Little Lily. Chapter 21. Ash

Soma and Nanami’s wedding, on the contrary, was real—dense, loud, smelling of fermented rice awamori and fresh cypress shavings.

By October of forty-eight, her older brother’s business at the Makishi market had fully taken off. His carpentry crew had expanded; he hired two assistants from among the returning refugees, and now his heavy workbench stood not under a torn army canvas, but beneath the sturdy tin roof of a new, spacious hangar. Soma and Nanami rented a real wooden house on the outskirts of rebuilding Naha—three bright rooms with tatami smelling of dry grass and a tiny inner garden.

The wedding was held at a surviving Shinto shrine whose ancient stone torii gate had miraculously weathered the bombings. Nanami was dazzlingly beautiful in a genuine white wedding kimono embroidered with silver-thread cranes—her father had buried the trunk in the earth just before the assault on Shuri began and managed to preserve it. The thin, pinkish scar on her left cheek was artfully powdered, and her eyes shone with the quiet, mature joy of a woman who had finally allowed herself to shed her mourning and return to the living.

Soma stood beside her—unusually dignified in a custom-tailored black suit. The fabric completely concealed his disability, and the wooden prosthesis he had polished to a mirror shine himself barely creaked today. He leaned heavily on a bamboo cane, but his face, usually grim and focused, radiated an open, proud smile.

When the priest finished the prayer and the guests began to fill the courtyard, Nanami approached Soma, who was shifting his weight heavily from the prosthesis to his good leg. She silently adjusted his collar, brushing off an invisible speck of dust. Soma looked at her—a long, heavy gaze mixing gratitude and shame for his own disability.

“Forgive me,” he said softly. “I can’t embrace you standing up. My leg won’t hold. It’s tired.”

Nanami smiled. She took his broad, rough palm, brought it to her cheek, and closed her eyes.

“You are embracing me,” she answered. “You just don’t realize how.”

They celebrated in the house’s courtyard. The sanshin rang out ceaselessly, carrying lively, bouncing Okinawan tunes. Guests made noise, clinked cups, smelling of fried fish and sweet rice mochi. Yuriko sat on a low bench in the corner, slowly sipping cooled green tea and watching this burst of returning life as if through clear water.

A man approached her. He looked to be about twenty-five—a sturdy, sun-tanned tableware vendor from the Makishi market, an acquaintance of Soma’s. He wore a light, dapper suit jacket, and his hair gleamed with pomade.

“Nakayama-san, right?” He bowed politely, flashing a gold crown. “My name is Kenji Arakawa. Your brother has told me a lot about you. It’s not right for such a lovely young woman to sit sadly to the side when music is playing. May I ask you for a dance?”

Yuriko looked at his outstretched, broad palm. All this wedding noise, the smell of alcohol and strange perfume suddenly felt suffocating and infinitely distant. She belonged to an entirely different realm—the world of white school chalk, coral pillars by dark caves, and letters locked away in a tin box.

She gently but firmly shook her head, hiding her palms in the sleeves of her coat.

“Thank you, Arakawa-san. But I already have an escort for the evening.”

She turned her head and pointed to Hinata. The boy sat nearby on an overturned vegetable crate, ecstatically devouring his third serving of glazed treats. He was wearing a clean white shirt buttoned all the way up to his throat and real dark trousers with crisp creases bought by Soma. Hearing Yuriko’s words, Hinata instantly swallowed the mochi, hurriedly wiped his mouth with his sleeve, and approached the bench with an absolutely serious, unchildishly stern expression. He decisively pushed the surprised merchant aside with his shoulder and extended his hand to Yuriko.

“Yuriko-nee, let’s go. I know how to dance; Uncle Soma showed me the steps,” he announced importantly.

“Good job, kid. Keep it up,” Arakawa laughed understandingly and stepped back.

Yuriko placed her fingers in the boy’s warm, rough little palm, and they stepped into the circle of guests. A ten-year-old child who had seen death in the forests and a nineteen-year-old teacher who had left her heart on the other side of the world twirled to the rattling notes of the sanshin. Hinata led her carefully and terribly seriously, stepping on her wooden geta every now and then and blushing deeply with effort. Yuriko looked at his sweaty forehead, at the neat part in his hair, and thought that this was the most honest and purest dance of her life.

The last chord of the sanshin faded. Hinata stepped back, bowed awkwardly, and hurriedly wiped his wet palms on his trousers. For a moment he froze, looking up at Yuriko with his huge, round, moist eyes. And Yuriko saw in that glance the very same six-year-old child who had once walked out of the dark forest in a torn shirt with three buttons and said: “I came from the forest.” Except now he was ten, wore trousers with crisp creases, and knew how to dance.

They returned to Mawashiasato late at night, when a thick, damp fog hung over the hills. Kohaku immediately led Hinata, who was falling asleep on his feet, behind the screen, while Yuriko lit the kerosene lamp above the dining table.

A small stack of letters lay on the wooden tabletop—a neighbor had brought them in from the field post office during the day. The top two envelopes were from America, with familiar light-blue stamps. Yuriko carefully set them aside to read later, when absolute silence settled over the house.

But the third letter was different.

