Burial in the Clouds by Hiroyuki Agawa

only one fly in the ointment: The beer wasn’t cold enough, probably due to the shortage of ice.
    We checked the train schedule only to discover that we hadn’t time to go to Minamata today, though the Fukais might well have expected us, so we headed straight back to the base. Oleander bloomed here and there (sumac and oleander are ubiquitous in these parts). Oleander flowers are lovely, but a stranger on the train told us that the tree is toxic. During the Seinan War, the government soldiers ate lunch using oleander twigs for chopsticks, and many were poisoned. We also learned that this region is renowned as the migratory home of cranes. Flocks of hooded cranes fly in from Siberia every winter.
    When we returned, two postcards awaited me, one from Professor E., the other from Kashima. To my surprise, Kashima has been in Kyushu since last month. The address read: “Yoshihiko Kashima, 120th Outfit, Provisional Torpedo Boat Training Camp, Kawatana-machi, Nagasaki Prefecture.” This is a special camp where men train in high-speed torpedo boats, lightweight crafts made of plywood and fitted out with aircraft engines. Their purpose is to launch close-quarter torpedo attacks on enemy warships.
    â€œYou guys come in from the air,” Kashima wrote, “I will come in on the water, and A. will creep in over the earth. Let’s keep up the work.” “A.” is A.K. of Oriental History, and a high school classmate of Kashima. Apparently he has been sent to Naval Gunnery School at Tateyama. “I don’t know which way Izumi is,” Kashima continued, and then he adapted a poem from the Manyoshu : “‘If I forget how you look / I shall call you to mind / When I look at the clouds / That cover the plain and rise / Up to the mountaintop.’ Har har.” Well, he could look Izumi up on a map.
    Professor E. is serving fifteen-day stints at Toyokawa Naval Arsenal in Aichi Prefecture, leading students from the faculties of Law, Letters, and Economics. Since the emergency Student Mobilization Order was issued, academic work has been virtually suspended at the university.
    â€œI have much to say about my experience in Toyokawa,” the professor writes. “I just can’t say it on a postcard.” I can imagine the general situation.
    August 23
    Sunny today. The cool rush of the night air tells me that autumn is approaching, and in this hint of a changing season I also feel the creeping shadow of death. From the window of the barracks, I see the clear sickle of the crescent moon.
    For some time now I have neglected to keep my diary. When we were in Tsuchiura, the division officer gave us a bit of advice: “You are free to keep a diary,” he said, “but its contents may be private, and since navy fliers must rely on others to see to their personal effects if they are killed, it is best, so far as you can manage it, never to write anything that might tarnish your name after death.” At the time, this gave me a little start, but lately I don’t much care whether or not my name is tarnished after I die. I don’t say this with any special conviction, as if I had resolved to take my own path and leave it to survivors to judge my life. On the contrary, I’m probably just backsliding. Well, in a word, I just don’t give a damn.
    As my mind grew passive, keeping a diary came to seem a pathetic exercise in literary masturbation, the sole outlet of my posthumous vanity. After all, I’m conscious of my readers as I compose. I play the scholar in front of my navy instructors and comrades, and I play the manly naval aviation student reserve officer in front of my university professors and parents, but really it’s all nothing except lies rolled up in grumbles. These thoughts occupied me, and I didn’t have the heart to take up a pen. In fact, I have eighty seven hundred sixty hours left, if I’m to live out another year, and I don’t really see