Burial in the Clouds Page 8

A white blanket of snow

  Covers the mountains peak to foot:

  All buried, the houses and villages,

  In retreat.

  (This is a prefatory poem.)

  The Japanese cemetery at Singapore.

  As I wandered about

  Tears brimmed in my eyes:

  That memory came to mind.

  In the rains falling round me

  Where I stand still

  Celestial Mt. Kagu-yama,

  Now shrouded in mist.

  This longing to see the weir

  At the old capitol of Fujiwara:

  Already my straw sandals are soaking wet.

  They refuse to wear parachutes,

  These air-raiders,

  Saluting as they prepare for takeoff.

  One after another, yesterday and today,

  My friends ship out for the front,

  Leaving my heart wild.

  I can but stare

  At this newspaper report:

  A family has sent out five conscripts.

  “The Pacific”

  Sailing out onto this ocean:

  You meet waves sky-high,

  You find a sea of oily smoothness.

  Saito wrote a couple of poems celebrating the wedding of Yoshiko Nakamura (probably the daughter of the late Kenkichi Nakamura).

  What a lovely young couple:

  As you drift off to sleep tonight,

  This life, this world,

  All of it shall look sublime.

  Such a joyous occasion:

  As she sits, sentiments well up,

  Wave upon wave,

  And overflow as tears.

  In all likelihood I will die before ever having this experience.

  I haven’t been able to finish the book yet, but for the first time in a long while, I actually enjoyed reading poetry.

  August 6

  Excursion today. We ventured in a new direction, heading out to Akune. The hot springs there are very salty, as the water flows across a bed of halite before gushing out. My body felt sticky. Still, we bathed after taking a rest, and bathed yet again after lunch, making the most of it. The Chinese poet Bai Juyi writes, “The smooth hot spring water laved her creamy skin.” In our case, it just wrung all the sweat from our bodies. But to men living in such times, to men situated as we are, a hot spring welling up so inexhaustibly, so mysteriously, by day and by night, seems a natural benediction.

  It’s sweltering. Not a drop of rain for the last ten days or so. I saw a rice field from the train, cracked by the sun. At the inn, the greenness of the garden was oppressive, and large brown cicadas chirred, intensifying the heat. The fried tiger prawns were delicious, and I ended up ordering three helpings. The watermelon was ripe and sweet. There was only one fly in the ointment: The beer wasn’t cold enough, probably due to the shortage of ice.

  We checked the train schedule only to discover that we hadn’t time to go to Minamata today, though the Fukais might well have expected us, so we headed straight back to the base. Oleander bloomed here and there (sumac and oleander are ubiquitous in these parts). Oleander flowers are lovely, but a stranger on the train told us that the tree is toxic. During the Seinan War, the government soldiers ate lunch using oleander twigs for chopsticks, and many were poisoned. We also learned that this region is renowned as the migratory home of cranes. Flocks of hooded cranes fly in from Siberia every winter.

  When we returned, two postcards awaited me, one from Professor E., the other from Kashima. To my surprise, Kashima has been in Kyushu since last month. The address read: “Yoshihiko Kashima, 120th Outfit, Provisional Torpedo Boat Training Camp, Kawatana-machi, Nagasaki Prefecture.” This is a special camp where men train in high-speed torpedo boats, lightweight crafts made of plywood and fitted out with aircraft engines. Their purpose is to launch close-quarter torpedo attacks on enemy warships.

  “You guys come in from the air,” Kashima wrote, “I will come in on the water, and A. will creep in over the earth. Let’s keep up the work.” “A.” is A.K. of Oriental History, and a high school classmate of Kashima. Apparently he has been sent to Naval Gunnery School at Tateyama. “I don’t know which way Izumi is,” Kashima continued, and then he adapted a poem from the Manyoshu: “‘If I forget how you look / I shall call you to mind / When I look at the clouds / That cover the plain and rise / Up to the mountaintop.’ Har har.” Well, he could look Izumi up on a map.

