Islands of Protest

by Davinder L. Bhowmik

  For a moment, I couldn’t recognize him as he stopped and stood before me.

  His clothes were soiled with sweat and dirt, his hair disheveled and without a soldier’s cap, his cheeks drawn and haggard … and his hands clutched a rifle.

  His appearance bore all the marks of the ordeals he’d been through.

  Yet, here he was, unmistakably—young and beautiful Paniman! His dark eyes still shone, and he seemed slightly bashful, just as I remembered.

  “It’s me. Paniman.”

  Without thinking, I grabbed both his arms. He had changed so much that he seemed like another person.

  “You’ve gotten so thin …” I said worriedly, feeling a tightness in my chest. In the end, that was all I managed to say.

  “Soesah,” he said, with a small sigh.

  That was all. His black eyes seemed to flicker, as if he wanted to say something more, but there was nothing.

  Soesah. It was just one word, muttered with a sigh, and yet no words I ever heard have made such a deep impression on me.

  Indonesians say soesah when they are in troubled circumstances or feel awkward. This simple expression had never sounded so heartrending to me.

  Then he left, as if afraid of what others might think. Once again, he vanished into the stream of soldiers flowing by me.

  Those Indonesian lads—how young they were!

  Sacrificing his youth and innocence for his country, Paniman had taken up arms and marched into the blood and filth of war. As I watched him leave, a pitiful yet courageous figure, I was overcome with affection for him that enveloped me like a cloud and filled my heart with pain. Suddenly, I wanted to chase after him.

  Ah! Those black diamonds.

  As I thought of them now, tears welled up.

  Asia has risen, we have risen

  Forward, forward

  in defense of our homeland.

  Defending heroes. Asia’s heroes. Indonesia’s heroes.…

  Asia Sudah bangun, Merdeka kita, Membela diri tanah air-ku, majulah, majulah, tentara pembela, pahlawan Asia, dan Indonisia.

  Sensing a mournful irony in the marching song these soldiers sang, I stood motionless, and in a daze, on that spot of ground.

  That was four years ago.…

  TAIWAN WOMAN

  Record of a Fish Shoal (1983)

  Medoruma Shun

  Translated by Shi-Lin Loh

  EVEN NOW I CLEARLY RECALL that sensation on my fingertip. It was the eye of a fish that displayed brilliant transitions of color: blue shifted to indigo and then to black in the depths of the taut, clear membrane that was held together in a precarious equilibrium. It looked like a target that overflowed with my deeply felt sense of insecurity. To me, it seemed as if, just by gazing at it, I would be pulled down into uncharted waters.

  The sharp needle point of the arrow I released pierces its target. I pull out the needle from the eyeball of the fish, which is still twitching, still yielding to my touch, and then put my fingertip over the small wound. A sensation of cold, battling with the sure resilience of the fish’s life: these feelings coalesce in the tip of my finger, sending shivers of exhilaration down the cilia of my nerves that eventually cool to a quiet headiness.

  My fingertip, sliding over the sleek surface of the fish’s eye, traces a series of circles that continues infinitely, over and over again. Every sensation I feel gathers at the tip of my finger with stunning speed, and the life of the fish, starting from its pupil, quickly begins to slip away. I am aware of my existence fading, gently dissolving as if it were no more than mist. Nothing is left of it but the muted rhythm of a joyful melody that arises from the two connected points of my fingertip and the fish’s pupil. And then the circular motions of my fingertip gradually speed up, finally contracting into a single point that vanishes into the wound. At that moment, I, who am standing still on a riverbank lit by the white radiance of the sun, am no longer there. Only the sensation on my fingertip, almost burning, remains.

  When I came back to myself, it was giving off a faint, revelatory sort of afterglow.

  In the end, however, I knew I would probably never figure out what it all meant. Even so, I was keenly aware of something breathing within me, something that the sensation in my fingertip was trying to give birth to.

