Little Lily. Chapter 23. Okinawa

Six years had passed since that March dawn in Tokyo.

April of nineteen sixty-one on Okinawa turned out to be so transparent that it seemed all the air over the archipelago had been carefully pulled from the celestial net, washed in the ocean, and returned to a transparent, crystal ringing. The island, which had once seemed to Yuriko completely gutted, burned, and turned into limestone crumbs, was now blooming with some ruthless, purely tropical, non-human splendor. The fiery cups of hibiscuses blazed along the flat shoulders of new asphalt roads, heavy purple sleeves of bougainvillea choked the concrete fences of American military bases with their smell of gasoline and cheap coffee, and the pandanus, whose roots had once absorbed phosphorus and blood, now stubbornly stretched their fleshy, glossy leaves to the sun, as if no war had ever happened.

Sixteen years… Yuriko noticed this not by the calendar, but by the color of her mother’s hair: from the thick shade of a raven’s wing to pure winter cotton. Time here had stopped moving in a straight line. It had coiled into a heavy, damp ring and circled, like a well-fed sea bird, over the endless runways of Kadena and Futenma. Sixteen years had passed since the old world was blown to pieces, and sixteen years since this world hastily, noisily, and fussily reinvented itself. Chrome-plated American “Chevrolets” and heavy army trucks now rushed along the roads, kicking up red dust, and the blue, high sky was constantly cut by jet fighters with a deafening roar that tore eardrums, leaving even, white, surgical scars of contrails on the azure dome.

The United States Civil Administration—all those strict officers and officials from USCAR—diligently printed green “B-yen” banknotes, opened new cinemas, and zealously ensured that the word “Okinawa” was mentioned as rarely as possible in official papers. It was ordered to be replaced by the half-forgotten, majestic name of the Ryukyu Kingdom. The Americans believed that if they rewrote the signs and changed the name of the currency and the authorities, it would be possible to neatly and painlessly cut the mental umbilical cord connecting the locals with the distant northern mainland. But the island’s memory was like a wild sweet potato: it was trampled, scorched with flamethrowers, buried under rock fragments, and yet it still sprouted deep underground—invisible, stubborn, and bitter.

Yuriko sat in her principal’s office at the school in Mawashiasato. In her thick, once blue-black hair, thin threads of early gray now distinctly shimmered—this internal frost, often found in those who managed to make it out of the underground caves of Okinawa, appeared not from age, but from contemplating the darkness for too long. Her face, round and soft in her youth, had acquired a strict, almost sculptural clarity, as if it had been carved from coral stone by the long, tireless surf. On the wide oak desk before her stood neat stacks of student notebooks, teacher duty schedules, rice registers, and dry reports printed on a hectograph for American inspectors. The school no longer resembled a canvas tent flapping in the wind, nor a plywood barrack; now it was a sturdy concrete building with wide windows, in the clean glass of which the lazy midday glare of the East China Sea was reflected.

The office door opened without a knock, quietly and unusually.

Usagi appeared in the doorway. She was still just as thin, in a simple, starched cotton dress, but her eyes—deep-set, surrounded by dark, indelible shadows—still harbored the eternal, midnight gloom of the Ihara cave. Usagi never greeted her first, as if their conversation, which had begun in the autumn of forty-five, had never been interrupted at all. She silently walked to the desk, put a twice-folded sheet of the fresh mainland newspaper “Asahi Shimbun” on it, and smoothed the fold with a dry, nervous movement of her long fingers.

“Read it,” Usagi said. Her voice sounded even and flat, like an overturned clay bowl. “I don’t know which of ours wrote this to them… And I don’t want to know.”

She turned and walked out without waiting for an answer. Her quick, absolutely silent steps instantly died away in the echoing school corridor, leaving behind only a faint, barely perceptible smell of sea salt, cheap soap, and roadside dust.

Yuriko looked down at the newspaper page. It was a column of short notes and human stories, printed in a large, neat Tokyo font.

“Larks for the Lilies,” read the headline. “A touching gift from the mainland for the spirits of Okinawa.”

