The Cake Tree in the Ruins

by Akiyuki Nosaka

  The 15th of August 1945

  IN THE OCEAN far to the south, on a narrow strip of sand between sea and jungle, a lone Japanese soldier lay fallen.

  The Japanese military had landed on this island soon after the start of the war, and at one time had used it as a landing stage to continue their operations farther to the south. Later on, after the Americans had started their counter-offensive, it became strategically important as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” and was used as an airbase.

  But its jungle-infested territory and crude facilities were of no interest to the Americans as they advanced closer to the Japanese mainland, landing on more important islands like Saipan and Iwo Jima. Meanwhile the military had their hands full countering the Allied offensive and were unable to do anything for the 300-odd soldiers left behind there. Even when they tried to send food and ammunition, as soon as they got anywhere near the island they were attacked by the Americans guarding the sea and airspace around it.

  Forsaken by friend and foe alike, for the best part of a year the soldiers lived in peace, untroubled by the sound of gunshots or explosions. However, they faced an even more terrible enemy: hunger.

  With no more provisions reaching them, they resorted to clearing land in the jungle, devising ways to catch fish and hunting birds and wild animals, and somehow managed to get by through sheer desperation. But it was by no means easy, with the trees so tightly intertwined and tangled up in ivy and vines that it took one man some three hours to advance just ten metres.

  It was each man for himself, and they never knew what would become of them tomorrow. If one got lucky and chanced upon a lizard, instead of sharing it with his fellows he would secretly stash it away. When one of them died, his share, however meagre, would mean more for the others, who would give a silent, heartfelt cheer at his demise. Hunger made the men mean and brought their basest instincts to the fore.

  They even ate butterflies, which are rumoured to be quite powdery, although I don’t know whether this is true or not. Field mice apparently taste like chicken, and caterpillars are a bit bitter.

  The weaker men steadily took on the appearance of paper-covered skeletons and died off one after another. Fighting to repulse the enemy forces as they landed and being overwhelmed by their sheer numbers was a miserable death, but still you died in the thick of the action. At least in battle they could convince themselves they were dying for their country.

  But there was nothing heroic about dying of starvation. They simply passed the days hungry and bored, squabbling with their best friends over a grain of rice. Losing all hope, some went mad while others thought up ways to commit suicide.

  After six months 300 men had become 250, and then, like a candle burning itself out, they succumbed in rapid succession so that by the summer of 1945 only five were left, each living separately from the others.

  These five had persevered, managing to survive by being adept at nimbly catching snakes, frogs and fish, and hoarding food that, however meagre, they jealously guarded from the others.

  The youngest was from a fishing family and spent all his time by the sea, diving into the water to gather seaweed and catch tropical fish with his bare hands. While his strength lasted he was at an advantage over the city-bred soldiers when it came to staving off starvation. However, there came a long spell of bad weather when he was unable to go into the sea, and all he could do was spend the time sleeping while the stash of fish that he had carefully dried rotted away.

  By the time the elements calmed down again, his body was so weakened that he was unable to dive far and consequently he caught little. Then, just when he was beginning to recover, another storm came along. Although he had fared better than the others, now he too became steadily emaciated until he was living exclusively on the seaweed that washed ashore. Eventually he lost even the strength to gather this, and lay down in the shade of a tree a short distance from the jungle.

  Hunger induces all kinds of fantasies—about food, of course, but not as you might expect about feasts. He dreamt rather of much more modest fare like, for example, the savoury pancakes his grandmother would grill for the festival at their local shrine.

  With dirty fingers, she would mix flour and water, then fry a circle of the batter on a hotplate before sprinkling it with small dried shrimps and green laver, topping it off with a trickle of sauce. The soldier could distinctly smell the delicious aroma of the sauce spilling over and sizzling on the hotplate.

  Or else it was the penny-tempura of lotus root, carrots, sweet potatoes and squid that he was sent to buy from the old man with the runny nose on the outskirts of the village. The man would often throw in some of the drops of fried batter, which they would add to their miso soup.

