One day he solemnly challenged me in the kendo club. The next moment I was hit right across the face by a wooden saber, such a powerful blow that I staggered. When I regained my balance, the victor bowed and thanked me for accepting the challenge. He took off his mask: his face was gleaming with sweat and glowing with secret delight. He bowed a respectful good-bye and left the dojo still wearing his kendo clothes.

Later, the boy said he wanted to be a writer, and he enrolled at the University of Tokyo. Since then our paths have gone their separate ways. At university he spent so much time with left-wing students that he became aggressive and contemptuous. Influenced by anarchist authors, he took a hostile stance towards the military, accusing them of interfering in government affairs, and calling them “assassins of liberty.”

I no longer had the time or the patience to set my brother straight. He had, anyway, taken to making himself scarce whenever I was at home. As far as I was concerned, Little Brother was lost, swept away on the great tide of red.

Why this change of heart now? Had he quarreled with his friends? Had someone revealed to him how vain Marxism was and how ridiculous their ideas of utopia?

I reply with a letter as brief as his: “My brother, after my first battle the only thing I now worship is the sun, a star that represents death’s constancy. Beware of the moon, which reflects our world of beauty. It waxes and wanes, it is treacherous and ephemeral. We will all die some day. Only our nation will live on. Thousands of generations of patriots will together create Japan ’s eternal greatness.”

17

At my age one friendship wipes out another, flaring up like a fire then dying down; they’re never constant, but each new one glows just as fiercely as the last.