Above the East China Sea: A Novel (12 page)

In Naha, we were always awed by the majestic port where ships from Japan, Taiwan, China, and the South Sea Islands came and went. Waves lapped against the concrete piers and seagulls cried overhead. There the dockworkers, all brown as bark and naked except for their loincloths, would load and unload huge crates. Rickshaw drivers dressed in starched black jackets scrambled to be the first to pick up disembarking passengers, usually government officials sent from the mainland. As I watched, another childhood song would run through my mind. This one captured the excitement from centuries gone by, when the great tribute ships came and went from China. It reminded us of the hundreds of years when Okinawa was a trading center with silks, dyes, spices, perfumes, wine, folding screens, feathers, exotic birds and animals, swords, gold, books, medicinal herbs, even eunuchs, passing to and from Java, Thailand, Korea, Japan, and, of course, the country we were aligned with for centuries, China.

After Hatsuko left for school, I would take the train to visit her by myself. She would meet me at the station and we’d rush off to catch one of the trolleys that crisscrossed Naha from its international port all the way to Shuri, home of the palace of the Ryukyuan kings and, of course, Himeyuri High School. I could have ridden those trolleys the entire day, marveling at the rickshaws and motorcycles and, very occasionally, an auto purring along the broad, palm-shaded avenues. We were thrilled when we spotted a fine Japanese lady in the backseat of her limousine driven by a chauffeur wearing a peaked cap, white gloves, and a double-breasted uniform.

Our first stop was always a little shop that Hatsuko had discovered that sold
mochii
balls as fine as the ones made in Tokyo. There would be no boring
beni imo
cakes made of purple sweet potatoes, or any other Okinawan food, for us on those special days. After our special Japanese treat, we would stroll along the avenue, peering into the elegant
hotels and restaurants built exclusively for the mainlanders, and whisper about the day when we were both Himeyuri graduates and would be allowed to enter with the rest of our elite classmates.

The highlight of those trips, though, was a trip to Naha’s best picture palace, the Golden Star. There we would watch one movie after another. Before they were banned, we also used to watch energetic, fast-moving films from America. Once, we saw a cowboy movie that caused Hatsuko and me to weep when the Indians—handsome braves, noble old women, babies in their mothers’ arms—were slaughtered simply for defending their homeland. We thought the Americans a cruel people indeed. Not just for what they’d done in the past, but for forcing the defeated Indians to reenact their conquest for the camera. From our allies the Germans came our favorites, horror movies about vampires and monsters constructed by mad scientists in which the wicked always threw their heads back and cackled in a horrendous way that made Hatsuko and me shriek and grab each other in fear.

The movie that invariably packed the theater, though, no matter how many times it played, was
The Coming of Satsuma,
which told how the Japanese had captured our beloved King Shō Tai in 1879. In the movie version, when our king was about to be thrown alive into a cauldron of boiling oil, he grabbed two of his executioners and leaped with his screaming victims into the boiling oil. Though the Japanese had told us that the story was a lie, and that Shō Tai was a trader in league with the Koreans who were plotting to enslave us, everyone in the theater would clap and shriek their approval. Everyone, that is, except Hatsuko, who found the entire display treasonous. The officials must have agreed, because a few years ago, the film was banned entirely and never played again.

Late that night, exhausted by the excitement of the city, I would ride home, imagining the time when I, too, would be a Princess Lily girl and live with Hatsuko. She would help me with my writing exercises, since she was famed for her elegant calligraphy, and mine looked as if a chicken with muddy feet had walked across the paper. After I earned my certificate, we would teach in classrooms next to each other, and our adoring students would follow us around like ducklings trailing after their mother. Everything, my entire life, depended on my name being on the list of those accepted into high school.

FOURTEEN

Anmā?

Yes.

What if the demon girl forgets about us?

She won’t forget us. That girl will never forget us.

But what if she does? What if we are trapped here forever? I will stop existing, won’t I?

I told you that I will never allow that.

But you fear it, don’t you? More than you fear our being separated. I am growing weaker. It will happen soon, won’t it?

Yes.

That frightens me.

Your fear won’t help us. Don’t you want to know whether my name was on your grandfather’s list?

Of course it was. You had a Princess Lily pin until the demon girl stole it.

Yes, but does that mean my name was on the list?

It wasn’t?

Listen and you will find out.

Though I was more nervous than I’d ever been in my life, there was one good thing about the upcoming announcement: At least, for that one day, no one would talk about the war. It had gotten so bad over the past few months that some dared to suggest that the conflict might come here, to Okinawa. Even though we had air-raid drills, our Japanese teachers told us not to worry. Yes, there had been bombing, but the American navy could do no serious damage. We knew from our teachers that our divine emperor’s brave aviators had destroyed the Americans’ Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor.

What could our island possibly have to fear? It was so tiny that it didn’t even appear on most maps. No Westerner had found his way to our shores since Commodore Perry’s brief visit nearly a hundred years before. Of what possible interest could Okinawa be to any of the
greedy imperialist powers? We had no weapons, no minerals. All we had were pineapples, papayas, sugarcane, and pig shit.

