Cherry Blossoms in Twilight:  Memories of a Japanese Girl
Written by Yaeko Sugama Weldon and Linda E. Austin
Illustrated by Yaeko Sugama
Publisher:  Moonbridge Publications, 2005
  
Cherry Blossoms in Twilight: Memories of a Japanese Girl, written by Yaeko Sugama Weldon and her daughter Linda E. Austin is published by Moonbridge Publications and contains 84 pages of text, eleven pencil line drawings drawn by Weldon, and a two-page appendix consisting of two Japanese children’s songs, “Shojogi (Song of the Tanuki)” and “Ame Ame (Rain, Rain).”  Cherry Blossoms in Twilight is a memoir of a woman who built her life on the words her father, the village shoemaker, wrote in the back of her closet on her first day of school: “Right, Straight, Honest and
Cheerful.”  These four principals Weldon continues to adhere to in the present and has passed the ideals onto her grandchildren.

Weldon’s simple conversational style of writing has an awkwardness that does not detract from the story or the lyrical power of the prose.  Instead, it adds to the story’s charm. It is a departure from slick, glossy braggarts reminiscing about their “back-in-the-day” achievements, exploits, and shenanigans.  The simplicity of language lends a credibility to Weldon’s voice as if she is dictating her story in Japanese and broken English to her daughter Linda.  There is a kindness that comes directly from her heart that shapes her words and exudes off the page.  She has written her memories into a minute-sized book that is a giant in feeling. Easily structured, anecdote to anecdote, there is an underlined complexity built from the honesty of her emotions.  She took joy in her life, throughout her childhood and as an adult. Exposed to brutal poverty, hardships, war, and failed relationships, Weldon never loses her child-like wonder, “cheerfulness,” and belief in the good.

Her pencil line drawings are portraits of her past that come directly from experience. She has illustrated only chapters that deal with her childhood. Her last drawing illustrates the chapter called, “World War II—The End of Childhood.” The picture shows the rear silhouettes of young Yaeko and her father walking away into the distance towards the unknown.  Here Weldon’s innocence ends and the density of World War II demands an increased gravitation and a harsher detailed picture that Weldon does not want to provide graphically. She realized that no artistic medium (except, maybe, the written word), regardless of intensity or color scheme, can correctly represent the stark factuality and nightmarish vividness of being attacked by a juggernaut killing machine as technologically superior as the United States of America’s Armed Forces.  She writes:

We were young and had little fear.  In the bomb shelter we would sing and some girls would dance.  One day, as usual we ran to the bomb shelter.  One of the girls ran back to the lunchroom to use the bathroom there.  We told her not to go, but she said she had to. All of a sudden a war plane came down from the sky like a hawk to catch a rabbit.  It made a terrible loud noise and shot her with its machine gun.  She lay bleeding on the ground and we all started crying.  She died at the hospital.  She was just a young girl. After that we were just scared.  No one sang songs anymore—we just listened for airplanes.

After this incident, Weldon developed a hatred for Americans.  Her father explained that her hatred was misplaced and unnecessary.  Weldon writes:

I told my father I hated war and I hated the American military killing innocent civilian mothers and children.  We did not ask for war.  My father said to me, “Don’t hate anyone, it doesn’t do any good.  They are only doing their duty. This is war.”

Cherry Blossoms in Twilight is Weldon’s statement on the survival of the altruistic and humane during all the battles in life. One can only think of how pertinent her book and ideals—“Right, Straight, Honest and Cheerful”—are to today’s Afghanistan and Iraqi citizens and our military that get caught in the onrush of our so-called liberating foreign policies.

Lee Gooden