A few days into December, Hiroshi awoke early and realized he’d forgotten to do one important thing. He dressed quickly without waking Kenji. Downstairs, his grandparents were surprised to see him up so early. “Ohayo gozaimasu,” he said, as he walked through the kitchen and out the back door so quickly, he scarcely heard his name and the sound of his obaachan’s questioning voice trailing behind him.
In the backyard, the sky was just awakening, a pale gray light that gradually revealed the outlines of a world he’d known all his life. It was like a photo being slowly developed. The air was thin ice as the yard came into focus. He stretched his tall frame, shook loose his arms and hands, and did a few leg squats until he felt the pull of his calf muscles. Why hadn’t he thought to fill the gaping wound in his own backyard before this morning? Wasn’t it the most personal scar of all, mocking them every day?
Hiroshi pulled away the plank that covered the entrance to the air-raid shelter, and stepped down into the dark, closed tomb. He lit a lantern and shook his head. To think the flimsy structure could have provided any kind of real protection! He shivered from the cold and the damp, earthy smell, then quickly set to work removing each board that had been wedged in to support the dirt walls. One by one, he dragged the pieces out before he emerged a final time to pick up the shovel. The ground wasn’t frozen yet, as in some winters. He and Kenji had built up the dirt walls and laid a piece of corrugated metal on top as a roof before covering it with more dirt. He began digging until his shovel tapped metal, then he cleared away the dirt and pulled the roof off, leaving a gaping hole. Hiroshi swung the shovel against the raised dirt walls of the shelter with a thwack, followed by several more hard blows—thwack, thwack—against the walls. He went another round of hits before he heard the earth breaking apart, gradually giving way. He stepped back and watched the dirt sink into the hole as big as the oversized graves he’d helped dig to bury the countless unidentified dead after the firestorm. He wanted to bury this air-raid shelter, too, and with it, the past. He shoveled the rest of the earth into the hole and thought of his ojiichan taking down the watchtower, which had stood on the same spot but had risen above the ground. It was time, Hiroshi thought, to move forward. Warm from the work and his desire for a stronger, better future, he knocked down another side of the wall and watched it collapse into the gaping hole.
Survivors
Sho Tanaka picked up a piece of charred wood that fell apart in his hands. The two-story wooden building where his sumo students slept and ate had burned to the ground, along with Hoku’s caretaker house. “Hoku,” he murmured to himself. He hadn’t been seen since the morning of the firestorm, nine months ago. It was Hoku who had pounded on their door that fateful night. “The planes are coming this way,” he warned, quick and urgent. By the time Tanaka had gathered Noriko and the girls, Hoku was gone.
On the other side of a stone walkway, the building housing his office and the practice area had miraculously survived. Had the winds suddenly shifted, the fire gone elsewhere? Tanaka shook his head and continued to clear the debris into a growing pile. The Japan Sumo Association financed most sumo stables, including the Katsuyama-beya. Tanaka could only guess when they’d be able to help restore the stable amid all the other destruction. Until then, he would have to get the stable back up and running on his own.
With the girls back in school, Sho Tanaka spent most afternoons sitting in his small upstairs office, which was drafty in winter. Occasionally, a quick shot of black-market whiskey, or sake, warmed him against the cold and the loneliness. The persistent smell of smoke filled the room and seeped into every crevice. He ran his hand over the top of his smooth pate. When the war ended in August and he began to lose his hair, Tanaka feared the cloud of radiation from the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had somehow poisoned him. He’d read accounts of survivors’ symptoms, and couldn’t bear to think of leaving his young daughters without both their parents. The doctor had found no medical explanation for his hair loss, and Tanaka had scoffed when he suggested an emotional cause. After all, the entire country was emotionally devastated. He didn’t tell the doctor that deep down, his terror grew when he lay alone at night, his thoughts bouncing between raising two daughters alone and trying to rebuild the Katsuyama-beya from its burned ruins.
The morning after seeing the doctor, not two months after the bombing, Sho Tanaka had risen and shaved his head, ignoring the dull rasp of the razor scraping across his pale skin. When he finished, the water was murky with tufts of black and gray hair floating at the top of the wooden bucket. He felt a sense of calm for the first time since the war ended. No longer would he worry if he found strands of his hair on his clothes, or at the bottom of the bath. He’d taken matters into his own hands.
His daughters, Haru and Aki, covered their mouths in laughter when they saw him for the first time, his head pale as a baby’s bottom. From then on, they often reached up and stroked it, “for luck,” Haru said. And he did believe it would bring him luck, or perhaps just more attention as the oyakata of the Katsuyama-beya. He smiled to think that at each major tournament to come, he would be more visible; his shaved head would be a stark contrast to the prized chonmage, the oiled topknot that each sumotori wore with pride.
A December chill had settled onto the small office. Sho Tanaka rubbed his eyes and gazed at the photo of his wife and daughters on his desk. It had been taken during a time of great happiness, the moment frozen on their beautiful faces. Now, Noriko was dead, Haru’s hands still hadn’t healed, and Aki’s voice had gone silent. He swallowed the sourness that rose to his mouth.
