Above the East China Sea: A Novel (25 page)

In spite of the horror stories, the long night of marching caught up with me and, wedged in between Hatsuko and Mitsue, I fell into a sleep darker than the cave became after the kerosene lamp was extinguished. I don’t know how many hours later I was dragged from my dreams by the stench of all those bodies crammed into such a small space and the urgent need to relieve myself.

Outside, the sunlight dazzled me. The early afternoon air was cool and fragrant with the scents of spring, new grass, and fresh leaves. The cloudless sky was bluer than I had ever seen it, and I recalled that the name of the nearby village, Haebaru, meant “meadows of southerly winds.” The previous night felt as if it had been nothing but a bad dream that was over now, and life would again be as it was meant to be. High overhead, flashing across the sun, I caught a glint of silver. I shielded my eyes to see the insect or bird better.

“Oh, no, a
tombo.
” Hatsuko appeared at my side.

“A dragonfly?” I asked. “It’s too big.”

“No, that’s what we call the
Amerikās
’ reconnaissance planes. Remember how we used to chase real
tombos?
”

I thought of the long summer days when we would run through the millet fields, the shimmering wings and big, all-seeing eyes of the dragonflies dancing ahead of us.

“Well, now the
tombos
are chasing us. We are the prey they search out.” An instant passed before Hatsuko laughed, almost as if she had to remind herself to make the sound of silver bells. “Where the
tombos
fly, the bombs will follow.” For a long time we watched the planes that were watching us.

Hatsuko’s words proved correct, and the next day a steady bombardment of the green meadows, fields, and woods around the cave hospitals
began. All day we were trapped inside by the fall of bombs that paused only briefly at dusk, when our enemy stopped to eat dinner.

Over the next few days, before any patients arrived, we had nothing to do but huddle inside the cave and wait and listen as the explosions grew closer and louder. With no water for bathing or washing our clothes, it wasn’t long before we were all afflicted by the tormenting bites of the lice that hid in our hair and the seams of our dirty clothes.

When word reached us in our gloomy cave that the
ketō
had come ashore on our beaches, and that they were equipped with monstrous war machines that moved like huge blocks of iron, crushing everything in their paths, we had to hide how downhearted and frightened we were. Though I knew enough not to ask aloud, I wondered about Operation Sho, the crafty trap that my father and Miyoko had spoken of in which the Imperial Navy, led by the mightiest warship ever created, the invincible
Yamato,
would trap the American fleet and wipe them out like sitting ducks. Why hadn’t the trap been sprung before our enemy came ashore?

Though we were afraid to voice our doubts for fear of not showing our true Japanese spirit, I knew that Hatsuko shared them. After a detonation so near that the shock waves rumbled through the cave, she called out in a voice too bright with false excitement, “Think of our brave soldiers lying in wait in the tunnels beneath Shuri like a thousand
habu
snakes, hiding until the right moment to emerge and strike.
Tennō heika banzai!
”

Our answering
Banzai!
s were drowned out by a furious series of staccato blasts. By the guttering flame of the stinking kerosene lantern, I saw the faces, pale from hiding in caves for so many days, go even paler as we imagined the
Amerikās
with their red faces and long noses trampling across our island, hoisting infants on their bayonets, ripping toddlers in half with their massive hands, torturing our parents, making their way to us so that they could use us in the unspeakable ways Father had warned Hatsuko and me of in the foreigners’ cemetery.

That evening when the bombing stopped at our enemy’s dinner hour, we rushed outside and beheld, in the place of Haebaru’s green meadows, a barren wasteland of smoldering tree stumps and bomb craters. Nonetheless, we hurried out to feel the sun on our faces, to fetch water, relieve ourselves, gather our meager rations from the quartermaster,
and visit with the hundreds of others who poured out of the honeycomb of caves.

Mitsue and I were filling our buckets with water when a woman from her fiancé Masaru’s village rushed up, her face a pudding of sorrow, and said, “Oh, dear Mitsue-san, I was so sorry when I heard the news about Masaru.”

“News of my fiancé? What news?” Mitsue demanded. Her lips, plump and full as a cartoon goldfish’s, trembled with fear as she waited for the answer her heart had already spoken.

The woman pressed her fingers against her mouth as if she could bottle up the words that had already been released. “You don’t know? I was certain that you would have known.”

“What? Tell me. Masaru, is he …?”

She couldn’t say the word, but none of us needed to hear it.

The neighbor nodded. “His parents received the white box over a month ago.”

The Imperial Army sent the ashes of the dead home in a white box. Mitsue wept all night for her fiancé named Victory, and there was nothing any of us could do to comfort her.

TWENTY-THREE

At the end of the second week in that gloomy cave, before casualties reached our part of the hospital system, we had little to do other than pluck and crush lice, and scratch at the maddening bites the chalky white insects crawling in and out of our clothes left. Our spirits were quite low when we received news that made us all leap to our feet and cheer as wildly as we had when we learned that Japan had devastated the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor: President Roosevelt had died! This proved to those few doubters that the emperor truly
was
divine. Just as the gods had sent divine winds to destroy Kublai Khan’s Mongol fleet when he tried, not once but twice—in 1274, then again in 1281—to
invade Japan, the deities had intervened again to protect our beloved homeland.

It was obvious that the bullying Americans were being punished for provoking Japan into attacking them. Surely now the war would be over. The Americans could not possibly go on without their leader. But the onslaught not only continued, it increased in ferocity. We couldn’t understand such callousness. If our emperor were to die, we would be incapacitated by grief. Our reason for fighting to the death would be gone; the
ketō
had to be even more monstrous than we thought.

