The captain said suicide pilots like us became divine. I knew he was lying, because I see gods, not ghosts, and I’d seen neither hide nor haunting of the others who’d gone before. All the same, when my manned torpedo malfunctioned and Yofune’s didn’t, I asked the captain to let me have another go. But the two mechanics restraining me said to stop fighting, and the captain withdrew to the radio room.
Yofune’s signal was five days lost when we returned to base. The Soviets were coming now. A red north and star-spangled blue south. One mass grave. For weeks, we were told to await orders. Yofune’s signal was twenty-two days lost when we were told to go home.
By then, we’d heard about the bomb.
• • •
Twenty-three nights after the bombing, the fires had died down but a bluish, lazuline glow came off the bodies stacked for disposal by the clearance squads. I would have preferred the dark, but by the look of it, engineers had already restored electricity to Ujina. And looking was easy; there wasn’t aught between me, standing slack-jawed on the platform of the burned-out Hiroshima train station, and the waterfront district of Ujina but a few speckling lights and that glow.
Behind me, steam howled and the freight train’s joints protested the departure. Its uniformed passengers rustled. Someone whispered, “Don’t breathe it in.”
It was taking two of them still packed inside to shut the door. Might have been easier if one were older than fifteen, and if the one holding a collar over his nose were using both hands.
I loaned them one more. They cried out as the door slammed on stray fingers.
Outside the station, us new arrivals lost the echoes of our boots to wind unimpeded for miles, the shuffling of barefoot children calling us by the wrong names, the hoarse begging of someone with only bandages below the ankles. Only the god, the wrinkled thing with disheveled hair past its breasts and nothing past its floating knees, was silent. The children flowed around it like water around a stone; I’ve never met any who see what I see. I sidestepped the current of their wasted bodies.
Past the throng, a few more children squatted by a fire and balanced cans of boiling water on a makeshift grate of rebars. One of them ran up as I drew near. His eyes were too swollen for him to know better than to shout, “Anchan! Anchan, it’s me!”
You never gave me a baby brother. Even if you had, I wouldn’t have recognized this one. Came up to my ribs, though I’m stocky for sixteen so that’s not hard to do. Still tall enough to see the crown of his head was an odd sort of bald, like a Catholic monk’s. The wounds obscuring his face had a more familiar quality. The left side must have been near a window when it happened; his sunburst grin reopened cuts that tessellated cruelly across his cheek.
When I approached the firelight, he sank and apologized for the mistake. Strapped across the back he turned was a baby about my new sister’s size. I’d held her only once, but her eyes had twinkled with laughter when I’d shown her the clams at low tide. Even blinking, this one’s pupils were a flat black.
One of the other boys said, “Thirsty, sir? Two yen a cup.”
The baby’s skin was colorless. Sweat pearled but drool didn’t. “Kid,” I said to the one with swollen eyelids, “where’re you from?”
The other boy pointed vaguely. “Yamatecho. You’ll have to speak up with Yuta. He’s deaf now. Water?”
Yuta was sniffling. A third kid mouthed to him, “Don’t, Yuta, you know the salt hurts.” No one saw the wrinkled god from the train station stagger near. No one but me, and of me it didn’t much care. The baby was what it stared longingly at, before letting out an infant’s wail and turning into a heron. It circled the baby until I waved it back, when with another wail, it collapsed onto the ground, winged but naked again, and vomited something gray.
“Yamatecho,” I said. That was across the entire delta. They’d said it was one bomb. “What are you all doing here?”
The boy with the water frowned. His hands were scarred, as if he’d dug through burning coals for something. “If you’re staying by the fire, it’ll be four yen.”
They’d stood at attention for me, last I was home in uniform. Yofune had hated that. You would have loved him, as utterly as you would have despised me for waiting twenty-three nights to get here, waiting on the base commander’s orders.
On the boy’s, I followed his pointed finger toward the delta.
A light blinked overhead, but it was only a canted utility pole’s tangled cables crossing the stars. No lanterns lined the street. No carelessly cloaked ceiling lights flashed as families reviewed evacuation maps. Only the moon now made jagged silhouettes of the debris they’d cleared from the main road so strangers like me could keep from tripping on our cheap plastic boots.
There was a horse pacing across Aioi Bridge, and I didn’t see that it wasn’t alive or even dead until it lowered its eyeless head to snuffle my hands.
“I’d offer sacred wine,” I said. “Can you show me, anyway? Who I’m looking for?”
It wouldn’t speak to me, but the blood gleaming across its neck reflected Yofune, alone in his manned torpedo, slumped over in sleep before he’d suffocated somewhere in the deep between here and Luzon.
I pushed away.
The horse followed me to the southward T of the three-way bridge. There, I faced the island in the delta—the whole island, as if they’d made of it a fire break. Only the ruins of the elementary school obscured the sea. It was supposed to have been evacuated, but the stench here was worse. I’d have to breathe it to get to Mother’s fabric shop.
