East Wind, Rain

by Caroline Paul

  -We’re Japanese. That is enough.

  Yoshio turned away and brought his hands together unconsciously. Before he knew it he was squeezing them again, the word Japanese ricocheting through his skull. He felt the sting of an old blister, the crack of his thumb bone.

  -We’re American citizens. Born and bred on an American island. Now, time to go home. He lifted the reins and slapped them against the horse’s shoulder, but Irene grabbed his arm.

  -There will be more of them, she said. He said so himself. Coming on the submarine to take over the island.

  -Mr. Robinson will let us know of the dangers ahead. Come on.

  -They’ve attacked Pearl Harbor, now they’ll go on to Kauai. Then to us, here on Niihau.

  -Quiet! Yoshio glanced around nervously. Enough talk of this.

  -We must see the plane, cried Irene. The horse jerked forward, but Irene still clung to his forearms, until finally he pulled back and the cart stopped.

  -I need to see it. She was breathing hard and her eyes had taken on a starved look he saw often but could not quite interpret.

  -Kachan, we must go home. It’s bad luck to go near a thing like that. We need to stay away from everything until Mr. Robinson comes.

  -Then I’ll go alone. She squirmed sideways in her seat and shifted Taeko from her lap.

  -Okay, okay. Slow down, sweet, slow down. I’m here. And he swung himself quickly off the cart and raised his arms to take his child.

  They walked carefully, Yoshio with Taeko in his arms now, Irene with the hem of her dress bundled in her hands to keep from tripping on it, her mouth set in a grim line. He thought that for once she was glad for the familiar silt against her face and the continuing heat because she looked so drained by fear and strangely light that without the heavy, oppressive air, she would surely float away. As the metal creature grew closer and larger, Yoshio felt dizzy. It was the strong smell of food and intermittent singing from Mr. Kaleohano’s house that did it. Such merriment was absurdly out of place, but it was his fault, wasn’t it? He should have wheeled toward his neighbors the second the pilot had spoken; he should have yelled at the top of his lungs. Pearl Harbor! he could have screamed. Instead his throat had squeezed shut and his body had seemed nailed to the floor.

  He held out his hand when the debris thickened, but Irene did not notice, or simply ignored him, and stepped slowly, eyes wide. Her lips were pursed in something between disgust and wonder. Sometimes, when jellyfish washed ashore after a storm, he moved this gingerly, this warily. But jellyfish did not scare him like this recumbent beast, shattered but still dangerous in a dark, unnameable way. Yoshio followed Irene until she stopped just short of the wingtip and stood with her arms folded. He stopped too, his shoulder in front of her, his hand dangling in case she wanted to hold it.

  He was scared, no doubt about it. He tried to remind himself that this was only a lifeless piece of metal and glass, brought here by a boy. He scanned the side and saw nothing too threatening: the red Japanese circle, the large, jutting wing. He had, he realized, half expected a message to be scrawled on the plane. An explanation or a declaration of some kind, something to match the destruction the plane had supposedly wreaked. He was disappointed in the simple red circle and in the gray, silent bulk.

  -It’s big, Irene said.

  The body aft of the wing sagged sideways. Part of the nose gear burrowed into the ground, and the wheel struts had disappeared under the belly, crushed by the emergency landing. Still, Irene was right; despite its damage it was still an impressive size. But to Yoshio it was more the world it came from that struck him as immense, that forgotten place of complicated machinery, so different from the simplicity of Niihau that from Yoshio’s vantage point it appeared in a flash as almost divine. Here, in this tangled piece of metal, were the godlike powers to destroy and create at will, and with it all the rage and sorrows of the outside world.

  Yoshio looked for the bullet holes that the pilot indicated had drained his gas tank and forced his landing. He could see them if he looked closely, tear-dropped holes near the belly. He turned to Irene to point them out and assure her that no Niihauans would guess they were there and that there had been a conflict. But her face was so white that he decided against it, and neither spoke for a while until Irene realized that Taeko had pulled her hand from her father’s. She walked in her stiff, unsteady lockstep toward the plane, her arms forward as if reaching for its blistered metal edges and shattered glass. Irene lunged with a cry of rebuke and fear, pushing past Yoshio’s hips and breaking him from his reverie. He watched in what appeared as slow motion as she swooped their child from the ground and pulled her against her breast; and simultaneously saw her leg jerk back as a bright red ribbon of blood leaped from her toe. He heard her gasp and realized with the part of him that quickly grasped and appreciated irony that his wife was the first, but perhaps not the last, on this tiny island to be wounded by the war, and it was, of course, because of him.

