Free Above the East China Sea: A Novel by Sarah Bird Page B

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.
    Did Aunt Hatsuko pray to the
kami
to send the demon girl to us?
    She must have. She promised we would be together in the other realm.
    But, Mother, if we claim a stranger’s body, won’t we be condemned to spend eternity with her ancestors?
    Once in the next world, we will find our clan.
    But I don’t know our clan and they don’t know me.
Anmā,
what if we are separated?
    That was the worst of all my fears. That we would be separated and my child wouldn’t know who his people were. Wouldn’t know where he belonged. Without intending, I recalled a song that had frightened me as a child.
    I let my innocent child
    Journey to the netherworld alone.
    Morning and night, looking for me,
    He must be crying.
    I don’t want to be alone.
    Don’t cry. Please don’t cry. You won’t. I promise you, you will never be alone. That is why the
kami
have given us more time. So that you will know the story of who I was and how you came to be. You must have all my memories so that you will know your clan and they will know you.
    Even the painful ones you have pushed from your thoughts?
    Especially those. You must know my story, for it is the story of the
munchū
we are part of and that you will be with for all of eternity.
    Even if we are separated?
    Even then.
    Will there be time?
    There must be time.
    Then tell me quickly. Tell me what I must know.
    I will begin on March twenty-third, 1945.
    Don’t tell me numbers,
Anmā.
Tell me what I understand. Tell me colors. Remember the colors again. The pink of the baby piglets. The gold of the trunks of your bamboo grove. The purple of your mother’s sweet potatoes. The yellow of the flowers on the sea hibiscus hedge that lined the narrow oxcart path. The red of the flowers on the
deigo
tree, so bright that the entire side of the mountain seemed to be on fire.
    Yes, and everything in between was green. Leaf, vine, grass. More