Letters to Memory

by Karen Tei Yamashita

  At first, you invoke Ganesha, the scribe dipping his tusk into ink, and you advise that Om Ganesha precedes any undertaking to remove obstacles. Thus, in your usual way, you gift an open path, and I am grateful.

  On to your namesake, Vyasa, which you say means to sever and then to join or construct, and this is true about the work of the poet who deconstructs events and remounts, re-members them to understand. In the storytelling of the Mahabharata, Bhishma vows celibacy in order not to have progeny who will be condemned to kill each other. However, the poet-narrator Vyasa, despite this prophecy and perhaps desiring a story, intervenes with his aging member to comply anyway, fathering two sons, and thus must tell the story of what transpires. You think about this, about Vyasa who is implicated in this great epic about civil war, and that neither narrator nor scholar may hide from the responsibility of their personal relationship to history or to ideas. You have said that in the Vedic tradition all histories begin with the word itihasa; thus it is said, and you understand this to mean that every history is a story told, weighted by the knowledge of the teller. It is, you add, this responsibility, not only accountability, that offers truth to storytelling. Knowing that the Bhagavad Gita is itself a later intervention, reinterpretation, and extension of verses added to the Mahabharata, you feel that my family stories are also welcome. Well, if you say so.

  Love,

  LETTERS TO

  Death

  Dear Ananda:

  We met at a dinner party where, you would say, all things can be resolved as long as, you would also insist, someone takes the time to arrange the flowers, polish the glass, set the stage. Well, it was in fact my dinner party, created in the havoc between classes and the usual short notice, so I doubt there were any flowers, though tea candles to create atmosphere and give a hint of reflective sparkle to obscure the untidy, unpolished household, but most certainly, some sort of stage was set. The dishes, platters, glassware, table, and cloth napkins all belonged to my parents, participating in a past generation of dinner parties, a backdrop of simple elegance to create a sense of celebrative belonging passed forward into time with John’s ever-present prescription, that the conversation be scintillating. John loved to cook bold and fearless, which meant that he never test-tasted anything while cooking; he wanted to experience the same surprise as his guests. And he expected a good return for his kitchen labors: that those who came to the table provided their own surprises, new thoughts, fellowship, and laughter. Whether we are aware of it or not, every dinner party recalls another and another, the glasses filled, raised, and emptied, different reflections, new lips, a tradition to honor the savoring tongue, the savoring spirit. You understood and made me remember the conditions of this tradition, remembered to me also your aunt and her dinner parties in Paris, your lost childhood in Cambodia, and the dear friends who have feted you along the way in Southeast Asia, London, New York, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Long Beach, Sacramento, San Jose, and Berkeley. I hear your laughter across many tables, blessed with irony, beauty tips, and your basic rule that homosexuality resides as a hidden gift, even if in minute degrees, in every man, woman, and child. This is the empathy your presence implants in each of us, and it is the reason you are both my brother and my sister.

  Mao Zedong famously said, a revolution is not a dinner party. And to that he added: writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery. But now, you will say, we should have learned in the very least that the insurrection and act of violence by which one class overthrows another may obliterate not only the conditions of inequality but everything that gives pleasure to the ideals of living in equality and brotherhood. This obliteration of pleasure is the smallest portion of the violent horrors we have come to know of such revolutions. It is no small feat of spirit that out of the ashes of genocide, you in your body and intellect have chosen to know and to remember the ancient past in order to reconstruct, recuperate, and to nourish, to push aside old pain to recapture lost elegance, dignity of spirit, and the luxury to speak with wit and frankness. You might argue that the essay, the painting, and embroidery may be in themselves small but significant revolutions. Here, then, I cordially invite you once again to a place at the table, to my dinner party, and I humbly ask that you arrange the flowers.

  Today is August 6. On the same date in 1945, Enola Gay ejected Little Boy into the city of Hiroshima to birth the atomic age. And two days later, Bockscar dumped Fat Man into Nagasaki, a city rich in a history of controlled encounters with hairy, unbathed redheaded barbarians in pantaloons—nanbanjin—and vestiges of their architecture, cultural curiosities, west folded into east, churches and temples, all vanquished with equal vengeance. This is the learned memory the August summer recalls; exiled, wanderer, prodigal, dead, all return home, under the grace of a broad, slippery moon shedding cool relief in the heated night, to grieve, to be reconciled, to be released.

