The Book of Water

The year is 1947. The surviving youths of the Republic have suffered a decline in national loyalty, pride, and unity. A national conscription commences in which approximately 2,000 schoolchildren will sacrifice their lives for the sake of national defense against the Western world. This is their mission: fight and die with honor, as their fathers and brothers had valiantly fought and died in the Second Great War.

It is the Battle Experiment No. 68 Program.

Fifty years from today, it will be known simply as the Program.

Chapter One

May 1946

Town of Akiyama near Nagaoka in Niigata Prefecture

School reopened that spring. Underneath the weeping cherry blossoms families were reunited or buried as official condolences traveled across the country from the military headquarters. This period, traditionally a renewal of life after a harsh and unforgiving winter was damp in comparison. Recovery and stability were the national mandates, and revitalization a feeble, pretty word that belonged to no one. While families mourned over identical letters printed on stiff paper, the nation's youth rotated dusty textbooks in their hands and wondered, why bother? Indeed, why bother with education?

Formal education provided no advantage during miserable battles, and intelligence a tool by which a soldier might live a day more, but thousands were still dead. And at home the undrafted had no thought or need of books while huddled in dark underground shelters or running through the blaze of an incendiary bomb. After the nation had lifted itself to a deceivingly stable position, the protests and rallies began. They were popular events in the cities, almost a social norm by the New Year.

People at the time simply didn't attend school. People he might have called his classmates before the war were preoccupied with the ticket life had allotted them. When they had a chance to escape the throes of work, they seized it. Rebuilding families, sending the youngest to elementary school for the basic necessities so that they may grow to work as well, were the main concerns of their generation. No one could force them to attend school if their entire generation resisted.

Their faulty logic did not last long. A new legislation declared education mandatory for all students, though it hardly impacted the weary children who could do nothing more than stare at the dilapidated school building and laugh. Should the bombings have reached their area, this school would have been converted into a refuge for the moaning and suffering citizens. Free weeds and layers of dust infested the concrete and brick structure, aging it beyond its years.

But they believed they had a reason to laugh at the ghostly windows and rusted metal piping. The volatile adults in the government had sacrificed millions of lives to win a costly war. In 1946 there was not a single person who had not lost someone of immediate relations or friendship for this rightful defense of their nation against the imperialistic West. During the rare opportunities he found to see his former classmates, he could not meet a single one who had emerged unscathed from the war.

There was a majority of young people he was not acquainted with – the ones who had migrated here to escape the bombings in industrial areas of the country. These city kids and the native country kids became the divide in their community as the strangely mannered refugees flooded into the prefecture. Through a common unity brought on by the suffering and hard times in the tide of war, at least some of those barriers had fractured and floated down the Shinano River. It was their only blessing.

Standing before each other in uniform around the dusty classroom 4B, was somehow a different matter altogether. He would have ventured to assume that whether or not they had a basket of shriveled vegetables, a shovel, or a book bag wouldn't affect the manner in which they saw the others. All twenty-nine of his classmates shuffled on the wooden floors, uncertain and indecisive before they migrated towards old friends and alliances. Soon the rectangular classroom had been divided into the locals and the city kids. Not a single one wanted to be there, but the government had made its demands very clear.

The protests weren't any of their concern, as far as they knew. Niigata City housed the nearest source of any significant uprising, but less than a handful of them had ever stepped foot there. After that first awkward day back, almost none of them bothered attending. They chose the days they wanted to spare for the hike all the way to the junior high school, and spent class time listening to their teachers with half an ear. Most of the older high school students had been drafted and those who returned were young men working now, so the empty two-story building a mile away from the junior high continued to grow weeds.

The rare days everyone managed to attend were the days devoted to community service. Those were the field days where they and the other junior high classes walked to a designated part of town that needed work done and skipped all lessons. Gradually, the divide began to crawl back to the riverbanks where it had fallen. The slow winter season further strengthened their bonds and provided school with a meaning to its name again.