  Professor E. is serving fifteen-day stints at Toyokawa Naval Arsenal in Aichi Prefecture, leading students from the faculties of Law, Letters, and Economics. Since the emergency Student Mobilization Order was issued, academic work has been virtually suspended at the university.

  “I have much to say about my experience in Toyokawa,” the professor writes. “I just can’t say it on a postcard.” I can imagine the general situation.

  August 23

  Sunny today. The cool rush of the night air tells me that autumn is approaching, and in this hint of a changing season I also feel the creeping shadow of death. From the window of the barracks, I see the clear sickle of the crescent moon.

  For some time now I have neglected to keep my diary. When we were in Tsuchiura, the division officer gave us a bit of advice: “You are free to keep a diary,” he said, “but its contents may be private, and since navy fliers must rely on others to see to their personal effects if they are killed, it is best, so far as you can manage it, never to write anything that might tarnish your name after death.” At the time, this gave me a little start, but lately I don’t much care whether or not my name is tarnished after I die. I don’t say this with any special conviction, as if I had resolved to take my own path and leave it to survivors to judge my life. On the contrary, I’m probably just backsliding. Well, in a word, I just don’t give a damn.

  As my mind grew passive, keeping a diary came to seem a pathetic exercise in literary masturbation, the sole outlet of my posthumous vanity. After all, I’m conscious of my readers as I compose. I play the scholar in front of my navy instructors and comrades, and I play the manly naval aviation student reserve officer in front of my university professors and parents, but really it’s all nothing except lies rolled up in grumbles. These thoughts occupied me, and I didn’t have the heart to take up a pen. In fact, I have eighty seven hundred sixty hours left, if I’m to live out another year, and I don’t really see the point in setting aside some portion of my limited time in order to write this tripe. And yet when I abandoned what had become a custom with me—writing in my diary during our nightly study sessions—I was overcome with the feeling that something was missing, just as you might feel the need to put something in your mouth after quitting smoking. So today I am inclined to start writing again, and if it’s masturbation, then so be it.

  I might be on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Sometimes I feel utterly lost. I know nothing about keeping a diary, nothing about the war, nothing about life, nothing about death, nothing about scholarship either. I’m just a vacillator. What on earth is there in me that can be “tarnished” after I am gone? I notched up my petty successes, with self-satisfaction, from junior high to high school, from high school to university, and I left the university to become a pilot in the Navy Air Corps, fancying myself as “honorably” singled out. I can’t resist the feeling that I am being stripped bare, so that I might see what my life really amounts to in the end. Not that I can handle an airplane better than anyone else, or that I can face my death with resolution. At the end of the day, I suppose, I simply have no core. I can’t even compose a single satisfactory tanka, even under such uniquely tumultuous circumstances as these.

  To my vexation, by and large I am in accord with what I am told, but none of it ever catches fire inside me. I can only conclude that I don’t have what it takes, that I’m not numbered among those who burn with zeal. I am instructed to purify my mind of worldly thoughts, but what will become of me if I struggle, again and again, to detach myself and still fail, if I am committed utterly to the task
and still cannot emancipate myself from what entangles me? Fortunately, during flight my brain functions only at about one-third of its natural capacity. It would be disastrous if thoughts like these swept over me in the cockpit. When, two months back, Senior Aviation Petty Officer D. leapt from the wing of his plane to his death, Instructor Yamaguchi chalked it up to a woman, and the explanation half convinced me. But now I wonder if his case might not have been so simple. Should my skill ever reach such a level as to free my mind up to wander while I fly, I can well imagine that my hand may, of its own accord, shove the control stick forward, sending the plane into a nosedive. I would kill myself, hardly even aware that I was to die. This is certainly among the possibilities, and if it should happen, the men will cremate my body, hold a wake by my ashes, and then forget about me as they return to their affairs, just as we all did when Senior Aviation Petty Officer D. perished. These men are strong; they possess the tenacity of an insect.

