Daughter of the Sword (41 page)

“Anyone with a map could tell you as much. The Netherlands are no bigger than a grain of rice. So? What, then? If not the East Indies, where?”

“Ceylon, sir. As soon as possible.”

Matsumori’s smile broadened. “Attack British interests directly? Is that wise, Lieutenant?”

“It is necessary, sir. That makes it wise.”

“Very good, Kiyama. You do understand that nothing said here can ever leave this building, yes?”

“Yes, sir. Of course, sir.”

“Good. The attack on Ceylon began yesterday morning. Where would you have me attack next?”

Keiji’s tongue lay like a lump of lead behind his teeth. Three days earlier he had celebrated graduation from officers’ school with his classmates. Now a general was confiding battle strategies to him. Was Matsumori reckless? Or worse yet, desperate? All the newspapers and film reels suggested the war was going well. Was it? Did men of Matsumori’s stature need new officers so badly that they would share state secrets on the second day? Or was Matsumori simply indiscreet?

“Come on, Kiyama, I haven’t got all day. We’ve been charged with planning the strategy and logistics of the Pacific theater. It is our duty to see the Empire to victory. Don’t fall mute on me. Tell me what you would do to secure His Majesty’s interests in the Pacific.”

“Guadalcanal.”

“Speak up, son. You’re not in grammar school.”

“Guadalcanal,” Keiji repeated, willing his voice to sound stronger than his last reedy spluttering. “And Tulagi, and Florida. All the Solomons, in fact. If I were you, sir, I would be forming plans to take them.”

General Matsumori shifted forward in his chair, rested his elbows on his knees. “Why there?”

“Supply lines, sir. After Hawai‘i, Guadalcanal is the biggest island between California and Australia. What the Americans need is a port. We cannot let them have it, sir. If we take the Solomons—”

“We cut off the Brits in Australia as well,” said Matsumori. “Hell, if we had an airstrip down there, we could harass every shipping lane in the south Pacific.”

He stood and leaned back, hands at his waist, stretching his hips and back. Keiji wondered if the general had sustained a pelvic injury. Then Matsumori gave a sudden snort. “It’s not bad, Lieutenant. Not bad at all. Give us a chance to show the
gaijin
what for.” He rolled his shoulders and stretched his hips and back again. “Come on, then. Let’s get cracking on it.”

60

Keiji spent the rest of the day drawing up fallback plans for supply chains to the Philippines in the event of bad weather. General Matsumori knew his history; if a typhoon sunk all their rations, even the armies of Genghis Khan would have no choice but to watch victory turn to defeat.

After nine hours of poring over the deployments, patterns started to form in Keiji’s mind. The Americans were damnably tenacious in their mountains on the Bataan peninsula. Estimates put their numbers in the neighborhood of sixty thousand, with another ten or twelve thousand Filipinos fighting beside them. Given the favorable terrain, their defenses would hold indefinitely against a direct assault.

What would defeat them in the end, Keiji realized, was hunger or disease. They were cut off. No friendly ship could reach them with food or medicine. And against disease their tens of thousands were only a liability; any contagion would spread like wildfire.

The connections in Keiji’s mind were forming ever faster. If the American defense should collapse sooner than expected, then Japan’s supply chains would need to deliver not only rations but additional personnel to manage POWs. There would be no long battle of attrition; those tens of thousands would give up all at once. Japanese troops could be expected to sell their lives to the last man, but the Americans were not reported to have that sort of discipline. They had no warrior
code underpinning their culture. As soon as they perceived their predicament—as soon as beriberi set in, or something worse—they would capitulate.

Keiji wrote a memo specifying the particular need for additional officers and secretarial staff, and had it sent to General Matsumori. He found it satisfying to be stationed under a commanding officer who took his input seriously. Command school had led him to believe this would not happen often, but Keiji thought this was a station where the general might actually read a recommendation from a subordinate.

Walking home, he enjoyed the smell of rain not more than an hour old. He noted the milky rivulets running in the gutters, offspring from the union of raindrops and the plaster dust shaken free by the earthquake. Birds were singing cheerily, unusually audible because the quake had silenced so much of the evening’s normal human activity. As he walked, Keiji caught a whiff of slaughtered yearling pigs hanging by their hocks in the butcher shop.