There were still no official requirements to graduate to the next grade in place. The school had enough problems staffing the building, so every student attended the ceremony that would advance them to the next academic level. It would be his last year of junior high school without attending hardly a month's worth of lessons. By this time the year was 1947. The country was in recovery, strengthening and growing. The conscription law that had claimed the lives of entire generations of people disappeared. The Republic, as they were now called, had solidified its tentative place in the world.

Then, the only black-and-white, grainy television in the school flickered in on a new legislation passed just that year. The Diet member representing Niigata stood with clasped hands and read aloud from the papers on his desk. He could hardly recall the man's words, at first interested only because it had been so long since any of them had watched television. There were a little under a hundred third year students, most of which had been transported by a rickety bus from nearby farming towns without a school. It was free study period.

We regret that we must now sacrifice so many of our nation's youths so soon after the wounds of the past have opened, he faintly remembered the man's words going. Though our lacerations are fresh, we must view this not as a death sentence, but as a noble and glorious sacrifice, in the words of our Great Dictator. Starting this year, forty-seven third year junior high school classes will be chosen from a random lottery pool to participate in the Battle Experiment No. 68 Program, in which the students must eliminate each other until there is one victor.

The legislation has been debating over whether or not the event should be televised…

He doubted anyone had heard anything beyond that; he had trouble remembering the exact words of the entire speech himself, no matter how impactful it was upon his life. There had been other worries in his mind, though had no recollection of those, either. Most of the kids hadn't even heard the Diet member speak over the complementary clamor, but tremors of panic manage to flicker to the ends of the crowd and soon a nervous hysteria swept the study hall. The teachers, evidently ignorant of the government's decree, struggled to calm the raging children once they had overcome their initial fears.

That's dog shit; they can't do something like that. No one would ever agree to pass such a thing. Why the heck would they want to kill off so many of their country's kids? Just because there's been a ton of protests lately doesn't give them the right to go around and pull sick jokes like this…similar and harsher words were exchanged between the classmates in the following weeks. The teachers and adults, once educated about the government's decision, eased their anxiety by stating the likelihood of being chosen even if it was serious.

That was right, everyone relaxed and reassured themselves. There were hundreds of third year junior high school classes in Japan alone, even after the war. The birthrates were expected to rise within the next decade. In addition to that, the newly admitted country of China opened that lottery pool to hundreds of other classes. Fifty was a significantly small number. And they were a small town junior high school, lucky that they had enough funds and students to function at all.

He would later learn that a large population resisted the radical changes, but their little town near Nagaoka hadn't the mind to consider protesting. Not that they blindly supported the government's every action, but they had more pressing matters to worry over. Matters, he remembered, such as food and a house to survive the harsh northern winters blown in from the Sea of Japan. The government could decree what they wanted and as always, the town would struggle and thrive.

In the intervening months, spring returned and renewed the land. Though the town's residents had no time for poetry, the teachers bribed the students with local field trips intended to restore nature's former glory to the war-weary earth. In fact, they barely deserved to be called "field trips", as their destinations were often no further than a half hour's walk away from the school. However, no one would deny that they enjoyed the rare chance when they were allowed to be children again.

Since before the war, Akiyama owned a few sparse telephones and televisions. The common family relied on the postal boys – and during the war, girls adopted the job as well – to deliver whatever messages they had to send along. The official letters from the military headquarters, however, were transmitted by men in crisp uniforms at the door. By 1947 those messages had all but disappeared. By the ninth month of the year, just after the annual school festival, two lone soldiers from the Imperial Army rolled into town carrying standard-issue firearms and a much deadlier message.

That day a gratefully light drizzle covered the town in a fine, almost hazy mist, enough to revive their precious crops withered from the summer heat. It provided them an excuse to avoid work and sit around battered desks in clusters of friends, watching the water trickle down the windowpanes. Whether they admitted it or not, the weather ruled their lives from the moment they were born or entered this rural town. The monotony that consumed their lives drew every out-of-place detail into their stark attention. Though the matter might be inconsequential and minute, they seized hold of it.

