Sometimes, when I fail to find my dreams, I sit at the upstairs window in what I still think must have been Helen’s room, a room which we have used only for storage. I have placed a chair under the window and it is here that I sit some nights, my daughter asleep in her own room and my dear wife asleep in our bed. I have said that I do this when I fail to find my dreams but in reality it is my dreams I am avoiding, for there remains, in the darker of my nights, a patch of rough water that runs through my thoughts, one which I recognize well enough to know that were I to drift into sleep under its influence I would find myself in the seeping heat again even after all these years. I light a cigarette and look out at the cool quietude of the night. On the opposite ridge, the roof of the little house in which the Takahashis once lived is like a slightly crooked line set upon the softness of the night canopy of the trees. What I think of there, what I am horrified to admit to, is that my location is a perfect one from which to call in an air strike. One-zero-Sierra. Foxtrot-Juliett. Six-zero. Two-seven. Zero-five. Three-six. And all of this would be transmuted into flame. It is, I think, a calling for relief more than anything else, for each time the heavy concussion came I could feel my heart unspooling in gratitude and deliverance.
My wife sometimes finds me in my chair, asleep, my cigarette an ash column between my fingers. She rouses me and sometimes we return to bed; other times, if my daughter is awake, we all head downstairs and pour our bowls of cereal and begin our day. Suzie is six years old and she is filled with questions and I try to answer them as I crunch my Chex and sip my coffee. Later the three of us will walk through the oaks and the last peaches and plums and despite everything I have done and all the guilt I carry both inherited and earned, despite it or perhaps because of it, I know that I am lucky, not only to be alive, but to have found in my life a measure of grace, or rather for that measure to have found me. There are days—many of them—when golden light seems to pour forth from the very soil. That I am here to meet that light continues to amaze. Somewhere phantoms yet blaze the sky. And yet what I think of most is this:
Sweet life. Have you not been with me all the while?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I GREW UP IN PLACER COUNTY AND LIVE, NOW, IN THE TOWN I have fictionalized herein. It has been a singular honor, therefore, to be trusted with the recollections of the various Placer County citizens who gave me their time, attention, memories, photographs, and reference materials. Thanks to Ray and Irene Yamasaki (and Denise Yamasaki for helping me connect with her parents); to Shig Yokote of the 442nd, whom I was fortunate enough to speak with just a few months shy his one hundredth birthday about his experiences before, during, and after the war (and double fortunate to join him later for the birthday party); to Stu Kageta, who shared his own experiences and those of his father, Frank, a machine gunner in the 442nd; and to Claire Camp (née Tsujimoto) for inviting me into her home and for her input and comments and her loan of some essential books on Tule Lake. Ken Tokutomi provided early guidance and contacts and made a rough sketch of the old Newcastle Japantown so I could begin to get my bearings around that vanished topography. Further to that study, Bill George’s documentary film Newcastle, Gem of the Foothills provided context and narratives of a lost time.
Dan Wilson kindly gathered some old Placer High School yearbooks for me so that I might be availed of the photographic evidence of Placer County’s demographics before and after the war. Local historian David Unruhe, a contributing editor to The Japantowns of Placer County, offered his time, suggestions, knowledge, and contacts—and a big stack of books and files from his personal collection—and Mike Holmes kindly offered me his research file on local events just after internment. Also useful were the collections of the Auburn branch of the Placer County Library—especially their oral history collection—and the holdings of the Placer County Archives. Paul DeWitt kindly assisted me on a tour of the Japanese American Museum of San Jose, patiently answering my many questions.
Among the dozens of textual sources consulted during the research for this book, the most useful were Wayne Maeda’s Changing Dreams and Treasured Memories: A Story of Japanese Americans in the Sacramento Region and Sierra College Press’s outstanding collection of Placer County oral histories, Standing Guard: Telling Our Stories. Tomeo Okui Nakae’s Recollections: An Autobiography of the Wife of a Japanese Immigrant provided useful information on life in Newcastle during the first half of the twentieth century. The writings of Mary Matsuda Gruenewald, Hiroshi Kashiwagi, Donald Keene, Julie Otsuka, Eileen Sunada Sarasohn, Hisaye Yamamoto, and Wakako Yamauchi were also important. The list of family names to whom this book is dedicated was extracted from the Tule Lake Directory and Camp News compiled and published by H. Inukai and supplied to me by the rangers at the Tule Lake Unit of WWII Valor in the Pacific National Monument, in Tulelake, California.
