The Cake Tree in the Ruins Read online

  The parrot had a yellow crown-like crest and a touch of red at the base of its wings, as if bleeding, but otherwise it was covered all over with soft blue feathers. From its ugly, wrinkled feet you might think it was quite old, but then the mischievous look in its eye was altogether childlike, and at any rate parrots were said to live for a hundred years so there was no way of knowing. But the boy, who was an only child, had decided that it was his little sister.

  For the past couple of weeks, the boy and the parrot had been hiding day and night in the darkness of the shelter.

  An air-raid shelter was a place to keep you safe from the attacks by enemy planes, and they had been built in all major cities all over Japan from around 1942. Big shelters were tunnelled into the hillside and reinforced with wood or concrete, and could accommodate tens or even hundreds of people. There were also little shelters known as “octopus pots”, which were just about the size of the holes people dug to dispose of household waste, and were meant for one person to quickly jump inside to escape machine-gun fire.

  At that time, not so long ago, American planes were flying day and night over all of Japan’s main cities, and people spent more time hunched up in air-raid shelters than they did in their own homes. The shelter the boy and his parrot were in was a pit 1 metre wide, 1.3 metres deep and 7 metres long, covered by planks of wood with half a metre of earth piled on top.

  Originally it had been constructed at the side of the road, but in the air raid two months earlier the town had been completely razed to the ground all the way from the mountain to the sea, and in the burnt-out ruins it was no longer possible to tell where houses had once stood and roads had once run. The shelter was surrounded by piles of scorched roof tiles, sheets of corrugated iron, blackened telegraph poles and bits of plasterboard. Nobody would even notice it was there unless they were looking for it.

  The sizzling midsummer sun beat down on the ruins of the town, but inside the shelter was dark, and it was damp from the water that poured in whenever it rained. The boy was sitting on one of two wooden pallets on the floor, and the parrot’s cage was on the other. The boy was so hungry that he barely had the energy to move, but the parrot would now and then playfully hang upside down, or screech loudly Konnichi wa! (Hello!)

  In truth, though, the parrot wasn’t being playful. Rather, it was worried that the boy hadn’t said anything for some time. It even tried singing his favourite song: Seagulls are / good sailors / Regimented / good sailors / Their white hats, their white shirts, everything in white / They… Here it got stuck. Before, the boy would have looked a little exasperated and, tapping in time on its cage, finished the last line for it: “They float splashing / on the waves. Try it again!”

  Whyareyoulookingsoglum?DidMamagiveyouascolding? The parrot tried hard to talk to the boy, but after all it was just a bird. It could imitate human speech, but whenever it spoke its own language it just sounded like screeching to humans.

  The boy heard the parrot, but merely glanced at it before sinking back into his own thoughts. Before he would have worried that maybe it was being attacked by a cat, or had run out of food, and would have tickled its yellow crown with his finger, or stroked its wrinkled feet.

  The boy had really doted on the parrot. When his father had brought it home with him his mother had said irritably, “There’s not enough food even for us people these days. A bird that lays eggs might be useful, but a parrot?” His father was away at sea and hardly ever home, and his mother was busy with the neighbourhood watch group, doing the shopping, gathering firewood and all the air-raid drills, so it was hardly surprising that she wasn’t exactly overjoyed at having to take on a useless parrot on top of everything else.

  The boy, though, had immediately taken to the brightly coloured tropical bird. He loved the mischievous look in its eyes, and was astonished when it repeated You okay? in exactly the same tone of voice as his father. Apparently, during the long voyage back to Japan, the parrot had looked so unwell that his father had asked it so many times, “You okay?” that it had memorized the phrase.

  The boy promised solemnly that he would take care of the parrot, feed it and clean out its cage, and so he was allowed to keep it. In 1942, it was still possible to get hold of bird feed such as sunflower seeds and hempseed. Few people were keeping birds at that time, and while such things were in short supply, they weren’t much use to people and the bird shops had leftover stocks.

