The Blossom and the Firefly
Also by
SHERRI L. SMITH
Flygirl
Orleans
Pasadena
The Toymaker’s Apprentice
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York
Copyright © 2020 by Sherri L. Smith
Map illustration copyright © 2020 by Maggie Edkins
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Smith, Sherri L., author.
Title: The blossom and the firefly / Sherri L. Smith.
Description: New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, [2020]
Summary: Told in two voices, seventeen-year-old kamikaze pilot
Taro and fifteen-year-old war worker Hana meet
in 1945 Japan, he with no future and she haunted by the past.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019005509 | ISBN 9781524737900 (hc) |
ISBN 9781524737917 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: World War, 1939–1945—Japan—Juvenile fiction. | CYAC: World War, 1939–1945—Japan—Fiction. | Kamikaze pilots—Fiction. | Musicians—Fiction. |
Family life—Japan—Fiction. | Japan—History—1926–1945—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.S65932 Blo 2020 | DDC [Fic]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019005509
ISBN 9781524737900
This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical persons appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
pid_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0
FOR PEACE
CONTENTS
Also By
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
The Empire of Japan
1945Chapter 1: Hana
Chapter 2: Hana
Chapter 3: Taro
Chapter 4: Hana
Chapter 5: Taro
Chapter 6: Hana
Chapter 7: Taro
Chapter 8: Hana
Chapter 9: Taro
Chapter 10: Hana
Chapter 11: Taro
Chapter 12: Hana
Chapter 13: Taro
Chapter 14: Hana
Chapter 15: Taro
Chapter 16: Taro
Chapter 17: Taro
Chapter 18: Hana
Chapter 19: Taro
Chapter 20: Hana
Chapter 21: Taro
Chapter 22: Hana
Chapter 23: Taro
Chapter 24: Hana
Chapter 25: Taro
Chapter 26: Hana
Chapter 27: Taro
Chapter 28: Hana
Chapter 29: Taro
Chapter 30: Taro
Chapter 31: Hana
Chapter 32: Hana
Chapter 33: Taro
Chapter 34: Hana
Chapter 35: Taro
Chapter 36: Hana
Chapter 37: Hana
Chapter 38: Hana
Chapter 39: Hana
Chapter 40: Taro
Chapter 41: Hana
Chapter 42: Taro
Chapter 43: Hana
Chapter 44: Taro
Chapter 45: Hana
Chapter 46: Taro
Chapter 47: Hana
Chapter 48: Hana
Chapter 49: Taro
Chapter 50: Hana
Chapter 51: Hana
Chapter 52: Hana
Chapter 53: Hana
Chapter 54: Taro
Chapter 55: Taro
Chapter 56: Taro
Chapter 57: Taro
Chapter 58: Hana
Chapter 59: Hana
Chapter 60: Taro
Chapter 61: Hana
Chapter 62: Taro
Chapter 63: Taro
1946Chapter 64: Hana
1947Chapter 65: Hana
Chapter 66: Taro
Chapter 67: Hana
Chapter 68: Taro
Chapter 69: Hana
Author’s Note
Glossary
Selected Bibliography
Acknowledgments
About the Author
1945
CHAPTER 1
HANA
My father’s voice wakes me—thick as wool, slightly scratchy. “Get up, Hana. It’s time to get going.” Music fills the room in a cresting wave. He must be playing the koto again.
Then a hand rocks my shoulder gently. I roll onto my back, flat on my futon, and open my eyes. There is no music. And I remember: my father has gone off to war.
My mother is there, kneeling beside me. She pours hot water from a kettle onto a fresh towel in the washbasin.
“Quickly now. Don’t make Sensei wait.”
She slips out of the room, and I lie there staring at the ceiling. Wooden slats, darkness. The sun will rise soon.
I get up. I roll my futon into a bundle, then push it into the closet. I kneel by the basin and unravel the hot towel with burning fingertips. Steam rises off of it like a sail in the wind. I drape it over my face, carefully wiping the corners of my eyes, my mouth. I breathe. Rinse the towel. Slide the cotton yukata from my shoulders to my waist and wipe my chest, my arms. They said the bruising would go away in a week or two. It’s been three. What was once black and purple is now yellow and green, almost gone, but not quite. There is a stiffness that has not left me. But I no longer limp. I should be pleased.
