For Chizuko, the day would be anything but ordinary.
On the first day, early in the morning, Chizuko heard the mes-senger fun to the door, panting noisily, just as she was washing up.His thick, hoarse voice delivered alarming news. In the pte-dawn hours, the Nishigi Battalion had been assigned to a combat mis-sion. The captain told her later, "No more consolation." He gave Nobuhiro two days'leave. But thefe was nowhere to camp, because of the fighting, and they had to push onward with the troops.
From the very first day, Chizuko sensed she would suddenly lose him, and this nagging worry tainted the happiness that filled her to overfiowing, like an undercurrent pulling on a boat, threat-ening to flip it. When she thought of him leaving tomorrow, to go back to fighting, she realized she might never see him again, and a chill ran through her. She looked at him with deep affection. She could have kept looking for a hundred years, or ten thousand. She longed to take him back home with her.
From the beginning the urge was hard to hold back. She knew it was foolish, but she couldn't restrain it. These thoughts just kept
arising, like the tide rolling in, driving her as mad as a crashing tsu-nami. She cleady heard a voice in her mind saying, "We're not in Japan anymore, and whatever they may say, fighting in a foreign land is always dangerous." The illusions of those Japanese war films she'd seen at home butst like bubbles in her heart. The idea of a "holy war" now seemed so empty, a falsehood she could never again accept.
Along the road she saw only hostility and hate. And each eve-ning images of brutality replayed in her mind, keeping her from sleep, especially when she slept in the bed in someone else's house,not knowing if the owner was alive or dead, but knowing they'd lived a calm and quiet life before suddenly losing their home to war.
It was a terrible tragedy to be left without a home...throughout the davs and nights she spent in China. her heart and mind were never at ease.
The sun rose quickly, like a balloon cut loose from its string,and as its color changed from red to white, dazzling radiance blind-ed them. A morning breeze began to stir, caressing their skin as softly as the sun. The driver squinted into the light. He was a little older than them, his face always lit by a hint of a smile, so that you never knew if it was the sunlight or a smile gleaming in his eyes.From time to time he would deliberately crane his neck out over the steering wheel, showing them he couldn't see. But what could they do about it?
Nobuhiro enfolded Chizuko in his arms,inhaling her fragrance,trying to imprint it forever in his memory. His heart thumped vi-olently, and Chizuko felt his pulse raang. She didn't know it, but her big black eyes betrayed the overwhelming depth of her grief.Nobuhiro's body went alternately cold, then tense, as if he'd been stricken with malatia, and he counted the moments, knowing that before long, he would lose her. Grief and desolation engulfed him.
Meeting her had only plunged his life deeper into tragedy The convoy headed south, then southeast, until amid the rolling hills of red earth, there was no more road. The locals had destroyed it. The ttucks traveled on ruts worn by tanks, then patches worked flat by sappers and coolies. They said most of the coolies had been brought by force from Hubei, because there wasn't enough local labor. The trucks jolted and jarred from left to right, leaving the drivers with no time to attend to theit passengers, eyes fixed on the road lest the truck tip over sideways or plunge into a ditch.
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