Above the East China Sea: A novel

by Sarah Bird

  “Make room for the paying customers,” Jake tells me as we quickly vacate our seats, whisking away our trash as we go. Jake’s cousin scoops some drinks out of a cooler, pops them into a bag, along with two packaged servings of the deep purple sweet potato cakes I’d seen earlier. With bows all around, we leave Kana and Matsukichi to their customers. Even though only a canvas curtain separates us from the globe of friendliness and warmth, the yatai seems a world away the instant we step outside and stroll over to the seawall. On the inland side, the seawall is covered with dazzling graffiti of dancing dragons and singing flowers, big-eyed children and lonesome wizards. The ocean side is reinforced with interlocking clusters of cement jacks the size of picnic tables, meant to break the power of typhoon waves.

  “Whenever you feel like it,” Jake says, and I know he means whenever I feel like talking about Vaughn. “Or not,” he adds, and takes my hand. He curls his arm up until my palm rests on his chest and I can feel his heart beat against it. The moon is even fuller than it was last night, and the air is heavy with the smell and feel of the sea. The darkness is a comfort.

  During the day surfers, snorkelers, and divers own the Sunabe Seawall. Church youth groups play volleyball on the narrow beach, and girls lie on bright towels to tan and watch their boyfriends surf. At night, however, the seawall is owned by lonely guys tracking the lights of distant freighters, by solitary drinkers, by couples having intense discussions that end with each one stalking off in opposite directions, and by cats. Yowling, feral cats.

  Jake tosses pebbles at a screeching pack until they saunter away, tails twitching lazily, as if they wouldn’t have deigned to eat our food even if we’d offered. Out in the water, patches of eerie blue light wobble, marking the spots where night divers are discovering luminescent squid, sleeping manta rays, and clouds of dancing shrimp. Off in the distance, Naha shimmers through the misty haze like a fairy castle. The wall where we sit is still warm from the day’s sun.

  Jake rustles around in the bag his cousin gave us and hands me a drink. I can just barely make out the name on the can in the red light cast by the lanterns hung outside the yatai. “ ‘Pocari Sweat.’ ” I pop the tab and take a swig. “Tastes like Gatorade with extra sugar.”

  “Hey, my cousin could have given us Pepsi Ice Cucumber.”

  “You’re making that up.”

  “It’s as real as Bilk, the new beer milk.”

  “Beer made out of milk?”

  “Very popular. And don’t miss the hot new curry soda. Or the soda that tastes like yogurt.”

  “Your people are sick, Jake.”

  Jake laughs, finishes his drink, accordions the can into an aluminum puck between his hands, overarms it toward the trash; the can rattles in, and he turns to me. “Were we going to talk?”

  “I need to do one thing first.”

  He looks over, waits for me to tell him what that thing is, and I kiss him.

  “Wow. Yeah. Okay. Good first thing to do.” He puts his hand behind my neck and pulls me to him. It is velvety when we kiss, more voluptuous than Oxy. All the chattering in my head stops, and the jagged edges melt away. I want to keep kissing him forever. To feed on him like a vampire, because at this moment, for the first time in longer than I can remember, I’m not thinking about Codie, or my grandmother, or my mom; I feel all right. I feel like what I think normal is.

  I put my arms around his neck. He is solid within my embrace. I want him to hold me and he does. It seems like I’ve been traveling a very long time to get to this moment. Like Jake was the destination I’ve been trying to reach without realizing it. I’m sad to discover that kissing him makes me feel as though I belong somewhere, because the one place I can’t belong is with him. I decide that I’m not going to ruin this moment by telling him about my grandmother or Codie or the girl in the cave. I’m going to be normal. I’m going to eat better, get more sleep, exercise. He’s going to go back to Christy, but I’m going to be fine. As long as I stop thinking about all this crazy stuff.

  Then the yuta’s curse comes back to me: Sister cry. Make sick. Sad.

