by Alan Gratz
If they’re so frightened of us, what are they doing here? Ray wondered. He lowered his rifle and started for a woman with a baby in her arms.
“Some of ’em are Jap soldiers!” Big John cried.
Ray watched in stunned horror as a Japanese soldier dressed as one of the Okinawans tossed aside the ratty blanket he hid beneath and shot the Old Man dead. More Japanese soldiers did the same, and all hell broke loose.
“Don’t let ’em through! Shoot! Shoot!” Big John yelled, and the Marines opened up on them. They didn’t know who was Japanese and who was Okinawan, and they didn’t wait to find out.
When the last rifle fired, the Marines stood in the pouring rain surrounded by bodies. Some of the dead were American Marines. Some were Japanese soldiers. But many more of them were Okinawans. Refugees who had needed their help.
Ray let the tip of his rifle drop into the mud and looked around in horror. In his panic he’d fired round after round into the crowd. He had to have killed innocent Okinawans. He knew it. In just a few awful seconds, he had become the monster these people were so afraid of. More of a monster than his father had ever been.
And the worst part was, Ray knew he would do it again when he had to.
Hideki didn’t know where his sister was now, but he knew the last place she’d been before the American monsters came: her high school. That was where he decided to start.
The schoolhouse was still standing when he got there, but a big hole had been blown in one side of it by an American bomb.
“Kimiko!” Hideki cried. He dropped the sack with the Emperor’s photographs and ran inside.
What he saw made him gasp.
Students lay dead all around Hideki. Some of them had been thrown across the room by the blast. Others were slumped over their desks. The bomb had hit while the students were in class.
Hideki would have retched if he’d had anything in his stomach.
He wanted to run, to get as far away from this horrible scene as he could, but Hideki had to know if any of the girls was his sister. He went up and down the rows of desks, examining each girl’s face. But none of them was Kimiko. He was sure of it. Relief washed over him. It felt wrong to be happy his sister wasn’t here when so many other girls hadn’t been so lucky, but it meant there was a chance his sister was still alive somewhere.
Kimiko had been one of the older girls at the school. Perhaps she had already been sent to her nursing assignment. But where?
Hideki searched the room for clues. There were still lessons scratched on the board, the neat kanji starting in the upper right corner and moving down and left across the blackboard. A Japanese language lesson. On the wall beside the blackboard, next to the hole the bomb had made, was a framed photo of the school’s faculty and students. The girls wore their best clothes—kimonos for some, fancy Western dresses for others—and their male teachers wore kimonos or jackets and ties.
There was a brighter spot on the wall next to the photograph where another frame had hung but was now missing. A picture of His Majesty the Emperor, Hideki guessed. Someone had taken it, no doubt to try to protect the Emperor’s mabui, but they had left the photo of the girls where it was.
Hideki examined the papers scattered around the room. Most of them were pages of student work, but one was an official communication from army headquarters. It ordered all fifth-year girls from the school to report to the army hospital in Ichinichibashi. Hideki’s heart leaped. Kimiko was a fifth-year student! That must be where she was! But Ichinichibashi was a town on the southern part of the island. The same direction the American monsters were going.
Hideki would have to get past them to find his sister.
I can’t do it, he thought. He remembered the disastrous first meeting of the Americans and the Blood and Iron Student Corps, and he was frightened all over again. It would be so much easier to run north, to hide in the part of the island the Americans had already passed through. But it was his father’s dying wish that Hideki find Kimiko, to restore what was left of their family. And Hideki had promised him he would.
The hole in the wall of the school was like the lens of a camera, and through it Hideki saw Shuri Castle in the distance. Shuri Castle was a big four-story red building—the biggest in all of Okinawa—with a Chinese pagoda-style roof and ornate columns.
Hideki thought of what Lieutenant Tanaka, the photographer, had said. What story did this picture tell? What had happened before this moment? What was happening now? What would happen next?
