KAMIKAZE//Renee Chen

I wasn’t there when they took Hoshino, the war and everything else, but I dreamt often about the tiny dunes his splintered body formed. Organs submerged in frozen air, his papery breath faded like the last buzz of a lightbulb.

The bartender called him and the others puppets of the General, a sacrificial swarm of bees. Yet, they weren’t bees. Bees are lucid creatures—insects that can pick up light from the ultraviolet spectrum, an uncharted territory for the human eye, peek at the world around them from the corners of their cylindrical eyes. But these pilots were blindfolded. They were fighting a war that they could not have won and barely recognized that.

“If you have a chance,” Sora asked, “to go back to that day. Would you have stopped—”

“Stopped him?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Stopped him.”

I leaned back, my hands knotted behind my scalp. Outside, snowflakes ticked down the grove of leafless gingko trees, washing Osaka away with a filigree of frost. The heaters gurgled, and everything smelt of lavender oil and incense. I drank more matcha tea, watching as Sora licked Nutella off his thumb.

***

The Kanoya Air Base was located at the southeastern edge of Osumi, an asymmetrical, sun-gilded peninsula, nestled against the purrs of the Philippine Sea. By the time I had left my old life behind and entered the city, I was thirty-three and a graduate of Kōkū Kenkyūjo, the Aviation Laboratory, an engineer from the University of Tokyo.

“You smell that?” The General asked me. He was a giant, his hair a cumulus of chalk and milk-whiteness. I stood before his oakwood office desk crowded with envelopes, kanji letters skimming the paper with their long tentacles, a cantaloupe-sized parcel wrapped in newspaper on top.

“The sea?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Death,” he said. He sat down on the spinning chair before his desk, the canopy leather. “Each month, twenty pilots sacrifice,” he went on. “The fighter planes that the pilots use are mostly in bad shape, decayed. There’s the Zero, the dogfighter, but the others are ancient.

Which is why we need you.” With that, he handed me a brass key. I gripped it, prodding the rust.

“It’s for your dorm room,” he said.

I followed him as he rose from his seat. We walked down an empty corridor and stopped by a dorm room.

“They’re consecrated,” he said.

“Huh?”

“Honored, I mean,” The General said. “As if they’re deities, or something of the sort. Each and every one of those men.”

“They’re more than that,” I said, but he only shrugged.

“There’s a bar down the road, but not much else here,” he said. “Most of them read, though.

To make the most out of their time left, I suppose. The bar has been there for decades, the people in the town say, run by an old bartender and his wife.”

I nodded. Past the overturned windowpane, a tide climbed against the gravel lane, its blue pristine, like plastic, like timeless, sterile glass. I watched as it scrambled down the white shore, ascending again toward the sky.

***

The bar had a bright blue facade, the glass frescos like a kaleidoscope. In the summer, the bartender served beer in Weizen glass, the pilots chanting drowsy tunes that lapped against the waves of the Philippine Sea. In winters, the bartender played his ancient accordion against the frost-dusted windows.

The first time I went to the bar was a June afternoon, smote with buzzing cicadas and moist wind sifting past gingko trees. I had picked a seat adjacent to the window and was drumming my fingers against my corduroy trousers when he walked over.

“New here?”

The short soldier was wearing a patchwork, salmon-pink button down. His cheeks were bright red, like a filet of raw sole, and he was wearing mismatched socks under his straw sandals. His long eyelashes shadowed his gray irises.

“Yeah,” I said. He sat down on the high teal stool next to me, reaching his hand out.

“Horikoshi,” I told him, shaking it, his callouses pressed against mine, “Reo Horikoshi.”

He smiled, showing his crooked front tooth. “I’m Masaru Hoshino.”

“Hoshino?” I watched the bartender glide over. “That’s a special name.”

“It means a field of stars,” he said. “Two sake,” he told the bartender, who was clad in a sleeveless white and had a widening bald spot on the left of his scalp. “My treat for the new sacrificer,” Hoshino said.

I laughed. “I’m not a pilot,” I told him.

“No?”

“I’m an engineer,” I said. His pupils dilated.

“Well,” he said, “I guess it’s a different kind of sacrifice.”

In front of us, the bartender placed a pitch-black disc onto a gramophone. Clarinets stirred into life. The voice of Watanabe Hamako slinked up and down in the air. The four soldiers beside us tapped their fingers against the redwood counter in sync to Hamako’s pulse.

***

I watched as Sora stretched the piece of paper in his hands, his fingers gliding across the surface. His hair is dark and straight, his bangs lapping against his brow like ebbs. When he finished folding the paper napkin, he held it up into the air.

“A plane,” he said. He placed it onto my palm, smiling.

I pushed my glasses up and studied it. The creases were hazy, with a smudge of soy sauce at the corner. “It’s a nice paper plane,” I told him.

He picked it up from my hands. “Is this what he flew in?” He asked.

A woman in a black kimono passed by us. There was a faint scent of sandalwood in the air, smoke slowly rising from the joss stick in her hands.

“Yeah,” I said. “That was what he flew in.”

***

By the time I had left the bar that evening, I knew more about Masaru than I knew about myself. He was one year older than me, with a king-sized appetite and laughter that could stir a room to life. His eagerness was contagious, his speech direct and candid. Whenever he was thinking, he would lick his finger like he was trying to tell the direction of the wind. He had a weakness for sake. He grew up beside a shipyard, and his parents were both professors.

As a child, he dreamt of becoming a pilot, on a plane, topping cumulus of white clouds and flocks of gliding doves. When his teachers lectured, he doodled on his textbook, sketching schematics and plane designs. He dissected his bicycle for its chains and the pencil sharpener for its springs and the wheelbarrow for its wheels, assembling failed replicas of bi and sesquiplanes.

His house had shelves crowded with encyclopedias, models of engines and ships, but he couldn’t pass high school for his life. Pages would dismantle and words stared back into his eyes, smirking in disorder. Back in Ishigaki, he had a family, a wife and a newborn son.

“Do you know what I named my son?” He asked me. We were walking side by side then, taking a stroll around the air base after our drink. The moist air lolled over our tousled hair.

“What?” I asked.

He smiled and laid down on the turf, his hands splayed out. He plucked up a blade of grass and sat it in between his teeth, the leaf bobbing up and down against his lips like a toothpick. “Sora,” he told me. The sky.

“Sora?” I asked, sitting down next to him.

“Yeah,” he said. I scanned the night sky, a drunk fog stumbling over the lattice of a distant tower. “So when I fly that plane, I’ll know that I’m only getting closer to him. To the sky,” he said.

***

Masaru departed from the Kanoya Air Base on the first of August. Before his flight, he and the other pilots were given a sake toast, his favorite. I watched from the side, among flocks of pilots and generals, as the Lieutenant handed each of them a samurai belt.

“Do you know what seppuku is?” He had asked me an hour before his mission. He was wearing boxed goggles, a russet brown uniform, the flag of Japan glimmering on the two sides of his ankle.

“A samurai’s way of committing suicide?” I said.

He nodded. “I think it’s a really special ritual,” he said. “That you would rather kill yourself and die in honor, than fall into the hands of the enemy.” I turned to him. Above us, the sky was a thousand shades of blue.

Renee Chen is an Asian-American writer currently residing in Taipei, Taiwan. She has written short stories for trampset, JMWW, and Cosmic Double, the latter of which nominated her for Best Small Fictions. Her short story collection, The Un-Inquired, is published by Querencia Press.