Burial in the Clouds Read online

  Or, if I learn that I am to make a sortie tomorrow, with little hope of coming back, I can always burn this notebook.

  April 23

  I am infested with lice, and not just any ordinary lice, either. It’s astonishing. I’ve heard a theory that this type of louse is sexually transmitted, but I haven’t laid a finger on anybody. Clearly, I got them when I took a bath. I slipped into the toilet to inspect the situation in private, and there they were, buried under my hair, pale-colored pests with wriggling legs, so small I could hardly make them out. A number of these quite undesirable creatures clung to my flesh, biting into it. I scraped some off with my fingernails, and pressed them. They popped and bled. It’s perfectly miserable. I am not suffering alone, though. Not a few students hereabouts are constantly scratching their groins, striking all manner of undignified poses.

  “What are you scratching at!?” the division officer shouted at N. during battle drills this morning.

  N. blushed deeply, but nevertheless seemed offended. “I got a dose of crabs at the petty officers’ bath, sir,” he began, but he couldn’t finish his explanation before another shout came.

  “Stop your whining!” the officer said. His tone notwithstanding, he seemed to be suppressing a chuckle. “Why don’t you consult a doctor? Get some mercurial ointment at once.”

  “Yes, sir,” N. replied, with a salute. He was all set to run, fists properly at his waist, when the thunder came:

  “Idiot! Who the hell told you to get medical treatment for crab lice in the middle of a battle!?” And he dealt N. a blow. In nervous desperation, N. blushed even more deeply. My heart went out to him.

  By contrast to the division officer, the drill instructors have the common touch after all. “Cadet Yoshino, you have crab lice, too, don’t you?” they would say, grinning. My face was as red as N.’s.

  During the break, Petty Officer First Class Okamoto, who is attached to the student units, triumphantly imparted to us his great stock of knowledge about this particular type of louse.

  Crab lice, he says, are so named for their physical similarity to crabs. They are by nature lethargic, and if left undisturbed will simply stay put for days, biting into the skin under the hair. When immersed in hot water, though, some of the little buggers get startled and cut loose. They cruise around the surface, and, as this happens to be at about the same level as our private parts, they sink their teeth into yet another victim. We student reserves, Okamoto said, turn all red and white, making a mountain out of a molehill, when we suffer even a mild infestation, but it can be much worse if you are assigned to a fleet where water is in short supply. A destroyer, which has a canvas bath, is particularly bad. Let one person get infested and the lice spread to the entire crew. Nobody is bashful or self-conscious about it. They say the condition can be fatal if it spreads to the eyebrows or the head, but, he assured us, this is quite rare. Experienced petty officers find it gratifying to dig out the lice with a toothpick while baring their pubic regions to the setting sun after a bath. In this manner they rid themselves of six or seven lice at a time. A petty officer would never willingly resort to so indelicate a tactic as to eradicate the lice with mercurial ointment. All the same, if you really do want to root them out, mercurial ointment is the thing, and you should never, ever, shave your private parts. Etc. etc.

  The special course this afternoon was sumo wrestling. The cherry trees on the base are finally in full bloom, and the rape blossoms are also out. Still, I can don a wrestler’s loincloth, and the cherry blossoms can bloom, with rape blossoms in the bargain; but if it itches, it itches. My manners are not so delicate as those of Petty Officer First Class Okamoto. I will definitely visit the doctor’s office tomorrow and get some mercurial ointment.

  April 29, The Imperial Birthday

  Rained in the early morning. But the sky cleared away beautifully around seven-thirty. No excursion today. We bowed in the direction of the Imperial Palace, and then did obeisance to His Majesty’s photograph.

  Sakai said: “Worshipping His Majesty’s photograph with such dignity, and in military uniform—it all makes me feel so solemn and so firm. I’m certainly changing, and I take that as a blessing.” To some extent, I share his feeling.

  Sumo wrestling in the morning. The green turf looks exceptionally fresh after the rain, and the tender grass is strewn with the petals of the cherry blossoms. I treaded lightly over them, feeling almost as if I were committing a sacrilege. The clover, which had drawn up the water from the earth, felt soft and comfortable to my feet.

  I saw a thunderhead cloud this afternoon. All of a sudden, the weather is like summer. Unit drilling from 1600. Tonight’s study session was open. I used this week’s postcard to write to Kashima.

