Above the East China Sea: A novel

by Sarah Bird

  Jake flips on the wipers. The car’s suspension groans as we lurch from one rapidly filling pothole to the next. The red dirt is transformed into slick clay that whirs beneath the tires. I am on the verge of questioning whether cars are even supposed to be on what looks like a goat path when a behemoth truck painted in a camouflage pattern hoves into view, crushing the saplings that line either side of the road. A grim-faced marine sits up high behind the flat rectangle of the rain-streaked windshield and glares down at us.

  “I guess we’re backing up.” Jake cranes around to look over his shoulder. Because of some male challenge that passes between him and the driver, Jake backs out faster than he was going when we drove in. He whips into the first road branching off and lets the truck lumber past. The open flatbed has two benches occupied by marines in olive-drab ponchos. The young men, all wearing floppy canvas hats that droop around their faces like wilted petals and funnel water in rivulets off their heads, turn glazed stares our way, too exhausted to do anything more than hang on to the rifles planted between their knees as the truck rocks them from side to side.

  “Where did they come from?” I ask.

  “The marines lease huge tracts of land around here for jungle maneuvers. They used them a lot during the Vietnam War. Vets said the terrain was worse than the real thing. Like a jungle, but on a roller coaster. All up and down.”

  When we pull back onto the road, not a twig or a branch scrapes the car; they’ve all been bulldozered aside by the truck. Once we’ve made our way to the main highway, we head down south. We drive for more than an hour until I spot the sign that points to the Himeyuri Peace Museum, and we enter what looks like a state park. The parking lot is nearly empty. The rain is still falling steadily enough to keep visitors away.

  I start to open my door and Jake asks, “Are you sure about this?”

  “Positive. This is my deal. I need to see it through.”

  “Okay, but I want you to take the car.” He holds out his keys. “I can catch a bus easy from here. Also, you’re taking my phone.” He shoves keys and phone into my bag.

  I fish them back out. “That is crazy talk. I am not taking your car and your phone.” I try to hand Jake back his keys and phone, but he won’t take them.

  “No, it has to be this way or I won’t leave, and the spirits won’t be driven back to the next world, and it will pretty much be all your fault.” Behind Jake’s easygoing, joking manner, I sense an implacable will. He’s like Okinawa, a thin layer of tropical lushness covering a core of limestone.

  Of course, I’ve got my own tough core and tell Jake I’ll take his phone, but only if he keeps his car.

  He finally agrees, promising to borrow a phone from someone at the practice and check in on me. As I turn away toward the door, Jake pulls me back and kisses me. It’s a combination of a good-bye and an I-don’t-want-to-leave kiss. Maybe with a little this-has-been-great-I’m-going-back-to-my-girlfriend thrown in.

  The rain is little more than a mist when I get out. I don’t watch Jake drive away. A side path leads into a heavily wooded area that is quiet and smells of pine. Six-sided stone lanterns, the edges curling up like sultans’ shoes, guard the path. Drops collected in the dark green needles plop heavily onto my head.

  Green lichen covers the limestone blocks of the stairs everywhere except the spots where it has been scoured away by visitors’ feet. A wood railing worn soft by innumerable hands curves gracefully around the winding stairs. At the top, bushes with bulbous branches like a cupped hand full of swollen fingers beg for something from the sky. Farther on, a grove of pines shelters a display dedicated to the kamikaze pilots. Its centerpiece is the portrait of a pilot in his late teens, lying on his stomach on a tatami mat, as he painstakingly writes a farewell letter home the night before his suicide mission.

  I emerge onto a grassy field intersected by stone walkways and a broad promenade running between high, zigzagging walks of polished black granite surrounded by dozens of walls inscribed with the names of everyone—soldiers and civilians, Japanese, Okinawan, American—who died in the Battle of Okinawa. I am stunned to see the names of enemies and invaders memorialized, and wonder whether anyone in Washington ever even considered putting the names of the Vietnamese who died on our own Vietnam Wall. The briny scent of the sea leads me to an overlook high atop a ring of black cliffs. Far below, the East China Sea is steely gray in the rain.

