The Hidden Girl and Other Stories

Maxwell’s Demon

Takako walked down the road, straight as an arrow, towards the cluster of administrative buildings. On both sides of her were blocks of neatly laid out squat barracks, each divided into six rooms, each room housing a family. To the east, she could see the round, columnar figure of Abalone Mountain in the distance. She imagined how the orderly grid of the camp might look from its summit: like those drawings of the balanced regularity of ancient Nara that her father had shown her in a book when she was little.

As she wore a simple white cotton dress, a breeze relieved her of the dry August heat of northern California. But she missed the cool wetness of Seattle, the endless rain of Puget Sound, the laughter of friends back home, and a horizon not bound by watchtowers and barbed wire fences.

She arrived at camp headquarters. She gave her name to the guards and they escorted her through long corridors, through large rooms filled with rows of clattering typewriters and stale cigarette smoke, until they arrived at a small office in the back. They closed the door behind her, muffling the bustle of conversation and office machinery.

She did not know why she was summoned. She stood gazing at the man in uniform sitting across the desk, leaning back comfortably and smoking a cigarette. An electric fan behind him blew the smoke at her.

The assistant director stared at the girl. Pretty Jap, he thought. Nearly pretty enough to make you forget what she is. He almost regretted having to let her go. This one would have provided a fun diversion if she were kept around.

“You are Takako Yamashiro, a no-no girl.”

“No,” she said. “I did not answer ‘no’ to those questions. I qualified my answers.”

“You would have just written ‘yes-yes’ if you were loyal.”

“As I explained on the form, those questions didn’t make sense.”

He gestured for her to sit in the chair across the desk. He did not offer her a drink.

“You Japs are very ungrateful,” he said. “We put you in here for your own protection, and all you do is complain and go on strikes and act suspicious and hostile.” He looked at Takako, daring her to challenge him.

But she said nothing. She was remembering the fear and loathing in the eyes of her neighbors and classmates.

After a moment, he took a deep drag of his cigarette and went on. “Unlike your people, we are not savages. We know there are good Japs and bad ones, but the question is which is which. So we open the door a bit, and ask some questions. The good ones tumble out and the bad ones stay in. Men behave according to their natures, and the loyal and disloyal have a way of sorting themselves out. But then you had to go and make it complicated.”

She opened her mouth but then thought better of it. In this man’s world, she could only be a “good Jap” or a “bad Jap.” There was no room for just Takako Yamashiro, free of labels.

“You went to college?” He changed the topic.

“Yes, physics. I was in graduate studies when… this happened.”

He whistled. “Never heard of a girl physicist, Jap or no Jap.”

“I was the only woman in my class.”

He appraised her, the way one appraised a circus monkey. “You’re very proud of being clever. Sneaky is more like it. Explains the attitude.”

She stared back at him evenly, saying nothing.

“Anyway, it seems that you are being given an opportunity to help America and prove that you are indeed loyal. The men from Washington specifically requested you. If you agree, you can sign these documents, and they can tell you more when they pick you up tomorrow.”

She could hardly believe her ears. “I can leave Tule Lake?”

“Don’t get too excited. You are not going on vacation.”

She flipped through the stack of papers in front of her quickly. Shocked, she looked up. “These papers have me renouncing my American citizenship.”

“Of course.” He was amused. “We can hardly send you back to the Empire of Japan as an American citizen, now can we?”

Back? She had never been to Japan. She had grown up in Seattle’s Japantown and then gone straight to college in California. All she knew were the comforts of a tiny slice of America, and then this place. She felt dizzy. “What if I refuse?”

“Then you’ll have confirmed that you are unwilling to help the American war effort. We’ll deal with you and your family accordingly.”

“I have to renounce America to prove that I’m a patriot. You don’t see how stupid this is?”

He shrugged.

“And my family?”

“Your parents and brother will stay here in our care,” he said, smiling. “It will ensure that you maintain focus in your work.”

