Free Fireflies by Ben Byrne Page B

Ota’s bookshop again, wondering if I dare steal a bound copy of Zola’s L’Assommoir . Two painters were working at the building next door, and I overheard the drifting words of their conversation. To my surprise, they were discussing the meals they had once enjoyed most at this time of year. Toasted mochi filled with chestnut jam! The crispness of the shell, the wonderfully sweet paste within . . . The other waxed lyrical about the pressed mackerel sushi he had eaten as a young man in Osaka — the vinegar tang of the silver-blue fish! The rice plump and sweet on the tongue! My mouth began to water. I recalled a strange pining that I’d had for persimmons as we had sailed on our long voyage back to Japan, a craving that had seemed, at times, almost overwhelmingly intense, the memory of the fragrant juice, the soft, mottled flesh transporting me back almost beyond childhood . . .
    I strolled over to the men and studied them as they worked. Their faces did not seem bitter or weathered, I thought, despite the cold. Rather, they were radiant, transported, transcendent even. They were dreamily happy, lost in the innocence of their memories. A thought struck me. I had a sudden inkling of what I might write.
    ~ ~ ~
    Nakamura and Mrs. Shimamura agreed straight away that the plan was a good one. We would sell fantasies.
    Mrs. Shimamura summarised things very cogently. She poured a glass of her clear spirit and pointed at it.
    â€œLook,” she said, “if you can’t afford saké, you have to settle for this.”
    I agreed, reaching for the glass, but she snatched it up and tipped it against her lips, swallowing with a grimace.
    â€œWhat I mean is, if you can’t have the real thing, you have to settle for its substitute. If you can’t find food, you’ll have to settle for stories about it. That’s what you’ll sell in your magazine. But you’re missing a trick, sensei — the most important fantasy of all.”
    â€œPlease enlighten us, obasan.”
    â€œSex.”
    I asked her what she meant.
    â€œWell. It used to be the only thing that was free, wasn’t it? But not any more. Think of those trollops in the back alleys. They hoard it up like stingy peasants do with rice, and only dole it out to those who can afford it.”
    I wistfully thought of Takara-san and the gaudy girls on the Ginza, rushing over to grasp the arms of the American GIs.
    â€œWhere’s the average man to find comfort nowadays? His wife’s most likely dead, and the only girls around are sluts. If he’s only got two yen, and a girl costs twenty, whatever is he to do?”
    ~ ~ ~
    I took Mrs. Shimamura at her word, and jam-packed our new magazine with every possible fantasy — epicurean, erotic, or otherwise — that might appeal to the ordinary Japanese man, so lately oppressed by frustrated desires. I wrote three stories interspersed with Nakamura’s drawings and cartoons — the usual erotic, grotesque nonsense we had grown up with.
    The first dealt with a soldier who, on returning home, finds that his wife has taken up with his neighbour. Soon enough, he is incapable of arousing himself in any other way than by spying on them from behind a screen.
    The second was a more monstrous variation on the theme. A man is forced by circumstance to take work in a brothel, mopping the stained floors and laundering the sheets. He learns that a new girl, a real beauty, is to start work the next day. An uncanny thought comes into his mind, and he hides himself under her bed that night. The next day, the presumed beauty comes in with an American soldier. They throw themselves onto the bed and start heaving and cavorting. Aroused, the man’s fingers creep into his pants, and, as the bed rattles and shakes, and the girl approaches the heights of her ecstasy, he cannot help but participate in her delerium. “With the roar of a mountain lion,” the American completes,