  8

  On the morning of Monday, December 8, Nishikaichi woke with a start. It was still completely dark in the shed, and he scrambled to his feet in a panic. Something moved to his left and he whirled sideways. He thrust one arm forward to ward off any blow, but nothing hit him, though he was sure he heard a growl and a sudden gnash of teeth. He chopped at the air frantically, still feeling nothing, and he knew that he was losing his composure, that he must calm down. Catching his breath, and suddenly ashamed of his panic, he stopped. When his eyes adjusted, what he had taken to be monsters became the long, skinny strips of salted pork draped from rafters and the outlines of large wood crates. The ominous angry snorts were just the heavy snores of his guards beyond the walls and sometimes the wind as it truckled across the scrub. Nishikaichi sat back down on the mat. He put his head in his hands. After a moment of quiet, when it was clear that the natives had not heard his one-sided punch fest, he began to take stock of where he was and the situation he was in.

  His first, unexamined, reaction was that he must simply find a sharpened object and end it here, in a large and bloody gesture. He imagined the wide eyes of his guards when they found him, cross-legged on their soft grass mat, leaked of life. He would die in his military uniform—gyokusai, suicide instead of surrender. Of course the papers would still be in the wrong hands and his plane would be picked over like carrion by American soldiers. Before gyokusai, he would have to take care of that. Then with one thrust of a pointed stick, or a sharp-edged stone, it would be over. He would be on his way to the Yasukuni Shrine, with the rest of the honored war dead.

  But what about escape? There was great haji in being imprisoned. Even the gentle and hospitable imprisonment of these villagers sent a wave of shame through him. But where could he go that he would not be found? A submarine patrolled offshore, assigned to rescue downed airmen, but it would not see him until the sun was much higher in the morning sky. And the island was dry and searingly hot. He could die of thirst. Or of a bite from a small and pincered insect, who knew or cared nothing of dying for a noble ideal. It would be a waste of his death, his bones scoured by a strange wind and bleached under a foreign sun, nourishing the soil of an enemy land. Besides, escape was out of the question while his plane and papers were in enemy hands. His chu, that lifelong obligation to the emperor, demanded that before anything else, those must be destroyed.

  Nishikaichi reached into his flight jacket and fingered the thousand-stitch belt around his waist. He thought of the nervous swoosh of breath that had swept the deck as each man on his aircraft carrier had tied his on, some stumbling as the sea rolled their huge aircraft carrier, others struggling with anxious hands to subdue the batting strand of cloth in the high wind so that it sounded as if hundreds of birds were taking flight, wings flapping madly. Some of the senninbari knots had been stitched by loved ones, and these lucky men boasted about it. They named women who waited for them back home with eager arms, and Nishikaichi had dreamed with them, though he knew it was mostly lies. Nishikaichi’s sennin
bari had been, like most, sewed only by strangers, and as he fingered each red knot (surprised by its knurled heft, its sturdiness), he imagined that one had been tied by the fishmonger’s daughter in an auspicious coincidence that would later, he imagined, bring him to her door in gratitude. On the carrier he had written her a letter. He had held it in his hand for a long time, as if weighing its chances. At the last moment he had sent only the one to his parents; hers he had ripped up and cast into the sea. When the pieces had flown back onto his outstretched arm like small butterflies, he had taken this as a good sign that she would come to him after all.

