by Sarah Bird
I lean in and listen.
FIFTY-SEVEN
Oh, Little Guppy, to see your beautiful face again! My prayers have been answered. The kami have returned you to me. Tami-chan, my sweet, my precious little sister, I have waited so long to explain, to beg you for your forgiveness. I should never have abandoned you. Never. The only reason I can give for leaving you alone and unprotected in our family’s tomb and for taking the crock of pork miso our mother made to save us is that I was crazed by love. It shames me still to think of how I deserted you. Perhaps, if you know the misfortunes I endured after we parted, you will see that I suffered for my blindness, my ignorance, and for all my failures to be a proper older sister.
“When I walked away from the tomb, Little Guppy, I believed that I could witness nothing worse than what you and I had already seen. But I was wrong. After the Imperial Army collapsed, everyone, soldiers and civilians alike, clawed for life. I saw a Japanese soldier knock an old woman down with the butt of his rifle and steal the shriveled bit of sweet potato she was gnawing on. I saw a starving infant suck the blood streaming from his dying mother’s chest. I saw a crazed Japanese soldier molest a dead woman. I saw a father, terrified of the Americans, gather his wife, his mother, his five children around him, then pull the pin on a grenade and turn them all into a cloud of pink dust. I saw a colonel kneel in a field and plunge his sword into his belly and his guts spill out like an overturned basket of eels.
“I forced myself to stop seeing and thought only of reaching Nakamura before honor compelled him to commit seppuku. For I was certain that he, the proudest of all the emperor’s proud soldiers, would surely choose the sword over surrender. Though I was starving, I didn’t touch a single bite from our mother’s crock. It was all for Nakamura. I would save him and he would love me. If not in this life, then certainly, and forever, in the next.
“The dead were everywhere. They were yellow mud in the rain. When the rain stopped, they shriveled up into mummies in the heat. Adult faces shrank to the size of a child’s and turned black. Except for the teeth, which continued to shine in hideous white smiles.
“When I finally reached Makabe the caves were nothing more than scorched holes that stank of flesh turned to charcoal by flamethrowers. I gave up all hope then that Nakamura might still be alive. I would have found a way to kill myself, but, upon accepting that I was too late to save the lieutenant, all strength left my starved body, and I sank to the earth. The heavy crock crashed against the rocks and a wave of maggots poured forth. The food was spoiled. Okinawa was spoiled. Life was spoiled.
“I hated the Amerikās for taking my beloved from me and for destroying all that was beautiful on this earth. When the long-nosed giants found me, I no longer cared how they might use me. I hated the enemy so much that even the unearthly blue eyes of the half-naked devils with their red skin marked by frightening tattoos did not scare me. In the moment that they lifted me from the ground in their demon-strong arms, I made a vow that somehow I would discover a way to kill as many of the monsters as I could, so that I would be the most brilliant of shattered jewels when I joined my gallant warrior in a warrior’s death.
“In their detention camp, endless rows of tents were staked on a mud flat and surrounded by a double row of barbed-wire fences. I drank only a few sips of water and ate only a few bites of their disgusting, greasy food. Their hamburgers. Their Spam. They both tasted of the slow-acting poison that our teachers had warned us about. My plan was to live only long enough to steal an unguarded weapon and kill as many of the enemy as I could before the poison sent me to a death as honorable as Nakamura’s.
“Please, little sister, don’t sneer at me. I know now that I was a fool. But then? We were children; we knew only what we had been told. What we had been taught in school.
“Early one morning, when I and the nine other women in my tent were herded out to relieve ourselves, I saw my chance. A guard at the edge of the women’s compound had isolated a pretty girl from the country to toy with. He wasn’t wearing a shirt and his hairy chest was marked with a tattoo depicting the flesh-eating eagle that they worshiped. The revolver on his hip was ignored as he leaned forward, playing with the terrified girl’s hair, pressing his unwanted attentions on her. I advanced quickly toward the demon.