  The main path winds back into the wooded area, past a succession of monuments. Lonely bouquets lie at their bases. Birds sheltering from the rain cry out to one another with sharp, companionable calls. One monument, a simple granite stone carved with a list of names, has a marker in English that explains that it is dedicated to the native boys, some as young as twelve, who, conscripted by the Japanese Imperial Army to serve as messengers and munitions bearers, perished in even greater numbers than the Okinawan girls had.

  Ancient roots worm through the hard-packed earth. Farther on, the thick vegetation gives way once again to broad stone walks. A canopy of branches arches over my head. Ahead, masses of streamers in crayon colors dangle from the trees. As I draw closer, I realize that the streamers are composed of thousands of origami cranes.

  The crane streamers wave gently above the serrated mouth of a cave that descends steeply into the craggy ground, a dank, dark hole that exhales the smell of all damp places shut off from the sun. Its rim is edged in black. The monument marking the entrance is written in Japanese. Though I can’t understand the characters, a flower chiseled in among them explains everything. The bloom is still closed; its petals have yet to open. The stem, collared in leaves up to the very top, droops, bowing the head of the flower in graceful acceptance of its fate.

  The Princess Lily.

  A small plaque in English explains that the black patches around the opening are scorch marks left by flamethrowers, grenade explosions. For several minutes I stand motionless as I imagine young girls down there, hiding in the darkness while enemy voices yelled in a foreign language at them from above. The plaque identifies the site as the Cave of the Virgins.

  Inside the Himeyuri Peace Museum, maps line the walls of the first room. Arrows swirl across the maps, indicating troop movements and reducing war to two dimensions. Farther on, cases contain artifacts from the lost paradise that the Himeyuri girls grew up in: a simple back loom for weaving banana-fiber cloth, a windup gramophone with a horn-shaped speaker, a lacquerware tea set, a tin of lilac-scented bath powder, books, pens, and, at the very end, a brooch like the one in my pocket that identified these girls as the best of the island’s best, the Princess Lily girls.

  I follow the polished concrete floor to the next room, where Japanese students—boys in black uniforms; girls in white blouses, plaid skirts, and knee socks—study the testimonies of survivors displayed in glass cases. The room is entirely silent except for the shuffling of feet as the students move from one document to the next.

  I turn from the documents and face the re-creation of a section of a hospital cave. The wooden bed planks bolted onto the cave wall in the claustrophobically cramped room seem to exhale the odors of sweat and decay. On a plaque next to the cave, some of the Himeyuri girls’ handwritten accounts are translated. The words swirl in front of me, forming images in my mind before I can stop them:

  … a patient with no legs was crawling in the mud.

  —16-year-old Sizuko Ōshiro

  … bloated corpses as large as gasoline drum cans.

  —17-year-old Toshi Higa

  … I could hear maggots eating the rotting flesh.

  —15-year-old Tsuneko Kinjō

  … I can’t describe the worst. The worst was indescribable.

  —18-year-old Ume Uchida

  The final panel concludes the narrative with: “Only eighteen of the original two hundred and twenty girls survived.”

  The wall opposite the hospital cave is covered by dozens of black-and-white portraits of the Himeyuri girls who served in the cave hospitals. From a plaq
ue, I learn that these were the last photos taken of the girls right before Shuri was evacuated, and that they only survived because the photographer, who was killed during the bombardment, buried his rolls of film in a metal box that was found when a new road was constructed.

  Certain that God, or the universe, or something will provide some sort of clue as to the identity of the girl in the cave, I study the faces of gentle native girls who’d been protected and treasured their whole lives, photographed at a time when they were so convinced that war would be a minor inconvenience that, as the plaque tells me, they carried their schoolbooks with them into the caves. They smile into the camera, looking as if they’re in on the best secret ever. As if they can’t believe their great good fortune in being Princess Lily girls.

  All I can think is, They’re so young.

  I scrutinize the photos, searching for some trait, some feature, that looks familiar. But none of the faces bears the slightest resemblance to the starved and suffering girl who appeared to me in the cave. For the first time, I fully accept Jake’s dictate that things are different in Okinawa, and I say a prayer to the kami. I ask for their guidance. Then, recalling Jake’s advice, I clap my hands softly and whisper, “Please help me find the right girl. Tell me what her name is.”