  I held the fish up to the sunlight. The blood that flowed out of its gills stained my thin wrists as the white cloudiness of death began drifting across the transparent membrane of its eyeballs. In the depths of that cloud, its eyes, once so profoundly mysterious, were already being forced into an unpleasant limpness. Like a machine, I hurled the fish into the river with perfect accuracy. The sense of having shared a fleeting moment of empathy lingered on my fingertip as I gazed out at the silver corpse of the fish; it was sinking into the turbid green waters of the river and would eventually drift out to the sea.

  I had been hunting fish at the mouth of the river M with several friends. Tall susuki grasses grew rampant on the riverbanks, and when we lay on our stomachs, we were completely hidden from the outside world. We were like five embryos encased in a single jelly-like membrane; while toying with our disparate dreams, we waited for the shadow of a fish to appear on the calm surface of a river shining in the afternoon sun.

  I extended my arm until it skimmed the river’s surface, poised in a stance that enabled me to shoot at any time. My bow was made from the spring of an umbrella, the crude arrow accompanying it from a sewing needle fastened to a susuki stem.

  On the water, the wind made ripples that raced towards the sea. From the susuki grasses came the sound of rustling leaves, and the sunlight made patterns that danced and glimmered on our necks and the backs of our white shirts. S, who had nestled his body snugly against my left side, stifled a yawn. N swiftly reached across my back and nudged him. The two of them were hugging my waist on either side in order to prevent me from slipping and falling into the river.

  The monotonous sound of the water gushing out of the drainpipe from the pineapple cannery on the opposite bank reverberated through our drowsiness. I caught whiffs of the peculiar scents from each of our lightly perspiring bodies. In particular, my attention was caught by S’s body, which reeked with the odor of a female goat. Before coming to the river, we had bullied the timid S into copulating with a goat. Though on the verge of tears, he had forced himself to smile as he screwed the nanny goat from behind, heroically straining to perform this joke.

  I could not help but recall the faint ache I felt at the bottom of my heart even as I had jeered at S’s pathetic figure. Now, S’s pressing himself against my body in support seemed to me unreasonably pleasing, even adorable. S eventually caved under the emotional strain and began breathing hard; now and then his breath would fall on my neck, and every time my heart would pound fiercely.

  To rest my tired eyes, I withdrew my gaze from the point of the needle and idly surveyed the various flotsam of everyday life drifting down the river. When I tired of that, I began observing the pineapple cannery on the opposite bank. The mokumao trees that had been planted on the riverbank as a windbreak, together with a mountainous pile of old wooden crates stacked up against the cannery walls, obscured most of the building from this angle. Even so, it was possible to guess that the lukewarm, salt-laden breeze blowing in from the sea was hastening the corrosion of the cannery more than one would imagine.

  Some years ago, when the cannery had just been built, the color of the new paint on its walls stood out from the surroundings, but by now it had blended in amidst the village’s rural scenery. Between gaps in the pile of wooden crates, window screens could be glimpsed, ceaselessly spouting out white clouds of steam that kept vanishing into the parched sky. Dense steam persistently shrouded the area around the black-painted drainpipe that jutted out from the thick growth of susuki grass on the riverbank.

  Boiling water was used to sterilize the cans of pineapple, and afterwards the waste water was drained away. And all year long, right where it poured into the river, a massive shoal o
f tilapia fish would gather, forming a wriggling agglomeration that could be spotted even from a distance. They resembled a jostling mass of dark thunderclouds. Over and over they kept floating and sinking, their greedy mouths held open, straining to catch every last piece of the pineapple scraps and leftover food from the cannery’s cafeteria, flushed out from the mouth of the drainpipe.

  There was a degenerate quality in that cavernous clump of mouths, just like a hollow beehive that had been abandoned after the death of its larvae. At the same time, it also overflowed with a profound sense of life. Over there, at the spot where they gathered, we wouldn’t even have to wait, as we were now doing, for the shadow of a tilapia to appear. However, entering the cannery’s grounds was forbidden. If the guard found us, we would be detained or beaten and chased away.

  Suddenly, S’s hand tightened its embrace. I looked at the murkiness of the gray-green river before me. The black shadow of a fish was silently floating upwards, coming to a standstill within a hair’s breadth of the water’s surface. It was a large tilapia, probably about a foot in length. Perhaps it had been in the river’s depths for a long time, for its body had turned purplish-black in color. A reddish-purple tint bordered its dorsal and pectoral fins, and a yellow streak ran from its chest to its belly; they formed a beautiful contrast to the color of its body.

