Little Lily. Chapter 13. The Taste of Grass

Sunday arrived with scents—the aroma of home cooking—rather than simply as another day on the calendar.

Even on Saturday evening, Kohaku had lit the hearth unusually early, and the smoke from the pine firewood—dry, clean, brought by Hinata and Soma not from abandoned artillery crates, but from a surviving grove beyond the far hill—hung over the half-ruined Mawashiasato in a thin, spicy, almost festive thread. This smoke smelled of the old, pre-war world: an unshakable home, a reliable roof, a shared dinner, and a rightful Sunday rest. Kohaku fried thick pancakes made of rice flour mixed with brackish well water on a flat, red-hot stone. They gave off a thick, sweetish, enveloping aroma that made Yuriko’s shoulders relax involuntarily, against her will. The pancakes came out uneven, browned on one side and pale on the other, and the steam rising from them smelled of the domestic warmth of a mother’s hands.

The four of them ate together: mother, daughter, son, and the boy with no surname. Miko sat nearby, breaking off tiny pieces from the hot dough and chewing them slowly, with the concentration of someone who had spent too long getting used to the idea that every bite could be their last. Hinata didn’t chew—he stuffed the pancakes into both cheeks, smearing himself with rice dough and licking his fingers with such blissful, almost animalistic pleasure that Soma, watching him across the table, couldn’t help but chuckle.

“Hinata,” Yuriko said quietly, her eyes following the sun dipping behind the plywood wall. “Tomorrow is Sunday. Miko and I are going to the neighboring village. Do you want to come with us?”

The boy raised his head, dotted with golden crumbs, and vigorously shook his dark tuft of hair.

“No! I want to go for a walk. To the forest. There are still wild pandanus berries there, I saw them by the stream yesterday.”

“Don’t go too close to the thicket,” Kohaku frowned, wiping her hands on her apron. “The grass is full of unexploded iron.”

“I know, I know! I’ve been there a hundred times!” Hinata wiped his mouth with his sleeve and deftly slid off the bench.

Sunday morning turned out thick and transparent, like congealed cherry tree sap. October was fully coming into its own, drop by drop chilling the night moisture out of the rusty Okinawan earth. The air over the village smelled of fresh wood shavings, seaweed drying in the sun, and a strong, salty ocean wind.

Soma sat on an overturned ammo box right at the entrance to their shack, and methodically, with a dry, strained creak, bound a new leather strap to his wooden prosthesis, which was clamped with an iron ring. He was getting ready to go to Naha, to the Makishi black market. It was a place that had grown straight out of liquid mud and human despair on a wasteland by the ruined port: a colossal, screaming labyrinth of rotten boards, canvas awnings, and rusted American iron. There, for Camel cigarettes, rationed rice, or copper wires found in the ruins, you could barter for absolutely anything—from a skein of thread to a bar of soap or homemade shogi pieces carved from shell casings. Makishi pulsated, shouted in a dozen dialects, didn’t ask for documents, and was thoroughly saturated with the smells of fried fish, gunpowder, cheap tobacco, and human sweat. Soma needed thread and nails—the roof of the house had started leaking again.

Her brother tightened the knot on the strap, straightened up, leaning on his bamboo cane, and looked at Hinata. The boy was hovering by the stone well, stealthily searching for something in the wet grass near his sugar sack, where he kept his simple treasures: green glass polished by the waves, pebbles, and spent cartridges.

“Listen, navigator,” Soma called out, tapping his wooden leg. “Want to go to Makishi with me? It’s crowded there right now. American quartermasters brought condensed milk, and Chinese smugglers are selling sweet flatbreads. Help me carry the sack, and I’ll trade for something for you.”

Hinata froze, his bare feet sinking up to the ankles in the cold dew. He looked at the tall, stooped figure of Yuriko’s older brother, then at his own canvas bundle.

“No, thank you, Mr. Soma,” the boy answered and took a quick step back, as if afraid he would be held by force. “I don’t want to go to the market. I want to go to the forest.”

He fussily turned away, thrust his hand deep into the sack, fished out some light-colored, dense object, hastily shoved it into his shirt—under the fabric with three buttons—and broke into a run toward the pandanus thicket. His little figure flashed among the broad, sawtooth green leaves and dissolved without a trace into the dense brush.

Soma frowned. His gaze followed the boy and slowly returned to the open sugar sack in the corner. He stayed silent for a moment, then poked the blunt end of his axe into it, pushed the edge of the canvas aside, and sighed heavily, turning to Yuriko, who was just stepping onto the threshold, adjusting the collar of her washed coveralls.

