Above the East China Sea: A novel

by Sarah Bird

  But you fear it, don’t you? More than you fear our being separated. I am growing weaker. It will happen soon, won’t it?

  Yes.

  That frightens me.

  Your fear won’t help us. Don’t you want to know whether my name was on your grandfather’s list?

  Of course it was. You had a Princess Lily pin until the demon girl stole it.

  Yes, but does that mean my name was on the list?

  It wasn’t?

  Listen and you will find out.

  Though I was more nervous than I’d ever been in my life, there was one good thing about the upcoming announcement: At least, for that one day, no one would talk about the war. It had gotten so bad over the past few months that some dared to suggest that the conflict might come here, to Okinawa. Even though we had air-raid drills, our Japanese teachers told us not to worry. Yes, there had been bombing, but the American navy could do no serious damage. We knew from our teachers that our divine emperor’s brave aviators had destroyed the Americans’ Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor.

  What could our island possibly have to fear? It was so tiny that it didn’t even appear on most maps. No Westerner had found his way to our shores since Commodore Perry’s brief visit nearly a hundred years before. Of what possible interest could Okinawa be to any of the greedy imperialist powers? We had no weapons, no minerals. All we had were pineapples, papayas, sugarcane, and pig shit.

  Still, that did not stop our teachers from educating us about what would happen in the highly unlikely event that the Americans did invade. Posters hung on the walls of our classrooms that depicted those sweating monsters with their red faces and monstrously long pointed noses. One showed the demon leaders Churchill and Roosevelt, devil horns curling out of their heads, squatting on a pile of bones, their clawed toes wrapped around skulls, eating the flesh of innocent Japanese. In voices trembling with horror and disgust, our teachers told us of the Americans’ unnatural and insatiable appetites. In the few small, weak countries they had managed to conquer, these beasts had roasted and eaten every child they could trap, and raped every female they could find, from infants in cradles to ancient crones. All that stood between us and that unspeakable fate was our emperor and the brave Imperial soldiers he had stationed in Okinawa to protect us.

  On the day the names were announced, for a few moments we would all forget those well-documented atrocities as we discovered what our futures held. That morning, a moment before dawn, Kobo, our old rooster, started in. His crows grew in volume as the first rays of day slanted across our small farm and he announced to the world that he, Kobo the Mighty, had once again singlehandedly caused the sun to rise. I hoped that his crowing would wake Hatsuko, but, exhausted, she slept on. The new principal had transformed our beloved Himeyuri High into a training center for girl warriors. Last month, Hatsuko had told me, a girl had died of exhaustion during a twenty-seven-kilometer forced march. The death had only inspired him to institute harsher measures so that the Himeyuri girls who were honored to wear the Princess Lily pin would have the discipline necessary not to disgrace him.

  Gradually other sounds joined in the symphony that I had woken to every morning of my life: the pigs grunting as they rooted through cooling mud for the bits of sweet potato my mother threw out; the chickens clucking and pecking about for tasty bugs; the goats bleating out their impatience to be fed. Missing was the mooing of our cows, since they had all been requisitioned by the Imperial Army.

  A rustling in the thatched roof that was so high overhead it kept our house cool even on the hottest days was followed by a series of happy chirps. In the darkness, I imagined the gecko that brought luck to our family, the sac at his throat puffing up into a lovely pink bubble as he did his morning push-ups. A second later, he darted away to do his job and keep the high roof free of cockroaches.

  The groaning of wood against leather signaled the arrival of our ox, Papaya, carrying a cartload of night soil. The leathery leaves of the tall sea hibiscus that lined the narrow path slapped against the cart as he made his way out to our fields. Soon the workers who tended our rice paddies and fields of soybeans, sweet potatoes, millet, and sugarcane would arrive to receive instructions from my mother. Bit by bit, as my father had grown more refined, more modern, more Japanese, my mother had taken over the daily operation of our farm. When Father refused to ever speak another word of Uchināguchi, our coarse local dialect, there was no longer any reason for him to meet with the men, since none of them spoke Japanese. That’s when my mother officially became the boss.