  I calmly waited for the tilapia to enter shooting range. It approached the riverside, moving its pectoral fin rather like a konerite movement in dance.1 As it did so, without warning it began spitting out several baby fish from its mouth. In no time at all, a small black clump had formed around the mouth of the parent fish. It was the perfect chance. At such a time, the tilapia would not just desert the baby fish in order to escape from a minor threat.

  When the tilapia came near the bank, it was slowly following behind the baby fish, and it began to turn so that its side was facing me. That put it within my shooting range. For one moment, a jolt of pity for the baby fish flitted across my mind. But my arms were no longer moving by my own volition. Once again, S’s hand tightly gripped my waist. White sunlight spilled over from my hands to the needle point. In the next instant, the arrow I released had pierced the tilapia’s pupil. A dull noise sounded in the water, and spray splashed up onto my face.

  The tilapia had disappeared. A group of scattered black dots, swaying amidst the rippling water, was all that remained. Beside my ear, S raised a small whoop of joy mingled with his deep breaths. He was still hugging my waist tightly, and it made me happy to see his face with a smile of contentment on its thin lips. The sight of the baby fish roaming aimlessly was a sad one, but nonetheless I got vigorously to my feet and, in high spirits, went to search for my game.

  The tilapia whose eye had been shot had traced a clean arc through the air and was floating on its side in the shade of the susuki grass that drooped over the river’s surface. When N scooped the tilapia up with a net, it was still thrashing inside its prison, but this did not last long. I thrust my hand inside the net and stabbed my thumb and forefinger right into the tilapia’s gills. Putting all my strength into my fingers, I lifted it out. Crimson blood gushed forth, spreading from my wrist to my elbow. Though the tilapia’s hard tail beat desperately against my arm, it finally lost even the strength to close its mouth and could only manage a series of delicate convulsions. I yanked out the arrow that was pierced deep into its eye. It was pleasant to hear everyone’s sighs of admiration.

  As always, I lovingly caressed the sleek, swollen eyeball of the tilapia with my fingertip, a fishy-smelling slime lubricating its movements. I luxuriated in the subtle thrill that transparent resilience transmitted to my fingertip. N, who could no longer contain his impatience, began hurrying me; only then did I come back to myself and passed the tilapia into N’s hands. Thus, each of us, by turns, experienced our own way of enjoying the fish’s corpse. S, who came last, imitated me by ecstatically absorbing himself in toying with the tilapia’s eyeball, and the two of us exchanged smiles of deep contentment.

  I urged S to toss the tilapia back into the river. He docilely acquiesced. Even the tilapia, most virile of all fishes, had in the end succumbed to our cruel sport. Now it could only lie on its side gasping for breath, with the blood flowing from its gills spreading into the muddy water. All of us kept silent as we watched it in that state. Slowly, finally, the tilapia sank to the gray-green depths of the riverbed.

  After we had watched this event in its entirety, we made our way out of the susuki grasses into the bright sunlight. The siren of the pineapple cannery was sounding noisily, and the steam gushing out of the window screens was abating. From the shimmers of hot air over the red-rusted tin roof of the cannery, however, it was clear that the summer sun had not yet lost half its force.

  There was a huge gajimaru tree whose branches reached nearly to the middle of the river, and it was up there that we awaited the appearance of the women. After a while, the door of the cannery opened, and female workers with their hair wrapped in white cloth came out. Sitting on the thick branches, we dangled our legs as we tuned our ears to their clear voices. The ring of their youthful talk, so innocent sounding, held us rapt. We could not understand what they were talking about, though. All these women were from Taiwan, seasonal migrant laborers who came here to earn a living.

  We simply called them “Taiwan women,” but it was a sordid term, loaded with condescension. We had sniffed out those nuances by listening to the conservations that adults had among themselves and imitated their use of the term with nary a scruple.

