I would look for signs. Yes. Now that I suspected there was someone on the island, I would look with intention, from my platform in the coral tree. There would have to be signs. For that matter, I could always sleep on the platform.
With my binoculars, I could not see down into the ravine, only the thick canopy of that low place. It was in the deepest part of the island, where the island seemed to curl in on itself, like some secret bodily cavity, another chamber of the heart that has become my home. I could not see down into its shadows, but I could see a lot. If there was a survivor, would he not have had to rely as did I on the bounty washed up on the beach? The fact that we had never run into each other might mean that the other had seen me first, but if he had done so, he had not taken advantage of the occasion. It was a mystery.
I looked and saw nothing, and so I took the flight manual up into the coral tree with me to begin this diary. On the cover I wrote out your name and address in Saipan so that if I did not survive and the journal was found, my story and my many protestations of love could be delivered to you.
Slowly and painstakingly, in the neatest and tiniest script, I began to relate the tale of my arrival here and everything that has happened since that fateful day. It was miraculous that this strange pen had so much ink in it. It was splotchy at times, but I prayed it would hold out.
Oh, I looked up at regular intervals, let me tell you. I scanned the island with the naked eye and with the binoculars as well, and then, satisfied that there was nothing worth attending to, I went back to my writing.
This is what my father called procrastination but my grandfather called ikigai — my reason to get up in the morning. My grandfather always thought something grand would come of me: that I would write books or make glorious pictures. Well, perhaps he was right after all, for although I am an auto mechanic by trade, I did begin to write this book. And since I had time on my hands stretching out before me at such a luxurious length, I could take the time to think carefully before I wrote anything, not wanting to spoil the limited pages before me. Ah, you are thinking now, if only I had learned how to think carefully before I spoke! In any case, if it is only for your eyes, Hisako, I will tell you that I am pouring into it everything I have learned or felt and all the patient hours Ojiisan spent reading with me and teaching me the ways of the written word.
From here on, everything changes.
Over these several days, I have caught you up to this very moment, and I will write henceforth in the present tense. It will make me feel closer to you.
The air is still. I have been writing and watching. When I am in my lookout, the family ghosts cannot get to me. They tend to congregate at the bottom of the tree, looking up, waiting for me to come down. And perhaps because I am in a tree, I have been thinking of a family tree, a diagram, and wonder whether these friendly spirits really are my family, those that have gone before: the ghosts of my ancestors. Then why are they children, I ask myself.
“Why are you children?” I asked the ringleader, just now, before I climbed up here.
He didn’t answer, but he reached out to me, so tenderly, Hisako, I was almost brought to tears. And as I sit here now, a rather extraordinary thought has come over me. I wonder if this family of children I am dragging around with me is not made up of those who have gone before but those who are yet to come!
It is later now. Time has passed. I look at the ghosts quite differently. For one thing, it fills me with joy to think that there might be a time yet to come: that I will survive and you and I will make a real family one day. A big family!
Is this a foolish idea? Perhaps. I wonder if it is the threat of another being on the island who might at any moment steal my life from me that lends to my musings over this sentimental idea. I can’t be sure. I do know that having this adversary here or even imagining him here brings a new urgency to my writing. I want so much to put my thoughts in order, to tell my story. A simple man thrust into an extraordinary situation.
But isn’t that the story of every war?
As you know, I have not had much schooling, but I learned much at my grandfather’s knee and have read, or tried to, the books that Grandfather lent me. With no motors to tinker with here, I find myself tinkering with ideas, trying to see how they fit together. I allow myself to write upon the page thoughts I would never dare to express to any living soul other than you, who are endlessly patient with me and do not judge me. I know you would be glad to hear whatever nonsense I have to say. Am I not your favorite chatterbox?
