Shattered Jewels
Larissa Sprecher
Few things come back to me with this much clarity.
I am ten. I walk by the shore just outside Kōzu with my two brothers, twins, and five years older than me. It is a cold December day, a blustery wind harassing the waves, pushing them up against the shore in riotous piles. Across the bay to the north Mount Fuji rises up, twenty miles away, perhaps thirty – I am too young to know distances. Its white cap is barely distinguishable from the heavy clouds, only a certain solidity marking where its sweeping sides begin and the grey mist ends.
Hiroshi and Minoru are rowdy – fighting over the best skipping stones, though stones are the one thing this coastline does not lack. Our goal is always to see how many waves we can skip our projectiles through. The younger brother by six minutes, Minoru woops and darts ahead of us, snatching up the smoothest, roundest stones to stuff in his pockets. He flicks them with such speed they break three or four waves before diving, the spray lost in the tumult of the wind. Spinning nimbly on the uneven footing, he tosses dumpy pebbles back at Hiroshi and me. He is thin and wild, with a smile teachers never trust and an unpredictable sense of humor.
Stop hitting Ayako! Hiroshi says, as another pebble bounces off my shoulder.
She doesn’t mind, says Minoru, she can give as good as she gets.
I pick up a bleached branch that has been washed up by a high tide. It’s soft, bark-less surface flakes in my hand as I flip it at him. When everyone treats you like a child, it is nice to have a legitimate opponent.
See? Minoru catches the clumsy throw, breaks the stick over his knee and begins juggling the pieces while walking backwards, a dexterity intended to annoy Hiroshi. His wide-set eyes crinkle with laughter, delighted at his own playful antagonism.
Hiroshi mumbles and hands me a stone I could have found for myself. I am trying to decide whether to take it or drop it when my cousin Shigeko runs down onto the beach. Did you hear? She says, breathless, her hair, normally so tight and neat, loose down her back.
Hiroshi stares at her with an intensity I cannot yet interpret. Minoru snaps around, the sticks making a soft thunk against the rocks.
We bombed them, she says. The United States. Someplace called Pearl Harbor.
So many of those days have been swept up and carried away, purposefully forgotten. It wasn’t the last time I was happy, or the last day I felt no fear. At first I was too young to understand much – I had no context to fear a country thousands of miles away. No way to measure our military prowess against the British, Chinese, Dutch, Australians, and Americans. ‘Total war’ meant nothing to me. The only thing I knew at the time was that it was the last day my brothers were content being children.
Our parents owned a bakery, and at first it seemed like they could keep it going. In the early days you could still get things like sugar and eggs, if you knew the right people and had something to trade. We made fried squid and green peas and sweet bean cakes, but mostly we were known for our kasutera. When things became scarce, we could get ten sen for a single sponge cake, and people came to the shop and formed a line all down the street. A can of flour and a can of sugar and a can of eggs went into the machine. I think the clanking must have woken all the neighbors. My memories of that first year are fragmented – when nothing was normal and yet very little had changed – but that clanking machine holds them together.
I am eleven, almost twelve. It is June 1942, and my brothers have only just turned seventeen. Hiroshi is trying to obey our father’s wishes that he and Minoru wait until they are eighteen to enlist. There is no talk of either of them going to University now, even though students still have exemptions. Hiroshi wants to become a pilot for the navy and fly planes off carriers, and next year he will enroll in the Etajima Naval Academy. Most of our great aircraft carriers have just been destroyed at a place called Midway, so he will not see our navy at its height. But he will see the battleship Yamato and become childishly infatuated, telling me that she will never be surpassed in size, and certain that with such a magnificent weapon serving our Imperial Japanese Navy we cannot lose this war at sea. And we will lose the war at sea and everywhere else, but that will not be his fault.
Minoru is walking with me in the mandarin orange groves by the sea. These are not the heavily cultivated citrus trees, pinched into rows, trimmed and irrigated. A young grove – most trees are not more than fifteen feet tall – they meander in loose rows on the gentle slopes, grass growing tall between them. The main branches are right at Minoru’s height, bristling with waxy dark leaves and heavy bundles of the tiny oranges like clusters of sun-colored grapes. I am barefoot because I like the cool feel of the grass under my feet, the whisper of the silky blades against my calves.