I stepped off the bridge, and onto something—someone—that gave way with a whimper.
Sixteen. Old enough to die, so they’d said. But I quailed, a child again, and fell onto my back.
• • •
“‘We must try to live.’”
The hilltop barracks were mercifully empty. Still, enough four-legged echoes lived in these hills, and I’d once caught them cupping their hairy hands to shout back our treasonous whispers. They’d giggled after, while I sweated. So, I hissed, “Not so loud, Yofune.”
“‘Non, non! Debout!’” He smiled at the sea below. “It’s Valery.”
“Valery, Baudelaire. If it’s not Péta, then—”
“Pétain.”
“—then they’ll fucking shoot us.”
“Executed. For poetry.” His gaze drifted southward, to the tunnel that spat our manned torpedoes into the bay, where on Wednesday we’d lost Ensign Yamamoto during a practice run. “I think you’d like Goethe. So obsessed with death, for someone too young to have lived.”
“Shut up. Just shut up and—” and say something else, anything else to amuse the echoes “—keep your head down.”
“That didn’t work last time.”
The echoes didn’t care about that. But you wouldn’t have, would you, Father? You’d have liked Yofune. He hadn’t volunteered.
“So, make it work,” I said. “They’ll send me where I’m most useful. People like you, you’re most useful rebuilding.” Alive.
“There’s no use for you or me, Kugiya. No blessed death. In this war, we die for nothing.”
I made fists so my hands would stop trembling. “Do they teach Du Bouchet at imperial universities? My father, he likes Du Bouchet.”
“You should write him.”
I was already forgetting my French, so I hummed for the echoes a folk song about the waterlogged dead. They carried the tune for me when my voice quavered and cracked on the usual line.
• • •
I woke on the horse.
The creature was plodding across Aioi Bridge in a world still tinged blue. The blue came not from the corpses anymore but from dawn on an impossibly broad sky. It was light enough to read whatever message you’d have left. A message telling where you’d all gone.
I swung off the horse. Bits of bone showed where I grasped its mane, and I wiped its sloughing skin from my trousers as I raced to the island. It nickered once, like a rattle of bones, and hung its head.
Dawn turned the island into a meadow of broken things. Tiles blasted off roofs, wood frames sundered from foundations. Post offices and kitchens pulverized to a uniform height, like ugly, tall grass. Daylight renewed not the thrum of cicadas and commerce but of moaning and shuffling, always too near. No signboards or branded lanterns gave away addresses. All the messages written in cinder on broken beams or the plastered exterior of brick walls were for someone else.
I stumbled seaward and back, until it was light enough for the sleeping to rise, for me to beg pardon of them and say no, I hadn’t any food. Two girls murmured to each other under a makeshift shanty and I asked them where Kugiya Fabrics had been, where its shopkeepers were sheltered, if Mother had swallowed her pride or you’d simply dragged her from the city to your childhood home by the sea. But the girls’ cracked lips wouldn’t move for me, and I saw at last, in their mouths and linked arms, the maggots.
Fists again, to stop the trembling. To think. The murmuring was not theirs.
It came from behind the corpses, from a huddle of small figures. Orphans, and hearth gods. Hard to tell apart, until the gods opened their overlarge eyes and crept from the ruins, the soot of homes they’d failed to protect creasing in their childlike faces. One peered shyly from behind a stone lantern, the kind by temple entrances.
The fabric shop had been near a temple.
Like cats following a fisherman, the hearth gods scurried after me, only retreating when I got too far from their respective piles of rubble. By then, I stood before the one that might have been mine.
Ours. Our home. I’d never seen the river or Industrial Promotion Hall from here. It was all wrong, wasn’t it? All sky, no wood facades tucked in on either side. The eaves should have been there. The entrance here, where traditional robes had replaced the dresses and suits Mother had pushed to the back. There, the study where you’d cast aside my penciled notes on the imperial rescripts and secretly taught me the Roman alphabet, before the red slip had come for our neighbors. There were not enough shadows now, and too much wind, with nowhere solid enough to scratch a message in cinder.
Then again, you hadn’t felt the need, had you? Because I’d never sent the letters. Despite my duty to silence, you knew I was supposed to have come home in a small white box. You’d had no one to write a message in cinder to.
The bright panic dulled and I unclenched my fists, until I could again sense movement. Murmuring, by the kitchen this time. No rafters for the poor creature to hide above anymore. I started toward it, but wheels clattered up the boulevard.
A girl, twelve or so, pulled a cart alongside a boy just under the draft age. Clearance squad. From beneath his cap, the boy eyed the buttons leading to my face. We looked away in unison.
