The Emperor of Any Place (4 page)

W
hat you are holding in your hands is a rare and extraordinary document, not just in its content but in its very existence, the fact that it has survived the journey it has taken. To that end, I owe a debt of gratitude to Sergeant Major Clifford E. “Griff” Griffin II, who rescued the original manuscript and was kind enough to forward it to me, knowing, or should I say, hypothesizing my relationship to Corporal Ōshiro. That this account, written in the dying year of the War of the Pacific, is only now coming to light is another aspect of the miracle. When Griff discovered the manuscript in 1945, he intended to send it to me, forthwith. That was what he said in the cover letter that accompanied the material when it appeared, so surprisingly, on my doorstep, more than half a century later. He apologized for taking so long, but no apology was required. I know how war and its aftermath tend to push aside the best of intentions. The cessation of conflict only lets us see the chaos that war has left behind, and small personal matters are forgotten, as a soldier attempts to find his way back to something like “ordinary” life. That certainly was my own experience. The manuscript had been shoved away somewhere and miraculously
not
been lost or left behind in any of a number of moves. Picking up stakes is the fate of a lifer in the armed forces, like Griff. So it was only when he was preparing to move into a retirement home, at the end of a distinguished career, that he rediscovered the document.

I did not know the sergeant major well or for very long. We were, as they say, ships passing in the night. And so it is all the more extraordinary that he remembered me and went to the trouble of tracking me down. For that I am eternally grateful.

There is a mystery here, however. Griff could not have known the content of these writings.
Isamu’s memoir was written in Japanese.
This point is important, as you will see when you come to the end of the story.

Before you read it, however, let me say a little something about myself. I do so not out of any vanity but only to try to place in context material that will undoubtedly strike the reader as far-fetched, the maundering of a mind set adrift. That might very well be the case! War does funny things to men.

I have spent my life as a man of science. After demobilization, I became a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I ended up doing a PhD and then followed my mentor, John McCarthy, when he left the Institute to go west in the early fifties. “Uncle John” was a cognitive scientist and among the earliest of a new breed of computer men. He was the one, in fact, who invented the term “artificial intelligence.” I didn’t have to think twice about accepting the invitation to join his staff at Stanford, where the university had created the first technologically focused industrial park to be found anywhere in the world. I am still affiliated with the university as a professor emeritus and a longtime denizen of that industrial park — that hive of activity — known now around the world as Silicon Valley.

So I think I am safe in declaring myself
compos mentis.
And therefore you may ask yourself, “Do I believe everything that is written herein?” I can only answer in the affirmative. Monsters, ghostly children, eaters of the dead . . . It cannot be so, you say, and yet it is what it is. I concur with everything Isamu describes, and his description, as you will soon see, is vivid and detailed. Oh, there is a passage in the opening chapter that is clearly fanciful — hallucinatory. Isamu seems to acknowledge it as such, the effect of shell-shock, as we used to call it. But from the moment he arrives on the desert island he named Kokoro-Jima, his refuge and later my own, I can vouch for everything that he saw and experienced there. Indeed, I have added my own recollections, interspersed with his, where I felt further explication might be warranted, fantastical though it might seem. I cannot explain any of it rationally, even now, so many years later. So it is worth repeating: War does funny things to men. Reading Isamu’s account revived in me those long-ago memories. A fear I have never known. A friendship like no other.

I wish I could proclaim here in this prologue that I had been able to track down Isamu’s beloved Hisako, to whom this memoir was dedicated. Nor have I been able to track down any relatives. How I would have loved to present this book to her, to them. I have tried, with the help of my son, Leonardo, to locate survivors of the family. The war effort in Saipan resulted in massive casualties to the population of the island, not just the combatants. Isamu was an immigrant to Saipan from Okinawa. That island was also devastated in the last great offensive of World War II. We keep searching, Leo and I. Who knows? In this age of global communication, the technology to which I have contributed in my own small way, we might still find heirs. And it is important that we try. This document, when you strip away all that is strange, all that might be a product of fright and horror, is more than anything else a remarkable love story. And I am still able to wish, despite the hard truths of this worrisome world, that every love story should have a satisfactory conclusion. I owe it to my friend Isamu Ōshiro to finish what he began.

Professor Derwood Kraft

Palo Alto, California

Evan looks up. Hears a lawn mower. Not exactly a startling sound in Any Place. In fact, he’s not sure of this, but he has a feeling you are given a lawn mower when you sign a lease to live here. There’s probably a law saying you have to use it, too. Like the law about no clotheslines.

Then Evan sits up straight. There
is
something strange about the sound, after all. He gets up, leaves the book on the lawn chair, and makes his way through the carport to the front. Lexie Jane Reidinger is mowing Evan’s lawn. She’s wearing her favorite snake T-shirt, the one that looks like you’ve got a boa around your neck — a boa constrictor, that is — draped around your shoulders with its tongue licking your belly button. She’s got earphones on, and she’s mouthing along with whatever song she’s listening to.