  The soldier could vividly see them floating there on the bowl of hot miso soup, making the surface all oily… and he could taste the fresh sardines that, exhausted from pulling in the seine, the fishermen would grab from the net, rip off the heads and rinse in seawater before gobbling them down still alive; and in winter they would return from fishing shivering with cold to be greeted with hot, sweet sake and miso soup with drops of fried tempura batter, which warmed them right through to their fingertips; and the freshly pounded rice cakes covered in grated daikon radish; and the parched barley flour, puffed corn and savoury twists from the old penny sweet shop, which now hung before his eyes so close he could reach out and grab them.

  The soldier’s father had died young in a shipwreck, and his mother had been so overworked that she too succumbed to pneumonia and died soon after he had finished primary school. After that, he had been passed among his relatives in the village and had no real memory of family life.

  Ever since he was a small child, he had been accustomed to working and buying his own snacks with the pocket money he earned, and it was these that came back to him so vividly now.

  As he grew weaker, it was too much bother to swat away the flies from his face and he screwed up his cheeks and blinked his eyes in an effort to rid himself of them. Now the food no longer mattered to him, he just longed return to Japan. It didn’t have to be the village where he grew up, anywhere in Japan would do… all he wanted now was to be able to die on home soil.

  The chance of his wish being granted was one in a million, but still he thought up ways to make it happen. He could cut down a big tree in the jungle to build a raft, and let the strong Kuroshio ocean current carry him home. The words of a song came back to him: A lone coconut washed up on the shore far, far from home. Once, out on a fishing boat, he had experienced the terrifying power of a swift stream in the sea that must have been something like the Kuroshio current.

  That’s it! That’s what I’ll do. His expression softened in relief. He lacked both the strength and the tools to build a raft, but even so he began to plan how to set sail for Japan as though the raft were ready to go. He was sure he had read something about the Kuroshio current in his elementary-school textbook. He vaguely remembered a rough sketch of the Pacific Ocean with arrows indicating the warm and cold currents, but he’d hated studying and spent all his time reading manga and adventure novels, and daydreaming in geography lessons.

  If only I’d studied! he thought ruefully and, forgetting about the raft, wondered instead about catching some migratory birds headed for Japan… if he wove a basket out of vines to ride in, how many birds would he need to carry him? With his emaciated body, a hundred should be enough. Maybe he could use hooked fish to catch them the same way adults used to catch cormorants when he was a child. How many days would it take to reach Japan? Suddenly he felt happy, as if he was already home, and grinned.

  The basket would probably sway. He had been terribly seasick on board the ship that brought him to this island, but would it be the same up in the air? As he thought about this, he started to feel as if his body really was floating in the air, and he felt a little sick. He tried to suppress it, but finally he couldn’t stand it any longer and the next thing he knew he was feeling tremendously heavy, though h
is body still felt as though it was swaying.

  He raised his head slightly to look around, but just then a tremendous roar sounded in his ears and a large flying boat appeared out of nowhere and landed on the water 100 metres out.

  “Ahoy there! Everything all right?” came the voice of a sailor from a rubber dinghy headed for shore. “Hang in there! We’ll get you back to Japan.” It was a dream come true! The Type 2 was the biggest of the flying boats mass-produced in Japan, and was used to transport important personnel. The soldier had only seen one once before, and was struck by its beauty. Before he had time to wonder why it would have come for him, a soldier of the lowest rank, he was briskly carried aboard, where an admiral dripping with gold braid was frying up some savoury pancakes.

  Seeing the soldier standing rigidly to attention, the admiral deferentially wrapped the freshly cooked pancake in some newspaper bearing the chrysanthemum crest and handed it to him. “From His Highness, the Emperor.”

