The Finder Read online

  Shimada picked up his police cap, tugged it snuggly into place, adjusted the brim and checked that his name was pinned properly. Short sleeves and no tie for the summer months (hardly distinguishable in the subtropics of southern Japan, but the nation ran on Tokyo time and Tokyo seasons, so a summer uniform it was).

  “I’m off then.”

  Without taking her eyes from the TV, she said, “Don’t forget your gun.”

  This irritated him immensely. He hadn’t forgotten his gun; it was locked up, as per protocol, in the adjoining police station. It didn’t seem proper to show up at the widow’s home, armed, just to check on one of her guests. His wife was right, though: a sidearm was required while on patrol. She was always right. It was one of her more annoying habits.

  “I didn’t forget,” he said, but she wasn’t listening.

  The morning show was now presenting a sneak peek of this evening’s detective drama. “It wraps up tonight!” gushed one of the hosts, full of breath. Cut to: a scar-chinned villain in a sharkskin suit standing under a streetlamp while a housewife waited, furtive in the shadows, ready to turn the tables. The tables were always being turned in these dramas. It was the one thing you could count on: if there was a table, it would be turned. “Kowai!” squealed the same host when they cut back to the studio. Looks scary!

  Hateruma’s kōban police station, a “police box” as it was more commonly known, was little more than a cement-walled cylindrical kiosk attached to the house behind it. Officer Shimada’s service revolver was in the gun rack along with the precinct’s shotgun and riot shield, never used. (How a single officer would go about containing a riot was never properly explained to him.) He threaded the holster through his belt, tucked in his uniform (again), rummaged around in the drawer for an English-language phrasebook: Nationality please? Japanese law requires that you present a valid passport upon request. He wouldn’t try to render the mashed-yam sounds of English himself, would just point to the questions as needed.

  Being the only police officer on Hateruma Island and manning its only police desk mainly involved giving directions to visitors. That and overseeing a lost-and-found box: cell phones and wallets mainly, usually pebble-dashed with sand, along with forgotten trinkets and orphaned earrings and other oddments, even the occasional damp towel, which he would accept in as begrudging a manner as possible. “This is a police station,” he would harrumph, “not a hotel customer service desk.” But this only confused the matter, as there were no hotels on Hateruma Island, just a series of guesthouses and rented rooms. “A hotel? Really? Where?”

  The only crimes, as such, were ones of disorderly conduct (drunkards and battling in-laws primarily), minor acts of vandalism (boys breaking bottles behind the bento shop), and the occasional petty theft (as often as not perpetrated by the same bottle-breaking boys). He had once been called in by an irate sugarcane farmer whose backhoe had been pushed onto its side. The farmer had blamed a neighbor with whom he’d been having an ongoing territorial spat, accusing said neighbor of encroaching on his property. A further escalation of the feud was averted when, upon examination of the crime scene, Police Inspector Shimada had determined that the farmer’s backhoe had been parked at too steep an angle on too soft a soil and had toppled over on its own accord. No charges were laid. It was the biggest case he’d ever worked on, and he still had the letter of commendation from the main office on Ishigaki Island for having resolved the issue so punctually.

  Shimada slipped the English phrasebook into his shirt pocket, turned the ON PATROL sign over, and stepped out into the shrill heat of midmorning. In the report prepared later by the Ishigaki main police station, investigators would ask why the sole officer on duty had not entered the requisite information into his daily log: where he was going, who he was planning to interview and why. But of course, by the time these questions were being asked, it no longer mattered.

  The trill of cicadas. A heavy weight in the air. Shimada straightened his collar while grandmothers in cotton bonnets and billowing smocks bicycled past: a uniform as surely as the short pants and peaked caps of the elementary school students that flowed by twice a day—out in the morning, back in the afternoon: the ebb and flow of running feet and laughter. Fewer feet and less laughter every year.

  In front of the Hateruma police box stood a weathered noticeboard displaying photographs of Japan’s Most Wanted, a parade of mug shots more ceremonial than practical. Fugitives never fled to Hateruma. Why would they? It would be like sprinting down a long hallway with no exit, like leapfrogging across poorly spaced stepping-stones only to find yourself surrounded by open water and deep currents. When you reached Hateruma, you had run out of Japan to cross. From here, you could only turn around and retrace your steps back to the world, much like the tourists who came to stand facing the wind at Cape Takana.

