Above the East China Sea: A Novel (34 page)

My mom.
There is no way to make Jake, with his constellations of family photos, understand what a dead end my mom is. How she’s spent her whole life fleeing real connection by escaping into fake ones. How, even now, she’s running from her last real connection, me. Having mastered the stealth cry, I don’t think that Jake will notice that thinking about my mom makes the silent tears flow even harder. But he does, and wraps his arms more tightly around me, and I think that I’ll never be critical of my mother again for seeking this out, this momentary comfort, this break, no matter how brief, from aloneness.

Above the steady beat of Jake’s heart, I hear a distant, mechanical whirring and look up at the exact instant that the two gray cars of a monorail with a red stripe through the middle whiz along near the tops of buildings several blocks away. As they pass from view, a clump of buildings higher than the rail hide part of the front car. In that moment, it appears as if the back car might be the last one in a long train. Might, in fact, be part of a big-city system. Like the El in Chicago. Like the one running behind the street-corner dude in the photo I found in my mom’s room.

In my mind, I see the photo in exact detail and am certain of what I suspected but wouldn’t allow myself to acknowledge from the moment I found the picture. I see the street corner dude’s hair, which is my hair and Codie’s hair and, almost certainly, the hair of the singer from the photo where my dazzled grandmother looks like Elvis’s girlfriend. I see the man’s coiled wariness as he glances down the street, and think of my mother’s implacable restlessness. Far overhead, I see the gray monorail car in the photo and how it is identical to the one that just passed, right down to the red stripe through its middle. A stripe that matches the color of what I thought were tissue-paper blossoms from a parade that made a crimson carpet at the feet of the curly-haired man. Like the ones Codie stood on in my dream. Like the ones that cover her grave with scarlet flowers from the
deigo
tree.

“I can get a better list,” I say.

“From who?”

“My grandfather.”

THIRTY-FOUR

I will never forget the date—May 29, 1945—when I heard the words, “Shuri has fallen.”

The news spread among us like the deadliest of plagues, killing every hope we still had of victory. Worse even than that, we learned that our generals, Ushijima and Chō, had fled and no one seemed to know where they’d gone. The thought of being leaderless filled us with fear worse than any we had yet experienced.

“I don’t believe it.” Hatsuko dismissed the information as rumors planted by spies.

None of us wanted to believe it. Shuri was the soul of Okinawa. We were safe as long as Shuri stood. I could not imagine the vermilion-and-gold palace, the enchanted gardens where I’d met the
juri,
much less the Imperial Army’s vast underground stronghold, falling into enemy hands.

“That’s impossible,” Hatsuko maintained stoutly. “Those tunnels beneath Shuri are impregnable. I won’t believe that Shuri has fallen unless I hear it from an officer of the Imperial Army.”

I knew immediately the officer she intended to seek confirmation from, and followed her as she strode purposefully down the long corridor to the officers’ quarters.

“Hatsuko, Tamiko, how happy I am to see you,” Lieutenant Nakamura, who was playing cards with his fellow officers, called out when he caught sight of us. “Won’t you come in? I’m afraid we no longer have any real tea, but the boiled pine needles we drink don’t make a bad brew.”

“No, thank you,” Hatsuko answered, lowering her lashes. “If we could just speak to you for a moment.” She added, “About a military matter.”

One of the other men pointed at his crotch and said that we were welcome to speak to his “little general” about any military matter we liked. That the “little general” would even stand up and salute for us. Hatsuko left then and didn’t see how Nakamura smiled in a knowing
way at their lewd laughter when he put his cards down and went into the corridor to speak with us.

“Is it true?” Hatsuko demanded. “Has Shuri fallen? Have the generals fled?”

“Does the huntsman flee when he runs ahead of the stag to set a trap to capture the great beast?”

“But no one knows where our leaders generals Ushijima and Chō are.”

“They are here,” Nakamura answered, and placed the palm of his hand over Hatsuko’s heart. She looked up at him like a fish with a hook in its mouth. “They are but the mere embodiment of the noble Japanese spirit that will give us all the courage to make the ultimate sacrifice for our emperor when the time comes.” At that moment, with Hatsuko’s lips trembling and Nakamura’s jaw set firmly, they looked like two film stars staring into each other’s eyes. “The spirit that will join us forever when we have the honor of shattering like jewels defending our homeland from invasion.”

Hatsuko gazed up as dreamily as if he’d just proposed marriage.

“What are you saying?” I demanded. Hatsuko shot me a sour look that warned me not to go on. I ignored her. “ ‘Our’ homeland has already been invaded. Okinawa
is
our homeland.”

Nakamura spoke to me as if I were a slow child who required a simple explanation for something that was obvious to everyone else. “Oh, Little Guppy.” I bristled at his using Hatsuko’s nickname for me. “Okinawa is a finger, the littlest of the fingers, which will have the honor of being broken as we deliver all the blows needed to stop the American bullies from ever reaching the shores of our homeland and harming any real Japanese.”

“A finger to be broken? Is that all Okinawa ever was to you? To any of you ‘real’ Japanese?”

Nakamura’s expression hardened.

“Tamiko, you’ve said enough,” my sister scolded. “You don’t understand.”

“I understand. You ‘real Japanese’ said you were defending
us,
but from the beginning we were nothing more to you than a shield for your own defense. Our deaths, our island, mean nothing to you and your precious emperor—”

A slap stung my cheek. “That will be enough!” Nakamura thundered, his handsome face twisting into that of a petulant child. “I could have you killed as a spy for voicing such unspeakable treason against the emperor.”