What had come before, Hideki had learned in school: For hundreds of years, Shuri Castle had been the royal palace of the Ryukyu Kingdom. Then the Japanese had invaded and conquered Okinawa in 1609—that fateful year Shigetomo had cursed his clan forever with his cowardice.
Now? Now the Japanese army ruled the island from the caves and tunnels Hideki and his classmates had helped dig beneath Shuri Castle last year. The castle was a fortress, and so was Okinawa. That was the story Hideki saw, and it gave him hope that the Imperial Japanese Army would win and he might actually find his sister.
What happened next? Hideki would step into the picture. Head south, toward Ichinichibashi and Kimiko. Shuri Castle was on the way, and if there was anyplace safe on the whole island, IJA headquarters had to be it.
Hideki heard strange voices outside, and he froze. American soldiers! A whole platoon of them, coming into the village! His hand went to one of the grenades in his pocket, but just as quickly he let it go. He might be able to kill one or two soldiers, but the others would kill Hideki just as quick, and then he would never find his sister. He had to find somewhere to hide instead.
Hideki heard a creak on the porch steps and threw himself onto one of the empty desks. He flopped over the desktop and pretended to be dead. It wasn’t hard. His uniform shirt and pants were so filthy they were unrecognizable, and his hair was matted and mangy. A buzzing fly crawled over his hands and face and up inside his cap.
His cap! Hideki whipped it off his head and dropped it at his feet. He flopped back down on the desktop just seconds before the American soldier came in the room. Would the American see his cap? Would Hideki have to kill him with his grenade after all?
Hideki kept his eyes screwed shut and held his breath, his heart pounding in his chest. Heavy boots shuffled a few steps into the room and then stopped. Had the soldier spotted him? Was he aiming his rifle at Hideki right now? Hideki waited, his lungs burning, sweat soaking his back. When Hideki didn’t hear anything more for almost a full minute, he pried his eyes open to take a peek.
There he was. An American soldier. Not much older than he was, Hideki realized with a start. He didn’t even have a beard. His face was round and freckled. He wore a big green-and-brown poncho over his backpack and a matching helmet on his head, both of which made him look more like a turtle-man than a soldier. He was wet and mucky, just like Hideki, and he dripped water on the dry floor.
The soldier hadn’t spotted Hideki. He was looking instead at the framed picture of the students and faculty. What in the world did he want with that?
The soldier stared at it for a few seconds more, then took the photograph out of its frame. The soldier folded the picture in half and put it in a pocket under his poncho.
But why? Hideki wondered. Did the soldier know one of the girls in the photograph? Was he tracking one of them down? Was there something special about this school?
“Rei?” a man called from outside. He asked a question in English that Hideki didn’t understand, and then called the soldier’s name again. “Rei?”
The soldier in the room with Hideki called back, and Hideki squeezed his eyes shut and played dead as the soldier picked up his rifle and left. Hideki didn’t breathe again until the soldier was long gone.
Ray looked at the picture he’d taken from the schoolroom as he and his platoon continued their march south. The strangest thing about the photo was that no one was smiling. It was like they all knew they were going to end up dead in that classroom. Ray wondered if the sai
lors on the battleships would still have fired if they knew they were killing schoolchildren. Whole villages of innocent people.
But he had done that. So why should the sailors be any different?
Big John put an arm around Ray’s neck and gave him a playful headlock. “Still a softy after all this time, huh, Barbecue?”
Ray tried to smile. Big John liked to talk tough, and he was tough, but Big John did have a heart inside that big barrel chest of his. Ray was sure of it. It had just been hardened over by combat. Ray had learned to hate the Japanese as much as Big John and the other old-timers did, but he still held out hope Big John would start to see the Okinawans differently.
The big guns of the US Navy fleet offshore erupted like thunder, and Ray and Big John froze. The battleships kept up a constant bombardment on the southern part of the island all day, and like the rain, everybody had just gotten used to it by now. But this was something new.
“It’s different this time,” Ray said. He was surprised to find he’d been around long enough to realize it. “I hear 16-inch, 5-inch, antiaircraft rockets. They’re shooting everything at once.”
