104 pages • 3 hours read
Alan GratzA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
In the opening sentence of Chapter 1, Hideki’s school is abruptly destroyed: As the boys are inducted into the Blood and Iron Student Corps, “An American bomb landed a hundred meters away—Kra-KOOM!—and the school building exploded. Hideki Kaneshiro ducked and screamed with all the other boys as they were showered with rocks and splinters” (3). This symbolically signals the end of the boys’ childhoods. Instead of continuing a normal coming-of-age path, as they would have done in peacetime, the imminent invasion of Okinawa forces the children to become soldiers, expected to kill as many US troops as possible before killing themselves. The formidable Lieutenant Colonel Sano tells the boys that, “each of you must be ready to die a glorious death in the name of the Emperor” (7). He urges them to “fight like demons to protect your homeland” (7).
Similarly, Kimiko’s high school is also partially destroyed by an American shell. Hideki is shocked by the sight of dead child bodies: “Some of them had been thrown across the desk by the blast. Others were slumped over their desks. The bomb had hit while the students were in class” (102). A sign on the wall instructs all fifth-year girls to report to the army hospital in Ichinichibashi. Like Hideki’s destroyed school, this blown up institution symbolizes the arrival of a bloody and brutal war which has absolutely disrupted the status quo. This shocking discovery also foreshadows the fact that tens of thousands of Okinawans will die in the conflict, including many children.
Grenades operate symbolically on a number of levels. Firstly, they serve to illustrate the Might of the US War Machine compared to the relative powerlessness of the Japanese forces on Okinawa. Ray’s grenades are high quality: “two of them. Cast iron. […] To activate the grenade, you gripped the gray handle on the side and pulled a big wire attached to a pin. The grenade activated when you let go of the handle, igniting the fuse” (13). These are juxtaposed with Hideki’s grenades, which are insubstantial and dangerous: “the glazed brown pottery grenades [were] much lighter than real metal grenades […] the soft clink of the delicate pottery grenades against each other made him worried that they would crack—or worse, explode in his jacket pocket” (9).
Hideki’s use or rejection of his grenades aligns with the level of his commitment to Lieutenant Colonel Sano’s instruction to kill Americans and then die “a glorious death in the name of the Emperor” (7). Hideki uses one grenade to kill Ray, which he immediately regrets. Later, he decides to abandon the second grenade rather than kill more Americans or himself. The symbolic moment of Hideki abandoning the grenade reveals his decision to leave behind the war and his life as a child soldier (he simultaneously lays aside his stole IJA uniform). Rather than creating further violence (and likely dying), he chooses life and a future.
Figurative and literal photographs are a recurring motif in the novel.
cThe photographs Hideki imagines by framing what he is looking at through a finger rectangle illustrate his desire to capture the unimaginable. One such image is the bay filled with hundreds of US vessels—“the story it told wasn’t a good one for Okinawa” (18). Hideki also uses his photography framing technique to highlight the baleful image of thousands of Okinawan refugees and Japanese soldiers trekking through the war-scarred countryside. The most striking of his imagined photographs is an image of an Okinawan mother in a beautiful blue kimono, to whom a Japanese officer straps dynamite. Hideki’s process of framing real life as hypothetical photos allows him to distance himself from the disturbing sights he witnesses, giving him the chance to preserve his psyche.
Photographs also demonstrate the depths of IJA propaganda about the ideal of honor in Imperial Japan. Hideki’s principal, and later Hideki himself, protect photographs of Emperor Hirohito to safeguard his mabui, or spirit. When the principal dies in this attempt, Hideki admires the honorable sacrifice with “a swell of pride for his country. Principal Kojima had been doing a brave thing, protecting his majesty’s mabui” (68).
This protection of the royal mabui is later contrasted with Hideki and Ray’s more urgent pulls to preserve the photographs of everyday civilian and soldier victims of the war. Although Ray is not Japanese and does not know the spiritual belief in mabuis, his connection to Hideki is illustrated by his decision to keep the photos of the Japanese man he killed; these photos humanize the man as a father and husband, “standing with a woman and a boy—probably his wife and young son” (66). By keeping this photo, Ray unknowingly protects and takes responsibility for the mabui of the Japanese soldier. Hideki finds Ray’s photograph collection after he kills him. He safeguards it and adds to it, thus honoring the dead they represent, including Ray, whose mabui Hideki believes is on him. Hideki’s photo collection illustrates his compassion, and his appreciation of all human life as valuable. Hanging the photographs of Americans, Japanese, and Okinawan people together in Shuri Castle shows that Hideki has learned to see their shared humanity, rather than dividing them into victims and enemies.
By Alan Gratz
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