May 12, 1945, 16:55
The Kaiten continued its lonely descent, its one-and-a-half-ton nose towing it down. He pounded the hatch, jiggled the detonation switch. 35.1, 35.2, 35.3…His legs began to twitch, a riot of muscles and nerves. 35.6, 35.7, 35.8…The Kaiten’s estimated crush depth was 400 meters; at his angle and speed, how long would it take to reach it?
The water crackled and swayed, gently letting him pass.
May 12, 1945, 17:35
A soft bump. He looked at the depth meter: 78.9. He pressed his eye to the periscope. The Kaiten had obviously hit a shelf, but with evening inking the water, it was impossible to see. He rattled the rudders. 78.9 meters. He banged the walls. The light blinked off. Shouting, he groped for his flashlight and snapped it on. The dark air swallowed its meager light, and a new fear studded his chest. He thumped the walls, shifted his weight from side to side. 78.9 meters. Outside, the water was a thick black curtain. It shifted and swayed but revealed nothing. A sob welled up in his throat. Then his bladder released.
May 12, 1945, 18:30
Submarine I-55, three Kaiten hits! Two destroyers and one transport. Banzai for the Shōwa Emperor!
Banzai
Banzai
Banzai
May 21, 1945
As they came to bloody grips with their exotic enemy, Americans were beginning to realize that to the Japanese mind (an entity utterly alien to them in culture and almost as uncontemporary with them as Neanderthal man), the Emperor Hirohito was Japan. In him was embodied the total enemy. He was the Japanese national mind with all its paradoxes—reeking savagery and sensitivity to beauty, frantic fanaticism and patient obedience to authority, brittle rituals and gross vices, habitual discipline and berserk outbursts, obsession with its divine mission and sudden obsession with worldly power….
—TIME
August 6, 1945
“There was a terrific flash of light—even in the daytime….I could see a mushroom of boiling dust…up to 20,000 feet….”
—Cpt. William S. Parsons, weaponeer, ENOLA GAY
FIVE
PASSING
Once upon a time, there was a fisherman named Urashima Tarō who lived with his aging parents. One day, on the seashore, he came upon a gang of boys bullying a sea turtle and rescued it. The next day, when he returned from fishing, he found the turtle waiting with a gift: to take him to Ryūgū-jō, the Dragon Emperor’s Undersea Palace. Clambering atop the turtle, Tarō journeyed deep into the ocean to a wondrous paradise where he was greeted by the enchanting princess Otohime. Time passed blissfully, but on the third day, Tarō, unable to forget his parents, asked to be returned home. Otohime was heartbroken, but pained by his unhappiness, she pressed a keepsake tamatebako into his hand and, cautioning him never to open it, summoned the turtle. When Tarō arrived ashore, he saw immediately that something was different: he recognized no one. Rushing into town, he found everything changed. For days he roamed the unfamiliar streets searching for his home, but nobody knew anything. Eventually he came to a graveyard and learned the truth. Three days undersea had been three hundred years on land, and everyone he knew was dead. Devastated, Tarō flung the tamatebako to the ground. Out poured smoke and ashes, transforming him into an old man.
* * *
—
LUNA WHEELS her carry-on down the branching road to her grandparents’ house. It has been more than two decades since she last visited this rural town in Kanagawa, and despite nine hours aboard a plane across the Pacific, she feels unprepared, the dusty road disorientingly familiar, the winding curve still blind with coniferous trees that incrementally reveal the shallow peak of the roof, the tinted top of the carport, and the quiet face of the house itself, with its sidelight window and stately door, the blue umbrella crock, faintly mossy from years of rain, holding the keys left there for her. The last time she faced this door, she was six and visiting her grandparents with her parents and sister. It was 1986, her grandfather was ill, and despite the tension between her parents, no one—not even her father, Luna believes—knew he’d end up staying behind in Japan and leaving them. Now, twenty-three years later, following a phone call from a Mr. Watanabe notifying the family of her father’s death, Luna, the only one in her family who bothered to learn Japanese, has decided to return to sort the house before demolition.
On the surface, the two-story home has changed little. A patina has darkened the hardwood corridors and stairs, and a deep creak has settled into its bones, but otherwise everything seems unchanged, the corded telephone, the rack of guest slippers neatly in their place, all the windows, half-frosted for privacy, still dressed in 1980s elegance. Even the linens, though spotted and frayed without her grandmother’s upkeep, appear not to have been replaced. It is as though her father, the sole occupant of the house for well over a decade since his parents’ deaths, left no mark. It unsettles her, like walking into a wax museum of her own memory, its staged perfection emphasizing its barrenness, all its inhabitants departed, the silent walls and corridors turned against her trespass. Switching on the heater, Luna ventures down the hall to the only door left closed. Once her grandfather’s sickroom, it has since been converted into her father’s study, and it is here that Watanabe, her father’s closest friend and colleague, has assembled a temporary altar to hold the urn. In the morning, she and Watanabe will inter it in her grandparents’ grave at the nearby temple.
The altar is plain, just a white sheet covering a squat platform, the urn and a large monochrome portrait sharing space with a vase of flowers and two offering bowls, one holding rice, the other water, along with an incense burner, several sticks of incense, and matches—an allegedly unorthodox setup for which Watanabe has apologized, though he has done this for Luna, postponing the urn’s interment and instead stopping by to refresh the food and flowers for almost three weeks while Luna completed her teaching duties at Berkeley. She is grateful, of course, though it is the photograph that transfixes her, her father’s face older than she has ever imagined it but peering out with an expression she instantly recognizes: a temporary seriousness breaking into delight. It loosens a lid she has forgotten. Unlike her mother and sister, her resistance to her father has softened over the years, but so much about him was buried by her parents’ transpacific separation, then divorce, the weekly international calls dissolving into annual birthday cards that conveyed little of his personality. It pains her that she never visited him—something she considered several times in recent years, prodded by her career (literature of the Japanese diaspora), tethered, as she is well aware, to her absent father, her illusory home. But like many things in her life, she put it off, the immediacy of the present unfailingly easier to prioritize. This fact digs close to her bones, and as she stands in the kitchen rinsing the offering bowls, two things come to her: the mellow timbre of his voice even when he scolded her, and the unrelated fact that her period is due and she is unprepared.