“Yuri! There you are!” he said. “Have you seen Itakura?!”
He was far more flustered now than the last time I’d seen him.
“Itakura-san? No…” I said, shaking my head.
“Shoot, okay… Thanks,” he said—then started looking around again.
“Why?” I asked curiously. “What happened to him?”
Akira hesitated a moment before lowering his voice and answering:
“…We can’t find him anywhere. He just disappeared without a word. Didn’t leave a note or anything…”
“What…? You’re kidding… But why?”
“Wish I could tell you…” He furrowed his brow and shook his head.
“Here,” I said. “Let me help you look for him.”
Akria looked at me, his eyes wide.
“No, no—it’s getting late,” he said. “You should head back home before it’s too dark.”
“But wouldn’t we be able to cover more ground together? Don’t you need to find him as quickly as possible?”
“I mean, yes… Honestly, we need to track him down before our superior officer finds out he ran off…”
“Then we’d better hurry. Come on—you go that way. I’ll check over here.”
I ran off down the street before Akira had a chance to shoot me down.
“Itakura-san!”
After searching high and low for a while, I spotted a familiar figure trudging down the road on the outskirts of town and called out to him from behind.
Itakura slowly turned around to face me—but as soon as he realized who I was, he nearly jumped out of his boots and took off running. His gait was so slow and unsteady, though, that even I was able to quickly catch up to him. His complexion was ghostly white.
“Itakura-san… Are you okay?” I asked with concern.
“Yuri…chan…” he said, his face screwed up in agony. “Let me go! I’m begging you!”
He raised his voice, then prostrated himself before me.
“Please!” he shouted. “Pretend you didn’t see me! I can’t do it… I just can’t…”
“Huh…?” I was dumbfounded. Absolutely speechless.
He looked up at me, his face pale and covered in cold sweat, and pleaded:
“…I’m not ready to die…”
Not ready to die.
The moment I heard him say those words, it felt like the weird haze that had been hanging over my heart ever since I’d arrived here dissipated all at once.
Of course… Yes, of course not. It should have gone without saying.
After all, no one in their right mind would ever want to die—right? That went for kamikaze pilots just as much as it did for those innocent civilians who had to flee their homes in the air raid. It was human nature to do everything you possibly could in order to survive! Who could ever be okay with their entire life being stolen away against their will?
I knelt down beside Itakura, his fists trembling against the hard earth.
“…Hey, I’m not here to apprehend you, or anything like that,” I said. “Nor am I in any position to report to the others on whether I saw you or not. I just heard from Akira that you’d disappeared. I got worried, so I decided to come looking for you. That’s all.”
Hearing this, Itakura slowly and nervously lifted his head. His eyes had been so hollow a moment ago, yet now it felt like they were finally starting to focus again. I could see a bead of sweat drip down to the ground from his temple.
“W-wait, so then…you won’t tell them?” he asked, his expression so full of disbelief it was as if he’d seen an alien. But I didn’t think I’d said anything too shocking. All I’d done was acknowledge that if he wasn’t ready to die in three days, it wasn’t my place to tell him he had to. It felt like common sense. And yet, it was like he couldn’t believe his ears.
How tragic was that?
Didn’t we all have the right to free will?
To wish? To live of our own volition?
The people here didn’t even have that.
I rose to my feet, pulling Itakura up by the hand.
But as he staggered to his feet, I heard a voice.
“Itakura!”
Akira shouted out as he ran over from across the way.
As soon as Itakura saw him, his face went deathly pale once again.
“That’s it—I’m done for,” his expression screamed.
Shoulders slouched, he stood before his fellow squad mate, who towered over him like an authority figure. I leaned over to try to get a better look at Akira’s face—his eyes were placid and calm, no discernible emotion held within them.
Suddenly, I got worried. Surely, Akira wouldn’t drag Itakura back to the base against his will, would he? He didn’t seem that heartless to me—but I also knew deserting one’s post was a grave military offense. It wouldn’t surprise me if Itakura’s comrades could be considered complicit if they knew it was happening and did nothing to stop it, either. I also knew Akira had a very strong sense of responsibility, so it was entirely possible he’d consider it his duty to bring back Itakura.
“Um… Akira, listen…” I began—but he shot me a sidelong glance and shook his head. Stay out of this, he seemed to be saying. So I simply bit my lip, chagrined. Then, Akira narrowed his eyes, almost smiling at me—before turning to face Itakura again.