  The students close to me exchange looks and move away. I don’t care, because when I return my attention to the portraits, one of them jumps out at me. All the other photos depict individual girls, but this one has captured two in the same frame. One rests her hand on the other’s shoulder. The taller girl in back has an elegant, long neck, thick braids, and a serene smile. She’s the only one of the students not wearing a pin. The shorter girl in front wears her wavy hair in pigtails that flip up just beneath her ears. The beaming smile on her broad, open face mirrors the curve of her perky hairstyle. Though they don’t resemble each other, the possessive hand of the older on the shoulder of the younger combined with the younger one’s smile of contented security make me so certain that the two girls are sisters that I can feel Codie’s hand on my shoulder.

  This knowledge, however, doesn’t help me in the least. I stare at the rows of white lilies pinned on the left side of all but one of the girls’ blouses, placed exactly above their hearts. All of the brooches are identical to the one in my pocket. The pale mother-of-pearl flower heads stand out in sharp contrast against the black of their blouses. And they’re all positioned with the blossom drooping inward to the right, toward their hearts. Every girl except the elegant older sister has one. Which means that she is the only student I know for sure is not the girl in the cave. Which leaves me with 219 other candidates. I can’t stand the feel of all those girls who’ve been waiting so long to be reunited with their families staring at me, knowing that the one I’ve failed so badly is among them.

  I rush out of the room and make my way outside to a meditation garden at the back of the museum. An old woman in a kimono sits silently on a bench, staring at a hillside densely planted with flowers, while tears roll down her cheeks. The sun comes out and the orange of the museum’s tile roof and the yellows and bright magentas of the flowers beam with a disconcerting gaudiness.

  What else can I do except make a report to the authorities? Authorities who will then put the sea-washed bones I tell them about in a warehouse, where the girl with the Princess Lily pin will stay until long after everyone who knew her and has been waiting seven decades to find out what happened to her is dead. I think of Codie sleeping beneath her blanket of red deigo tree petals and try to imagine how infinitely more awful it would be if we didn’t have even that. Though I ache to believe otherwise, I have to accept the truth: No matter how different the rules are on Okinawa, how much these kami of Jake’s may or may not be able to intervene in our lives, one rule remains the same: The dead are beyond our help. They are gone forever and ever and ever. We can do nothing for them.

  Defeated, I drop onto a stone bench in the shade. The pin in my pocket jabs me. I take it out, study it, and I decide that I’ll donate it to the museum. Perhaps they’ll make it their mission to identify its owner. Deciding to give the pin away makes me as sad as I was when, without asking me, my mother threw away Codie’s old hairbrush that I had saved. The one that still carried her scent and held strands of her hair. I hold the brooch against my own heart, and touch the flower to feel it bending inward toward my sternum, just as the heads of the lilies in all the portraits drooped to the wearer’s right. Except that the lily on my chest doesn’t face to the right. Though I hold it on my left side, just where all the girls in their portraits had pinned their brooches so that they would curl inward, the one in my hand faces the other way. Outward, to the left. I look down to confirm what my fingers have told me: Yes, this pin is different from all the others.

  I rush back into the museum and head straight for the portrait gallery. All the girls’ pins do face inward to their right except for the one belonging to the cute girl I took for a little sister. Her lily droops the opposite way, to her left. Pinned over her heart, just like all her classmates, it faces out. Exactly like the one I have in my hand. I find the girl’s name on the guide beneath the portraits: Tamiko Kokuba. And the name of her village: Madadayo.

  FORTY-THREE

  “Navigate to Madadayo,” I tell the map program on Jake’s phone.

  I’m standing on the main road with the museum behind me. The sun is out, and steam rises off the drying road in wisps that smell of dust and asphalt. I’m trying to get an idea of which way to go, but the nice lady on the map program keeps telling me that there is no such place as Madadayo. I try a few more pronunciations with no more luck. My brain is starting to cook, so I give up and head to a shop across the highway that rents scuba gear.

