Days of Infamy

IX

ACCELERATION PRESSED LIEUTENANT SABURO SHINDO back into his seat as he roared off the Akagi ’s flight deck. He’d had the mechanics install steel plates in the back and bottom of the seat. A lot of Japanese pilots disdained the extra weight: it made their Zeros slower and less maneuverable. The Americans had carried much more armor than he did. It had saved a lot of pilots, or at least let them bail out. It hadn’t saved Hawaii, but he still thought it was a good idea.

Surrounded by a screen of destroyers, Akagi patrolled northeast of Oahu. The Japanese had also commandeered some big fishing sampans, mounted radios on them, and posted them in a picket arc close to a thousand kilometers out from the Hawaiian Islands. No carrier-based bomber could fly that far and return to the ship that had launched it. The United States wasn’t going to catch Japan napping, the way Japan had caught the USA.

Just in case the boats in that picket arc had missed something, Shindo watched the sky like a hawk. Some people slacked off when they didn’t expect to run into trouble. Shindo wasn’t one of those. Routine meant routinely capable, routinely excellent, to him.

He also glanced down at the ocean every now and again. Losing the Bordeaux Maru was a wake-up call for the Japanese Navy. That had happened more than three weeks ago now. The submarine that got the freighter was bound to be long gone. That didn’t mean others hadn’t come to take its place, though. Shindo couldn’t sink one if he spotted it on the surface: the Zero didn’t carry bombs. But he could shoot it up. If his machine guns and cannons filled it full of holes, it couldn’t submerge. Then it would be easy meat for bombers or destroyers.

Here, though, nothing marred the Pacific but the ships of the Japanese flotilla and their wakes. The rest of the ocean seemed glassy smooth. There was hardly any chop; the wind was the next thing to a dead calm. No big swells were rolling down out of the north, either, as they had been when the task force moved on Hawaii. Had those been much worse, the barges would have had trouble landing, and the invasion might have turned into a fiasco. Admiral Yamamoto had bet against the kami of wind and wave, and he’d won.

Shindo called the other fighter pilots flying combat air patrol: “Anything?”

A chorus of “No”s resounded in his earphones. Some pilots were even tempted to take the radio out of a plane to save weight. Shindo had issued stern orders against that. As far as he was concerned, staying in touch counted for more than the tiny bit of extra speed and liveliness you might gain from saving the kilos the radio weighed. Some people had grumbled about it, but he’d stood firm.

A sudden spurt of steam down below, foam and spray everywhere as a great bulk heaved itself out of the water. Excitement coursed through Shindo. Was that a broaching submarine? A few seconds later, the Japanese flier started to laugh. That was no submarine-it was a breaching whale. The war between Japan and the USA meant nothing to it. To it, the ocean mattered only for krill. Men had other ideas, though. One of those ideas had put Shindo in a fighter plane and taken him far from home.

He listened to excited radio calls from the other pilots who’d seen the whale. “I was going to dive on it and shoot it up,” somebody said.

“Shame to waste all that meat without a factory ship close by,” someone else replied.

That made people laugh. Shindo smiled a thin smile inside his cockpit. Better when the men were happy and laughing. They paid closer attention to what was going on around them. Right here, right now, that probably didn’t matter. No Yankees were likely to be within hundreds of kilometers. But you never could tell.

Throttled back, a Zero could stay in the air for more than two hours. Shindo and his comrades buzzed along in great spirals around the Akagi and the destroyers that covered her. The whale was the most interesting thing any of them saw. Shindo didn’t yawn as he flew-he was far too professional to let down on the job-but it was a long way from the most exciting patrol he’d ever led.

He took the flight back to the carrier after its replacements had risen into the air. Nobody felt like yawning landing on a rolling, pitching flight deck. Shindo made himself into a machine, automatically obeying the signals of the landing officer at Akagi ’s stern. The man on the ship could judge his course better than he could. He knew that, however little he cared to admit it even to himself.

When the landing officer’s wigwag flags went down, Shindo dove for the deck. He bounced when he hit, so that the Zero’s hook missed the first arrester wire. But it snagged the second one. The fighter jerked to a stop.

Shindo pushed back the canopy and scrambled out. The deck crew took charge of the Zero, shoving it to one side, away from the path of the incoming planes behind it. Shindo sprinted for the island. The motion of the deck under his feet seemed as natural as the motion of air in his lungs.

Commander Genda greeted him just inside. “Anything unusual?” he asked.

“No, sir.” Shindo shook his head. “About the most interesting thing we saw was a whale. We wondered if it was a Yankee sub, but it was only a whale.”

“All right,” Genda said. “The splash the big ones make when they come to the surface can confuse you at first. But the Americans don’t build subs with fins and flukes.” He chuckled.

Shindo managed another thin smile. Fins and flukes… Where did Genda come up with such nonsense? The smile didn’t last long; Shindo’s smiles seldom did. He said, “Forgive me for saying so, sir, but I’m afraid this patrol is costing us more fuel than it’s worth. How likely are we to encounter the enemy?”

Genda only shrugged. “I don’t know, Lieutenant. As a matter of fact, you don’t know, either. That’s why we’re here: to help find out how likely we are to run into the Americans sticking their long noses where they don’t belong. We learn something if we meet them… and we learn something if we don’t.”

“Yes, sir,” Shindo said, an answer a subordinate could never go wrong in giving to his superior. His own opinion he kept to himself. If Genda wanted it, he would ask for it.

He didn’t. He just said, “Prepare your report. We’ll put it together with all the others and see what kind of picture it makes.”

“Yes, sir,” Saburo Shindo said again, and gave Genda a salute as mechanically perfect as his landing a few minutes before. As he had then, he followed someone else’s will rather than his own. He shrugged, if only to himself. A lot of military life involved following someone else’s will.

THE SUN SANK toward the Pacific. Jim Peterson took a nail out of his mouth and used it to fasten a plank to a two-by-four. He wished he were using his hammer to smash in a Jap’s skull instead. The guards, though, were on the other side of the barbed wire as the POW camp rose near Opana-about as far north as anyone could go on Oahu. From there, it was nothing but ocean all the way up to Alaska. Peterson could look up and see waves rolling onto the beach.

He drove another nail to make sure the plank stayed securely fastened. He might have to stay in the barracks he was building. He wanted to make sure the building kept off the rain. He didn’t have to worry about making sure the place was warm, the way he would have on the mainland. A good thing, too, because the Japs couldn’t have cared less if their prisoners froze.

He fastened another plank, and another, and another. He worked till a Jap outside the wire blew a horn. The bastard must have thought he was Satchmo Armstrong; he put some Dixieland into the call that let the POWs knock off for the day. And wasn’t that a kick in the nuts-a Jap who liked jazz? Peterson had run into some crazy things in his time, but that might have taken the cake.

The prisoners lined up to return their tools. The guards kept track of every hammer and saw and chisel and axe and screwdriver and pliers they issued each morning. If the count didn’t add up when the tools came back, there was hell to pay. They’d beaten the crap out of a guy who tried to stick a chisel in his pocket and walk off with it. You had to be nuts to think you’d get away with something like that, but young Einstein had taken a shot at it. He’d paid for his stupidity, too; he was still laid up in the infirmary.

Peterson turned in the hammer without any fuss. No matter what he wanted to do with it, he couldn’t, not with armed Japs ready to kill him if he got cute with the sergeant in charge of checking off the tools on a chart full of incomprehensible squiggles.

