Yasuyuki Kasai - Dragon of the Mangroves

“It’s too bad. We can’t roam around during the day,” Tomita grumbled to himself while he watched the gunboat going north on Myinkhon Creek.

Kasuga also expressed his anxiety. “This creek is too wide, Sarge. Can we really wade across?”

“Of course not! Didn’t you watch the enemy boat sail through? Your feet can’t touch the bottom, you moron!” an irritated Tomita snapped at him.

“Why am I a moron? You said earlier we could wade across this creek,” Kasuga responded.

“I can’t help it. That’s what I was told. I’m surprised to see this too.”

“Maybe the tide is in the middle now, so it’s deep enough for some boats to sail. But it may get more shallow at the ebb.”

“Pinhead! How can we wade through this broad creek in the daylight? That battered barge isn’t the only enemy we have to cope with. What do you do if aircraft come hunting for us when we’re tottering in the water?”

“Then what will we do? Do we have to swim across at night? I’m not confident I can swim that far.”

“Neither am I! I’m not a competitive swimmer. But, listen, what else can we do now? I don’t know how many boats Garrison HQ has. But I don’t think it has enough to allocate some to us. There’s no way but to make a raft or something and cross this damn water with it.”

Kasuga fell silent. He didn’t have a counterargument and knew nothing could be done even if he had.

Something inside made him yearn to go home. He had made up his mind to sacrifice his life for the empire more than once. However, his firm resolution flickered with seeing the route before his very eyes.

“I don’t think the company commander has crossed the creek,” Tomita said.

“He must be here somewhere if he’s still wandering. Now split up and search for him.”

A desert island called Leikdaung lay in front of them, like it had been pushed out from the opposite bank. They set that as their common landmark and arranged the time, place, and password for assembling. Then Tomita Squad separated into two parties.

Kasuga set out searching the western area with Tomita. Bathed in the setting sun, the mountains of Arakan were dyed red.

The mangrove extended indefinitely in front of his eyes. The once-clamorous birdcalls suddenly faded away as dusk fell. But there was still no change in the strange vitality permeating their surroundings.

Abruptly, one of the overhead branches creaked. Startled, Kasuga stopped. He strained his eyes and found a stout branch nodding. Something was moving from one tree to another.

“Oh, it’s a monkey. Probably a crab-eating macaque hunting for food,” whispered Tomita, ahead of Kasuga.

The branch just above Kasuga wasn’t the only one nodding. Many boughs and branches swayed here and there. He heard each creak, but he couldn’t catch a glimpse of the animal, however hard he might try to find it. The treetops, which protected them from the eyes of airborne enemies, were melting into the darkness. The whole area was turning into the world of nocturnal animals, which put him on guard.

Alarm welled up deep inside. The flowing water had already reached Kasuga’s shins, and he sensed something touching his anklebone. He looked down to see a black metallic box floating near his leg.

It was a mess kit made of aluminum—unmistakably one issued by the Japanese government. Judging from its square design and good finish, it might be for an officer’s use. He immediately remembered First Lieutenant Kishimoto, for whom they were searching.

“Isn’t this his mess kit?” Kasuga asked himself as he picked it up excitedly and called out to Tomita, “Sarge! I found a mess kit!”

A big tree towered about ten meters to his left. Standing beside it, Tomita was staring at something at its base. His profile looked frozen.

“What’s wrong with you?” asked Kasuga.

Tomita looked back and slowly pointed down at a spot.

Silt was exposed around the roots of the tree. Kasuga’s eyes focused on an elongated item laying there.

It was a human left leg amputated at the groin. Looking like it had soaked in water for a long time, it was grotesquely whitened, clubbed, and swollen. But there was no conspicuous rot. Kasuga could tell that the leg hadn’t been laying there for long after it had been severed from a body.

He had seen amputated human limbs many times even before the Battle of Ramree broke out. He wasn’t in the mental state in which every sight struck terror in his heart anymore. But the sight of the leg came too abruptly to accept.

Resisting nausea, Kasuga asked, “What’s all this about?”

“I don’t know. But this is Japanese. It’s too white for Burmese,” answered Tomita in a low voice.

Kasuga regained his composure a little, and showed Tomita the mess kit. “I picked it up over there, Sarge.”

Tomita opened the lid. Kasuga also looked but could find nothing but a few grains of rice. Tomita closed the lid and tied up the mess kit to his belt. Then he put his palms together in prayer toward the leg and started a thorough inspection of it without a wince. When he lifted up the thigh, a calf half-buried in the mud came out. It wore a leather boot—clearly not a private’s gear. Kasuga watched with his lips closed firmly.

Tomita asked, “Is this mess kit all, Kasu? Did you find any other belongings?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Likely a part of the company commander’s remains.”

“I think so. The mess kit and the boot—both are for an officers’ use,” Kasuga agreed.

But he still had some doubts about the state of the leg. From the first glance, his eyes had been focused on many deep incisions, each about an inch long. He thought they were postmortem wounds, since all the gashes had lost color evenly.

Who had made those, and for what purpose? Why did this severed left leg lie alone here?

Tomita raised his head and asked, “Where are the other parts?”

“I don’t know. How would I know?”

Tomita said with confidence, “No way only this left leg could be here! The rest should be somewhere near. Let’s find it quick!”

Kasuga and Tomita found a flat place, slightly higher than the others, behind the big tree. Accumulated mud formed a natural trapezoidal stage that looked like an embankment. They saw few vertical roots on the stage, quite a difference from the rest of the mire. Kasuga supposed that place might not submerge, even at high tide.

The two climbed on the embankment to get a better view, and they found it about thirty square meters. It was covered sporadically with miscellaneous weeds.

“Oh, it’s terrible,” Tomita blurted out a hoarse voice.

When Kasuga heard it, his eyes had caught a reddish-brown blotch at his feet.

There spread a puddle of half-clotted blood like a bubbling jelly. Its breadth, extending to at least four square meters, eloquently told the story of its possessor.

The mud around it had been churned up entirely, which allowed anyone to figure out that something had dismembered the kill there. The two gazed silently at the puddle of blood for a while.

The sun had now set completely, leaving only a faint violet light in the western sky. Nevertheless, it was still stiflingly muggy in the humid mangrove. In the foul air, Kasuga’s nose caught an odor. The area reeked of something rotten—the smell of something like meat and mud commingled. It didn’t come from the amputated leg, or from the half-coagulated blood. He knew he had smelled it before a number of times. It reminded him of the story of Myinde told by the rudgi. The golden eye with a vertical slit flashed in his mind.

He felt his whole body become gooseflesh. “Sarge.”

“Yeah?”

“I think the rest of his body has been already taken away somewhere. It’s a waste of time to search. No! It will be a waste of our lives unless we stop moving around right now,” Kasuga stated.