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The River. Epilogue
He sat on a bench by the river, and time flowed through him like water through his fingers.
Plum blossoms, almost as white as the first snow, drifted down onto his shoulders, onto the earth, onto the grey, indifferent waters of the Yangtze. The wind carried them, and in their dance there was neither beauty nor sorrow. There was only the mechanics of the fall.
His hands gripped the smooth handle of his cane, polished by the friction of time. It was carved from pale, almost white wood, and once, an eternity ago in another life, it had borne an inscription. Now it had worn away, rubbed smooth into faint indentations — characters of a dead language that no one understood anymore.
He had found the strength — or perhaps merely the apathy — to return here, to this city he had once departed as a soldier. To return decades after the Empire he had served had crumbled into dust. Capitulation. Defeat. Yet he had never found the strength to return to Tokyo. Never. Not even to die.
…and memory, like a drop of ink in a glass of water, bled into the grey day, coloring it in shades of fire and ash. That March day had been bright, almost summery. He was traveling on leave. He was going home to Yuki and Ayame. He carried a silk scarf for his wife, bartered from a merchant in Shanghai, and for Ayame — a small wooden doll he had taken from a Chinese man in exchange for a pack of cigarettes. He had imagined how she would laugh, how her tiny fingers would explore the carved kimono of the toy. But when the train approached Tokyo, he did not see a city. He saw its funeral. The sky was pitch-black with smoke, and through it pierced a sickly, tangerine sun. He did not recognize his district, Shitamachi, where every alleyway had been steeped in his childhood. There were no streets. There were only riverbeds carved through the cooling ash. There were no houses. There were only blackened, charred skeletons, lifting their dead limbs toward the heavens. His city was gone. His home. His Yuki. His Ayame. Nothing. Only the wind, chasing scraps of what had once been life across the wasteland. And the smell. That same sweetish, nauseating stench he knew so intimately from Nanjing.
When they, the last soldiers of the Empire, were repatriated from China, he did not travel to Tokyo. He disembarked the train in Kyoto and never again returned to the city of his birth. To the city that had become a mass grave for his entire world. He became Miyazaki once more.
He drew a small silk pouch from his pocket. Fingers, trembling from the chill, untied the faded cord. Inside lay ash, within which, if one looked closely, minuscule, unburned fragments could be discerned. Grey, faceless, like dust. He brought it to his face. The ash smelled of nothing. It smelled simply of the void.
He closed his eyes.
A young Chinese couple strolling along the embankment saw the elderly man suddenly twitch in a strange manner and begin to slump sideways. His cane clattered against the paving stones.
“Nín hǎo? Xūyào bāngzhù ma?” they rushed over, the young man cautiously touching his shoulder. “Do you need help? Should we call an ambulance?”
But Ichiro could no longer hear them. The final sound he deciphered in his fading consciousness was not their questions, not the murmur of the river, not the rustle of last year’s leaves.
It was a quiet, distinct clatter.
The clatter of his wooden sword falling against the tatami mat on the day he turned five.
Et victor,
Et victus,
In ludo huius mundi —
Non plus quam gutta roris,
Non diutius quam fulguris micat.