Read Online Fireflies by Ben Byrne - Free Book Online Page B

coastline. But the soldiers sensed something amiss as soon as we clambered down the gangplank to the damaged harbour: the shops were empty, the populace unwilling to meet our eyes. From the dock, I watched as three old warhorses, their ribs showing through wan hides, were led stumbling from the dark hold of the ship, unused to the bright light of day. A young man in a grubby vest approached the stableman immediately to haggle for their withered flesh.
    We were shunted toward Tokyo in a cramped train full of poisonous smells and sour faces. The city had clearly taken a smashing. Its ribs were showing too; its carcass was open to the sky. Tokyo Station swarmed with fellow returnees wrapped in thick greatcoats, lying in clumps, or drinking, red faced and angry in the squalid stalls around the plaza. The eyes avoided us here too, I noticed, and I longed to shed my woollen winter uniform, writhing now with lice. But the evening was bitterly cold, and so I buttoned my drab overcoat to the collar, pulled my fighting cap down, and, overcome with an almost exquisite weariness, began to trudge, disorientated by the burned-out streets and unfamiliar vistas, toward Asakusa, town of rainbow lanterns and sleepless sparrows: my spiritual home.
    My letters to my honourable mother had gone unanswered for several months. Finally, I had received a curt note from her fellow harridans at the National Defence Women’s Association, informing me that Madame had died of tuberculosis three weeks before, despite an almost complete excision of her lung. It seemed of little use, then, to return home now. With my mother gone, the main house would revert to the distant Osaka branch of her family, and I held out little hope of much assistance from them. They had long ago let me know how much they disapproved of my dissolute lifestyle, even after I had received my red call-up papers.
    â€œAcross the sea, corpses soaking in water!” the radio had sung. “Across the mountains, corpses heaped upon the grass!”
    â€œCongratulations on being called to the front, honourable son,” my mother had wept. “Your family is so proud of you.”
    I wandered up the shabby remains of the Ginza. The stores were mostly shuttered and those that were not lay empty and bare. As I passed the ravaged edifice of the Matsuzakaya, an Occupation bus stencilled with the name of an American city roared up on the other side of the road. It expelled a group of boisterous soldiers, who raced over to a low cabaret that had been set up next door. Painted girls in cheap kimonos advanced upon them. They squealed and clutched at their arms, tugging them through the door of the club like kappa imps dragging wayfarers down into the marsh.
    I stopped suddenly and screwed up my eyes. One of them seemed very familiar. The short hair, the white oval face, dark eyes that I once knew intimately —
    Satsuko Takara. The girl who had once appeared to me the embodiment of a beautiful Asakusa Park sparrow. My brief affair with whom had so scandalized my mother. The girl whose lovely face had hovered in my mind during all those nights of malarial horror in New Guinea.
    Look at her now. In her prancing colours, hovering on the dimly lit street. How had she ever fallen so low? Never had she been a zubu , a bad girl, like the crop-haired nymphs who hung stockingless around the Asakusa theatres. She had been a delight, a sweetheart. No more, no less.
    I writhed with embarrassment as I recalled my mother’s coldness to her on the day of my leaving ceremony, when Takara-san had visited our house, only to be turned away, weeping, at the side door. I had listened from upstairs to my mother scolding her for her impudence — intent upon packing my cases, too cowardly to descend.
    A sharp feeling of guilt flared inside me as I studied her from the darkness. Lice crawled beneath my cap, and I felt a hopeless sense of destitution. How would I appear to her now, I thought, even if