The Miko - 02 (16 page)

Nicholas’ spirit expanded outward, his heart soaring, as he put his feet down on the loamy pine-needled earth. The wind was fresh, and warmth was already creeping into the air. Soon the mist would disappear from the boles of the pines and the skin of the lake. The view would be fantastic then.

He was aware of the wings rushing by overhead, the rustling of the great branches, the concerted sway of the stand of bamboo. The buzz of insects was in his ears as the breeze flapped his jacket.

Then, lastly, he recognized the stir within the crowd. It was subtle and he was doubtful whether Tomkin was even aware of it. But Nicholas knew. The
gaijin
were here. Even him. Nangi had made it eminently clear that many did not consider him a Japanese.

As he passed through them, looking from face to face, he wondered what they privately thought of Colonel Linnear, Nicholas’ father. Were they proud of how he had helped in the rebuilding of Japan when he was brought in by MacArthur’s SCAP forces? Or did they secretly revile his memory because he was a foreign devil at work in Japan? There was no accurate way of knowing, and Nicholas preferred to believe that at least some of them—like Sato—still honored his memory. Nicholas knew that his father had been a great man, that he had fought long and hard against some deadly opposition to create a new and democratic superstructure for the postwar nation to rebuild itself.

“Jesus, these bastards’re small,” Tomkin whispered to him out of the side of his mouth. “I feel like a bull in a china shop.”

They were heading toward Sato. Nicholas could see him clearly, with Koten, the giant
sumō
, looking grotesque in a suit, not far away. And by his side, a slim, elegant woman in the traditional bride’s garb. Nicholas tried to get a good look at her but she was holding a ceremonial fan spread across her face. The
Tsunokakushi
hid the top of her head completely.

“If this were any other country,” Tomkin said softly, “I wouldn’t even be here. I still feel like shit.”

“Face,” said Nicholas.

“Yeah.” Tomkin tried to cover his sour expression with a smile. “Face is gonna kill me one of these days.”

Now they had come almost all the way through the mingling guests. Nicholas could see Nangi off to the right, amid a dense swirl of dark-suited men. It looked as if the higher echelons of seven or eight ministries were present.

They stopped a few feet away from Sato and his bride-to-be. Tomkin took one step forward about to greet Sato and congratulate him. Nicholas was gazing at Akiko, wondering what features lay behind the mask of the golden fan. Then, almost magically, in response to his wish, the fan came down, and all the breath left his lungs. He stepped backward a pace as if pushed by an invisible hand. His eyes opened wide and his lips parted.

“No!”

It was a whisper that seemed a shout to him. Blood rushed uncontrollably in his ears and the beating of his heart seemed painful. Tears broke the corners of his long eyes, trembling with the enormous force of his emotions.

The past was rising up like a haunted demon to inexplicably confront him again. But the dead could not rise. Their bodies were laid to rest and were decomposed by the elements: earth, air, fire, water.

She had been murdered by Saigō because she belonged to Nicholas, body and soul, and could never be his. He had drowned her in the Straits of Shimonoseki where the
Kami
of the Heiké clan etched the backs of the crabs into human countenances. She was gone.

And yet here she was standing a foot away from him. It was impossible but true.

Yukio.

W
HAT TANZAN NANGI REMEMBERED
most vividly about the war were the red skies. There seemed no gentle color left in the world when the sun rose over the vast heaving bosom of the Pacific; only slashes of fierce orange and crimson like the vast tentacles of some monstrous sea creature emerging from the seabed at the sun’s slow dawning.

The long nights of the engines’ thrumming, the constant vibration of the mighty screws of the carrier as it plowed southward past the small black humps of the Bonin Islands gave way grudgingly to days filled with blinding light. Cloud cover hung far off and mocking at the edge of the horizon.

They were only a thousand nautical miles from Tokyo yet the weather here was so much different. There was a great deal of speculation on the part of the men as to what their destination would be. They were not part of a fleet; they had no escort. They had even put to sea in the dead of night when only a scattering of bare bulbs burned here and there along the great military harbor, casting hard shadows across the gently rippling water. Hunched guards spoke in whispers and studiously ignored the careful progress of the carrier out into open waters.

They were traveling under sealed orders, that much Captain Noguchi had told them. He had meant it to squelch rumors but it only had the opposite effect.

