• Thirty years.
    Thirty years have past since my father died.
    I never really understood my father. He always wore a suit even in the hottest weather. And he never said a word of encouragement to me. He was a life insurance manager until the war started. Business was booming, then the world started bombing. Then he lost his job and started to get drunk. Beer and spirit became his best friend. Drunk, he would walk around the house in only underwear, shouting to unknown people and cursing to my mother and sister. The figure of a father was gone. I was sent to an all girl school as soon as I turned of age. My father didn't even say good-bye.

    During my years in school, I began to hate my father. My mother would send me letters filled with sad words. I didn't even think it was even possible for my father to have a heart. And then he sent me a postcard. He had never sent one to me, and I read it slowly, as if my heart wasn't ready to see what my father had wrote. It said:

    Miss Ayano Yamamura,

    The flowers here are beautiful, spring has come early. I hope you do well in school. Listen to each class carefully, your future life depends on that. The war will be over before you know it, and then we can be a family again.

    sincerely,
    Takeshi Yamamura.

    This was the first time I saw him be polite. I was shocked by the words he wrote, filled with love and hope. I wondered why he never expressed himself this way. Maybe he was embarrassed of talking this way to his daughter, and words could express what he felt more easily. Whatever it meant, this postcard was the only way I could see a kind father.

    A few weeks later, he sent me a short postcard:
    I wish to learn how you are doing. Draw a circle if you are happy.

    And so I did. I was very happy. I did well in school, and I had fallen in love with a boy, a nurse, who tended to wounded men in the army. Everyday, I wrote a large red circle on a postcard and sent it away to my father. He didn't return an answer, but I didn't mine. I felt as if I was connecting with him through wordless postcards. Look at how many words of love can pass through us without a word being written, I thought.

    But then my lover fell ill with a disease no one knew how to cure. And my grades turned for the worst. My circles on the postcards grew smaller and smaller until they turned into X-marks. I decided a trip to my mother and father's house was in order and so I left to see them. My father had changed. He was polite to me and my mother and acted as if I had never written an X-mark on the card. And then he started to cry. I had never seen an adult cry. I didn't really know what to think. So I just held him in my arms and cried with him.

    And thirty years pass. After that day, we became very close. And when he died, he died with a happy heart. I inherited his house and looked for those wordless postcards, but they were no where to be found. The house was as empty as the cards I had written to him.