Above the East China Sea

by Sarah Bird

  “Lusitania!” he answers. I can barely hear him above the pounding in the background, like thunder with a heavy-metal beat.

  “God, Jake, it sounds like it’s going to be the Night of Ten Thousand Drummers. On steroids.”

  “You got that right. Where are you?”

  “On my way to Madadayo.”

  “What’s that?”

  I tell him about how I figured out the identity of the pin’s owner and Jake says, “Awesome, possum.”

  “Did you really just say that?”

  “Maybe I did and maybe I did.”

  “Jake, have you been drinking?”

  “Takes a hella awamori to chase the dead back to where they belong. Some of them don’t wanna go.”

  He laughs and I wish I were there with him. Jake is very cute when he’s drunk. Hoping that he won’t remember the question, the proof that I care, I ask, “Is Christy there?”

  “Am I having fun?”

  “You seem to be.”

  “Then that answers your question. She’s still up north with her people. Tell me about Madadayo.”

  “Jake, I wish you could see this place. I’m walking down this narrow road and not another soul has passed me, and it’s all shaded and cool. It actually feels enchanted.”

  “Lots of little hidden parts of Okinawa feel that way.”

  “I can’t wait to find someone related to Tamiko and give them her pin. I hope someone in her family still lives here. They’ll know what to do about the bones.”

  “Great. Good plan. Hey, Luz, seriously, five stars for you. Pretty rare for anyone from the base to care as much as you do.”

  “I’m not ‘anyone from the base.’ ”

  “You’re not, Luz. Believe me, you really are not.”

  I listen to Jake breathe and imagine that he’s holding back from saying more because of still being with Christy. That maybe it’s possible there’s an honorable guy out there. I want to tell him that I appreciate him looking out for me, but someone who sounds half-mad, half-teasing yells at Jake in Japanese, and he says he has to go.

  “Jake, I’m going to need you to translate when I get into the village.”

  “Sure, I’ll hang on to Nobu’s phone. Call me when you get there, okay?”

  “I will.”

  I stay on the road and soon come to a house with a red-tiled roof. I rehearse saying the girl’s name the Japanese way, with the family name first, Kokuba Tamiko. I wish I’d copied the characters down at the museum, but I’m filled with confidence and a feeling that, no matter what, I will end up on the right path; the kami are guiding me.

  The road widens and ends in a cul-de-sac. Circled around it are more houses with red tile roofs. In a large garden plot, a short woman is bent over, hacking at the roots of a plant until she unearths a large, bushy head of lettuce. It is only when she uses her hand hoe to stand up that she sees me. For a moment she freezes; then she heads my way. She is so short and bowlegged that she looks like Yosemite Sam.

  “Hai-sai mensorei,” she greets me.

  “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 f
or 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.

  “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.”