The Emperor of Any Place (8 page)

“Shoo! Off with you!” I shouted, racing across the hard sand toward the gathering, splashing into the low tide, my sword raised in two hands like a samurai. Ah yes, I can hear you say, what a dashing figure I must have cut, Hisako! Oh, how the
jikininki
hissed at me, stumbling out of my way, to the left and right, but not prepared to leave. They spit and slobbered. Then they turned their backs on me, bent over, and farted horribly. You laugh, Hisako, but it was true! Bravely, I covered my nose and waded into their midst, swinging my sword back and forth. You cannot kill what is already dead, but the
jikininki
are tender-skinned nonetheless, I soon found out. They are half rotted and, in any case, afraid of the living. They hate the living; too much of a reminder of what they’ve lost, I guess.

“Leave him!” I shouted, slashing at the one who had claimed the body. The thing pulled back. Then it opened its horrible maw, from which gobbets of blood and flesh spilled. It tried to growl at me, but its mouth was too full. Sick with revulsion, I pierced the creature through the chest. It squealed hideously, loud as a siren, and clambered to its feet, scuttling away, but not without taking a great hank of flesh in the talons of its left paw. While I stood guard over the corpse, the other
jikininki
circled the one with the food, slavering and screeching, like so many seagulls wanting their share of the bounty.

The flesh-eaters had hideously disfigured the dead man’s face, but his tattered uniform proclaimed him to be an American sailor. I wasn’t sure what Americans did with their dead; I seemed to think they buried them, but since I was not sure, all I could think to do was to cremate him, as is our custom.

There would be no need to moisten the lips of the soldier with the “water of the last moment.” He was lying in the wet sand of low tide, waterlogged. I wondered how long the sailor had been trying to land, washed up and washed back out again by the tide.

It is not hard to die; I had learned that all too well. But I found myself thinking how hard it is to settle, to find a place of rest. With the flesh-eaters around, there would be no rest for this soldier’s spirit. So I dragged the man up the sand to dry off. I stayed nearby, for I could sometimes see the ghouls not so far off, watching, waiting for their chance. Then the wind changed and they wandered off. When I felt I could leave him for a moment, I gathered what I needed and built a pyre of driftwood and a bamboo platform for the sailor to lie upon, his body facing north. I talked to him. I wished him luck.

“I have no coins to give you to ford the River of Three Crossings,” I said. “I’m sorry. But perhaps your gods do not require payment.” Then I lit the fire with one of my precious matches and watched the flames consume the man. I fed the hungry fire to keep it as hot as possible. The
jikininki
returned with the fickle breeze, drew as near as they dared, and howled at their loss, their hands raised to their cadaverous cheeks, but did not dare come too close. Fire, it seemed, was their enemy.

And so I set myself up as the island’s undertaker. It was something that needed doing, and I went about it as best I could, sending dead souls to wherever it was dead souls went. Did
gaijin
go to the same place our own people go? I had no idea; I had never given such things much thought. But here I had only to keep myself alive and to get well, and so the days stretched before me with more time to think than I would have thought possible. By the time you next see me, Hisako, I will be a wise man, a philosopher! Meanwhile, the dead floated in on the tide, and I was the only one around to send them on their way to heaven or hell or wherever it was they were going. The destination of the dead was not my business: the vehicle was.

“Am I not an auto mechanic? Is it not my job to make sure people get to where they are going as smoothly as possible?”

I made a spear out of bamboo. Using my trusty raft, I ventured out onto the reef, where I proved an able fisherman. It seems, Hisako, that for all my unkind comments about him, my father did at least teach me something. There were sea urchins, crabs, oysters, octopuses — real food! The gelatinous canned meat did have one great value. It made good bait.

There was some American food I grew to like, especially the beans in a red sauce and a vegetable stew of which there was an abundant supply. But fish became my staple diet. Besides, fishing gave me something to occupy my time.

Once, when I was fishing in deeper waters with a line and improvised hook, taking advantage of a clear, calm day, I looked down and saw the ghostly form of a sunken ship. It might have been the source of my bounty, spilled onto the tides to wash up on the shores of Kokoro-Jima. I knelt on my raft and stared down into the waters at the wreck. I said a blessing to the gods for the bounty and a prayer for the dead I knew must be trapped down there in the green darkness. I had found three other corpses by then. But if the wreck gave up further members of its crew, I would give them a proper send-off. I could do this much.

Days passed into weeks. I had clothes to wear now, and shoes. I had stripped the clothes off more than one dead sailor by then. As I had suspected, other sailors from the wreck washed ashore, and I sent them on their way, getting to them whenever possible before the
jikininki.
I would regularly go on death patrol, which, as awful as it may seem, was better than when I was a soldier and went looking for people to kill!

“Come home in death.” It was a line from a song we had learned when I joined up. There were many such songs extolling the proud deaths we soldiers would earn on the battlefield. Curiously, there were not a lot of songs about what to do if you happened to survive.

Sometimes I would wake and find the ghouls hovering near me, longing for me to die, drawn to the stench of the corpses that lingered about me, I suspect. A smell that remained no matter how many times I bathed in the lagoon. But I would not die. I would not give them the satisfaction.

I will return to you, Hisako, when the aroma of the dead is gone from me.

I have not mentioned the other pleasant ghosts for quite a while. I suppose that is because I have become quite used to them, these “children” of mine, for I cannot seem to shake them. I no longer try to frighten them away. I do not waste my breath yelling at them. Though their faces are hardly formed and they cannot speak, they seem to express human emotions. They smile and frown and look angry sometimes, though it is hard for me to know what motivates their feelings. The expression I see most when I gaze at one or another of them is hopefulness. There is one, a boy child, Hisako, who comes closer to me than the others. In some strange way, he reminds me of you. But perhaps that is just my longing for you that makes me look for your features everywhere — even in the clouds.

