The young soldier nervously kept his eye on a horse while this was going on, knowing that if he went to its aid he would probably end up being beaten himself. He tried to reassure himself that at least the horse was having a rest from work while it was down. Come evening, as the horse finally managed to totter back to the barracks, he would go without his own dinner in order to tend to it. Even when it wasn’t his charge, he would stay with it throughout the night, tenderly nursing it as if it were a member of his own family.
He was worried about what would happen to the horses when the invasion happened, and dreaded the idea that they might be turned into real weapons, strapped with explosives and whipped to make them run into the enemy. But if the Americans really did land they would only be a burden, so surely it would be better to let them go off into the mountains. “Just stick it out a while longer,” he would tell them, although they were so emaciated that their bones stuck out through their flesh.
Every morning at roll-call the captain would brief the soldiers: “The miraculous moment when we shall implement our strategy to annihilate the enemy in a decisive battle on our home soil is getting ever closer. Dedicate yourselves to your work, fired by the certainty of victory.”
The young soldier was not completely unafraid of being blown to smithereens as he destroyed an enemy tank. He sometimes thought how sad his ageing parents back home would be if he died, but still, it couldn’t be helped. It was for the good of his country, after all, so he resigned himself to his fate and carried on. He was more worried about the horses. He really wished he could let them run free on the open plain, just once more, and eat their fill of fresh grass.
And then the town was hit by an air raid.
The town where they were stationed was small, without any notable factories, and not at all the type of place to be targeted by the B-29s. It was simply unfortunate enough to lie in the path of some B-29s returning from a raid on a port 100 kilometres away, when they decided to offload the unused bombs they were carrying rather than return to base with them.
This sort of thing happened all the time, and many rural areas were surprised by having bombs dropped on them by returning B-29s. Entire villages would sometimes evacuate if they realized that a B-29 was suffering some malfunction, perhaps damaged by anti-aircraft fire, since it would shed bombs to lighten the load.
For all that they’d just been targeted on a whim, though, bombs are bombs. Looking up in disbelief at the B-29s flying overhead, the people heard a terrifying whine and saw the bombs falling towards them.
By this time, the Japanese planes no longer engaged in dogfights and even the anti-aircraft guns remained silent, so the B-29s were bold enough to fly so low that you could see their fuselages opening wide and the bombs falling like a sprinkling of sesame seeds. But if you just stood there blankly watching you would die.
Air raid! To the shelters! As soon as they heard the warning, the soldiers had rushed back from the beach and the mountain to the barracks and were taking it easy, since there wasn’t much else you could do during an air raid. Their normally haughty, whiskered officer now looked white as a sheet and yelled at them frantically to get in the air-raid shelters.
The first wave of bombs fell in the centre of the town, and in the barracks they only felt the force of the explosion, which blew out the glass doors. The incendiary bombs were terrifying, but the sound of the exploding bombs and the way they made the earth shake was also scary. If one happened to fall near you, of course you didn’t stand a chance, but even those falling farther away made you fear for your life.
Incendiary bombs flattened everything, leaving an almost clean slate, but an exploding bomb reduced everything in the vicinity to a pile of matchwood. The victims too were a pitiful sight. In a bomb blast the air pressure briefly rises, and if you happen to be caught with your mouth open, air is blown into your body and your stomach blows up like a ball, your arms and legs are all blown off, and you end up a veritable vision of hell.
Inside the shelter, buffeted by the blast and with the walls beginning to cave in, the soldiers huddled together with no regard for rank and prayed fervently that they wouldn’t receive a direct hit. They wouldn’t have felt so afraid if they’d had some kind of gun, even just a rifle, and permission to return fire, but they couldn’t bear being sitting ducks.
The terrifying din went on around them for some time, but then all of sudden everything went quiet and the air raid was over. They left the shelter in a daze, not knowing how much time had passed, to find that half the buildings in the barracks had collapsed, while those that remained had had their windows blown out, the people inside had been blown away, and bits of paper strewn all around outside.
The soldiers finally relaxed, realizing they had at least survived. Just one of them was distraught—the young soldier who loved horses. Noticing that one side of the stables had been particularly badly damaged, he slipped away from the others as they began to get into line, and ran over to get a closer look.
He’d missed a good opportunity, he thought. If he’d let them loose at the start of the bombing, they would probably have sensibly headed for safety, and once the raid was over would have run off to the plains or the mountains, free at last.
There were three big holes in the stables where bombs had fallen, and he couldn’t make out anything inside. The smell of dust mixed with gunpowder hung over them. He sniffed the air, hoping to catch a whiff of his beloved horses, but instead caught the smell of blood.