Their homeroom teacher Saito was somewhere in the building, probably chatting in the staff room with the other volunteer teachers. Due to an "unfortunate circumstance", their teacher had avoided the mandatory draft. No one saw a need to find him as they pressed their faces against the murky glass windows and peered down at the crudely paved road below. A heavy car trudged through the slick mud, some bulky thing the country kids couldn't recognize. A wave of speculative murmurs erupted from the class.

His eyes flickered to his neighbor, one of those shipped to the countryside after the first bombings struck mainland Japan, now living with distant relatives in the house nearest his. As with all the friendships forged during the war, theirs had been slow to blossom, at first nothing more than a basis of mutual suspicion and ignorance. The city boy had never worked a day in his life – and by work he meant labor in the field – so his first impression had been that of a spoiled brat. He could only imagine what his friend had once thought of him.

The moment the car rolled into view he instantly glanced at his friend to gauge his reaction. That was within human nature, he supposed, to evaluate whether or not the crowd had the same sentiments for a given situation, a strange one in particular. The musing hadn't crossed his mind in the slightest when he saw the pallid complexion on his friend's relatively pale face. A few months under the summer sun had darkened him a considerable amount. Not only his skin tone, but his eyes also disturbed him.

Those were the haunted eyes of someone who had seen things. They were a frightened rabbit's glimmering pupils in the vestige of death, body stiff as if it were a statue or a frozen corpse. He was sure that if everyone in that classroom had stared into his friend's face for a few solid seconds, they would have ceased all excited movement as well. The other city kids were mildly discomforted when they saw the car downstairs, but none reacted so strongly.

"Natsume, what's wrong?" he asked his friend. It took a few seconds for him to process and to comprehend his own name. The boy with his fair looks and somewhat thin stature blinked as the fright melted from his eyes. A faint remnant of disturbance remained, but his body had relaxed already. He offered a normal smile and waved the concern away as the class returned to their clusters, the excitement gone from sight. He swung Natsume around by his shoulders and pushed him into a chair. Still somewhat perturbed and half amazed, he said, "Wasn't that strange? I've never seen a car like that before."

"It's a military issued car. You didn't see one when your dad was drafted?" Natsume inquired, though he appeared as if he wished to retract that question the instant it left his lips, for all the unpleasant memories it must have held. Both boys and their classmates in the immediate vicinity quieted. Evidently, most of them hadn't made the connection that the car had been from the military. Of course they wouldn't, he thought.

"They had to go to Nagaoka to get picked up," he replied. The nearest city wasn't too far away, and there was a convenient train that ran through the land near the western edge of town. Most people avoided the train tracks now, if they could help it. While running on a decent schedule it still only passed through the town twice a day. He remembered endless childhood days spent playing between those ribs of steel laced with grass and weeds.

"But why is it here, of all places?"

Natsume shrugged, hardly having more extensive knowledge than his own on the subject of the military and how it functioned. It was no remarkable feat to recognize an army car, as it was no sign of strength to lift an autumn hair. There was any number of reasons for it to roll through town, none of which concerned anyone when a teacher down the hall released them for lunch. Though he remained restless the entire walk home, Natsume recovered his pleasant mood as they darted off into the thin copse of trees near the road's edge.

The gentle slope littered in decaying branches and withered leaves compressed underfoot, absorbing the soles of their shoes in narrow ditches of mud. The trees here were gaunt, sparse twigs that emerged from the dank ground with a general reluctance, as if shrinking from the sun. Many had been felled by the elements, splinters protruding from the earth and stretching for the sky. A narrow creek wound through the lower ground, a rickety bridge made of spare rotten wood planks somewhere downstream. There wasn't much around, as Natsume often pointed out, but he wasn't bothered. They made do with what they had.

The boys cleared the unstable, moldy bridge in a single bound without touching it, and slid up the rise on the other side as the uneven ground yielded beneath their feet. If later called upon to recall what had transpired, neither of them would have a solid answer. It was a made-up game of grandeur, all credit owed to the strange and fantastic ideas Natsume brought with him from the city. And the countryside had its own unique charm as well, encompassed in the mythological stories of monsters and spirits.

