One More Sunrise

Yoshiro Yamawaki opened his eyes and stared into the darkness that was enveloping him. He thought he heard the siren again, but after a few seconds, he realized that it was a remnant of a memory from earlier in his sleep. He recalled a dimly lit and fleeting moment that occurred earlier that night, a siren calling out in the night, his wife, Emiko, sitting up, turning on the lights, looking around as she wiped the sleep out of her eyes, panic gripping her, stirring him, Emiko’s reluctant rise to the radio until the all-clear was sounded nearly 5 minutes later. 

Having just finished a 12-hour shift at the factory the night before, Yoshiro had laid his head down just after midnight, only to hear the banshee’s cry of a hand-siren cut the night barely an hour into his sleep. Once it was quiet, he started dreaming about Takato again, a quiet and still dream where they’d been sitting at a table enjoying tea together. 

But that was a dream-world: a world where his boy, Takato, still lived. This was the real world. A little after 8 AM. The usual time he woke up to help with whatever needed helping. He sat up slowly, careful to not disturb his wife, Emiko, who was still sleeping, or so he thought until he noticed the distinct lack of a presence beside him. She must be awake.

He sat with his feet on the floor while the thick cobwebs of sleep cleared from his mind. He shuffled his feet and found Emiko in the kitchen sipping tea and reading the morning paper. 

Like many couples who’d been married for nearly three decades there wasn’t an exaggerated good-morning display of affection- there was a nod and “Good morning,” from Emiko. Yoshiro made his way to the stove to boil more water for his tea. He began to wait and asked: “That was a siren last night, right?” 

His wife nodded her head slowly.

“Yes. It was. And you nearly slept through it. You sleep like the dead, Yoshiro.” 

At this unintentional jab, they both felt something inside that wasn’t entirely funny. Takato’s birthday had become a day to forget, not celebrate, and both Emiko and Yoshiro would have likely made it through the day without excessive discussion of their fallen son had it not been for their dreams… or Emiko’s comment… or simply, the wheel that is fate in itself. In truth, it was Emiko’s comment that gave Yoshiro pause, bringing back his dream like a grenade to his own mind, slinging his whole being to a standstill until the high-pitched trilling of the kettle brought him back to reality. Emiko was still reading the paper as he poured himself a cup of tea and offered her another, to which she declined. 

“You were up early,” he said, sitting down beside her at the table. He was already thinking about breakfast, some soup, and rice, maybe an egg.

“It was that siren. I couldn’t get to sleep after. So I woke up around 5 and I watched the sunrise.”

To Yoshiro, this was normal. His wife had spent many a morning staring across Hiroshima after Takato was gone. She’d watch the sun begin its ascent, shedding its light and illuminating everything in its path. The reason was her own. 

“Any more leaflets? I’d love to get my hands on one. See what it really says. I wonder if we should worry. After Tokyo?”

Emiko sips tea.

“Nothing yet. What can we do? Anticipate something that might never happen? The Americans are angry but… who knows?”

Except-

“I felt him today. I felt him with me. As the sun rose, I felt something rising with me. Like he had come to sit with me in the dark, just to say hi. And then he said it’s time to go and went back with the sun. He just came for one more sunrise.”

A few seconds passed before Yoshiro could decide how to respond.

“I had a dream about him. We were sitting beside each other, drinking tea and not talking. This Freud, I wonder what he would say.”

Emiko looked at her husband and held his eyes. There were no tears. They’d all dried up. At that moment, there was so much that eyes could never explain.

...

More silence as Yoshiro began to blow on his tea to cool it. Silence, it would seem, is not as severe to some as it is to most. Emiko and Yoshiro, for example, were used to silence. In the moments that followed Yoshiro's Freudian reference, you could easily include the life of Takato. You might be wondering: how can a life be put into a few minutes? The truth is, life is only what we allow it to be. What time allows it to be. And so, the battle between our minds and time rages on. In those quiet moments, with Yoshiro’s dreams and Emiko’s thoughts of sunrise, it’d be fair to assume that the life of their only son was on their mind. It’s par for the course, really, if you were to ask them what dominates their lives. Macbeth’s Banquo becomes a lot more real when you are faced with him every day for the rest of your life. 

…

The birth, growth, and development of a child opens up worlds that a human being has never before experienced. The death of a child rips a person open to experience a side of life they have never encountered. 

…

Takato was a young boy in the 1920s, and as a result, had a good time… Well, as good of a time as a society and infrastructure can allow a child to have.

 So did his parents. There was a boom after the war, and Yoshiro, having just completed his service, wasted no time in finding his sweetheart and making things real. Young Takato enjoyed a carefree upbringing as part and parcel of the roaring Japanese 20s. The earthquake in Tokyo changed things. The country, in itself, would feel the seismic after-shocks for years to come. The reverberations of the Great Depression were not far behind.

 As Takato got older, he, as the saying goes, got bolder. Emiko would always say (when Takato was out of ear-shot): “When you’re daddy was a soldier, why wouldn't you be one too?”

Yoshiro’s response, were he to have given one, would inevitably result in patriotism that was borne out of his school, including statements about loyalty and pride.

His parents were a bygone generation. 

By the time Takato was old enough, he decided to enlist. There was no way his parents could complain. It would have been treasonous, and above all else, his father would never have been caught dead expressing any trepidation about serving his country. Their true feelings were left as after-thoughts.

Until the message at the door that day...

A telegram.

…

The days that followed were the closest that Yoshiro and Emiko had ever come to expressing how they felt. 

They didn’t. 

They strangled the silence of their broken hearts. 

…

Emiko sipped her tea as Yoshiro fixed the soup. Improbable as it may seem, these aforementioned moments of life, of their son’s life, had clung to them. You might think that life goes to heaven, hell or somewhere else, and that’s fine; but you need to understand that everything can’t go everywhere. What we are coats those around us, like spray-paint, and we move on, a palette of the experiences that make us. 

…

Emiko turns to Yoshiro and holds his hand. Their house is quiet, bar the ambient noise of life on a Thursday morning with its streetcars and birds and car horns and voices of vendors calling out across the street and-

A siren. 

Their reactions are not sudden. Perhaps the one earlier in the night has given them a false sense of security. Or maybe there is that thing (that thing) that told them that needed to be told. But there is. 

There is something.

Something inside that says that this is something. The deepest part of the darkest part that doesn't come out until it really needs to. 

Yoshiro looks around, sees his wife and the life that he has collected around him scattered around his modest house. The window in front of him, hazy morning grey.

 There is a sound overhead. It’s like a million radios. They both panic, but it becomes a panic that laughs at itself. Something tells them something. 

Emiko says: 

“I love you.”

Yoshiro replies:

“I love you t-”

There is, in the blink of an eye, a second sun. 

They never saw it.