  It was a pity that the pancake from the Emperor didn’t have any sauce on it, thought the soldier, but nonetheless he took it reverently and was just about to tuck in when a voice rang out, “Enemy attack!” The flying boat went into a tailspin, going round and round and round, then suddenly everything went dark and it was hard to breathe. Just as the soldier wondered sorrowfully whether he was finally dying, a large turtle appeared before him.

  “Give me that pancake and I’ll take you wherever you wish to go,” said the turtle, which looked quite ancient with its shell covered in seaweed. The soldier held out the pancake and the turtle took it deftly between its forelegs. When it had finished eating, it turned so the soldier could hop onto its shell.

  “How about I take you to the Palace of the Dragon God?”

  “No, I want to go to Japan.”

  “Ah, that’s a bit too far for me.”

  “Some of the way would be fine. As long as I can see the mountains of home, even from a distance, I’ll be satisfied.”

  Great shoals of migrating fish, like paper cut-outs, flashed apart to make way for the turtle. They were close enough for the soldier to catch them with his bare hands, but they were the turtle’s friends and so he desisted. He found he could breathe normally even though they were underwater. He recalled the fairy stories that his mother used to tell him. Was this how Urashima Taro had ended up visiting the Princess of the Dragon Palace, he wondered—then thought with amusement that being asked to hand over the pancake was more like Momotaro the Peach Boy.

  “I can’t go any farther, I’m worn out. There’s an island not far from here, so I’ll take you there.” Suddenly the surroundings grew lighter, and as they burst through the surface of the water into the dazzling sunlight, sure enough he saw the vague outline of an island.

  As they drew closer, though, the soldier was disappointed to see coconut palms. They were still far from Japan. He saw a number of people moving around, waving eagerly at him. They were pitch-black, with rings in their ears, holding spears. “Welcome! We’ve been waiting for you,” they called to him.

  Once he had alighted on the jetty, the turtle immediately disappeared back into the sea. The natives led him to a group of huts roofed with palm leaves, and to his great surprise, inside the largest of these, was a Japanese boy with big round eyes and a crown on his head.

  Just as the soldier thought to himself that he’d seen him somewhere before, the boy told him, “I’m Dankichi, the Adventurous Boy.” No wonder he seemed familiar; there had been a cartoon on television about Dankichi when he was a boy.

  “Thank you for fighting for our country,” said Dankichi, offering him some coconut milk, pineapple and bananas. “You’re welcome to stay here as long as you like.”

  “No thank you,” the soldier said emphatically, “I have to get back to Japan.”

  “Do you have urgent business there?”

  The soldier was at a loss how to answer. He wasn’t even sure why he wanted to get back to Japan. His parents were dead, and the life of a fisherman was full of hardships—so much so that it had almost been a relief to become a soldier, and even better than he’d expected since he got to see lots of new places.

  “I want to go there because I’m Japanese. I want to hear people speaking my own language, and I miss the mountains and rivers of home.”

  “But we only have canoes here.”

  “A canoe would be fine. Please give me one so I can paddle myself home.”

  Dankichi readily agreed, and gave orders for one to be prepared for him.

  “Please come again,” he said, and the soldier nodded, then paddled off in the direction they pointed out for him.

  Night fell, and the North Star twinkled brightly, and the soldier worked the paddles intently as he followed its light.

  On the second night, a huge black mass like a whale suddenly rose up in his path. It was a submarine. As he watched in astonishment, the gun turret at the bow slowly turned to him.

  “Wait! I’m not an enemy! I’m a first-class private with the Japanese Army!”

  The hatch opened and a man in a naval uniform with stand-up collar, severe-looking even in the dark, stood ramrod-straight with feet planted firmly apart.

  “I am Captain Takeda. What are you doing here?”

  Captain Takeda? The soldier had heard that name before. He looked more closely at the submarine and its bulging broadside with six guns fore and aft, and realized it must be the flying submarine Fuji from Showa Raiders. That’s right, it had been made by Captain Takeda’s elder brother, Professor Takeda, hadn’t it?