Takako was denounced as a Japanese loyalist, a Nisei who was willing to die for the Emperor and who had eagerly renounced her citizenship. The American authorities, in their compassion to not harm a mere girl, put her on the list of prisoners to be repatriated back to Japan in exchange for American prisoners captured by the Japanese in Hong Kong. The pro-Japan internees at Tule Lake congratulated her parents for her bravery while most internees looked at the family with pity. Mr. and Mrs. Yamashiro were bewildered. Her brother, another “No-No Boy” who had refused to answer those questions on principle, got into fights with the other prisoners. The family was shortly taken to the stockades, separated from the rest of the prisoners in camp, “for their own protection.”

The men from Washington explained to Takako what she was to do once the boat arrived in Japan. The Japanese would be suspicious of her and she would be interrogated and debriefed. She was to say and do whatever she needed to convince them of her loyalty to the Japanese Empire. To bolster her story, news would be leaked that her family members were killed for leading a prisoner riot that led to martial law being imposed at the camp. They’d think she had no ties to America anymore. She was to use all assets at her disposal—the men glanced at her lithe body meaningfully—to gain useful information, specifically about Japanese engineering developments.

“The more you give us,” they told her, “the safer you’ll make your family and your country.”

Takako’s Japanese, learned at home and in the markets of Japantown, was severely put to the test by the Kempeitai interrogators. She answered the same questions again and again.

Why do you hate the Americans?

Have you always felt an allegiance to the Empire of Japan?

What did you feel when you first heard the news of the victory at Pearl Harbor?

Eventually she was pronounced a loyal subject of the Emperor, a proud Japanese who had suffered at the hands of the savage Americans. Her English skills and science education were deemed useful and she was put to work for the military scientists, translating English papers. She thought she was still being watched by the Kempeitai, but she could not be sure.

The propaganda crews filmed her at work in Tokyo, a white lab coat on her. A woman physicist who abandoned America to work for the glory of the nation! She was a symbol of the New Japan. She looked into the camera, wearing a demure smile and professional makeup. It is not so much how well the dog dances, she thought, but that a dog is dancing at all.

Satoshi Akiba, a physicist and officer of the Imperial Army, was impressed with her. He was in his forties, looked distinguished, and had studied in England and America. Would she, he leaned in and whispered to her, be interested in coming to join him in Okinawa, where he was working on an important project and could use her help? He said this and then reached out to lift a strand of hair away from her eyes.

Springtime in Okinawa, a thousand miles from Tokyo, was warm, hot even. It was also quiet, almost pre-modern compared to the bustle of the cities on the Japanese home islands. Here, away from the constant broadcasts and exhortations to dedicate oneself to the war effort, the war seemed more distant, less real. Takako sometimes could even pretend that she was simply in graduate school.

She had her own room in the compound. But she seldom got to sleep in it. Most nights Director Akiba requested her company. Sometimes he wrote letters to his wife back home in Hiroshima, while Takako gave him a massage. Other times he wanted to talk to her in English before they went to bed, “for practice.” Her American habits and American education seemed to make her extra appealing to him.

Takako did not understand what Unit 98 was up to. Akiba did not seem to trust her completely, and he never discussed with her news of the war or his work. He was careful to assign her only the most innocuous tasks, reading and summarizing Western research that seemed to have little practical application: experiments on gaseous diffusion, calculations of atomic energy levels, competing theories in psychology. But the compound was highly secretive and closely guarded. More than fifty scientists worked there, and all the nearby farms had been cleared and the villagers forcefully removed.

Through the servants, her American handlers had gotten in touch with her. If she thought she had something of significance, she was to put it in her trash, wrapped in her womanly napkins. The servants would take the bundle outside the compound, seal it in a canister, and give it to a family of fishermen who would take it out into the Philippine Sea and drop it at a particular sunken atoll. An American submarine would pick it up later.

She thought about the bundles on their long journey to America, the white wrapping stained with her monthly blood, a parody of the Hinomaru that men would be reluctant to examine closely. She had to admit that her handlers were clever.

One day, Akiba was in a pensive mood. He wanted to go hiking in the woods inland, and asked Takako to come with him. They drove until the road ended, and walked deep into the forest. Takako enjoyed herself. She had not been given any chance to explore the island since her arrival.

They walked past the giant looking-glass mangroves, their vertical platelike roots nature’s version of Japanese screens. They listened to the chi-chi calls made by the Okinawan woodpecker. They admired the Malayan banyans, their aerial roots twisting and descending like nymphs climbing down from the branches. Takako silently prayed as she walked past the sacred trees, the way her mother had taught her when she was little.

