The bus passed the base entrance. Two American soldiers in camouflage fatigues stood beside the guard box, next to a large sign on which was written the name of the base. Hisako dropped her head again, closed her eyes, and struggled to control her breathing. Though she felt chilly from the air conditioning, she began to sweat. She reminded herself that she was no longer that ten-year-old child of long ago. Nowadays, American soldiers could no longer do whatever they wanted—as they could back then. But telling herself this didn’t stop the sweating.
She recalled what had happened ten years ago up in northern Okinawa. An elementary school girl had been raped by three American soldiers. The incident made the front pages of every newspaper in the country and led to intense protests throughout Okinawa. When Hisako read about it in the newspaper, she suddenly had difficulty breathing, causing her husband and children to worry. How much had things really changed since then? The question made her feel guilty for having so long avoided her memories of Okinawa and for not knowing what was happening in her own hometown.
But what else could I have done? How else could I have gotten through all these years? That was what she told herself ten years ago in order to keep going. But after she started having these dreams, she could no longer shake off the feelings of guilt. She decided to go to Okinawa in order to resolve those feelings. A year had passed since Kōsuke’s unexpected death, so she wanted to tie up all the loose ends of her life.
Kōsuke had collapsed suddenly at the go club he’d been devotedly attending since retirement. Apparently, he was in the middle of a game when he fell across the board, causing the black and white stones to scatter across the floor. He was rushed to the hospital in an ambulance, and Hisako hurried to his side as soon as she’d heard what had happened. He was already unconscious when she arrived. After an emergency operation for a brain hemorrhage and a mere two days in the intensive care unit, he passed away.
Hisako had struggled through the hectic period from her husband’s death up until the important memorial service commemorating the forty-ninth day after his death. She wasn’t able to consider her situation calmly until another six months had passed. She became obsessed with the idea that she herself could collapse any day now, just like her husband. Her three children took turns visiting with her grandchildren, so that she wouldn’t feel alone. Thanks to their attentiveness, she never suffered any serious bouts of depression.
Even so, the daily words she’d shared with Kōsuke for decades now had nowhere to go. They withered, crumbled, and piled up inside her heart. The burden slowly robbed her of energy. To compensate, she tried to get out and talk with people as much as possible, but she felt distant from others. And the feeling grew worse with each passing day. Sometimes a fragment from the pile of words would whirl up like dust and float inside her without meaning, causing her considerable unease.
Gradually, she stopped going out. Talking to people who weren’t members of the family began to feel like a nuisance. That was when she started having the dreams about the running woman. The sound of footsteps in the dark closed in on her from behind. Hisako shuddered when the young woman with long disheveled hair ran past. The woman was practically a girl. Her obi sash had come undone, and the front of her kimono was open. Her breasts swayed, and blood flowed down between her legs to her ankles. The woman stopped in the middle of an open space and screamed something incomprehensible. Then she began to flail her arms as if fighting some invisible enemy. Somebody held Hisako’s hand. The woman repeatedly stamped on her own shadow, which the strong sunlight cast on the ground. Beating her breasts with her fists, she shrieked with a ferocity that made Hisako’s hair stand on end. When the woman dashed off toward the woods in the northern part of the village, a woman of about forty and a girl of about ten, both in tears, chased after her.
The first time Hisako had the dream, she couldn’t stop crying for a while after she woke up. She knew immediately that the dream was connected to the island she’d been evacuated to. But why would scenes that she’d witnessed sixty years ago revive in her now? She didn’t know. Even so, the conviction that she should go to the island to find out grew stronger day by day. The young woman with glazed eyes and a gaping mouth made a lasting impression on her. Everything else in the dream was a blur. She had even forgotten the woman’s name, though that was something she wanted to find out.
After she’d started having the dreams about the woman, other memories also started to return. American soldiers with guns were standing around a cave in the woods. Behind them, the villagers watched, too. Hisako was among them. Clinging to her mother, she stared at the cave under the cliff. Several scorched tree trunks stood nearby, and the sloped ground was covered with rocks and stones that had rained down from sections of the cliff pulverized by the bombing. In the dull sunlight, the combat uniforms of the soldiers looked faded, compared to the shiny green of the trees, which glistened as if wet. Before long, a young man emerged from the cave. He screamed like a wild beast, and the moment he raised his right hand, a gunshot rang out. The man’s body jerked back in reaction, and then his knees buckled, and he fell forward. The American soldiers screamed, and Hisako’s mother covered Hisako with her body.
The next thing she remembered was the man being carried away on a stretcher. His