  “I’m Japanese, help me!” the soldier cried. A ladder was lowered to him.

  “We are on our way south to annihilate the Americans. At last we have them! See how efficient this baby is,” said the Captain, handing him a thick document that showed the vessel had an air speed of 450kph, underwater speed of 25 knots and sailing speed of 50 knots.

  So they had done it! “Have you got the Aoki Beam too?” the soldier asked, remembering the new weapon in Showa Raiders that had set his heart racing when he was at elementary school.

  “Of course! With the Aoki Beam, we’ll knock Grumman and Lockheed out of the sky!”

  But if the Fuji was headed south, it would take the soldier ever farther away from Japan. “Captain, I want to go home to Japan. Can you drop me off somewhere close? Anywhere will do.”

  Captain Takeda was not just brave, he was a military man with a heart. “Very well. We’ll arrange it somehow for you. We’re on operations and won’t be able to land due to counter-intelligence, so you’ll have to parachute out as we fly over.”

  At last he was going home! The soldier jumped out of the plane into thin air without the slightest qualm. Floating quietly in the sky he could not see a thing, not even any land below his feet. The Fuji had already long departed with a spurt of blue flame from its rocket. He began to worry whether he was just floating gently down, or whether he was being blown way off-course.

  In the semi-darkness of the ink-washed sky, he eventually began to feel sleepy. Just as he dozed off, he had the distinct sensation of being carried, the wind whistling in his ears. He opened his eyes and saw that he was indeed being carried, swaddled in white cloth, in the beak of a large bird.

  Oh, a stork! Of all the means of transport that had brought him here, this was the one he felt most at ease with, and for the first time he really began to believe that he would make it back to Japan, and to his mother. When he was little, his mother had told him how the stork delivered new babies to their mothers. That must mean he was now being taken to his mother and would become that little boy.

  As he hung, gently rocking, from the stork’s beak, the soldier looked down and saw Japan laid out like a map below him, with Mount Fuji rising up from its centre.

  I finally made it back. Home at last! His heart swelled with emotion. I wonder where she is? He leant out to look for his mother as the stork began its descent.

  In the rush of the descent he grew dizzy, and curled up
with his arms wrapped around his knees and his head lowered. Now when he opened his eyes, he saw her. Mama. Mama! he cried. Mama!

  On 15th August, there on the beach, his head pointing towards Japan and his body curled up like a baby in its mother’s womb, the lone soldier died of starvation.

  He was all skin and bone, but the expression on his face was utterly at peace, with no trace of suffering.

  MY HOME BUNKER

  The 15th of August 1945

  JAPAN HAD LOST THE WAR and there was no longer any need to run from the B-29 bombers and fighter planes.

  After 20th August, blackout orders were lifted one after another, and the streets after dark were once again adorned with soft lights. It felt like a very long time since the night had been coloured by anything other than the beacon lights on the B-29s or the fires razing everything to the ground.

  Once the flames had died down, darkness in the ruins had been complete. A blackout order meant that black curtains were pulled over windows, and black covers placed over lamps so that no light whatsoever could be allowed to leak outside. During the war the town was pitch-black, so much so that you had to feel your way as you walked—but just knowing that people were living there made it a warm kind of darkness, unlike the scary darkness of the firebombed areas where you expected ghosts to pop out at any moment.

  As light began tentatively to seep out of the makeshift shacks in the burnt-out areas, people began filling in the air-raid shelters. These shelters, or bunkers as they were also known, were for protecting yourself from exploding bombs, falling fragments from anti-aircraft shells and machine-gun fire from fighter planes during the air raids.

  To give you some idea, a 250kg bomb would open up a funnel-like hole in the ground around ten metres deep and twenty metres across, and the blast and bomb fragments would mow down everything within a 100-metre range. If you were above ground at this time you’d be killed instantly, but if you hid underground you stood a good chance of survival, even if you were terrified to death by the noise.