  Inside, a loud hissing comes from the area where tanks are being filled with compressed air. Racks of neoprene suits hang like the gaudy pelts of animals furred in black with neon-colored stripes. A couple of Japanese vacationers, probably newlyweds—the husband in golf clothes, his bride wearing a large, droopy hat—sit on a bench trying on swim fins.

  At the counter, an Okinawan woman listens to me repeat the name of the village several times with a quizzical expression on her face that finally disappears when she bursts out with the name correctly pronounced, “Ah! Mah-dah-DAY-o!”

  She points to a broad-shouldered man filling scuba tanks in the corner and tells me something that I take to mean he knows where Madadayo is. “Yeyo!” she yells at him. The hissing stops, and Yeyo walks over with a bowlegged gait, his broad, flip-flopped feet gripping the earth.

  The woman explains, and he points to me and asks, “Madadayo?”

  I dig through my feeble memories of my grandmother speaking Japanese and answer, “Onegai shimasu.”

  Yeyo nods and motions for me to follow him outside. A few minutes later, he flags down a bus, has a lengthy discussion with the driver, then gestures for me to get on board.

  “Madadayo?” I ask.

  “Madadayo!” the driver answers with a smile, nodding his head vigorously.

  The bus is filled with housewives holding string bags of groceries on their laps, students with their heads bent over phones and comic books, and old people staring out the windows with peaceful expressions on their faces, as if they are on a holiday that is going perfectly. I sit down next to an elderly man so slender that his belt is cinched up to the last hole and the extra wags down half a foot. He bows, smiles, and asks, “Madadayo?”

  “Hai, Madadayo,” I answer, bobbing my head in a bow, and smiling back.

  He grins like I’m his smartest grandchild and, pointing at me, repeats my destination, “Madadayo.”

  “Hai, hai! Madadayo.”

  He mutters, “Madadayo,” to the riders around us, and they all nod in a happy way that tells me not to worry. The route hugs the coastline, rising until we have a view of the ocean that seems to go all the way to China. I settle in, and the miles rock past.

  I feel a light pat on my knee and find a serious-faced
little girl in a yellow sundress with ties at the shoulder standing in the aisle next to me and holding a piece of paper with Japanese characters written on it in ballpoint pen. The man beside me taps the characters and explains, “Madadayo.”

  I turn around to face the little girl’s mother, who is still holding a pen. I wave the paper in the air and thank her: “Arigatō gozaimasu.” She nods and the little girl runs away and buries her face in her mother’s lap.

  A few miles later, Jake’s phone announces a message; he has texted me his friend’s phone number. I am on the verge of calling him to share the news of my giant discovery at the museum when the bus rocks and hisses to a stop. A cooing like doves in the evening sweeps through the passengers as they call out the stop: “Madadayo.” My seatmate taps me lightly on the shoulder and waves his hand, shooing me off. At the front of the bus, I feel how happy everyone is at the success of their group effort to get me to my destination, and I stop to bow and wave good-bye. They wave back and are still waving out the windows when the bus pulls away.

  I look toward the ocean far below, which seems as flat and silver as a mirror in the sun. A breeze lifts my hair and cools me down. Next to the highway is a small wooden sign that points to a small road. I pull the paper from my bag and check to make sure that the characters the helpful mother wrote there match the ones on the sign. They do.

  The landscape gets more jungly and overgrown the farther I walk down the narrow road. Soon the entire road is shaded by a thick canopy of trees that cools the air beneath. The noise from the highway grows more and more muffled until I can’t hear anything but birds and the breeze rustling leaves above my head. No cars pass. I notice horse turds along the road and wonder whether people in Madadayo still use carts.

  It’s such a peaceful place that I am even able to think about Codie and how this seems exactly like the kind of fun adventure she would have taken me on, without wanting to run back to the ocean cliff and jump off. In fact, it seems like she’s with me, and it is a fun adventure that we’re sharing. I rub my hand against the lily pin and almost break into a run. Excited, I call the number Jake texted me. The owner of the phone answers in Japanese, then passes it to Jake as soon as I speak.