The Cake Tree in the Ruins

by Akiyuki Nosaka

  However, most of the air raids on Japan’s cities were firebomb attacks. The shelters weren’t much use against these, since hidden away inside them you couldn’t see the approaching flames and would find yourself trapped and end up suffocating. Many people were lost this way.

  Nevertheless, at the beginning of 1943, when the news was still all about Japan’s victories, the military had predicted that America would soon start aerial attacks and began frantically urging people to build shelters with the slogan, “Be well prepared for peace of mind.” There were various types of shelters, including those built in people’s homes under the floor, roofed overground structures, and tunnels or caves. Others were made by covering the walls and windows of one room in a house with bookcases and chests of drawers.

  The most common were the ones in people’s homes: they would take up the tatami mats, cut through the floorboards and dig straight down into the earth underneath the house. The hole had to make a right-angled turn underground to provide protection from the main force of the bomb blast, and also had to lead to the garden so as to avoid being trapped inside if the house collapsed.

  Digging out these home bunkers was really hard work. After all, you had to use a shovel crouched in a cramped space with no room to wield a pickaxe or other tools. This was all very well when there was a man in the house, but in families where the husband had been called up, day after day womenfolk scratched away at the hard earth with garden trowels like prisoners in escape movies.

  Nobody yet knew what to expect from the air raids. The military, for their part, were still putting up a show of bravado, saying things like, “Our defences are impenetrable and we will never permit even a single plane of the enemy scoundrels to invade the land of the gods.” Everyone was generally optimistic, unable to believe that bombs might fall on top of houses, but of course as rumours flew they still felt an instinct for self-preservation. Hearing that so-and-so had dug down over a metre, they would begin to worry that their own bunker was only as deep as the street gutters, and then they would learn that covering the base in wooden slats protected against water and damp, so they would take boards from elsewhere in the house and cut them to size for the bunker.

  And so it happened that one little boy who lived in the suburbs had a splendid home bunker, which his father built in 1942 shortly before he was called up to the front.

  The boy, who had only just started going to school, came home one day to find his father, who was normally out at work in his company, dressed like a labourer and sitting drinking tea with his mother. The house looked just like it did during the annual spring-clean, with chests of drawers moved aside and the tatami mats leant up against the alcove pillar.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “I’m making a room in the basement,” his father replied.

  “Really?” The boy’s eyes sparkled, as he thought of the basements in the department store, the cinema and the newsreel theatre, even though he couldn’t imagine why they would need anything like that at home. He looked cautiously through the neatly cut floorboards into the hole. There was a strange smell, and he saw something white mixed in with the earth that had been dug up. Looking closer, he saw two lines had been drawn there.

  His father finished his tea and crawled back into the hole. Sitting with his back bent in the cramped space, he used both feet to give leverage to the shovel, plunging it rhythmically into the earth, grunting with the effort. Watching him, the boy got the urge to help. He had dug holes on empty plots in the neighbourhood, and tunnelled through the sand at the beach. He was confident he could do it.

  “Let me help!” he said eagerly, but his mother stopped him with a fierce look. “No, it’s dangerous.”

  Thwump thwump thwump came the sound of the shovel tearing into the earth, with the occasional sharp cha-ching as it hit a stone.

  His father continued even as night fell. The smell of his sweat mixed in with the musty earth assailed the boy’s nostrils as he peered into the hole at his father’s pale, naked shoulders, muscles bulging with the strain. But it still didn’t look anything like a basement room. “Just give it a break, will you? I’ll finish it off,” his mother said, sounding thoroughly fed up, but his father carried on without replying.

  The next morning, when the boy went into the bathroom to wash his face, he caught sight of a smudge of dirt on the corner of the tiles. So Papa had a bath before bed, he thought with satisfaction, and the smell of the earth again washed over him.

  That day too, and the next, his father burrowed under the floor. The space taking shape there looked more like a trench than a basement room. As the displaced dirt piled higher around the hole, he had more space to move around in and could fill the shovel with mounds of earth that landed on the heap with a thud.

  “Are you digging a trench?” asked the boy.

  “Do you know about trenches?” His father stopped digging and looked up at him.

  “Yes, it’s where soldiers go to fire their guns at the enemy, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right. But this isn’t a trench, it’s a bunker.”

  “A bunker?” the boy blurted out. Then he realized he’d heard the word before. In fact he also remembered having seen pictures of them, imposing concrete structures with air vents like those you got in toilets.

  “It’s a place where you and Mama can come during air raids so that the bombs can’t hurt you.”

  “What?” The boy had no idea what he was talking about.

  After digging for five days, his father bolted together the cut floorboards to make a trapdoor, and also made a cover for the escape exit in the garden by the front door. “Keep an eye on it from time to time, as the walls might begin to crumble—if they do, get a carpenter to shore them up with some planks,” he told the boy’s mother, but she just kept a stony silence. The boy was proud of his father going off to fight for his country and trounce those beastly Americans, but his mother just seemed sad.

