Tokyo Twins – Chapters 4 and 5
Tokyo Twins A serialized online story
Introduction
Tokyo Twins looks at two issues -
what the roots of terrorism are, and what the end of terrorism might be.
One new chapter, in both text and audio, will be posted each week to Pakistan Times.
Tokyo Twins – Chapters 4 & 5 – mp3 audio
The girls did lightning fast rounds of rock-scissors-paper to divvy-up their chores, and Obá-chan went into her bedroom and sat upon the tatami mat with her back against the wall to let drain “oh please let drain” the ghost of fear and panic now seizing her body and soul.
The disappearance of Henry and Mieko O’Brien in Kashmir would hit the news in 24 hours, so say the two gentlemen from the Foreign Ministry of Japan.
It didn’t matter to Obá-chan that it would hit all at once and all around the world.
The problem she simply could not face right now was telling Katie and Susan.
She knew in her own life what sudden losses were. Loved ones. Family. Here today. Then here no more.
She was in her early teenage years living in Tokyo during the Second World War.
She pondered through the years her memories of fear and loss and hopelessness. Were they now all the more hidden inside her, or were they wearing themselves away?
Tonight, the answer came.
For Obá-chan and every surviving Japanese these were the utmost of private matters. Not even with your older sister, would you bring the topic up. There was too much work to do. And way too much to sort through.
And now this sudden devastation: Mieko and Henry were missing in Kashmir.
Her state of shock was digging up fresh her ancient despair and suffering and loneliness.
She had escaped inside her bedroom to gather strength and just the opposite was happening now.
How could she find and form the words to explain to Katie and Susan?
Without invitation, without intention, her past was roaring itself to life, and there was nothing she could do about it.
She cracked open a bottle of shochu – rice whiskey and poured a half a glass. And slipped her hand inside her bottom chest of drawers pulling out a cigarette from her secret place.
How could she find and form the words to tell Susan and Katie, she thought again.
Then her mind got captured by the past.
Obá-chan had three younger brothers and an older sister – five children in the household during the war.
The first two brothers, it seemed, survived unscarred the misery of those four years.
At the end of 1945 they were ten and twelve years old–and now both leaders in television broadcasting, an industry then unimagined, but made real over night by physics as physics made real—yet faster—The Bomb.
But it was a gradual and growing wreckage that invaded the life of Kenji, the family’s baby boy.
Kenji was five years old at the end of the war. Unable to talk… well he stuttered, stuttered himself speechless. Unable to play with others. Unable to demonstrate or even show signs of how or what he was feeling.
Not after the war.
Kenji was fine at birth, fine at three years old, a perfectly normal Japanese toddler. Happy, expressive and aware. Always smiling. Sensitive for a young child to the needs and well being of everyone – family, friends, even those in the neighborhood we didn’t care for much.
Kenji got lost one night. It was summer 1944.
For safety, we were changing locations – walking, the whole family – to a cousin’s house miles away, to avoid what most of us long feared: that our own neighborhood was the likely and imminent bull’s-eye for new bombs.
Just so happened we were right.
Little Kenji, four years old, got lost along the way, and somehow followed the tracks we had hiked for miles and made his way back home.
Kenji was found the next day buried in the rubble of the bombing of our home, alone, severely hurt, severely awake, aware of all that transpired from moment to moment – the violence and destruction, the flames and heat all around him, the unceasing explosions, the deadly loud noise of neighbors in pain–put viscously upon the only world he knew.
The events hit Kenji like a meteor leaving its footprint for godknows how long.
Kenji shut down badly, more and more so with the passing days and months and years.
Nobody said anything, but everybody knew.
Some of us could still see the old Kenji-light somewhere in his eyes, the old Kenji-wit and humor and love. But these beautiful ways he had of being himself, a joyful little boy, stayed hidden deep inside.
At 16, without saying good-bye – it was 1956 – Kenji hopped an ocean freighter in Tokyo Bay, and left Japan, (could it be 50 years ago already?) and we never heard from him again.
“Obá-chan, daijoubu?” Susan stuck her head half-way inside the bedroom door.
“Come in, Susan. Come in and sit here on my lap like you use to do… You too, Katie. Come in girls, let’s get close.”
