eighteen
Ka-ke, Near Hiroshima: April 1946
On a low hill the gravestones tilt crazily, as if trying to wrench loose from the soil.
“It was the bomb,” Toyo explains. “Even here, fifteen miles away, like an earthquake sent to rip the world in two.”
Woody, gazing at the stones, says, “Were many in our family lost?”
“We were lucky,” Toyo says. “Only one. He would have been your cousin. None of the rest of us were in the city then.”
“And is he buried here?”
“No. He was near the center of the fire storm. But let us not talk of that. I did not bring you here to talk of that. Do you see this stone?”
“This one?”
“‘Your father was buried here in nineteen thirteen.”
Woody looks at her, wondering how old she really is, wondering how well she remembers. She is Papa’s aunt. She must he eighty. He studies her face for some measure of how far her recollection can he trusted. He thinks of Granny, not yet this old, but blind, forgetful, full of needs that must be cared for and tales everyone half listens to. Toyo’s not at all like that. She has a monks tranquillity. Her eyes are still alert. Her face shows both the burden and the full understanding of all her eighty years or more.
With great care Woody says, “But I told you, he lives in California now, today, alive, with ten children, of which I am the second oldest.”
“In nineteen thirteen he had been gone for nine years, with no word. To the family in Japan, he was dead. This is his gravestone. I show it to you so you will know how much he mattered to us here, so you will know how happy you have made me bringing this news that he still lives. The happiness I feel now erases all this war has put us through.”
Woody looks away, tears welling in his eyes. He stares at the stone, the characters engraved on it. When he looks back at Toyo he expects to see her weeping. She isn’t. She gazes intently at him, as if he is ready to disappear, as if to imprint him in her mind before he’s gone.
“Come,” she says. “We don’t want to linger here. There are many things to see, many relatives to meet. Everyone will want to see Ko’s son.
Woody has postponed this visit many times, postponed the train ride south from Tokyo, afraid of how he’d be received. Being an American is hard enough; being a Nisei among these occupying forces is sometimes agony. He dreads those looks that seem to call him traitor to his homeland or his race. And if he sees such looks in Tokyo, what might he not see in the eyes of those who survived the leveling and the ash heap of Hiroshima? Yet that part of the country is his family’s seat and too close not to visit.
He decided to come hearing sugar, since he knows how hadly everyone wants it these days. His teams job is to break up the black markets that have sent prices soaring. The army schools perfected his Japanese. Working in civilian clothes he has confiscated tons of sugar and then watched it disappear from the warehouses, as if through a funnel he is sure leads back into the street.
He came bearing as much as he could pack into one large suitcase, about fifty pounds. But he knew, as soon as he arrived, that he did not need the sugar to cancel out his GI crewcut and his American smile. Being Ko’s son was enough, being family. That was all they saw.
They accepted the sugar, of course. But they bowed so graciously, thanking him, you’d scarcely guess their deep craving. Refusing to unwrap the package in his presence, or even seem interested in the contents, they carried it, like a coat in need of a closet, to some other part of the house. Just a hint of embarrassment gave them away, a tinge in the cheek for the fact that such a common item should now be so highly prized. And this was of a piece with their unspoken apology for the general condition of what they had to offer him in return.
Entering, Woody had passed through an immaculate rock garden, its sand white and freshly raked. A hedge of high hamboo bordered it. Inside, the rooms were almost empty—a large, once elegant country house stripped of all but a few mats, an altar in one corner of the first room, a funeral urn. They had not been hit by bombs. The war itself, the years of losing, had turned the house into a clean, swept, airy skeleton.
