“We Not Die,” by Karl Taro Greenfeld, appears in the Sept/Oct 2017 issue of the Kenyon Review.
Initially, what attracts me most to a story or essay is the language, its rhythm and music—I want to read a good story or essay, sure, but I also want to hear it sing. I want the writer to take stylistic and linguistic risks, to convey entire worlds in mere sentences. I want sentences like rollercoasters, sentences that grab hold of you and don’t let you go, that travel through time and space and history and culture, that make you forget yourself. I want to be surprised.
Karl Taro Greenfeld’s “We Not Die” immediately surprises, written in the form of an essay, as part of a fellowship application to the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts, which must be completed in English. Kumiko, the narrator and applicant, begins to tell her story in her own words:
I was bombed, in wartime, in Osaka, on the Hankyu line, train stops in middle, not station, and door open, and we hear siren, running people, panic, I am push, knock down, because everyone much scared of bombing. I have my bookbag, is leather, on my back, I wear uniform, I’m lying on floor of train, wooden board, splinter in my face I can feel, and strange foot on top of me . . .
I am surprised, and I will be again and again as the story progresses. But more importantly, I have abandoned my own notions of what language is supposed to be doing, because this opening has taught me how to read the story. As Kumiko recalls the bombing of Osaka, I hear the music of her voice over the cacophony of war.
While the story opens with chaos and confusion—people running for their lives, bodies on fire—it is these simple sentences that I find most surprising in that opening: “I shake. I pee on myself, but so scared not embarrass.” And yet not surprising at all. This is the image that stays with me. Kumiko, a child, trying to survive the war. Sometimes, the moments in a story that hold the most power are not the ones that are beautifully wrought, or the most harrowing, but the simple moments.
We return to this image of young Kumiko as the story nears its ending. Now a grown woman who has lost a brother and lived through the war, she explains why she is applying for the painting fellowship:
I think I have to make new painting, of being bombed. Painting of things that happens to me. Paintings of war. There is feeling you have, when you are scared, in tunnel, when bomb is falling, when world is on fire, when you are make urine on yourself, when the face of man and woman around is twisted and mouth is open, eyes are squeezed, everyone is so frightened can only look inside themselves, this is such a feeling I think I must paint. So that we all can know that war is made by human, but war takes from human everything.
And there is another layer to the story: the violence of war is also gendered violence. The story reminds us that the world where Kumiko lived was one where women were not valued, where a woman’s purpose was to give birth to boys who would become soldiers, to serve men, or to comfort them. Kumiko’s favorite teacher, Miss Tango, who saves her life and becomes her role model, is stripped of her job as a teacher and sent off to sembuhan, where she is forced to become a comfort woman for Japanese soldiers.
War is made by men. War takes from women everything. Their dreams, their bodies, their very beings. But this is more than story—this is history. This is a reminder that we’re not just talking about characters, but people. Lives.
Greenfeld has done exactly what I want a writer to do: move me, destroy me, break my heart in two. This is what I want from a story. I want to see beauty and ugliness on the same page, a memory that recalls those feelings that are so terrifying we have no words for them, only an image to remind us that we felt them. That we were, and are, alive.