The Yokota Officers Club

by Sarah Bird

  “Hana Rose’s thin, thready sobs followed me out of the house. I put them out of my mind and worked as I never had before. I bought forty boxes of Ray-O-Vac lantern batteries, twenty to a box, from the back of an Army truck on the condition that the sergeant would deliver them to my stall since they were far too heavy to carry on my three-wheeled cart.

  “For two and a half weeks, I could not leave my purchase. I had to sleep beside the boxes of batteries until they were all sold. I couldn’t leave them for a second or they would have all been stolen. There was no chance that I could visit Hana Rose. I comforted myself with visions of her in the warm house, surrounded by other babies, being cared for by Mrs. Ishikawa, who thought she was beautiful. Each day, I sent someone to the stationmaster to ask if a letter had arrived from the officer. Long after I had given up hope, I kept on checking.

  “At last, all the batteries were sold. By that time, I was very sick. My breath rattled in my chest worse than an old tin teapot rattled its top as it boiled. When I walked, the ground seesawed beneath my feet. It didn’t matter. I had enough money. I rented an apaato, one room in a new ferro-concrete building filled like a beehive with hundreds of similar cells. But it was warm, sheltered from the Siberian wind, and I could bring Hana Rose home.

  “On the train, I put all my strength into my right hand clinging to the strap while the rest of my body hung from it heavy as a sack of rice. By the time I reached Yanagi-cho, I had to tilt my head at odd angles to see around the tunnels of black that had opened up in my vision. With all that, I was giddy with happiness. I hid my smile in the folds of the new quilt—all silk, maroon and gray—I had bought to bring Hana Rose home in.

  “At the door of Jusan-in, I called out a greeting and waited. No one answered. No one slid the door back. I called out more loudly. Neighbors on the alley began to poke their heads out and mutter under their breath to each other. I called out one more time. When no one answered, when none of the neighbors spoke to me, I slid the door open. The warm house was cold and empty. All the children were gone. I became a madwoman. I turned on the neighbors, screaming, pleading, demanding to know where my child was. They all knew, yet none of them would tell me. They turned their backs and went into their houses. I grabbed one old woman before she disappeared and she told me to ask the police and that, in her opinion, we gaisen had brought this on ourselves.

  “There was a neighborhood station around the corner. A tall, skinny policeman in a baggy uniform with a streak of egg yolk on the front would not look in my face as he informed me in a scolding monotone that Mr. and Mrs. Ishikawa were awaiting sentencing for the murder of eighty-five babies, all dead of starvation and buried at isolated spots around the city. They might never have been found out if a servant pushing a cart hadn’t slipped on an ice patch and spilled the corpses of four infants. Skeletons, really, he said. Little mummies, they were so emaciated.

  “Fearing that I would do something that might embarrass the station, the policeman walked me to the train station and stood with me until I was pushed on the train. On the train, there was no question of falling to the floor. The crowd, though it squeezed the breath out of me, forced me to remain upright though my legs had stopped working.

  “Back in my concrete room, I knelt on the floor cradling the new quilt as if Hana Rose were tucked within its folds. I prayed to my mother to be merciful and care for her granddaughter. I begged her forgiveness that I would not be alive to honor her on O-bon. To read her name from the Book of the Dead. I wished that I were not sick so that I might suffer exactly as Hana Rose had as she was starving to death, but I was already escaping from consciousness.

  “When I awoke, the American officer was there, making tea on a hot plate in the corner. The stationmaster’s assistant had told him where I was. He asked why I had left the Hotel New York. He’d given the owner enough to pay my rent through the winter. He asked why I hadn’t told him before he left that I was pregnant. He asked where his child was, if it was a boy. He’d come as soon as he could get TDY. He’d written. Did I get the money he’d sent? One hundred dollars.

  “One hundred dollars.

  “I knew then that I had died after all, just as my mother had died in the cave, just as all of Japan had died on the day the Emperor surrendered. I turned my face to the wall. The officer understood and accepted that I was his fate and he was mine. This made us closer than he and his wife ever would be.

