Little Lily. Chapter 22. The Gods of Tokyo

The years on Okinawa slipped by unnoticed—just as the temples turn white unnoticed on a person you see every day.

The world around hastily shed its skin, healing wounds with fresh asphalt and washing away traces of soot with spring downpours.

Umi Sanchez came to the school on her last day on the island, when the March of nineteen forty-nine was already driving the smell of wet clay and young rice across the hills. She stood in the doorway of the classroom—stern, in a dark-blue American dress, looking foreign among the pine boards, but gazing at the desks as if trying to memorize the location of every knot in the floorboards.

She set a heavy packet of thick archival paper, tied with twine, down on the teacher’s desk. Inside rustled folders filled with small, soul-less clerical handwriting: hospital discharge summaries, reports from engineering battalion burial details, Red Cross lists. Hundreds of names. Mostly these were Americans—boys from Ohio and Idaho whose bones remained lying in the coral soil, but among them were also those Okinawans who had been identified before bulldozers filled in the trenches.

“I’m going back. I’m being transferred to the States, Nakayama-san,” Umi said, touching the packet with her short fingers, roughened by paperwork. She smelled of tobacco, archival dust, and dry, bitter sandalwood. “And I’m giving this to you. Someone has to keep these papers. You’ve taken on a terrible undertaking. But archives are a terrifying thing. They pull you in. Don’t let the dead take up more space in your life than the living.”

“I know, Mrs.,” Yuriko replied, clutching the heavy packet to her chest as if shielding herself with it from the wind. “But if we don’t preserve them, they will simply disappear. As if they never existed. Thank you.”

Sanchez nodded—shortly, with military dryness—and walked out, dissolving into the shimmering spring air. Yuriko never saw her again.

Meanwhile, the school in Mawashiasato grew and transformed, obeying some internal, almost natural rhythm. The canvas tent under which the children had once taken shelter from the sun first turned into a plywood barrack, and by nineteen fifty acquired a real concrete foundation. The walls were leveled, the roof was covered with gray corrugated slate, and glass appeared in the wide window frames—clean, clear, reflecting the high Okinawan sky without a trace of airplane vapor trails.

Other teachers appeared as well: a young, vibrant girl from Shuri who smelled of cheap powder, and an elderly repatriate from the mainland, a former accountant who taught arithmetic to the younger children, no longer using spent machine-gun casings as counting material. Yuriko held chalk in her hands less and less often. In her early twenties, she had become the principal. The youngest female principal in the prefecture. Her life now consisted of endless, exhausting schedules, ledgers for flour and rice, searching for notebooks, and attempting to build normalcy on a land that, during heavy rains, still pushed rusted shrapnel and white human bones to the surface.

The book arrived from Tokyo at the end of nineteen fifty. It was delivered by a mailman on a creaky bicycle—an ordinary gray package with a red printed stamp.

The novel was titled Himeyuri no Tō—“The Tower of the White Lilies.” It was written by Keiichirō Ishino—a man born on Okinawa who had left for the capital as a teenager. He had not sat in the suffocating darkness of the Ihara cave, had not choked on phosphorus smoke, had not heard sixteen-year-old girls in delirium calling for their mothers and begging for water, licking moisture from the walls. But he had written a beautiful story.

It was a book about young, pure, translucent maidens who, with smiles and patriotic songs on their lips, voluntarily fell to the ground like flower petals, defending the sacred will of the Emperor. Their death was symmetrical, cleansed of pus, blood, and excrement. It was complete and aesthetic, like a ritual bowl of green tea. The novel instantly became a bestseller on the mainland; it was read on trains and in cafés by people who wanted to weep bright, sublime tears over someone else’s neatly washed death.

Yuriko read it in a single night, sitting by the kerosene lamp while twelve-year-old Hinata quietly snuffled in the corner, his nose buried in a notebook. She turned the final page and froze, listening to herself. She had expected rage, anger, a desire to tear the paper apart and scream that it hadn’t been like that. But inside there was nothing. Only that same vast, ringing, sterile void. The author’s words were so smooth and round, like sea-tumbled pebbles, that memory could not catch on them. This story had nothing to do with her, nor with Miko, nor with those girls they had buried in the forest. These were some other creatures, invented in a clean Tokyo office.

The same thing happened again in fifty-three, when a film based on the book, directed by the famous Tadashi Imai, was brought to the school for a private adult screening. The renowned Takarazuka Revue theater troupe had already managed to turn the tragedy into a musical revue, and now the Toei film company was packing theaters across Japan, which had barely freed itself from the American occupation of the mainland.

In the dark classroom, the projector hummed monotonously. On a white sheet stretched over the chalkboard, beautiful actresses with flawless cinematic makeup died tragically and sublimely to the music of a pathetic orchestra. Women in the room sobbed, wiping their eyes with handkerchiefs. Soma, sitting at Yuriko’s right hand, stood up silently twenty minutes in, his polished wooden prosthesis thudding heavily, walked outside, and smoked greedily in the darkness for a long time, looking at the stars.

