Little Lily. Chapter 10. Little Lily

The late September morning turned out to be strange and piercingly clear.

Light came from everywhere: from the evaporating condensation on the canvas tent slopes, from large, trembling drops on the barbed wire, from the damp, rain-flattened grass. The world seemed transparent, like washed glass, devoid of the usual sticky tropical humidity, as if the sky itself were apologizing for all those long months of suffocation. And in this crystal, diffused glow, the tents of the Shimabuku camp appeared not like a military prison, but like faded ship’s canvas, sparkling with sea salt, cast ashore by someone as no longer needed. Just as the broken edge of a baked sweet potato glows when you break it in half at twilight and see the warm sun hidden in the heart of the earth—the day was suffused with this soft radiance.

Yuriko, Miko, and Hinata stood at the edge of the dusty road, straight and still, as they always stood. They were tying up their few belongings into two soldier’s duffel bags made of coarse American canvas, which Mrs. Sanchez had silently handed them before their departure, securing them with thin parachute cords. Among the three of them, they didn’t have much past that could fit into bundles: a couple of changes of altered coveralls, a few handfuls of rice, American scissors, pencil stubs, and a piece of drawing charcoal. At the very bottom of one of the bags, wrapped in a clean cloth, rested a scrap of plywood bearing the uneven charcoal outline of Okinawa, where a tiny dot marked their final destination—the village of Mawashiasato.

They were ready. Ren Kimura had warned them about the move two days before.

That evening, when they gathered the children on the square for the last time to say goodbye, Yuriko felt her heart crack. It was not a farewell in the conventional sense—no shouting or passionate tears. Thirty pairs of huge black eyes, thirty pairs of dirty hands and bare feet simply froze on the woven mats. The children of Okinawa, with gauze bandages on their heads instead of kerchiefs and wearing tattered shirts, looked at their young senseis with that stoic, frightening silence with which old people watch a train disappearing into the fog. In this absolute childhood resignation lay everything: both “we understand” and “we will miss you.” Miko handed out all the remaining camp peanuts, and Yuriko promised: “We will send you a real sanshin. Made of wood. When we rebuild.” They left their kankara-sanshin with the oldest boy from Itoman, and the children just stood there, following them with their eyes until the girls disappeared behind the corner of the tent.

Later, in the tent, they sat Hinata down in front of them. Miko sat beside him on the mat, and Yuriko, taking a long time to choose her words, began to say:

“Hinata, the camp is closing. People are being taken away. We are going north, to my mother… Do you want to come with us?”

But the boy cut her off mid-sentence, looking with his round, deep eyes, in which the decision had been made long before the question itself:

“Yes,” he said simply. “Of course. I’m going with you. I’ll carry the bag, I’m strong. I can’t leave you two alone, you’d get lost.”

He left them no chance for doubt. He simply solidified his status as the third, stubborn point in their unbreakable triangle.

“Good morning,” Ren Kimura’s voice yanked Yuriko from her memories.

A green army Willys jeep with its canvas top folded back pulled up to them, its engine humming low and heavy. When the engine cut off, a special silence fell—the border between what had ended and what had not yet begun. Ren was in a fresh uniform, but without a helmet; his dark, thick hair was ruffled by the cool morning wind. He jumped out of the vehicle, lightly tossed their canvas bundles into the back, and turned to Yuriko.

In his expression—on his tan, high-cheekboned, hafu face with slightly slanted eyes—lay that very hidden, gentle request that he had never dared to voice through all these weeks.

“Yuriko-san,” he opened the front passenger door, his voice losing a bit of its military dryness. “Sit in front. In the back, it’ll be very bumpy.”

Yuriko looked at the open door, then at Ren. She saw in him the man who had saved them. Who had brought paper for lessons and contraband chocolate, who spent nights searching for the names of her loved ones in endless lists of the dead. It was a true, pure tenderness, like the warmth of an evening campfire. But the front seat meant an intimacy to which she had no right. Nor did she want it. The answer inside her had long been given, and that answer was Miko. Always—Miko. And this “always” was not a choice, but a property of her very nature, as moss is a property of stone.

She shook her head, stepping back a pace, shoulder to shoulder with her friend.

“No, thank you, Mr. Kimura. I’ll sit in the back with Miko.”

