Above the East China Sea: A novel

by Sarah Bird

  Yes, your aunt Hatsuko and all the rest of our family will be there. We will be together. I promise you, no matter what the cost, we will be reunited with our clan.

  Are they waiting for us in the next world?

  Yes.

  But first we must be found and buried, right?

  Yes, I say, though he already knows that answer. He knows everything I know, all the rules that govern this life and those that determine who will be admitted to the next. He also knows my ignorance, the parts I don’t understand. And those voids frighten him.

  How will we be found down here so far beneath the sea?

  That is not for you to concern yourself with. The kami will find a way.

  Will we become fiidama, like the one who drowned your brother and stole his corpse?

  When had I allowed such a sad memory to enter our minds?

  Yes.

  Are we waiting here until we can lure a swimmer out to us, then steal his spirit and use his corpse to gain entrance to the next world?

  There is no other way left to us.

  Mother?

  Call me by our Okinawan word for mother.

  Yes, Anmā. Anmā, I miss the eels.

  I remember the moray eels that gathered after we jumped. They were a great source of amusement for us. My son liked the ones that were mossy and green as old logs. I preferred those speckled brown and white like giraffes. Neither of us liked the ones with mad, spinning eyes, or those with only murky gray spots for eyes.

  They all had blubbery lips that parted to reveal dagger-tipped teeth that tore at our flesh and released a rain of particles that lured a rainbow of fish to us in colors dazzling as hand-blown glass. So many different sorts of fish. Fish with scales of yellow, purple, silver, green. Clouds of fish that flashed a neon blue brighter than the lights of Naha. Fish with blue teeth and green lips. Fish striped black and white like prisoners. Fish that never tired of chasing one another about in endless games of tag. Our favorites, though, were the ones that floated stupefied in front of us, as if they had forgotten how to swim.

  When all our flesh was gone, the eels and fish, and, finally, even the marine worms, stopped visiting, and we waited. And slept. And now my son is awake and asking questions that I am obliged to find answers for.

  Anmā, we are so far from the surface down here. How will we ever steal a stranger’s spirit so that we might take over his corpse and find our way to the next world, where our munchū waits for us?

  When it is time, the kami will show us the way to our clan.

  It must be time now. Why else would we have awakened?

  We shall soon learn why.

  But we must do something.

  What? We are no longer of the living, and we certainly are not yet kami-sama. We are trapped between worlds. The only power we have is to wait.

  Then, while we wait, tell me once more everything you know about the next world.

  I told my son what his grandmother had told me: that in that other realm, the air shimmered like lapis lazuli and was perfumed by the scent of lilies and pineapples. That every one of the 2,046 ancestors of our munchū for ten generations into the past would meet there after death to feast on pigs’ ears in vinegar, sweet potato in green-tea sauce, stir-fried bitter melon, and pork stewed in squid’s ink, all washed down with cool wheat tea sweetened with black sugar for the children and millet brandy for the adults. That we would dance beneath the vast roof of a banyan tree while our legendary great-great-great-grandfather Ryō plucked tunes from his sanshin. That the timid dwarf deer, the emerald frog, the long-haired mouse, and the orchid leaf butterfly would all emerge from hiding to marvel at the beauty of our arm movements, the liveliness of our steps. That we would frolic there with the fairies and fauns who inhabit that other world and be reunited with our mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and great-grandparents beyond remembering.

  I told him of the sweetest promise the other realm held for me: I would be reunited with my sister. Hatsuko and I would be together once more.

  Will there be sword fights?

  That my child loved best my memories of the sword fights I used to have with my boy cousins, Shinsei and Uei, made me certain that he, too, was a boy. So I assured him that of course in the next world there would be sword fights. This excited him. There had been no real weapons on our island since they were confiscated by the Japanese invaders in 1609, so my cousins and I used to arm ourselves with the straightest boughs we could pluck from the screw pine trees and slash at one another like the valiant samurai our ancestors had been.

  And spiders?

