A Place to Belong

by Cynthia Kadohata

  Papa took her face in his hands. “Hanako. Listen to me. The war is over. We’re going to my parents’ farm. Even during the war, it wasn’t as bad on the farms.” The way he shook her head so firmly almost hurt.

  “How do you know? When did you last hear from your parents?” Mama asked now, her face almost burning with intensity. “How do you know?”

  He paused and turned away grumpily.

  “Papa?” Hanako pressed.

  “I’m not sure,” he said reluctantly. Then he added with annoyance, “I know what I know.”

  Mama was staring at Papa with disbelief. “You know what you know?”

  Papa didn’t get mad much, but Hanako could see tension building in his face, in his stiffening body. She braced herself, but then Mama didn’t say more, and neither did Papa.

  Somehow Hanako felt herself calming down instead of getting upset. This was just one more thing they would get through. If Papa said he knew something, then he did. Period.

  “We aren’t staying in the city, though, are we? We are going to the farmlands,” she said. “We will change trains in Hiroshima and never even walk outside.”

  Papa kissed her head. “Yes,” he said. “Yes. And I know my parents are there waiting for us. I wrote them in July, and in August, September, and October. I didn’t hear back, but mail has been disrupted. But I know they must have gotten one of those letters.” He paused, and Hanako again studied the cracks on the sides of his face. They went straight down from his eyes, splitting his cheeks into sections. But you could tell he wasn’t old—that was what gave the cracks their peculiar quality. “I know—I know—that they’re alive.”

  Hanako met eyes with Akira. She knew they were both thinking, But how do you know?

  “I don’t want to sit by the window,” Akira announced. He and Mama changed places. “I don’t like the window anymore.”

  “I hate windows!” Hanako exclaimed, and turned her back to hers.

  “It shouldn’t be bad where we’re going,” Papa tried to assure them. But Hanako did not feel assured, even when he added, “We’re headed to where the small villages are. Why would they bomb those?” A look passed over Papa’s face, like he had a sudden headache. “But it won’t be easy. Everybody is very poor in Japan. While you were sleeping, your mother spoke with one of the soldiers. He said you can’t imagine how poor.”

  But Hanako could imagine how poor. She could imagine it because of the faces of the Japanese soldiers, of the truck drivers, of the people watching the train roll by their villages. Papa had always told her, “Do everything you can do.” For instance, she would say, “How long should I work for?” And he would answer, “Do everything you can do.” That was one of his mottoes. The faces of the people she was seeing seemed to be saying, “There’s nothing more I can do.” What could a soldier do who had killed people for no good reason and then returned starving to his country?

  CHAPTER

  TEN

  Nothing, that’s what.

  The PA announced Hiroshima Station, so Papa pulled down their bags from the rack. The whole train emptied out. Everybody else seemed eager to get off, but her own family waited and were the last out the door. Then, after having been so eager to get off, the passengers walked slowly, some gazing around with their brows furrowed. The teenage boys were frowning, looking worried—scared, even. No more swagger as they moved along with the crowd.

  The station building was heavily damaged, but there were workers atop scaffolding at the ceiling. You could see the sky through the broken ceiling. Hanako held on to Papa’s coat, and Akira held on to Mama’s. But then he pulled his hand away and pointed, exclaiming, “Mama! Papa!” almost hysterically.

  Akira was looking at a woman sitting on a blanket, with what appeared to be mochigashi sitting in front of her! Those were delicious, colorful cakes such as you could get in Little Tokyo, by downtown Los Angeles. It was like a mirage. Hanako was almost shaking with excitement. She hadn’t seen these for four years, and they were her most favorite treat. Akira ran forward.

  The woman was middle-aged, with her hair pulled back off her face, and she did not look like the people Hanako had seen from the train, the people who seemed to be feeling that there was nothing they could do. On the contrary, this woman looked quite motivated. She began immediately haggling with Mama and Papa about the price of the cakes, even though they hadn’t said a word about even buying them. She was so motivated, she couldn’t stop talking, making offers and taking them back and making new offers.

