Above the East China Sea: A Novel (10 page)

The girl raises her arms, begging me to save her baby. The bandage around her wrist slips off, and maggots like dancing rice boil out from the blackened gash of a wound on her forearm. They spill out over her body in unstoppable white waves. It is a vision from the nightmare I’ve had every night since Codie died. The image imprints itself on my mind and only gets worse when the kerosene light goes out and the cave falls into blackness. I feel like I’m being pulled down. And then I am falling. Wind rushes through my hair. There is no end to the descent.

Exhausted, I sag down onto the cave floor. It is far cozier than my own bed. I could rest in this dark place, silent except for the white-noise roar of the sea. Really, truly rest. It would be unimaginably peaceful to simply lie here as, one by one, all the torments of life dwindled away until I could finally sleep. And all I have to do is lie quietly until the tide comes in to fill this stone hole like a swimming pool.

“Luz? Luz, are you back there? Luz?”

I consider answering the distant voice, but even as I do, a weariness so complete overtakes me and my eyelids droop shut and I am asleep before I can open my mouth.

“Luz!” Jake’s voice echoes as it recedes, moving farther and farther away from me. The first touch of a wave reaching back into the cave shocks me for a second. It is cold and alarming; I almost jerk awake, but the wave recedes and, easy as switching TV channels, I tune back in to the program where I am warm and carefree. I’m snuggling up against the luxuriant rock when I bump into what must be a sea urchin, because a spine like a steel pin pokes me, and I cry out from the pain.

Suddenly I’m awake and there’s a girl and a baby who need help. I feel blindly for the wall. My hands scrape against rock on all sides as I make my way out into the main tunnel. A pulse of light gleams faintly against the wet walls. I follow it into the tunnel, where the beam from a flashlight is disappearing.

“Jake, wait!”

“Luz.”

The beam bounces crazily off the damp walls as Jake runs, sloshing through the rising tide, back to me.

“Hurry, she’s in here.”

Jake, who’s wet from the waist down and holding the flashlight over his head to keep it dry, follows without any questions. He gives off a vibe like my mom when she’s in emergency mode and is just thinking about what needs to be done and how to do it. I rush ahead back into the dark. The kerosene lamp is still out, but the flashlight throws a smear of illumination onto the entrance to the chamber.

“She’s back in there. She has a baby.”

Jake nods, as if this is what he expected to hear.

I step aside and let him go in first. I can’t make myself face my nightmare, of Codie wounded, suffering. Not with a full light. I wait at the entrance to the chamber. The tide rises higher against my ankles.

“Jake, hurry. We have to get them out of here.”

I wait to hear Jake speaking to the girl in Japanese. But no sound emerges until he says, “Luz?”

I take a deep breath to steady myself and notice that the stench has disappeared. The cave now smells like stone washed by clean seawater. The only way I can make myself go back into the chamber is by keeping my eyes trained on Jake’s face. He’s calm in a way I’ll never be able to fake in a million years. My skin prickles from feeling the girl, lost in the black shadows at our feet, watching me, waiting for me to save her and her baby. The tide pulls away, back out of the cave, as Jake directs the flashlight down to the girl at our feet.

“Luz?” There’s a tenderness in his voice I’ve never heard before. “Is this what you mean?” I brace myself to see the girl revealed in its glare. Images flash through my mind of prisoners in dungeons, lepers in caves, shrinking from a harsh glare. But the light falls on nothing except bones. Bones so white and bleached they’re pieces of art made of ivory. There’s not even anything definably human about them.

Jake touches my shoulder. His hand, warm and steady, makes me aware that I’m shivering. “We have to leave.” Seawater splashes in, rising this time to our shins. “Now. Before the tide completely floods us in.”

Jake takes my hand and pulls me away. At the last second, something makes me turn back. I grab at the space where the sea urchin was, snatch up what I find there, stuff it into a pocket that I zipper shut, and Jake and I haul ass as fast as we can back down the tunnel.

The opening is lost in the foaming roil of water rushing in through the chink in the cliff that is our only way to escape. The waves surge in, pushing against our legs.

“The tide is in!” Jake yells. “We can’t get out!”

“No!” I scream back over the roar of the waves. My death is one thing, but Jake is absolutely not going to die too just for being kind. This time I’m the one who channels my mom, and when we catch each other’s gazes in the sputtering beam from the dying flashlight, we both know what we have to do. We brace ourselves against the battering power of the water, and Jake, using his surfer’s wisdom, calculates. At the exact moment that the flow reverses, he orders, “Dive!” The flashlight dies. I plunge forward into the torrent and am sucked into the wet darkness.

TWELVE

Anmā,
she’s leaving; the stranger is leaving. You can’t let her leave. She was the one the
kami
sent to us.

Don’t fret; she will be sent again.

You should have killed her. She was ready. Why didn’t you kill her?

The
kami
stopped me.

But why? Why did they bring us up from the bottom of the sea here to this place to meet her if they didn’t wish us to claim her?

The
kami
knew we weren’t ready.

They made a mistake.

The
kami
never make a mistake. It is only we who make mistakes when interpreting their will.

No,
Anmā,
they made a mistake. They sent a demon who speaks demon language. And a girl besides. Why would they send a demon girl?

Because our fate is bound up with hers.

How do you know this? You’ve never even encountered a demon before.

