In all likelihood I will die before ever having this experience.
I haven’t been able to finish the book yet, but for the first time in a long while, I actually enjoyed reading poetry.
August 6
Excursion today. We ventured in a new direction, heading out to Akune. The hot springs there are very salty, as the water flows across a bed of halite before gushing out. My body felt sticky. Still, we bathed after taking a rest, and bathed yet again after lunch, making the most of it. The Chinese poet Bai Juyi writes, “The smooth hot spring water laved her creamy skin.” In our case, it just wrung all the sweat from our bodies. But to men living in such times, to men situated as we are, a hot spring welling up so inexhaustibly, so mysteriously, by day and by night, seems a natural benediction.
It’s sweltering. Not a drop of rain for the last ten days or so. I saw a rice field from the train, cracked by the sun. At the inn, the greenness of the garden was oppressive, and large brown cicadas chirred, intensifying the heat. The fried tiger prawns were delicious, and I ended up ordering three helpings. The watermelon was ripe and sweet. There was 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.
“You 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.
“I 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 the point in setting aside some portion of my limited time in order to write this tripe. And yet when I abandoned what had become a custom with me—writing in my diary during our nightly study sessions—I was overcome with the feeling that something was missing, just as you might feel the need to put something in your mouth after quitting smoking. So today I am inclined to start writing again, and if it’s masturbation, then so be it.
I might be on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Sometimes I feel utterly lost. I know nothing about keeping a diary, nothing about the war, nothing about life, nothing about death, nothing about scholarship either. I’m just a vacillator. What on earth is there in me that can be “tarnished” after I am gone? I notched up my petty successes, with self-satisfaction, from junior high to high school, from high school to university, and I left the university to become a pilot in the Navy Air Corps, fancying myself as “honorably” singled out. I can’t resist the feeling that I am being stripped bare, so that I might see what my life really amounts to in the end. Not that I can handle an airplane better than anyone else, or that I can face my death with resolution. At the end of the day, I suppose, I simply have no core. I can’t even compose a single satisfactory tanka, even under such uniquely tumultuous circumstances as these.
To my vexation, by and large I am in accord with what I am told, but none of it ever catches fire inside me. I can only conclude that I don’t have what it takes, that I’m not numbered among those who burn with zeal. I am instructed to purify my mind of worldly thoughts, but what will become of me if I struggle, again and again, to detach myself and still fail, if I am committed utterly to the task and still cannot emancipate myself from what entangles me? Fortunately, during flight my brain functions only at about one-third of its natural capacity. It would be disastrous if thoughts like these swept over me in the cockpit. When, two months back, Senior Aviation Petty Officer D. leapt from the wing of his plane to his death, Instructor Yamaguchi chalked it up to a woman, and the explanation half convinced me. But now I wonder if his case might not have been so simple. Should my skill ever reach such a level as to free my mind up to wander while I fly, I can well imagine that my hand may, of its own accord, shove the control stick forward, sending the plane into a nosedive. I would kill myself, hardly even aware that I was to die. This is certainly among the possibilities, and if it should happen, the men will cremate my body, hold a wake by my ashes, and then forget about me as they return to their affairs, just as we all did when Senior Aviation Petty Officer D. perished. These men are strong; they possess the tenacity of an insect.