Above the East China Sea: A novel

by Sarah Bird

  “Don’t you dare faint,” she commanded me.

  I gripped the soldier’s leg and he writhed beneath my hands like a python. Time seemed to derail like a film that had unlocked from its sprocket. The soldier’s mouth still gaped open, but his screams no longer reached my ears. In fact, all sounds fell away and a blessed silence blanketed me, until an insistent voice ordered, “Take the leg away.”

  The nurse jabbed a sharp elbow into my side and repeated her command. “Stop your daydreaming! Take the leg away.”

  She laughed when I looked from her to the leg and found that the soldier was no longer attached to it. “What’s wrong with you? Didn’t you notice that he’d stopped struggling? Come on! Come on! Get it out of here. That leg’s of no use to anyone anymore.”

  I staggered out of the cave, not able to understand how a limb could feel as if it weighed more than an entire body.

  “Dump it there,” a soldier with a shovel barked at me from the safety of a shallow cave, where he was digging graves for the bodies piled next to the opening. I laid the leg down carefully, but when I straightened back up nothing around me made sense. I wondered why Anmā had allowed the pigs’ pens to become so filthy that their rank odor made me gag. And why hadn’t this muddy field that surrounded me been planted? At this time of year, it should be lined with neat rows of sugarcane and sweet potatoes poking chartreuse buds out of the dark earth.

  “Idiot!” A harsh voice exploded the word in my ear as strong arms closed around me and dragged me into the cave. A bomb detonated only a few meters from where I had been standing. The grave digger threw his body over mine to shield me from the spray of rocks and gravel that pelted us.

  “What’s wrong with you?” he asked when the debris stopped falling. “Are you deaf? Didn’t you hear me yelling at you?”

  I almost asked him where my mother was. But abruptly, the film that had come unspooled began running at its proper speed again, and I was in a cave filled with graves, and Anmā and our green fields of sweet potatoes were far, far away.

  THIRTY-THREE

  “Damn, I forgot about all this mess,” Jake says when a man with a hard hat atop his scarf-wrapped head appears, waving a red flag on a stick, detouring traffic around the massive road construction project up ahead. The diverted traffic funnels into a clogged bypass. “Back route,” Jake mutters before whipping a screeching U-turn that leaves drivers honking and swerving out of his way.

  Jake switches on the radio. An Okinawan singer warbles out a tune, accompanied by several ukuleles. The song ends and two deejays, a man and a woman, come on. The man barks out aggressive sentences in Japanese. The woman giggles a lot as she chatters away in high-pitched baby talk. Whatever they’re bantering about makes Jake snort and shake his head. He stops laughing, though, when we come to a halt at a light next to a vending machine, with its perky sound track and Close Encounters lights selling drinks right next to a massive cement structure in the shape of a turtle shell.

  “That is so wrong,” he mutters, speeding away. “I can’t believe the fucking Japanese put one of their fucking machines next to a family’s tomb.”

  The fucking Japanese. I try to figure out Jake’s animosity. Isn’t Okinawa a prefecture of Japan? Isn’t he Japanese? I don’t ask, but it’s like hearing a Californian, or an Iowan, talk about fucking Americans like they belonged to a whole other country. He snaps off the radio.

  We make a bewildering number of turns until we’re in an Okinawa I’ve never seen before. The roads narrow and traffic dwindles to nothing. English disappears entirely from the signs. We pass through a succession of small towns and villages. Houses and businesses crowd in to the very edge of the road. Tanks for collecting water sit atop the flat roofs. Water rationing is in effect across the entire southern half of the island, with supplies being shut off entirely every other day. High concrete walls and bars across the windows protect buildings from the flying debris and wind damage of a possible typhoon. The rare traditional Okinawan house with a red-tiled roof and a pair of ceramic shiisā dogs guarding the gate stands out.

  Big, round mirrors at intersections keep Jake from colliding with oncoming cars. Brightly lit vending machines pop up everywhere on an empty stretch of road beside a field planted with pineapple bushes. Next to a bus stop on a deserted stretch of road between two towns, we stop at a red light and the machine on the corner there chirps out a greeting to us in Japanese.