Where were they bound?

At night, after all lights had been extinguished, the men huddled in their cramped windowless quarters to discuss issues and destinations.

It had been Gōtarō Sato who had been certain they were bound for the Marianas. Most of the other men found that idea preposterous. The Marianas were far too close to Japan for there to be any fighting and this was most definitely a war mission of the highest priority, as Captain Noguchi had made clear to them in his speech.

But the idea of the Marianas piqued Nangi’s imagination and, after the men broke up, he sought Gōtarō out. Gōtarō Sato was a bear of a man, thick-necked and round-faced. He had wide, shrewd eyes that revealed nothing, but, far from emotionless, he was given to wild bursts of great good humor. He had the ability of knowing when a dose of his absurd wit—he was a prankster—would cool tensions or allay fears.

And in those dark days, deep in the final months of the war, there was plenty of both. The Allies had already won two long, extremely hard fought campaigns, the first in the Solomons, late in 1943, and more recently in New Guinea. Everyone knew they were heading inexorably toward Japan, and they looked toward their leaders for a supreme strategy to alter the tide of the bitter conflict.

They went up on deck. Gōtarō took out a cigarette, then thought better of lighting up. The Pacific lay dark and foreboding all around them and, not for the first time, Nangi experienced an eerie chill. He was a brave man and the thought of death in battle—a
samurai
’s proud end—did not disturb him. Yet out here, with only the depths of the sea surrounding him, so very far from any land mass, his stomach was never calm.

“It’s the Marianas,” Gōtarō said, staring south, the way they were headed, “and I’ll tell you why. If the Americans are not already there, they soon will be. We have an air base there. The Islands are no more than fifteen hundred nautical miles from home.” His head turned as a sudden gust of wind came up, feathering his short hair. “Can you imagine a better target for the Allies to base and fuel their own planes for bombing runs into Japan? I can’t.”

There was no humor in him now as he leaned his elbows on the metal bars of the top rail. The sea hissed by far below them.

Despite himself, Nangi felt a terrible despair engulfing him. “Then there can be no doubt. The war is surely lost, no matter what the Imperial Command tells us.”

Gōtarō turned to him, his eyes bright amid the shadows of the carrier’s many tiered superstructure. The proximity to so much reinforced metal was chilling, coming as they did from a culture intent on building structures of wood and rice paper. “Have faith.”

At first, Nangi was not sure that he had heard the other man correctly. “Faith?” he said after a pause. And when Gōtarō nodded, said, “Faith in what? Our Emperor? The Imperial Command? The
zaibatsu
? Tell me, which of our many traditional icons shall I bow down to tonight?” He heard the bitterness in his voice but he did not care. This night, so far from home, so close to the utter alienness of the battle lines, seemed meant for a venting of emotion long bottled up.

“Greed got us into this mad war,” he rushed on before the other could answer his rhetorical questions. “The blind ambition of the
zaibatsu
who persuaded the government that Japan was not a large enough area for their empire. ‘Expand, expand, expand,’ they counseled, and the war seemed like a superb excuse to carve out the niche we had long been seeking in Asia.

“But, Gōtarō-san, answer me this: Did they attempt to get a sense of our enemy before the attack on Pearl Harbor was ordered?” He shook his head. “Oh, no, no. Not a jot of ink was put to paper, not a moment of research was applied.” He smiled grimly. “History, Gōtarō. If they had known—or understood—anything about American history, they would have perhaps been able to anticipate the response to their attack.” Nangi’s gaze dropped, the fierceness went out of his voice. “Now what will happen to us in the end?”

“Have faith,” Gōtarō said again. “Trust in God.”

God? Now Nangi began to understand. He turned toward Gōtarō. “You’re a Christian, aren’t you?”

The big man nodded. “My family does not know. I cannot think that they would understand.”

Nangi stared at him for a time. “But why?”

“Because,” Gōtarō said softly, “for me there is no more fear.”

At 04:15 on the morning of March 13, Nangi was summoned to the captain’s cabin for a briefing. Dressed smartly in his pressed uniform, he moved down the silent narrow corridors up the ringing metal companionways. He might have had the entire carrier to himself. The
kami
of the ancient Shōgun seemed to walk with him, a descending line of invincible
samurai
with the wiles of the fox, the strength of the tiger.