  What’s more, I believe that I am unduly influenced by Fujikura, even as I oppose him. My nervous breakdown might well be called “Fujikura’s neurasthenia.” When, on occasion, I find myself in good spirits, possessed of a forthright warrior’s disposition, Fujikura’s voice inevitably intrudes upon me. Of course, he sometimes does come and talk to me in person, but for the most part, it is his words—what he has said and is likely to say—that haunt me, shattering my resolve.

  “‘A forthright warrior’s disposition’? What does that mean?”

  “Doesn’t it ever occur to you to doubt a war that militarists, capitalists, and politicians started on a gamble? Do you really consider it an honor to sacrifice your life in such a war?”

  “No, you don’t really believe it. You’re just obsessed with the notion and too scared to question it.”

  “Why don’t you take a good hard look, a patient look, at your innermost self, and at the condition of the war?”

  And I offer my weak reply, closing my eyes. “Yes, I understand. I understand what you’re saying.”

  Then an instructor’s voice displaces Fujikura’s. “What’s eating you, Cadet Yoshino?” And not one of those bitter old maids who hang on in the training units, but my favorite instructor, the gentle, plain-spoken, clear-eyed chief flight officer whom we all call “the long-nosed goblin of Kurama.” “You look depressed,” he says. “Open your eyes and examine the situation. Things have come to such a pass that no one can say the tragedy in Saipan won’t be repeated scene for scene on mainland Japan. If we don’t want to see our country destroyed, we have to pitch in hard. We have no alternative. I know it’s difficult, but you must follow me without qualms. You can’t grip the control stick while casting a backward glance.”

  “I understand, sir,” I reply, snapping to attention in my daydream. Can there be such a spineless attack bomber pilot as I am, a man who understands a little of this and a little of that, a man who is half-assed in everything?

  My energy drains away into fancies of an old hermit’s life (and here I am, a mere twenty-four years of age!), and then the reverie absorbs me utterly. . . . Alongside a mountain stream, deep in the hills and bathed by the sun, there stands a forlorn cottage. Bestowed with the blessings of birdsong and abundant fruit, and with a few books to read and a good country wifi to talk to, I will consign my feckless self to the vicissitudes of nature, like the grasses that grow silently and wither silently, locking all the old agitations away in my heart, and close my life in solitude and peace. . . . At other times I summon up as my ideal something rather more concrete. In this scenario, I’m pushing along a wheelbarrow of tomatoes on a farm of my own, or capering about with puppyish children at a district school, on some small island of terraced fields.... But then the whistle sounds beyond the deck, “Hoa-hi-hoa! Cease work in five minutes,” and I pull out of my stupor.

  Speaking of Saipan, I heard the following tale from a PO in the mess hall. The POs there are generally a realistic, hedonistic lot, fat and flabby—not at all the “gallant” type. Anyhow, this officer said that on a small island off Guadalcanal two navy signalers, men who had been left behind all but dead, somehow managed to filch a canoe and make their escape. Open wounds festered on their legs, streaming with bloody pus, and they had nothing at all to eat. For several days they drifted with the tide, gnawing their leather belts. Finally they made shore on a strange island. Human voices were audible just beyond a cliff draped with grasses and tree branches. The men couldn’t tell whether the voices belonged to friend or to foe, but still they ventured to land. It turned out to be a Japanese army unit, and the two signalers were safely packed off to Saipan. From there, one of them was shipped back to Yokosuka, but the other, whose infection was not so severe, stayed on at Saipan, and when his health recovered, he was assigned to the island’s signal unit. On the fortieth day after his rescue the American troops started landing, and this signaler, aware now that he would not survive, despite having made such a harrowing escape, rapped out a message in plain language to all navy units as he went to his death: “Damn the Imperial Navy.

  “It might be true, the PO said. I just don’t know how credible the story is.

