A Tale for the Time Being (35 page)

I had my eyes closed, and it was like I was talking to myself in the darkness, or maybe not even talking, maybe just thinking. I could feel Jiko’s hand on my forehead, drawing my thoughts
out of my mind and holding me down to earth at the same time, so I wouldn’t fly away. This is another one of old Jiko’s superpowers. She can pull a story out of anybody, and sometimes
you don’t even need to open your mouth, because she can hear the thoughts that are going through your crazy mind before your voice can even find them. When I finished my story, I opened my
eyes and she took her hand away. She seemed to be looking off into the distance, out into the garden, where the frogs were singing in the pond. Over and over their croaking voices swelled like a
wave and then fell silent.

“Yes,” she said. “That’s how they were trained. They were student soldiers and very bright. The military men despised them. They bullied them and beat them every day.
They broke their bones and crushed their spirits.”

The word she used was ijime, and hearing it, suddenly I felt very small. Me and my stupid classmates. My little pricks and pokes and stabbings. I thought I knew all about ijime, but it turned
out I didn’t know anything about it at all. I felt ashamed, but I wanted to know more.

“But it didn’t work, right?” I asked. “They didn’t crush Haruki Ojisama’s fighting spirit, did they?”

Jiko shook her head. “No,” she said. “I don’t believe they did.”

I thought about it some more. “Americans were the enemies,” I said. “That’s so weird. I grew up in Sunnyvale. Does that mean I’m an enemy?”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“Do you hate Americans?

“No.”

“Why not?

“I don’t hate anybody.”

“Did you, before?”

“No.”

“Did Haruki hate them? Is that why he wanted to be a suicide bomber?”

“No. Haruki never hated Americans. He hated war. He hated fascism. He hated the government and its bullying politics of imperialism and capitalism and exploitation. He hated the idea of
killing people he could not hate.”

It didn’t make sense. “But in his letter, he said that he was giving his life for his country. And you can’t be a suicide bomber and not kill people, can you?”

“No, but that letter was just for show. It was not his true feeling.”

“So why did he join the army then?”

“He had no choice.”

“They made him go?”

She nodded. “Japan was losing the war. They had drafted all the men. Only the students and little boys were left. Haruki was nineteen when his notice came, calling on him, as a Japanese
patriot and warrior, to report for battle. When he showed it to me, I cried, but he only smiled. ‘Me,’ he said. ‘A
warrior
. Imagine that!’ ”

A single frog croaked, and then another. Jiko’s words dropped like stones into the silence in between.

“He was poking fun at himself, you see. He was a kind boy, so gentle and wry. He was not the warrior type.”

The frog voices began to gather and rise. Jiko kept on talking, and now her words were steady, a low drumbeat under the shrill croaking.

“It was late October. There was a pageant. Twenty-five thousand student draftees marched into the compound outside Meiji Shrine. They were given rifles to carry on their shoulders like
children playing soldiers. A cold, dull rain was falling, and the red and gold colors of the shrine looked gaudy and much too bright. For three hours the boys stood at attention, and we stood
there, too, listening to the fine words and phrases in praise of the fatherland.

“One of the boys, Haruki’s classmate, gave a speech. ‘We, of course, do not expect to return alive,’ he said. They knew they would die. We had all heard about the mass
suicides of soldiers at a place called Attu. Gyokusai,
¹³⁷
they called it. Insanity, but by then there was no stopping. The prime minister was there.
Tojo Hideki. It is not true, what I said before, because I hated him. He was a war criminal, and after the war, they hanged him. I was so happy. I wept for joy when I heard he was dead. Then I
shaved my head and took a vow to stop hating.”

The frog chorus fell silent.

“That boy who gave the speech survived,” she said. “Every year at Obon he comes here to apologize.”

It took me a moment to understand. “You mean that old man?”

She nodded. “Not a boy anymore. My son would be an old man, too, if he had survived. It is hard for me to imagine.”

I lay on my back and pictured the old soldier’s face. I tried to imagine him as a young man, as young as Haruki’s ghost. Impossible.

“They were our finest students,” she said. “They were the
crème de la crème
.” She used the French words, pronouncing them in Japanese, but I knew
what she meant. Her eyes, cloudy with emptiness, stared into the past. I was afraid to say anything to disturb her, but I had to know.

“I’m sorry I took the letter,” I said. “I’ll put it back.”

She nodded, but I don’t know if she really heard me.

“What’s in the box?” I asked.

The question seemed to bring her back for a moment. “What box?”

“The one on the family altar.”

A shadow crossed her face. Maybe it was a cloud passing in front of the moon, or maybe it was my imagination.

“Nothing.”

“What do you mean, nothing?” I asked, and when she didn’t answer, I prompted her. “You mean it’s empty?”

“Empty,” she repeated. “So desu ne.”

She looked at me as though I was a fading memory. “Forgive me, Nao dear. I go on and on. You must sleep.”

“No,” I protested. “I like your stories! Tell me more!”