Big John nodded.
“What is it? What’s happening?” Zimmer asked.
“Has to be a Jap counterattack. Big one,” Big John said.
They all waited while Gonzalez radioed in. He blinked in surprise when he finally got through and learned what it was.
“They’re celebrating,” he told them. “Germany surrendered. Hitler committed suicide. The Nazis are through.”
Ray felt himself go slack. He knew he should be happy about the news—the war in Europe had been going on for six long years, and it had cost the lives of millions of people, soldiers and civilians alike. And he was glad it was over, for the sake of all the people who were still fighting it. But it didn’t change anything for Ray or his squad. Looking around at the rest of the Marines, he could see that most of them felt the same way.
“But … but that’s great, isn’t it?” Zimmer asked, seeing all the gloomy faces around him. He hadn’t been on Okinawa long enough to understand.
“It’s good and all,” Big John said, “but Nazi Germany might as well be on the moon for all it matters to us.”
Another sergeant brought a sack of mail up through the lines, and everyone gathered around to see if they had gotten a letter from home.
Ray had a letter from his mother. It was mostly about planting the new corn crop back on the farm in Nebraska, and what his young cousins were up to. But she had included a photograph too. It was a picture of Ray and his father at the state fair, mugging for the camera in silly pirate costumes. Ray had an eye patch and a fake beard and an old-fashioned flintlock pistol, and Pa wore a bandanna and brandished a wooden cutlass. They were laughing and leaning into each other, a loving father and son. Ray figured his mother had sent him the picture to remind him that his father wasn’t always a terrible person, and for a moment it worked. Ray smiled to himself at the memory of that day, and he got homesick all over again.
But then Ray remembered a night not long after the one at the fair, when his Pa had stormed drunk from the house, leaving broken furniture in his wake. Ma had begged Ray not to judge his father too harshly. “He’s not the man I married,” she told Ray. “He was different before the war.”
They were both different now—Ray and his father. But they were still the happy people in the photograph too, weren’t they?
Could they be both at once?
“What’d you get, Busko?” Gonzalez asked one of the other Marines.
“Letter from my sweetheart, Sarah.” Busko beamed. “She’s training to be a teacher back in North Carolina. Met her on Atlantic Beach when I was down there training at Camp Lejeune.”
“Gonna move in with her parents when you get back?” Zimmer kidded him.
“I hope not—her daddy runs a funeral home!”
“Hey, get this,” Zimmer said. He held up a piece of paper. “I got a letter from the Missouri Department of Transportation. They say if I don’t pay off my traffic tickets, they’re gonna come arrest me!”
That got a lot of laughs. “Now, that I’d like to see!” Ray said.
“You oughtta let ’em do it,” said Big John. “Even jail’d be better than this everlovin’ rain.”
As they got closer to the front lines, they passed exhausted soldiers headed north for a break. They were bloody and bandaged and muddy. They stumbled along, dog-tired, their heads down and eyes on the ground. On the rare occasion that one of them looked up, Ray saw that thousand-yard stare. They looked like ghosts. Ray felt a lead weight grow heavier in his stomach, and it got harder and harder to pick up his feet and move forward.
One of the ghosts glanced at Ray for a second as they passed. “Take plenty of grenades with you down there, Marine,” he said.
Farther on, Ray saw the evidence of the hard-fought battle alongside the muddy road: empty ammo boxes, spent rifle clips, bloody bandages, bullet-riddled jackets and trousers. The American dead had already been removed, but there were dead Japanese everywhere.
Ray winced and had to look away. Ray was a hunter. He had killed deer and stripped their skins. But this was different. It was unnatural. Brutal. After seeing these horrible, broken bodies, Ray wasn’t sure he could ever hunt again.
Just like Pa, Ray realized. It had always been Ray’s uncle who took him hunting.
A sudden thought struck Ray: Was this why his Pa had argued so strongly against him enlisting? Had his father actually been trying to protect Ray from becoming the monster he had become?
