Islands of Protest

by Davinder L. Bhowmik

  Ever since she could remember, Gozei hadn’t known whose child she was. She reached the age of twenty-three, working as a servant in a brothel. Day after day, she was forced to look after the children, draw water from the well, and learn traditional songs and the sanshin and then to flirt and sell her body to men. What difference did it make when she died? This thought didn’t change even after meeting Shōsei.

  From a distance, they heard the sound of sanshin, drums, and lilting men’s voices. “I’m better than them,” Shōsei said and laughed. Until he hurt his arm, he’d played the sanshin for the village festivals. The villagers were surprised that this man they thought was slow could play the sanshin better and knew more songs than any of the others. But no matter how well he sang for the call-and-response songs, not one woman in the village approached him.… As Shōsei spoke, smiling, the moonlight passed through the branches of the yūna tree and danced on his face. Suddenly filled with a desire for Shōsei and his scent of the forest and ocean, Gozei ran to the sacred grove in the forest, toward the sound of sanshin and singing voices.

  “The festival won’t happen this year either,” she heard Shōsei murmur. It was four years after the war ended that the harvest festival was revived. Gozei would never forget the roar of the crowd as the curtain—made from an American parachute—opened. She stayed in the village after the war, continuing to watch the festival every year. She’d never been allowed to participate, but she never wished to be a part of it.

  Gozei watched the procession from the wooded hills, looking down on the road below, and hid in a shadowy corner of the prayer site to watch the dances and plays on the stage. She saw a girl, who only a short time ago had started preschool, have her stage debut as a high school teenager. She’d now graduated from college and returned to the village as a government employee. The girl danced the plovers dance. Tears filled Gozei’s eyes. She pointed at the amateur movements of the girl’s hands but praised the overall talent that emanated from the younger dancer. Shōsei stood beside her, nodding in agreement. The next moment, she noticed the young women now dancing onstage and felt as though she was there among them and that Shōsei was among the men accompanying the dancers from the side of the stage, dressed in a haori and hakama. In the next instant, the stage lights and the rows of festival lanterns disappeared. She was left standing alone on the paved road leading through the forest.

  Shōsei, where did you go?

  As the moonlight faded, she heard Shōsei’s footsteps beyond the darkness.

  Shōsei, don’t leave me.…

  Her nostrils ached from the breathing tubes they put in her nose. Only shallow breaths could escape from her lips. She saw herself chasing after the slowly fading footsteps, but the self that was watching was crouching underneath the yūna tree.

  After closing the gate and entering the house through the back door, Yoshiaki decided to shower, feeling disgustingly sweaty. He worried that he’d wake his father and make him angry, but the arm where Gozei had grabbed him was slimy and smelled. He quietly entered the shower and quickly washed himself off. He was drying his hair in his room when he heard something banging against the shutters.

  The sound continued intermittently and resounded even as far as Yoshiaki’s room, which was an addition at the back of the house. The door to Gikei’s room was violently shoved open, and footsteps sounded in the hallway. Yoshiaki followed the noise and found his father opening the shutters in the main living room with the lights on. He saw Yorinori’s body recoil as he banged the shutters open.

  “Shōsei.”

  Gozei, who’d been standing under the eaves, threw herself at Gikei’s legs. He instinctively kicked her away. Hearing her pitiful moans as she fell, he called out in a panicked voice, “Obā, are you okay?” He turned to Yoshiaki and yelled, “The phone, the phone!” Should he call the police or the ambulance? Yoshiaki couldn’t decide. Kimi, who’d been awakened by the noise, ran to the entryway and called for an ambulance. Gikei tried to raise Gozei from the floor, apologizing to her. But she would only repeat, “Shōsei, Shōsei,” as she tried to cling to his body. Gikei looked at Yoshiaki, grimacing as the stench wafted from Gozei’s body.

  A few minutes later, lit by the revolving lights, Gozei was led away to the ambulance through the crowd of neighbors that had gathered outside, held on either side by an EMT. Yoshiaki was angered by the people who’d gathered around his father as he stood near the patrol car explaining the situation to a police officer.

  Yoshiaki was also questioned about what had happened, which made him sweaty and uncomfortable again. But this time he didn’t even feel like taking a shower. Seeing Gozei’s senile state three times in one day and, finally, made a fool of by her had gotten to him. When he went into the living room, he said to his mother, “Are they just gonna let that crazy woman run loose?” Kimi seemed lost in thought for a moment, then murmured, “Breaks my heart … makes me remember Grandma,” and she looked towards the Buddhist altar. A memory of his grandmother flashed before his eyes—of her standing helplessly in the hallway staring at the urine spreading at her feet one night when she had tried to go to the bathroom. Suddenly, Yoshiaki felt an overwhelming pity for Gozei and regretted his harsh words.