  The boy didn’t know if the parrot was male or female but, having decided it was like a little sister to him, he named it Setchan. When his mother was out, he would sit before the parrot and talk to it, teaching it songs and various words.

  The parrot didn’t know it, but in the spring of 1942 the boy’s father lost his life when his ship was sunk by an American warplane near the Philippines. The boy’s mother had insisted, “He died for our country so you mustn’t cry,” but when the parrot called out You okay? in his father’s voice, he simply couldn’t hold back the tears.

  And though his mother now no longer disapproved of him keeping the parrot, it was increasingly difficult to get hold of bird feed. Once the bird shops’ stocks ran out, the boy fed it on wheat, rice and even the flour they used to make noodles, though it meant that he had less to eat himself. His mother began growing cucumbers, tomatoes, aubergines and other vegetables in their small garden to supplement the meagre rations, and at the edge of the plot she planted a few sunflowers for the parrot. After all, it was a keepsake from her late husband.

  When summer came, enormous blooms twenty centimetres across not only provided food for the yellow-crested parrot, but looked so gorgeous that she planted more in the autumn. All the neighbours mocked her for wasting good land on a bird but, come New Year, they were shocked when everyone was ordered to grow sunflowers in their gardens. Of course this wasn’t to provide food for the parrot; the seeds were pressed to make oil to be used in the war effort. The countries they had occupied in the south were oil-rich, but the ships transporting their produce to Japan were all sunk en route. It wasn’t long before urgent orders were issued to extract oil and alcohol from pine roots and potatoes as well as sunflowers.

  Sunflowers were planted all along the narrow streets and on open land on the mountainside behind. Each household had a quota. The boy and his mother had already planted them the year before, so things went smoothly and they had a bumper harvest. However, their plot of land was quite small, and when they took out what they needed for the parrot’s food, there just wasn’t enough left to meet their quota.

  Their neighbours, however, were unsympathetic. “This is no time to be growing food for a pet bird,” they said. “Besides, parrots are American brutes too, aren’t they? Kill it!” The boy tried to explain that it was a memento of his dead father, but they wouldn’t listen and took most of the seeds away, leaving only a pitiful few for the parrot.

  His mother accepted that this was only to be expected during wartime, but the boy couldn’t bear to see the parrot looking so dejected at the lack of food. That night he slipped out of the house and found a plot some distance away where the sunflowers hadn’t yet been harvested and stole some seeds. He stored these, and more from subsequent night-time sorties, under the veranda. Every now and then they were discovered and he received a thorough telling-off, but it didn’t occur to anybody that he was feeding them to the parrot, so he escaped any more severe punishment.

  Eventually the air raids started for real and they were forced to run for the shelter whenever the warning sounded. The parrot’s cage was over half the boy’s own height, but he would always take it with him. The parrot of course understood nothing about the seeds or the air raids, and perhaps thought the boy was playing with him for it frolicked merrily in the shelter. While the grown-ups cowered in anticipation of the fearsome sound of the enemy bombs, it would screech at the top of its voice You okay? and sing Seagulls are good sailors hopelessly out of tune. The grown-ups naturally were annoyed, and grumbled, “The air-raid shelters are for peopl
e, not birds. Get rid of the disgusting thing!” so after that he had to leave the parrot behind at home.

  And then, six months ago, his neighbourhood was targeted by the B-29s. The sound of the incendiary bombs and explosions was terrifying. However hard he blocked up his ears, it felt as though the noise was seeping in through each and every one of his pores. He clung to his mother, but after some time the grown-ups decided that if they stayed in the shelter they would likely burn to death, so they decided to evacuate. The boy’s mother too dragged him by the hand towards the mountain.