Yuriko began to read, and with every line, her stomach clenched into a heavy, cold knot. The article recounted in a saccharine, warm tone how some successful businessman from Osaka or, perhaps, from Tokyo received a letter from distant Okinawa, in which an unknown author tearfully asked: “I want to send larks from the motherland-Japan (bokoku Nihon) to the spirits of the fallen Himeyuri girls… If we send these birds to the Himeyuri cenotaph, the spirits will rejoice, seeing the birds multiply.” The touched capital merchant immediately organized a fundraiser among his colleagues to buy a large batch of songbirds on the mainland and solemnly transport them by plane to the southern island.

Larks. Hibari.

Birds of northern fields and temperate latitudes, which had never, since the creation of the world, been found on Okinawa. They had never flown over the crimson clay of Mawashiasato, never sung over the sharp rocks of Cape Kiyan, never built nests in the crevices of coral limestone. The fallen girls from the Himeyuri unit—all those with whom Yuriko shared the last sip of rotten water—didn’t even know what these larks looked like, how they smelled, or how their morning trill sounded. They knew the cries of piercing sea terns, they knew the quiet hissing of emerald lizards, they knew the dull, mournful murmur of the wind in the thickets of prickly pandanus.

But the distant, well-fed mainland did not need the harsh, bleeding truth of Okinawa. The mainland vitally needed a beautiful, sentimental fairy tale, into which it now sent decorative songbirds so that they would beautifully reproduce over abandoned bones.

Yuriko closed the newspaper. A bright, blinding April light poured into the wide window, smelling of salt and blooming bougainvilleas. In the schoolyard, children played tag, and their ringing, carefree shouts reached through the glass muffled, as if through a thickness of clear ocean water. Yuriko sat motionless, staring at one point, until the sun slowly passed the zenith. She carefully picked up the newspaper sheet with two fingers, folded it in half, then again, and again, until it turned into a tiny dense square, and with a sharp movement threw it into the wastebasket.

At home in Mawashiasato, she was expected.

By the plywood porch—which Soma had long ago lined with sturdy pine boards, whitewashed with lime, and turned into a real, reliable porch—stood the familiar, heavy army “Studebaker”. Soma had once traded it on the black market in Naha for a few sets of homemade furniture. From behind the body of the car, a cheerful, demanding childish chirp could already be heard, and when Yuriko turned the corner of the house, she involuntarily stopped, admiring this picture.

Soma sat on the low stone wall of the vegetable garden, tossing his healthy leg over his knee and leaning heavily with his hands on a thick bamboo cane. He was thirty-eight years old, but he looked a full forty-five: his face, heavily weathered and darkened by the sun, was covered with deep creases at the mouth; his hands had become bumpy from constant work with wood. His wooden prosthesis, to which he had long been accustomed as to his own body, no longer emitted that pitiful iron squeak—an old master in Naha had replaced the rough ring with a soft, oiled leather strap. Next to him on the grass sat Nanami in a simple, but surprisingly elegant chintz dress. The thin scar on her left cheek had paled over time, turning into a barely noticeable silvery thread that flashed when she smiled. Nanami, just like in the old days, smelled of dry wormwood, coziness, and home-baked bread.

At their father’s feet sat two girls. The eldest, Keiko, was seven years old; she inherited her father’s penetrating dark eyes and her mother’s soft grace. Keiko was already in the first grade at Yuriko’s school and proudly wore a clean blue apron with an ironed white collar. The youngest, four-year-old Yumi, held a branch of blooming hibiscus in her tiny fingers and enthusiastically fed the bright petals to a toy wooden horse that Soma had carved for her from a solid piece of pine.

Kohaku stood on the threshold of the house, wiping her hands on a long blue apron. She was over sixty, her hair had turned completely white, looking like pure winter cotton, and her shoulders had noticeably drooped under the weight of her past years, but her hands remained as strong, tenacious, and precise as before. She looked at her granddaughters and smiled with that deep, silent, all-forgiving maternal smile that never required words.