And yet, if you only watched Aunt Toyo, you might never guess the price of this defeat. She moved with an ancient, inextinguishable dignity. Her cook prepared for Woody a special meal of teriyaki fish, its sauce enriched by the gift of sugar, and Toyo served it on one of her few remaining treasures, a fine set of porcelain. She served him small, steaming cups of precious prewar sake a cousin had brought along and opened for this celebration. Afterward she led him to a room of clean, close-woven tatami mats and, over his protests, made him accept the thick cover of down-filled silk he’s lying under now, a very old and valuable cover by the look and feel of it, so light against him it’s like being covered with warm air, and surely the one piece of bedding she has kept for herself.
His eyes close. How royally they’ve treated him, he thinks, in spite of all they’ve lost. How pleased Papa will be to hear of this reception, and to know Toyo is well, and how proud he’ll be when Woody returns to tell what a family they come from in Japan. Woody himself is proud already and more than a little relieved to know that those stories Papa used to tell them—about an estate so broad a man could not cross it in one day on horseback, about the generals and the judges and educated women and the fine houses he lived in as a boy—that all those tales were true. Until today, as much as he respects his father, Woody has kept open a little door of doubt. Now that door has softly closed, leaving him wonderfully secure, and stronger, in a room whose dimensions are finally known.
As he dozes, it seems to him a room one can fall asleep in quite easily, a comfortable room, warm, and nearly dark now. He would let the black weight of sleep settle over him completely. But something rouses him. Another presence. Something, or someone has joined him in the room. His eyes spring open.
She is next to him, sitting back on her heels, hands folded in her lap, her dark kimono sheening in the half light, and gazing at him the way she did this afternoon, steadily, intently. This time the tears drop down her cheeks. She had been the one, forty years before, who gave Papa the money he needed to leave Japan and sail to the Hawaiian Islands. His favorite aunt. Her favorite nephew.
Quietly she says, “You look so much like Ko-san. Around the mouth, just like him. And around the eyes. There is a Wakatsuki look, you know, right at the corners, the way the lines crease back.”
Involuntarily he reaches up to touch the corner of one eye, feels the wetness there, wants to answer her, wants to find some words to knit those years together, that gap of time. A thickness in his throat makes speech impossible.
She rises. Her eyes drink him in a moment longer. “Sleep. Sleep,” she says, and noiselessly scurries out.
He watches her, and watches the screen slide shut, struck by her grace in even this small gesture, learned from centuries of screens slid shut. From somewhere a light illuminates the rich paper texture of the screen. Then the light goes. Woody lies suspended in the warm darkness, buoyed up by a sadness both heavy and sweet. He strokes the skin above his cheekbones, squeezes shut his eyes, to feel what happens when the creases form, tries to visualize it. He rubs his eyes to rub away the water and begins to conjure Papas face. It takes a long time, as if Papa had to cross the whole Pacific to make his appearance in this room. When he’s finally standing there, Woody is amazed at how his stance resembles Toyo's. For the first time he understands that crazy pride. And with his fingertips still touching creases, he marvels at this resemblance too—Papa’s eyes, and his own. He’d never seen it before, never thought to compare himself with Papa, never dared. Now he knows what he should have said while Toyo knelt here.
“Tell me more about him, Auntie. Tell me how he dressed as a young man, how he walked, and what he did for his amusement. Tell me everything you can remember.”
He aches to call her back, and almost does, almost calls her name into the dark, quiet maze of screens and mats and c
orridors. But doesn’t. There is time, he thinks, time for all those questions. Tomorrow we will talk. She likes to recall those days. She says there is still a hill outside of town that Papa used to climb. Tomorrow I will climb it and see what his eyes used to see.
nineteen
Re-entry
A FEW DAYS BEFORE WE LEFT MANZANAR PAPA decided that since we had to go, we might as well leave in style, and by our own volition. He broke free of the lethargy that had nailed him to our steps for months. He grabbed his Bismarck walking stick and took off, almost at a run, heading for Lone Pine to buy himself a car. Mama tried to talk him out of this. Traveling by bus made much more sense, she said. It was faster, and we’d be there in a day. He snorted with disdain at her advice.
