by Steve Bein
“Hayano-chan, you said you saw something growing in my mom’s belly, neh?”
“Yes.” Her voice creaked with sleepiness.
“How big was it?”
He saw her shrug under her covers. “Maybe like a yam.”
Keiji swallowed. How long had it been since his mother had her surgery? Two weeks? Three? And back then the doctor had removed a tumor the size of an egg. “You can see the future, can’t you?”
“Don’t know.”
“You can.” He could not say the rest. The cancer coming back. Someday a tumor as big as a yam. Engulfing the organs around it. Killing her. Maybe before the end of the war. Maybe when Keiji was at his duty station. So close to home and yet not there. Not with his parents as a son should be. Not at her side to say good-bye.
He cried until he could not cry anymore; then he fell asleep.
61
The little brass hammer battered the bells atop Keiji’s alarm clock and jarred him out of sleep. His father had always been able to wake at any time he chose, but Keiji hadn’t inherited that gift, and getting up in the winter and spring was always the worst. Moving from the warm confines of his futon to the cold floor was the hardest thing he had to do in any given day—or so he felt, at least, in the moments after his hand fumbled blindly to silence the damnable clock.
It was set early this morning, as it was the morning before: Keiji knew he could not afford to be late for Matsumori ever again. He got himself dressed, got Hayano dressed and fed, and the two of them were out the door before Keiji’s parents made it out of bed. As Keiji and Hayano walked toward Tora-no-mon, he said to her, “How about explaining the thing you were going to explain yesterday? About the tiger and how you knew the butcher shop wouldn’t fall down, remember?”
“All right.” She turned her head as if to look directly at the sword. “The tiger protects the mountain. He lives there. There’s a beautiful lady, and when she comes by the tiger, the tiger has to kill her. But if the tiger leaves his house, his house might fall down. The forest spirit is going to wreck it if the tiger goes away.”
“Who is the forest spirit?”
“The forest spirit is the defender of the trees. It has a great power: it can wreck things. It wrecks its enemies, but in some stories it wrecks its friends too.”
None of it made any sense to Keiji, but the fact that she’d known the name of his sword and she’d seen his mother’s cancer was enough to make him try to sort it out. As with the war effort, frustration would have to make way for necessity.
But by the time they reached the Intelligence building, he still hadn’t been able to get a straight answer from her about the identity of the beautiful woman, nor about who this defender of the trees was supposed to be. Keiji had no choice but to leave Hayano under the watchful eye of the butcher, to whom he gave ten yen he’d borrowed from his father before leaving the house. “For yesterday and the day before,” he told the old man, “and for today and the rest of the week too, if you’re willing. I’ll come back every day after six.”
Keiji arrived at the Intelligence building thirty minutes early, set water boiling for tea even before the secretaries arrived, and started analyzing intelligence reports of the Solomon Islands. As near as he could tell, the islands were all but undefended. Once taken, keeping them from the Americans would be a trick, but seizing the islands would not be difficult. He wondered how many battle groups were already within striking distance of the islands, and how soon he could begin an analysis of the invasion.
“Kiyama,” General Matsumori said. “You’re early. Good. You can take a hint.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well done with that report yesterday on the Philippines. I’m putting you in charge of rerouting personnel down there. You’ll sort out where we’ll keep POWs too, of course. Get to it.”
“What of Guadalcanal, sir?”
Matsumori waved him off. “You’ll get your share of the glory. We all will. But we’ll take care of today before we worry about tomorrow. All right by you?”
“Yes, sir. Of course, sir.”
“I’m ever so pleased.”
The general went to his office, and Keiji exchanged his maps of the Solomons for maps of the Philippines. Gradually the other intelligence officers arrived and set about their tasks. The smells of coffee and tea and old paper filled the room, as did the slow whirring of the ceiling fan and the occasional cough or sniffle.