Ren lowered his eyes for a second, nodded, and didn’t press further. In that barely noticeable flicker of his eyelashes, his little personal war died. He understood: this place was not his, this gaze was not for him. And this understanding was as clear as the sky after a storm. But right then, Hinata popped out from under Yuriko’s elbow.

“What about me? Can I sit there?” The boy danced on the spot, pointing a dirty finger at the jeep’s shiny dashboard. “I’ve never sat in front in my whole life! I’ll be the navigator! Please!”

The tension burst instantly. Ren Kimura burst out laughing—openly, genuinely, as only Americans know how to laugh. In that brief, human laugh, Yuriko suddenly saw in the military police sergeant an ordinary boy from Sacramento, who once upon a time climbed into his father’s truck in the very same way. Ren scooped Hinata up under the arms and set him on the wide seat.

“Hold on tight, navigator. Buckle up,” Ren said, though Hinata had no idea how to do that and simply craned his neck in delight.

The girls climbed into the back, settling onto the wooden bench. The jeep lurched and slowly rolled along the rutted camp trail.

Yuriko sat facing backward, watching Shimabuku recede and shrink in size. She looked at the endless rows of canvas roofs, at the rusty barbed wire against which grey rags had been blown by the wind. Once, they had been notes from the Wall of Names, but now they seemed like flocks of silent white birds nailed to a wall. They had nowhere to fly. The empty, trampled square with marks from the cooking pots drifted past, as did the information boards… This place had been a purgatory. A place where she had learned of her father’s death and where the Empire had left her mind forever. But this very piece of red, barren land had become her first real home in recent times—a home where they had learned anew how to sew, breathe, and feel. Yuriko felt a bright, poignant sorrow. As if she were saying goodbye to her crippled youth.

The jeep rounded a corner, and the camp disappeared. The open road began.

Through the hum of the engine came Miko’s voice. She wasn’t looking back. Her gaze was fixed on the back of Ren Kimura’s head through the open cab window.

“Mr. Kimura,” Miko had to speak clearly to be heard over the wind. “What about the other girls from our unit? From Himeyuri? From the upper classes?”

Ren cast a quick glance into the rearview mirror. Yuriko noticed how taut the tendons in his neck grew under the green fabric of his shirt. He was silent for a long time, as if deciding whether it was worth destroying this crystal morning with the terrible truth. But Miko, as always, did not need pity.

“Most perished,” Ren answered dully, without turning around. His voice had returned to its dry, translator tone. “Those who remained in the caves near the cliffs of Kiyan and Mabuni… when American units closed in… some…” He fell silent for a moment. “We are still clearing the rubble in those caves. There are no precise lists yet, the Red Cross is working, but… few survived. You are among them.”

Yuriko closed her eyes. There had been two hundred twenty-two of them. In that number lay the cold mathematics of the end of the world. Two hundred twenty-two girls with snow-white ribbons in their hair, who only back in spring had been afraid of getting a bad grade in geography, had turned into ash, soot, and sea foam simply because madmen in Tokyo decided that their death would be beautiful.

She looked down at her palms inside the altered sleeves of her American coveralls. Two tiny crescent-shaped scars on her hand, two imprints, had noticeably faded. Now they resembled thin, translucent flower petals. A lily. If in that second in the forest she hadn’t overcome her fear and thrown away the ceramic grenade, her name would now also be scattered over the cliffs of Mabuni. Miko’s face remained impenetrable, stony, but her fingers gripped the jeep’s wooden side with such force that her knuckles turned white. Yuriko silently covered Miko’s cold hand with her palm, as she had grown accustomed to doing in the tent.

The Willys broke out onto the dirt road winding through the south of the island.

What they saw defied human comprehension. The road ran through a deep, unhealed wound. Okinawa lay before them like an eviscerated giant. Villages had turned into grey patches of ash. Stone bridges were torn in two. In fields where sugar cane had once swayed, the red clay was so densely pitted with bomb craters that the earth resembled diseased, pox-marked skin. Everywhere—in ditches, on hill slopes—rusted the twisted, burned hulls of tanks, artillery, and shattered trucks. Rust trickled down boulders in brown, orange streams, making it seem as if the earth were still bleeding.

Yet through this infernal, dead landscape of iron, the magic of life was already breaking through.