Mortar shells exploded along the road, and Ray and his squad dove facedown into the muck. Mud and rock geysered up around them, and the earth shook with the thunder of artillery. The Japanese were shooting at them in the daylight? This never happened up north!
“Into the foxholes!” Big John bellowed, and they leaped into trenches that had been dug and re-dug a dozen times since Love Day a month ago. Ray held on to his helmet while the mortars fell all around them with the rain.
“Zimmer! Lemme see that letter you got from the Missouri D.O.T.!” Big John hollered.
Zimmer didn’t understand and neither did anyone else, but he handed it over anyway. Big John took a grease pencil out of his pocket and scrawled the word DECEASED across the envelope in big block letters.
“There you go,” Big John said. “Now you can send that back to them in advance, and they won’t bother you no more.”
Hideki’s foot stuck in the mud. He tugged and tugged on it until his foot came right out of his boot. It took him ages to dig his boot out in the darkness.
When he could finally walk again, Hideki staggered to the top of a hill and stopped for a minute, bone-weary. He had to travel by night—that was the only time the American battleships stopped shelling the island.
Hideki made sure he was still pointed toward the dark silhouette of Shuri Castle in the distance. If Shuri Castle was still standing, the Americans couldn’t be winning too much. Hideki felt a swell of pride at that. As long as Shuri Castle still stood, so too did Okinawa.
Hideki took another step forward and his feet went out from under him. He fell on his back, and suddenly he was tumbling and sliding down a steep, muddy slope. He crashed into the shattered remains of tree stumps but bounced off them, was lashed by saplings but couldn’t grab them. There was nothing he could do to stop his long, dizzying barrel roll down the hill until he plunged headfirst into a pool of mud.
Hideki’s skin crawled, and with a horrified yelp, he realized he was covered in maggots. They were in his hair and inside his shirt and down his pants. Hideki screamed and scrambled away, tearing at his clothes. He stripped off his shirt and his shoes and his pants and both socks—even the shorts he wore as underpants.
Hideki ran his shaking hands over every inch of his body, now glad for the pounding, incessant rain that washed him clean. His skin still crawled, and his shuddering turned into a constant tremble in the cold rain. Hideki w
rapped his arms around himself and shivered. But he would not put his clothes back on. Not with them covered in maggots.
Hideki had never felt so naked before. So utterly helpless and exposed. Everything he was, the person he had been, all of it had been stripped away. He was nothing. Nobody.
He was a ghost.
Hideki’s ceramic grenades glistened in the mud. Miraculously, they hadn’t cracked in the fall. Hideki remembered Lieutenant Colonel Sano’s words to him and all the other boys: One grenade is for the American monsters coming to kill your family. You are to use the other grenade to kill yourself. Hideki hadn’t used either of his grenades. He’d been too frightened to throw one at the Americans. Might be too frightened to ever throw one at the Americans.
Did that mean he should use one on himself here and now? The way Lieutenant Colonel Sano had told him?
Hideki wanted to. No—that wasn’t true. He didn’t want to be here, now. He didn’t want to be naked and shivering and afraid. But he didn’t want to die. And if he used his grenade on himself, he could never fulfill his promise to his father to find his sister.
Still shivering, Hideki picked up the sack with the photos of His Majesty the Emperor. Some pictures had fallen out and he had no hope of finding them, but he saved what he could.
The sack and his two grenades were all he took with him.
Hideki trudged on until he heard voices in the darkness—foreign voices, Americans. Will they even see me? Hideki wondered. Am I really a ghost?
But no, he must be alive. Not even death could be this cold. Hideki gave the American camp a wide berth, his eyes searching the darkness for anything that might give him shelter or warmth.
There—a blacker spot in the darkness. Was that the opening of a cave? So close to the American camp? Hideki staggered over to it.
“Yōkai,” someone whispered at him out of the darkness.
Hideki froze. Yōkai was the Japanese word for a spirit. A ghost.
“I—I’m not a yōkai,” Hideki said, his teeth chattering. “I’m—”