Free Fire Flowers by Ben Byrne Page A

to Asakusa-bashi and then 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 the shelves for a while 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 greatcoat—the pocket flaps at least were conveniently large.
    What a relief it was, when I finally turned down a ruined alley and saw a red lantern glowing in front of the Montmartre—Mrs. Shimamura’s bottle shop. A lump swelled in my throat. The light was like a glowing beacon, a lonely 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, still wearing her famous white dress; though, as I came closer, I saw to my dismay that her cheeky 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 loyal, lifelong patron?”
    She stared at me, 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 ghosts, crawling about the city seeking credit 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. Hunched over the counter sat a skeleton with a drink and a sketchpad. It was him all right! 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 bayoneted to death by loyal children of the emperor; aircraft carriers 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 mulled this over for a few moments, and then remarked, philosophically, that the emperor himself had told us that we must endure the unendurable, after all.
    I politely inquired whether Nakamura was still producing illustrations for
Manga
. He gave a ghastly grin, displaying many broken teeth, and, as I hoped, called to Mrs. Shimamura to pour us two glasses of the house spirit, in order to “welcome me home.” I thanked him politely and poured the drink into my mouth.
    For a