In its own way it was the optimal environment for intelligence work. Each man had his own assignment, and since there was no need for conversation, the only distractions came when someone else required Keiji’s maps. He shared them when he had to, got them back as he could, and relied upon field reports for the rest of his data.
By six o’clock he’d drawn up a preliminary assessment. In eight pages he’d calculated how many officers ought to be sent per five thousand POWs, which officers were both suitable to the task and near at hand, what support personnel they would require, and which aircraft and naval vessels could accomplish the redeployments as efficiently as possible. Any one of a dozen hypotheses might have been ill founded—he had no idea how many POWs there would be, nor how many of the officers he’d selected were already KIA, nor how many of his chosen vessels were sunk or damaged—but as an initial assessment he thought it wasn’t bad.
Again he had dinner with Hayano and his parents, and again he delivered the girl to the butcher shop the next morning on the way to work. She was a sweet child. She didn’t deserve to have her mother run off on her. But it was wartime, and people were becoming unpredictable. Perhaps it was the rationing that made them that way, Keiji mused, but what could be done for that? Sugar, paper, gasoline—they were all in short supply, all vital for the war effort. Where had the samurai spirit gone? Where was the selflessness, the sacrifice for the emperor, the reliability in times of turmoil? If the newsreels showed Americans abandoning their daughters or letting their grown women become pickpockets in the streets, he might have understood, but how could it happen in Tokyo?
He arrived to find his preliminary assessment of the Philippine deployment missing from his desk. As he shuffled through his other papers in search of it, he heard the heels of General Matsumori’s boots clip-clop into the room. Keiji snapped to attention.
“At ease. This is good, Kiyama. Itō wasn’t wrong about you.” The general strode across the room and dropped his assessment—annotated—on Keiji’s desk. “The Oshima is docked in Nagasaki for repairs, by the way. You’ll have to find a different merchantman. And Colonel Arai is a libertine. Have you ever met the man?”
“No, sir.”
“He should be fighting on the sumo circuit, if only he weren’t so old. No good to send him down to the tropics; he’d just sweat to death.”
“I’ll replace him, sir.”
Matsumori waved his hand. “Already done. I’ve got just the man for you. Iwasaki’s his name. He did a good bit of fighting in Nanking and he understands how to make the enemy feel fear. Just the man to cow those Americans and Filipinos into submission.”
“I’ll track him down, sir.”
“Good. Do you read English, Kiyama?”
“Only what they taught us in intelligence school.”
“That’s more than I can do. I’ve got a Californian newspaper being wired to me, and I want to know what’s going through those people’s minds from day to day. From now on, when you get here in the morning, come straight to my office and go over the headlines. If there’s anything there that you think I need to know, give me a translation of the article. Don’t spend all day at it; an hour should do.”
“I’ll do my best, sir.”
“I expect nothing less.” The general turned to leave, then paused. “Say, Kiyama, that’s a fine sword you’ve got there.”
“Sir?”
“Your sword. I recognize fine craftsmanship when I see it. May I?”
Keiji withdrew the blade from its sheath and handed it to the general with a bo
w. “Extraordinary,” Matsumori said. “Almost floats on the air, doesn’t it? And yet as sturdy as the heart of an oak tree. I’d say this is very old steel. Would I be right?”
“You would, sir. I’m told it’s an Inazuma.”
Matsumori’s eyebrows arched at that. “Is it? Incredible. You know, today most people don’t believe Inazuma ever existed. Even men like General Itō, men who have a passion for swords, doubt he was real. Hold a sword like this, though, and there’s no doubt the creator was one of a kind.”
Matsumori angled the blade to catch the light. “Believe it or not, Kiyama, this is the second Inazuma I’ve held in my own two hands. Quite a fortunate life, neh? Two Inazumas. The other happens to be my own. I shall have to let you see it sometime.”
“I’d like that, sir.”
“Good. Back to work.”
62
Keiji came home in time to hear a fit of furious coughing from the back room. “You’ll be all right,” Hayano’s little voice kept saying. “You’ll be all right.”