The shade is laced with the tangy sweet bitter smell of the mandarins. Minoru picks ripe oranges and peels them, leaving the glossy curls of skin to decorate the grass. He breaks them into shiny halves which he eats in two bites. A bead of juice falls onto his chin, but he doesn’t notice.
When are you leaving, I ask him, and he seems startled, then laughs.
Little Ayako, I should have known. What was it? Has my great subtlety let me down?
I had been woken the night before by Minoru yelling, How can I be too young to support our country?
I had gone to the door of my room, peaking through the crack, seen Father respond in a low voice, something about sending children to do the work of men. He looked dazed, as if he was just realizing he might never see his sons again. It was hard to remember that the wrinkle lines at his eyes were once from smiling, that he had not always been so tired and thin. He looked down at the leg that kept him out of the army – crippled in a factory accident a long time before. He seemed so regretful, but Minoru did not notice. Minoru could not see how he looked – standing there in front of his father, bristling with naïve self-righteousness, his hands so smooth and young, curled tight at his sides.
Now he watches me curiously. I only say, I’m glad you’re going.
For once Minoru lets the lie go. He does not ruffle my hair like Hiroshi might, just nods. I’m joining the Air Force, he says. They need pilots to save this war – good ones.
It does not surprise me that my brothers are choosing different paths to get to the same end. How long until you become an ace? I ask. I want to brag about you.
What do you think? Who has better eyesight than me? He squints down his stretched arm, then pulls back and hurls a mandarin, hitting another hanging on the tip of a branch about twenty yards away. The two oranges fall without a sound.
When we leave the grove, he is making airplane noises, wheeling his arms about in great dipping circles. I am laughing.
They tore that mandarin grove down soon enough. I was never sure why. War is like that I guess.
In the fall of 1943, all college students were called to the colors. But my brothers had already joined. We were all proud of them for that, even our father. About that time I could see things had changed for good – the bakery long abandoned. Father was working as a welder at a factory making Zeros, and mother and I were working out in the rice patties by a factory that made dried rice cakes for the infantry.
Minoru came back in August 1944, a neat trail of bullets like the even knots of stitches up his right arm. He was decorated and honorably discharged. He said he had shot down twenty-nine Allied planes and thought it was unlucky to end on an uneven number. He said he was lucky to have the arm at all. Lucky he wasn’t infantry and that the military cared about the pilots. I didn’t know what he meant until a decade after the war, when Shigeko told me about Okinawa. He wore a patch where his right eye used to be and bare, milky scars roped around the right side of his head from the splinters of his cockpit windshield glass.
By that time many of us had the sense that things were not going so well, only of course you could never say so and it was better not even to think it. But once when I thought we were alone I asked him if we could still win. It was hard to look in his eyes then. They were wide-set and had always been so bright. Now his ruined socket was uncovered and lurid, his good eye was guarded. Yes, he told me, but it would take all of us. Everyone doing his or her part. Being willing to sacrifice. He used that word, sacrifice. It was the first time I thought he might not be telling me the truth.
Once, a few months after Minoru returned, a friend of the family dropped by with her husband, an on-leave officer. He was a small man with a peculiar way of looking at you, head just to one side like a bird eyeing a worm. He did not say anything, but his eyes never stopped moving.
After they left, Minoru asked me, Do you know who that man was? He was Army Intelligence. I knew men like him. One would come to the base when we had captured enemy airmen.
What made him look so strange? I asked. He was twitchy.
Prisoners are of little use when they run out of information, Minoru said. The man I knew – one of his jobs was to behead them when he was done with the interrogation. He told me I had a superb neck. That it would be nice and clean to cut off.
I stared at the back of Minoru’s neck – the skin smooth and exposed, except for where his hair was growing out from the severe regulation cut. The back of my neck tingled and I said, You’re making that up.
Minoru shrugged, He said he couldn’t help himself. Apparently if you cut off enough heads it’s the first thing you consider. If you let him, he’d go on about the right way to do it. The kind of sword you needed, the type of stroke for different kinds of necks. He claimed he was so good he never got blood on his uniform.