“Unnoticed, I crept up behind him. My hand was reaching out for his gun when the guard spotted someone he knew, straightened up abruptly, and called out to the man, ‘Hey, Nocky, get your ass over here.’
“A tall Okinawan man, his head bent low in a servile posture beneath a farmer’s conical straw hat that hid his face, rushed over, eager to do the guard’s bidding. He wore a ragged kimono belted beneath his potbelly that flapped about his knees as he hurried toward us.
“ ‘Nocky,’ the guard said, waving a casual finger at the girl trembling with fear. ‘Tell this one that I think she’s mighty sweet.’
“Though no proud sword swept out behind the farmer as he bowed lower than even the most obsequious of servants, I recognized the voice that scurried to pander. ‘Hai! Hai! Hai! Yes, sir! Right away, sir!’
“For a moment, I couldn’t understand why my noble, brave Nakamura, the hero who had sung about death before dishonor and being a jewel shattering into a thousand pieces for the glory of the emperor, had stripped off the uniform of an Imperial officer and disguised himself as a farmer. When he looked up, I thought I had been mistaken, for this wasn’t Nakamura’s thin, handsome face. This was the face of a man who’d grown fat on the enemy’s butter and hamburgers. But it was. It was Nakamura.
“In Japanese he snarled at the girl, ‘Do whatever he wants; do you hear me? He will strangle you with his bare hands if you don’t. Now, smile. Smile! And don’t make trouble or the demons will kill and eat you and all of your family!’
“Her chin quivering, her eyes bright with unshed tears, the girl did lift the corners of her lips as the giant put his arm around her and led her away. But then, bending her head in shame, she didn’t see the American guard turn back to Nakamura with surprise lighting his face; the soldier hadn’t expected the girl to go with him. He hadn’t expected anything. Nor did the girl see Nakamura grin and raise his thumb. Or the guard return the salute and toss him a package of cigarettes marked with the red circle of the rising sun. A package of the Lucky Strikes that we once had believed were proof of America’s acceptance of the invincibility of Japan.
“At that instant, as I watched Nakamura greedily hide his booty in the waistband of the stolen kimono, it was as if I had fallen down into one of the caves where we’d hidden. There was no ground beneath my feet as I saw the proof that it had all been lies. All of it. The lice, the young men’s shattered bodies, the hunger, the suicides, the death. It had all been for nothing. For lies. It was as though I had been fed nothing but black sugar for years, all the way back to my first day as a Princess Lily girl, when we practiced marching with our sharpened bamboo sticks. All the way back to my first day of grade school, when our Japanese teacher taught us to raise our right arms straight out in front to salute that red circle and pledge with all our silly Okinawan hearts to strive to become worthy to one day be true Japanese. How the thought of being a true Japanese girl had once thrilled me. And how the sweet taste of it that had once been so intoxicating now sickened me.
“Only when his awful prize was safely tucked away did Nakamura notice me. For an instant he forgot and smiled, believing he was greeting one of his admirers, one of the stupid girls in the soot-filled cave who had mooned over him when she wasn’t picking lice from her hair. When he saw the shock and contempt on my face, though, he remembered what he had become. The face I had once thought so noble showed its cruel baseness as he snarled, ‘Don’t look at me like that, darling Hatsuko. You are no Princess Lily anymore.’ He pointed to the girl, her slight figure disappearing as the GI led her into the large, dark tent where supplies were stored. ‘Believe me, you will do worse than her. Worse than me.’
“ ‘I have already done worse,�
�� I told that villain. ‘I abandoned a person of true nobility for the likes of you.’
“Tamiko, until that moment I was under a spell. In the instant that it was broken, I realized what I had done to you. I had left my sister, my little sister, alone and unprotected, when you had never been anything but faithful and loving to me.
