by Alan Gratz
There was a Japanese soldier here too.
Hideki took a step back toward the entrance of the cave, but Yoshio was too fast for him.
“This is my friend Hideki, from school!” Yoshio told everyone. He put an arm around Hideki and gave him a playful squeeze.
Friend? Since when were they friends?
“I was just helping Yoshio bring the barrel back,” Hideki explained. He backed away from Yoshio. “I won’t take up any of your space.”
“No!” the Japanese soldier cried. He ran to block Hideki’s way out of the cave. “You can’t go! It’s not safe. There are Americans everywhere!” There was a nervous twitch in his cheek, and his hands shook like he was freezing. He peered nervously through the cave’s small entrance. “Did anyone follow you back?” he demanded, his eyes big.
“No,” Hideki said. He was tired. So very, very tired. And now he had another unhinged Japanese soldier to deal with. One had tried to force him out to fight against the Americans, and this one wouldn’t let him leave. Hideki put his head in his hands. All he wanted was to lie down. Close his eyes. Escape the constant pulsing in his ears.
“I—I don’t understand,” Yoshio whispered to Hideki. “Private Maeda wasn’t like this yesterday.”
Yesterday they probably had more food, Hideki thought. Weeks inside this stinking cave with bombs falling outside and dwindling food and water had driven Private Maeda close to his breaking point.
Before the Americans had invaded, Hideki had known the Japanese soldiers to be demanding taskmasters. But they had never been crazy. Not like this. The war had changed Yoshio somehow for the better, and it had changed soldiers like Private Maeda for the worse.
Hideki watched Private Maeda eye the door warily, and wondered how long it would be until the soldier turned that suspicious look on the Okinawans.
Hideki fought the fog in his head and scanned the cave, looking for any other way out. But the only one he could see was through the front entrance, past Private Maeda. Would Maeda shoot him if he tried to leave? Was there any way he could slip past him?
The water barrel. Private Maeda had sent Yoshio out tonight to refill the water barrel, and he would send some other expendable Okinawan out to refill it tomorrow. That was how Hideki would get out. The next time they needed a water boy, he would volunteer to go, and he would never come back.
Hideki ran through fire, chased by a cackling kijimunaa. Kijimunaa were little naked forest sprites with big heads and flaming red hair. Hideki zigged and zagged, but he couldn’t escape it. Then the pine tree loomed up ahead of him again, and again there was nowhere to turn. Hideki knew what was coming, what waited for him around the other side of that pine tree, but he couldn’t stop, couldn’t stop. And suddenly there he was. The American soldier. Rei. Hideki barreled into him, and then the dream exploded with the force of a grenade.
“Ahhhh! No! No! I’m sorry!” Hideki cried. He shot straight up, his chest tight, his face covered in sweat.
The others in the cave around him woke up, grumbling, and then turned over to go back to sleep.
“Keep that boy quiet, or I’ll make him quiet!” Private Maeda hissed from his guard post at the front of the cave.
Hideki ran a hand over his face. He had a fever, he was sure of it, and he shivered even though he was burning up inside.
“Here, my dear,” an old Okinawan woman whispered, making him jump. The woman’s face was wrinkled, and she wore a matching blue bashōfu kimono and kerchief. She had brought Hideki a cup of dirty water from the water barrel he and Yoshio had carried back to the cave.
As Hideki nodded his thanks and took the cup from the kind old lady, he noticed the backs of her hands. They were tattooed with hajichi. Hajichi were indigo tattoos Okinawan women had once worn on the backs of their hands to mark important events in their lives. The Japanese government had banned hajichi long before Hideki was born, but some old women still had them. Hideki caught glimpses of a circle and square that represented a wound spool of thread and a sewing box, arrows that marked the days her daughters left home to start families of their own, and little stars for when her grandchildren had been born. Then the old woman’s hands disappeared inside the sleeves of her kimono.
“Did you have a nightmare?” the old woman asked. She spoke Okinawan, not Japanese.
“I was being chased by a kijimunaa,” Hideki whispered.