  For as long as I can remember, and in every garage that he occupied in a series of three houses in Los Angeles, John had a carpenter’s worktable with a power saw and tools. And above the table, there always hung a framed oil painting of the Oakland West Tenth Methodist Church. We never thought to question the presence of this painting that always hung next to handsaws, hammers, and fishing rods in the structure that served as shop, gardening shed, and car port. We simply expected to see it there as if to greet us as we arrived from church, a picnic, a summer camping trip. The painting never entered the house; it was a part of John’s particular handyman’s workspace, always there to watch over him sawing and refashioning the headboards of a bed into a shelf, polishing and prepping his reels or golf clubs, a transistor radio tuned to the voice of Vin Scully and the Dodgers.

  In L.A., the first house we lived in was a typical Southern California bungalow on Fifth Avenue near Jefferson, a several-block strip of Japanese American businesses—groceries with tofu and fresh fish, butchers, dry cleaning, pharmacy, curios, dry goods, sweet shop, dentistry, and optics—which reopened in the postwar 1950s to service the returning Japanese community, young nisei families hoping to jumpstart their lives with kids and the old American dream. John’s next ministerial appointment, the Centenary Methodist Church on Jefferson and Normandie, was at the very center of this community, at least for me. Our neighbors on one side were an elderly retired white couple named the Thydens, and on the other were two African American families living in a stucco duplex. Cookie Green and I could open our bedroom windows and talk across the narrow corridor lined with calla lilies between our two houses. At one end of Cookie’s house, her mother, tall and elegant, practiced her vocal scales and songs. I imagined her to be a famous opera singer, but more possibly she was the soloist in her church choir. And at the other, Mr. Green seemed to have the television tuned perpetually to the commotion of cowboy and Indian epics. During the school year, my sister and I walked a block to Sixth Avenue Elementary, and during the summers, we pranced in and out of a small geyser of cool water spouting from a single hose over the sloping front lawn.

  This house was raised over a half basement you entered through slanted shed-like double doors outside the back porch. John used this slender space under the house as a storage area. I have an unclear memory of watching water slip over the concrete patio and under those doors. Perhaps it was my fault, enjoying the curiosity of spraying water steaming over hot cement, filling our plastic wading pool, then discarding the flowing hose. Or perhaps it was a broken pipe or a particularly rainy season. Whatever happened, the basement flooded, destroying the stuff stored there. So many years later, Asako dampened my enthusiasm for this archive of letters. Oh, you are missing Nobu’s letters to John from Italy. They were destroyed in that basement flood at Fifth Ave. I imagine a cache of letters bound in string, script on thin paper, aerograms perhaps and postcards, European stamps and postal marks, Nobu’s confident scrawl and the return address: N. Kajiwara, 100th Infantry Battalion, U.S. Army, all turned to pulpy mush.

  In his written memory of Nobuo Kajiwara, Joh
n never mentioned the lost letters. Instead he remembered:

  It was in the summer of 1943 when I was in summer session at Garrett that Nobu completed his basic training at Camp Shelby in Louisiana. He dropped in to see me at the Garrett campus in his going overseas furlough in full uniform. I didn’t know how we were to spend his few days, but since he liked good jazz music we decided to go to Chicago’s southside . . . just west of the University of Chicago . . . We found our negro night club and walked in to see all black faces. When they saw me a Japanese and another in full uniform, they gave us the best seats in the place as cherished ethnic buddies. We were treated royally—we dined and drank and had our fill of Chicago jazz. I returned to spend the rest of that summer in Ethnic and Theological studies, and Nobu left to take the military transport bound for Salerno Italy.

  This Chicago visit is recorded in photographs of John and Nobu in front of the Buckingham fountain. On July 11, the following summer, Nobu was killed at the Allied front, somewhere north of Rome.