  May 5

  Decisions as to who shall be pilots and who shall go into reconnaissance were announced today, as were also our new duty stations. I managed to make the grade as a pilot and am delighted from the bottom of my heart. The mercurial ointment completely eradicated that infamous infestation, so I feel refreshed in both mind and body. We were evenly divided into pilot and reconnaissance groups, and Sakai and Fujikura both belong to the first. I must bear in mind what an honor it is to be designated a pilot. Only some nine hundred out of three hundred thousand men conscripted into the Naval Air Corps in the emergency national call-up are judged fit to be pilots. Like it or not, we have now been geared, like toothed wheels, into the most crucial component of a huge machine, a machine that will affect the fate of our country and determine the outcome of the war. Crews of conventional planes are to be assigned to the naval air stations at Yatabe, Miho, and Izumi. As for myself, I am bound for Izumi, where the majority of the future pilots, six hundred of them, will also go. Izumi, I hear, is a small town along the Kagoshima main rail line, halfway between Kumamoto and Kagoshima.

  Surely we will succeed in the important work entrusted to us. We need not necessarily take a grim view of the progress of the war. The 13th Class of student reserve fliers will bear up to hold the tide at its present level, and we of the 14th Class will make a rally. Today is the day of the Boy’s Festival, and though we have neither rice dumplings nor carp streamers to mark the event, I feel a kind of manly pride. As for our day-to-day life at the new station: I should imagine we will be allowed more letters, and the food might be better, too. Before long we will be commissioned, and the gloom will be swept out of me. I know I had better not let my hopes run after my desires, lest I be disappointed, but what a delight it will be to leave this place! The word is we will be allowed visitors on the 14th. This might be the last chance we ever have to see our parents, so the division officer says we must be in good spirits, make the most of the occasion, and eat as much as we please—ohagi, red rice, what have you.

  Strangely enough, today I had the queerest dream, at dawn, on the day of the announcement of our new assignments. I have never been superstitious, but from this point forward I can’t help but believe in the separation of the soul from the body. I was back home in Osaka. I opened the door to the bookcase in my room, took from the right end of the second shelf my copy of Poems for the Reverend Emperor, and read it. I saw no one from my family. The blue curtain that hangs over the glass doors of the bookcase, however—that remains vividly before my eyes. I would be willing to say this was nothing but an ordinary dream if it weren’t for that particular book, a book I had bought just before joining the navy, and which I had never had the chance to so much as open. But in my dream I opened it, and there can be no doubt that I read “San-ten-ka,” a poem by an obscure author that deals with General Maresuke Nogi, a hero of the Russo-Japanese War, and his sons Katsusuke and Yasusuke. The poem celebrates the valor of both the father and the sons, and at one point in it the General, having escorted the great Emperor Meiji to the grave, puts into words his feelings toward his two sons, who had earlier fallen in battle. The following passage is particularly exquisite.

  I am eternally grateful

  To the late Emperor for his favor
s.

  How can I bear to go home again now?

  And the new Court has no need of councilors.

  So, my old legs run after the funeral hearse.

  Where are you, my sons?

  Already I am eight years behind you in death.

  But I am coming, together with your mother,

  As we attend the Imperial hearse.

  I am sorry to have made you wait so long.

  I remembered the poem clearly from the dream. I found this so odd that I asked Wakatsuki, who happens to own the same book, to show me his copy, and as I turned to the page an uncanny sensation overcame me. The poem was just as I had seen it in my dream, almost to the letter. I do not know how to interpret this incident, other than to say that my soul left my body as I slept and returned to my hometown. If our souls do what our bodies plainly cannot, if they are endowed with perception as mine was in this dream, then I simply cannot believe that the complex activity of the mind is extinguished at the point of death, or that it is buried in the grave with the flesh. This notion heartens me, and gives me courage. Most definitely some sort of kinship affiliates sleep and death, and the question might not necessarily lie beyond the reach of science. Instead, this may be a matter that awaits scientific confirmation at a future date. Simply because science cannot at present explain a thing, and for that reason takes a dismissive view of it, we shouldn’t sweep it all aside as “superstition.” At least, I certainly cannot disregard the miraculous dream I had this morning.

  Notes by Akira Fujikura

  May, Showa 19 (1944) Tsuchiura Naval Air Station

  Professor E.

  Please excuse me for ever having been so discourteous. It has been quite a long time since I sent you so much as a simple greeting. In fact, it was right after I first joined the navy, at Otake, and all the while I have been receiving kind letters from you.