  Finally, Papa said he would pay one American dollar for ten cakes, and she accepted.

  Hanako could not believe their luck to find this woman in a starving country selling these beautiful cakes. Pleasure flooded her chest. She and Akira picked out five apiece, pale greens and yellows and pinks. Akira gave her his to hold because he was afraid he would drop them. She wrapped five in her handkerchief and put them in one of her deep pockets. Papa gave her his handkerchief, and she wrapped the other five in that for her second pocket.

  Mama said, “You must not eat them until we get to your grandparents’ house. And you must share. They may not have had sweets for a long time.”

  “But, Mama! Can’t we eat just one each?” Hanako turned to Papa, but he gestured toward Mama. She took Mama’s hand. “Please?”

  Mama seemed torn, but then she said, “We must respect your grandparents.”

  Hanako had never understood why she must respect people who weren’t even there at that moment. For instance, Mama and Papa had never let her criticize kids at school when she was at home. Or her teachers. All this respect among the Japanese could get quite aggravating! She thought about begging further, and maybe even trying to work some tears out of her eyes so she could get at those precious cakes. But Akira had surprisingly not argued at all. “I respect my grandparents,” he said, putting her to shame.

  “I do too,” she said. Her mouth was watering, though, so she said it reluctantly.

  Mama smiled at Akira with pride, but she frowned at Hanako. Hanako felt embarrassed.

  They all trailed Papa through the station, Hanako’s mind on her heavy pockets. Then Mama called out in a panic, “Where is Akira?”

  Hanako spun around. Where was he? And so quickly gone? Then she spotted him about twenty-five feet away, just standing and staring. “There he is!” she shouted, running over. She slowed down when she saw what he was looking at.

  They were . . . people. Dozens of them. People lying down on single sheets of newspaper or sitting on the bare ground staring at nothing. Some with no shirts, a couple with no pants, like that soldier on the train. A man with only a shirt, and it was very dirty. Maybe ten or twelve children. Most of the children were sleeping, though it wasn’t nighttime. A naked baby clung to a woman, both asleep. A dirty, shirtless boy lay with an arm resting over a toddler girl. A very dirty toddler girl.

  It was so rude to be staring! But the people didn’t seem to care; they just watched Hanako and Akira with dead eyes. The chest of the older of the shirtless boys was covered in scars. He didn’t seem to have one of his ears. His face was pink, as if the skin had been scraped off and was still growing back. But at least he had a face; she saw one man who didn’t. That is, two men didn’t, although . . . actually, she wasn’t sure if the second faceless person was a man or a woman. No face, baggy clothes, eyes peering out from a mass of scars.

  She started to get that sense of mindlessness again. It was too much; it was hard to look at; her mind was freezing. She gazed down. When she lifted her eyes again, she focused on the pink-faced boy, because he did not look much older than her. She realized that although his eyes were closed and he wasn’t moving, he might be awake. His lips were pursed, but then he relaxed them.

  He didn’t seem to have one single possession. Actually, not many did. Nobody had shoes or anything. She thought of the pile of baggage that the Nikkei from the ship had searched through so fervently. Things. Things they owned. Skirts and pencils and toothbrush
es and underwear and probably sheets and pillowcases. Among these people, it seemed only the fortunate had even a sheet of newspaper to sit on. She did spot someone with a possession, though—a little girl clutching what looked like a piece of flowered cloth, not really big enough to be a blanket.

  But the pink-faced boy . . . She went as if hypnotized to kneel beside him. She heard her family calling to her. “Sumimasen,” she said softly. Both the boy and the toddler opened their eyes tiredly. No hope in those eyes. Just fatigue and a little suspicion. She reached into her pockets, emptying out the handkerchiefs and placing the cakes next to them. The boy blinked a few times, then sat up abruptly and grunted like an animal, he and the little one suddenly yelling at each other as they gathered the cakes into their newspaper. Maybe the pink-faced kid was thirteen or fourteen, and the tot maybe three or four. Pink Face picked up the newspaper, and they both broke into a run, the smaller one struggling to keep up. Hanako watched until they disappeared into the crowds.