Before the war he had always preferred off-beat, unpredictable cars that no one else of his acquaintance would be likely to own. For a couple of years he drove a long, six-cylinder Chrysler that got about nine miles to the gallon. In the early thirties he drove a Terraplane. Late that afternoon he came back from Lone Pine in a midnight blue Nash sedan, fondling the short, stubby gearshift that projected from its dashboard. The gearshift was what attracted him, and it was one of the few parts of that car to reach southern California unscathed. To get all nine of us, plus our clothes and the odds and ends of furniture we’d accumulated, from Owens Valley 225 miles south to Long Beach, Papa had to make the trip three times. He pushed the car so hard it broke down about every hundred miles or so. In all it took four days.
I went in the first load, with Mama and May and a back seat heaped to the ceiling with dishes and lamps and bedding. A double mattress was tied to the roof. We could have been an Okie family heading west, while Papa in his wide-brim hat and his turtleneck sweater drove like a wild man, as if he couldn’t wait to get back to civilization.
I didn’t understand this, after all the stories we’d heard. Each time the car collapsed, I prayed we might be stranded there indefinitely. But he would leap out, cursing, and bully it into motion again, fix the tire, replace the fan belt, kick the radiator, whatever was required. I still see him standing by that desert road, in the hot shade of a great saguaro cactus, the blue hood open, as he shouts at the engine in Japanese, damning it and damning the man who sold him this car. He slams the hood shut in disgust, ready to attack it with the butt end of his cane, and that slam, as if by insult, somehow starts the car, so that Papa has to jump in and grab the steering wheel and that dashboard gear knob before the Nash drives away without him.
When he came back from Lone Pine he was drunk, on the first real whiskey he had tasted in years. He was drinking all the way past Mojave, and into the northern suburbs of Los Angeles. There he suddenly sobered up, and his mood began to match what mine had been since we drove out the main gate, as if what we had all been dreading so long was finally to appear, at any moment, without warning—a burst of machine-gun fire, or a row of Burma-Shave signs saying Japs Go Bach Where You Came From.
The stories, the murmurs, the headlines of the last few months had imprinted in my mind the word HATE. I had heard my sisters say, “Why do they hate us?” I had heard Mama say with lonesome resignation, “I don’t understand all this hate in the world.” It was a bleak and awful-sounding word, yet I had no idea at all what shape it might take if ever I confronted it. I saw it as a dark, amorphous cloud that would descend from above and enclose us forever. As we entered Los Angeles, I sat huddled in the back seat, silent, fearing any word I uttered might bring it to life.
But there was no sign of it anywhere, in fact no response to us at all as we drove down the palm-lined boulevards, past the busy rows of shops and markets, the lawns and driveways of quiet residential streets. Leaving in 1942, no one had any idea what to expect, since no one knew what awaited us; we had been underprepared and that just deepened the shock of what we found. Now the situation was reversed. In our isolated world we had overprepared for shows of abuse. If anything, what greeted us now was indifference. Indeed, if the movements of this city were an indication, the very existence of Manzanar and all it had stood for might be in doubt. The land we drove away from three and a half years earlier had not altered a bit. Here we were, like fleeing refugees, trekking in from some ruined zone of war. And yet, on our six-hour drive south, we seemed to have passed through a time machine, as if, in March of 1942 one had lifted his foot to take a step, had set it down in October of 1945, and was expected just to keep on walking, with all intervening time erased.
In the months to come, because one did have to keep on walking, one desperately wanted to believe nothing had changed during those years of suspended animation. But of course, as we soon discovered, everything had.
Our most immediate problem was where to live. What Papa had read in the papers was true. Housing was short and getting shorter. During 1944 over a million people had moved into California from the south and midwest. But due to wartime priorities, very little new housing had been developed. Now, 60,000 Japanese Americans were returning to their former communities on the West Coast and being put into trailer camps, Quonset huts, back rooms of private homes, church social halls, anywhere they could fit.