  Angry at that sugar packet–stealing loony-bird yuta for planting such sick ideas in my head, angry at her for forcing me on a search that contaminated the best memories of my childhood, angry at Okinawa for being nothing like it was supposed to be, I find Jake’s lips again. They are just as soft and warm as before, but this time instead of forgetful ease, panic rises up in me as the comfort I’d found there before slips farther and farther away. I chase it with lips and tongue so frenzied that Jake’s hands lift me like an ocean swell and pull me onto his lap. He fumbles with his zipper, tugs at my shorts. Only the shriek of a siren so loud it’s like an ice pick in my ear stops us, and we both smash our hands against our ears. The unbearable sound goes on, rising and falling, a warbling wail that haunts and hurts. It’s the creepy typhoon siren that Vaughn described, and it’s even more frightening than he’d said. I expect to see a tsunami wave rising high enough to shadow the moon. I turn a panicked expression to Jake and find that he’s laughing and yelling something that’s impossible to hear.

  The siren cuts off just as Jake is shouting, “DON’T WORRY—” In the sudden silence, we both tentatively take our hands down. Though the siren near us has stopped, others miles away continue the eerie warbling.

  “Why are you laughing? That’s a typhoon siren, isn’t it?”

  “Usually, but not tonight. Tonight that just means that it’s midnight, that the last day of Obon, Ukui, has started, and the spirits only have twenty-four hours left before they have to go back to their world for another year.”

  “Well, it scared the shit out of me.”

  “Come here, girl.” Jake opens his arms. I’m leaning back into them when one of the cats returns. A white one with otherworldly blue eyes outlined in black, it jumps onto the seawall, winds figure eights around Jake and me until, drawn by the smell of the dessert, it pounces on the bag. Jake snatches it away and removes the package inside.

  The light hits the wrapped pastry that his cousin gave us, and I can see clearly for the first time the logo of the bakery it came from. It is a lily with leaves all the way up to the trumpet-shaped flower bowing its head. It is exactly like the lily on the pin that I stole.

  UKUI THE THIRD AND FINAL DAY

  FORTY-ONE

  “What is that?”

  “The cake? Beni imo,” Jake answers. “It’s made out of purple sweet potatoes. Very Uchinānchu.”

  “No, the flower on the package.”

  “Oh, the famous Princess Lily.”

  “Famous? Why famous?”

  “Because of the Princess Lily girls.”

  “Who were they?”

  “High school girls who were forced to be nurses in the Japanese cave hospitals. Why? Luz? Why are you so intense about this?”

  It’s time. Time to stop just passing through. This assignment, this base, this life. It’s time to tell Jake everything. I reach into my pocket and show him the pin.

  His eyes narrow as he touches it. “Where did you get this?”

  “I saw a girl in the cave. She gave it to me. She was dead.” For a moment, he says nothing, and I’m certain I’ve made a terrible mistake. I brace for him to recoil, to turn back into one of the endless Quasis who’ve drifted through my life.

  Instead he asks an amazing question: “This girl, was she wearing a school uniform? Sailor collar? Tie? The whole nine?”

  “How did you know that?”

  He takes the brooch, holds it up to catch more of the light. “Back before the war, the few girls who made it into the handful of high schools on the island wore school pins. It was such a huge deal to be picked that they were always buried wearing their pins. Why didn’t you show me this before?”

  “Because I thought you’d think I was crazy.”

  He doesn’t say anything.

  “So? Do you?”

  “Think you’re crazy? No. Hell, no.”

  “Why?”

>   “Why?” He inhales a long breath, looks at me out of the corner of his eye. I recognize the push-pull of trying to decide whether or not to say something as weird as it is true. His verdict goes in my favor, and words he’s obviously thought about for a long time tumble out.

  “Because this is Okinawa. Because you have to grow up here to truly understand it. Because the rules are different here. Because Americans believe that they can choose their family and relatives and leave them behind whenever they want and that they don’t owe anything to the ones who went before. And they’re the loneliest, most unhealthy rich people on the planet. And Okinawans believe that once you are part of a family, you are part of it forever, and they are part of you forever, and you owe everything to the ones who went before. And we’re the least lonely, longest-lived, not-rich people on the planet. And because, I guess, we all believe what we’re taught before we’re old enough to ask questions, since it makes us part of the ones we love most. So I may be as deluded as anyone else, but it’s what I believe.”

