Little Lily. Chapter 1. Awakening

The blade curved like the beak of a bird of prey, and for a fleeting second, it caught the blinding, white sun—caught it so sharply, flared so brightly, that the eye inside the dream began to ache.

She stood in the yielding, cool shade of a stone archway, seeing everything around her with that terrifying, crystalline clarity that only comes a second before you wake up. The man—tall, with a face weathered by desert winds to the color of old, darkened bronze—stepped toward the man in light robes. His movement was flawless in its lazy grace, almost tender, almost loving: his hand slipped easily, effortlessly into the folds of rough wool on the other man’s chest, and the metal entered the flesh with a strange, soft, rustling sound, as if a knife were slicing through an overripe melon. It was a triumph of pure geometry, an ideal, self-contained act of the merging of steel and human warmth. Instantly, petal by petal, a wet scarlet chrysanthemum began to bloom on the faded, unbleached cloth. It grew, pulsating with the very life that was leaving the body right at that moment to become a simply unbelievably beautiful, symmetrical stain on the fabric. And it smelled of hot iron, bitter copper, and scorching dust that scratched the throat.

The man with the bronze face turned around. His eyes, black and dry as sun-cured olives, met her gaze, piercing right through her, through the thickness of centuries and someone else’s memory.

“Run!” his cry tore through the ringing midday silence of the square, like tearing thick silk. “Tamar! Run!”

And she ran. The narrow streets, squeezed by white limestone, rushed to meet her. The air burned her throat, smelling of fermented honey and overripe figs that burst beneath her bare feet. Her feet pounded against the scorching, uneven stone; her soles burned, but stopping was impossible, because behind her—she felt it not with her ears, but with the skin between her shoulder blades—something massive, heavy was moving, making the walls of the houses terrifying tremors. She dashed forward, her shoulders knocking aside woven baskets, and dark purple fruit oozing sweet juice spilled under the wheels of unseen chariots. She ducked into a blind alley, and bright, damp, freshly dyed fabrics hung from wall to wall struck her in the face: carmine-red, rich saffron, piercingly blue cloths entangled her, stuck to her lips, blinded her, suffocated her, stripped her of her name…

“Nakayama. Wake up. Do you hear me? Wake up.”

The blue fabric of the dream instantly turned rigid, gray, and cold. It no longer smelled of figs or oriental spices. It smelled of sour, days-old sweat, rotten straw, and an underlying, sticky fear.

Yuriko opened her eyes and inhaled convulsively, with a rasp, as if surfacing from the bottom of a deep, abandoned well. Miko’s thin, icy fingers still gripped her shoulder in a deathly hold, biting straight to the bone through the filthy fabric.

“Get up,” Miko said. Her voice was flat, dry, and empty, like an overturned terracotta bowl from which every last drop has been drunk. “Get up, Yuriko. They are here.”

All around was not a sun-drenched ancient square, but Ihamigama—a cave that had become the Third Surgical Hospital of the Okinawa Prefecture. The gloom here was not merely the absence of light; it was a dense, porous, tangible entity that pressed against the eardrums and smelled so foul that a heavy, sour nausea constantly rose in the throat. This sickening, sweetish stench of gangrene and decaying living flesh mingled here with the sharp, nostril-burning reek of chloride of lime, stagnant urine, carbolic acid, and raw earth churned by explosions. Water dripped from the invisible, moisture-oozing stone vault with the monotony of a broken chronometer. Drip. Drip. Drip. The sound ate into the subconscious, ticking away the seconds of other people’s lives.

The girls—students of the First Women’s School—sat huddled together in the damp darkness, clustered in heaps like freezing, terrified nestlings. Their school uniforms, once immaculately neat with sailor collars and starched blouses, were now stiff with ingrained dirt, clay, and dry, brown, alien blood. They were children—ordinary fifteen- or seventeen-year-old girls from the village of Mawashiasato, with sharp knees protruding from hunger, thin necks, and cracked lips bitten to the flesh. They were shaking—not from the cold, though a tomb-like, bone-chilling dampness filled the cave—but because the fear inside them had outgrown the stage of tears and hardened into a dull, numb stupor.

In the center of the cave, illuminated by the trembling, dying beam of a kerosene lamp, stood their teacher. His face, once round and kind, had sharpened over these weeks, turning into a skull stretched with yellowish parchment skin. His round-rimmed glasses were askew, the lenses covered in a web of tiny scratches and limestone dust, but he didn’t notice. Here, beneath these low vaults, he seemed too large and too straight—a man who had already made a decision and was now carrying it like a tombstone.

“Girls,” the teacher said. His voice creaked and stumbled like an un-oiled door hinge, but in the silenced cave it echoed up to the ceiling, bouncing off the wet walls. “Listen to me carefully. Our duty… The Himeyuri unit is disbanded. Orders from headquarters. The Army can no longer hold this line and protect you.”

