She is forced to suffer all manner of privation on the road to disillusionment with the imperial cause. The other narrator is Takimo, a wartime Okinawan teen convinced that Japan is invincible and that her emperor is divine. In her crass way, she tries to navigate global transience and her own mélange of ancestries. Luz is a modern American army brat, in Okinawa because of her gung-ho military mother. Above the East China Sea by Sarah Bird attempts to bridge the gap between these two phases in Okinawan history. The American bases occupy about one-fifth of Okinawa, an island unfortunate to have served as a rampart for the Japanese mainland during the war and as an aircraft carrier for the Americans after it. As the United States exits two protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s easy to forget that nearly 100,000 defense-related Americans remain in Japan, a country with which the U.S.
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