Okinawa’s tropical nature knew no such word as “surrender.” It possessed a blind, fierce, almost mystical power. From craters filled with stagnant orange water rose emerald, abnormally bright stems of wild fern. Charred, pitch-black trunks of breadfruit trees suddenly sprouted lush, neon-green young shoots from their dead, torn flanks. Vines, like slender emerald snakes, uncoiled right before their eyes, intertwining through the rusted tracks of Shermans and the melted barrels of anti-aircraft guns, whistling as they dragged the iron back into the bosom of the earth. It was as if the plants had drunk everything left behind by the war—blood, ash, rust, and tears—and transformed it into a fierce, stubborn growth. Bamboo shot through armor plates; ferns unfurled their living fans from beneath chunks of concrete. Life surged from every crevice, closing the island’s scars with a speed that frightened the mind.

Yuriko looked at this lush, damp greenery, and inside her, something untangled once and for all. She shifted her gaze from the sprouting jungle to Miko’s thin profile, and to her, they became one and the same. Miko was that very fern pushing through the ash. A stubborn, unyielding force that paid no mind to tanks or fallen empires, but simply kept breathing and growing, no matter what.

“Mr. Kimura!” Hinata’s ringing voice cut through the noise of the wind and brought them back to reality. The boy was fidgeting intensely on the seat, blushing to the very tips of his ears. “Mr. Kimura, please stop… I need to go… over there, in the bushes.”

Ren smiled understandingly and pulled smoothly onto the wide shoulder where the road looped around.

“Run along, navigator,” he said, opening the door. But then he added strictly, “Just don’t go far! Not a single step deep into the jungle. Do you hear me? Unexploded mines could be left there. It’s dangerous.”

Hinata nodded in agreement, jumped down to the ground in his oversized three-button shirt, and waddled off toward the wall of ferns. Yuriko watched his tiny figure approach the thickets. The boy stepped past the first row of wide leaves—and suddenly dissolved. He hadn’t gone deep; he had simply vanished into the green, chlorophyll haze, merging with the forest as if a drop of water had fallen into the ocean. Simply vanished. The jungle swallowed him without a single sound.

At that very second, a strange, shimmering numbness seized Yuriko. It wasn’t fear. It was a transparent, mystical sorrow. What if Hinata had never existed? What if this boy, who had appeared out of nowhere in the scariest June days, who couldn’t remember his mother’s last name and had never cried from hunger, was simply a forest spirit? A kijimuna tree sprite, a creation of their own exhausted, dying consciousness? A spirit that had made them stay alive simply because someone needed to be cared for? And now, having fulfilled his work, having brought them almost to the border of their home, had he simply returned back into the evergreen, wild memory of the island? Perhaps this whole world around them—the camp, the war—was all just a long, drawn-out dream?

A minute passed. Another. Yuriko held her breath. Miko too stopped looking at the road and strained her eyes toward the rustling foliage. The silence emanating from the jungle felt absolute and ancient.

And suddenly out of the bushes, with a ringing, pure childish laugh, leaped Hinata. The magic instantly dissolved into reality—he was alive, real, and covered all over in yellow flower pollen. In his hands, he clutched a huge, fluffy armful of piercingly purple, fully bloomed wild haibisukasu flowers. These forest bells bloomed only in autumn, right after the heavy rains, and they smelled of incredible freshness, dampness, and the beginning of a new life.

He ran up to the back of the jeep and, laughing, threw all this purple magnificence right at the girls.

The flowers scattered in a fan across the hood, the windshield, falling onto their coarse dark-olive coveralls, onto Yuriko’s black hair, onto Miko’s knees. The numbness broke. Wet drops fell onto the fabric, and from these tiny, living spots on the American canvas, the invisible barrier inside Yuriko shattered completely. Through the crack, light poured in. He was simply a child who had found flowers and wanted to bring joy to his older sisters.

“Hinata!” Miko shouted. And in that cry, for the first time in all these long months, it wasn’t her usual medical composure that broke through, but a ringing, genuine girl’s laugh. “You’ve covered us in dirt!”

“It’s a present! The most beautiful ones!” the boy laughed, tossing flowers in the air and climbing back into the cab.

Ren started the engine and looked at them through the rearview mirror. On his face was a smile—not polite or translator-like, but warm, sad, and real. The smile of a person who understands that he is witnessing something elusive and beautiful: a little boy with an armful of flowers in the middle of a shattered world, and two laughing girls.