The old woman nodded. “There are many kijimunaa about these days. Their homes in the banyan trees are all destroyed. They usually hate the smell of farts though, so I don’t know what they’re doing in this stinky cave.”
She was trying to cheer him up, but Hideki’s despair went deeper than fart jokes. He avoided her eyes and stared into the dark water in his cup.
“There’s something more though, isn’t there?” the old woman asked.
Hideki could still feel the weight of it on his chest. “I—I killed a man. An American soldier. And I think … I think he’s haunting me. I’ve been seeing things. Hearing things …”
The old woman looked at Hideki this way and that, as though trying to spot a spider that was crawling on him. “No—this is no yōkai. You have the American’s mabui on you.”
Hideki gave a start. He carried Rei’s mabui? How did she know? But then Hideki remembered his grandmother, back when she was alive, helping Hideki find his own mabui every day after he’d lost it playing outside. Maybe you had to be older to see it.
“I thought you could only carry the mabui of an ancestor,” Hideki said.
“Oh, no,” said the woman. “A person’s mabui can come loose when something shocking happens. Sometimes a mabui is simply lost, and you can find it again. But sometimes it attaches itself to someone else. Was his death a particularly frightful one?”
Hideki saw himself running into Rei. Knocking him down. Fumbling for his grenade. Throwing it.
“Yes,” Hideki said. His heart sank. Not only had he killed Rei, he had done it in so shocking a manner that Rei’s very spirit had come unstuck and attached to him. No wonder he’d felt haunted. It wasn’t just Shigetomo’s mabui that was competing with Hideki’s soul. It was Rei’s too.
“Can you help me get rid of it?” Hideki asked the old woman.
She shook her head. “For that you need a yuta.”
Kimiko. Hideki was already going to find his sister, and now he was even more eager to reach her. If he could just clear this fog from his head. And get past Private Maeda and his rifle. Then he could help Kimiko and Kimiko could help him.
But it might be days before he found her. Weeks.
If she was even still alive.
“Maybe I can do it myself,” Hideki said. Kimiko had taught Hideki how to perform the ceremony to try to appease Shigetomo’s mabui. Shigetomo’s spirit had proven too stubborn to go away with just a ritual, but maybe it would work with Rei’s.
Hideki remembered the words, but he didn’t have incense. No—wait! He did have something. He dug in Rei’s pack and pulled out the matches and cigarettes. He could light the cigarettes and use them as incense. And they had even belonged to the dead soldier. That had to help.
Hideki lit one of the cigarettes and fanned it until a trickle of smoke rose from it. In something like a fever dream, Hideki closed his eyes and began to speak to Rei’s mabui.
“I’m sorry, Rei,” Hideki said. “I didn’t know what I was doing. I was afraid, and my fear turned me into a monster.”
The trick was for Hideki and Rei to come to some sort of understanding about what had happened. To resolve whatever issues Rei’s mabui still had with the way he had died.
Hideki felt a chill, and when he opened his eyes, he thought he could almost see the American standing there in front of him in the smoke.
“Rei,” Hideki whispered.
“What’s that smell?”
Private Maeda’s angry voice broke the spell. The scent of burning tobacco had drawn him to the back of the cave. The private waved away the smoke and picked up the
cigarette, ruining everything.
“This is an American cigarette! Where did you get this?” Maeda demanded. He tossed the cigarette on the floor and and snatched up Rei’s pack. “This is an American pack! Are you a spy?”
“What? No!” Hideki said. “I took it off a soldier I killed!”
The others in the cave awoke to the yelling, and Hideki heard them murmuring and stirring around him.
“The boy is just trying to appease the spirit of the man who died,” the old woman told the soldier. She said it in Okinawan though, not Japanese, and it threw the soldier into a rage.
“You were told to speak only Japanese!” Maeda yelled. “Anyone who doesn’t speak Japanese is the enemy!”
“She’s an old lady who doesn’t speak Japanese,” Hideki tried to explain. “She was just telling you what I was doing with the cigarettes.”
But the private wasn’t listening. “What are you trying to hide?” he yelled at the old woman. He yanked her up by the arm, and her kimono fell away from her hands. When the soldier saw her markings, his eyes went wide.
