Pathway to Japanese Literature

Kamakiri Oyaji would sometimes call me “Madam” and sometimes “Big Sister.”
Debu Oyaji called me “Madam.”
That’s why I liked Debu.
When Kamakiri called me “Big Sister,” I pretended not to notice and kept a straight face, but I had resolved to make him suffer terribly someday.

Kamakiri and Debu were both around sixty years old.
Kamakiri ran a local factory while Debu owned a well.
We would gather between air raid sirens to gamble.
Nomura and Debu usually won; Kamakiri and I usually lost.
When Kamakiri lost and grew agitated, he would call me “Big Sister” with a lecherous stare.
At times he made such an obscene face it seemed saliva might drip down.
Kamakiri was pathologically stingy.
When settling debts, he’d pull out bills and meticulously smooth each crease before parting with them.
If I said, “Don’t slobber on them—just hand it over,” he’d crumple his face like a child about to weep.

I would sometimes ride a bicycle to invite Debu and Kamakiri.
We believed Japan would lose, but Kamakiri was especially vile.
He seemed to be rejoicing in Japan’s defeat.
Eighty percent of men and twenty percent of women—half of Japan’s population—would die, and he counted himself among the remaining twenty percent of men: babies and decrepit old men.
And this was his scheme—to consider me among his hundreds or thousands of mistresses and take care of me accordingly.

The old men's terror-stricken behavior during air raids was appalling.
They overflowed with a raw attachment to life.
Yet their curiosity about others' destruction proved more vigorous than the young's—whenever Chiba, Hachioji, or Hiratsuka were hit, they went to gawk, returning disappointed when the damage proved slight.
They would crouch down and scrutinize half-burned female corpses with such intensity that onlookers might shrink from touching them.

Kamakiri would come to invite me to tour the disaster areas after every air raid, but I stopped going after the second time.
They hated the war because they couldn't eat sweet foods, had no enjoyable pastimes, and lived constrained lives—yet cherished only themselves, sparing neither compatriots nor strangers in their conviction that everyone besides themselves should be destroyed.
As the air raids intensified, layer by layer their true natures were laid bare, until finally they could declare it shamelessly outright, their eyes taking on a strange glint that turned demonic.
They sniffed out people’s misfortunes, hunted for them, and prayed for them.

One day when it was hot, I rode my bicycle in a short skirt without stockings to invite Kamakiri.
Kamakiri had been living in an air-raid shelter since his house burned down.
After this area too became scorched earth along with the rest of town, nobody got angry anymore even if you didn't wear monpe work pants.
Kamakiri made a breathless face as he stared at my bare legs.
He came out from the shelter with something tucked in his coat pocket, and on our way to my house together—saying "I'll show this only to you"—he sat down in the grassy burned ruins and pulled out what turned out to be an obscene picture book.
It was beautifully bound like an art album in a protective case.

“You’ll give it to me, won’t you?”

“No way!”

Kamakiri said in a fluster. And in the moment he turned his face away and fidgeted with something, I grabbed the book and leapt onto the bicycle. The decrepit Kamakiri could only gape open-mouthed as I leisurely straddled the bicycle, barely managing to stand up.

“Come and get it!”

“You bastard!”

Kamakiri bared his white teeth.

Kamakiri hated me. I knew that men’s attitudes toward women changed entirely once they reached around forty. By that age, men can no longer harbor spiritual yearnings, dreams, or solace toward women—they come to believe that anything spiritual is sufficiently provided by the dregs of domesticity. And they inevitably come to realize that beyond the stench of things like rice bran miso and stale diapers, there exists no such thing as the spiritual. And they become lost in women’s bodies. It’s from this age that men truly become lost in women, and since they lose themselves in the physical from the very beginning without ever considering things like the spirit, they never awaken from it. When men reach this age, they have come to fully understand women’s dispositions and see through all feminine wiles—indeed, they harbor hatred toward anything “womanly.” Yet their obsession remains purely carnal, so rather than diminishing their fixation, this hatred often stokes it further.

