The pilot had taken off from the aircraft carrier with his heart light, his throat constricted. He’d sat at the controls with a straight posture and one hand tapping his knee, which his instructor had always hated, not so much because it was ineffective or dangerous, but because it reflected a jauntiness unseemly for a Japanese warrior. He was only twenty-one, but he had flown all of his air raids over China like this, except the first few when he had clutched the stick so hard his forearm had hurt for days afterward.
It was a good day to die, he thought. The sky was cloudless, and his squadron navigated the final miles to their target by a Hawaiian radio station that played American jazz music, so that he nodded his head almost unconsciously to words he did not understand. They were sure that they would be spotted and intercepted before Pearl Harbor and the military installations came into view, but they were not. And then here was the airfield, the American planes waiting quietly for their destruction.
He rained machine-gun fire down on men running for outbuildings. A gasoline tank blew, sending orange-black flames into the sky. P-36s, lined up wingtip to wingtip like children holding hands, were easily destroyed. When his squadron leader finally ordered them all to reassemble, the young pilot made one more pass, just for the sheer thrill of it. Below him the ground was littered with the innards of planes and hangars. He saw the blink of scattered machine-gun fire, but otherwise there was little resistance. Smoke blurred the air. He knew that men screamed, heated ammunition popped from its casements, steel collapsed with a moan, but from where he was in his Zero he heard only the roar of the engine against the stillness of his heart. It had gone so perfectly, and as he wheeled toward home—or at least to his carrier somewhere on the high seas—he allowed himself one raised fist, a private moment of unabashed self-adulation that he quickly buried with thoughts of his navy brothers, his country, and the emperor.
But his gas tank had been hit. By the time he realized this, as his engine began to hesitate and cough, Pearl Harbor was behind him and it was too late to turn back and make a final pass, with true warrior seishin, right into an American target. He stopped tapping his free hand, thinking vaguely that his instructor would finally be happy, and dipped his right wing, then his left, to get a view of what was below. Somewhere nearby was an uninhabited island called Niihau, designated by his commanders as a crash-landing spot, if necessary. When he saw Kauai off to his right, the deep green of lush forests and high mountains, he knew he was close. And there it was, looking, as promised, like a small, reddish seal lounging on its side. And there, at the northernmost tip, where the head curved toward the body, was the rock Lehua, a beacon of white bird guano. He didn’t have much time. Even as he headed for it, his engine died completely, and refused all of his efforts to coax it back to life. But he had the altitude to make it to the island, where he saw enough to realize that most of it was rocky and full of scrub—not ideal for an emergency landing. Off to his right, however, he spotted a small diamond of color. As he turned toward it the island seemed to bloom, with rows and rows of planted trees, herds of cattle, and the white dots of what must have been sheep. The pilot went rigid with surprise. Were there people here? He saw a large yellow field perfect for landing. But a sprawling white house, a mansion really, sat on the eastern flank like a whale bone, a vertebrae of small sheds and outhouses whittled along its periphery. The pilot wheeled to the left and saw to the south more open fields and finally a cluster of houses, though much more modest than the white mansion. The pilot drew in his breath. He quickly glanced at his map; could he have made a mistake? But there was no other possibility. This was the island of Niihau, not uninhabited after all.
The pilot’s mind reeled with this new information. People? Americans? Why, of course they were American, this was the Hawaiian island chain. Americans had spread through here like a stain for more than one hundred years. Well, he could not land here. The worst dishonor, worse than a useless plunge into the sea, was the capture of his plane and papers by the enemy. The pilot jerked his head to look at his instrument panel. The altimeter read 1,000; he could still make it to the ocean and dump her there. Deliberately he turned toward the water; he would die with the same calmness with which he had flown most of his three thousand combat hours. But then the silvery sheen of a familiar face coalesced in his mind. He felt a rushing torrent in his stomach, his breathing shortened. His mind flooded with what seemed to be bright colors, though he could not say he actually saw the colors, it was more of a feeling that they were there. Abruptly, he steered back toward the fields. Something in him softened and blurred, and he lined up for a crash landing onto the clearest ground possible.
No, no, no, a voice inside him cried, deep and gravelly, like an officer in the distance shouting over a great wind. The pilot blinked, sat ramrod straight. As if waking from a sleep, he seemed to shake himself, then canted the stick wildly to the left, until the heaving blue ocean again filled his windshield. For the Divine Emperor! he thought, or perhaps shouted. The whitecaps blinked like landing lights in front of him. The roar of his descending plane was wild applause in his ears. He exhaled, willing himself to be calm. He called upon all his years of combat, the muga deep inside him. Duty, honor: those were all that mattered now. The altimeter began to drop fast.
But he had been told to land on this island. A submarine patrolled offshore to rescue him or any downed flier who made it to this designated spot. He could live. Back went the nose of the plane, once again the scrub stretched before him. Oh, he was weak! He knew why: he had allowed himself to love the fishmonger’s daughter (there was her face, glinting, shining), and his yearning for her had softened him, overcoming his years of military duty. Now his mind was a cacophony of differing orders, a shrieking of training against instinct. Until this moment he had been sure he had always wanted the highest honor a Japanese soldier could attain—to die for the emperor. And now he was battling that with some reflex he had not known he had, an unnameable force that shamed him.