The thought of the butcher sent his mind racing back to the girl. His day had been so busy that he’d forgotten about Hayano completely. But there she was, sitting in the only building still standing within fifty meters, chattering to no one and everyone.

The two of them walked the three kilometers back to the house, learning as they went that they must have been at the very epicenter of the quake when it struck. Any number of obstacles forced Keiji to lift Hayano over them, but their frequency decreased as Keiji and Hayano increased their distance from the butcher’s.

Keiji’s father had done yeoman’s work making the house presentable after the quake. The structure itself was undamaged, but every shelf and cabinet had vomited its contents, and tiny black-rimmed holes in the kitchen tatami suggested sparks from a fire only barely reined in.

“Isn’t Keiji-san’s mom going to eat with us tonight?” Hayano asked between mouthfuls of rice.

“No, she’s still sick,” Keiji’s father said.

“Oh,” said Hayano. “But what if she’s hungry now?”

“What a thoughtful little girl,” his father said. “Perhaps we should bring her dinner right away. Would you like to help me?”

Ryoichi carried a platter with the food, Keiji brought the teapot, and Hayano was entrusted with a teacup and a pair of chopsticks. They walked down a narrow corridor, floorboards creaking underfoot, and Keiji slid aside the door to his mother’s dark, antiseptic room.

His mother, Yasu, looked up from beneath her thick quilt, and Keiji’s first thought was that she must have been getting worse if she was shivering in a room this warm. Her hair hung in limp strands and her face was flushed. “Hello, Keiji,” she said. “Who’s your friend?”

“This is Shoji Hayano,” Keiji said. “Hayano, this is my mother.”

“Hello,” Hayano said, her high voice sweet as a bird’s in the dark room. “Your tummy is sick, huh?”

“Yes it is,” Yasu said, nodding and smiling to her husband as he walked gingerly across the tatami floor and set the tray of food beside her. “I suppose my son told you that.”

“I didn’t,” said Keiji. “Dad and I mentioned the surgery, but not…Hayano, how did you know about Mom’s stomach?”

“I can see it,” said Hayano. She pointed at the quilts. “There’s something big in her tummy that’s not supposed to be there. It looks like it hurts.”

Ryoichi looked at his son. “What’s going on here?”

“I don’t know, Dad. I swear to you, I didn’t say a thing about the cancer. Mom, I’m sorry.”

He took Hayano by the shoulders and turned her to escort her from the room. Behind him, a word from his mother turned into a wet, hacking cough. Keiji had captured the word, though. It was “Wait.”

“Mom? Are you all right?”

“No,” she said between coughs. “I’m sick, son. And this little girl can see that. Are you a
goze
, dear?”

“No. I’m Hayano.”

“You are,
neh
? You’re a modern-day
goze
. Who would have thought?”

Keiji knelt on the floor between his mother and Hayano. “Mom, what are you talking about?”

“You should know,” Ryoichi said, kneeling beside him. “Have you forgotten your bedtime stories? Ah, but you always preferred your samurai stories, didn’t you? Hayano-chan, have you ever heard of a
goze
?”

“No.”

“The
goze
were blind women,” Keiji’s mother said, “from a long, long time ago. They played instruments and they walked the old highways, begging for alms.”

“What’s alms?”

“Money, sweetheart. Like monks ask for when they stand outside of temples with bowls.”

“Oh.”

“The
goze
were not beautiful women, and of course everyone thought them crippled, but they played the
shamisen
and the
shakuhachi
marvelously, and they saw what no one else could see.”

“What was it?” Hayano hunched forward in anticipation.

“The future, little one.”

From the way Hayano’s hair shifted on her head, Keiji could tell her eyebrows must have risen halfway up her forehead. Her mouth made the shape of an egg, a black hole in her bright face in the dark room.

“Hayano-chan,” Yasu said, “you should finish your dinner and have a bath. Your cheeks are dirty.”