  “Once he realized that we were bound together, though neither one of us would have chosen the other, he confessed his greatest secret to me who knew his greatest sin: He was scared. The great air hero was scared of flying. The cockpit of his airplane had become a coffin. He saw the end of each flight in every beginning. The tilting plummet through the sky, the feigned bravado, the ejector seat that jams, the parachute lines that foul. The endless nightmare moment before his soft bag of flesh hit the rock of earth. More than death, however, the officer feared his crew discovering his fear. For an aviator, this fear was more shameful than his desire for the body of a child.

  “He paid the rent on my room, then left to meet his squadron in Misawa and return to his wife and child in the States. But he would be back. War with Korea was inevitable. TDYs would be easy and lengthy.

  “Then began a time when I walked in two worlds. I was careful to keep my body alive so that I could fulfill my obligations to the dead. The first thing I did with the money the officer gave me was to buy a beautiful altar made of luminous paulownia wood with five steps and many drawers. The first item I placed in the highest drawer was Hana Rose’s umbilical cord nestled in a box of fragrant cedar. In the other drawers I placed all the items I remembered being in my family’s altar: prayer books, packets of incense, strings of beads, feather dusters, ornate china, bells made of pure brass. Then I set about reconstructing the thirty-one pages of our Book of the Dead. The first name I entered was Hana Rose. Even as I wrote it, the air filled with the smell of camphor from my mother’s kimonos as she protested the entry of my daughter’s name into her family’s book. I advised my mother to heed the Emperor’s advice and endure the unendurable, then calmly continued wiping my brush over the ink stone and entering my daughter’s name and birth date in the beautiful hand my mother herself had taught me in the house with the blue tile roof.

  “When I wrote in the date of my mother’s birth and death next, a crow landed on the sill of the window and pecked out my mother’s continuing protest at occupying the same book as my bastard daughter. But the pecking stopped the instant I struggled to recall the date my little brother died. At the exact moment the correct day came into my mind, the room flooded with a smell of caramel like Hana Rose’s breath when her stomach was filled with the milk my little brother had starved for. I knew by these signs that, at last, my mother was happy, and I rushed to enter all the dates and names that I could remember: my father, my grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins. With each entry, that ancestor appeared to thank me. Many made their appearance in the form of insects: beetles, grasshoppers, butterflies, moths, cicadas, cockroaches. Some came as the smell of burnt rice, of old chrysanthemums. I meditated for days, trying to remember the names of distant ancestors and the dates upon which they had died. As I struggled to recall when my father’s great-uncle, a successful kimono merchant, had died from eating bad oysters, the blades of the fan began to sob mournfully, stopping only when I wrote the proper date of the merchant’s death on a practice sheet and meticulously copied it into our family’s book. In this way, I became a bureaucrat listening endlessly to the petitions of those demanding favors.

  “Each morning, I fetched fresh water for the flowers or bought new ones, a chore that involved riding the train to the countryside, where I also purchased soft candles made of beeswax. Back at my room, I would clean away the old flowers, arrange new ones, set out fresh candles and incense. When all was ready, I would ring the bells, recite the names of all the ancestors who had died that day, then turn the page in the Book of the Dead.

  �
��While I struggled to remember, all of Japan sought only to forget. As the weathered veterans in their grimy caps—feet missing, legs missing, arms missing; hopping about like crows on crutches—disappeared, it became easier and easier to pretend that they had never lived. That Japan had still never been invaded. That nuclear bombs had not been dropped on our country and no one had ever apologized. The only past anyone wanted to remember was long ago, the era of the Emperor Meiji, who had taught his subjects to ‘let all Japanese hearts beat as one.’ An era when neighbor trusted neighbor and the stifling, comforting bonds of giri ruled all relations.

  “MacArthur told the world that Japan would be the Switzerland of the Pacific and then established a thousand bases from Kyushu to Misawa. More than 245,000 acres of military installations, more than even Hirohito himself had dreamed of. When the sky filled again with B-29s, people kept their eyes on the ground in front of them and said nothing, the drone of the engines drowned out by the incessant beat of the jackhammers battering away what was left of vanished Japan and replacing it with a new Japan built of concrete. F-80s, F-82s, F-94s roared overhead, training, we were told, to defend Japan from China, from Russia, from Korea. And then, on June twenty-fifth, 1950, the North Koreans crossed the Thirty-eighth Parallel.