“Yuriko-nee, we brought fish!” Soma shouted, noticing his sister and giving a welcoming nod towards the well, where a wet hemp sack lay. “Red snapper, from the very morning catch in Itoman. Fresh, still smells of the sea.”

Yumi, the youngest, ran up to Yuriko and pulled the edge of her dress. Her round, tanned face wore an expression of utmost seriousness.

“Aunt Yuriko,” she whispered, looking up with huge eyes. “Dad says you’re the principal. Is that true?”

“It’s true,” Yuriko squatted down to be at her level.

“And what does a principal do?”

“A principal makes sure all the children wash their feet before lunch.”

Yumi thought for a moment. Then she nodded strictly:

“Then you’re a bad principal. Keiko doesn’t wash her feet. I saw her.”

At dinner, the conversations flowed slowly and smoothly, like a hot, rich rice broth. Soma thoroughly talked about a new large order: his carpentry artel, which had grown into a real workshop, had taken up the construction of a wooden building for a fishing cooperative on the south coast. Nanami quietly, with a soft smile, complained that Keiko didn’t want to diligently learn the multiplication table, while the girl, burying her nose in her plate of fish, angrily muttered that numbers were terribly boring, but the stories about the ancient kings of Shuri Castle that Aunt Yuriko told them were the most interesting thing in the world.

Yuriko looked at her little nieces and felt how deep in her chest, under many years of layers of hardened ash, something very warm, alive, and sharp, resembling a fresh ginger root, was slowly and stubbornly uncoiling. Life went on. It was wounded, limping, covered with deep scars, but it stubbornly and victoriously went on.

When Soma and Nanami left, putting the sleepy, yawning girls into the spacious back of the “Studebaker”, and Kohaku went to the well to wash the wooden dishes, the house plunged into a dense, blue, velvet silence. The kerosene lamp on the table smoked slightly, casting long, moving shadows on the plastered and thoroughly lime-whitened walls. Yuriko went to the narrow wooden cabinet standing in the corner of the room, knelt down, and opened the lowest door.

Immediately, a dry, sweetish smell of old paper, dried herbs, and confectionery vanilla drifted from there.

She took out a tin box of English cookies darkened by time, on the lid of which a faded royal crest could still be faintly guessed. Yuriko opened it and poured the contents onto the table. Inside lay letters. Tens, hundreds of light blue airmail envelopes, carefully tied with thin twine. Some of them had yellowed with time, their corners frayed and cracked, others looked completely fresh, as if they had been delivered only yesterday.

Yuriko began to slowly sort through these envelopes, and all her past, forever cut-off life began to unfold before her like a long, detailed scroll. She did this not to reopen old wounds, but because tonight she needed to finally close all the circles of her memory.

She unfolded the very first letter from Miko, dated October forty-eight. The handwriting—familiar down to the last dash, small and cramped—made Yuriko smile:

“Dear Yuriko. We finally arrived in Sacramento. Our apartment is quite small, but very clean, and from the large window you can see a real apple orchard. Yesterday I tried local American coffee for the first time in my life. Yuriko, it’s terrible! Black, thick as axle grease, and bitter, but Ren laughs and says I’ll get used to it soon. I hope not…”

The letters followed a strict chronological order, and Miko’s life appeared on these pages in all its tactile, sensual fullness. She enrolled in nursing courses, and the American professors at the California hospital were in sincere amazement at her incredible field experience. “They just don’t understand,” Miko wrote, “how it was possible to apply tourniquets and do dressings without soap, without clean water, and in the absolute darkness of the cave. I tell them about it, and they look at me as if I fell from the Moon. I guess I really did fall from there.”

Later Miko transferred to the veterinary faculty. She chose to treat animals. “People remind me too much of those I can never help again,” she explained in one of the letters from fifty-one. “And dogs, horses, and cats don’t ask stupid questions about duty and the nation. They just want to live. And in this striving, I understand them better than anyone else.”