That he, of all the men on board, should be summoned seemed a clear sign of his
karma.
Though he disagreed with the war, his soul still belonged to Japan. Now that they were in the thick of it, what frightened him was the specter of defeat. Perhaps he was to be a part of the new strategy; perhaps the war was not yet lost.

He rapped softly on the captain’s white-painted door with his knuckles, then went in. He was surprised to find Gōtarō there as well.

“Please be seated, Major,” Captain Noguchi said after the traditional formalities had been dispensed with. Nangi took a chair next to Gōtarō.

“You know Major Sato,” Noguchi said in his clipped tones. His bullet head bobbed. “Good.” A steward appeared, bringing a tray of sakē. He set it down in the center of Noguchi’s desk and departed.

“It is the middle of March in what we all fear may be the last year of the war.” Noguchi was quite calm, his eyes boring into first Nangi, then Gōtarō, magnified through the circular lenses of his steel-rimmed spectacles. He was a powerfully built man who emitted confidence and energy. He had intelligent eyes beneath heavy brows, a wide, thick-lipped mouth, and odd, splayed ears that stuck out from his close-cropped head like mushroom caps.

“The European playwright Shakespeare wrote that these days are the Ides, an evil time.” Noguchi smiled. “At least they were for Julius Caesar.” He spread his long, delicately fingered hands on his desk top. “And perhaps they will be so for the Allies.”

He had the habit of looking directly at you when he spoke instead of away as so many of his fellow upper-echelon officers did. Nangi felt instinctively that this was one source of the confidence he instilled in his men.

“Within the month the cherry blossoms will again come to the slopes and valleys of our homeland.” His eyes blazed with light. “The enemy threatens the extinction of the cherry blossom as he threatens our very lives.” His chest heaved as if he had gotten something hard and ugly off his mind.

“At this very moment, the mechanics are preparing another kind of cherry blossom for you two majors. I see the perplexed look on your faces. I will explain.”

He got up from behind his desk and set about pacing back and forth in the small cabin as if he was beginning to generate too much energy to be held to a sitting position. “We have precisely one hundred fifty planes on board. All—save one—are Mitsubishi G4 M.2e bombers. The ones the enemy calls ‘Bettys’ in an inexplicable form of derision.”

His closed fist slammed the desk, making the tiny cups quiver and rock where even the sea could not. “But no more! Not now that we have the Ōka!”

He turned toward them. “One of our Mitsubishis has been modified. Beneath its fuselage is another, smaller craft: a single-seat midwing monoplane of a length of just over nineteen feet and with a wingspan of sixteen feet, fifteen inches.

“The Ōka will be borne aloft by the Mitsubishi mother plane. At an altitude of 27,000 feet the two craft will separate. The Ōka will be able to cruise up to fifty miles at an effective airspeed of two hundred thirty miles per hour. When it comes within sighting distance of its target, the pilot will cut in its three solid-fuel rocket motors. The craft will then be flying at almost six hundred miles per hour.”

Noguchi was standing directly in front of them now, his cheeks red from the height of his emotion. “For a period of nine seconds, the Ōka will have a total thrust of 1,764 pounds. A great rush of momentum and then…” His head lifted up and his eyes went opaque as his lenses caught the light, reflecting it back at them in a dazzle. “Then you will become the avenging sword of the Emperor, opening up the side of an American warship.”

Nangi remembered this quite clearly. Noguchi did not ask either of them if they understood. But of course they did. The Ōka was a rocket bomb, manned for supreme accuracy.

“Yamato-dama-shii,”
Noguchi said now, returning to his seat behind his desk, “the Japanese spirit will be our bulwark against the superior material force of the Allies. That and the Ōka attacks will quickly demoralize the advancing enemy. We will blunt their coming attack on the Philippines.”

Noguchi began to pour the sakē, handed a gleaming porcelain cup to each of them and, lifting his, made this toast: “A man has only one death. That death may be as weighty as Fuji-yama or it may be as light as feather down. It all depends on the way he uses it. It is the nature of every Japanese to love life and hate death, to think of his family and care for his wife and children. Only when a man is moved by higher principles—by
junsuisei
, the purity of resolve—is this not so. Then mere are things which he must do.”