The writing pleases me, even more, now that I have told you everything that has passed and we can be here, like this, in the moment. But I cannot pretend to have shaken the idea of the other. It works on me, under my skin, an irritant, an unwanted burden. I have survived, found a paradise, only to have the tranquillity of it compromised by this cagey gaijin. As the days pass, I can only picture him as very evasive and clever. When I go foraging for food, I feel the presence of him. I feel I am being stalked — stalked even in my dreams, for the kingdom of sleep has been usurped every bit as thoroughly as my island kingdom. I wake dispirited and angry. I try sleeping in the coral tree, but my sleep is interrupted by the terrible fear of rolling off.
Nowhere is safe.
There is a bird building a nest in a tree that I pass every morning on my way down to the lagoon for a swim. I have watched the little golden white-eye fly back and forth with casuarina needles, grasses, and vines. I have watched her settle in her nest, have bid her good morning and wished her good luck with her family. One time, when she was off hunting for food, I even dared to shinny up her tree to take a look: there were two pale bluish-green eggs with red splotches there.
Then, this morning, a dull gray morning, after a particularly bad night of dreams, I saw the golden white-eye not foraging or on her nest but flitting about above it, crying with alarm. I stopped in my tracks, for I saw right away the cause of her distress: a brown snake was gliding up the trunk of the tree toward the nest. No! The snake was too high up for me to do anything but watch it slither out onto the branch and over the lip of the nest, where it devoured her eggs, one by one.
I stood seething with anger, my fists clenched. It is later and I have calmed a bit and have had the time to think about the incident more clearly. I have this to say: the brown snake must eat, too. But nonetheless the event is surely a sign. I know that my rage is not simply for the golden white-eye’s loss, but for my own predicament. I have let an unseen enemy slither into my nest! I am so filled with apprehension that I cannot sleep at night. I have avoided acting out of cowardice, pretending it was only caution. I know I must find out now, once and for all, if I am master of this place. I cannot put off a confrontation for one more day. Tomorrow, Hisako-chan, I will track the navigator down. If this is my last entry, then you know what happened.
Tomorrow is now yesterday, a day of surpassing strangeness. I must try to recall every detail beginning with a tragedy.
I stared at the carcass lying across the sandy path. I was heading to the Pond of Sweet Water to fill my canteen before heading into the jungle to find the navigator or his remains. I was filled with resolve. I was determined not to put off what must be done for even one day longer. I was a warrior, refreshed and ready for anything.
And then this.
It was the sambar doe, or what remained of her, for she had been savaged. Her neck had been slashed, her belly torn open. Few innards were left to be seen. Her belly was concave. Whatever had done this to her had feasted on offal, nothing else. Flies gathered on her lifeless eye.
In a nearby grove, several jikininki gathered, watching me.
“Did you see this happen?” I demanded.
A curious sound emanated from the wounds in their heads where a real person’s mouth would be. Sniggering. They were sniggering at me. “What? You find this funny?” I shouted at them, my fists on my hips.
“It washed up on the beach,” said one.
“Large,” said another, holding out
its arms. “As large as the largest bear.”
“No, a great cat — a tiger,” said still another.
“Tigers are striped,” squalled one of them, cuffing the last speaker across the chest. “I ate a man who had seen one, once. This . . . this thing was black as mud.”
“Brown.”
“Claws,” said the first. “As long as a human’s hands.”
“And the beak of a mighty sea eagle.”
“Pah!” I shouted, striding toward them angrily. “It was him, wasn’t it — the American. He is the monster that did this?”
They all shook their heads; they agreed on that, if nothing else.
“Pah!” I said again, spitting at their feet. “I will find him. He will pay for this!”
One of them dared to approach me. “This is good,” it said. “We are pleased to see you filled with revenge.” That should have been a clue, but it is only now in writing this down that I see what I could not then see in my rage.
I spit again, and turning on my heels, I tramped up the path, only to stop again. My hands flew to my mouth in horror. The fawn. A young buck by now, with little bumps of horns coming in. He also had been mutilated.
The jikininki sniggered and howled at me.
