Naoki Hyakuta - The Eternal Zero

Losing a man like him meant Japan was finished. Was there any way my death could avert his?

I wanted to sacrifice myself for his sake. I vowed to stay right at his side until the very end. If any fighters targeted him, I would shield him. I would take on any and all anti-aircraft fire as well.

The formation headed south. The sky to the east was growing faintly lighter. I recalled the old Japanese word shinonome, the reddish hue of early dawn. I marveled at the ancients’ way with language.

I turned around to look behind me. Kagoshima Bay glittered. Kyushu’s mountains further in the distance were painted green, bathed in the morning sunlight. “Beautiful,” I whispered.

I was going to my death alongside a truly magnificent man.

I thought about my fiancée. I’ll be with you soon…

Mother, I’m so sorry! I shouted in my mind. My life was a happy one. You raised me with such love. If I’m to be born once more, I hope it’s as your child again. As a girl, if possible… So I can stay with you all life long.

Crying out these thoughts in my heart, I severed all worldly attachments. The beauty of my homeland, my feelings for my fiancée, the yearning for my mother, all of it.

Our upcoming ramming attack on an enemy warship then became everything. And I would die for Miyabe-san.

Yet not an hour into the flight my aircraft started acting up. The fuselage occasionally vibrated, and oil started spewing from the engine. The lubricant spattered on the front of the canopy, which rapidly became covered in a black film. I couldn’t see anything out the front.

I continued to fly, trying not to break formation, now and then shifting the angle of my aircraft. So what? No big deal that I can barely see what’s in front of me, I thought.

But the engine’s condition only worsened. The power output drastically dropped and I couldn’t keep up my airspeed. I opened the throttle flat-out but still found myself falling behind.

The formation leader pulled up next to me and signaled with his hands, “What’s wrong?” I indicated that my engine was acting up. He saw that my windshield was coated in black grease and gestured for me to return to base. I responded, “No way!” But then the fuselage began rattling and shuddering again.

The leader signaled anew for me to go back before pulling away.

I tried everything I could think of, but the engine refused to come back to life. The rest of the formation flew on, leaving me behind.

“Miyabe-san!” I screamed at the top of my lungs.

Weeping, I turned my aircraft around.

The plane was on its last leg. There was no way I could make it back to Kanoya. I searched for Kikaijima Island on the map. It was roughly fifty nautical miles to the west. It was up to fate whether or not the engine would hold up. If it failed before I reached Kikaijima, I would die. If I encountered an enemy fighter along the way, I would die. It was all down to my luck.

In order to lighten the aircraft, I pulled the cord to release the payload. The bomb didn’t drop. No matter how many times I yanked the cord, it wouldn’t budge. The bomb was rigged so as to not release. How cruel are they? I can’t even attempt an emergency landing like this. Command really intended for us to go die to the last man.

Twenty minutes later, I spotted Kikaijima. There were no enemy aircraft in the skies above the island.

Just as I saw the island, the engine gave out completely. All I could do was glide. The windshield was coated in black grease, which reduced my forward vision to zero. If I approached the landing at the wrong angle, the bomb strapped to the belly of the aircraft would explode. I couldn’t pull up, so there was no way to retry the landing after the first attempt.

I prepared for death. Just then, I heard Miyabe-san’s voice.

“You must not give up, Ensign Oishi. Do whatever it takes to survive!”

I could hear his voice perfectly clearly. Even after sixty years, it’s still engraved in my memory. It wasn’t my imagination.

These things do happen.

Right before I approached the runway, I banked my plane and looked over the whole airfield. I drilled the distance and angle into my mind and then leveled the aircraft. Then I closed my eyes, having decided to rely on my mind’s eye to make the landing.

The image of the airfield stood out in bold relief in my mind—so clearly that it was as though I was seeing it with my eyes. I could even vividly sense when the plane was getting closer to the landing strip. I nosed up, bringing the aircraft level, the correct posture for a three-point landing. The aircraft continued to descend. Altitude fifty meters, twenty meters, five meters—the moment I thought “one more meter,” the wheels hit the runway. The plane continued to roll for a distance, then came to a stop.

Even looking back now, I think that it was a miracle. I could never pull off such a landing again if I tried. It was as though I’d been possessed, a rare experience.

I was saved. True, once I returned to the interior, I would be sortieing as a kamikaze again.

I was told, however, that the aircraft’s engine was totaled and couldn’t be fixed easily.

In the evening, the base’s communication specialist informed me that all pilots on our special attack mission, apart from me, hadn’t returned.

Miyabe-san was dead…

It was there on Kikaijima that I listened to Emperor Hirohito’s broadcast.

“So that was your fate, Grandpa,” Keiko said softly.

“It wasn’t fate,” he stated. “Just as I was about to climb down from the plane, I noticed a piece of paper in the cockpit. It was a note, hastily written, by Miyabe-san.”

“What?” I blurted out without thinking.

“The note read, ‘Ensign Oishi, if luck is with you and you manage to survive this war, I have a request. If my family is homeless and suffering, please help them.’ I think he jotted it down when he went back to the Model 52 before insisting that we switch planes. Do you still think it’s by chance that I survived?”

Wordlessly, I shook my head. I’d actually expected as much.

It was only after a while that I could bring myself to ask, “But why?”

Grandpa slowly shook his head. “I don’t know, either. However,” he said, almost glaring at me, “I think when he got into the Model 52, he could tell the engine was faulty. He must have realized that he’d drawn a ticket for survival.”

In my heart, I raised a voiceless cry. What a brutal choice the goddess of fate had given Kyuzo Miyabe at the eleventh hour.

He went back once to his Model 52. He’d wavered, there at the end. But then he shook off his doubts and handed the winning lottery ticket to Ensign Oishi…

Next to me, my sister had her head bowed. Her cheeks were wet with tears.

After a long moment of silence, Grandpa quietly continued his tale.

It took me well over three years to find Miyabe-san’s wife.

Their house was in Yokohama, but the city had been reduced to ashes in the Great Air Raid in May. None of their neighbors knew where she had gone.

I returned to college. Whenever I had time to spare, I walked all around their old neighborhood, asking after Miyabe-san’s wife, but her whereabouts were a total mystery. Two years later, I graduated from college and got a job with National Railway.

By that time, many of those who had lived in Miyabe-san’s former neighborhood had returned, but she wasn’t among them. I persistently contacted my reserve officer friends from the Navy, thinking that if his wife was in distress, she might try to contact one of his comrades.

Another year passed with no leads.