“These tattoos—they are forbidden! You are Okinawan spies, both of you!” With his other hand, the soldier grabbed Hideki’s arm. Private Maeda dragged him and the old woman toward the mouth of the cave. “Spies and traitors will be shot!”
“No! Please! Wait!” Hideki cried. “Yoshio! Somebody! Help us!”
Yoshio was awake and sitting up, but he didn’t leave his mother’s side. None of the other Okinawans moved to help Hideki and the old woman. No one wanted to draw the crazy soldier’s attention.
As Maeda wrestled both of them toward the entrance of the cave, Hideki remembered the grenade in his pocket. His last grenade. He pulled it out and uncorked the rubber stopper.
“I have a grenade!” Hideki cried. “Let us go, or I’ll blow us all up!”
Private Maeda released Hideki and the old woman. He stepped back, frightened. Hideki’s heart raced. He couldn’t believe what he was doing. But what other choice did he have?
Private Maeda’s rifle was propped up against the wall a few steps away. He glanced at it, then back at the grenade, then took a step toward his rifle.
“Don’t!” Hideki said. He brought the fuse and the cap closer like he was about to light the grenade, and Maeda froze. “We’re not spies,” Hideki tried to explain again. “I took those cigarettes—I took those cigarettes from a dead American soldier.” The blood was thundering in his aching head, and he was having trouble putting words together. Remembering how to speak Japanese. “I’m in the Blood and Iron Student Corps,” Hideki told Private Maeda. “I was just trying to get rid of the mabui of the man I killed.”
“What’s a ‘mabui’? I don’t even know what that means!” the soldier yelled.
“What’s happening?” the old woman asked Hideki in Okinawan. “Why is he angry with us?”
“Spies!” Maeda cried again. “Anyone who speaks Okinawan is a spy!”
Hideki knew then that nothing he said would satisfy the private. Maeda was angry and hungry and scared, and as long as there were American soldiers on Okinawa, as long as American bombs kept falling all day and all night, nothing was going to change that.
Private Maeda took another step toward his rifle. Hideki snatched up the still-smoldering cigarette from the floor of the cave and held it close to the grenade fuse.
“If you touch that rifle, I’ll light this fuse,” Hideki promised. As he said it, visions of Rei at the pine tree flooded back to him—Rei raising his rifle, Hideki lighting his grenade. The shot. The explosion. Hideki felt a cold shiver go down his back, saw a shadow flicker out of the corner of his eye. He didn’t turn to look at it though. He knew what it was.
Who it was.
“I’ve killed a man,” Hideki said quietly. “Have you?”
That seemed to get through to Maeda at last. Sweat broke out on his forehead and he slowly lifted his arms in surrender.
“Move to the back of the cave,” Hideki told him.
Maeda did, his eyes never leaving the grenade. The Okinawans in the back of the cave slid away from the private, keeping their distance from Hideki too. Yoshio stared at Hideki with wide, disbelieving eyes.
“Come with me,” Hideki said.
“Who? Me?” the old woman asked. She stepped deeper into the cave, away from Hideki.
“All of you,” Hideki said. His eyes flitted from Maeda to the Okinawans and back again, but he spoke to the families in the corner. “This man has gone crazy. It’s not safe here any longer. Come with me.”
“Where?” asked one of the old Okinawan men. “It’s not safe outside either! We can feel the bombs. Hear the guns.”
The old man was right. Hideki knew it. They shouldn’t stay here, but they shouldn’t come with him, either. Nowhere on Okinawa was safe for Okinawans.
Hideki bent down and slipped his arm through one of the straps on Rei’s pack, quickly bringing the smoking cigarette back up to the fuse. The weight of the pack threw off his coordination, and he almost touched the burning ember to the fuse by accident. Private Maeda cried out and cowered, but the grenade wasn’t lit.
Hideki backed away toward the entrance. He was going to be on his own again.
“These people are not spies,” Hideki told Maeda. “They are innocent Japanese citizens who need your help. Your protection. But since I don’t trust you to keep them safe, I’m taking this.”
Hideki snatched up Private Maeda’s rifle and dashed out into the rain.