When they left, I picked my way to the murmuring in the house. At my footsteps, the hearth god searched the ruins with its overlarge eyes. Bobbed hair, colorless now and brittle, flew off its wrinkled face as it bounded into my shadow, where it resumed its frantic gibberish and latched onto my leg, like the neighborhood children trying to wrestle me to the ground. I let it adjust its grip as I waded through the sea of tiles tumbled in ash. Mother’s gleaming silks in lilac and vermilion, reduced to the same gray as a scorched abacus.
Hard crunches, too sharp to be wood. Knees to glass, I surveyed my footprint and picked out a metal hook. Your spectacles. Both lenses were cracked, but I pocketed them. Thought you’d need them later.
“They cleared out the bodies.”
The boy was now pulling the cart. The girl had fashioned a broom.
“There weren’t bodies here,” I said. Not a question, but the girl misunderstood.
“Don’t know. We’ve been digging up the middle school boys in the old demolition crew, by the school.”
The boy turned away as if from an unpleasant smell.
“My name’s Kugiya Sentaro. Like Kugiya Fabrics. You know where they went?”
The girl frowned. “Few hereabouts that lived, sir.”
“You should check the Red Cross Hospital,” said the boy, still facing away. “Everyone does. You might even get their ashes.”
When they left, the hearth god murmured its gibberish, and I dug. I didn’t respond to passersby or flies, and I didn’t stop until I hit hard-packed earth. Either under cloud cover or night, I dug to the kitchen, indistinguishable from the shop floor but for the immovable stone oven. Ridden by the stench of shit and rotting meat in the sun, and then memories in sepia of nighttime baths, I searched for the copper tub that should have withstood the blast or melted in place. But it was gone. The cast-iron pots and the fittings on Mother’s cabinetry, the gleaming pendulum and accusing hands on the grandfather clock still ticking between my ears, vanished.
Well, you’d hand-planed those cabinets. You’d have taken them. You’d not have let their fittings melt like wax, your prized clock burn and bare its teeth. You’d have retreated to safety, carted them and Mother to the seaside house.
If I left now, I’d get there before dark.
I stood, weak and parched. Careless. My boot caught on an arc of excavated debris, and the hearth god leaped away as I sank through a fallen beam. Another unsteady surface stopped my heel before caving with a crack. Not stoneware—too thin. Glass wouldn’t have been white beneath the ash sliding off it. I lifted my heel from the pieces of a skull.
It had broken, but before that, it hadn’t fused. Kneeling, I picked the white bits off my boot and then dug with both hands.
No ribs, vertebrae, or teeth. Only shards, as if everything had kindled to a needle point. Except for a long bar, and then another. Two bones from a forearm resting atop someone’s baby sister.
You know that brooch she wore? Mother, I mean. Lapis lazuli, no matter the day. The only bijou she hadn’t sold. Kept it tucked behind a collar or fold since neighbors had started selling heirloom kimonos to buy food.
In the ashes, in the trenches I dug until I hit packed earth, and still deeper because I had to be sure, and I couldn’t be sure until I had bled through my fingers, there was no brooch.
Terrible thing, really. But good. Someone else’s mother, someone else’s baby sister, with faces blurred like smudged graphite. Good.
I doffed my cap, wrapped the ends of the bones, and slipped them into my navy-issued satchel.
Something pulled at it. I’d forgotten the hearth god, pushed its mumbles into the wasteland’s unremitting moans. Tears welled in its orange owl eyes, duller than I remembered. It pulled again.
My release papers were in the satchel, and a few coins, the family portrait, and two caramels for Mother and the baby. The baby was too young, but I could hardly give a caramel to one lady and not the other. As it happened, I still had a mother, a sister, and only two caramels. When I shook my head, eyelids that stretched rice paper-thin over the god’s eyes started to quiver.
I pulled free. Like the god at the train station, it fell to its skinned knees and vomited something gray.
But from the yanked satchel, a single caramel tumbled out and onto the earth. Before I could snatch it back, the creature’s knobby fingers curled around the treat. Instead of following me, it returned to the wreckage and the stone oven, where it circled up like a stray and shut its eyes, the caramel clutched far from its mouth.
I walked away from it and the waning sun. I crossed a bridge and didn’t look down. I searched for landmarks and tripped on their ruins. I blinked against the confused, cupped-mouth echoes of a sutra from a temple blasted to bits and stepped around shadows seared into the pavement. Whenever carts were not rolling by, the unknown woman’s bones clattered at my hip.
Soon, she quieted, overcome by the moaning and shuffling. I’d walked the wrong way; the seaside house was west. Here was a press of people, burned people, maimed people, uninjured people who averted their stares from everyone but me. For me, their stares turned hard. Around them were stalls of salvaged wood and corrugated metal I had last night mistaken for rubble.
