The Plum Blooms in Winter

by Linda Thompson

  No reason I have to tell him right away, ah?

  Delaying the inevitable. “How under heaven did you get me out of that place?”

  He turned with a smile, knelt across from her, and placed the tray on the table between them. “Our friend”—emphasis on our—“Reverend Delham was responsible, Mi-chan. He pled your case very persistently with Suzuki-san.”

  She stared at him, astonished. “He did? After what I tried to do to him?”

  “Hai. He told Suzuki-san you sincerely asked for forgiveness, and he insisted you should get it. He wouldn’t give up. He used all his connections. He’s a war hero, after all.”

  Tears blurred her vision again. “That was so kind of him.”

  “Hai. He’s an amazing person, Mi-chan. I didn’t tell you sooner because I didn’t want to give you false hope.” The teakettle whistled. Akira-san stood and returned with a pot of tea. “Shall we pray over our first meal in your new home?”

  She shot him a smile. “You can’t imagine how much I would love that.” The prayer, and the home. She bowed her head.

  Akira-san prayed. “Shu Iesu, thank you for the miracle you worked today in giving my sister back her freedom. May we always walk in freedom, and in the light of your presence. Please bless this meal together. Amen.”

  And may it not be our last. Amen. Maybe she could put off telling him until the next morning. Enjoy a few precious hours with him, at least.

  Her eyes lingered on the porcelain teacups. One for him and one for her—like those his-and-hers bowls of sweet bean soup. That must have been another lifetime.

  She picked up the teapot and poured for him.

  “But your release comes with a price tag, Mi-chan.”

  She caught her breath and stopped pouring.

  “You are going to have to talk to the press. Tell them what a gracious thing the Americans have done for you.”

  She sighed. “I suppose that’s fair. It will be painful, but I’ve endured worse.” She looked into his face. “Far worse.”

  His eyes went soft with sympathy. “I’m so sorry for everything you’ve been through.”

  Something inside her shouted now. She tried to ignore it. But it had reached the point where it was harder not to speak about it, than to speak about it and accept the consequences.

  She finished pouring. “Onii-san, there is something you need to know.”

  He chuckled and lifted his cup. “I’m sure there are a lot of things I need to know. Everything about your life. And vice versa.”

  “No. This is serious.”

  “All right, Mi-chan. Tell me.”

  She sipped at her tea. It did nothing to moisten the dry sand that seemed to have invaded her mouth. “When you invite me to stay, you need to know it’s not just me.”

  He peered at her, teacup frozen in midair. “I don’t understand.”

  The clock on his middle shelf let out a loud tick. Then another.

  Out with it. “I’m pretty sure I’m pregnant, onii-san.”

  He set his cup down and blinked, like he thought it might help if he cleared his vision. “Ah.” That was all.

  She ran her forefinger along the fluted rim of the bowl of plums. “I guess I’m in my third month.”

  Air whistled as he sucked it in through his teeth.

  She took a deep breath. She fixed her gaze on the tiny blossom by her sleeve so she wouldn’t have to read the disappointment on his face. “There are other places I can stay. I think my friend Kimi would probably—”

  “No.” His hand landed on top of hers. “No, Mi-chan.”

  She looked up into eyes that shone with tears. “I’ve waited years to find you,” he said. “You are not leaving now. No matter what.”

  “No matter what?”

  He gave her a level gaze and shook his head.

  “No matter if I don’t know who the father is?” Not for sure. George-san’s face hovered in her mind, laughter crinkling the corners of his ocean-colored eyes.

  “No.” Akira-san’s voice was quiet but emphatic.

  “No matter”—she gathered all her courage and pushed the worst part out in a rush—“if the father might well be American?”

  A shadow crossed his face. “No.” The response took longer this time, but it was just as emphatic. “Mi-chan, whatever happens, we will deal with it together.”

  “Really, Onii-san? A mixed-blood child?” The words seemed to rip half her heart out with them.

  He stood and took measured steps to the window. He stared down at the street for a long moment, pressing both fists into the sill. “Your child. My nephew or niece.” He swiveled and faced her, tears glistening on his cheeks. “A person Iesu died for. That’s all that matters, Mi-chan.” He gave her a thin smile. “I may be just a two-legged ghost, but I’m not going to vanish. This ghost is here for you. And your child.”

  He knelt at the table, beside her this time, and gave her shoulders a squeeze. He pushed the bowl of pickled plums toward her. “Now. Please eat.”

  She leaned into his chest. Warm and solid, not ghostly at all.

  She shot a relieved smile up at him. “Arigato. For everything.” She dabbed away her tears and lifted her chopsticks. She was ravenous. “Now, you must tell me all about how the war went for you. I want every detail.”

  “Of course.” He toyed with a pastry, then looked at her with an expression she couldn’t read. “But not every detail. I’ll stick to the interesting parts, if that’s okay.”

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  Brands from the Burning

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  Author Note

  Thank you so much for letting me share this story with you. It’s my fond hope it will jump off the page and come to life as vividly for you as it has for me.

