Above the East China Sea: A Novel (50 page)

FIFTY-SIX

As the ambulance attendants help Jake into the ambulance he tells them something as he points at me. The bleeding from where I gashed my arm has mostly stopped, but Jake convinces them that I need help too. I try to explain that the cuts look a lot worse than they are, but neither of the EMTs has time for a discussion. They’ve already got a patient on the stretcher, and the old woman needs help a lot more than either Jake or I do. The second EMT hops in back with us, the doors slam, and we speed off as rapidly as the crowd can clear out of our way.

“Jake, how are you?” I ask as the Okinawan EMT shines a penlight into Jake’s eyes and orders him to follow its beam.

“Seriously, I’m fine,” he answers, after telling the attendant how many fingers he’s holding up.

“Seriously, you got hit by an ambulance.”

“Bumped is more like it. I was stunned for a minute, but I’m okay now. The real question is, what the hell were you doing sauntering across the street? It was a miracle that my drum team was stopped at that spot right when you ran out in front of an ambulance. An ambulance that had its lights and siren on. What is up with that?” Jake looks at me and waits for an answer. He is still in his Eisā drummer’s costume.

I consider lying. But I don’t and simply answer, “I saw her. The girl from the cave.”

Jake nods, and I’m surprised at how unsurprised he is. “Yeah, I thought it might be something like that. Happens on the last day of Obon. Lot of the dead have too good a time and don’t want to go back. Hope someone else chases her back to her world.”

The ambulance, blaring its horn to clear the crowd, gains speed. Before I can say anything more, the old woman strapped onto the
stretcher a few inches from us opens her eyes and looks around, a confused, haunted expression on her face. She moves her mouth like a fish gasping for oxygen. “Jake, she needs something. What should we do?”

Jake speaks to the attendant, who explains that the old woman is stabilized and they’re not supposed to do anything more except transport her to the hospital.

But she clearly needs help. A pair of glasses, their thick, heavy lenses shattered, lies on the stretcher next to her. I realize she can’t see and how scared and disoriented she must be. There’s so little room between us that I only have to bend forward to enter into her field of vision. Though I’m certain I’m nothing more than a blurry smudge to her, the old lady smiles a smile like angels on Christmas morning when she sees me. But then, as she reaches a trembling hand up, I realize that the smile is not for me. It’s for the object that she strokes while exhaling a trembling sigh of relief deeper than any I’ve ever heard. It’s for the lily brooch still pinned on my blouse.

At the hospital, the old woman seems agitated when I have to step away so that the nurses and orderlies who rush out to greet us can transfer her to a gurney. She reaches out her hand to me, and I take it. Though he objects, Jake is ordered to ride in a wheelchair.

The emergency room smells of sweat and vomit and is packed with casualties of the combustion of three days of drinking and close contact with extended family, all coming to a mad crescendo at the Ten Thousand Eisā Dance Parade. We are rushed through the waiting room, back to the examining area. Doctors in white lab coats, nurses in blue scrubs, techs in green whip past, their shoes brushing the floor in a brisk rhythm punctuated by the constant beeping of monitors. A young female physician directs the gurney to be wheeled into a newly vacated examining room. I try to slip away, but the woman only hangs on to my hand more tightly.

Whether they assume we’re family, or simply because all the other rooms are full, Jake and I are waved in while the old woman is examined, a heart monitor hooked up, and an IV started. The odors, human and medicinal, combined with the general frenzy of the emergency room act on her like smelling salts under a boxer’s nose. She shakes her head and, blinking wildly, struggles as if she were expected to get up and perform vital duties. I hurry over to calm her. She clutches my hand and reaches out again for the lily pin. Her fingers close around it,
and words that sound even more foreign to me than Japanese tumble out as if a timer is running and she can’t talk fast enough.

I lean in close, stroke her face, and croon,
“Shi-shi-shi.”
She relaxes her clawing grip and I pin the lily brooch on her blouse. I place her free hand on the pin, and her face lights up. She grins as if this were part of a secret joke between us and pulls me close. I am enclosed in a cloud of memory and the smells of Pond’s cold cream, green tea, and a vinegary body odor. Her voice falls to a whisper as she speaks only to me. I am distressed, confused by the urgency of her feverish monologue that she seems to expect me to understand. Then, from out of the cacophony, a name spoken by a nurse reporting to a doctor about the new patient emerges as clearly as if it were my own: Kokuba Hatsuko. The only Princess Lily girl without a pin. The big sister.

I lean in and listen.