  Jake’s back route leads to a road that hugs the eastern coastline off to our right. Waves break against a seawall protected by thousands of loosely stacked, pyramid-shaped chunks of concrete. In the distance, immense freighters—black and rust monsters—inch across the far horizon. We climb a long hill that falls away steeply down to the ocean in a series of steep black cliffs. Beyond them the East China Sea glitters in the sun. The shifting aquas and jades darken to a hard Prussian blue where the Pacific stretches out toward China.

  Naha appears. From a distance it looks like a city made of white building blocks. An armada of miniature vehicles and skinny men on scooters riding with their knees cocked out buzz past us. Traffic picks up on the multilane highway and we are swept into the surge flowing toward the capital of the Ryukyu Islands.

  On the outskirts of the city, strip malls pop up. Mama-san stores selling dried squid jerky and bentō boxed lunches mix with Starbucks and McDonald’s. Two-headed speaker horns for typhoon alerts are nailed high on utility poles. A round, five-story emporium towers over the small businesses. It is crowned with tall letters that announce SLOT & PACHINKO.

  As we move from the gray outskirts, the city rises up around us, bustling in a sunshiny, tropical way as the streets turn into wide boulevards lined with stately palms and broad sidewalks. Workers balancing on a scaffold seven floors above wear white hard hats and what look like long harem pants. A mailman with an official red lockbox above the rear wheel of his scooter weaves through traffic.

  A big sign announces that we are on Okinawa’s Miracle Mile, Kokusai-dōri, International Street, heart of the shopping district. The city that was white from a distance is pastel at street level. Shops with clear plastic awnings cast candy-colored squares of pink, yellow, baby blue light onto the passersby strolling past. A two-story-tall, splay-footed green gecko wriggles up the side of a store. Jake parks in the first lot we come to.

  I pay the attendant while Jake studies the address, consults his phone, gets oriented; then we head off. The stores nearby cater to Japanese tourists, offering a king’s ransom of Hello Kitty merchandise next to fierce rows of red clay shiisā dogs, all wearing sunglasses. Perched on the second floor of the souvenir store nearest us is a sculpture the size of a Dumpster of the Japanese lucky totem, a white cat with empty black eyes and big red ears. The cat with the dead eyes waves one motorized paw, beckoning customers to enter. On my past trips to the Kokusai-dōri, the sidewalks have been packed. The Obon festival has emptied the town, and we stroll easily past stores, many of them closed, with signs in Japanese and English saying they’re off for the holiday.

  We pass slender businessmen in white shirts tucked into black slacks, swarms of giggling, gossiping schoolgirls in pigtails pointing to clothes in store windows, and Japanese tourists in floppy hats and flowing cotton vacation clothes. They’re all dwarfed by the occasional American serviceman, hair too short, nose burned red.

  I follow Jake onto a covered street that has a green sign accented with white doves arcing over the entrance. In the sign’s center, a translation of the characters—“Heiwa-dōri, Peace Street”—is printed in English. Inside, a high, vaulted skeleton of silvery steel, covered by a curved glass roof, encloses the maze of tiny shops and booths crammed together beneath it. Locals shuffling through the labyrinth in plastic shower shoes outnumber tourist shoppers. Shops sell more work clothes than aloha shirts and swim trunks. Dresses and trousers in easy-care polyesters cascade down in rows so high that shopkeepers have to use a long pole with a hook on the end to snag the garments their customers ar
e interested in.

  One business, however, a souvenir store, is a clear tourist destination. Shoppers examine lacquered sea turtles, branches of coral, and taxidermied habu snakes, fangs exposed, coiled up, ready to strike. The store is so well lit that the shoppers inside seem like part of a museum diorama. In this setting, it is easy to see how different the Japanese tourists pointing at bottles of awamori liquor with a habu snake curled up on the bottom are from the cheery Okinawan shopgirls bustling about them. The mainlanders are better dressed, taller, more angular, with narrower eyes. Mostly, though, they radiate a sense of entitled ease.

