As Nishikaichi settled onto the hard floor for the night, he was strangely calm. In the cooling air the warehouse smelled of old wood and dust and reminded him of the temple near his home in the Shikoku prefecture, where the pilgrims came and lit candles and left offerings, and where the rooms were ghostly with ancient things, as if all the candles ever lit, all the whispered prayers ever exhaled, all the fruit ever offered had left their scents in the grain of the walls. But as he turned on his back to get comfortable on the dirt (the other men put their heads on the tight balls of their dusty shirts, but Nishikaichi would still not allow himself to remove his flight suit), he caught sight of the Christian cross on the wall. It reminded him of the Zero, its wings outstretched uselessly, tilted on the rocky ground, abandoned. His heart clenched then, but he closed his eyes to feign sleep, though he would not sleep, not now, when his mission was so far from completion and dishonor pushed down on his shoulders like a weight. When the sub came—it would come, wouldn’t it?—he wouldn’t need Harada-san anymore. The sub’s crew would blow the plane up. He would watch as the sheared metal heaved toward the blue sky in one last effort to take flight.
His anxiety did not last long. The hum of the shore break was soothing, the wind, which had picked up, whistled quietly. Nishikaichi had begun to see why Harada-san was still loyal to this island. There was a serenity here that Nishikaichi could not explain. Perhaps it was the lack of machines. Perhaps it was just the heat, relentless, sapping. He would have to be careful that he did not let his guard down too much, get carried away by this loosening of his limbs.
As he drifted off to sleep, the pilot thought of the white scar of the fishmonger’s daughter. It moved like a wave, beckoning him. He lifted his arms and, still breathing deeply, began to swim toward it.
Nishikaichi woke the morning of Wednesday, December 10, with a headache. He’d had disturbing, incoherent dreams of a plane come alive. It walked on its back tail and flapped large wings menacingly. Which was why, despite the steely nerve that had been drilled into him as a soldier, the sight of Howard looming over him startled him so much.
-Ohana, the Hawaiian man said. Nishikaichi got to his feet, thinking that perhaps the emperor’s boat had come, but then Howard stopped a few feet outside the door and kicked some rocks out of the way. Then he went carefully to his knees. He raised folded hands to the lightening sky. After a moment Nishikaichi heard a strange bleating sound and realized that Howard had begun to sing. His voice quickly gathered momentum and soon it was loud and exuberant. Despite his tightened bladder, Nishikaichi did not move from the warehouse. He was not sure what to make of this sudden, unabashed worship, but he knew he did not want to disturb it. He slowly sat back on the ground, crossed his own legs, and lay the backs of his hands on his knees. He closed his eyes. Within a moment he had forgotten his own need to urinate. He blanked his mind in a quick rush of what he could only describe as wind and felt the familiar lightness that came with the meditative prayer he had learned as a boy. He chanted in a voice that came silently from the crown of his head. While the voice repeated the sacred words, his heart opened slowly, like the mouth of a cave seems to do when the sun hits. His heart spoke then, without words, asking the great forces to allow him to see the fishmonger’s daughter one more time, to miraculously destroy his plane and papers, to protect his parents, and to keep the war from this lonely island. He wondered if this was blasphemous, communing with Lord Buddha against the backdrop of Jesus. It didn’t feel like it; it felt organic and whole. The more powerful Howard’s singing became, the more the white light behind his eyes shone, the more his scalp glowed. When the singing stopped, Nishikaichi opened his eyes quickly. He was letting his guard down too much, much too much.
No one said anything during the breakfast of leftover yams, not even Howard. When the sun was well above the horizon, Nishikaichi walked to the water’s edge, but he no longer wanted to swim. The Niihauan emperor had not arrived, and this was Nishikaichi’s third day with no sign of a rescuing submarine. The sub was not coming, he would have to face that. Now something had to change here, he knew. He waited for Yoshio to join him so that he could begin to talk in earnest to him, but the man stayed in the warehouse, a tormented look on his face, and so Nishikaichi stared out to sea alone.