“Obá-chan, we know you’re not feeling well, so we made your dinner. It’s there at the dining room table.” said Susan.
And tears welled-up in Obá-chan’s eyes, and rolled in slow motion down her cheeks, then over a delicate and feeling smile somehow finding form.
“You kids eat?” Obá-chan slowly asked.
“Hmm.” Katie and Susan nodded their heads.
A long pause came down upon them, and the three sat quietly in the dark.
“Katie and Susan?”
“Yes?” the girls responded.
“Obá-chan needs to tell you something.”
Chapter 5 – Mourning and mystery on Hebiyama.
__________________________________________
Katie and Susan and Obá-chan huddled and cuddled around one other to absorb, to grieve, to reject as impossible the news of their loved ones missing in Kashmir.
Obá-chan suggested the girls stay home tomorrow away from the uncertainty and chaos surely to hound them from well meaning friends, from media from within their own minds.
They had never missed a day of school before, not a single one, nor a day of Shintaiso practice, and “tomorrow”, Katie and Susan said, “would not be the first.”
The girls retired to their room. And Katie did some homework by the light of an oil lamp lit for comfort and for quiet, while Susan sat at the piano and began to slowly and quietly play the very first song her father Henry O’Brien had taught her at the age of six, and her own tears broke new ground in her feelings of loss compelling more tears from Katie.
The melody Susan played, became the words spoken between sisters and these were words enough – this lullaby passed down to her through her father, passed down to her father by his own, who wrote the melody in Des Moines, Iowa, 70 years ago.
Some minutes passed by when softly appeared another melody. Maybe from the radio in Obá-chan’s room?
The girls looked around and at each other.
No.
This melody, harmonizing and weaving measure for measure over the lullaby Susan played, a soft solo sound from some kind of flute, floated quietly and on key out of the black of Hebiyama through their opened bedroom window into the golden glow of their room.
These melodies, unlikely companions, induced the girls to peace of mind, to feelings of exhaustion to futons on the floor, and sweetly and subtly to sleep.
? ? ? ? ?
Where the national forest begins at the O’Brien household property line, a mere one meter from its west brick wall, the stranger in Snake Mountain (Hebiyama) whose voice the girls had heard that same evening on their way home had spent the earlier part of the day making a nest about 40 meters away in a thick and impenetrable thatch of bamboo.
He cut out a small clearing with a machete knife, dividing out in stacks the solid bamboo stalks for vectoring from those a bit more flexible for shaping from those a lot more flexible for lashing from those brand new for food.
The solid bamboo stalks for vectoring became foundation and floor and walls laid out in pentagon, in diameter the length of his body and half again.
He then trimmed and cut and lined up in ratio, like making angels in the snow, a pattern of chords from the flexible stalks for a geodesic dome. Weaving for a few hours more in the afternoon a bamboo roof of some organic half moon, he lashed this unlikely sturdy top to the foundation and walls and floor.
Then sitting back with a smile and a sigh he welcomed himself in silence to home-sweet home.
He took from his sack a bottle of water, and also a bottle of mayonnaise labeled “Kyupi”, and sat down and enjoyed a banquet of H2O and bamboo shoots dipped in the local mayo.
After his evening meal the man took a walk in the woods in darkness and spotted Katie and Susan O’Brien returning home, and he naturally offered a “daijoubu”, inquiring about the well-being of his two special young neighbors who passed by nearly unnoticed, and upon hearing his voice suddenly ran away.
And later in the evening he began to hear an exquisite and simple melody plucked gently on a piano nearby, so he took from his pack his well worn flute and with improvisation played along for a while.
And with his final chore of the day, nearly forgotten by these transporting and companion melodies on piano and flute, the man retrieved a cell phone from his bag, and to his team on the other end reported, “I’m all set-up. Let’s spread the party out.”
? ? ? ? ?
The next morning the girls awoke to a quandary of determination and unbearable loss.
A determination to make it through the long day ahead, then seek out before bedtime, to meet face-to face the mysterious flautist of Snake Mountain.
Yet sadness hung dragging from their will power like anchors dropped many and deep into a harbor of anxiety and too heavy for the bottom of that sea.
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