Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [117]
And they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning-hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.
As a child in church he had heard the familiar words declaimed, but Isaiah never got round to helmets.
In one broad plaza the crumbling walls are covered with handwritten notices on grubby scraps of paper. He slowly identifies the kanji characters, picking out the frequently repeated ‘mother’ and ‘home’. Next to him an elderly man points to a sign, begins to translate, but here is a chance for Joe to practise his Japanese, newly polished from training camp immersion. He reads one message aloud, ‘Your brother waits for you.’ And, slowly, from another : ‘Your mother waits at sunset each day . . .’
He too has sent messages, not scrawled on torn paper but carrying the same hope of a response. The letters, via the military grapevine to Nagasaki, have gone to Suzuki, hers the only address he has.
Rain has washed the words away on some notices, the ink blurred as though by tears, the fluttering paper the sound of a thousand unheard voices.
He has been fighting off a sense of horror since he got here; drawn and quartered again, pulled in different directions. Where does he stand in this dead land, the land of his birth, where a smell of burning still rises from the rubble? Where people are starving. Is he among the victors and the generals or is he one of the conquered and slain? Where does he want to be? Where might he be, now, if Nancy had not scooped him up and carried him away?
The streets are crowded with cycle rickshaws, there are carts pulled by horses or oxen. A few taxis powered by charcoal wheeze past, billowing smoke. The city seems enveloped by fog, and people wear improvised mouth masks to ward off the choking fumes. Threading through the traffic, moving fast, bouncing over potholes, are the jeeps of the occupying force. The troops look startlingly bright-faced, healthy, clean.
Further off, gutted factories stand, empty, their broken chimneys smokeless. On the horizon, with a shock of pleasure and surprise, he picks out Mount Fuji, the purple-yellow of a half-ripe plum, a scarf of cloud swirled at its peak, recalling the Hiroshige woodcuts he had pored over in Mr Murakami’s hut. This is a sight newly revealed to the city: until they were bombed flat, tall buildings would have hidden Fuji from view.
When darkness descends, with no street lamps left standing, acetylene torches from roadside stalls beam lurid brilliance on to the nearest faces; the passing headlamps of Occupation vehicles throw moving silhouettes against the walls as the lights from cars had done long ago when Joey sat on the steps of his grandmother’s house and watched the homeless men tramp past, outrun by their shadows.
There are hot dog stands run by and for the Eighth Army on corners of the Ginza, where silver coins were once minted. Locals silently watch as GIs grab burgers and orange frank-furters in long bread rolls. They do not beg, they simply stand and watch. This is their town but the hot dog stand is an outpost of America: Japs not served.
Joe knows already that he is not permitted to buy an item and hand it straight over. Nothing pristine can be passed on; first he must take at least a bite, to render the roll ‘left-over’. The insensitivity of this repels him, and he finds a way round it: buying a hot dog he breaks it in two and hands half to a grey-haired man, half to the woman by his side.
‘Tsumaranai mono desuga.’
The traditional phrase hardly seems appropriate: the ‘trifling thing’ he is asking them to accept could be their only food today, but they accept it silently, with a dignified inclination of the head to express their thanks.
Everyone knew who was in charge of the Occupation; the picture had gone round the world: the tall US general, relaxed, hands on hips, towering over the defeated Emperor, Hirohito standing blank-eyed, stiff as a doll. A god defeated by a gaijin: MacArthur.
Not everyone