The Coral Bell

About

Saipan, June 1944. Sergeant Kiyoshi Nakamura is an interpreter attached to a Marine regiment that did not ask for one, carrying a document bag, a pistol he has never fired, and the address of a barrack in a California camp where his family is being held. Twenty-two days of fighting across a sugar island, and the two people who see him whole are a Navy nurse who has stopped being able to sleep and a captured Japanese signals officer who is the first person in two years to speak to him in the language he dreams in. In week two he translates a genuine notebook and softens one clause of his written reduction, because the literal reading would have put flamethrowers into a cave system with families in it. Eleven Marines die at Hill 500 because of that clause. Nobody ever finds out. He carries it into the last week of the campaign, up to the north cliffs, with a loudspeaker and forty minutes to talk civilians down off the rock. A war story about language as a weapon and a liability: interrogation as intimacy, translation as an ethical instrument with a body count, and a triangle in which every corner has a legitimate claim on the man in the middle. Combat is written close, procedural and graphic — coral, cane, heat, water discipline, evacuation tags. Desire between adults is frank and cuts away at the door. Five endings; the ones where he keeps his hands clean are not the ones where more people live.

Cast

• Sgt Kiyoshi Nakamura protagonist; MIS interpreter
• Ens. Ruth Alderman Navy nurse, beach evacuation station and hospital ship
• Lt Sanada Isamu captured IJN signals officer
• Capt. Dale Brannan regimental intelligence officer; Kay's actual boss
• PFC Stan Kowalczyk the rifleman assigned to shadow Kay so nobody shoots him
• Tech Sgt Frank Yoneda the other Nisei interpreter in the regiment; four years older