The technological advances in industry and luxuries the city afforded a number of its citizens contributed to their creations. The entertainment and vitality there were sensations a mere country boy could never imagine alone. He supposed his grandparents' old tales of demons that stalked the shadows and gods that reigned over the forests were amusing, even scary to naïve young children, but in the end were intangible specters. The most solid proof he had ever seen were those little stone shrines scattered throughout the land. And as far as he knew, there wasn't a major shrine near them.

Though Natsume held no particular inclination towards the weathered, moss-covered stones, other foreign kids found them intriguing, at least. They were pieces of history in some sense. The deeper the mountain trails burrowed, the stranger the shrines, or so he had heard. Some no longer retained a human or animal form. Not that he had ever harbored a strong desire to seek these forgotten little monuments out. Who had the time and patience for that? He couldn't recall who had told him about them.

The rain had dampened their lungs a little by the time they meandered back home, but the slight coughs and warm skin weren't a major distraction. The sun had lowered beyond the overcast sky, a dimmed ball of weak golden light behind grey curtains. The flat clouds extended over a typical rural scene: houses dotting verdant fields and brown dirt paths, hills rising into different properties. Primarily a farming community, there wasn't much livestock wandering around except for some complementary chickens. There were other industries in town, of course, but a majority made a living from the fall harvest.

His house expressed the plain, practical style of tradition. Pale wood, rice paper doors, a deck suspended over the dampened ground, and a stone tiled roof that sometimes clattered and shattered in a storm. The structure was set into the shadow of the nearby forest, denser than the woods that dotted the road to school. The surrounding land was boggy and always contained that dank scent of earth, now obscured by the distinctive odor rain emitted. He glanced about, but the family dog was probably nestled away in the storehouse or underneath the main building and didn't leap out to greet him as usual.

The others in the family were at work, but his grandparents were probably lurking somewhere inside. He beckoned Natsume to approach with caution, sliding the wooden door in its frame as silently as possible. There was a point when he knew a knot in the wood would catch in the track, so he stopped it and squeezed through the narrow space. As predicted, most of the family's sandals were absent from the landing. As Natsume glided past him and muttered, "Sorry for the intrusion", he closed the door and shrugged off his coat.

This was routine, a type of game he and his cousins invented while they still attended the same elementary school. Their unpleasant elders plagued the children since they were small, urging them to help around the house instead of darting outside to play, and screaming them down to lend a hand. The light rain was enough to dampen their joints, so perhaps they were asleep now. Either way, it was fun to see how long they could escape chores and other such duties. Natsume just played along with a pleasant smile.

He had to admit that the city kid adjusted rather well. When the boy arrived to stay with his relatives, he'd been inconsolable and prone to random bouts of crying or grim silence. Most of the city kids were slow to adjust even after the initial stage of unsettlement. When they realized that they were here to stay, they became overwhelmed by the drastically different environment. Theirs was a quiet life, he understood, and a simple one. Economically, they still had a lax tendency to exchange favors or goods instead of money.

Their work was hard but honest, as his older cousin once worded it. Now that cousin was gone, perhaps trampled into an unknown turf in the Pacific or sunk and lost in the depths of the sea, and all he had left were those words. He grimaced at the memories and the knowledge that the black and whites were still untouched and folded underneath his spare clothes in the closet.

"Kimura-san, are you okay?" Natsume whispered from around the corner. He blinked, kicked off his shoes, and bounded up the landing on muffled feet to join him with a disregarding wave. He wriggled his toes uncomfortably, but hesitated to yank his socks off; bare feet made noise, particularly if they were wet from the rain. Together they advanced down the dim, drafty hallways towards the back of the house where his bedroom was. It was empty, but he had once shared it with his brother before he had been drafted.

Often as children they inevitably argued over sharing a room, though they managed to accept the arrangement as a necessary fact of life. Now, these past few years, the empty space had been a source of great loneliness and discomfort. The regular sounds of human life and severe comfort of another human being were things he hadn't noticed he needed to sleep until his brother was gone. Sometimes Natsume visited and slept over or he would creep over there to invade the relatively quite household.

