The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature (Modern Asian Literature Series)

by Неизвестный

  But then again, if he was talking about the bones of war dead, “Well, no, that was another story altogether.”

  “Where’s a phone around here?” The assistant section chief seemed to have decided on some plan of action and needed to report it to the office.

  The boss took the lead as the two men headed up the red clay slope of the hill. The others remained seated on the ground, watching the boss and the assistant section chief disappear into the distance.

  The first to speak was the oldest member in the group. He was wearing a pair of rubber work boots. “Ma’am, when you say ‘bones,’ are you talking about the bones of mainland Japanese?”

  The turtle woman inched her way under the big banyan tree. Her lips were in constant motion. It was as if she were chewing on something or muttering to herself.

  “Hell, what does it matter whose bones they are? They all died in the big battle. Japanese. Americans. Men. Women. Even little babies got killed while they were still sucking at their mothers’ breasts. We dumped them all together into this one big pit.”

  “You mean there really are thousands of bodies buried under here?” This time it was the fellow with only one eye who spoke. He could hardly believe what the old woman had said.

  “They talked about putting up a memorial stone. That’s what the mayor told us, and that’s why my father planted this tree to mark the spot.”

  Without thinking, the men let their eyes scan the tree that branched over-head. Now that she had mentioned it, there was something strange about a banyan tree growing here. But there it was, standing in the middle of a field of pampas grass. It had been free to grow as it pleased, and, tropical plant that it was, it had shot up to a height of ten yards. From its boughs hung a long red beard of tendrils that reached all the way to the ground.

  “That means it’s twenty-eight years old.” The one-eyed jack blew a puff of smoke from his lips. He sounded impressed at the thought of how much the tree had grown.

  “And, ma’am, that means when you got the boss here to buy the land you pretended not to know about the bones, right?” This time it was the youngster in the group who spoke up. What with a crop of whiskers on his chin, he looked like a hippie, and there was a smart-alecky grin on his face.

  “No, idiot. The reason the company got the property was . . .” The old woman sprayed the area with the spittle that flew from the gap between her missing two front teeth. “It was all because of that dumb son of ours. He let the real estate agent pull the wool over his eyes. We tried to educate him. We tried to get him to understand what sort of property it was and that it ought not to be sold, but he never got the point.”

  It was not long before the assistant section chief and the construction boss were back. They both looked agitated.

  “We’ve got no choice. We’re the ones who will have to step in and deal with the problem, and that’s that. The government is ducking it at both the national and prefectural levels, saying there’s no budget. Or no manpower. That means we’re elected for the job. So let’s get to work.” The assistant section chief turned to his men and addressed them in a voice that was more mature than expected for a person his age.

  But no one moved. The men continued to sit, smoking their cigarettes and wearing the same dull expression that had been on their faces all morning. The construction company boss studied them with a forlorn, even helpless, look. “Just how many days is this going to take, anyway?” he asked.

  “Hmm, I wonder. After all, these are the only men we could muster from the city’s Disinfection Unit. With such a small crew, there’s no telling how long it might take,” replied the assistant section chief.

  The construction boss walked in a circle, trampling the thick clumps of summer grass underfoot. It appeared he had some sort of plan in mind. Suddenly he stopped in his tracks and looked up, turning the full force of his charming baby face on the crew. “First, I must ask you men not to let anyone from the newspapers get wind of what’s happening here. Once the press gets to shouting about it, we’ll have a real mess on our hands.”

  The assistant section chief had a questioning look in his eye as he closely studied the construction boss’ face. He seemed to be stumped and not fully prepared to digest what the boss might say next.

  “We don’t want any news to get out that will damage the future image of the hotel.”

  The assistant section chief nodded in agreement. Clearly, something in the boss’ argument had impressed and persuaded him.

  But by then Hippie-Beard was already on his feet. “Here we go again. And whose ass are we wiping this time? I can’t believe we are going to do this.” His heavy, gong-like voice resonated in the air. Yet if he was being sarcastic, his remarks seemed aimed at no one in particular.

