Snakeskin Shamisen

by Naomi Hirahara

  Mas felt his chest grow tighter as the clock continued its ticking. Years ago, he had had to throw away their old, defective clock and replaced it with a plastic one he’d gotten free at Santa Anita Racetrack. The face featured a jockey holding on to a racehorse, the image blurred as if they were going top speed. There were no numbers, so sometimes Mas was an hour off the real time.

  It was either four or five when Mas drove to Frank’s Liquor Store on Fair Oaks Avenue to use the beat-up pay phone outside on the sidewalk. He took out a couple of business cards from his wallet and propped them up in the graffiti-covered pay phone enclosure.

  “Your phone not workin’, Mas?” Frank walked outside to rearrange his stacks of the Los Angeles Times, the L.A. Sentinel, and La Opiñion by his open door.

  “Broke,” Mas said.

  “Here, here, on me.” Frank stuffed a couple of coins into the slot and went back in his store to give Mas some privacy. Mas knew who he would be calling first.

  “Alo here.” The detective’s voice was surprisingly loud over the phone.

  “Hallo, Mas Arai.”

  “Mr. Arai, how can I help you?”

  “Findsu out the man with shamisen—Judge Edwin Parker.”

  “Yes.”

  What? Alo knew already?

  “We got that information on the day of the murder. Anything else, Mr. Arai?”

  Mas felt like a fool. What had taken him and Juanita days to uncover had already been in the hands of Detective Alo, a real professional. He thought about mentioning his having been followed by Agent Lee, but he wasn’t sure what the relationship was between the Torrance Police Department and Homeland Security. It would be better to wait on that revelation.

  “Well, call if you happen to get a hold of any other information.”

  Mas ended the call and considered going back home. But instead he stuck more coins in the pay phone.

  At the third ring, she finally answered. “Hello.”

  “Professor Genessee.” Mas was surprised how her name rolled off his tongue, as easily as ordering hamachi from his favorite sushi bar in Little Tokyo. “Itsu Mas Arai.”

  “Mas, so nice to hear from you again. How can I help you?”

  “Sumptin’ happen.” Mas could only manage to whisper.

  Mas told Genessee a condensed version of events—from the Spam jackpot to the Hawaiian restaurant to the shamisen sensei, the Homeland Security agent, and the funny sound on his phone. And, of course, the arrest of Antonio Gushiken.

  “I think your Mr. Gushiken may be in serious trouble.” The professor didn’t mince words. “After 9/11, everyone’s on high alert about immigrants.”

  “Just a boy when he come ova,” Mas explained the little he knew. “The U.S. government the one who bring the family here in the first place.”

  Genessee knew all about it: Japanese Peruvians who were taken to a camp in Crystal City, Texas, to be part of a prisoner-of-war exchange. Only the exchange was never totally completed, and even if it had happened, what purpose would it have served? Japan wasn’t home for these Peruvians, as much as it wasn’t home for Americans like Tug and Spoon. So then the leftover Peruvian folks were truly homeless. Peru didn’t want them, and neither did Japan or the United States. It was only after work by some lawyers that the Japanese Peruvians were allowed to stay in the States, Genessee explained.

  “I hope your man has a good lawyer,” she added.

  Mas nodded. Big guns, wasn’t that what G. I. had said? “Don’t wanna be too involve,” he inadvertently murmured.

  “Mr. Arai, I think you’re already involved. You need to help Juanita. And her family. Isn’t that why you called me?”

  Mas felt his face grow hot. He glanced at his image in the metal faceplate of the pay telephone. On the scuffed surface was a distorted tan swirl with two dark holes, his eyes, staring back at him. Why was he calling this woman, whom he barely knew? What about her seemed safe and strong, somebody who could point him in the right direction?

  “Listen, Mr. Arai, I think I know of a place that can help you out.” She mentioned something about a library and then an address in South Central L.A.

  South Central? What kind of help was the professor offering?

  “It’s a private library—I’ve heard that records belonging to immigration attorneys in the fifties are stored there. I can even meet you there on Tuesday. Maybe we can find out information about this Isokichi Sanjo.”