She smiled. “Life is full of stories. Or maybe life is only stories. Good night, my dear Nao.”

“Good night, my dear Jiko,” I answered.

In the moonlight, she looked tired and old.

5.

The next day, my dad came to pick me up, but before he arrived, I went back to Jiko’s study one last time. I had promised to put back the letter, and the box was still
sitting on the little shelf, tied in its white cloth, next to the photograph. I didn’t want to disturb him again, but I really needed to see what was in that box. Jiko said there was nothing,
but the way Haruki had laughed his ghostly laugh made me think there was something inside. Maybe his baby teeth, or his glasses, or his high school diploma. You can call it superstition, but I
wanted to see some piece of him that really existed in order for him to be real.

I stood up on my tiptoes and reached for the box, pulling it off the shelf and into my arms. I sat down on the floor and untied the white cloth. It was like unwrapping a Christmas present.
Inside the cloth there was a wooden box with some writing on it that said, “The Heroic Soul of the Late Second Sub-Lieutenant Yasutani Haruki.” I felt my heart start to pound. The box
was about 40 centimeters tall. I gave it a little shake and thought I heard something rattle inside. What would a soul sound like? I really wanted to look, but suddenly I was afraid if I opened the
box, his heroic soul would fly out. Would it be angry at me? Would it fly in my face? I almost wrapped the box up again and put it back on the shelf, but at the last minute I changed my mind. I
lifted up the lid.

It was empty.

Jiko was right. I couldn’t believe it. Just to be sure, I turned it upside down and shook it. A small slip of paper fell to the floor.

“The Naval Authority sent me that,” Jiko said.

She was standing in the doorway, dressed in the faded brown robe that she wore for morning service and leaning on her cane. I swear, she can appear out of nowhere. It’s another one of her
superpowers.

“They sent us a box with the remains of our beloved children. If the bodies weren’t found, they put in a piece of paper. They couldn’t just send an empty box, you
see.”

I looked at the paper in my hand. There was one word written on it:

¹³⁸

“I opened it just like you did,” she said. “And just like that, the paper fell out. I was so surprised! I read it and then I laughed and laughed. Ema and Suga were in the room
with me. They thought I had gone crazy with grief, but they didn’t understand. My daughters were not writers. To a writer, this is so funny. To send a word, instead of a body! Haruki was a
writer. He would have understood. If he had been there, he would have laughed, too, and for a moment that’s what it felt like, like he was there with me and we were laughing
together.”

She chuckled to herself and wiped her eyes with her crooked old finger. Sometimes when she told stories about the past her eyes would get teary from all the memories she had, but they
weren’t tears. She wasn’t crying. They were just the memories, leaking out.

“It was the nicest consolation,” she said. “Given the circumstances. But I could never bring myself to put it into the family grave. That last word was not his, after all. It
was the government’s.”

She was still leaning on her cane, but now she started looking for something in the deep sleeve of her robe, and she swayed a little like she might lose her balance, so I jumped up to help her.
When I reached her, she held out her hand.

“Here,” she said. She was holding one of Muji’s freezer bags with some papers inside. “These were the letters that Haruki wrote to me before he died. Perhaps you’d
better have them, too. You can keep them together with the one you found.”

I took the bag from her, unzipped it, and looked in. I recognized Haruki’s handwriting from the letter I’d taken from the picture frame.

“You may read them,” Jiko said. “But please remember these aren’t his last words, either.”

I nodded, but I was barely listening. I was so excited! I couldn’t wait to read the letters. Haruki #1 was my new hero. I wanted to know everything I could about him. She fumbled around in
her robe sleeve again.

“And this,” she said. “Take this, too.”

She was holding an old wristwatch. It had a round black face and steel hands and a steel case and a big knob on the side for winding. I took it and held it to my ear. It made a nice ticking
sound. I turned it over. Engraved in the metal back were a line of numbers and two kanji characters. The first was the kanji
for sky.
The second was the kanji
for soldier. Sky soldier. That made sense. But the character for sky can also mean “empty.” Empty
soldier. That made sense, too. I turned it back over and strapped it on my wrist. Not big. Not small. Just right.

“It was Haruki’s,” Jiko said. “You have to wind it.” She tapped the little knob on the side with her bent finger. “Every day.”

“Okay.”

“Never let it stop,” Jiko said. “Please don’t forget.”

“I won’t,” I promised. I held out my wrist to show her the watch. I made a fist. It made me feel strong. Like a warrior.

She nodded and seemed satisfied. “I’m glad you met him while you were here,” she said. “He was a good boy. Smart like you. He took his life seriously. He would have liked
you.”

She gave another nod, taking her time, and then turned and shuffled away. I stood there listening to the sound of her cane tapping down the old wooden corridor. I couldn’t believe she said
that. Nobody ever called me smart. Nobody liked me.

I put Haruki’s remains-that-were-not-remains back into the box and tied the whole package up and put it back on the altar. Then I lit a candle and a stick of incense and offered it to him,
placing my palms together.