Grenade Read online

  How long had Hideki been gone? Was it already five minutes? He had to hurry. Kimiko and Masako and the kids might already be moving by now.

  “Private Hideki Kaneshiro, Blood and Iron Student Corps,” Hideki said, saluting them. “Lieutenant Colonel Sano sent me.” It wasn’t exactly a lie.

  Through the window of the bunker, Hideki caught a flash of movement. It wasn’t Rei’s ghost this time—it was Kimiko, Masako, and the kids. They were out in the open, where the machine gunners could see them if they looked. Hideki slid around to the back side of the cave so the soldiers had to turn away from them to see him.

  “What’s the message?” one of the soldiers asked.

  “Yes! The message,” Hideki said. He hadn’t thought that far ahead yet. Ideas swarmed in his mind like flies, but none of them landed. Behind the soldiers, one of the children slipped in the mud and fell, and Kimiko stopped to help him up.

  “The Yamato,” Hideki said. “The big battleship is coming to save us!”

  “What? We heard it was sunk!” one of the soldiers said.

  “No! That was just a rumor started by the high command to fool the Americans. The Yamato is still floating and will soon chase the American armada away so more reinforcements can land!”

  It might have been a tall tale, but it was one the two soldiers desperately wanted to believe. They laughed and clapped each other on the shoulders. As life came back into their faces, Hideki saw how young they were under those beards. Barely older than he was.

  Behind the soldiers, Kimiko and the others were still visible, climbing a long, low hill.

  “Where are you from?” Hideki asked, trying to stall for time.

  “Hiroshima,” one of the boys said. “I was going to go to university to study chemistry, but then I was drafted into the army.”

  “I’m from Iwaki,” the other boy said. “My father and I were fishermen before the navy confiscated our boat. Then he and I were both drafted. He’s in Korea now.”

  The two soldiers were quiet for a moment, remembering the people they used to be. Their lives got interrupted by the war just like mine, Hideki realized. It was easy to think of the soldiers as the ones doing the interrupting. As the people who had come to disrupt the peace of Okinawa. But neither of these boys had volunteered for this. They both had things they’d been doing, families they longed to see again, plans for the future. All that had been taken away from them too.

  “Do you have any food in that pack, Private?” one of the soldiers asked.

  Hideki’s heart fluttered at the offer of a perfect new distraction—until he remembered he and the others had already eaten everything he had.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t have food,” he told them. “But I do have cigarettes!”

  The look on the soldiers’ faces told Hideki he was their new best friend. Hideki took his time emptying his pack to look for the cigarettes and stole a quick glance outside. Kimiko helped the last of the children over the hill, and they disappeared into the darkness. Hideki smiled with relief, and relaxed. He didn’t have to keep the soldiers’ attention any longer, and his thoughts turned to how quickly now he could get away and rejoin Kimiko.

  “What’s this?” one of the soldiers asked.

  Hideki had taken the oilskin pouch of photographs out to find the cigarettes, and one of the soldiers had picked it up and was looking inside.

  “Oh. That’s … pictures,” Hideki said, though the soldiers could clearly see that’s what they were. Pictures of dead soldiers and their families, he thought, but he couldn’t say that.

  The soldiers lit cigarettes and flipped through the pictures, studying the faces and places. With each image of their long-lost home, the mood in the bunker became more and more melancholy.

  “Why do you have all these?” one of the soldiers asked.

  Hideki couldn’t explain mabui. Couldn’t explain Rei. Not here. Not now. He said instead, “The American ones were in a pack I took from a soldier after he was dead. After I killed him. The others … soldiers gave to me for safekeeping.”

  The soldiers might have understood that the men who “gave” Hideki the photos were all dead now, but they accepted the little white lie. The two young men smoked their cigarettes and thought of home, and Hideki sat awkwardly, itching to get his pictures back and leave.

  “I should get back to headquarters,” Hideki said at last.

  The soldiers nodded and handed him back the pictures.