  Perhaps also lost to wet pulp were the letters from a second childhood neighbor and lifetime friend, Tyler Eitaro Nakayama, who, as a pharmacist, joined the 442nd medical corps. Of Tyler, John wrote:

  He served in Italy, France and Germany, and when the war was over he discarded his past life and entered the College of Arts and Crafts . . . In the course of the years he changed his name . . . to Willard Tyler, the nickname his boyhood buddies gave him . . . He is the one who had sent me many European gifts and to this day I treasure an Italian brass mug . . . I still have his old jazz wax records of Bix Beiderbecke and others. I cannot break them up to discard them.

  John does not speculate about why Tyler abandoned his former profession or his Japanese name or even why Tyler disappeared so completely from a lifetime of friendship. One friend died; another survived. Both disappeared forever.

  So it was Tyler who left John with the oil painting of the West Tenth Church. Flipping through a box, I found a signed pencil drawing, a tableau in a stone house with a medic bandaging the arm of a man, his wife and two children surrounding him, the image of a saint or Mary mounted in a relic box on the wall. Posted in the doorway just outside is a soldier with a rifle. In lieu of letters, Tyler drew for John this moment of war somewhere in Italy. There are also two watercolors and another pencil drawing, unsigned, but likely also Tyler’s work.

  Among John’s old collection of 78 shellac jazz records there are three albums: A Duke Ellington Panorama, Meade “Lux” Lewis Blues Boogie Woogie, and volume two of the History of Jazz: The Golden Era. There are also scattered collections with Bing Crosby and others, but no Bix Beiderbecke. Knowing John, he met someone along the way who showed an interest and gave Bix up to another enthusiast, someone who likely walked away with my title favorites: “Sentimental Baby” and “There Ain’t No Sweet Man Worth the Salt of My Tears.”

  Sometime in the 1960s, the West Tenth Methodist Church was demolished to make room for the Acorn public-housing project and a freeway through West Oakland, to this day a disastrous urban plan of displacement and enforced segregation. This was about the same time that we moved to our second L.A. house, another parsonage, in the Crenshaw district. In 1964, as predicted by his history of hypertension, John suffered a massive stroke and the paralysis of his right side. He struggled through physical therapy to regain his ability to walk, to write, and to speak, but he would never be the same. Yet, the following year, on the hottest summer day in August 1965, he must have stood with us, leaning unsteadily on his cane, out on our Virginia Road sidewalk listening to fire engines roar across the city, smoke billowing far to the east in Watts. The riots were distant but near enough to our old house on Fifth Avenue and to the Centenary Church. What John thought, I do not know, but he stood there disabled and impotent to act or even to speak. I was too young to understand the sad impossibility of John’s dream of racial integration; though in a few years I would join the volatility that was the tinder for riots—power and by any means necessary. Japanese and African American urban communities had been bound to each other by labor migration, racial prejudice, and housing covenants. Two decades after the war’s end, the promises of racial democracy and economic well-being did not pan out for everyone.

  For my family, this was the summer when everything changed. Eventually John took disability retirement from the church, and Asako taught elementary school children for the Los Angeles Unified School District, beginning a teaching career of nineteen years and replacing John as breadwinner. From this moment on, I understood John to be always dying, believing that I might look away and he would be gone. Though at times an anxious feeling, it was just a new reality, and besides, he always wore that smile. My sister and I grew up boomers, our cultural nutrition a mix of soul and rock, Aretha and Baez, I Spy and Captain Kangaroo. We became part of a sansei generation who would seek to recover the history of our people’s incarceration, protest the racist war in Vietnam, join voices and ideologies with militant paths to power and revolution.

  Meanwhile, an old collection of jazz wax records gathered dust near a newer turntable, no longer equipped to play at 78 rpm, and Tyler’s painting of a demolished church and disappearing neighborhood still hung faithfully over another worktable, greeting always our arrivals and departures.

