Fireflies by Ben Byrne Page B

me one morning complaining that he felt exhausted and that his mouth stung. He held up his shirt as I examined him. I was sure I could see a faint flush on his chest.
    Outside, a frost had covered the city with a sheet of white that sparkled in the dawn sunlight. It lay crinkled on the wasteground behind the station and on the jagged mounds of scrap metal. As I wandered toward Ueno Pond, I thought about the tall American in the trench coat who’d come over to talk to us the week before, and who’d been so interested in Tomoko.
    The Americans are savages and demons! That’s what we’d always been taught. During the war, I’d gazed at the murderous coloured double-spreads in Boy’ s Magazine for hours on end, imagining myself in the midst of a desperate suicide charge, firing a submachine gun at those monsters on the beaches at Guam. Chun-chun-chun!
    The man had looked stylish and rugged, as he stooped over to talk to us, his camera dangling around his neck. It was some kind of Leica, I thought, a new model I’d never seen before. When he draped it around my neck, I rubbed my thumb over the exposure control and twisted the smooth aperture dial. I felt the weight of the brushed metal in my hands. It was absolutely beautiful. I held up the camera and looked through the rangefinder at the crisp twin images of Tomoko. I didn’t want to ever give it back.
    My father had owned a camera once. A Rolleiflex, with a hinged back, which a fat customer had given to him at the bonenkai party he held to thank his regulars at the end of each year. I liked to take it out and study the embossed foreign letters. One day, my father brought home some photographic film, and for two weeks I’d waltzed around the neighbourhood, a cut-out masthead of the Yomiuri newspaper pinned to my jacket, taking “portraits” of the locals: wrinkly old Mrs. Oka from next door; two white-faced maiko girls who held their fans over their faces as they stopped in for snacks on their way to a party.
    A year before the end of the war, my father received his red call-up papers. I was sent back to Tokyo from the countryside. My mother had been stunned — after all, he’d been a borderline at his age. That Sunday, my father told me to dig out the old camera. He wanted to go up to Ueno Park to see the cherry blossoms before he left to join his unit. There weren’t many families stretched out on the grass that year, and no classical music played from picnic gramophones. We laid out our blanket and ate a quiet meal together beneath the trees. Before we left, my father told me to take a photograph, as a souvenir. I lined the whole family up beneath the sprays of white blossom, and waved them into position.
    My mother wore her pale blue spring kimono, her hand resting lightly on my father’s broad shoulder. Satsuko stood beside them in green and gold. They gazed out serenely, calm and dignified, as all around them, the falling blossom floated hesitantly in the air. After a second, I pressed the shutter to capture the scene. When I tried to wind on the film, the lever resisted. The spool was at an end.
    ~ ~ ~
    Past the crimson walls of the Imperial University, I climbed up the hill toward the older, more elegant quarter, where the merchants and artists once had their mansions. The grand old villas were mostly still standing, though many were damaged and silent now behind their heavy wooden gates. Further along the road, around the side of the stucco wall, I saw that a tree had splintered in one of the gardens, knocking out a section of brick. I looked up at it, uncertainly. Then I swung myself up by the woolly branches and dropped down onto the other side.
    The wide garden was choked with tangled grasses and gnarled ornamental trees. The walls of the main building looked solid and the slanted roof was overlapping with neat slate tiles. But the windows were boarded up, and the fishpond was empty and silted.
    It must have