KAZUO ODACHI, MEMORIES OF A KAMIKAZE (GARZANTI, PP. 300, EURO 22) Kazuo Odachi, kamikaze pilot in the service of the Imperial Japanese Navy aviation, survived the eight missions for which he was destined. After the end of the Second World War he began a career in the Tokyo police force. In this book, published in Italy by Garzanti translated by Motoko Tanaka, he retraces that period.
The volume, whose first original edition dates back to 2016, is the account of a series of interviews that Odachi gave, between 2014 and 2016, to the former prosecutor Shigeru Ota and the former journalist Hiroyoshi Nishijima, both co-authors of the essay.
Kazuo Odachi enlisted in ’43, at the age of sixteen. A year later he is assigned to the Kamikaze Special Attack Corps, aviators whose mission is to sacrifice their lives by crashing their plane into enemy ships. Odachi remembers the difficulties of training, the conscious expectation of death, the trauma. “When it was diving at its maximum speed, the fighter could not hold on and risked disintegrating in flight”, he says and explains that when the plane began the climb, his body and head were crushed against the seat and his face was deformed by the pressure: “I had the impression that my eyelids were gradually changing color, going from yellow to purple and finally to black, and I felt like I was about to faint.” The combat simulations lasted five or six minutes “and the entire exercise lasted twenty-five to thirty minutes in total, but it was exhausting. During that type of training, some pilots, failing to raise the control stick, ended up crashing into the ground against a mountain or elsewhere,” says Odachi.
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