Above the East China Sea: A novel

by Sarah Bird

  Our cultured father made a sour face and spit in disgust at such foolishness. “How stupid those pitiful fools were not to understand that shame is a useless weapon against men with no honor. Remember this, daughters, should war come to our shores: Americans have no honor. You cannot imagine how they will defile you.” Hatsuko lowered her head in embarrassment and I, as always, copied her.

  “If you don’t believe me,” he said, though we didn’t doubt him in the least, “look at this.” He tapped the dates on the tombstones when Perry’s sailors, dead of disease and accident, had been put into the earth of Okinawa. Hatsuko and I gasped as we read the year: 1853.

  Faster than a Chinese merchant with an abacus, Hatsuko did the calculation. “Ninety years ago?”

  “And they’re still here?” I was stunned.

  Our father nodded. “Yes. And in all that time the sailors’ oldest male relatives have never come to wash their bones and take them home.”

  I shivered in the stifling heat, thinking of the spirits of these wretches, abandoned by their families and trapped for all eternity among strangers. I could not imagine such loneliness. Even though they were imperialistic invaders and enemies of Our Beloved Father the emperor, it made me sad to think that the spirits of the lost sailors would be trapped here forever. Alone. Alone and forgotten.

  Once Father saw how stricken we were by this evidence of the Americans’ cruelty in abandoning their own, he hurried us from that unholy place. Still the restless spirits imprisoned there haunted my dreams ever after. Hatsuko and I could not imagine a people so callous or a fate so cruel, and we swore that no power on earth would ever keep us apart in this or, more important, the next world.

  Did Aunt Hatsuko pray to the kami to send the demon girl to us?

  She must have. She promised we would be together in the other realm.

  But, Mother, if we claim a stranger’s body, won’t we be condemned to spend eternity with her ancestors?

  Once in the next world, we will find our clan.

  But I don’t know our clan and they don’t know me. Anmā, what if we are separated?

  That was the worst of all my fears. That we would be separated and my child wouldn’t know who his people were. Wouldn’t know where he belonged. Without intending, I recalled a song that had frightened me as a child.

  I let my innocent child

  Journey to the netherworld alone.

  Morning and night, looking for me,

  He must be crying.

  I don’t want to be alone.

  Don’t cry. Please don’t cry. You won’t. I promise you, you will never be alone. That is why the kami have given us more time. So that you will know the story of who I was and how you came to be. You must have all my memories so that you will know your clan and they will know you.

  Even the painful ones you have pushed from your thoughts?

  Especially those. You must know my story, for it is the story of the munchū we are part of and that you will be with for all of eternity.

  Even if we are separated?

  Even then.

  Will there be time?

  There must be time.

  Then tell me quickly. Tell me what I must know.

  I will begin on March twenty-third, 1945.

  Don’t tell me numbers, Anmā. Tell me what I understand. Tell me colors. Remember the colors again. The pink of the baby piglets. The gold of the trunks of your bamboo grove. The purple of your mother’s sweet potatoes. The yellow of the flowers on the sea hibiscus hedge that lined the narrow oxcart path. The red of the flowers on the deigo tree, so bright that the entire side of the mountain seemed to be on fire.

  Yes, and everything in between was green. Leaf, vine, grass. More greens than you can imagine.

  I can imagine so many greens, Anmā.

  Imagine all of them and then imagine above and below was blue. The sea was the blue of jewels. The sky was the blue of softness. I believed that my life would change forever on that day.

  And did it?

  Yes, but not in the way I had imagined.

  Tell me. Tell me.

  Will you be quiet now and listen?

  Yes.

  It is a very long story.

  I will be quiet.

  All right then, I will begin.