  The night before his father left for the front, all their relatives gathered to give him a lively send-off and even the boy was allowed to stay up past his bedtime and eat lots of the red-bean rice that was always served on special occasions; and on the day of his departure the boy stood at the head of the line of all the locals who turned out to wave him off. The boy only knew you went to the battlefield to beat the baddies, and he didn’t know that the goodies also got shot at and blown up.

  After his father left for the front, life at home didn’t change much. His mother nagged him a little more, telling him, “Hurry up! Papa’s watching, you know,” which made him look all around wondering where his father was watching from. They would go to the shrine every ten days, when she would tell him with a stern look, “We’re praying for Papa’s good fortune at war,” but he didn’t have a clue what she meant by that.

  The boy had just entered the third grade at elementary school when news came of his father’s heroic death on the battlefield. Surrounded somewhere in China, he had continued to spray the enemy with his machine-gun, killing many of them and greatly helping our boys gain the advantage. The boy was a little disappointed that they had been Chinese, not American, but at morning assembly the headmaster had praised him: “It was a courageous stand that would make even demons weep.” Much later they even received a letter written in ink praising him as a “paragon of the Imperial Army”.

  Yet the boy still had no real sense of his father’s death. When his mother in her white apron sometimes said to him, “You must be terribly sad that Papa died in the war,” he would reply, “I’m not sad at all. After all, I can see him at Yasukuni Shrine.” He had often been to the Yasukuni Shrine and knew very well it had nothing at all to do with his father, but adults were always impressed when he said this.

  Three months or so after his father died, the nation was thrown into turmoil at the news that Saipan had fallen. Now it was only a matter of time before the air raids would start. Until then drills had only been carried out perfunctorily, but now the b
oy’s neighbourhood began practising them with renewed zeal. Many people took clothes and bedding elsewhere for safe-keeping, and began feverishly digging out shelters like the one his father had made.

  A home bunker wasn’t a luxury item like a car or an air conditioner; given the way things were going it could save your life if the worst came to the worst, so everyone began devising ways to make them more secure, and if it was said that a dugout should be covered by a metre of soil, then everyone made sure that it was. Children and the elderly had to go in there during drills as a matter of course, so people took care to line their bunkers properly and put cushions inside to make it more comfortable for themselves.

  The first time the boy had to go alone into the semi-darkness of the shelter he hated it, but he soon grew accustomed to it, and then the figure of his father digging it out floated up right next to him so that he could even hear the thwump thwump of the shovel on the soil.

  Sitting there in the gloom, he could hear his mother and the other adults relaying buckets between them, the rasping of the hand pump, and the shrill orders of the local leader. As he gazed at marks left by the shovel on the bunker’s walls, he recalled the muscles rippling in his father’s shoulders, and became aware of the smell of his sweat mixed in with the familiar smell of the earth.

  “Papa?”

  Just then he heard a soldier yelling Enemy attack! and the rat-a-tat-tat of a burst of machine-gun fire. Not to be outdone, his father poked his upper body out of the trench in a hail of enemy bullets and returned fire. “Go for it, Papa!” the boy blurted out, and his father grinned back and reassured him, Don’t worry, I’m too strong for them!

  Before the boy knew it, he had pressed himself up against the wall of the shelter and was keeping his eyes peeled in the darkness; if the enemy turned up he’d warn his father right away, he thought with bated breath.

  “It’s over, so you can come out now.” The boy was startled by the sound of his mother’s voice and didn’t move right away. “Come on, the damp down there’s bad for you. And wash your hands. We have to have dinner now, since there’ll be another drill tonight.” His mother sounded fed up. “Does that mean I get to come in here again?” he asked, but she replied curtly, “No, it’s at night when children are in bed.”

  Later in bed he tried to recall the scene of him together with his father on the battlefield, but it was too hot to sleep and he longed for the cool touch of the earth on his skin. He resolved to go back down in the bunker as soon as he came back from school the next day, and with that thought he finally managed to sleep.

  The entrance to the bunker inside the house was kept locked, so he opened the cover by the front door and went inside as planned. Despite the bright daylight, the interior was in almost total darkness. He dropped to the ground face-down and inched his way along, the sound of enemy shells exploding in his ears.

  Seems we’re surrounded, lad. The two of us’ll have to defend our position to the last. “Yessir!” the boy answered. How fast can you run a hundred metres? The boy’s teacher had just timed him at school that day, so he could answer, “Um, twenty-two seconds.” Hmm, not really fast enough to run under fire. “What shall we do?” We need to call for reinforcements. “I’ll go!” Hold on, there must be another way. Here, take over the machine-gun for me. His father scanned the enemy lines through binoculars while the boy did as he was told and took hold of the big gun, peppering the enemy with fire rat-a-tat tat tat tat tat tat tat.

  You must be hungry, lad, his father said, taking some chocolate and toffees out of his knapsack. When the boy popped them into his mouth, sweetness spread through his whole body and he gave a deep sigh. Suddenly it grew light, and his mother peered through the trapdoor. “What do you think you’re doing down there? Come out right now,” she shouted. “The food in the shelter is emergency rations for when there is an air raid. And it’s not cooked, so it’s not good for you.” She must have thought he was after the condensed milk, dried sweet potato and white radish and other provisions she’d placed in there, but he didn’t protest. After all, it would have been even more embarrassing to tell her he’d been talking to his father.