  “It’s a helluva lot better than having to dig up undetonated bombs,” piped up One-Eyed Jack.

  All the men from city hall knew what he was talking about. They also knew he had a history of dropping explosives overboard in the ocean to catch fish illegally, and this was how he had lost an eye.

  “Anyway, we start work right after lunch,” announced the assistant section chief.

  But Kamakichi was in no hurry, and he was the last member of the crew to get to his feet. The shadow that the big banyan tree cast on the ground had shrunk to nothing by now. In the distance, the cicadas were droning away. The mere thought of what was about to unfold was enough to make Kamakichi depressed. And, try as he might, he could not help feeling this way.

  It was a little past noon the following day when the first bones began to surface. The men had been digging all morning, and until then the only noticeable change had been in the color of the soil as it turned from red to gray. As they dug deeper, they began to find some white things that looked like pieces of broken clamshells scattered in the powdered soil. Perhaps they only imagined it, but the earth seemed to give off the odor of rotting flesh.

  “It’s like the old woman said. The upper layer is all ashes.”

  The assistant section chief directed his crew to spread a canvas tarp along the edge of the pit. Kamakichi and the man in the rubber work boots were put to work doing the sorting. When each spadeful of dirt and ash was shoveled out of the hole, their job was to pick out the pieces of bone and put them in a burlap bag. Because the small, cremated pieces of bone had been reduced almost to a powder, it was impossible to identify any of them as belonging to a particular part of the human anatomy. Kamakichi closed his eyes. It was with a sinking feeling of dread and disgust that he forced his hands to sift through the piles of ashes.

  The work went at a livelier pace once whole pieces of bone began to emerge from the pit. The gloomier the job became, the more it seemed, paradoxically, to raise the men’s spirits. From out of the ashes came two round objects about the size of Ping-Pong balls.

  “What’re these?” When Kamakichi showed them to the man in the boots, Rubber Boots laughed and thrust them in the direction of Kamakichi’s crotch.

  “Fossilized balls.”

  All at once the men roared with laughter.

  “No, no. It’s not right to laugh at the dead. They’re all bodhisattvas now, you know.” The assistant section chief looked very serious, befitting his position of responsibility, and there was a mildly admonishing tone in his voice. “That’s the hinge ball where the femur attaches to the hipbone.”

  “I bet you were born after the war,” said Rubber Boots to Kamakichi.

  Kamakichi felt as if the older man was trying to make fun of him. As for the war, he had no memory of it. “I was two when the war ended.”

  “Why, it’s practically the same thing. If you ask me it seems like, ever since the war, we’ve all kept on living here in these islands by picking our way through a huge pile of bones. That’s what’s kept us going.”

  “Back then, nobody batted an eye at the thought of sleeping with a corpse,” chimed in One-Eyed Jack.

  Rubber Boots went on with what he was saying. He spoke with the authority
of an older person who was the senior member of the work crew. “I was in the local defense forces when I was taken prisoner. One day I discovered a patch of big, white daikon growing in a field not far from the POW camp. But when I went to dig them out of the ground, I found they were growing on top of a huge mound of bones.”

  “Did you eat’em?” asked Hippie-Beard.

  “Of course I did. What do you think?”

  Once again the men roared with laughter.

  “It’s the dead protecting the living,” said One-Eyed Jack. The tone of his voice was almost reverential.

  “This here banyan tree is a lot like us. It’s had good fertilizer.” Rubber Boots stretched himself upward from the waist and craned his neck to peer up at the tree.

  “It’s the same for everybody here in Okinawa,” added One-Eyed Jack, sounding almost as if he were making excuses for himself.

  “That may be true, but what about the others? You know, the ones who’ve used their fellow Okinawans as bonemeal to feed off them and make them-selves rich and fat.” It was Hippie-Beard speaking up again. He had been born after the war but was determined not to let this conversation pass without putting in his two cents.