  Shimada considered taking the island’s lone patrol car; it added a certain dignity—he could imagine the young widow being secretly impressed—but opted instead for the precinct’s official bicycle. In a car, one could drive clean across Hateruma Island, end to end, in ten minutes. Pedaling took twenty-five. From the police station to the port, less than twelve. A short ride, yet also very long, depending on one’s state of mind.

  He unlocked the bicycle, checked the tires. A little soft, but not worth looking for the pump.

  The southernmost police box in Japan was right beside the southernmost post office, which was just down the lane from the southernmost elementary school, tucked in behind shaggy fernlike stands of sago palm trees—the southernmost such trees in Japan. Tamura-san’s wife ran an izakaya restaurant, which proclaimed itself “the southernmost izakaya in Japan!” Everything was the southernmost something down here. If you opened an umbrella stand it would be the southernmost umbrella stand in Japan. Which is to say, at that very moment, Senior Inspector Shimada, Hateruma Island Substation, was the southernmost police officer in all of Japan, with the entire Japanese nation balanced swordlike above him and no one at his side. He was on his own.

  ISLANDS OF THE BLACK CURRENT

  THE LANE WAS LEAFY WITH bamboo, the shadows playing along the wall of his home as Shimada leaned down to check the chain. Recent rains had left a patina of rust on the gears, but otherwise good. How had he ended up here?

  How does anyone end up anywhere?

  Officer Shimada was born and raised on a larger island, farther north, and as a child Hateruma had seemed so far away, it hardly existed. So when he found himself posted here—rather than, say, amid the neon glow of US military bases on Okinawa’s main island—it was as though he had fallen off the map, had landed in an upside-down world, vaguely familiar, yet oddly distorted. Even its name was lonely. Hate-no-Uruma, “the last reef,” an island of coral at the far end, a reminder that beyond this final outpost there was only open water, heavy seas, starry skies, and dragons.

  Hateruma was the outer edge of the outer edge, the last island in the last cluster of what had once been a kingdom of the sea: the Kingdom of Ryukyu, with its own language and religion, its own trade routes and intrigues, its own treaties and alliances, legends and lore, death chants and court poetry, the darker olive complexions a reminder of older migrations, of Polynesian forebears and open-sea journeys in rudimentary canoes. Crossing open ocean in a canoe, thought Shimada. Can you imagine such a feat?

  It was a kingdom based not on conquest but commerce, part of a mercantile network that reached as far as Java and Siam, Formosa and Shanghai, Malaysia and Macau. The cotton grown in Okinawa could be traced to the arid plains of Afghanistan, and the islands’ feral ponies to the steppes of Mongolia, such was the extent of the Great Loo-Choo’s trade routes, as the kingdom was known in the inner courts of China’s Ming dynasty.

  This was a point of pride among Okinawans, even now. Ryukyu seafarers were plying the Straits of Malacca when their Japanese cousins were still struggling with the swirling currents between China and Japan. Ryukyu scholars were being entertained in the Great Halls of th
e Ming, while their Japanese counterparts could only look on in sullen envy. Rice wine from Bangkok, pottery from Pusan, silks from China, spices from Indonesia. All gone. With the Japanese invasion and eventual subjugation, the kingdom became a colony, the colony a prefecture, and the prefecture a quiet backwater. Lost in the sea.

  But here the history turned dark. With the advent of World War II, Japan rediscovered Okinawa—with a vengeance. Under military rule, Japan would turn these islands into an armed bastion, and the people of this in-between dominion would pay a heavy price. Were they even Japanese? When the soldiers of the Emperor waded ashore, bayonets raised, they found that the older islanders couldn’t even speak the language of their conquerors. They were the colonized. A lower caste, less than human.

  The kingdom was gone, and Hateruma remained mainly as an afterthought, a crumbling outpost, a vague memory, more an apparition than anything real. Officer Shimada knew this all too well: The past is a lost continent. It lingers in the undergrowth, half-hidden in family tombs and funeral rites, in dialectal turns of phrase, in the dance steps and hand gestures, in that strange parallel realm of folk creatures and ghosts, in the sharp taste of the gōya melon, a fruit so bitter it is almost inedible.

