Free Fire Flowers by Ben Byrne Page B

moment, I thought my throat was going to explode. I somehow managed to swallow the poisonous stuff, and promptly felt as if my eyes were bleeding. I tugged at Nakamura’s sleeve to see what he was drawing. He tried to hide the pad, but I gripped hold of the paper and tugged, until suddenly it tore.
    My, my. What an evolution. No foreign barbarians here: instead, a Japanese soldier (who bore a remarkable likeness to Nakamura himself) bowed in thanks to a titanic American with a colossal pair of scissors, who was triumphantly snipping the man free of chains that tied him to a pile of tanks and bombs. I laughed long and hard at this, and told Mrs. Shimamura that we’d better have two more glasses of her awful liquor to celebrate Nakamura-san’s new career. I banged my glass against his.
    â€œWell, Nakamura,” I said, “‘
À l’oeuvre on reconnaît l’artisan
.’” I poured the horrid stuff into my throat, and instantly slid from the chair.
    Â 
    Painful waves beat relentlessly against the quick of my brain. A sensation of helplessness—paralysis. Someone was pounding on the door. I was no longer in a stockade cell on a poisonous island, I realised, nor in the dark bowels of an oceangoing ship. I was somewhere I knew, somewhere as intimately familiar as the womb. Slowly, it dawned on me—with exquisite relief. The room above Mrs. Shimamura’s shop. Reserved for customers to sleep off their night’s excesses. The banging came again, and my panic rose as the door slid open.
    Mrs. Shimamura poked her head into the room. “Time to go, sensei. I’ve laid out your breakfast.”
    The thought of the crowds swelling around Tokyo Station filled my heart with fear.
    â€œObasan, perhaps I could ask you . . . ”
    â€œDon’t be a pain, sensei—”
    â€œPlease, obasan—”
    Disgusted with myself, I broke into sobs as I knelt before her. “For just a few days, obasan. Please! I beg you.”
    Mrs. Shimamura’s face crinkled. She hesitated for a moment. I sensed victory.
    Kind and noble obasan. She would let me stay—for just a few days. I was expected to carry out several duties in the bar. I was not expected to sit around the place pickling myself in sake lees.
    I stayed on my knees as she strode from the room. I sank back into the soft blankets and closed my eyes. The crowds at the station, the waves of refugees casting about and crashing against each other . . . They were far away now. Here, I was safe, hidden upon my lifeboat, bobbing about on a quiet inland sea. The sky was flowing with the stars of the Milky Way.
    Â 
    The artists who had survived the war were emerging now from the cracks, crawling like valiant cockroaches to the refuge of Mrs. Shimamura’s saloon. Every night, around the hour of the dog, the bar filled up with various writers, journalists and assorted poets I had known before the war, as well as the usual students and hangers-on.
    My greatest need now was for money. With my mother dead, I was one of the few of the intellectuals with no private income of my own. I discussed the matter with Nakamura and a yawning Mrs. Shimamura one afternoon. What was the role of a writer, I asked, in a world that had fractured so entirely? How could he ever respond to such devastation? And how, I gloomily thought, was he ever to scratch a living? Every crevice had already been swept, it seemed, the dust rolled out into dough. We truly were distilling the dregs.
    The following morning in Kanda, I was browsing Mr. Ota’s bookshop again, wondering if I dared steal a bound copy of Zola’s
L’Assommoir
. Two painters were hoisted up alongside the building next door, working upon its restoration, and, as they slopped whitewash on the brickwork, I overheard the drifting threads of their conversation. To my surprise, they were discussing meals they had once most enjoyed at this time of year.