End of the Beginning Read online

  The soldiers trudged through Wahiawa. Like Haleiwa farther north, it wasn’t anything special: not very big, not very rich. It wasn’t very rich by Hawaiian standards, anyhow. But towns here never failed to remind Shimizu that America was a much richer country than Japan. Cars sat by the curb—so many! They couldn’t go now, because they had no fuel, but ordinary people had been able to buy them. In Japan, cars were for rich men.

  Some of the tires on these automobiles had gone flat. Some had been removed, too. Sooner or later, Malaya would give Japan rubber, but she was desperately short of it now. All those tires weren’t doing the people of Hawaii any good, not when they couldn’t drive the cars on which the tires were mounted. Better they should help Japan, then.

  In Wahiawa, as anywhere else, civilians had to bow when Japanese soldiers went by. Local Japanese not only took it in stride, they did it properly, showing just the right amount of deference and respect. Whites and Chinese and Filipinos weren’t so good, but orders were not to make an issue out of any bow that showed the right spirit.

  A pretty blond woman in her late twenties—not far from Shimizu’s age—bent as the soldiers went past. He remembered seeing a pretty woman with yellow hair as his regiment marched up through Wahiawa. Was this the same one? How could he tell after several weeks?

  He’d seen a handful of missionaries in China. But for them, these people on Oahu were the first whites he’d ever set eyes on. They were big. He’d seen that from the moment he landed, when they started shooting at him. But big didn’t mean tough—or not tough enough, anyhow. They’d fought hard, but in the end they’d surrendered.

  Shimizu’s lip curled. They deserved whatever happened to them after that. He couldn’t imagine anything but fighting to the finish. At least then it was over. You didn’t give yourself up to the foe so he could do whatever he wanted with you—and to you.

  Lieutenant Horino strode along with one hand on the hilt of his sword. “Let them see who their masters are,” he declared.

  No one in Wahiawa showed the Japanese even the slightest disrespect. The locals would have been crazy to do so. Whoever tried it would have paid, and so would his or her family and friends and neighbors. Civilians didn’t have shooting squads the way prisoners did, but the occupying authorities would have come up with something to make people remember.

  Then the regiment trudged out of the town. More rice paddies replaced cane and pineapple. Men muttered about sore feet. No one would have had the energy to sing now. Shimizu didn’t have the energy or the desire to order them to sing an Army song. He picked his feet up and put them down again, over and over and over.

  The regiment didn’t quite make it into Pearl City, let alone Honolulu, before the sun went down. Colonel Fujikawa looked unhappy. He’d also been unhappy when they failed to march from Honolulu to Haleiwa in one day. “You’ve got weak,” he grumbled.

  He was probably right, too. Oahu didn’t offer marching opportunities the way, say, China did. You could march forever in China. After a lot of campaigns there, Shimizu thought he had. This place wasn’t like that. You settled down and you patrolled in town, and that was that. If you did a whole lot of marching here, you marched into the Pacific.

  As the men were settling down by the side of the road, an enormous flying boat landed in Pearl Harbor and taxied up to the shore at Pearl City. “I wonder what that’s all about,” said Senior Private Yasuo Furusawa, who was curious about everything.

  “No idea,” Shimizu said. “If the brass wants us to know, they’ll tell us about it. As long as it’s one of our planes, I won’t lose any sleep about it.”

  It must have been a Japanese plane—no gunfire erupted, no bombs burst. He ate rice, assigned sentries, and rolled himself in a blanket as soon as it got dark. And, weary as he was, he lost not even a moment’s sleep.

  BY NOW, JANE ARMITAGE WAS USED TO JAPANESE soldiers tramping through Wahiawa. She was used to bowing whenever she saw them. She was used to keeping her thoughts to herself. If she didn’t, someone might blab to the Japs, and what happened after that wouldn’t be pretty.

  And she was used to being hungry. She hated looking into the mirror in her apartment. The face that stared back was a stranger’s, all cheekbones and chin and staring eyes. Only her yellow hair reminded her that she was really herself. When she got into the shower, her ribs stood out like ladder rungs. She could watch muscles move on her arms and legs.