  Since nearly all of our men had left to serve the emperor’s glorious struggle against the imperialist forces of the West, most farms and businesses were now run by women. My three older brothers were gone. Father had tried to enlist but, to his shame and sorrow, was turned away because, even with spectacles, his eyesight was too poor. And now it was my turn to learn whether I had been judged worthy to serve the emperor by going on to high school. I thought of the intolerable disgrace our father would be forced to bear if the name of his youngest daughter was not on the list that he, as headman, would read out today before the entire village. The shame of that possibility stabbed me with such force that tears sprang to my eyes.

  Though I neither moved nor made the slightest sound, my sister, always eerily sensitive, woke and asked, “Tami-chan, what’s wrong? Why is my Little Guppy crying?” She took my hand. Hers, usually soft and white as a true lily, was rough and calloused. Her tone, however, was still gentle and refined, and it caused me to blubber as wetly as the big-eyed, round-faced guppy I’d been nicknamed for. The first rays of the morning sun slanted in, and the blue mosquito netting around us turned the light into a pastel cloud.

  “What if my name is not on the list?” I wailed. “What if I can’t come to Shuri with you and study to be a teacher? What if I have to stay here and marry a farmer who makes our children poop into the pigsty? Whose teeth are rotten from sucking black sugar and who drinks too much millet brandy? What if I have to sleep on gōyā melon seeds for the rest of my life?”

  Hatsuko’s face was creased with concern until the mention of the gōyā melon seeds. She laughed then at my typically Okinawan habit of eating the roasted seeds of the deliciously bitter gōyā melon in bed at night and hiding the shells by tucking them into the straw of the tatami mat.

  My big sister put her arm around me. Her sleeping kimono was soft against my skin. Our aunt Yasu, the second-oldest of Mother’s sisters, wove on her backstrap loom the finest bashōfu cloth made from the purest banana fibers, so that our kimonos were light and cool in the summer heat. “Oh, Little Guppy, I’m laughing because I was just as fretful as you on the morning when they read the names for my class.”

  “Yes, but you’re so smart. The smartest girl ever to come from Madadayo.”

  “Guppy, you’re smart. You’re certainly much smarter than Cousin Mitsue, and she was admitted.”

  “Because she …” I stopped myself before I could utter the word “beautiful,” and said something that amounted to the same thing: “… looks like a real Japanese girl! I bet Fumiko Inoue is on the list.” I named the smartest girl in my class.

  “Fumi has hair like a shiisā lion dog.”

  I grinned at Hatsuko’s wicked comment. It was true. Fumiko washed her hair with hand soap and it always puffed out around her head like a fierce guardian dog’s. Hatsuko covered her own grin with her hand in the refined manner of a proper Japanese girl, reminding me to do the same. We giggled in the sophisticated way she’d learned at school, making a high-pitched, silvery sound as pleasing as the ringing of tiny silver bells.

  Later, at breakfast, the three of us, me, Hatsuko, and my father, knelt at the foot-high table where the treats my mother had prepared in advance for this special day were laid out for us. Sea-snake soup, always eaten for courage; bright pink, spicy tofuyu; sweet potato with green-tea sauce; deep-fried whale tripe in peanut sauce; and my favorite, gōyā chanpuru, made with bitter melon, pork, and tofu.


  It was quiet and a bit lonely with my brothers gone. I even missed my mother, who had gone to the fields early so that she could finish the day’s work in time to be by my side when the names were read. As annoying and uncultured as her loud, braying laugh and insistence on speaking our native dialect were, the morning felt leaden, almost ominous, without them.

  I studied my father’s face. His spectacles caught the early morning light and turned them into two circles of silver hiding his eyes. He had known since yesterday whether or not my name was on the list. Hatsuko saw me peering intently at Father and shook her head at my foolishness; of course he would reveal nothing. Until the names were read, I would not know whether he was hiding pride at my acceptance or humiliation that I had been rejected. Unlike so many of our uncivilized relatives and neighbors, whose every feeling was allowed to play across their broad, brown faces, my father had mastered the fine Japanese art of masking all show of untoward emotion.