  After that, the boy would wait until his mother was out before sneaking into the shelter to join his father in trench warfare, and sometimes they even flew aeroplanes and fired the cannon on a warship. They had so much fun together! And so when, in 1945, the air raids began for real and the boy was ordered into the shelter several times every day, he would secretly continue to act with his father even though his mother was there at his side.

  Don’t worry, his father told him, it doesn’t matter how many B-29s come as long as you’re in the bunker. I made it, remember? “Mm. But these walls look as though they could do with a bit more earth on them.” Yes, maybe we should pack the earth a bit harder. And so the boy patted the walls down with his toy spade, the way he’d seen his father do. But his mother scolded him, “Stop that! Don’t get up to mischief, now,” so he quietly patted the wall with his hand doing his best to make it safe.

  When the air-raid warning was lifted and they went back up into the room, the boy would tell his father, “Papa, I’m just going on reconnaissance. I’ll be back soon.” And when he returned to the bunker, he would announce, “I’m back!” and joined his father in mercilessly shooting down the B-29s, which he had only ever seen in pictures, and catching the American airmen who had bailed out by parachute. And in between battles, his father would take him to the seaside or to the mountains. When eventually the air raids came close to the boy’s neighbourhood and they started hearing the sound of the bombs falling and the explosions from the bunker, his mother would hold the boy tight to her, but he wasn’t in the slightest afraid. That was pretty close, lad, but if they come any closer we’ll wipe ’em out in no time! came his father’s reassuring voice in his ear.

  The war ended, and the boy’s neighbourhood survived the bombing intact. His mother was in a daze for a while, but soon recovered herself and put the furniture, which had been rearranged for protection against air raids, back in its place. And she started filling in the air-raid shelter.

  “Don’t do that!” protested the boy, but she just said, “It’s okay now, there won’t be any more air raids. They were scary, weren’t they?” and carried on shovelling, although truth be told she wasn’t really strong enough for the task. Coming home from school to find it half filled in, the boy peered inside and whispered to his father, but no answer came.

  That Sunday his mother called in two men, who roughly finished it off in no time at all. “What a ridiculous thing to have built,” they grumbled as they collected their payment and left.

  “It’s not ridiculous!” Tears welled up in his eyes, and he peered through the floorboards, which hadn’t yet been replaced, at the dark earth. Finally the fact that his father was dead sank in. Even when he’d seen the memorial tablet or the photo on the family altar he hadn’t been able to believe it, but seeing the bunker filled in brought home to him that he would never again be able to talk with his father. Sadly he wished the war wasn’t over and there would be more air raids. He felt thoroughly miserable.

  Peace came to the town and the streets were again lit brightly but, lost in his grief, the boy hardly noticed.

  A BALLOON IN AUGUST

  The 15th of August 1945

  HIGH IN THE SKY over the Japanese archipelago, floating eastwards, was a single balloon. It was made of dark-grey paper and was plain ugly, but at over ten metres in diameter it was ginormous. Its sheer size made it seem all the more lonesome as it floated there in the cloudless summer sky at dusk, untinted by the red glow of sunset or the deep blue of the sea.

  This balloon was a secret weapon known as the fire balloon. It was one of the more primitive new weapons devised by the Japanese during the Pacific War, but it was based on solid scientific fact and did actually achieve some measure of success.

  A balloon at the mercy of the winds doesn’t sound very reliable at all, but in fact ther
e is a fast air current that passes over Japan that we now know as the jet stream; at the time nobody knew about it other than Japan’s own meteorological agency. This jet stream is especially strong in winter, when it can reach speeds of seventy to eighty metres per second. Eighty metres per second is equivalent to over 250 kilometres per hour, so a balloon riding on this current would take only two days and nights to reach America. And it could do so without the need for an engine or any fuel, or anyone to operate it.

  It was reasonable to suppose that not even America would be able to defend itself against this weapon, and in this sense it was a forerunner of those much more dangerous intercontinental ballistic missiles developed later on by the Americans and Soviets. Even so, it had been devised out of desperation.

  For the first six months after the war started on 8th December 1941 the outlook for Japan was extremely good, but then she suffered heavy losses at the Battle of Midway, in which four of her coveted aircraft carriers were sunk and many veteran airmen lost their lives. This battle was the turning point for Japan, after which, despite a few isolated successes in occupying enemy territory, sinking enemy ships or winning the occasional battle, she weakened like an ebbing tide until she was eventually brought to her knees by the air raids on home soil.

  From the outset Japan had stood little chance against her powerful enemy, America. Having started an absurd war in which the odds were so clearly against her, it was hard to recover the initiative once weakened. The military desperately tried to regain the upper hand, and urgently sought to encourage the populace with some positive results, and so they went ahead with the fire balloons.

  The Japanese mainland was subjected to its first air raid quite early in the war, on 18th April 1942. There was not much damage, but it had come as a terrible shock to the population. Until then the military had sworn they would not allow even a single enemy plane to enter the nation’s airspace, but in the event the attack took them by surprise with just moments to issue the air-raid warning.