After an hour, they arrived at a clearing in the woods. At the other end of the clearing was the dark maw of a cave that led underground. A stream flowed into the cave, the tinkling made loud by echoes against the wall of the cave.

Takako felt the malevolence in that cave. She seemed to hear groans, shrieks, accusatory screams that grew louder the longer she stood there. Her knees felt weak. Before she could stop herself, she knelt down, leaned forward and put her hands and forehead against the ground, and said, in a language she had not used for so long that it sounded strange to her own ears: “Munoo yuu iyuru mun.” Speak well of others.

The sounds quieted, and she looked up to see Akiba standing by, looking down at her with an unreadable expression.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and prostrated herself before him. “My grandmother and mother spoke to me in Uchinaaguchi when I was a small girl.”

She remembered the stories that her mother had told her, about how when her mother was a schoolgirl in Okinawa the teacher would make her wear a batsu fuda around her neck, a placard that announced that she was a bad student for speaking Okinawan instead of Japanese. Her mother had come from a long line of yuta, women skilled in communicating with the spirits of the dead. The mainlanders had said that yuta and nuuru priestesses were primitive superstitions dangerous to national unity, practices that had to be stamped out so that Okinawans could be cleansed of their impure taint and become full members of the Japanese nation.

Those who spoke Uchinaaguchi were traitors, spies. It was a forbidden language.

“It’s all right,” Akiba said. “I’m not a language zealot. I know about your family background. Why do you think I asked you to come?”

The cave, Akiba explained, had been rumored to be the site where centuries earlier the old Ryukyuan kings had hidden their treasure before the Japanese army conquered the island. Some bureaucrats in the Imperial Army had decided that this was a rumor worth pursuing, and slave laborers from China and Korea and convicted Communist sympathizers had been brought in to work in the cave. The commander got a little too zealous with skimming off the funds for the project, and the prisoners were fed too little. They rioted last year, and all of them, about fifty in number, were shot and their bodies left to rot in the cave. Nothing valuable was ever found.

“You can hear them, can’t you?” Akiba asked. “You have your mother’s gift as a yuta.”

A man of science, he went on, should not dismiss any phenomenon out of hand without examination. Unit 98 was established to conduct research into the claims of the paranormal: ESP, telekinesis, the dead coming back to life. The yuta had communicated with the dead for generations, and it was best, he felt, to look into this claim to see what could be done with it.

“Many of the yuta claim to be able to hear and speak with the spirits of those who died violent and untimely deaths, but we’ve had little luck getting the yuta to make the dead do anything useful. What they lack is any understanding of science.

“But now we have you.”

Takako convinced two of the spirits, T’ai and Sanle, to attach themselves to a shovel left at the entrance of the cave. They had used the shovel when they were alive, and felt comfortable with it. She could see them, wisps in the shape of gaunt, starved men, clinging to the shovel’s handle.

They showed her images of the sorghum fields of Manchuria, their home, the waving red stalks undulating like a sea. They showed her images of explosions and burning houses and lines of marching soldiers. They showed her images of women whose bellies were sliced open by bayonets and young boys whose heads were lopped off with swords as they knelt in a row under a fluttering Hinomaru. They showed her images of shackles and chains, darkness, hunger, and the final moment, when they had nothing to lose and death was almost welcome.

“Stop,” she begged them. “Please stop.”

A memory came to her. She was in Seattle, in their tiny one-room apartment. It was raining, as it always was. She was six, and the first to wake up. Next to her was her grandmother.

She leaned over to pull the blanket higher to cover her grandmother. Nnmee had been sick, and shivered during the nights. She put her hand on Grandma’s cheek. That was how she always woke Grandma in the mornings, and they would then lie next to each other and whisper and giggle, as the window gradually brightened.

But something was wrong. Grandma’s cheek was cold, and as hard as leather. Little Takako sat up, and saw that a ghostly outline of Grandma was sitting at the foot of the futon. Takako looked between the body next to her and the ghostly version, and she understood.

