He is standing there, tense with the effort of keeping up with his own thoughts, when the noise, the racket at the edge of hearing he has been hoping would simply fade away, becomes, instead, more insistent. Wooden clappers. A drum. He listens, strains to hear, hears, understands, but cannot quite believe it. He is fire-watching and somewhere — or so the noises tell him — there is a fire. A real fire! He scans the 150 degrees of his view from the platform. Nothing there, nothing at all. What is the procedure now? What is he supposed to do? Call Saburo? Use his whistle? He has not, he realises, paid much attention to the scant instructions he has received, nor has he read the recently issued government manual — other than to glance at the title (Stay and Fight!) — a copy of which is under a pile of newspapers on the dresser downstairs.
He goes into the sewing room again, fills his arms with books, and carries them outside. At the back of the platform, the roof slopes to chest height. He builds a step out of dictionaries and novels and clambers up. He has never been on the roof before. The tiles grate and shift beneath his weight. He starts to climb (not a bear any more but a giant slug), writhing over the tiles, the bird droppings, the tufts of grass, the glittering moss, until his gloved hands grasp the ridge and he pulls himself up the final inches. He sees the fire immediately — a small cloud of pulsing orange light somewhere up by Watanabe’s bathhouse — and in his excitement he lets go of the ridge and descends chaotically, losing three buttons from his coat and landing on the platform, winded but unhurt, on the cushion of his own back. He gropes around his neck for the whistle, lets off three short blasts, drops the whistle, and runs through the house.
‘Fire by Watanabe’s,’ he says to Miyo as he pulls on a pair of boots.
‘Fire by Watanabe’s!’ he calls to Saburo, who swings from his gate, bellowing orders. He commands Yuji to stop, Yuji cannot, the little pills will not let him. He mounts his bicycle. His legs seem immensely happy to be peddling. He weaves, stylishly, around all obstacles. ‘Fire by Watanabe’s bathhouse!’ he calls to whoever he passes.
After ten minutes he smells it, a waft of smoke, sour, fungal. He slows. The way now is filling up with drowsy neighbours, bedrobes under winter coats. They wander about, leaderless. He leaves the bicycle against the shuttered window of a shop, and runs, part of a pack of running shadows, the length of a last street.
Already, at least a hundred people have gathered by the building, though the noise of them is buried under the rushing and crackle of the fire. Such is the confusion, the rapid shifting of light and dark, it takes Yuji several moments, standing on tiptoe and craning his neck, to realise that the fire is not by Watanabe’s, it is Watanabe’s. He lets out a sound, a moan of surprise and sorrow. ‘Did they escape?’ he shouts to the woman next to him. She doesn’t hear him, or doesn’t know. From a shattered window a flame shoots out, dies back, then leans from the window beside it, a lunatic in a yellow bed sheet.
Someone passes him a bucket. He passes it on, slopping water over his boots. Someone else sees his armband, the character for fire. The crowd opens a channel, lets him through, pushes him forward. Soon, he is close enough to feel the heat prickling the skin of his face. In the distance he can hear the swelling chant of a fire crew, then a group of men jog past, not firemen but soldiers, cloths tied round their faces. Immediately, unthinkingly, Yuji follows them, runs after them like a boy in a game. They go into the alley at the side of the bathhouse — the side that seeps smoke rather than flames — and climb a flight of rusted metal steps to a door at the level of the first floor. The door is locked. The soldier at the front bursts it open with his boot. On the other side, Mrs Watanabe is sprawled on the mat, her small white feet twitching. Two of the soldiers lift her and retreat towards the alley. The others, Yuji at the rear, start, on hands and knees, to go up the stairs. The smoke above their heads is black, clotted. The stairs are hot to the touch, even through gloves. On one of the steps a hole the size of a horse’s eye has burnt away (or was it always there? A peephole?) and Yuji has a fire-lit glimpse of the women’s baths below, the water crusted with ash.
At the entrance to the upper room the curtain is fringed with small flames. They duck beneath it, blunder on, crawl as far as the passage to the kitchen but can go no further. A single searing glance through narrowed eyes is enough to show that this is where it started, that old Watanabe, whatever is left of him, will be sifted from among the cinders of his rattan chair.
‘Watch out!’
At the back of the kitchen something ignites, explodes with a shriek, burns with a bright green flame. Frightened now, awake at last to the danger, this peril he has so casually put himself in the path of, Yuji gets to his feet, intending, with held breath, to run for the top of the stairs, but as he turns he trips across the end of a table, scattering the tiles of a last mah-jong game. For a moment he is stunned, and when he raises his head he can no longer see the others. He calls out, drags his aching chest over the mats. The room, familiar to him from countless visits, has become a puzzle, a maze. Is this where it ends? Not in a shell-hole, but a bathhouse a mile from his home? He circles, squints crazily into the confused air, the flame-dark, then sees, an arm’s-reach to the side of him, a smudge of khaki. He stretches for it, touches cloth, flesh. A smoke-blackened face looms towards his own. Two eyes widen, blink. Stare. Yuji stares back, the pair of them, for a long second neither can afford, frozen in mutual amazement. Then the face looks away, and together, burrowing under the smoke, they find the top of the stairs. The house is roaring like a sea. They slither down, side by side, coughing and retching. Odd events take place in Yuji’s brain, leisurely imaginings, sequences, serenely lit, from boyhood (there, at the edge of the sea, is his brother gathering clams in a bucket, there is Grandfather standing in the low tide, his yukata gathered about his thighs. .)
Against his cheek he feels a gust of air. Cold air. A voice shouts, ‘One more here!’ His shoulders are seized. A man, a fireman, a wonderful stranger, lifts him to his feet. Then more hands, more strong arms, an effortless progress through the crowd until he is set down, gently, on the far pavement, his back against a wall. A canteen of water is pushed towards him. He drinks, coughs furiously, splashes water into his eyes. His coat is buttonless now. Patches of it are smouldering. He grips his throbbing head, spits between his knees. It’s several minutes before he feels well enough to look at the soldier beside him. A minute more before he has the wind to speak.
‘It’s you?’ he asks. ‘It’s really you?’ His voice is half an octave deeper. To his own ears he sounds like Father. ‘I can’t . . It’s so . .’ He drinks from the canteen again but coughs as he swallows and spews up the water. ‘Poor Watanabe,’ he says, at last. ‘Think Mrs Watanabe made it?’
Junzo is wiping his face with the cloth that masked his mouth and nose. When he has finished he climbs to his feet, tugs a field cap from his belt and puts it on a scalp shaved so close it’s hard to see any hair there at all.
‘I wrote to you,’ says Yuji, rising dizzily with the help of the wall. ‘I even tried to visit. When you were in Kagurazaka . . Did the girl tell you?’