Dolls of War Read online

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Author’s Note

  Stanby, Oregon

  August 14, 1941

  Macy James tightened her hands over the back of her mother’s wheeled chair while she tried to send silent “be quiet” messages toward her friend Lily. She glanced at a tall Japanese girl doll on a stand nearby, trying to absorb Miss Tokyo’s calm. She glanced at the doll several times, because what she really wanted to do was shove Lily through the Stanby Museum’s tall front doors and lock them after her.

  Lily wasn’t looking at Macy, so she didn’t see the warning Macy was sending. Lily was looking at Mama. Once, Mama’s hair had been as thick as Macy’s and an even sunnier brown. Lily was seeing thinning blond. She was seeing Mama’s sharp cheekbones and the fragile shape of her arms and legs and she was being honest again.

  “They have earthquakes in Japan,” Lily said in her best know-it-all voice. “We learned about them in geography. Remember, Macy?”

  “Of course I remember. And so does Mama. She lived there when she was ten like us. Her father worked for the American ambassador. Didn’t he, Mama?”

  Her mother smiled gently. She no longer had the energy for a lively discussion. Again, Macy wanted to shove Lily outside.

  Lily still wasn’t seeing the message. “And they have volcanoes!” she went on. “And hilly streets. Those streets would be hard for you, Mrs. James. You probably couldn’t get up them in your chair.”

  Lily’s mother called honesty a virtue and said that people should face the truth. What I think, Macy told herself, is that making someone face the truth can sometimes just be a way of making them feel bad.

  “Besides,” Lily added, still being honest, “that Japanese doll has been on display forever. You should put it in storage and set out something new for people to see.”

  Mama started to answer but broke into one of her bouts of coughing. Shaking her head in apology, she pushed the chair’s wheels to roll backward, away from them.

  Macy took the opportunity to hiss at Lily. “You know Mama loves Miss Tokyo. And she loves Japan. That’s why she carries that big book filled with pictures from there. How can you be so mean?”

  “Mean?” Lily’s brown eyes got wider. “When was I being mean?”

  “When you said she shouldn’t travel to Japan, that’s when.”

  “Well, she shouldn’t, Macy. You moved to Stanby two years ago because she couldn’t take the damp weather at the coast. Listen to her coughing now. Do you think she’s strong enough for a trip to Japan?”

  “She wants to meet the artist who created Miss Tokyo.” Macy turned toward the doll. Miss Tokyo was meant to look like a ten-year-old girl. On her foot-high floor stand, she stood almost as tall as Macy. “I’m not going to tell Mama she can’t travel. Neither is Papa. She needs to believe she can.”

  “But Macy —”

  “When we came here,” Macy said, cutting into Lily’s protest, “Miss Tokyo was in a back room with her little dishes and lamps and things scattered around. Nick helped Mama get them all together and Mama arranged every one of them. She earned the trip.”

  “Where is Nick?” Lily glanced around.

  “He’s somewhere with his friend Hap. Getting older,” Macy said, almost as amused as her seventeen-year-old brother by Lily’s crush.

  As Lily made a face at the reminder of the difference in age, Mama rolled forward again. Macy darted over to help position her beside Miss Tokyo. The big book filled with colored pictures of Japan was starting to slip from her lap. Macy straightened it before pressing Mama’s shoulder in sympathy for the coughing. Inside, she worried.

  Everyone could see that Mama was growing weaker. To hide the thoughts that might be showing on her face, Macy looked again at the doll. Gleaming black hair framed Miss Tokyo’s dark moveable eyes and gentle almost-smile.

  Her heavy blue silk kimono glowed. Papa always pointed out to museum visitors that the hand-painted peach blossoms on the silk were a design chosen for the doll by the empress’s own dressmaker.

  Almost every day, Macy and Mama pretended to discuss the flowers and temples in the pictures in Mama’s book with Miss Tokyo. And every day, they planned a trip to Japan they would make together.

  Papa had said privately that Mama might never again be strong enough to travel, but he pretended, the way Macy did. Sometimes, Macy wondered if Mama was pretending, too.

