Above the East China Sea: A Novel (45 page)

“Hai-sai,”
I say in return, bowing several times, and smiling big.

She watches me, amused but not overly concerned. I try to guess her age and can’t. Even though she doesn’t wear glasses or a hearing aid and moves around better than some forty-year-olds I can think of, she seems as old as a sea turtle, and just as calm.

“I’m looking for someone who lives here.” I try to pantomime my mission by pointing to myself, then using my fingers to illustrate searching the area. I just end up looking like I’m telling her I can shoot lasers out of my eyes. I hold up my finger to ask her to wait a moment and I dial the number Jake gave me. Not surprisingly, given that he was in the middle of what sounded like a battlefield, he doesn’t answer.

Before I can resort to another charade, though, the old lady asks, “Kokuba Tamiko?”

My mouth drops open. I’m so surprised, it takes me a moment to react. The silence fills with the roar of a jet fighter streaking overhead.

“Yes.
Sí, sí,
” I answer, then, shaking away the Spanish that has suddenly crowded into my head, say, “
Hai. Hai!
Kokuba Tamiko.” Though I know she can’t understand, the English words pour out of me. “How did you know? Are you Kokuba Tamiko?” I point to her, trying to see the pigtailed girl’s face in hers.

“Kokuba Tamiko.”

I’m certain she’s telling me that she’s Kokuba Tamiko. Relief at having accomplished my mission floods through me as I reach into my pocket, ready to pull the pin out, return it to her, and figure out how to explain to her about the bones, since they obviously aren’t hers. But apparently I have misunderstood, and, leaning on her short hoe, the old woman sets off down the road, waving at me to follow. In spite of rolling from side to side more than moving forward, she marches along at a brisk pace, and soon we are outside the main village on a one-lane dirt road lined by tall bushes with lustrous green leaves and bright yellow flowers at the top that look like hibiscus.

After we walk long enough for sweat to start rolling down in a steady stream from my scalp, the thick bushes stop at a waist-high wall of gnarled gray coral rock, its gate guarded by a pair of fierce
shiisā
dogs. The courtyard inside the wall is shaded by an immense banyan tree. At the center is the first house I’ve seen on the island with a thatched roof. A long porch lined with sliding doors runs the length of the house. Birds loop in and out of the branches of the tall tree. Pink piglets grunt in a nearby pen. The glossy green leaves of sweet potato vines curl over a neat patch. The golden trunks of a bamboo grove gleam in the woods behind the house. On a distant hillside the last
deigo
tree still in bloom is covered in blossoms so red that the tree appears to be on fire.

It’s the coral tree that makes me certain I’m in the right place. I reach out my hand to push the gate back and go in, but the instant I do, the old lady stops me. Scowling and pointing furiously, she makes me stop and read the sign hanging from the gate.

“It’s in Japanese,” I say, tapping the pretty picture letters.

She counters by stabbing numbers with yen signs next to them and
what appear to be hours of operation. I put that together with the sight of plaques posted in front of the pigpen and the stables and a long, open-sided cart with rows of seats, and it dawns on me, “Is this some kind of museum?”

She nods, happy that I’m getting the picture, then rains Japanese down on me. The only word I can pick out of the deluge is “Obon.”

“It’s closed? For Obon?”

“Hai! Hai!”
She beams at me.

“Tamiko Kokuba? Here?”

The old lady tilts her head to the side, trying to puzzle out what I’m asking.

I go back to pointing. “Tamiko? Here? In this house?”

She shakes her finger, saying,
“Neh, neh, neh,”
and tries to correct me by first pointing at the house—“Tamiko,
hai
!”—then down at the ground in front of us so that I get the concept of “here.” “Tamiko,
neh.
” Point-point. Her eyes stay fastened on her feet as she shakes her head with slow sadness at the fact that Tamiko used to live in that house, but she’s not here anymore.

Which I should have known. It’s unlikely that, even if Tamiko were one of the eighteen Himeyuri girls who’d survived the Battle of Okinawa, she would still be living in her house anymore. Even on an island where it’s normal to be out hoeing up lettuce at an age when most Americans are either dead or acting like it, the odds are against it.

My hand closes around the pin. When I open it in front of the old lady, she gasps, drops the short hoe, covers her open mouth, and looks up at me, her eyes wide. Seeing how moved she is, I want her to have the pin and nudge my hand closer. But she won’t take it.

I try calling Jake again to make him explain everything, but he still doesn’t answer. So I act out walking along in my big dopey oblivious American way and being stunned to find this pin. I do a whole second act on searching high and low for the owner. I hope that a hand visoring the eyes, peering off into the far horizon is universal for scoping things out. My big finale is placing the pin on the tips of my outstretched hands and bowing to offer it to her.

Her work-gnarled fingers are rough against my palms as she plucks the pin up. It’s a relief to have the brooch literally off my hands. The feeling doesn’t last long, though, because she reaches up and pins it on me, directly over my heart.

“No, really, it can’t be mine. It should be yours.” I try to unpin it, but she stops me and does her own bit of improv. Except that hers is like a very expressive dance, a hula, where you know every movement means something and the dancer is telling you an important story, if you only knew what the gestures meant. She lifts her arms above her head to take in the trees and mountains around us and the sky above and makes a graceful wave motion like birds flying through the air that, for some reason, are drawn to me from all directions. Then she repeats a nicer version of my bumpkin walk, of me finding the pin. In her telling, though, the wavy creatures flying through the air all zero in on the spot on the ground where she’s pretending the pin is, lift it up like the birds in Cinderella carrying ribbons in their beaks to tie up her hair for the ball, and bring it to me.

