Islands of Protest

by Davinder L. Bhowmik

  Yoshiaki had heard similar stories about the factories from his grandmother. The Okinawans who’d gone to the mainland had naturally settled together in communities. His grandmother had told him of how she’d gone to the Kanagawa mills for work and how she met her husband, an activist in the movement fighting discrimination against Okinawans.

  In the play, Chiru is seduced by a mainlander, a fellow factory worker, and becomes pregnant. Fired from the factory, Chiru returns to Okinawa, only to be beaten by her father and scorned by her mother and brothers. She leaves for Naha and gives birth to her child, alone. But, unable to bear the burden of raising her child, she abandons her son at the gates of the Sōgenji temple on his first birthday. After drifting from job to job, Chiru is finally reduced to prostitution. During the Battle of Okinawa, her life is saved by her son, who had become a student soldier in the Imperial Blood and Iron Corps. The two spend one night in a bunker together, not realizing that they are mother and child. At dawn, the son strokes her hair as she sleeps. Mouthing the word that he’d wanted to say just once, “Mama,” he leaves the trench with a grenade in hand, following orders to throw himself at an American tank. When she wakes, Chiru is unaware that the smoke she sees rising from beyond the hills is from the explosion of the tank and her son. Nevertheless, calling out the name of the child she abandoned, Chiru commits suicide, slitting her neck with a razor.

  The play was overwhelmingly tragic, patching together familiar stories that Yoshiaki had heard before. But after the curtain fell, the clapping and cries from the audience continued for more than a minute. Even Yoshiaki had tears in his eyes from the surprising power of the performance. He wiped them away with the back of his hand so that the people around him wouldn’t notice and waited for the next performance. The program was nearing its second climax. The dancer performing the Shyodon, a representative work of Ryukyu theatre, had won a contest sponsored by the local newspaper. It seemed that the festival committee that organized the program had considered him to be the only dancer who could follow the powerful reverberations of the previous play. Indeed, the movement of his fingertips and the agility of his feet, as well as his ability to express inner emotions with only the slight movement of his eyes, distinguished him from the earlier dancers.

  The children, seeing their parents absorbed in the performance, also stopped running about and watched the stage. The yard was silent except for the music being broadcast through the staticky speakers. A slight rustling began to spread through the crowd. From the sugarcane fields behind the stage, Gozei appeared. She walked to the stage dragging a bamboo rake by the handle. Waving the stick in the air at the spectators, she screamed, “The soldiers are coming! Everyone hide!” The force of her screams, louder than the music from the speakers, unraveled her sash and revealed her naked, emaciated body. Every time she shook the stick, her long breasts shook, and her pubic hair, the only youthful black hair on her, shone in the spotlight.

  Amidst the silence, an old woman burst from the front row, hugging Gozei to her to hide her body. Young men ran out from both sides and dragged Gozei away behind the stage without a word. Yoshiaki’s memory of what had happened earlier that afternoon merged with the scene in front of his eyes, and he had a strange sensation of time stopping and twisting on itself. He stood to look toward the back of the stage, but his eyes were caught by the dancer, who slowly sank down at the center of the stage, twisting his body and directing his gaze. Even as the crowd’s eyes followed Gozei, the dancer did not change his expression, continuing to dance even through the chaos. Realizing that only the space beneath the stage spotlight was disconnected from the passage of time, Yoshiaki sat down, embarrassed for standing on his toes. Others in the crowd seemed to feel the same way. In minutes, the resolute dancer had quieted the spectators.

  For the following pieces, Yoshiaki showed his respect to the dancers and made sure not to look behind the stage. But throughout the rest of the program, he couldn’t help but wonder what had happened to Gozei. The desire to close the harvest festival without further mishap quelled the spread of whispers and curses, but it was clear that discomfort and anger over the disruption of the festival were smoldering.

  When Yoshiaki returned home, he found that Kimi had gone home ahead of him. She was telling his father, who’d been watching television, about Gozei’s disruption. His father snorted when she mentioned that the enraged young men might raid Gozei’s hut and harm her.

  “Who’d be stupid enough to take that senile old woman seriously?” he said, as he leaned on one elbow to change the channel.

  “Maybe people like you who don’t even go to the festival wouldn’t care, but think about the boys, practicing every day and being disrupted like that. And they aren’t the only ones who are angry,” Kimi answered. She stood in the hallway looking at Yoshiaki and waiting for him to agree.