They harbored no sweet notions like love.
They considered calculations and physical transactions, but while women’s bodies were an inexhaustible spring lasting ten or fifteen years, men’s money was no such spring—thus it took no time at all to turn one into a decrepit beggar.

I sometimes thought about reducing Kamakiri to a beggar.
I thought about it almost every day.
I thought about making him crawl around me like a male dog, then pluck out all his fur, gouge his eyeballs, and cast him aside.
But in reality, I had no real interest in actually trying it out.
Kamakiri was such a decrepit and utterly repulsive old man.
And since he was already dying, though I sometimes thought it might be better to just finish him off in one go, I never actually felt inclined to do it.

That was probably because I loved Nomura, and because Nomura didn’t like such things, I thought.
However, Nomura did not believe that I loved him; he seemed to think it was merely because the war had made people act somewhat more solemnly.

I was once a prostitute.
I was the woman who would hang on the lattice and call out, "Psst, psst... Hey, Mister."
I was bought out by a certain man and became his mistress and the madam of a bar, but being licentious, I had relations with nearly every regular customer.
Nomura was also one of them.
When this war made it impossible to keep the bar running, with conscription notices and such becoming a nuisance, I needed a nominal marriage—so I decided to cohabit with Nomura, an easygoing bachelor who didn't fuss over things.
"Since Japan was going to lose the war and be completely ruined anyway, everything was just marking time until then," Nomura said with a bitter smile as he took me in.
Neither he nor I entertained conventional notions like marriage.

However, I had liked Nomura from the start, and gradually came to love him.
I had come to think that if even Nomura were willing, I wanted to remain his wife for life.
Because I was licentious, I was a woman who couldn’t refrain from infidelity.
Women like me don’t even consider physical chastity.
My body was my toy, and I was a woman who couldn’t go through life without playing with my toy.

Nomura thought I was a woman who couldn’t be satisfied by one man, a woman who drifted from man to man—but playing and loving were different things.
I couldn’t keep from playing.
My body dried out and twisted on its own, and I thought I was truly a hopeless woman—but was wanting to play something unique to me alone?
However, I loved Nomura, and that was different from playing.
But Nomura intended to eventually leave me and take a proper wife; moreover, he believed that before we could separate, we would either be crushed by the war or, if we luckily survived, be made into slaves and taken somewhere.
I too had likely come to think that way, so I wanted to at least be a good wife to Nomura during the war.

It was on the night of April 15th that the district we lived in was bombed.

I liked the B-29 night formation air raids.
The daytime air raids flew at such high altitudes they were hard to see clearly, lacking both light and color—I hated them.
When Haneda Airfield was hit, five or six small black planes plunged down one by one, tilting their wings as they carved straight vertical lines through the sky.
War is truly beautiful.
We couldn't anticipate that beauty; we could only glimpse it fleetingly through our terror, and by the time we noticed, it had already vanished.
Without pretense, without lingering attachments—the war was lavish.
I didn't hate watching homes and streets and life itself slip away.
Because I'd never formed attachments strong enough to resent losing them.
But when I held my breath watching dive bombers strike, a sudden whirlwind of air pressure erupted by my ear—by then the plane had already skimmed overhead while machine guns ripped through the air in all directions.
I lacked even the instinct to duck.
Coming to my senses, I found someone collapsed on the road less than ten meters away, their house wall pocked with thirty fist-sized holes.
From that moment on, I came to detest daytime raids.
Like being harassed by some pimply middle school delinquent—all swagger without substance—it left me with hollow disgust.
A few days before surrender came another daytime raid that buried us in sand.
Nomura and I were mending our shelter when black fighter planes swooped down five hundred meters low.
Something resembling a drum canister tumbled loose—I cried out "Ah!" and Nomura barked "Down! Get down!"
Though stranded outside the shelter's entrance with no time to dash inside, seeing Nomura's face steadied me enough to lower myself slowly.
The ground trembled beneath my navel and chin as wind roared like it might flip me over—then came the sandstorm.
Nomura always looked after me in these moments.
Certain he'd come revive me if alive, I played dead—and true enough, he scooped me up, kissed me, started tickling until we rolled laughing in each other's arms.