FIFTY-SEVEN

Oh, Little Guppy, to see your beautiful face again! My prayers have been answered. The
kami
have returned you to me. Tami-chan, my sweet, my precious little sister, I have waited so long to explain, to beg you for your forgiveness. I should never have abandoned you. Never. The only reason I can give for leaving you alone and unprotected in our family’s tomb and for taking the crock of pork miso our mother made to save us is that I was crazed by love. It shames me still to think of how I deserted you. Perhaps, if you know the misfortunes I endured after we parted, you will see that I suffered for my blindness, my ignorance, and for all my failures to be a proper older sister.

“When I walked away from the tomb, Little Guppy, I believed that I could witness nothing worse than what you and I had already seen. But I was wrong. After the Imperial Army collapsed, everyone, soldiers and civilians alike, clawed for life. I saw a Japanese soldier knock an old woman down with the butt of his rifle and steal the shriveled bit
of sweet potato she was gnawing on. I saw a starving infant suck the blood streaming from his dying mother’s chest. I saw a crazed Japanese soldier molest a dead woman. I saw a father, terrified of the Americans, gather his wife, his mother, his five children around him, then pull the pin on a grenade and turn them all into a cloud of pink dust. I saw a colonel kneel in a field and plunge his sword into his belly and his guts spill out like an overturned basket of eels.

“I forced myself to stop seeing and thought only of reaching Nakamura before honor compelled him to commit seppuku. For I was certain that he, the proudest of all the emperor’s proud soldiers, would surely choose the sword over surrender. Though I was starving, I didn’t touch a single bite from our mother’s crock. It was all for Nakamura. I would save him and he would love me. If not in this life, then certainly, and forever, in the next.

“The dead were everywhere. They were yellow mud in the rain. When the rain stopped, they shriveled up into mummies in the heat. Adult faces shrank to the size of a child’s and turned black. Except for the teeth, which continued to shine in hideous white smiles.

“When I finally reached Makabe the caves were nothing more than scorched holes that stank of flesh turned to charcoal by flamethrowers. I gave up all hope then that Nakamura might still be alive. I would have found a way to kill myself, but, upon accepting that I was too late to save the lieutenant, all strength left my starved body, and I sank to the earth. The heavy crock crashed against the rocks and a wave of maggots poured forth. The food was spoiled. Okinawa was spoiled. Life was spoiled.

“I hated the
Amerikās
for taking my beloved from me and for destroying all that was beautiful on this earth. When the long-nosed giants found me, I no longer cared how they might use me. I hated the enemy so much that even the unearthly blue eyes of the half-naked devils with their red skin marked by frightening tattoos did not scare me. In the moment that they lifted me from the ground in their demon-strong arms, I made a vow that somehow I would discover a way to kill as many of the monsters as I could, so that I would be the most brilliant of shattered jewels when I joined my gallant warrior in a warrior’s death.

“In their detention camp, endless rows of tents were staked on a mud flat and surrounded by a double row of barbed-wire fences. I
drank only a few sips of water and ate only a few bites of their disgusting, greasy food. Their hamburgers. Their Spam. They both tasted of the slow-acting poison that our teachers had warned us about. My plan was to live only long enough to steal an unguarded weapon and kill as many of the enemy as I could before the poison sent me to a death as honorable as Nakamura’s.

“Please, little sister, don’t sneer at me. I know now that I was a fool. But then? We were children; we knew only what we had been told. What we had been taught in school.

“Early one morning, when I and the nine other women in my tent were herded out to relieve ourselves, I saw my chance. A guard at the edge of the women’s compound had isolated a pretty girl from the country to toy with. He wasn’t wearing a shirt and his hairy chest was marked with a tattoo depicting the flesh-eating eagle that they worshiped. The revolver on his hip was ignored as he leaned forward, playing with the terrified girl’s hair, pressing his unwanted attentions on her. I advanced quickly toward the demon.

“Unnoticed, I crept up behind him. My hand was reaching out for his gun when the guard spotted someone he knew, straightened up abruptly, and called out to the man, ‘Hey, Nocky, get your ass over here.’

“A tall Okinawan man, his head bent low in a servile posture beneath a farmer’s conical straw hat that hid his face, rushed over, eager to do the guard’s bidding. He wore a ragged kimono belted beneath his potbelly that flapped about his knees as he hurried toward us.

“ ‘Nocky,’ the guard said, waving a casual finger at the girl trembling with fear. ‘Tell this one that I think she’s mighty sweet.’

“Though no proud sword swept out behind the farmer as he bowed lower than even the most obsequious of servants, I recognized the voice that scurried to pander.
‘Hai! Hai! Hai!
Yes, sir! Right away, sir!’