The Cake Tree in the Ruins

“On 15th August, the war the grown-ups had started finally ended. The whole of Japan had been burnt to the ground and everyone was hungry, but amidst the ruins stood just one cake tree. It was always surrounded by children gorging themselves on its delicious leaves and branches, but the grown-ups passed right by without ever even noticing it was there.”

Post World War Two Japanese fiction is a World Class cultural treasure. Underlying much of the tremendously creative and often profoundly wise literature is the impact of Japan’s defeat in the war. When The Emperor addressed his subject on the radio on August 15, 1945 and told them Japan had surrendered and that he was not a god, the cultural basis for Japanese society was devastated. Kenzaburo Óe has said the most valuable result of the atomic bomb attacks was in the wisdom the terrible suffering brought to the survivors and care givers. Some writers, responded by writing elegant accounts of a destroyed tradition, others shifted to very violent sexually graphic works representing a now limit free ethos, others to magic realism. Some, like Akiyuki Nosaka strives to capture the pain of ordinary Japanese.

In “The Cake Tree”, set in a Kobe after it was firebombed in 1945
we are presented a very moving account of the daily existence of a group of children, ages five to ten. These lines show the impact on the children

“Adults were better at enduring these conditions, but it was really tough on growing children, especially since it was the grown-ups who had gone to war in the first place while the children were simply innocent victims. For those children between the ages of five and ten in 1945, it really was a miserable existence—they had never eaten anything tasty, while however hungry the grown-ups were now they could remember eating their fill of delicious food in the past. They would reminisce about the tasty eel in suchand-such a restaurant, and the mouth-watering tempura in another, especially the shrimp and vegetable fritters”

The search for food became the work of the children:

“Rice had been rationed since 1941, sugar was hard to come by, the cakes and candies that had once flooded into the ports had vanished, and by the end of the war the only sweets available were dried bananas and sweet potatoes. In order to survive, the children formed gangs to go scavenging for the tomatoes, cucumbers, pumpkins and other vegetables people had started growing in the ruins. They knew it was wrong to steal, but survival was more important to them, and they could sniff out exactly where tomatoes were turning red or pumpkins were swelling up nicely. “Hey, what’s this tree?”

The tree’s story is just so beautiful, magic realism with the touch of a master. I don’t want to tell the marvelous close of this story but I loved it. Nosaka, drawing on his own experiences, in just a few pages bringing to life a world now largely forgotten

This is the title story in a collection of that name forthcoming from Pushkin Press. There are eleven other WW II era stories in collection, one about a whale that falls in love with a submarine and a very deep story about the relationship of an American POW and a little girl.

All into Japanese fiction, especially works about the war, need to add this to their to be read list. I will be returning to these stories for more
posts.

Akiyuki Nosaka was born in 1930 in Japan, and was a member of the yakeato generation, ’the generation of the ashes’, who survived the devastating firebombing of Japan during the Second World War. Nosaka was an award-winning novelist, short-story writer, essayist, lyricist, singer and politician. His adoptive parents were killed in the Allied firebombing of Kobe, and after he was evacuated with his sister, she died of malnutrition. These experiences inspired the stories in this collection, as well as one of his best-known works, Grave of the Fireflies, which was turned into a hugely successful Studio Ghibli film (called ’a masterpiece’ by the Guardian), and which is forthcoming in a new translation from Pushkin Press. Nosaka died in 2015. From Pushkin Press

Mel u

I was gutted by this Japanese collection of short takes dated at the end of World War II, from the perspective of the little and defenseless, including a romantic whale in love with a submarine, a parrot and his boy, an AWOL zoo keeper. Somehow Nosaka conveys the effects of a brutal six-year war with whimsy and lyricism.

This is what I wrote, upon seeing the majority of this book, dressed up as a Pushkin Childrens' title a couple of years ago.


Out of extraordinary times comes extraordinary literature, and that's certainly the case with this book of fable-type Japanese short stories. They all centre around VJ Day – the submission by the Emperor of Japan to finally end WWII – and do so with galling, shocking, powerfully emotional and emotive darkness. At first we get something twee – a large whale that we are told is just too off-puttingly big for the female of his species, even if they are regularly larger. He seems to find a mate in a submarine, but that's not the end of the story. A young lad and his parrot, which had constantly been a quite unworkable memento of his father, live alone in an air raid shelter. A mother harbours her son in the middle of a fire-storm – yes, I did imply the tweeness ran out. This story, certainly, is hard-hitting enough for the adult reader, let alone the traumatised youth the book seeks to target.

The fourth story is equally bare and forthright about the destruction about the world – a dying wolf meets a young girl abandoned on a route march, and you realise nothing is being hidden from the audience, by any fashion or technique – the way the different animals all look up and see aeroplanes above them, and not some idea of what animals would assume them to be, is a case in point. We get a blunt and firm resolution to each tale – as well as to that age-old quandary, what would survive a war better – a cockroach, or a kamikaze pilot? Only towards the end do we get a sustained period of happiness – in contrast to the life of a POW, and ultimately a child's eye view that for once doesn't make us fear for the dreariness of our lot.