Three horses lay fallen. For a moment, the young soldier had the illusion they were blue. In fact they had been spattered with shrapnel and were covered in blood, and just looked pale in the dim light.
Faced with this scene of carnage, there was nothing he could do. He couldn’t even bring himself to look at them. They were probably all dead anyway, and he couldn’t even summon the energy to look for the other three. He was just about to go back to roll-call when all of a sudden he heard the sound of a hoof pawing the ground and a horse breathing hard.
It’s alive! He looked at the pile of debris trapping the horse, and realized he couldn’t remove it by himself so would have to call the other soldiers on horse duty. But the horse managed to push its own way out and, elated to be in the open air, whinnied loudly and looked warily around.
It was a miracle! “Woah, boy, come now,” he said soothingly, taking two or three steps towards it, but the horse took one look at him and stepped backwards in fright. He could see blood on its neck and belly. Anxious that it would die unless treated soon, he tried to go closer, but the horse unsteadily kicked the debris aside and set off at a brisk trot.
The soldier ran after it without thinking of the consequences. He did worry briefly about roll-call, but then he was on horse duty and a horse was as valuable as a weapon, so it should be all right for him to try to bring it back.
Normally, a human would never be able to keep up with a bolting horse, but the horse was weak from its injuries, and the roads were full of people in all the commotion after the raid. Nobody paid any attention to the horse trotting along, let alone the young soldier chasing after it, covered in sweat.
They soon left the town behind, and the horse seemed to feel a little safer, or perhaps it was tired, for it sometimes stopped to graze or drink. It also seemed to have finally noticed its injuries and tossed its head in distress. Whenever the soldier approached it, however, it felt threatened and ran off again.
Eventually they reached the small irrigation reservoir. “Don’t worry, I won’t take you back to the barracks,” he told it, as if he were speaking to another person, “but you must let me tend to your wounds. Otherwise you’ll die, you know.”
It was all very well saying this, but he didn’t have any medicines or dressings, and while the horse no longer ran whenever he approached, it did try to twist its body away from him. The soldier understood how it felt. First it had been worked to the bone, then subjected to such a terrifying experience. No wonder it hated humans now! It
couldn’t know that the soldier hadn’t been responsible for the bombs, and that it had been the hated Americans that had dropped them.
And so night fell, and the soldier stayed by the horse’s side. He was now too scared to go back to the barracks. He dreaded to think what would happen to him if he was accused of deserting under enemy fire. They probably wouldn’t believe that he’d been trying to catch the horse. He decided not to think about it, and instead devoted himself to looking after the horse, gathering grass for it to eat.
It still wouldn’t allow him to touch it, though. He was worried about its injuries, which had become infected in the heat. It was getting very weak, and he really should go back to the town to find a vet, regardless of the consequences for him. But then after that terrible air raid he would never persuade anyone to come all the way out here to the mountains.
The horse and the soldier lay in the grass two metres or so apart. The soldier took out his emergency rations and gave the sugar candy to the horse, keeping the dry bread for himself. He would be satisfied if he could just gain the horse’s trust once again, he thought. In any case, they would both die once the fighting reached the mainland. They were fortunate to have gained their freedom before dying. He’d always wanted to let the horses run free on the open plains just once, but he now realized that ultimately that was what he’d wanted for himself. He’d followed the horse all this way because he himself had wanted to escape from the barracks.
Eventually the horse no longer tried to escape his approaches. Indeed, it no longer had the strength to flee. And it finally seemed to have forgiven him. Now when he stroked its long nose it curled back its lip affectionately, seeming to enjoy the attention. But that was all he could do for it at present. From time to time he would remember that he was a deserter and grew fearful, but then he thought impatiently that it was fine if he died here together with the horse.
On 15th August, the young soldier went to the reservoir to wash the sweat from his body and by the time he returned the horse was already dead.
From this day the crime of desertion had ceased to exist, but the young soldier didn’t know this. He pulled out his short sword, the only weapon that he had been given. Gazing at the sharp blade glinting in the summer afternoon light, he told himself that if he wanted to keep the horse’s trust he must quickly follow it in death.
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Pushkin Press
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Original text © 2003 Akiyuki Nosaka
English translation © Ginny Tapley Takemori 2015
The Cake Tree in the Ruins was first published in Japanese as (Sensō dōwa shū) in 2003 by Chuokoron-Shinsha, Inc., Tokyo (Original edition 1980)
The first seven stories in this volume were first published
by Pushkin Press in 2015 as
The Whale That Fell in Love with a Submarine
This edition first published in 2018
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
ISBN 13: 978–1–78227–419–3
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The verses quoted in ‘The Parrot and the Boy’ are from the song ‘Seagull Sailors’ by Toshiko Takeuchi, translated by B. Ito
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