The moon was up, a caterwauling cat was crying out to it, and the Kiyamas had managed to get little Hayano cleaned up. Her bandages were fresh, and Keiji’s father had taken a shot at trimming her hair. He’d done this for Yasu some weeks ago, and the effect on Hayano was
more or less the same: not a bad job, all things considered, but since the only hairstyle Ryoichi knew how to cut was his wife’s, Hayano wound up looking like an elegant dwarf. If only they’d had a fifty-year-old’s clothes in nine-year-old sizes, she might have passed for a large and lifelike doll, albeit a sinister one given the white linen wrapped around her eyes.

The scars there were terrible. Keiji suspected an explosion, though he couldn’t imagine where it might have happened. The war was in the Pacific and on Chinese soil, nowhere near the homeland. But then he chided himself. That’s boot camp talking, he thought; explosions happened in civilian life too. In his mind he started to list the things that might explode, engines and boilers and the like, and soon found himself thinking about how quickly he’d shifted his frame of reference. He was a soldier now, no longer in the same category as his parents or this little girl. Civilian life was so far away from him it was like another country, one he could book passage to visit only after the war was over.

“Hayano-chan, you said you saw something growing in my mom’s belly,
neh
?”

“Yes.” Her voice creaked with sleepiness.

“How big was it?”

He saw her shrug under her covers. “Maybe like a yam.”

Keiji swallowed. How long had it been since his mother had her surgery? Two weeks? Three? And back then the doctor had removed a tumor the size of an egg. “You can see the future, can’t you?”

“Don’t know.”

“You can.” He could not say the rest. The cancer coming back. Someday a tumor as big as a yam. Engulfing the organs around it. Killing her. Maybe before the end of the war. Maybe when Keiji was at his duty station. So close to home and yet not there. Not with his parents as a son should be. Not at her side to say good-bye.

He cried until he could not cry anymore; then he fell asleep.

61

The little brass hammer battered the bells atop Keiji’s alarm clock and jarred him out of sleep. His father had always been able to wake at any time he chose, but Keiji hadn’t inherited that gift, and getting up in the winter and spring was always the worst. Moving from the warm confines of his futon to the cold floor was the hardest thing he had to do in any given day—or so he felt, at least, in the moments after his hand fumbled blindly to silence the damnable clock.

It was set early this morning, as it was the morning before: Keiji knew he could not afford to be late for Matsumori ever again. He got himself dressed, got Hayano dressed and fed, and the two of them were out the door before Keiji’s parents made it out of bed. As Keiji and Hayano walked toward Tora-no-mon, he said to her, “How about explaining the thing you were going to explain yesterday? About the tiger and how you knew the butcher shop wouldn’t fall down, remember?”

“All right.” She turned her head as if to look directly at the sword. “The tiger protects the mountain. He lives there. There’s a beautiful lady, and when she comes by the tiger, the tiger has to kill her. But if the tiger leaves his house, his house might fall down. The forest spirit is going to wreck it if the tiger goes away.”

“Who is the forest spirit?”

“The forest spirit is the defender of the trees. It has a great power:
it can wreck things. It wrecks its enemies, but in some stories it wrecks its friends too.”

None of it made any sense to Keiji, but the fact that she’d known the name of his sword and she’d seen his mother’s cancer was enough to make him try to sort it out. As with the war effort, frustration would have to make way for necessity.

But by the time they reached the Intelligence building, he still hadn’t been able to get a straight answer from her about the identity of the beautiful woman, nor about who this defender of the trees was supposed to be. Keiji had no choice but to leave Hayano under the watchful eye of the butcher, to whom he gave ten yen he’d borrowed from his father before leaving the house. “For yesterday and the day before,” he told the old man, “and for today and the rest of the week too, if you’re willing. I’ll come back every day after six.”

Keiji arrived at the Intelligence building thirty minutes early, set water boiling for tea even before the secretaries arrived, and started analyzing intelligence reports of the Solomon Islands. As near as he could tell, the islands were all but undefended. Once taken, keeping them from the Americans would be a trick, but seizing the islands would not be difficult. He wondered how many battle groups were already within striking distance of the islands, and how soon he could begin an analysis of the invasion.

“Kiyama,” General Matsumori said. “You’re early. Good. You can take a hint.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well done with that report yesterday on the Philippines. I’m putting you in charge of rerouting personnel down there. You’ll sort out where we’ll keep POWs too, of course. Get to it.”