  But he couldn’t leave the parrot behind! He told his mother to wait a moment, and bravely set off as fast as his legs would carry him through all the whistles and whooshes of the falling incendiary bombs. He had just grabbed the parrot’s cage and was crawling under the veranda to retrieve some of the sunflower seeds he’d squirrelled away there when suddenly there was a bright flash and a roar in his ears. For a moment he couldn’t see or hear anything, he could just smell burning. “Mama! Mama!” he screamed, struggling to his feet. The next thing he knew he was standing on the corner of a street he didn’t recognize, still clutching the parrot’s cage and a bag of sunflower seeds.

  Of course he didn’t recognize it, for all the 250kg bombs had blown the entire neighbourhood to smithereens, and his mother and those cantankerous neighbourhood watch members along with it.

  The boy did as his mother had always told him, and went into the air-raid shelter to wait for her there. With nobody left to extinguish the fires, the remains of the houses continued burning for some time. Once the flames had died down, some officials came around to check the damage. Noting all the bomb craters, they shook their heads and muttered, “Awful. Just awful,” and went away again. They didn’t notice the boy and his parrot hiding in the shelter.

  The boy stopped talking altogether. Or rather, he couldn’t talk. The shock had been so immense that he had completely forgotten how. However hard he tried to call out “Mama!” his voice seemed to stick in the back of his throat and the only sounds that came out were “Mmn unhhh.” He couldn’t even remember the word he used to call his sweet mother, who had always been there at his bedside darning clothes in the dim light whenever he awoke at night.

  Of course he was hungry, and at night when nobody was around he would slip into the burnt remains of vegetable plots to steal cucumbers and aubergines, and gnaw on potato leaves. For the time being he had enough food for the parrot which, now that it was just the two of them, would babble away cheerfully, Hello… You okay?… Oh dear… Hahahahaha! But in fact the parrot was beside itself with worry for the boy, who never spoke to it any more. Whydon’tyoutalktomeanymore?WheredidMamago?

  In the darkness of the shelter, where night and day didn’t exist, the boy gradually became thinner and thinner. Sometimes he would do his best to rouse himself and try to speak, straining his whole body to produce a sound, but it never came out as words.

  Whenever the parrot uttered its best phrase, You okay?, his eyes would light up. Since he had lost his power of speech, he hadn’t been able to understand what the parrot said either, but even so the words made him feel terribly nostalgic and he tried desperately to copy the sounds: Yu… yuuo.

  The parrot was happy finally to get a reaction from the boy, and repeated over and over again, You okay? You okay? in exactly the same tone as the boy’s father had used. The boy was silent for a while, but eventually he managed to thickly articulate the sounds You okay?

  The parrot was delighted and screeched in his own language, Waaah! That’smyboy! It didn’t know the boy was in shock from the bomb blast, and had been fretting all this time that he was angry with it. It started babbling happily, Hello… Oh dear oh dear! This is what the boy’s mother had always said. Don’t do that!… No! The boy mumbled each phrase after him, and as he began speaking the words, little by little as if in a dream, the reality of the air raid began to sink in.

  Mama’s dead. Those bombs… The moment this thought came to him, his strength drained from him, but he quickly said, “No, she isn’t dead. As long as I wait here, she’ll come looking for me. Won’t she, Setchan?” Hearing its name, the parrot screeched Setchan! and launched into Seagulls are good sailors. The boy too was drawn in and began singing along, but he couldn’t form the words as well as the parrot. When he got stuck on They float splashing / on the waves, the parrot laughed merrily, Ha ha ha ha!, just as the boy used to do.

  On 15th August, the war between Japan and America ended. Some of the people living in the burnt-out ruins were angry, some were tearful and some heaved a deep sigh of relief, but in the small air-raid shelter at the foot of the mountain, some distance from the town, the boy was trying his hardest to relearn words from the parrot.

  Just as the parrot had once learnt from the boy, now it patiently repeated the same words over again, and the boy repeated them, savouring each one. But by the time the boy finally was able to speak again, he was too hungry to stand.

  The parrot frantically screeched at the once again silent boy, You okay? You okay? The boy’s faint okay… was the last word he spoke. And three days after the boy died, the parrot that was supposed to live a hundred years ran out of food and toppled from its perch, never to move again.

