Above the East China Sea: A Novel (3 page)

I’m concentrating so hard on making myself full of life and the opposite of suicidal that when Kirby sways, it knocks me off balance, and I bump into the cliff. The razor-sharp black rock scrapes my ankle. The cut will get infected, since every cut gets infected on Okinawa. The island is encircled by one of the world’s great coral reefs. I watched a YouTube video that showed how coral is composed of billions of tiny polyps that form themselves into fantastical shapes—antlers, fans, brains—in these amazing purples and yellows and reds. When the polyps die, they leave their skeletons and the tiny limestone tombs they’ve built around themselves behind. So, dead polyp skeletons, that’s what’s in the cut.

“Hey, Tiger Woods?” Kirby grunts back at me. “Why are you so late? It’s after twenty hundred hours.”

“If you mean eight o’clock, Kirby, say eight o’clock.”

“You’re such a civilian, Luz.”

“Only a Gung Ho would even think that that’s an insult.”

“You callin’ me a gun ho?”

I start to tell him about how Codie called the freaks who were genetically engineered to be military brats Gung Hos. I see her doing her imitation of a typical Gung Ho, jumping around all excited, going, “I love moving! It gives me a chance to reinvent myself!” like they’re Lady Gaga with the whole world just waiting to see the latest incarnation. After a lifetime of our mom and the U.S. Air Force uprooting us every other year or so, Codie and I were so anti–Gung Ho that we even developed mental blocks about decoding the twenty-four-hour clock. It meant that we occasionally committed the worst brat sin of all: being late. But to us, being late was a lot better than being a Gung Ho.

I’m doing it again. I’m relating everything back to Codie.

“Loozer,” Kirby repeats, “why’d you call me a gun ho?”

“Never mind, Kirb. It’s nothing.” Suddenly very, very tired, I dump my end of the cooler down onto the trail. “Brew thirty,” I say, popping the cooler open. I ice-fish for a beer, hook a tall silver one, and reel it in. The cold feels good against my hot hand, lips, going down my throat. My thirst leaves, but not what I didn’t want to think about:
Codie was not
a Gung Ho.
She wasn’t. That’s why it doesn’t make sense. Why what happened could never have happened.

THREE

Are you there?

For a moment, before I awake, I think the distant voice belongs to Hatsuko, and joy floods my being: My sister has come for us. I never doubted that she would.

It’s not Aunt Hatsuko, Mother; it’s me.

My child. His voice grows stronger as we both awaken.

How long have we slept?

A year? A decade? A century?

I don’t know.

Mother, am I going to be born now? Is that why we awoke?

No.

I can’t lie. Curled up as he is beneath the place where my heart once was, my child knows all the thoughts and memories that I allow to enter my mind. Which is why I must carefully monitor what I think so he will never know the worst.

Are we going home then? To your family in Madadayo? Will Aunt Hatsuko be waiting to greet us in the shade of the veranda? Will she offer us cool wheat tea sweetened with barley sugar and
beni imo
cakes as purple as the tang fish?

Yes, your aunt Hatsuko and all the rest of our family will be there. We will be together. I promise you, no matter what the cost, we will be reunited with our clan.

Are they waiting for us in the next world?

Yes.

But first we must be found and buried, right?

Yes,
I say, though he already knows that answer. He knows everything I know, all the rules that govern this life and those that determine who will be admitted to the next. He also knows my ignorance, the parts I don’t understand. And those voids frighten him.

How will we be found down here so far beneath the sea?

That is not for you to concern yourself with. The
kami
will find a way.

Will we become
fiidama,
like the one who drowned your brother and stole his corpse?

When had I allowed such a sad memory to enter our minds?

Yes.

Are we waiting here until we can lure a swimmer out to us, then steal his spirit and use his corpse to gain entrance to the next world?

There is no other way left to us.

Mother?

Call me by our Okinawan word for mother.

Yes,
Anmā. Anmā,
I miss the eels.

I remember the moray eels that gathered after we jumped. They were a great source of amusement for us. My son liked the ones that were mossy and green as old logs. I preferred those speckled brown and white like giraffes. Neither of us liked the ones with mad, spinning eyes, or those with only murky gray spots for eyes.

They all had blubbery lips that parted to reveal dagger-tipped teeth that tore at our flesh and released a rain of particles that lured a rainbow of fish to us in colors dazzling as hand-blown glass. So many different sorts of fish. Fish with scales of yellow, purple, silver, green. Clouds of fish that flashed a neon blue brighter than the lights of Naha. Fish with blue teeth and green lips. Fish striped black and white like prisoners. Fish that never tired of chasing one another about in endless games of tag. Our favorites, though, were the ones that floated stupefied in front of us, as if they had forgotten how to swim.

When all our flesh was gone, the eels and fish, and, finally, even the marine worms, stopped visiting, and we waited. And slept. And now my son is awake and asking questions that I am obliged to find answers for.

Anmā,
we are so far from the surface down here. How will we ever steal a stranger’s spirit so that we might take over his corpse and find our way to the next world, where our
munchū
waits for us?

When it is time, the
kami
will show us the way to our clan.

It must be time now. Why else would we have awakened?

We shall soon learn why.

But we must do something.

What? We are no longer of the living, and we certainly are not yet
kami-sama.
We are trapped between worlds. The only power we have is to wait.

