Burial in the Clouds Read online

  Burial Clouds

  in the

  Burial Clouds

  in the

  Hiroyuki Agawa

  Translated by Teruyo Shimizu

  TUTTLE PUBLISHING

  Tokyo • Rutland, Vermont • Singapore

  First English-language edition published by Tuttle Publishing, an imprint of Periplus Editions (HK) Ltd., with editorial offices at 364 Innovation Drive, North Clarendon, Vermont 05759 U.S.A.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher.

  English translation © 2006 Teruyo Shimizu

  “KUMO NO BOHYO” by Hiroyuki Agawa

  Copyright © Hiroyuki Agawa 1956.

  All rights reserved.

  Original Japanese edition published by Shinchosha Co.

  This English-language edition published by arrangement with Shinchosha Co.,

  Tokyo, in care of the Tuttle-Mori Agency, Inc., Tokyo.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Agawa, Hiroyuki, 1920-

  [Kumo no bohyo. English]

  Burial in the clouds /Hiroyuki Agawa; translated by Teruyo Shimizu.—1st ed. p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8048-3759-0 ISBN-10: 0-8048-3759-7 (pbk.)

  I. Shimizu, Teruyo, 1967- II. Title.

  PL845.G3K713 2006

  895.6’35—dc22

  2006015263

  ISBN-10: 0-8048-3759-7

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8048-3759-0

  ISBN: 978-1-4629-1418-0 (ebook)

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  Burial Clouds

  in the

  CONTENTS

  Otake Naval Barracks (Hiroshima Prefecture)

  Tsuchiura Naval Air Station

  Izumi Naval Air Station

  Usa Naval Air Station

  Usa Naval Air Station

  Hyakuri-hara Naval Air Station

  Otake Naval Barracks (Hiroshima Prefecture)

  December 12, Showa 18 (1943)

  My first Sunday since joining the Imperial Navy. Our duty today was to organize our belongings. I have recovered my composure somewhat and decided to start this journal.

  At 11:50 a.m., the day before yesterday, I stepped off the train at Otake Station and headed for the Naval Barracks. Had a physical exam in the afternoon and passed it as “B” class. I was pronounced flight-worthy, and that determined the course I shall follow. I traded in my school uniform for a sailor’s togs (called jonbira), and donned that clumsy sailor cap. Our snow-white fatigues were distributed, too. At night, I was taught for the first time how to sling a hammock and how to fold my clothing so as to make a pillow out of it. Had my first navy supper. The dawn following my first night here was cold.

  Only four nights have passed since I left bustling Osaka Station, with all my friends and family there to see me off. But I feel now that this must have happened six months ago, a year ago, even three years. It seems like an event lodged deep in the past, and I look back at it as if through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars.

  I have no idea whether the navy is hell or paradise, but when I heard the division officer say the word shaba—the term navy men use for the “free world” without—I fully realized that I had entered a new realm, utterly different and completely estranged from the snug world I have always inhabited. I knew all of this before, of course. Nevertheless, at one moment my spirit balloons out with a courage that floods my entire body, and I am determined to confront whatever comes. And at the next moment it deflates, and I am vexed and bereft, as if thrown into the abyss. I have a lingering attachment to the studies I left behind. I yearn for my parents. Fond sentiments bind me to so many people. And these feelings twine round and round about me, cutting me to pieces in the end. But I suppose we are no longer to “choose” anything. The only option open to us is to train ourselves, according to a fate already determined.

  In the navy a bucket is referred to as a “tin case.” A dust cloth is an “inner gunwale match,” a tub is a “washtub,” and so on. Use of such worldly expressions as boku, kimi, ne, and tono is absolutely prohibited. One slip of the tongue gets you a “cow killer” from the drill instructor—a disciplinary knuckle on the forehead. I must become proficient at the language and order of this new society. In fact, I need to master it, down to the minutest detail.

  Scholar-sailors like me are grouped according to the schools we are from. There is the Waseda Division, for example, and the Tokyo University Division. There are Divisions from Chu-o University, from Hiroshima Higher Normal School, and of course from our own Kyoto University. I look about me as I write and see Fujikura, with a long face, chewing his “Jintan” mints. Sakai is writing a postcard. And Kashima—well, he must be someplace around here. In this, I am really quite fortunate.

  After our last seminar on the Manyoshu, at the end of November, we played baseball out on the grounds till it grew dark. Then we sat down and talked under a broad oak tree behind the library. Kashima composed a poem for the occasion, which I liked and still remember.

  If I remain in one piece,

  Will there come a time

  When again I see you and you,

  Whom I left under the blue Japanese oak?

  It encourages me to no end that half of those old friends are living here together.

  The tide of the war is not in our favor, but I don’t think it is necessarily in favor of the United States either. I can imagine that American students have given up their study of Shakespeare or Whitman to take their place in the battle line, and in a sense the outcome of the war might well be determined by youths like us. I must sink all impertinent thoughts to the bottom of my mind and try to become a man.

