War’s Desperate End: A Review of The Blossom and the Firefly

In the final months of WWII, 16-year-old Hana has just survived a bombing near her home on a southern island of Japan. Bruised and traumatized, she still has to report for work at an airbase, where she and other teenage girls will be seeing off young pilots before they “body-crash”, or fly their broken-down planes, into American ships. Heading toward the airbase is 18-year-old Taro, a gifted violinist and pilot, who experiences flying a plane as another form of music. Taro and his friends have no choice but to sacrifice their young lives for what is to the outside world a lost cause but because of the Japanese regime’s propaganda, the best way of saving the country and defeating the enemy. Though he’s only supposed to stay at the base overnight, bad weather and mechanical problems keep Taro and one other pilot there for days, where he and Hana connect and he changes her life.

The author of Flygirl, the acclaimed YA novel about Black pilots in WWII, Sherri L. Smith returns with another thoroughly researched story filled with unforgettable characters. We know right away that Hana and Taro’s relationship is doomed, but we care about them nonetheless and hope some miracle will keep them alive and safe. In writing about Japanese teens during the war, alternating their perspectives, Smith explores the inner lives of people our history books have depicted as the enemy to show that they have the same hopes, dreams, and gifts as their American counterparts then and now. Her novel challenges readers to empathize with the Other, and to understand the larger political forces – ones not of their own making – that put these characters in life-and-death battles against young people more similar to them than different. Read at a time when political leaders stoke hatreds within and abroad, Smith’s story shows how legends and media became propaganda, and giving up one’s life to kill another was seen as a badge of honor.