The Emperor of Any Place (5 page)

I think too much, I talk too much — have you not told me many times? But there is precious little paper for my yammering. Ah, the miracle of these pages! You will have to wait to find out how the paper came to me along with the implement to write down my adventure. Patience.

You know everything about me until the day I boarded the troop carrier for Tinian, and after that, nothing. There was no time for letters. Everything happened so fast. So I will pick up the story of my life at the moment when it looked as if it was most likely to come to an end. It was the day after the invasion of Tinian.
¹

I remember little of the fighting. At one point it was all around me, the loudest thing in the world. And I was part of the noise, but my rifle did all the talking for me! Then there was a very loud whooshing sound, a wall of heat, and everything went dark. Time passed with no help from me to count the minutes or the hours.

The next thing I remember was pain. How strange it was to not be able to really see or hear or think at all but only feel this searing pain all over. I rolled onto my back, breathing heavily from the effort and gritting my teeth. I opened my eyes and lay there several minutes sucking in air, greedily, while the dizzy sky swirled above me. Then I raised myself onto my elbow and, dreading what I would see, I looked down at my body. Yellow pus oozed from my left flank, discoloring my torn uniform, which was already brown with dried blood. I had been scorched. I shuddered and shook. My heart was racing. Septicemia was setting in. I wiped the sweat off my face, knuckled it out of my eyes, looked up, looked around. My rifle lay a few feet away, as scorched as I was, broken. The chrysanthemum etched into the stock was filled with dirt. Everywhere was quiet. Dead quiet.

Rolling onto my front, I dragged myself painfully forward on my elbows toward a stand of new bamboo. I parted the culms with my hand. I blinked. Blinked again, for what I saw could not be. What insanity was this?

Amidst the smoke, a terrible battle was being fought in utter silence.

By puppets!

Bunraku
puppets shot at one another with bright-blue rifles or slashed with yellow swords. This one held a red dagger in his polished wooden fist, which came down repeatedly on the inflated torso of another puppet, who twisted and turned this way and that, throwing up its hands, its clever glass eyes rolling in its wooden head. Over there, another puppet twirled around and around, shooting a green handgun, out of the barrel of which rained a silvery cascade of confetti.

Parts of soldiers flew off, this way and that.

The puppets were elaborately dressed: on one side, brave samurai warriors in orange-colored armor with ferocious grins; and on the other side, grotesque ogres, pale with white noses as long as daikon radishes.

For every puppet there were three puppeteers, one to operate the feet and legs, the other to operate the left hand, and one — the master puppeteer — to operate the right hand and the head. The puppeteers were all but invisible. I squinted to see them at all, for they were dressed in black from head to toe, with black hoods over their heads as if they were death’s own helpers. What Dancers they were — blind Dancers under the blazing sun. War Dancers holding aloft warriors with child-bright weapons, and hungry mouths open to reveal the whitest of chompers and the pinkest of tongues.

Now this one’s head flew off and rolled toward me, so that when it stopped I could see the worn handhold in the hollowed-out neck. This was a puppet that had fought in many battles. Had he lost his head every time?

There was something terribly wrong with the performance, but I was so delirious it took me a while to realize what it was. Ah, yes! There was no chanter to tell the story. There were no musicians: no one to pluck the
shamisen,
to drum on the
taiko,
or to blow on the
shakuhachi.

There was no noise at all, and what is a battle without noise?

My grandfather had taken me to see
Bunraku
when I was a child. Did I ever tell you that, Hisako? No, I mostly complained about my father, didn’t I. Ah, but my grandfather — how I miss him. I remembered him explaining how the chanter always held up the text before the play and bowed to it, promising the audience that he would follow the author’s story, faithfully. So this was a performance without sound, and without an author or a story. And how could such a story be true? How could such a story ever end?

