Above the East China Sea: A Novel (46 page)

“Ketō,”
I whispered.

We listened to the Americans, probably scouts. When the first spoke his voice sounded like the angry shriek of a broken machine. A second was as terrifyingly mechanical as the first. They were true; all the stories we had heard about these raping, devouring, destroying man-beasts were true.

The energy of fear coursed through Hatsuko. In an urgent whisper, she told me, “We have to get the food for Nakamura before they come for us.” She sprang into a crouching run and set off for our family tomb hidden in the woods. On our journey to Madadayo we had passed so many tombs that had been blown apart by grenades or shattered into rubble by bombs that I feared what we would find. As we slipped silently through the dense foliage beyond our house, I recalled all the times my mother’s extended family had gathered, and how we had complained because the tomb was so far from the main path. When Hatsuko and I reached the tomb and saw that it was still intact, though, we were thankful for the remote location, since that was what had saved it. The heavy stone chiseled into a square had been replaced since I had been there months ago with my mother and my aunts, and once again it blocked the entrance. It took every molecule of strength that Hatsuko and I had between us to move it away.

Inside, we dared to light the wick of a small millet-seed oil lamp. Unlike the smelly, smudgy kerosene lanterns in the caves, the oil was fragrant and didn’t fill the air with soot. The gentle light gleamed on the beautifully decorated ceramic urns that held the cleaned bones of our ancestors. Before we proceeded, I asked Hatsuko to join me in offering prayers of thanks to them for guiding and safeguarding us and to beg them to continue helping us.

“We have no time for that,” Hatsuko snapped. “We must gather up as
much food as we can carry and leave immediately. Before the
Amerikās
come any closer. Oh, here are the crocks of dried sweet potatoes. Here’s one of dried bonito fish. Toasted soybeans. Where did Mother bury the pork miso? Nakamura will love our mother’s pork miso.”

“Hatsuko, you can’t be serious.”

“Of course I am. That was our plan. That was why I came.”

“We made that plan before we knew that Madadayo would be surrounded by
Amerikās.
We can’t go back out now. It would be suicide.”

“Tamiko, if we
don’t
go it will be suicide. Without the food I bring him, my fiancé will die, and then I will have no reason to go on living.”

“Hatsuko, listen to me: Nakamura is not your fiancé. He has never spoken to you of marriage.”

“Tami-chan, he didn’t need to. There are things that pass between a man and a woman that you are too young to understand. Especially when that man is an officer in the Imperial Army fighting for the very survival of our country.”

“No, I understand you will give your life for a man who is not worthy of it. A vain and selfish man who betrayed you with your own cousin.”

A hard slap stung my cheek. “I forbid you to make any further traitorous remarks that question the honor of a devoted servant of our divine emperor, who stands ready to sacrifice his very life for all we hold dear.”

“Hatsuko, stop! Stop spouting such idiocies. There are no spies. There are no gallant officers with shining swords to cut off heads. There is no one here but me. Me and our ancestors. Our Okinawan ancestors. I vowed to
Anmā
that I would protect you, and protect you I will, even if it means I have to knock you out and tie you up.”

Hatsuko shook her head, snorted a laugh dismissing my threat, located the patch of freshly dug soil where Mother had buried the crock of pork miso to keep it from spoiling, and began scraping away at it with the silver blade from Father’s scissors. When she unearthed the crock and didn’t even remove the lid to so much as take a taste of Mother’s delicious ginger, brown sugar, and pork mixture, I knew she was serious.

I blocked the exit. “Hatsuko, you can’t leave. I promised Mother. We must live, don’t you understand? For her. For Father.”

“Don’t be silly. What are you talking about? Mother and Father will be waiting for us with the other refugees.”

“Hatsuko, no,” I said gently. “Mother and Father will not be waiting for us.” From my pocket, I withdrew what I had found earlier: the mangled remains of Father’s spectacles. A few jagged shards of shattered glass still adhered to the frames that had been smashed, so that the spectacles lay out flat as the skin of a dead animal.

Hatsuko set the crock down, held out her hand, and I placed the glasses that Father was never without on her white palm. She stared at the twisted metal as if it were a kanji character that she had yet to learn the meaning of.

I knew she was in shock, and used the moment to explain what had to be done. “We can’t leave and go south. The Americans are driving us toward the sea, and once they have all of us penned up with the high black cliffs above the ocean at our backs, there will only be surrender or suicide. So we will remain here until they find us. Then we will surrender, and the soldiers will do with us what soldiers always do with the women of the conquered. But we will live, Hatsuko. For Mother. For Father. For all who have died.” I held my open hand out to the bones of our ancestors. “For them. For all of them, we will live.” Hatsuko stared back at me as if I were speaking a language she no longer understood. I spoke to her gently, like she was a child with a fever. “This is what must be done, Hat-chan.”