  A kid about my age—obviously a base kid, from his slouchy, oversize jeans and Dallas Cowboys T-shirt—clutches one of the stuffed habu snakes as he sneaks up on his buddy, who is examining the fine assortment of shell figurines in shell hot rods, and pretends to sink the viper’s exposed fangs into his friend’s neck.

  “Motherfucker!” his victim explodes, slapping his neck and whirling around to find the snake being poked into his face. He bats the snake out of his friend’s hands. “You asshole!”

  The friend’s cackles echo up and down the alley. The Japanese tourists exchange looks of disapproval as the guys commence swatting at each other. Without a word, the nearest shopgirl carefully returns the discarded snake and shell figures to their proper places.

  Farther on, Jake and I enter a bustling market filled with housewives buying food for the evening meal. Piles of silver fish with their scarlet flesh exposed sit next to packages of wrapped pig parts. Ears and entire pig faces are particularly popular.

  “It’s just a little farther,” Jake assures me, as we step out of the enclosed arcade.

  Outside the market, we find that the sun has disappeared and a light drizzle is falling. Vendors beyond the cover of the glass roof hurry to cover piles of purple sweet potatoes and a vegetable that looks like a shriveled, bumpy cucumber, with sheets of clear plastic. The rain beads up on the sheets and trickles in rivulets onto the pavement.

  “What are we looking for?” I ask. Jake gives me the address and I search for a number. We are in the city’s backyard, surrounded by utility poles and high concrete walls covered with graffiti. The air is dense with the odor of fried food venting from the restaurants. The bright, tropical pastels have gone gray in the dismal light, and we could be in the anonymous urban heart of any city in the world.

  Jake looks up and down the long alley, then back down at the address. “This can’t be right,” he concludes.

  “What? You think I scared the yuta so much she sent us on a wild-goose chase?”

  Jake shrugs; in other words, that’s exactly what he thinks. A kitchen worker, Okinawan, his spiky black hair held back with a headband, a dirty white apron wrapped around his waist, wheels a large trash can out. Jake shows him the address; they exchange a few words of Japanese. The worker, a kid really, maybe fifteen, considers. His perplexed expression and the way he points one way, then the other, do not give me hope. I glance around, frantic to find some sign that I haven’t hit a dead end. There has to be someone in this stinking alley who can help. An odd sense of urgency overtakes me, and I hurry off down the alley. The wind picks up, shifts direction, and a fresh breeze blows in from the ocean, sweeping the stale odors away.

  “Luz, there’s nothing down there!” Jake calls after me.

  I ignore him, and rush away, only to stop dead at the unexpected sight of a wooden fence covered with velvety purple morning glories. Atop the gateposts a pair of shiisā dogs glare down. A string of metal bells hangs from the latch. Inside the fence is a small courtyard and a bungalow tucked in the shadows behind a department store and a sushi restaurant. Above the door is a symbol carved in wood that exactly matches the whirling circle image, the crest of the ancient Ryukyu Kingdom, that Jake has tattooed around his biceps.

  Jake catches up just as I’m about to open the gate. “Hang on. People around here keep crazy vicious guard dogs.”

  “It’s okay,” I tell him. For reasons I don’t understand, I know that it is. I open the gate and step into the small courtyard. As soon as I do, the bustling city seems to fall silent and all I am aware of is the spicy, sweet scent of orchids from the potted plants on the porch. My heart races as I mount the porch steps ahead of Jake, almost as if Codie herself were waiting for me inside the little house. I’m convinced that the next-best thing is, though: a way to communicate with her. I’m so eager that my hand trembles as I rap on the door. I hold my breath and listen for sounds of footsteps, a door about to be answered. I hear nothing and rap again.

  “Hang on,” Jake says, coming up behind me; he removes a note written in Japanese characters taped to the front door.

  “What does it say?”

  “She’s not here. She’s off celebrating Obon with her family.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Jake shakes his head. The same feeling I get every time I wake from a Codie dream to discover yet again that she’s gone overwhelms me, and my eyes fill. I almost trip hurrying back down the steps.

  Jake follows. I try to run away; I can’t stop the tears and I can’t let him see them. His hand on my shoulder stops me. I duck my head as fast as I can.

  “Luz.”