It had to be the gaijin. The monster the jikininki described was like nothing at all — they couldn’t agree amongst themselves on what it looked like. Nothing else had changed on the island but for the American’s arrival! So, in a way, their stories were true; there was a monster here.
As I departed, I looked around, expecting to see the flesh-eaters descend on the corpses of the deer to clean up. They made no move. Obviously, they only dine on human remains. And that reminded me of my only other conversation with one of the jikininki. If it was memories they were after, did this mean that deer have no memories? I cannot say. They remember where the water is sweet and the twigs are tasty. I said a silent prayer for the dead deer and then pushed on through to the pond, where I filled my canteen and ducked my head in the clean water to cool down the heat of anger that burned my cheeks. I had to be cool: keep control over the intense emotion burning inside me. Focus it.
I knelt at the pond’s edge, my sopping hair falling across my face, until I smoothed it back with hard hands, strong and browned by the sun. Yes, Hisako, my hair is long now after so many weeks, and if you had seen me there kneeling by the pond at that moment, you would have probably gasped, for I must look like a wild man. There was something evil loose on the island — my island! — and I had let myself be distracted from it. I was distracted no longer.
I was a soldier again.
I had to root out this foul thing and destroy it. And then I must somehow contact the imperial forces. There was a planeload of arms, ready for use. How could I have ignored this fact for so many days? What’s more, there was probably a radio on the plane. I knew little about radios, but, as you know, I have a way with machinery of all kinds. Yes! I would make contact with whatever was left of my compatriots. I would be a hero.
Ah, you will have noticed, Hisako, with your sharp eye, that I have drifted into the past tense again. These are things I was going to do. That’s what I thought at the time. But life can be strange, indeed. Read on.
I bounded to my feet and set off. My ghosts hovered near me. I saw fear or even panic in their eyes. They understood and although they could do nothing to help me in my quest, I felt better to have them there. They were my family, and I would need to be brave for them!
Silently I found my way into the gully to the downed supply plane. It was early, and the silver fuselage was draped in shadows and wet with dew. Fearlessly I approached it, my every sense alert. I noticed right away that the yellow box was gone, and days of pointless speculation were resolved in a moment. I had whiled away my time writing to you, and in the meantime a monster was out here, only waiting for Isamu to come to life, to act, to do what had to be done. It was now only a matter of following its path, tracking it down.
I hurled open the hatch to the plane, explored it from stem to stern, no longer afraid of anything, filled with holy wrath. When I left the plane, the carrion crows were gathered in the trees, unable to carry out their ravaging of the crew due to the barricade I had put in their way, but drawn to the smell nonetheless.
“Go ahead,” I said. “Shriek at me as much as you want.” Then without thinking, I raised my new rifle to my shoulder and fired into the trees. The crows flew up again, enraged. I only laughed. I no longer cared if my quarry knew where I was. Let him! Let him shake in his boots! Waiting and hiding had achieved nothing. Frighten the enemy into making a mistake, I thought: that was the way of it. Show no fear. Show no mercy.
I searched the ground outside the plane, my vision sharpened by grim determination. And sure enough, I found a path, recently used. I followed it up the shallow southwest side out of the gully that led to high walls of limestone. I peered up through the canopy. The walls were pocked with holes, caves. He is hiding there even now! Oh, the navigator might be rapacious when it came to defenseless deer but petrified to face a man. Did he have a scope trained on me that very minute? I no longer cared.
It was suddenly all so clear. No wonder I had seen hide nor hair of this monster. I pictured him now, a fearful, simpering, timid thing. The very thing I, Isamu, had become but was no longer. It was good to feel this fury. I felt more alive than I had for ages.
I climbed a rugged path between the rocks.
Stooping, I found a torn length of shoelace. A hundred yards on, my fingers plucked a ragged scrap of bloodied bandage caught on the thorns of a twisted, leafless tree, growing out of a crevice in the rock face. I sniffed the bandage. It was rank. I looked ahead to where the path met the sky. If I listened hard, I could hear the wind in the rocks ahead, and was that . . . yes, waves; this path must lead to the lower southwest flank of the island, a part I had not explored because it was so rocky and probably would yield little in the way of anything I needed. Now this barren place harbored the only thing I needed.
