Fireflies by Ben Byrne

and leaves the room.
    The man hears the girl dressing. He sidles out from underneath the bed, intent upon presenting her with a diabolical proposition. As he emerges, she shrieks. He gasps, clutching at his chest. The girl is his own daughter.
    The cover was a master stroke, lovingly drawn and coloured by Nakamura. A woman suns herself on a beach, wide hips, jutting breasts, plus ça change. But, this is no Japanese bathing beauty. She is a Westerner. An American lady, with just a wisp of hair emerging beneath her navel — for the first time, I was sure, on the cover of a Japanese magazine. The wife of one of the generals, perhaps? Of MacArthur himself? All of this, and more, now available to anyone for just three yen. This, I sensed instinctively, was the true essence of democracy.
    The second half of the magazine was more considered. Inspired by the house painters, “The Dish I Most Lament” was based upon a series of interviews I conducted at various stations along the Yamanote Line, in which I asked ordinary citizens to describe the meal for which they felt most nostalgic. The reactions were astonishing. Some shook their heads furiously and marched away; one man even punched me on the nose. Others simply froze, then began to reel off a list of dishes as if they were reading from a long menu unfurling in their minds — sea bream cooked in chestnut rice; bubbling stews of chicken and burdock; hot fried tempura and fat slivers of bonito . . . Others smiled with that faraway look I had seen on the faces of the painters, and talked of cold buckwheat soba from a temple in Kyoto; itawasa fish cakes from a famous shop in Nihonbashi . . . They talked of tofu and oden , horsemeat and clams, but, most of all, they talked of miso. Miso, miso, always miso soup, prepared each morning by the hands of once beloved, now departed mothers and wives.
    Sometimes I had to stop them talking, as my eyes would be blurry with tears. Then their smiles would falter and the wind would gust past us in the street. The interviewees would look at me bitterly then, as if I had robbed them of something precious. More than anything, I realized, it was our lost past that was the most captivating daydream. In these days of dried cod, of the rotten sweet potato, it was the most painful fantasy of all.
    ~ ~ ~
    ERO , as we named the magazine, was an instant hit. Convinced of its appeal, Mrs. Shimamura funded the first printing. By the end of the day, all of the copies we had placed with the booksellers and newsstands had sold out. With the profits, we printed another issue, which itself sold out by the end of the week. It seemed we had struck a peculiar vein.
    My financial issues then were temporarily solved. But I was troubled by the fact that in just five days, my erotic stories had sold a hundred times more than all my literary scribblings had in a decade. Even more disturbingly, while in the past I had agonized over every word and punctuation point, these stories had flowed from my pen like water. I had written them all in one night, in fact, one after the other, sitting up in my room with an inkstone and a bottle of liquor. I wondered if something had fractured in my mind during those long, malarial months of horror in the jungles of New Guinea.
    What irony that I, who fancied myself the Japanese Tolstoy, an Oriental Zola, should find my métier in pornography. That the first thing I should write on my return from the inferno of war should be sensual and erotic!

10
    THE TOURISTIC GI
    (HAL LYNCH)
    My compatriots glanced at me curiously across the basement dining room of the Continental Hotel as I attempted to lever chunks of rice into my mouth with my chopsticks. A small bowl of anonymous, gelatinous fish swamped in brown paste lay on my table, alongside a slippery white cuboid of tofu and a pot of green tea. The boy had been delighted when I’d asked him for a “Japanese-style” breakfast, but I was now envying the morning