“Nnmee, maa kai ga?” she asked. Where are you going? Grandma always spoke Uchinaaguchi with her, even though Father said it was a bad habit. “We all need to be Japanese now in Japantown,” he would say. “Okinawan has no future.”

“Nmarijima,” Grandma said. Home.

“Njichaabira.” Goodbye. And she began to cry, and the adults woke up.

Her mother made the trip back to Okinawa alone, carrying a ring from Grandma. Takako had helped her mother coax Grandma to attach herself to the ring. “Hold on tight, Nnmee!” And Grandma had smiled in her mind.

“You are a yuta now, too,” her mother had said to her. “There is nothing worse than dying away from your home. The spirits cannot rest until they go home, and it is the duty of the yuta to help them.”

They carried the shovel back with them, Akiba in high spirits, whistling and humming the whole way. He asked Takako about the details of the spirits: what they looked like, what they sounded like, what they wanted.

“They want to go home,” she said.

“Do they?” Akiba kicked at a clump of mushrooms by the trail, scattering the pieces everywhere. “Tell them that they’ll get to go home after they help us win the war. They were too lazy to do much work for the Emperor when they were alive, but now they have a chance to redeem themselves.”

They passed by the banyans and mangroves, the hibiscus bushes and night-scented lilies, their leaves like giant upright elephant ears. But Takako was no longer able to enjoy the sights. She felt barely able to hold on to her mabui, her life essence, in her shell of a body.

Akiba showed her the prototype: a metal box, divided down the middle with a partition. The partition was full of tiny holes that were covered with a translucent silk membrane.

“The yuta tell me that the spirits are very weak. They have little strength to manipulate physical objects, not even enough to lift a pencil off a table. The most they might do is to nudge a single thread this way or that. Is that right?”

She agreed. The spirits were indeed limited in their interactions with the physical world.

“I guess those women were telling the truth,” Akiba mused. “We tortured a few of them to see if they were withholding their skills.”

She tried to match his calm expression.

“The war is not going well,” Akiba said, “despite what the propaganda men may tell you. We have been on the defense for a while, and the Americans keep on advancing, hopping across the Pacific from island to island. What they lack in bravery and skill they make up with their wealth and endless supplies. This was always Japan’s weakness. We are running out of oil and other essential raw materials, and we need to come up with unexpected sources of power, something that can turn the tide of war.”

Akiba caressed her face, and despite herself, she found herself relaxing into his gentle touch.

“In 1871, James Clerk Maxwell devised an ingenious engine,” Akiba continued. Takako wanted to tell him that she knew about Maxwell’s idea, but Akiba ignored her because he was in the mood to lecture. “Clever, for a non-Japanese,” he added.

“A box of air is full of molecules moving rapidly about. Their average velocity is what we think of as their temperature.

“But the air molecules do not, in fact, move with uniform velocity. Some have higher energy and move fast, while others are sluggish and move slowly. Suppose, however, that the box is partitioned down the middle with a trapdoor. Suppose also that we have a tiny demon standing by it. The demon observes all the molecules bouncing about the box. Whenever he sees a fast-moving molecule coming at the door from the right side, he opens the door to let it through to the left side, and then closes the door immediately. Whenever he sees a slow-moving molecule coming at the door from the left side, he opens the door to let it through to the right side, and then closes the door immediately. After a while, even though the demon will not have directly manipulated any molecules or imparted any energy into the system, the total entropy in the system decreases, and the left side of the box will be full of fast-moving molecules, becoming hotter, while the right side will be full of slow-moving molecules, becoming colder.”

“That heat differential can be used to produce useful work,” Takako said, “like a dam holding back water.”

Akiba nodded. “The demon has simply allowed the molecules to sort themselves based on information about their pre-existing qualities, but in that separation he has converted information into energy and bypassed the Second Law of Thermodynamics. We must build this engine.”

“But it’s just a thought experiment,” Takako said. “Where would you find such demons?”

Akiba smiled at her, and Takako felt a chill run down her spine.

“That is where you come in,” Akiba said. “You will teach your spirits to power this engine, to separate the hot molecules from the cold. When you succeed, we will have a limitless supply of energy, spontaneously generated out of air. We will be able to build submarines that require no diesel and never need to surface, airplanes that never run out of fuel and never need to land. Powered by the dead, we will bathe New York and San Francisco in a sea of fire, and we will bomb Washington back into the swamp from which it rose. Every American will die or scream and scream in terror.”