Yuriko watched until the end. And again—emptiness. Only now this void was larger—it held not just a single book, but an entire cinema hall full of warm, living people who sniffled and did not know that they were weeping not over the truth, but over a myth of the national spirit.

And in nineteen fifty-five, the void acquired a state seal. The Ministry of Health and Welfare in Tokyo made the decision: to officially equate the Himeyuri students to the status of gunzoku—civilian employees of the Imperial Army. This granted them the right to be included in the rolls of the Yasukuni Shrine. They were becoming kami gods.

The Okinawan Association of Bereaved Families organized a trip to the capital for the official ceremony of entry into Yasukuni. Local newspapers wrote about it as a grand return of justice. Included in the delegation were Yuriko, Seiko, and Usagi—surviving “Lilies” whose faces Tokyo wanted to see on its ceremonial platforms.

The train traveled north for three days. Outside the window of the comfortable car, smelling of varnish and expensive tobacco, flashed the well-tended, even fields of mainland Japan. There were no craters here, no scorched banyans. This land did not remember the war; it was sated and indifferent.

At Tokyo Station on a gray March day, they were deafened by the crowd. The capital, risen from the ashes, smelled of gasoline, roasted coffee, and a bustling, greedy life. When the Okinawan delegation stepped onto the platform, the air exploded with white flashes of magnesium. Cameras clicked like rifle bolts; microphones shoved into their faces.

They were met by Tamotsu Ozawa. The former sergeant major whom they had once dragged out of a rotting pit in the forests of Mawashiasato now wore an impeccable dark-blue suit, a snow-white shirt, and a silk tie. His face had rounded, the scar on his cheek had faded and looked almost like a mark of quality. Beside him stood Shiro Sakai—a trim capital-city reporter leaning confidently on crutches.

“Nakayama-san, welcome,” Ozawa bowed politely, wafting expensive cologne at her instead of forest dampness. He lowered his voice almost imperceptibly, and beneath his polite tone emerged soft, bureaucratic steel: “There will be questions from the press now. Please… stay as calm as possible. For postwar Japan, this is vital right now. We must show the world our fortitude and purity of spirit.”

Journalists surrounded them in a tight circle. Pushing through to the microphones was an elderly woman from the Okinawan delegation who had lost her daughter in the war. Her face, lined with deep wrinkles, paled under the stage lights, but she straightened up and spoke a learned, proper phrase that the Ryūkyū Shimpō would print the next day:

“Okinawans are currently legally not Japanese; we are under American occupation. However, our children fought for Japan. As a Japanese woman, I am extraordinarily happy that they have become the first Okinawan schoolgirls enshrined at Yasukuni.”

Reporters hurriedly jotted in their notebooks. A flash—and another—blinded Yuriko. A microphone was thrust at Seiko. She froze, her thin neck trembling, but she found the strength to repeat what was expected of her:

“When I recall what happened back then, I do not want war to ever happen again. Many of my friends died… I want all of them to be enshrined at Yasukuni. It is an honor for them.”

Yuriko looked at Seiko and saw how, beneath this mask of proper words, a frightened girl from the cave was thrashing in a vise. Tokyo had gotten its ideal picture. Beautiful female self-sacrifice, washed clean of the smell of gangrene.

A camera flash burst in her eyes. For a second she was blinded. When her sight returned, she saw before her an open reporter’s notebook—clean, white, flawless paper on which foreign fingers drew even, beautiful lines. And suddenly it felt as though she were seeing the very same thing she had seen in the Ihamigama cave: someone else’s hand handing out ceramic grenades. Only now, instead of clay—paper. Instead of explosives—words. Instead of “die with honor”—“become a legend.”

But Yuriko did not say a word. She simply stood, hiding her left hand in her pocket, waiting for it to end.

That evening, the three of them sat in a small room in a cheap Tokyo hotel. Outside the window hummed a neon, victorious city that knew no mercy. On a low wooden table stood a porcelain bottle of cheap sake and three tiny cups.

They drank in silence, scalding their lips with the bitter rice alcohol. Usagi was the first to break. She set her cup down on the table with a sharp clatter, covered her face with her hands, and her shoulders shook convulsively. Seiko immediately moved over to her on the futon, put her arms around her, pressed her close, and a second later began to cry as well—soundlessly, terribly, biting her lips until they bled.

These were not tears of relief. These were tears of absolute, total helplessness before a colossal state machine. Tokyo had stolen their friends for the second time. The first time, it had taken their lives in the caves. Now it was taking their death, transforming it into a ceremonial myth in which there was no room for truth. And the most terrifying thing was that they, the survivors, had themselves stood before the cameras and nodded, because they no longer had the strength left to resist this sated, polished normalcy.

Yuriko did not cry. She stroked Usagi’s trembling back, feeling the vacuum inside her turn completely into glass and freeze solid.

That night Yuriko fell into a heavy, deep sleep like a blackout. But toward morning, while the city still slept, wrapped in March fog, the glass dome steeped in alcohol shattered into pieces in her head.

She dreamed of the Dry Mountain again.