  The ceremony officially marking our enlistment is set for Monday, which is tomorrow. The commander-in-chief of the Kure Naval Station make a tour of inspection. The turn of a vast wheel galvanizes all the merely private movements of our minds, and we are welded, little by little, into a larger organization.

  December 15

  Fujikura was caught reading this morning as the division officer, Lieutenant Yuhara, delivered a moral lecture. The lieutenant defined one aspect of navy spirit as “smartness.” He was not talking about stylishness or anything like that. To be “smart,” he said, is to be swift, flexible, and agile, all the while retaining a certain grace so as never to be rough. We must acquire this “smartness” in our carriage as well as in our minds, for without it we will be useless to the navy, whether as sailors or as pilots. And then, abruptly, Lieutenant Yuhara thundered:

  “Who’s that reading? Stand up!”

  We all looked on anxiously. The lieutenant demanded to know what Fujikura had in his hands and was baffled when the latter replied that it was a “literary journal.” He had to ask ag
ain.

  “I was reading a literary journal, sir,” Fujikura all but shouted, in a tone just a shade defiant. “The article is on Basho, the poet. My old teacher wrote it. I was just thinking that the ‘smartness’ you describe is rather like the quality Basho has in view when he speaks of his principle of‘lightness.”’

  “You mean to tell me that you understood what I said, even while reading?"

  “Yes, sir. I did."

  We all got a chuckle out of that, except for the division officer himself. “All right,” he said. “Put down that magazine and don’t let this happen again.” He gave no further rebuke. Incidentally, Professor O. wrote that article on Basho, and I remember it with nostalgia. At the same time, I formed no bad impression of Lieutenant Yuhara.

  We took the Student Reserve Officers Examination this afternoon. The subjects were Japanese, composition, mathematics, and physics. The proctor was our drill instructor, Petty Officer First Class Zenta Yoshimi. If we pass the exam and finish our course at the naval barracks, in a little more than a month we will be given a naval officer’s uniform and assigned a rank just below midshipman, and we start acquiring skills specific to our positions. I’ll probably be sent to the Tsuchiura Naval Air Station.

  Petty Officer Yoshimi is among the surviving crew of the aircraft carrier So-ryu, which was sunk at the Battle of Midway Island. He is a veteran of ten years’ standing, yet before long we will outrank him. And if we find ourselves together on the same battlefield, we students must assume command, taking into our hands the lives of officers like these. We cannot treat the matter lightly. I can well imagine that it won’t be pleasant for these drill instructors to see students like us—men who don’t know their left from their right—outrank them, and in such short order, too. But at least our instructor, Petty Officer Yoshimi, has the good humor to say, with a laugh, that he “has now become a college professor.” Besides, he takes his responsibilities seriously and never makes unreasonable demands of us.

  As for the examinations: It is a piece of cake for us to tackle Japanese and composition, but we humanities students are totally out of our element in mathematics and physics. I have only the faintest memory of ever hearing such terms as “Ohm’s law,” or Helmholtz’s “Conservation of Energy,” and that was when I was in junior high school. Everybody is having trouble. However, navy custom fosters a decidedly strong rivalry among its various divisions and outfits, and to that rule the Student Reserve Officers Exam is no exception. The drill instructors would do anything to avoid the dishonor of producing a failure from their own outfits. So the proctors themselves cheat. Petty Officer Yoshimi paused once beside my desk and rapped it with a pencil. I turned, but he stepped away as if nothing had happened. Whereupon I scrutinized the paper: I had given the wrong answer to one of the questions in mathematics. I looked around me and saw our proctor rapping, here and there, as he walked among the desks.

  In the evening, we had a special course in navy calisthenics.

  December 28

  Our third time rowing the cutter. About fifty strokes. I can think of nothing more beautiful and orderly to look at, and yet more arduous to do myself But I have to pull my own weight.

  Navy mottoes: Iron will. Order. Initiative. And above all, praxis.

  But honestly, I know my heart always harbors the antitheses of all these elements of virtue, side by side with each of them. Weakness. Slovenliness. Passive maintenance of the status quo. And above all, just going through the motions. As for that last one: I’m really not shrewd enough to pull it off, though I sometimes feel that you have to pull it off if you want to survive in the military.

  “Ingenuity, Yoshino,” Fujikura said to me bluntly during a cigarette break. “Ingenuity. I tell you this because you’re rather naively honest. We can do what we’re asked to do without letting ourselves be cast into the mold of this insular navy world. If you can’t salvage at least that much independence, to what purpose have you lived such a free and easy life at high school and university? Of course, the brass would be furious if we didn’t at least appear to fit their mold, and that’s where the ingenuity comes in. You know, the novelist Ryunosuke Akutagawa once said, ‘There is also a truth that can only be told through lies.”’

  Fujikura still won’t use military talk like kisama, ore, and omae,* unless a supervisor is within earshot. He seems to enjoy putting up a little resistance. I don’t always agree with him, but I can listen to anything with an open mind so long as it comes from Kashima or Fujikura. Among the four of us, it’s Fujikura and Kashima who rebel most strongly against the navy atmosphere. Sakai is the most amenable, though he’s timid and somewhat whiny. And I’d say I’m just about in between.

