Jim Shepard - You Think That's Bad

Early in the war they’d brought Hajime to see the rare birds and animals that had been added to the Ueno Zoo after the conquests in the south. Tsuburaya remembered the days being perpetually sunny. Hajime had also loved the rooftop pool of the Matsuzakaya department store, where shoppers were treated to mock battles between electrically controlled models of the Japanese and Allied fleets while the store’s customer service manager talked about the need for consumer restraint. Plaques bearing the phrase “Honor Home” were in the windows of every house that had a father or son off at the war, and Masano had joked to her friends that only her husband’s age had held him back, and that national mobilization was never a problem if all that was asked of men was that they cast off parents, wives, or children before going off to war.

But by that point he was already working in the Special Arts Department at Toho. The ten major studios had been forced to consolidate into just three, all making mostly war films in order to promote national policy and strengthen the country’s resolve. The rooftop display had given him the idea for the miniatures photography for Toho’s first drama about the China war, Navy Bomber Squadron . And the climactic battle sequence had gone off so well that he’d then been given responsibility for the scene in which the Chinese primary school, once destroyed, turned out to have been a secret armaments depot. Those sequences had resulted in his first screen credit for visual effects, though the sight of the bombed Chinese school seemed to cripple Masano’s enjoyment at the premiere.

Had they ever been closer, though? The ongoing national emergency had seemed to revive her sense of all that she still had to lose, and nearly every night her face found his in their bed once they had extinguished the light. Every family was urged to start the day at the same hour with radio calisthenics, and during the first six months after Pearl Harbor there were nothing but victories to report, so the radio made for good listening. Hajime found it hilarious to watch his parents huff and sweat. More and more disappeared from public life to exist only in private, the way before the war the censors had edited out of foreign films all instances of socialism or kissing.

Accounts of each battle were concluded with a rendition of Ifukube’s Naval March. But then as the war turned, announcements of this or that territory’s strategic importance were reversed, and its loss apparently meant nothing, whereas its capture had been wildly celebrated the year before. Hajime spent even longer hours in school undergoing mandatory vocational and military training. And Masano was further saddened at the eradication of neighborhood birds by the heavy guns of an artillery training division billeted nearby.

Tsuburaya told her one night that it was just like Japan to go to war with the nation upon whom she was most dependent for the raw materials essential to prosecuting that war. Modern warfare began in the mine and continued in the factory, feeding on coal and steel and oil, and ninety percent of the oil Japan consumed before the war was imported, nearly all of it from the United States. She seemed to find this point even more painful than he did.

They were told that Leyte was the battle that would determine the fate of the nation. Once Leyte was lost, it turned out that Luzon was the key. After Luzon, Iwo Jima. After Iwo Jima, Okinawa. “Well, apparently the mountain moves,” Masano answered, a little bitterly, when he remarked to her about it. She was especially demoralized by a newspaper account of the destruction of Okinawa’s capital, and the printed photo of their narrow and hushed streets from all those years ago shelled into rubble.

By then there were no pleasures. Food was miserable, lovemaking was impossible, there was no time even for reading, and they constantly feared that even at his age Hajime would be called up. Dinners were rice bran, fried in a pan, which looked like custard but made Hajime cry when he ate it. Movie production had come to a halt due to a lack of nitrate for film stock. Workers at Toho were serving as labor volunteers in the countryside, helping farmers and returning each night with a few sweet potatoes for their work.

And then came the raids. Hajime demanded to be taken to a public exhibition of a B-29 in Hibiya Park, where the bomber had been reconstructed from the parts of various downed aircraft and was displayed alongside one of Japan’s latest interceptors. The fighter looked like a peanut beside a dinner plate. Such was the Americans’ nonchalance by that point that they dropped leaflets the day before detailing where and when they would strike. Aloft, these leaflets resembled a small, fleecy cloud, but as they fluttered down they dispersed over the city.

The fire raid on March ninth centered on the area hit by the 1923 earthquake, the trauma that had separated him forever from his father. The one on the tenth extended the destruction. The next morning they returned to acres of ruin where their homes had been. Block after block was burned flat, with lonely telephone poles erect at odd angles like grave markers, leaving only ash and brick and the occasional low shell of a concrete building. Where the desolation wasn’t complete, the neighborhood associations were still holding air-defense drills and doing their best to resettle those bombed out of their homes.

The only topic of conversation by then was food, or the failure of the rationing system. Everyone spent their days foraging. They were told to collect acorns for flour because they had the same nutritive value as rice. They ate weeds and boiled licorice greens and bracken ferns. And then they heard that as the result of an attack by a very small number of B-29’s, the city of Hiroshima had been considerably damaged. And that the Emperor would be addressing the nation by radio for the first time in history.

When Tsuburaya mentioned by way of offering encouragement that they’d completed the first month of shooting, Masano said in response, “You take as much time as you need to. Whatever your lack of interest, our routine is going to continue as it has.”

He was taken aback. She’d caught him struggling into his rain shell and preoccupied with the problem of the high-tension wires the monster was to destroy on his way into Tokyo. She was at their kitchen table working on a gourd that was supposed to afford the sparrows some protection from rats. The gourd would hang from a nail under the eave outside their front door.

This wasn’t how things would always be, he assured her. Soon the shooting and even postproduction would be over.

“I’ll continue to maintain your household and raise your child, whatever happens between us,” she told him.

“What does that mean, ‘whatever happens between us’?” he asked. He was shaken, the notion of yet more separation like a fear of the dark.

“Akira’s very proud of you,” she answered. “And his brother. Do you know what he said to me before he left for school? He said he understood why neither of you liked him.”

“Do I need to stay home?” Tsuburaya asked her, and set down his work satchel. “Do we need to talk about this now?”

“He’s nine years old and he sounded like me,” she said.

He unbuckled his rain shell in contrition, pained at her attempt to keep her composure. “I’ll talk to him this evening,” he told her. “Hajime will talk to him as well.”

“It’s one thing if it’s just myself,” she said. “But I can’t watch this happen to him, too.”

“I’ll go see him now,” he said. He had his driver wait outside Akira’s school, but the boy’s classroom was empty when he finally found it. The instructor in an adjacent room said he thought the class might have gone off on a nature walk.