Still, that did not stop our teachers from educating us about what would happen in the highly unlikely event that the Americans did invade. Posters hung on the walls of our classrooms that depicted those sweating monsters with their red faces and monstrously long pointed noses. One showed the demon leaders Churchill and Roosevelt, devil horns curling out of their heads, squatting on a pile of bones, their clawed toes wrapped around skulls, eating the flesh of innocent Japanese. In voices trembling with horror and disgust, our teachers told us of the Americans’ unnatural and insatiable appetites. In the few small, weak countries they had managed to conquer, these beasts had roasted and eaten every child they could trap, and raped every female they could find, from infants in cradles to ancient crones. All that stood between us and that unspeakable fate was our emperor and the brave Imperial soldiers he had stationed in Okinawa to protect us.

On the day the names were announced, for a few moments we would all forget those well-documented atrocities as we discovered what our futures held. That morning, a moment before dawn, Kobo, our old rooster, started in. His crows grew in volume as the first rays of day slanted across our small farm and he announced to the world that he, Kobo the Mighty, had once again singlehandedly caused the sun to rise. I hoped that his crowing would wake Hatsuko, but, exhausted, she slept on. The new principal had transformed our beloved Himeyuri High into a training center for girl warriors. Last month, Hatsuko had told me, a girl had died of exhaustion during a twenty-seven-kilometer forced march. The death had only inspired him to institute harsher measures so that the Himeyuri girls who were honored to wear the Princess Lily pin would have the discipline necessary not to disgrace him.

Gradually other sounds joined in the symphony that I had woken to every morning of my life: the pigs grunting as they rooted through cooling mud for the bits of sweet potato my mother threw out; the chickens clucking and pecking about for tasty bugs; the goats bleating out their impatience to be fed. Missing was the mooing of our cows, since they had all been requisitioned by the Imperial Army.

A rustling in the thatched roof that was so high overhead it kept our house cool even on the hottest days was followed by a series of happy
chirps. In the darkness, I imagined the gecko that brought luck to our family, the sac at his throat puffing up into a lovely pink bubble as he did his morning push-ups. A second later, he darted away to do his job and keep the high roof free of cockroaches.

The groaning of wood against leather signaled the arrival of our ox, Papaya, carrying a cartload of night soil. The leathery leaves of the tall sea hibiscus that lined the narrow path slapped against the cart as he made his way out to our fields. Soon the workers who tended our rice paddies and fields of soybeans, sweet potatoes, millet, and sugarcane would arrive to receive instructions from my mother. Bit by bit, as my father had grown more refined, more modern, more Japanese, my mother had taken over the daily operation of our farm. When Father refused to ever speak another word of
Uchināguchi,
our coarse local dialect, there was no longer any reason for him to meet with the men, since none of them spoke Japanese. That’s when my mother officially became the boss.

Since nearly all of our men had left to serve the emperor’s glorious struggle against the imperialist forces of the West, most farms and businesses were now run by women. My three older brothers were gone. Father had tried to enlist but, to his shame and sorrow, was turned away because, even with spectacles, his eyesight was too poor. And now it was my turn to learn whether I had been judged worthy to serve the emperor by going on to high school. I thought of the intolerable disgrace our father would be forced to bear if the name of his youngest daughter was not on the list that he, as headman, would read out today before the entire village. The shame of that possibility stabbed me with such force that tears sprang to my eyes.

Though I neither moved nor made the slightest sound, my sister, always eerily sensitive, woke and asked, “Tami-chan, what’s wrong? Why is my Little Guppy crying?” She took my hand. Hers, usually soft and white as a true lily, was rough and calloused. Her tone, however, was still gentle and refined, and it caused me to blubber as wetly as the big-eyed, round-faced guppy I’d been nicknamed for. The first rays of the morning sun slanted in, and the blue mosquito netting around us turned the light into a pastel cloud.

“What if my name is not on the list?” I wailed. “What if I can’t come to Shuri with you and study to be a teacher? What if I have to stay here
and marry a farmer who makes our children poop into the pigsty? Whose teeth are rotten from sucking black sugar and who drinks too much millet brandy? What if I have to sleep on
gōyā
melon seeds for the rest of my life?”

Hatsuko’s face was creased with concern until the mention of the
gōyā
melon seeds. She laughed then at my typically Okinawan habit of eating the roasted seeds of the deliciously bitter
gōyā
melon in bed at night and hiding the shells by tucking them into the straw of the tatami mat.

My big sister put her arm around me. Her sleeping kimono was soft against my skin. Our aunt Yasu, the second-oldest of Mother’s sisters, wove on her backstrap loom the finest
bashōfu
cloth made from the purest banana fibers, so that our kimonos were light and cool in the summer heat. “Oh, Little Guppy, I’m laughing because I was just as fretful as you on the morning when they read the names for my class.”

“Yes, but you’re so smart. The smartest girl ever to come from Madadayo.”

“Guppy, you’re smart. You’re certainly much smarter than Cousin Mitsue, and she was admitted.”

“Because she …” I stopped myself before I could utter the word “beautiful,” and said something that amounted to the same thing: “… looks like a real Japanese girl! I bet Fumiko Inoue is on the list.” I named the smartest girl in my class.

“Fumi has hair like a
shiisā
lion dog.”