  Second only to sword fights, he liked memories about the times when we children, the capering herd of us, would capture banana spiders bigger than a man’s hand and stage grand battles with them.

  And the hills?

  He never tired of my memories of sliding down hills of grass. I assured him that in that place where all the best memories are forever real, we would never need worry about vipers hiding beneath the silvery blades. No habus or mosquitoes, gnats or lice exist where the evenings last an eternity and ocean breezes are always blowing, gentle and cool.

  We will be there soon.

  As the months or years or decades, I know not which, passed, I made this vow again and again to my son, promising him that we had not been abandoned for all eternity at the bottom of the East China Sea. That even now my sister was begging the kami to intercede on our behalf. Yet, eventually, despair found me, and I feared that we had, indeed, been forgotten. I could accept that my father, mother, and brothers had all ceased imploring the kami to save us, but Hatsuko? Hatsuko would never abandon me. I now cling to the hope that she is still visiting yutas, the women the spirits speak through. That she simply has not found the right one yet.

  It galls me that I can do nothing to help Hatsuko rescue us from this netherworld and send us on to the shimmering place. Until I join my ancestors, I’m not kami-sama like them, so I don’t have the power to inflict suffering on the living to remind them of their obligations to us. I can’t even summon a swarm of biting flies, as Old Jug, my great-great-grandmother Uto Kokuba, once did during the worst of the invasion, when she expressed her displeasure at me for almost giving up on life. I can do nothing, except wait for the kami to send us a stranger.

  I study my brother’s story endlessly, picking it apart to find the clues I need to save my child from this watery limbo. In our village, my oldest brother, Ichirō, was known as Forest Orchid Boy, because his scent alone was said to drive girls mad. Ichirō was funny, smart, strong, and so handsome that the juris in the Tsuji pleasure quarter never charged him their usual rate of five yen for the privilege of making love to them. All the maidens in the village dreamed of marrying him, but none captured his fancy until Nobuko, a distant cousin of the Jiriya family, arrived to work at her uncle’s factory, where she was put to work stripping fibers from the pandanus plant to weave into panama hats. From the first moment Ichirō set eyes on Nobuko, he was crazed with love for her, and she for him.

  For months they met in secret, stealing away to lie together upon cool beds of leathery ferns beside the crystalline waters of the Oigama River. Ichirō’s joy abounded when he learned his lover was carrying his ashibingwa, his love child, and they planned to be married. Nobuko’s uncle, however, flew into a rage at such an idea, since he had already arranged an advantageous union between Nobuko and his largest exporter, Mr. Inafuku. The deal had been struck; glasses of awamori had already been shared. The uncle would not endure the humiliation of his niece’s disobedience, and immediately sent Nobuku away to marry the exporter and live imprisoned behind the stone walls that surrounded his grand house in Naha.

  Ichirō’s spirit left his body then, and our mother exhausted herself doing all she could to lure it back. She took him to the secluded grove of acacia trees, where he had bidden Nobuko farewell, dropped to her knees facing the direction of home, placed her hands together, bowed her head, and prayed to her son’s spirit, begg
ing his mabui to please come home. Then, holding out leafy canes of bamboo on either side to keep her son’s spirit from straying, she guided him home.

  Sadly, Ichirō’s spirit did not accompany them. Anmā kept trying to entice it back by forcing her son to eat sweets, rubbing scented oil on his arms, and sweeping the air around him with bundles of burning tobacco leaves from her patch, but nothing worked. The light was gone from her firstborn’s eyes as surely as from the eyes of one of the fat pigs she butchered on special occasions to make her delicious pork miso. Ichirō cared for nothing, which was why on Ukui, the third and last day of the Obon festival, he made the terrible announcement that he would go swimming.

  Though the waves that day were gentle enough to rock a baby’s cradle, we all went wide-eyed with fear. Everyone knew that on the third and last day of Obon, the spirits of the drowned whose remains were lost at sea tried everything within their power to lure one of the living to his death so that the displaced souls might find a home in the corpse.