  “Hey, can I give you a picture too?” one of them said. He pulled a wrinkled, water-stained photo from his jacket pocket. He hesitated, reluctant to let it go, then handed it to Hideki. “It’s me and my mother, back in Iwaki,” he said. “For safekeeping, like the others. You know, in case the Yamato doesn’t come in time for us.”

  “Me too,” the other soldier said. He gave Hideki a picture of him and his sweetheart, a pretty young woman who lived in Hiroshima.

  They knew, Hideki realized. They knew the Yamato was a lie. If not his lie, then somebody else’s. That the dream of victory was just that—a dream. The reality was, they were all going to die here on Okinawa. And soon.

  And Hideki and his sister and the children were going to die with them if they couldn’t get past the American army next.

  Hideki hadn’t walked too far when he found Kimiko, Masako, and the children all hiding behind an exploded Japanese truck. To their left, Hideki could hear the roar of the sea. To their right, a steep rock cliff rose like teeth from the ground.

  “Sorry you had to wait for me,” Hideki said.

  “We didn’t have a choice,” Masako said. She nodded for Hideki to follow her, and together the two of them crawled through the mud to a bend in the road. Just beyond them was an American camp. Someone—either the Americans or the Japanese before them—had cut down trees so that they fell across the road, and the soldiers guarding the camp stood behind the log barricade, facing south. Behind them, Hideki could see other soldiers at a cookfire they’d sheltered from the rain.

  Hideki made a frame with his fingers. There were at least ten American soldiers, including two guards so close Hideki could hit them with a rock.

  Or a grenade.

  The American camp couldn’t have been more than a few dozen meters from the Japanese machine gun nest Hideki had just left. It was almost dawn, and as soon as the sun rose, these American soldiers would advance south and run right into the young Japanese soldiers. They would fight, and the Americans would win—they always won, eventually—but in the meantime, Hideki and the others would be caught in the cross fire.

  They had to get past the Americans before that happened.

  Hideki nodded for Masako to turn around, and together they returned to where Kimiko and the children waited.

  “Well?” Kimiko asked.

  “The Americans are taking up the whole road,” Hideki explained. “There’s no way to sneak by without them seeing us.”

  “What if we went out in the water and swam around them?” Kimiko suggested.

  Hideki shook his head. “If they see us in the water, they’ll think we’re a Japanese attack force and start shooting at us.”

  “Do you still have that grenade?” Masako asked.

  “Yes,” Hideki said. “But I can’t kill them all with one grenade. There’s too many of them.”

  “We don’t have to kill them all,” Masako said. “Just a few of them. We throw it from the ocean side, to make them think the Japanese army is attacking from the beach. While they’re shooting at shadows, we run behind them, along the road. Then we’re safe!”

  Hideki pulled the grenade out of his pocket, weighing it in his hand as he walked off by himself. Masako’s plan was dangerous, but it could work. He’d seen the Americans when they were angry. They were like shisa. Lion-dogs. When they got something in their teeth, they shook it until it was dead. They would destroy the beach with machine guns and mortars and grenades, and then go down there with rifles and bayonets to make sure there wasn’t anyone left. Tha
t’s when Hideki and the others could slip on by.

  Kimiko joined Hideki, leaving Masako with the children.

  “What are you thinking, Hideki?” his sister asked him quietly.

  Hideki tried to put it into words, the way he hadn’t been able to when Masako wanted him to use his grenade on the mother of all bombs. The way he’d felt when he decided not to use his grenade on the Japanese soldiers in the machine gun nest.

  “I’m thinking … that this isn’t our fight,” Hideki told her. “It’s not between Okinawa and America, or Okinawa and Japan. It’s between America and Japan. Why can’t we just let them duke it out?”

  “Because Okinawa is caught in the middle, just like we are,” Kimiko said.

  “All this time, people kept telling me, ‘This is your island, you should be defending it,’ ” Hideki said. “But I wasn’t defending it. I was fighting for somebody else’s side while they both destroyed my home. And I’m tired of it. I want to be on Okinawa’s side for once.”

