Above the East China Sea: A Novel (43 page)

“So if I report this, the girl will be even more lost than she is now in a cave at the edge of the sea.”

“Pretty much.”

I hop off the seawall. “I guess then that it’s up to us to find out who the girl in the cave is and where she belongs.”

FORTY-TWO

I wake up the next morning in the back of the Surfmobile. Jake snores lightly in the front seat. I admire his ability to fall asleep anywhere. The seat is cranked back as far as it can go, giving his head a regal tilt. His dark, shiny hair falls straight back, fanning across the headrest. His snoring is a comforting snuffling that blends nicely with the rustle of a breeze blowing through the high cane of the field we’re parked beside. It was way past curfew last night, too late to go back to the base, so Jake managed to find a remote spot up here in the less populated north end of the island where we could sleep for a few hours. He
insisted on letting me spread out in the back. Alone. Without putting it into words, we both seemed to agree that anything else would be a kind of desecration of what we had to do.

As soon as it opens, we’re going to go to the museum dedicated to the Princess Lily girls. Since so many of the girls died at that site, Jake is certain that their
kami
will be there to guide me. His phone plinks out his
sanshin
ring tone, and he inhales a startled snort, sits up, swivels his head around, surprised to find himself next to a canefield, and glances back at me as he fumbles for his phone. I assume it’s Christy. But they always speak in English, and he answers in crisp Japanese, hangs up after a short conversation.

“Was it your family?”

“My dad. They’re a drummer short for the Eisā dancing tonight. He told me to find someone to fill in for me at the golf course and to come to the practice field as soon as I can.”

“You’re an ice dancer?”

“Right. Because I look so good in spandex. No, Eisā dancing. All the villages have teams of dancers and drummers. We practice all year for the island-wide competition in Naha tonight, the Ten Thousand Eisā Dance Parade. Since it’s the last night of Obon, we have to escort the dead back to the other world. The team I usually drum with thinks they’ll lose if I don’t come, so they talked my dad into calling.”

“The Ten Thousand Eisā Dance Parade, Jake, you can’t miss that. Listen, you’ve already helped me so much. You should just drop me off at the museum.”

“Just drop you off?”

“I’ve ridden buses and hitched all over this island. I’ll be fine.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

Jake takes a shortcut back to the main highway and soon we’re creeping through the jungle on a red dirt path. Dense foliage closes in until it scrapes against the windows on either side. High overhead two Cobra attack helicopters bank slowly, returning to the marine base at Futenma. Gray clouds move in, and the choppers are lost. A moment later rain patters against the windshield.

Jake flips on the wipers. The car’s suspension groans as we lurch from one rapidly filling pothole to the next. The red dirt is transformed into slick clay that whirs beneath the tires. I am on the verge of
questioning whether cars are even supposed to be on what looks like a goat path when a behemoth truck painted in a camouflage pattern hoves into view, crushing the saplings that line either side of the road. A grim-faced marine sits up high behind the flat rectangle of the rain-streaked windshield and glares down at us.

“I guess we’re backing up.” Jake cranes around to look over his shoulder. Because of some male challenge that passes between him and the driver, Jake backs out faster than he was going when we drove in. He whips into the first road branching off and lets the truck lumber past. The open flatbed has two benches occupied by marines in olive-drab ponchos. The young men, all wearing floppy canvas hats that droop around their faces like wilted petals and funnel water in rivulets off their heads, turn glazed stares our way, too exhausted to do anything more than hang on to the rifles planted between their knees as the truck rocks them from side to side.

“Where did they come from?” I ask.

“The marines lease huge tracts of land around here for jungle maneuvers. They used them a lot during the Vietnam War. Vets said the terrain was worse than the real thing. Like a jungle, but on a roller coaster. All up and down.”

When we pull back onto the road, not a twig or a branch scrapes the car; they’ve all been bulldozered aside by the truck. Once we’ve made our way to the main highway, we head down south. We drive for more than an hour until I spot the sign that points to the Himeyuri Peace Museum, and we enter what looks like a state park. The parking lot is nearly empty. The rain is still falling steadily enough to keep visitors away.

I start to open my door and Jake asks, “Are you sure about this?”

“Positive. This is my deal. I need to see it through.”

“Okay, but I want you to take the car.” He holds out his keys. “I can catch a bus easy from here. Also, you’re taking my phone.” He shoves keys and phone into my bag.

I fish them back out. “That is crazy talk. I am not taking your car
and
your phone.” I try to hand Jake back his keys and phone, but he won’t take them.

“No, it has to be this way or I won’t leave, and the spirits won’t be driven back to the next world, and it will pretty much be all your fault.”
Behind Jake’s easygoing, joking manner, I sense an implacable will. He’s like Okinawa, a thin layer of tropical lushness covering a core of limestone.

Of course, I’ve got my own tough core and tell Jake I’ll take his phone, but only if he keeps his car.

He finally agrees, promising to borrow a phone from someone at the practice and check in on me. As I turn away toward the door, Jake pulls me back and kisses me. It’s a combination of a good-bye and an I-don’t-want-to-leave kiss. Maybe with a little this-has-been-great-I’m-going-back-to-my-girlfriend thrown in.

