litlinks 2025

Anamnesis: The Crane That Waited

by Chiara Biggs, Canberra Institute of Technology

The house smelled of warm rice and sun-dried tatami—soft, grassy, tinged with the faint bitterness of ash. The scent clung stubbornly to the beams, as though memory alone could keep the roof from collapsing. Sunlight slanted through paper screens patched with war rations, cutting pale ribbons through a room too quiet for a city that still claimed to be alive.

Kaito crouched by the window, sleeves rolled to the elbow. His schoolbook lay open across his lap, but the page was crowded with pencil lines; not formulas or grammar drills, but a drawing. A fox, sleek and nine-tailed, stared back at him from the paper. Smoke curled from its mouth, and in its coils nestled shapes: paper cranes, a comb, a child’s sandal.

“You’re drawing ghosts again,” came a voice from behind. Dry. Faintly amused.

Kaito didn’t turn. “You never stay still. I have to keep trying.”

The fox spirit tilted his head, all white ears and lacquered gaze. “Try all you like,” he said, “but no pencil can hold the soul.”

He drew leisurely from a kiseru pipe, tapping ash into a broken teacup on the floor.

The cup had belonged to Kaito’s mother.

Kaito did not say this aloud. Names held weight in the house. They might tip the silence into something unbearable.

He glanced toward the hearth. The kettle was long gone. Burned, maybe, or buried under rubble. Only a blackened ring remained.

“You were clever to return,” said the fox. “Most leave and forget. You stayed.”

“I had nowhere else to go.”

The fox didn’t answer. Outside, the wind shifted. A brittle hush passed through the beams.

A rustle.

In the corner, Aiko sat on a faded zabuton, knees tucked under her, folding cranes from old newspaper. Her hair was uneven, clipped short with blunt scissors. There were soot marks on her arms where the kimono sleeves had once shielded her.

“Do you think the birds still fly over Tokyo?” she asked. Her fingers paused mid-fold. “Or did the bombs get them too?”

Kaito’s answer came slow. “Maybe they fly lower now. Closer to the ruins.”

“Closer to us,” she agreed, smiling. “Good.”

She placed a crane on the windowsill beside the others. One was folded from a rice ration ticket. Another, from the edge of a government leaflet warning of American planes.

The last raid had come at night, March tenth. The sky had bloomed red, not with firecrackers, but with phosphorus. Their street was one of the few that hadn’t collapsed entirely. A miracle, some said. A mistake, others.

Kaito didn’t believe in miracles anymore.

“Do you hear them?” Aiko asked suddenly. “The cranes. They’re singing.”

He nodded, though the only sounds were the cicadas and the far-off grind of a military truck coughing through the ruined street.

“I hear them,” he said.

Aiko smiled and returned to folding.

The fox rose and wandered closer, tails brushing the floor like banners in slow retreat. “She hears what’s no longer here,” he said softly. “That’s a kind of peace even we spirits can’t reach.”

The sunlight moved. The shadows changed.

And suddenly Kaito saw it: Aiko’s outline growing faint, like a smudge at the edge of his vision. As if the light passed through her, revealing not just the wall behind, but what was left imprinted there.

Charcoal streaks, once brushed away, re-emerged in shape. A child’s silhouette. Arms outstretched. Caught mid-fold.

He closed the sketchbook. He didn’t flinch. The image was familiar, etched into him like something long remembered, long mourned.

They used to call them yakeato no kodomo, children of the ruins. Survivors, at least by name. Bodies too small to carry grief, but eyes old enough to understand absence.

“You’re finished,” the fox said.

Kaito gave a slow nod. “I am.”

He rose, brushing dust from his knees. The last crane lay in his palm, its paper thinned at the folds, softened by time. He creased it gently, then placed it on the sill. It was imperfect, the wings misaligned; the body slightly bent, but it stood among its kin like a final whisper. Something once cherished, now at rest.

From outside, the city exhaled. Smoke, dust, and wind.

He didn’t take anything with him. Not the drawing, not the bowl, not the remnants of meals never finished. The house had already let go of the living. It would keep what remained.

The fox padded toward the open doorway, his tails trailing embers. “Time to go,” he said.

“What’s out there?”

“Whatever you’re ready to remember.”

They stepped outside.

But the street was no longer the street.

Instead, there was a field, dust-colored, dry, and endless. Ash shimmered in the air, not falling but floating, as if the world had paused to breathe.

Above them, cranes circled, hundreds, maybe thousands, folded from every kind of paper imaginable. Some crisp as prayers, others singed and brittle, their wings trembling with memory.

They moved in wide, unhurried arcs, silent as snowfall.

Each pass stirred the sky like a ripple in still water.

And in that hush, Kaito felt it—not sorrow, not release, but something quieter. A threshold.
As if the world behind him had faded, and the one ahead was just beginning.

The fox waited nearby, where the light bent around the ruins.

Kaito walked, slower now, each step steady.

Behind him, the house faded.
Its doorframe folded inward, like a bow.

All but one crane flew on.
One remained.
The smallest. Aiko’s last.

It sat on the sill, soot darkened.
Wings stiff. Uneven. Held by memory.

It would wait.

For those who returned.

For those who remembered her hands, small, sure, folding a future from ash.

Let the past remain. Carry it gently.