General Yamamoto Softens

by Kat Beyer

When Women’s Battle College went on Candlemas break, Dana Yamamoto went home to Japan. She took the Orient Express to the hydrofoil from Vladivostok, caught the Kyoto Limited, then shouldered her pack and walked through the blossoming streets to her mother’s high wooden house. When she entered the courtyard, the General chided her.

“I would have sent a chair,” she said.

“I know, Mother.”

“Well: welcome back,” said the General.

They sat in the spring silence and drank tea, looking out at the rock garden; Dana saw that her mother had raked it into a new pattern.

“What do you see in the sand, Mother?” Dana asked suddenly.

Her mother took a sip of tea, set down her cup, fastened her eyes on a river rock near the center of the waves of stone.

“Lives I could have saved,” General Yamamoto replied. “Wheels that turned too quickly.”

Dana put out a hand and found that her mother’s arm was living bone clothed in flesh, warm to the touch; somehow she had expected river stone.

“Mother!” She said. “I am studying with Dr Fujiwara. I will learn to save the lives, to slow the wheels.”

General Yamamoto looked at her with the kindest eyes Dana had ever seen in her mother, and did not tell Dana that she too had studied hard for the same end.

Instead she said, “I know, Daughter.”