Friday, January 29, 2010 - Through the glare of the sun on his back, the... |
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Through the glare of the sun on his back, the glittering brilliance of the sand, Wakara realized that he was very depressedWhat was it Dove had said about Ishimara's diary? "Fascinating document Had Dove actually been touched by it? Wakara shrugged; it was impossible for him to understand Americans like Dove, just as it was impossible for him to understand JapaneseStill there had been a time in Berkeley in his senior year when his paintings were getting some notice, and many of the American students were friendly with himBut of course that was all shattered by the war Major Infantry, Japanese ArmyThat was the way he had signed it, relinquishing himself again to anonymity
"Did you have a look at it, Wakara?" Dove had asked
Wakara grinned, staring at the sandHis own translation was in his breast pocket nowPoor Ishimara, whoever he wasThe Americans had looted his corpse, and some noncom had brought the diary backNo, Wakara thought, he was louis vuitton diaper bag tote too much of an American himself to understand really the kind of things that had gone on in Ishimara's headWould an American keep a diary, write in it an hour before an attack? The poor bastard Ishimara, dumb, dumb like all the JapaneseWakara unfolded his translation, read it over again for a moment
The sun was red in its setting tonight, red with the blood of our soldiers who died todayTomorrow my blood shall be in itThis night I cannot sleepI find myself weepingI have thought achingly of my childhood, and I remember the boys, my school friends, and the games we have playedI think of the year I have spent with my grandparents in the prefecture of ChoshiI think, I am born and I dieI am born, I live, and I am to die, I think on this night
I do not believe in the Emperor, His Most Exalted, I must confess it
I ask myself -- WHY? I am born, I am to dieWHY? WHY? What is the meaning?
Wakara shrugged againA thinker, a poet; there were many handbag chanel Japanese like himAnd yet they died like anything but poets, died in mass ecstatic outbursts, communal frenziesNAZE, NAZE DESU KA? Ishimara had written in huge trembling characters, WHY, WHY IS IT? and he had gone out and been killed in the river on the night of the big Japanese attackHe had fallen, shrieking, no doubt, a unit in an anonymous exalted massWho could comprehend it fully? Wakara wondered
When he had been in Japan as a child of twelve, it had seemed the most wonderful and beautiful country he had ever seenEverything was so small; it was a country built for the size of a twelve-year-oldWakara knew Choshi where Ishimara had spent a year with his grandparents; perhaps he had even spoken once to Ishimara's grandparentsAnd in the peninsula at Choshi, in two miles, one could see everythingThere were great cliffs which dropped several hundred feet into the Pacific, there were miniature wooded groves, as perfect, as tailored as emeralds, there designer louis vuitton denim bags knock offs were tiny fishing towns constructed of gray wood and rocks, there were rice paddies and mournful low foothills, and the cramped choked streets of the city of Choshi with its smells of fish tripe and human dung, the crowded bloody docks of the fishing wharvesNothing went to wasteAll the land had been manicured for a thousand years
Wakara put out his cigarette in the sand and scratched at his thin mustacheNo matter where you went, Japan was always beautiful, with an unreal finite beauty, like a miniature landscaped panorama constructed for a showroom or a fairFor a thousand years or more perhaps the Japanese had lived like seedy caretakers watching over precious jewelsThey tilled the land, expended their lives upon it, and left nothing for themselvesEven when he was twelve years old he had known that the faces of the women were different from those of American womenAnd now in retrospect there was a curious detached wistfulness about the Japanese louis vuitton replica bags women as if they had renounced even the desire to think about joys they would never have
Behind the beauty it was all bare, with nothing in their lives but toil and abnegationThey were abstract people, who had elaborated an abstract art, and thought in abstractions and spoke in them, devised involuted ceremonies for saying nothing at all, and lived in the most intense fear of their superiors that any people had ever had
And a week ago a battalion of those wistful people had charged to their death with great terrifying screamsOh, he understood, Wakara thought, why the Americans who had been in Japan hated the Japanese worst of allBefore the war they had been so wistful, so charming; the Americans had picked them up like pets, and were feeling the fury now of having a pet bite themAll the conversations, the polite evasions, the embarrassed laughs the Japanese had given them had suddenly assumed another meaning, had become malign once the war pink prada handbag starte |
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