  Yoshiaki only nodded slightly, saying nothing. His father’s gaze seemed to accuse him of agreeing and made him uncomfortable. He left the room to shower. When he was through, Kimi told him that someone had called. She handed him the message from Kaneshiro. His friend was at a bar and wanted Yoshiaki to meet him. The name of the place was on the note. It was a five-minute walk, a place they’d been several times.

  Yoshiaki dried his hair, put on an old coat that he’d left at the house, and went out. He expected five or six classmates to be there, too, but only Kaneshiro was drinking at the back table. Without asking why they were alone, Yoshiaki sat down on the sofa opposite Kaneshiro and toasted him with a beer. For about half an hour, the two caught up on what was going on in each other’s lives and exchanged news about several friends. Then Kaneshiro began to talk about how T had begun calling frequently about a month before. Kaneshiro hadn’t seen him since graduation, so he’d felt pleased and nostalgic, thanking T for calling. But T’s one-sided rambling was so muddled that Kaneshiro couldn’t make sense of anything he said. He thought at first that T was drunk. But as he continued to listen, he realized he wasn’t. Kaneshiro ended that first call after listening for about ten minutes, but from then on, T began to call every night at ten o’clock. Kaneshiro asked Yoshio and Nishizato, two classmates who’d also stayed behind in the village after graduation, about T. They told him that since returning home from the mainland two years before, T had become mentally unstable and barely left his house. It had become difficult for Kaneshiro to listen and respond to T’s unintelligible string of words, and his wife had become frightened, even telling him to stop taking the calls.

  “I wasn’t trying to be charitable or anything,” Kaneshiro laughed. “I just thought that if I didn’t listen, he’d have no way to vent and might do something drastic. But maybe I’m full of myself.…”

  It seems that T died one hour after talking to Kaneshiro.

  “A classmate died, someone I’d been talking to every day.… Sure, I got depressed. But to tell you the truth, I didn’t get too down.… I just couldn’t stop wondering, you know. There was just something not right.…”

  “You think it was suicide?”

  After contemplating Yoshiaki’s question, Kaneshiro answered. “Even supposing that he fell by accident, it doesn’t make much difference.… I just realized suddenly that we’re getting to be that age, you know. Doesn’t matter if you’re young or old, if we go crazy, some of us, we’re going to kill ourselves.… We don’t know what happened to T on the mainland.… Some say that mental problems run in T’s family. A terrible thing to say, but it seems true. But, even if that were true, there’s something about T’s dying that’s connected to maybe this village … well, he lived in the next village … anyway, or the people who grew up here and got to be our age. I’m not saying everyone’ll go crazy like T did.… But I can’t help thinking we have something in common, me and you. Well, I don’t know about you, but I just can’t help thinking there’s something …”

  Suddenly, Yoshiaki felt as if he’d heard T’s nightly calls to Kaneshiro himself. It wasn’t just that feeling that chilled him but
the realization that the same thing that drove T to his death was inside him. It was forming like a hard tumor and growing almost to a detectable size. Perhaps the pain that he felt when he heard the news of T’s death from Kaneshiro was from the threat of this growth.

  The two kept silent for a while. Then Kaneshiro began to talk about how his third child was born two months before. Because the baby was another girl, his wife was worried that his parents and other relatives were complaining behind their backs.

  “I can’t say that it’s all in her head, but it’s not as bad as other families.… Sorry, we’re back to serious stuff again.” Kaneshiro changed the subject, and they sang karaoke for about an hour before leaving the bar. It was past one when Kaneshiro said that he had to attend another harvest festival ceremony the next morning and they parted.

  As Yoshiaki walked home, T’s and Kaneshiro’s words would not leave his mind. The feeling that the growth was propagating inside him lingered. Suddenly, he wondered what had happened to Gozei. He couldn’t believe that the young men would raid her home. But he decided to check on her, partially to distract him from his other thoughts.