  The only thing that kept her from complete despair was that everybody in Wahiawa was in the same boat—all the locals, anyhow, for the occupiers ate well enough to keep their weight on. One scrawny wretch in a group of normal people would have drawn notice. One scrawny wretch in a group of scrawny wretches? They said misery loved company. By God, they had a point.

  “Damn you, Fletch,” she would whisper once in a while, when she was sure nobody could hear. Her ex-husband had been an artillery officer at nearby Schofield Barracks. He’d sworn up and down that the U.S. Army would give the Japs a black eye if they ever came anywhere near Hawaii. These days, Jane despised him more for being wrong than she did for drinking too much and generally for forgetting she existed except when he felt like a roll in the hay.

  She couldn’t brood for very long. She had her vegetable patch to look after. She was growing turnips and potatoes. She hated what the work did to her hands. They were hard and callused and scarred, with short nails with permanently black rims. There too, though, she wasn’t the only one—far from it. Without the produce the locals grew, they might well have starved to death. The occupying forces wouldn’t have shed a tear. The Japs might have laughed instead.

  She hardly ever thought, I should be teaching third grade, any more. The elementary school was closed, by all appearances permanently. The principal . . . Jane flinched away from that thought. She still remembered the thunk of Major Hirabayashi’s sword biting into Mr. Murphy’s neck when the Japs caught Murphy with a radio after they ordered all sets turned in.

  But the dreadful sound and the memory came back to her even when she was weeding in the little plot of ground. She’d chop through some nasty plant’s stem . . . and Murphy’s head would leap from his shoulders, blood fountaining impossibly red and his whole body convulsing—but not for long, not for long.

  “Your plot looks good.”

  Four words returned her to reality. Bad as reality was, it beat the stuffing out of what had been going on in her head. She turned. “Thank you, Mr. Nakayama,” she said. She didn’t have to bow to Tsuyoshi Nakayama. He was just a local Jap, a nursery man, not one of the invaders. But she did have to treat him with respect. He was Major Hirabayashi’s interpreter and factotum. Get on his wrong side and you’d be sorry. Jane didn’t want to find out how sorry she could be.

  “Thank you for working so hard,” Yosh Nakayama told her. He was about fifty, but looked older, his face tanned to wrinkled leather from a lifetime in the sun. “If everyone worked as hard as you, we would have more to eat.”

  He’d lost weight, too. He hadn’t used his position to take special privileges—of which food came first these days, well ahead of money or women’s favors. By all appearances, he didn’t much want the job he had. That didn’t keep him from doing it conscientiously.

  Jane saw a bug. Automatically, she lashed out with a foot and squashed it. Nakayama nodded approval. “Some people don’t care enough to do things right,” he said. His English was slow and deliberate—fluent, but not quite the speech of someone who’d grown up with the language. “You are not like that.”

  “Well, I hope not,” Jane said. “If you’re going to do something, do it right.”

  He nodded again, and actually smiled. His teeth were very white, except for a couple of glinting gold ones. “Yes,” he said, and went on to the next vegetable patch without another word.

  Yes? Jane wondered. Then why didn’t my marriage work? Of course, that had taken two, and Fletch hadn’t exactly held up his end of the bargain. Jane wondered if he was still alive. If he was,
he was probably a prisoner. She shivered under the warm Hawaiian sun. The Japs treated POWs worse than they treated civilians, and that was saying something. Gangs of prisoners occasionally shambled through Wahiawa, on their way to God knows what. She didn’t like thinking that Fletch could be one of those skeletons in rags.

  She didn’t wish her ex-husband anything particularly bad. If she ever saw him coming up the street in one of those labor gangs, she would . . . She didn’t have the faintest idea what she would do. Break down and cry, most likely. But if she broke down and cried about everything in Hawaii that upset her these days, she’d have no time to do anything else. She assassinated a weed instead.

  PLATOON SERGEANT LESTER DILLON WAS NOT A HAPPY MAN. The Marines who served under him would have said he was never a happy man, but a platoon sergeant was supposed to make his men feel as if hell wasn’t half a mile off. He wanted them more afraid of him, and of letting him down, than of the enemy.