Though, a quiet household wasn't necessarily a good thing either, just like his quiet room.

When they managed to enter without mishap, he went to the far wall and slid the screen open just enough to expose the space to the outside. The musty air was suffocating, and the rain's soft patter soothing. From here had a nice view of the forest, as well as the stretch of foliage and mountains in the far off distance. Of course, the light mist that had settled over the land obscured that view temporarily.

"Hey," Natsume said as they were sitting in silence sometime after dinner. He flipped through a notebook filled with drawings and side notes unrelated to the day's lesson. He couldn't even remember what the teacher had tried to teach them. "You guys really get to go on a trip to the mountains? I mean, really deep into the mountains – where all the shrines are? How are we supposed to get there?"

He glanced at his friend and shrugged. Natsume was referring to the field trip that came around the beginning of fall sometime after the festival and before the harvesting season plunged them into work. The high school and junior high school students took a week long camping trip into the mountains each year before the war, and the school decided to implement the program again. For most of the town's residents, the mountains were as mysterious and unexplored as they were to the city people. No one had the luxury of time to explore the mountains in modern or ancient times. Only courageous samurai did that.

The students liked the trip, though. It wasn't exactly a relaxing excursion to the hot springs, but they enjoyed it.

"We'll probably walk. The paths up there are too narrow or underdeveloped in some places, so we can't ride a bike even if we had them. But we don't go to the mountains here; the school rents a bus to take us to a different one. We get on the train to Nagaoka and then take a bus somewhere else. Or at least, that's what my cousins said they do. I don't see why they'd change it this year, if they decided to run it again."

The answer satisfied his friend. Natsume might have thought that he was calm and collected because he was accustomed to such sights, but inside he was probably as excited as his friend. Sure, he saw the mountains and forests every day since he was a child, but he had never wandered deep into them and seen real shrines. The cheap little stones ones didn't quite count. Perhaps it was more of a shock to people who had never really seen an extensive forest or lived right at its border.

"It'll be fine. I heard that it's pretty relaxed. Most of the time people are goofing off and it doesn't move that fast, so it's not like it's very demanding. As long as you have some endurance in your lungs, you should be fine." His friend nodded and tossed the notebook aside, stretching out subtlety toned arms in front of him. Despite his displacement, Natsume hadn't complained very much about the monotonous work everyone here was subjected to. Between the two of them, no one was particularly strong, but it was impossible not to grow.

Though he had to admit, the mixture of frailty and strength in his city friend had endeared the boy to him. Maybe it was only because Natsume was the first person from such a place that he had met, but he thought that he would rather have Natsume and his strange quirks than another country kid as his neighbor. He could never tell the same of the other boy, of course, but he liked to think that Natsume had grown somewhat fond of him as well.

He scrambled towards the open door and crawled on hands and knees to the shielded deck outside, leaning over the edge enough to find the crescent moon hanging in the sky. Squinting at the sliver of light, he crawled back inside and shut the wooden frames tight. The rain was still falling at the same steady rate, though it might increase in intensity later into the night. It was about time to sleep, he figured, so he cupped his hands over the candle flame to blow it out.

Natsume slipped into the futon that had once been his brother's and curled up on his side, his face winking out of existence when the flame died. The room had a draft courtesy of the rain, but the warmth from their laughter and blankets was enough to stave off the cold. At least it wasn't as bad as the winter months, when no one had any qualms sleeping pressed against each other with a few blankets piled on top.

The last thought he had that night was of the military issued car that rolled down the street. Perhaps it had become part of his dream, but he imagined his older brother and father just as they were the day they departed on the train, this time climbing into the back of that car. His father had a grim, sullen face and a stiff back. His brother had been pleasant and encouraging, one arm thrown over their cousin's shoulder as they posed as if to imprint a photograph in their memories. It was a good photo, he thought. It was in color and not at all blurry.

People were so happy when those things arrived. The people departing on them were happy, too, despite the fate that awaited them. Had he been happy? Or had he been crying like some others were that day? He couldn't quite remember having a sense of self on the platform. Surely his mother and aunts were there, along with the younger kids, but he couldn't quite form a photograph of them in his mind.