  There was a noise outside. Nishikaichi got up quietly, stiff from the night on the ground. He walked in awkward steps to the wall and squinted through a crack. In the dawn light he could see the dark shapes of his guards. The large one was turning over, muttering, his huge bulk shaking the wooden slats against Nishikaichi’s cheek. The other two slept soundly, the ghostly outlines of their shovels like haphazard limbs nearby. Who were these strange tribal people? He had been startled by their resemblance to him (the black, almond-shaped eyes, the blunt nose, the darker skin), and not to the American that he had been briefed on: that pink barbarian who ritually ate raw meat for the taste of its fresh blood, who snorted more than talked, who had mucus running from his nose in floods, and nails grown long to disembowel enemies. Instead these people had shown little aggression; they were good-natured and gentle; natives, he supposed, who had escaped the Americans’ rapacious ways. He had heard of Hawaiians, and how they had been wiped out by white disease—but here they were, intact. It was amazing, and for him, fortuitous. It would buy him much needed time.

  Though the Japanese couple had assured him that the islanders would have no way of knowing that a war was on, because there were no telephones or newspapers and only one radio, at their Main House, the crooked-toothed man had told these men to stay with him all night. Perhaps the pilot had been too insistent about the papers, and the man had become suspicious. Perhaps—as the Japanese man had told him—he just followed the rules of the pink barbarian who oversaw them, some man named Robinson-san. Either way, he reminded himself, he would have to be more careful. These people might be ignorant, but they were not stupid.

  He thought again of the fishmonger’s daughter. She had carefully combed black hair and small teeth and, he had noticed, a short, white scar on the soft place above her thumb. Perhaps she’d cut herself with her own paring knife when her concentration had flickered away from a customer’s fish to—what? He wished he knew. Perhaps she thought of a sunny afternoon in a boat on the nearby lake. Perhaps she dreamed of children at her feet, pulling the hem of her dress. Perhaps she thought of him, or someone like him, since he had never dared to say a word to her beyond asking for the fish his mother requested. If he ever returned he would speak to her, something precise and wonderful. What would that be? He had no idea. He would make his war friends laugh with tales of how tall and wide the men on this dusty island were, of how rotten their teeth, of how strange their native language sounded. He would tell them how badly it smelled in the shed he had to sleep in, of dead meat and flies. But none of that would be right for her. Nevertheless, he saw his mouth moving and her answering, glance-away smile. He would take her home to his parents, he thought, and they would not mind that she was the fishmonger’s daughter.

  He fingered the thousand-stitch belt again. He was unsure whether its luck had worked for him. It was that last moment, he thought, when things went awry, after he had raised his fist like a young, undisciplined boy. So overtly pleased with himself. Such shameful hubris—that had been his downfall. Then, his unspeakable cowardice, his keening need to live. He should have crashed his plane in the ocean, he knew that. It was one of the mandates in the Senjinkun, the war manual from the emperor—never surrender yourself or your possessions to the inferior enemy. Not that it was necessary to read something like this in a manual—this kind of obligation was as much a part of him as his skin. He dropped his head as shame swept over him again like a wind; now he was not among his navy brothers in the honorable realms of the dead, but surrounded by strange-looking people, weighted down by his unresolved chu.

  They had squinted at the cut on his face, and finally an old woman, short in stature, but with a broad, blocky body, and hair frizzed like dried grass, had thrust a poultice toward him. He had reflexively tried to hit her—his military training had taken over—but at the last moment he had seen his own grandmother, dead now, in her face. The poultice had smelled like leaves and something else; fish, he thought, though this he put down to his dreams of the fishmonger’s daughter. Nevertheless it was a good sign, so he’d relented. The old woman’s fingers had latticed his cheek; she’d pressed the strange ingredients to his skin. He had suddenly smelled honey, it was unmistakable. He had closed his eyes for a moment before he’d remembered that he had to remain on his guard and opened them again, just as the woman reached for his cupped hand and gently lifted it upward. He thought she might clasp it to her own wrinkled cheek, and he had almost smiled gratefully, but she had put it up to his head instead. She’d wanted him to hold the poultice in place.

  The heat had been terrible; sweat muddied the blood on his face, darkened his brown collar. He’d strained to understand the conversation as he ate, keeping his eyes down carefully. Though his English was poor, he had studied enough at the military academy to know that these people were speaking another language entirely. The sounds darted and flitted in a singsong manner; and finally he surmised that this must be Hawaiian, the tongue of the people of these islands.