By the time I was fourteen, I knew the sound of a Zero as well as the sound of my mother’s voice. They often flew over the field where mother and I worked – from Sagami Bay towards Mount Fuji. Sometimes they came in flocks of a dozen or more, broken shimmers of light glancing off the cockpits. Even at altitude, they filled the air with the stuttering, guttural drone of their engines.
The planes would spiral down towards us, looking almost new, the paint shiny and flashing in the slanting evening light. Their propellers revved to a throaty, pulsing snarl as they circled those working in the fields and most of us stopped our work to wave. I waited for them to dip their wings, then wished I had looked away.
At first when I saw the planes with the rising suns so bright on their wings I would wave and bounce and once I yelled. Then Mother told me to be quiet, that we were not waving hello.
We all knew they were Divine Wind Special Attack, or Tōkko planes. Rumor informed those that death did not, trickled down even to me. Everyone was using the term gyukosai. A sacrificial battle, they said, when it really means to give until you shatter like a jewel. We heard about the infantry soldiers keeping their last grenade with them no matter what – better to blow themselves up than be captured. We had not yet heard about the group suicides the military would encourage on Okinawa, when it looked like the Americans would win. How whole villages would assemble to die together, by their own hands. Even then, many thought it the only obvious choice.
But to me, those days working in the fields, the saddest thing in the world was the bow of those painted wings. They often flew so low I could see the young pilots in the cockpits – pale faces and white scarves through the thick glass. The painted red suns glinted against the snowy cap of Mount Fuji, with the setting sun off to the left. Most evenings only the setting sun had any strength.
One morning in late January 1945, Hiroshi arrived at our house without warning. I remember a heavy mist condensing and dripping off his cap, and his proud and bashful smile as mother opened the door. We were all so surprised. He said he’d been given twenty-four hours leave, and he brought a small trunk full of delicacies. Sweet bean cakes and canned salmon and real Saké, even extra food coupons. It seemed like a feast, more and better food than we had seen in months. All we had in the house were some sweet potato stalks, a tiny bit of dried squid, and a potato liqueur that left an awful taste.
Those were the days of constant lack – I was always hungry, and I never stopped to think how often my parents did not eat so I could. The jobs we worked did not afford us enough to buy what meager supplies remained. And we were lucky to live in the country, where one could still find black market squid, and if you were lucky, even grow a few vegetables that were not taken for an army apparently hungrier than we were.
What Hiroshi brought that night we could not have bought if we had all the money in the world – those luxuries did not exist any more. Father asked him how he managed it.
I’ve become important, was all Hiroshi said. But we knew.
At the time I was not quite fifteen, but that is not so young in a time of total war. By then even children knew what it meant when a warrior came home, uninjured, in the middle of a war. A single act of decency amid the grinding cogs of the vast, implacable war machine – to let a soldier say goodbye. I remember mother and father trying to act like everything was normal – like he was just a son who had given them an unexpected visit. We were all good at pretending by then.
I felt only an edge of sharpness to the growing ache in the center of me – more than the hunger and toil at the factory and the constant worry and want. Minoru’s smile flashed grimly. Don’t worry, he said. Hiro-chan will go on and do great things for the Empire. He is the man we have all been waiting for.
Hiroshi took a photo out of his pocket to show us. There were three young men smiling at us, all in flying gear, standing in front of a gleaming Zero. He said they were his friends.
So handsome, said Shigeko, you look just like them. Her face was pinched and eyes shining. I wondered if Hiroshi saw that the glisten in them was from sadness. She was living with us, as her family had sent her away from Tokyo due to the bombing raids.
I remember forcing my mind from the reality that photo, and his visit represented – noticing with dull interest what good complexions the airmen all had, and how fine they looked with their leather coats and headbands and snowy white scarves. And so young, none of them looked much older than Hiroshi, who was only twenty. It seems silly now, but I even commented on how straight their teeth were. Do they all have such lovely teeth? I asked him.
They only pick the finest, Minoru said, an edge to his characteristic flippancy. The teeth are what they look at first.