  “The officer returned. He was stationed in Korea but came to the room every few weeks, still wearing his nylon flight suit, sticky with sweat and terror. He told me about shooting down MiGs over the Yalu River. He was an ace. They might name a theater after him like Richard Bong. As he spoke, I searched his face for some sign of Hana Rose and found none. Even when our ghost bodies were together, the officer was less real than my cantankerous great-grandfather who had died in a typhoon and appeared in the form of a squirrel that bit my finger in Ueno Park when I fed him a rice cracker. I believe the officer came to need that about me: that I was not of this world.

  “With each mission, the fear grew. The officer told me everything. He had to speak. He was a man with too many secrets. His job had become finding secrets and keeping secrets. He flew where American pilots were forbidden to fly. Forbidden by their own government, their own president. He could tell no one. Once the mission was over, he could not speak of it even with his own crew. But the officer was a man whose fear forced him to speak, so, in just the way a boy will tell his dog everything, the officer talked to me.

  “There was money in the secrets he told me. Many of the women sent to the clubs and bars and brothels to win the peace for Japan made fortunes selling the secrets they learned while giggling behind fans. Though I could have sold the officer’s secrets for more money than he would make in a year, I never considered it. He was Hana Rose’s father.

  “Each year as his secrets grew more dangerous, his need to confess, which had become the root of his need for me, grew more desperate. The officer could no more hold his tongue than a riverbed can stop water from flowing. He could hide the fear from his crew for only so long before he had to come to me to lie shaking and crying in my arms. He asked me to write his name and the day he was born in my book. Then he asked me to enter the names of his mother and father. Of an older sister who had died of scarlet fever. Of his grandparents. Of a favorite uncle who had taught him to shoot a gun. In this way, he tried to make friends with death.

  “He made me tell him of the ways that our daughter appeared to me: as a tiny cyclone of dried azalea petals that followed my ankles. Fog on a warm mirror. A dandelion whose white fuzz would not be blown away. Soon the officer too could see Hana Rose’s presence in a wind sock on the Flight Line that inexplicably reversed direction, heat shimmers from a jet engine that swirled into whimsical shapes, the sparrow that came to him and no one else. It calmed him to kneel beside me at the altar as I turned the pages, rang the bells, lit incense. Only then would he be able to put on the flight suit I had washed and return to his crew, to the sky where MiGs waited to kill him.

  “Money from the war poured into Japan as our factories again made guns and ammunition, steel and plywood. The Allied Army of the Occupation loosened its grip. We no longer had to have our hair sprayed with DDT every week. Schoolchildren no longer had to drink the sludgy green makuri made from boiling seaweed twice a month to kill parasites. The black markets all but disappeared. The Korean War ended, but factories remained as busy as ever. Then one day—perhaps it was on the day the newspapers pronounced us to be in the midst of an economic boom and called it jimmu bumu after the first emperor—Japan was reborn. The front pages filled with numbers: production of steel, value of exports, employment rates, productivity rates, and the most treasured number of all: Japan now had the eighth largest economy in the world.

  “The war was never mentioned. A whole generation sprang up that did not know and could not believe that Japan had ever tried to conquer the world by force and been defeated. They believed that Japan was a small island nation whose only weapon was hard work. That is how it was during the jimmu bumu as this new Japan scraped its way from eighth to seventh and then to the sixth largest economy in the world. And that, we told ourselves, was how it had always been.

  “On the day Hana Rose would have been five, the officer came with flowers, candles, incense, and both rice-flour cookies stamped in pink with a cherry blossom design and Baby Ruth candy bars for the altar. As we prayed, the room filled with the scent of roses and the flames of the candles danced in a room where the air did not move.