The bomb this time had embedded itself so deeply into the ground that it blew away only our neighbor’s neighbor’s house, leaving the roofs and windows of nearby houses undamaged.

Night air raids were splendid.
I had hated the war because it took various enjoyable things from me, but once night air raids began, I came to no longer hate it.
Though I had hated the darkness of wartime nights, after night air raids started, that darkness seeped into me with nostalgic familiarity, and I felt a profound harmony with my own body as if we were one.

However, if asked what was most splendid about the night bombings, my honest truth would be that what I liked best was precisely the immense scale of the destruction.
The dull silver B-29s floating starkly amidst the searchlight arrows were also beautiful.
The clattering flashes of anti-aircraft guns, and the roar of B-29s swimming through the sound of those guns.
The incendiary bombs that bloomed and fell through the sky like fireworks—yet for me, only the boundless purgatorial flames spreading across the ground could provide complete satisfaction.

There was nostalgia there.
The town in Tohoku where I had been abandoned by my father and mother and taken away by a human trafficker—surrounded by small mountains, those barren bald peaks still capped with snow—seemed to burn ceaselessly within the purgatorial flames, the scenery of my hometown forever aflame in their depths.
Burn everything, I always screamed in my heart.
Towns and fields and trees and skies—even birds burned in the air, water burned, seas burned; my chest tightened so fiercely that I instinctively covered my face to stifle the tears threatening to burst forth.

I wished that even hatred would burn away too.
As I gazed at the flames and realized I was hating people, it felt so poignant.
And I found myself wanting to desperately confirm that I was being loved by Nomura.
Nomura loved only my body.
I was fine with that.
I am being loved.
And amidst Nomura's fierce caresses, I was thinking of various sad things.
When Nomura’s caresses waned, I screamed.
“More—more—more!”
And I felt like I wanted to hold my incomprehensible self alone and weep.

I had been waiting in my heart for the day when our city would be wrapped in a sea of purgatorial flames.
I had obtained industrial-grade potassium cyanide from Kamakiri and kept it on my person without fail during air raids.
My plan was to die before being suffocated by smoke—I didn't particularly wish for death, but carried a vague dread of suffering should smoke overcome me.

The dull silver planes that usually passed over other cities’ seas of flames floated up into the center of the searchlight arrows that night, tilting and swaying above our heads before racing past; our surroundings gradually became a sea of fire, until the sky was obscured by red smoke and vanished from view—sounds upon sounds, the thuds of falling bombs, explosions, anti-aircraft guns, and the crackling of flames closing in from all directions, until a deep, rumbling roar arose.

“Let’s get out of here.”

Nomura said.
On the road, evacuees were milling about, gathering, and running.
I kept feeling that those people were separate beings from me.
Abruptly, I thought that even if it meant death, I absolutely would not join that rude, presumptuous, blind current of unfamiliar others—not on this day of all days.
I was alone.

Only Nomura—I wanted him to stay with me.
I had begun dimly grasping the vague significance of keeping potassium cyanide pressed against my skin.
I had been listening intently to something since earlier.
But I could grasp nothing.

“Let’s wait a little longer.”
“Are you scared of dying?”

“I don’t want to die.”
“Ever since earlier, every time bombs come clattering down, my heart nearly stops.”

“I am too.”
“I’m—even more—terrified.”
“But you know, I—I don’t want to flee with everyone else.”

And then, an unexpected resolve welled up within me.
It was a singular, aching nostalgia.
I felt precious to myself.
Beloved.
I wanted to weep.
Even as people perished and others' houses were destroyed, I became convinced that only we must survive—that our house must not burn.
Guarding this house until the final moment, I could think of nothing else.

“Please put out the fire!” I screamed, clinging to Nomura.
“Please don’t burn this house.”
“This house of yours—it’s my house too.”
“I don’t want this house to burn!”

