by Sarah Bird
The colonel stands and presses some coins into the old man’s hand, and the man turns to bid him farewell. I read his name tag: YODA HAYASHI, the name I remembered. He sees me staring at him and smiles. Does he remember me? I beam at him, ecstatic to find this one link to a vanished world. A fraction of a second later, I realize it is impossible that this man, who’s watched thousands of dependent kids pass by his stand, would remember one very shy girl who’s now mostly grown. I adjust my smile from one of grinning recognition to the generic tilt of the lips used for any stranger, nod my head, and go into the café.
The Terrace Café, once a fifties fantasy of bamboo and rattan, has been remodeled and now sports the blandly pleasant look of a chain-motel coffee shop. Several tables overlooking the pool are occupied by groups of wives who gossip over Cokes and iced teas, occasionally glancing at the children splashing outside. Another half dozen tables around the edges of the café are occupied by operations officers eating early lunches. I find a table in an uneasy area between the two groups.
A Japanese waitress, her attention on flipping an order pad to a clean page, comes to my table. “Jew wan sontheen?”
Stitched above the pocket of her pale blue Dacron blouse is the motto Ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen. Like housing developments named Deercreek, the motto seems more wistful memorial than description of current reality.
“Filet mignon and onion rings.”
“No fray. Ion ring. Hahburger. Hah dog.”
“Just the onion rings.”
My elation at remembering the name of the shoeshine man fades when nothing else seems familiar. The onion rings that were once as good as tempura are now machine-punched loops frozen months ago in a factory in New Jersey.
I sense the wives turning their attention toward me. A glance, a few overheard words, gazes that sweep in my direction then quickly away, followed by laughter, knowing and excluding, suddenly recall the strict hierarchy of LaRue Wingo and her crew of harpies. For a moment I know exactly why I should hate “RaRue.” In the next second, the memory vanishes and I am back in a second-rate coffee shop with a bunch of women eyeing me with hostility because I am young and single, and they know their next child will permanently explode their waistlines and marble their legs with varicose veins.
The pressure of those gazes suddenly lifts when a flight crew swaggers in. A cocky major with a red crew cut leads the pack. All the men wear nylon flight suits that zip up the front and are creased at the crotch from parachute straps. Zippered pockets line the legs, arms, chest. In those pockets are matches coated in wax for survival in the event of an emergency water landing, hard candies to relieve thirst during unheated high-altitude flights when the water will freeze, a Benzedrine inhaler to keep eardrums from blowing out in unpressurized cabins, a compass, and a serrated knife for hacking away fouled straps before ejection. I once overheard whispers about cyanide capsules. These items jingle like a gunfighter’s spurs as the men enter and cause all the wives’ heads to turn.
The operations officers, ground pounders, paper pushers, desk jockeys, the men whose careers stand or fall on Brasso, Kiwi shoe wax, and efficiency reports, all stop eating and watch the fliers strut in, talking too loudly, unshaven, smelling from whatever mission they just completed, from the hours of sweating or freezing in the nylon suits. The wives shift in their chairs, turning away from the chubby-legged children in the pool toward the fliers. The five men take a table, order Cokes and coffees, and don’t try very hard to hide the pint bottles of bourbon and scotch they tip into the drinks. The redheaded major with the smirky grin holds his mug up in a toast to the ladies. A wife, the prettiest one, a petite brunette wearing a lacy cover-up over her bikini, holds her glass of iced tea up in an answering toast.
A phrase LaRue Wingo used to use when TDY crews like this one would enter the club echoes back to me: “exchange program.” It meant nothing to me when I was one of the children splashing in the pool outside the window.
The crew and the wives size each other up. The wives who stare the longest are most likely to have dropped their husbands off at the Flight Line that morning to take off on TDY missions bound for—who knows?—maybe the exact base this crew has come from. Maybe at this very moment the husbands are heading for the O Club at that other base where the wives of this visiting crew are huddled over Cokes and iced teas. Exchange program.