I finish my towel bath and pull my uniform from the closet. Baggy monpé pants, deep blue, gathered at the ankles and at the waist. I push aside my work shirt and retrieve the rest of my school uniform. Blue jacket. Middy blouse with rounded collar—a bit loose lately. My mother has taken it in twice already, as food has grown less plentiful, folding in the seams without cutting the cloth, tacking the excess fabric down with optimistically loose stitches. As if food and peace are on the horizon and I will need those extra inches back. For now, the cotton bunches uncomfortably beneath my arms, but we must make do. This is a season of emergencies. As was the last season. And the one before.
I pull on white tabi socks, split
between the big and second toe. Brush my hair in quick, long strokes and tie it into a knot at the back of my neck.
In the kitchen, a rice ball and a weak cup of hot tea await me. I use the tea to wash the taste of ash and dirt from my mouth. It’s there every morning now, these past three weeks, no matter how I scrape my tongue or rinse with water. The rice sticks in my throat, but I know my duty. For a week I would not eat, and I fainted on my first day back with my classmates. Now I do not faint. I swallow the rice, drink the tea.
“Okā-san, I’m leaving,” I call to my mother.
She is in the front room, the one that contains my father’s tailoring business. The morning is dim outside, the house darker still. She sits at a low cutting table, sorting through scraps of fabric too small to be of use on their own. When the sun comes up fully, she will pull back the shutters and sew the scraps together by the light of day. Something can always be made of what remains, she says. I hope she is right.
“Have a good day, Hana. Give Kaori-sensei my best. And see if your farmer has any onions to trade. This patchwork would make decent pants for children.”
“I will, Okā-san.”
My mother believes I still work in the fields with my classmates, that I help the farmers indoors with their tallies, their bookkeeping—hence my clean collar, my school uniform instead of work clothes. She believes this because it is what I have told her. It’s what we have been instructed to say to protect our families from worry. And the first lie I’ve ever told my mother.
I bow, slip my feet onto my platform geta, the cloth thong tucked snugly in the notch of my tabi, and slide open the front door.
There are both Western and Japanese houses here in Chiran. On the main street around the corner, many buildings have hinged doorways; some even have display windows. Covered in blackout cloth now, of course. The whole world has become darker in recent years. Lanterns at night are targets for the enemy.
Mariko is waiting for me across the wide road. I avoid the splashing stream that runs along the gutter. A gray-and-white carp glides by, headed for the river. Mariko is shivering. It’s chilly today. April is always unpredictable. By noon, we will be sweating, no doubt.
Soon, Sachiko joins us, and Hisako, Kazuko. One by one, or in twos and threes, the eighteen girls in my unit gather on the corner. We are the girls of Chiran Junior High School. Almost identical in our dark blue uniforms, white collars tucked in to make us less visible from the air. We wear our hair in braids or ponytails to keep it off our faces as we work.
Sensei arrives and claps us to attention. The sky is turning pearly gray. Shops are beginning to open their windows. Chiran is waking up. Everyone needs to take advantage of the daylight while it lasts.
And then we hear the rumble of the truck. And our workday begins.
The brakes argue with the road as the truck stops in front of my class. One by one, we climb into the back. They no longer pick us up at the junior high. The school is a hospital now. Our teacher enters last, pausing to catch her slipping geta so it doesn’t fall into the road, and shuts the truck gate with both hands. We slide down the wooden bench and she sits. The truck complains an old man’s gripe of grinding bones and dry joints, and lurches forward.
It runs up the rutted road, squeak-jostling at every bump, our young bodies flying up and down, as though on horseback. Mariko huddles against me for warmth, though the humidity is slowly rising. The road dwindles, leaving behind the roar of the river, the old samurai houses with their stone walls topped by high green hedges and tidy gardens framing the rolling peak of Hahagatake. The low-slung village homes built of disapproving wood, stained dark with age and rain. The countryside is ripe with the familiar scent of kuromatsu pine and cherry trees—with fewer blossoms now. We have to harvest at the shrine these days. We pass tea and sweet potato fields, climbing the gentle slope to Chiran Army Air Force Base. The sun is about to rise.
We arrive at the base and tumble out of the truck bed, clap our palms twice on the back door to let the driver know we are free of the wheels. The truck grumbles forward, pulling for home. We pause a moment, chattering like birds, like acolytes calling down a blessing of normalcy for the day. And then we begin.
We pinch each other’s cheeks for color, comb the dust and leaves from our black hair. Only our youth keeps our cheeks plump and glowing. Beneath our thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years, we are old women with youthful, useful bones.