“Let’s try this game,” Takako said to T’ai and Sanle. “If you can do this, I may have a way for you to go home.”

She closed her eyes and let her mind drift, merging her consciousness with the spirits. She felt for their sight, shared it, saw what they saw. Unconstrained by the limits of physical bodies, they could focus their senses into the tiniest scales and the minutest slices of time so that everything seemed vastly magnified and slowed down. But they, unlettered and uneducated, did not know what they were supposed to look for.

Still holding their attention, she shared her knowledge with them, and helped them see the air as a sea of glass marbles zipping and bouncing about.

She directed them to the strands of silk in the membrane covering the partition in the middle of the box. With infinite care and patience, she taught them to wait until a molecule was careening towards the partition. “Open!” she shouted.

And watched as T’ai and Sanle threw all their meager strength into bending the silk strands, opening a tiny opening through which the molecule of air zoomed.

“Faster, faster!” she shouted. She did not know how long she spent with them, teaching them to work quicker, opening and closing doors in the partition, separating the fast molecules from the slow.

She opened her eyes and gasped as her mabui again fully inhabited her body. Time returned to normal and dust motes glided slowly in beams of sunlight in the dark room.

She put her hand on one end of the metal box, and shivered as she felt it gradually heat up.

It was the middle of the night. Takako was in her own room. She had explained to Akiba that it was that time of the month for her. He had nodded, and sought the company of a servant girl.

The hardest part of her plan turned out to be getting T’ai and Sanle to hide inside the napkins. After all they had suffered, it seemed absurd to her that they would balk at this. But men were strange that way. She finally convinced them that this was the only way home, a long, circuitous way halfway around the globe. They trusted her, and reluctantly did as she asked.

Exhausted, she sat down at the desk and wrote in the light of the gibbous Moon.

Spies in America had brought news that the Americans were pursuing a new weapon, based on the energy of splitting an atom. The Germans had already split uranium years ago, and the Japanese were working on the same project. The Americans needed to hurry.

A critical step in the building of an atomic bomb based on uranium, Takako knew, was to have the right sort of uranium. Uranium came in two varieties, uranium-238 and uranium-235. In nature, 99.284% of uranium came in the form of uranium-238, but to have a sustained nuclear chain reaction, you needed mostly uranium-235. There was no way to tell the two isotopes apart chemically.

Takako imagined the uranium atoms, vaporized in some compound form. The molecules bounce about, like the air in her metal box. The molecules with the heavier uranium-238 will move, on average, just a bit slower than the molecules with the lighter uranium-235. She imagined the molecules bouncing inside a tube, and the spirits waiting near the top, opening a door to let the faster molecules through but closing it to keep the slow ones inside.

“If you help America win the war, you will get to go home,” she whispered to the spirits.

She wrote down her suggestion.

Takako imagined the power of the bomb that her spirits would help make. Would it be brighter than the sun? Would it bathe a whole city in a sea of fire? Would it create thousands, millions more screaming spirits who will never, ever be able to go home?

She paused. Was she a killer? If she did nothing, people would die. No matter what she did, people would die. She closed her eyes and thought about her family. She hoped that they were not having too rough a time of it. Her brother was the problematic one. He brooded and was so angry all the time. She imagined the doors of the camp at Tule Lake opening and everyone bouncing out, like high-energy molecules. The war is over!

She finished her report, hoping that the analysts back at home in America would not treat it as the ravings of a lunatic. She double-underlined the request that her mother be allowed to work with T’ai and Sanle, and to help them go home after their work was done.

“What do you mean, they escaped?” Akiba did not sound angry. He looked puzzled.

“I could not explain to them with sufficient clarity what was expected,” Takako said, prostrating herself. “My apologies. I promised them rewards that were too enticing. They deceived me, and I thought for a time that the experiment was working, but it turned out to be nothing but my imagination. They must have escaped during the night because they were scared that I had discovered their deception. We can go obtain other spirits from the cave if you like.”

Akiba narrowed his eyes. “That never happened with any of the other yuta.”