But here there was no longer the humid, rot-filled stifling heat of the Okinawan jungle; it did not smell of sea mud and burnt lime. The air on this mountain was absolutely, sterilely dry. Sharp, like fine crushed glass. With every breath, it scratched the throat, settling on the tongue with the taste of scorched dust and ancient bronze. The sun above the Dry Mountain had nothing in common with the benevolent goddess Amaterasu warming the rice paddies. It was a blind, furious, white eye that scorched the stones down to their blackest basalt foundation. It smelled of execution and iron.

Yuriko looked at the world not through her own eyes.

She saw it from inside heavy armor, heated red-hot in the sun. The leather strap of the helmet chafed her chin; her shoulders ached from the weight of the bronze cuirass. A thick smell of sweat, gun oil, and old, thickened blood struck her nostrils.

She was a Roman legionnaire.

She was standing on the summit of Masada. The massive earthen ramp, built in her past nightmares by faceless soldier-beetles, was completed. The fortress walls were breached. Rome had entered within.

But there was no battle. There was silence. That very echoing silence that Yuriko knew better than anything else in the world—the silence of the Ihara cave after the explosion, the silence of the Shimabuku camp, the silence of a Tokyo hotel room.

The legionnaires moved among the bodies methodically, without rush. Their heavy sandals—caligae with iron nails in the soles—clattered against the scorched stones dryly and rhythmically, like grave-diggers’ hammers: clank, scrape, clank. They turned over the dead, checked pulses, entered data into scrolls. This was not a slaughter, but an inventory of property. A bureaucratic accounting of losses.

Men, women, children lay in neat, terrifying rows. They had killed each other themselves, preferring a sublime, pure death in the fire to disgraceful slavery.

Yuriko-the-legionnaire stopped at a ruined stone wall. On the yellow, hot sand lay a young woman.

Her long black hair, held by a simple leather strap, was scattered across the stones. On her neck gaped a smooth, terrifying dark-red stripe from a blade. But her huge, almond-shaped dark eyes were open. They looked straight into the bottomless, scorched sky.

Tamar.

The legionnaire slowly sank to one knee. The heavy joints of armor pierced the silence with a rasp. He reached out a hand in a leather gauntlet to close her eyelids and complete the accounting.

And suddenly the girl’s dead, dry lips twitched. From her torn throat, bypassing burned vocal cords, straight into Yuriko’s consciousness struck a voice—quiet, rustling like sand rubbing against basalt:

“Are you Gods now, too?”

This dry, pitiless question echoed above the Dry Mountain, tearing off masks and shattering scenery. And in that voice, Yuriko heard everything all at once: Ozawa’s insinuating whisper on the platform, the grandiose music from the film, the crackle of magnesium flashes, and Usagi weeping into her pillow.

Dead children, transformed into kami gods. Girls whose names were carved onto the granite slabs of militarism’s shrines only to justify future slaughters and send new children to the butchery. Tamar, who had perished thousands of years ago in Judea, and the Himeyuri students, burned in forty-five—they looked at each other through the well of time, and at the bottom of that well was reflected the very same soul-less face of the state that takes from its children first their life, and then—the truth of their death.

Yuriko wanted to scream, but the red-hot desert air scorched her lungs.

She woke with a sharp, shuddering breath, as if surfacing from the bottom of the ocean.

Yuriko sat up on the futon. Her heart pounded right against her teeth; her shirt clung to her back, wet with icy sweat. The room was quiet. In the predawn twilight of Tokyo, Seiko breathed evenly, while Usagi slept curled up, hiding her face.

Yuriko raised her left hand. In the faint pinkish light filtering through the curtains, she looked at her palm. Two small, pale crescent scars. The seal of survival.

Tamar had asked a question to which the Empire had no answer. But she did.

Yuriko stood up slowly, trying not to creak the floorboards. She dressed in the dark, threw on her jacket, and quietly left the room.

The hotel corridor greeted her with cool air and the smell of an old carpet. She went down the wooden stairs into the lobby. Behind the reception desk, an elderly Japanese man in a worn uniform was dozing. Hearing steps, he started and straightened up:

“Good morning, ma’am. Has something happened? It’s still too early for breakfast.”

Yuriko approached the desk. Her face was pale, but her eyes looked clear and cold, like the water in a mountain stream on Okinawa. The dome in her head had completely vanished. All that remained was pure, absolutely clear resolve.

“I need a telephone,” she said. “The international operator.”

The clerk blinked in surprise, adjusting his glasses:

“International? But, ma’am, at such an hour… It is incredibly expensive, and overseas calls currently go through military lines…”

“Connect me to the United States of America,” Yuriko said clearly, separating each word. “The city of Sacramento, California. Please.”

The clerk looked at her straight back, at her left hand tightly gripping the edge of the wooden counter, and without asking any more questions, reached for the heavy ebonite phone.

Yuriko picked up the black receiver. Crackling and clicking filled the earpiece, and across thousands of miles of ocean floor, through the hum of undersea cables and static, a distant, endless sound of waves reached her. She pressed the receiver to her ear and waited for someone on the other side of the ocean—where evening was just getting underway—to pick up the phone and speak her name.

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