Hideki heard Private Maeda yell out behind him, but he didn’t slow down to look back. Once he was outside the cave, he zigzagged this way and that for the cover of a low hill in the distance.
It was cloudy and rainy but it was daylight out now, and the water and the light in his eyes blinded him. His heart pounded like a hammer as he slipped and slid, juggling the grenade, the pack, and the rifle. The cigarette had already been drowned in the rain, and he let it fall into the mud.
Hideki ran and ran, but unlike the kijimunaa that chased Hideki in his dreams, Private Maeda didn’t follow him. At the edge of a steep ridge, Hideki flung the private’s rifle down, down into the ravine, where it sank into the mud with a splurch. He never once considered keeping it. Just carrying a rifle was dangerous. People with rifles shot at other people with rifles, and he didn’t know how to use the thing anyway.
Yoshio and the old woman and the other Okinawans in the cave might still not be safe, but at least now they couldn’t be shot by Private Maeda.
Hideki kept running. When his lungs gave out, he collapsed underneath the remains of an exploded American tank. He panted heavily, his body still weak from days with too little food and too little sleep, his head still ringing. He stuffed the unused grenade back in his pocket. How many other brushes with death would it help him escape from?
Hideki wanted to go on, to look for Kimiko, but he felt himself fading. He was crashing from the adrenaline rush of his standoff with Private Maeda, from running away. His escape had used up the last of his energy, and his sick, feverish body was giving up. If he didn’t eat some food today—real food—he was going to die.
It was time to try the food in Rei’s backpack.
Hideki tried one of the hard, unwrapped crackers first. It was tough to bite off, and it tasted like wood shavings, but Hideki was able to gulp it down. He wanted to wait, to see if the cracker was poisoned and would make him sick, but his hunger got the better of him. He bit off more and more, swallowing the dry bits of cracker as fast as he could choke them down. The second, third, and fourth crackers quickly followed the first. If they were poison, he was at least going to die with a full belly.
The can with the key might have food in it too. Better food than the crackers. But what if it was some kind of an explosive device instead that would blow up in Hideki’s face? Surely he’d eaten enough crackers to buy him another couple of days. But his body still shook with hunger and the anticipation of what might be inside the can. He would try it. He h
ad to. Eyes closed, head turned, Hideki snapped the key into the can’s lid and cranked it back.
The smell that rose from the can made his mouth water. It wasn’t an explosive device, it was potatoes and beef. Real meat! In a daze, Hideki used the fork from the meal kit to spear a piece of beef. His hand shook as he lifted the morsel to his mouth, afraid he would drop it. Afraid it might somehow go away or be taken from him at the last moment.
He placed a mouthful on his tongue and closed his eyes. It tasted overwhelmingly of salt, but underneath it was the fatty, rich flavor of beef, something Hideki hadn’t tasted since long before the battle began. Hideki chewed the meat slowly and fought his stomach’s powerful urge to swallow it down quickly.
Hideki’s eyes watered at the sheer joy of it, and he cried softly. The food was so good, and it had taken him so long to eat it. He might even have lost the pack before he’d tried it. And the food hadn’t been poisoned after all.
It took all the willpower he had, but Hideki saved the rest for later. He would need it. His stomach still yawned, begging for more food, but he had bought himself more time. He felt solid again. Less like a ghost. He repacked Rei’s bag, took off his clammy, wet jacket, and put both of them under his head for a pillow. His head still pounded, and he needed to close his eyes. To rest.
In seconds, Hideki was asleep. He twisted and turned, his body still blazing with fever and shaking with hunger, and as he slept he dreamed. He was being chased by a kijimunaa again. The kijimunaa hurled pinecones at him that exploded like grenades, cratering the ground to Hideki’s left and right. Hideki ran and ran, through rice paddies and around trees, up hills and over streams. But every time he turned to look over his shoulder, the kijimunaa was right there behind him, cackling and hurling more pinecone grenades at him. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom.
The evil sprite was chasing him toward the pine tree again, toward Rei, but this time the kijimunaa caught him first. It leaped onto his back and sank its long, sharp fangs into his neck, and Hideki jerked awake.