When the long line of soldiers finally petered out, my tension eased and I felt much better, but now I was alone again. That would have been fine if I’d been walking on a beach. But all by myself in this artificially constructed square park, I felt as if I’d wandered into a hiding place for state secrets, which unsettled me. I’m not a spy or a journalist—what is this place anyway? I had no idea when I meandered in, but I’ll leave right away, really, I’m just an ordinary person. This string of excuses rang hollow in my ears, keeping time with the sound of my footsteps. I stopped to shake them off. I was being ridiculous. There were no state secrets here. Just the opposite. This was a public memorial, built in the hope of everyone coming see it.

The center of the memorial was shaped like a huge rectangle; it faced a hill, some distance away, something like an ancient Japanese tomb mound. Even from this far away the soldier standing on top of it looked so big that he must have been about half the size of the Brandenburg Gate.

Right beside me was a stone statue of a mother. Her head was bowed, the fist on her chest tightly clenched. Looking up at this massive statue—she stood on a base at about eye level—I tried talking to her. “Did you lose your son?” I asked. “Was he shot on the battlefield?” The stone statue said nothing in reply. If her head had bowed a little lower, and then, no longer able to support herself, she had bent over double, perhaps I would have been pierced right through with pure sadness and hopelessness. But, though it might seem rude to say so, there was something defiant about this woman. In the angle of her neck I saw the pose of someone aware of people watching her, and her clenched fist showed not so much the unbearable sadness of a grieving mother as her pride in fulfilling her duty to endure. Her lower body gradually stopped being human and became part of the unmovable stone pedestal. The creases in her skirt looked as solemn and proud as the national flag. “You look awfully sad,” I said. The statue of the mother glowered down at me but said nothing. On the verge of saying something really rude, like, “You wouldn’t actually be feeling proud of yourself for having sacrificed your son to your country, would you?” I quickly swallowed the words, but apparently she heard me anyway. Tears glinted in the eyes of the statue. Or that’s what I thought until I realized that big raindrops had fallen into the mother’s eyes. Rather than turning into tears and rolling down her cheeks, the raindrops disappeared, absorbed by the stone. Stone apparently has that much absorptive power. Even though it looks so hard. As the rain soaked her cheeks, the lines around the mother’s mouth stood out starkly and her eyebrows raised until finally, moving her shoulders back and forth as if she were rowing a boat, she lifted her head. She was now staring straight down on me. Stiffening with fear, I drew my head back, but for some reason found myself growing angrier and angrier. “You didn’t actually encourage your son to go to war, did you?” I asked, itching for a fight, but my head ended up only hitting a wall of silence. Being made of stone, it wasn’t particularly strange that she didn’t reply, but still I couldn’t forgive her. And there was something else irritating me. The rain was pouring down now, tangling my wet hair like a cold hand moving around my head. It was so persistent, I felt as if it were touching my skull. “The Egoist Party dragged your son off to the war, didn’t they?” I was now a high school girl, screaming my protests at the world. “You voted for the Egoist Party, knowing they’d send the sons of everyone who didn’t belong to the party to war, didn’t you? Why did you do that?” The rain streamed down my cheeks, and no matter how many barbs I threw at her it was no use. Now that she’d turned completely to stone, this mother looked as if she’d never even heard that her son was dead, yet at times she had felt terribly sad and, sitting there, a grieving mother with her head bowed, tried to bear the pain, but then it always rained, and with people praising her all the time, saying her son had died for his country, she’d finally given up, deciding it was easier to be as hard as rock for all eternity.