Prez McKinley stood a couple of men behind Peterson in line. He gave the Jap sergeant his saw. Then he and Peterson got bowls and spoons from their tent and headed for the chow line. The march up to Opana had taught them sticking with a buddy was a good idea. The Japanese had hardly bothered to feed the POWs on the trek across the island. What the guards did give out, the strong had tried to snatch from the weak. Two men together were stronger than any lone wolf could be. Nobody had robbed the two of them. They’d got to Opana in fair shape. Some of the weaker, hungrier men had lain down by the Kamehameha Highway and, too weary to go on, let the Japs do them in.

Here at the camp, having a buddy proved even more important than it had on the road. A buddy could hold your place in line if nature called or if you were busy trying to make some scheme pay off. A buddy might help you escape, too. Prisoners were duty-bound to try to get away. Nobody seemed hot to try it, though. Even under the Geneva Convention, the power holding prisoners could punish would-be escapees who failed. Since the Japs hadn’t signed the convention, no one was eager to find out what they’d do.

“I wonder what sort of gourmet treat we’ll have tonight,” Peterson said. “The pheasant under glass, do you think, or the filet mignon?”

“Shut the fuck up,” said somebody behind him in line.

“Hey, I can dream, can’t I?” Peterson tried to stay pleasant.

“Not while I gotta listen to you, goddammit.” The other prisoner didn’t bother.

It could have turned into a brawl. The main reason it didn’t was that Peterson was too worn and hungry to take it any further. He told McKinley, “Some people can’t take a joke,” but he didn’t say it loud enough for the angry POW in back of them to hear.

“Filet mignon… Hell, I didn’t know whether to laugh or to want to deck you myself,” McKinley answered. “Your belly’s empty, you take food serious.”

Peterson decided he must have stepped over a line if that was the most backing his friend would give him. Joking about steak and pheasant here felt like joking about somebody’s mother on the outside. You were asking for trouble if you did. But if you couldn’t joke, wouldn’t you start going nuts?

Such thoughts vanished from his mind when the chow line started snaking forward. His belly growled like a wolf. He had to clamp his lips together to keep drool from running down his chin. The spit flooding into his mouth reminded him that he took food as seriously as Prez McKinley, as seriously as the son of a bitch who’d resented what he’d said, as seriously as all the other sorry bastards cooped up here with him. The most beautiful prisoner-of-war camp in the world-but who gave a damn?

He looked down at his bowl. It was cheap, heavy earthenware, glazed white. It had probably come from a Chinese restaurant. He’d eaten chop suey out of bowls just like it plenty of times. Thinking about chop suey made him want to drool, too. I really was out of line with that crack, he decided.

Cooks slapped stuff into POWs’ bowls. Peterson wondered how they’d landed the job. Had they been cooks before the surrender, or had the Japs just pointed and said, “You, you, and you”? Either way, he was jealous of them. If anybody here came close to getting enough to eat, it had to be the cooks.

Plop! A ladleful of supper went into a bowl. Plop! Another ladleful, one man closer to Peterson. Plop! Another. Plop! Another. And then plop! — and it was his turn.

He stared avidly at the bowl as he carried it away from the chow line. Just behind him, McKinley was doing the same thing. Rice, some broth, some green things. He didn’t think the green came from proper vegetables. Some of it looked like grass, some like ferns, some like torn-up leaves boiled in with the rice. He didn’t care, not one bit. He drank every drop of the broth and made sure he ate every grain of rice and every bit of greenery-whatever the hell it was-the cook doled out to him.

He was still hungry when he finished-hungry, yes, but not hungry. Even partial relief might have been a benediction from on high. “Jesus!” he said. “That hit the spot.”

“Hit part of the spot, anyway,” McKinley answered. His bowl was as perfectly empty and polished as Peterson’s. “Give me about three of those, and some spare ribs to go with ’em…” Before the surrender, he wouldn’t have talked so reverently about anything but women. People had taken food for granted then, fools that they were.

The two men carried their bowls over to what looked like a horse trough. For all Peterson knew, it had been a horse trough once upon a time. He sloshed his bowl in the water, and his spoon, too. You did want to keep things as clean as you could. Otherwise, you were asking for dysentery. With so many men packed so close together, you might come down with it anyhow, but you were smart to try not to.

After supper came the evening lineup and count. Nobody got to sack out till the Japs were happy with it. Some of the guards couldn’t count to twenty-one without undoing their fly, which didn’t make things any easier. It started to rain while the Americans stood in their rows. Nobody tried to get away from the rain. That might have fouled up the count and left them out there longer yet. At least it wasn’t a cold, nasty rain, like so many on the mainland. Not even the Japs could ruin the weather. Peterson stood there with rain dripping from his nose and ears and chin and the ends of his fingers. He felt sorry for the guys who wore glasses. They probably went blind after a few minutes.

Finally, the Japs decided no one had escaped. The sergeant in charge of the count gestured. The men in the first couple of rows could see him. When they peeled off, the rest of the Americans did, too.

Peterson and McKinley had been smart enough to pitch their tent on the highest ground they could find. The rain wouldn’t get the ground inside too muddy. Besides, it would probably stop before too long. A little on, a little off, a little on… There was the tent. “Home, sweet home,” Peterson said, not altogether ironically.

“Right,” Prez McKinley answered. They dried off as best they could and rolled themselves in their blankets. Sleep slugged Peterson over the head.

LEARNING TO HANDLE the sails that had sprouted on the Oshima Maru kept Kenzo Takahashi busy. He and Hiroshi were both surprised to find their father a good teacher. Most of the time, their old man lacked the patience to teach well. Not here: he took everything one step at a time, and didn’t ask them for more than they knew how to do. “It’s his neck, too,” Kenzo said in English as they came in after a fair fishing run.

“That’s part of it,” Hiroshi said, also in English. “The other part is, he’s learning it at the same time as he’s showing us. He doesn’t have it down pat himself. If he did, he’d think we ought to know it just like that.” He snapped his fingers.

Kenzo didn’t need long to think it over. “Well, you’re right,” he said.

“What are you two going on about?” their father asked in Japanese. “You talking about me again?”

He knew they did that. He wasn’t a fool, however much Kenzo wanted to think of him as one. He didn’t have much education, but that wasn’t the same thing. “No, not about you-we were talking about the sampan and sailing,” Kenzo said, the second part of which held some truth.

Jiro Takahashi let out one of the grunts he used to show he didn’t believe a word of it. “You could do that in Japanese.”

“We feel more at home in English,” Hiroshi said, and that held nothing but the truth.

It got another grunt from the senior Takahashi. “Foolishness,” he said. “Foolishness any old time, but especially now. Japanese is the language everybody needs to know.”

He succeeded in getting his sons to stop speaking English for a while. Kenzo didn’t want to say anything in any language. Was Japanese going to drive English into second place in Hawaii? It would if Japan won the war and kept the islands. From all the news, that looked to be the way to bet right now. Wake Island and Midway were gone. The Philippines were going. Singapore had just fallen, finishing the British collapse in Malaya. And the Japanese were rampaging through the Dutch East Indies. The Dutch, the Australians, and the Americans seemed able to do little to stop them.

“Wouldn’t that be just our luck?” Hiroshi said-in English-to break that long silence. “We spend our whole lives trying to turn into Americans, and just when we start to get good at it it turns out not to be worth anything.”

“Funny,” Kenzo said. “Funny like a crutch.”

