—Hey, check it out! they yelled.
Then they turned Seiji toward the girls, who screamed and turned away. But when the three boys taunted them, the girls cast glances in their direction, and one of the girls laughed. Seiji struggled to escape, but the boys punched him in the face until he relented. As blood dripped from his nose and tears ran down his face, Seiji saw Sayoko staring at him with pity. The additional excitement caused his penis to stiffen against his own will. The three bullies laughed. The girls pretended to be disgusted, but they couldn’t avert their eyes.
—Look! Even a dimwit can get a hard on! yelled one of the bullies. I guess he’s a real man!
As the coup de grace, they lifted Seiji up and tossed him into the bushes. Humiliated, Seiji pulled up his pants and ran off into the woods, leaving behind his sickle and the cut grass.
From the next day, Sayoko turned and ran away whenever she saw Seiji. As for Seiji, he couldn’t even bear to look at her. Even if he saw her in the distance, he immediately ran off and hid. He felt ashamed that his body always reacted at the mere thought of her, not to mention the sight of her. When he recalled the look on her face as she stared at him—with his legs spread and his genitals exposed like a dog—he became overwhelmed less with anger toward the bullies than toward his own repulsiveness. He wished that she’d never lay eyes on him again. Since they lived next door to each other, however, there was no way to avoid her.
As the months passed, though, Sayoko started smiling and talking to him again as if nothing had ever happened. But Seiji couldn’t speak to her like before, and could only drop his head and stammer. After that, they celebrated their Coming of Age ceremonies, graduated from school, turned fourteen, and then fifteen. From then on, Seiji spent all his time helping his father with fishing. After big catches, Seiji helped distribute fish and shellfish to the families in the neighborhood. Handing fish to Sayoko and hearing her words of appreciation were the happiest moments of his life.
That all seemed so long ago. Seiji pictured Sayoko smiling and saying, Thank you, as he stood at her door with some fish. I’ll never hear that voice again, he thought. Never again. He leaned back against the wall of the cave and pressed the harpoon to his forehead.
—I’m the only one left! The only one left!
Seiji’s words rippled through the cave. You can do it! You can do it! replied the echo from the cave’s depths. Yes, I’ll kill every American that hurt Sayoko. He picked up his canteen, took a swig of the tepid water, and closed his eyes. The rage heating his body caused him to sweat even more. Suddenly, he felt an insect in the back of his right eye. No bigger than his smallest fingernail, the insect started to move, then multiply. Before long, more were in his ears and nostrils, and under his skin, scratching their way toward his back, hands, and feet. They even worked their way into his head and started squirming inside his brain. At the internment camp hospital, he’d thought the insects implanted in his body by the Americans were trying to kill him. He jumped up screaming and scratched wildly at his head.
Suddenly, a shell from a warship landed next to the cave, and the blast rushing through the entrance shook Seiji’s body. The smell of burning trees sent him into a panic. Outside, bombs rained down on the sandy beach shimmering in the sun. With each explosion, sand flew up and heaps of screwpine trees leapt into the air. Seiji dropped to the bottom of the trench and covered his ears.
The night before, he had received two grenades from a Japanese soldier in anticipation of an American landing. He was ordered to throw the first one, and then while the enemy was recoiling from the blast, charge into them while holding the second. Seiji was hiding with the other Defense Corps members in a trench they’d dug along the woods near the beach. As the sky began to lighten, they stared at the enemy ships lined up off the coast. The Americans seemed to have read the minds of the Japanese, however, and instead intensified their bombing along the coast. From the blurry space between the dawn sky and the gray sea, red lights shot up in rapid succession. A moment later, Seiji heard something ripping through the air, followed by a deafening roar and a blast that blew across the trench. Leaves, branches, and trunks of mowed-down screwpine trees rained down with the sand. In a daze, he raised his head. Ōshiro, a man from the neighboring village, grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and yelled at him:
—If you don’t get out of here fast, you’re dead!
The other Defense Corps members jumped out of the trench and chased after Ōshiro, who had started running toward the slightly elevated woods on the western edge of the beach. Taking up the rear was a man in his fifties named Uehara. He turned around and yelled to Seiji:
—What’re you doing?! Hurry up!
Just as he’d finished yelling, Uehara tripped on the root of a tree and fell. Aghast, Seiji again heard something splitting the air. The combined sound, force, and heat of each blast pressed down on his body, which was pinned to the bottom of the trench. In the woods, hidden in a trench at the base of
