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By Root 646 0

the pavement, allowed himself to let go, to drift for a moment; but drifting was bad, it allowed unwelcome thoughts to surface. Passing a once-elegant villa earlier, Joe had glimpsed a room empty of furniture, an electric cable hanging from the ceiling where a chandelier had spread its crystal wings. At the window a woman stared, unseeing, into the street. A bare room, a woman alone, waiting. Elsewhere, in another place, were waiting women being ordered to defend their country against the approaching Americans? Arming themselves, barricading their homes – vulnerable structures built not of stone and brick, but of more fragile materials. How do you barricade a structure of paper and wood?

He took another gulp of wine. Not far from vinegar, it still warmed his guts; it gave comfort.

50

Cho-Cho is often hungry, but she is also grateful: at least she is not in Tokyo, where American B-29s have efficiently fire-bombed the city to rubble. Here plants grow and birds sing. But she is hungry, a constant condition.

There is a haiku she recalls with wry nostalgia, written by a woman nearly two hundred years before, but some things don’t change – for example, yearnings in a time of shortage.

Once again to be in a world

of white rice.

The fragrance of the plums.

White rice! A memory. These days they get by on barley and potatoes; weeds. They gather and grind acorns.

Official bulletins told them sawdust could usefully supplement flour in a proportion of one to four when making dumplings. Once again they were eating silkworms, harvesting nourishment from sea grasses, trapping snails, frogs, grasshoppers. Fish had vanished. Eggs were but a memory, the hens too scrawny and listless to lay, until they went under the knife, giving up flesh, blood, gizzards, bones. Some said feathers could be stewed.

The government had been bullying them for years. Ministerial orders littered the landscape the way over-ripe fruit had once dropped from trees: one edict prohibited the production and sale of luxury goods, and overnight a whole range of what made life bearable for the well-to-do vanished from the shelves. Cho-Cho folded up her fine silk garments, stroking each one gently as if soothing a child before turning out the light. Then she put them away in a trunk, along with her glove-soft shoes, wrapped in tissue.

‘Oh, Suzuki,’ she sighed, ‘my beautiful French shoes!’

How could she continue to wear them now? Clogs had been designated ‘patriotic’; nothing else was seen on the street as people patriotically clacked their way to work on wooden platforms.

She missed her elegant footwear, the sensuous pleasure of fine fabric touching her skin; she felt that in some way she was being punished. Her sense of despondency shocked her: was she then so trivial, so frivolous, that mere lack of luxury was so important? She saw that Suzuki did not grumble; she had not complained even when widowed, but then Suzuki was always so busy, finding creative ways to extend the life of clothes, mending, patching, passing down garments from older to younger siblings; cooking or cleaning or worrying about one or other of her children. Without such distractions, Cho-Cho had only herself to think about, and she saw that solipsism was not comforting at a time like this.

Worse was to come. Offering restaurant menus above a strictly fixed price could land you in jail; it now cost her more to provide a meal than she could charge a customer. She closed the restaurant.

As the weather sharpened into wintry cold the Nagasaki black market cost of coal rose to almost 50 per cent above the official price. ‘And the problem,’ as Suzuki pointed out, ‘is that you can’t find any at the official price.’

Above all, Cho-Cho missed Henry, missed their talks, their arguments, the letters he received from America that had linked her vicariously to her child. After Henry died, Oregon had drifted away like a floating island, not quite real. There had been a note from the American woman, the blonde wife, widow, stepmother. She seemed friendly and Cho-Cho had replied, but then came