Each time it came, he'd open and close his mouth like a fish, trying to drink in the droplets. Though the typhoon had passed, now and then fresh torrents of rain would fall on the corpses and onto Takezo's upturned face. It was now past noon on the fifteenth of the ninth month of 1600. The night before, sometime between midnight and dawn, a blinding rain had drenched the plain of Sekigahara. Low, dark clouds shifted ominously across the sky.
Little did he know he was wounded, with two bullets lodged firmly in his thigh. "I must've been out for quite a while," he thought, wiggling one finger at a time. It was stiff, almost brittle, like the rest of his body. He wanted to brush them away, but couldn't even muster the energy to raise his arm.
"How long have I been here?" he wondered.įlies came buzzing around his head. He couldn't remember ever feeling so weak. He tried to raise his head, but could only lift it a few inches from the ground. He himself looked like one of the lifeless bodies surrounding him. "A man might as well be a dead leaf, floating in the autumn breeze." "The whole world's gone crazy," he thought dimly. Resident in Japan since 1952, he also received a master's degree in Chinese history from the University of Tokyo and has since been active as a translator of works on Japanese art, architecture and history. Navy during WW II and after the war received a master's degree from Columbia University in Japanese history. TERRY, the translator, was born in Mississippi in 1926 and graduated from Duke University. He received the Cultural Medal, the highest award for a man of letters, and other cultural decorations, including the Order of the Sacred Treasure.ĬHARLES S. At the time of his death in 1962, he was one of Japan's best-known and best-loved novelists. During his thirties he worked as a journalist while continuing to write stories and novels, reaching a large and appreciative readership through having his work published, often serially, in newspapers and popular magazines. He began his literary career at the age of twenty-two. EIJI YOSHIKAWA was born in 1892 in Kanagawa Prefecture, near Tokyo.
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