Above the East China Sea: A Novel

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

PUBLISHED BY
A
LFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright © 2014 by Sarah Bird

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bird, Sarah.

Above the East China Sea : a novel / by Sarah Bird.—First Edition.

pages cm

ISBN
978-0-385-35011-2 (Hardcover)—
ISBN
978-0-385-35012-9 (eBook)

1. Daughters—Fiction. 2. Orphans—Fiction. 3. Okinawa Island (Japan)—Fiction. I. Title.

PS
3552.
I
74
A
425 2014

813′.54—dc23

2013024336

This is a work of historical fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Front-of-jacket photograph by Jane Yeomans

Jacket design by Gabriele Wilson

Maps by Christy Krames

v3.1

To the people of Okinawa,

who have learned the only lesson war has to teach:

Nuchi du takara.

Children, I’m singing you the story of Miyako

the beautiful, the blue, the deepening indigo,

and the red soil made from crushed bodies

that lay down their genealogy of bones.

Their spirits are whispering to you: all of this is what is.

—from “The Ocean of the Dead” by Yonaha Mikio