  After I read a historical novel, I’m always curious to know how much of what I read is fiction and how much is fact. I feel it’s important to answer that for this book. This is a work of fiction, but the bones of the story are true. And quite honestly, I’m humbled I’ve had the privilege to capture a story that centers on such heroes.

  A POW-turned-war-hero did feel led to show the love of Christ to the nation that tortured and nearly starved him. In 1948, he returned to Japan as a missionary.

  And a Japanese woman did determine to assassinate him, because a bomb his B-25 deployed killed a young man she loved. When she learned the former airman was slated to speak in her city, she showed up at the service with a knife in her purse, hoping to find a way to kill him. But she was so moved by his message of forgiveness that she gave up that idea, ultimately deciding to follow Jesus instead. (She did not make an actual attempt on his life.)

 
; Here’s a bit more historical background. On April 18, 1942, a mere six months after Pearl Harbor, eighty men took flight from the U.S.S. Hornet on a perilous volunteer mission to bomb Japan. The Doolittle Raid was a brilliant military success. But it left fifteen B-25 crews stranded in enemy-occupied China.

  Thirteen crews were smuggled to freedom, at great risk, by the Chinese underground. Two crews were captured by the Japanese. The entire crew of Bat Out of Hell and the three who survived the crash of Green Hornet enjoyed Japanese prison “hospitality” for the duration of the war—forty months.

  As you read in the novel, only four of those eight men came home. Lieutenant William Farrell, pilot of Bat Out of Hell; Lieutenant Dean Hallmark, pilot of Green Hornet; and Sargent Harold Spatz, gunner on Bat Out of Hell, were executed by firing squad in Kiangwan, China, on October 15, 1942. Lieutenant Robert Meder died of malnutrition on December 1, 1943.

  In the novel, I’ve got the men from Green Hornet (Dean Hallmark, Robert Meder, and Chase Nielsen) playing themselves. Although, as the legal disclaimer states, events and characters are used fictitiously, and this novel should not be construed as representing an accurate historical narrative, I’ve done my best to depict these heroes in keeping with historical records I located in my research. Many of the details are drawn from the account of their imprisonment in Four Came Home by Carroll V. Glines1, arguably the Doolittle Raid’s foremost historian.

  The Pensacola Payback is a fictional plane with a fictional crew. Dave Delham is an invention. However, his spiritual journey was inspired by that of a real (but very different) man—Jacob DeShazer, the bombardier on Bat Out of Hell. Reverend DeShazer’s prison conversion and subsequent return to Japan as a missionary are documented in a couple of biographies: DeShazer by C. Hoyt Watson2 and Return of the Raider by Jake’s daughter, Carol Aiko DeShazer Dixon, and Donald M. Goldstein3. Both biographies include numerous excerpts from Jake’s own comments and notes.

  Sadly, the prison conditions this novel depicts are as true to the Raiders’ actual experience as I know how to make them. I didn’t invent the tortures, the physical abuse, the privation, or the long months of solitary confinement. Nor did I invent the Morse code, the mental exercises Lieutenant Meder led the men to undertake to preserve their acuity, the names scratched under tin cups—or the impact of the books.

  Glines’ account includes a moving joint statement on what receiving a copy of the Bible after so many months in prison meant to these men. All four airmen acknowledged that, while they had attended church as children, they had never fully grasped the gospel message, and never understood the meaning behind the Bible verses they had memorized. They credited the Bible, and the trust it led them to place in the God who authored it, with bringing them through their “valley of the shadow of death”4 (Psalm 23:4).

  Chen and the other Chinese villagers Dave meets in the novel are fictional. No Raider participated in any kind of firefight in China. The Raiders were proud to say later that not one of them fired a shot in his own defense on the ground—which is why I don’t have Dave fire that Colt .45.

  Dave’s fictional interlude with Chen and Pete and Chen’s family was a bit of my own thought experiment. It’s estimated that the Japanese army slaughtered as many as 250,000 Chinese people in Zhejiang and Jiangxi provinces in retaliation for aiding the Raiders. An entire region was decimated. Whole towns destroyed. Men, women, and children indiscriminately slaughtered. Bacterial warfare agents—anthrax, cholera, typhoid, and paratyphoid—deployed, compounding the misery and devastation for any who tried to return.

  If the Raiders could have foreseen the price their Chinese friends were going to pay for bringing them to safety, how would it have affected them?

  As far as I know, Jacob DeShazer never attacked a guard. The guards did push some of the others past their limits. George Barr, the Bat’s navigator, threw a punch at a guard in Nanking. They gave him the straitjacket torture I make poor Dave endure. George described it as “the most harrowing experience of my life.”5

  Miyako and her family and friends are fictional, although the knife in her purse was real enough. She’s a composite of three different women Jake describes in his biography. I did my best to make her a fair reflection of the plight of many young women in turbulent post-war Japan. It’s estimated that 100,000 Japanese women were forced into prostitution during the desperate years following the war.

