This remarkable and intriguing story covers the lives of three men, whose experience intersects although one was born thousands of miles away in Europe, and had already died by the time the two Japanese characters had begun the lives as described in this book.
Naoko Abe has chosen the example of Maximilian Kolbe, a martyr and a 20th Century saint as the fulcrum upon which to balance this narrative. Kolbe was Polish, he was a Franciscan, but formed his own group devoted to the Virgin Mary, Militia Immaculatae and set up a monastery in Niepokalanów Poland, although much reduced, it is still one of the largest in Europe, at its height there were 800 monks living together. Kolbe felt that he had been given a task by The Virgin Mary, to spread the Gospel around the world, and although he was himself very ill, he went first to Japan where he set up a branch of his order. Just before the outbreak of World War II, he had to return to Poland, and was unable to leave. Caught up in the Nazi purges, he ended up in Auschwitz and there he gave up his life for another man, in one of the random selections.
The Martyr and the Red Kimono is about Kolbe’s influence on two Japanese men, one Tomei Ozaki was a young man working for the Japanese military making rockets for the war effort, he and his colleagues were working in underground tunnels near Nagasaki when the bomb was dropped; the blast knocked everyone over but when Tomei emerged from the tunnel he found his whole world transformed. In searching for his mother, he avoided or ignored many pleas for help which later tormented him. As a Japanese Christian, this guilt led him to join the Kolbe monastery, Mugenzai no Sono. There he learned about Kolbe and his death. For the last few years of his life, Ozaki visited the cell where Kolbe had been shut in to die, and although perilously unwell on his first visit, he felt energised by the spirit of the saint, and afterwards went every year until his death.
The third man in this book is a botanist, as a young man, also suffering from tuberculosis (as was Kolbe) he studied and cherished the many varieties of Japanese Cherry, some of them almost on the edge of extinction. These he planted, often from seed, in a garden at Matsumae, on the island of Hokkaido. Masatoshi Asari came to the realisation of the appalling treatment of prisoners of war by the Japanese, firstly and principally the Koreans, but later he learned of the other nation’s individuals who had been equally mistreated and abused. In an act of personal reconciliation he took to sending cherry tree saplings to each country as a symbol of peace. Even to North Korea, and at some point he learned about Kolbe and sent plants to Poland, to the monastery.
Naoka interviewed both these men, and went in search of the Polish cherry trees, finding only a few and a blanket of ignorance about how they got there.
So now to the Red Kimono: in Strachocina, Poland, there stands a beautiful statue of the Virgin Mary, dressed in a red kimono, with a traditional arrangement of her black hair, hanging in a long tassel down her back. There are two lovely photographs in the book, from the front and from the back, and a description of how it got there. Asari went himself to the convent at Strachocina and planted the saplings himself, the story of the Virgin Mary of Japan is equally strange and wonderful.
This is a book that rewards the reader on every page.
deborahjs 