An expression of disbelief and astonishment appeared on Nomura's face, flooding him with emotion and tenderness.
I should have simply surrendered my body to Nomura.
I should have given Nomura my heart, my flesh, my entire being—utterly enraptured.
I choked on convulsive sobs.
Nomura gripped my jaw with his large hand seeking my lips.
The sky arching above us blazed crimson like some demonic hue.
Never once in my life had I contemplated yearning for heaven.
But to find such rapture in hell—this was beyond even my darkest dreams.
The sea of fire swallowing us both seethed with greater anguish and fury than any flames I'd witnessed.
Tears streamed from me without cease.
My breath hitched from weeping, each strangled gasp becoming fragmented cries of exultation.

My skin had taken on a pallid brightness that showed faintly white against the fire's glow. Nomura kept caressing my skin as if unable to let go, then resolutely covered me with a garment like sealing a lid, hiding my flesh. He stood up, grabbed a bucket and ran off. I too grabbed a bucket. Then we became frantic. Our house stood surrounded by garden trees. The road lying upwind and our neighbor's single-story dwelling proved fortunate. Though encircled by flames, fires advanced from only one direction—we needed only to extinguish them sequentially. Moreover, when the flames truly raged and hot wind masses seethed violently, this lasted barely fifteen minutes. During that time we couldn't approach, but once it passed what remained differed little from a campfire—just wider-spread flames. Before our neighbor's house began burning wildly, we'd drenched our home with water. When we rushed over after their house collapsed, flames licking the kitchen eaves were smothered by three-four bucketfuls—with that alone danger had passed. The true ordeal lasted until fire jumped to neighboring homes—we hauled and poured water in near frenzy.

I had collapsed onto the garden soil, gasping for breath.
Even when Nomura tried to speak, I had no intention of replying.
When Nomura pulled me close, I noticed my left hand was still unconsciously gripping the bucket.
I was satisfied.
I felt as though I’d never cried with such hollow fulfillment before.
That emptiness was like that of a newborn baby feeling its own existence.
My heart was more desolate and empty than the vastness of the flames, but I felt as though my life was stuffed full.
“Hold me tighter—more, more, more tightly—” I cried out.
Nomura loved my body.
Nose, mouth, eyes, ears, cheeks, throat—each one.
He doted on me in such an odd way—making me laugh, making me angry, making me fret—but I was satisfied.
Confirming that he was enthralled with my body and took pleasure in it was also my joy.
I wasn’t thinking about anything.
There was not a single thing in particular that I had to think about.
I merely thought about my childhood.
I recalled things in a scattered manner.
I wasn’t comparing them to the present.
I was merely remembering.
And in the sadness of such thoughts, I would abruptly act harshly toward Nomura.
While being doted on by Nomura, there were times I would think about men’s faces and bodies that weren’t his.

There were times I even thought about that Kamakiri.
Thinking about anything was generally tedious.
And I was satisfied, at any rate, that Nomura was intoxicated with my body—that he loved and doted on me.

I had always detested things that put on airs of refinement—heaven, God, and the like—but until this moment, I had never considered that I might be a woman from hell.
Our neighborhood had become scorched earth spanning one square ri, leaving only three blocks across about one square chō where we lived—but when I realized this town would burn no more, I felt an inexplicable disappointment.
I detested the burned wasteland surrounding me.
It was because it would never burn again.
And even toward the visits of B-29s, I could no longer muster the same tension as before.

Yet the final hour approached—the enemy invasion, bullets scattering like arrows through Japan’s winds, bombs caroming wildly, people darting like scattered spiderlings only to drop one after another.
That day was my raison d’être.
The day after my town’s air raid, I roamed the vast burned ruins muttering to myself. How pathetically underwhelming it all was.
Everything humans do and achieve—why must it all end so pathetically?
I’ve only glimpsed shadows—never embraced anything real.
I ached with longing, fissures splitting open behind me as the marrow in my bones withered like fields parched by drought.
Whenever the radio blared warnings about B-29 squadrons—three hundred planes here, five hundred there—I’d sneer: *Hmph*. *A measly five hundred?*
Not even three thousand or five thousand yet—how pitifully inadequate—I crept forward inch by inch, fantasizing about swarms so vast they’d blot out the sky with plane-clouds, delighting in their coming.