The rain is little more than a mist when I get out. I don’t watch Jake drive away. A side path leads into a heavily wooded area that is quiet and smells of pine. Six-sided stone lanterns, the edges curling up like sultans’ shoes, guard the path. Drops collected in the dark green needles plop heavily onto my head.

Green lichen covers the limestone blocks of the stairs everywhere except the spots where it has been scoured away by visitors’ feet. A wood railing worn soft by innumerable hands curves gracefully around the winding stairs. At the top, bushes with bulbous branches like a cupped hand full of swollen fingers beg for something from the sky. Farther on, a grove of pines shelters a display dedicated to the kamikaze pilots. Its centerpiece is the portrait of a pilot in his late teens, lying on his stomach on a tatami mat, as he painstakingly writes a farewell letter home the night before his suicide mission.

I emerge onto a grassy field intersected by stone walkways and a broad promenade running between high, zigzagging walks of polished black granite surrounded by dozens of walls inscribed with the names of everyone—soldiers and civilians, Japanese, Okinawan, American—who died in the Battle of Okinawa. I am stunned to see the names of enemies and invaders memorialized, and wonder whether anyone in Washington ever even considered putting the names of the Vietnamese who died on our own Vietnam Wall. The briny scent of the sea leads me to an overlook high atop a ring of black cliffs. Far below, the East China Sea is steely gray in the rain.

The main path winds back into the wooded area, past a succession of monuments. Lonely bouquets lie at their bases. Birds sheltering from the rain cry out to one another with sharp, companionable calls. One monument, a simple granite stone carved with a list of names, has
a marker in English that explains that it is dedicated to the native boys, some as young as twelve, who, conscripted by the Japanese Imperial Army to serve as messengers and munitions bearers, perished in even greater numbers than the Okinawan girls had.

Ancient roots worm through the hard-packed earth. Farther on, the thick vegetation gives way once again to broad stone walks. A canopy of branches arches over my head. Ahead, masses of streamers in crayon colors dangle from the trees. As I draw closer, I realize that the streamers are composed of thousands of origami cranes.

The crane streamers wave gently above the serrated mouth of a cave that descends steeply into the craggy ground, a dank, dark hole that exhales the smell of all damp places shut off from the sun. Its rim is edged in black. The monument marking the entrance is written in Japanese. Though I can’t understand the characters, a flower chiseled in among them explains everything. The bloom is still closed; its petals have yet to open. The stem, collared in leaves up to the very top, droops, bowing the head of the flower in graceful acceptance of its fate.

The Princess Lily.

A small plaque in English explains that the black patches around the opening are scorch marks left by flamethrowers, grenade explosions. For several minutes I stand motionless as I imagine young girls down there, hiding in the darkness while enemy voices yelled in a foreign language at them from above. The plaque identifies the site as the Cave of the Virgins.

Inside the Himeyuri Peace Museum, maps line the walls of the first room. Arrows swirl across the maps, indicating troop movements and reducing war to two dimensions. Farther on, cases contain artifacts from the lost paradise that the Himeyuri girls grew up in: a simple back loom for weaving banana-fiber cloth, a windup gramophone with a horn-shaped speaker, a lacquerware tea set, a tin of lilac-scented bath powder, books, pens, and, at the very end, a brooch like the one in my pocket that identified these girls as the best of the island’s best, the Princess Lily girls.

I follow the polished concrete floor to the next room, where Japanese students—boys in black uniforms; girls in white blouses, plaid skirts, and knee socks—study the testimonies of survivors displayed in glass cases. The room is entirely silent except for the shuffling of feet as the students move from one document to the next.

I turn from the documents and face the re-creation of a section of a hospital cave. The wooden bed planks bolted onto the cave wall in the claustrophobically cramped room seem to exhale the odors of sweat and decay. On a plaque next to the cave, some of the Himeyuri girls’ handwritten accounts are translated. The words swirl in front of me, forming images in my mind before I can stop them:

The final panel concludes the narrative with: “Only eighteen of the original two hundred and twenty girls survived.”

The wall opposite the hospital cave is covered by dozens of black-and-white portraits of the Himeyuri girls who served in the cave hospitals. From a plaque, I learn that these were the last photos taken of the girls right before Shuri was evacuated, and that they only survived because the photographer, who was killed during the bombardment, buried his rolls of film in a metal box that was found when a new road was constructed.

Certain that God, or the universe, or something will provide some sort of clue as to the identity of the girl in the cave, I study the faces of gentle native girls who’d been protected and treasured their whole lives, photographed at a time when they were so convinced that war would be a minor inconvenience that, as the plaque tells me, they carried their schoolbooks with them into the caves. They smile into the camera, looking as if they’re in on the best secret ever. As if they can’t believe their great good fortune in being Princess Lily girls.

All I can think is,
They’re so young.

I scrutinize the photos, searching for some trait, some feature, that
looks familiar. But none of the faces bears the slightest resemblance to the starved and suffering girl who appeared to me in the cave. For the first time, I fully accept Jake’s dictate that things are different in Okinawa, and I say a prayer to the
kami.
I ask for their guidance. Then, recalling Jake’s advice, I clap my hands softly and whisper, “Please help me find the right girl. Tell me what her name is.”