“You think I was kidding?” his brother asked.

“No.” Kenzo left it at that. Would he have to spend the rest of his life trying to make himself Japanese? The New York Yankees meant more to him than the Emperor did. On the mainland, spring training would be starting soon. The closest that came to Hawaii was the Cubs’ springtime home on Catalina Island near Los Angeles.

He and Hiroshi brought the Oshima Maru into Kewalo Basin. Their father watched everything they did, but said not a word. That had to mean they’d done it right. If they’d messed up, they would have heard about it.

As usual these days, Japanese soldiers took charge of the catch. Onto the scales it went, and the Takahashis got paid by weight. Also as usual, nobody fussed when they took some fish for themselves and for Eizo Doi. “Personal use?” a noncom asked Kenzo.

“Hai. Personal use,” he answered. The formula kept the soldiers happy. Kenzo saw speaking fluent Japanese was especially useful just now. He would sooner have slammed the sampan into a pier than admitted that to his father.

It was late in the afternoon, but not too late. They’d brought in as much fish as the Oshima Maru would hold. People hurried here and there, trying to get on with their lives as best they could. More than a few of them sent jealous glances toward Kenzo and his brother and father. If they hadn’t been three stalwart men walking together, they might have had trouble.

A girl coming out of a side street waved and called, “Ken!”

“Hi, Elsie,” he answered, not sorry to see her without her stuck-up friends. “How are you doing?”

The haole girl shrugged. “Okay, I guess. I’m looking for a job. Nobody has enough these days, but there isn’t much out there.” She shrugged again. “Everything’s gone to pot since… since the surrender.”

What had she almost said? Since the Japs took over? Something like that, Kenzo supposed. Well, she hadn’t said it. He asked, “Are you getting enough to eat?”

“Nobody’s getting enough to eat these days except people like you who catch your own,” Elsie said. “It’s not too bad. We’re not starving or anything.” Not yet hung in the air. “But we’re hungry some of the time.” By the way she said it, she’d never gone hungry before.

Neither had Kenzo. Elsie was right about that. A fisherman’s family might not have much money, but the Takahashis had always had food on the table. Impulsively, Kenzo held out a nice aku. The striped tuna was as long as his forearm. “Here. Take this back to your folks.”

She didn’t say, Oh, you shouldn’t, or anything like that. She reached out and took the fish by the tail. What she did say was, “Thank you very much, Ken. This means a lot to me.”

“Be careful with it. Don’t let anybody get it,” he told her. She nodded, then hurried away with the prize.

“What did you go and do that for?” his father said. “Now we have to tell Doi we’re short this time.”

“So we give him some extra next time,” Kenzo answered. “He knows we’re good for it. He’d better, everything we’ve brought him so far.”

“You’re sweet on this girl, neh? ” his father said.

How am I supposed to answer that? Kenzo wondered. If he said he wasn’t, his old man would know he was lying. If he said he was, his father might pitch a fit. He might have pitched a fit any old time. With Japanese soldiers on the streets of Honolulu, with civilians of all colors scrambling out of their way and bowing as they went by… “Maybe some,” Kenzo said cautiously.

“Foolishness. Nothing but foolishness.” But his father left it there.

Hiroshi was the one who spoke up, and he did it in English: “Dad may be right. Is this a smart time to show you like a haole girl?”

“Jesus Christ! Not you, too!” Kenzo said.

His brother flushed. “I didn’t say it wasn’t a smart time to like her. I know you like Elsie, for crying out loud. I said it wasn’t a smart time to show you like her-and you know why as well as I do.”

As if to make his point for him, four or five more Japanese Army men turned the corner and came up the street toward the Takahashis. Kenzo had taken men in U.S. uniforms for granted. Getting used to the new occupiers was harder. Bowing didn’t grate on him the way it had to on haoles, though. He’d grown up with it, and took it for granted.

“I’m not going to do anything stupid,” Kenzo said.

“Good. Make sure you don’t,” Hiroshi told him.

Since it was still daytime, they went to Eizo Doi’s shop instead of his home. The place was tiny; if you weren’t looking for it, you wouldn’t find it. A sign over the door said HANDYMAN in English in small letters. The hiragana characters for the same thing were twice as tall.

Doi was tinkering with a bicycle’s chain and sprocket when Kenzo and his brother and father came in. “You have an icebox here?” Jiro Takahashi asked.

“Hai,” Doi answered. “Come on in back. So you make me lug the fish home, do you?”

“We didn’t want to knock on your door when you weren’t home-might scare your wife,” Kenzo’s father said. The handyman nodded. Kenzo grimaced. Nobody would have said that before the Japanese took Hawaii. Times had changed, and not for the better. Kenzo kept that to himself. He didn’t know who all of Eizo Doi’s friends were. Being wrong about such things could cost much more now than it had when the Stars and Stripes flew over Iolani Palace.

The handyman’s back room was even more crowded than the part of the shop where he worked: a dark jumble of handmade shelves full of a ridiculous variety of spare parts and odd tools and stuff that looked like junk to Kenzo but presumably was or might prove useful to Doi. Kenzo knew a couple of other handymen. They accumulated odds and ends the same way. If you weren’t part pack rat, you were in the wrong line of work.

Hiroshi pointed to the icebox-no, it was a refrigerator, for a plug snaked out of it. “Did you make that yourself, Doi-san?” he asked. Kenzo couldn’t tell whether his tone was meant to be admiring or appalled.

“Hai,” the handyman said again, looking pleased. “It’s not that hard. I got the motor from a drill press, the compressor from… I don’t remember where I got the compressor. But I put everything together, and it works.”

“That’s what counts,” Kenzo’s father said.

When Doi opened the refrigerator door, Kenzo saw a couple of bottles of beer and other things he had more trouble identifying. By the way some of those looked, he didn’t want to know what they’d been once upon a time. They’d been in there much too long. Doi happily piled fish on the shelves, which might have started their careers as oven racks. If he wasn’t going to worry about it, Kenzo wouldn’t, either.

After the Takahashis left the place, Kenzo said, “See? He didn’t care about that aku. I bet he didn’t even notice.”

His father shook his head. “He noticed. Or if he didn’t, his wife will when he takes the fish home. But you were right-they know we’re good for it sooner or later.”

Sooner or later. The phrase made Kenzo look to the northeast, toward the American mainland. Sooner or later, the USA would try to take Hawaii back. He was sure of that. When, though? And how? And what were the odds the Americans would succeed? Kenzo had no answers for any of those questions. He was sure of one thing, though: it wouldn’t be easy.

IN BACK OF Iolani Palace stood a barracks hall. Once upon a time, when Hawaii was an independent kingdom, it had housed the Royal Guards. Commander Minoru Genda had seen a photograph of the Guards in the palace: big men in fancy uniforms with hats that made them look like British bobbies standing at attention beside and behind a battery of polished brass field pieces.

Now the Iolani Barracks held only one man: a prisoner. Walking slowly across the brilliant green lawn toward the building-with the crosses set into its square, crenellated towers, it looked more like a medieval European fortress than a barracks-Genda turned to Mitsuo Fuchida and said, “This is a bad business.”

“Hai.” The man who’d commanded the air strikes against Oahu nodded. “I don’t know what else we can do, though. Do you?”

“No, I’m afraid not.” Genda sighed. “But I wish I could think of something. And I wish we hadn’t been chosen as witnesses.” He sent a defiant stare up toward the taller Fuchida. “Go ahead, call me soft.”

