Little Lily. Chapter 20. Letters

Miko and Ren’s wedding passed so quietly, as if it had been written in the margins of history in small, almost unnoticeable handwriting.

There was no ceremonial exchange of sake cups, no opulent silk kimonos embroidered with pine branches, no dignified processions beneath paper lanterns. Everything fit into a small, hastily whitewashed room in the American military commandature building. The air held a heavy, lingering scent of fresh oil paint, mixed with disinfectant and cheap tobacco. The military chaplain—a gray-haired, nearsighted American with the tired eyes of a man who had seen too much death—businesslike and brisk, read out a short formula in English. His words sounded dry, like the rustle of fallen leaves.

Miko stood in her only good pair of coveralls, which Yuriko had washed in the river until midnight the day before and smoothed out with a heavy stone heated over coals. Ren wore his dress army uniform, with crisp, flawless creases on his trousers and boots shined to a mirror reflection. The witnesses were two complete strangers, soldiers from the transport division whom the chaplain had simply plucked from the hallway for a couple of minutes. It was a clean, flawless transaction—an exchange of signatures for freedom, the right to receive a visa, and a spot on an ocean transport. They both knew it. And Yuriko, standing by the whitewashed wall, knew it best of all.

Seven minutes later, the chaplain brought down a purple stamp onto the thick paper with a dull thud. Miko Nishida became Mrs. Kimura.

On the eve of the wedding, Yuriko did not sleep.

She lay on the mat beside Miko, listening to her friend’s even breathing, and stared at the ceiling of the plywood house, where the kerosene lamp’s golden shadows drew slow, flowing patterns. Beyond the wall, the ocean thudded dully, with heavy intervals between strikes.

Miko slept on her back, one arm thrown behind her head. In the half-light, her face seemed white, smooth, calm—like the surface of a stone that could no longer be touched. Tomorrow she would put on clean coveralls, sign an official form, and become someone else’s wife on a distant continent. And this entire plywood room—with its scents of sweet potato, kerosene, and children’s sweat—would remain here on the island, turned into memory.

Yuriko reached out her hand in the dark. Her fingers gently, almost without touching, rested on Miko’s wrist—where beneath thin, pale skin a steady, strong pulse could be felt. Alive. Real. Departing.

Miko did not wake. But her fingers moved slightly in her sleep and intertwined with Yuriko’s—familiarly, unconsciously, like the roots of two trees growing too close together. Yuriko lay like that until dawn without closing her eyes, counting the beats of another’s heart that tomorrow would sail across the ocean.

On the pier in the port of Naha, amid the bustle, shouts of longshoremen, and the roar of steamship horns, only Hinata cried. The boy, in his ninth year, held out until the very last moment, standing tall as a string, but when Miko squatted before him, his face contorted. He caught hold of the sleeve of her formal dress with a death grip, smearing tears across his face, and wailed—desperately, wildly, as if he were being left alone again in the dark June forest of forty-five.

“Don’t leave, Miko-nee…” he pleaded, choking back sobs. “Don’t go to America. Stay with us.”

Miko pressed him to herself so tightly that the boy heard the dull, steady thud of her heart through the thick cloth.

“I’ll return, navigator,” she promised him quietly, yet surprisingly firmly, into the crown of his head that smelled of river soap. “As soon as I can, I’ll return. And you take care of Yuriko. Do you hear me? You’re the man of the house now.”

Yuriko stood nearby, hands hidden in her pockets. She did not shed a single tear. Inside her, an immense, echoing hall seemed to have formed, where every outside sound reverberated with an icy echo. When Miko straightened up and walked up the wooden gangway holding Ren’s elbow, Yuriko did not look away. She watched her friend’s silhouette dissolve into the gray mass of passengers on the deck, and knew: if she faltered now, Miko would drop her canvas sack and step back down onto the Okinawan shore.

But the ocean settled between them as an unbearable, ringing silence of the heart, dividing them by thousands of nautical miles.

Letters from California began arriving by the autumn of forty-eight.

Postwar mail service worked in strange ways: envelopes might not arrive for months, and then the prefectural mailman would deliver a whole bundle at once—five or six of them tied with coarse jute string. These light-blue airmail envelopes smelled unaccustomed and sweet: of vanilla, an unfamiliar laundry detergent, printer’s ink, and dry, foreign sun.

Miko filled the pages in small, cramped handwriting. She wrote about Sacramento—a city without a single shell crater or scorched banyan tree. She wrote of how stiflingly sweet the apple orchards smelled in the valley, and how Ren had helped her enroll in nursing courses at the local hospital, where American doctors marvelled at her underlying, terrifying experience working in field bunkers.

“You know, Yuriko,” Miko wrote in one of her first letters, “here at the hospital I have my own stethoscope. A real, chromed one with a rubber tube. When I press it against someone’s chest and listen to their heart, every time I remember how you slept beside me in the Shimabuku tent, and I could hear your pulse through the thin wall of the mat. Everything is different here…”

Inside the envelopes there were always glossy black-and-white photographs. On one of them, Miko and Ren stood on the porch of a neat wooden house. Ren gently put his arm around her shoulders, and Miko smiled—restrainedly, with just the corners of her mouth, but her eyes no longer looked like dead wells. On another picture, Miko sat by the window with a cup of black American coffee, her hair grown past her shoulders and styled in a lovely, soft wave. In these photos, they looked like a real, solid family.

“Come visit us, Yuriko,” Miko invariably wrote at the end of every page. “As soon as it becomes possible, take Hinata and come. It’s beautiful here. It’s warm here. I am waiting for you.”

Yuriko kept these letters in an old English biscuit tin that Ren had once given to Hinata. At night, when the village fell asleep to the chirping of cicadas, she would take out the thin sheets and slowly run her fingers along the inked lines, as if trying to feel her friend’s pulse through the depth of the ocean water. And in the half-darkness she would look at the photos… their photos… photos of Miko.

← Prologue
Chapter 21. Ash →