  As for the historical woman who once purposed to take revenge on Reverend DeShazer, her name and the rest of her story are lost. We only get a glimpse of her in snippets Jake and his colleagues captured. She attended Jake DeShazer’s meetings with the intention of plunging a knife into him. But his marvelous message of God’s forgiving love spoke to her, to the point where she ultimately decided to follow Jesus Christ instead.

  About midway through writing this novel, an early reader—my mother—asked why I felt it had to be written. Why dredge up such excruciating stories from a generation past?

  In my view, any novel worth writing (or reading) needs to be about something bigger than that particular story. Something timeless. On the surface, this one is about how a group of individuals survived a certain war and its aftermath. But on another level, it’s about two clashing worldviews. Both Dave and Miyako are doing what they believe is right and noble. It puts them on a deadly collision course.

  But they have more in common than it might appear. Both must come to a crisis of faith. And both must surrender the flawed ideas they grew up with about what creates a person’s worth and what makes a hero. “And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God” (Romans 12:2). This is true in any culture.

  The sordid situations this novel portrays—armed conflict, abuse of power, abuse of women, thirst for vengeance—have existed throughout history. And sadly, they won’t go away until history as we know it ends. They’re part of the human condition. As long as flawed humans are in charge of things on this planet, we won’t be rid of them.

  So why did this story need to be written? Because it’s such a powerful illustration of how God’s grace pierces through to the darkest places our world can devise.

  You might be interested to hear how Jacob DeShazer’s story actually ended. In his last weeks in prison, God told him to return to Japan, to teach the Japanese people about Christ’s love for them. Jake, a farmer and lay pastor’s son from Oregon, came back to the U.S. after the war. He stayed just long enough to acquire a Bible college degree from Seattle Pacific University. And a wife—Florence Matheny of Toddville, Oregon, who also completed a B.A. at S.P.U.

  In 1948, Jake returned to Japan with his new wife and baby son, Paul. The little family eventually settled in Nagoya, the very city Jake bombed from Bat Out of Hell. Their thirty-year ministry in Japan bore fruit in twenty-three church plants, numerous changed hearts, and many stories as miraculous as this one.

  Jake’s decision to return to Japan wasn’t as unique as I first assumed. General MacArthur, commander during the U.S. occupation of Japan, recognized the spiritual void left by the demise of Japan’s prewar militarist ideology. He begged the major denominations to send missionaries. Thousands of people responded. Many of these were men who’d battled the Japanese across the Pacific, then felt called to serve them in ministry after the war.

  Jake had a vision to see Japan become a “Christian nation.” While this didn't happen, millions of Japanese individuals responded to the good news of Jesus Christ. The Bible became a bestseller there in the years following the war. So did The Bells of Nagasaki, a personal testimony of the power of Christian faith authored by Japanese Christian Nagai Takashi — while he lay dying of radiation poisoning.

  God found Gideon in a hole. He found Joseph in a prison.

  He found Daniel in a lion’s den.

  Where the world sees failure, God sees future....

  He tends to recruit from the pit, not the pedestal
.

  - Jon Acuff

  FOOTNOTES

  1. Glines, Carroll V, Four Came Home (Missoula, MN: Pictorial Histories Publishing Co., Inc., 1981).

  2. Watson, C. Hoyt, DeShazer (USA: Carol Aiko DeShazer Dixon, 2002).

  3. Dixon, Carol Aiko DeShazer and Goldstein, Donald M., Return of the Raider (Lake Mary, FL: Creation House, 2010).

  4. Glines, 164.

  5. Glines, 106.

  Discussion Questions

  1. Most of us will never have to endure anything resembling Dave’s prison experience. But we all have our “prisons”—our bad days and difficult situations where we feel imprisoned and there’s no way out. What about Dave’s reactions and responses to his imprisonment enlightened you about yours? What takeaways do you have from his story?

  2. Have you met people who react to their “captors” (difficult marriage, unfulfilling employment, children on the wrong path, addictions to food, alcohol, internet, etc.) in ways similar to Dave (rage, hatred, contempt, dehumanizing)? What can you learn from Dave’s errors? From his good choices? How can you pass that along to others?

  3. The Bible is filled with conversion stories. We read about others’ conversions and are challenged to consider where we are with our own. Are we “all-in” with Jesus? Believe in Him, yet still behave as if we are in control of our lives? Do we talk the talk, but fail to walk the walk in some ways? Have you ever had an opportunity to mentor a new Christian? If not, can you think of ways you might be able to get involved in the lives of people struggling in their faith?

  4. How does Miyako’s conversion story compare to Dave’s? Does hearing about such dramatic conversions solidify your faith journey? Boost it? How, or why not?

  5. Think about a time when you needed to ask for forgiveness. Did you do it? Or did you justify your actions, as Dave does through much of the novel, so you could sidestep your need to humble yourself and seek forgiveness? If you did seek forgiveness, how did the person respond? How did you feel afterward?