“Let’s go, ladies,” he said, shifting into gear. “We’re almost there.”

The road turned behind a hill. In the distance, in the haze of the midday sun, appeared the outlines of what had once been called the village of Mawashiasato.

Nothing remained of the former village. Not a single stone wall, not a single tiled roof, nor a Shinto shrine on the hill. Only red earth churned by tank tracks and charred stumps. But on this lunar landscape, life was already teeming. Like ants after a downpour, people stubbornly rebuilt their world from scratch. Out of corrugated iron sheets, discarded American tents, scraps of plywood, and wooden shell crates, they hammered together new, awkward, lopsided, but living homes. Everywhere axes thundered, blue-grey smoke rose from campfires, and someone’s cleanly washed laundry was already drying on a wire stretched between the hull of an anti-aircraft gun and a scorched tree. Every board was a statement: “I am here. I am alive. I am building.”

The jeep slowly drove into this makeshift settlement, raising clouds of brown dust, and stopped by a roughly knocked-together shelter of boards and plywood. An old, charred school desk served as a door, and above the canvas roof, a piece of blue parachute silk fluttered proudly.

Yuriko stood up in the back, holding tightly to the iron arch of the soft top. Near the shelter, bent over a large tin tub of water, stood a woman. Hearing the unfamiliar sound of an engine, she slowly straightened up.

She had aged greatly. Her hair was touched with deep grey, her shoulders had slumped, and her face was lined with sharp furrows of grief for her dead husband. But it was Mother. Kohaku Nakayama. Her own, alive. She was wearing a simple dark dress—not camp issue, not American, but her own, carefully preserved, cleanly washed, and ironed. At the sight of this simple, peaceful fabric, Yuriko’s throat constricted.

The woman stood looking at the jeep, at the American soldier behind the wheel, at the strange dirty boy with purple flowers on the dashboard. And then her eyes rested on Yuriko.

She did not scream. She did not rush to the car wringing her hands. She simply dropped the wet shirt she was washing and sank to her knees right in the dry roadside dust. Her lips moved soundlessly, repeating a single word—her daughter’s name.

Yuriko didn’t remember how she vaulted over the side of the truck bed. She didn’t even notice her coveralls catching on a nail, nor did she pay attention to being barefoot. She simply ran—fast, barefoot, over the red, hot earth of her native village. Stones pricked her soles, the wind whipped her hair, and the whole world around her blurred, melted, and vanished under a rush of tears. There remained only one thin, upright figure in a dark dress, fallen to her knees in the dust.

Behind her, at the vehicle, Miko carefully lifted Hinata down from the seat and set him on the ground, tenderly pressing their canvas duffle bags to her chest. Ren Kimura, cutting the engine, watched the running girl in silence, tears filling his dark eyes that he no longer felt ashamed of. Nobody moved. This was their moment. Their embrace. Their homecoming, into which no one had the right to intervene.

Yuriko fell to her knees right in the dust beside her mother and buried her face hard, to the point of pain, into her shoulder—a shoulder smelling of soap, grass, and home fire smoke. Her mother’s arms held her tight in response.

In this single quiet, convulsive embrace, everything dissolved: the damp darkness of the cave, the weight of unthrown grenades, the endless flight through the jungle, the camp’s barbed wire, the paper birds on the boards of Shimabuku, Hinata’s purple bells, her father who died three minutes from salvation, and Soma—distant Soma, who had lost a foot—and Miko, who had lost her family… All of it was right here, at this single point, and all of it was finally coming to an end. Not forgotten, not erased from memory, but coming to an end. As a long polar winter ends. As a suffocating night ends. As a tropical storm ends.

Together with her, behind her back, stood her Miko and her Hinata. Ahead lay long, hard, filthy work—rebuilding a home from charred debris, planting sweet potatoes in soil churned by tank tracks, teaching orphans the alphabet, and learning once again how to fall asleep without fear.

But above them already shone a huge, calm, warm September sun, having washed the world after prolonged rain. And in the pocket of Yuriko’s coveralls lay a damp purple flower, tossed by a boy who had come out of the forest. The little stubborn lily had finally taken root in these ashes. And the world around her—against all odds—was alive.

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