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 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
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.