“We’ve been cut off,” my husband’s colleague says, after the server gives his hand a stern wave over our empty sake cups. “Let’s find another brewery.”

Roaming Nara’s narrow streets in search of more sake samples, we soon see miniature model airplanes of Japanese World War II Zeros appear in a machiya window. “Let’s go in here,” he says. “It looks really interesting.”

The wooden door makes a slow, rough sound as it slides open. Sunlight streams in to reveal a smoke-filled, dark interior with 1940s Japanese nationalist music playing in the background. The three of us huddle in the doorway, peer around.

From the ceiling, a Rising Sun flag and miniature Japanese warplane models hang from wires above antique magazines, uniforms, vinyl records. An elderly Japanese man in the corner, cigarette in hand, begins to rise from his chair to see who is there. In silence, we Americans look at each other, step backwards retreating outside, close the sliding door.

We walk in silence a distance before the colleague says, “My uncle fought in the war. My mother said he was never the same again. Look! Another sake brewery!”

I don’t tell him about my family’s war experiences, my elderly father, vomiting in the emergency room from opiate withdrawal. I keep my mouth shut and a lump in my throat. That story I no longer wish to tell.

melancholy spring—
grandpa’s slave-laboring hands
the train tracks we ride

Sydney Solis

is an American visual, literary, and performing artist. Originally from Boulder, Colorado, she lived for three years in Japan. Her haibun have been published in The Haibun Journal and MacQueen’s Quinterly, and won an honorable mention in the 2020 Genjuan International Haibun Contest. Her poetry has also appeared in The Caribbean Writer, Shambhala Times, and elsewhere.

Ms. Solis is a world traveler whose articles and award-winning photographs have appeared in Kyoto Journal, Kansai Scene Magazine, Depth Insights Journal, and the Orlando Sentinel. She has taught writing, yoga, and memoir at Lighthouse Writers Workshops in Denver and online.

Author’s website: www.SydneySolis.com