It was the same, he supposed, the same no matter the shape of the vehicle that transported men to their deaths. In the end, no one wanted to see such things again.

It was a fair summer's day, as far as summer days went. The breeze rustled the dry leaves, the fluttering laundry, and stirred the dry earth beneath his feet. The sun glistened overhead, blissfully forgiving today. Rain had not arrived recently, but the clear skies and pleasant wind heralded worse weather to come. Not a cloud was in sight. The sweet crop scents drifted to the main house and the aromas from spices in the kitchen wafted into the courtyard.

He dusted calloused hands on his light cotton pants. His shirt lay draped over a tree branch back in the field and his chest shone from the sticky, gritty layers of sweat. Just a quick lunch, and then it was back to work for him. The younger children had already eaten, their discarded bowls and chopsticks scattered over the deck where they played their innocent games. A few abandoned toys littered the yard. Perhaps they were in the middle of playing a game. He couldn't see a single one.

No – that was wrong – he spotted a little boy in the shade, sitting outside a room with the rice paper doors wide open. Since he had time to spare, he wandered over to see who it was there all alone. The little boy fiddled with a toy ball made with rice and spare bits of cloth, the type used to play the game where people kicked it with their ankles. It was little Seiji, his cousin, the son of his mother's brother.

"Hey, what're you doing, kid?" he asked as he sat down on the side of the deck and leaned forward. The little boy blinked and raised his head questioningly, akin to a wide-eyed rabbit for a moment before he realized who it was. A wide grin broke out on his small, adorable face. He smiled back. Maybe there wasn't anything wrong with him, after all.

"I'm waiting for the others to hide. Did you just come back from work?" Seiji erupted in a rush. He chuckled at the child's antics and nodded, restraining himself from ruffling the kid's hair. He'd only dirty the soft locks and besides, the kid hated it. Seiji nodded in return a few times, returning to his ball in solemnity. He didn't need to prod him into speaking the truth; patience was all one needed with Seiji. He eventually voiced his concerns. "Why are you always working? The kids from Fujioka say that it's dirty work. You should find a job in a shop."

He blinked. He didn't remember having such troubles as a kid. Everyone he knew growing up was in the same or similar positions economically, though some were a little better off than others. They never once considered themselves in squalor and poverty, though they knew that they weren't rich and had little money to afford nice things. Then again, the short time ago when he had been a child, Fujioka kids hadn't yet come from the neighboring town to attend school.

"I don't mind this work, as long as it helps my family. Don't listen to them, okay? It doesn't matter what they think. If I'm unhappy, I'll get a different job to support you guys. But don't get me wrong. Our work is hard, but honest. Honest work is all a man can ever ask for in our situation. Whatever you end up being happy with is okay, too, but I'm content here," he beamed at the boy. Seiji had listened with rapt attention, no doubt deeply bothered by his thoughts until now.

"Okay," he said as he darted off to find his cousins.

• While devising this story, I deliberated over what would constitute as "original" without featuring the canon characters. After all, Battle Royale provides a perfect cookie-cutter story: X number of kids are forced to fight until one remains. I chanced upon this idea Takami brought to the table: What if Japan had won WWII and this was the result? I decided to delve into one of the very first Programs, being a bit of a history buff. Also, having a love of historical stuff, there are some references within the story and heavy cultural themes.

• The Book of Water was a war strategy book that was part of a collection called The Book of Five Rings, written by Musashi Miyamoto. The Book of Water emphasized flexibility in life and in fighting, the ability to adjust to any situation as water molds to the form of its container.

• I used Google Map to find the location of the mountains in Niigata, so places like Nagaoka and the Shinano River exist, though Akiyama and Fujioka are fictional. I suppose that back then the mountains would have been less developed.

• Each chapter will end with a little anecdote. It won't always be centered around the main characters. Speaking of which, all names are in Eastern order and are referred to by their surnames unless the main character is particularly close to them.