  The rotating red lights illuminated the crowd that had gathered outside the bar. Everyone stared in fear as the MPs led the black soldier away in handcuffs. Only Gozei cursed the soldier, with her eyes filled with rage. She could hear Yoshiko crying inside the bar. Just a few moments ago, Yoshiko’s crying had moved her, but now she could not suppress her irritation with the girl’s voice. By tomorrow, her neck would turn purple from internal bleeding. Gozei went inside to escape the villagers’ eyes, filled openly with curiosity and scorn. The women surrounded Yoshiko to comfort her. As Gozei returned to her room, she spat out, “She was lucky she wasn’t stabbed with a knife.” The room, lit by a small red bulb, wasn’t even three tatami mats in size. With the futon on the floor, she barely had enough space to change her clothes. Unlike the other women, she didn’t cover her walls with cutouts from the magazines the American soldiers brought them. Water stains from the leaking roof spread down over the thin plywood wall that separated her room from the next. She lay face up on the damp futon and stared at the red lightbulb and thought about Shōsei.

  It was the owner of the inn that was used as a comfort station for the Japanese officers during the war who approached Gozei about working in a brothel serving American soldiers. At that time, she was living in a tent on the elementary school playground after being captured by the Americans in the mountains south of the village. Shimabukuro, the former owner of the inn, and Uchima, a man who said he had taken care of the villagers while they were in the detainment camps, were very persistent. Gozei knew right away that it was a scheme to protect the women of the village and provide an outlet for the American soldiers. “Let the Americans go after the women, old folks, and children in the village,” she thought to herself. She wanted to kill men like Shimabukuro and Uchima who assumed that having sold her body to the Japanese soldiers during the war, she’d have to sell herself to the Americans now that the war was over. But in the end, she accepted, on the condition that they allow her to stay in the village and that they build her a small house out of American surplus materials, by the river near the yūna tree.

  Do you have any idea how much I’ve suffered? The young officer stared ahead and did not respond. You want me to cooperate so that you can protect the village women and children from delinquent American soldiers? Why? Didn’t you lose the war? If you lose, all the women are booty for the American soldiers. I hope they get your wife and your daughters. I’m not even from your village, and I’m not the ‘women and children’ that you keep talking about. Why should I sleep with the soldiers to protect your wives and daughters? These words boiled in her chest, but in the end, she did not speak them. Locked away for more than fifty years, the words flooded out of her, one after another. The moment they were exposed to the air, they rotted and crumbled
away.

  She knew that no matter how long she lived there, she would never be one of them. Even so, she didn’t want to leave the place that held her memories of Shōsei. If she lived near the yūna tree where she had talked with him, felt the heat of his flesh, and smelled his scent of the forest and the ocean, she thought his image would appear. Gozei felt that Shōsei would have given up on her, a woman who’d not only sold herself to the Japanese but was now being used by American soldiers.

  The woman in the next room raised her voice while the American soldier continued to jabber at her. Five women, in such close quarters that they could hear the sound of someone wiping down with a wash cloth, worked serving the soldiers who came from the base built in the next town. Irritated by Gozei’s refusal to make a sound, their movements became violent. Beneath the white body covered with hair like a pig and so large that she could not encircle it, she stared at the red light. How long had she had the dull pain in her stomach? She couldn’t have children anyway.… It wasn’t just women like Gozei who went with the Americans. The village women were thrilled to catch an American soldier and become his “Honey.” Even Yoshiko, who’d been choked by a black soldier, always talked about how she was going to find a nice soldier and go to America with him.

  More than one soldier had asked Gozei to be his “Only,” but she always ignored them. I’m not leaving this village. What had happened to Yoshiko and the other girls who’d stared in shock when she said those words? Were they still alive? What good was living a long life.… The pain only lasted longer. Did Gozei say those words? Or was it Yoshiko? The police officer who’d been sitting beside her grabbed her arm and told her to step out of the ambulance. The spinning red lights lit the river’s surface and dyed the yūna blossoms. A cloud of yellow butterflies that couldn’t take flight but only withered and fell to the ground. Who said that and laughed? Gozei or Yoshiko?

  Two weeks after the harvest festival, Yoshiaki learned that Gozei had been hospitalized at an institution for the elderly in the next town. Over the phone, his mother had told him along with the news of the village that Gozei’s roaming hadn’t stopped after that incident. The district head and the representative of the village council pressured the social welfare office to fill out the paperwork for her to be hospitalized. Since she had no relations, the district head and the councilman acted as her guarantors. They’d even decided that the village would be responsible for her funeral arrangements when she died.

  When Yoshiaki heard that the hospital was the one where his grandmother had spent her last years, he remembered the hallway where old men and women came and went walking slowly with their hands following the walls or being pushed in wheelchairs by family members. He also remembered how in the beginning his grandmother was able to walk to the cafeteria, but a year later she was bedridden. Six months after that, she was unable to respond to people. Gradually, her body weakened, and she died. He thought that Gozei was lucky to be admitted to the home when so many applicants were forced to wait for more than six months. However, when he realized that he would never see Gozei pushing the cart of used bottles and cardboard boxes around the village as she had done as recently as two or three years ago, he felt a pain in his chest.

  After returning to Naha from the harvest festival, Yoshiaki recalled an old memory of when he was in preschool. Masashi, a boy in the oldest group whom they called Mābō, had invited him to his house to see some baby mongooses. Mābō’s father, who liked to hike the mountains, had found a nest and brought them home. It was the first time that Yoshiaki learned that such animals existed. Even with Mābō’s explanations that they were so strong that they could bite a habu snake to death, he could only imagine the sharp fangs and not the rest of its body. This made him even more curious, and he followed Mābō home.

