careful.

  108 Evil Thoughts

  Every night as they lay on their futons, Hiroshi whispered a new story to Kenji. He had stolen from Okata again, and not just anything but a box of New Year’s mochi, sticky rice with red bean in the middle, given to Okata by the military police for his exemplary service as head of the neighborhood association. “I heard everything,” Hiroshi said. “I was waiting just outside his kitchen window. When Okata showed them out, I took the box of mochi off the table and walked right out.” Hiroshi snickered and spread his body full length on his futon. “He shouldn’t leave his back door open.”

  Kenji could feel his brother smiling in the dark. With Hiroshi next to him in their small room, it felt like the safest place in the world. How could everything change so quickly? The once vibrant streets of Yanaka had turned gray and drab, the bright-colored cloth banners hanging from shops torn down, replaced with blackout curtains or black inked-out windows. Everyone walked around like hungry ghosts, while he moved carefully down the alleyways to the mask shop. But what Kenji hated most of all was the noise—the air-raid sirens that blasted in the early hours of the morning and brought them outside, shivering as they squeezed into a makeshift air-raid shelter, the high, scratchy voices that came over the radio, the whimpering ones begging for food in the streets, and the low, worried whispers between his grandparents that hummed through the house like persistent flies.

  Just yesterday, Kenji had turned down a quiet alleyway, away from the noise and crowds, lost in his thoughts. A sudden, high-pitched shriek made him glance up; two kempeitai stood not ten feet away, watching something on the ground and laughing. A terrible burning smell rose through the air and a squealing sound came from a small twitching heap on the ground. Kenji hesitated, put his hand over his nose, and kept walking, thinking he might draw more attention to himself if he suddenly turned back and went the other direction. If he could just make it past them, the mask shop wasn’t far.

  “What are you looking at?” one of the men turned and snapped at him.

  Kenji bowed quickly and kept his gaze downward, heart beating as he walked faster. He heard the men laughing but didn’t dare look up. When he was far enough away, he turned back, saw them kicking the small bundle on the ground, a rat, he guessed from the long tail that twitched as smoke rose from the dark, convulsing creature. Kenji turned around and felt sick to his stomach as he hurried away. He never said a word about it to anyone.

  Kenji shook his head in the darkness of their room but couldn’t tell his brother what was really on his mind. He was proud of Hiroshi, but even more so, he was afraid for him.

  “What did obaachan say?” he asked.

  “Nothing. I haven’t given the mochi to her yet. I told her I would stop stealing.”

  Kenji swallowed. Like his obaachan, he didn’t want his brother stealing anymore, taking chances that might get him hurt or in trouble with the military police and taken away to prison. Even his brother’s skill and speed as a wrestler wouldn’t help him then. For as long as
Kenji could remember, Hiroshi had never backed down from what he believed. It was what he admired about him, and also what he feared. If his brother’s life were a Noh play, Hiroshi would be an Ayakashi, the warrior who returns to earth to avenge his family and good name. Yes, Hiroshi would always be the avenger. Kenji could see the mask now, the sharp piercing gaze and dark flowing beard. He’d also come back and seek the love he’d left behind. Kenji’s mind wandered and he wasn’t sure how long they had remained silent until he recaptured his train of thought, breathed in deeply, squared his shoulders, and whispered from his futon, “I think you should stop stealing, before something really goes wrong.”

  There, he had said it. When Hiroshi didn’t answer, Kenji waited in the darkness of the room as the winter winds blew, rattling the shoji windows behind the rough blackout curtains. In the dimness, he reached out, let his fingers lightly brush against his brother’s blanket, his shoulder or arm just underneath. Kenji listened, until beyond the rattling, the soft sounds of Hiroshi’s even breathing let him know that his brother was already asleep.

  The Shogatsu or New Year of 1943 had passed quietly. His obaachan cleaned house but there were no decorations, no going to visit the shrines or friends, and no traditional three-day holiday filled with toshikoshi soba, the buckwheat noodles Kenji loved. Ozoni, the soup with mochi, was only a memory that left his stomach aching. Hiroshi gave his obaachan the box of Okata’s mochi, but only after he solemnly promised never to steal again would she allow them to be eaten.