Time for these desolate reflections vanished when patients began to arrive from the front. We were summoned to the main hospital cave to receive our assignments. The rainy season had commenced and rivers of mud now ran between the bomb craters. At the entrance, we were told to wait while our leaders, the Himeyuri teachers, consulted with the authorities inside. All around us wounded soldiers lay on stretchers, moaning with pain. They had obviously been waiting for hours, since their uniforms were soaking wet. We stood outside with them, the rain running in rivulets down our faces.

After several hours we were ushered in by Nurse Tanaka. The air of the main corridor was thick with fluffy black soot from the kerosene lamps mounted on the walls. “No talking,” Tanaka hissed at us. “We’re coming close to the officers’ quarters. They’ve just arrived from the front.”

All the rooms were open to the main corridor, so we fell silent and bowed our heads as we passed the officers’ quarters. To look directly at an officer in such circumstances would have been a sign of disrespect that the more capricious among their ranks would punish with a severe beating. But that didn’t stop Hatsuko from glancing around until she found Lieutenant Nakamura in a room stacked with sleeping planks. My sister stopped dead. Nakamura had his back to us. He wore only trousers and a sleeveless T-shirt that revealed broad shoulders and a fine, slender physique. In his hand was a tin of Jintan breath mints with the navy commander on the front wearing his trademark old-fashioned commodore’s hat. Carefully, almost reverently, Nakamura plucked a mint from the tin.

As he was bringing the Jintan mint to his mouth, he felt my sister’s eyes burning a hole into his back and turned to face us. In spite of being
caught in a state of undress, he was the essence of dignity as he bent at the waist in a courtly bow and held his last mint out, offering it to Hatsuko. My dazed sister barely had time to offer a stunned wave of thanks and refusal before I hurried her down the hall.

Hatsuko’s hand in mine trembled from the force of her emotion. Sachiko and Miyoko were reacting like silly schoolgirls to the sight of the handsome lieutenant, their heads pressed together, stifling giggles. Mitsue, on the other hand, hadn’t even noticed the half-dressed lieutenant. Her grief had lent her a detached serenity, and she seemed to float among us like a spirit summoned back from the dead.

Beyond the officers’ quarters was an operating room. It was lit by a naked electric bulb that blinded us after our confinement in the dim cave. Two masked doctors bent over an operating table while a nurse stood by, holding a tray piled with gleaming instruments. Their patient groaned in agony. The harsh illumination threw jagged, dancing shadows across the cave wall, and I felt as if I were watching one of the German horror movies that Hatsuko and I had seen in Naha.

“Stop gawking!” Nurse Tanaka ordered, swatting the back of my head with a hard slap.

The patients’ ward was at the end of the corridor. Here stacks of bunk beds six high filled with wounded men lined the bare cave walls. In addition to the usual odors of cave life, there was the stench of rotting flesh, pus, urine, and acrid medicines. Nurse Tanaka gave us our assignments, and we broke into three groups. Hatsuko and Miyoko were sent off to surgery ward one. Mitsue went to surgery ward two, and Sachiko left for the internal medicine ward.

Nurse Tanaka stared sharply at the pin on my chest that designated me a head girl, and, without looking at my face, asked, “Name?”

I told her. And, just as Hatsuko had promised, she wrote it down without question.

A nearby patient began calling out to us, “Nurse, please, a bedpan. Please, I’ve been asking for hours. Please.” The man was so emaciated and dehydrated that his head was little more than a skull with eyes sunk deep into their sockets and dark hollows shadowing his cheeks.

“Help this man!” Head Nurse shouted at me, as if I had been the one ignoring him for so long. Before I could tell her that I’d received no training and didn’t even know what a bedpan looked like, she stomped away.
I stood, rooted to the bumpy floor, overwhelmed by the men around me, who all began crying out for help the instant Nurse Tanaka left, as though they knew better than to make any requests in front of her.

“Please, Nurse, a bedpan,” the first man begged again.

I wanted to tell him that I wasn’t a nurse. I wasn’t even a Himeyuri student. But the years of having it drilled into me that no respectable young woman would ever speak to a man silenced my tongue.

“Please, you have two hands.” The soldier’s voice was so piteous that I couldn’t refuse. I searched the ward for a receptacle and found a foul-smelling basin, which I intended to hand to him, then turn my back while he relieved himself. At his bed, however, he wouldn’t take the pan.

“Nurse, please, I need a bit of help. If you could pull back the sheet …”

I did and found that both the man’s arms had been amputated.

“And now,” he continued. “I’m very sorry, but …” He nodded his head toward his crotch.

I, who had not so much as spoken to a boy since I was a young girl, and certainly never seen an unclothed man, had to remove his loincloth and hold his member as he urinated. I breathed through my mouth so as not to faint and repeated to myself,
I am doing this for my emperor and my country. I am doing this for my emperor and my country.
When he was finished, other patients begged for the same service. Some had the use of their hands. Some did not.

As the shock of what I would be required to do wore off, I reminded myself that these men had been wounded defending me and my island from the predatory Americans, and I forced myself to speak to them. The effect of a few kind words was remarkable. Men who’d seemed little more than pathetic, groveling animals a moment before retook their human form and told me where they were from and how they had been wounded. More than one had tears in his eyes as he whispered that I reminded him of the little sister he’d left back home in Japan.