Night on the Galactic Railroad

Japan played a minor but regionally important role in the First World War as an ally of Britain. Its navy was active both in restricting German and Austrian naval activity in the Pacific and in seizing German and Austrian territories in China and in Micronesia. In early 1917 Japanese ships arrived in the Mediterranean to assist the Royal Navy. 

This imaginative novel, written around 1927, explores death and the afterlife from a child’s perspective. The author, Kenji Miyazawa (born 27 August 1896), experienced serious health problems throughout his life and wrote with a special awareness of mortality. The story was published posthumously in 1934, the author having died of pneumonia in the previous year.

The two central characters in this novella are Giovanni and Campanella, who are close friends and the sons of close friends (their fathers). One night Giovanni is on a grassy hill above his home town. There he gets on a mysterious train and finds that Campanella is already on board. The train brings them through space with passengers boarding and disembarking at the various stations along the way. When the conductor approaches Giovanni, he shows him a ticket that he did not know he had in his pocket. One of the passengers explains to him:
“Now this is something! That ticket will take you anywhere, even all the way to the true Heaven... No, perhaps even farther! It will take you anywhere this four-dimensional Galactic Railroad is capable of going. To have something like this on your person... you must be very important!”

Miyazawa tells about three of the passengers that board the train and have come from a ship that has sunk having hit an iceberg (as the Titanic had). These two children (a brother and sister) and their tutor did not get places on the lifeboats:
“I held onto these two for as long as I could... and now we're here.”
They are heading for Heaven. The girl tells them a tale about a scorpion that is cornered by a weasel. Fearing for his life, he runs away but falls into a well and starts to drown. He then started to pray:
“Oh, God. How many lives have I stolen to survive? Yet when it came my turn to be eaten by the weasel, I selfishly ran away... If only I'd let the weasel eat me, I could have helped him live another day. God, please hear my prayer. Even if my life has been meaningless, let my death be of help to others.”

Campanella looks out the window and observes his mother in Heaven. He leaves the train to join her. The scene that immediately follows is Giovanni waking on the same grassy hill. He walks to the bridge over the river and finds a commotion there. One of his classmates tells him what has happened:
“Zanelli leaned too far over on the boat we were in... It ended up tipping over and Zanelli fell in but Campanella dived in right after him and pushed him back up to the surface. Zanelli got pulled back into the boat... but Campanella... never resurfaced.”
As was often said about acts of self-sacrifice during the war,
“Greater love has no man than this than to lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13)