  THIRTEEN

  Like every other fifteen-year-old in Okinawa I was nervous that morning, my son, the morning your story begins, and I woke long before dawn. I wished that my older sister, your aunt, Hatsuko, was awake, but she snored softly on the futon we had shared for my entire life. She had come from Shuri late the night before in order to stand by my side when, in a few hours, all across the island, we would learn which students had been accepted to one of the few prefectural high schools. Those whose names were not read out that morning would be condemned to be farmers or fishermen, maids or shop clerks. But if our names were on that short list, we could dream of careers as teachers, nurses. Perhaps even positions as administrators with the exalted Imperial Japanese prefectural government.

  In the big city of Naha, families rushed out at dawn to purchase the first copies of the Ryūkyū Shimpō on the newsstand to read the list printed there. In small villages such as ours, we would all gather around the photo of the emperor to hear the headman read the list, whose contents only he knew. In our village of Madadayo that man was your grandfather. As our village’s highest-ranking man, Father was responsible not only for announcing official proclamations, such as the high school lists, but also for collecting taxes and making sure that all orders given by our Japanese governor were carried out.

  The thought of humiliating your grandfather and grandmother, your great-uncles and great-aunts, and all the ancestors who protect and guide us so long as we bring honor to their memory made my stomach tighten into a fist that punched against my heart.

  To calm myself that morning, I stared at my sister’s school uniform hanging from its own special peg. The night before, I’d helped Hatsuko brush the dust from the shoulders of the sailor blouse and scrub at the smudges on the collar with a cloth dipped in Fels-Naptha until it was again so crisp and white that it shone in the darkness as brightly as the lily pin that designated that she was the head girl, gleaming on the breast of the navy-blue blouse. I knew that I would never be elected head girl and wear such a special pin, but I wanted just an ordinary Princess Lily pin so badly that my chest ached with longing.

  Hatsuko’s name had been announced two years ago as one of the few girls from the entire island admitted to the Himeyuri Girls High School in Shuri. Known as the Princess Lily girls because of the pins they all were honored to wear, Himeyuri students represented the finest of Okinawan society. They were so elite that some graduates were even allowed into the restaurants and hotels in Naha that Okinawans were forbidden to enter, since only true Japanese were admitted. Just like true Japanese girls, the purity of the Princess Lilies was prized above all. A student could be expelled for so much as exchanging a note with a boy. Our Japanese rulers had taught us that only the lower classes allowed the sexes to have any contact after childhood and before a suitable marriage had been arranged.

  I never had the slightest doubt that Hatsuko would be one of the few selected to go on to high school. Your aunt was so smart that she even learned to speak English from our uncle Chūzō Shimojo, who worked on a sugar plantation in Hawaii for most of his life before returning to Okinawa so his spirit could rest here with our ancestors when he died.

  Not only was Hatsuko always the best student, but, like our father, she was very Japanese-looking. Quite tall—nearly 160 centimeters—she had the long, straight black hair, high brow, angular features, pale ivory skin, and refined ways of a Japanese noblewoman. She’d even adopted their genteel way of walking pigeon-toed. Yes, your aunt Hatsuko was as fine and delicate as an actual lily. The only other girl as lovely as Hatsuko was Uncle Chūzō’s daughter, our cousin Mitsue. In truth, Cousin Mitsue, with her large, luminous eyes, thick lashes, and full lips, was far prettier
than any girl ever born in Madadayo. Mitsue was Aunt Toyo’s daughter and had been born fully two years after Toyo’s husband, Uncle Chūzō, had left to work in Hawaii. Mitsue’s real father was rumored to be a sugar importer from Tokyo who was as handsome as a movie star. It was said that the sugar importer insisted upon testing the sweetness of the local product before he made any purchase. The baby Mitsue was a year old when Uncle Chūzō, who knew nothing of the child, returned. Aunt Toyo was terrified that Chūzō would turn her out and she’d be forced to flee with her bastard child to Naha and work as a juri in the pleasure quarter to keep them alive. And though Chūzō was furious, and he did beat Toyo terribly, he was as charmed by Cousin Mitsue as every other male she ever encountered would be, and ultimately Uncle Chūzō claimed her as his own.