  “But, Jake? A ghost? I didn’t grow up believing in that.”

  “Listen, on Okinawa, ghosts run our lives. You want a whole list? We honor and placate the dead every day with offerings at the family butsudan. Families go bankrupt building and maintaining enormous tombs. Twice a year at Shiimii and Obon, the clans gather to weed and sweep the courtyards of their family tombs. Then feast and celebrate there and in their homes with the ancestors. Then there’s the Royal Hotel.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Giant multimillion-dollar hotel near the ruins of Nakagusuku Castle. When it was started in the seventies, right after the island reverted to Japan, when Okinawa was supposed to turn into Hawaii after a tourism boom hit like a tsunami and vast fortunes were made, the developer was warned that he was building on a sacred site where the medieval castle’s tomb had once been. But he scoffed at the warnings and went all in. He put in a swimming pool, a multistory water-slide, even cages for a zoo. He outfitted the rooms with fine furniture, hardwood flooring, and the most expensive tatami mats. But, one after another, his workers got sick with all these mysterious ailments. After two men died, none of the other workers would return to the haunted site, and construction halted. The owner, determined to prove that the stories were superstitious nonsense, spent three nights in this cavernous, empty hotel. After the third night, he was never seen again. Some say he went mad and was institutionalized. Others maintain that he killed himself. Whichever it was, the hotel was abandoned. No Okinawan would go near the place for any amount of money after that. Not even to steal any of the expensive furnishings that have sat there rotting now for forty years. So, yeah, we Okinawans believe. And, apparently, even the U.S. Air Force can’t argue with us.”

  “You mean Murder House?”

  “You ever heard of them leaving another base house unoccupied like that? Ever?”

  “Have you seen one? A ghost?”

  “No, negative spirits, what you call ghosts, only make themselves visible if they die violently or aren’t buried right.”

  “Jake, she held out her hand to me. She gave me the pin. She wanted something.”

  “Probably to be buried with her munchū, her kin group.”

  “So I’m not on drugs or crazy?”

  “I wouldn’t go that far.”

  A bubble of something odd rises in me. It’s so unusual that it takes me a second to identify it as hope. Once I do, though, I rush after it, burbling over. “We have to tell someone. Tell the authorities, so they can find out where she belongs.”

  He doesn’t answer.

  “Jake? We have to tell someone. You’ll back me up, right? The bones in the cave are human. We have to report them.”

  “It’s a little more complicated than that.”

  I don’t want complicated. I want easy. I want this to be over. I want to make peace with the girl in the cave. With Codie. With myself. With Delmar Vaughn’s revelations. This might not be the entire answer, but it’s a first step, and it’s been such a long time since I’ve even known what direction to go in that when I ask, “What’s the problem?” there’s a snap in my tone that comes straight from my mom.

  “The problem is that you’ve wandered into the odd historical Bermuda Triangle that Okinawa occupies.”

  “Jake, it seems kind of obvious: You find human remains, you report them to the police. Done and done.”

  “Wow. Spoken like a true American. You know what will happen if we report this? I’ll tell you. Nothing. That girl’s bones will get tossed into a warehouse crammed floor-to-ceiling with the tens of thousands that have already been turned in.”

  Jake sounds as annoyed as if all those bones were my fault. I blink. Is this the boy who just kissed me with such tenderness only a few moments ago?

  Jake shakes his head. “Sorry. Sore spot. It’s just that here we are, what? Nearly seventy years after the war, and there’s still not an official channel for returning the remains of Okinawans who died in the war to their families. Volunteers have tried to fill the gap. Tried to match DNA samples from families with remains. But DNA testing is expensive, and there really are giant warehouses stuffed with bones. With more still being found every week. This is a tiny island, and more people were killed here than at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.”

  “What? That can’t be right. All through school, every time we studied the Second World War, we would always do a whole unit on the atomic bomb. Everyone knows all about the moment that changed history. Mushroom cloud. Instant vaporization. Why would no one have ever even mentioned Okinawa?”