Now, from the midst of the swirling mayhem, stepped the most impressive of samurai with a mighty ax, which he swung at the loftiest of the ogres. The ogre ducked but not fast enough, for the top of his head was sheared clear off! As you can imagine, I gasped in astonishment. Then as if all this were not strange enough, out of the white ogre’s skull appeared the head of another miniature ogre. A hatchling that rose on tiny white wings and floated into the air above his fallen father, higher and higher, until he hovered above the battle. All the brave samurai stopped their fighting to look up in awe. The hatchling held a rose-colored orb with a fuse that flashed and sparked.

A bomb!

If there were black-gloved hands holding that flying ogre-child aloft, I swear I could not see them. The mightiest of the samurai, stunned by what had happened, regained his composure, raised his ax, and swung at the tiny winged warrior, back and forth, leaping and twirling and lashing out. How comical he was — deadly comical. But with great alacrity the ogre’s offspring averted every blow, rising to just the right height above the battle scene.

The fuse grew shorter and shorter.

And then the bomb went off.

A hot wind made the bamboo culms click together. I did not open my eyes this time, afraid of what I might see. I was thinking about something I had been told, something that had been drummed into me, when I became a soldier. “There can be no surrender. A great man should die as a shattered jewel.”

A great man, yes. But I, Lance Corporal Isamu Ōshiro, knew I was not a great man. I was a burned man, a broken man. A puppet deserted and left to die by my manipulators. I was nineteen, married not four months, before I was called to serve my country and my Emperor. Which I had done and failed. Failed not once but twice, for I was too weak now to throw myself on my own sword. To be fair, I had no sword. But I was too weak to throw myself on the sword of the conqueror.

There was even greater shame inside me. In my heart of hearts, I knew that, given the chance, I
would
be a tile under the invaders’ feet — would suffer the infamy of becoming a prisoner of war — if it meant eventually I could be with you again, Hisako. If you have survived on your island, then I would live on this one, with any amount of shame, just to be with you there again. I did not then know that there was a third island, a third choice. Ah, but I get ahead of myself.

There I lay. Tears sprang from my eyes, I will tell you, and mingled with the sand, which coated my cheek. The burning in my side throbbed and throbbed. My breath came in sobs.

I dreamed of you, your face so somber and strong. “Live,” you said to me. “I will live, if you will, too. Live and come back to me.”

I woke a third time to the thumping of a bittern. I could hear again! I listened to the wind stir the leaves of the trees. Is there a more glorious sound in the world? Then I heard human sounds, voices. Not the cries of war, but of men talking. I lay perfectly still. A burst of tired laughter split the air. One voice louder than the others sounded on the verge of hysteria. I knew that kind of laugh only too well, but I could not understand what the voices might be saying. From the pitch and the lazy timbre I could tell they were
gaijin.

It was dawn. A day and a night had passed. Or maybe several days and several nights — how would I know? I raised my head, scraped at the sand coating my cheek. Dug the sand out of my ear. The voices were still there. They were not a dream, although it had been a night of uncommonly strange dreams!

I cleared the sleep out of my eyes. Then carefully, I rose on my knees and peered again through the bamboo. This is what I saw: American soldiers walking amongst the dead and dying, eyes peeled, rifles fitted with bayonets. A wounded Japanese soldier was helped to his feet. He was frisked and led away, without a struggle. The two Americans and their prisoner crossed a slight rise and disappeared from view, and I waited for the single shot of execution. None came.

Another warrior writhed in pain. A marine called out, and two men appeared with a stretcher, and the three of them loaded the man onto it. A farmer, by the look of him, for many of the citizens of the island had joined us in the last-ditch effort against the invaders.
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I had heard, Hisako, as have you, what the Americans do to the wounded — the torture, the humiliation they inflict. And yet that was not what I was seeing here. The stretcher-bearers carried the warrior to a place where there were many stretchers and where the wounded were being treated, Americans, Japanese, soldiers and commoners alike.

Then a baby started to cry.

A baby? Now you will think I am hallucinating again. Believe me I thought so, too. I punched my head with the heel of my hand as if my untrustworthy ears had deceived me. But no, across the battlefield a marine leaned his rifle against a tree and gently released a child from the dead arms of its mother. Awkwardly he cradled it.