  When Mas hesitated, Genessee added, “What do you have to lose?”

  My life, Mas thought, recollecting the daily reports of shootings in the area on the television news. But if the professor was not afraid, Mas wasn’t either.

  On Tuesday morning, Mas went down the Harbor Freeway, but this time not as far as Gardena. He got off at the Florence exit, recalling the intersection where the 1992 riots had started. Hadn’t there been a Japanese man pulled out of a melee by a black man who turned out to be a TV actor?

  He parked on the street, fed money into a parking meter, and approached a building with a long mural featuring a bunch of women—a bespectacled black woman in a suit and hat, a woman bent over a sewing machine, a woman wearing a hard hat with her arm raised. What kind of library was this? Mas wondered. Looked like a place for troublemakers, not researchers. But there, in front, wearing a dress that looked like it was made of Japanese batik cloth, was Genessee Howard.

  “Had any problems finding the place?”

  Mas shook his head. Genessee was wearing new earrings this time, simple pearls that made her earlobes look like open oysters. Instead of a purse or briefcase, she carried a large straw handbag.

  The metal folding security gate had been pushed aside to make way for visitors. The tint on the locked glass door was too dark for Mas to see inside. Genessee went straight for the black doorbell on the frame of the door. It was obvious that she had been there before.

  A large woman wearing a Mexican-style embroidered shirt opened the door and gestured for them to come in. Her salt-and-pepper hair was all mussed up—definitely a look of an asanebo, a late riser who had just rolled out of bed to come to work.

  The cavernous room felt a bit dreary, as if it had been drizzling inside. A few colorful posters punctuated the stark walls, but what took center stage were rows of bookcases filled with books of every size—yellowed tomes as solid as bricks, flimsy booklets as thin as mud flaps on a truck, and new paperbacks that glistened with hope and expectation. The whole place smelled like old paper, and Mas felt his body growing itchy, as if silverfish had gotten underneath his clothes.

  Mas’s eyes attempted to adjust to the dimness. How could anybody read in here? The professor, meanwhile, had been talking to the bedhead-haired librarian, who nodded and disappeared in some stacks. The professor set her straw bag on a fake wood table and pulled out a laptop computer and a yellow legal pad. She handed the pad and a pencil to Mas. “We’re not supposed to use ink,” she said to Mas, who let the pencil slip through his fingers. Now what was the professor expecting him to do? Mas preferred reseeding someone’s lawn to anything dealing with books and writing. But he needed to be strong and keep all his petty monku locked up inside, he told himself. Juanita and her father were in trouble, in need of any kind of break. So when the librarian emerged with a box full of files, Mas did not say one word of complaint.

  “These files have been popular lately,” the librarian said. The front of the box was marked AMERICANS TO PROTECT IMMIGRANTS COMMITTEE FILES, 1952–1960.

  “What do you mean?” Genessee asked.

  “Well, no one’s asked for them in years, and all of sudden, we’ve received three—well, four—requests, counting yours, over the past couple of weeks.”

  “Who’s asked for them?”

  The librarian denied the professor’s request. “You know, Genessee, that that information is confidential. You wouldn’t want me to be telling other people what you’ve been up to, right?”

  They went through file by file, paper by paper. There we
re newspaper articles from the fifties, legal documents, and finally correspondence. Letters from people Mas had never heard of, written to people he had never heard of. The pages of Mas’s legal pad remained empty, and his eyes began to slide shut. Before his forehead hit the table, Mas heard the professor’s voice: “I think I’ve found something.”

  Mas wiped the drool off the sides of his mouth and pushed his reading glasses back over his eyes. “Nani?”

  “Isokichi Sanjo, wasn’t that his name?” The professor traced a section of a letter with her smooth index finger. She sounded out the name: “I-so-ki-chi San-jo.”

  “Yah, datsu him,” Mas said, looking over Genessee’s arm. It was some kind of mimeographed letter. Dated 1953.

  “I guess he was among immigrants arrested for their affiliations with the Communist Party in the thirties.”

