“Yes.”
“Okay. Tokyo Station, four o’clock.” There were other things to do on a Sunday afternoon. Bidding Hajime a fond adieu wasn’t high on Harry’s list.
“You’ll be there?” Hajime asked.
“Scout’s honor.”
Harry stopped a taxi, stuffed Hajime into the backseat and gave the driver two yen, which would cover the meter to anywhere in the city and clean a bloody seat. As the car moved off, Hajime stuck his head out the window. His eyeglasses were bright with theater lights, but there was something hidden behind Hajime’s expression, some nasty surprise tucked under his mustache or kept up his sleeve.
“ Tokyo Station, Harry.”
Harry gave the taxi a halfhearted wave. The car had disappeared in the crowd when Harry remembered the gun still in his belt. He kicked himself. A gun might be useful if Ishigami caught up with him, but Harry didn’t want to shoot anyone. It was against the law to possess a handgun, and his first instinct was to ditch it. The trouble was that a soldier who lost a weapon entrusted to him by the emperor could face a firing squad, which was a little stiff even for someone as unpleasant as Hajime. Now Harry really would have to see him again just to return it.
In the meantime, there was plenty to do. Harry’s part of Tokyo was Asakusa, and its theater row was lit with side-by-side marquees like Broadway. Life-size posters of samurai stood between cardboard cutouts of Clark Gable and Mickey Mouse. A customer could see Gable, go next door to a samurai film and end up at a newsreel theater to follow warplanes in action over China. Tall banners animated by the evening breeze invited the passerby to music halls like the Fuji and the International. The Folies, where Oharu used to dance, had been closed on charges of frivolity, but the Tokiwaza Theater still offered allfemale swordplay, and Kabuki had special devotees, prostitutes tattooed with the faces of their favorite actors. Fortune-tellers in tents with gnostic symbols read palms, faces, feet, bumps on the head. Food stalls sold sake and shochu, sweet-potato vodka poured into a glass set in a little bowl until both glass and bowl brimmed over. Asakusa brimmed over. It was set between the pleasure quarter’s thousand licensed women and the elegant willow houses of the geishas and was called the Floating World in part for its evanescent, irrepressible quality. It was also called the Nightless City. Harry watched police with short sabers stroll by. The rest of Tokyo hewed to wartime regulations about brothels closing by ten and willow houses by eleven. But there was always action in Asakusa, which was too bizarre, too full of life to quell.
Warmed by shochu, Harry found a pay phone and made a call. A woman answered.
“Are you alone?” Harry asked.
“Not exactly.”
“How about tomorrow? Matsuya’s roof at two.”
“I’m sorry, this is a bad connection.”
A man came on the line. “Beechum here.”
“The lady of the house?” Harry switched to the querulous voice of an old woman uncertain about her l’s and r’s.
“What?”
“The lady of the house, please?”
“Busy. Do you have any idea what time it is?”
“She want to learn geisha dance, to play shamisen, to pour tea. I tell her she has to be Japanese to be geisha. Not Japanese, very difficult.”
“My wife has no interest in being a geisha girl.”
“Flower arranging is possible. Or prepare sukiyaki. Or maybe squid.”
“Are you quite mad?”
The man hung up. Too bad, Harry thought, though the course of adultery ne’er did run smooth. He considered wandering over to the Rheingold, a German version of the Happy. The Rheingold served Berlin pancakes with Holsten beer. The waitresses wore dirndls and were renamed Bertha and Brunhilda, gruesome enough; but worse, their jukebox played only waltz and schmaltz. Harry decided he couldn’t tolerate that. Still, the night was young. There was a hearts game at the Imperial Hotel, expats killing time with pissant pots. Better games were on river barges. Where the river Sumida lazed along Asakusa, boat after boat hosted games of dice. Merchants, brothel madams, famous actors bet serious money, and because the boats were run by yakuza instead of amateurs, the games were honest. Sometimes it was better to join a game midway, when you were fresh and the other players stale, for as the Good Book said, The last shall be first, and the first last: for many be called, but few chosen.
Heading for the river, Harry took a shortcut through a jigsaw puzzle of dark streets without names. Cars could pass through some streets, only bikes through others, and in some alleys the pedestrians squeezed between walls that nearly touched. Harry was at home, though. These were the escape routes he grew up in. From a chestnut cart, Harry bought a bag of nuts that were hot and charred, the skin split open and the meat as sweet as candy. Oharu came to mind. Harry remembered, as a kid, bringing her chestnuts wrapped in a cloth. “My hero,” Oharu would say and kiss his cheek. He saw more sparks down the street and thought that another chestnut cart lay ahead until he heard the singsong Klaxon of a fire engine.
The fire was down a side street at a tailor’s shop; Harry knew the place, which was near the garage where he kept his car. He had often seen the tailor and his wife, a grandmother, a girl and her younger brother eating dinner in the room behind, the tailor’s eye on the open shop door and any possible trade that might be lured by his window display of the cheapest cotton, rayon and sufu. The house was old, built of wood frame with a bamboo front, the typical tinderbox Japanese lived in. The fire was already in full throat, an oven roar accompanied by exploding glass and the excited whoosh of paper screens. The crowd inched close, in awe of how a hovel’s straw, books, bedding, needles and thread could transcend themselves into such a beautiful tower of flame, the sort of fireworks that spread, rose and blossomed a second time into a glowing maelstrom. The way Eskimos had words for different kinds of snow, the Japanese had words for fire: deliberate, accidental, initial flame, approaching blaze, invading, spreading, overwhelming fire. Harry found himself next to the tailor, who was explaining through his tears and with many apologies how the girl had left her homework on a space heater. The paper had caught fire and fallen and lit a mat, then a screen and scraps of rayon that lit as fast as candlewicks. Sufu was worse. It was a new wartime material, ersatz cloth made of wood fibers, basically cellulose that disintegrated after three or four washings but burned like hell. One minute, the tailor said, one minute the family was out of the room, and then it was too late. Harry saw the wife and children, everyone painted orange and black in the fire’s glow. Two Red Cross workers bore off the grandmother on a litter. Air-raid drills were all the fashion. Well, this was more like the real thing.
A pumper arrived with a company of firemen. In helmets of lacquered leather with paneled neck protectors they looked like samurai in armor launching a siege. They hosed one another until their jackets of heavy cotton were soaked. One man climbed with a hose to the top of a tall ladder that was supported by nothing but the strong arms of his companions. Other firemen swung stout poles with metal scythes to tear down not only the burning house but also the tattoo shop and eel grill on either side. No one protested, not in a city where sparks swarmed over the rooftops like visible contagion and a hundred thousand could die in a single blaze. A second wall peeled off, revealing a tailor’s dummy trapped by flames. Screens burned from the center, stairs step by step. Hell, Harry thought, why not just build the whole damn thing of matches? Smoke swirled like cannon fire, and all the windows of the street lit, as if each house yearned to join in. The firemen regrouped, their jackets steaming. Firemen had a special incentive in leveling whole neighborhoods, since their second occupation was construction. What they tore down, they rebuilt. Not a bad racket, it seemed to Harry. However, there was more than money in such a drama of smoke and flames. It sometimes struck him that there was in the Japanese a majestic perversity that made them build for fire, leaving open the chance that at any time they could be wiped from the map just so they could start from scratch again.