The Emperor of Any Place Read online

  I wish I could proclaim here in this prologue that I had been able to track down Isamu’s beloved Hisako, to whom this memoir was dedicated. Nor have I been able to track down any relatives. How I would have loved to present this book to her, to them. I have tried, with the help of my son, Leonardo, to locate survivors of the family. The war effort in Saipan resulted in massive casualties to the population of the island, not just the combatants. Isamu was an immigrant to Saipan from Okinawa. That island was also devastated in the last great offensive of World War II. We keep searching, Leo and I. Who knows? In this age of global communication, the technology to which I have contributed in my own small way, we might still find heirs. And it is important that we try. This document, when you strip away all that is strange, all that might be a product of fright and horror, is more than anything else a remarkable love story. And I am still able to wish, despite the hard truths of this worrisome world, that every love story should have a satisfactory conclusion. I owe it to my friend Isamu Ōshiro to finish what he began.

  Professor Derwood Kraft

  Palo Alto, California

  Evan looks up. Hears a lawn mower. Not exactly a startling sound in Any Place. In fact, he’s not sure of this, but he has a feeling you are given a lawn mower when you sign a lease to live here. There’s probably a law saying you have to use it, too. Like the law about no clotheslines.

  Then Evan sits up straight. There is something strange about the sound, after all. He gets up, leaves the book on the lawn chair, and makes his way through the carport to the front. Lexie Jane Reidinger is mowing Evan’s lawn. She’s wearing her favorite snake T-shirt, the one that looks like you’ve got a boa around your neck — a boa constrictor, that is — draped around your shoulders with its tongue licking your belly button. She’s got earphones on, and she’s mouthing along with whatever song she’s listening to.

  A twelve-year-old is mowing my lawn for me, thinks Evan. I am now certifiably pathetic.

  He waves. Moves down the driveway a bit, stones poking his bare feet, just in case his guilt isn’t painful enough. He waves again to get her attention. She sees him finally, stops the lawn mower, pauses her iPod, and takes off her earphones.

  “Thanks, Lexie,” he says. “You didn’t have to do this.”

  “My dad said I did,” she says with a frown.

  Great, thinks Evan. Alienate the neighbors. Maybe he should get some chickens, a hound dog, and a rusty car or two. “I’m really sorry,” he says. “I had been meaning to get to it . . .”

  “It’s okay,” she says. “You don’t have to pay me.”

  “Oh. Right. Uh, thanks.”

  “But . . .” She stretches the word out.

  “Here it comes,” he says. “What is it? My LEGO collection?”

  She rolls her eyes; proof positive that she’s almost a teenager. But then her expression changes to unadulterated excitement; proof positive that she’s not.

  “I was wondering if I could see how the frigate turned out.”

  For a moment, Evan is lost.

  “The boat?” She’s got a “duh” look on her face. “The one your dad was . . . you know . . .” Now her expression changes. She looks a bit worried, as if this was one of those things you weren’t supposed to say to the bereaved.

  “Oh, right!” says Evan. “The frigate.” He thinks a bit. “The USS Constitution.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’d forgotten. You were his . . . What’d he call you?”

  “His navvy slave,” she says with enthusiasm.

  He has to laugh. “You’re in luck, slave girl — he finished it.” Then he gets an idea. “Wait here,” he says. He holds up his index finger. “One sec.” She nods excitedly, pushes the hair out of her eyes. And he heads into the house, takes the stairs up to the Dockyard, two at a time.

  The newest boat is there on the shelf where he placed it. Sixteen days ago, now, that morning when he found it on the floor. He picks it up in two hands. This is such a good idea, he thinks. Then he sees the dust on the shoulders of the bottle, the clean space on the shelf where the bottle sat, outlined in dust. Everything covered in dust. And dust . . . he knows what dust is.

  Give it to her. Go on. Let it go. You can do it.

  But he can’t.

  Slowly he places the bottle back on the shelf.

  He leaves the room, closes the door behind him, and stands at the top of the stairs. Then he turns one-eighty and heads to his room. He lies down on his bed and closes his eyes. He thinks of Lexie Jane standing out there on the lawn waiting. Waiting for one sec. He’s not sure how long it is before he hears the lawn mower fire up again.

  Evan sits in his bed, the book open in his lap propped against his raised knees. It is late, raining again. There is distant thunder, sheet lightning. His window is open and a sheen of raindrops paints the windowsill. A breeze stirs the curtains and wanders around the room checking out his stuff, riffling paper on his desk, the feathers on a dream catcher, the right bottom corner of a poster of the Three Stooges. A breeze cool enough to make him glad of a summer-weight duvet.

  He hadn’t noticed at first, but there is a title embossed on the back of the book as well. The gold letters in kanji must be the Japanese for the title on the front. And if he opens the book that way up, sure enough there is a title page in Japanese, and then the body of the book in reverse order to the English translation. Which is how Japanese is read, he guesses, right to left.

  He pages through the reproduced photographs of the original manuscript, tiny kanji characters, written in pencil and pen — the “monograph,” as it’s identified in the acknowledgments. Then he flips to the English translation. Two translators are acknowledged in the book’s front matter, a professor and a graduate student, as if this thing were an archaeological specimen. Something dug up and dusted off and handled with white gloves and a magnifying glass.

  For some reason he is full of trepidation.

  Why me, he thinks. Why does he suddenly have a grandfather with a mysterious past? What was it Leo had written in the letter: something about the “ambiguous and disturbing conclusion.” There was something in the prologue, too. He flips back, finds the paragraph . . . yeah, here it is: “Griff could not have known the content of these writings.”

  What was that supposed to mean?

  And then he recalls that look on his father’s face, the last night, as if he was trying to recall something, a lost memory.

  There’s something wrong with the picture.

  Evan leans back and closes his eyes for a moment. The memory of his father’s words has spooked him. The whole thing spooks him. How does a book like this float up onto the shore of 123 Any Place, a perfectly ordinary island in the perfectly ordinary sea of Don Mills?

  My name is Isamu Ōshiro. I was born in Okinawa but left for Saipan in 1938, when I was just sixteen. There was work there harvesting sugarcane, and no father to slap me for reading too much and for being a dreamer. I wanted to be a mechanic and soon found work fixing cars and trucks. But you know all that, Hisako. I only mention it in case this book falls into the hands of a stranger. Your name and address are plainly displayed on the book’s cover, for it is into your hands that I wish it to be delivered, into your arms that I wish myself to be delivered. How I wish to share with you my most intimate thoughts. Trust that I hold many sweet memories of you in my heart.

  I think too much, I talk too much — have you not told me many times? But there is precious little paper for my yammering. Ah, the miracle of these pages! You will have to wait to find out how the paper came to me along with the implement to write down my adventure. Patience.

  You know everything about me until the day I boarded the troop carrier for Tinian, and after that, nothing. There was no time for letters. Everything happened so fast. So I will pick up the story of my life at the moment when it looked as if it was most likely to come to an end. It was the day after the invasion of Tinian.1

  I remember little of the fighting. At one
point it was all around me, the loudest thing in the world. And I was part of the noise, but my rifle did all the talking for me! Then there was a very loud whooshing sound, a wall of heat, and everything went dark. Time passed with no help from me to count the minutes or the hours.

  The next thing I remember was pain. How strange it was to not be able to really see or hear or think at all but only feel this searing pain all over. I rolled onto my back, breathing heavily from the effort and gritting my teeth. I opened my eyes and lay there several minutes sucking in air, greedily, while the dizzy sky swirled above me. Then I raised myself onto my elbow and, dreading what I would see, I looked down at my body. Yellow pus oozed from my left flank, discoloring my torn uniform, which was already brown with dried blood. I had been scorched. I shuddered and shook. My heart was racing. Septicemia was setting in. I wiped the sweat off my face, knuckled it out of my eyes, looked up, looked around. My rifle lay a few feet away, as scorched as I was, broken. The chrysanthemum etched into the stock was filled with dirt. Everywhere was quiet. Dead quiet.

  Rolling onto my front, I dragged myself painfully forward on my elbows toward a stand of new bamboo. I parted the culms with my hand. I blinked. Blinked again, for what I saw could not be. What insanity was this?

  Amidst the smoke, a terrible battle was being fought in utter silence.

  By puppets!

  Bunraku puppets shot at one another with bright-blue rifles or slashed with yellow swords. This one held a red dagger in his polished wooden fist, which came down repeatedly on the inflated torso of another puppet, who twisted and turned this way and that, throwing up its hands, its clever glass eyes rolling in its wooden head. Over there, another puppet twirled around and around, shooting a green handgun, out of the barrel of which rained a silvery cascade of confetti.

  Parts of soldiers flew off, this way and that.

  The puppets were elaborately dressed: on one side, brave samurai warriors in orange-colored armor with ferocious grins; and on the other side, grotesque ogres, pale with white noses as long as daikon radishes.

  For every puppet there were three puppeteers, one to operate the feet and legs, the other to operate the left hand, and one — the master puppeteer — to operate the right hand and the head. The puppeteers were all but invisible. I squinted to see them at all, for they were dressed in black from head to toe, with black hoods over their heads as if they were death’s own helpers. What Dancers they were — blind Dancers under the blazing sun. War Dancers holding aloft warriors with child-bright weapons, and hungry mouths open to reveal the whitest of chompers and the pinkest of tongues.

  Now this one’s head flew off and rolled toward me, so that when it stopped I could see the worn handhold in the hollowed-out neck. This was a puppet that had fought in many battles. Had he lost his head every time?

  There was something terribly wrong with the performance, but I was so delirious it took me a while to realize what it was. Ah, yes! There was no chanter to tell the story. There were no musicians: no one to pluck the shamisen, to drum on the taiko, or to blow on the shakuhachi.

  There was no noise at all, and what is a battle without noise?

  My grandfather had taken me to see Bunraku when I was a child. Did I ever tell you that, Hisako? No, I mostly complained about my father, didn’t I. Ah, but my grandfather — how I miss him. I remembered him explaining how the chanter always held up the text before the play and bowed to it, promising the audience that he would follow the author’s story, faithfully. So this was a performance without sound, and without an author or a story. And how could such a story be true? How could such a story ever end?

  Now, from the midst of the swirling mayhem, stepped the most impressive of samurai with a mighty ax, which he swung at the loftiest of the ogres. The ogre ducked but not fast enough, for the top of his head was sheared clear off! As you can imagine, I gasped in astonishment. Then as if all this were not strange enough, out of the white ogre’s skull appeared the head of another miniature ogre. A hatchling that rose on tiny white wings and floated into the air above his fallen father, higher and higher, until he hovered above the battle. All the brave samurai stopped their fighting to look up in awe. The hatchling held a rose-colored orb with a fuse that flashed and sparked.

  A bomb!

  If there were black-gloved hands holding that flying ogre-child aloft, I swear I could not see them. The mightiest of the samurai, stunned by what had happened, regained his composure, raised his ax, and swung at the tiny winged warrior, back and forth, leaping and twirling and lashing out. How comical he was — deadly comical. But with great alacrity the ogre’s offspring averted every blow, rising to just the right height above the battle scene.

  The fuse grew shorter and shorter.

  And then the bomb went off.

  A hot wind made the bamboo culms click together. I did not open my eyes this time, afraid of what I might see. I was thinking about something I had been told, something that had been drummed into me, when I became a soldier. “There can be no surrender. A great man should die as a shattered jewel.”

  A great man, yes. But I, Lance Corporal Isamu Ōshiro, knew I was not a great man. I was a burned man, a broken man. A puppet deserted and left to die by my manipulators. I was nineteen, married not four months, before I was called to serve my country and my Emperor. Which I had done and failed. Failed not once but twice, for I was too weak now to throw myself on my own sword. To be fair, I had no sword. But I was too weak to throw myself on the sword of the conqueror.