I have come to taking the clothing from dead men and hanging them over bushes to dry, leaving them until the sun has bleached every last drop of death out of the material. One of the corpses I found was not so big, and his boots fit me quite well. I go barefoot most of the time, in any case, but these boots are good for when the sand is hot or for my sorties into the jungle, where there are snakes and thorns but where there are also luscious fruits for the picking.

Ah, but I have not yet told you of my biggest project! Up on the promontory above the lagoon, I built a shelter, which I work on all the time. It is made out of wooden packing cases, stout bamboo posts and beams, and with a roof of palm leaves. I have notched into one of the posts the number of days I have been here and in that way kept track of the passing of the summer. Of my time on the raft reaching this island, I can only guess. One night, two nights, thirty-one?

I made a hammock of fish netting I found washed up in a terrible snarl on the beach. Ah, the beach. It is like a postbox!

The nights are warm, but I found canvas to hang from the bamboo beams of the shelter for when the breezes pick up, walls that flap and snap in the wind. After every rainfall I add more palm leaves to the roof, once it dries out, so that now my shelter is dry even in a hard downpour. I hope it will be sturdy enough for the monsoon season, but by then, who knows, I might be back with you and we will read this together. Of this, I fondly dream.

Farther along the headland from my dwelling, a stone’s throw, at the very highest point on the island, I found a stout coral tree, over eighty feet high, with wide embracing branches. I knew these trees from my youth in Okinawa. There were a few bright crimson flowers on it when I first discovered it, but I knew in the spring it would put on a brilliant show if I were around to see it. There were black tiger’s claw spines all over the tree, but I cut and smoothed myself a route up through the prickles and built a platform, a watchtower, where I could see for miles and not be seen from below.

From this high spot at night, I could see the lights of another island. At first I thought it to be a ship far out at sea, but it was there all the time in the same place, never moving. So I had not traveled so far, really! You can’t imagine how this renewed my hope of a return to civilization. As I grew stronger, I wrestled with the idea that I should go, for surely the island across the sound must be Tinian, unless it was Saipan — even better!
³
If it was Saipan, then that is where you are, Hisako, and there was every reason to want to return. I knew, of course, that Saipan was invaded before Tinian, and I knew something of the result of the invasion, the terrible loss of life there. But I also knew this: reports are not always accurate. More important, I knew that
you were alive
! I knew this as well as I knew that I was alive. You, Hisako, were the one shining thing that made my own survival an imperative. And in my braver moments, I imagined making a sail for my raft, the quicker to get to you. There was all manner of machinery on the island, albeit in mangled bits and pieces, some of it. I might even have made myself a motor, rigged up a propeller —
sped
to my beloved!

But the thing that held me back was that the islands, both of them, were now in the hands of the enemy, as far as I knew. And who could say what would happen to me when I landed there, or if I would even make it to land before they opened fire? The image of the American soldiers tending the injured, the black one caring for the baby, haunted me as I tossed and turned some restless nights. I had been led to believe that the
gaijin
would as likely tear a child to pieces with their bare teeth as look at it. My own eyes told me differently. And I dared to believe that you, as a civilian, would be spared any suffering. But what I couldn’t know was how they would treat an enemy soldier. Prison camp? I wouldn’t mind that. My job now was to stay alive. But why not stay alive here on the heart-shaped island? In time, the war must end. The Empire would rally or fall. I realized that it was wicked to suggest that the Empire might ever be defeated, and if this account was to fall into the wrong hands, I might be had up on a court-martial. So let me quickly add for anyone to see that the Emperor is in my prayers every night, and it is my fervent desire that we will prevail! But in any case, it was just a matter of time. War could not go on and on in a perpetual state forever, could it? Oh, on my bad nights, when the fighting was in me, the killing, the horror, the bone-jarring noises coursing through my memories and bloodstream, I shivered and thought that, yes, war
could
go on forever if one were in the earth prison of purgatory. But then I would wake up, push back my canvas walls, and look out at this beautiful place and my hope was renewed.

I will wait. I will make myself strong. I will cremate the dead to keep them from the hunger of the undead. I will purify myself in this peaceful place. The nightmares will stop, and then the war will be over, yes? There will again be something like civilization to which I might return.

¹
I can only assume Isamu is talking about Spam, which was included in certain rations.

²
Probably hardtack.

³
Saipan and Tinian are sister islands in the Northern Marianas, the latter only a little over five miles from the southern shore of Saipan.

¹

I found a pair of binoculars. Sadly, they were wrapped around the neck of a drowned sailor, but apart from a dent or two, they were serviceable. No water had seeped into the lenses. I smacked the side of them, and when I looked, there was my jungle. There was sand in the adjusting wheel, but I was able to fiddle with the binoculars enough to suit my eyes and bring the distance into sharper focus, as if dragging the jungle toward me. I could not wait to take them to my watchtower, but first I had work to do: cremating the dead solider.

One of the
jikininki
dared to approach me just as I was lighting the fire.

“Wait,” it said.

I must tell you, Hisako-chan, I jumped with surprise. I had not known they could talk. I had assumed their mouths were only good for squealing and devouring dead flesh. “We could share this one, yes?” the ghoul asked, although it had to say it more than once, for its words came out mangled. The creature’s tongue was bloated.