  We hear of three successive uprisings in Korea recently. Once I might have dismissed the rioters as a nuisance, but now I believe their actions may spring from a perfectly natural impulse. Japan talks about a lasting peace in East Asia, a peace on whose terms every nation can agree, but Japan has never said she will grant Korea her independence. What could be more reasonable than that Koreans should resent being asked to bow at shrines consecrated to the Japanese dead? No wonder they don’t share our concerns as to the outcome of the war, no wonder they resist conscription in a war that promises them no future. As for me, my fighting spirit burns when I recall the abuses that America, Britain, and all the other so-called “industrial” nations of the West have committed all over Asia for a hundred years, but I’ve rather indifferently tolerated our own nation’s actions in China and Korea. At the time of my birth, Korea was already our possession, and we have harbored no doubts about it, but apparently the question is not so simple. I understand why the Koreans believe they will be liberated should Japan lose this war, and if, capitalizing on Japan’s deteriorating military position, they take to the streets rather than be drafted before that day of liberation comes, I can understand that, too. Perhaps my weak heart sympathizes with a weak and oppressed people. I have no idea whether that is a good thing or a bad thing.

  August 26

  Insects sing constantly, and it’s quite cool, morning and evening. The tadpoles that once swarmed in the gutters at the barracks vanished before I noticed. My heart sinks deep, deep as it ever has. I received a severe reprimand from the division officer.

  The fledgling sparrows, now barely able to fly, leap in flurries from the gutters to the eaves of the panoptic auditorium. The lecture on the science of war fades from view as I watch them, vacantly. Timidly the siblings launch desperately into flight. Nevertheless, they fly in order to live.

  We are allowed considerable freedom now during solo flights, so I flew over Minamata the other day, where I could easily make out the Fukais’ place. The lines of the earthen wall enclosing it to the southwest looked lovely from the air. I dove twice in salutation. Neither Fukiko nor anybody else came out, though I flew so close to the ground that the roar of the plane shook the pine tree in the garden. It was a disappointment. In a field, children threw up their arms at me. I replied with a waggle of the wings and headed back. I wasn’t upbraided for any of this, as they didn’t find out about it, but today I flew out to sea and spotted a fleet of ships steaming along some twelve nautical miles south-southwest of Ushibuka, a town on the main island of Amakusa. The fleet consisted of an enormous battleship, escorted by two destroyers and two heavy cruisers. The ships dominated the seascape, leaving behind them five snowy wakes as they cruised over rough blue waters ruffled with whitecaps. Stirred by a tender pride, I set a course for the battleship, and, at an altitude 700 meters, whizzed by. No sooner had I
passed over the ship, however, than her antiaircraft machine guns and high-angle canon opened up on me simultaneously, emitting sharp flashes of light. I was stunned and wheeled about in haste. At first I thought they mistook me for an enemy aircraft, but then I realized that they had in fact been firing blanks. I couldn’t figure out why they opened fire, though, and could only conclude that I had inadvertently served as a target for antiaircraft fire training. As soon as I landed at Izumi, I was called in by the division officer.

  “Where in the hell did you fly!?” he thundered, glaring at me. The battleship had been none other than the Musashi, as it happened, and he had already received a dispatch from its LC: “At 1025 a training aircraft from your base overflew this ship without permission, turned, and headed back. I request that you attend to the matter.” I was fairly boiled in oil. I felt pathetic. This is precisely why you should never doze off during lectures on navy rules and regulations. I hadn’t known we are forbidden to pass over a fleet of ships without permission.

  September 1

  We conducted a mutual flight in formation.

  I flew plane #2. Only the lead plane was piloted by an instructor. At one point I recklessly pulled in so close to him that my wing might easily have touched his. I held the position for several minutes. If we crash, I thought, then so be it. The lead plane would surely have gone down had we collided, as its tail assembly would have been damaged. We, however, would have likely survived, if it were just a matter of our plowing the propeller into the other plane. The crew in the lead plane was evidently anxious, as they glanced back at us constantly. But I didn’t expect a scolding, because our instructions had been to “follow with a vengeance.” Cowardly Sakai, in plane #3, fell off to the rear left, now and then, marring the formation. Perceiving this, the instructor lowered his altitude and banked left at a steep angle. As the umbrella formation suddenly inclined, Sakai, had he remained where he was, would have had no choice but to plunge into the sea. So he scrambled to catch up. It’s a brutal, unforgiving tactic.