  Father held up his chopsticks horizontally. We all bowed our heads and said the blessing with him, “Itadakimasu”—“I gratefully accept”—then began our meal.

  I had given up on Father betraying the tiniest hint as to what fate had in store for me when I noticed something that turned my belly to ice: As he lifted his bowl of soup, his hand trembled. His hand had not ever trembled before on any of the other mornings when he knew in advance that the names of his children were on the list of those admitted to high school.

  Hatsuko’s own hand reaching for her chopsticks halted as we both stared at that telltale quiver. Her eyes, wide now with distress, found mine. My sister’s reaction confirmed what I feared most: My name was not on the list. I would not be going on to high school.

  Reflected in my own bowl of sea-snake soup, I saw my future self: skin like my mother’s—tough and brown as ox hide—married to a farmer with brown teeth rotted away from sucking on black sugar and stinking from never cleaning himself properly after doing his business into a pigsty.

  Heartbroken, our dream of teaching together vanished, neither Hatsuko nor I could force down a single bite of the delicacies my mother had prepared. My tears dropped without a sound into the bowl as I lowered my head, accepted that my name was not on the list, and whispered, “Itadakimasu.”

  FIFTEEN

  When he finished his meal, our father carefully replaced his chopsticks, stood, and nodded once at Hatsuko to indicate that it was time. We both trailed him out to the veranda. I copied Hatsuko and walked in the delicate, pigeon-toed way of a true Japanese girl, rather than the splay-footed manner of an Okinawan peasant. On the veranda, we followed our assigned roles. As I always did before he appeared at any public function, I trimmed our father’s steel gray hair with the pair of long-bladed silver scissors kept for this precise purpose. Hatsuko stood up tall and elegant, and, swallowing the ashen lump of disappointment that I’m certain was choking her as badly as the one blocking my throat, she began to recite the Imperial Rescript on Education.

  The silver blades in my hand flashed against my father’s silver hair as Hatsuko recited the words that every Japanese schoolchild knew by heart. I tried to draw strength from our former emperor’s wisdom to face the disgrace that awaited me.

  Know ye, Our subjects:

  Our Imperial Ancestors have founded Our Empire on a basis broad and everlasting.

  A fly buzzed about my father’s head, but his attention was so focused on the words of the Emperor Meiji that he did not sweep it away. A tear slid silently down my sister’s cheek, yet I felt her making her leaden heart as pure as possible as she poured it into her recitation.

  Ye, Our subjects, be filial to your parents, affectionate to your brothers and sisters; as husbands and wives be harmonious, as friends true; bear yourselves in modesty and moderation … always respect the Constitution and observe the laws; should emergency arise, offer yourselves courageously to the State; and thus guard and maintain the prosperity of Our Imperial Throne coeval with heaven and earth.

  Though it didn’t seem possible, my father stiffened his spine even further than it already was, and I knew that he was steeling himself to accept the blow to his honor that was to come. The certain knowledge that our Emperor Hirohito, one hundred and twenty-fourth holder of the Chrysanthemum Throne, was a god, descended in an unbroken line from the Sun Goddess, Amaterasu, who brought light to the world, and that his every act and thought were blessed by heaven, made all hardships endurable. I focused on how trivial my sorrow was in comparison to the threat that our dear Father Emperor was now facing from the despotic Western powers. The emperor’s divinity eased our worries: my father’s about his three sons, Hatsuko’s and mine about our brothers.

  Really, it was silly to worry. In school we had learned that never in history had foreign soldiers invaded Japan. Kublai Khan had tried in 1281, but a kamikaze, a divine wind, had arisen to destroy the mighty Khan’s fleet, a naval force five times as large as the Spanish Armada would be some three centuries later. As long as the Sun Goddess’s descendant sat on the Chrysanthemum Throne, no enemy could harm our sons or brothers defending him. Though I would not serve our glorious cause as an educated subject, I would do my best to bring honor to my family and to our emperor no matter what my destiny might be.

  “Oh, Father,” Hatsuko called out, startling me. “What has Tamiko done?”