  “So use the grenade on the Americans to save some Okinawans,” Kimiko told him.

  Kimiko had a point. If he used the grenade here and now, he could lead them all to safety. Masako. The children. Kimiko. That’s what he’d really promised his father after all, wasn’t it? Not just to find his sister, but to keep what was left of his family together. To live. And sometimes you had to fight to live. Maybe he needed to fight to save Okinawa too.

  The thought of fighting made Hideki remember all the awful things he’d seen each side do to each other, the awful things both sides had done to Okinawans in the name of war.

  “No,” Hideki said. “No, if we attack them, we’re their enemy. When they’re not under attack, when they’re not afraid, the Americans are human beings. They actually helped me. Gave me medicine. Sewed up my head. It’s the same with the Japanese. The photographer, my principal, my teachers, they were nice to me before the Americans came. That machine gun nest back there, it didn’t have two monsters in it. It had two human beings. But if I threw this grenade at them, they would have turned into monsters. Just like these Americans. They’ll become monsters that breathe fire and bullets. They’re not at war with Okinawa. They’re at war with Japan. But if I throw this grenade at them, they’ll be at war with Okinawa too.”

  “Okinawa is Japan,” Kimiko said.

  “Are we?” Hideki asked.

  Kimiko was quiet for a time, then said, “We have to do something, Hideki.”

  Hideki stared at the grenade in his hand. If he didn’t use his last grenade here and now, when would he ever use it?

  And that’s when he knew what he had to do.

  To the east, the black night sky was beginning to turn blue over the high, jagged ridge. “It’s almost dawn,” Hideki said. “As soon as the sun’s up, we’ll surrender.”

  “Surrender?” Masako said. She’d come to see what he and Kimiko were talking about. “We can’t surrender to the Americans! They’ll kill us!”

  “Not if we don’t make them afraid,” Hideki said. He remembered the HOW TO SURRENDER leaflets that had fallen on him the day after the Americans had first landed. How long ago that seemed now! What had the papers said? Stay away from the Japanese army. Wear white. Make it clear you were surrendering, and not a threat.

  He also remembered the Japanese using Okinawans as human shields, and how the Americans had gunned down Okinawans who were no threat at all because they were afraid there were explosives or Japanese soldiers hidden under their kimonos.

  Hideki and the others didn’t have anything white to wear—all their clothes were muddy brown. So how would they convince the Americans they were harmless?

  Hideki had felt powerless many times in his life, especially since the Americans had landed. But one moment stood out among them all. Hideki remembered being naked on the battlefield, shivering in the rain as he peeled layer after layer of maggot-filled, bloody clothes off his body. Stripped down until there was nothing left of him. A ghost. He’d felt so exposed. So unprotected. It was horrifying.

  That was how they had to be now if they wanted to survive.

  “We’ll go naked,” Hideki said.

  “What?” Masako said.

  “It’s the only way,” Hideki told them. “At least down to our underclothes. We have to be as harmless as possible. As long as we don’t make them scared, we’ll be all right. But if anybody does anything to make them angry, or afraid …”

  Hideki didn’t have to tell them what they would do if that happened.

  “Hideki, are you sure about this?” Kimiko asked him.

  The sky behind the sawtooth ridge to the east turned orange. The sun was almost up.

  “Tell the kids to take their clothes off,” Hideki said. “It’s time.”

  Hideki stepped away from the others and pulled off Rei’s pack. The only thing he took out from it was the oilskin envelope with the photographs. Hideki removed his Japanese army jacket and pants and slid the waterproof pouch down the back of his underpants, the only piece of clothing he still wore.

  Hideki put his helmet upside down in the mud, then folded his clothes and nestled them neatly inside it. On the very top, he placed his grenade. The one the IJA had given him to kill himself with. Hideki had finally understood: This is what he had to do with his last grenade. If he took it with him now, it would kill him.