  Ananda, you have invited me to walk in meditation with you, but when we do walk, we chatter and laugh endlessly about everything, foolish nonsense, and yet with the pleasure of the deepest sense of our living moments together; we live a noisy meditation. I suppose we would not have it any other way. To be honest, the silent meditation we experience is when we are apart, distant in our own worlds, writers in separate universes. That is perhaps the state of the writer and the letter writer, a meditative state graced by the imagination of the presence of the other. Ah, but you would say that meditation is wordless, the breathing space in the hollow of the mind that whispers through and between and beyond. There is no such thing as noisy meditation or musing meditation or even prayer meditation. It is complete attention to a bodiless timeless everywhere, a wholly mindful space between life and death. Of this, I believe I am incapable. But push me out into warm waters to swim, become a fish, better yet, a jellyfish, a transparent billowing community, pulsing through liquid, slipping into and under muffled and cyanese silence. Maybe. As a child, nightly I witnessed the severed heads of unknown people swirling around my dark bed; terrified, I slipped into water and swam away.

  By contrast, Tomi landed in the desert of central Utah. Nothing but sand and sage. At the end of 1942, Tomi turned sixty. She had immigrated to Oakland through the Port of San Francisco at the turn of the twentieth century at the fair age of eighteen, married Kishiro Yamashita, and bore seven children, one every three years from 1903 on. John speculated that he and his siblings were exactly three years apart because Tomi breastfed each of them until age three. I never heard this from anyone else in the family, but maybe John had a good memory; plus this was the sort of raised-eyebrow detail John liked to tell in the middle of some dinner party. Between raising kids and breastfeeding, Tomi also worked as a seamstress in Kishiro’s Yokohama Tailors shop. In 1932, when Kishiro died, Tomi opened the Mayfair Cleaners, taking in laundry and sewing jobs. When people talked about the issei generation, you got the message that these were the real pioneers who labored, who broke their backs, scrimped and saved, lost their shirts, suffered the confusion of language and cruel humiliation of hatred. Then at the end of years of continuous labor, the final indignity was incarceration. As my mother Asako would say, no rest for the wicked. Not to say that I’ve had any sort of comparable life, but I’m around the same age as Tomi was when she walked into Topaz. She lived to be a few months short of ninety, so let’s say she was about two-thirds there. Knowing Tomi, she probably wore a corset all through camp; nothing would stop her from looking svelte, with proper posture and bosom in place, a woman of vitality. When Tomi was at the end of her life, nearing wicked rest, John flew to Chicago to be her hospice nurse. She o
pened her eyes one morning to find John cleaning up her room and grunted with some irritation, Mada ikiteru yo. When I think about Tomi, it’s this phrase I remember: You know, I’m still alive.

  In Tomi’s photo album, there were a few of those rare photographs taken in camp: a larger group picture arranged before a tarpaper barrack and a smaller photo of Tomi and four women set against barbed wire and the dirt landscape. With some research, I discover that these folks represent the artists in camp sometime around 1944. Of the artists incarcerated at Topaz, perhaps the most well known were Miné Okubo and Chiura Obata. Both were friends of the Yamashitas from their Berkeley days. In the prewar, Okubo studied art at Cal with a couple years in Paris, and painted frescos with Diego Rivera for the Works Projects Administration. The Obata family lived in Berkeley, Chiura teaching art at Cal. At war’s end, Okubo gathered her sketches of evacuation to Tanforan and imprisonment in Topaz and published Citizen 13660, a pictorial indictment of those years. It was Chiura Obata who founded and opened an art school in camp, involving sixteen artists and eight hundred students over the years. One of those students was Tomi.

  A story I did not know was that Chiura Obata, despite his idealistic decision to stay in Topaz to create an art school, attempting to bring some beauty and hope to that ugly episode, was attacked and beaten as if a traitor by a camp fellow. After his hospitalization, the Obatas left Topaz for Saint Louis, and thereafter, colleague artist and friend Matsusaburo Hibi and his wife Hisako continued the direction of the art school until the camp’s closure in 1945. It is this later contingent of artists and students, sans Obata, who pose in that group photo before the Topaz barracks. And in the smaller photo, Tomi stands among her lady artist friends, Hisako Hibi and her daughter Ibuki crouched in the dirt. The gifted artist Hisako Hibi would also have been Tomi’s teacher.