  He stood on the bridge that crossed the Irigami River downstream and gazed at the water hovering in the moonlight. Upstream, both banks were reinforced with concrete. A distance of more than ten meters separated the banks, but the nearly dried-up stream reflecting the twisting and turning moonlight was only two meters wide. During Yoshiaki’s elementary school days, a bridge built by American soldiers had still been there. Rock foundations said to be more than three hundred years old were used as the base and were reinforced with concrete to allow trucks to pass over the bridge. On either shore, mangroves grew, and near the bridge was a large yūna tree with yellow blossoms like a flock of butterflies. Back then, since the river was narrow and the forests in the mountains had hardly been cleared, the water level was high enough to allow small boats to come to the central area of the village, called the machi.

  When heavy rains hit the village the year before Okinawa was reverted to the Japanese mainland, the yūna tree and Gozei’s hut that stood nearby were washed away. The project to widen the river and construct the concrete banks occurred after this flood. Traces of the time before reversion still remained in this area downstream. Mangroves spread out on either side of the river, which widened as it flowed towards the inlet. The blue heron perched on top of a rock in the shallows was startled by Yoshiaki’s presence and flew away. Yoshiaki was also startled by the loud flapping of the bird’s wings. Gozei’s hut, now dark, had a tin roof and was so small that it could have been mistaken for a goat shed. The shabbiness of the hut was hidden in the moonlight, but by day, it looked abandoned.

  After the hut had been washed away by the flood, the men of the village rebuilt it as a charitable gesture. But since then, the men had not gone as far as to keep up the repairs. Yoshiaki knew little about how Gozei lived, since he rarely came to the river to play after he began his middle school club activities. However, he could clearly remember how her hut looked when he was in elementary school before the flood. Her old hut was only slightly bigger than the hut that stood there now, and the roof had been laid with red-clay tiles. The jade of the river, the green of the yūna tree, the yellow flocks of blossoms, and the red-tiled roof all went well together.

  Near the hut, there was a goat shed and a pigpen. The brown feces and urine from the pigpen ran and collected in a stagnant pool, where a disgusting number of tilapia and bora fish gathered. By dropping a large fish hook, made from binding several hooks together, into the swarm of fish and waiting with the rod raised in the ready position, Yoshiaki could get a catch one out of three tries without using any bait. The fish reeked, were inedible, and would only be kicked back into the river. But the pleasure of the catch was enough for him. He remembered Kaneshiro and Gibo hanging their bodies over the edge of the bridge, reaching out with the bamboo poles that they’d cut down on the way home from school and manipulating the pole so that the hook would dangle below the tilapia’s chin.

  Even T, who wouldn’t even have been there that time, appeared in Yoshiaki’s mind as an elementary school boy browned by the summer sun, scratching his neck, red from a heat rash, and intently staring at the movement of the fish hook. Kaneshiro had laughed, noticing Yoshiaki’s distant look, and playfully pushed his shoulder. When they were bored with fishing, Kaneshiro got out a handmade slingshot and took aim at Gozei’s pigs. Yoshiaki and the other boys rolled in laughter, pointing at the pigs as they ran frantically, squealing as their faces and rears were hit. Gozei came out of her hut with a sorrowful expression on her face.

  “Children, don’t be cruel … ,” she said in a small voice.

  Pretending not to hear her, Kaneshiro took one last shot. But, in fact, her sad voice was even more effective than being yelled at and chased away. Her expression lingered in their minds, her face so blackened by the sun that even in midday her features blurred from a slight distance away. At that time, Gozei must have still been in her fifties.

  “Let’s go,” Yoshiaki urged, and together the boys ran back across the bridge.

  The ripples made by the bora fish broke the moonlight shining on the water’s surface. As Yoshiaki leaned against the concrete edge of the bridge and gazed at the mangrove spreading out downstream, someone suddenly grabbed hold of him from behind. He quickly grabbed the handrail and braced his body. “What do you want!” he yelled. A wet hand grabbed his coat lapel. The smell of rotting seaweed wafted in the air. When he grabbed both wrists to try to break free, he found the hands slippery and wet. For an instant, he wondered if it was T.

  “Shōsei.”

  “Who is it?”

  A small shadow buried her head in his chest, shaking her hair loose.

  “Shōsei, hide quick! Yamato soldiers are coming after you!”

  Her thin, hard fingers dug into his shoulders. With incredible strength, she dragged him down, bringing him to his knees.

  “What? Obā! Let go!”

  He tried to break loose, but Gozei was stronger than he expected. As soon as he thought he’d freed his left hand, she was grabbing at his neck.