  And here was Lily, being honest and ruining it all.

  This time, she caught Macy’s glare. Her cheeks turning red, she said, “My mama’s expecting me home,” and ran out.

  As the solid doors of the Stanby Museum thudded shut, Mama drew Macy closer to her chair. Her eyes no longer danced with her love for life as they had even last fall, but they were still the same clear green as Macy’s. “Lily feels left out, sweetheart. We won’t speak of Japan in front of her again. It would not be kind.”

  Lily’s not being kind, Macy thought, but she said only, “When you feel better, you’ll show me Miss Tokyo’s country the way you saw it years ago. We’ll have so much fun!”

  “Of course we will.” Mama’s eyes glittered. “I look forward to our trip more than anything. You will love the kind people I knew as a child.” Raising her hands to her neck, she removed a chain she always wore.

  A tiny kokeshi doll hung from the fine gold links. The cylindrical doll with a ball-shaped head and no arms or legs was even smaller than one of Miss Tokyo’s fingers.

  “Your little doll is so cute,” Macy said softly. “It must have been exciting to meet the doll maker who made it. He was the father of the artist who made Miss Tokyo?”

  “Yes. Gouyou the first, as he’s known now. He was celebrated as an artist who created lifelike dolls. Miss Tokyo was created by his son and always makes me think of him. You can see the artist’s kindness in the loving way he shaped and painted the doll.”

  Macy imagined the artist’s hands as he followed the natural curve of Miss Tokyo’s cheeks with his chisel. “Did he have a model or did he carve her from memory?”

  “The artist I met didn’t create Miss Tokyo,” Mama reminded her, her voice wistful. “He was training his young son when I knew him. The son, Hirata Gouyou the second, later became a master doll artist, too. It was he who carved and painted our Miss Tokyo.”

  “Ikiningyo.” Macy rolled the Japanese word on her tongue, remembering that ningyo meant “doll” and that iki meant “lifelike.”

  “Both doll makers, father and son, gained wide admiration for their ikiningyo.” Mama’s voice warmed with memory, as it always did. “I was no older than you when I visited Gouyou-san’s studio.” She turned the tiny doll in her hand. “When we had admired the beautiful lifelike dolls, the artist gave me this little kokeshi to take home with me.”

  “But she didn’t have a hole in her hair then,” Macy said, enjoying Mama’s pleasure in relivin
g a time when she had been so happy.

  “When we returned to America,” Mama said, her voice sounding stronger as she relaxed into the memory, “my father paid a jeweler to drill a hole through the little painted topknot. He threaded a gold chain through so I could wear it.”

  Her hands trembled as she held the chain toward Macy. “I want you to wear it now.”

  Macy bent forward because Mama was waiting, but inside, she felt alarm she didn’t understand. “But Mama, you always wear it.”

  “And now you will.” Mama settled the tiny doll at Macy’s collar. “The little kokeshi looks sweet on you. Don’t you agree, Miss Tokyo?”

  She waited expectantly while Macy tried to hide a growing ache in her heart.

  Nearly every day since Papa became curator of the museum, she and Mama had pretended to pick up the tiny cups to sip tea with the doll. They talked with Miss Tokyo and took turns answering for her.

  Now Mama was waiting for her to say, in the high-pitched voice they gave the doll, “Yes, Mama-san, she looks very nice.”

  But fear for her mother grew stronger, and she could only say, “I’ll take good care of her. And I’ll watch over Miss Tokyo. I’ll watch over them both forever!”

  December 8, 1941

  Macy looked away as Lily raised an imaginary machine gun toward imaginary Japanese warplanes flying over the American flag hanging in the school yard, screaming firing sounds. “Akk! Akk! Akk!”

  Everyone in the country hates Japan today, Macy thought. Everyone but me, and I don’t know how to feel.

  Betsy Oshima, a fourth-grader, ran by using one hand to hold her other arm high as she aimed at imaginary planes. “Pow! Pow! I got one! Pow!”

