Kamikaze

by Michael Slade

  “I don’t know your name,” the jarhead said, “’cause they found no papers on you. So I’ll call you Monkey Man, since that’s what you are to me. You like cartoons?”

  Today, the Marine was dressed in sage green. His bloodshot eyes tattled that he had spent last night in the bar, and he had nicked his face twice while shaving.

  Tokuda wondered if henceforth his own facial hair would be only half a beard.

  “Here’s Bugs Bunny.”

  His tormentor held up a frame from the film “Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips.” It showed the rabbit battling it out on a Pacific island with a short, bucktoothed, slant-eyed “Jap” in big, round glasses. The Marine dropped the cartoon onto the bed.

  “No? What about Popeye?”

  In the next cartoon, a squinty-eyed sailor clenched a corncob pipe in his teeth and had rolled up his sleeves to bare an anchor tattoo on his huge forearm. “Let’s blast ’em Japanazis!” read the caption, and beneath was an ad for the U.S. Treasury: “A 25¢ war stamp buys 12 bullets.”

  “Get it?” said the Marine.

  Tokuda got more than the jarhead thought, for he had seen similar cartoons about the war in Europe, except those were directed at Hitler’s Nazis, not the German people. In the Pacific, however, U.S. hatred got spewed at all Japanese, who were viewed as a subhuman race of animalistic demons.

  “You’re a sap, Mr. Jap,” jeered the next cartoon in bamboo script. His wrists going limp to illustrate his taunt, the Marine mimicked Popeye, calling Tokuda a “yellow-skinned Japansy.”

  One by one, the cartoons fluttered down onto the bed like autumn leaves. In “Jap Trap,” a mousetrap had crushed the neck of a rat-like Japanese soldier. In those titled the “Tokyo Kid,” a snaggle-tooth monster with drooling lips clutched a bloody dagger in its clawed fist and sneered in pidgin English at American factory workers.

  The jarhead aped, “Tokyo Kid say ...”

  Oh so happy

  For honorable scrap

  Busting of tools

  Help winning for Jap.

  In the next one, the same degenerate monster cowered in fright.

  “Tokyo Kid say ...”

  Boom planes

  Saved from

  Box of scrap

  Make so very

  Unhappy Jap.

  Then it was over.

  August 15, 1945.

  The first time Japanese nationals ever heard their emperor’s voice, it came by radio from a phonograph record that had been smuggled out of the palace in a laundry basket of women’s underwear. That thwarted an attempted raid on the Chrysanthemum Throne by a thousand outraged officers who were intent on heading off dishonorable surrender by assassinating Emperor Hirohito.

  “The enemy now possesses,” intoned the Son of Heaven, “a new and terrible weapon with the power to destroy many innocent lives ... It is according to the dictates of time and fate that we have resolved to pave the way for a grand peace for all the generations to come by enduring the unendurable and suffering what is insufferable.”

  In short, this time the Divine Wind had not saved Japan.

  By then out of hospital and caged behind barbed wire, Tokuda had vowed to follow the Way of the Warrior, as had his heroic commanders at the Battle of Okinawa. In the code of bushido, surrender shames one’s family. Hara-kiri by sword is the warrior’s honorable death, and according to what Tokuda had heard ...

  General Ushijima was headquartered in a cave that snaked through a prominent coral formation at the southern shore of Okinawa. The flat summit was defended by Japanese snipers, mortar men, and machine-gunners. Below the jagged pinnacle, the cave had two outlets: one facing land, and the other above the sea.

  Backed by flame-throwing tanks spewing five thousand gallons of napalm, the Yanks captured the crest of the hill on June 20. A surrender demand was rejected by Ushijima, and his men then launched counterattacks to push the enemy back. Explosives sealed the mouth of the cave on the inland slope.

  At 10:00 p.m. the next day, Ushijima and General Cho—the patriot who gave the “no prisoners” order in the Rape of Nanking—sat down to an elaborate meal of miso soup, fish cakes, canned meats, rice, cabbage, potatoes, pineapple, and tea, washed down with sake and a bottle of fine Scotch. As they dined, headquarters staff sang “Umi Yukaba,” a solemn poem from ancient times of sacrificing life for the emperor.