  At the beach that evening we all saw what we feared most. Fiidama, the hazy phosphorescent fireballs that are a sure sign of the presence of an uneasy spirit, danced in terrible clusters above the waves. As tears streamed down her face, Mother tried to hold Ichirō back. She pleaded with her son, telling him what she would tell me years later: Nuchi du takara. Life is the treasure. But he forced her to let him go. His spirit had already left his body, and his life had stopped being a treasure. Mother wept as her brave, handsome child swam out so far that we could barely see his dark head bobbing up and down among the waves.

  We watched in horror from the shore as the eerie glow of a fiidama shining with a particularly bright and steady green luminescence targeted Ichirō. It followed him as he swam away from us, wobbling over the black dot of his head like a jellyfish swaying in an ocean current. Our mother wailed out her grief, for she knew that some lost spirit who’d never had a proper burial—some fisherman who’d drowned in a storm, or merchant who’d fallen overboard off a trading vessel, or even one of the brave warriors who’d defended the island against the Japanese invaders—waited to claim her son’s body. In the twilight, the fiidama pulsed with a deep, murderous glow that reflected red on the waves. And then it vanished and our brother was gone.

  When his corpse washed ashore, we placed it in our family tomb and observed all the proper funeral rituals, but we knew we were honoring a stranger who did not belong with us. Mother grieved terribly that her son’s body, his chance to spend eternity with his clan, had been stolen. Over the years, though she never specifically wished for Ichirō’s displaced spirit to claim a stranger’s body, as his had been claimed, she did go frequently to the place where he had disappeared to pray that, if such a thing were to happen, her son would find his way to our family’s munchū. More than anything, she wanted her oldest son to be waiting for her with our clan’s departed in the next world.

  Had our mother been more specific in her prayers, I might now know how to become a fiidama myself and how to lure a stranger our way. But since she gave no instructions on this score, I am powerless, and I ache with a ferocity unknown to the living for what was promised in my mother’s stories. For sweet potatoes in green-tea sauce, the scent of lilies and pineapples, but most of all, I yearn for Hatsuko. Near the end, when thirst and hunger were knives twisting ceaselessly within us, I believed that my ruined body was the cause of all my suffering. Here I have learned that pain is not sharpened by flesh; it is blunted. With no body there is no way to partition off suffering. It is a curse, yet it gives me an advantage over any of the living, who never see clearly until their eyes are closed forever. They are blind to the injustice of love withheld from the unlovely and lavished on the lovely, who, with their consolations of lovely, long necks and shiny, straight hair, need it so much less. They don’t see how their foolish desires drive them to crawl over one another like crabs in a bucket fighting for a small circle of blue when the whole sky waits above.

  And now, though I don’t yet know why the kami have awakened us, I must make myself ready to use my advantage. I concentrate. I put doubt and despair aside and hone my desire. I fletch it like a samurai’s arrowhead. I pull it back taut in the bow until it quivers, and I wait. The rules of destiny are harsh, but to save my child’s soul, I have accepted them. The kami-sama will send to us someone who hovers between the living and the dead, as Ichirō once did, as my child and I do now. And when that person arrives, I shall be ready and will release the arrow of my yearning straight into his heart.

  FOUR

  On the beach a driftwood bonfire shimmies in the offshore breeze. When I get close enough that the cave-drawing figures clustered around the fire turn into actual humans, I slap something resembling a smile on my face.

  “Luz! Luz! Luz and brews!” A baboon-troop hoot of greeting goes up when they spot us. Well, not us so much as Kirby’s sloshing Igloo.

  DaQuane Green lopes our way, and asks Kirby, “What the hell took you so long, son?” Tonight DQ’s sporting a fade with a topknot of glossy curls. In a burst of speed, a figure breaks away from the others, darts ahead of DaQuane, and reaches the cooler first. It’s Jake Furusato. Jake is the reigning prince of Smokinawa, leader of the kids who are either full or part Oki and part American and attached in some permanent way to the base. The Smokinawans are perfectly fluent in both languages and cultures. I wait for Jake to take my end of the cooler, but he messes with me, pretending to take the handle, then pulling his hand away.