I didn’t know until later that Tōkko pilots got almost whatever they wanted. That it was a matter of honor to go on their final mission in the best condition possible, and if this meant corrective dental work, they were given corrective dental work.
Hiroshi said, I’ll tell you something about their headbands. And he pointed at the tiny dark dots that were the rising suns. You can’t tell from a picture, he said, but that isn’t red cloth and it wasn’t dyed. The girls at a school near the air base, they all cut their fingers and filled in the suns with their blood.
Everyone must do their part, Minoru laughed. It was the first time I realized how much his laugh had changed – once so buoyant, now flat and caustic.
Hiroshi said, I’m sorry you were injured, Minoru-chan. You did your part.
That night as we were finishing up dinner, Hiroshi said he and Shigeko had decided to get married, and would my parents perform the ceremony, that very night.
We were all startled at the request. Hiroshi had been gone for years. They had been so young before and would likely never be together again. But Hiroshi looked smart in his crisp pilot’s uniform, dignified and grown-up, and it was easy to be proud of him, to feel that he was good and brave and that Shigeko could not do better than to marry someone she had known her whole life.
I was glad to see Shigeko take off her stiff, wide-legged Monpi, which we all wore and put on Mother’s good kimono. She was beautiful in the tangerine silk with bits of green and blue. Looking at it, I could almost smell the bitter citrus of the mandarin groves. Father got the Saké and we toasted three times. He started to sing the Takasagoya wedding song, but there is a part in that song about living forever and he stopped then. The only sound was the wash and patter of rain against the blackout shutters.
Through the whole ceremony, Minoru sat and stared at the bullet hole in the center of his right hand. The way it healed, only a thin ridge of scar tissue kept you from being able to stick your finger right through. He never looked up.
Hiroshi left at dawn. It was still raining. Shigeko was grave and resigned as she said goodbye. He had just disappeared down the road, the mist closing around him, when Minoru appeared around the side of the house. He never used to be so silent. His hair was dripping over his forehead, and he held his saturated eye patch in one hand.
Hiro-chan is a good pilot, he said. Decorated.
I nodded. You are both good pilots.
They don’t send the injured ones to dive into American carriers. Minoru looked out towards the sea. What does it say about us, that we have come to killing our best pilots?
Years later, I sit with Shigeko – my cousin and my sister-in-law – in her private sanctuary, screened by bamboo and filled with braziers and pictures of Hiroshi and her family, who were all killed in the Tokyo firebombing. The smell of incense clouds the still air, overpowering the jasmine rising from the cup of tea in my hand. The war has been over for five years and a new decade has begun, and this is the first time she has wanted to talk about where she went in the last few months of the war. Shigeko had volunteered in a group of college-age girls who were trained as a makeshift medical corps – the kind an army uses only out of desperation – and she was sent to Okinawa.
They don’t train you to leave them behind, Shigeko says now. They never tell you how little use the critically injured are to an army that can barely keep the so-called healthy on their feet. That sometimes healing is not an option.
How do you know the ones you left behind didn’t survive? I ask. At least some of them.
Because I was one who gave the critical cases a shot of opium, she says, then 20 cc’s of corrosive sublimate in a vein.
After all I have heard, I can no longer be shocked. Among the things military rhetoric never covered – the logistics of a retreating, beleaguered army.
Shigeko will only look at the Buddha statue sitting on the table behind my left shoulder. We would patch up the wounded one day, cutting limbs off with only local anesthesia, no time for lumbar. We placed the ones we knew would die towards the center of the aid tent, and the next day we would kill them when we had to retreat again, or when we could do nothing else.
We are both silent
They told us it was better for the wounded that way, Shigeko says. They told us the Americans would do worse. Her voice is a soft monotone. Some of them knew. The critically wounded, the ones who were still aware – they knew what we were doing.
They knew you couldn’t do anything else, I say, the statement feeling hypocritical, even though I mean it. I think.
It only took them a few seconds to die, she says. Maybe it was easier that way.