“Not you, Genda-san. Never you.” Fuchida walked along for a couple of paces before continuing, “I might say that of some other men. I might also say you would do well not to say such things to officers who aren’t lucky enough to know you the way I do.”

Genda bowed. “Domo arigato. This is good advice.”

They went in through the rounded entranceway. The courtyard inside the barracks was a long, narrow rectangle paved with flagstones. Several Navy officers already stood inside it. Some of them looked grim, others proud and righteous. Also waiting in the courtyard was a squad of special Navy landing troops, in square rig with infantry rifles and helmets (though those bore the Navy chrysanthemum, not the Army star) and white canvas gaiters that reached their knees. They were all impassive as so many statues.

Two more witnesses came in after Genda and Fuchida. Genda was relieved not to have been the last. Captain Hasegawa of the Akagi, the senior officer present, spoke in a loud, official-sounding voice: “Let the prisoner be brought forth!”

Out of one of the rooms at the far end of the courtyard came four hard-faced guards leading a young Japanese man. Such a pity, Genda thought. A couple of the nearby officers let out soft sighs, but only a couple.

Captain Hasegawa faced the young man. “Kazuo Sakamaki, you know what you have done. You know how you have disgraced your country and the Emperor.”

Sakamaki bowed. “Hai, Captain-san,” was all he said. He was-he had been, before his summary court-martial-an ensign in the Japanese Navy. He’d commanded one of the five two-man midget submarines Japan had launched against Pearl Harbor as part of the opening attack. Four were lost with all hands. Sakamaki’s crewmate had also perished. But Sakamaki himself had floundered up onto an Oahu beach-and been captured by the Americans.

Hasegawa nodded to the guards and the special Navy landing troops in turn. “Let the sentence be carried out.”

“Captain-san ”-Sakamaki spoke once more-“again I request the privilege of atoning for my dishonor by taking my own life.”

The skipper of the Akagi shook his head. “You have been judged unworthy of that privilege. Guards, tie him to the post.”

With another bow, Sakamaki said, “Sir, it is not necessary. I will show you I do know how to die for my country. Banzai! for the Emperor!” He came to stiff attention, his back touching the post driven between two flagstones.

For that, Hasegawa gave him a nod if not a bow. The senior officer turned to the special landing troops. “Ready!” he said. The guards hurried out of the line of fire. “Aim!” Hasegawa said. Up came the rifles, all pointing at Sakamaki’s chest. “Fire!”

As the rifles roared, Genda thought Sakamaki shouted, “Banzai! ” one last time. His mouth opened wide and he yelled something, but the word was lost in the fusillade. Sakamaki staggered, twisted, and fell. Red had already spread over the front of his prison coveralls. It soaked the back, where the exit wounds were. The young man jerked and twitched for a minute or two, then lay still.

Captain Hasegawa nodded to the firing squad. “You did your duty, men, and did it well. You are dismissed.” They saluted and marched away. The skipper of the Akagi held up a piece of paper for the officers who’d witnessed Sakamaki’s execution. “I will need your signatures, gentlemen.”

Along with the others, Genda wrote his name under the brief report that described Kazuo Sakamaki’s failure to die in battle, his humiliating capture (it said he’d asked the Americans to kill him, but they’d refused), the court-martial following the Japanese victory, the inevitable sentence, and its completion. There on the page, everything seemed perfectly clear-cut, perfectly official. Genda didn’t look at Sakamaki’s body. He couldn’t help noticing the air smelled of blood.

“Thank you, Commander,” Hasegawa said when Genda returned the pen to him. “One more loose end cleared up.”

“Hai.” As far as Genda was concerned, that was acknowledgment, not agreement.

After the officers signed the report, they left the barracks one by one. Genda waited on the grass till Mitsuo Fuchida came out. A small bird with a gray back, a white belly, and a crested head of a red even brighter in the sun than Kazuo Sakamaki’s blood hopped along three or four meters away from him, pausing every once in a while to peck at an insect. When he took a step towards it, it fluttered away. He was probably more frightening than the thunderous volley of rifle fire had been a few minutes earlier.

Here came Fuchida. The red-headed bird flew away. Genda and Fuchida walked slowly back towards Iolani Palace. After a while, Fuchida said, “I didn’t know he tried to get the Americans to finish him.”

“Neither did I,” Genda said heavily.

“Too bad they didn’t-it would have saved him the disgrace,” Fuchida said. “But you can’t count on the enemy to take care of what you should have done yourself.”

“I suppose not,” Genda said. It wasn’t that his friend was wrong. It was only that… He didn’t know quite what it was, only that it left him unhappy rather than satisfied. “Too bad all the way around.”

“Can’t argue with you there,” Fuchida said. “Think of his poor family. All the other men on the midget submarines died as heroes, attacking the Americans. Their son, their brother, was the only captive. How can you live something like that down?”

“If the officials are kind, they’ll bury the report and just tell the family he died in Hawaii,” Genda said. “I hope they do.”

“That would be good,” Fuchida agreed. “Still, though, even reports that should be buried have ways of getting out.”

He wasn’t wrong, though Genda wished he were. “Witnessing one of those will last me forever, even if he did die bravely,” Genda said. “I hope I don’t get drawn for the same duty twice. Plenty of other work I’d rather be doing.”

“Can’t argue about that, either,” Fuchida said. “A man with a clean desk is a man who doesn’t get enough thrown at him.” Genda nodded. They both headed back toward their desks, which were anything but clean.

IN JAPANESE, THE name of Hotel Street came out as three syllables: Hoteru. Corporal Takeo Shimizu wasn’t fussy about how he said it. He just wanted the chance to get there as often as he could. Before the war came to Oahu, the street had been geared to making American soldiers and sailors happy. It had taken some damage during the fighting, but hadn’t needed long to start doing the same job for the new masters of Hawaii.

Before letting the men from Shimizu’s squad go on leave, Lieutenant Horino, the platoon commander who’d replaced Lieutenant Yonehara, lectured them: “I do not want any man here disgracing himself or his country. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, sir!” the men chorused.

“You will be punished if you do. Do you understand that?”

“Yes, sir!” they said again.

“All right, then. See that you remember it,” Horino said.

“Salute!” Shimizu called. Like him, the other men made their salutes as crisp and perfect as they could. Some officers would forbid a soldier to go on leave if they didn’t like the way he saluted. Shimizu didn’t think Lieutenant Horino was that strict, but why take chances?

Horino returned those precise salutes with one that wasn’t much more than a wave. A sergeant would have slapped a common soldier till his ears fell off for a salute like that. But officers lived by different rules. “Dismissed,” Horino said. Then he unbent enough to add, “Enjoy yourselves.”

“Yes, sir,” the men said, Shimizu loud among them. He wasn’t sure that had been an order-how could someone command you to have a good time? — but he wasn’t sure it hadn’t been, either. Again, why take chances? Lieutenant Horino strode away, sword swinging on his hip. Shimizu eyed the men he’d led since before they got on the transport back in Japan. “You have your passes? The military police are bound to ask you to show them.” He had his, in his tunic pocket.

“Yes, Corporal. We have them,” the soldiers said. Shimizu waited. One by one, they dug them out and displayed them.

When he’d seen all of them, he nodded. “All right. Let’s go. You all know what the lieutenant meant about not disgracing yourselves?” He waited. When no one said anything, he spelled it out for them: “Don’t get the clap.”