  “Good question. We Okinawans have wondered that. A lot. Not to make Hiroshima and Nagasaki any less tragic, but counting all those who died here after the surrender from starvation, disease, and injuries, as much as one-third of the population was killed. All totaled, a quarter of a million people died.”

  I think of my grandmother. Of orphans being handed out like puppies at a pound.

  “For what?” Jake asks. “A war we never wanted? Had no part in starting? A battle Japan knew from the beginning they’d lose? They used us like a human shield, throwing as many bodies as necessary at the invaders to protect their precious homeland. Then, when the war was over, Japan totally shafted us yet again in the so-called peace treaty. Not only did we get twenty-seven years of U.S. military occupation, but they handed over one-fifth of the island to the Pentagon. Most of it prime farmland. Then, after we reverted to Japan in 1971, which was supposed to make us a full Japanese prefecture, which we all dreamed of and protested for, you know what happened?”

  I shake my head.

  “Jack and shit. With Tokyo’s full cooperation, the Pentagon is still essentially running our country.” Jake stops. “Sorry, I promised myself that I wouldn’t go off on rants like that anymore, but you need to understand some of this backstory so you can see how Okinawa has been trapped in a limbo just like that girl in the cave. Tokyo allocated funds for DNA testing, but all they’ve actually done so far is ‘facilitate information sharing.’ Even the Japanese don’t understand what a huge psychic wound being separated from our ancestors is for Okinawans.”

  “So if I report this, the girl will be even more lost than she is now in a cave at the edge of the sea.”

  “Pretty much.”

  I hop off the seawall. “I guess then that it’s up to us to find out who the girl in the cave is and where she belongs.”

  FORTY-TWO

  I wake up the next morning in the back of the Surfmobile. Jake snores lightly in the front seat. I admire his ability to fall asleep anywhere. The seat is cranked back as far as it can go, giving his head a regal tilt. His dark, shiny hair falls straight back, fanning across the headrest. His snoring is a comforting snuffling that blends nicely with the rustle of a breeze blowing through the high cane of the field we’re parked beside. It was way past curfew last night, too late to go back to the base, so Jake managed to find a remote spot up here in the less populated north end of the islan
d where we could sleep for a few hours. He insisted on letting me spread out in the back. Alone. Without putting it into words, we both seemed to agree that anything else would be a kind of desecration of what we had to do.

  As soon as it opens, we’re going to go to the museum dedicated to the Princess Lily girls. Since so many of the girls died at that site, Jake is certain that their kami will be there to guide me. His phone plinks out his sanshin ring tone, and he inhales a startled snort, sits up, swivels his head around, surprised to find himself next to a canefield, and glances back at me as he fumbles for his phone. I assume it’s Christy. But they always speak in English, and he answers in crisp Japanese, hangs up after a short conversation.

  “Was it your family?”

  “My dad. They’re a drummer short for the Eisā dancing tonight. He told me to find someone to fill in for me at the golf course and to come to the practice field as soon as I can.”

  “You’re an ice dancer?”

  “Right. Because I look so good in spandex. No, Eisā dancing. All the villages have teams of dancers and drummers. We practice all year for the island-wide competition in Naha tonight, the Ten Thousand Eisā Dance Parade. Since it’s the last night of Obon, we have to escort the dead back to the other world. The team I usually drum with thinks they’ll lose if I don’t come, so they talked my dad into calling.”

  “The Ten Thousand Eisā Dance Parade, Jake, you can’t miss that. Listen, you’ve already helped me so much. You should just drop me off at the museum.”

  “Just drop you off?”

  “I’ve ridden buses and hitched all over this island. I’ll be fine.”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  Jake takes a shortcut back to the main highway and soon we’re creeping through the jungle on a red dirt path. Dense foliage closes in until it scrapes against the windows on either side. High overhead two Cobra attack helicopters bank slowly, returning to the marine base at Futenma. Gray clouds move in, and the choppers are lost. A moment later rain patters against the windshield.