Takako kept her eyes on the floor. Her heart pounded in her chest. “Please understand that these spirits did not come from loyal subjects of the Emperor. They were criminals. What can you expect of the Chinese?”

“That’s interesting. Are you suggesting that we should ask for loyal subjects to volunteer for this task? To convert their bodies into spirits, as it were, so that they might serve the Emperor better?”

“Not at all,” Takako said. Her mouth felt dry. “As I said, the theory is good, but I think the difficulty of the task is beyond the skill of lowly soldiers and peasants, even if their spirits are full of zeal for the Emperor. For now, we should pursue other research.”

“For now,” Akiba said.

Takako swallowed her terror and smiled at him, then began to undress.

The village was nestled against the side of a hill, which sheltered it from much of the bombing and artillery fire. Still, the ground under the little hut they were huddled in shook every few minutes.

There weren’t any more places to run to. The Marines had landed two months before and pushed forward slowly but inexorably. The Unit 98 compound had been bombed into rubble weeks ago.

Outside the hut, the villagers were assembled in the square to listen to the sergeant. He had stripped off his shirt, and one could see the ribs poking out from under his dirty skin. Food had been rationed for months, and even though many civilians had been ordered to commit suicide to make the supplies last longer for the Imperial Army, the food had finally run out.

The assembled were women, as well as the very young and the very old. Every able-bodied man, boys included, had been handed bamboo spears and been led on a final banzai charge against the Marines days ago.

Takako had said goodbye to the boys. Some of the teenagers were calm, eager even, before the battle. “We men of Okinawa will show the Americans our Yamato spirit!” they had shouted in unison. “Every day we fight is another day that the home islands will be safe!”

None of them came back.

The sergeant wore his sword on his belt. His hachimaki was tattered and bloody, and as he paced back and forth, tears flowed freely down his face. He was filled with anger and sorrow. What had gone wrong? Japan was invincible. It must have been the fault of the impure Okinawans, who were, after all, not real Japanese. Even though they had executed so many traitors who were caught whispering in their incomprehensible dialect, too many others must have been secretly helping the Americans.

“The Americans shot into every house, every house that held children and women. They did not flinch at the sound of babies crying. They are animals!”

Takako listened to the speech and imagined the scene. The sergeant was describing the American assault on the village over the hill. The Japanese soldiers had retreated into the houses and used the villagers as human shields. Some of the women charged at the Marines with spears. The Marines shot them and then shot into the houses. There was no distinction between civilian and combatant. It was too late for that.

“They will rape all of you and torture your children before your eyes,” the sergeant said. “Do not let them have that satisfaction. The time has come for us to give our lives to the Emperor. We will triumph with our spirit. Japan will never give up!”

Some of the children began to cry, and their mothers hushed them. They stared at the wildly gesticulating sergeant with vacant eyes. They did not react at the word “rape.” The Imperial Army had already taken the women for one last wild night of comfort before going on their final suicide charge days earlier. Few women had resisted. That was the way of war, wasn’t it?

The head of each family had been given a grenade. Earlier, it had been possible to give each two grenades, one for the enemy, one for the family. But they were running out of grenades too.

“It is time,” the sergeant shouted. None of the villagers moved.

“It is time!” the sergeant repeated. He pointed his gun at one of the mothers.

The mother pulled her two children close to her. She screamed and pulled the grenade pin, and held the grenade against her chest. She continued to scream until the explosion ended it suddenly. Bits of flesh were scattered around, some landed on the sergeant’s face.

The other mothers and grandparents began to scream and cry, and more explosions followed. Takako plugged up her ears tightly with her fingers, but the spirits of the dead continued to scream, and it was impossible to block them out.

“It is time for us too,” Akiba said. He was as calm as ever. “I will let you choose how you wish to go.”

Takako looked at him in disbelief. He reached out and stroked her cheeks. She flinched and Akiba stopped, smiling sardonically.

“But we will perform an experiment,” he said. “I wish to see if your spirit, a loyal subject of the Emperor educated in science, will be able to do what other spirits could not do, and perform as Maxwell’s demon. I want to know if my engine will work.” He nodded at the metal box in the corner of the room.

Takako saw the mad glint in Akiba’s eyes. She forced herself to remain calm, to speak gently, as if to a child. “Perhaps we should consider surrender. You are an important man. They will not harm you, given your knowledge.”