But this noise. It was like the chanting and haggling on Hondori, but only the way a record sounded under a bamboo needle: off. No buildings to soften the voices. Rough talk reserved for construction crews or yakuza, now directed at a girl buying sugar that had disappeared from shelves in 1944. A badly burned soldier endured the same rough talk from a woman consumed by a monstrously large winter coat. He barked that his burns were worse and he needed protection from the sun. She said, served him right; she’d heard the rumors, what they’d done in China. The soldier boiled, steamed, and stormed past an enormous wok of colorless food; the cook boasted of barley and roadside weeds from out of town, untouched by the black rain, with extra sustenance from sawdust. The cook moved as though hand-cranked from a film roll in the fluttering shadows of a passing cart’s wheel spokes, until a vitriolic peddler stopped the cart for having rolled over his twisted foot. One of the haulers removed his cap and hid the embroidered anchor on it, switching from Korean to Japanese to soothe the peddler’s ire, while the others continued pushing shadows across the peddler’s stretch of cloth and wares.
And there, among the wares, something bluish, something lazuline. Lapis lazuli set in filigree gold.
Your arms were that color gold, she’d said. Your arms that had dragged her from her shop and city, that even now, across the bay, shaded her and the baby from harsh angles of the sun. That was your duty, and where I’d failed, surely you hadn’t.
I approached the peddler’s wares, everything gray but for that blue glow.
The peddler’s ire faded. He asked me something about my jacket. I ignored him and the hauler, the rest of the noise. I touched the brooch as gently as I’d picked up the bones.
A flash, a flick of pain across my knuckles, and the grays sharpened into red, dripping idly from the peddler’s nose. Teeth as pink as Yofune’s spit after I hadn’t warned him in time and they’d found his copy of Das Kapital in the barracks. Untreated wounds oozing, bruises blooming indigo, spots like Yofune’s freckles but purple and grave, on a frame no meatier than one of the corpses that would pile high and glow again tonight.
The peddler raised a hand in warning. It was missing several fingers, and layers of skin stretched taut here and curdled like seafoam there. “Jacket first. Then the discount.”
“It’s my mother’s brooch.” It came out cracked, like the eyeless horse’s nicker, like bone shards.
The peddler watched for collaborators I didn’t have. “Lost your glasses, have you? Keep scaring customers, boy, and I’ll double the price.”
Only officers had called me boy since I’d joined the Yokaren at fourteen. Officers, and Yofune, who’d slipped two caramels into my pockets as if for a child, as if he’d known my torpedo and his luck would fail. Yofune, and you, the two of you had seen past the propaganda about Burma and Bataan and the inevitability of a battlefield death for which I’d soundly fallen. You’d not have failed. And so Mother—“She’ll want it back. Give it back.”
“Give it back, he says. Weren’t you supposed to win the war, you fucking mongrel?”
“Give it back.”
The peddler drew something from his pocket that paled his knuckles, paled the hauler stepping aside, which meant the peddler’s knife was small but sharp, meant for some task I’d never learned in the kitchen or for killing in a market.
“Give it back.”
“What have we been dying for if not for you!”
The knife flashed but didn’t cut. Instead, the hauler’s shoulder tucked under my chin and threw me backwards. Air burst from my lungs, but even as the pink sky grayed, I wrapped around his legs to bring him down on top of me. He was long-limbed, too thin, like everyone else. I grew small, pulling his jacket collar against the tender arteries in his throat. It was his turn to struggle, but I held fast to the collar, to the comfort of his shadow and oblivion.
“Stop fighting,” he said in my ear. “He’d have killed you. Stop, you damn—”
A damn fool, because I opened my eyes long enough for dirt to fly in. The pain let the hauler wrestle me onto my stomach and twist an arm behind me. In my satchel, under our weight, her bones snapped.
The echoes, startled from their confused sutras, let the snap roll through their mouths.
“Stop fighting,” the hauler hissed. And I, with one arm still free, pushed off the ground with it and elbowed his head. He groaned but held fast, while I stifled a sob.
“Give it back!” I elbowed him, again and again, to the hell-bent rhythm of the ruined clock measuring the seconds I’d been too late. With each echoed strike, the opposite shoulder strained and flared white-hot, like tracer rounds at night, like magnesium on fire, the flash of a hundred thousand souls seized with awe. “Give it back!”
Even in the unremitting noise, I heard the inhale, his hesitation. He pushed onto the captive shoulder, and I struck anyway.
There was a pop as my bone left its socket. A scream too, and all-consuming pain, a wave across my back that plunged me into bright, breathless panic. From there, I sank through a meadow of bones and fathoms of water, where my scream was as distant as the groan of steel settling in the deep, and the pain began to flicker like sunbeams through blue waters on an unexploded torpedo.
No gods, no ghosts, and that was all right. But I really hoped you’d be there. I really hoped I wouldn’t be alone.