Ren, together with his former battalion comrades, opened a construction company. They engaged in the erection of standard, quick-assembly modernist houses—using the Eichler Homes system. “Ren is constantly disappearing on construction sites,” Miko shared. “He tells me: ‘Miko, we just build sturdy wooden frames and walls for people, and they themselves put life into them and make a home out of it.’ And I laugh and answer him that he’s still a translator, just now he translates American blueprints into the language of human comfort.”

The photographs in the box also changed from year to year. Miko grew her hair long; her face rounded, completely losing that terrible, cave-like, hungry sharpness of the cheekbones. In one photo, she stood in a snow-white medical coat against the background of a neat sign reading “Sacramento Veterinary Clinic”. In another, she was laughing, standing in a light summer sundress in the middle of a violently blooming apple orchard. In the third photograph, sent in the winter of fifty-one, she and Ren, both incredibly happy, held a small, tightly swaddled lace bundle in their arms.

“Yuriko, we had a boy,” Miko wrote on the back of the card. “For four months I didn’t know what to name him. I didn’t dare to give him the names of my fallen parents—this burden is too heavy for our sunny, quiet city. Can we name him Jiro? In honor of your father. You won’t mind, will you? I thought, let my child have the name of at least someone’s father who didn’t run away, didn’t betray, but died trying to save the children and reach our cave.”

Yuriko pressed this photograph to her chest and closed her eyes for a second. Behind the plastered wall of the house, the ocean breathed rhythmically and soothingly. Little Jiro Kimura was growing up a healthy, black-haired boy with the wide, white-toothed American smile of his father Ren.

Yuriko sorted through these letters slowly, like rosary beads during a long evening prayer. She perfectly remembered that icy March morning of nineteen fifty-five in Tokyo. That dawn in the hotel lobby, when she, shaken by a nightmare and the rustling voice of the Jewish girl Tamar, went down to the telephone switchboard. Yuriko called Sacramento not at all to hear Miko’s voice, and not to ask Ren to take her out of this ruined world. Miko was already a beautiful, completed part of her past—a part that she herself had cut off and handed into the reliable hands of a man capable of giving her happiness.

She called for Hinata.

The boy who, at the age of six, dragged wounded soldiers out of the forest rot. The boy who knew by heart the price of every cracker in the Shimabuku camp. The boy who danced so bravely and cheerfully with her at her older brother’s wedding. Yuriko then realized that he should not stay here, on this damned, blood-drenched piece of land, among coral tombstones, American tanks, and the false state myths of Tokyo. He deserved a completely different life—a life where the sky doesn’t fall on your head like phosphorus rain, where you can study and breathe freely. And Ren understood her then without a word.

Three weeks after that call, Ren sent a telegram from Sacramento: “Processing documents. The boy is coming. Everything will be fine. R.K.”

It took almost a year of correspondence, petitions to the military commandant’s office, and guarantees to get the young man a student visa. But they still pulled him out.

Yuriko took out another stack of letters from the tin box. The envelopes were slightly smaller, the paper rougher, and the postage stamps were local, Okinawan—depicting the ancient gates of Shuri Castle. From Hinata. She pulled out the freshest photo, sent just a couple of months ago. In it, against the backdrop of a strict California college building, stood a tall, broad-shouldered young man in a clean white shirt with carelessly rolled-up sleeves. Under his arm, he confidently held thick textbooks on higher mathematics. Her navigator.

“Dear Yuriko-nee! I’m writing from the dorm, it’s very noisy here, the neighbor upstairs plays the guitar and is always out of tune,” Hinata’s lines were fast, flying, and uneven. “Mathematics turned out to be cool—better than katakana, which I never learned properly, remember? Professor Foster says my head works. I tell him: ‘Because I was taught to count using bullets.’ He didn’t understand. Americans generally understand very little. On weekends I go to Ren-san’s, I help him with the blueprints. He says I’m a born engineer. I tell him—no, I’m a navigator. And we both laugh, because we both know it’s the same thing. Yuriko-nee, I really miss the sea. Ours. And Grandma Kohaku’s sweet potatoes. American potatoes are not the same.”