“You, you with your long, shiny sword, you are the bully, just as much as the Americans.” Barely believing myself what I’d said, I ran away. When I reached the safety of a bend in the corridor to hide behind, I stopped and looked back. Hatsuko had thrown herself at Nakamura’s feet and was begging forgiveness for my transgression. He reached down, pulled her to her feet, tilted her tear-splashed face up, and gently stroked her cheek. I ran on, heavy with the knowledge that after such a display, Nakamura would surely propose marriage to my sister.

Hatsuko was still not speaking to me when, a few days later, the order came for us to evacuate the patients; the
ketō
ground troops were closing in. Head Nurse Tanaka had to go into the wards to determine which of the patients were mobile enough to make the journey south.

“You,” she said, pointing to me. “You’ll come with me and do something useful for a change and write down the names of the patients who can walk.”

“What of the others?” I asked. “The ones who cannot walk?”

“What do you think? Quit being an Okinawan simpleton and come along.”

A medic carrying a large brown box accompanied us, and we entered the first ward. None of the emaciated men with their maggot-infested wounds and missing limbs seemed capable of making the trip to the latrine, much less a hard march on hilly terrain. But when Head Nurse announced our mission, all the men struggled to stand. A few managed to hold themselves upright. Head Nurse told me to take their names.

Those not selected trembled with fear as they pleaded for her not to leave them behind. “The
ketō
will crush us beneath the treads of their monstrous tanks,” they wailed. “I heard that they kill prisoners by skinning them alive. Please, Nurse, please.”

“All of you, stop disgracing yourselves!” Head Nurse bellowed. She nodded at the medic, who passed among the men, handing out packets of white powder. “Mix this with water and it will speed you on your way to a glorious death in the service of our emperor.”

I recalled the stories about Head Nurse’s familiarity with poison, and a shiver ran through me.

“You men over there.” She indicated a cluster of a dozen patients packed together on a couple of mats on the cave floor. “Since there is not enough powder for everyone, you will have a special honor.” The medic handed the man in the middle a grenade.

“All you patients will remain silent when the enemy comes,” Head Nurse instructed them, her eyes alight with a strange gleam. “When they have wandered far into the cave, then, and only then, will you pull the pin on your grenade. And, if luck is with us, the cave will collapse and those of the enemy not killed outright will be crushed. In this way your deaths will be of some small service to the emperor.”

We helped the abandoned, bedridden patients arrange themselves in the proper posture of death, with their heads facing north. Their piteous cries, begging us not to leave them to starve to death or to die at a cruel enemy’s hand, echoed out as we strode off to the next ward.

By that evening the ambulatory patients had gathered in front of the main cave. Men tottered on crutches; arms were in slings, heads bandaged. There wasn’t a complete uniform among the lot of them, just a battered hat here, the scraps of a jacket there. Few even had boots. We stood in an eerie, ominous silence so unusual that it took a moment for us to identify its cause. A one-legged man who had his arm looped around the neck of a companion finally said, in a flat tone devoid of all emotion, “The bombing has stopped. Now they will come to kill us one by one.”

As the sun set, I watched the army of broken bodies leave Haebaru. The stragglers at the end cast long, dark shadows that teetered behind them as they hobbled up the sloping hill.

In our cave, I felt Hatsuko’s silence more keenly now that the incessant bombing had stopped. Sachiko, Miyoko, Mitsue, Hatsuko, and I were the only Princess Lily girls remaining. The others had left with the mobile patients. We had been assigned to stay behind until the next morning, in case the officers arriving then needed our help. We tried to chat, but our voices sounded stilted and too loud in the echoing silence. Soon the others were snoring softly, but I had become so accustomed to the sounds of war that I could no longer fall asleep without that constant rumble. I got up and went outside again.

It was drizzling, and a miraculous sound reached me: the croaking of frogs. The call of night birds joined their serenade. And then, most magical of all, I heard the chirping of a happy gecko, just like the one that had always brought luck to our family. I imagined the pink bubble of his air sac blowing up and down at his neck and was transported back to my room beneath our thick thatch roof. In that dark and serene moment, it was as if there had never been a war and there was nothing more natural in the world than for me to take a stroll. I followed the peaceful sounds out beyond the edge of our cave world. I would have gone farther, gone wherever those sounds led me, had a squad of twenty Japanese soldiers not marched past.

Each soldier wore full combat dress and carried a small square box under his arm. Their movements were crisp and forceful. It was exhilarating to see such a by-now-rare display of pride and spirit. These were the human bombs I had heard so much about. They would go out into the night and hide. When the enemy approached in their monstrous tanks, they would hurl themselves beneath the awful treads and detonate their bombs, destroying the machines, their occupants, and themselves in one final burst of glory.

As they came closer, I saw that the troops were not all Japanese. In fact, only those on the outer edges were. All the men, boys, really, inside the square of real soldiers were Okinawans of the Blood and Iron corps. One of the Okinawans glanced my way, and for just one instant, his mask of noble sacrifice fell away and he was only a boy again, young and scared, and I was the last girl he would ever see on this earth. He risked his sergeant’s wrath by hissing at me, “They’re here. The
Amerikās.
They’re only fifty meters from this spot. Don’t stay any longer. Go back to your cave. Hurry. Run. Save yourself!” His words were a dying wish. A wish not to be dying.