  The female workers, exchanging carefree chatter as they waited, had formed two lines to use the only two tap-water stations in the cannery. Some of the more sharp-eyed ones among them noticed us on top of the tree and waved, perhaps in fun. N and the others, while nudging one another with their elbows, hurried to wave back.

  At a spot some distance away from them, I watched one particular female worker taking off her long rubber gloves and washing her white arms, now exposed all the way to the shoulders. She washed her face with apparent pleasure and then let the next woman in line use the tap. Wiping her face with a white towel, she came over to the shade of the mokumao trees at the opposite bank of the river in search of cool air. At that point, N suddenly leapt from the tree down to the river by hanging from a rope tied to a high branch. Before everyone’s eyes, he then lightly swung, bird-like, back to the branch he had been standing on before. The female workers assembled on the bank cheered, delighted by N’s silly little stunt. She came among her colleagues and proceeded to observe, with a worried look on her face. N, S, Y, and the other boys leapt off the tree one after another. “Hey, Masashi, aren’t you gonna do it too?” N called to me, holding the rope in one hand. However, I ignored him and continued gazing at her.

  Unlike Okinawan women, every one of these female workers had beautiful skin, as white as if it had been drained of color. Seeing this made me aware, for the first time, of the desire to touch a woman’s skin. My sense of touch was far more developed than all my other senses. My fingertips bred fantasies that moved into the darkness within me, and their feelers caressed every aspect of that which they touched. Suspended in uncertainty, I trembled at the prospect of encountering parts of her that remained, as yet, unknown to me.

  The stirrings of the desires that tormented me every night had extended their feelers from the very first time I had seen her eyes, those eyes that seemed to draw me in. Their sorrowful depths, so unlike those of the other female workers, vividly recalled the particular sensation aroused by the fish’s eyeball on my fingertip. Deep inside my body, a voiceless fear had shaped itself into an unstable sphere. The impulse to strike at that fear made me intensely aware of her existence—an intensity I had hitherto never experienced.

  The door opened again. One by one, the male workers appeared, still clad in work uniforms that were soaked with steam and sweat. Among them could also be glimpsed the figures of Okinawan female workers. They milled about the open space between the river and
the cannery buildings. The female workers from Taiwan had left the washing area and were watching these other workers from a distance. The men and women who had gathered in the open space had broken up into clusters of a few people each, all making small talk. After some time, though, one young man came in front of them and began calling for attention. It was my older brother. He was saying something in a loud voice, his words mixed with dialect. I soon realized that his subject was the issue of reversion.

  This small village in northern Okinawa was far from the big U.S. military bases. There were no impassioned demonstrations or large-scale gatherings of the kind that occurred in Naha and the central region. But even here, assemblies demanding reversion to the motherland occasionally formed in several of the factories and open spaces. Those gatherings did little to draw our interest. Except for one thing: the Koza riot. Ever since the headlines about the uprising in Koza had shattered the calm of the morning after and the news had spread to everyone in the village, even such boys as we were could not help but absorb, to some extent, the atmosphere of the times.

  As my older brother’s speech progressed, he appeared to be getting more and more worked up and was punctuating his declamation with an excess of large, showy gestures. I had seen him get into frequent quarrels with our father over his advocacy of the movement for reversion. It was a pet peeve of our father, whose livelihood consisted of clearing close-set mountains to grow pineapples, that reversion would only cause the value of his lands to be driven down by mainland Japanese competitors. Though I too grew vaguely anxious whenever I heard this, I could not understand anything beyond what he said.

  At length, my older brother made a slight bow and ended his speech. In his place, another man stood up and began speaking. My brother exchanged some words with a few of the workers who were seated. He then moved further to the back, so that the river was now behind him, and began looking around. After a while, he made some hand signals in the direction of the female workers from Taiwan, who were quietly watching the assembly’s proceedings. This provoked giggles and a light stir among them. In their midst, her lone figure was visible, hurriedly making its way towards the gates with lowered face—she, who until just now had been standing on tiptoes to watch my brother giving his speech. My brother cast a glance at her departing figure and leaned back against a mokumao tree, smoking a cigarette and observing the assembly’s progress. Following more speeches by a number of both male and female workers, everyone stood up, linked arms, and began singing a song about reversion: