FOURTEEN

Anmā?

Yes.

What if the demon girl forgets about us?

She won’t forget us. That girl will never forget us.

But what if she does? What if we are trapped here forever? I will stop existing, won’t I?

I told you that I will never allow that.

But you fear it, don’t you? More than you fear our being separated. I am growing weaker. It will happen soon, won’t it?

Yes.

That frightens me.

Your fear won’t help us. Don’t you want to know whether my name was on your grandfather’s list?

Of course it was. You had a Princess Lily pin until the demon girl stole it.

Yes, but does that mean my name was on the list?

It wasn’t?

Listen and you will find out.

Though I was more nervous than I’d ever been in my life, there was one good thing about the upcoming announcement: At least, for that one day, no one would talk about the war. It had gotten so bad over the past few months that some dared to suggest that the conflict might come here, to Okinawa. Even though we had air-raid drills, our Japanese teachers told us not to worry. Yes, there had been bombing, but the American navy could do no serious damage. We knew from our teachers that our divine emperor’s brave aviators had destroyed the Americans’ Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor.

What could our island possibly have to fear? It was so tiny that it didn’t even appear on most maps. No Westerner had found his way to our shores since Commodore Perry’s brief visit nearly a hundred years before. Of what possible interest could Okinawa be to any of the greedy imperialist powers? We had no weapons, no minerals. All we had were pineapples, papayas, sugarcane, and pig shit.

Still, that did not stop our teachers from educating us about what would happen in the highly unlikely event that the Americans did invade. Posters hung on the walls of our classrooms that depicted those sweating monsters with their red faces and monstrously long pointed noses. One showed the demon leaders Churchill and Roosevelt, devil horns curling out of their heads, squatting on a pile of bones, their clawed toes wrapped around skulls, eating the flesh of innocent Japanese. In voices trembling with horror and disgust, our teachers told us of the Americans’ unnatural and insatiable appetites. In the few small, weak countries they had managed to conquer, these beasts had roasted and eaten every child they could trap, and raped every female they could find, from infants in cradles to ancient crones. All that stood between us and that unspeakable fate was our emperor and the brave Imperial soldiers he had stationed in Okinawa to protect us.

On the day the names were announced, for a few moments we would all forget those well-documented atrocities as we discovered what our futures held. That morning, a moment before dawn, Kobo, our old rooster, started in. His crows grew in volume as the first rays of day slanted across our small farm and he announced to the world that he, Kobo the Mighty, had once again singlehandedly caused the sun to rise. I hoped that his crowing would wake Hatsuko, but, exhausted, she slept on. The new principal had transformed our beloved Himeyuri High into a training center for girl warriors. Last month, Hatsuko had told me, a girl had died of exhaustion during a twenty-seven-kilometer forced march. The death had only inspired him to institute harsher measures so that the Himeyuri girls who were honored to wear the Princess Lily pin would have the discipline necessary not to disgrace him.

Gradually other sounds joined in the symphony that I had woken to every morning of my life: the pigs grunting as they rooted through cooling mud for the bits of sweet potato my mother threw out; the chickens clucking and pecking about for tasty bugs; the goats bleating out their impatience to be fed. Missing was the mooing of our cows, since they had all been requisitioned by the Imperial Army.

A rustling in the thatched roof that was so high overhead it kept our house cool even on the hottest days was followed by a series of happy chirps. In the darkness, I imagined the gecko that brought luck to our family, the sac at his throat puffing up into a lovely pink bubble as he did his morning push-ups. A second later, he darted away to do his job and keep the high roof free of cockroaches.

The groaning of wood against leather signaled the arrival of our ox, Papaya, carrying a cartload of night soil. The leathery leaves of the tall sea hibiscus that lined the narrow path slapped against the cart as he made his way out to our fields. Soon the workers who tended our rice paddies and fields of soybeans, sweet potatoes, millet, and sugarcane would arrive to receive instructions from my mother. Bit by bit, as my father had grown more refined, more modern, more Japanese, my mother had taken over the daily operation of our farm. When Father refused to ever speak another word of Uchināguchi, our coarse local dialect, there was no longer any reason for him to meet with the men, since none of them spoke Japanese. That’s when my mother officially became the boss.

Since nearly all of our men had left to serve the emperor’s glorious struggle against the imperialist forces of the West, most farms and businesses were now run by women. My three older brothers were gone. Father had tried to enlist but, to his shame and sorrow, was turned away because, even with spectacles, his eyesight was too poor. And now it was my turn to learn whether I had been judged worthy to serve the emperor by going on to high school. I thought of the intolerable disgrace our father would be forced to bear if the name of his youngest daughter was not on the list that he, as headman, would read out today before the entire village. The shame of that possibility stabbed me with such force that tears sprang to my eyes.

Though I neither moved nor made the slightest sound, my sister, always eerily sensitive, woke and asked, “Tami-chan, what’s wrong? Why is my Little Guppy crying?” She took my hand. Hers, usually soft and white as a true lily, was rough and calloused. Her tone, however, was still gentle and refined, and it caused me to blubber as wetly as the big-eyed, round-faced guppy I’d been nicknamed for. The first rays of the morning sun slanted in, and the blue mosquito netting around us turned the light into a pastel cloud.

“What if my name is not on the list?” I wailed. “What if I can’t come to Shuri with you and study to be a teacher? What if I have to stay here and marry a farmer who makes our children poop into the pigsty? Whose teeth are rotten from sucking black sugar and who drinks too much millet brandy? What if I have to sleep on gōyā melon seeds for the rest of my life?”

Hatsuko’s face was creased with concern until the mention of the gōyā melon seeds. She laughed then at my typically Okinawan habit of eating the roasted seeds of the deliciously bitter gōyā melon in bed at night and hiding the shells by tucking them into the straw of the tatami mat.

My big sister put her arm around me. Her sleeping kimono was soft against my skin. Our aunt Yasu, the second-oldest of Mother’s sisters, wove on her backstrap loom the finest bashōfu cloth made from the purest banana fibers, so that our kimonos were light and cool in the summer heat. “Oh, Little Guppy, I’m laughing because I was just as fretful as you on the morning when they read the names for my class.”

“Yes, but you’re so smart. The smartest girl ever to come from Madadayo.”

“Guppy, you’re smart. You’re certainly much smarter than Cousin Mitsue, and she was admitted.”

“Because she …” I stopped myself before I could utter the word “beautiful,” and said something that amounted to the same thing: “… looks like a real Japanese girl! I bet Fumiko Inoue is on the list.” I named the smartest girl in my class.

“Fumi has hair like a shiisā lion dog.”

I grinned at Hatsuko’s wicked comment. It was true. Fumiko washed her hair with hand soap and it always puffed out around her head like a fierce guardian dog’s. Hatsuko covered her own grin with her hand in the refined manner of a proper Japanese girl, reminding me to do the same. We giggled in the sophisticated way she’d learned at school, making a high-pitched, silvery sound as pleasing as the ringing of tiny silver bells.

Later, at breakfast, the three of us, me, Hatsuko, and my father, knelt at the foot-high table where the treats my mother had prepared in advance for this special day were laid out for us. Sea-snake soup, always eaten for courage; bright pink, spicy tofuyu; sweet potato with green-tea sauce; deep-fried whale tripe in peanut sauce; and my favorite, gōyā chanpuru, made with bitter melon, pork, and tofu.

It was quiet and a bit lonely with my brothers gone. I even missed my mother, who had gone to the fields early so that she could finish the day’s work in time to be by my side when the names were read. As annoying and uncultured as her loud, braying laugh and insistence on speaking our native dialect were, the morning felt leaden, almost ominous, without them.

I studied my father’s face. His spectacles caught the early morning light and turned them into two circles of silver hiding his eyes. He had known since yesterday whether or not my name was on the list. Hatsuko saw me peering intently at Father and shook her head at my foolishness; of course he would reveal nothing. Until the names were read, I would not know whether he was hiding pride at my acceptance or humiliation that I had been rejected. Unlike so many of our uncivilized relatives and neighbors, whose every feeling was allowed to play across their broad, brown faces, my father had mastered the fine Japanese art of masking all show of untoward emotion.

Father held up his chopsticks horizontally. We all bowed our heads and said the blessing with him, “Itadakimasu”—“I gratefully accept”—then began our meal.

I had given up on Father betraying the tiniest hint as to what fate had in store for me when I noticed something that turned my belly to ice: As he lifted his bowl of soup, his hand trembled. His hand had not ever trembled before on any of the other mornings when he knew in advance that the names of his children were on the list of those admitted to high school.

Hatsuko’s own hand reaching for her chopsticks halted as we both stared at that telltale quiver. Her eyes, wide now with distress, found mine. My sister’s reaction confirmed what I feared most: My name was not on the list. I would not be going on to high school.

Reflected in my own bowl of sea-snake soup, I saw my future self: skin like my mother’s—tough and brown as ox hide—married to a farmer with brown teeth rotted away from sucking on black sugar and stinking from never cleaning himself properly after doing his business into a pigsty.

Heartbroken, our dream of teaching together vanished, neither Hatsuko nor I could force down a single bite of the delicacies my mother had prepared. My tears dropped without a sound into the bowl as I lowered my head, accepted that my name was not on the list, and whispered, “Itadakimasu.”