“He took a bandage for some reason,” Soma said, pointing the axe handle toward the forest. “A real medical bandage. From those clean supplies Sergeant Kimura brought for the school. I saw the white gauze edge. What does he need a roll of sterile gauze in the forest for?”

Yuriko walked over and peered into the sack. The spot where the bandage had been was indeed empty. She looked anxiously at the wall of the jungle, which lived its own massive, rustling life.

“Probably playing robbers or hospital,” Miko answered calmly, appearing right behind her. Her medical gaze was steady. “Kids these days treat trees or bandage wounded bugs. Let him walk. Hinata knows this island better than military cartographers. He always comes back.”

Yuriko hesitated, but nodded. For the two of them today, there was only one direction. One name they had to step over in order to move forward.

“All right,” Yuriko said. “Let him go.”

Soma threw the empty sack, which contained a few of Kohaku’s woven baskets and a bundle of dried sweet potato for trading, over his shoulder. His footsteps—tap… tap… tap—slowly faded into the morning silence, leaving round craters in the soft clay next to the imprints of human toes.

Yuriko and Miko met Seiko at the fork of two dirt roads at the very break of dawn. Usagi hadn’t found the resolve to come—her fear had proven stronger. Seiko stood alone, thin, with sunken, earthy cheeks, shifting from foot to foot in the road dust. Her eyes hid in the shadow of her overgrown, uneven bangs, and her clothes still carried that elusive, underlying scent of cave dampness that no sun could burn away.

The path to the neighboring village of Nagato lay through a gently sloping valley that remembered far too much. It was a true journey through ghosts—not metaphorical, but material, tangible ghosts of a destroyed world. Dry grass clung to their ankles, as if someone’s invisible fingers were begging them to stop. The air felt dense, warped by the unbearable weight of unlived lives. Here was the stone wall of a former temple, half-collapsed, but still bearing a faded wooden plaque with the name of a deity who hadn’t saved anyone. Over there was the overturned, mangled bed of a Japanese army truck, half-ingrown into the red soil, with juicy, bright green vines of wild grapes reaching out from its rusted sides. The island continued to devour the war—quickly, greedily, methodically, turning steel and concrete into fertilizer for its roots.

Shadows from charred trunks fell upon the earth incorrectly, intersecting at impossible angles, and in the dry chirping of cicadas, Yuriko kept imagining the metallic clatter of rifle bolts. The earth breathed with the dead. On the shoulder, near a stream, they passed a concrete culvert. Inside it, in the cool shade, was a pile of white stones arranged in a neat pyramid, topped with tiny, faded scraps of colorful girls’ clothing. Someone had gathered here the little that remained of the fallen. Seiko walked past without looking, but Yuriko stopped for a second and felt her hands instinctively clench into fists. Her left palm, bearing the crescent-scars, responded with a barely noticeable warmth. It wasn’t Tamar’s rage—it was a deep, ancient solidarity with the earth that remembered everyone.

“Who else is left?” Yuriko asked quietly, breaking the drawn-out silence. “From our unit? From the parallel classes?”

Seiko walked in silence for a long time, her bare feet stepping noiselessly on the grass. Seiko didn’t know how to speak in long sentences—over these months in caves and camps, she had forgotten how to tie words into threads, and now her speech consisted of short, hard, chopped fragments, as if she were chipping pieces off a frozen block of stone, or like the clatter of train wheels constantly falling between the rails.

“I don’t know for sure,” she answered colorlessly. “But they say there are survivors from the Women’s Division of the Normal School. From the “Shirayuri”—White Lily—unit. They were also abandoned in the cave hospitals by the Mabuni cliffs when the mobilization was canceled. They only went outside at night, drank water from puddles mixed with blood and lime. Those who didn’t jump off the cliff into the sea are now in the camps up north. There are very few of us left, Yuriko. So few. Just faces. And the smell.”

“What smell?” asked Miko, walking ahead. Her back was straight as a taut string; it was as if she were slicing through this phantom air with her movement.

“Like ours,” Seiko dropped quietly. “That same cave smell. Bleach, stagnant water, and despair. We recognize each other by it. Like a brand.”

Beyond the hill, the road descended into the valley. The village of Nagato had suffered a little less: here a woman stood by a well with buckets, and the sound of a hammer came from broken windows. Rusty iron shacks stood alongside surviving stone buildings. Seiko stopped at the last house on the edge; above its door hung a dried bunch of wormwood, exuding a bitter, earthy scent. The very same scent that came to Yuriko in her ancient, foreign dreams.

“Here,” Seiko exhaled, her fingers once again frantically picking at the edge of her blouse. “I… I can’t. I’ll wait for you by the fork, in the bushes.”