I block the terrible memory that tries to twist into my mind.

Listen, my son: We knew long before the war came to our shores that the Americans were demons.

Because that is what you were taught in school?

No, Hatsuko and I didn’t need our Japanese rulers to teach us that. My father, your grandfather Shojin Kokuba, had already proved to us that our enemies were soulless monsters when he took us to the foreigners’ cemetery near the port of Tomari. Since we have to wait now, shall I tell you about it?

Yes.

All right, then. The visit was dangerous. To express any interest in the imperialistic enemies of the emperor was a treasonous crime, punishable by public flogging if the commander was merciful and beheading if he was not. But our father took the risk, because he believed it essential to impress upon his daughters that, in the unlikely event that the Americans did manage to overcome the invincible Imperial navy and invade our island, we, the young women of Okinawa, had to understand that Americans were not human, and that we would be used in beastly, unspeakable ways.

The round lenses of Father’s spectacles flashed like the beacons of the great lighthouse at Zanpa Saki as he nervously checked in all directions before we entered the neglected plot. Who knew what spies might be lurking about? But the only soul who passed was a bowlegged old man with whiskers long and white as Confucius’s, and a stack of dried pandanus leaves taller than himself lashed to his back. When Father was certain it was safe, he shooed us in like our mother driving her silky-eared goats before her.

At our approach, chartreuse-spotted monkey lizards skittered away from the weeds and vines choking the strangers’ graves. I reached for my big sister Hatsuko’s hand. Even in the still afternoon heat, her fingers were chilled by the presence of the unquiet spirits that occupied this shunned place. Weathered headstones lay flat on the ground, where any passing dog could lift its leg on them. Odd stick-letter words were etched horizontally into the foreigners’ grave markers.

I caught Hatsuko’s eye and jerked my head from side to side like a crazy girl, pretending to read the strange letters that made a person’s eyes twitch back and forth in such an unnatural way. Hatsuko rewarded me with a tight smile that she immediately covered, and I made the crazy-girl face again.

Our father cracked his walking stick against my backside. “Tamiko,” he hissed. “Do you think this is funny?”

“No, Father.” Fortunately it was his stick made of bamboo, not the sturdy one of banyan wood, and the smack only stung for a moment. Overall, I preferred the bamboo cane to the times when Father disciplined me by making me kneel on rice with my hands tied behind my back for so long that when my punishment was over, Hatsuko had to help me stand, then dig out the grains embedded in my knees with the tips of her fingernails.

Father had been a schoolteacher before the day when he both married our mother and was adopted by her father, your great-grandfather, Masahide Kokuba. My mother’s father was a well-off farmer cursed with six daughters and no sons to inherit the family’s land or mortuary tablets or carry out the funeral rites that would ensure that Grandfather Kokuba would be with his kin group in the next world. That day in the barbarians’ cemetery, Father was once again the stern schoolteacher as he tapped the stick letters engraved on the tombstones, and said, “These are the names of four of the sailors who came with Commodore Perry on his expedition to force open the closed door of the mighty Japanese Empire and lay it bare to America’s imperialistic greed. When our king would not meet with him, Perry marched on Shuri Castle with two hundred of his men and they bullied their way through Shurei Gate like the barbarians they are.

“Though there had been no weapons on our island since the Japanese claimed Okinawa in 1609, and Commodore Perry and his men wore gleaming swords at the high waists of their white trousers and were guarded by soldiers carrying rifles with bayoneted tips that reached to the top of their impossibly tall hats, our brave king refused to meet with him. Instead, with smiles and gentle words, Perry was put off and forced to meet with a lowly regent in Hokuden Hall, where only the most minor of trading envoys were received. The people of Okinawa rejoiced at this brutal snub. They were certain that their king had shamed the mighty American commodore so thoroughly that he would slink away in disgrace.”

Our cultured father made a sour face and spit in disgust at such foolishness. “How stupid those pitiful fools were not to understand that shame is a useless weapon against men with no honor. Remember this, daughters, should war come to our shores: Americans have no honor. You cannot imagine how they will defile you.” Hatsuko lowered her head in embarrassment and I, as always, copied her.

“If you don’t believe me,” he said, though we didn’t doubt him in the least, “look at this.” He tapped the dates on the tombstones when Perry’s sailors, dead of disease and accident, had been put into the earth of Okinawa. Hatsuko and I gasped as we read the year: 1853.

Faster than a Chinese merchant with an abacus, Hatsuko did the calculation. “Ninety years ago?”

“And they’re still here?” I was stunned.

Our father nodded. “Yes. And in all that time the sailors’ oldest male relatives have never come to wash their bones and take them home.”

I shivered in the stifling heat, thinking of the spirits of these wretches, abandoned by their families and trapped for all eternity among strangers. I could not imagine such loneliness. Even though they were imperialistic invaders and enemies of Our Beloved Father the emperor, it made me sad to think that the spirits of the lost sailors would be trapped here forever. Alone. Alone and forgotten.

Once Father saw how stricken we were by this evidence of the Americans’ cruelty in abandoning their own, he hurried us from that unholy place. Still the restless spirits imprisoned there haunted my dreams ever after. Hatsuko and I could not imagine a people so callous or a fate so cruel, and we swore that no power on earth would ever keep us apart in this or, more important, the next world.