The Gate

by Stephen O'Connor

Makiko was on her way to Shinjuku to meet her sister. Clutching the door handle, she urged the driver on toward the distant pillars of the shrine gate and the smoking houses beyond. Darkness was falling and the wind was blowing unmercifully the blossoms from the trees, flinging them in the direction of the gate like grains of rice. The other passenger in the cab was an elderly man from her neighborhood. Worried about the ever increasing plumes of smoke, she willed herself to respond to his comments.

“It’s strange, the things that happen. They installed one of those sirens in my street.”

“In your street, oh?” Makiko replied absently. She took a deep breath and sat up quickly, placing a protective hand over the slight bump of her stomach and sat still, listening. All around her were the running voices from outside playing chase in and out of the taxi’s windows.

“Recently, it’s been hooting all day and night.” He continued.

“Yes, the raids are more insistent these days.” She said, a new note in her voice.

Suddenly, a thunderous roar pounded the cab. She sat up in her seat, wide eyes straining at the sky and the man gaped, his lips quivering and he cried out. At that voice, a chill shot down her back—though not as a voice she remembered and disliked, but at an awful memory of her own cries. The elderly man next to her then clasped his hands, bent forward and started praying just as a group of naval observation planes passed over. Makiko’s breath became tight and her mind reverted to the terrible night some months before and Hiroshi. She recalled the dried sweat on Hiroshi’s fingertips with hands like talons, grasping and shifting while she had prayed desperately. The old man in the cab then unclasped his hands, sighed and involuntarily shook. The taxi driver immediately turned on the radio to the announcement that American planes were still bombing Yokohama. Makiko closed her eyes slowly, and her mouth contorted into a little smile, which seemed wrong in the cool of the early evening.

* * *

Makiko nimbly stepped between the long weeds that had sprung from the crumbling pavement and inwardly cursed the taxi driver dropping her half a block back. She stopped and scanned the road ahead. The city since the bombing had faced astonishing decline. The neighborhood was a blackened wasteland, houses crumpled one-on-top of the other, their wooden innards grotesquely saw toothed against the horizon. The crows picked and cawed amongst the burnt houses. If she looked harder, she would have seen the prominent parts of charred corpses, but she hunched down, held her breath and strode forward toward the ever closer gate. Perhaps she wouldn’t starve to death in a Shinjuku gutter yet, for the letter she clasped in her pocket provided a glimmer of hope, but also made her feel slightly unsteady on her feet, as she thought of what she was going to say to her sister. Getting up close to the gate, she noticed its lacquer was dulled and gouged by shrapnel, and this knowledge calmed her. Just beyond, her sister Satomi’s house cowered in the gate’s shadow, its roof bowed and buckled. She hurried on past the shrine gate and urgently knocked at her sister’s door which immediately slid open.

“My husband’s alive,” she gasped to Satomi.

Makiko’s sister had taken refuge in the undestroyed backroom of her house. The windows were covered in brown paper, making the air in the place thick and syrupy. Makiko sat and warmed her hands on a cup of green tea. She looked at the delicate little cup with a glaze so sublime it could have been made from cream, but then as her sister reentered the room, her brow furrowed at a crack tumbling through the pink cherry blossoms hanging from a branch on the cup. She glanced up, and as if for the first time, noticed how her sister was so tiny, dark and thin, with her hair severely cropped and solemn eyes.

As they began to talk, Satomi reached out and turned the heavily creased envelope over, pushing her glasses from her head to the bridge of her nose.

“It’s an English post stamp, is it?”

Makiko nodded, eyeing the ornate Buddhist altar behind her older sister’s head and the picture of her young nephew, Yuta, lost in the fire from the first bombings in Tokyo. Her thoughts turned to the last time she’d seen him. They were in this very room, just before the war had started, watching the observation planes take off from the nearby airport.

“They’re big, aren’t they, Aunty?

“Yes, they are.” She had replied.

“They are like dinosaurs,” he’d said excitedly. “If we fight the Americans, will the planes come back? The dinosaurs didn’t, did they, aunty?”

“When we die, we come back as something else,” she’d said.

He’d looked away then, smiling, and she’d ruffled his hair, just as Hiroshi had slid the front door open, announced his return and had instructed Yuta to leave the room. Now, the memory suddenly made her head ache. Hesitantly, and lowering her eyes, she said to Satomi, “He’s in a foreign POW camp.”

Satomi blinked, her eyes wide and uncomprehending.

“I didn’t think there were any such things, not for us.”

“What do you mean?” A dark knot gripped her stomach.

“The young men from the secret police who came three days ago kept insisting to Hiroshi.”

Makiko’s heart skipped a beat and patches of red appeared on her neck.

“They insisted Hiroshi close the shop, and then frog marched him away.” Her voice trailed off. “They said for the final victory at Okinawa.”

Makiko looked down, a slight grin curling her mouth. “I’m so sorry.”

Satomi’s eyes hardened and she looked at her sister just as they used to when they were little and fighting together. The afternoon seemed to have suddenly faded, suddenly ripened and had wilted, its petals forever closed under the accusing stare of Satomi.

Satomi, hunching her round shoulders, continued to gaze at Makiko’s face intently, then sometimes glanced down at her stomach. Her right hand rested on the table and every now and then her fingers would twitch. Satomi turned away then and looked dimly at the altar. For a while she stayed like that. Eventually, her head came back around and Makiko thought she saw a dark glow in her sister’s pupils.

“So, little sister, how can you live in such dishonor after your affair with my husband?”

Makiko felt the hair on her head stand on end. “No, it wasn’t like that,” she protested. “He raped me.”

The room became as quiet as a grave. Satomi gaped and blinked rapidly. Both sisters could feel their hearts beating in quick, dull throbs like thudding blows between them.

“What? No, it’s not true. He would never …”

“He did, and look, this is the outcome!” Makiko pointed at the slight bulge of her stomach.

Then, Satomi lunged furiously over the table, her fingers grasping at the envelope.

“Give it to me! I want to know where he is! I’ll send a letter that will make it clear how much of a tart you have been!”

Makiko jumped up, her heart pounding. She wished her sister’s outstretched arms were love flying towards her. She glanced at the photo of the boy, then at the envelope, felt the weight of her stomach, and she realized that their sisterly relationship had finished. She then quickly scrambled up, grabbed the envelope, and ran out through the doorway, until she was out onto the street.

The shrine gate stood perfect as though becalmed. Makiko felt defeated, but as the sky overhead turned dim with the departing sun, she noticed amongst the cracks of the shrine’s steps, the yellow pampas grass seeming to list into the dusk. She squinted at the gate’s ridge-pole that cut a straight line through the air, leaving a narrow sliver of sky that was buzzing with black dots in the distance and she felt a twinge of hope. American planes were clustered to the north in the sky, the plumes of fire and smoke from the city below trailing them. Soon the terrible conflict would be done. Then the fires would eventually burn out and from the ashes her husband would return. The swifter the better she thought, and she willed the planes to drop their explosives quicker. She glanced back at her sister’s house, slipped the envelope into the folds of her kimono, and plunged onwards towards the outskirts of Tokyo and salvation in the countryside.

About the author

Stephen O'Connor is a short fiction writer currently living in New Zealand. His short fiction has appeared in Takehe, Ad Hoc, Headland, and Flash Frontier, among others. He spent a good deal of his time in Japan living in a city well known for its eel delicacies.

https://soconnor87.wixsite.com/fiction

About the artwork

Unaltered photograph by Shin--k on flickr. It is used here under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 license.