“Corporal-san?” Senior Private Furusawa waited to be recognized. Only after Shimizu nodded to him did he go on, “Corporal-san, the Americans are supposed to have medicines that can really cure it.”

Since his father was a druggist, maybe he knew what he was talking about. Or maybe he didn’t. Shimizu only shrugged. “If you don’t get a dose in the first place, you won’t have to worry about that, will you?”

Unlike some of the men in the squad, Furusawa was smart enough to know a dangerous question when he heard one. “Oh, no, Corporal,” he said hastily.

“Good. And remember to salute all your superiors, too.” Shimizu looked the men over one more time. He didn’t see anything wrong with anybody’s uniform. “Come on. Let’s go.”

They followed him like ducklings hurrying on after a mother duck. That made him proud; even if he was only a corporal, he had a fine string of common soldiers in tow. The civilians the men passed on the street didn’t care that he was only a corporal. They scrambled out of the squad’s way. The Japanese among them knew how to bow properly. The Chinese and whites didn’t, but orders were not to make a fuss about it as long as they tried to do it right.

Here came a reeling sergeant who’d had a good time somewhere. “Salute!” Shimizu said, and the whole squad did in unison. He hoped everyone did it well. That might not matter, of course. If the sergeant felt like topping off his leave by slapping common soldiers around (and maybe even a corporal, too), he could always find an excuse to do it. But he only returned the salutes and kept on going. He was singing a song about a geisha named Hanako. Shimizu remembered singing that song when he’d got drunken leave in China.

As soon as he and his squad got to Hotel Street, military policemen rushed up to them like mean farmyard dogs. “Let’s see your passes!” they shouted, their voices loud and angry.

Shimizu produced his. One by one, his men did the same. The military policemen scowled as they inspected each pass. But there was nothing wrong with any of them. All the information was there, and in the proper form. The military policemen had no choice but to give them back and nod; grudgingly, they did. “Salute!” Shimizu said again. Again, the men obeyed.

“You keep your noses clean, you hear me?” one of the military policemen growled. “If you end up in trouble, you’ll wish your mothers never weaned you. Do you understand me?”

“Hai, Sergeant-san! ” chorused Shimizu and the men he led. They must have been loud enough to satisfy the sergeant, for he and his pal went off to harass some other soldiers. Shimizu pitied anyone they found without proper papers.

But that wasn’t his worry. A lot of places that had served food were closed. There wasn’t a lot of food to serve. Bars were open, though. Some of them sported freshly painted signs in hiragana and also, Senior Private Furusawa said, in Roman letters boasting that they served sake. Shimizu was sure it wasn’t sake imported from Japan. They grew rice here. Some of it had probably been taken out of the food store and turned into something more entertaining. He wondered whose palm had been greased to make that happen, and with how much cash. More than I’ll see any time soon, he thought mournfully.

Almost all the bright, blinking neon signs were in English. One looked as good as another to Shimizu. “I’m going in here,” he said, pointing to one bigger and fancier than most. “Who’s coming with me?”

Only a couple of men from the squad hung back. “I want to start off with a woman,” one of them said. The other nodded.

“You’ll last longer if you do some drinking first,” Shimizu said. They shook their heads. Shimizu shrugged. “Suit yourselves, then. But if you aren’t back at the barracks when you’re supposed to be, you’ll wish those military policemen were beating on you. Have you got that?” He tried to sound fierce, and hoped he succeeded. He really was too easygoing to make a good noncom.

The bar was dark and cool inside, and already full of Japanese soldiers and sailors. The bartender was an Asian man. He spoke Japanese, but oddly; after a little while, Shimizu decided he had to be a Korean. “No, no whiskey, gomen nasai,” he said when the corporal asked. “Have sake, have sort of gin.”

“What do you mean, sort of?” Shimizu inquired.

“Made from fruit. Made from fruit here, understand. Is very good. Ichi-ban,” the bartender said.

A drink was one yen or twenty-five cents U.S. money-outrageously expensive, like everything else in Oahu. “Give me some of this gin,” Shimizu said. “I want something stronger than sake.” He dropped a U.S. quarter on the bar. The silver rang sweetly. The bartender set a shot in front of him.

He knocked it back. He had all he could do not to cough and lose face before his men. The stuff tasted like sweet paint thinner and kicked like a wild horse. It might have been a mortar bomb exploding in his stomach. He liked the warmth that flowed out from his middle afterwards, though.

His men followed his lead. The bartender poured them shots, too. Like Shimizu, they gulped them down. They weren’t so good at hiding what the stuff did to them. Some of them coughed. Senior Private Furusawa said, “My insides are on fire!” Private Wakuzawa seemed on the edge of choking to death. Somebody pounded his back till he could breathe easily again.

By then, Shimizu had recovered his equilibrium-and the use of his voice. He hardly wheezed at all as he laid down a new quarter and said, “Let me have another one.”

“The corporal’s a real man!” one of his soldiers said admiringly.

Shimizu drank the second shot as fast as the first. The stuff didn’t taste good enough to savor. It didn’t hurt so much going down as the first shot had. Maybe he’d got used to it. Or maybe the first assault had stunned his gullet. He managed a smile that looked as if he meant it. “Not so bad,” he said.

“If he can do it, so can we,” Furusawa declared. He put a yen on the bar. “Give me a refill, too.” The rest of the soldiers who’d come in with Shimizu followed suit. They also did better the second time around. Most of them did, anyway: even in the gloom inside the bar, it was easy to see how red Shiro Wakuzawa turned.

“Are you all right?” Shimizu asked him.

He nodded. “Hai, Corporal-san.”

Another question occurred to Shimizu: “How much drinking have you done before this?”

“Some, Corporal-san,” Wakuzawa answered. Not much, Shimizu thought. He didn’t push any more, though. Sooner or later, the youngster had to get hardened. Why not now?

They all had another couple of drinks. Shimizu could feel the strong spirits mounting to his head. He didn’t want to get falling-down drunk or go-to-sleep drunk, not yet. Plenty of other things to do first. He gathered up his men. “Are you ready to stand in line now?” They nodded. He pointed to the door. “Then let’s go.”

Under the Americans, prostitution had been officially illegal, which didn’t mean there hadn’t been plenty of brothels on Hotel Street. It only meant they had to be called hotels. The Japanese were less hypocritical. They knew a young man needed to lie down with a woman every so often. They thought nothing of importing comfort women to serve soldiers in places where there weren’t many local girls (and they didn’t wonder, or even care, what the comfort women-usually Koreans-thought). Here in Honolulu, they didn’t have to worry about that.

“Senator Hotel.” Senior Private Furusawa spelled out the name of the place. The line of men waiting to get in stretched around the block. Some of them-most of them, in fact-had been drinking, too. Nobody got too unruly, though. Ferocious-looking military policemen kept an eye on things. You wouldn’t want them landing on you, not before you got what you were waiting for.

A soldier started singing. Everyone who knew the tune joined in. Shimizu hadn’t drunk enough to make them sound good. Some of the soldiers from his squad added to the racket. “You sound like cats with their tails stepped on,” he told them. They laughed, but they didn’t stop.

More men got in line behind Shimizu and his soldiers. The line moved forward one slow step at a time. He wished he’d had another drink or two. By the time he went in, he’d be half sobered up.

More military policemen waited inside, to make sure there was no trouble. A sign said 16 YEN, 4 DOLLARS, 5 MINUTES. Four dollars! He sighed. Almost a month’s pay for him. Two months’ pay for the most junior privates. No one walked out.