  “All the secrets the officer had to dam up spilled out in the small room. He told me about the general who ruled his life. This general believed that a war with Russia, still weak from the war they had fought as allies, but now an enemy, would be like a vaccine, where a small dose of a disease is given to prevent a fatal occurrence. But the general needed evidence to wage this preventive war. For this, they sent planes high over Russia to take photos of missile factories and bases, to decode radar signals. But mostly he sent planes to call forth other planes, so that the general could learn how long and how sharp the Russian bear’s claws were.

  “All the men on these missions went knowing that their deaths would be the best proof the general could offer that the bear’s claws were so long and so sharp that all of America was in mortal danger. That more bombers had to be built. That a halo of radar stations had to encircle the top of the earth like a crown. Proof had to be gathered. So many men died gathering this proof that the bear was coiled and waiting to spring. Each time a plane was shot down, the officer would tell the wife and children that her husband, their father, had died gathering weather information. Had gone astray on a routine training flight. Then the officer would come to me and lie in my arms and shiver as the truth spilled forth.

  “He told of the eighteen-hour flights when his men had to suck hard candy because all the water on the plane had frozen in the bitter cold, and even then his flight suit would be slick with bitter sweat from fear. He told of vibration, so constant, so loud, his bones hummed in time with it. The smells, he didn’t have to tell me of the smells, he was saturated in them: diesel fuel, the navigator’s grease pencils, the radar men’s cigars, the crew chief’s Lucky Strikes, the milk souring in the white-boxed lunches, Vitalis, Aqua-Velva, Right Guard—all eventually curdling into the smell of too many men in too small a space. And through it all, the officer had to pretend to be eager for the next mission, for the next chance to strap himself inside ten tons of metal that he knew would become his coffin.

  “And then his wife and children arrived. His wife now controlled the family’s money, and soon he could no longer pay even for my small room. The officer told me he had found a job for me that would bring me much closer to him at Yokota. I was going to be a maid with the family of one of his men.

  “I cared as little about where I lived as I cared if I lived. I was like my mother, waiting only for the proper time to force my body to join my spirit in death. I moved into the empty house and set up the altar in a room that faced Fuji-san. I knew I had found the proper spot to die and went to the pharmacy around the c
orner to purchase the correct pills.

  “I covered the concrete floor of the room with a thick layer of straw, dressed in the crane-and-willow kimono the officer had given me, and knelt before the altar. I opened the Book of the Dead and entered the date of my death. As the sun set, I emptied the bottle of pills onto the altar. With each pill I swallowed, I read the names on one page. The great-aunt who died in childbirth. The nephew stricken by scarlet fever. The cousin who drowned when the battleship Yamato sank. There were eighteen names listed for August 9, 1945. My mother’s family had lived in Nagasaki. As I swallowed a pill with each name I read, a glow lightened the room. Outside, the setting sun turned Fuji-san the golden pink of a rose in candlelight. Exactly the color of Hana Rose’s skin. Exactly. In that moment, I knew Fuji-san was going to answer my prayers to allow me to join my child. I dropped to the straw and slept.

  “I dreamed that Hana Rose was cold. That my mother was carrying her. That they were locked outside and only I could let them enter. Hana Rose was crying from the cold. They called my name and I fought to answer. Struggling to pull myself off the straw, I opened the door, and there you were, my Hana Rose.”

  Marshmallow Creme

  “Me?”

  I stare at Fumiko, not understanding. Not the words, not the meaning, nothing. The late-afternoon light slants in through the courtyard, illuminating a golden haze of dust motes and pollen above the stone lantern and turning the lacy leaves of a small willow tree into a chartreuse cloud.

  “Me?”

  “Yes. I saw it as soon as I opened the door. Your father was holding you so that I looked directly into your face. Hana Rose stared out at me through your eyes. I was not surprised when I learned that you had been born several years later but on the exact same day Hana Rose died. And, of course, the Fuji hairline, what you call a widow’s peak. How many American children have that? I was so pleased that Hana Rose had chosen her father’s people. That she had had bottles and bottles of milk to drink, as if it were water. That she could run without shoes on fields of soft green grass. That she had never had her neck dusted with DDT powder. That she could sleep with her legs untied and sit and eat at the same time, at the same table, as her father and her brothers. Later, what I was most pleased about was that she had chosen Moe as her mother.”