Grenade

To highlight The Brutality of War, an important theme in the novel, Alan Gratz purposefully avoids the traditional literary technique of rising tension. Instead, the novel’s immediate and jarringly climactic opening illustrates the shocking abruptness of invasion, which symbolically and literally ends Hideki’s childhood. As US forces attack a relatively undefended area, chaos ensues: “An American bomb landed a hundred meters away—Kra-KOOM!—and the school building exploded. Hideki Kaneshiro ducked and screamed with all the other boys as they were showered with rocks and splinters” (3). The dramatic explosion of Hideki’s school by an American shell signals that Hideki will no longer be protected by the institutions designed to shelter children.

Significantly, this happens just as Hideki graduates from being a student to becoming a member of the Blood and Iron Corps of child soldiers, instructed to kill as many Americans as possible before killing themselves. In an instance of dramatic irony, invading US Marines expect find the Okinawans “simple, polite, law-abiding, and peaceful” (13)—a stereotype filled with racist assumptions about Asian meekness—while readers know that the Okinawans have been flooded by IJA propaganda depicting the American soldiers as bloodthirsty “devils, whose only purpose is to kill you and your family in the most brutal, merciless ways possible […] hunt your grandparents down and burn them alive […] torture your mothers. Butcher your brothers and sisters” (6).

The brutality of war is also explored from Ray’s perspective. He is overcome with tears when he kills a very young Japanese soldier. When Ray sees the photo of the dead man with his wife and child, the man goes from enemy to fellow human being, as Ray reflects that the Japanese man, “loved them. Wanted to keep them safe. Wanted to protect them from American devils like Ray” (66). Ray is traumatized by the invasion because right and wrong become hard to identify: He had to kill the soldier to save himself and Big John, but it is not right that the man had to die, particularly in light of the fact that he had a wife and son. In keeping with this idea of gray morality, the novel’s technique of shifting perspectives allows readers to empathize simultaneously with both protagonists who will soon face each other in a life and death situation. The fact that we root for both Hideki and Ray foregrounds the tragedy of war, rather than presenting one side as “right” and the other as “wrong.”

The novel’s most important symbol—the grenade—here appears for the first time. Hideki and other children are issued hard to use, malfunctioning grenades. Some boys, like the bullying Yoshio, treat these weapons as extensions of childhood—he forcefully switches his ceramic pair with Hideki’s metal ones to demonstrate his continued authority, rather than dividing the better functioning ones fairly to be a more effective fighting force. Other children, unable to handle the unimaginable stress of this terrifying situation, buckle. When one boy’s grenade goes off, killing him, Hideki is justified in wondering whether this was intentional: “Was it an accident, or had Takeshi killed himself out of fear?” (58). Grenades are also part of the IJA’s propaganda, which explains that US soldiers are duplicitous: “[T]he hand that beckons you with friendship hides the other one behind their back, holding a grenade” (6).

Hideki’s “glazed brown pottery grenades” are insubstantial and dangerous:

[M]uch lighter than real metal grenades. Inside the small rubber cap at the top, there was a match-like fuse and a little piece of rough wood. You activated the grenade by striking the fuse against the wood, but Hideki had no idea how fast the fuse burned and how long he would have before the grenade exploded. The complicated trigger distressed him, and the soft clink of the delicate pottery grenades against each other made him worried that they would crack—or worse, explode in his jacket pocket (9).

In contrast, the grenades used by US forces are hardy, army-issue “[c]ast iron […] painted a drab olive green, […] To activate the grenade, you gripped the gray handle on the side and pulled a big wire attached to a pin. The grenade activated when you let go of the handle, igniting the fuse” (13).

Another important theme, The Honor Culture of Imperial Japan, is also introduced in this section. In wartime Japan, bringing honor to one’s country and family is valued above all else. In Chapter 1, the boys of the Blood and Iron Corps—some of whom are only 13 years old—are told: “Each of you must be ready to die a glorious death in the name of the Emperor” (7). Similarly, Hideki prepares to bomb the American trucks by reminding himself of a patriotic Japanese ideal that equates domestic and national kinship: “For the Emperor, Hideki told himself. For Japan. For my family” (37). Furthermore, the kamikaze pilot’s sacrifice is glorified to the children as a brave act; Hideki watches the dive-bombing with pride: “This was true bravery, he thought. To fight in the face of overwhelming odds” (21). Dying for one’s country is romanticized as admirable, whereas saving one’s own life—even for a child—is represented as weak and cowardly. When Hideki tries to leave with his mother and brother, a Japanese soldier confronts him about his age: “Fourteen is old enough to fight!” (33). This veneration of self-sacrifice contributed significantly to the horror of battle by minimizing prisoner of war (POW) capture in favor of mass death.

The generational nature of Imperial Japan’s conception of family honor places further pressure on Okinawans to act bravely, despite the terrifying and unreasonable position they are placed in. Okinawan Spirituality dictates that Hideki’s family still carries immense shame at the surrender of an ancestor named Shigetomo, who capitulated to Japanese samurai who invaded Okinawa many generations earlier. Hideki conceptualizes his fear of the Americans as the influence of this past: “Shigetomo’s mabui tugged at Hideki’s gut and Hideki took a step back” (58). Hideki hopes that if he fights bravely, “I can finally overcome my family's curse. I can prove to Lieutenant Colonel Sano and to Yoshio and to everyone that I really am brave. And I can make the Kaneshiro family fearless again” (9).

The Might of the US War Machine is another important theme in the novel. The deadly power of US shells is compared to a force of nature, as they shake the island like an earthquake: Hideki can “feel the vibrations deep inside the island’s bedrock” (31). Hideki is staggered by the sight of the massive naval force approaching Okinawa, which was historically the largest amphibious assault in the Pacific Theatre during WWII: “[B]elow them were hundreds—maybe thousands—of American ships. Huge ones, too, bigger than any Japanese ship Hideki had ever seen in Naha Harbor” (17).

In the novel, photographs are a recurring motif. Imagined photographs capture both the tragic sights of war, while real ones are memorials of peaceful, prewar life. In the beginning of the novel, Hideki’s main association with photography comes through his friendship with military photographer Tanaka. Hideki often copes with the horror of what he sees by framing what he sees with his fingers, as though setting up a shot. Hideki imagines taking a photo of the destroyed school buildings with boys standing in front of it: “what a picture it would have made” (5). He does the same thing with the terrifying fleet in the harbor: “Hideki framed a shot of the battleships at sea through his fingers. The story it told wasn’t a good one for Okinawa” (18). This is a way to create emotional distance, to reconceptualize what he is looking at as a two-dimensional version of itself. Meanwhile, the novel’s physical photographs link characters trapped in a nightmare to their prewar, humanized selves. When Hideki thinks about the day his family evacuated, “he still remembered that day as though he had a picture of it” (32). When Ray kills a Japanese soldier, he cannot help but carry away a picture of the man’s wife and child. Ray stores these relics of the man’s past—evidence of a future he will never get to have—with his own photographs of home.