  “So just who is it you’re talking about?” One-Eyed Jack had turned serious.

  But now Hippie-Beard got flustered, at a loss to explain.

  As Kamakichi sorted out the pieces of bone, he could feel the gorge rise in his throat, and he had to swallow hard from time to time just to be able to keep working. He felt oddly out of place amid the lively banter of the other men in the work crew. What they were saying struck him as terribly disrespectful, even blasphemous, toward the dead. At the same time, he kept trying to tell himself that the bones were just objects, no different from what one might find in an archaeological dig of an old shell mound.

  In the afternoon, as the men began to let their pace slacken, all at once the old woman silently reappeared, as if out of nowhere. They welcomed her back, trying to joke with her about the job they were doing. But she would have no part of it. She hunkered down next to Kamakichi and began to study the pile of bones. As always, her mouth was in constant but wordless motion.

  “Hey, ma’am. Afterward we want you to do a good job of saying prayers for the dead buried here to rest in peace. Otherwise, there’ll be hell to pay if so many lost souls get out and start wandering all over the place.” The assistant section chief seemed to be in an uncharacteristically jocular mood.

  But the old woman said nothing, and presently she began to help Kamakichi sift through a pile of ash. She worked with the deftness of a farm girl trained to sort beans of different sizes. As her fingers sifted, her mouth in ceaseless motion began to form words that she muttered to herself. “You poor, poor things. Whose bones are you, here in this miserable place? Look what’s become of you. Who were your parents? And who were your children? It’s all so sad.”

  Her mutterings were like a pesky gadfly that flitted about Kamakichi’s ears. As he watched the deft movements of the old woman’s withered hands, suddenly he was reminded of his mother. And then he remembered the three stones she had told him about. She said she had collected them at the bottom of the precipice at Mabuni. That was the place where Japanese soldiers had jumped to their deaths rather than surrender to the enemy at the end of the Battle of Okinawa. But he knew that the story about the stones was no more true than the inscription “June 23rd,” the last day of the battle, that was written on the back of his father’s mortuary tablet as the date of his death in the war. He recalled the photograph placed on the family altar of his father dressed in the uniform for civilians in the Okinawa Defense Corps. His father had been taken from his job at the town office and conscripted into this citizens’ army, which was supposed to be the island’s last line of defense. It had all happened so very long ago that, to Kamakichi, it seemed like some ancient, mythical tale that had no connection with him now.

  Just as the men were about to finish for the day, the construction boss showed up. The straps of his safety helmet were, as always, tied firmly in place, and there was a folding ruler in his breast pocket.

  “Looks like it’s going to take a lot longer than expected.” There was an arch look on his face as he peered down at the men in the pit.

  “Look at it, will you? There are thousands of bones down here.” Such was the cheerless reply the assistant section chief shouted back from the bottom of the hole.

  Hippie-Beard shoveled a spadeful of bone and ash over the edge of the pit. “Wiping the ass of people who make a mess starting a war is no picnic, you know.”

  “This area here will be the front of the hotel’s stroll garden,” announced the construction boss as he walked around the pit one more time. “The landscape design is going to be quite elaborate.”

  “The view will be wonderful,” said the assistant section chief, picking up on what the boss said and complimenting him.

  “That’s why, starting tomorrow, if it’s okay with you, we’ll get to work with the heavy equipment in the area next to your crew. As things stand now, we’re way behind schedule, and it’s time to start construction on the hotel.”

  “That’s fine with us,” replied the assistant section chief without a moment’s hesitation.

  That night Kamakichi sat drinking awamori at an o-den restaurant in Sakaemachi. It was his first night out in quite a while. But he had no appetite. It was almost as though his stomach were no longer his own. The mutterings of the old turtle woman continued to resound in his ears no matter how hard he tried to tune them out. Little by little, and long before he realized it, he had drunk himself into an alcoholic haze. He thought of his father, and the memories came back fast and furious, without letting up.

