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by Danny Joe Robb
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Inside Higa’s room at the Los Angeles VA nursing home, pastel-blue paint clung to the walls like artic ice, the ceiling a bitter white sky. His warm bed, his ark of solitude, drifted over a speckled-tile ocean. With the blanket pulled over his head, he listened to the rain softly pelting the roof.
The nurse pleaded with him. “Time to get dressed, Higa-san.”
“Go away.” He turned over with his back to her.
“Please,” she said, “the Emperor is coming. We have to get ready.”
“He’s coming? Today?”
“Yes. For tea I’m told.”
Higa swung his stumps over the side of the bed.
“Where’s my uniform? I can’t meet the Emperor dressed like this.”
“After breakfast you can change. That way your coat won’t chance any stains or creases.”
She brought him a tray from the hallway. Real eggs and sausage. Not bad. Much better than field rations—though he fondly recalled Chief Petty Officer Kobayashi always joking that rice and beans made the best turds.
Higa had hardly finished eating when a young man barged into his room, “Time for Taiso, Higa-san.”
“No. I don’t want to.”
“All sailors are required to exercise, Seaman Higa.”
This was true. Every morning on Tinian, his unit fell out in front of the hangar for calisthenics. He could do more pushups than even Petty Officer Shiba—of course that wasn’t a fair comparison. As brave as he was strong, Shiba once loaded a 100-kilogram torpedo onto a Zero by himself. Higa hadn’t seen Shiba do it, but Kobayashi told him how the munition lifter had been disabled by shrapnel, and he did remember the American’s first attack. There was a lot of damage—and dead men.
“What is your name?” Higa asked the young man.
“Why, I’m Atsushi of course, Seaman Higa.”
Higa liked being addressed by his rank. His squadron commander had often told the men they were heroes and all of Japan loved them. Lieutenant Kinjo once pinned a medal on his uniform, although Higa thought he’d just been doing his duty when he pulled the pilot from the crashed plane. He wasn’t sure where the medal was now. A proud looking device. Below a ruffled, red-silk ribbon, a hawk with outstretched wings clutched cherry blossoms in one claw, the other holding a branch of chrysanthemums, a symbol of the Emperor…
“Is the Emperor coming today?”
Atsushi put his hand on Higa’s shoulder, “No, not today. He wanted to, but you know how busy he is.”
Higa straightened his back and sat quietly and respectfully at attention. He was disappointed, but he tried not to show it. The Emperor had the responsibility of all Japan on his shoulders.
***
In the evening, at dinner time, a young woman came to visit Higa. She looked like his sister, long black hair, slim, pretty, a face like an angel.
She put her hand on his shoulder and asked, “Hello, Papa. How are you feeling?”
Higa shook his head, confused.
An older woman in a white uniform, busy reading and flipping through papers, looked up from her clipboard and told the younger woman, “You should come earlier, he’s at his best in the morning.”
“I wish I could…work, my children, you know. It was too much…that’s why we brought my father here.”
“I see,” the woman said and resumed reading.
The younger woman pulled up a chair to sit next to Higa.
“Are you not hungry, Papa?” she asked. “You’ve barely touched your food. Do you want me to help you?”
Higa smiled. Something about her reminded him of a girl he’d known. What was her name?
She picked up a spoon from his tray and scooped some rice. “Open wide and close your eyes I’m going to give you a nice surprise,” she said singsong.
Higa did as she asked. This was fun.
The other woman looked up from her chart. “This is interesting. How long has your father been stuck in this fantasy of being a Japanese sailor?”
The young woman picked at the rice on his plate and asked the older woman, “You’re new here?”
“Sort of. Well, I retired from the VA in 2018, but I got a call last month asking me to come back. Even now that the pandemic seems to be winding down, there’s still a pretty bad need for nurses, even old buzzards like me.”
“His rice is as dry as rocks,” the young woman muttered.
“I doubt I’ll find any better in the kitchen,” the nurse said, “but I bet I can get some ice cream.”
Higa’s mind jerked at the mention of ice cream. He opened wide, and the woman emptied the spoon into his mouth. The taste disappointed him, but he was not quite sure why.
“His older brother Akio served in the Japanese Navy during the war,” the nice woman said as she raked another helping of round green pebbles into the spoon, “but my father was too young to fight. After the war, he and his parents immigrated to America. Papa sometimes joked that he’d received his draft card before his citizenship papers.”
Higa listened as the women talked about him. His head seemed to clear a little.
The young woman spooned the food into Higa’s mouth and smiled at him as he chewed and swallowed.
“He lost his legs in Korea,” she said.
His eyes widened. “I did?”
She squinted at him, then the smile came back. “Uncle Akio also suffered from Alzheimers. Papa told me toward the end of his life, Akio could only remember his time on Tinian and the battle. Almost every day, he’d ask if the Emperor was coming to visit.” She wiped Higa’s mouth with her thumb and then patted his cheek with her hand. “It broke your heart, didn’t it, Papa, to see your brother disappointed time and time again.”
“The Emperor is coming?” Higa asked.
“Of course not, Papa.” She shook her head. “The Emperor died years ago.”
