Free Fireflies by Ben Byrne

I were to approach her? A frail ghost with hollow cheeks, returning so broken by war?
    I smiled grimly as I watched. At last she claimed her prey: a boyish American with spectacles and a thatch of wiry hair. As she dragged him down the steps, I turned and strode quickly northward. If a girl as proper as Satsuko Takara had fallen to such depths, I thought, then things must truly be bad.
    ~ ~ ~
    To comfort myself, I took a detour via Kanda, intending to then follow the river to Asakusa-bashi and walk up the Sumida from there. Most of the booksellers were gone, their volumes apparently incinerated in the conflagrations of March. But Ota Books was still standing, and I browsed inside in a forlorn attempt to get warm. To my surprise, I found a copy of Crime and Punishment on the shelf, the first I’d seen in years. I flipped open the frontispiece and saw the ex libris stamp of the Sorbonne University. A pit opened in my stomach. Another one of my dreams the war had put paid to.
    Mr. Ota shuffled out, armed with a feather duster. I greeted him hopefully. He stared at me as if I were a stranger. I asked if any of the old haunts or bars were still open — the Café d’Asakusa perhaps, the Dragon, or the Montmartre — but he told me that all but the Montmartre had been destroyed in the air raids. As he hobbled outside to bring in the boxes, I quickly slid the novel into my overcoat — the pocket flaps at least were conveniently large. I followed him outside.
    What a relief it was, when I finally turned down a ruined alley and saw a red lantern glowing in front of Mrs. Shimamura’s shop. I paused in the street and stared, a lump swelling in my throat. The light was like a glowing beacon, a forlorn torch to welcome me home. I pulled aside the curtain at the entrance, and there it was, almost unchanged since the old days. The big map of the Paris arrondissements was still up on the wall, and there, polishing glasses behind the counter, was Mrs. Shimamura herself, wearing her famous white dress; though, as I came closer, I saw with dismay that her old rolls of fat had shrunken now to wrinkled folds of skin.
    She didn’t know me either, at first. As I took my old stool up at the bar, I wondered if I could truly have appeared so altered.
    â€œ Obasan ,” I said. “Forgive my presumption. But might you extend a note of credit to a returning soldier — and to a lifelong, loyal patron?”
    She stared at me with a dim flicker of amused recognition in her eyes.
    â€œRegrettably, sensei,” she replied, “since the war ended, there have been so many hundreds of hungry and thirsty patrons, crawling about the city seeking notes. Perhaps sensei would better off talking to his friend Nakamura-san, whom he must surely recognize sitting at the end of the bar?”
    I turned and saw him, hunched over the counter with a drink and a sketchpad. It was him all right, though he seemed almost a skeleton now. Nakamura and I had been in the same French literature class at Keio; we had even once thought about producing a Sensationalist pamphlet together. But while my stories had withered on the vine, his drawings had won so much acclaim that he had been hired by the noted magazine, Manga , at the outbreak of the Pacific War. I remembered his cartoons well. They grew more and more barbarous as the war progressed. Allied soldiers being bayoneted to death by loyal children of the emperor; aircraft carriers being destroyed by whizzing Zero fighters; not to mention his celebrated masterpiece, The Annihilation of Britain and America . . .
    Naturally, I was overjoyed to see him sitting there, just as in the old days. As I slid over to him, he gave a sickly smile and quickly turned over his pad to hide whatever it was he was drawing. I asked him what there was to drink nowadays, and he told me that the only thing available was a rotten blend of distilled shochu dregs mixed with aviation fuel to give it a kick. I