  Mitsue and Hatsuko were born only a week apart, and though there was always an edge of competitiveness between them, they became good friends, and went off to Shuri together. I was always so proud of my cousin the great beauty, and my elegant and intelligent big sister, and tried to be like them in every way, though I knew that I would never truly measure up since I took after our mother.

  I was very Uchinānchu, and my mongrel Okinawan blood showed up clearly in my short stature, in my round face that was all blunted nubs, and in my skin, dark as an ancient banyan tree, no matter how careful I was about wearing a sun hat. And because our mother foolishly allowed me to go barefoot when I was a child, my toes were splayed out like a hairy Ainu’s, the most mongrelized of the impure races in the vast and invincible Japanese Empire that our Japanese teachers told us occupied one-fifth of the entire globe—all the way from Java in the South Seas to Manchukuo at the northernmost tip of China.

  I shudder now to recall how Mother also allowed, encouraged me even, to squat down over the open privy flowing into the pigsty and do my business with no more shame than a goat releasing pellets onto the ground. She was such a typical Okinawan peasant that she actually believed that a bit of a person’s spirit is discharged with the excrement and that the only way for a family to reclaim this lost spirit was by eating the flesh of pigs fed in this manner. Who could blame our refined Japanese rulers for despairing that Okinawans would ever become truly civilized? Ever be worthy of being called Japanese?

  The only small hope any of us had of escaping the poverty and ignorance of Okinawa was high school. Four of my five older siblings had honored our family and our ancestors by being accepted. Your uncle Ichirō, Forest Orchid Boy, had already been drowned by that time, claimed by the fiidama, which left my remaining three older brothers, your uncles Takashi, Mori, and Hiroyuki. All of them honored our clan by being accepted to the elite boys’ high school. Upon graduation, they had all, in turn, enlisted in the Imperial Army and been allowed the privilege—rare among Okinawans, who were usually too short and skinny to qualify—of fighting for our emperor. The second-born, Takashi, was serving with the emperor’s forces in Manchukuo to liberate the native Manchurian people from the cruel Russians. My third brother, Mori, was helping to liberate the Filipino people from the colonial dictators. And my fourth brother, Hiroyuki, was battling the British aggressors in the jungles of Burma. Even Hatsuko had the honor of serving the emperor. She and her classmates at Himeyuri High School were training as nurses in case of the remote possibility that the Imperial Army might need them. I alone had thus far failed to serve our emperor.

  I dreamed of joining Hatsuko. Even before she went to Shuri, on the outskirts of Naha, Hatsuko and I always visited Naha several times a year. You can’t believe how exciting those trips were. Before the Imperial Army took control of the railroad, we would rise before dawn and catch the train that ran from Itoman in the south all the way north to the village of Kadena. On every trip one of our fellow passengers, invariably a man, would point out that the tracks were made in Pennsylvania by the Carnegie Steel Company and that tickets for more than three million journeys were sold each year. Oh, we were proud of our railroad!

  I loved watching scenes flash past my window: housewives squatting at the edge of a stream, washing potatoes and squeezing and pounding dirty laundry on the stepping-stones; old men sitting in the shade of a banyan tree transforming strips of bamboo into baskets; peddlers pushing carts down village lanes advertising their fresh tofu or sweet red-bean cakes; children bouncing balls of rubbery sago-palm pulp, spinning around and catching them as they sang in our native Okinawan language:

  Mai-mai, nuri-nuri, nuran yaraba, inu shimabuni ukite, noshite yarachi!

  Spin, spin, obey, obey, else you will be set afloat on the Devil’s Island boat!

  I especially liked peeking into farmers’ backyards when they were making sugar. While their half-naked young children chased one another through the fields where the cane’s golden tassels swayed in the breeze, their fathers and big brothers would feed the stalks into grinding machines driven by patient horses plodding around an endless circle. Then the mothers and older daughters, their hair tied up in white kerchiefs, would boil the juice in large iron pots until it thickened into a sugary black paste. Beyond the cane fields, luxuriant rice paddies either rippled along the sides of terraced mountains in undulating rows, or shimmered in flooded fields like mosaics of silver and green.