Akiba laughed. “I’ve always suspected that you were not what you said you were. Living in America for so long must have defiled you. I’m giving you one more chance to prove your loyalty to the Emperor. Take it and decide how you will die, or I will make the decision for you.”

Takako looked at Akiba. This was a man who thought nothing of torturing old women, a man who took delight in imagining entire cities dying in flames, a man who dispassionately contemplated killing men so that their souls could power machines of death. But he was also the only man in years that had shown her any tenderness, anything akin to love.

She was terrified of him and she wanted to scream at him. She hated him and she pitied him. She wanted to see him die and she wanted to save him. But above all, whatever happened to him, she wanted to live. That was the way of war, wasn’t it?

“You are right, Director. But please, before I go, one more time, to make me happy.” She began to take off her dress.

Akiba grunted. He put down his gun and started to loosen his belt. The impending threat of death only made his appetite stronger, and he suspected that it affected the girl the same way.

His attention drifted.

Perhaps he had been too hard on the girl, who was loyal after all. He would miss the strange, endearing American expressions that flitted across her face from time to time, the way her eyes hovered halfway between fear and yearning, like a puppy wanting to go home but not sure how. He thought he would be gentle this time and treat her like he did his wife, long ago when they were first wed. (His heart clenched for a moment as he thought about his wife alone in Hiroshima, not even knowing whether he was still alive or already dead.) Then he would strangle her, to preserve her beauty. Yes, that was the way, at the moment of his ecstasy he would send Takako on her way to the afterlife, and then he would follow.

He looked up. Takako was gone.

Takako kept on running. She did not care which direction she was heading in. She simply wanted to get as far away from Akiba and the screaming spirits as possible.

In the distance, she saw a bright bit of color. Could it be? Yes! It was the Stars and Stripes, waving in the wind. Her heart leapt into her throat, and she thought she would die from the sudden burst of joy. She ran even faster.

From atop a hillock, she could see it was a small village. The dead bodies, both Japanese and American, were everywhere. Women too. And infants. Blood soaked into the ground. The flag whipped proudly in the hot, windy air.

She saw that scattered Marines were walking about, spitting onto the dead Japanese and picking up swords and other souvenirs from the bodies of the officers. Some sat on the ground, resting from their exhaustion. Others were walking towards the women cowering in the doors of the houses. When the Marines arrived at their doors, the women did not resist. They retreated mutely into the houses. That was the way of war, wasn’t it?

But it was almost over. She was almost home. With her last bit of strength, she sprinted through the final hundred feet or so through the woods, and emerged into the village.

Two of the Marines whipped around to face her. They were young, about her brother’s age. Takako thought about how she would look to these men: a torn dress, face and hair unwashed for days, one breast bare from when she ran away from Akiba. She imagined speaking to them in English, in the cadences of the Pacific Northwest, in its rain-dipped vowels, in its unadorned consonants.

The Marines’ faces were tense, frightened. They had thought they were done, but was this another suicide charge?

She opened her mouth and tried to push the air that were not there out through her constricted throat. She croaked, “I am an Am—”

A loud burst of bullets.

The Marines stood over her body.

One of the Marines whistled. “What a pretty Jap.”

“Pretty enough,” the other said. “Just can’t stand the eyes.”

Blood gurgled in Takako’s chest and throat.

She thought about her family at Tule Lake, and the papers she had signed. She thought about the spirits she had disguised and smuggled out with her blood. She thought about the mother holding a grenade to her chest. Then her mind was overwhelmed with the screaming and groaning of the dead around her, their grief, horror, and pain.

A war opened a door in men, and whatever was inside just tumbled out. The entropy of the world increased, in the absence of a demon by the door.

That was the way of war, wasn’t it?

Takako drifted above her body. The Marines had already lost interest in it, moved on. She looked down at it, sad but not angry. She looked away.

The flag, tattered and stained, waved as proudly as ever.

She drifted closer to it. She would imbue herself into its fibers, its red, white, and blue threads. She would lie among its stars and embrace its stripes. The flag would be taken back to America, and she would go with it.

“Nmarijima,” she said to herself. “I’m going home.”