Atonement for Iwo. Lester S. Taube

did not suspect. I also want to apologize for her manners last night. It was unforgivable.”

      He shrugged. “She had a right to ask the questions.”

      Kimiko shook her head vigorously. “You were a guest in our home and she embarrassed you. I am afraid that I built up the image of her father too greatly over the years and neglected to teach her self discipline.”

      “Aren’t you also bitter at the thought that I might have been one of the men who killed your husband?”

      She sighed. “I am bitter only when I remember the waste. The years have taught me to accept the manner of his death. It was a needless, senseless war, and I cannot forgive those who permitted it to occur. But I realize that my husband, and you, were soldiers who had to obey the commands of your superiors in doing what you considered was right.” She looked down at the table. “My heart is lighter knowing that he did not suffer and that he is with his companions. Twenty years of uncertainty, Mr. Masters, had brought to my mind many horrible pictures which made the loss even greater.”

      Their food had come, and they were eating while talking. Masters stopped chewing. “What kind of man was your husband?” he asked.

      A wistful smile tugged at her lips. “He was a great man. A kind, wonderful person.” Her face lit up as a thought came to her. “Do you have any plans for the weekend, Mr. Masters?”

      “No. I was going to check on a return passage to the United States, but a few more days won’t make any difference.”

      Her face registered dismay. “You will leave soon? Oh no.”

      “It’s not I must leave, Mrs. Tanaka.” He shrugged again. “There is just nothing here to keep me.” He paused as the thought struck. “In fact, there is nothing on the other end either.”

      “There is no family, Mr. Masters?”

      He sipped the remainder of his tea, then shook his head.

      Kimiko’s eyes lowered, like a high school girl about to ask a boy for a date. “Would you like to visit the area where my husband and I were raised?”

      He was about to say “not really”, but “yes” slipped out.

      “Thank you. Tomorrow is Saturday. Would it be convenient to leave at noon?”

      “That’s all right with me.”

      They rose from the table, he paid the bill and guided her back to the street. She turned and bowed. “Thank you for lunch, Mr. Masters.” Then bowing again, as if she was shaking his hand, she disappeared in the throng passing by.

      At noon the following day, Kimiko arrived at the hotel driving a new, expensive Datsun sedan. Masters eyed the wild Tokyo traffic as he climbed apprehensively into the car.

      “Good morning,” she said, moving smoothly into the streaming madhouse. She drove well, not challenging the wildness of the other drivers, and not being bluffed either, but fitting into the pattern and the flow calmly and without effort.

      Soon they were in the countryside, where Kimiko pointed out the points of interest, as if she was a guide for a special tour, and later stopped the car for lunch at an isolated hotel in the rolling hills. It had a small restaurant, containing less than a dozen tables, but since they had arrived after the rush hour, they were seated at once.

      “They have a marvelous fish soup,” she explained. “It will be good for you.” Masters raised a brow, and she suddenly blushed, then quickly ordered to cover her confusion.

      The soup was excellent, and so was the tea which they drank seated by a window that overlooked a grove of poplars and listened to the soft patter of conversation of the few other diners who had also come in late. They did not talk much, he and Kimiko, as if now was the time for silence, and it make him comfortable to realize that she knew it as well as he.

      He did not say anything either when the bill came. He could have eaten for two days in Tokyo for the same amount. The fact must have registered on his face, for Kimiko opened her mouth to say something, then closed it, as though she suddenly understood why he was staying at such a small, inexpensive hotel.

      It was past mid afternoon when she turned off the main road onto a narrow lane that was little more than a dirt path. The countryside was not a rich land, that Masters could see. It was hilly terrain, rocky, which tolerated only small patches of ground to be farmed. It was evident that the people had striven for countless years to conquer the barren, unfriendly hills by terracing the sides with barriers of stone and hand carrying earth up the slopes to lay over the hard, rock base.

      The danger to their livelihood was even more obvious in that fierce storms could easily wash away the stone barriers and carry down the soil the farmers had so laboriously built up.

      She stopped the car at the base of a jagged hill. About sixty or seventy feet up, a man working in a garden stood up and waved. He was a veritable ancient, bent and wrinkled, and his greeting brought forth from a hut situated to one side an old woman, equally bent and wrinkled. Kimiko lifted out a weekend bag, caught up Masters’ shaving kit, and locked the car doors.

      “I’ll carry those,” he said, as she started up the dirt path to the hut.

      “Please,” she said, smiling. “You are now in ancient Japan, Mr. Masters. It is the custom for the women to carry the parcels.”

      He eyed the petite, healthy woman in the light blue suit, wearing fine, Italian slippers on her feet, admiring the ripple of smooth muscles in the calves of her legs as she stepped lightly up the hill.

      She’s a helleva good looking forty, he thought. Then he began to follow her up the path.

      On a small landing in front of the hut, she bowed low to the old man, and when Masters finally came up, huffing and puffing, she introduced him to her father, Mr. Ishkawa. He was about seventy years old, neatly dressed in blue work clothes, with a thin beard and merry, black eyes.

      Masters bowed. “Hajume mashinte,” he said, in the formal manner of greeting.

      Kimiko presented him to her mother, as old as her husband and with the same twinkle in her eyes, who unabashedly appraised him like she would a chicken in the market place.

      “You are the first American they have ever met,” explained Kimiko.

      The hut consisted of two tiny rooms with a shed at the rear, handsomely wallpapered and well furnished. Masters guessed that Kimiko had fixed up the place for her parents, and when he wondered why they chose to live the unsophisticated life of the hills when she possessed the means to provide a more comfortable existence, he remembered what the man at the Association for the Protection of Families of Soldiers had said that the farmer remained with his soil.

      One room was the traditional living dining room, containing a kotatsu in the center. This was a wood lined hollow in the floor, three feet square and eighteen inches deep, with a table rising about a foot above it.

      He nearly burst out laughing when he thought back almost fifteen years to the time an artillery major and he had taken off for a weekend while attending an air ground course at Camp Drake just outside of Tokyo. They had visited a neighboring village for the express purpose of tracking down a somewhat famous whorehouse that boasted of extraordinary beautiful partners and unusually low prices, and while the owner was sending out for the girls who lived nearby, the major had sat at the kotatsu and opened a bottle of scotch. His girl had arrived soon after, a splendid looking whore, with the information that Masters’ woman would be along a bit later.

      They had played strip poker to while away the time, and soon the major was so cock eyed drunk that he was barely able to read the cards. Masters had really stacked them after that. Within a short time, the major was almost naked and pulling up the blanket being used as a tablecloth around his waist to keep from chattering from the cold. The girl, who did not know what in the devil the game was all about, was taking off her clothes and laying them on the pile building up beside Masters. She struggled to the end to keep her breasts from being exposed, even to the point of