The Last Chrysanthemum

📖 The Scoop

As Osaka Maru steams into the port town of Kure, the great, grey war-making vessels of the Imperial Japanese Navy are making steam. The boy at the bow wonders where they are headed. Once ashore, he finds Kure changed beyond recognition. The boy is returning to Japan, to the only family he knows, his uncle and aunt and his cousin, Kazuo. It is seven years since he last saw his homeland. Seven years since, with his parents, he left Kure for Minas Gerais, in the wilds of Brazil, to fulfil his father's misplaced ambition to become a coffee planter. It had brought his parents only misery and ultimately, an untimely end for them both, leaving Hanro orphaned and alone in a foreign country. It has taken almost two years to find the means to return to his homeland. He climbs Mount Egezan and knocks on his Uncle Junichiro's door. The lady who answers is a surprise. She is a gaigin, an Englishwoman who explains that his uncle's family had moved away, to Hiroshima. She invites him in and he finds that she is married to a flyer on the aircraft carrier Hiryu, the Flying Dragon. When she shows a photo of her husband flying his Nakajima torpedo bomber, wearing a white hachimaki tied around his forehead, a samurai of the sky, he is immediately seen as a hero. The Englishwoman invites the boy to stay with her until he can find his family. In exchange, he agrees to restore the samurai's garden. The boy finds that he has walked into a tense and conflicted household. Then Radio Tokyo announces that the Imperial Japanese Navy has destroyed the US fleet at Pearl Harbor ...

Genre: Fiction / Historical / General (fancy, right?)