“I spit in the face I had once thought so handsome, and from that moment on, all I could think of was finding you and returning home, so that I might spend the rest of my life atoning for my selfishness. But, though I begged, no one was permitted to leave the camp. They called us detainees, but we knew that we were prisoners. Each morning from that day on, I was at the gate to greet the latest shipment of newcomers, searching the starvelings for you, for our parents. Though I looked for our brothers, the only Imperial soldiers among the detainees were cowards, like Nakamura, who had disguised themselves as farmers. Unlike Nakamura, however, none of those traitors would meet my gaze. They still had the decency to hang their heads in shame at the humiliation of not having died for the emperor. Knowing the cruelty that they themselves would have shown any enemy prisoner, much less a soldier who disgraced himself by surrendering, they trembled with fear at being discovered.
“Gradually, though, soldiers and civilians alike, we realized our conquerors would treat us all the same. I watched an old farmer ask for one last cigarette before he was crushed to death beneath the treads of the mighty tanks, as the Imperial soldiers had promised. The farmer was stupefied when the guards handed him six cigarettes, tucked two more behind his ears, and gave him a bowl of soup and a pair of boots. Terrified children, new to the camp, still expecting to be eaten, saw other children, plump cheeked and playing games, and began to trust that the red devils’ bars of chocolate were not poisoned. Mothers were stunned when the enemy gave their malaria-stricken children quinine as generously as if to their own sons and daughters. I watched a defeated captain burst into tears when an American medic approached with long tweezers that he believed would be used to gouge out his eyes, and instead the American knelt down beside him and tenderly plucked the maggots from his wounds.
“One night in the middle of August, our captors took up their guns and cannons and blasted wildly until the dark sky was filled again with the awful fireworks of tracers and flares. The Imperial soldiers hidden among us screamed that the beasts had fooled us all. That they’d only been holding back for the rampage of revenge that was now about to descend upon us. The next morning, word filtered through the camp that the emperor had surrendered. Many former Imperial soldiers wept, but none of our people shed any tears. We had learned the bitter truth long ago: The emperor for whom we had sacrificed so much had never been our father.
“Oh, dear Tamiko, I dreamed of home every night. Every night, I entered the courtyard of our farm in Madadayo and Anmā held her apron over her face to catch the tears of joy as she welcomed me back. Everyone was with her: Father, all four of our brothers, Aunt Junko, Cousin Chiiko, her baby Little Mouse, everyone. Even loyal old Papaya. But you, Tamiko, they all stepped aside when you appeared, for they knew that you were the one I had truly come back for. I woke each morning more certain than ever that my dreams were a vision of what waited for me in Madadayo, and I ached to return and be reunited with you and the rest of our family. Months passed, however, before the Americans finally released me.
“The instant they did, I rushed home, traveling to our village on a smooth new road that connected the north and south of Okinawa for the first time. For longer than I had been alive the Japanese had promised to build such a road; the Americans had made a river of asphalt materialize overnight.
“Tami-chan, you would not have recognized the country I passed through. Runways and roads covered what had been fields and forests. Barracks and command centers had replaced villages and farms. Barbed wire wrapped around the heart of our island. Everywhere I looked, machines even larger than the tanks we feared would be used to crush our bones scraped the earth clean. Worst of all, though, was that the machines had clawed away not only trees and grass, but corpses, skeletons, and the tombs where our ancestors had rested for a thousand years. The tombs that hadn’t been obliterated were desecrated. Urns lay broken and scattered in the dust, and with them our connection to the past and the future.
“One morning, before sunrise, I watched as men and women and children were dragged from their beds and forced to leave their homes at gunpoint by American soldiers. The young men who protested as bulldozers obliterated their village, their homes, their lives from the face of the earth were arrested and taken into custody by military police wearing white helmets and white straps across their chests. Unlike you and I, Tami-chan, they must not have seen the movies of the Americans slaughtering the Indians and driving them from their homeland. If they had, they would have known how futile their protests were.
“When I finally reached Madadayo and walked down the narrow lane toward our farm, I held my breath, fearing that it, like so many others, had been bartered away by the Imperial government in the terrible conspiracy between between Tokyo and Washington that saved the mainland and sacrificed Okinawa. But no base had taken the place of our home. No fence locked me out of our property. I stood before the blackened square of earth that had once been the house we grew up in and forced myself not to imagine Father, Mother, and our brothers crowding onto the veranda to welcome me home. Instead, I rushed to the last place where I had seen you, dear sister.