Then, while we wait, tell me once more everything you know about the next world.

I told my son what his grandmother had told me: that in that other realm, the air shimmered like lapis lazuli and was perfumed by the scent of lilies and pineapples. That every one of the 2,046 ancestors of our
munchū
for ten generations into the past would meet there after death to feast on pigs’ ears in vinegar, sweet potato in green-tea sauce, stir-fried bitter melon, and pork stewed in squid’s ink, all washed down with cool wheat tea sweetened with black sugar for the children and millet brandy for the adults. That we would dance beneath the vast roof of a banyan tree while our legendary great-great-great-grandfather Ryō plucked tunes from his
sanshin.
That the timid dwarf deer, the emerald frog, the long-haired mouse, and the orchid leaf butterfly would all emerge from hiding to marvel at the beauty of our arm movements, the liveliness of our steps. That we would frolic there with the fairies and fauns who inhabit that other world and be reunited with our mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and great-grandparents beyond remembering.

I told him of the sweetest promise the other realm held for me: I would be reunited with my sister. Hatsuko and I would be together once more.

Will there be sword fights?

That my child loved best my memories of the sword fights I used to have with my boy cousins, Shinsei and Uei, made me certain that he, too, was a boy. So I assured him that of course in the next world there would be sword fights. This excited him. There had been no real weapons on our island since they were confiscated by the Japanese invaders in 1609, so my cousins and I used to arm ourselves with the straightest boughs we could pluck from the screw pine trees and slash at one another like the valiant samurai our ancestors had been.

And spiders?

Second only to sword fights, he liked memories about the times when we children, the capering herd of us, would capture banana spiders bigger than a man’s hand and stage grand battles with them.

And the hills?

He never tired of my memories of sliding down hills of grass. I assured him that in that place where all the best memories are forever real, we would never need worry about vipers hiding beneath the silvery blades. No
habus
or mosquitoes, gnats or lice exist where the evenings last an eternity and ocean breezes are always blowing, gentle and cool.

We will be there soon.

As the months or years or decades, I know not which, passed, I made this vow again and again to my son, promising him that we had not been abandoned for all eternity at the bottom of the East China Sea. That even now my sister was begging the
kami
to intercede on our behalf. Yet, eventually, despair found me, and I feared that we had, indeed, been forgotten. I could accept that my father, mother, and brothers had all ceased imploring the
kami
to save us, but Hatsuko? Hatsuko would never abandon me. I now cling to the hope that she is still visiting
yuta
s, the women the spirits speak through. That she simply has not found the right one yet.

It galls me that I can do nothing to help Hatsuko rescue us from this netherworld and send us on to the shimmering place. Until I join my ancestors, I’m not
kami-sama
like them, so I don’t have the power to inflict suffering on the living to remind them of their obligations to us. I can’t even summon a swarm of biting flies, as Old Jug, my great-great-grandmother Uto Kokuba, once did during the worst of the invasion, when she expressed her displeasure at me for almost giving up on life. I can do nothing, except wait for the
kami
to send us a stranger.

I study my brother’s story endlessly, picking it apart to find the clues I need to save my child from this watery limbo. In our village, my oldest brother, Ichirō, was known as Forest Orchid Boy, because his scent alone was said to drive girls mad. Ichirō was funny, smart, strong, and so handsome that the
juris
in the Tsuji pleasure quarter never charged him their usual rate of five yen for the privilege of making love to them. All the maidens in the village dreamed of marrying him, but none captured his fancy until Nobuko, a distant cousin of the Jiriya family, arrived to work at her uncle’s factory, where she was put to work stripping fibers from the pandanus plant to weave into panama hats. From the first moment Ichirō set eyes on Nobuko, he was crazed with love for her, and she for him.

For months they met in secret, stealing away to lie together upon cool beds of leathery ferns beside the crystalline waters of the Oigama River. Ichirō’s joy abounded when he learned his lover was carrying his
ashibingwa,
his love child, and they planned to be married. Nobuko’s uncle, however, flew into a rage at such an idea, since he had already arranged an advantageous union between Nobuko and his largest exporter, Mr. Inafuku. The deal had been struck; glasses of
awamori
had already been shared. The uncle would not endure the humiliation of his niece’s disobedience, and immediately sent Nobuku away to marry the exporter and live imprisoned behind the stone walls that surrounded his grand house in Naha.

Ichirō’s spirit left his body then, and our mother exhausted herself doing all she could to lure it back. She took him to the secluded grove of acacia trees, where he had bidden Nobuko farewell, dropped to her knees facing the direction of home, placed her hands together, bowed her head, and prayed to her son’s spirit, begging his
mabui
to please come home. Then, holding out leafy canes of bamboo on either side to keep her son’s spirit from straying, she guided him home.

Sadly, Ichirō’s spirit did not accompany them.
Anmā
kept trying to entice it back by forcing her son to eat sweets, rubbing scented oil on his arms, and sweeping the air around him with bundles of burning tobacco leaves from her patch, but nothing worked. The light was gone from her firstborn’s eyes as surely as from the eyes of one of the fat pigs she butchered on special occasions to make her delicious pork miso. Ichirō cared for nothing, which was why on Ukui, the third and last day of the Obon festival, he made the terrible announcement that he would go swimming.