  There was even greater shame inside me. In my heart of hearts, I knew that, given the chance, I would be a tile under the invaders’ feet — would suffer the infamy of becoming a prisoner of war — if it meant eventually I could be with you again, Hisako. If you have survived on your island, then I would live on this one, with any amount of shame, just to be with you there again. I did not then know that there was a third island, a third choice. Ah, but I get ahead of myself.

  There I lay. Tears sprang from my eyes, I will tell you, and mingled with the sand, which coated my cheek. The burning in my side throbbed and throbbed. My breath came in sobs.

  I dreamed of you, your face so somber and strong. “Live,” you said to me. “I will live, if you will, too. Live and come back to me.”

  I woke a third time to the thumping of a bittern. I could hear again! I listened to the wind stir the leaves of the trees. Is there a more glorious sound in the world? Then I heard human sounds, voices. Not the cries of war, but of men talking. I lay perfectly still. A burst of tired laughter split the air. One voice louder than the others sounded on the verge of hysteria. I knew that kind of laugh only too well, but I could not understand what the voices might be saying. From the pitch and the lazy timbre I could tell they were gaijin.

  It was dawn. A day and a night had passed. Or maybe several days and several nights — how would I know? I raised my head, scraped at the sand coating my cheek. Dug the sand out of my ear. The voices were still there. They were not a dream, although it had been a night of uncommonly strange dreams!

  I cleared the sleep out of my eyes. Then carefully, I rose on my knees and peered again through the bamboo. This is what I saw: American soldiers walking amongst the dead and dying, eyes peeled, rifles fitted with bayonets. A wounded Japanese soldier was helped to his feet. He was frisked and led away, without a struggle. The two Americans and their prisoner crossed a slight rise and disappeared from view, and I waited for the single shot of execution. None came.

  Another warrior writhed in pain. A marine called out, and two men appeared with a stretcher, and the three of them loaded the man onto it. A farmer, by the look of him, for many of the citizens of the island had joined us in the last-ditch effort against the invaders.2 I had heard, Hisako, as have you, what the Americans do to the wounded — the torture, the humiliation they inflict. And yet that was not what I was seeing here. The stretcher-bearers carried the warrior to a place where there were many stretchers and where the wounded were b
eing treated, Americans, Japanese, soldiers and commoners alike.

  Then a baby started to cry.

  A baby? Now you will think I am hallucinating again. Believe me I thought so, too. I punched my head with the heel of my hand as if my untrustworthy ears had deceived me. But no, across the battlefield a marine leaned his rifle against a tree and gently released a child from the dead arms of its mother. Awkwardly he cradled it.

  “Will you look at this,” he called out. No, I cannot understand English, as you well know, but that is what he must have said, for another soldier approached him. “Well, what do you know,” he said, or words of that kind. I wanted to turn away, for fear of what would happen next. They would kill it. They would throw it to the ground and tread on it. They would snap its neck like a market chicken. This was what we had been told. I had to do something!

  My rifle was ruined, but I still had my handgun. I rolled onto my side, almost screaming with pain, but biting down on my tongue to keep from giving myself away. I reached for my Nambu, struggling to pull it from its holster. But by the time all of this had transpired and I had rolled back onto my stomach to fire — nauseous from the exertion — there were three soldiers gathered around the child. It was howling now, and the first soldier held the baby at arm’s length and wrinkled his nose. The others laughed.

  I took aim, or tried to; my hand shook too violently.

  The newest of the trio had pushed his helmet off the back of his head and taken the baby, placing it across his shoulder. He patted its back tenderly. I lowered my gun. The soldier’s face was black. Black, I thought, from the smoke of war. But no, so were his arms and hands: black because he was black.

  The black man cooed at the baby.

  What was I to do? I lay my head down in the sand, too weak to hold it up, confused and ashamed. Surely war is madness. Meanwhile, the baby, quiet now, was carried away, back through the dead and dying, back to the living and recovering. And I faded off again, exhausted by the attempt to care.