The envelope, made of thick, rough government paper of a yellowish hue, was sealed with an official stamp and the postmark of the Tokyo Prefecture. Yuriko opened it slowly with a bamboo knife. The scent of archival dust, stationery glue, and cold, official smoke from capital city ministries blew into her face.

The letter was written in flawless, calligraphic India ink.

“Dear Nakayama Yuriko-san,

This is Tamotsu Ozawa writing to you, former sergeant major of the Seventh Engineering Regiment of the Imperial Army. You may remember me: in the autumn of forty-five, you and Nishida-san saved my life and Private Sakai’s life in the forest thickets near Mawashiasato.

I hereby wish to inform you that our affairs have taken an important turn. I currently hold a position as an official in the Tokyo Prefectural Administration, in the Department of Repatriate Affairs. Shiro Sakai works as a reporter for a major city newspaper. A month ago, he published a lengthy feature on the Himeyuri unit—on the sacrificial feat of the Okinawan students and teachers. The article provoked a massive response in the capital; hundreds of letters from mothers who lost children and war veterans are coming to the editorial office and ministries.

Leveraging my official position, I submitted a formal petition to the Ministry of Health and Welfare (Kōseishō). I initiated the proposal to officially equate all mobilized students of the Himeyuri unit to the status of military personnel and civilian employees of the Imperial Army (gunzoku).

Ministry officials have already begun preliminary consideration of this matter. This is a great undertaking, Nakayama-san. This status will not only provide the survivors with state support, but, most importantly, will allow the names of all your fallen friends to be officially included in the sacred rolls of the Yasukuni Shrine. Their souls will not remain in obscure pits of Okinawa—they will be recognized as kami who fell for their loyalty to the Emperor and the Homeland. The state will finally restore their honorable names.

With deepest respect,

Tamotsu Ozawa.”

Yuriko read to the very last line. The paper slipped from her fingers and fell soundlessly onto the table.

In that exact second, a wild, unbearable phantom pain pierced her left palm. Two small crescent-shaped scars, almost faded over three years, suddenly flared with a crimson, throbbing fire. The pain was so tangible and physical, as if someone had pressed a red-hot branding iron against her skin.

And immediately the lamp on the table began to smoke. The yellow flame stretched upward, and Yuriko felt as though the oscillating shadows on the plywood wall gave rise to the outlines of a massive, ominous Yasukuni building—a dark, bone shrine constructed from skulls and crushed ribs of dead children. From the corners of the room crawled the very same soldier-beetles from her old camp nightmares, only now they wore not dented helmets, but strict, pressed suits of capital city bureaucrats. They reached out their chitinous limbs toward the coral monument in Ihara, as if trying to scrape off its living names.

The temple from her ancient, biblical dreams—the Temple of Tamar—was burning again, but now it was being consumed not by Roman legions, but by dry official quills.

The paper trembled in her fingers.

“Gunzoku.” Civilian employees of the Imperial Army. Auxiliary personnel. A dry, bureaucratic word from Tokyo.

The Empire that handed clay grenades to sixteen-year-old girls and ordered them to swallow potassium cyanide in the darkness of caves; the Empire that cowardly surrendered over the radio, leaving them to suffocate in phosphorus smoke while generals signed papers on battleships… that very same Empire was now returning. It was returning to steal their death.

But Yuriko remembered them alive. She remembered Midori laughing at a silly joke. Shinju crying out of fear in the darkness of the cave. How they ate sweet potatoes stolen from soldiers and licked their fingers. They were not heroines. They were children who were forced to die.

With a single stroke of the pen, ministry clerks in the capital were planning to turn frightened, crying girls—who in their final minutes had called for their mothers and simply wanted to live—into brave, obedient soldiers. Into silent idols of militarism, whose supposed “heroism” new generations of politicians would use to justify new slaughters. Their future had been stolen, and now, with beautiful words about “supreme justice,” the very truth of their death was being stolen from them.

And this was being done by a man whose life she, Hinata, and Miko had once saved in the jungle—sincerely believing he was doing them the greatest good.

Yuriko sat on the bench, pressing her burning left hand tightly to her chest. There were no tears. There was not even rage. An absolute, ringing, sterile void spilled within her—as though her soul and heart had been burned to the ground, flooded with lime, and sealed with official sealing wax. Everything they had survived for, carried boards for, built a school for, and carved letters onto coral stone for, dissolved into gray, weightless ash.

She slowly stood up, took the thick sheets of the Tokyo letter from the table, and walked over to the hearth where embers were still glowing. Yuriko lowered the paper into the fire.

The official prefectural letterhead reluctantly darkened, the corners curled, and then Ozawa’s ink flared into a bright, angry flame. A moment later, only a fragile, black skeleton remained on the embers, which crumbled at the slightest draft and mixed with the ash, leaving behind neither names nor ranks.

Hinata quietly stepped out from behind the screen, rubbing his sleepy eyes.

“Yuriko-nee? What’s burning like that? It smells like paper… Is that a letter from Miko and Ren?”

Yuriko turned back to him. The pain in her palm was slowly fading, leaving only the accustomed cold in her scars. She walked over to the boy, gently stroked his coarse hair, and smiled—the way people smile when defending their final boundary.

“No, navigator. The letters from America are good; we will read them together tomorrow. And this… this was just old paper no one needs anymore. Go back to sleep.”

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Chapter 22. The Gods of Tokyo →