  At 3:00 a.m. on June 22, the moon was in the sky and dappling on the sea. Inside the cave, General Ushijima was dressed in full uniform, and General Cho wore a white kimono. In preparation for death, the soldiers exchanged last poems.

  General Ushijima’s:

  We spend arrows and bullets to stain heaven and earth,

  Defending our homeland forever.

  General Cho’s:

  The devil foe tightly grips our southwest land,

  His aircraft fill the sky, his ships control the sea;

  Bravely we fought for ninety days inside a dream;

  We have used up our withered lives,

  But our souls race to heaven.

  “Well, Commanding General Ushijima, as the way may be dark, I, Cho, will lead the way.”

  “Please do so,” replied Ushijima, his voice serene. “I’ll take along my fan, as it is getting warm.”

  By candlelight, the morbid procession walked toward the cave’s seaward exit, passing the staff, who’d drawn up in a line to pay their last respects. On the back of his kimono, General Cho had brush-stroked, in large characters, the words “With bravery I served my nation, / With loyalty I dedicate my life.” Behind him, Ushijima cooled himself with flutters of an Okinawan kuba fan.

  The moon, by now, had sunk into the western sea. Mist scaled the cliff from the brine below. Dawn had yet to break on the horizon. Ten paces out from the cave, at the lip of its ledge, a white sheet spread over a quilt created a ritual seat. There, both men knelt and exposed their abdomens. Sensing movement below, the Yanks up top threw down a few grenades. Neither general flinched.

  Both bowed in reverence toward the eastern sky. An aide handed each man a hara-kiri dagger with half the blade wrapped in white cloth. Behind Ushijima stood the adjutant, grasping his katana sword with both hands and poised to strike. The general also held his dagger in both fists, then ...

  “It’s too dark to see your neck,” the swordsman said. “Please wait a few moments.”

  With the first flush of dawn, Ushijima plunged the blade deep into his belly. Barely had the samurai shout escaped from his throat when the razor-sharp sword beheaded him. As the corpse lurched forward onto the sheet, Cho performed the same ritual, and was himself done in by another flash of steel. With that last honorable duty to their emperor done, both spirits would be immortalized at Yasukuni Shrine.

  Mine too, thought Tokuda. As soon as they set me free from this accursed camp.

  He wished he had his daisho.

  His samurai swords.

  Both had been with him when corkscrew and blowtorch had burned him alive.

  And when he’d come to, both were gone.

  “Lookee, lookee. Come see me.”

  The jarhead strutted back and forth on the other side of the barbed-wire fence, a pair of samurai swords stuck through his belt.

  The Marine taunted, “Tokyo Kid say ...”

  Yank play poker

  Hand win swords

  That make Jappy

  So-o-o-o unhappy.

  Tokuda recognized both swords as his own.

  “Got another cartoon for you,” gloated the Yank. He spiked a grim photograph onto the barbed wire, pinning it to the perimeter of the POW camp. The snapshot, taken by U.S. forces, showed the dead bodies of Ushijima and Cho with what appeared to be blood at their temples.

  “Japansies,” the picador jabbed. “They violated the samurai code. The cowards shot themselves because they didn’t have the guts to take it like men.”

  “Lie!” Tokuda spat in Japanese. “You faked that to demean their families!”

  “Sorry to say, Mo
nkey Man, but we gotta part ways. They’re shipping me out to Ginza for the occupation. I don’t know your name, but I want you to know mine. So if your kids ever ask you, you’ll be able to tell ’em, ‘The Marine who whupped my yellow ass in the Pacific War was Lance Corporal Eugene Kerr.’”

  The jarhead turned away, but then turned back.

  “Nice cutlery. I’ll take good care of it. I’ll use it in my backyard to pick up dog shit.”

  So now he had a reason to live, instead of a reason to die. The thought of his father’s daisho being dishonored like that shamed Tokuda to the core.

  With the signing of Japan’s surrender aboard the USS Missouri on September 2, Japanese soldiers not wanted for war crimes were released from confinement. Nameless and with half his face scarred beyond recognition, Genjo Tokuda was sprung from that U.S. prisoner-of-war camp. He made his way to the bombed-out Ginza district, where he struck a deal with the tattered remnants of the local yakuza for help in regaining his honor. If they would locate Lance Corporal Eugene Kerr for him and aid in the recovery of his father’s daisho, he would kill any five men they wished executed as payment.

