Rationing

EDITORS' PRIZE WINNERS Fiction—Mary Yukari Waters "Rationing" Essay—Jonathan Pitts "Little People" THE LARRY LEVIS PRIZE IN POETRY Ellen Bass RATIONING/Mfln/ Yukari Waters SABURO'S FATHER belonged to that generation which, having survived the war, rebuilt Japan from ashes, distilling defeat and loss into a single-minded focus with which they erected cities and industries and personal lives. Reflecting on this as an adult, Saburo felt it accounted at least partially for his father's stoicism. This was conjecture , ofcourse. WhenJapan surrendered he had been only six, too young to remember what his father had been like in peacetime. Saburo's memories of the surrender included his uncle Kotai being brought home, delirious with hepatitic fever, from Micronesia. He lived only a few weeks, unconscious the entire time and nursed round the clock by Saburo's parents. One of the visitors to their home was Uncle Kotai's sweetheart, a pretty girl of nineteen on whom Saburo had a crush. She wiped away her tears with a handkerchief patterned with cherry blossoms and announced brokenly that her life was now over. Saburo was impressed. "Big Sister really loves Uncle, ne!" he said later that day to his parents at dinner. "The grief didn't hurt her appetite," his mother said curtly. She was referring to the rationed tea she had served at lunch as well as to a certain fish cake that had been purchased, after two hours of waiting in line, for their own family dinner. In a dispassionate voice, Saburo's father explained that the amount of energy you have is limited, just like your food, and that when you love a sick person you have to make the choice of either using up that energy on tears or else saving it for constructive actions such as changing bedpans and spoonfeeding and giving sponge baths. "In the long run, which would help your uncle more?" he asked. Saburo supposed the constructive actions would. "That's right," his father said. Saburo's father had not fought in the war. He was barred from service because of his glaucoma, which was discovered for the first time during his military recruiting exam. So he stayed home while the war claimed the lives of his best friend, then his cousin and last of all his brother-in-law Kotai. Growing up, all Saburo understood of glaucoma was that it consisted of some sort of elevated pressure within the eye. "Your father has to keep calm," was his mother's constant refrain. "Don't you dare upset him, or his eye pressure will go up." It seemed to young Saburo that this condition was in some insidious way a result 58 · The Missouri Review of the war, not unlike those radioactive poisons pulsing within survivors from Hiroshima. At Uncle Kotai's funeral Saburo had overheard a woman say, "At least in his short life he was never thwarted." He understood later that Uncle, the babied youngest son of a wealthy family, had had no profession save that of martial arts champion and dandy. He drank too often, laughed too loudly, used too much hair pomade. Saburo had very few memories of him or of their former wealth, which had been lost in the Tenkan bombing, forcing Saburo's family to move into the merchant district. He did recall that once when he had gotten a nosebleed as a little boy, Uncle Kotai stopped it instantly by giving a hard chop with the side of his hand to a specific vertebra on his nape. "Aaa, be careful!" Saburo's mother had wailed, watching with both hands pressed to her mouth. Uncle Kotai used another trick when Saburo tried to tag along on one of his outings. "Let me come; I want to go too!" he had demanded, squatting at his uncle's feet and clutching fistfuls of his long yukata. With a rumble of amusement, Uncle Kotai reached down to press some secret nerve between thumb and forefinger, and Saburo's fists miraculously unclenched. Seen across the gulf of the war that separated them, this lost uncle held for young Saburo all the magic of a lost era, a magic emanating from...