Tim Wendel

OFF THE COAST OF JAPAN

Here, beneath the waves, Yoshi Minagi found that any noise, no matter how faint or inconsequential, carried a life of its own. The ripples of whatever happened swept through the submarine, with everyone knowing everybody else’s business. It was so unlike Manzanar, where the high desert winds took away anything of hope and consequence and carried them over the snow-capped mountains. That’s what her brother had once said and Yoshi couldn’t disagree. The jagged line of mountains, the heat in the summer, the cold in the winter – they all combined to separate them from the sea and how life had been before the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.

But here, beneath the shimmering blue surface of the Pacific, any sound was precious and often acknowledged. Yoshi had been aboard the submarine for only four days. Her time with them was almost at an end. Still, she couldn’t understand how these men, these American sailors, kept themselves from going crazy. Even though Yoshi had her own small room, a luxury aboard such a small vessel, she often had difficulty falling asleep. And when she did sleep she often awoke with a start. Her forehead damp with sweat. Feeling the anxiety well up inside her as she inhaled ragged breaths of the damp, stale air. Almost always dreaming of Manzanar and her family that so needed her to succeed. For a few agonizing moments she was uncertain about where her nightmares ended and where her new fortunes began.

Yoshi arose from the steel berth with its thin mattress that folded into the wall. She walked on tiptoe to her doorway and peered out. No wonder they all spoke in hushed tones, like they were in a church or a courtroom. Even from here she could understand much of what was said. It floated like music above the dull throb of the engines and now the whir of the periscope going up. Only yesterday they had allowed her to sit with the boy at the sonar table. He was a proud one, trying to act so much like a man in his creased khakis and white tank top. She noticed the sheen of perspiration on his forearms as he let her listen for a few moments to his precious headphones. That strange language of pings and clicks belonged to the adversarial world that surrounded them. Yoshi gazed at the screen and its revolving bar of light and listened, listened hard, but she could make no sense of it and too soon the boy asked for his headphones back. She knew he was afraid that he would miss something if he allowed her to listen for too long. After all they were approaching the coast of Japan.

On this day, her last one scheduled aboard the submarine, the crew soon realized that she was awake and watching them.

“Don’t be shy,” Butch Allen said as he stepped back from the periscope. “Come take a look at what you’re heading into.”

Yoshi walked down the corridor and the men paused in their work as she entered the control room. Most of them worked in their shirt sleeves, and Yoshi couldn’t understand how they did that. Here, far beneath the sea, Yoshi never felt warm enough.

Lieutenant Neil Starling stood next to Allen. He was nervous, on edge, while Allen, commander of the U.S.S. Stephen Crane, simply smiled and nodded in her direction. Allen was so happy that he was nearly rid of her.

“It looks pretty quiet, doesn’t it?” said Allen as Yoshi peered into the viewfinder and saw the dark outline of the coast. Quickly she scanned to the left and now the right. The metal of the scope felt cold to the touch. “But don’t you worry your sweet little head,” Allen added. “It’ll be burning soon. The B-29s will make sure of it.”

“That’s enough,” Starling said and Allen started to reply but then stopped, perhaps thinking better of it.

“All right, scope down,” Allen said. “Ahead slow.”

Be burning again soon. The phrase rattled around inside Yoshi’s head after she returned to her cabin to prepare for her departure. The small room with steel walls was located adjacent to the aft bulkhead. This place had been part sanctuary, part cage for her during their nine days at sea. About all Yoshi had been able to see through the periscope was the twisted wreckage of a factory, probably the Osaka textile mills. And farther over to the right, where she was scheduled to land a few hours from now, stood the hazy outline of trees. The towering cedars intermixed with cypress. That’s where the rendezvous was scheduled to take place. In an odd way it reminded her of home. A place that she sometimes pretended was still out there, waiting for her to return. That small farm south of Monterey, where her family had once lived. Back in that time when everything seemed so simple and perfect.

“You ready?”

