The Eggplant Legacy

Abstract

I have been a rice farmer all my life in this village in the mountains of Okayama. Only four exciting things have happened to me in my sixty-two years of hard work and modest return. Strange to say they are all somehow related, though the third and the fourth happened years and years after the first and the second. The first was the day in the year of Showa 19, during the Pacific War, when we eight friends, four boys and four girls, sat on the edge of a rice field overlooking the valley and watched the distant air battle above Okayama. It was, I guess, sometime in the spring. We were not supposed to be there, but hiding in the shelter next to our little school house. We eight had escaped and though we were frightened when the bombs exploded in Okayama City or an airplane exploded, we were happy to be there because of the sheer excitement. And what a sight to see! The bombs fell in long columns and went off with quick flashes and much smoke. A moment later we could hear their noise like a series of pop-pop-pops. The people bombing us were the Americans in B-29 bombers. Our army was shooting at them from the ground and filling the sky with little black clouds. Our air force was attacking them in Mitsubishi Zero fighters. Whenever a bomber was hit, a long black trail of smoke would come out of it and it would slowly turn over and over as it went down in a graceful spiral. Sometimes, if you squinted and looked hard, you might see little parachutes coming out of the falling B-29. ^ut when one of our fighters was hit it just exploded and there'd be nothing left of it. We were absolutely insensitive to the death and suffering we were witnessing. This was not because we were so young but because we were always hungry and because our clothes were rags and because each of us had lost family members in battle. My own father had died early in the Great Pacific War and my two elder brothers went missing in action. They never came back.