  Now she noticed that everybody was staring at her hopefully. She had no more cakes, though. She and the man with no face looked directly at each other. She heard her father urgently yelling: “Hanako, hurry! We don’t want to miss our train!”

  She hesitated, frozen in place. “Hanako!”

  “I have no more cake!” she shouted out. There was nothing more she could do! Then she turned and saw throngs of people rushing toward a train. Papa scooped up Akira, and she and Mama joined the surging crowd. As she pressed forward, she realized she had shouted to the man in English.

  And it turned out they were all running for a train going in the same direction they had just come from.

  Papa seemed to be confused, wandered aimlessly for a few minutes, and then stood in front of a sign for a long time. He had been trying to be so American for so long! Was it possible he couldn’t read Japanese very well anymore?

  As Hanako waited, she thought of the two children dashing away with the cakes. They had not looked happy to get the mochigashi; they had looked absolutely panicked, as if somebody might steal the sweets from them. Would they even be able to appreciate how good the cakes were? Or would they just eat them all at once in a panic?

  Mama approached Papa and laid her arm around his shoulder. He glanced toward her, then studied the sign further.

  “Why doesn’t he just ask someone?” Akira asked.

  Seeing how confused Papa looked, Hanako started to feel scared, almost dizzy. It made her dizzy to think that her father didn’t actually belong here in Japan, and as a matter of fact, maybe her parents belonged nowhere in the world, not here and not there. This made her feel as if her whole family could float up and up into the sky, right up through the hole in the ceiling, like they had no weight. See, the law in America had always been that you couldn’t give up your citizenship during times of war, but President Roosevelt had signed the law just to get rid of them. That’s what Papa had told her. He had wanted them out, and he had gotten his way. One thing she had to admit about President Roosevelt was that he’d been a very powerful man.

  And yet. And yet. To her personally, her father was a more powerful man, because the president had not taken care of her. He had not worked to feed her. That was her father. And her mother. So the fear started to drain. And see there! Papa was at last nodding confidently and said, “This direction!” He had read the sign and knew where they should go! Relief washed over her. Her parents would do everything they could. She took her brother’s hand and said it out loud: “Mama and Papa will do everything they can. We’ll be fine. We’re going to have the best life ever. That’s a fact. I promise.”

  CHAPTER

  ELEVEN

  And yet. And yet.

  They were on the next train now. Was it possible for a train to be any more rickety? It felt like it might fall to pieces even as it chugged down the tracks. It might even tip right over at any moment, or jump off the rails. Akira, sitting next to her as he’d asked to do, had a look on his face of terror-delight, as if a part of him liked this wild ride and a part of him didn’t. It was actually amusing.

  And yet. It was hard to forget the children she’d given the cakes to.

  “Mama! Remember those pictures you had from the Dust Bowl?”

  Mama used to tear photos from magazines, photos of the Dust Bowl years in the 1930s in America, when a long drought had stricken the Midwest. She’d started collecting them even before Hanako was born, stuffing them into a drawer. Then when Hanako was just a toddler, millions of people had to leave the Midwest, where massive dust storms were creating dark, towering clouds in the fields, like the smoke from the biggest fire she could imagine. When Hanako looked at such pictures, and at the pictures of the people who’d left their homes behind, she felt in her heart that she knew those people. They were white people, but Hanako had a strong sense that she had met them, maybe was even related to them, though she hadn’t and of course she wasn’t. And that’s how she felt about those two kids at the train station. She knew them. She had met them before today.

  “Yes, of course,” Mama replied.

  “Why did you collect those?”

  “Oh, what makes you think of that?” Mama paused to think. “I don’t know why I started collecting them. I suppose those people reminded me of Nikkei I knew. Picking produce for a living. But today those people remind me of us. They had no home.” She thought more. “I brought those pictures to camp, but I threw them away when we left America.”