We were luckier than many. The American Friends Service—the same people who had helped us after the eviction from Terminal Island—helped us rent and move into an apartment in Cabrillo Homes, a housing project in west Long Beach, built by the government for shipyard and defense plant workers. At the time it seemed to be a big step up in the world. There would be no more standing in chow lines; now Mama had a stove to cook on. We had three bedrooms. And we had an inside toilet. As soon as the front door was closed, Papa went in and flushed it, and when it worked, we all hooted with delight.
I didn’t really see Cabrillo Homes for what it was until I started high school, a few years later. It looked like a halffinished and undermaintained army base. Long, two-story stucco buildings were set in rows like barracks. Peeling, two-by-four banisters guided you up the outside stairways. Community clotheslines ran above the ragged strips of grass.
Mama picked up the kitchenware and some silver she had stored with neighbors in Boyle Heights. But the warehouse where she’d stored the rest had been unaccountably “robbed”—of furniture, appliances, and most of those silver anniversary gifts. Papa already knew the car he’d put money on before Pearl Harbor had been repossessed. And, as he suspected, no record of his fishing boats remained. This put him right back where he’d been in 1904, arriving in a new land and starting over from economic zero.
It was another snip of the castrator’s scissors, and he never really recovered from this, either financially or spiritually. Yet neither did he entirely give up. One of the amazing things about America is the way it can both undermine you and keep you believing in your own possibilities, pumping you with hope. To maintain some hold on his self-esteem Papa began to pursue his doomed plan for setting up a housing cooperative among the returning Japanese. In our small front room he built a drafting table and worked on sketches for what would become the thick pile of blueprints he carried to households and civic offices all over Los Angeles County, looking for support.
Mama’s first concern, meanwhile, as always, was how to keep money coming in. She had saved about $500, but that wouldn’t last long. Soon after we settled into Cabrillo Homes, the Friends Service found some openings at one of the fish canneries, and she went back to the kind of job she’d had when we lived on Terminal Island. It meant much more to her now than it had before the war. In 1941, after Papa disappeared, she was marking time while we drifted, awaiting the inevitable. Now she knew the household income was going to be her responsibility for quite a while. Papa would never accept anything like a cannery job. And if he did, Mama’s shame would be even greater than his: this would be a sure sign that we had hit rock bottom. So she went to work with as much pride as she could muster. Early each morning she would make up her face. She would fix her hair, cover it with a flimsy net, put on a clean white cannery worker’s dress, and stick a brightly
colored handkerchief in the lapel pocket. The car pool horn would honk, and she would rush out to join four other Japanese women who had fixed their hair that morning, applied the vanishing cream, and sported freshly ironed hankies.
As for me, the shapeless dread of that great dark cloud in my imagination gradually receded, soothed away by a sky the same blue it had always been, lawns the same green, traffic signals that still changed with dependable regularity, and familiar radio programs to fill up the late afternoons and evenings: Jack Armstrong, Captain Midnight, The Whistler, I Love a Mystery. That dread was gone. But those premonitions proved correct, in a way I hadn’t been at all prepared for, on the first day back in public school, when the shape of what I truly had to deal with appeared to me for the first time.
twenty
A Double Impulse
WHEN THE SIXTH-GRADE TEACHER USHERED me in, the other kids inspected me, but not unlike I myself would study a new arrival. She was a warm, benevolent woman who tried to make this first day as easy as possible. She gave me the morning to get the feel of the room. That afternoon, during a reading lesson, she finally asked me if I’d care to try a page out loud. I had not yet opened my mouth, except to smile. When I stood up, everyone turned to watch. Any kid entering a new class wants, first of all, to be liked. This was uppermost in my mind. I smiled wider, then began to read. I made no mistakes. When I finished, a pretty blond girl in front of me said, quite innocently, “Gee, I didn’t know you could speak English.”
Farewell to Manzanar Page 10
