Member
Framing A Moose
IzurichCharacter Description
Name: Masako Yamamoto (山本正子)
Gender: F
Age: 23
Nationality: Japanese
Appearance:
Personal Effects: Aside from normal everyday clothes, Masako possesses a fully-equipped nurse’s chatelaine, a lighter and pack of cigarettes, a flash, a small bottle of laudanum, and a combat knife. She has tentative plans to purchase a pistol.
Background:
What is your job Registered Nurse with the Japanese Red Cross
Backstory: I was born in 1900—that is, Meiji 33—perhaps two or three weeks after that year’s Hanami. I do not actually know when I was born, exactly, which I must admit is the greatest disappointment my father probably found in me. I can say that I was born at my father’s work, where my mother was visiting him after classes had finished for the day. I was told growing up that this was an omen of my studious nature. I performed well in school; from the beginning to the end, I was one of my father’s best students. Certainly, I imagine this was helped by the fact that my teacher followed me home! But I always found the praise from hard work attractive, and further enjoyed most of my studies then.
I must have gotten my will to be studious from my father, as my mother was always more concerned with tradition and with my grooming than these academic matters. I still do not understand, to that end, how they became married, but my mother always suggested to me that my father had only ever become more liberal-minded in his time as an academic. I remember that they often fought, as my mother felt my education should not come at the expense of my potential as a mother myself, while my father was particularly delighted by my interest in the sciences, and only ever disappointed by my lack of a sense for literature. In that time, I learned English from my father, who was an avid reader of the latest works on education, many of which were written in that language, while the others often were translated into it.
I had, when I was younger, accepted that my mother had already made up her mind on which sorts of men she wanted to see me with; two of her closest friends had sons, and it was my understanding that I had a choice between the two of them and only the two of them. I got along particularly well with the elder of the two, named Katsuo, and it was felt with great excitement by both of our mothers that we would marry soon after our primary schooling. But as we grew from children into young people, I felt as if we grew apart, though I do not know if he felt the same. “It is only natural that people change,” my father told me then, and so at this point I understood better how he felt about the matter. He did not want his young daughter to be married so soon, imagining that I would instead, after completing primary school, go on and continue my education, to become more than a wife and mother, but rather, at the very least, a good wife and wise mother, as it was said. With such encouragement, to my mother’s outrage, I chose to study nursing under the Red Cross with my father’s support, rather than to follow Katsuo around on whatever path he chose. If the two of us should reconvene in our paths, my father imagined, then he would surely approve of whatever we chose to do, but he firmly refused to insist upon any relationship, despite insistence from my mother and from Katsuo’s.
For my ability in English, I was delighted to have the opportunity to serve as one of the youngest nurses in the squad sent to Southampton. My father greatly encouraged that trip abroad, while my mother was beside herself. Little did any of us know that we would be asked to remain for the entirety of the war! I will admit, then, that this time awoke something within me. I imagine a keen mind must be inclined to thinking on its own, and if this is the case, then my own was left to its own devices. I was young and silly then, and at such a time in my life as I was, I learned a great many things there. If my mother should ever learn how I came to know the German language, I would imagine she would die on the spot, unless she managed to induce me to kill myself first, so I will ask that my writing of my experiences abroad not be shared outside of my confidence.
Although the majority of the Prisoners of War we cared for in our time in Southampton were of no consequence to me, I found myself picking out several of the most dashing, and considering what I might do. I told myself and my fellow nurses, then, that the extra time I devoted to the injured among these dashing sorts was to learn the German language, so that we might better be able to care for them. I did make good progress with the language, but I cannot say that this was the only product of my time among them. By my second year around these—shall we call them crippled gentlemen?—I found myself perhaps more bold than sensible. Although my fellow nurses said nothing of the matter, perhaps for at least one of them also considered a fling as I did, the surgeon indeed took notice when I turned entirely red as one of the new men in our charge requested me to care for him by name, despite us having never been introduced. He presumed, in a sort of kindness to me, that it was simply that I was better with German language than any of my fellow nurses. But I will admit that I did care for him as I cared for some of those other handsome fellows; after all, I had found that I greatly enjoyed going “above and beyond” in my care.
I suppose it is poor form to say that I enjoyed the war, but my experience was surely more lovely than most. The stress and activity of my work and the sort of entertainment I could access, both in the forms of the United Kingdom’s extensive scientific literature and in the nonetheless handsome forms of the crippled Germans in our care, brought me to feel almost mournful when I was on my way to return to Japan. To go from intensive medical work and intensive leisure to a possible quiet domesticity felt entirely unacceptable to me. I remember, as I sat in my bed on the way back, thinking of ways to prolong my time in the service. How fortunate I was that Russia was in shambles and that our country was engaged in a massive intervention! I had no sooner greeted my parents than I announced that I would be departing north shortly. My mother screamed at me then, while my father stood in stunned silence. But I had already enlisted to go there, and it could therefore not be helped, even as I then felt a sense of remorse for abandoning them so soon after my return.
The Siberian Intervention, I suppose, was less excellent than my time in Southampton, but despite the unpleasant material conditions and good reading, I made up for this with socialising—of the normal kind, to be clear. That is not to say, though, that I did not maintain my previous hobbies. At the time of my departure to Siberia, I had known a number of Germans, a Hungarian, two Englishmen, a Scotsman, two Canadians, and an American. By the summer of last year, when that disappointing announcement of our withdrawal from the intervention came, I realised in my tally that whoever I married would not be my first anything. I had known, in addition to those previous fellows, a particularly handsome Cossack, as I learned he was called, a Buryat fellow, two Yakut gentlemen in rapid succession (they called themselves Sakka, as I recall, and needed only a bit of patching—it was their visit where I was almost caught!), one of my fellow nurses (on several occasions, actually, we slept together specifically to stay warm, but found ourselves enjoying one another’s company more than I had imagined I would), five or six Czechoslovak legionaries, perhaps twelve White Russians and one Red, if I recall, out of my own curiosity and as an odd sort of kindness to him, for he was to be executed when the Whites returned, and a significant number of our own soldiers—enough of whom, anyway, that I cannot recall all of their names, though for a certain number of them, I believe it is because we had both drunk far more than we ought to have. I admit, writing it, that I make it sound as if I were immensely promiscuous, but disregarding recurring incidents, I rarely engaged more than a few times a month—twice in a week, at the very most.
But when that conflict ended, I could not bring myself to return home at all. I wrote a letter to my father, saying that I intended to immigrate to America. But instead, I boarded a ship heading to Germany—a place I imagine few who know me would bother to consider—intent on finding one of my old flings to perhaps help me find some nursing work in their area. Perhaps fortunately, it is unusual to see an Oriental woman of any sort in this part of the world, and I had managed to track down several of them. So it seems, I sound like a Southern German when I speak, and not a proper one at that. Munich is home to not one, but three of my old flings! Werner, Julius, and Eduard are their names—sadly, only Julius greeted me warmly. Though I could not stay with him, on account of his mother, he was kind as to give me directions and assistance in finding temporary employment while I made arrangements to become properly certified in accordance with German law. While modelling for artists is by no stretch of my imagination anything I would have ever done under normal circumstances, with how fascinated they are to have a “genuine Oriental subject,” as they say, I would be silly to try and find other temporary work. Artists are, even in such a case, stimulating enough company that I cannot find myself too disappointed. But I still look forward to when I can return to my nursing work, and find more situations as I have in the past to enjoy excitement in work and leisure at once.