Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze (49 page)

Akio
was back for the first time in many months, and the visit was utterly unexpected. But happy though the family members may have been, expressions of emotion were restrained, as is the Japanese custom in such occasions. There were no bear hugs and kissed cheeks, and if the women felt compelled to weep, this was kept to polite sniffles and a kimono sleeve dab or two to the eyes. Shirō may have allowed himself a slap on his stepson’s shoulder before sending him upstairs to change out of his wet uniform and into a nice dry
yukata
robe from the wardrobe closet.

When
Akio finished washing up and changing, he joined the rest of the family in the living room. Shirō growled for Yumi to break out the last of the good saké. After the “Welcome home” toast and a pregnant pause, Akio filled the family in on the particulars of his recent activities, speaking slowly and methodically in his soft, low voice. His monologue ended with the news that he had been given command of a tokkō Shinbu unit.

The mood around the table took an understandable nosedive after this revelation. Conversation tapered off to a sporadic sprinkling of short utterance/res
ponse couplets, falling into long silences when everyone ran out of things to say. Again, there was no excessive expression of emotion here. Given the unspoken understanding that Akio had no choice but to follow his orders, the family could do nothing but accept his fate stoically. Tears or laments or anger at this point would have been in bad taste.

During one of the longer lulls of uncomfortable silence,
Akio excused himself, then tugged Naoko’s sleeve for her to follow him out of the room.

“
Akio told me that, given his tokkō assignment, he wasn’t going to hold me to my marriage promise any longer,” Naoko-san recalls of their conversation in the pitch black hallway that night. “But I said I wasn’t having any of that, and that a promise is a promise.”

Aki
o made a show of standing his ground, but his resistance was half-hearted, and he folded after a brief, whispered argument in the shadows. The couple returned to the living room and announced their intentions to Shirō and Yumi.

“
Sonna baka na!
(“That’s out of the question!”),” Yumi cried when the youngsters finished their pitch. She bolted from the room with muffled sobs and a slammed door.

Shirō
, however, nodded slowly, with weighty solemnity, and not without a hint of satisfied fatherly pride flickering around the corners of his mouth. He ordered Yumi to come back at once, and to bring a pair of lacquerware saucers. They were going to hold a wedding ceremony right here and now.

The town air raid siren started up again as the saké was poured, providing an eerie accompaniment to
Shirō’s recitation of the ancient
Takasagoya
– a
nagauta
traditionally performed
a capella
at Japanese weddings by fathers sending daughters off into marriage. Shirō held his notes long and loud, but his voice began to break with emotion in the last stanzas, and by the time he finished, all four people in the room were sobbing aloud. It was the first time Naoko had seen either of the men cry.

The newlyweds drained their saucer cups, apologized to their respective parents for a lifetime of worries and troubles their upbringing had caused, then without further ado, retired for the evening to
Naoko’s bedroom.

The household was up at dawn the next day to make sure
Akio had everything ready for his trip. Although everyone tried to keep up the appearance of normalcy, the mood around the breakfast table was tense. Toward the end of the meal, Akio – already dressed in his crisp khakis – tried to lighten things up. 

“We can’t fly if the weather is bad,” he said. “I’ll be back whenever it rains.”

Everyone else nodded behind their raised teacups, avoiding eye contact, perhaps harboring some slim hope that this was true while doing their best to pretend it was.

After the meal,
Akio excused himself and walked out into the spacious backyard alone. As Yumi and Naoko cleared the table, Shirō stood at the kitchen window, watching his son pace back and forth, occasionally stopping to touch a flower or stare off into the hills behind the house.

“He’s saying good-bye to the place,”
Shirō muttered. “He knows he’s not coming back.”

Akio
continued his garden meditation for nearly an hour before coming back into the house and announcing his imminent departure. He shouldered his gear and made his final farewells to Shirō and Yumi while Naoko polished his shoes in the foyer.

“Can I
walk you to the station?” Naoko asked, looking up from her chore.

“
Ah
,” Akio replied, addressing his wife with the bluntest possible affirmative in the Japanese lexicon – an utterance just this side of a grunt. If anyone doubted the legitimacy of the previous night’s nuptials, no one hearing the tone of voice Akio used towards his new bride would doubt it this morning. He was now a traditional Japanese husband, through and through.

*****

“It was the first word he said to me all morning,” Naoko remembers. “And one of the last. He made me walk three steps behind him all the way to the station. Just like a samurai wife in old days. He had nothing to say while we walked, either. A few times I thought I saw him getting ready to say something, but he never did. There were things I wanted to say, too, but couldn’t. The timing just didn’t feel right, and I was afraid of saying something I would regret…Now, of course, I regret having not said anything.”

When they reached the station,
Akio showed his high priority military orders to the clerk at the ticket window, paid for his fare, then hid the ticket with his hand so Naoko could not read the destination. Naoko asked anyway, but Akio refused to divulge any information about where he was going.

“It’s none of your business,”
Akio replied when Naoko pressed.

Just as he had flatly refused any histrionics upon his welcome home the night before, he was not about to indulge in any this morning for his farewell. An eastbound train pulled into the station with a long whistle, and
Akio stalked off toward the ticket gate with his back to Naoko.

“Sayonara,” he said over his shoulder. “Now go home.”

Akio got on the train and took a seat by the window. He kept his gaze fixed straight ahead as the train hissed to life again and clacked away in the direction of Tokyo.

F
or the next two months, the Motokis kept their ears open for heavy footfalls on the gravel walkway, and stayed up until the last train pulled out of Kōzu Station every night. Even then, they left the gate and front door to the house open on the off-chance that Akio might come in at some wee hour of the morning. In line with Akio’s promise to come home when bad weather prevented flying, rain always brought on the most desperate expectations, with a single drop of precipitation never failing to send Yumi and Naoko scrambling to scrape together every morsel they could to put a decent welcome home meal on the table. But come rain or shine, night or day, there was no sign of Akio. Not even a letter or postcard. 

In addition to fretting over the unknown fate of her young husband,
Naoko had a new major complication in her life. She missed her June period, which should have come the first week of the month. She had always been, in her own words, “as regular as clockwork,” and missing a cycle – or even being late – had never happened to her before. Another clue to the nature of her condition was that the steaming rice and starch smells at work were beginning to sour her stomach every morning, and that had never happened before, either.

But was that possible
, Naoko thought.
In one night?

Fumi was of little or no help in the way of constructive family planning consultation, having no experience herself in such matters. But the friendly middle-aged woman who ran the sewing academy dormitory had a prodigious brood of kids, and she was easy to approach for advice. After hearing a tactfully handled explanation of the details, the headmistress recommended seeing a doctor at once, suggesting a trip post haste to Odawara, the nearest town big enough to boast of an obstetrician.
Yumi went along for the ride the next day, and the two returned to the Kōzu house/nail factory that afternoon with the news that Naoko was pregnant.

Shirō
was beside himself with joy, and he made no secret of his desire that the baby would be a male child, for such an eventuality would mean that the Motoki line would go on. Naoko had not seen Shirō this happy since Akio’s acceptance letter from the IMA arrived four years earlier. The happiness was infectious, and even Yumi – who had always been less than thrilled about her stepdaughter’s “marriage” – could not help but be caught up in the emotion of the moment. Shirō was on cloud nine, and Yumi was happy about seeing him like this, regardless of how she truly felt about the scheduled household member addition. In the meantime, no one thought to ask Naoko what she thought about it all, although much doting attention was devoted to her daily physical condition. The future of the House of Motoki, after all, was now riding on her narrow but sturdy shoulders.