“Will you look at this,” he called out. No, I cannot understand English, as you well know, but that is what he must have said, for another soldier approached him. “Well, what do you know,” he said, or words of that kind. I wanted to turn away, for fear of what would happen next.
They would kill it. They would throw it to the ground and tread on it. They would snap its neck like a market chicken.
This was what we had been told. I had to do something!

My rifle was ruined, but I still had my handgun. I rolled onto my side, almost screaming with pain, but biting down on my tongue to keep from giving myself away. I reached for my Nambu, struggling to pull it from its holster. But by the time all of this had transpired and I had rolled back onto my stomach to fire — nauseous from the exertion — there were three soldiers gathered around the child. It was howling now, and the first soldier held the baby at arm’s length and wrinkled his nose. The others laughed.

I took aim, or tried to; my hand shook too violently.

The newest of the trio had pushed his helmet off the back of his head and taken the baby, placing it across his shoulder. He patted its back tenderly. I lowered my gun. The soldier’s face was black. Black, I thought, from the smoke of war. But no, so were his arms and hands: black because he was black.

The black man cooed at the baby.

What was I to do? I lay my head down in the sand, too weak to hold it up, confused and ashamed. Surely war is madness. Meanwhile, the baby, quiet now, was carried away, back through the dead and dying, back to the living and recovering. And I faded off again, exhausted by the attempt to care.

I awoke another time and it was evening. Another day was coming to an end, although how many had passed I have no idea. The birds told one another the news of the battle in excited chatter and shrieks. I sat up and with my good hand tugged at the string around my neck. The little red-and-gold sack came free of my shirt, my
omamori:
the amulet you gave me on the day we wed, meant to keep me safe.

Gingerly, I opened the top of the sack and with two fingers slipped out the photo of you, my bride, Hisako.

I will live, if you will, too.

It was time, I thought. Your face gave me courage. I tenderly placed the picture back in my
omamori
and tucked the little sack back into my filthy shirt.

And so . . .

I was prepared for anything now. I gathered up my strength and climbed to my feet. I wobbled like a drunken man, then stepped through the vale of bamboo and stood unsteadily at attention, staring straight ahead across the clearing. There were still soldiers there; the cleanup from the massacre would go on long into the night, whichever night it was.

But no one saw me.

Their eyes were cast down at the carnage. I would have called out but found I had no voice. I would have gone to them — given myself up, but you, Hisako, you snapped at me!

“Iie!”
you said. “No!” Such a shock. I could have sworn I heard you.

So I stood there a moment longer, the longest moment of my life. Then I turned and shambled off the other way. I held myself as tall as a limping burned man can, and I waited for the shout, the gunfire, the end, but it didn’t come.

I am leaving this war,
I thought.
It is no defeat to live.
Isn’t that what you meant when your voice snapped at me from the amulet lying next to my heart?

It is funny. We have been married so little time that I have never heard you raise your voice except to sing! But I am glad you shouted at me like that, even if it was most impolite of you.

I came to the brink of the sea. I looked down at the beach below. The tide was in, lapping at the wreckage of the American amphibious landing vehicles. There were landing ramps,
³
constructed by the Americans, to scale the bank. The tide was high, a spring tide. One of the ramps floated, the wooden platform torn free from its base.

A raft waited for me in the floating world.

I washed up on a shore at low tide. It was early evening. My raft was deposited on a wide strand of beach, littered with all manner of flotsam, the debris of battle: what was left when the war was over but not over. From the fringe of the beach, where the grasses waved in the onshore breeze, I could just make out hungry ghosts watching and waiting, impatiently. I thought to myself,
Isamu, beware! When you are good and dead, they will feast on you.
But then, before my eyes, children appeared, unraveling from the air, first one, then another, and so on, until there were a number of them — too many to count in my half-dead state. The nearest came to my side, a ghost boy, who might have been nine or ten to look at, if years count for anything in the in-between world. He rested his vaporous hand on my shoulder. And although I could feel nothing, I closed my eyes again with a feeling of peace coming over me.
These ghost children will protect me from the other ghosts,
I thought. It was not a very rational kind of thought, but it was my last in what had been an endlessly long day.