Free Burial in the Clouds by Hiroyuki Agawa

bear to imagine what the country will be like. But somehow we will make our way back to you, and to our old university in Kyoto. Well, I guess that’s just a fantasy after all. It will not happen. It’s too much, even for me, to assume that we will be alive three years down the road.
    Professor E.
    Ten days have passed since I started to write this clumsy letter during study sessions, avoiding the eyes of my instructors. We have been to the village of Obata at the foot of Mt. Tsukuba, about thirty kilometers distant, for three days of maneuvers, from the day before yesterday until today. We rose at 4:30 on the morning of the departure, shouldered our rain gear, clipped haversacks and canteens to our waists, took up our #38 rifles, and assembled in front of the drill platform in the darkness of dawn. (“#38” means old, by the way. This rifle hasn’t been updated since the 38th year of the Meiji era, in 1905.) The chief instructor almost shouted when he addressed us. “You are outfitted exactly as were your comrades who died their warriors’ deaths at Makin, at Tarawa, and in the Aleutian Islands. Brace yourselves. Tough it out with fire and spirit during these next three days of maneuvers.” By all appearances many among us did gird themselves up at this speech, burning with a Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead! sort of intensity. And in point of fact, we all “toughed it out,” without a single man dropping. But even an affair like this seems funny to me. Why should we find it moving rather than depressing, and how can it give us good reason to get all fired up, simply to be outfitted exactly like our hapless “comrades” who were ill-equipped, and, consequently, annihilated by our enemy’s overwhelming firepower? I just can’t help feeling that everything is standing wrong side up somehow.
    Have you visited the country around here, by the way? Paulownia and wisteria were flowering gracefully in the prosperous villages at the foot of Mt. Tsukuba. Milk vetches were also in bloom, and frogs croaked in the rice fields. This is the spot where the poems in volume fourteen of the Manyoshu are set. As I lay in ambush under a chestnut tree, I tore off a Japanese pepper leaf and sniffed it, thinking, for no special reason, of the poem that says,
    Unlike the waters that thunder
    Against the rocks of Mt. Tsukuba,
    My heart never wavers.
    On our way back, we practiced an intense running engagement. The rifle butt bit into my shoulder, my fatigues were thoroughly mired, and my face broke out in a salty sweat. Now I realize how aptly put the expression “My legs are like lead” really is. So I have no words to describe the euphoria I felt when, after returning to base, after finishing the laundry and cleaning duty, and after taking a bath, I received a parcel of sweets. But then I heard a fellow in my outfit say, while nibbling away at some confection, “It was tough, but it was good experience.” I wanted to turn on him and had to struggle to suppress the urge. Isn’t it the luxury of those who look forward to a long life to say that hard times make for “good experience”? As for me, the hard times I have here are just hard times plain and simple, and I cannot by any means imagine they will bear good fruit in the future.
    Professor E.
    I’m writing the last part of this letter on the train. Today is May 25. We are supposed to pass through Kyoto around five o’clock tomorrow morning. You will be sleeping peacefully in your Kita Shirakawa residence. At the moment, we are running halfway between Odawara and Atami, with the ocean on our left. I can see Kashima’s Miura Peninsula looming low. A little while ago, I spotted a bunch of sorrel, a familiar face from the Manyo lectures, flowering along the railroad. The day after tomorrow we finally start our lives as real pilots in Izumi, down in southern Kyushu.
    My heart is full, so I hope you will