★

Kamakiri also burned.
Debu also burned.

Kamakiri came asking to move in together, but I harshly rebuffed him. He had built an unusually expensive air-raid shelter in this area—one rarely seen around here—that could hold most household goods and withstand any fire short of a direct hit. He mocked our flimsy shelter with barbs like “Did you evacuate your furniture?” and “Must be nice not to care if everything burns,” though his true aim was to sneer at our carelessness while relishing the thought of us left dazed by fire damage.

A demonic defeat-wisher, Kamakiri grew irritated that B-29 formations never numbered tens of thousands. He clung to visions of Tokyo becoming a scorched plain meticulously cratered by artillery—yet still believed his shelter would survive anything but a direct strike. He’d even planned to crawl out waving his arms, counting on pity for his decrepit frame, all while boasting to us with money clutched in hand: “Fools who skimp on shelters! Your cash’ll turn to scrap! Hoarding paper scraps—what nonsense!”

So I told him off: “You built this shelter just for this occasion, didn’t you? Go live in your precious hole.”

“Because it’s packed full of luggage,” Kamakiri said.

“I wouldn’t know anything about that. If we get burned out, will you take us in?”

“I won’t be taking you in, though.”

With a bitter grin, Kamakiri made a sarcastic remark and left.
Kamakiri was as blatant as an insect.
When he came visiting into the embers of the burned ruins and greeted me with “You survived the fire, huh?,” he couldn’t conceal his evident dissatisfaction and made a face of utter disappointment.
And though he said “You survived the fire,” he lacked even the decency to add “Good for you” or “Congratulations.”
The slight solace his heart found stemmed from two prospects: first, that every last house would inevitably burn, collapse, and be blown away; second, that those who survived might become targets—struck down by machine guns or obliterated by a single bullet from a small plane.
“My shelter’s still cramped, see. When the time comes—well, at best—I could take you in, at least,” Kamakiri declared brazenly.

To put it bluntly, even if a bomb had struck us, blowing Nomura and the house away and leaving me as the sole survivor, I wouldn’t have been troubled.
I thought that would be the very moment I would infiltrate Kamakiri's shelter, destroy his household, make his elderly wife die in agony, and eventually drive Kamakiri himself into such a frenzy that he too would perish in torment.
Even in the path that lay beyond, I felt no anxiety whatsoever about living.

Yet I imagined fleeing the battlefield with Nomura—staggering this way and that, diving into wheat fields, having Nomura carry me through rivers, escaping deep into the mountains’ darkest recesses to build an unknown hut, and living secretly for years to come, evading the enemy’s searching eyes.

Now that the war had ended, I considered returning to the old way of life natural, but during the war itself, such former ways never once crossed my mind. I thought most Japanese would be killed outright, and those who hid would be dragged out and slaughtered. While evading enemy soldiers' eyes through flight and concealment, I fantasized about the pleasure of playing house with Nomura. How many years might that last? No matter how many years continued, there would eventually come a time when we descended to the village—when peaceful days arrived and those tedious old days of peace opened before us—at which point we would surely part ways, I had concluded. Ultimately my fantasies always ended at our separation with Nomura. While we were together though, I'd never once considered such an outcome. I could imagine working at a famed sake house and tricking the old proprietor into sheltering some young swallow—I could envision anything at all.

I liked Nomura—loved him even—but to dwell on where I liked him or why—for a woman like me, that seemed vulgar.
That we could live together without discomfort—this alone was reason enough for a love greater than any other.
There were plenty of other men, and I had never forgotten that many existed who were more splendid than Nomura.
While being held and caressed by Nomura, I was actually thinking much about that.
However, dwelling on such things is vulgar.
I still liked sweet dreams.

Humans claim they can think of anything, but I believed we could only manage rather constrained thoughts.
Why? Because during the war, I couldn't even dream that this old life would come rushing back with the war's end.
And there I was with Nomura—the two of us facing the fate called war as if we were a single mass, as if desperately standing against something—feeling nostalgia, ferocity, and tenderness.
I grew irritated by the dearth of amusements, came to hate and curse every tedious thing around me—Nomura and Kamakiri included—rejected Nomura's caresses, stopped wanting to respond even when spoken to, and in those moments, I would ride my bicycle through the scorched ruins.
When young workers and civil defense corps members teased or scolded me for not wearing work pants and exposing my bare legs, I would grow so irritated that I thought about scratching them.

But in my heart, I felt that Nomura was pitiful.
It was the fact that Nomura would inevitably be killed in the war.
I believed it eighty percent, ninety percent, or even a full hundred percent.
And I, a woman, survived and believed that from that point onward, I could do anything.

I wished to preserve as a single fragment of memory that I had been a man’s dear wife.
That man doted on me even as the war killed him, and I survived into postwar Japan—a nation pockmarked with craters, littered with concrete debris and stone shards, a world that seemed ripe for amusement—and after indulging in every amusement imaginable, I imagined murmuring: “My dear man died in the war.”
That seemed perfectly fitting in its quiet melancholy.

However, I thought Nomura was pitiable.
I truly thought he was pitiable.
The primary reason—the sole reason—the absolute reason—was that Nomura himself had gazed unflinchingly upon war's most wretched final days without harboring a single sweet thought.
Nomura believed that even if Japanese men didn't die in the war, there would be no path for them beyond slavery.
He believed Japan as a nation would cease to exist.
He believed only women would survive to bear mixed-blood children and birth a different country.
Nomura's convictions weren't groundless, yet there was no comforting him.
Nomura caressed me.
He believed even caresses had expiration dates.
Nomura would caress me while hating me and flying into rages.
I thought Japan's fate resided within that.
Thus Japan was perishing.
The Japan that bore me.
I didn't hate Japan.
In Nomura's frenzied caresses, I beheld Japan's perishing form—Ah, Japan today had become like this: feverish, sweat pouring down its brow, hating the woman it loved.
I thought so.
I yielded my body to Nomura's ministrations.

“Let the women survive and make a grand show of it.”

Nomura laughed that wry laugh of his while needling me.
I never backed down.

“I’m done with men like you who fawn over my body like some mutt.”
“Have a proper romance.”

“What’s ‘proper’ mean?”

“Refined.”

“Refined?”
“You mean spiritual, then.”

Nomura scrunched up his eyes, making that face like something was tickling his nose.

“If I were taken off to some southern seas island for labor and tried to sweet-talk a native woman, they’d probably beat me with a whip until I stopped breathing.”

“So you should have a spiritual romance with a native girl too.”

“I see.”
“After all, I can’t exactly go wooing a mermaid either.”

Our conversations were nothing but vulgar, absurd things.

One night, our bedroom was bathed in moonlight, and Nomura scooped up my body, tossed me beneath the full cascade of moonlight at the window’s edge, and played.
Our faces were clearly visible, and the veins beneath our skin stood out distinctly blue.

Nomura told me a tale from the ancient Heian period.
Hearing a koto’s notes deep in the woods, someone advanced through the rustling pines to find a woman playing the instrument atop a tower gate.
The man grew suspicious and formed a pledge with the woman, but she wore a hood, so even under the moonlight, her face remained indistinct.
The man became one yearning for this woman of a single night, but through the koto, he eventually discovered she was the current empress… It was that sort of tale.

“If we lose the war, this country might instead become such a refined place.
“They say ‘the country perishes, yet mountains and rivers remain’—but add women to that.”
“The sound of wind through pines, moonlight, and women—even though Japanese women are scrambling about after being burned out of their homes, I bet all sorts of dreamlike love stories will start blossoming, I tell you.”

Nomura cherished my face in the moonlight and wouldn’t let go.
I understood the deep reluctance.
It was through war's inexorable deadline that I came to fully understand how our play could remain so innocent, so uncomplicated, with such deep reluctance, and yet be so cherished.

“I’ll become exactly the cute little wife you want me to be.”
“How should I be for you to think me even cuter?”

“Let’s see…”
“But, well… It’s fine as it is now.”

“But hey. Tell me. What kind of woman is your ideal?”
“Hey, you.”