  In Naha, we were always awed by the majestic port where ships from Japan, Taiwan, China, and the South Sea Islands came and went. Waves lapped against the concrete piers and seagulls cried overhead. There the dockworkers, all brown as bark and naked except for their loincloths, would load and unload huge crates. Rickshaw drivers dressed in starched black jackets scrambled to be the first to pick up disembarking passengers, usually government officials sent from the mainland. As I watched, another childhood song would run through my mind. This one captured the excitement from centuries gone by, when the great tribute ships came and went from China. It reminded us of the hundreds of years when Okinawa was a trading center with silks, dyes, spices, perfumes, wine, folding screens, feathers, exotic birds and animals, swords, gold, books, medicinal herbs, even eunuchs, passing to and from Java, Thailand, Korea, Japan, and, of course, the country we were aligned with for centuries, China.

  After Hatsuko left for school, I would take the train to visit her by myself. She would meet me at the station and we’d rush off to catch one of the trolleys that crisscrossed Naha from its international port all the way to Shuri, home of the palace of the Ryukyuan kings and, of course, Himeyuri High School. I could have ridden those trolleys the entire day, marveling at the rickshaws and motorcycles and, very occasionally, an auto purring along the broad, palm-shaded avenues. We were thrilled when we spotted a fine Japanese lady in the backseat of her limousine driven by a chauffeur wearing a peaked cap, white gloves, and a double-breasted uniform.

  Our first stop was always a little shop that Hatsuko had discovered that sold mochii balls as fine as the ones made in Tokyo. There would be no boring beni imo cakes made of purple sweet potatoes, or any other Okinawan food, for us on those special days. After our special Japanese treat, we would stroll along the avenue, peering into the elegant hotels and restaurants built exclusively for the mainlanders, and whisper about the day when we were both Himeyuri graduates and would be allowed to enter with the rest of our elite classmates.

  The highlight of those trips, though, was a trip to Naha’s best picture palace, the Golden Star. There we would watch one movie after another. Before they were banned, we also used to watch energetic, fast-moving films from America. Once, we saw a cowboy movie that caused Hatsuko and me to weep when the Indians—handsome braves, noble old women, babies in their mothers’ arms—were slaughtered simply for defending their homeland. We thought the Americans a cruel people indeed. Not just for what they’d done in the past, but for forcing the defeated Indians to reenact their conquest for the camera. From our allies the Germans came our favorites, horror movies about vampires and monsters constructed by mad scientists in which the wicked always threw their heads back and cackled in a horrendous way that made Hatsuko and me sh
riek and grab each other in fear.

  The movie that invariably packed the theater, though, no matter how many times it played, was The Coming of Satsuma, which told how the Japanese had captured our beloved King Shō Tai in 1879. In the movie version, when our king was about to be thrown alive into a cauldron of boiling oil, he grabbed two of his executioners and leaped with his screaming victims into the boiling oil. Though the Japanese had told us that the story was a lie, and that Shō Tai was a trader in league with the Koreans who were plotting to enslave us, everyone in the theater would clap and shriek their approval. Everyone, that is, except Hatsuko, who found the entire display treasonous. The officials must have agreed, because a few years ago, the film was banned entirely and never played again.

  Late that night, exhausted by the excitement of the city, I would ride home, imagining the time when I, too, would be a Princess Lily girl and live with Hatsuko. She would help me with my writing exercises, since she was famed for her elegant calligraphy, and mine looked as if a chicken with muddy feet had walked across the paper. After I earned my certificate, we would teach in classrooms next to each other, and our adoring students would follow us around like ducklings trailing after their mother. Everything, my entire life, depended on my name being on the list of those accepted into high school.

  FOURTEEN

  Anmā?

  Yes.

  What if the demon girl forgets about us?

  She won’t forget us. That girl will never forget us.

  But what if she does? What if we are trapped here forever? I will stop existing, won’t I?

  I told you that I will never allow that.