He gave his money to a gray-haired white woman who could have looked no more bored if she were dead. She wrote a number-203-on a scrap of paper and shoved it at him. “Is this the room I go to?” he asked. She shrugged-she must not have spoken Japanese. One of the military policemen nodded. Shimizu sighed again as he went up the stairs. He’d hoped to pick a woman for himself. No such luck.

When he found the cubicle with 203 above it, he knocked on the door. “Hai? ” a woman called from within. The word was Japanese. He didn’t think the voice was. He opened the door and found he was right. She was a brassy blonde, somewhere a little past thirty, who lay naked on a narrow bed. “Isogi! ” she told him-hurry up.

Five minutes, he reminded himself. Not even time to get undressed. Part of him wondered why he’d bothered to do this. But the rest of him knew. He dropped his pants, poised himself between her legs (the hair there was yellow, too, which he hadn’t thought about till that moment), and impaled her.

She didn’t help much. For all the expression on her face, he might have been delivering a package, not plundering her secret places. Because he’d gone without, he quickly spent himself anyway. As soon as he did, she pushed him off. She pointed to a bar of soap and an enameled metal basin of water. He washed himself, dried with a small, soggy towel, and did up his pants again. She jerked a thumb at the door. “Sayonara.”

“Sayonara,” he echoed, and left. A military policeman in the hallway pointed him towards another set of stairs at the far end. Down the hall he went, trying to ignore the noises from the numbered cubicles on either side. A minute earlier, he’d been making noises like that. He felt a strange mixture of afterglow and disgust.

These stairs led out to an alley behind the Senator Hotel. It smelled of piss and vomit. A military policeman standing near the exit said, “Move along, soldier.”

“Please, Sergeant-san, I came here with friends, and I’d like to wait for them,” Shimizu said. He was a corporal himself, not a miserable common soldier, and he spoke politely. The military policeman grudged him a nod.

Over the next five or ten minutes, the soldiers from Shimizu’s squad came out. Some of them came happy, others revolted, others both at once like Shimizu himself. “I don’t think I’ll do that again any time soon,” Shiro Wakuzawa said.

“Of course you won’t-you won’t be able to afford it,” somebody else told him, adding, “The only thing worse than a lousy lay is no lay at all.” The whole squad laughed at that. It explained why they’d stood in line better than anything else could have done.

“Move along,” the military policeman said again, this time in a voice that brooked no argument.

“Salute!” Shimizu told his men, and they did. Some of them were clumsy, but the military policeman didn’t complain. When they got to the end of the alley, they turned left to go back up to Hotel Street. “You all still have money?” Shimizu asked. Their heads bobbed up and down. “Good,” he said. “In that case, let’s drink some more.” Nobody said no.

WHEN OSCAR VAN der Kirk paused at the water’s edge on Waikiki Beach to assemble his contraption, the men fishing in the surf paused to stare at him. One of them said, “That’s the goddamnedest thing I ever set eyes on.”

“I never saw anything like it,” another agreed.

“Glad you like it,” Oscar said. Because he was a happy-go-lucky fellow, he made them smile instead of getting them angry. It did look as if his surfboard’s mother had been unfaithful with a small sailboat.

He’d had to find a Jap to do the work. That made him queasy in a way it wouldn’t have before the war started. He’d paid that Doi character twenty-five bucks-which happened to be all the cash he had-plus a promise of fish when he went out to sea. Doi didn’t speak a hell of a lot of English, but he had no trouble at all with numbers.

What if I stiff him? Oscar wondered, not for the first time, as he fit the small mast and sail to the surfboard. Only a Jap, after all… But a Jap wasn’t only a Jap, not these days. If the handyman had any kind of connections with the occupiers… Well, that might not be a whole lot of fun.

And besides, Doi had giggled like a third-grade girl when he finally figured out what the deuce Oscar was driving at. “Ichi-ban! ” he’d said. Oscar knew what that meant, as any kamaaina would. How could you stiff a guy who got so fired up about your brainstorm? Oh, you could, but how would you look at yourself in the mirror afterwards?

Into the Pacific went the-whatever the dickens it was. Oscar didn’t know what to call it any more. It wasn’t exactly a surfboard, not now. But it wasn’t quite a boat, either. Neither fish nor fowl, Oscar thought. It would be pretty foul, though, if he couldn’t get any fish. Wincing to himself, he went into the Pacific.

Till he got out past the breakers, he lay on his belly and paddled as he would have with a wahine on the surfboard instead of a mast (he didn’t-he wouldn’t-think about Susie Higgins). But once he made it out to calm water… Everything changed then.

He stood up on the surfboard. He could do that riding a wave as tall as a three-story building. It would have been child’s play for him here even without the mast, but the tall pole did make it easier. And then he unfurled the sail.

“Wow!” he said.

The breeze came off the mainland, as it usually did in the morning. The sail filled with wind. Oscar had had an argument with Eizo Doi about how big to make it. He’d wanted it bigger. The handyman had kept shaking his head and flapping his hands. “No good. No good,” he’d said, and he’d pantomimed a capsizing. He’d been right, too. Oscar tipped the hat he wasn’t wearing to the Jap.

Even the small spread of canvas Doi had put on the mast was plenty to make the surfboard scoot along like a live thing. And the breeze was none too strong. A real wind would have made the board buck like a bronco. Oscar wouldn’t have wanted to try to control it. This, though, this was as right as Baby Bear’s porridge.

An hour with the surfboard-sailboard? Oscar wondered-took him farther out to sea than he could have gone paddling half the day. The northern horizon started to swallow Diamond Head and the hills behind Honolulu. Fishing sampans rarely bothered putting out lines or nets where they could still see the shore, but nobody without one could come even this far. With luck, that meant Oscar had found a pretty good spot. He furled the sail and glided to a stop.

The Japs who went out in sampans used minnows for bait. Oscar didn’t know where to get his hands on those. Next best choice would have been meat scraps. But meat scraps were worth their weight in gold these days. People were eating dog food and cat food. They’d be eating dogs and cats pretty damn quick, too. For all Oscar knew, they already were.

He couldn’t even cast bread upon the waters. Bread was as extinct as the mamo birds that had given Hawaiian kings yellow feathers for their cloaks. Oscar had to make do with grains of rice. With luck, they would lure small fish, and the small fish would lure bigger ones-although nobody turned up his nose at even small fish these days.

“Come on, fish,” Oscar said, scattering the grains. “Pretend it’s a wedding. Eat it up. You know you want to.”

He had the net he’d used when he went out with Charlie Kaapu. And he had a length of line with a motley assortment of hooks on it that Eizo Doi had thrown in with the mast and sail. What he didn’t have was any bait for the hooks. I should have swatted flies or dug up worms or something, he thought. Next time. I’m making it up as I go along.

Glints of silver and blue in the water said the rice was luring fish of some sort, anyhow. He started swiping with the wide-mouthed net. Sure as hell, he caught flying fish and other fish he had more trouble naming and some squid that stared reproachfully at him. He wasn’t wild for squid himself-it was like chewing on a tire-but he knew plenty of people weren’t so fussy.

When he drew in the line, he felt like shouting. It had four or five mackerel on it, and a couple of dogfish, too. He wouldn’t have eaten shark before he came to Hawaii, either, but he knew better now. Besides, flesh was flesh these days. He wasn’t about to throw anything back.

