#267 Rationing- Mary Yukari Waters

#267 Rationing- Mary Yukari Waters

If you only have a finite amount of energy or time, is it better to lament the bad things around you, or to use that time to try to alleviate the suffering? This story is about the rationing of emotion for more practical pursuits.

Saburo was only 6 when Japan surrendered, and he cannot remember his father from a time before the war, buts sees him as a pragmatic rock of a figure. “What he heard was his father’s voice: a voice like the universe, regulated and unknowable, with the endurance of silent planets rotating in their endless solitary orbits.”

He has a lifelong fear of running out of time, or preparing for a longer life than he will be allotted. This doesn’t seem to spur him into living life more fully, but seems to paralyze him into not making solid decisions. This is a one-life-in-twenty-pages type of story, so all we see are snapshots in the life of Saburo. He is lonely and afraid to disappoint his family.

Rating: 8-7-7-7 Total= 29

#254 Aftermath- Mary Yukari Waters

#254 Aftermath- Mary Yukari Waters

Makiko is raising her son, Toshi, in occupied Japan after the war. Her husband died and she is struggling with the rapidly changing world. “These last few years, however, with the war and the surrender, the changes have come too fast, skimming her consciousness like pebbles over water.”

Toshi is seven and being taught and fed by American soldiers. Makiko bristles at the same force killing her son's father now giving him sustenance. She tries hard to instill in Toshi the importance of his own past.

“A man who forgets his past…stays at the level of an animal.”

However, she herself has bad memories of this past, of her imperfect husband. What happens to such unpleasant memories? “They get scattered, left behind. Over the past few years, more pleasant recollections have taken the lead, informing all the rest, like a flock of birds, heading as one body along an altered course of nostalgia.”

These aftermath stories are always somber to read, but important to recognize. We’ve seen two so far during this project, the first being Hiroshima by Nam Le. That story was so much about the overall destruction of the war, while this one was more personal and individual.

Rating: 8-7-8-8 Total= 31