  I assume that you have already heard from Yoshino or Sakai that we are allowed only one postcard per week. That is one of my excuses, but there was another reason why I chose not to write you for such a long time. So far as my parents and siblings are concerned, I can content myself with saying to them the sorts of things the censors permit us all to say, but I simply could not persuade myself to send so artificial a note to you. For the same reason, I have scarcely written to my oldest and closest friends. Of course, there were times when I almost wrote you to say that I was dashing about, right as rain, hopping into gliders, shouldering heavy machine guns, and gripping the fat oars of a cutter, that my weight had risen to sixty-five kilograms, and that I enjoyed splendid health, and often recalled debating with you as we ate pork cutlet at Ogawa-tei. But each time the result was peculiarly hollow, and each time I tore up the letter and trashed it. Sure, I remember the pork cutlet at Ogawa-tei, and I now weigh sixty-five kilograms. It’s all true enough. But I couldn’t banish the thought that there is something else I must write, something of my true feelings—something of which I want you, at least, to have some knowledge before I end this life of mine (which might not last much longer).

  There is no reason I should be so ceremonious, but that, anyway, is why I have chosen to write for you, bit by bit, and as I find time to spare, something between a letter and a note of my impressions, and to send it all to you once it is done. And I shall be grateful if you accept my complaints as those of a man who harbors his warped, unspoken views and can direct them to no one else. Needless to say, this letter would never pass the censors. However, we will leave Tsuchiura Air Station soon for a flight training base in a town called Izumi, way down in Kagoshima. We should be allowed to see our families, if only briefly, during the journey, at Shinagawa Station in Tokyo, and, in Kansai, either at Kyoto, Osaka, or Kobe Stations. My thought is that on one of these occasions I may have a chance to deliver this letter to you by means of someone I can trust. With that hope in mind, I’ve started writing today.

  It has been exactly five months to the day since we joined the navy. My life here is utterly lonely. To be lonely in the military is most peculiar, it seems. I live in close contact with the naked flesh of hundreds, even thousands, of other men, shoulder to shoulder, day and night, leading a lively, tumultuous life, always on the move. But when I escape for a moment from all the rush, an overpowering desolation cuts me deep, as if I were totally abandoned in an empty, tranquil wilderness. My heart bonds with nothing, never once have I laid bare my feelings. This loneliness differs completely in nature from the solitude I knew as I studied in my second floor, four-and-a-half tatami room in the Hyakumanben district near Kyoto University, warming my hands over a hibachi on cold winter nights, yet satisfied in the belief that I was doing work that related to the world.

  My only consolation is that Sakai and Yoshino are here with me. Still, I rarely get the chance to speak with them in a relaxed sort of way. Besides, both men have changed considerably, each in his own way, over the course of the last five months. As a matter of fact, this place changes every living soul. We have ceased to talk about the Manyoshu. Everyone is trying his best, under a bitter trial, to find some sort of anchorage. I am by no means being sarcastic when I say that Sakai and Yoshino are, after all, uncommonly modest and supple at heart, compared to myself. We know that in order to survive as military men or as naval officers, and above all to face the shadow of death that looms before our eyes, we must have a firm sense of ourselves. We accept that, obediently. In fact, we are more than willing to re-create ourselves for the purpose at hand, when all we ever get drilled into us, by the chief instructor, the division officers, the flight instructors, the daily newspapers with their infamous tone and their conveniently selected extracts from books, is the necessity of carrying through this holy war to its end, our responsibilities as honorable youths, the glorious tradition of the Imperial Navy, and the ideal of “the whole world under one roof.” Neither Sakai nor Yoshino has ever been blindly fanatical, and I wouldn’t necessarily call them that now, but their critical, skeptical air seems to be diminishing with repeated exposure to all these mantras. First, they began to think that the slogans weren’t entirely empty, then they were persuaded that they actually made some sense, and finally they came to believe that these slogans were absolutely right, and that all along only their own “deficient consciousness” prevented them from seeing the light. At least, they seem to be moving in this direction. I stand alone in my pigheaded inability to abandon my suspicions. I could never assume the “spiritual” frame of mind that the instructors demand of me, and yet I can’t figure out for sure what to do about my future. In point of fact, that timid Sakai (and maybe this is precisely because he is timid) recently declared that he has begun to fathom the deep meaning of the phrase, “We shall be united into a single Emperor.” He is even prepared to espouse the theory that we never truly understood the Manyoshu, which is, after all, a collection of “ethnic” poems, because we failed to comprehend this great spirit of “being united into a single Emperor.”