He still believed Noriko might enter his office at any moment to tell him she was on her way to the market, a barely visible smile rising at the corners of her lips. The same slight smile he’d seen twenty years ago at the teahouse where they’d met. But he was no longer the young, strapping sekitori of so many years ago, who sat in the Sakura teahouse—one of the finest geisha teahouses in the Akasaka district in Tokyo—celebrating his advance to the rank of a professional wrestler. He’d heard that many of the geisha at the teahouse had trained in the famous Gion district of Kyoto. Only through a formal introduction, or as a guest of a long-standing client, such as his oyakata, could he be welcomed at the Sakura.
Sho Tanaka was twenty-five, his head spinning from the beer he had already consumed at the stable with the other sekitori wrestlers. He should have lain down to rest instead of going to a geisha house with his oyakata and other high-ranked wrestlers, but they wanted to celebrate his promotion from the ranks of apprenticeship. He sat and drank more beer with them, waiting to be entertained.
Tanaka looked up when the shoji door slid open and two geisha knelt just outside; then they entered to pour each guest more beer and sake. He watched their smooth, white faces, each a perfect mask, and their swift, delicate movements around the low table, the sweet scent of their perfume lingering as they bowed and retreated from the room.
His good friend, the wrestler Fujimoto-san, leaned over toward him. “It’s a good time for you to meet some women,” he teased. “You’re a professional wrestler now, you’re free to marry.”
“I’m too busy winning matches,” Tanaka had answered, raising his glass. The truth was, he didn’t allow himself to think much about women. Throughout a wrestler’s early training, marriage was discouraged until he reached the sekitori division. Before then, there was little time or money as an apprentice sumotori. His life was that of a rikishi, and once he stepped into the stable, the door was closed to the outside world. Even with this promotion, it would be a struggle to support himself with what he was making as a lower-ranked sumotori. He could rarely spend an evening with a geisha, much less support a wife.
Sho had been lost in the hazy spinning of the room, the loud conversation and laughter, when the door slid open again and two young maiko, geisha apprentices, entered. Three older geisha who carried instruments—a drum, a flute, and a three-stringed shamisen- followed them in. The room fell
silent as the music began and the young geisha apprentices began the Tachikata, moving in precise, fluid movements through the traditional Japanese dance.
“Each dance tells a story,” his oyakata whispered to him.
But Sho wasn’t interested in how each movement added to the progression of the story. He couldn’t take his eyes off one of the geisha apprentices, the taller, thinner of the two, her red collar against her pale skin, her eyes the color of black pearls. The dancer captivated him, and he saw in her a fragility that he wanted to protect. Later that evening, he discovered her name was Noriko-san.
Even when they secretly began to court the following year, he never believed she would leave the o-chayo at twenty to marry him. But she had. Four years later, when he began to lose tournaments at the age of thirty, and had decided to retire from tournament wrestling after twelve years, rather than lose his rank, Noriko stood by his side. At twenty-four, she embraced the position of okamisan, the stable master’s wife, as if it were always meant to be her life’s work.
In the past few years, he’d seen more than traces of Noriko in his daughters, in Haru’s slender, graceful limbs, and more predominantly, in Aki’s black-pearl eyes and fair complexion. As the girls grew older, he couldn’t look Aki directly in the eyes without seeing Noriko. Through them, Noriko’s absence still struck him at the most unexpected times, moments of sorrow that caught in his throat and brought tears to his eyes. They would always be an enduring reminder that in the end, he hadn’t been able to protect her.
Silence
Aki’s voice sang out “Otosan” when her father returned to the stable after the firestorm. Walking toward her covered in black soot, he looked like a monster in a movie she’d once seen. She shouted out his name and ran to him. He picked her up and held her tight. Her arms went around his neck and she looked hard into the distance, hoping her mother would be coming through the smoky shadows, too.
Afterward, Aki went to stay a few days with relatives, while her father took care of Haru and the burns on her hands. When she returned to the stable, Aki saw Haru’s bandaged hands like two bound stumps and began to cry. It was her fault that her sister had to suffer, while she had escaped relatively unharmed. She touched the small, raw spot on the back of her own head. She could barely swallow her throat was so sore.
The day Aki finally lost her voice was when she entered the temple to say goodbye to her mother, though it was only an empty body; the mother who had laughed and danced for her was already gone. The words of farewell began to roll and tumble over themselves in her head but wouldn’t come out of her mouth. It was as if her voice had slowly burned away in the intense heat of the fire. If her mother had to die and Haru had to suffer from her burns, then so must Aki.
At first, her father and Haru thought Aki’s silence was from the shock of losing her mother, of having to witness and survive the devastating firestorm. The doctors who had cleaned the singed skin on the back of her head couldn’t find anything else physically wrong. Aki knew better. She still had conversations in her head, but the words refused to emerge. How could she tell her father that she didn’t remember what had happened to her mother? She knew he needed to hear something, anything, to lighten his grief. But she remained silent, as if her words were held captive in a dark, airless room. It had happened so quickly—engulfed by the smoke, the wind, and the heat of the flames—her mother there and then not there. Forever and ever, Aki would be the last one to have seen her mother alive.