It was Starling. The one who had accompanied her from the Manzanar Internment Camp. The one who had convinced her to enlist and then recommended her for this mission. Some would say that she should hold this against him. But she didn’t. In an odd way he had done her a great favor. Starling had gotten her out of the internment camp and witnessing the slow collapse of her family and her people. It wasn’t his fault that all he could offer was substituting one form of lunacy for another.

“Yoshi, it’s time,” Starling said when she didn’t answer.

He stepped into the room and Yoshi instinctively leaned forward, momentarily shielding him from seeing the two photographs lying on the small table next to the cot bed. But then she realized that this was ridiculous. If anybody knew about her past, where she had come from, it was Starling. So, she turned toward him, allowing him to peer over her shoulder at the photos. The larger one had been taken on her parents’ wedding day. When they were married by the justice of the peace in Capitola. Neither of them smiled in the sepia-tone image, but their dark eyes appeared so hopeful, filled with expectations. In the old photograph, her mother wore a long dress with small strand of pearls around her neck. Her father appeared almost regal in his dark suit. They had decided to wear Western clothes, not traditional Japanese attire, because they lived in the United States now. They were proud to be Americans. That’s what they considered themselves – Americans. That’s why being taken away from their farm and forced to live in the desert beyond the Sierra Nevada mountains had broken their hearts. Her father had tried to farm on the patch of desert where they had been told to grow their food. He went out with the men every morning while mother stayed in what was supposed to pass for a home, the small barracks they had been assigned. Every morning her mother swept the small room clean of sand and dirt, and every morning she needed to do it again.

The other photo, the smaller one, was of the farmhouse that had once been theirs. In the far left-hand corner of the photograph were the artichoke fields that led down to the sea. The vast and simmering Pacific.

“You can’t take those with you,” Starling said, his face clouding over, always attentive to any detail.

“I know,” Yoshi replied.

Until that moment she had thought she would simply throw the photographs away when the time came. That’s what her mother had done. Anything that could trace them back to the old country had been burned before they left the farm. Yoshi remembered how Mrs. Hamada, who had lived down the road from them, threw her fine dishes against the wall the day before the buses came to take them to Bay Meadows. Mrs. Hamada broke every single one instead of selling them for pennies to the vultures that were their Caucasian neighbors.

“You’ll take care of them for me?” she asked.

Surprised, Starling tried to smile at this and Yoshi watched him closely. His face was framed by brownish-red hair, closely cropped like all the men did these days. His crooked smile erupted for a moment, a passing fascination, only to quickly subside. Those blue-gray eyes soon regained their seriousness.

“All right,” Starling said. “If you’d like me to.”

“Please,” she replied, happy to see him smile again, shy for a moment in his presence.

“It’s going to be OK,” Starling added, even though Yoshi knew this was another one of his sweet lies. Sometimes, especially when he was nervous, such words tumbled out without much thinking. Sweet, sweet lies. Just something to say to help move things along.

Yoshi gathered up the photographs and held them out for him. As he reached for them, she moved her hand forward so their fingertips briefly touched. She was acting crazy. She knew that. But with the time of her departure nearly at hand, she found herself hungry for any memory she could store away and take with her.

“We’ve gone over everything repeatedly,” Starling said. “But do you have any questions?”

More than you can imagine, Yoshi thought to herself. How did you convince me to do this? What was it you saw in me that could be transformed into a spy?

After Starling had brought her down from Manzanar, Yoshi had studied for three months at the huge military base in the Presidio. Even though the men in uniform routinely worked such raw recruits twelve, fourteen hours a day, it felt good just to be close to the sea again. Hearing the sea gulls chatter in the morning, smelling the eucalyptus trees and the salt air at night had somehow strengthened her for whatever the Navy people asked of her. While three-quarters of her class had flunked out, Yoshi surprised herself by not only surviving the training period at the Presidio but being one of the handful selected to go into the field. It helped that Starling had been there, too. That he seemed to have a vested interest in her success.

“Once you get ashore,” Starling said, “our people will be there to help you.”

Yoshi nodded. They had gone over this many times before.

“Just get to Kyoto. That could be the toughest part.”

Yoshi doubted that, but still she found herself nodding her head.

“I will,” she said.

