This was Teraoka—the eldest of the group at age twenty-nine. He was a tolerant, mild-mannered sort who exuded an aura of great competence. Even I could tell just how much the rest of the group relied on his judgment.
And then there was Akira—sitting in the background while the others bantered with each other, not actually taking part in the conversation. I leaned over to get a better look and saw that he was currently flipping through a thick book of some sort.
Noticing my gaze, Ishimaru clapped him on the shoulder.
“Hey, Sakuma!” he shouted. “Yuri-chan’s here to say hi! Get your nose outta that book already!”
“Huh?” said Akira. “Oh, right… Sorry.”
He lifted his head and hurriedly set aside his book. It was as though he truly hadn’t been paying any attention whatsoever for the past several minutes.
“This guy, I tell ya…” said Ishimaru. “As soon as he cracks open one of those dusty old hardcovers, it’s like the whole rest o’ the world just fades away…”
“Sorry… I just got to a really good part, that’s all,” said Akira, grinning sheepishly.
“A really good part, huh? ’Cause that tome looks more like one of your college textbooks than a tense page-turner to me…” said Ishimaru, squinting as he examined the book’s cover. “Oh yeah—he ever tell you about that, Yuri-chan?”
“Sorry?” I said. “About what?”
“Sakuma here’s goin’ to Waseda University to study philosophy. He’s some kinda whiz kid, I tell ya! He actually reads stuff like this for fun, if you can believe that!”
I had no delusions of ever being able to afford going to college, so I wasn’t especially familiar, but I of course recognized the name. I found myself less impressed by the weight it held, however, since I was overcome by another emotion entirely.
Even the brightest of our country’s college students, with incredibly promising futures ahead of them, were being sent off to die in a war. It was as though their lives were worth nothing at all. Not to suggest that their lives were any more important than those who did not or could not go to college, of course. But dragging aspiring scholars, who wanted nothing more than to create a better world for us all, away from their studies only to sentence them to an early grave felt so tragic, I couldn’t bear the thought.
Suddenly, I grew curious about what the others’ educational backgrounds were, so I asked—and to my surprise, they had all either been college students or were school teachers already. This was even more of a shock, given that so few people could afford to go to university in this day and age—at least compared to the era I grew up in. Although maybe that was also why school instructors used to command far more respect than they did nowadays; giving children an education was seen as an extremely noble profession by society at large, not an unambitious career choice for those with few other prospects for making a living.
But honestly, that only made it all the more surprising that the military would draw from that particular pool of talented individuals and designate them not for posts that would make use of their intelligence in the larger war effort, but instead sentencing them to simply “die an honorable death” for their country.
How backward was that? They claimed they would be laying down their lives to protect their country—but in the end, they were actually sacrificing their own nation’s future by throwing away its most valuable asset.
“What’s wrong?” Akira asked, his expression dubious.
Apparently, I’d let my misgivings show too plainly on my face. But since I’d always had a habit of speaking my mind, no matter how controversial, I decided to just lean into it and bring the uncomfortable subject up head-on.
“…Why did you all agree to become kamikaze pilots, anyway?” I asked.
All of the men turned to look at me, their eyes wide. Then, a moment later, the youngest boy—Itakura—lowered his head as though this comment had wounded him somehow. After a few more moments of awkward silence, I continued:
“You were all ordered to do this, right? Could you not, I don’t know, refuse?”
The silence continued unbroken. Eventually, Teraoka, as the oldest, spoke up:
“The five of us here… You should know that we weren’t selected for this against our will.”
He reached into his chest pocket and pulled out a single, faded black-and-white photo, which he then set down on the table. In it, I could see a young woman who looked to be around twenty holding a tiny infant in her arms.
“This is my wife and daughter,” said Teraoka, glancing up at me for a moment before lowering his gaze to the photo and smiling softly. “We just got married the year before last, and she gave birth to our first child this past winter. I still haven’t had a chance to meet her, though, because she was born after I became a soldier…”
“What…?” I said. “You haven’t met your own daughter?”
Only after the words left my lips did I realize how thoughtless my question had been. I could see in Teraoka’s gentle smile and lonesome gaze that that fact was something that pained him deeply. I mean—how could it not? He was going to be sent off to die before he ever had the chance to hold his daughter in his arms, after all.
I couldn’t believe my ears. It was a fate too cruel for words. How could such a thing be considered even remotely permissible, even in wartime? And yet, Teraoka simply looked at me, a fierce glimmer of determination in his eyes, and said:
“I consider it an honor to have been named a kamikaze pilot. It means I can use my life to achieve something greater than myself—to protect the woman and child I love.”
I was so unable to swallow these words that my mouth hung open, speechless.
What in the hell was he talking about? That didn’t make any sense at all. It was an “honor” to make his wife a single mother in her early twenties?
Honestly, the whole thing reminded me of my own mother—which only made me grow more incensed. That woman had been forced to work multiple jobs my entire life just to support me, a thought that both pained me and filled me with a sort of wistful reminiscence.
I wonder how she’s doing without me. What I wouldn’t give to see her again…
Struggling not to break down in tears, I replied in a low voice:
“…I promise you, your wife has to feel lost and hopeless at the thought of losing you, at least in private. It’s extremely, extremely difficult for a mother to raise a child all on her own. Having to raise a child while also working day in and day out just to support them is a fate I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. I guarantee that your wife would much rather have you alive and at home, helping her raise your family together.”
Teraoka listened attentively to my little rant before lowering his head slightly and pulling something else out from his chest pocket—a tattered old letter. Immediately, I could tell, based on how worn it looked, that he’d probably read it over a thousand times. The thought made me unspeakably sad, and I didn’t even know what it said yet.
He laid it out on the table, but the writer’s penmanship was so fancy and old-fashioned that I couldn’t read it. Realizing this, Akira read it out for me: