The Payoff

Tokyo, Taishō 3

An exchange of letters.

After Emperor Meiji's passing, a commemorative shrine was planned. Mrs. Myōjin had adored her Emperor, and had read every news story she could find on him and his Empress. His passing had saddened her greatly, and both she and her husband waited for many hours among the silent, reverent throngs that lined the street along which his funeral cortege was to pass. It was the last event they attended together, and she was glad they had been able to share it before her beloved, too, passed out of her life. When it was announced that the chosen location of the shrine was the iris garden where the Emperor and Empress often visited during their visits to the Eastern City, she set her mind on the idea that two of Tomoe's bulbs should make their way into the new garden. She wrote to her son, who was in his third year studying engineering at the university in Tokyo.

My dearest son,

I am hoping you still harbor warm thoughts for your mother. If that is so, perhaps you will be inclined to do something for me.

The shrine being built to honor our dear Meiji Emperor will include an iris garden, and the invitation has gone out for the whole country to send bulbs from all regions. If you remember the story behind my irises, you know it will be a happiness for me to send two of my own, and to think that those two souls are still watching together over the era they helped to create.

If you are willing to indulge your old mother's foolish dream, please write back to me.

I am well, and you are in my heart every moment. Daily I ask our ancestors to watch over you and bring you good fortune. Do your best in your studies so that life favors you, and so your father can watch over you with pride.

Your devoted mother

Shinya did write back.

Honored mother,

It pleases me to hear of your good health.

I well remember the stories you have told me. I think that you will not be satisfied with merely sending your irises to me. I have a school break coming up, so I will come get you, and together we will tour the garden in progress. You may then give your flowers to the gardeners with your own hands.

Stay well until my return. Please take very good care of yourself until we are together again. I long to see you.

Your loving son

Mrs. Myōjin and her son arrived in Tokyo just as the cherry blossoms began to fall. Japan's new capital city was awash with flower-viewing parties, and the two of them laughed together as they picked pink and white petals out of each other's hair. Shinya escorted his mother to his favorite points of interest, and introduced her to the dishes and fashions of the booming city's young population. She was eager and game, but he noticed that her walk was slower than he remembered, and she tired early in the afternoon. At the end of a week, he loaded her with souvenirs and mementos of their time together, and put her on the train for Kyoto. Before she boarded, she kissed his cheek, right there in the train station. Neither of them mentioned her new fragility. She was home in a matter of hours, and she recalled with fondness how, in her youth, it had taken their patchwork family twenty days to walk this same path, once there and once back again after their great adventure against the evil Shishio and his band of thugs.

In early August, Shinya journeyed home one last time, the trip this time an urgent and heartbreaking interruption of his studies. He had not expected to lose the last of his family so soon. Afterwards, he did not return to school, but instead enlisted in the Navy, and was detailed to the destroyer Shirotae. He liked this assignment, liked putting his engineering skills to good use. They executed three day-long training cruises, just in and out of the harbor, and then put out from Osaka in late August for the port of Tsingtao on China's Shandong Peninsula. There, Japan and Great Britain were struggling to wrest control of the port from Germany and, on their fifth day of action, the destroyer engaged the German gunboat SMS Jaguar. The Shirotae was the only ship Japan lost in that first world-wide conflagration. There were no survivors.

Thirty-one years later, the Meiji memorial shrine was itself destroyed in a rain of fire from the sky, wiping out the last remembrance of the boy and the girl who rode the winds of change.