His father reminded him that in the old days a child like Tsuburaya would be made to swallow a small salamander alive as a cure for nervous weakness. One rainy morning in a park, when his father thought he’d been too peevish, he held one up to Tsuburaya’s mouth and said that a childhood classmate of his had reported he could feel it moving about his stomach for some minutes afterward.
Yet Tsuburaya also remembered him taking them on the hottest days for shaved ice with grape, strawberry, or lemon syrup, the syrup never getting down as far as the red beans at the base of the paper cone. He remembered a delivery in a downpour in which they sat in their wagon watching farmers in a field in the distance, in their raincoats woven from rushes looking like so many porcupines while they squatted to rest. He remembered insect festivals in the evenings when the autumn grasses bloomed and the singing insects they’d gathered in their tiny cages were, at an agreed-upon stroke, all freed, and how they waited — himself, his grandmother, Ichiro, and his father — for that moment when the cicadas would get their bearings, puzzle out their freedom, and let loose their rejoicing in song.
For the first day of principal photography, the visual-effects team was divided into its three units, one for location photography to shoot the plates for the process and composite shots, one for the lab work, and one for the miniatures. Tsuburaya called Hajime that morning to let him know that he could join the unit. Hajime was so excited, he claimed, that he ran all the way to the studio when the streetcar was late.
“Why didn’t you take a cab?” Honda asked once he arrived. “You’re sweating on our work,” he added, when Hajime only grinned for an answer.
Tsuburaya told him that he had three minutes to get the film casings loaded, and the boy disappeared to cool himself off as best he could at the sinks in the washroom before returning with his hair askew and in a borrowed shirt.
It turned out that before they’d even gotten through a half a day, another stuntman, Tezuka, was needed to spell Nakajima, so exhausting was the part. The suit was stifling in the August heat even without the studio lights, but with them it was a roasting pan. Added to that were the fumes from the burning kerosene rags intended to simulate Tokyo’s fires. Under the searing lights Nakajima was barely able to breathe or see, and could only spend a maximum of fifteen minutes in the suit before being too overcome to continue. Each time he stepped out of it, the supporting technicians drained the legs as if pouring water out of a boot. One measured a cup and a half of sweat from each leg.
The second half of the first day’s schedule involved the destruction of the National Diet. Tezuka fainted and broke his jaw on the top of the parliament building as he fell, so they were back to Nakajima again. While awaiting his recovery, they repaired the damage to the building.
Upon Nakajima’s return, everything went off in one shot. While he maneuvered his way down the row of buildings, crew members at Tsuburaya’s signal heaved on the cable that ran up through a pulley in the rafters and worked the tail. When it crashed into the side of the National Diet, another technician detonated the pyrotechnics and plastic and wooden parts rained down on everyone in the studio. Honda said it looked even better through the eyepiece than they might have hoped. And they all felt at once exultation and disquiet. While the men extinguishing the fires sprayed everything down, the fastenings were undone and the top part of the creature was peeled from poor Nakajima’s head and shoulders. While he was given some water it hung before him like a sack.
Tanaka came by to see the last part of the shot and reported that Mori had taken to calling what they were doing “suitmation.”
“How’d the boy work out?” he asked Honda, half-teasing.
“I haven’t heard any complaints,” Honda told him in response. And Hajime pretended to be too absorbed in sealing the rush canisters to have heard what they said.
Masano was asleep when Tsuburaya was finally dropped off after the first day of shooting, and asleep when he left the next morning. Toward the end of the second day, an assistant informed him during a break that she’d telephoned to let him know that Hajime would be joining them for dinner that night.
His son was lugging film cans to the processing wagon while Tsuburaya read the note. “You’re dining with us tonight?” he called to him.
“That’s what I’m told,” Hajime answered.
They rode home together. It was still bright out and the dining table was flooded with a quiet white light from the paper windows. Masano collected Imari porcelain and had set out for the occasion her most prized bowls and cups.
Seeming even more grim than usual, she asked how their days had been. Tsuburaya told her his had gone well. Hajime smiled like a guest in someone else’s home, and Akira seemed beside himself with joy at his brother’s unexpected presence, though even he seemed to register the tension. For appetizers there were a number of variations on raw radishes, Hajime’s favorite, including some involving three kinds of flavored salts. Masano had begun believing more and more fiercely in the purifying usefulness of salt.
There was a silence while they ate, except for Akira smacking his lips. When they finished, Masano cleared the table and served, for dessert, more radishes, pickled and sugared. She asked if they had anything to tell her.
“Do you have anything to tell your mother?” Tsuburaya asked the older boy.
Hajime seemed to give it some knit-browed thought. “It’s nice to see you?” he finally offered.
She sat back with her arms folded and watched them exchange looks. “I’ve tried to give our son some direction; a little instruction,” she finally remarked. “But you know what that’s like. It’s like praying into a horse’s ear.”
“I’ve taken Hajime on as my camera assistant,” Tsuburaya told her.
“Yes, I thought that might be the situation,” she answered, and even Akira acknowledged the extent of her anger by hunching his shoulders. “The Personnel Department called, needing information,” she added.
He’d provided their oldest son with a job, and a good one, Tsuburaya reminded her. That seemed cause for celebration, and not complaint.
“As you say, I have no cause for complaint,” Masano told him. But something in her shoulders once she’d turned away left him so dismayed that he found he no longer had the heart to argue. They sat facing each other like mirror images of defeat.
“Thank you for this excellent meal,” Hajime told her.
“Thank you for coming,” Masano answered. Tsuburaya put his hand atop hers, at the table, and she let him leave it there.
But she didn’t speak to him again until later that night, when he threw off his covers in the heat. She said then that as a young woman she’d felt anxious about seeming awkward when she tried to express herself. And that until she’d met him, she’d feared it had something to do with being too self-centered. And that their letters — their feelings — had helped her understand that something else was possible.
“Remember how thrilled we’d be when we saw my name in the credits?” Tsuburaya asked her.
“I read some of those letters today,” she told him. In the dark he couldn’t see her face. “They’re such strange things. So full of connection.”
“Hajime can work for Toho and remain a loving son,” he told her.
“I need to sleep now,” she explained, after a pause. And after another pause, she did.
He departed earlier than usual for the studio the next day, and at his driver’s horn-blowing, he raised his head from his work to find his car in a great migration of bicycles ridden by delivery boys, bakery boys, and messenger boys, some of them negotiating astonishing loads: glaziers’ boys balancing great panes of glass, soba boys shouldering pyramids of boxed soups, peddlers’ boys with pickle barrels, all weaving along at high speed. When a toddler in a tram window reached out to touch one, the cyclist veered away down a side street.