  There were smatterings of outsiders on Hateruma Island, people who washed in and out like so much tidal flotsam: schoolteachers, doctors at the medical clinic, pilots before they closed the airport, and even—Shimada supposed—Shimada himself. Outsiders aside, on an island like Hateruma, everyone was someone’s cousin. The surnames circulated, and nicknames lasted for generations. An island of sugarcane farmers and small-scale fishers. And goats.

  Lots of goats. They seemed to outnumber the human population at times. Shimada remembered the son of one sugarcane farmer, still young and plagued with ideas, who decided to import more pliant, fat-tailed sheep instead. They kept falling off cliffs. Sheep were not as sure-footed or as resourceful as your typical hardscrabble goat. Goat Island, Shimada thought, as he walked his bicycle down the alley beside the station. That’s what they should have named it. An outpost of goats in the middle of the sea. Whether tethered or running free, ripping up scrub grass from among the coral or chewing thoughtfully on sugarcane, Hateruma’s goats were treated like communal pets as much as they were livestock—albeit pets that ended up in cooking pots. He’d never eaten so much goat stew. Goat stew and sugarcane sweets.

  Like bamboo, sugarcane is rigid and jointed. But where bamboo is hollow, sugarcane is densely packed, thick, and wetly fibrous, with a pulpy interior. In Japan, every clan worthy of a name has its own family crest, a mon: whether a bird or a flower, a falcon’s feather or a bent-cross swastika, the symbols were ancient and almost endless. Officer Shimada was descended from a lesser line—retainers to an adjutant to an adviser to the royal house of Okinawa—and as such, had a mon of his own: a bamboo stalk with leaves. Hollow, but alive. He had no doubt that if his wife’s family had had a mon, it would have been sugarcane. Pulpy and rich. Perhaps they should have called it Sugarcane Island, he thought.

  He was alongside his house, still he hadn’t left. Why was he lingering with his bicycle, like an eavesdropper at a funeral?

  Through the side window, he could hear the muffled laughter of his wife’s TV. A twelve-minute bike ride to the dock—he had timed it one dull afternoon—and with a wobble and a shift of his holster he pushed off, down the lane and toward the sea, bell ringing as he went.

  Shimada’s wife was listening for the sound of his departure, and when she heard her husband pedal away, she flipped open her phone and texted her lover: Not tonight, maybe tomorrow. We have guests. (They didn’t have guests; her detective drama was wrapping up and she wanted to know how the tables would be turned this time around.) Her lover would be distraught, and there was some satisfaction in that. On an island like Hateruma, infidelity was as much about boredom as desire, but her moping young schoolteacher from Naha, alone in his moldering apartment, had mistaken this for love in much the same manner that the tourists who straggled in mistook Hateruma for the end of Japan. It wasn’t. There were other islands farther out—there are always other islands farther out—islands beyond Hateruma, but still in Japanese territory: half-moon atolls and semi-submerged reefs, sharp rocks shredding the surface; they just weren’t inhabited. One could never reach the end of Japan, because the end of Japan was unreachable. Her young schoolteacher was clinging to one such rock. Or was it a buoy? A small light lost at sea.

  She unwrapped another sembei.

  That her husband, trained in the art of investigation and detection, had not a clue about this affair (or the others) only added to the frisson, such as it was. Why was she still volunteering at the school’s parent-teacher society, long after their own children had gone? Why was there always a bustle of activity when a new crop of young teachers arrived? He had never bothered to ask, and she had never bothered to answer. Arrivals and departures. Lives, intersecting. And somewhere in the middle, the unexpected appearance of a foreigner arriving on the last ferry, agitated and alone, lugging a heavy duffel bag and asking about fireflies.

  LION-DOGS AND TURTLEBACK TOMBS

  ON OBJECTS THAT ARE HIDDEN just below the surface:

  Once a year, at the lowest ebb tide of spring, on the tropical island Shimada grew up on, a massive coral reef emerges from the sea like Atlantis. His earliest memory was of crowds on the shore, plastic pails in hand, waiting for this reef to appear so they could wade out over shallow layers of salt water, hurrying to gather shellfish and loose chunks of premium coral before the reef sank back down again. It was an illusion, of course. As his father explained, the reef never moved, only the sea. The reef remained: always there, but out of sight.