  He knew how that worked. He’d been a buck private himself in 1918, and his own sergeant had scared him a damn sight more than the Germans did. He’d gone over the top time after time, till a machine-gun bullet took a bite out of his leg and put him on the shelf for the rest of what the politicians had insisted was the War to End All Wars.

  But his unhappiness here was at least as much personal as it was institutional. His company commander, Captain Braxton Bradford, had ordered all his noncoms not to go drinking in San Diego. Bradford’s logic was crystal clear. “Y’all go drinking off the base, you’ll run into sailors,” he’d said—he was as Southern as his name. “Y’all run into sailors, you’ll fight ’em. Tell me I’m wrong and you can go.”

  None of the corporals and sergeants had even tried. Les knew he wanted to punch the first swabbie he saw. One of his buddies, another platoon sergeant named Dutch Wenzel, said, “We wouldn’t if those pussies hadn’t blown the fight with the Japs.”

  “They did their damnedest,” Captain Bradford answered. “Nobody can say any different.”

  No one contradicted that, either. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that the troopship carrying the regiment had had to hightail it back to the mainland after the Navy lost. Marines didn’t like running away, even for the best of reasons. There had already been a lot of brawls between angry leathernecks and sailors. Some of the sailors hadn’t even been part of the failed attack on Hawaii. The Marines weren’t inclined to be fussy.

  And so Dillon sat in the Camp Elliott NCOs’ club, soaking up a beer and pondering the unfairness of the world—a melancholy pursuit usually reserved for privates and other lower forms of life. It wasn’t so much that he minded drinking with his own kind. He didn’t. But the decor left a good deal to be desired. And the chances of picking up a barmaid were pretty damn slim—there were no barmaids, only Filipino mess stewards to take away empties and sometimes help the bartender by bringing out reinforcements.

  When Dutch Wenzel walked into the club, Les waved to him. Wenzel ambled over. He and Dillon were two of a kind: big, fair-haired men with bronze suntans that said they spent a lot of time in the open. Wenzel was a few years younger: too young to have got into the First World War. But he’d served in Central America and in China and on several warships, just like Les.

  “Bourbon over ice,” he called to the barkeep, who waved back to show he’d heard. Wenzel nodded to Dillon. “Ain’t this a lovely snafu?”

  “What? You mean you’d rather be drinking in Honolulu?” Les said.

  “Bet your ass,” Wenzel replied. “And they wouldn’t try and put Hotel Street off limits, either. We’d riot if they did, and so would the Navy. Army, too,” he added after a moment—to a Marine, soldiers were hardly worth noticing.

  “We coulda done it,” Dillon said, draining his beer and holding up the glass to show he wanted another one. “If they’d landed us, we could’ve kicked the Japs’ scrawny little ass.”

  “Oh, hell, yes,” Wenzel said. He paused while the bartender brought his drink and a new beer for Dillon. “No doubt about it. They beat the Army, yeah, but they wouldn’t’ve had a chance with us. Not a chance.” He sounded as sure as if he were talking about the sunrise. That the Japanese had beaten the Army might almost have been proof they couldn’t beat the Marines.

  “Wonder how long it’ll be before we have another go at the slant-eyed sons of bitches,” Les said moodily, and then answered his own question: “We’re gonna have to build more carriers first. God only knows how long that’ll take.”

  “I hope they started ’em before we got whipped out there,” his friend said. “Hell, I hope they started before the bombs stopped falling on Pearl Harbor.”

  Dillon nodded. “I wish they would’ve started a long time before that. Then we wouldn’t’ve had to worry about any of this in the first place.”

  “Yeah, and then you wake up.” Wenzel knocked back the rest of his drink. He looked over to the man behind the bar and nodded. The barkeep started making him another one. He went on, “Half the guys who joined the Corps in the Thirties did it because they were out of work—no better reason than that.”

  “Most of ’em turned out to make pretty fair Marines anyway,” Dillon said. He’d signed up in a wartime burst of patriotism. He didn’t ask why Dutch had. If Wenzel wanted to say, he would, but you didn’t ask. The Marines weren’t the French Foreign Legion, but they came closer than any other U.S. outfit.