A quiet, collective, convulsive sigh swept through the cave—like the rustle of dry leaves caught in an autumn wind. Those who had been sleeping woke up. Those who had been quietly moaning on rotting mats in the depths fell silent. Duty was over? To them, who had considered their work in the hospital as something eternal and unbreakable, this «over» sounded as if they had been told the sun simply wouldn’t rise over Okinawa tomorrow.

“You know who is coming here,” the teacher continued, and for a moment a mad, feverish fire flashed in his eyes, drowned in their dark sockets. “The Americans. Long-nosed demons. They will spare no one. If they take you alive… what they will do to you will be a thousand times worse than death. They will dishonor you, tear your bodies to pieces, and throw you to the dogs. You are daughters of the Emperor, students of the First School. You must not surrender.”

He turned and lowered a heavy canvas backpack to the stone floor. From the bag came a strange sound—dull, dry, purely ceramic. Like ceramic pots clinking against each other at a bazaar.

The head nurse, her face as white as chalk, began passing these round, rough objects through the rows. When Yuriko’s turn came, her hand reached into the sack, and her fingers bumped against something cold and weighty.

“This is a grenade,” the sensei said quietly, almost soundlessly. “Type 4. You know how to use it. A weapon of despair.”

It was not made of iron. It was a round orb of coarse, baked, dark-brown clay, covered in a thin layer of rough glaze, about the size of a large Okinawan orange. They weren’t made in military factories, but in pottery workshops, by hand, when the Empire ran out of metal.

“And one more thing,” the teacher pulled small paper packets from his pocket, rustling in his trembling fingers. “This is cyanide. In case the grenade misfires. Over there, by the exit, in the kitchen, there are two milk cans with condensed milk left. You can… add this in. Stir it. And drink it. It will be easier that way.”

No one cried. The word “milk”—the only peaceful, sweet word from a past life—sounded here like a terrible, absurd joke.

“Teacher…” the voice of a girl from the corner of the cave, where the most severely wounded, the amputees, lay, trembled so violently that her words broke. “What about the wounded? Are we leaving them? What will happen to them?”

Minato Kobayashi froze for a second. His hands, holding a ceramic orb, shook harder, but he did not turn his head toward the gloom, toward the pus-oozing mats where people with torn-open bellies were wheezing.

“They,” he replied dryly and abruptly, “will have their own choice too.”

Yuriko looked down at her uniform. Her fingers automatically, with a sort of domestic neatness, began to smooth out the crumpled sailor collar, to button the surviving buttons of her blouse. It was unbearably absurd: the world was collapsing, the walls of the cave were shuddering from the distant strikes of naval artillery, and they were straightening their clothes as if preparing for a calligraphy lesson. Beside her, without uttering a word, Miko hid her ceramic grenade in the deep pocket of her dark hakama. The white ribbon in her hair was gray with dust, but tied in a perfect, precise bow.

“Let’s go,” the sensei ordered.

And they ran.

The exit from the Ihamigama cave didn’t just let them out—it literally spat them outside, right into the gaping, boiling maw of hell. The sky over Okinawa wasn’t blue; it was the color of clotted, baked blood, ripped open by black pillars of greasy smoke. The entire island shook, shuddering beneath their bare soles like a giant wounded whale that had just taken a thousand harpoons in the back all at once.

The jungle absorbed them instantly, swallowing them whole as muddy water swallows a thrown stone. The air outside proved dense, hot as tropical broth; it was so humid that Yuriko’s blouse was soaked in seconds, turning into a thin, sticky film glued to her body. This air smelled of ash, cordite, shredded pandanus wood, and the sweet, suffocating, nauseating stench of rot—the stench of hundreds of bodies that had been lying in these thickets for days. The sounds of explosions merged into one continuous, droning metallic chord that vibrated their teeth and bones.

They dashed through the chaos of greenery. Enormous fern leaves, resembling the bony ribs of prehistoric fish, violently whipped their faces, leaving sticky green streaks. Time here lost its linearity: it would stretch, turning every step into an endless, viscous torture, then race at a gallop, confusing yesterday, when the birds still sang, with today, where there was nothing but death.

The girls scattered through the brush like pearls from a snapped thread. Yuriko saw it happen ahead, some twenty meters away: right on the path, a blindingly white, silent sphere of an artillery shell flared up. Two fleeing figures in school skirts simply dissolved into that flash, ascending to the zenith along with a pillar of red Okinawan clay, turning into dust, into nothing, in a split-second of pure destruction of life. Yuriko didn’t even have time to feel afraid. She merely registered it with her eyes and kept running, feeling the two grenades in the pockets of her hakama battering her thighs—heavy, rhythmic, like a second and third heart.

