David Mitchell - The Cloud Atlas

He was Japanese.

HER REASON HAD BEEN living, temporarily, in the back stockroom of Sam’s Universal Supply. The Supply was Bethel ’s second, and lesser, general store, and Lily worked there as a cashier.

Saburo spoke English fairly well, a little better than Sam, in fact, who had been born an unknown number of years ago to Japanese immigrant parents in Southern California. How Sam had made his way to Bethel, and whether he had done so on purpose, was never clear. But he’d done well once he’d arrived. He was kind, honest, fair to a fault, and extremely generous. Until the war with Japan began, his being Japanese attracted little attention- Bethel had a small but persistent collection of people who were neither white nor Yup’ik, and as a result, little discussed.

Saburo’s arrival was only mysterious if you thought about it: one week he wasn’t there, the next week he was. And people didn’t think about it, not even Lily, at first. People were always passing through Sam’s employ, particularly those, like Lily, who didn’t quite fit in anywhere else.

She took Saburo at his word when he said he was a relative of Sam’s; she didn’t realize differently until they were a few days into a fishing trip together. Sam had suggested that Lily “show Saburo Alaska;” she had thought he was making fun. But then, it was summer; almost all of the Yupiit and many of the whites had already left town, journeying south and west to fish camps across the vast, marshy delta that surfaced each year beneath the lingering sun.

And there was the article she’d read in a two-week-old copy of the FairbanksDaily News-Miner. Persons of Japanese ancestry were being relocated to special camps throughout the American West, “for their safety.” Two days later, Sam received a large white envelope emblazoned with a government eagle. Before he even opened it, he suggested the trip to Lily again. The next day, Lily and Saburo were off, down the Kuskokwim River in a haphazardly packed outboard.

Lily had assumed she would serve as the guide; as a child, she’d often joined friends for the annual summer trip into the delta. But half an hour south of town, with Lily in the stern, piloting, Saburo pulled out a map-a journal, really, filled with page after page of drawings, charts and notes. After a few minutes’ study, he looked up and pointed right.

Lily shrugged; if you weren’t aiming for a favorite spot, it really didn’t matter which waterway you chose once you left the broad expanse of the Kuskokwim River. Depending on the thaw and the previous week’s weather, there were hundreds, even thousands, of sloughs to follow. And if a slough ever proved to be a dead end, all you usually had to do was turn around or drag your boat through the mud and grass and reindeer moss for a few minutes before another waterway appeared.

But Saburo’s decisions that first day led them to one portage after another. By evening, they’d found themselves on a small, reasonably dry patch of tundra. Lily was exhausted. Saburo wanted to go on; it was still light, after all.

Lily shook her head. Saburo pursed his lips, looked down in his book.

“I did not need you to come,” Saburo said.

Lily looked at him and then back toward Bethel. “I didn’t need you to come,” she said. “It was your uncle’s idea, anyway. He thought you’d get lost out here, and after what we’ve been through today seems like he was right.”

“Not uncle,” said Saburo after a pause.

Lily started unpacking some cooking gear and then changed her mind. She didn’t want to cook-and she definitely did not want to cook for him. They’d eat some of the canned fish and dried blubber Sam had urged them to take.

“I can come back, pick you up,” said Saburo.

“That’s sweet,” Lily said. Saburo glared, but Lily said nothing, just sat and chewed for a while. She offered a piece of blubber to Saburo. “How would you find me?” Lily asked. “That book of yours?” When he refused to answer or eat, she wiped her mouth with her forearm and reached for his journal.

He snatched it away. He started to stalk off, but there was no place to go; the tuft of dry tundra they’d found for themselves wasn’t much larger than Sam’s store. Venture too close to any edge and your footprints started filling with water; a step or two later, you were knee-deep.

Lily finished eating. She swallowed, and then asked him, very quietly, “May I see your book?”

“Not a book. It’s in Japanese. Hard to understand.”

“I’m good at understanding things,” Lily said, wiping her hands on her pants.

“You know Japanese?” he asked.

Lily shook her head. “You know your way back?”

He frowned, checked the height of the sun, and then handed her the journal. Smiling at him, Lily held it closed on her lap until he turned away, took a few steps north, and started scouting the route they’d take next.

He was scouting the wrong way. Lily knew it instantly; she didn’t even have to open the book. Just holding it there, on her lap, she knew what he was looking for, though not why, and where the object was, though not how it got there. She started to call for him, but hesitated. She didn’t trust herself. Her powers, such as they were, had been waning after all, especially with things like books. And besides, what she was seeing didn’t make sense: a black bit of earth, smoking, like the remains of a giant campfire. There was some wreckage-something had crashed-but it wasn’t a truck or a plane-maybe books? Books didn’t seem likely, but that was what she felt, could almost smell: paper, burning, grass, burning, and all of it just to the south.

With Lily as guide, they reached the spot an hour and two portages later. Lily was surprised, even disappointed, that the fire she’d imagined seemed to have burned itself out some time ago. All that remained were some charred, bent metal strips-some kind of a crate?-and a few dozen square feet of earth that looked as if it had been seared by a giant, fiery thumbprint. Saburo took out his book and started writing.

He didn’t tell her the whole story the first night, and even after two months together, crisscrossing the tundra, she was never sure he had told her everything, even when she took up his hand and held it tight. But he had told her enough: he was Japanese, a soldier, a spy, sent behind enemy lines to see if early tests of a frightening new device were having any success. They were called fu-go weapons, bombs carried across the Pacific by large, gas-filled balloons. Hundreds had been launched, but so far, little news of their impact had made its way back to Japan. Scouts were sent behind enemy lines to see what they could learn. Saburo had been given southern Alaska, another scout had been given British Columbia, and a third who had already been living in San Francisco got the northwest coast of the United States. Each had too much territory to cover completely, but they were armed with maps and projections of where the balloons were likeliest to land, given the trade winds and the design of the balloons themselves.

The enemy , I remember asking Lily: Weren’t you afraid? Weren’t you alarmed? Weren’t you worried how you would get word to the authorities? You, an American citizen, I said, alone with a Japanese soldier. I didn’t know what to say. I think the farther from the enemy you remained-and I’d spend the entire war on American soil-the more you believed that should you ever actually meet your foe, violence would be automatic, instant.

“I was never scared,” Lily said.

“Wasn’t he scared of you?” I asked. “Here you were, an American—”

“I don’t usually get taken for American,” Lily said. “Not even by me.”