Her father shook his head sorrowfully and told Haru, “Aki-chan will be better in a few days. Give her time.” Aki watched her father in silence. Already he was talking around her. Why did he think that just because she didn’t speak, she had disappeared? She quickly looked down to see if she was becoming invisible again, as she used to be when she was afraid. Ichi, ni, san, shi… But no, she held up her hands, looked down at her legs, her flower-patterned kimono, Haru leaning over to touch her hand with her own bandaged one.
The moment Aki stopped talking, everything around her changed. Life felt charged with both distance and clarity. While her lack of speech made her invisible to some, she saw and heard much more than before. There was something comforting in the silence of her own voice. She remembered things long forgotten, like being small and taking a nap, wrapped up tightly in a silk comforter, while her mother told her to close her eyes. And slowly, slowly, she would drift off to sleep. But strangely enough, when she lay quietly in the dark room those first nights staying with relatives, listening to all the strange sounds of a different house, it wasn’t her mother she missed but Haru. She wondered if this somehow made her a bad person.
For months, Aki answered questions with a nod or a shake of her head. Her father lost himself in plans to reopen the stable and rarely spoke to her directly. In her mind, she knew he was angry with her for losing her voice, for not telling him what happened to her mother. “I’m sorry,” she wanted to tell him, but the words lodged in her throat. Only Haru spoke to her as always. Even though she didn’t answer, her sister’s eyes focused on hers with infinite patience.
In late December, just after her tenth birthday, Aki was in the kitchen helping her sister stir the rice gruel, dropping in the green leaves and the stem that came from the pumpkin Haru was cutting into pieces.
“Fukata-san tried to cheat me,” Haru said, her voice filling the kitchen. She seemed to speak twice as much to compensate for Aki’s silence. “He wanted to cut off the stem and leaves, only to resell them to someone else. I refused to buy the pumpkin until he agreed to leave them on.”
Aki smiled. Her sister had become as capable as her mother in going to the market, waiting in food lines, and bargaining every day to make the most of the little she brought home. She often wished she had Haru’s talents. Her thoughts were interrupted by a soft rustling noise like that of her mother’s slippers against the tatami. She assumed it was her father coming in, but when she looked up, it was her mother standing in the doorway watching them with a contented smile on her lips. She looked beautiful and young again, dressed in her favorite maroon kimono with the white chrysanthemums on it. Aki dropped the wooden spoon on the floor and cried out, “Okasan!” Her heart skipped with a quick joy.
Her voice resonated through the room. It took Haru a moment to realize that she’d spoken. Her hand rose to her mouth as if containing a scream of joy or surprise. “Aki-chan?” she asked, as if unsure any other words would follow.
Aki’s gaze fell on her sister’s hand, discolored from the orange veins of pumpkin, the same hand that had been burned red and raw. “Over there,” she said, pointing to the doorway. Her voice sounded strange to her, low and throaty. But before she could say another word, Haru rushed over to embrace her.
Aki pulled away from her sister to tell her it was their mother who had brought her voice back to her. “Over there,” she said once more. “At the doorway.” But when she looked again, her mother was gone.
The Praying-Hands House
More than a year had passed since Akira arrived at the village of Aio with no idea how long he would stay. He’d rented the room behind the small sake shop that was now closed, and emerged only for food and to take long walks into the mountains through the late summer and fall, when the leaves blazed an angry orange-red. The village survived on its trees, the residents making wood charcoal and taking it down to the larger town of Oyama. Akira liked the idea of coming to a place were wood was of such importance, just as it always was for him and the masks. He began to read and draw again in both pencil and charcoal—the mountains, the tall pines with the sloped roofs peeking through. He felt like an art student, with the freedom to do as he pleased, discover what he would. The masks faded in and out of his thoughts; the one unfinished Okina mask he’d taken with him was safely tucked away under his bed with his chisels. He couldn’t bring himself to finish it, because then what would be left for him to do?
It was on one of these walks his first winter there, late in 1944, that he had met
Kiyo. Snow was falling. He looked up at the pale gray sky and the white blanket that covered the mountains, and pulled his coat closer. Was this mountain village, nestled high above the world with its steep-roofed houses that resembled praying hands, enough to keep him sane until the war ended? Could he live out a year or more hiding in such a solitary place?
When he heard the dull crunch of snow, he turned and saw her standing there, a thin girl of nine or ten, with long hair. In the freezing wind, she wore only a dark cotton kimono and tabi socks with her sandals. She stood at a distance and watched him with curiosity.
“Why are you always by yourself?” she asked.
The question rang through the cold, clear air and startled him.
“How long have you been watching me?” he asked. His breath drifted out like smoke.
“Long enough to know you’re always by yourself,” she answered, without any shyness or restraint. The girl’s focused gaze didn’t turn away from him.
Akira was amused. “Some people enjoy being by themselves.”