  “Go! You have to hide! The soldiers are coming!”

  With the moonlight on her back, Gozei’s expression was hidden by the shadows. But he clearly felt the urgency in her voice.

  “Run! Hurry! Run away!! Then let go!”

  When Yoshiaki finally broke loose using all his strength, Gozei’s body pitched forward and fell to the ground. He heard the sound of bone meeting the ground. Though he was still standing, Gozei grabbed hold of him again.

  “Shōsei, don’t leave me behind … ,” she murmured, crawling on her hands and knees after Yoshiaki as he backed away. When he saw her about to rise to her feet, he ran for his house. He didn’t want to see any more of the feeble Gozei. He ran down the path along the northern side of the sacred grove, becoming short of breath after going less than a hundred meters. As he stopped to catch his breath, he sensed her approaching, dragging a wet kimono. “Impossible,” he thought to himself, but feeling as though Gozei were closing in on him, he quickly ran down the dark forest path towards his house.

  Gozei thought that he’d purposely hurt his left arm, leaving it useless. She also thought his slowness and his shabby appearance were an act to fool the villagers. She’d been fooled, too, at first. But one day she watched him as he pumped water from the well and knew from his stern face that he was really an intelligent man who possessed a strong will.

  Gozei called to him five or six times. Although he ignored her, she stood near where he was working and watched him. Soon, he walked over to her with a faint smile on his face. He whispered, “You’ll be killed” and walked away. She realized he was serious. Shivers ran down her spine, but at the same time, she smiled, knowing that her eyes hadn’t deceived her. He wasn’t like the other villagers, all cowards and fools.

  Contrary to what he’d said, Shōsei was the one to approach her next. He grabb
ed her wrists with his right hand, which was rigid as a tree branch. Making sure they weren’t being followed, he pushed her body against his chest, which smelled of the ocean. She licked his neck with its large Adam’s apple. She’d never held the body of a man full of vitality. The bodies of the Japanese soldiers were like rotting, white squid. She wanted Shōsei to take the right hand that he always used to split wood and swing down the ax, splitting the spines of their long, insect-like bodies. There was no movement in the fingers of his left hand, which circled her back as he moaned.

  Under the yūna tree, as they gazed at the surface of the water, Shōsei told her what he’d done as soon as he overheard the drunk soldiers at the inn saying it wouldn’t be long now until the war would come to Okinawa. Right away, he crushed his left wrist with a rock and shoved it into a kiln, feigning an accident. By their third meeting, they were comfortable enough with each other to talk about such things.

  She caressed the nape of his neck, along his backbone and side, writhing with the rough movement of his right hand as it entered the hollow of her legs. She caressed the left arm that hung immobile and enclosed the rigid fingers in her palm. She didn’t have long to spend with Shōsei, who waited for her by the bridge under the yūna tree. During the day, they pretended to ignore each other. But a momentary glance told her that he would be waiting for her that night. He never let her down. In fact, it was Shōsei and not Gozei who had gotten it right. When she returned to the inn, she was terrified by the touch of the rotting, pale-blue bodies, especially by the sergeant called Ishino. He would purposely bring his purple mouth, oozing with blood and pus, close to hers, laughing at her disgusted face. The returning memories brought Gozei to the floor, and she vomited. The tongue had crawled over her body like a slithering worm. How long would she have to bear the agony?

  Three months had passed since Gozei was brought to the village from the brothel in Naha, separate from the Korean comfort women who served the lower-ranking soldiers. An inn only by name, the house was a comfort station for the Japanese officers. She was told of the imminent American invasion, even if she didn’t want to hear it. When she thought she’d spend her last days in that desolate northern Okinawan village comforting Yamato soldiers, she knew she’d rather hang herself by the river, from the yūna tree where the yellow blossoms bloomed in droves. It was then that she saw Shōsei’s face and knew for the first time that there was a man who shared her feelings. He was really an even stronger man than she had imagined. The smell of the forest and the ocean emanated from his entire body. There was a part of him that was regal, like an ancient tree. She thought the villagers, who flattered the soldiers to secure their protection and shrewdly did business with them, could all die and go to hell. Not too far in the future, it would happen. She knew that some day both she and Shōsei would lie bleeding somewhere, left to die and rot away.… She thought that was all right, too.