  The island of his childhood lay low along the water, so low it had been completely submerged during the reptilian age and was—a rarity in Okinawa—snake-free. Wild boars rooted through the melon groves, vexing farmers who stalked them with ancient hunting rifles. But no snakes. Never snakes.

  Not so Hateruma.

  This small island was rife with habu, a particularly lethal strain of pit viper that seemed to exist as much in the imagination as in the underbrush. They were ghostlike, these habu, rarely seen but very real. Irritable and aggressive, they lay in wait, two meters long at times and loosely coiled, ready to lash out. The Japanese had a saying: These four things are the most terrifying: earthquake, thunder, fire, and father. On Hateruma, they might add a fifth: habu. The habu of Hateruma moved through the shadows with a sibilant ease, in and out of abandoned lots and grassy fields, through crumbling tombs and unkempt yards. Night dwellers that fed on rodents, habu were notoriously unimpressed by humans. Their venom worked quickly, on a cellular level, breaking down the body from within, turning their victim’s innards into a pink slurry. It was a decidedly painful way to die.

  The island’s medical clinic had antitoxin on hand, as did the police station, and on occasion a tourist who had stepped on a sharp stick would rush in, shrieking for an antidote. But there was no antidote for fear, and the habu’s effects—like its presence—were more insidious than real. Dragons of the mind.

  The island Shimada grew up on took pride in its streetlights and pedestrian malls, even a KFC and a MOS Burger. It was anchored in the modern era. Hateruma belonged to another age entirely, a snake-riddled realm, thick with older idioms. He’d noticed this when he first moved here, how the locals, instead of saying “Take care!” on parting, as was the norm in most of Japan, would say instead “Take care, and watch out for habu.” Habu ni kiwotsukete. It was something he had never gotten used to, any more than he had gotten used to the bottles of awamori liquor that were sold with pickled habu floating inside, jaws agape and fangs bared, or the dried sea snakes that were peddled as elixirs in dusty shops. He understood that this sort of bravado was a way of facing one’s fears, of confronting those things that lurked in the shadowy undergrowth, but none of that made it any less queasy, any less unsettling.

  Shimada on his bicycle
.

  He rattled down narrow lanes, past jumble-stacked coral walls. The wisteria was in bloom, faintly aromatic, and they hung over the walls, pink and blue and ripe, like grapes on the vine.

  The walls of Hateruma, hand-piled over generations from rough-cut coral limestone, formed a loose labyrinth in the heart of the village. Like the leather-leafed fukugi trees that crowded the homes he bicycled past, these coral walls acted as windbreaks. They provided protection from monsoon rains and typhoon winds, just as the wide-hipped rooftops of the homes behind them, with their wraparound verandas, provided wellsprings of shade in the summer, pools of cooled air, a refuge from the punitive heat. The walls also kept the world back a step. For Shimada, these rugged blocks of coral, loosely piled yet immovable, were clotted with shadows and secrets.

  Behind these walls, massive roofs rose up, heavy and propped above the modest homes below. And such roofs they were! Grand and lordly, with terra-cotta tiles and ceramic lion-dogs perched atop, demon chasers, rooftop protectors. These were the shī-sā who stood guard over hearth and home, gargoyle-like in their ferocity. The shī-sā lion-dogs kept evil from entering, but Shimada found them unnerving in their own right, especially when, bicycling past, he seemed to make eye contact with one.

  A parallel village appeared, hidden in the groves, standing at the roadsides. A village of the dead.

  Okinawa’s ancestral tombs represented rites older than anything found in mainland Japan. Elsewhere, Japanese might cremate their familial remains, but not in Okinawa. Entire ancestral lines were interred in these tombs. Once constructed out of coral, now cement, round at the rear and flaring outward at the front, they’d been dubbed “turtlebacks,” kameko-baka. But they were actually built to resemble wombs. Life, returning to its source. Visitors might stumble upon these tombs anywhere: beside a parking lot, behind a grocer’s, next to a school, nestled in someone’s backyard. In Okinawa, the dead inhabited the same space as the living.