“Once you get in touch with our people there, find out what you can,” Starling said, his voice picking up speed. “Anything, any detail will help.”

Turning away for a moment, Yoshi nodded again. They had been all through this so many times before. How these military men hated the realization that there was something out there that they couldn’t control. That they had to turn to one as inexperienced as she was. Yoshi almost smiled at the silliness of it all. How such circumstances had become as fickle as the winds of Manzanar.

Two and a half years ago, they had banished her family to the lonely lands where nobody wanted to live. Sent them to Manzanar because they were of Japanese descent and living in California. Her cousin, Yero, and his family were still living in their home in Kansas City. But any Jap in California, Oregon or the state of Washington was sent to the camp because of the Civilian Exclusion Order. That damn piece of paper was posted in stores, restaurants and telephone poles four months after the attack on Pearl Harbor. There was no place to hide. To make sure they were sent away, their Caucasian neighbors had told the authorities that the Minagi Family could speak Japanese fluently, even though it wasn’t necessarily true. Yoshi and her mother were the only ones who could really speak in the old tongue. Still, there was no denying it. In such times, rumor took root and quickly blossomed into fact. They went to the camp and later were told that the military needed people like her. Somehow they went from being outcasts to the only hope the U.S. forces had in this particular situation.

“Good luck,” Starling said, and he came to attention and briefly saluted her.

Instead of returning his salute, Yoshi took her time gathering up her things and then slipped close to kiss him once on the cheek. Once more she found herself too daring, always ready for any experience she can hang to and perhaps transform into a pleasant memory.

“Good-bye,” she whispered and brushed past him, eager now to go, to get on with it.

Topside, the seas were choppy, rougher than either of them had expected. Two sailors held her raft as Yoshi waited between Allen and Starling and listened to the instructions she had memorized weeks before.

“You keep bearing for that big stand of trees,” Starling said and pointed toward the shore. It was dusk. “Go as hard as you can. It will be darker soon.”

There was hardly any wind and the angry waves slapped the hull of the submarine sounding like distant gunfire.

A head appeared in the hatchway. “Captain, activity to the west,” he said. “Betcha it’s that patrol boat we picked up earlier on radar.”

“Time’s a wasting, folks,” Allen said. “Jensen, lower her on down.”

Yoshi took the sailor’s hand and half-tumbled into the gray-black raft. Down here she was surprised by how much the craft pitched and rolled, and she tried to look high, toward the horizon, to keep her stomach settled. Just the way Starling had once told her back at the Presidio.

“It would be good to bring her in closer to shore,” she heard Starling say high above her.

“The hell we are,” Allen replied. “We’ve got the bombers coming in. Their patrol boats are on our tail. This is as good as it gets, lieutenant. Take it or we scrub the mission.”

“I’ll take it,” Starling said reluctantly.

“Then let’s get moving,” Allen said. “Cast her off, men.”

Two sailors pushed the raft away from the submarine and scrambled for the hatch.

“C’mon,” Allen told Starling.

“Go,” Starling said and Yoshi couldn’t tell if he was speaking to Allen or her.

Still, she did as she was told and begun to paddle, fighting the first of many waves that lay between her and the shoreline. But then Yoshi turned and saw that Starling was still watching her.

“Go,” he repeated. “Go as hard as you can.”

The other men had already disappeared below deck. Yet, for some reason, Starling stayed. His face, even from this distance was filled with concern and for a moment Yoshi wished that the lines of protocol hadn’t extended into every minute of every hour that they had been together since Manzanar. When she looked at him, her mind sometimes ran away from her. She had dreamed of him in the nights leading up to this departure, and she vowed that she would dream of him again.

Starling moved his entire arm forward, as if he could magically propel her forward to the distant beach. As if everything he hoped and prayed for somehow rode upon her shoulders now. It wouldn’t be the touch or the impromptu kiss that she would remember. It would be the memory of him standing there on the deck of the submarine. The concern that had somehow crept across his face.

Yoshi dug her paddle back into the black sea and pulled hard for the shadow land far out in front of her. After a long while, when she glanced back again, the submarine was gone.