  “You brought the pictures to camp? Mama, why?”

  “Well.” Mama got a pained look in her eyes. “The way the world drives you from your home, sometimes. I just like a predictable world, but it hasn’t worked out that way for us or for them. Maybe for anyone . . .” That kind of scared Hanako. It made her feel she could be driven from her home again someday, when she was older. When she had a family to take care of. She wanted to talk more, but Mama’s mind seemed to have drifted away. She was blinking, her mouth hanging open as she stared at air.

  Akira was studying Hanako as if he were suspicious about something, as if he were about to accuse her of something. Then his face relaxed and he said, “It’s all right that you gave those kids our cakes. I was mad for a minute, but it’s all right.”

  “Don’t worry. We’ll eat a thousand cakes, Aki.”

  He looked excited at the prospect. “Then I could eat one every single day! For . . .”

  “A thousand days.”

  “A thousand days!”

  She didn’t want to get his hopes up too much, so she added, “Anyway, we’ll find a few more somewhere. It might not actually be a thousand.”

  But she could see by the way he was smiling dreamily into space that he was thinking now of a thousand colorful mochigashi, maybe sitting in piles around him on the floor.

  The train soon entered farmland. Here and there houses were clustered near one another against small forests and wild, disorganized fields, but they were green—nothing was destroyed! Everything looked perfectly peaceful, like there had never been a war and never would be. Sometimes you could see an expanse of farmland, the fields stretching into the distance, separated from any houses. In other areas the houses had small farm fields next to them. Not too far away were mountains—she had heard that just about everywhere you went in Japan, you could see a mountain. They were going to the place where Papa had grown up, and it didn’t look destroyed!

  Just seeing all the green made Hanako feel better, and her energy surged. Her eyes drank it all in. Green = Life.

  They passed fields where Papa said wheat was growing. “Wheat is a winter crop—” he was explaining when the PA announced something. Papa interrupted himself to bellow, “This is it!”

  What? Already? Hanako jumped up.

  “Hurry!” Mama snapped.

  “Hurry!” Papa yelled.

  “Help me!” Akira called out, and Papa grabbed him rather roughly with one arm and took luggage in the other.

  Hanako scrambled after them, tripping on
ce and feeling so panicked, she cried out as Aki had, “Help me!”

  But nobody heard her, and she scrambled to her feet. The train was slowing down, though, and then it stopped. For them. There was no conductor, and Papa pushed open the door. He threw down the suitcases and hopped to the ground to help each of them out. Then they all stepped back and watched the train pick up speed.

  As it grew quieter, Hanako looked around. There was a platform, but it seemed like it was plopped in the middle of nowhere. Papa rubbed his face as he looked around.

  Finally, Hanako asked, “Which way should we go? Papa?”

  “Hmm,” he said, like she’d just asked an interesting question. Hanako spotted a group of old wooden buildings, a couple of them almost shacks, in the distance, and Papa led them through the weeds toward that. Some of the weeds were taller than Akira.

  The buildings were made of dark, unpainted wood, topped off with slanted roofs. One roof was bright red tile, but the others were grayish brown thatch or tile. There was no glass in the windows—most were covered with something white, either paper or cloth. The path through the village was dirt and pebbles. People walked through the streets, different kinds of people than in the city. These people were calmer, and a few times one of them caught Papa’s eye and nodded as if they knew one another—which Hanako knew they didn’t.

  Papa paused in the middle of it, his head cocked, almost as if listening. “I’m trying to find my memories,” he said, and kept cocking his head.

  Silence, except for the wind in the trees beyond.

  Mama shifted the luggage in her hands. “I don’t like the weeds,” Akira said. “They’re scary.” So Mama picked him up, ready to continue walking, still holding her suitcase.

  “I can take the bag,” Hanako offered, but Mama just shook her head no. Mama was the kind of person who would carry her youngest child until she collapsed. A lot of parents Hanako knew were like that.