And then Fumiko walks in. Instantly, all the male attention turns away from the wives and toward her as she crosses the coffee shop coming to me. For a second I am proud that the best-looking woman in the room is my friend. Then I catch sight of the wives’ stretch marks and varicose veins that are just like the ones Moe bears and the pride vanishes. I jump up, intercept Fumiko before she reaches the table, and head for the cashier.
As we leave the coffee shop, the shoeshine man stops us. He points excitedly to me and speaks to Fumiko in rapid Japanese. The words “Moe” and “ojosan” jump out at me several times. Fumiko nods and answers with a brisk and smiling, “Hai! Hai!” She repeats the same words: “Moe, ojosan.” Though the shoeshine man bows and beams at me as I walk away, I assume that the words I heard are random syllables.
It is not until I am outside that I recall ojosan means “daughter.”
DDT
The wind has shifted direction, and the smell of JP-4 fuel drifts over from the Flight Line.
Fumiko catches up with me and grabs my arm. “Hey, why you piss off me?”
“I’m not pissed off at you.” But I am and have no desire to deal with any of this.
“Don’t shit me.”
“Yeah, I know. I’m your favorite turd.”
“Okay, you terr me Moe? Captain?”
“He’s a major now.”
“Onaree major? He fry after reave Yokota?”
Her question surprises me. “No, he never flew again.”
“Moe? She sing?”
This question surprises me even more. “Not really.”
“No fry, no sing.”
There is such sorrow in Fumiko’s voice that my irritation disappears. “What happened then? If it wasn’t you and my father, what happened? We were happy, we were a family, my parents loved each other; then it all ended. We left Japan and nothing was the same again.”
“You were there. The night ebbrything ober, ebbrything end. You were there.”
“Fumiko, I was ten years old. I don’t remember.”
“Ten? Ten not so rittoe.”
“Fumiko, tell me.”
“Okay, but you hear stupid pan-pan girl talk or you hear what Fumiko mean?”
“I’ll hear what you mean.”
“Okay, but I terr you part story, Moe part story, got to terr arr story.”
“Yeah, fine, of course.”
“No, you say ‘yeah, fine,’ but story rong, berry berry rong. Have to terr when Fumiko rittoe gurroe, so you know why ebbrything hoppen. Rong rong story.”
“No, I want to. I want to hear all of it.”
“Okay. Come.”
Fumiko leads me through the gardens surrounding the club to an area far behind the pool that had always been off limits. As children, we were told it was off limits because it occupied a low spot where water ponded, and no amount of the DDT that was sprayed every evening in thick pine-smelling clouds over the entire base would ever eliminate the mosquitoes whose bite could make your brain swell up and turn you into a vegetable.
An old gardener, stooped with age, greets Fumiko by name and unlocks the gate blocking the path. We enter the thick stand of pines, supposedly guarded by what Bosco would have told us were ravenous Culex tritaeniorhyncus mosquitoes. The path leads to a small, exquisite teahouse hidden away in the forest. As she slides back the paper-screened doors, Fumiko explains that the teahouse is reserved for special parties, for generals, visiting senators, members of the Diet. It is understood that Fumiko has entertained at these parties.
Nothing in the teahouse betrays that a century ago the Black Ships ever lan
ded to taint Japan with Western ways. Fumiko leaves her shoes at the entrance. Her steps become shorter; she shuffle-glides with hydraulic ease across the smooth wooden floor, leading me to a room at the back of the teahouse.
The floor of the room is covered with tatami mats. Polished cypress and soft white shoji walls are offset by a cloisonné vase with a few pussy willow branches artfully arranged in it. The light filtering through the paper screens is dim and gently diffuse. One wall opens onto a garden. The scents of jasmine and cedar hang in the air. Fumiko rolls her hand over and, her pale wrist leading, gestures to a low table. We kneel at the table, sitting on our heels.
Fumiko composes herself. Her brash American manner drains away and she sits silent for several minutes. When she speaks, the bar-girl English is gone. She sounds again like the timid young woman who slid the door open on the little house in the alley.