“Of course not,” he replied, shaking his head the same as the young woman. He kept his mouth closed as she put the spoon to his lips.
“Eat, Papa.”
“I don’t like peas.”
The pretty young woman put the spoon down and stared at him. “Yes you do, Papa. You used to grow them in our garden. At our house in Santa Ana. You remember, right?”
An image formed in Higa’s mind, but it was like an old faded picture grayed to shadows. He squinted his eyes in concentration, and a little color tinted his memory. He remembered a little black-haired girl sitting in a highchair—she pursed her lips as he tried to feed her some peas he had mashed into a paste, and then a woman’s voice, laughing and saying, she gets her stubbornness from me. The voice came with a face that cleared as he traced the scene back in his mind. Standing next to the kitchen sink was Shinobu. His wife wore a sunflower-patterned wrap on her head, and a smile that no darkness could ever dim. The cancer took her life but never her spirit.
The older woman moved her lips as she silently read from the stack of papers bound to the metal clipboard. Every now and then she’d nod and grunt an uh hum and then flip to the next page. When she finished with the chart, she hung it on the end of Higa’s bed. “The medical term for his delusion,” she said, “is called, transference. Dr. Lee noted that at your father’s age and the severity of his Alzheimer’s, there’s not much we can do.”
The young woman nodded. “His birthday is next month.” She rubbed Higa’s hand and said cheerfully, “You’ll be ninety-two, Papa.”
Higa reached and cupped the younger woman’s hand between his. “I love you, Patty.”
“Papa! You recognize me?”
He turned to the nurse. “We’ll have that ice cream now, chocolate for me and. . .” He paused and asked his daughter, “Do you still like strawberry?”
She nodded and smiled. Patty did favor his sister.
“Well, all right then. Ice cream it is,” the nurse said. As she walked out of the room, she spoke over her shoulder, “I think I’ll have some too.”
***
That night, when he closed his eyes, sleep took Higa once again to the place where he and the others had hidden. The cave was dark and damp, filled with the smell of urine and feces. A dampened kerosene lantern cast slivers of light on a host of ghostly faces. Men huddled in a circle whispering to each other. Machine guns rattled dully in the distance. The Japanese Army and Navy had taken heavy losses, but the fight for the island was still on. Kobayashi had carried him away from the airfield and bandaged his badly wounded legs. He felt so felt guilty lying on his bed of palm fronds unable to help—and his eyelids seemed like heavy curtains.
***
The next day after Taiso, Atsushi wheeled Higa into the lounge and parked his chair in the corner of the bright sunlit room. As he sipped his tea, Higa watched the people at the other tables, some grouped into twos and threes and fours, and some alone, like him. Heads turned toward the door as a murmur spread across the room, and soon everyone was staring at a man who sat at a small round table set aside by itself and that had a yellow candle and single rose in a vase on top.
Atsushi and a young woman wearing blue pajamas coaxed the man to get up and sit at a different table. The man complained but did as they said. Higa tried not to stare. He’d once carried a photograph of the Emperor in his wallet. Hirohito was in his twenties then, dressed in his imperial uniform and sitting on an ornate chair. The war had ruined his regal face. The whites of his eyes now a sickly yellow, his hair like steel-wool. Part of his ear was missing, and he was as scrawny as a homeless person. Still though, he wore the same round-metal glasses and had the same neatly trimmed mustache as in the picture.
The man’s eyes flitted like angry bees as Higa rolled up to the table and sat directly across from him.
Higa picked up the pot, “Would you care for some more tea, your majesty?”
A pleasant smile formed on the man’s lips. “Yes. Thank you.”
Much of the past Higa had forgotten, and every day, more seemed to slip away. Soon it would all be gone. The man calmly sipped his tea and seemed to listen attentively to his story.
“. . .We were alone in the cave,” Higa said, “me and Takeshi, the scullery boy, who kneeled beside me. The kid had a bloody rag around his forehead that covered one eye. He talked anxiously, ‘You can’t die now, Higa-san. Chief Kobayashi promised that the Emperor himself is coming to take us home.’ Takeshi cradled his arms around me, leaning me up to drink the last sips of water from his canteen. Then there was shouting—an explosion—the world turned wet and dark. The next thing I remember is the GI’s round blue eyes when I woke up in the American field hospital.”
The man bowed his head and poured Higa tea. He asked, “Do you know what they did with my cart?”
The nurse watched the two men. She asked Atsushi, “Who’s that talking to Mr. Higa?”
“That’s Mr. Yosano. Social Services took him off the streets a few weeks ago. He won’t be here very long—late-stage cirrhosis.”
A little later, when Atsushi walked over to take Higa back to his room, he found the old man with his head bowed to his chest, and who looked as if he had fallen asleep. Atsushi checked Higa’s pulse—and found none.
He sighed and asked, “What happened, Yosano-san?”
The man straightened his back and looked Atsushi in the eye.
“He went home.”
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After a successful career as a professional engineer and Air Force Reservist, Danny graduated from retirement to become a student of the literary arts. He earned a Certificate in Fiction Writing from UCLA in May, 2020. He resides in Whidbey Island, Washington with his wife, Mary Tomonaga, and their spoiled dog, Ichiro.
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