  Mābō lived on the east side of the Irigami, the river that divided the village in half. The buraku, or section of the village, was originally founded on the west side, the location of the sacred grove. But as second and third sons began to clear away land and settle across the river, the buraku spread to the east side. Yoshiaki’s family, whose ancestral home was near the sacred grove, was said to be one of the seven original families who had founded the buraku. Until entering preschool, Yoshiaki had hardly ever crossed the river to the east side. This was the first time that he’d gone alone, without his family. He felt anxious as he crossed the bridge, but he distracted himself by talking to Mābō.

  No one was home when they arrived at Mābō’s house. Mābō brought out some grapes, still a rare treat in Okinawa at the time. As Yoshiaki ate, he peeked into the cardboard box. The three creatures squirming on top of the cotton batting looked exactly like baby mice. Their large eyes had yet to open, and their organs and veins showed through their hairless skin. Mābō picked one up and put it on Yoshiaki’s palm. Inside he was afraid, but he smiled to hide his fear. He listened to Mābō brag how the night before he and his father had soaked the cotton in milk and fed the babies. Feeling the small feet moving on his hand, Yoshiaki wanted to quickly return it to the box. But he couldn’t refuse when Mābō told him that he could have one of the babies. Yoshiaki thanked him and headed home with his hands cupped as if he were scooping up water.

  It was a sweltering day in June. The unpaved road that had been laid with limestone reflected the white sunlight and made it difficult for Yoshiaki to keep his eyes open for long. As he wiped the sweat from his forehead with his shoulder, he panicked over what to do about the creature in his hands. If he brought it home, he knew that his father would be angry. The crying body even looked like a severed finger, making him want to throw it away as soon as he could. He quickened his pace and turned two corners. When he lost sight of Mābō’s house, he turned onto a side road. Leaving the narrow path, he was wandering about in search of the right place when he came to a green sweet potato field spreading between the houses. He looked around and threw the mongoose into a growth of vines.

  The mongoose’s parents would be hiding in the field, and they’d rescue their baby and raise it. He tried to make himself believe that, but he couldn’t escape the reality that he’d killed the small, squeaking creature. When he ran down the path and returned to the main road, the glowing white path and the row of houses seemed suddenly different. He had no idea how to find the river or how to go home. He thought he’d be able to find his way back to Mābō’s house, but he couldn’t even do that. Trying not to cry, he decided to follow the big road. He thought vaguely that at some point he would have to turn either right or left. But he didn’t know where that place would be. Afraid of becoming even more lost by choosing the wrong turn, he ended up passing several turns and intersections. The road paved with limestone was warm. As the row of houses came to an end, rice paddies and fields spread out to his right and left. By this time, tears were running down his face. Unable to stop or turn back, he continued to walk straight ahead as the sun beat down on him.

  The road had been built by the Americans after the war. It cut through the forest, known as Shijimui, and ran north as far as the next village. Before he knew it, Yoshiaki found himself at the edge of his village. Several graves were dug into the base of the cliff of the forest. He saw figures standing and sitting in front of the graves—a woman holding the hand of a boy about the same age as Yoshiaki and a teenager in a white shirt, slumped over with his neck sunk into his chest. A thin man, about the same age as his father, was smoking and leaning against the stone wall encircling the yard. He realized that these people had come from inside the graves.

  When he walked through the forest, he felt himself watched by many eyes amidst the flock of trees rising up on either side. As he entered the next village, rows of newly constructed concrete graves continued for a while, then the tobacco fields began to spread out before him. When the large leaves began to open, pale-pink flowers bloomed. There were no houses in sight. By this time, Yoshiaki was bawling. He climbed a long hill and stopped when the road swung to the right. The road forked. If he w
ent straight, he would have to pass along the narrow path through the sugarcane fields. He knew instinctively he should not take that path. He knew as well that if he kept following the big road, he’d only go farther and farther from his home. Even so, he couldn’t take the simple step of turning back. How long had he stood there, paralyzed?

  The voice that called to Yoshiaki, now crouched on the ground as if the sun were beating him down from above, was Gozei’s.

  “Yoshiaki, is that you? What’re you doing in a place like this?” He tearfully let out a heavy sob. “You’re lost.… Aiya.… A little one like you got all the way here by yourself.…”

  Leaving her cart filled with leftover food and used bottles at the side of the road, Gozei helped Yoshiaki up from the ground and wiped his face with the cloth she had wrapped around her head. Taking out a bit of brown sugar from a bag that hung at her hip, she placed it in his mouth. The sweetness with the lingering scent of a plant made his dry mouth water. The tension in his body began to soften. Gozei placed him in the cart and pulled it down the hill, reaching the forest. Several brown-eared bulbul birds passed overhead, crying loudly. Looking up, Yoshiaki saw a snake as large as a man’s arm hanging from a branch of the banyan tree and leaning out over the road, with a bulbul in its mouth.