The first is that of sixteen-year-old Hana Benkan who lives with her mother in Chiran which is located on the island of Kyushu, just above Okinawa. It is April, 1945 and Hana's father is off at war. Hana along with her friend Mariko as well as Sachiko, Hisako and Kazuko and the other eighteen girls in her unit from Chiran Junior High School board a truck that takes them into the Chrian Army Air Force Base. Hana's mother believes that she still attends school but like the other girls, she has not told her mother what she's doing, so as to protect her.
Hana has survived a bombing that buried her alive. While working in the sweet potato fields, Hana and the others had to hide in trenches from bombs being dropped by the Americans. Hana's trench collapsed and she was buried alive. Hana survived but was so traumatized she couldn't eat for a week. Devotion to duty forces her both to eat and work.Hana has never known a Japan at peace. At first Japan was at war with China, controlling Manchukuo but with the 1930's Depression, the Japan Empire spread into Nanking, Beijing and even further south. When Hana was twelve-years-old, Japan bombed Pearl Harbour. Eventually Hana's father, a tailor and musician enlisted, leaving behind his beloved instrument, a thirteen stringed koto.
So instead of school, Hana and the other girls are part of Nadeshiko Tai, a unit that cares for the tokko, attack pilots known as kamikaze. Their missions are always their last as they give their lives for Japan and the Emperor. Hana, Mariko and her friends wash their clothing and mend their socks. They also serve the boys their meals consisting of rice, pickled plum and seaweed. For Hana it has been a learning curve, unable to sew when she was younger due to her soft fingers and many mistakes, she is now adept at mending.
Each day more and more pilots come and spend their last days in the barracks. Until one day a group arrive which includes a young pilot, tall with dark hair, who plays music that captivates Hana. His music not only reawakens Hana, but she finds herself falling in love with this pilot doomed to die for his country.
The second narrative traces the life of Tokko pilot, Taro Inoguchi beginning in 1928 when he is baby. In 1933 while watching the kamishibai man tell a story with his father, Taro hears a "high sweet voice singing to him" and entranced, races off to find it. He learns from his father that this "bird" is an instrument from the West called a violin. By the winter of 1936, eight-year-old Taro now studying violin, plays Miyagi Michio's The Sea in Spring for his parents and Ayugai-sensei, his violin teacher. Ayugai tells his parents that he has yet to feel the music; that he lacks the mono no aware. This is a Japanese term meaning an understanding and sense of the transiency of this life.
In the spring of 1938, Taro's father goes off to war. He is an aeronautical engineer and will be running the maintenance of Japan's air fleet on the mainland. Later, Taro watches as his father flies over their house in his silver plane, waggling his wings as he promised. By the summer of 1940, Taro is struggling to master Mozart and gain his father's approval. But his father believes that studying music is fruitless and that Taro should be an engineer. With Japan at war, Taro's father believes that he should attend the Army Youth Pilot School in order to get the best assignments in the Imperial Military Academy. Taro, only twelve-years-old, in an attempt to please his father, decides he will apply for the Shonen Hikohei, Youth Pilot School. It will mean giving fifteen years of his life to the army, but it will also mean a chance to make his parents proud and to be a war hero.
During the winter of 1941, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Taro and his mother learn that Japan has now declared war on the United States and the British Empire. Taro and his classmates along with other Japanese believe the Americans do not have the fortitude or the discipline to enter into war. They are elated. By the spring of 1943, Taro is enrolled in the Oita Air Cadet School where he meets fellow cadet Kenji Nakamura. Twelve months later the two friends graduate and move on to Tachiarai Army Flying School in Fukuoka, on the southern tip of Kyushu. Taro's mother attends the graduation ceremony and gives him an senninabri, a sash with one thousand rows of knotted red stitches made to protect soldiers in battle.
In February of 1945, Japan becomes increasingly desperate with the Americans closing in on Okinawa. Having suffered increasing losses, Captain Hibara asks for volunteers for a new attack squadron, a tokko unit. Taro and his friend Nakamura along with the other young pilots all volunteer. Given a brief leave to go home to see his mother, Taro cannot bring himself to tell his mother what he has volunteered for. As they prepare for their first mission, Taro meets Hana.
Hana and Taro's lives come together when he arrives at the Chiran Base as part of the Tokko Tai. One day Hana hears Taro playing his violin and just as he was years earlier, she is drawn to the beauty of the violin. On the morning of his final mission, Taro decides to give his violin to the young girl who saw him playing earlier in the barracks. But things do not go as planned on his mission to "body-crash" in an American naval ship. Taro must deal with his shame and deep conflict over still being alive. When they are given a second chance, Hana and Taro spend some time together to make up with the lifetime they will never share. Their brief time together as Taro prepares for his second mission blossoms into longing and love. Both, rescued from death now have a reason to live, that will remain unfulfilled. But once again fate intervenes, and that lifetime both wished for may just happen.
Discussion
Sherri Smith has crafted a deeply moving novel that explores a unique aspect of World War II. In The Blossom and the Firefly, Smith focuses on the war effort in Japan in the last days of the conflict in the Pacific. Her story is one of love, inner conflict, duty, sacrifice, and hope.
Her two main characters, Hana Benkan and Taro Inoguchi, are young teenagers whose lives have been overshadowed by war for as long as they can remember. Hana, who survived being buried alive in a trench during a bombing, has been deeply traumatized by this experience and considers herself more dead than alive. Only her devotion to duty and to her country compels her to work as a Nadeshiko Tai, helping the young pilots who are part of the Tokko Tai, or kamikaze pilots who "body crash" into American naval ships. Hana whose name means flower is the blossom, like those the Nadeshiko gave to the pilots before their last flight.