  The tenderness, the pity in his voice undoes me. I feel my face start squirming around—chin trembling, lips twitching, eyes puddling—and squash it against his shoulder before he can see me losing control.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispers, his lips brushing against the top of my head. “I shouldn’t have built your hopes up. Without a more complete list of your relatives, she probably couldn’t have told you anything even if she’d been there. No decent yuta could have. It might take a while, but I’m sure that with your mom’s help you can eventually put a better list together.”

  My mom. There is no way to make Jake, with his constellations of family photos, understand what a dead end my mom is. How she’s spent her whole life fleeing real connection by escaping into fake ones. How, even now, she’s running from her last real connection, me. Having mastered the stealth cry, I don’t think that Jake will notice that thinking about my mom makes the silent tears flow even harder. But he does, and wraps his arms more tightly around me, and I think that I’ll never be critical of my mother again for seeking this out, this momentary comfort, this break, no matter how brief, from aloneness.

  Above the steady beat of Jake’s heart, I hear a distant, mechanical whirring and look up at the exact instant that the two gray cars of a monorail with a red stripe through the middle whiz along near the tops of buildings several blocks away. As they pass from view, a clump of buildings higher than the rail hide part of the front car. In that moment, it appears as if the back car might be the last one in a long train. Might, in fact, be part of a big-city system. Like the El in Chicago. Like the one running behind the street-corner dude in the photo I found in my mom’s room.

  In my mind, I see the photo in exact detail and am certain of what I suspected but wouldn’t allow myself to acknowledge from the moment I found the picture. I see the street corner dude’s hair, which is my hair and Codie’s hair and, almost certainly, the hair of the singer from the photo where my dazzled grandmother looks like Elvis’s girlfriend. I see the man’s coiled wariness as he glances down the street, and think of my mother’s implacable restlessness. Far overhead, I see the gray monorail car in the photo and how it is identical to the one that just passed, right down to the red stripe through its middle. A stripe that matches the color of what I thought were tissue-paper blossoms from a parade that made a crimson carpet at the feet of the curly-haired man. Like the ones Codie stood on in my dream. Like the ones that cover her grave with scarlet flowers from the deigo tree.

  “I can get a better list,” I say.

  “From who?”

  “My grandfather.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  I will never forget the date—May 29, 1945—when I heard the words, “Shuri has fallen.”

  The news spread among us l
ike the deadliest of plagues, killing every hope we still had of victory. Worse even than that, we learned that our generals, Ushijima and Chō, had fled and no one seemed to know where they’d gone. The thought of being leaderless filled us with fear worse than any we had yet experienced.

  “I don’t believe it.” Hatsuko dismissed the information as rumors planted by spies.

  None of us wanted to believe it. Shuri was the soul of Okinawa. We were safe as long as Shuri stood. I could not imagine the vermilion-and-gold palace, the enchanted gardens where I’d met the juri, much less the Imperial Army’s vast underground stronghold, falling into enemy hands.

  “That’s impossible,” Hatsuko maintained stoutly. “Those tunnels beneath Shuri are impregnable. I won’t believe that Shuri has fallen unless I hear it from an officer of the Imperial Army.”

  I knew immediately the officer she intended to seek confirmation from, and followed her as she strode purposefully down the long corridor to the officers’ quarters.

  “Hatsuko, Tamiko, how happy I am to see you,” Lieutenant Nakamura, who was playing cards with his fellow officers, called out when he caught sight of us. “Won’t you come in? I’m afraid we no longer have any real tea, but the boiled pine needles we drink don’t make a bad brew.”

  “No, thank you,” Hatsuko answered, lowering her lashes. “If we could just speak to you for a moment.” She added, “About a military matter.”

  One of the other men pointed at his crotch and said that we were welcome to speak to his “little general” about any military matter we liked. That the “little general” would even stand up and salute for us. Hatsuko left then and didn’t see how Nakamura smiled in a knowing way at their lewd laughter when he put his cards down and went into the corridor to speak with us.

  “Is it true?” Hatsuko demanded. “Has Shuri fallen? Have the generals fled?”

  “Does the huntsman flee when he runs ahead of the stag to set a trap to capture the great beast?”