“Itakura,” he said.
“…S-Sakuma-san…” said the other man, his voice low and hoarse.
Then, all of a sudden, he fell forward and clung tight to Akira’s chest. Akira reacted quickly, reaching both his hands up to support Itakura’s weight.
“Please, Sakuma-san!” Itakura cried, his eyes glossy with barely held-back tears. “Please…you have to look the other way! I can’t… I can’t die yet! There’s still so much I need to do!”
It was only after seeing him so desperate and disheveled like this that I was reminded of something incredibly important: Itakura was seventeen years old. In my time, that would make him a second-year student in high school, just three years my senior. Still a mere child—yet he’d been given absolute orders to die for his country and was expected to nod his head and simply go along with it. Of course there were things he still wanted to do; he’d only lived a mere seventeen years on this Earth. He had his whole life ahead of him.
There was no sense in these kamikaze tactics. It was wrong, no matter how you sliced it. I could feel an indignant rage welling up inside of me as Itakura continued his plea:
“Sakuma-san, I… I just need to go home. I need to go back to my fiancée.”
Akira’s eyes widened.
Still clinging to Akira’s chest, Itakura lowered his head and began to explain.
“…She was my best friend growing up,” he said. “But she lost her whole family in an air raid… She herself managed to survive, but got paralyzed from the waist down… The doctors say she’ll never walk again. After that, she was convinced she’d never marry…but that didn’t matter to me. I loved her and wanted to spend the rest of my life with her, no matter what disabilities she might have. So I finally proposed…and she was so happy, she broke down in tears… A few days later, my draft papers came in the mail.”
He furrowed his brow in anguish, then took a deep breath before continuing.
“I told her I’d make it back alive, no matter what—that she just needed to have faith and wait for me. She looked so forlorn at the thought of being left all alone, but she nodded and said she believed me. Then, on the day I left, she came out to see me off at the station—trying as hard as she could to walk on her own with a cane. When I saw her struggling like that, I swore to myself I’d do whatever it took to make it back to her.”
Akira didn’t say a word. How could he? He just listened and looked at Itakura with calm, patient eyes.
“…I regret volunteering myself as a kamikaze pilot. It wasn’t something I wanted to do. Never in a million years. I knew full well I didn’t want to die. But everyone around me had already volunteered…and I could feel my superior officer glaring at me, the only person who wasn’t raising his hand. I didn’t know what might happen to me if I didn’t follow suit… And so I just went with the flow, hoping I could maybe get out of the assignment later.”
He let out a groan of anguish.
“…I hate myself for being so weak,” he said. “For caving to the pressure of my peers. Why didn’t I have the courage to stand my ground back then? I regret it so deeply, it makes me nauseated just thinking about it. For a while, I just kind of resigned myself to my fate, as the consequences of my own actions… But now…”
He looked up at Akira with a surprisingly resolved and earnest gaze.
“I can’t die,” he said. “For her sake, more than anything else. I’m all she’s got left in this world. If I don’t come home to her alive, she’ll be forced to go on living all alone in this world, struggling every day just to survive. She’ll have lost everything, including her own autonomy. I don’t really have a choice in the matter… I have to go home.”
His steadfast expression hit me right in the heart.
It wasn’t just that he was afraid to die. No—far from it.
He wanted to live. Not for himself, but for someone else.
For the one he loved most.
He’d resolved to live on and survive this war—even if it came at the cost of being hated by his peers. At the cost of being called a coward, of being looked down on with contempt.
But to me, he’d made the most honorable choice there was.
I looked up at Akira, whose stone-faced expression had finally begun to soften.
“…Then go, Itakura,” he said, softly.
Itakura looked at him, dumbfounded.
“What…?” he said. “Sakuma-san…?”
“I said go. Live your life.”
He pushed the other man on the back, urging him forward. But when Itakura turned back over his shoulder, his eyes still full of disbelief, Akira smiled at him gently.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll just have to sink an even bigger ship for the both of us. What you need to do is focus on living…and protecting the ones you need to protect.”
In an instant, the dam broke, and Itakura’s eyes welled up with tears. He turned back around to face Akira and bowed his head deeply .
“Thank you, Sakuma-san…” he said. “I will never forget this!”
“Go on, already,” said Akira, still smiling.
As I watched from the sidelines, I couldn’t help but linger over Akira’s words.
“You just focus on living,” he’d said. But I could read between the lines.