What about Hiroshi? I ask. It’s the first time I’ve dared, perhaps it seemed improper before, indelicate. But I’ve always wondered if it was worth it to her – to marry Hiroshi for one night. How she feels now, when she thinks about his plane plunging through exploding skies towards some American warship.
She smooths the kimono out on her leg. Blue as the skies he must have flown through on his final mission. Though his skies were not speckled with white herons and cherry blossoms.
It only took him a few seconds to die, she says. Maybe it was easier that way.
In February 1945, a month after Hiroshi left, we received a small trunk with his belongings and an official note letting us know that he had died bravely in action. They mentioned nothing of the Divine Wind Special Attack Force, but that was normal. It was the secret everybody knew about.
When people in the village learned he’d died, they said that’s good, congratulations. What an honor for your family.
Yes, said Shigeko, her face carefully composed, blank as the face of the Buddha in our room. It’s for the country, she said.
Women came over and began cooking vegetables. That’s how it was in the country villages – the kitchen smelling of white radishes. Consoling smiles beneath misted, sincere eyes. They told Shigeko how fortunate she was to be the war widow of such a brave husband.
Once Minoru came into the kitchen and it was like a door slamming shut somewhere, everyone suddenly still and listening, though he had entered without a sound. The women cast uncomfortable glances at his ruined eye, the even bullet scars up his bare forearm.
How much easier it was to face the war dead than the war living.
Towards the end, all through the heat of that June and July, they gather us in the village squares – in any open spot. The children, the women who are not working. The weak. We practice with hastily cut bamboo spears and they teach us how to march in bedraggled formation. They – the injured, the discharged, the ones the army can no longer use. A category that shrinks by the day.
Step together, they teach us. Stab up. We can expect the Anglo-American demons to be huge, says one corporal. He is missing an arm at the elbow, and one leg seems mysteriously shorter than the other. Stab up, he yells, his voice modulating on the end like a wail. Don’t look in their eyes.
The bamboo is cool and smooth against my palms, the ridges making marks in my sweaty skin.
Step stab. Step stab.
The tip of the spear is sharpened in a single diagonal cut, green and vibrant against the milky turquoise haze over the Pacific.
Aim for the throat.
We are the last line of defense if the Americans invade Japan. Total war. Never forget the honor of gyukosai. A country preparing to shatter.
Forward together. Use any momentum you have.
Don’t look in their eyes.
Minoru left in April, on one of the last days of the cherry blossoms. The rutted dirt path to our house was littered with bruised, darkening petals. It was the first time we had seen the sun in what seemed like weeks. Mother and father and I stood outside that morning, blinking and dazed in the wan light. Minoru came out with his worn haversack on his back. He never looked up at the sun. They’re taking class C and D for the infantry now, he said. They won’t care about my eye, or my arm. They’d take Ayako if she cut her hair.
Father didn’t say anything. Mother grasped his face and kissed him, then she went inside without crying.
You could stay, I told him. It will be over soon.
He just shook his head. Everyone must do their part, he said. There was a look in his eye – glinting and hard, like a wounded animal, caught where it can no longer flee.
When will you be back? I asked. And for that moment it was comforting to pretend he might return.
He squinted up then at the sky. I can still remember the sun that day – it was an odd sun. Pale and bled-out looking. Like it wanted to hide again. I remember the twist of Minoru’s mouth, a flicker of his old smile.
When it rains, he said.
I still live on the coast. Forty years, and some things are the same. At night I still hear the cicadas, their chirring no longer muted by blackout shutters. I like to walk by the shore and watch the clouds pooling over Mount Fuji and listen to the waves when they pile against the rocks in frothy ribbons.
I stopped looking for skipping stones a long time ago – they all seem to have edges now. It was Minoru’s gift anyway. They never told us what happened to him, not even to list him as missing. And they never did replant the mandarin groves.
Larissa is an English professor whose first literary love is historical fiction. When she is not riding her horse or training for her next trail race, she can be found hunting for more great pieces of fiction to share with her next class, or working up the courage to finish her WWII novel about the battleship Bismarck. She has been published in None of the Above (NOTA) and Equus magazine, and takes historical and linguistic inspiration from The Book Thief by Markus Zusak.