On any other day, he would have asked his father how his mother was doing. This time, hearing Hayano’s words and knowing who had spoken them, he thought they were not mere consolation. If one who could see the future said, “You’ll be all right,” to Keiji there was no cause for alarm.
He found his father standing in the doorway to the kitchen, leaning and watching the door from which the coughs came. “Hi, Dad,” Keiji said. “Let me help you with dinner.”
The family ate together in the back room—the oncologist said it was best for Yasu to stay away from smoke, and therefore away from the kitchen and dining room—and afterward Hayano played her shakuhachi. Yasu clapped and otherwise tried not to exert herself; every time she laughed, she would lapse into paroxysms of coughing.
That night, as Keiji lay on his pillow looking at the ceiling, he heard sobbing from near his feet. Sitting up, he saw Hayano was crying.
“What’s wrong?”
“Am I a goze, Keiji-san?”
“I don’t know. I think so.”
“I can’t see my mom.”
“I know, sweetheart.”
“No you don’t!” Hayano pounded her little fist on the tatami floor. “If you can’t see your mom, that just means she’s not in here. If I can’t see my mom, that means she’s not coming. Because I can see the future, can’t I?”
She broke down wailing. She cried into her pillow, then into her hands, then into Keiji’s shoulder. He held her there, tight against his chest, rocked her until the tears soaked the fabric of his yukata and she stopped struggling to get free. At long last she stopped crying, and used the sleeve of his yukata to wipe her nose. He didn’t care. He held her until she was asleep, and because he could not bear the thought of waking her, he lay down and nestled her beside him. He slept alongside her as if she were his own daughter, and both of them slept the sleep of the dead, peaceful and dreamless and warm.
63
The Californian newspaper was not at all like the intercepted memoranda he’d analyzed in intelligence school. The sentences were longer, many of the verbs unknown. Journalism did not admit much room for artistic flair, but compared to military memos, translating the articles was like interpreting poetry.
Keiji took on just one article, which pertained to something called Executive Order 9066 and had rather a lot to do with Japanese people in the western United States. It seemed they’d been rounded up for the last six weeks or so, not unlike the Jews under Hitler and Stalin. Keiji thought General Matsumori would be interested.
There was another article, one Keiji tried to piece together but did not bother to translate. It claimed new discoveries that Japanese troops had committed terrible atrocities in southern China, particularly in Nanking, including rapes, burning, torture, and wholesale slaughter.
Keiji would have written it off as propaganda were it not for the level of detail. Dates were given, body counts, locations, causes of death. Japanese bayonets were mentioned, and swords and rifles too. He could not doubt it: something awful had happened in that city. Could the Chinese have done it to their own kin? He could not be sure—but neither could he say with certainty that his own countrymen were not involved.
He translated as much of the 9066 article as he could manage in an hour—no more than a rough sketch of the highlights, which he hand-carried to Matsumori’s office as soon as he finished. There he found the general in conversation with a lanky man wearing colonel’s stripes. “Kiyama,” Matsumori said with a smile, “here’s someone for you to meet. Colonel Iwasaki, this is Lieutenant Kiyama. He’s new in our division and already making waves. Neh, Kiyama? It’s because of him that you have your new command in the Philippines, Colonel.”
“Is that so?” said Iwasaki. He had a trim, close-cropped mustache like the general’s and wore the decorations of a man who had seen long years in the service. “You have my thanks.”
As was his wont, the general was in his shirtsleeves, the presence of a war hero notwithstanding. “Iwasaki here is going to corral those POWs in Mindanao,” said Matsumori.
“Ah, good,” said Keiji. “I understand you fought in China some years ago, sir? In Nanking?”
“That’s right,” Iwasaki said. “Showed those bastards a thing or two about who’s running Asia.”