“You risten Fumiko or risten what Fumiko mean?” Her voice is as high and babyish as it was that first time.
“I’ll hear what you mean. I promise.”
And I do. When Fumiko begins, I stop hearing the words she uses. I hear again what she means as she tells me her long story, a story that started many years before my family ever sailed into Yokohama Bay.
Breath
“Imagine,” Fumiko tells me as she begins her long story, “what cannot be imagined. Imagine Japan conquered. You believe you can imagine this, but you cannot. You cannot because we Japanese even twenty-three years later still cannot imagine it.”
I can’t understand why she’s starting this far back but will myself to stay with her, to hear the meaning of her story.
“The days before the war officially ended were the hardest. When my mother learned my father had died on Okinawa, she lay down in the cave and prepared to die. But death does not come to someone strong enough to wish for it. She continued to eat the yam roots and mushrooms I grubbed from the earth and the barley and radishes I stole from the villagers’ gardens, but they only fed her body for her spirit had died.
“From then on, my real mother, my beautiful, elegant mother, existed in my memory alone. There she stood in her dressing room back in our house with the blue tile roof in Tokyo, in front of a tall thin mirror framed in dark mahogany, her long hair parted in the middle and flowing to her knees.
“My mother was a warrior when she dressed. Her long, square sleeves sliced the air as she bound the slippery mass of silk of her kimonos and under-kimonos about herself, tightening the strings around her waist until her face went pale from the pain and the room filled with the smell of camphor used to preserve her kimonos. When she finished, my mother was perfect. Do you remember the fragrance of the apricot blossom? My mother was more perfect.
“The stranger that I led from the cave on the last day of the war wore a dirty monpe bulky as a baby’s diaper with her tattered cotton kimono tucked in at the waist. She had cut her long hair. Stubby ends stuck out like the fur on a macaque’s head and were tied back from her face with a piece of white rag. On her feet were black rubber boots with a pocket for the big toe like the gardener back at our home in Tokyo wore. She sat with her legs splayed apart.
“I didn’t know what the day was then, but now all Japanese know this date: August fifteenth, 1945. The villagers gathered in the yard of the chief, who brought his radio outside, the only radio in the village, and nestled it on a grimy cushion of violet silk.
“I was fourteen and did not understand why all the villagers who had been so hard and cruel for the past years now fell silent. The voice coming from the radio was thin and whiny and spoke in Japanese so old-fashioned and high-blown that, any other time, these farmers would have jeered. Instead, they all stood in the boiling sun with their heads bowed gentle as lilies.
“The Emperor told us that we must endure the unendurable. That from then on he was no longer a god. That we must call the enemy the Allied Army of Occupation. A howl rose from the villagers. They wailed and sobbed, gasping for air, tears running down their faces. I had never seen grown-ups act this way, and it scared me.
“Though my mother kept her head bent even lower than anyone else’s, her shoulders were shaking, not with sobs but with laughter she was fighting to contain. I asked her why she was laughing and everyone else was crying. She dug her bony fingers into my thin arm and pulled me so close that her words were wet on my ear. When she told me the war was over, I could not contain myself. The long nightmare would end. We would go home. My beautiful mother would return.
“I was infected with the laughter my mother was hiding. Unlike her, however, I could not contain it. When they heard my giggles, the villagers raised their heads and stared at me in horror.
“My mother slapped me so hard tears flew from my eyes, she jerked my arm until I thought she had pulled it from its socket, but still the villagers glared. My mother said that what happened next was my fault, because I laughed when the Emperor said Japan had lost the war. But I think it all would have happened anyway.
“Late into the night, all the men of the village stayed at the headman’s house. One had a cousin who was in the navy. He’d been on Okinawa when the Amekos invaded the island and raped all the women with penises big as beer bottles. Ten females, twenty—old women, girls, infants torn from their mothers’ backs—none were enough to satisfy them. And the dark ones were even worse.