  One of Macy’s fifth-grade classmates shoved red hair back from his eyes and looked at Betsy in disgust. “You’re shooting your own people.”

  “I’m shooting our enemy, Mark. The way you are.”

  “Japs are the enemy. You’re a Jap.”

  Did that mean Betsy was the enemy? Macy wanted to say something but wasn’t sure what. Betsy was fun. Everyone liked her. It wasn’t fair to blame her for Pearl Harbor.

  As Macy groped for words, Betsy shook her head, making her black hair fly. “Uh-uh. I was born here. My parents were born here. We’re Americans, just like you.”

  She raised her arm again and ran toward her friends from the fourth grade. “Akk! Akk! Akk! There goes another one!”

  “Jerk!” Macy exclaimed to Mark.

  Whether Betsy’s words made any difference to Mark was hard to tell. But he found a new argument to answer Macy. “Girls don’t shoot down planes.”

  Now Lily was offended. “Why not?”

  “Because you’re girls.” Mark ran off to join friends, all of them boys aiming pretend guns toward the sky.

  “That’s not a reason!” Macy shouted, raising her own pretend gun.

  Lily’s anger vanished in a laugh. “It’s a reason to boys.” She stopped laughing and looked more closely at Macy. “You look kind of white. Are you worried about Miss Tokyo?”

  Macy dropped her imaginary machine gun, her arm falling to her side. Mama had loved the big Japanese doll right up to her death, three months ago. Yesterday’s awful news on the radio had made Macy feel like taffy on a hook pulled in two directions. She loved the doll more than anything. She felt as if the doll captured part of Mama. But disease had killed Mama. Now Japanese bombers had killed American sailors. And people like Mark were blaming the deaths at Pearl Harbor on everyone and maybe everything that looked Japanese.

  “She’s just a doll,” she said to Lily. “Betsy Oshima didn’t have anything to do with bombing Pearl Harbor. And neither did Miss Tokyo.” If anything happens to Mama’s doll . . . She couldn’t finish the thought.

  “She came from our enemy,” Lily warned. “Remember, the museum is named for Professor Stanby, like the town. The museum and everything in it represent the town. Nobody wants an enemy doll to represent them!”

  Macy didn’t want to talk about Miss Tokyo. She didn’t want to remind anyone of the doll in the museum. Instead, she said, “The Japanese bombed our ships on a Sunday. A Sunday!”

  Lily agreed with a shiver. “I’m not sure how far away Pearl Harbor is, but it’s in Hawaii, and the Hawaiian Islands are in our own Pacific Ocean!” Her eyes got wider. “Those planes might come here!”

  Would they? Could they fly so far? “Papa says the world will never go back to the way things were before the bombing.”

  Papa had made it sound like change might be a good thing, as if a new path might help them stop hearing Mama’s voice and feeling her touch every time they turned around. Macy clutched the small kokeshi doll she had worn on its chain since the day Mama put it around her neck. How can I hate the Japanese when Mama loved them?

  That same question had torn through her yesterday while she hovered near the radio with Nick and Papa, trying to understand the terrible news the reporters read in tight, angry voices. “Our navy was prepared,” one broadcaster exclaimed. “Navy aircraft guns blazed, shooting down the attacking planes.”

  “What happened to all our ships based at Pearl Harbor?” Nick demanded.

  The news broadcast switched from one to another reporter around the world, all saying pretty much the same thing. “That’s all they’re allowed to tell us,” Papa said. “The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor from the air.”

  “But what’s the damage to all our ships at Pearl?” Nick demanded again.

  Papa leaned back from the radio, straightening his shoulders. “Reporters have to watch their words. The government doesn’t want the Japanese to learn how much damage has been done.”

  “They’ll know. Their pilots will report it.” Frustration shook Nick’s voice. “They can’t miss the sinking ships or sailors trying to swim through water blazing with burning oil.”

  Macy couldn’t stop a choked gasp.

  Papa glanced at her and motioned Nick to silence. “We’ll know the facts in good time, son. We know all we need to know right now.”