Taro, whose life has revolved around music, has struggled to obtain the respect and approval of his father, a pilot and an engineer. Taro's father views his son's passion for music as fruitless and believes he should become a pilot to bring honour to Japan and his family. This desire to gain his father's approval eventually leads Taro to join the army, become a pilot and then to make the drastic choice join the tokko tai. He will gain honour by offering his life as a suicide pilot. Taro is the firefly, a reference to a young girl whose pilot comes back once more to her at night in the form of a firefly.
As a young violinist, Taro was told he lacked mono no aware, the Japanese phrase referring to having a sense of empathy and understanding regarding the transience of life in his playing. However, on a visit home to his mother, just before his first tokko mission and faced with his own mortality and his imminent certain death, Taro plays the Mozart piece that has always eluded him, in a way that expresses both the joy of living and the sadness of leaving life behind.
It is music that brings together Taro and Hana at Chiran: Taro while preparing for his last mission, Hana one of the Nadeshiko tending to him. Music heals, comforts and gives hope to both Taro and Hana. Hana encounters Taro when she hears him playing his violin and the gorgeous music brings her back to life. It is a moment of profound rebirth for her.
"I am standing in the doorway, listening to the lone musician, the boy with the black case in his duffel. He stands in the center of the barracks, playing a Western violin...
There was a moment when I was dead, swaddled in darkness, a moment of utter stillness. My ears were ringing because of the bomb, a constant hum, like the first note of creation.
And then there was light.
Just a tiny dot of it, streaming in as if it were all the light in the universe.
And it grew. And grew.
Until there were fingers, hands, faces, and blue sky.
And voices screaming, 'She's here! She's alive!'
Now my ears ring with that first note once more. Through the doorway, dot of light. And fingers, hands, a face like the open sky, and music singing, I am here. I am alive."
Hana's rebirth continues when Taro offers her his violin as a token, just before his tokko mission. Hana who has never bothered to learn the names of any of the pilots she has served as a maid to, is suddenly entrusted with Taro's most prized possession.
When Hana hears Taro play in the barracks after his first failed flight her world opens even more. She begins to see people not in the context of war, but as real people. "This is what I see when I look at Taro: a young man, standing tall, a shining instrument of wood held confidently in his arm, like a dance partner, his chin resting on her shoulder...The girls are no longer Nadeshiko Tai, but schoolgirls, happy to clap and sing. The kitchen workers are no longer scullery maids and pot scrubbers, but men and women who have families, stories, songs of their own. I see tired people turned into human beings. I see a gray rainy day turned into sunshine. It surprises me, as if there is color in the world I have been blind to until now."
Similar to Hana after her traumatic experience of being buried alive, Taro who survives his first tokko mission feels the deep shame of failure and feels dead to the world. Taro is "not living, not dead....., little more than shadows on the borderlands of the spirit world..." and "dies" when his plane crashes on a beach and burns at the end of the war. His deep shame at failing as tokko leaves him living a life of the dead. "It was only then that Taro realized how funereal his world had become. The dirt beneath his feet was below ground level. The entire barracks was a crypt, a roof over a grave. A stone hand reached out to choke him. His eyes burned." Even worse, the army doubts Taro's "moral fortitude. His devotion to his duty."
Hana and Taro's rebirth to the world of the living is finally concluded when both meet again two years after the war at the Yasukuni Shrine, a monument to the Japanese war dead in Tokyo. They both purify themselves at the Otemizusha font, Hana before she is to play, Taro after paying his respects to the dead. Hana is playing the koto just inside the third gate, the Shinmon Gate with her group. At the end of the day, Hana is sad. There are
"Not glowing fireflies. No ghostly violin." Instead there is Taro.
Smith, in her Author's Note at the back of the novel, writes that she was inspired to write this story after seeing a photograph online of, " A row of Japanese schoolgirls in dark middy blouses and shining bobbed haircuts stand smiling and waving at the edge of a runway. Their arms are full of cherry blossoms. Their eyes are on a departing fighter plane. It was black and white, the resolution poor, but the image struck me." This is how Smith learned about the Nadeshiko Unit girls of Chiran Junior High School in Japan. In the historical photograph shown in this blog post, taken from the World War 2 database, (https://worldwar2database.com/gallery/wwii1203) girls from the Nadeshiko Unit wave as Second Lieutenant Toshio Anazawa takes off on a suicide mission, leaving behind his fiancé.
The end of the war is no easier for Hana as she struggles to not only deal with Taro's likely death but to comprehend what defeat means for Japan. "The Emperor has been allowed to keep his Chrysanthemum Throne, but he has surrendered his divinity. As if one can simply agree to no longer be a descendant of Heaven. This is the new world we find ourselves in. The Emperor is merely a man. His generals and admirals are on trial for crimes against peace, against humanity, for crimes of war. I do not understand the accusations the Americans and their allies are levying in these trials. Imperially sanctioned rape, murder, and torture in foreign places." This troubles Hana because her father was in a foreign country, China. Does this mean her father was part of this? It is something her mother refuses to even broach. Japan during the war was "... boy pilots, bright buttons, and fresh faces full of Yamato-damashii" and tokko. Post war and American occupation, Hana now wonders what Japan is.
The Blossom and the Firefly is an exquisite love story, one filled with loss, rebirth and hope. Smith has captured the essence of Japanese culture, as well as the tragedy and consequences of war in this well written novel. One can't help but wonder at the many people who did not get a second chance like that given to Taro and Hana in a time of war.
Some interesting articles about the kamikaze attacks on the US Fifth Fleet John Chapman and the Kamikaze Attack: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/pacific-john-chapman/
Book Details:
The Blossom and the Firefly by Sherri Smith
New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons 2020
310 pp.
No comments:
Post a Comment