  THE MOTHER THAT TURNED INTO A KITE

  The 15th of August 1945

  THE SUMMER SUN beat down on the burnt-out ruins that stretched uninterrupted from the mountains all the way to the sea. At a glance the ruins looked like nothing more than a reddish-brown wasteland, but in fact they were more than just rubble.

  The blackened remnants of telegraph poles and toilet bowls, cash boxes, water pipes, bed frames, sewing-machine bobbin cases, wire-reinforced glass and various other bits of wreckage half buried in the ground were testament to the daily lives of the people who had until recently been living here.

  Crouching amidst all this debris was a child. He was five years old, but his face was as shrivelled as an old man’s and utterly lacking in any signs of life.

  Hungry or starving children everywhere all look the same, whether in Biafra or refugees from Vietnam, or, to go back a bit further in time, in the coal mines of Kyushu, or, still further back, the street urchins you would find outside any station in Japan’s major cities. They all have a face like an upside-down triangle with enormous eyes, wide open but unseeing, the pupils unmoving, and a mouth puckered as though the skin from their face has been tucked into it.

  This child’s name was Katchan. Ever since the town had burnt down, Katchan had remained crouching here looking up at the sky. That summer, 1945, had seen the endlessly clear skies criss-crossed constantly by aeroplanes, but Katchan didn’t even notice them. He was waiting for his mother, who was sure to come back from the sky—the mother who had soared up into the sky like a kite blown by the wind.

  Ten days before, the town in which Katchan and his mother lived had been the target of an air raid. It was a residential neighbourhood with no factories or military installations whatsoever, but the unpredictable B-29s dropped their incendiary bombs on it anyway, starting fires that spread rapidly. Some people evacuated immediately and managed to reach the safety of the elementary school grounds, but Katchan’s mother had dilly-dallied.

  She was convinced that his father, called up two years earlier, would come home safe and sound from the front, and when he did so he would need something to wear other than his uniform. Therefore, without bothering about her own kimonos, she put together a set of clothing for him along with his beloved fishing tackle, and was just dithering over his books when their house was filled with ominous black smoke from the spreading fires.

  She grabbed Katchan’s hand, hoisted the bundle onto her back and rushed out into the street. They headed for the elementary school, but their path was blocked by a sea of flames, while from the opposite direction came the cracking and popping of the flames engulfing roofs that were eerily lit up by the blaze.

  “Hold onto my hand tight,” she shouted at Katchan, and set of
f at a trot in the direction where the flames seemed less intense. Incendiary bombs were still falling all around, and she couldn’t tell whether she was headed east or west. She stopped briefly to dunk their air-raid hoods in some water, before continuing along the darkest possible streets like a thief. Everyone must have fled already, for they didn’t come across a single person.

  They ran past fire-fighting hoses lying like snakes on the road, upturned buckets strewn around and the body of a man who had been hit by a bomb. She clasped Katchan tightly to her and he struggled to breathe, but he knew very well that now was not the time to whine.

  Suddenly she dropped him on the ground with a thud. He thought they’d run quite some way, but now, looking around, he saw they were in the little park not far from their house. It had a small playground, with just a sandpit and a swing, and Katchan knew it well. They were now surrounded by a solid wall of flames and unable to escape any farther.

  His mother breathed heavily for a while, then drew Katchan into her arms and crouched down low as she checked around her. She had jumped into what had been a sandpit, although a couple of years earlier all the sand had been taken out and distributed around the neighbourhood to use for extinguishing fires. It was kept in pots known as “fire-fighting grenades” that were displayed in department store windows.

  The sound of the blaze grew fiercer. The houses surrounding the park had not yet caught fire, but it was clearly just a matter of time. Even now the flames were so strong that the fire didn’t simply spread from house to house but rather caused each house to explode. As the air grew hotter and hotter they began to feel as though they were breathing fire, and even all the leaves on the trees seemed to tremble and scream in the heat.