only a handsome and spacious one, from its reception hall to its vast kitchen, it is also in the best of taste: a delightful garden, sliding panels decorated by the foremost painters, a distinctive screen pattern and style of metal fittings for each room. The general effect is chaste and aristocratic, rather than voluptuous or rococo. Despite my son’s worldly comments about “entertainment districts,” I judged it best to withhold these fascinating details.
“It’s all gone,” I answered him. “Bombed flat during the war—Yoshiwara, and Asakusa, and Ueno, too.”
What I didn’t tell him was that Yoshiwara had been in severe decline long before the war, and that what had once been the subject of plays, novels, and Hokusai woodcuts had by now become a district of gangs and massage parlours.
In 1939 Yoshiwara boasted three hundred and twenty brothels. When the firebombing was over, only ten were left standing. The American army of occupation swiftly established Special Recreation centres in the few unbombed factories, and price lists were posted on the quartermaster bulletin boards: 20 yen — a buck and a quarter—for the first hour. 10 yen for each additional hour and all night for 50 yen. if you pay more, you spoil it for the rest. The MP’s will he stationed at the doors to enforce these prices. Trucks will leave here each hour, on the hour. NO MATTER HOW GOOD IT FEELS, BE SURE TO WEAR ONE .
“He’d be sad,” said Charley, as if reading my thoughts.
“Who?”
“What’s-his-name. Gonpachi?”
“Yes,” I said. “He would.”
5.
It is Hiroshima and Nagasaki that we Westerners remember, somehow obliterating from our collective memory the firebombing not only of working-class Shitamachi but of the more upscale Yamanote and, finally, of all Tokyo, a catastrophe movinglydramatized in Grave of the Fireflies , one of the most powerful anime yet produced. The director, Isao Takahata, is the business partner of the much more famous director Hayao Miyazaki, whose work includes Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away , but Grave of the Fireflies , the story of a teenage boy Seita, and his little sister, Setsuko, is equal to any of Miyazaki’s great films. Seita and Setsuko’s father is serving in the navy, so when their mother is killed in the fire-bombing they are abandoned in a burning world. At first they stay with their aunt, but she is so lacking in affection, so loudly resentful of the expense of housing them, that they decide to look out for themselves, living in a cave by a stream. What starts as playing house becomes more and more serious as Seita is reduced to stealing in order to feed his sister. Ultimately, he cannot look after her and she dies of malnutrition. Seita painfully makes his way back to the devastated Tokyo, where he becomes yet another lost child and dies in a crowded railway station.
It was this film that led us to our meeting with Mr. Yazaki, not because he was an animator—he was not—but because he had been Charley’s age at the time of the firebombing. This was really all I knew about the very pleasant, very articulate Mr. Yazaki. I never questioned him about his life as an adult, a writer, an intellectual, and never, in fact, understoodhow he might know my agent, Paul Hulbert, or exactly what chain of relationships had persuaded him to talk about these few months of childhood to an untidy Australian about whom he, in turn, must have known almost nothing.
He was a story; I was a writer; and that was our relationship. If I use only his family name it is because I cannot translate the first name on his business card.
“My friend,” said Mr. Yazaki, “is the novelist who wrote Grave of the Fireflies , the novel on which the film is based. Not surprisingly, there are some points of connection between his life and the novel. For instance, he was evacuated to Kobe during the war while his sister stayed in Tokyo. She was killed in the firebombing, and all throughout his life—he’s three
“It’s all gone,” I answered him. “Bombed flat during the war—Yoshiwara, and Asakusa, and Ueno, too.”
What I didn’t tell him was that Yoshiwara had been in severe decline long before the war, and that what had once been the subject of plays, novels, and Hokusai woodcuts had by now become a district of gangs and massage parlours.
In 1939 Yoshiwara boasted three hundred and twenty brothels. When the firebombing was over, only ten were left standing. The American army of occupation swiftly established Special Recreation centres in the few unbombed factories, and price lists were posted on the quartermaster bulletin boards: 20 yen — a buck and a quarter—for the first hour. 10 yen for each additional hour and all night for 50 yen. if you pay more, you spoil it for the rest. The MP’s will he stationed at the doors to enforce these prices. Trucks will leave here each hour, on the hour. NO MATTER HOW GOOD IT FEELS, BE SURE TO WEAR ONE .
“He’d be sad,” said Charley, as if reading my thoughts.
“Who?”
“What’s-his-name. Gonpachi?”
“Yes,” I said. “He would.”
5.
It is Hiroshima and Nagasaki that we Westerners remember, somehow obliterating from our collective memory the firebombing not only of working-class Shitamachi but of the more upscale Yamanote and, finally, of all Tokyo, a catastrophe movinglydramatized in Grave of the Fireflies , one of the most powerful anime yet produced. The director, Isao Takahata, is the business partner of the much more famous director Hayao Miyazaki, whose work includes Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away , but Grave of the Fireflies , the story of a teenage boy Seita, and his little sister, Setsuko, is equal to any of Miyazaki’s great films. Seita and Setsuko’s father is serving in the navy, so when their mother is killed in the fire-bombing they are abandoned in a burning world. At first they stay with their aunt, but she is so lacking in affection, so loudly resentful of the expense of housing them, that they decide to look out for themselves, living in a cave by a stream. What starts as playing house becomes more and more serious as Seita is reduced to stealing in order to feed his sister. Ultimately, he cannot look after her and she dies of malnutrition. Seita painfully makes his way back to the devastated Tokyo, where he becomes yet another lost child and dies in a crowded railway station.
It was this film that led us to our meeting with Mr. Yazaki, not because he was an animator—he was not—but because he had been Charley’s age at the time of the firebombing. This was really all I knew about the very pleasant, very articulate Mr. Yazaki. I never questioned him about his life as an adult, a writer, an intellectual, and never, in fact, understoodhow he might know my agent, Paul Hulbert, or exactly what chain of relationships had persuaded him to talk about these few months of childhood to an untidy Australian about whom he, in turn, must have known almost nothing.
He was a story; I was a writer; and that was our relationship. If I use only his family name it is because I cannot translate the first name on his business card.
“My friend,” said Mr. Yazaki, “is the novelist who wrote Grave of the Fireflies , the novel on which the film is based. Not surprisingly, there are some points of connection between his life and the novel. For instance, he was evacuated to Kobe during the war while his sister stayed in Tokyo. She was killed in the firebombing, and all throughout his life—he’s three
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