Kk10 b

Once, after I’d finished expounding yet again on the amazing sound quality of my father’s brilliant Sony stereo that made the whole house vibrate, he said very quietly, “Maybe one day before I die I go back to my home. One day I go back to Japan. Maybe.” I wasn’t sure he meant it, but it did mean that he was at least considering it, and that gave me some cause for hope.

It wasn’t until the night of the turtles though, that I came to believe Kensuke was really serious about it.

I was fast asleep when he woke me. “You come, Micasan. Very quickly you come. You come,” he said.

“What for?” I asked him, but he was already gone. I ran out after him into the moonlight and caught him up halfway down the track. “What are we doing. Where are we going? Is it a boat?”

“Very soon you see. Very soon.” Stella stayed at my heels all the way to the beach. She never liked going out in the dark very much. I looked around. There was nothing there. The beach looked completely deserted. The waves lapped listlessly. The moon rode the clouds, and the world felt still about me as if it was holding its breath. I did not see what was happening until Kensuke suddenly fell on his knees in the sand. “They very small. Sometimes they are not so strong. Sometimes in the morning birds come and eat them.” And then I saw it.

I thought it was a crab at first. It wasn’t. It was a minuscule turtle, tinier than a terrapin, clambering out of a hole in the sand and then beetling off down the beach towards the sea. Then another, and another, and further down the beach dozens of them, hundreds I could see now, maybe thousands, all scuttling across the moonlit sand into the sea. Everywhere the beach was alive with them. Stella was nosing at one, so I warned her off. She yawned and looked innocently up at the moon.

I saw that one of them was on its back at the bottom of the hole, legs kicking frantically. Kensuke reached down, picked it up gently and set it on its feet in the sand. “You go to sea, little turtle,” he said. “You live there now. You soon be big fine turtle, and then one day you come back and see me maybe.” He sat back on his haunches to watch him scuttle off. “You know what they do, Mica. Mother turtles, they lay eggs in this place. Then, one night-time every year, always when moon is high, little turtles are born. Long way to go to sea. Very many die. So always I stay. I help them. I chase birds away, so they not eat baby turtles. Many years from now, when turtles are big, they come back. They lay eggs again. True story, Micasan.”

All night long we kept our vigil over the mass birth, as the infant turtles made their run for it. We patrolled together, reaching into every hole we found to see if there were any left, stuck or stranded. We found several too weak to make the journey, and carried them down into the sea ourselves. The sea seemed to revive them. Away they went, no swimming lessons needed. We turned dozens the right way up and shepherded them safely into the sea.

When dawn came and the birds came down to scavenge, we were there to drive them off. Stella chased and barked after them, and we ran at them, shrieking, waving, hurling stones. We were not entirely successful, but most of the turtles made it down into the sea. But even here they were still not entirely safe. In spite of all our desperate efforts a few were plucked up out of the water by the birds and carried off.

By noon it was all over. Kensuke was tired as we stood ankle deep in the water watching the very last of them swim away. He put his arm on my shoulder. “They very small turtles, Micasan, but they very brave. They braver than me. They do not know what they find out there, what happen to them; but they go anyway. Very brave. Maybe they teach me good lesson. I make up my mind. When one day ship come, and we light fire, and they find us, then I go. Like turtles I go. I go with you. I go home to Japan. Maybe I find Kimi. Maybe I find Michiya. I find truth. I go with you, Micasan.”

Now, you make the questions

Kk 10a
And the words

Kk10 a

The next morning we began building a beacon on the hilltop above the cave house. We used most of the pile of firewood we had collected for the cooking fire and stored in the dry at the back of the cave – he even sacrificed some of his best pieces of driftwood. It wasn’t far to carry it, so before long we had enough to make a sizeable fire. Kensuke said it would do for the moment, that we could find more from the forest, more and more each day as we wanted. “We soon have fire so big they see in Japan maybe,” he laughed. “We have lunch now, then sleep, then football. Yes?”
What a time we had. Neither of us wanted it to end. With a crowd of bemused orang-utans looking on, with Stella interfering and chasing after every goal scored, we were at it till darkness drove us at last back up the hill. We were both too tired to do more than have a long drink of water, eat a banana or two and go to our sleeping mats.
Once at sea, the stories simply flowed. He talked a great deal of his childhood in Japan, of his twin sister and how the worst thing he’d ever done was to push her out of the tree in their garden, how she’d broken her arm, how when he painted that cherry tree it always reminded him of her. But she too had been in Nagasaki when the bomb fell.

But it was Kimi and Michiya he talked of most, about how he wished he could have seen Michiya grow up. Michiya, he said, would have been nearly fifty by now if the bomb hadn’t fallen on Nagasaki, and Kimi would be exactly the same age as he was, seventy-five. I rarely interrupted him when he was like this, but once to comfort him I did say, “Bombs don’t kill everyone. They could still be alive. You never know. You could find out. You could go home.” He looked at me then as if it was the first time such a possibility had ever occurred to him in all those years. “Why not?” I went on. “When we see a ship and we light the fire and they come and fetch me, you could come too. You could go back to Japan. You don’t have to stay here.”

He thought about it for some time, but then shook his head. “No,” he said. “They are dead. That bomb was very big bomb, very terrible bomb. Americans say Nagasaki is destroyed, every house. I hear them. My family dead for sure. I stay here. I safe here. I stay on my island.”

Day after day we piled more and more wood on the beacon. It was massive now, I longed to see a ship, of course I did. I longed to go home. But at the same time I dreaded what that would mean. I felt so much at home with Kensuke. The thought of leaving him filled me with a terrible sadness. I determined to do all I could to persuade him to come away with me, if and when a ship came.

At every opportunity now I talked to him of the outside world, and the more I talked the more he seemed to become interested. Of course, I never spoke of the wars and famines and disasters. I painted the best picture of the world outside I could. There was so much he didn’t know. He marvelled at all I told him, at the microwave in our kitchen, at computers and what they could do, at Concorde flying faster than the speed of sound, at men going to the moon, and satellites. These things took some explaining, I can tell you. Some of it he didn’t even believe, not at first.

The time came when he began to quiz me. In particular he would ask about Japan. But I knew very little about Japan, only that back home in England lots of things, including our microwave, had ‘made in Japan’ written on them: cars, calculators, my father’s stereo, my mother’s hair dryer.

“I ‘made in Japan’ person,” he laughed. “Very old machine, still good, still very strong.”

Try as I did to trawl my memory, after a while I could find nothing more to tell him about Japan, but he would still keep asking. “You sure there no war in Japan these days?” I was fairly certain there wasn’t and said so. “They build up Nagasaki again after bomb?” I told him they had, and hoped I was right. All I could do was to reassure him as best I could, and then tell him the same few things I did know about over and over again. He seemed to love to hear it, like a child listening to a favourite fairy story.