  “I know all I need to know,” Nick said with a resolve that scared Macy all over again. A reporter had just declared, “All recruiting stations will be open tomorrow at eight a.m.”

  Nick was only seventeen, too young to sign up, she assured herself, and she kept listening to the radio for facts the announcers weren’t able to provide.

  Those planes had done terrible damage. Macy knew it as well as Nick and Papa, whatever the radio people held back. The truth was in their hard voices, if not in their careful reporting.

  The kids pretending to shoot down planes this morning knew it, too. Screams for revenge ripped through the school yard. “Remember Pearl Harbor!”

  “They caught our boys sleeping! We’re all awake now!”

  “Here comes another rotten Zero! Shoot ’im, boys!”

  Nearly everyone in the school yard raised imaginary guns to shoot down the imaginary Japanese plane with red circles on its body and wings. As Macy watched, she felt a shiver of fear. She couldn’t think of a way to help Betsy Oshima. But maybe Papa should put Miss Tokyo into storage.

  Moments later, Lily grabbed her arm. “Don’t look! Look! No, don’t look! Christopher Adams is coming over! He’s going to talk to us!”

  “You don’t have to shriek.” Macy sounded sharper than she meant to and gave her friend a weak smile of apology. Last week, she’d have been more than happy if Christopher talked to her. He was smart and funny and collected popular girls as fast as their teacher caught whispers. Christopher didn’t care. He laughed away flirty smiles and fluttery eyelashes.

  He was probably the only boy in school who didn’t follow after Rachel Rivers, the flirtiest of them all.

  He wasn’t laughing now. His mouth was in a hard line. When he stopped in front of Macy, dangerous sparks in his blue eyes made her take a step back. “Someone said you have a giant Japanese doll in your living room. Is that true?”

  “She isn’t in our living room. She’s in
the Stanby Museum. My dad runs it, and we live next door.” Macy stepped forward again, challenging him. “So what? She’s just a doll.”

  Miss Tokyo was a lot more than just a doll, but Christopher didn’t need to know all of it. He wouldn’t listen anyway, with his eyes flashing like he wanted to fight somebody.

  “The people who made her killed our sailors,” he said. “If you like stuff they made, you like them! That makes you a traitor.”

  Stung, Macy exclaimed, “I don’t like war!”

  “Then make your dad get rid of the doll.”

  “He can’t get rid of her. She belongs to the museum.” As if she could make Papa do anything. He hardly even talked to her since they lost Mama.

  “Then we’ll get rid of it,” Christopher said. “I’ll get my dad to take some men over there.”

  “No!” The word leaped from Macy. “She’s just a doll,” she said again.

  “If you don’t get rid of it, you’re a rotten traitor,” Christopher said. “And so is your father.”

  He might as well have said, And so was your mother, for loving that doll, for loving all things Japanese.

  Anger raged through anguish. Macy knew she would always stick up for Mama’s doll, even against Christopher Adams. As he turned to walk away, she grabbed for his shoulder. “Take that back!”

  He swung around faster than she expected, but tripped and landed hard on his rear. The look of disbelief on his face made Macy bite back a laugh. Christopher Adams was too perfect to be sitting in the dirt at her feet.

  His shock quickly turned thunderous. “She shoved me. You all saw that! She attacked when my back was turned. Just like those sneaky Japs she loves so much!”

  He leaped to his feet and grabbed the kokeshi doll on its chain around her neck. He yanked. The chain snapped.

  “Stop!” she screamed.

  The broken links burned across her skin.

  “This is Jap stuff,” he yelled, waving the tiny doll. “What do we do with Jap stuff?”

  “Stomp it!” someone shouted.

  Christopher flung it onto the walk. Mark slammed one shoe down, snapping the round head from the cylinder-shaped body.

  Macy lunged for the doll pieces. Miss Lawrence, one of the teachers, caught her as she snatched them from the pavement. The teacher grabbed Christopher with her free hand. Her eyes narrowed behind round glasses. “What is going on here?”