Above the East China Sea: A Novel (54 page)

The cool air of dawn brings Hatsuko the indispensable scent of the sea and the fragrance of sixty years of incense burned at the
butsudan,
mixed with the fresh smell of the
igusa
straw tatami beneath her. Now that she rests on her own futon she is ready. She knows that her final journey has begun when she hears again the chickens clucking and pecking about for tasty bugs. Goats bleating out their impatience to be fed. Pigs grunting as they root through cooling mud for the bits of sweet potato Mother has thrown out. Missing is the mooing of the cows, since they have all been requisitioned by the Imperial Army.

The groaning of wood against leather signals Papaya’s arrival, carrying a cartload of night soil. The leathery leaves of the tall sea hibiscus that line the narrow path slap against the cart as she makes her way out to the fields. A rustling in the thatched roof high overhead is followed by a series of happy chirps, and Hatsuko imagines the gecko that brought luck to her family puffing up the sac at his throat into a lovely pink bubble.

When their old rooster Kobo crows to announce her last day on earth, Hatsuko has only one regret: She never found Tamiko’s remains. Her sister’s earthbound spirit came to her last night only long enough
for her to explain and be forgiven but not to learn where Tamiko’s bones are buried, which means that Tamiko will not be waiting for her in the next realm. She touches the lily pin on her chest and tells Mitsue, “Please make sure that no one removes this pin.”

“Of course.”

“Good,” she says, then speaks her final words, “I will see you again soon, my dearest friend.” A short while later, Kokuba Hatsuko leaves this world as easily as a boat slipping its moorings.

With her cousin’s last breath set free, Mitsue goes to work. It has been nearly half a century since she was part of a true Okinawan funeral, but with Hatsuko’s instructions to guide her, she calls in the five selected female relatives. Together they bathe Hatsuko, cut her fingernails, toenails, and hair, and wrap the clippings in fine rice paper to be buried with her. They dress her in the kimono Hatsuko had purchased for this day. Mitsue smiles when she sees that the kimono is printed in bright
bingata
style with images of her favorite animal, the Okinawan rail, a flightless bird being driven to extinction by the foreign invaders, mongooses, and cats. She fastens the lily pin to the front of her cousin’s kimono. As the backs of her fingers brush against the washboard ridges of her cousin’s motionless chest, the
kami
cause her to recall the
hāfu
girl trying to give her the lily pin. As is so often the case with the ways of the
kami,
she doesn’t understand why they put the girl in her heart. All that is clear is what must be done.

When they’re finished, Mitsue dispatches her helpers to notify everyone in Madadayo. There is only one outsider who must be told the news. The
kami
have made their mysterious wishes known. Mitsue begins making the calls that will connect her to the American girl.

SIXTY-THREE

When my phone rings early the next morning, I’m surprised to see Jake’s name appear and assume that he’s slipping in one final communication before he returns to Christy. Before I can
tell him I am serious and not to call anymore, he says, “Mitsue just called.”

“Mitsue? From Madadayo? How did she even get your number?”

“At the hospital she recognized from my uniform what team I dance with and called the center where we practice. They gave her my number.”

“Wow, that’s random.”

“No, that’s Okinawa. There aren’t six degrees of separation between any of us. More like two. Three at the most. Anyway, Mitsue wanted me to let you know that Hatsuko is gone.”

“Oh.” I don’t know what to say and settle on, “Thanks for telling me.”

“She wants you to come to the funeral.”

“Me? Why?”

“She said you’d know why. She made me promise that I’d make sure you were there. It’s today. In Madadayo. An hour before sunset. I’d take you myself but—”

“It’s fine, Jake. No worries. I’ll figure it out.”

“Luz—”

“Jake, really, can you not talk about this? I understand. You and Christy. I get it. I always knew you were together. Seriously, don’t stress.”

“And, Luz, seriously, shut up, okay? It’s not that simple. I just wanted to tell you that I have obligations. To her. To our families. We’ve all known one another for a long time. I know this is probably hard for you to understand, but it means that I have to do this the right way. And that will take time. Do you trust me?”

I think about the question, and answer, “I do,” because, surprisingly, it’s the truth. As I hang up, Jake’s message, “She said you’d know why,” echoes in my mind, because Mitsue is right; I just don’t know how I’m going to accomplish what I now know I have to do. Not with my mom coming home. All I’m sure of is that I need her, and I need her car.

The first step is, obviously, cleaning her room. The havoc I find there seems unfamiliar, as if an entirely different person had wreaked it. I return the photo of Delmar Vaughn and the envelope with
“yuta”
written on it to their hiding spot. I pack the socks back into tight balls, make the bed with hospital corners crisp enough to cut yourself on, and hang all the uniforms up with the perfect amount of space between each one. Somehow, as I return my mom’s room to its original state of
immaculate order, the confusion in my mind gets sorted out too and a plan emerges, complete with all the lies I’ll need to tell to implement it.

