Read Online Burial in the Clouds by Hiroyuki Agawa - Free Book Online

since we joined the navy. My life here is utterly lonely. To be lonely in the military is most peculiar, it seems. I live in close contact with the naked flesh of hundreds, even thousands, of other men, shoulder to shoulder, day and night, leading a lively, tumultuous life, always on the move. But when I escape for a moment from all the rush, an overpowering desolation cuts me deep, as if I were totally abandoned in an empty, tranquil wilderness. My heart bonds with nothing, never once have I laid bare my feelings. This loneliness differs completely in nature from the solitude I knew as I studied in my second floor, four-and-a-half tatami room in the Hyakumanben district near Kyoto University, warming my hands over a hibachi on cold winter nights, yet satisfied in the belief that I was doing work that related to the world.
    My only consolation is that Sakai and Yoshino are here with me. Still, I rarely get the chance to speak with them in a relaxed sort of way. Besides, both men have changed considerably, each in his own way, over the course of the last five months. As a matter of fact, this place changes every living soul. We have ceased to talk about the Manyoshu. Everyone is trying his best, under a bitter trial, to find some sort of anchorage. I am by no means being sarcastic when I say that Sakai and Yoshino are, after all, uncommonly modest and supple at heart, compared to myself. We know that in order to survive as military men or as naval officers, and above all to face the shadow of death that looms before our eyes, we must have a firm sense of ourselves. We accept that, obediently. In fact, we are more than willing to re-create ourselves for the purpose at hand, when all we ever get drilled into us, by the chief instructor, the division officers, the flight instructors, the daily newspapers with their infamous tone and their conveniently selected extracts from books, is the necessity of carrying through this holy war to its end, our responsibilities as honorable youths, the glorious tradition of the Imperial Navy, and the ideal of “the whole world under one roof.” Neither Sakai nor Yoshino has ever been blindly fanatical, and I wouldn’t necessarily call them that now, but their critical, skeptical air seems to be diminishing with repeated exposure to all these mantras. First, they began to think that the slogans weren’t entirely empty, then they were persuaded that they actually made some sense, and finally they came to believe that these slogans were absolutely right, and that all along only their own “deficient consciousness” prevented them from seeing the light. At least, they seem to be moving in this direction. I stand alone in my pigheaded inability to abandon my suspicions. I could never assume the “spiritual” frame of mind that the instructors demand of me, and yet I can’t figure out for sure what to do about my future. In point of fact, that timid Sakai (and maybe this is precisely because he is timid) recently declared that he has begun to fathom the deep meaning of the phrase, “We shall be united into a single Emperor.” He is even prepared to espouse the theory that we never truly understood the Manyoshu, which is, after all, a collection of “ethnic” poems, because we failed to comprehend this great spirit of “being united into a single Emperor.”
    Several days ago, Yoshino came to me with a somber look on his face and reported a dream he had had. He tells me that his soul left his body while he slept, and traveled to his home in Osaka. He says that, while there, it read Poems for the Reverend Emperor, which Yoshino himself had never read before, and that, now, he vividly remembers the lines of a poem in it. Yoshino was shaken. Maybe he has already sent you a postcard describing this incident. What touched me, though, was how thoroughly Yoshino struggles, thinking, as he takes matters so hard, that he must stir in himself a spirit of