One particularly salient point of unpleasantness during this otherwise upbeat season was the frustrating inability of anyone in the house to contact
Akio with the happy news. Any inquiry into his whereabouts brought on a maddening bureaucratic runaround – or just a slammed receiver on the other end of the phone line – from every army official they contacted. Even Shirō’s IMA credentials were not enough to cut through all the red tape. But despite the situation, no one in the house suspected – or at least voiced their suspicions – that there may have been reasons other than security concerns behind the army’s taciturnity. Alternative explanations, although more than merely plausible, were also utterly unthinkable.

One steamy afternoon in mid-June, a slightly worse-for-wear, bushy-haired civilian in his late thirties visi
ted the Kōzu house. He introduced himself as Toshirō Takagi – a Nichiei cameraman by trade. He had just come back to the Tokyo area from a town in Kyūshū named Chiran. In case the family had not read about it in the papers, it was a big tokkō base. Takagi had met Akio there, and Akio had given him some items to bring back to the house.

“Here they are,” Takagi said, pulling a parcel wrapped in
furōshiki
batik-dyed cloth from his shoulder bag.

Shirō
had come into the house from the factory out back when he heard the visitor arrive, and now peered over Yumi’s and Naoko’s shoulders as the women accepted the parcel with deep bows of respectful gratitude.

“
Waza waza tōi tokoro kara
…,” Yumi said, expressing her sincere – if mildly perturbed – thanks for Takagi to make the effort of journeying so long and from so far away to hand deliver the parcel. “Won’t you stay for tea?”

“Please don’t go to the trouble,” Takagi said, graciously refusing the offer, as Japanese protocol demanded. “I’m just here to deliver the package, and if possible, to light an incense stick for your son.”

Shirō, Yumi and Naoko froze to the spot, ashen-faced. Sixty years later, Naoko-san would recall of that moment that she experienced a sensation of falling – as if a fathomless chasm had suddenly appeared under her feet to send her plummeting through cold, black space.

Taken aback by the abrupt emotional temperature drop in the foyer, Takagi looked up from the entranceway with a puzzled expression for a moment before a flash of horrified realization crossed his face.

“Oh no,” he said. “What have I done?…You haven’t been told yet, have you? The army hasn’t contacted you. Please forgive me…”

After a few moments of confusion, heartbreaking confirmations and overall excrutiating discomfort for all concerned, Takagi was welcomed into the house to a place of hono
r in the living room, where he proceeded to tell the family about Chiran, the 51
st
Shinbu and Akio’s last hours on earth. Akio’s
furōshiki
-bound package was unwrapped with loving care and its contents were passed around and examined: there was a small box containing clippings of Akio’s hair and fingernails, and another containing the epaulets and collar tabs from his dress uniform. These items were to be used in lieu of his body for funerary purposes. The parcel also contained Akio’s
isho
[253]
warrior’s farewell in flowery, formal language. This was addressed to Shirō.

Takagi told everyone that he actually had several more letter-delivery stops to make in Kōzu and other northern Kanagawa Prefecture towns today. Many of the tokkō pilots at Chiran had given over their isho for him to hand-deliver instead of trustin
g the letters to army mail. As Takagi explained, it was a way to slip in more personal and frank sentiment that might otherwise fall victim to an army censor’s black fat-tipped pen. The higher-ups preferred the pilots’ letters to stick to hackneyed writing styles, and tended to savage – or even demand total rewrites – of anything that strayed from the narrow selection of approved formats.

Almost as an afterthought, Takagi handed
Naoko a note on simple stationery with her name written on the outside fold. She slipped the note into her kimono lapel and began planning an escape from the parlor to read it. She knew she would not be able to do so without breaking down and sobbing, for it was all she could do to keep her composure as things were. Shirō told Naoko often in recent months that, as an army wife, she was now forbidden to cry in front of other people. “If you have to cry, save it for when you’re home alone, out of sight,” he always said. Luckily, Takagi proved to be a thirsty guest, so this gave Naoko a chance to excuse herself and run back to the kitchen for a crying jag on the pretext of putting more water on to boil for another pot of tea. It was a tactic she would employ several times before the visit was over.