Nomura said after a while, laughing.

“You’ll be my last woman.”
“Huh. So that’s how it is.”
“This one thing defies all logic—it’s looming over us right here and now.”

I couldn’t help but sink my teeth into Nomura’s neck.
He had clearly made up his mind.
That a man’s resolve could be so endearing—I hadn’t known.
If a man could always make such resolve, I would want to always be his endearing woman.
I closed my eyes and thought.
The young men of the Special Attack Units must surely be this endearing too.
They must surely be even more endearing.
What kind of women were loving or being loved in what ways, I wondered.

★

When the war ended, I hadn’t imagined it would conclude like this, so I felt bewildered, as though the agreement had been broken. I was troubled by how undignified it all felt. Of course, Japan’s government, military personnel, monks, scholars, spies, barbers, black-market vendors, and geisha alike must have all found themselves equally undignified.

Kamakiri raged. He burned with fury. "What do you mean by stopping here?" he said. "Why quit before Tokyo burns?" he said. "Why not keep going until the whole nation's destroyed?" he said. Kamakiri had wanted every Japanese soul to suffer worse than himself. I loathed his brazenly filthy, malicious desire—yet when I realized I harbored the same wish, disgust washed over me. Even when I tried believing mine differed slightly, since it didn't, Kamakiri remained detestable.

American planes began flying at low altitudes over Japan.
B-29 formations flew right over my head and back, and I quickly grew tired of seeing them.
They were merely unfamiliar four-engine aircraft with beautiful streamlined forms—not those dull silver planes that had floated dimly in war’s darkened skies, caught between arrows of radiant light.
Those silver planes had reflected the color of hellfire.
That had been my lover, but I couldn’t help but keenly realize that lover’s form was already lost.
The war had ended!
And it had already been cast into the irretrievable distant past—I thought that no matter how I struggled, I could never grasp it again.

“The war too was like a dream.”

I couldn’t help murmuring.
Everything may have been a dream, but the war was a particularly strange, unsatisfying, irretrievable dream.

“Your lover’s dead.”

Nomura saw through my heart.
When I thought that from now on there would come ordinary days—divided into night and day, with set times for sleeping and eating, a boring peace all neatly regimented—I couldn’t help but curse myself: Why hadn’t I died in the midst of the war?

I was a woman who could not tolerate boredom.
I gambled, danced, and had affairs—yet I was always bored.
I used my body as a plaything, and through doing so, I had both the means and the confidence to live without financial hardship.
I knew no ordinary regrets or sentimentality, had never thought to want praise from others, and did not want to be loved by a man.
I wanted to be loved in order to deceive men, but I did not want to be loved in order to love.
I did not believe in eternal love in the slightest.
I questioned why humans must hate war and love peace.

I wanted to live like the tigers, bears, foxes, and raccoon dogs of the jungle—loving, playing, fearing, fleeing, hiding, holding my breath, stifling my breath, staking my life on survival.

I invited Nomura out for a walk.
Nomura had injured his leg and had finally become able to walk again, though he still couldn’t manage long distances.
To rest his injured leg, he would occasionally lean on my shoulder and let one leg dangle in midair.
The weight was painful, but feeling him press against me felt exhilarating.
The burned ruins had become a field of wild grass.

“During the war I doted on you, so this time I’ll give you proper trouble.”

“So you’re finally starting your affairs?”

“With the war gone, there’s nothing left but for me to become a bomb.”

“An atomic bomb?”

“About five hundred pounds—a small one.”

“Hmm.”
“You really do know yourself.”

Nomura gave a wry smile.
I felt as though standing there pressed against him in the sweltering heat of the scorched field’s grass was an event in history.
This too would become a memory, I supposed.
Everything passed.
Like a dream.
Nothing could be grasped.
When I thought about myself, I realized I was nothing more than my own shadow.
We would part ways before long.
I did not even think of that as something sad.
When we moved, our shadows moved.
Why—was everything so trite, like these shadows!
I had come to hate shadows intensely for some reason, and my chest felt like it was tearing apart.

(Sister work to the *New Life Special Issue*)