  To live, Hideki had to leave his only weapon behind.

  Hideki felt like he was about to brave the Gauntlet back at school, but this gauntlet was deadly serious. How had he ever been afraid of Yoshio and his friends when there were things that were far scarier in the world?

  The sun was just over the crest of the ridge when Hideki, Kimiko, and Masako walked around the bend, followed by eight small children. All of them wore nothing but their underclothes. For Hideki and the other boys, that meant once-white, now-gray shorts. The girls wore gray underpants, with another piece of gray cloth tied tight around the chest for Kimiko and Masako. The younger children were more comfortable with their nakedness, but Hideki knew how Kimiko and Masako and the older children must be feeling. Defenseless. Exposed. Vulnerable.

  Hopefully, the Americans would see them the same way.

  The soldiers stood behind the barricade of fallen trees. Hideki and the others had just come within sight of the first American sentries when the clouds above them parted, and for the first time in a solid month, the rain stopped. It was like someone had suddenly dammed up a river.

  Hideki stopped and blinked as actual sunlight came streaming through, warm on his naked skin. The children all stopped in their tracks, forgetting for a moment they were walking into a viper’s nest. It distracted the soldiers on guard too. For a long moment, everyone on the road and in the camp stopped and looked up at the sun, like none of them had ever imagined living to see it again.

  And then one of the soldiers cried out and pointed at the children, and the moment was broken.

  The two guards at the perimeter of the camp aimed their rifles at them and shouted things Hideki didn’t understand. Hideki’s hand instinctively went for his grenade, but of course it wasn’t there. He felt a twinge of panic at leaving his only protection behind. But no—if he had a grenade in his hand right now, he would already be dead.

  Within seconds, more soldiers had run to take up positions behind the fallen logs that ringed their camp. An entire squad pointed their guns straight at Hideki and the others. One of the smaller boys whimpered and tried to turn around, but Kimiko took his hand and comforted him.

  Hideki took a step forward, and the American soldiers erupted with unintelligible, angry shouts. Hideki’s heart beat so hard he thought it would bust out of his chest. What had he done? How would they survive this? If the American soldiers fired at them now, they were helpless. They would all be dead. They didn’t even speak the same language.

  One of the soldiers barked at them again in English, but no one understood it.

  Hideki took another step forward.

  T
he Americans shouted again, and they squinted down the barrels of their rifles. Hideki could just imagine their fingers tightening around the triggers. Squeezing …

  This wasn’t going at all like it had when he’d surrendered with the Miyagi family. The Americans were too on edge now. The sunlight had startled everyone. Made it look like Hideki and the others had appeared out of nowhere. Hideki felt a bead of sweat trickle down his forehead and hit his bare chest. Beside him, one of the little girls started to cry.

  “It’s going to be all right,” Hideki told the children with a courage he didn’t feel.

  One of the soldiers barked louder than all the others, and Hideki trembled as the biggest man he’d ever seen pushed his way to the front of the soldiers. He was more bear than man, and he carried a big rifle that was as long as Hideki was tall. His face was dark with stubble, and Hideki realized with a start that one of his ears was completely gone, replaced by a scarred red crater the size and shape of a coconut crab. Hideki fought the urge to take a step back, and he stood his ground.

  “Do not move,” the big bear-man said. The intonation was all wrong, but Hideki thought he understood it. The American was speaking Japanese.

  Hideki glanced around Masako and his sister, and they shared in his amazement and relief. Quickly, Kimiko and Masako made sure the children understood.

  “Okay. Okay,” Hideki said, repeating something he’d heard the Americans say at the field hospital where he was treated.

  “Do not be tricks,” the bear-man said.

  “We surrender!” Hideki said, hoping the bear-man understood. He pronounced the Japanese word more slowly: “Sur-ren-der.”

  The big bear-man glanced around at the other soldiers, and they grunted slowly at each other. Hideki guessed they were debating what he had said.