“ ‘That is the nature of conquerors,’ said another man, adding, ‘Remember Nanking.’ He held up his hand, which was missing the thumb he’d blown off when his rifle misfired during the sack of Nanking. Nothing more needed to be said, though the thumb-less man did remind the group that the women of Nanking were not Japanese, not real humans, so no true offense had been committed.
“The problem before them that day was that since their young men, soldiers of the Imperial Army, were the finest men on earth, what had happened in Nanking was, obviously, the best that could be expected of conquerors. When the barbarians’ Allied Army of Occupation arrived it would be infinitely worse, especially for women. Something had to be done. Fear made the hot night grow cold.
“Each day brought new rumors. The Amekos were in Tokyo burning homes and looting temples. The Amekos were in the prefecture raping Buddhist nuns and grandmothers. Each day the conquerors came closer to the village.
“After weeks of debate, they agreed on what had to be done. Early the next morning, the packing began. By the end of the day, all the daughters of the village, all the young wives, were gone. We, my mother and I, of course, had no one to send us off. Nowhere to be sent. For the first time, I noticed the women’s chattering because it had fallen silent as if all the birds had died. Late that evening, the old women who were left came to our cave and invited us to stay with them. One had the audacity to wear the stork-and-water-lily kimono she had traded my mother for one small packet of weevil-infested barley. They told my mother that there would be bowls of rice and hot baths for us. That in the end we were all Japanese. Our hearts beat as one. We must sacrifice for the good of all.
“I thought my mother would snarl and hiss and throw the old bitches out. Instead, she lowered her eyes and answered in a soft voice that, yes, we would come. Just as the old women broke into cracked smiles, my mother added if—and they stopped. ‘If my wedding kimono is returned to me.’ They agreed immediately.
“That night we tied up all the belongings we had left in a furoshiki: the comb carved from cypress that still carried the scent of my grandmother’s hair, a dozen ten-yen coins. I started to put in the handful of barley that we were saving for our meal the next day, but my mother told me to leave it behind. That we would never eat barley or taro or yams again. Only rice, the silvery-white rice that makes a Japanese feel Japanese. I felt I had been saved from death, but my mother was sadder than I had seen her since she tried to die, and I was frightened again.
“My fears melted as the old women placed bowl after bowl of rice in front of us. In the village sentoo, they scrubbed me and my mother and joked as if we had all
been friends throughout the war. As if they had never turned their dogs on us for taking a yam. It was only when I was soaking in the big wooden tub filled with water heated to an almost unbearably delicious heat that I noticed my mother staring at me with the same expression she used to wear in our fine house in Tokyo while setting out new candles, incense sticks, flowers at our family altar. She had the same look when she rang the bells and turned a page in the Book of the Dead. This book had thirty-one pages, and on each page were the names of the family’s ancestors who had died that day. It frightened me to see my mother looking as if she were reading my name in our family’s Book of the Dead.
“Each day, we stayed with a different old woman and her family, who fed us as much as our stomachs could hold. Seeing how little the women had, how their shoulder blades stood out like plucked wings, I felt sorry for them and regretted stealing their food. For three days, we were all friends; our hearts beat as one. On the fourth day, a boy from the next village ran into ours. Panting and out of breath, he told us the Amekos had been spotted. The village elders nodded and began burning wood to make fuel for their one vehicle, an ancient truck that ran on charcoal.
“In the house of the village chief, the old women patted rice flour on our faces, outlined our eyes with soot, and reddened our lips with crushed berries. When they were finished, they left us alone. My mother brushed the hair away from my face and stared into my eyes. ‘You are beautiful,’ she told me, but in a sorrowful way that made me think she wished I were ugly. She told me to shut my mouth when I asked her where we were going. She told me the answer to that and to all the questions I might have in the future was that my belly was full, I was clean, new clothes covered my back, and my mother had fulfilled her obligation to me in the only way she knew how. She ordered me to repeat that to myself no matter what happened.