  Blood dripped from the tip of Father’s ear in a steady stream down the side of his face and onto the collar of his yukata. I had nipped the tender flesh of his ear. Our father had not uttered one sound, one word, not of pain or of reproach. Instead, he pressed his handkerchief against the wound, and, without a word or glance in my direction, took the scissors from my hand and gave them to Hatsuko. I sank into myself as Hatsuko finished the job I had botched.

  A few hours later, all the inhabitants of our village had gathered in our courtyard. It was rare that they’d all stopped work this way. Everyone’s workdays had grown longer, since Tokyo needed every sen we could provide to help in the fight against the Western imperialists. And, since we were such a backward place that required so much additional administration, we were taxed twice what other prefectures were. Many of the lazier farmers claimed that these necessary taxes were bankrupting them. I smelled them now, their sweat, the stink of night soil from their fields, as all the other villagers crowded in next to me in the courtyard of my family’s house while we waited for my father to speak. I shuddered at the thought that I would be condemned to marry one of their sons. Father and Hatsuko stood on the long veranda that ran the length of our house. The ear I had cut was covered with white gauze. The noonday sun grew hot on our heads and the drone of the cicadas rose to an unbearable pitch.

  On the shaded veranda, Hatsuko cradled a case made of hinoki wood, the whitest and holiest of all woods, for it contained the photo of our father, the emperor. Usually it was safeguarded inside the hōanden built in the yard of our school, where we could bow to it each day, but today was special, and, with great care, the photo had been transported here to watch over the proceedings. With great solemnity, Father put on a pair of white gloves, then carefully took the case of pale wood from Hatsuko. Since none of us was worthy of gazing upon the emperor’s image, we all bowed our heads even before he could unlatch the case.

  My twin cousins, Shinsei and Uei, stood beside me, heads lowered. The acrid scent of their nervousness wafted over to me. They were good students, but they had both been caught too many times speaking Uchināguchi, and been punished with whippings and by having to wear the humiliating “dialect tag” on strings around their necks that they couldn’t remove until they caught someone else using our backward language. Those infractions would eliminate them from consideration; they would not be going on to high school either. Like mine, their lives would end in our small village. I wanted to reach out and take my old friends by their hands, to stand next to them as we endured our shame together. But it had been many years since we’d fought with screw pine swords or slid down hills of silvery susuki gr
ass. Not since Hatsuko had explained to me how coarse and Okinawan it was for boys and girls to play together. She had shared what she’d learned in her Moral Education class about how making love was a painful duty that a wife endured for the sake of her husband. And until a suitable marriage was arranged, a girl had to remain a model of Japanese purity. That meant no contact with boys whatsoever. No talking, no exchanging notes, and, if I really wanted to be above reproach, I wouldn’t even look at a boy. I didn’t know whether this applied to cousins, but I didn’t want to take any chances.

  A ripple ran through the silent crowd as everyone shifted to make way for a newcomer elbowing in from the rear. In loud Uchināguchi, she brayed out, “Excuse me, excuse me, I’m sorry I’m late.” Only one person would have the effrontery to speak out so coarsely in the presence of our emperor: my mother.

  Of course, Mother’s favorite sister, Aunt Junko, was with her, along with Aunt Junko’s grown daughter, Chiiko, and the youngest of Chiiko’s three children, Kazumi, a baby girl as sweet-tempered as her mother. Kazumi was so pink and tiny that we all called her Little Mouse. Little Mouse, strapped to Chiiko’s back, popped her head up above her mother’s shoulder.

  Hatsuko lowered her head in shame as our famously bigmouthed mother stopped to address one of our neighbors. “Tokashiki-san, old friend, it’s all your fault that I’m late, you know. Your bull escaped and tried to mount our old water buffalo, Papaya. We had our hands full getting that randy devil off of her. Does he take after you? I’ll have to ask your wife.”

  I started to laugh, but the sight of that courtyard filled with farmers and their wives hooting, exposing mouths full of blackened or missing teeth, stopped me. I did not want to be one of them. I creased my lips into a hard line of censure and glanced up at Hatsuko. She gave me the tiniest nod of approval.

  “Make way for my fat behind; I want to stand with my second daughter, Tamiko, when her name is read out.”