In the storage area at the end of the carport, I drag out our battered olive-drab footlocker with the broken brass latches and sweat-curled leather grips. “Overholt, Eugene, Airman 2nd Class E-3,” is stenciled in white on the dented metal top. Next to the name of the man I will still always think of as my grandfather is glued the tattered, browned remnants of a shipping label with the destination typed at the bottom: Kadena Air Base. We once had a tiny key to open the brass lock, but it disappeared long ago, so my mom popped it open with a kitchen knife and we filled it with our stuff.

Glued inside the top of the lid are the magazine photos my grandfather pasted there before he shipped out on his first trip away from Missouri: Clint Eastwood in a poncho and a flat cowboy hat with a thin cigar clenched between his front teeth. Elvis and Priscilla getting married. Raquel Welch in a fur bikini. A red Dodge Charger. I wonder for a moment about what kind of a badass Eugene had dreamed of being. Whether Delmar Vaughn or the U.S. Air Force stole those dreams. Or if Okinawa and my grandmother were the most badass things that were ever, under any circumstances, going to happen to E-3 Overholt.

I take out the divider on top. Underneath it are report cards: mine, Codie’s. Finger paintings. Crayon drawings. Locks of hair and impossibly tiny baby teeth in Ziploc bags with either Codie’s or my name Sharpied on them. Albums with bright color photos show Codie and me blowing out birthday candles; sitting under Christmas trees unwrapping presents; standing in front of a base house, squinting into the sun, holding up Easter baskets. I uncover a plaster-of-paris handprint with Codie’s name written into the plaster when it was still wet. I fit my hand over the print and cover it entirely with just my palm. It was my grandmother, my
anmā,
who must have saved all the memorabilia from mine and Codie’s childhood, since the mementos end around the time she died.

Pulling myself out of this memory dive, I dig back in and find what I’m looking for: the kimonos
Anmā
made for Codie and me for Girls’ Day and shipped to us when we were stationed in Germany. We’d been disappointed because the kimonos weren’t made of bright fabric with pink cherry blossoms and blue Mount Fujis printed on it. Instead, she’d
taken apart one of her drab old kimonos from Okinawa and made the dull, dark indigo fabric printed with a subtle pattern of white cross-hatchings into our kimonos.

Though we thought the kimonos were dreary, we both loved the soft lining that
Anmā
had sewn in so we could wear them in cold, snowy Germany. She had made that lining by piecing together squares from our old baby blankets and it was a patchwork of blue and pink kittens chasing balls of yarn, baby Donald Ducks and baby Mickey Mouses playing badminton, rows of pink elephants holding one another’s tails, and storks in mailmen’s uniforms flying through the air dangling happy babies in slings from their long, pointed beaks. She’d made the blankets before Codie and I were born, and they captured a whole cartoon world of happy expectancy.
Anmā
had even sewn little pockets into the lining. Sometimes we flipped the kimonos inside out to show the pastel patchwork. But we liked having the soft flannel menagerie cuddled against our skin too much to do that very often.

I neatly snip out a large square of the lining from Codie’s kimono so that it again looks like a blanket waiting to receive a child about to be born. I carefully place one of Codie’s curls and a baby tooth inside the little pocket, wrap it all into a tight bundle, and stuff it inside a red-and-green, holly-bedecked gift bag left over from Christmas, then set out for the runway to meet my mom’s flight. As I cut through the ravine, sweeping spiderwebs radiant with early morning light out of the way, I rehearse all the lies I will need to tell my mom in order to do what I have to do, what the
kami
want me to do.

SIXTY-FOUR

Throughout the long day Mitsue receives the visits of representatives from each of the households in Madadayo. Every visitor presses into her hand an envelope containing small offerings of money to help defray entombment expenses. As noon approaches, kinsmen
are dispatched to clear the brush and weeds along the path to the family tomb and in the courtyard in front of it. The men remove the stone slab closing the tomb and leave fresh mud to seal it after the funeral. Inside the house, women cook. On the long veranda, several of the oldest male relatives, the ones who still know how, fold squares of paper into the flowers and birds that will be needed at the ceremony.

Hatsuko had not wanted a Buddhist priest to be summoned to chant a service, since that had never been the custom in her family. Her mother and her sisters had always insisted on the pure, the old ways as they were practiced before Buddhism and Shinto invaded. So visitors simply come, one by one, to weep and bid farewell to the woman who’d given them back their lives after the war. After the final mourner, Hatsuko’s body is placed in the coffin she’d had made years before, and her knees are drawn up to her chest so that she might return to the womb of the earth in the correct manner.