Ogasawara

I

Only after arriving on Chichijima—after sailing twenty-five hours on the Ogasawara Maru (second class, sleeping on a pad on the carpeted floor of a lower deck with a hundred other passengers, of whom I am the only Caucasian), and only after rain, on the second day of the stay, has shut me into my lodging on the island—will I learn that, during the Pacific War, eight United States Navy pilots, captured during bombing missions, were beheaded here, and their flesh and livers cooked and eaten by officers of the Japanese Imperial Army.

The travel book does not mention this history. The section on Ogasawara-shotō is short and sweet: Beautifully preserved. Pristine beaches. Tropical waters. Dolphins. A nature-lover’s paradise.

As a boy, the books and movies that drew me in were always about the ocean and the oases of land where travelers found solitude and adventure—and my own first novel (ca. age eleven), abandoned after three chapters painstakingly typed on my mother’s electric Smith-Corona, featured a cast of orphan animals shipwrecked in a magical archipelago. When I have the means to travel, it isn’t usually to a capital of high culture. Instead of Europe, I go to Oceania. Kauai, Pago Pago, Koror and Babeldaob in Palau, Rota and Saipan in the Marianas. You can fly to all these places. Even Ofu, a tiny gem of American Samoa, has a beachside runway. But Chichijima can only be reached by water, on a liner that departs once a week from Tokyo and returns three days later. So, even in the summer season, in addition to the two thousand residents, there are never more than eight hundred visitors. During this week in May, I will be one of three hundred.

It is a beautiful afternoon. In six hours, we’ve gone less than two hundred kilometers. I’m sitting up top, on the floor of the upper deck, against a rail on the starboard side. I have a book in my hands, but mostly I’m looking down at the surging water and into the distance where the ocean shines metallic. A few feet away, there’s a little party: people drinking Sapporo out of big paper cups.

One of them, a thirtysomething guy in a T-shirt, shorts, and sandals, approaches me and says, “We see you here reading, what is it?”

I show him.

“A book of Japan. We see you’re interested in Japanese culture, so come have a drink with us.”

His name is Shuji. There are five others: two men, three women. They already have a beer for me. All of them live on the island and all are now returning there from visits to their places of origin: Osaka, Chiba, Hokkaido. Only Shuji speaks fluent English. But the women know a little and one wants to know how old I think she is.

“Eighteen.”

Everyone laughs. It was a joke, sort of. She says she’s thirty-five. I tell them I’m an American. A writer of fiction. Shuji explains that he is “an engineer of tofu.” The woman to my right, he can’t think of the word, so he squeezes my shoulder a couple of times. “Masseuse,” I say. The next woman works for a diving outfit. Which brings us to the one who can’t possibly be thirty-five.

She gives me a look like a burning fuse, strikes a lusty pose, runs her hands down her torso, and says, “Sex. Eee.”

I turn to Shuji and make like we’re playing charades. “She’s a swimsuit model.”

“Aah? No.”

“Gre-gū.” (This is how my name comes out in Japanese.) “I want you.”

They all crack up. When she goes off in her native language, the laughter gets raucous, and Shuji says, “I don’t translate that.”

“Kiss me now,” she says in very clear English.

She is smiling, and I, too, have some kind of smile on my face—of embarrassment, I suppose. She and I are the only ones not doubled over with laughter; this seems to distinguish us somehow and to bond...