They stopped only when their lungs began burning from the inside with live fire, and the air in their chests felt like crushed glass. The roar of the artillery here, on the slope of the hill, had become slightly muffled, bogged down in the dense thickets of banyan trees.

They were left alone. Only Yuriko and Miko. The other silhouettes had melted away into the green hell.

Breathing heavily, with a rasp, Miko leaned against the trunk of a tree through a fissure in its trunk, white sap resembling milk slowly oozed. Her face was completely covered in black soot and grime, making the whites of her eyes look unnaturally enormous, almost bottomless. She thrust her hand into her hakama pocket and slowly, as if disbelieving her own fingers, withdrew the ceramic orb of the grenade.

Yuriko froze, pressing her back against a wet stone. Her heart pounded right in her ears.

“Miko,” she whispered, barely audible. She knew what was supposed to happen next.

They taught us. They taught us at school, taught us on the parade ground. Press it to your stomach. Pull the pin. Strike the primer hard against a rock. Do it for the Emperor. Do it so the devils don’t touch your clean blouses.

Miko looked at the brown, baked clay in her hand for a long, endlessly long time. In her huge eyes, there was neither the teacher’s fanaticism, nor patriotic ecstasy, nor even fear. There was a strange, frightening, adult transparency. Devastation. Suddenly, she swung her arm—not at all the way soldiers are taught, but simply, childishly—and threw the grenade. Not at her own feet. Not at a rock. She hurled it far away, into the dense, squelching pandanus thickets, right into the mud.

The shell traced an absurd arc, plopped softly into the muck, and vanished. No explosion. No honor. No flash of a chrysanthemum. Just a piece of scorched earth returning back to the earth. And following the first, Miko pulled out and threw the second.

Yuriko stared at the spot where the mud had closed over, feeling as if some invisible string that had held her up all her life was snapping inside her with a deafening, glassy ringing. Miko turned to her, held out her empty, soot-stained hands, and looked silently into her eyes. And in that gaze was everything: we are just children, I refuse, this is not our war, we are not going to do this.

Slowly, as if someone else’s hand were controlling her body, Yuriko lowered her fingers into her own pocket. Her palm closed around the rough body of the Type 4 ceramic grenade.

And in that moment, the world around her seemed to fall silent. Yuriko felt it with her entire being, with every microscopic receptor of her skin. The clay was heavy, dense, and surprisingly, absurdly warm. But it wasn’t the warmth of the midday sun from her dream, nor the warmth of a mother’s hand—the grenade had heated up from her own body, absorbing the fever of her frantically beating blood, her sweat, and her life. To the touch, the surface was porous, uneven, bearing the fingerprints of an unknown master potter who had fired it in an oven. On the side of the sphere, Yuriko distinctly felt a thin, sharp seam from the mold—it dug into the tender skin of her palm, leaving a deep mark. If you rubbed it just a little, the dry, poorly fired clay began to crumble, leaving a fine, brown powder smelling of the kiln on her fingertips. A thin crack ran near the very base of the fuse—like a life line on a hand that abruptly ends. There was no steel majesty in this object, no military pride. It was simply dead, cold earth packed into a mold, stuffed with explosives, and forced to make human warmth work for destruction. This clay weight weighed too much—it was pulling her down, down to the graves of the cave, to the teacher’s order, to someone else’s forced death.

Yuriko pulled her hand from her pocket. She brought the grenade right up to her face, peering one last time into its wretched, brown simplicity, feeling her fingers cramp from its weight. And then—she simply opened her fingers. Without a swing. Without effort.

The ceramic orb hit a thick banyan root with a dull, dry thud, rolled over the wet, slimy moss, smearing itself in the white tree sap, and came to a stop in the grass at her feet. The second grenade followed the first.

Yuriko felt a strange, deafening emptiness. The palm that had just gripped death remained open, damp with sweat. On her skin, right across the lines of fate—from the base of her thumb to her pinky—two crimson, indented stripes burned from the ceramic seams. They looked like scars. Or like new, clean roads she had yet to walk. Her hand still remembered the weight, her muscles still remembered the shape of the sphere, but there was nothing left in it. It was empty.

Miko stepped closer and took that empty, trembling palm. Silently. Tightly. The way one grasps at life. Miko’s fingers were thin, dry, and hot, and when their palms joined, Yuriko went perfectly still.

And so they stood—two girls in filthy school uniforms, with clean, empty hands on their island, in the middle of someone else’s war. And neither of them knew what to do next.

While the jungle around them went on living its massive, indifferent life: water dripped, unseen lizards rustled in the foliage, and somewhere in the background, the earth hummed from the explosions.

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Chapter 2. The Forest →