The Street of a Thousand Blossoms

The novel opens with a prologue set in February 1966, as thirty-seven-year-old Hiroshi Matsumoto awakens on the morning of his retirement ceremony from sumo wrestling. Lying on his futon, he reflects on his career as a yokozuna, or grand champion, whose youthful agility helped revive Japan's pride after the devastation of World War II. His thoughts are shadowed by regret over what the sport cost him, especially as the accusing stare of his wife, Aki, flashes through his mind. Haru, Aki's older sister, enters and tells him they will leave for the stadium soon, remarking that it will be "a day of no regrets" (3). Something tender and inconsolable grips his chest.

The story moves back to 1939 in the Yanaka district of Tokyo, where eleven-year-old Hiroshi and his nine-year-old brother, Kenji, live with their grandparents, Yoshio and Fumiko Wada. Their parents, Kazuo and Misako, drowned years earlier during a festival at Miyazu Bay when a boat struck rocks. Three-year-old Hiroshi survived by being placed in a fish barrel by his father, while baby Kenji had stayed home with the grandparents. Fumiko retells this story with slight variations each time, reinventing the parents and keeping them alive through words. Kenji, however, always leaves the room during these retellings, unable to bear the sorrow. The brothers live on a quiet street near the Kyo-ou-ji temple, where Yoshio, a retired brewery master whose eyesight is failing, has built a wooden watchtower onto the back of the house so the boys can observe the world, honoring their mother's wish.

The brothers differ sharply in temperament. Hiroshi is strong, outgoing, and already the top wrestler in his school. Kenji is shy and introverted, taunted by classmates who chant about "Kenji the ghost." Kenji discovers his calling when he stumbles upon the mask shop of Akira Yoshiwara, a renowned artisan who carves masks for Noh theater, a centuries-old Japanese dramatic tradition in which performers wear elaborately carved and painted wooden masks. Yoshiwara takes the boy as his apprentice, teaching him to shape Japanese cypress into living faces and giving him a leather-bound volume called The Book of Masks. Hiroshi, meanwhile, is scouted by Tanaka-oyakata, the respected stable master of the Katsuyama-beya sumo stable. On the December day Hiroshi rushes home with this news, however, his family huddles around the radio hearing that Japan has bombed Pearl Harbor. War begins, and his sumo dreams evaporate.

The Pacific War transforms Yanaka. Food rationing worsens as men disappear to fight. Fumiko sells her finest kimonos on the black market to feed the family, while Hiroshi begins stealing food to survive. Yoshio goes completely blind but keeps it secret, finding peace in surrendering to darkness. Their neighbor Mariko Yoshida, a young cellist whose fiancé was killed in the Philippines, defiantly plays her cello outdoors after blackout. When the kempeitai, Japan's wartime military police, arrive, a policeman fires and Mariko falls dead. Hiroshi rushes forward and a guard's bayonet slashes his forehead, leaving a permanent scar. Yoshiwara flees Tokyo after the kempeitai target him for antiwar activities, leaving only a note for Kenji, who feels abandoned by yet another person he loves. When the kempeitai order the watchtower demolished, Yoshio rises before dawn and destroys it himself with a sledgehammer. Kenji is evacuated to the countryside near Nagano, while Hiroshi remains behind to watch over their grandparents.

The night of March 9, 1945, changes everything. Incendiary bombs create a massive firestorm that sweeps through Tokyo. Tanaka-oyakata's wife, Noriko, is killed. His older daughter Haru, only eleven, suffers severe burns on her palms when she smothers fire catching on her younger sister Aki's headgear. Eight-year-old Aki loses her voice completely after witnessing her mother's death and does not speak for months. Yanaka is miraculously spared by shifting winds. Hiroshi volunteers to retrieve the dead and finds Noriko's body by a river, a discovery that connects him to the Tanaka family. In August, atomic bombs fall on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the emperor announces Japan's surrender.

The postwar years bring new hardships and new beginnings. Fumiko desperately seeks news of her closest friend, Ayako Sugihara, who moved to Hiroshima before the bombing and is never heard from again. Tanaka-oyakata invites Hiroshi to join the stable as an apprentice, and Hiroshi begins the grueling life of a sumo trainee: predawn rising, rigorous exercise, and servitude to higher-ranked wrestlers. Tanaka gives him the fighting name Takanoyama, meaning Noble Mountain. Kenji earns an architecture degree from Tokyo University but announces he wants to be a mask artisan instead. His grandfather supports him, saying a man should do what he loves. Using money borrowed from Hiroshi, Kenji opens a small mask shop. Meanwhile, Yoshiwara, who hid in a remote mountain village during the war and lost his left hand in an avalanche, returns to Tokyo and reunites with Kenji. The two become partners, with Yoshiwara painting and finishing the masks Kenji carves.

Hiroshi rises steadily through the sumo ranks, eventually reaching the highest rank of yokozuna. His career parallels Japan's own recovery, and he becomes a national figure. Along the way, he tears a ligament in his knee that threatens to end his career, but he fights his way back. He develops feelings for Aki, Tanaka's younger daughter, and after years of quiet courtship they marry. Haru, who studies botany at Nara Women's University inspired by a bracken fern she found pushing through the ashes after the firestorm, carries quiet feelings for Hiroshi and watches from a distance as he marries her sister. Kenji falls in love with Mika Abe, an art student from university who draws him away from the kasutori culture of postwar drinking and escapism, and they marry in a simple civil ceremony.

Yoshio dies peacefully in 1952 among Fumiko's lilies of the valley, his vision clearing in his final moment to reveal his daughter Misako smiling at him. Aki gives birth to a son, Takashi, but the baby dies in his sleep at four months old. Aki retreats into severe depression. Hiroshi, consumed with grief, returns to sumo and begins spending evenings at geisha teahouses. A daughter, Takara, is born, but Aki's depression deepens; she refuses to hold the baby, terrified of losing another child. Haru returns from Nara to care for Aki and raise Takara, sacrificing her career once more.

In November 1963, Mika and her father are killed in a train crash at Tsurumi outside Tokyo. Kenji descends into alcoholism and one night sets fire to the masks he has carved of Mika's face over the years. When her features come alive in the flames, he screams and smothers the fire with his bare hands, then falls and strikes his head on the flagstones. Hiroshi arrives and finds him unconscious. Kenji recovers while staying with Fumiko, who tells him that Mika would not want him to destroy himself. He stops drinking and carefully restores the scorched masks, finding new life beneath the damaged surfaces.

On August 6, 1965, the twentieth anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, Aki dresses herself in her dead mother's red silk kimono from Noriko's days as a maiko, or geisha apprentice, applies white makeup, and hangs herself from the old pine tree in the garden. In her final moments, the memory she has suppressed for twenty years surfaces: During the firestorm, little Aki stubbornly refused to move, and when she turned, she saw her mother's back engulfed in flames as Noriko pushed her to safety and vanished. This buried guilt is the catalyst for her final act. Hiroshi returns home early and finds her.

The novel returns to the frame of the prologue. Hiroshi channels his grief into one final tournament victory and retires from sumo. At the February retirement ceremony, Tanaka-oyakata cuts Hiroshi's topknot in the traditional danpatsu-shiki haircutting ritual, severing his connection to the sport. His unkempt hair falls across his eyes as he bows to the audience. He looks to the box seats and sees Kenji beside Fumiko, Takara waving, and Haru with her once-hidden scarred hands now visible, poised to catch his daughter if she should fall. Hiroshi reflects that, unlike the samurai in his grandmother's old tale whose life passed him by, it is not too late for him. Outside the stadium, a new Japan prospers. One step at a time, he will move forward.