SAD TALES FROM DEMOBILIZED SOLDIERS
by Kurihara Sadako
Site Ed. note: The following poem was written in tanka format (31 syllables in alternating lines of 5//7/5/7/7), November 1945. It appeared, uncensored, in Kurihara's anthology, Kuroi tamago (Black Eggs), August 1946. The poem is actually about the repatriation of defeated soldiers back to Japan in the demobilization process.
Wake Island in the south!
Supplies cut off,
So many
starved
to death.
Soldiers coming home
utterly famished
resemble
pathetic
bare trees.
How sad—
Men dying
just as they
were bound to board
the ship for home.
Wives who learn
their husbands starved to death:
they must weep
every time
they eat.
They say they hunted
frogs and snakes;
the days they lived were
horrible,
nightmarish.
.........................
Reference
Kurihara Sadako. Black Eggs: Poems. Trans. Richard H. Minear. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan, Center for Japanese Studies, 1994, 102-103.
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