  As the afternoon wore on, exhaustion had prickled the back of the pilot’s neck, had quietly forced his shoulders to sag, had urged his forearms to relax. When the crooked-toothed man brought out a ukelele and the crowd sang Hawaiian songs for his benefit, the pilot caught himself tapping one foot. He’d even cleared his throat when the milling crowd finally quieted, and tried to express his thanks for their hospitality, feeling it would be a useful tactic at least, in case their mood changed. Unable to find the right gestures, he instead sang the first few lines of an old Japanese folk song. The sounds came out hesitant and his voice wavered, but the villagers did not seem to notice. They hushed, their delight evident, so that the pilot, forgetting all the words for this one, continued into another that he knew better, and soon the notes stopped quivering, and he felt, to his surprise, that he was enjoying himself. Only after he’d stopped and thought of the Japanese couple, who had long since disappeared, did his unease slowly return.

  He had not noticed the wife at first; she was hiding behind her husband’s large back and clutching a child. It was only when she stepped sideways to hear his story better in the din of the room that he saw her. She did not look directly at him, but stared at an indefinable place on the table as he spoke, her body so still and her face so expressionless that he might have believed she was a statue, except that once or twice she lifted a hand to wipe invisible hair off the child’s cheek. She was small, and as pretty as her husband was handsome; they made a striking couple. But it had quickly become clear that they didn’t have an allegiance to their real country of Japan, as he had hoped. Or did they? Even as the man foolishly insisted they were American citizens, he seemed to hesitate at the words, as if he himself wasn’t too sure. But he hadn’t liked the request to retrieve the papers from the crooked-toothed man—clearly there was some bond between him and the villagers. Then they’d left abruptly. Well, he knew he would see the Japanese man today; he would have to plan how to win him to his side. With this, Nishikaichi sat back down on his haunches. He wanted to wash himself with water, but there was none; instead he ran his hands over his face. He could smell the pig fat on his fingers, and the gasoline of his downed plane in his hair. He thought of the fishmonger’s daughter and her thin white scar. There would be no witty words to her, no smile from his parents. There was only the paper and the plane and his own honorable death. He clapped his hands once in the tradition of
Shinto, and then he prayed to his emperor, Son of Heaven, for the successful completion of this one final mission.

  Near dawn Yoshio sat up and gasped, unable to breathe. He jerked sideways, pushed away the sheets tangled at his shins, and almost fell from the small single mattress. On the edge of the bed, he waited for his heart to slow down, and untangled his clenched fists from themselves. Irene, in the next bed, was just a small shadow, sleeping soundly. Yoshio got up and walked outside.

  He stood by the corner of the house, listening to the thud of his own urine. Tomorrow the sun would bake it and Irene would scold him, but he didn’t have the strength to make his way to the outhouse, as she insisted. When he was done he knew he didn’t want to go back into the dark room. He walked to the apiary.

  With each step he remembered the evening before as if it had been a dream: the pilot’s voice speaking to them in the language of his parents, saying terrifying things. The plane stretched out on the field like a burn. Taeko slipping from his hands like sand and marching toward the plane; he, frozen and ineffectual once again. The cut on his wife’s foot, which she refused to let him tend. Then he and Irene, hunched in front of the radio that the old foreman had previously owned and which Irene turned on every night as one of her small pleasures, flicking past the Hawaiian music and the sports scores until she heard the triumphant hoot of the trumpets and knew she had landed on the big-band station. But last night there had been none of that lifting of her spirits, that slight foot tapping and small smile as she let herself be carried away from this island and its monotony. There had only been her tears and his own shock and horror. They had known that tensions were high with Japan—after all, it was impossible not to hear the news once the radio was on. But their neighbors, radioless, without phones or newspapers, knew nothing, and the Haradas never mentioned it aloud to anyone else on the island. Still, they were not prepared for this. It was true, all of what the pilot had said, worse even, perhaps, because now came the numbers and the devastating descriptions of death and dismemberment. In his mind Yoshio saw the mound of gray, metallic dust that had once been the Pacific Fleet, the black smoke that rose as if from a volcano, the flames. He heard the echoing cries of the men still trapped within the groaning, broken hulls, the twisted remains. He hated the pilot for what he had done, and for landing here, on Niihau.