These stories are pretty much superb – tightly written, if fond of overly-long flashback sequences now and again, vivid and evocative, and I guess burning with quite a fierce moral, even from the Japanese eye view of the victim. They've been well presented, as usual, by Pushkin Press, although I really didn't take to the pictures that added nothing. They certainly amount to a strong work together and apart, and combine to create a book the likes of which you won't have read before.



And I can only second that having read the full original – although here, with this now being for adults, there are no dodgy pictures. The stories previously dropped – all hitting the 12-14pp mark teach us about the lot of a zoo elephant in wartime; the fantasia of a homesick, starving soldier stranded on a Pacific island; a lad getting too much pleasure out of his father's home-made under-home bunker; war balloons that get made, much to the makers' initial indifference; and a Japanese war horse.

Either volume, the one titled after the whale and the submarine, or this full selection, are inherently readable, and with their brevity and clarity, and distinctive feel that puts them at a remove from anything else I've ever read, are right up my street. Recommended isn't the word – urged, perhaps, or threatened over.

I haven't watched Studio Ghibli's Grave of the Fireflies yet, which was adapted from Akiyuki Nosaka's story. But I've heard so many good things about it. So when I saw this collection of stories by Nosaka in NetGalley I had to request it. These are simple stories with a deceptively whimsical tone. Infused with magic realism and the extraordinary, they read like fables, and land as lightly as butterflies. But each bears the weight and trauma of the Allied war on Japan, which the author lived through as a young boy.

All throughout these stories, there is death. There's no escaping the cruelty and absurdity of war. Parrots are little sisters, lonely whales fall in love with submarines, aging wolves find themselves mothering abandoned little girls. Despite the heaviness of the subject matter, I felt cleansed when I read this because of the tender, beautiful connections that living things make with each other when they are under siege. War is ugly, but life doesn't have to be...

All of the stories take place "The 15th of August 1945"--the day the Japanese surrendered, and all evoke a sense of surrender and loss. It's a good thing I like dark stories because these are dark stories. Children are starving, separated from their parents, and they survive by being with each other. The stories are fables, like the story about the whale that falls in love with a submarine, and you wonder what is real, what is imagined, and you see the horrors of war and hope for a glimmer of peace. The use of animals, a parrot, a dying wolf, the just mentioned whale, find a way to both dehumanize and humanize the brutal effect of war.

Nosaka is a master of making you think that maybe, just maybe, this won't be a story that yanks your still-beating heart from your chest and then, at that moment, doing so, just yanking it out. Over and over. Even when the story is not overtly about Allied fire bombings of civilians, it is and there you are, metaphorical blood pouring from your chest. The stories themselves are varied, from the viewpoint of a whale, children, US POW, etc and let me be clear, there are moments of such beauty here but no one wins. My use of blood as analogy is because this book is seeped in the blood shed and sheer trauma of civilians during WWII in Japan-something not often so well evoked in English. Expect to give yourself time to pause between the stories.

This is a series of short stories centered on the day the Emperor of Japan officially surrendered to the Allies in WWII: August 15, 1945. It was a good week after the atom and hydrogen bombs laid waste to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but this history-making event is not mentioned in this book.

The author died a few years ago so this collection has been lovingly put together and added to by the press. A version was published some years ago but this has more stories. The main form of attack on Japanese cities by the Americans was firebombing and this is mostly what Nosaka recounts, having been in a fire-bombed city himself at the end of the war.

These stories are incredible. They are magic and fantastic and entirely heartrending. I wouldn't be surprised if this were for YA or even younger children: every story is, in fact, a bit of a fairy tale and I think that children can tolerate the abominations of history better than adults can, just as they find delight in stories in which grandma is eaten, little children are left alone in a child-eating monster's house, and littl'uns are lost in the woods. I, myself, get sweat in my palms just typing 'lost in the woods.’ These stories are extremely beautiful and gentle and imaginative, the product of a mind that can transform horror into beauty. Only great minds can do this. We must honor their greatness. They nourish us.

As is clear, I'm no longer a child and I had to take serious breaks between one story and another. Absolutely no one is winning here: not the Japanese, not the Americans, not adults, not children, not animals, no one. The only people who win when devastating wars are waged are a couple of dozen men who have managed to dupe armies and populations into collective rage. One despairs that humanity should not have learned yet to resist these greed, recklessness and absolute stupidity.

Some years ago I became insanely interested in the fact that no one in America reads the memoirs and poetry that were written by Hiroshima survivors who were also (brilliant) writers. They are collected in translation in a book called Hiroshima Three Witnesses which, I believe, is out of print. Americans know about the only nuclear bombing in history, made by their own government, through John Hershey's Hiroshima. The novels and poetry contained in Three Witnesses (and other literature) show the massive shock people felt the morning on which the unimaginable happened and the massive shock the country felt afterward. The general Japanese population had a really hard time withholding contempt towards nuclear bombing survivors and I must say that I don't find it entirely surprising that this book doesn't even mention Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It may still be a national shame, though I confess not to having kept up.

In Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, what I found most shocking was the depiction of the firebombing of Dresden. It seems to me that, in love as we are with all things WWII, we are still extremely reluctant to look in the eye the horror, abomination and shame of victims and perpetrators (shame is a big deal in Japanese accounts of the war and it is a big deal in this book).

One can only hope that by reading this book some switch may be turned in one, two, 500 minds that will allow us to find a way to resist the insanity of war.