My friend William T. Vollmann kindly accompanied me to the UC Davis library several times and helped me research agricultural events in California from 1920 until the peach and pear blight wiped out much of the state’s fruit-growing industry in the early 1960s.
I would also like to offer my appreciation to members of two literary conference panels which focused on writers crossing outside their lived experiences and which gave me much to think about as I pondered how to approach this story: Jodi Angel, Skip Horack, Bich Minh Nguyen, Derek Palacio, Rob Spillman, Luis Alberto Urrea, and Naomi Williams. I would also like to thank Matthew Salesses, whose engaging pedagogical work, particularly on the subject of white writers writing about people of color, has been eye-opening and useful, as has the work of Viet Thanh Nguyen, especially Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, which offered ways to consider America’s treatment and understanding of Asia both inside and outside its borders. Edward W. Said’s Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism and Judith Butler’s Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? were important to me as I framed how to handle these same subjects.
On the American experience in Vietnam, I found useful sources in Joseph W. Callaway Jr.’s Mekong First Light, Andrew Wiest’s The Boys of ’67, Frederick Downs Jr.’s The Killing Zone, Michael Herr’s Dispatches, and Nick Turse’s Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam. Also important was Liz Reph’s documentary Brothers in War. Special thanks too for the memoir In Pharaoh’s Army and to its author, Tobias Wolff, for his kindness in looking over my pages on the Vietnam War and spending some time in discussion with me over email. In terms of naming the nameless, a task my protagonist was never able to do, the reader might explore Dương Thu Hương’s Paradise of the Blind and Novel Without a Name, Hữu Ngọc’s Wandering Through Vietnamese Culture, Bảo Ninh’s The Sorrow of War, Nguyễn Huy Thiệp’s The General Retires and Other Stories, Nguyễn Ngọc Tu.’s Floating Lives, Heonik Kwon’s Ghosts of War in Vietnam, and the anthologies Wild Mustard: New Voices from Vietnam (edited by Charles Waugh, Nguyễn Lien, and Văn Giá), Night, Again (edited by Linh Dinh), and Vietnam: A Traveler’s Literary Companion (edited by John Balaban and Nguyen Qui Duc).
I would particularly like to thank Marie Mutsuki Mockett and Naomi Williams for their attention to questions of Japanese culture, character, and language. For support and care: Tetuzi Akiyama, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Alexander Chee, and Emily Nemens. Special thanks to Michael Spurgeon and Jonathan Franzen for helping me find those moments when the unruly eccentricities of my sentences tilted toward the unreadable.
To my agent and dear friend Eleanor Jackson: much love and gratitude for everything you have done and for all you continue to do and, in particular, for continuing to have faith in my work, even when I can’t find such faith for myself. My editor at Liveright is Katie Adams, a true genius who could somehow see what I was trying to do here in the midst of what I first gave her to read: an unwieldly and impossibly entangled narrative. Katie, you make my work better every time but this book you absolutely rescued. To the rest of team Liveright, especially Cordelia Calvert and Gina Iaquinta: my sincere gratitude.
Of the 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry displaced under Executive Order 9066, 18,789 were imprisoned behind barbed wire at the 7,400-acre concentration camp at Tule Lake. Today, the site of the camp is little more than a desolate field of dry grass through which the wreckage of concrete foundations can barely be seen. The field is once more surrounded by barbed wire and the weekday I visited, with my friend the writer Debra Gwartney, there was no ranger available to open its locked gate. Somehow this seemed fitting enough: the impossibility of entering that space, its fence meant to keep us out, rather than to keep anyone locked inside.
This book is for the families and descendants of those who survived. It is also for my wife Macie and for my children. If there is any grace in my life it is because of you.
ALSO BY CHRISTIAN KIEFER
One Day Soon Time Will
Have No Place Left to Hide
The Animals
The Infinite Tides
Excerpt from The Sorrow of War: A Novel of North Vietnam by Bảo Ninh, copyright © 1995 by Bảo Ninh. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
California State Mining Bureau. Placer County California.
[S.l.: s.n, 1902] Map. https://www.loc.gov/item/2007633931/.
Copyright © 2019 by Christian Kiefer
All rights reserved
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Names: Kiefer, Christian, 1971– author.
Title: Phantoms : a novel / Christian Kiefer.
Description: First edition. | New York : Liveright Publishing Corporation, [2019]
Identifiers: LCCN 2018044996 | ISBN 9780871404817 (hardcover)
Classification: LCC PS3611.I443 P48 2019 | DDC 813/.6—dc23
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ISBN: 9780871408877 (ebk.)
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