He hadn’t seen any bigger sharks sliding through the sea. These days, their streamlined deadliness put him in mind of Jap fighter planes, a comparison that never would have crossed his mind before December 7. Any surf-rider had to be alert for them. A surf-rider with a crate full of fish had to be a lot more than alert. Now he had to get the fish back to Oahu.

That might also turn into an adventure. The breeze was still blowing from the north. If he kept on running before it, the next stop was Tahiti, a hell of a long way away. He felt like Mickey Mouse as the sorcerer’s apprentice in Fantasia. Had he started something he didn’t know how to finish?

“Making it up as I go along,” he said again, this time out loud. The sampans went out and came back. He ought to be able to do the same… but how? He tried to dredge up memories of high-school trig and physics. Triangles of forces, that’s what they were called. What to do with them, though?

Memory didn’t help much. Maybe experiment would. If he set the sail so he ran before the wind, he was screwed. That meant he had to set it at some different angle. His first effort got him moving parallel to the shore. That didn’t hurt, but it didn’t help, either. If he swung the sail a little more…

Bit by bit, he figured out how to tack. He didn’t have the seafaring lingo to describe what he was doing, even to himself. That made things harder. But his confidence grew as each successive reach brought him closer to land.

Beginner’s luck carried him back almost exactly to the point from which he’d set out. There were the waves rolling up onto Waikiki Beach. He started to take down the sail and mast and ride in on his belly.

He started to-but he didn’t. He’d thought of surfsailing to let him get farther out to sea than he could with an ordinary surfboard. A slow grin spread over his face. That was why he’d thought of it, yeah, but did anything in the rules say he couldn’t have some fun with it, too?

“You don’t want to lose the fish,” he reminded himself, and lashed the crate to the mast with a length of his fishing line. He stood by the mast, too, holding on to it with one hand, adjusting the sail so it kept on pushing him shoreward.

People on the beach were pointing to him. They had to wonder what the hell kind of contraption that was out there on the Pacific and what he was doing with it. I’ll show ’em, he thought, and rode in on the crest of a breaker, skimming along as graceful as a fairy tern. He didn’t even think about what would happen if things went wrong, and they didn’t. He came up onto the soft white sand feeling like Jesus-hadn’t he just walked on water?

The surf fishermen actually gave him a hand. “That’s the goddamnedest thing I ever saw,” one of them said, nothing but admiration in his voice.

Oscar grinned again. “It is, isn’t it?”

COMMANDER MITSUO FUCHIDA muttered to himself as he walked up to Iolani Palace. Commander Minoru Genda sent him a quizzical look. Fuchida’s mutters-and his misgivings-coalesced into words: “I don’t like getting dragged into politics. I’m an airman, not a diplomat in striped trousers.”

“I don’t like it, either,” Genda said. “But would you rather leave the political choices to the Army?”

That question had only one possible answer. “No,” Fuchida said. The Army had the political sense of a water buffalo. The unending strife in China proved that. Half of Japan’s resources, manpower and manufacturing that could have been used against the United States, were tied down in the quagmire on the Asian mainland, a quagmire of the Army’s making. Maybe Japanese rule here wouldn’t mean antagonizing everybody in sight. Maybe. Fuchida dared hope.

Japanese soldiers had replaced the American honor guard at the palace. They presented arms as Fuchida and Genda came up the stairs. Once inside, the two Navy officers climbed the magnificent inner staircase-Fuchida had learned it was of koa wood-and into King Kalakaua’s Library, which adjoined the King’s Bedroom. The Army officers waited for them there. Fuchida had trouble telling Lieutenant Colonel Minami from Lieutenant Colonel Murakami. One of them had a mustache; the other didn’t. He thought Minami was the one with it, but he wasn’t sure. Maybe Minami and Murakami had trouble telling him and Genda apart, too. He hoped so.

The Library was another fine specimen of late-Victorian splendor. The chairs featured elaborately turned wood, leather upholstery, and brass tacks polished till they gleamed like gold. There were book stands of walnut and of koa wood, all full of leather-bound volumes. Along with those of officials from the Kingdom of Hawaii, the walls boasted photographs of Prime Ministers Gladstone and Disraeli and the British House of Commons.

“Busy,” was Genda’s one-word verdict.

“I like it,” Fuchida said. “It knows what it wants to be.”

Murakami and Minami just sat at the heavy green-topped desk in the center of the room. For all they had to say about the decor, they might have been part of it themselves. Army boors, Fuchida thought as he sat down, too.

Two minutes later, precisely at ten o’clock, a large, impressive-looking woman of about sixty with heavy features and light brown skin strode into the room. In a long floral-print dress and a big flowered hat, she made a parade of one-in fact, of slightly more than one, because Izumi Shirakawa, the local Japanese who’d interpreted for the Americans at the surrender ceremony, skittered in behind her. He might have been a skiff following a man-of-war with all sails set.

Fuchida and Genda rose. Half a second slower than they should have, so did Minami and Murakami. All four Japanese officers bowed in unison. The impressive-looking woman regally inclined her head to them. Fuchida spoke to the interpreter: “Please tell her Highness we are pleased to greet her here.”

Shirakawa murmured in English. Princess Abigail Kawananakoa replied loudly and clearly in the same language. Shirakawa hesitated before turning it into Japanese. The woman spoke again, even more sharply than before. Shirakawa licked his lips and said, “She, ah, thanks you for the generosity of welcoming her to the palace her family built.”

“She has her nerve,” Lieutenant Colonel Murakami said indignantly.

“Yes, she does,” Fuchida said, but he was smiling. He found himself liking the Hawaiian (actually, half-Hawaiian, as her father had been an American businessman) princess. She was the widow of Prince David Kawananakoa, who was Queen Kapiolani’s nephew. Fuchida looked back to the interpreter. “Tell her we appreciate her very kind greeting.”

Through Shirakawa, the princess said, “I suppose you asked me-no, you told me-to come here because you want something from me.”

That made both Minami and Murakami splutter. This time, Fuchida had all he could do not to laugh out loud. He did like her. She had a great sense of her own importance, and wasn’t about to let anyone get the better of her. The Army officers didn’t know what to make of that. They thought she should have been groveling at their feet, and didn’t see that her sturdy independence might make her all the more useful to Japan.

Minoru Genda did. He said, “Tell me, your Highness, do you remember the days when the Americans put an end to the Kingdom of Hawaii and annexed these islands?”

“I do,” Princess Abigail Kawananakoa replied at once. “I was only a girl, but I remember those days very well.”

“How do you feel about them?” Genda asked.

For the first time, the princess hesitated. “Things are not always simple,” she said at last. “Look at me if you do not believe that. I have both bloods in me. That is what Hawaii is like these days. And what I thought then and what I think now looking back are two different things.”

Lieutenant Colonel Minami opened his mouth. Fuchida was sure what he would say and how he would say it. He was also sure Minami could not do worse if he tried for a week. Forestalling the Army officer, he said, “And yet you still have your disagreements with the American government.”

“With this American government, certainly.” Princess Abigail Kawananakoa let out a disdainful sniff. “How anyone could agree with that man in the White House has always been beyond me, though many people seem to.”

“You were Republican National Committeewoman for Hawaii,” Fuchida said after checking his notes. The title translated only awkwardly into Japanese. He had no idea what a committeewoman might do, especially when Hawaii was only an external territory of the USA, not a province-no, a state: that’s why they call it the United States, he reminded himself.