  The navy adheres to a diet of brown rice, and before each meal a voice bellows instructions from the loudspeakers. Dinner is ready! Wash your hands! Chew thoroughly and eat slowly! Chew thoroughly and eat slowly.

  We always heard that in the military you have to eat quickly, or else they teach you a lesson. To prepare ourselves we even staged an eating contest at a restaurant we used to haunt called Ogawa-tei, if only for fun. But I find that in the navy it’s actually the other way round. I don’t know whether this has anything to do with it, but the sailors, to a man, empty their bowels with remarkable frequency, quite as if their bodies had somehow altered. I myself take a good hard shit three times a day, every day. The bathroom is always packed during short breaks. If you delay getting in line, you miss your chance. It’s quite painful to engage in battle drills while holding at bay so urgent a call of nature. This is especially true when you have to stand at attention. Your lower abdomen feels bloated, and you have to struggle not to let out a fart. Maybe I should get up in the middle of the night and finish off a portion of the business. That might be an example of “ingenuity.”

  January 2, Showa 19 (1944)

  A new year begins. Our first march to Iwakuni. For the first time since joining the navy, I breathed the air of the outside world. Chickens clucking. Children playing battledore and shuttlecock in their Sunday best. A drunk peddler taking a leak by the road, his bicycle at his side. The sights and sounds of the holiday impressed me vividly. The waters of the Iwakuni River ran clear, with round, white pebbles covering the bottom. The landscape around the Kintaikyo Bridge reminded me of the country near Togetsukyo Bridge in Arashiyama, in the western suburbs of Kyoto. We returned to base in the evening.

  I want something sweet. For two weeks I have been craving botamochi. What preoccupies me most since I entered the navy? Well, I find myself always thinking of food. I don’t have any sexual desire at all, probably because I haven’t had any experience, but I certainly desire mame-daifuku, beautifully browned over red-hot charcoal. Just one more time I want to sit down to some breaded pork cutlets at Ogawa-tei.

  We are eating white rice for the first three days of the New Year. I am so used to staring at brown rice day after day that freshly cooked white rice, with its moist, pearly finish, is precious in my sight. Lunch was served at 1000 on New Year’s Day: salad, steamed fish cake, herring roe, sweet black beans, beef, and soft azuki-bean jelly, immediately followed by two parcels of treats, an apple, and four satsuma oranges. We were told, however, that we had to polish it all off at the table. We were forbidden to set anything aside for later. We wondered why, but as they say, we haven’t mastered soldiering yet if we are forever asking why. Nobody openly opposes that idea, and yet isn’t it true that skepticism is the father of modern science? And isn’t the navy, above all, founded upon the modern science of the West? I mean, the navy is hardly the infantry. Naval officers know perfectly well that soldiership alone can’t move its warships and aircraft. Isn’t this all something of a paradox?

  Anyway, it seems that if you wish for something from the bottom of your heart, you will be heard. Last night, unbeknownst to me, someone laid three dried persimmons in my hammock. And there was another anonymous gift today of five miso-seasoned rice crackers. It requires supreme skill to eat rice crackers without
making any noise. They say that, even now, with the world cut in two by the war, there are ways to get steel from Sweden or equipment from the United States, if you only have the will to do it. And in much the same way, we aren’t shut off completely from the outer world. For example, the father of S. in my outfit is a man of some influence in the city of Otake, and he manages to send food in through the executive officer at the naval barracks. This accounts for the miso-seasoned rice crackers, a bequest from S.

  Kashima belongs to the outfit bunking next to us. As New Year’s Eve wound to a close, he was startled by a sharp, goblin-like cackle, coming at him from above: “Hey, Kashima! Kashima!” Before he could recover from the shock, he was hauled up onto a broom closet. There, with Drill Instructor Ishii at his side, Kashima found himself forced to wolf down dried persimmons and twenty-odd boiled eggs. The story goes that Kashima’s father came for a visit bearing various morsels for him to eat during the New Year holiday. However, he was not allowed to see his son. “Well, it’s a shame to waste this,” he said. “Please share it with the instructors.” And he left all the food for them. Many fathers and mothers reportedly come out to visit their sons only to be turned away. Some try to bribe their way in, and the drill instructors have been known to wink at the practice. I don’t like this sort of business, but I could sell my soul when it comes to food. Needless to say, last night’s dried persimmons came from Kashima.

  During study session New Year’s Eve, a fellow got caught drawing elaborate pictures of an oyako-donburi, curried rice, and all manner of cakes. This was M., of the 6th outfit, and he used pencils in twelve different colors to sketch these painstakingly detailed pictures. But no matter, they ended up torn to bits. He received a slap on each cheek from the division officer. Fortunately, I have yet to suffer a blow since joining the navy.

  January 7

  The cold last night chilled me to the bone, and, sure enough, we had snow this morning. It has been falling steadily ever since, blanketing the mountains of the Chugoku district and the islands of the Seto Inland Sea.