  Communists—aka, that’s what Gushi-mama had told them. But it didn’t make sense. If the letter was dated 1953, what did that have to do with something from the thirties?

  “It was the height of the Red scare. The McCarran-Walter Act enabled the government to deport ‘undesirable’ aliens, which was open to interpretation, let me tell you. Some of the deported had even fought for the Allied Forces during World War Two. But on the flip side, the act was the same legislation that allowed Issei to finally get naturalized. So most Japanese Americans view it as being beneficial.”

  Mas nodded. He did recall photographs in The Rafu Shimpo of Japanese men in suits and felt hats and their wives in dresses and sturdy black shoes raising their right hands to take oaths to be Americans. Just like Gushi-mama, these folks couldn’t wait to pledge allegiance to the country where they had spent most or all of their adult lives. Didn’t matter that three years of it might have been behind barbed wire. Didn’t matter that the government had forced them to leave their strawberry and lettuce fields ready to be harvested. Their love for America was deep; it went far beyond material possessions. It was wrapped up in their children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. They didn’t care about severing ties to the past, because they wanted to hold on to the future.

  “Let’s see.” Genessee rubbed the backs of her ears as if that move would help her think. “This letter mentions his defense attorney, Isaac Delman. A very well-respected civil rights lawyer. Helped a lot of people placed on blacklists during the McCarthy era.”

  Mas had never heard of him.

  “He died about a decade ago. His daughter Olivia is still alive. She’s on a few boards at UCLA. I’ve met her a couple of times.”

  Genessee flipped through different pages of the correspondence. “Wait a minute,” she said. “I guess Delman backed out and another lawyer filled in. Edwin Parker.”

  “Paa-kaa?” Mas’s voice came out high, like the cawing of a crow.

  “Edwin Parker,” Genessee repeated. “Sounds familiar. Isn’t there an Edwin Parker who’s a county judge?”

  Mas gave the professor a fake excuse to cut their meeting short. Genessee made some copies of the letter before they left. She lingered by the sign-out sheet at the front counter and finally joined Mas outside.

  “Well, I figured out who at least two of the three other people looking at the Americans to Protect Immigrants Committee files were. That agent you mentioned, Buchanan Lee? And a reporter for the Times—Manuel Spicer.”

  Mas didn’t know which one surprised him more—the government agent who had been tailing him and Juanita, or this new name, Spicer. But reporters were always sniffing around in dark corners. Who knew what other stories were buried in those files?

  Mas knew what he had to do. There was no reason to involve the professor further. She had done enough. She was a woman with a lot to lose: a good job, a title, a hyoban. According to Gushi-mama, Mas’s hyoban was dirt anyway. To hell with being a kurogo; Mas had to play it his way: straight.

  Mas knew where Judge Parker worked. Years ago, he had been called to jury duty and in spite of Chizuko clearly having written DOES NOT SPEAK ENGLISH on his jury response form, he had received instructions that he needed to call a number during a certain week in the summer. Chizuko indeed called for him, and, of course, his assigned number was selected. He would have to go in. “Tell them that you cannot speak Eigo,” Chizuko said, handing him a note on which she had typed: TO

  WHOM IT MAY CONCERN: MASAO ARAI DOES NOT SPEAK ENGLISH.

  On the day he was scheduled to appear for jury duty, he parked in a three-story parking lot across the street from the Music Center, walked four long blocks, and, after passing through a metal detector, waited with another group of people to go on the elevator. As he’d walked down one of the long corridors, he’d seen a familiar name on a plaque outside a courtroom: JUDGE EDWIN PARKER. His first instinct had been to hide; he didn’t know exactly why, because the doors were closed. But he did move across to the other side of the hall, protected by lines of taller people.

  Mas’s name was not called the whole day as he waited in a large room with year-old magazines and a television whose sound was muted. He had thrown away Chizuko’s note, anyhow. Despite what she thought, he wasn’t a child. He could speak and understand enough English, probably better than most, he thought. People usually just listened for words, while Mas knew that you needed to listen to the spaces in between the words.

