Above the East China Sea: A Novel
Read Above the East China Sea: A Novel Online
Authors: Sarah Bird
Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #Historical, #War & Military
The Gap Year
How Perfect Is That
The Flamenco Academy
The Yokota Officers Club
Virgin of the Rodeo
The Mommy Club
The Boyfriend School
Alamo House
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY
A
LFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2014 by Sarah Bird
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bird, Sarah.
Above the East China Sea : a novel / by Sarah Bird.—First Edition.
pages cm
ISBN
978-0-385-35011-2 (Hardcover)—
ISBN
978-0-385-35012-9 (eBook)
1. Daughters—Fiction. 2. Orphans—Fiction. 3. Okinawa Island (Japan)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS
3552.
I
74
A
425 2014
813′.54—dc23
2013024336
This is a work of historical fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Front-of-jacket photograph by Jane Yeomans
Jacket design by Gabriele Wilson
Maps by Christy Krames
v3.1
To the people of Okinawa,
who have learned the only lesson war has to teach:
Nuchi du takara.
Children, I’m singing you the story of Miyako
the beautiful, the blue, the deepening indigo,
and the red soil made from crushed bodies
that lay down their genealogy of bones.
Their spirits are whispering to you: all of this is what is.
—from “The Ocean of the Dead” by Yonaha Mikio
THE FIRST DAY