  Several days ago, Yoshino came to me with a somber look on his face and reported a dream he had had. He tells me that his soul left his body while he slept, and traveled to his home in Osaka. He says that, while there, it read Poems for the Reverend Emperor, which Yoshino himself had never read before, and that, now, he vividly remembers the lines of a poem in it. Yoshino was shaken. Maybe he has already sent you a postcard describing this incident. What touched me, though, was how thoroughly Yoshino struggles, thinking, as he takes matters so hard, that he must stir in himself a spirit of martyrdom, and that he must train himself up. No doubt he is anything but insincere. I can tell that by his look. Yet I think it highly symbolic that what Yoshino supposedly did, among all the other things he could have done, and would have wanted to do, at his old house, was read a bit of the Poems for the Reverend Emperor, such-and-such a poem celebrating the martyrdom of General Nogi. It was fortunate that Yoshino’s soul wasn’t caught when it went AWOL and given a blow by the rigorous guard commander at Tsuchiura Naval Air Station. Interestingly enough, tho
ugh, in Yoshino’s outfit there is a geeky fellow named Wakatsuki from Takushoku University, and he has had in his possession, for some time now, this same book, volume one of Poems for the Reverend Emperor. Anyway, to me, it seems far more rational to suppose that Yoshino had read this poem a long time back, and had simply forgotten about it until it put in an appearance in his dream, than that his soul made an excursion to Osaka.

  About a month ago, a Mr. Gakushu Ohara from the Association for the Enhancement of Imperial National Prestige visited our base, and gave a fanatical talk, pure gibberish, for two and a half hours, earning the ridicule of everyone present. He was one of those inspired leaders of whom there is an epidemic these days, the same genre of men you often complained about. Yoshino and Sakai were both scornful. But when things reach this point, we can’t content ourselves with sneering at Mr. Ohara alone, I think. Besides, fellows like this Mr. Something Ohara reap tidy profits making the rounds of the military training units and the schools, giving their “inspirational” speeches, and performing their “purifications.” And who knows, they may be perfect realists at heart, all the while laughing into their sleeves. But Sakai and Yoshino aren’t of a calculating turn of mind, and that makes me more apprehensive about them.

  Professor E.

  I know I wasn’t a very good student. I often put on airs, and now and then I launched into arguments against the theories of all you scholars out of conceit. Consequently, I was never a favorite with the professors. Many a time I wished I could, and thought I must, have an open, cheerful, supple mind, just like all the other students, but now I’m determined to stick to this cranky, arrogant disposition of mine. Only extraordinary crankiness can save you from being cajoled into the belief (and this, mind you, while leading the kind of life we lead here) that the war is indeed a great mission given to us by our country, and that our country will be saved by our martyrdom. Things will change someday. Our desperate feelings may not be understood forever, either by the older generation or the younger. Still, whenever I get the chance to see Yoshino and Sakai in private, I tell them, in the strongest terms possible, just how foolish it is to force themselves, and so rapidly, too, to change their way of thinking. Occasionally, after giving the matter some thought, they say, “You are right,” and we all agree in criticizing certain aspects of navy life and the general conduct of the war. But for the most part, they (Yoshino in particular) will not budge an inch, saying, “Still, at this point anyway, Japan must win the war. I take it to heart, as a Japanese citizen, that we must fight it all out, with the fate of our race at stake. It’s a supreme duty. You can’t quarrel with it. Our country will collapse if each of us starts to express his own particular view and turns his back.” Gazing into Yoshino’s earnest face makes me falter somewhat. It is true, the war is “in progress,” however wrong it may be. And though, as I say, I oppose the war and don’t want any longer to be a cog in its machinery, I can make no concrete answer if asked what it is I believe I should do. One possible course of action is simply to try to save my own life. Shrewd as I am, however, it would be extremely difficult for me, a navy pilot, alone to escape death. It’s not that I’ll be killed unless I finish off the enemy first. No, I’ll be eliminated whether or not I kill the enemy. It’s not that my friends will die unless I do. No, everybody must die, my friends, me, one and all. That such total war is our destiny I take for granted. Needless to say, I’m not prepared in the least.