A twelve-year-old is mowing my lawn for me,
thinks Evan.
I am now certifiably pathetic.

He waves. Moves down the driveway a bit, stones poking his bare feet, just in case his guilt isn’t painful enough. He waves again to get her attention. She sees him finally, stops the lawn mower, pauses her iPod, and takes off her earphones.

“Thanks, Lexie,” he says. “You didn’t have to do this.”

“My dad said I did,” she says with a frown.

Great,
thinks Evan.
Alienate the neighbors.
Maybe he should get some chickens, a hound dog, and a rusty car or two. “I’m really sorry,” he says. “I had been meaning to get to it . . .”

“It’s okay,” she says. “You don’t have to pay me.”

“Oh. Right. Uh, thanks.”

“But . . .” She stretches the word out.

“Here it comes,” he says. “What is it? My LEGO collection?”

She rolls her eyes; proof positive that she’s almost a teenager. But then her expression changes to unadulterated excitement; proof positive that she’s not.

“I was wondering if I could see how the frigate turned out.”

For a moment, Evan is lost.

“The boat?” She’s got a “duh” look on her face. “The one your dad was . . . you know . . .” Now her expression changes. She looks a bit worried, as if this was one of those things you weren’t supposed to say to the bereaved.

“Oh, right!” says Evan. “The frigate.” He thinks a bit. “The USS
Constitution.
”

“Yeah.”

“I’d forgotten. You were his . . . What’d he call you?”

“His navvy slave,” she says with enthusiasm.

He has to laugh. “You’re in luck, slave girl — he finished it.” Then he gets an idea. “Wait here,” he says. He holds up his index finger. “One sec.” She nods excitedly, pushes the hair out of her eyes. And he heads into the house, takes the stairs up to the Dockyard, two at a time.

The newest boat is there on the shelf where he placed it. Sixteen days ago, now, that morning when he found it on the floor. He picks it up in two hands.
This is such a good idea,
he thinks. Then he sees the dust on the shoulders of the bottle, the clean space on the shelf where the bottle sat, outlined in dust. Everything covered in dust. And dust . . . he knows what dust is.

Give it to her. Go on. Let it go. You can do it.

But he can’t.

Slowly he places the bottle back on the shelf.

He leaves the room, closes the door behind him, and stands at the top of the stairs. Then he turns one-eighty and heads to his room. He lies down on his bed and closes his eyes. He thinks of Lexie Jane standing out there on the lawn waiting. Waiting for one sec. He’s not sure how long it is before he hears the lawn mower fire up again.

Evan sits in his bed, the book open in his lap propped against his raised knees. It is late, raining again. There is distant thunder, sheet lightning. His window is open and a sheen of raindrops paints the windowsill. A breeze stirs the curtains and wanders around the room checking out his stuff, riffling paper on his desk, the feathers on a dream catcher, the right bottom corner of a poster of the Three Stooges. A breeze cool enough to make him glad of a summer-weight duvet.

He hadn’t noticed at first, but there is a title embossed on the back of the book as well. The gold letters in kanji must be the Japanese for the title on the front. And if he opens the book that way up, sure enough there is a title page in Japanese, and then the body of the book in reverse order to the English translation. Which is how Japanese is read, he guesses, right to left.

He pages through the reproduced photographs of the original manuscript, tiny kanji characters, written in pencil and pen — the “monograph,” as it’s identified in the acknowledgments. Then he flips to the English translation. Two translators are acknowledged in the book’s front matter, a professor and a graduate student, as if this thing were an archaeological specimen. Something dug up and dusted off and handled with white gloves and a magnifying glass.

For some reason he is full of trepidation.

Why me,
he thinks. Why does he suddenly have a grandfather with a mysterious past? What was it Leo had written in the letter: something about the “ambiguous and disturbing conclusion.” There was something in the prologue, too. He flips back, finds the paragraph . . . yeah, here it is: “Griff could not have known the content of these writings.”

What was that supposed to mean?

And then he recalls that look on his father’s face, the last night, as if he was trying to recall something, a lost memory.

There’s something wrong with the picture.

Evan leans back and closes his eyes for a moment. The memory of his father’s words has spooked him. The whole thing spooks him. How does a book like this float up onto the shore of 123 Any Place, a perfectly ordinary island in the perfectly ordinary sea of Don Mills?

My name is Isamu Ōshiro. I was born in Okinawa but left for Saipan in 1938, when I was just sixteen. There was work there harvesting sugarcane, and no father to slap me for reading too much and for being a dreamer. I wanted to be a mechanic and soon found work fixing cars and trucks. But you know all that, Hisako. I only mention it in case this book falls into the hands of a stranger. Your name and address are plainly displayed on the book’s cover, for it is into your hands that I wish it to be delivered, into your arms that I wish myself to be delivered. How I wish to share with you my most intimate thoughts. Trust that I hold many sweet memories of you in my heart.