The ground was coming up fast. He turned to the ocean. Yes. His free hand gripped the cotton leg of his flight suit, as if he were afraid it would fly to the stick of its own accord. And then he turned again, with something like a cry tearing from his throat, losing more altitude and aligning himself with a rutted brown field. He was committed now, too late to sink his plane into the depths, waterlog it with salt and plankton and let it disappear. His chin jutted with shame. His plane would be vulnerable to the enemy now, his own life a cowardly misfortune if he survived. He told himself that there was hope, that he must yaw toward the water—now, now, now—but the wheels touched and there was a terrible groan from his plane and then a thunderous yawn, and he felt his body slowly compress and a pain above his eye and then it was dark.
He was moving; he was on the carrier being lifted by the seas. Images spun toward him: the spume of foam when the plane in line in front of him crashed on takeoff into the water; the perfect blue of the morning; how the nose of an American P-36 looked before it dropped away and began to spin. Then all this was swallowed by a sudden billow of black smoke, its angry thrust into the sky: another airfield losing a hangar. How beautiful it was from where he was in the sky, and how terrible. His mind began to fill with the long, dark tendrils; they curled and swam around his plane, buffeting him with tangible fury. Finally there was nothing but its very blackness, as he dropped out of consciousness again.
Then a great wind rocked him. His shoulder was being pummeled by it, pushing him from side to side. Then it subsided, ruffling his coat and pressing his hips. It began again at his shoulder, and First Airman Shigenori Nishikaichi finally came awake. He scrabbled at the goggles and pulled them from his head. Blood arced into the air and as he followed its exuberant spray, the shiny, hard light of midday forced him to close his eyes again. Squeezing his eyelids together tightly, Nishikaichi ran his hand along his hair, understanding with a soldier’s calm and cool detachment that head wounds bleed a lot. Next he reached instinctively for his pistol. It was gone. When he opened his eyes again, he saw a mynah bird staring at him from the nose of his plane. The creature flicked his black head to and fro.
-Aloha, mister, the bird said, and flew off.
To Nishikaichi, who did not speak Hawaiian and only the rudiments of English, the words sounded garbled, otherworldly. For a fleeting second, he thought that Lord Buddha himself had come to lead him to the other side, and as he watched the bird-God fly away, hammering at the air with ragged, black wings, he raised his hands. He waited for his body to rise silently and follow, thinking then of his mother and father, who would not yet have gotten the letter informing them of his death on its stark, precise military stationery, who had not yet fallen to their knees in a spasm of conflicted feelings, who may only now be wondering if he, their one and only son, had something to do with news trickling in about the great destruction. He only wished that he could assure them by including this part, that Lord Buddha had indeed come, though in an unlikely form, graceless and almost ugly, as a great god should, and taken him to, well, he didn’t quite know that yet, but he waited, arms outstretched for the magnificent, unlikely Will to speed him away, and wondering at how this at least they had gotten wrong, that there was no great calm in death, at least not yet. He had been aware of an uncomfortable heat and bright light, and now suddenly that he was not able to move much, far less fly.
There was a heavy pressure on his shoulder and he jerked sideways. Staring at him was an older man with very brown, crooked teeth and black eyes whose corners tilted slightly downward, not unlike his own (in fact, Howard was only twenty-nine). He had a large, square chin, and a mountain of a forehead. His features were as angular as a movie star’s but rough with sun and dust. Jet-black hair rose in a curl from the man’s forehead and, though the pilot could not know this, was combed carefully whenever he found himself alone.
Nishikaichi would have thought that this was yet another Buddha on a mission—except for the stench. It was an unmistakable man smell, the muddy funk of sweat and something else—horse, it turned out. The stubby fingers were red with dust and there was horsehair all down the front of his white shirt. Startled by Nishikaichi’s sudden consciousness, the strange man took a step back on the wing. For an endless moment the two blinked at each other, wordless, and then Nishikaichi saw his pistol balanced in the man’s other hand and any illusion that he was dead quickly disappeared in the ensuing rush of adrenaline.
Nishikaichi considered the distance between him and the man; he was fairly sure he could take him in a fight, but it would mean finding the harness buckle and undoing it, then hoisting himself from the cockpit. He thought his legs would come free fast, but he could not be sure, and though the man seemed clumsy and a little confused, the pilot knew from his own experience that country people were most dangerous like this. Besides, the island was not uninhabited, as he had been told in his briefing. There would be more of them. Nishikaichi lowered his outstretched arms, then raised one hand slowly. The man raised his. He frowned and said something that did not seem to be threatening, but still, it was hard to tell. Nishikaichi did not respond, waiting for the gun to be raised to his face and cocked. Well, it would be right to die, wouldn’t it? He had dishonored the Divine Emperor by landing here, and now he deserved whatever this man wanted to inflict on him. Except that to die now meant that his plane was theirs. The man spoke again. He gestured. Nishikaichi unbuckled the harness and pushed himself slowly from the cockpit. He would do as this crooked-toothed man asked, until he could find a way to destroy his plane, and then himself.