  What was there to lose?

  Before long, a thug known to his gang mates as the Claw reported that they had found Kerr. In the company of Tokuda, the yakuza waylaid the Yank in an alley one night as he staggered drunkenly home from a poker game. The samurai burgled his digs to recover Tokuda’s swords. The next morning, MPs found Kerr’s body, but they never found his head, which had been cleanly sliced from his shoulders by the sweep of a razor-sharp blade. They did, however, find his eyes, which had been clawed out before his death and left to stare up from the filth on the alley stones.

  Every year, on the anniversary of his corkscrew-and-blowtorch disfigurement in the Battle of Okinawa, Genjo Tokuda sipped sake in honor of his family from a bowl mounted in the jarhead’s skull.

  Jarhead.

  What a fitting description.

  The Kamloops Kid wasn’t as lucky.

  As Genjo Tokuda tightened his grip on the Tokyo yakuza, turning the black market into a profitable endeavor, he kept track of the fate of his former Hong Kong cohort. For beating Canadian prisoners to death, Sergeant Inouye was tried and found guilty of war crimes. At first, his Canadian citizenship saved him. That conviction was overturned because Canada couldn’t try a Canadian for war crimes. But eventually, his Canadian citizenship doomed him. The Kamloops Kid was tried and convicted of treason, and in 1947, he was hanged at Stanley Prison.

  With time, Tokuda sensed he was safe from prosecution. America needed Japan as an ally in the Cold War, and in 1948, Truman granted amnesty to all Japanese soldiers not already imprisoned for war crimes. His past a dead issue, Tokuda revived his real name.

  Over the years, he occasionally recalled the pretty Canadian nurse he’d won in a card game and raped at St. Stephen’s during the fall of Hong Kong. Magnanimously, he had let her live while so many others died, and he wondered what had become of her in the post-war years.

  With the emergence of his unknown son, that question had been answered.

  A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, Tokuda had read somewhere; so he had thought just weeks ago that dissatisfaction would be his fate. True, he was one of Japan’s richest titans. But what was fortune to an old man with no family to inherit his wealth? The Pacific War had wiped out his family tree, and the wounds he’d suffered on Okinawa had left him a eunuch. True, he had forged his yakuza hoods into a force to be feared. But after his retirement, that strength had turned to flab. Gone were the days when a samurai would spill his guts for bushido—as the author Yukio Mishima had in 1970—and in place of honor came street punks with no moral ethics, like that “Japansy” he’d had beheaded for missing the Stanley Park meeting. True, he had used the yakuza to wreak vengeance on America, by flooding its youth with speed and sapping its economy. But that wasn’t personal vengeance against the actual killers who had slaughtered his family and dishonored their Shinto shrine.

  Now, however, he was standing on his pinnacle overlooking Vancouver, sword in hand, as those who had once seemed out of reach were finally drawing closer to his bony grasp.

  Tokuda had a son.

  Sired by the rape of that nurse.

  A son who was morally fit to inherit his father’s earthly wealth.

  A son who desired to live by the code of bushido.

  A son who yearned to become a twenty-first-century samurai.

  A son who wasn’t afraid to worship at the Yasukuni Shrine, where Japan’s 2.5 million war dead—including those so-called war criminals executed by the occupiers—were honored as deities.

  A son who, even as Genjo Tokuda slashed at the city with his samurai sword, was down there in that spread of glittering lights, hunting for the bait that would hook one of the actual killers of their ancestral family. An American killer who was fated to suffer the same excruciating pain he had once inflicted on this vengeful kumicho.

  Slash ...

  Slash ...

  Slash ...

  Special O

  November 1, Now

  “Cascade Consulting,” read the sign out front of a nondescript building in the Mayfair Industrial Park, just this side of the Forensic Psychiatric Hospital at Colony Farm. Cascade Consulting’s business was nebulous, but whatever it was, it required cars to come and go all night. Luckily, the building was situated next to the Trans-Canada Highway, on the north bank of the Fraser River. So wherever the cars were coming from and going to at such ungodly hours, the reps had several routes to choose from.