  “Jake, quit being a douche.”

  He grins, grabs the handle, brushes up against me, doesn’t move. It’s been this way since the first second we set eyes on each other, Jake always finding excuses to touch me in semijokey ways. I guess that if there’s one thing that would keep me interested in Okinawa, it would be Jake Furusato. But he’s not a possibility, since he has an attached-at-the-hip-girlfriend, Christy Medoruma. I check the group gathered around the fire to see whether Christy is over there shooting daggers my way. She’s not; Jake only gets playa with me when she’s not around. In fact, none of Jake’s crew of Smokinawans is in attendance tonight. An empty Orion can flashes in the firelight as it arcs into the flames, sending sparks flying into the dark night.

  “Dude!” Jake protests, as he leans away from the burning shower. In the light from the fire, his skin is the color of apple jelly and his eyes are two slashes of calligraphy angling into his high cheeks. He reminds me so much of Ashkii Begay, this really good-looking Navajo guy I was crushed out on at my last school, that it’s eerie.

  As I head toward the fire, my flip-flops pelt gritty sand against my calves with each step. I met most of the beach crew three months ago, right after my mom and I arrived at the beginning of summer. Summer is high season for PCSing—permanent change of station—when the air force shuffles the deck and, for its own random reasons, moves about a third of its personnel to yet another random spot on the globe. Which is why Kadena was having an event to welcome incoming “military teens.” It was held at the Kadena Teen Center Millennium: “Where Being a Teen Has Never Been So Much Fun!” Representatives from the crafts shop, gamers’ club, archery range, and bowling league spoke about their groups and services. Then the director of the center, a staff sergeant with an Adam’s apple like a hatchet blade sliding up and down in his throat, told us “military teens” that joining one of the groups he ran was the best way to integrate ourselves “into the community of your choice and to find others with shared interests.”

  Turned out that even better than throwing pots or playing “World of Warcraft” for getting integrated into the community of my choice was the interest me and Kirby’s crew shared in getting high. Which, thanks to my mom’s endless supply of benzodiazepines, I was when I went to the meeting. It was no big trick for us—the glassy and red of eye, the inappropriate of mirth, the flattened of affect, the bad of attitude—to recognize one another at that first meeting. It was even easier to sneak out of said meeting when the director told us to “
break out”—an unfortunate choice of words for a guy whose cheeks were spangled with lavender acne—into our “interest groups.”

  My interest group broke out into the area behind the Teen Center. That’s when Kirby said, “Welcome to Smokinawa,” passed around a handful of one-hitters that looked like cigarettes from a distance, and we all smoked up. Then DaQuane volunteered that he knew a GI who’d buy liquor for us at the Class Six. Someone else, maybe me, had a sampler platter of pharmaceuticals. And boom. It was party time there, “Where Being a High Teen Has Never Been So Much Fun!”

  The next night, we adjourned to Kirby’s cove, and that’s when I met Jake. He’d been surfing with his boys, and his black hair was wild and bushy and all spiked out from the salt water and humidity. A sleeveless T showed off his excellent surfer’s tan and shoulders. From the second Jake noticed me, he kept looking my way. When Christy and her friends left to pee, he came over.

  “Hai-sai, mensorei,” he said.

  “Hi sie to you too,” I answered.

  “Sorry, I thought you were part Oki.”

  “I am. My grandmother was born here.”

  “Cool.”

  There was a silence and, out of nervousness, I threw in that, on my dad’s side, I was also part German, African American, Irish, and Filipina. I didn’t mention that my mom’s father was a Missouri redneck.

  “So, your name, Luz, it comes from the Philippines?”

  I smiled, impressed that he could pronounce my name. Looz. Not Luss. “Yeah, it was my dad’s mother’s name.” I didn’t add that my name was pretty much the last thing my parents collaborated on, since my dad was gone before my first birthday. What did my mother expect, marrying her Kali martial arts teacher? A long harmonious relationship?

  “Means ‘light,’ right?”