“It was fortunate, indeed, that our family tomb was hidden away, for neither the flamethrowers nor the souvenir hunters, those Amerikās who thought that our burial urns were nothing more than mementos to steal, had found it. I called out your name. There was no answer. The square stone blocking the entrance was still ajar and I squeezed in. I feared that I would find your body resting inside, but you were not there. The only evidence of you that I found was hidden behind Great-great-great-grandfather Ryō’s urn, where I discovered the air-raid bonnet Anmā had made for you. I rejoiced then, certain that you weren’t waiting to greet me because, without your padded bonnet, you’d suffered an injury that had wiped out your memory of me and Madadayo. All I had to do was find you and bring you home.
“For months I searched. I traveled from one end of the island to the other. From Kyan to Hedo. Though I believed I had shed all my tears, I wept when I came to the rubble-strewn plot of bare earth that had been Shuri Castle. Only stone fragments remained of our ancient kings’ fairy-tale palace. Towering trees that had shaded the nobility of the Ryukyu Islands were blackened stumps. The ancient city was gone, and with it all the centuries of documents, records, and registries. The history of our people had been turned to ash.
“Walking the Americans’ ribbon of asphalt, I headed north. As I approached the last of the sixteen detention camps and had still not found you or Mother or Father or any of our aunts and uncles and cousins, I came close to abandoning hope: I was all alone in the world. Even if I’d had a reason to go on living, I had no means. I could either haunt the Americans’ trash dumps and scavenge bits of Spam and the sweet beans they left in the discarded cans, or I could return home and wait for the Americans to come and throw me off our land as they’d evicted so many others. I appealed to the kami, I begged Old Jug, to send me a sign that I should go on living. And she did. There, in that last camp, I found our cousin Mitsue. She had not been killed by the bomb blast outside the cave where we were denied entrance after all.
“Her first reaction when she saw me was to hang her head in shame and turn away. But, filled with joy at the sight of someone from our family, I took her in my arms, and soon she, too, was weeping with happiness. We were all each other had left. Over and over, Mitsue begged me to forgive her. I said there was nothing to forgive. If she and Nakamura had found a moment of comfort in the hell we had lived through, then at least he had been good for one thing. The war had twisted us all in ways we could never have imagined. Me worst of all. We determined that we would spend the rest of our lives honorin
g those who had been taken from us. We returned to Madadayo, where we lived in our family tomb, and prayed for our ancestors’ help to survive and to remain on our land when so many others’ property had been seized. That is when I found all the precious items our wise mother had hidden there and blessed her for her foresight.
“Mitsue and I built a shack from boxes discarded by the U.S. Army and waited. In short order, a colonel and a representative from the Japanese government came with papers saying that we must leave. Because our property was ideally located high on a cliff facing the East China Sea, it had been appropriated to make way for a giant tower to intercept communications from our new enemies, the communists in China. The man from Tokyo said that we should be honored to be allowed to make this sacrifice; Okinawans could only be protected from such a terrible new threat if we cooperated in our defense.
“The colonel and the Japanese official were surprised by two things. The first was that I spoke English and addressed the colonel directly. The second was that, because our wise mother, who never trusted the Japanese, had insisted on formally registering our property, I had a copy of our family’s koseki shōhon. Though most land titles had burned with Shuri, I had the proof that we owned our land, with a seal affixed in Tokyo. Furthermore, I told the gentlemen, I had no quarrel with the Chinese; they weren’t my enemies. We had existed peacefully with the Chinese, trading and sharing our cultures, for centuries before Japan invaded. In fact, we had existed peacefully with everyone until the cursed day when the Japanese packed our defenseless island with soldiers and weapons and transformed it into a target. But, I allowed, the Americans could lease a sliver of our land for their tower. If they were willing to pay handsomely for the privilege. Far, far more than the pittance they were giving others when they ‘leased’ the land they’d taken by force. And, I added, I would require first payment in advance.