Yuriko carefully re-read this letter three times, then neatly folded all the pages back into the tin box and closed the lid tightly. She wasn’t crying. In her soul, there was no longer any ringing emptiness, nor bitter resentment towards fate. Inside her reigned a heavy, calm, crystal-clear peace, similar to the water at the very bottom of a deep well, from which people drink on the hottest day. Her life was not unhappy or lived in vain. Her life was her own, conscious, and proud choice.

She gave Miko to a man who idolized her. She gave Hinata to a country that gave him a future and mathematics. And for herself, she kept this island, her aging mother, and this memory. Because someone had to stay here, on Okinawa, just to hold these stones and not let them finally crumble to dust.

She stood up, wiped her hands on her skirt, put the box away, and went to the dark window…

The next morning, the sun rose over Mawashiasato as a piercing, blindingly yellow disk. The air smelled of dew, damp grass, and the sweet smoke of the hearth, over which Kohaku was already boiling the morning rice early in the day, rhythmically stirring it with a large wooden spoon. Yuriko quickly had breakfast, rinsed her face with icy well water, and went to school.

That morning was fresh, permeated with young greenery and the eternal smell of ocean salt. The concrete walls of the school building glowed in the rays of the early sun like smooth, scrubbed skin. Yuriko walked down the corridor past her principal’s office, past the bright bulletin boards with lesson schedules, and stopped at the slightly open door of one of the junior classes.

At the even wooden desks sat children. They were only six or seven years old; all of them were barefoot, tanned, in clean blue aprons with white collars. They cheerfully exchanged glances, whispered; someone enthusiastically drew with colored pencils in the margins of their notebooks. Soma’s daughter sat in the third row by the window and, seeing her, began to straighten her apron with an important, adult air.

The young teacher, who had very recently arrived on assignment from Naha, raised her eyebrows in surprise, noticing the principal in the doorway:

“Nakayama-san? Good morning. Do you want to check something?”

“Good morning, Ms. Takada,” Yuriko said quietly, walking into the classroom. “Excuse me. May I take a few minutes of your lesson?”

The teacher bowed respectfully and immediately stepped aside to the window.

Yuriko walked to the blackboard. At her appearance, thirty pairs of round, clean, lively eyes that knew absolutely nothing about caves, gas, and grenades instantly fixed on her. The children froze, standing at attention, with that special, reverent respect with which first-graders always look at the school principal. Yuriko cast a glance over these faces and felt how something colossal, simple, and clear, like this dawn itself, was uncoiling inside her.

“Good morning, children,” she said. Her voice was quiet, but it instantly filled the classroom from corner to corner, silencing even the most inveterate whisperers. “Starting today, a new, most important subject appears in the schedule of our school. We will begin to study history. But not the history that is written in Tokyo’s textbooks, and not the one the Americans brought with them on ships. We will study the true history of our own archipelago. The history of Ryukyu. Our land, our ancestors, our ancient kings, our defenders, and our seas. You must know where we came from to this land. Only then will you clearly understand where you need to go next.”

The children listened to her, their mouths literally open in amazement. Little Keiko in the third row looked at her aunt with huge eyes shining with pride.

Yuriko turned her back to the class. She reached out and took a piece of clean white chalk from a special stand. It rested in her palm surprisingly familiarly, firmly, and confidently, as a master’s most important, time-tested tool rests in his hand. It seemed that the chalk smelled not of lime, but of dry, strict cleanliness. The two pale, faded crescent scars on her left palm—the seal of her survival—were now absolutely calm. They no longer burned or hurt.

Yuriko raised her hand high and began to write on the black slate board. Every stroke was laid down clearly, sweepingly, and confidently, leaving fat, blindingly white, glowing lines on the dark surface. The chalk squeaked rhythmically and dryly in the silence of the classroom, and fine white dust fell on the wooden floor like a quiet, blessed rain.

When she took a step back, the children read:

“We are Okinawa.”

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