  Question?

  What did Cascade Consulting do?

  If a door-to-door salesman walked in off the street, he’d be met by a receptionist skilled at thinking on her feet. She might call the boss out for backup, and he would then say, “We don’t need photocopy supplies at the moment,” or whatever was necessary to get rid of the salesman. If you asked a local cop what Cascade was all about, you’d be met with a shrug. That’s because the building was on a jurisdiction line between two forces, and anything near a boundary gets less police attention. What’s more, when cheap patrolmen wandered in to ask, “Any chance cops get half price here?” they were advised that the business was strictly client-based.

  Whatever that meant.

  In fact, there was only one way to pierce the veil, and that was to do what this cop was doing now. At four o’clock in the morning, before the break of day would smudge the horizon, he wheeled his aging Mercedes-Benz into the parking lot, climbed out, crossed to the building, pulled open the door, and said to the night guard at the desk, “DeClercq. Special X. Here to see Oscar.”

  “ID?” the guard asked.

  The chief superintendent flashed his bison-head badge.

  “Oscar’s waiting.”

  The guard buzzed him in.

  For reasons that no one can now recall, “Oscar” is the in-house name for Special O. That’s “O” as in “observation,” the physical surveillance trackers of the RCMP. Special O is so secretive that it might as well not exist. Oscar is “offside” to other officers because it also investigates for the anti-corruption unit of Internal Affairs. Only the brass—the so-called white shirts—know where Oscar has its office.

  White shirts like DeClercq.

  The cop who greeted him inside the door to the inner sanctum was Corporal Nick Craven. Blond-haired, blue-eyed, and in his mid-thirties, Nick had once worked at Special X, but he later abandoned urban life to police the rural Gulf Islands. “Be careful what you wish for,” the Chinese say, and so it had been with Craven’s dream of idyllic country policing. Out in the wilds, he had run afoul of a psychopath named Mephisto, and that rotten luck had cost him an ear and one of his hands. Disillusioned, Nick had recently returned to the city, where he had taken a posting with Special O.

  “Is everyone here?” DeClercq asked.

  “Roger. I called in the old guys. Who knows how many years in O are gathered in this room.”

  “G
ood. This will be dicey, so experience will count.”

  Craven led DeClercq to the front of the war room. Although coffee was being guzzled by the gallon, the faces before them were still as puffed and red-eyed as you’d expect in a team that had been rousted from sleep and told to muster fast. There was no mystery about why they were here. Anyone who had to ask would not be in Oscar. Many of the faces were non-white, for it was an asset in O not to look like the stereotypical Mountie.

  O’s job was to blindside the bad guys.

  “You know who I am,” the chief said, “so let’s get down to work. Two days ago, a gang of thugs flew in from Japan. One was the hood of hoods in Tokyo’s yakuza.”

  DeClercq withdrew several blown-up passport photos from his carryall and began pinning them on a spread of corkboard that mimicked his Strategy Wall.

  “Genjo Tokuda, the godfather. In his eighties. He looks like Two-Face in a Batman movie.”

  The next tough had an ugly facial mole.

  “This one’s the Claw. Tokuda’s enforcer. He gets that nickname from his penchant for gouging out eyes. There have been several Claws over the years.”

  Soon, a rogues’ gallery lined the wall.

  “No criminal records, and we all know why. Japan’s economic bubble burst under the squeeze of corruption. And now Tokuda has his tentacles in here.”

  “Why?” asked a watcher.

  “I don’t know. Tokuda’s the right age to have been embroiled in the Second World War. It’s possible he’s here for some kind of revenge. Last evening, a kamikaze plane slammed into a Pacific vets’ convention, and indications are that Tokuda’s to blame. Old men his age obsess over tying up loose ends.”

  “Where do we find him?”

  “There’s the rub,” said DeClercq. “The Japanese planted a bug in his bags before he left Tokyo. They told us, after the gang had arrived, and provided a GPS device to track the bug. The luggage went to a hotel, but the thugs who brought it did not. They vanished and are probably holed up in safe houses.”