He said it calmly enough, but there was something in his demeanor that made Keiji shiver. Indeed, it was the very serenity with which he spoke. This was a man who had seen the horrors of battle and was not troubled in the slightest. Even a schoolyard bully could appreciate the emotional turmoil in his violence. This was no bully. He was passionless, devoid of morality; a shark.
Matsumori slapped the two of them on the back. “What say we have a drink and a spot of lunch, gentlemen? I can trust both of you for a bit of sake, neh? Maybe a whiskey?”
Keiji balked. “On duty, sir?”
“Duty? Lieutenant, we’re on the verge of taking the Philippines! The Solomons are next! If victory isn’t cause enough for a drink, then this isn’t an army worth fighting for.”
The stairs of the Intelligence building were easily broad enough for three or four men to walk abreast, but General Matsumori lagged behind the other two because of his limp. With one hand on his considerable belly and the other on the handrail, the general said, “Say there, Iwasaki, that’s a handsome sidearm you’re wearing.”
“My pistol, sir? It’s standard-issue—”
“No, no, the sword, son. May I see it?”
Iwasaki’s weapon cleared its scabbard in a flash. Keiji had never seen a draw so fast. It flashed again, and before he knew it the blade was at his throat.
“Beautiful, isn’t she? Those Chinese bastards never saw her coming either.”
Keiji stood very still and looked down at the gleaming steel. The temper patterns along the edge resembled those of his own sword, like little waves on a tiny sea.
“A fine weapon,” said Matsumori. “Very old too, I should think.”
“I wouldn’t know, sir,” said Iwasaki. He spun the sword once in the air and resheathed it. “Someone told my father it might be a Muramasa, but my father met a sword scholar at the Tokugawa Art Museum who was certain it’s older.”
“Does it have a name?” asked the general.
“It may have at one time. I don’t know. I’ve named her Glorious Sun. For the empire, sir.”
“Excellent!” Matsumori clapped. “My own blade is called Glorious Victory. We’ll drink to both for the empire, neh? Come on, Kiyama. Don’t lag behind.”
Keiji followed the two of them out of the building and down the main thoroughfare bisecting the Tora-no-mon district. Matsumori was pointing out the finer places to eat and drink in the area—what was left of them, anyway; the earthquake had leveled most of them, and of the few survivors, more than half were ravaged by fire. A tavern with four standing walls and an able-bodied bartender wasn’t ordinarily a rare find in Tokyo, but after walking a few blocks, General Matsumori joked that he shoul
d have sent an advance recon.
“Sir,” Keiji ventured, “I think I know of a place.”
“Speak up, Kiyama. Do you mean to tell me you can find us real live booze around here?”
“Do you know that butcher’s shop just south of our post? I think the sushi restaurant behind it is up and running again.”
“So long as they’ve got a few unbroken bottles, I’m game. Lead on, Lieutenant.”
Keiji did as he was told, though he was careful to keep his distance; he had no wish to be within a sword’s length of Colonel Iwasaki. Workmen and shop owners scurried about them, busy as ants. Teams of three and four erected new wall frames. Individual men and women replaced windowpanes or reassembled broken furniture. There was no division of labor among the sexes, for every hand was needed. Even the children’s hands were put to work, armed with little brushes to sweep the dust out of nooks and crannies. The air was heavy with smells of pulverized plaster and smoldering wood.
Those adults who had no more useful talents shoveled rubble into the street for collection. The collectors themselves made slower progress, heaping the detritus into the back of a horse-drawn wagon. At first the sight of the horses took Keiji aback, but that was his soldier’s thinking again. Before boot camp he would have understood immediately that gasoline was much too precious a resource for civilian uses such as this. Besides, in the aftermath of an earthquake, horses were more nimble than trucks.
“There she is!” he heard a voice cry, instantly snapping him out of his reverie. “There’s the lady! Get her, tiger! Get her!”
It was Hayano, and despite the cloth over her eyes she was pointing right at Iwasaki.