I know I’m missing big chunks of what she’s actually trying to tell me, but the one thing I’m certain of is that she—and possibly the things flying through the air—
really
wants me to keep the pin. That she believes I was intended to have it. I launch into another goofy charade to express that I understand how much this means. I cup both my hands around the pin so that they make a little echo chamber over my heart, and bow deeply.

The old lady beams, the years fall away, and I see what had been in front of me the whole time: the old woman’s beauty. In her day, she must have been stunning. Even now, her eyes are darkly lashed, adorable dimples poke into her full cheeks, and her lips are still plump.

I pat my chest, say, “Luz,” and stick my hand out.

She shakes it, pats her chest, and says, “Mitsue.”

FORTY-FOUR

Anmā,
she is leaving. Your cousin Mitsue is letting her leave. Shouldn’t the
kami-sama
act through her to help us? Cousin Mitsue is old, but she is still strong. She could do it with her hoe; then we could steal the girl’s spirit and enter the next world like your brother did.

Shi-shi-shi.
Don’t fret. All is in motion now. We merely have to be ready to step through the door when it opens.

Will it open soon?

Yes, it must. Time is running out. It is Ukui tonight, the final night. It is our last chance.

What are you going to do?

Nothing remains to be done except that she must be in the proper place when the time is right.

How do we do that?

It is all in the hands of the
kami-sama.
They will do what must be done. Now, we don’t have much time, so let me finish my story. I was telling you how I led your aunt back to Madadayo.

On the last night of our journey, the moon was like a lamp that
Anmā
had left on to guide us home in the dark. Hatsuko and I followed the road we had walked thousands of times before, yet we did not recognize it. Where once, in the cool shade cast by tall banyan and
deigo
trees, my twin cousins, Shinsei and Uei, and I had had sword fights with branches, not a leaf remained. The hilly field where we had once slid down the slick grass was a naked slope of dust and rock pockmarked by deep bomb craters. Farther on, I searched in vain for the thick hedge of sea hibiscus, always bright with yellow flowers, that led to our house, and found nothing but a desolate path protected by a few blackened branches.

“Are you certain we’re going the right way?” Hatsuko asked, almost as if we’d simply made a wrong turn, and if we found the correct path flowers would be blooming along it and the fields on either side of us would be thick with the twisting vines of potato plants and the fragile chartreuse lace of new rice sprouts. As if, over the sound of our labored breathing, we might be able to hear the warble of Grandfather plucking a tune from the strings of his
sanshin.
As if the aroma of
Anmā
’s
gōyā chanpuru
might drift down the lane, welcoming us to a home where they all waited around the table: Mother, Father, our three older brothers, all our aunts, uncles, cousins, even my beloved cousin Chiiko and her baby Little Mouse.

After a long moment, I answered, “Yes, I’m certain.” Neither one
of us wanted to walk the final steps, to make the last turn in the path before we reached our farm. We stood in the warm night and strained to see and hear what should have been there: fireflies, the glow from our house in the distance, the gurgle of the brook running through the glade, night birds calling songs of love, frogs raising a raucous chorus, our lucky gecko chirping out a happy greeting.

“Come on,” Hatsuko urged, taking my hand.

All that was left of our home was the smell of smoke rising from the blackened roof beams. The sliding doors; the thatched palm fronds of the roof; the wood of the veranda; the pig and goat pens; the barn; the books where
Anmā
had kept the accounts; my winter kimono; Hatsuko’s brush paintings; the letters our brothers had sent Mother and Father from Manchukuo, the Philippines, Singapore; the photo of the emperor in its box of pale, fragrant
hinoki
wood; all had been reduced to ash. All except for one small item that flashed back the faintest glint of moonlight my way. Fearing that it was what I suspected, I put my foot over it before Hatsuko could notice.

A glimmer of something else buried in the ashes caught her eye instead. Without a word, she stooped to pick up a silver dagger with a loop at its end. It was one of the blades from Father’s scissors. I’m certain we both thought of how the long blades had flashed as I snipped at our father’s hair, preparing him to do the emperor’s bidding, on a day that now seemed so long ago, a day when we believed that victory was inevitable.

“Where’s the other blade?” Hatsuko asked, a blank look in her eyes. She dropped to her knees and pawed at the charcoal, not seeming to care how she was blackening her hands, her clothes. “Where is the other blade?” she asked again, but her question had no force. It floated in the silent night as light and airy as dandelion puff about to be blown away forever.

“It must be here somewhere. It was steel. It couldn’t have burned. Those were Father’s special scissors.” Her voice dwindled away bit by bit until it was little more than the whimper of a lost child. I shifted my foot, retrieved the item I’d kept hidden from Hatsuko, slipped it into my pocket, and, as I had learned to do so well, forced myself to think no further of it.

“I know,” Hatsuko announced, abruptly standing, holding the silver
blade out like a sword. “Father took the other blade with him. To protect Mother when they fled south to safety. With a blade like this he could—”

I shoved my hand over Hatsuko’s mouth to silence her and yanked her back down onto the ashes. “Shhh,” I breathed in her ear, and we both listened for the sounds I’d heard. From the place where our potato field had once bloomed came voices so strange I doubted they were human.