I climbed on. Stopped. Listened. There was another sound now, a whirring, mechanical sound. I slid my hand along a steep wall of cliffside, looking down at my feet with every step, so as not to dislodge a stone, and then quickly up again, feeling the wind cool on my face as I neared the trailhead. The whirring grew louder as I crested the hill. Then it stopped. Had he seen me? I flattened myself against the rock, cold at so early an hour. Then I inched forward. When I was not fifteen feet from the cliff’s edge, something fluttered into my view, bobbing on the wind. A kite. A yellow-and-blue box kite. I blinked.
A kite?
I slithered back along the stone face and peered down upon a beach at low tide, a long strand trailing out into the ocean, the very tail end of the heart. My eyes followed the kite’s string down, down, down to where it was lost to view behind a rocky overhang. The trail turned back on itself and carried on toward the sand, maybe sixty or seventy feet below. Edging along the path, I reached a place where, by crouching, I could see the kite string again and now the man at the base of it.
He was sitting below me, with the strange yellow box between his knees. He was turning a crank on the top of the box. His left arm tried to keep the box from jiggling, and I could plainly see the filthy-looking bandage at the end of his arm where the man’s left hand should have been.
Aha!
Such a revelation! The man could not shoot. Not a rifle, anyway. Not with only one hand. He stopped cranking and wiped his forehead with his useless arm. The gaijin was lean, almost skeletal. I could count the ribs and vertebrae on his sunburned back. Several familiars gathered near him, shivering transparently in the low sun, watching him like mourners at a funeral ceremony. I turned to my own ghosts. They trailed behind me on the path, waiting. I looked into the eyes of the nearest one. Did he shake his head? It was hard to tell. When the sun is flat on them, they are hardly there at all. But it did not matter, in any case. I moved farther down the path until I could see the man in partial prof
ile. He was bearded, with sunken cheeks, and ragged hair bleached to a dull tan by the sun.
This was my enemy? This helpless wretch disemboweled a sambar and her child? It could not be so. But this was no time to ponder such improbabilities. I had to keep my mind sharp and my mission clear.
The scarecrow man was completely unaware of me. I raised my eyes and looked up at his kite high out over the water, buffeted by breezes, straining at the line. Then he started to turn the crank again. In a flash of inspiration, I realized what it must be: some kind of emergency signaling device.
I had to do something right away. I raised my rifle. There was a scope. Closing one eye, I brought the man into focus with the other. The muscles of his stringy neck were strained with the effort, his face grimacing. How long had he been at it? Was it already too late?
I could feel my resolve slipping away. He had only one arm. Yet I had to stop him. That was all. Stop him and then take him as a prisoner. But how was I to look after a prisoner? Indecision was tearing my rage apart at the seams.
I ran down the narrow path toward the beach, recklessly now, for the real man did not fill me with fear the way the idea of him had. I kept my eye on my quarry, still quite a way below me and well out on the sand. The path hairpinned again and then fizzled out altogether, never a real path to begin with, so I leaped from rock to rock and doubled back behind him. Finally I reached the beach and stood on the sand, my rifle raised, ready to fire. The outcrop shielded me from the sun. I stood in its shadow, cool and collected. Through the scope, I could now see a belt and holstered handgun lying on a knapsack beside the man. So even with one arm, he could still prove deadly. Surely he had no idea of my presence, or he would have tried to shoot me already. One of his ghosts lazily turned its head and saw me. It kept its eyes on me but made no effort to warn its host. Even his ghosts see no hope of his survival! I sank to one knee, the rifle raised again at a target less than thirty feet away. A target that had no idea he was being marked. He would be dead before he heard the rifle’s report. He would never know what hit him.
The Emperor of Any Place Page 11