  Mas headed to the courthouse now, locking his door with another screwdriver that he had fished out of his toolbox. He had only one hour to make his point or else face a sixty-dollar fine. He would keep it short. As soon as he stood before Judge Parker, he would know. Parker wouldn’t have to even say a word; Mas was sure he could read his face.

  But Mas didn’t count on being foiled at the door. He walked through the metal detector, only to have it buzz, causing the uniformed officers to straighten up after an apparently uneventful morning. One of them took him aside, waved a wand around his body, and then stopped at his jeans pocket. Sonafugun. The screwdriver. The officer with the wand made Mas lift his arms higher and patted the sides of his body. The man wasted no time in extracting the screwdriver; the next move was by the officer sitting on a stool by the metal detector. He removed a walkie-talkie from his belt and cupped it to his mouth. Mas couldn’t hear exactly what he was saying—all he knew was that it wasn’t good.

  A mustachioed man in a suit and tie and plastic-laminated badge crossed the lobby and spoke to the officer with the wand. He kept his eyes on Mas at all times. What did he think? That Mas at age seventy-two would make a run for it?

  The man in the suit finally approached Mas. “You can’t bring something like this into the courtroom,” he said, holding up the screwdriver.

  A new officer had joined him. A burly-looking one the size of a giant refrigerator.

  “Itsu my key. Open car door,” Mas tried to explain. His voice was high-pitched, and in the cavernous lobby, it sounded tinny and cheap.

  The officers exchanged glances.

  “What’s the nature of your business here?” the man in the suit asked. Mas tried to make out the name on his badge. The photo was old—in it, he had the same mustache, but was wearing a fat tie and glasses with thick plastic frames.

  “Judge Edwin Parker.”

  “Judge Parker? What business do you have with him?”

  Mas didn’t know what to say now. So he said a half-truth, half-lie. “Gardener. Izu Parker’s gardener.” So what if he was off by a couple of decades.

  The faces of the men instantly softened, relaxed. It was an identity that they could believe. And only a gardener could be baka enough to try to bring a screwdriver into a criminal courts building.

  “Parker behind on his gardening bill?” the officer with the wand asked. He smiled widely, as if he wasn’t really expecting an answer. The man in the suit whispered something in the seated officer’s ear, who began talking into his walkie-talkie again. Mas had to stand on the side for ten minutes until a familiar person appeared. Judge Parker, in a suit, without his robe.

  “Hello, Mas,” he said. The judg
e then addressed the officers. “It’s all right. I’ve recessed early anyway. He can come on up.”

  “You can get your key on the way out.” The officer smiled again, waving Mas’s old screwdriver.

  Mas awkwardly followed the judge to a set of closed elevators, joining a crowd of men in ties and women in nylon stockings and dresses, carrying either briefcases or carryout food. Mas said nothing. There was no sense in either of them attempting small talk.

  They rode an elevator to the fourth floor. It was the same courtroom that Mas had passed before, only this time they went through a small door next to the double doors, down a narrow hallway, and finally into Judge Parker’s private chambers. Papers and accordion files were neatly arranged on his desk. A black robe hung from a wooden hanger on the edge of a bookcase. Freshly dusted photos of the judge, Mrs. Parker, their children (who had grown up so much that Mas barely recognized them) were on display on his desk. Mas was surprised to also see on his wall a framed illustration of the ten camps that had once held Issei and Nisei. He had never pegged Parker as having been a lover of Japanese America, but if he really thought about it, some kind of connection was there. After all, Judge Parker had represented Sanjo and was on the board of the Japanese American Bar Association.

  The judge sat in a black padded leather chair. “What are you doing here, Mas?” he asked.

  “Needsu to talk to you. About Isokichi Sanjo.”

  “Sit down.” Judge Parker gestured toward a wooden chair on the other side of his desk. Mas did as he was told. His feet could barely touch the floor, and he couldn’t help but wonder if that was Judge Parker’s way of making him feel like a child.

  “I was his attorney. Yes,” Parker said.

  “You knowsu Randy Yamashiro, his son?”

  “Yes, well, at least that’s what Randy told me.”

  “He say?”

  “He called me on the Friday before the party. He wanted to talk to me.”