Sensei claps for our attention. We don our best smiles and clip-clop like trained ponies to the runway. We scoop our arms full of cherry blossoms, the branches showing like black bones through the creamy pink flesh, like starving women, once great beauties, with some beauty still. The pink-and-white petals fall like sighs, like hopeless love in a movie, in a song.
We line the pitted runway, treacherous in our wooden shoes, their raised soles marking the dusty gravel with soft equal signs. We are equal to the task. We are Japan.
The Tokkō Tai appear, olive uniforms sharply creased, flight jackets left behind. They won’t need them where they are going. Their duty keeps them warm.
Saké is poured. Toasts raised. The generals give their speeches; the boys say their prayers. We accept their offerings. Gifts and letters. We offer courage in return.
We are the future of Japan.
These are our warriors.
They will save us.
The boys mount the steps to their aeroplanes, climbing toward heaven.
The girls wave goodbye.
The girls wave goodbye.
The girls wave goodbye.
Until there is no one left.
CHAPTER 2
HANA
Once I was a schoolgirl carrying books and giggling behind my hand with my friends. War was a thing for foreign places. But there has been no school in Chiran for a year now. Last April, even students were mobilized for the war effort. At first it almost seemed like a holiday. We went from studying books to weeding the sweet potato fields outside of town with the old farmers. It was hard work, but we all felt like we were doing something useful. Only we never guessed it would last so long. By summer, we were missing our lessons. By winter, it was as if our school days had been a dream. At least working in the fields assured we had food to eat. We were serving our country, and glad to do so.
And then one day, there were aeroplanes overhead, painted with large white stars. Bombs fell from the sky like overripe melons. Such a raid had never happened before so far from the base. I could not comprehend it, and stared at them in wonder.
And then everyone was screaming. I was screaming. An old woman digging potatoes beside me grabbed my hand. We ran and hid in silt trenches they’d had us dig alongside the road, where the dirt was clear of crops.
The melons burst like thunderclaps, throwing earth into the sky. My trench collapsed. I was buried alive.
Kaori-sensei knows this. My teacher was there, leading the charge to dig me out. It took a long time to find me. When they did, it was as though I had been dead a long time. My face was white with dust, my black hair gray. My monpé were caked with blood and soil, hardened into mud. I was a brick unbaked in an oven, waiting to dry.
“We’ve got her! She’s here! She’s here!” the old men cried, and they pulled me into the world like rough midwives, slapping my back to get me breathing clearly again. The other trenches had held, I learned later. We had been lucky, everyone said. My classmates were safe, and I was alive. But the old lady who had urged me to take cover was dead.
That was three weeks ago.
I was carried home on a plank of wood while everyone watched the skies overhead. Some stayed to retrieve the bodies, unburying the dead so they could cremate them properly. My mother was waiting in our doorway. She is often afraid to leave the house unattended, lest word of my father come while she is out. When she heard the news, she sent the neighbor’s boy instead.
His g
eta slapped along the roadway as he ran ahead of us, echoing out a tattoo to which he shouted, “She’s alive! Hana is alive!”
How I’d wished he’d shut up. Hadn’t anyone told him? I was a ghost. I was like the others. I was dead, too.
Kaori-sensei does not know this. Nor my mother. Nor my friends. No one seems to know I am dead but me.
CHAPTER 3
TARO
Spring 1928
“Taro . . . Taro!”
The wings of the crane drifted overhead, white as snow, bright as his mother’s smile.
“Taro . . . Taro!” The jingle of the paper bird on its string, the jounce of the stick over his head, the lilting voice singsonging his name.
Shōji walls, white ceiling, wall panel open to the burning blue sky.
“Taro!”
The little bird dipped and jostled, swooping and swinging through the air, white and crisp against the curve of a cheek, the corner of a smile.
Reaching fat hands, baby fists clutched, grasping at the sky.
CHAPTER 4
HANA
Our fathers have all gone to war. Or nearly all of them. Those that were able-bodied and strong. Otō-san left a year after the war with the West began. But Japan has been at war even longer. When I was barely two years old, the Emperor set his sights on China. A great depression had spread across the world. Japan was going hungry. Expanding into Manchukuo meant food and resources that the home islands could not provide. But Manchukuo was not enough. When I was eight, the Empire spread west and south across China, into Nanking, Beijing, and beyond, soldiers and aeroplanes carving the way. Some of the men in our village went to the mainland and came back with tales of adventure.
Japan had been hungry; now it feasted, and still its belly growled.
As our Empire grew, the long-reaching hands of the West tangled with our own across Asia. The British, the Americans, the French—everywhere the Emperor wished to be in the East, the West was also.