memories

as you know, the war ended a very long time ago, and memory naturally degenerates as the years go by. memories and thoughts age, just as people do. but certain thoughts can never age, and certain memories can never fade.

...i have stayed alive all these years clinging to the frail hope that these memories of mine were nothing but a dream or a delusion. i have struggled to convince myself that they never happened. but each time i tried to push them into the dark, they came back stronger and more vivid than ever. like cancer cells, these memories have taken root in my mind and eaten into my flesh.

even now i can recall each tiny detail with such terrible clarity, i feel i am remembering events that happened yesterday. i can hold the sand and the grass in my hands; i can even smell them. i can see the shapes of the clouds in the sky. i can feel the dry, sandy wind against my cheeks. by comparison, it is the subsequent events of my life that seem like delusions on the borderline of dream and reality.

...but what i want to convey to you, mr. okada, is this: i happened to lose my life at one particular moment in time, and i have gone on living these forty years or more with my life lost. as a person who finds himself in such a position, i have come to think that life is a far more limited thing than those in the midst of its maelstrom realize. the light shines into the act of life for only the briefest moment--perhaps only a matter of seconds. once it is gone and one has failed to grasp its offered revelation, there is no second chance. one may have to live the rest of one's life in hopeless depths of loneliness and remorse. in that twilight world, one can no longer look forward to anything. all that such a person holds in his hands is the withered corpse of what should have been.

--lieutenant mamiya


a powerful expression of what post-traumatic disorder must feel like, with its roots wrapped tightly around the memories of extraordinary events, so tight that life is stuck in that moment, unable to move forward.