“I was,” she agreed. “And I have stayed a Republican even though my party is no longer in the majority. I do not abandon causes once I undertake them.”

There was the opening Fuchida had hoped for. “And have you abandoned the cause of the Hawaiians, your Highness?”

Again, Princess Abigail Kawananakoa hesitated. At last, she shook her head. “No, I have not abandoned it. How could I? I am one of them, after all.”

Now Fuchida could ask the question Lieutenant Colonel Minami would have tried too soon: “Since things have changed here, do you not think you could do most for them as Queen of a restored Kingdom of Hawaii?”

She looked at him. She looked through him-he got the feeling she could see the wall behind him through the back of his head. She said, “If I were to be Queen of Hawaii, I would rule; I would not just reign. I am no one’s figurehead, sir: not the Americans’, and not yours, either. Could I be anything more than a figurehead?”

The only possible answer to that was no. Japan wanted pliable puppets like the Emperor of Manchukuo. The Japanese told him what to do, and he told his people. That caused less friction than if a Japanese governor gave orders in his own name. A Queen of Hawaii would serve the the same function. Even the whites would be happier about orders from her than from General Yamashita.

A Queen of Hawaii, yes, but plainly not this Queen of Hawaii. Still, Fuchida did his best: “You would serve the interests of your people, your Highness, and the interests of all the people of Hawaii, if you accepted.”

When Abigail Kawananakoa shook her head, her jowls wobbled. Oddly, that made her seem more impressive, not less. She said, “If I accepted, I would serve the interests of the Empire of Japan. I do not doubt that you make the offer in a spirit of good will, but I must decline. Good morning, gentlemen.” She rose from her chair and sailed out of the King’s Library, Izumi Shirakawa again drifting along in her wake.

“She is a widow, neh? ” Lieutenant Colonel Murakami said.

“Hai. For many years,” Fuchida answered.

“I can see why,” the Army man said with a shudder. “I would rather die than live with a woman like that, too.” Fuchida and Genda both laughed; Fuchida wouldn’t have guessed Murakami had a joke in him.

Lieutenant Colonel Minami said, “What do we do now? We’ve got orders to start up the Kingdom of Hawaii again. How can we do that if we have no royal backside to plop down on the throne?”

“We’ll manage.” Genda sounded confident. “This woman isn’t the only person with connections to the old royal family, just the one with the best connections. Sooner or later, one of the others will say yes, and we’ll have the backside we need.”

“This princess would have been a nuisance even if she did say yes,” Fuchida said. “We’re better off without her.” None of the other Japanese officers told him he was wrong.

WHEN JANE ARMITAGE dug her first turnip out of the ground, she was as proud as she had been when she first got her driver’s license. She might have been prouder now, in fact. The driver’s license had given her the freedom of the open road. That first turnip, and the other white-and-purple roots that came out of the ground with it, gave the promise of freedom to keep on living.

If she’d seen her turnips in a grocery-store bin before the war, she wouldn’t have spent a nickel on the lot of them. They weren’t much for looks. Bugs had nibbled them, and they were generally ratty. Jane didn’t care, not these days. Beggars couldn’t be choosers.

Tsuyoshi Nakayama studied the pile with grave approval. “You have done well,” he said, and wrote a note on a piece of paper in a clipboard he carried.

“Thank you.” Jane had never imagined a Jap gardener’s opinion could matter to her. But Nakayama knew how to grow things, even if he was the occupiers’ go-between in Wahiawa. Jane knew in her belly-quite literally knew in her belly-how important that was.

“Because you have done so well, take a dozen turnips back to your apartment,” Nakayama said. “Take greens, too. The rest will go to the community kitchen.”

“Thank you!” Jane exclaimed. Food of her own! He could have given her no greater reward. Or could he? Doubt set in. “How am I supposed to cook them? I don’t even have hot water, let alone a working stove.”

“You can make a fire. You can boil water.” The local Jap was imperturbable. “Or you can leave them there, and they will all go to the kitchen.”

“Oh, I’ll take them,” Jane said quickly. “Will you watch the pile till I get back?” Yosh Nakayama nodded. Like her, he knew others would make turnips disappear if someone didn’t keep an eye on them.

Jane picked what looked like the biggest and best turnips. Then she discovered that carrying a dozen of them was no easier than carrying a dozen softballs. She thought about making two trips, but doubted whether Nakayama would put up with such inefficiency. Instead, she tucked her blouse into her dungarees and dumped the turnips down her front. She looked ridiculously lumpy, but so what?

When she got to the apartment, she hid the turnips in as many different places as she could find. Even if someone broke in, he might not steal them all. And she locked the door behind her when she went out again. She hadn’t bothered lately, but now she had valuables in there again.

Valuables! Before the invasion, she would have turned up her nose at turnips; she’d thought of turnip greens as nigger food, if she’d thought of them at all. No more. Before the invasion, she’d been worried about the beginnings of a double chin. Where so many fears had grown, that one had shriveled and blown away. Nowadays, her jawline was as sharp as anyone could want. Her cheekbones stood out in sharp relief under her skin. She didn’t know anyone in Wahiawa who wasn’t skinnier than before the war began. From what doctors said, that would add years to people’s lives. Some of the days Jane put in felt like years.

To give Yosh Nakayama his due, he was skinnier than he had been before the war started, too. He wasn’t living off the fat of the land for helping the Japs. In his weathered face, the prominent cheekbones put Jane in mind of the Old Man of the Mountain in New Hampshire. Nothing else in Hawaii reminded her of New England.

“Thank you for keeping an eye on things,” she told him.

He nodded gravely. “You’re welcome. I do it for everybody, you understand, not just for you.”

“Of course.” She was glad he wasn’t interested in her in particular. That could have got awkward. If she said no and he didn’t like it, would he make sure she didn’t eat? Would he get her in trouble with the occupiers? The nasty possibilities were endless.

Three men with wheelbarrows came up and started loading her turnips into them. When the wheelbarrows were full, they wheeled them off in the direction of the community kitchen. A few turnips were left. Jane wondered what would become of them. She needn’t have. One of the men, a Filipino, came back and loaded in those last few. Sweat ran down his face as he said, “Hard work!” Away he went, panting a little.

Nakayama looked after him, an odd expression on his face-so odd that Jane asked, “What is it?”

“We say, ‘Hard work!’ in Japanese, too. I wonder if Carlos knows that. With us, it can mean the work really is hard, or it can mean you complain about what you have to do, or it can mean you are sorry about what someone else has to do.”

Jane hadn’t expected a Japanese lesson. She also hadn’t had the faintest idea what the Filipino’s name was. To her, he was only a face in the crowd, and not a handsome face, either. But Nakayama knew. He knew who she was, too. He probably knew who everybody in and around Wahiawa was. That had to make him all the more valuable for Major Horikawa and the rest of the Japs.

“Your potatoes, I think, do well, too,” he said. Touching the broad brim of his straw hat, he went off to talk with another cultivator.

How do I cook those turnips? Jane wondered over and over. Only two answers came to her. She could build a fire in the open-and risk having more company than she wanted. Or she could build one in the oven of her gas stove. It might make a fair imitation of the coal-burner her family had had when she was a little girl.

She tried that. It worked, though the kitchen got smoky and she wouldn’t have wanted to do it every day. Boiled turnips, even with salt, were uninspiring. But they were better than nothing, and a welcome addition to the slop from the community kitchen. When you got right down to it, what counted for more than a belly that didn’t rumble? Not much. No, not much.