to promote General Ishiwara; after the plan failed, he returned to the village on New Year's Day 1943 and shut himself up in the storehouse. There he wore the goggles later used by the narrator and used headphones to listen to a radio. The narrator's parents broke off contact with one another after the father's son by his first marriage deserted from the Japanese army in Manchuria. Both parents sent telegrams to contacts in the army: the mother to help her stepson escape, and the father to preserve the family honour by having him shot. The son was shot. The mother claimed the ashes, and thereafter referred to her husband only as ano hito (あの人) — "that man", or "a certain party". The narrator describes the time spent with his father in the storehouse after this breach as the first "Happy Days" of his life. They culminated in an attempted revolt led by his father on 16 August 1945, the day after the end of the war. The plan was to kill the emperor (to "accomplish what your father tried and failed to do", as the narrator's father said to his wife), and to blame the act on the Americans, thereby preventing the country's surrender. The father takes his son with him and his co-conspirators as he leaves the valley. The group sing the closing chorale from Bach's cantata Ich will den Kreuzstab gerne tragen, BWV 56, "Komm, o Tod, du Schlafes Bruder, Komm und führe mich nur fort" (Come, O death, brother of sleep, come and lead me forth). Another line from the same cantata is: "Da wischt mir die Tränen mein Heiland selbst ab" (My saviour himself shall wipe my tears away). The father tells his son that the words mean that the emperor will wipe their tears away. The plot is a failure, and the conspirators are all killed (in the narrator's opinion, "very likely" by American agents in disguise). At the moment of his father's death, he recalls that he saw, "high in the sky... a shining gold chrysanthemum against a vast background of purple light... the light from that flower irradiated his Happy Days". By the time he reaches this part of the story, however, his mother has arrived at the hospital, and it is she who wipes away the tears he sheds. She recalls that her son only survived the massacre of the conspirators