She had found the strength to bring them here, but she was incapable of looking into the face of the man who had sent her to her death. Yuriko nodded understandingly, and Seiko walked quickly back along the path, dissolving into the greenery as a shadow dissolves.

Yuriko and Miko approached the threshold. It smelled of boiling water, dried herbs, and old, centuries-aged tatami straw. The door was opened by a woman—improbably small, dry, and quick as a field mouse. Her face was round, covered with deep wrinkles near her lips, but her lively eyes shone with a warm, domestic light. She wore a clean, neatly patched cotton dress, and her hands smelled of lemongrass and yarrow. Hisa. Their teacher’s sister.

“Are you here for him?” she asked without surprise or judgment. Only an old, worn-out fatigue sounded in her guttural Okinawan accent.

“We are from Himeyuri,” Miko answered evenly. “From the First Women’s Division. We came to visit Sensei Kobayashi.”

Hisa blinked, took a step back, and threw the door wider:

“Come in. I’ll bring some tea right away.”

Inside, the house was dark and cool. Thin reed mats covered the dirt floor. In the corner stood a low bed, and nearby—an overturned box, on which lay two books wrapped in cloth and round glasses in a tarnished metal frame.

Minato Kobayashi sat on a mat by the far wall, with his back to the light. Yuriko froze, her heart skipping a beat. For the first second, she didn’t recognize him. The man from the Ihamigama cave, whose voice had vibrated with fanatical steel, was gone. Before them sat a slouched, terribly withered man in a clean but faded yukata. His right cheek, from the very temple across his brow ridge down to his chin, was disfigured by a crimson-pink, knotty scar that roughly deformed the corner of his mouth, pulling the skin into a glossy fold. His left arm was pressed tightly to his chest, immobile, paralyzed, supported by a white canvas sling. Kobayashi seemed shorter in stature, as if the mainspring had been removed from a broken mechanism.

Hearing their footsteps, his body instantly petrified. His shoulders tensed, his chin pressed convulsively to his chest. He knew who had entered. His healthy right hand reached slowly, with disobedient fingers, for the glasses lying on the box. He put them on. Round lenses. The right glass was bisected by a deep crisscross crack.

Through this crack, he looked at them. At Yuriko. At Miko. At his living students, standing before him in coarse American coveralls with parachute seams.

“Sensei,” Yuriko began, and her voice traitorously broke into a whisper. “We came to see… how you are. Maybe you need some help. We’re nearby, in Mawashiasato.”

A silence of such density hung in the room that one could hear the flame humming in the kerosene lamp. Kobayashi looked at them for a second, two, three. And then, slowly, with trembling fingers, he took off the glasses. He carefully folded the earpieces, placed them on his lap, and lowered his eyes to the dirt floor.

He did not utter a single word.

But in this muteness, there was neither peace nor resignation. Yuriko felt it just as distinctly as the dry, sour smell of his body—it was a ringing, dull, white-hot rage. But he wasn’t angry at the girls. This rage was directed inward, at himself. It was devouring him like acid. He was sitting in front of the students to whom he had personally handed out cyanide and clay grenades… And then the American orderlies came, injected him with morphine, sewed up his torn chest, and left him to live in a world where the Emperor had surrendered, and his “fallen petals” were treading the earth with bare feet. The shame and guilt were so immense that there were simply no sounds for them. Any word now would have been a falsehood. He was burning from the inside, like a deep, smoldering coal, and the ashes of this fire were choking him.

Hisa started bustling about, her movements becoming hurried, as if she were trying to fill this terrifying emptiness with the clinking of dishes. She brought in a coarse ceramic teapot and arranged crooked, handleless cups on the low table.

“Please, drink some tea,” she said quietly, addressing the dishes rather than the guests. “It’s hibiscus flowers, wild mint, and dandelion root. Minato and I gather them ourselves on the slopes where there was no shelling. The war couldn’t kill the herbs. He… he is almost always silent lately. At night he talks to someone who isn’t there, begs for forgiveness, screams. But during the day, he’s silent. He helps around the house, though. He mends the fence with his right hand, weaves ropes. Drink, it’s hot.”

The tea smelled of earth, burnt forest, and the sweetish bitterness of a departed summer. Yuriko wrapped both palms around the cup. The clay was warm and rough. She took a sip—the hot liquid scalded her throat, leaving the taste of pollen and mint. Hisa sat down next to her brother and simply placed her small, calloused palm on his healthy knee, like leaving a beacon on the shore.