She shook her head as though she were waking from a bad dream. “No.” She shoved the bits of wire and glass back at me. “No.” She repeated the word again as if she could forbid what had already happened. “No. First I will find Nakamura. Then I will find Father and Mother. They will be hungry. They will need the food we will bring them. You can carry the dried sweet potatoes and bonito fish.”

“I’m not coming,” I said, though she knew that already.

This time when she made to leave, I snatched the silver blade from her hand, knelt at her feet, and pressed the point against the artery thumping beneath my jawbone so hard that blood trickled down my neck. “If you leave, I will kill myself!”

Hatsuko smiled as she took the blade from my hand and slid it into the waistband of her pants. “Life is the treasure,” was all she said before taking the crock and slipping out into the dark where demons now ruled.

FORTY-FIVE

“Hey, where are you right now?” Jake asks as soon as I answer his phone.

“Standing on the highway waiting for a bus heading back to the base. Jake, I tried to call you. You won’t believe what happened in Madadayo. You have to come back with me to explain everything to a woman I met here who, I’m sure, knew the girl in the cave.”

“I will. But right now, want to come meet me in Naha? See my mad
taiko
drumming skills?”

“Sure, but—”

“Just get the forty-six or seventeen bus. It’ll take you right into Naha.”

“How will I ever find you?”

“Can you get back to Kokusai-dōri?”

“That’s a very long street.”

“Go to where it crosses Heiwa-dōri, the covered street where we were yesterday. You can watch the parade from there. Maybe you’ll even be able to spot me. In any case, just stay there after the parade, and I’ll come back and find you.”

He hears the uncertainty in my answer and says, “Just get to Kokusai-dōri, okay? Then keep the ocean at your back and the monorail on your left and watch for Heiwa-dōri. Remember? Peace Street? With the entrance marked by that green arch with the white doves on either side?”

“Kokusai-dōri. Heiwa-dōri. I got it.”

“You got it, Nahottie.”

I smile at him calling me by the slang for an Okinawan hottie and flag down the 17 bus that appears a second later as if by magic.

FORTY-SIX

Hatsuko, who has remained Kokuba Hatsuko all her long, unmarried life, wakes from a nap. The false cheeriness of her room in the Shiawase Nursing Home, with its sunny yellow walls and harshly bright lighting, offends Hatsuko anew. Her longing for the quiet, shadowed austerity of her home in Madadayo is especially painful during the three days of Obon. It is then that she most regrets having allowed her father’s brother’s grandson, that conniving Tonaki Hideo, to trick her into leaving her home. She is deeply suspicious of the deal he engineered that turned her home, an exact replica of the one destroyed in the war, into a strange sort of zoo. Hideo promised that all would be preserved precisely as it was. That hers was one of the last truly traditional dwellings left on the island, and it needed to be shared with the young. She knows that there is something in it for Hideo and all the greedy Tonakis of her father’s birth family who perch like vultures, waiting to wrest complete control of her mother’s family’s property from her.

Hatsuko rises slowly and remembers other Obons, when she still had a real home to welcome the dead into. Each year on Welcoming Day, she used to rise before dawn to sweep the courtyard of her family tomb so that the spirits within could emerge. Back at her house, she would string lanterns to guide the spirits to her door and place bowls of water on the long veranda so that the returning spirits could wash their feet after their long journey home. Then she would load the family altar with candles, flowers, sugarcane, papayas, and
awamori
until the offerings overflowed onto the floor below.

When the ancestors arrived, Hatsuko would clap and sing along with the spirits, but her smile would be wistful, because those she wanted most never came, since their bones hadn’t been recovered. She yearned for her mother to visit so she could apologize and beg her forgiveness, and tell her that she had been right about everything. She’d predicted that the great war would humble Japan and destroy Okinawa, and that was what had happened.
Anmā
predicted that her three sons would
die when the sun passed too close to the earth, and when the Second Army transferred all three of Hatsuko’s brothers to Hiroshima, that, too, was what happened.

Most of all, Hatsuko ached for Little Guppy with a longing that the passing years only made sharper. Hatsuko knew she had been stupid and blind about many things, but her worst failing was as a big sister; she had failed Tamiko in death even worse than she had in life. Years ago, Hatsuko had gone to the office of the Okinawa Prefecture Department of Welfare and Health where a technician wearing a blue surgical mask and gloves and a name tag that identified her as Reiko had scrubbed a gauze pad over the inside of Hatsuko’s cheek. Reiko had promised that if Hatsuko’s DNA matched any of the “remains” that had been found, her office would notify her immediately.