Tin can of Sakuma hard candy, two orphans, on Kobe streets dark illuminated by the natural lit matches of the summer field, sound of its hollowness. Wide streets emptied of the koi and the yukatas, and the family of dolls dressed with kimono sitting like rocks with their powdered faces: the conflagration spreads. Shuga, tastes the eight-grade boy, carefully swaying his imouto-san tight in the nook of his arms. Melting gold embraces them softly from the rose-cheeked nihon and the hotaru, fluttering soundlessly, like a timed bomb. Imouto-san, open your eyes, he says, the fever raging like drones which came like that Kanagawai-oki as hellish as the eyes of the kichiku beiei, the deafening sound as he cupped his hands over his ears, praying for the kami of the rubbles of his home to protect him and his imouto. Bright slips from the nightmare are the racing fancy of reunion upon the rabbit in the bright moon, orphans barefoot with tattered undergarment and pantsu imports to Kobe since the Meiji Restoration, as hunger turns kimonos into rice and rice into scars of the crackling leather belt. Accommodate, muttered the aunt, devouring rice bartered with the kimono of her distant cousin. Bushi, capsized by the torpedoes, and that refusal to abandon, Kakun, sang the mothers slowly savoring the cherries robbed from trees the season of its flowers stitched into the children they left behind: As well Odachi’s Zero, the Yokaren with propellers as chisel, carving the enemy with the ardor of life. As well the bomb weighing it, making it impossible to outmaneuver the fire of the enemy tempest: each day, a mission of elegizing the still-living. The children dance among the himiwari, before they are cut down unaware that their pride—like that of their mother a little beyond the rivers— will cost them dearly, the tin holds a box of matches in shuga, offering hallucination of a better time in the feverish confusion, surrounded by the tinkering fire. The brother kept his imouto-san’s little ash bones in the tin can—with her doll and what’s left of the shadow of stealing on Kobe streets, beaten by the Western baker too afraid to go to war— tricksters alive when news of Nihon’s surrender breaks. What meaning is the withdrawal from the bank account, for food his malnourished imouto never has chance to eat? What meaning is the ballad of Mount Narayama as the adult at home ate the children to survive? What meaning is shuga? Come morn, the janitor sees yet another corpse under the shadow of the narrow streets. He sorts through the belongings for valuables, finds nothing but a tin that doesn’t chime. He throws it, the top coming loose, imouto’s gray ash projected as kami. That morning, what’s left of the majesty of children held hands to board the single-track train with no return.
The Pine Cone Review 