  II

  THEOSHIMA MARURAN SOUTH BEFORE THE WIND THAT BLEW DOWN FROM Oahu’s hills. The island rapidly receded behind the fishing sampan. Jiro Takahashi tended the sails with more pleasure than he’d ever taken in riding herd on a diesel engine. Up till Hawaii changed hands, the boat, like all the sampans that set out from Kewalo Basin, had had a motor. When fuel dried up, they’d had to make other arrangements.

  “I used to do this on the Inner Sea with my father when I was a boy,” Jiro said. “You had to sail then—nobody could afford an engine.”

  His two sons, Hiroshi and Kenzo, only nodded. Neither said anything. Jiro realized he might have mentioned his time on Japan’s Inner Sea a time or two—dozen—before. But that wasn’t the only thing that made his sons surly. They’d both been born here on Oahu. Their Japanese was all right—Jiro had made sure of that with after-school lessons—but they both preferred English, a language in which he’d learned only a few swear words and other common phrases. They liked hamburgers and hot dogs better than rice and raw fish. Kenzo was seeing a blond girl named Elsie Sundberg. They were, in short, Americans.

  Because they were Americans, they hated the Japanese conquest of Hawaii. They hardly bothered making a secret of it. They hadn’t got in trouble for it, but they’d had endless rows with their father.

  Jiro Takahashi had been born near Hiroshima. He’d come to Hawaii when he was still in his teens, before the First World War, to work in the cane fields, make himself some money, and go home. He’d made himself some money: enough to get out of the fields and go back to fishing, which was what he knew best. But he’d never returned to Japan. He’d married Reiko, settled down in Honolulu, and raised his family.

  A sigh escaped him. “What is it, Father?” asked Hiroshi, who was standing by the rudder.

  “I was just thinking of your mother,” Jiro answered.

  “Ah. I’m sorry,” his older son said, and looked downcast. So did Kenzo. Their mother had died in the closing days of the fighting, when the Japanese bombarded Honolulu. The two of them and Jiro had been at sea. When they came ashore, that whole district was nothing but wreckage and fire. No one ever found Reiko Takahashi’s body.

  Even there, Jiro and his sons differed. The boys blamed Japan for bombing and shelling a defenseless city. Jiro blamed the Americans for not giving up when their cause was plainly hopeless.

  He remained proud to be Japanese. He’d waved a Rising Sun flag when the Japanese Army held its triumphal parade through Honolulu after the Americans finally did surrender. Along with everyone else along the parade route, he’d gaped at the dirty,
ragged, glum American prisoners herded along by Japanese soldiers with well-pressed uniforms and gleaming bayonets. The big, hulking Americans weren’t cocks o’ the walk any more. He still made a point of delivering fancy fish to the Japanese consulate on Nuuanu Avenue. He was, in short, Japanese to the core, and glad about what his countrymen had done.

  And, being a father whose sons had ideas of their own (and what other kind of father was there?), he wasted no chance to show the younger generation it wasn’t as smart as it thought it was. “These islands are going to stay in the Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” he said. “You saw what happened when the Americans tried to take them back. They couldn’t do it.”

  “They’ll try again,” Kenzo said. “You can bet your bottom dollar on it.”

  “I’d rather bet a yen—-that’s real money,” Jiro said.

  Before Kenzo could answer, Hiroshi spoke rapidly in English. Kenzo’s reply in the same language sounded hot. Hiroshi said something else. Jiro’s sons went back and forth like that whenever they didn’t want him to know what was going on. Finally, Hiroshi returned to Japanese: “Father-san, can we please leave politics ashore? There’s not much room to get away from each other here, and we all have to work together to bring in the fish.”

  Perhaps a bit grudgingly, Jiro nodded. “All right. We’ll let it go,” he said. Hiroshi had been polite enough that he couldn’t very well refuse without seeming churlish even to himself. He spoke an obvious truth: “The fish do come first.”

  Now both his sons nodded, plainly in relief. The truth Jiro had spoken was truer than usual these days. Cut off from supplies from the U.S. mainland, Oahu was a hungry place. Without all the sampans setting out from Kewalo Basin, it would have been hungrier yet.