Free Fire Flowers by Ben Byrne

angry at squalid stalls surrounding the plaza. Civilian eyes avoided us here too, I noticed, and I longed to shed my winter uniform, writhing now with lice. But the evening was bitterly cold, and so I buttoned my woolen overcoat to the collar, pulled my fighting cap down, and, overcome by an almost exquisite weariness, began to trudge, disorientated by burned-out streets and unfamiliar vistas, toward Asakusa, town of rainbow lanterns and sleepless sparrows: my spiritual home.
    My letters to my honourable mother from the camp on New Guinea had gone unanswered for many months. Finally, I had received a crumpled note from her fellow harridans at the National Defence Women’s Association, which informed 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 that day. “Across the mountains, corpses heaped upon the grass!”
    â€œCongratulations on being called to the front, honourable son,” my mother had wept. “Your father would be 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 pockmarked edifice of the Matsuzakaya, an Occupation bus stenciled with the name of an American city roared up alongside me. It expelled a group of boisterous soldiers, who raced over to what seemed to be a low cabaret further along. Painted girls in cheap kimonos advanced upon them, squealing and clutching at their arms, tugging them through the door of the club like kappa imps dragging wayfarers down into the marsh.
    Suddenly, I started. One of them seemed very familiar. The short hair, the white oval face, the jet-black eyes that I once knew so intimately—
    Satsuko Takara. The girl who had once appeared to me the embodiment of a beautiful Asakusa Park sparrow. I hobbled over to the other side of the road before she could spot me, a jeep blaring its horn as it swerved in its path.
    From the opposite curb, I stood and stared across the road. Satsuko Takara. My brief affair with whom had so scandalized my mother. The girl whose face had hovered before me during all those nights of malarial horror on New Guinea.
    Look at her now. In her prancing colours, hovering on the dimly lit street. However 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. Takara-san had visited our house, only to be turned away weeping at the side door. From upstairs, I had listened as my mother scolded Takara-san 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. Thank Heaven she hadn’t seen me. How would I appear now, anyway, even if I were to approach her? A frail ghost with hollow cheeks, returning so utterly broken by war?
    I smiled grimly as I watched, tormenting myself with the vision. 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.
    Â 
    To comfort myself, I took a detour via Kanda, intending to follow the river