Miko sat with a flawlessly straight back:

“We opened a school, Sensei. In a tent, on the site of an old foundation. We already have fifty students. We teach them to read and count. We have cardboard and charcoal.”

Yuriko noticed Kobayashi’s right hand clamp down in a death grip around the wooden cane leaning against the wall. His knuckles went white to the point of flat spots. The corner of his mouth, where the crimson scar abruptly ended, twitched convulsively. He heard everything. Every word entered him like a thin bayonet. Yuriko wanted to say that they held no grudge, that they hadn’t come to judge, but she realized: right now, any forgiveness would fall on him like a fresh blow. He needed their silence.

The monster from the cave turned out to be just a broken, miserable man locked in the prison of his own survival. The fear that tormented Yuriko at night crumbled, leaving behind only a bitter, dry sense of pity. The embankment in her dreams was destroyed. The past no longer had power over her—it remained here, in the dim room, sitting on a mat with broken glasses on its lap.

They didn’t stay long. Having finished their tea, they bowed politely and headed for the exit. Kobayashi didn’t even stir, but his fingers on the cane finally relaxed, slowly and with effort.

Hisa walked them to the gate. On the threshold she lingered, then took a small paper bundle from her apron pocket and handed it to Yuriko:

“This is for your mother from us. Tell her it’s from us. Herbs for tea. He will be pleased. He won’t say it—but he will.”

Yuriko took the bundle; dry leaves crunched under her fingers.

“Thank you,” she said quietly. Hisa nodded and closed the door.

The journey back was different. The sun stood at its zenith, mercilessly burning away shadows and dissolving the ghosts of the valley. They walked in silence; the soil had grown scorching hot, and their bare soles sank into the soft ground, hot as dough. The clay underfoot no longer felt alien. It was just hot earth that held them up.

Seiko was waiting for them at the fork. She didn’t ask what had happened, just walked alongside them in silence. Three girls in strange clothes made from altered coveralls and old kimonos moved along the road like three dark silhouettes, still smelling of the un-weatherable military past. At the intersection by her house, Seiko quietly said goodbye and disappeared behind the bushes.

When the sun was already sinking to the west, the tin and canvas roofs of Mawashiasato appeared ahead. Hinata was running across the wasteland in front of their house, waving a long stick like a sword and shouting loudly.

“A bandage. Why did he take a medical bandage?” The thought flashed through Yuriko’s mind, but immediately melted away in the evening coolness.

Soma had already returned from the market; a coil of copper wire and a little rice poked out of his sack. He was sitting on the threshold, methodically hammering nails into fresh wood, and this rhythmic sound of the axe had a calming effect. Yuriko went into the house and silently placed the bundle of herbs on the table. Kohaku looked at her daughter questioningly, but Yuriko merely shook her head: later.

In the evening, when Hinata fell asleep, curled up into a ball on his sugar sacks, and all sounds in the house died down, Miko and Yuriko went outside and sat on the low stone wall of the foundation.

The night was transparent and starry. The Okinawan sky had nothing in common with the Japanese one: it seemed deeper, closer, and heavier with constellations. They looked huge, improbably bright, as if someone had scattered a handful of red-hot, pulsating coals across black velvet. The air smelled of cooling clay, smoke from the neighbors’ hearths, and the distant, barely discernible breath of the ocean.

Miko stayed silent for a long time, peering into this bottomless blue. Finally, she spoke, and her voice sounded unexpectedly loud, clear, with an undeniable metallic resolve:

“Yuriko.”

“Yes.”

“We must remember them,” Miko’s words dropped into the night coolness like stones into clear water. “All the dead. Our girls from Himeyuri. From the First High School. From the Normal School. Everyone who remained in the darkness of the caves, who was buried in the hospitals, who jumped from the cliffs. We don’t have the right to simply survive and forget. We must honor their memory. Make sure their names do not turn to dust like this island.”

Yuriko looked at her profile—sharp, delicate, as if carved from dark stone in the flickering starlight.

“How will we do that?” she asked quietly.

“I don’t know yet,” Miko replied, inhaling deeply the smell of the sea. “But we will find a way. Maybe it will be stone. Or wood. Or just names written on something enduring. So that the people who walk this earth after us will know: girls lay here… They deserve to be remembered.”

Miko fell silent. Yuriko didn’t answer, because words were no longer needed here. She simply lowered her left palm onto the cold stone of the foundation between them—open, palm up. The petal-scars on her skin were quiet and calm. In this gesture, her skin said what her tongue could not express: yes. We will not forget.

Miko turned and covered Yuriko’s palm with her hand. Firmly, securely. And this time, she didn’t let go of her hand until morning.

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Chapter 14. The Boy →