  The bulldozer went to work in the area adjacent to the pit on the crew’s third day at the site. The loud, ferocious roar and the perpetual cloud of dust it generated assaulted the men mercilessly. Their mouths filled with grit, and they began to feel sick. It was as though something had swept them up in the air and was shaking their internal organs violently. To make matters worse, what had been the sole source of pleasure in their lugubrious task was now denied them because the bulldozer obliterated all possibility of conversation. Indeed, it stamped out anything they tried to say in much the same way it trampled the weeds growing on the hillside. The men now fell into a dark, sullen mood, and as the temperature climbed and their fatigue increased, they became wildly careless wielding their shovels. As they spit and tried to clear their parched throats, they felt a rising anger directed in equal parts at the steel-monster bulldozer and the idiocy of the assistant section chief.

  The old woman was back again to help, having arrived in the morning. On the one hand, the din generated by what she called “the bull” made it impossible to hear her and thereby saved Kamakichi from having to listen to her gadfly-like mutterings. On the other hand, the lack of conversation or any other diversion left him all the more vulnerable to his private fantasies about the bones, causing him to withdraw into ever-deeper introspection.

  It was a little past noon when the men began to uncover bones in the shape of whole skeletons. If not apparent earlier, it was now all too clear that excavating the gravesite would be far more time consuming than originally anticipated. The bones were solid, each one a heavy weight. In addition, buried along with them were all sorts of paraphernalia. Metal helmets. Army boots. Canteens. Bayonets. The mouth of the pit looked like a battlefield strewn with the litter of war. All the bones had turned a rusty red. Collarbones. Shoulder bones. Thighbones. Rib bones. Tailbones. Skulls. One after another, bones like those Kamakichi remembered seeing in high school science class were chucked over the edge of the pit. Each time he went to pick one up, he could not prevent his mind from clothing it in fantasies about the living human flesh to which it had once been attached; and when he went to toss it in the burlap bag, he could not avoid hearing the dry, hollow sound it made. At times it seemed to him as if the bones were quietly laughing, their laughte
r not unlike the sound of a stone rolling over and over, or of a cricket chirping.

  A skull cracked in two right before his eyes. As he looked at the jagged edges, he felt he was about to be sick. He had been suffering from a hangover since morning and was sure his stomach was about to go on a rampage. In the midday heat, his head felt terribly heavy.

  A tattered pair of army boots was slung over the edge of the pit. As Kamakichi went to set them aside, he saw a perfect set of foot bones inside. Each and every white piece of bone was intact, arranged in five neat little rows. As he began to pull them out, he heard one bone that had stuck to the boot’s inside sole snap and break off with a crisp, popping sound. He felt his fingers go numb. And suddenly, his chest began to heave. The nausea swept over him like a great wave that rose from his stomach and then surged forward.

  The old woman was collecting skulls from which she painstakingly wiped the dirt. No matter what skull she picked up, it always seemed to have the look of a living human face. Although everything else had turned a rusty red, the teeth eerily retained their original shining white. It was if they were alive and wanted Kamakichi to know how hungry they were. He remembered the words his mother had said so many times. “War is hell. And, in that hell, no one escapes becoming a hungry ghost.” She, too, had known what it was to fall into that hell and live among the hungry ghosts. Once, at the bottom of a dark cave at Makabe, she had taken a fistful of dirt and stuffed it into her little boy’s mouth. Kamakichi was just a baby. He would not stop crying, and this was the only way she could silence him. She had seen a Japanese army officer silhouetted in the light at the mouth of the cave. His sword was drawn, and she knew that meant he would kill the child if he did not stop crying. And so it had become her habit to say to her son, “That’s what war is like.”

  Doubtless these bones had been on the verge of starvation when the people died, and even now they wore a hungry look. Kamakichi’s hands ceased to move, and kneeling there in front of a skull, he mentally traced on it what he could remember of his father’s face.