Country of Origin

by Don Lee

  “Would it be that big of a deal?”

  “I’d get kicked out if I got caught.”

  “So don’t get caught.”

  He thought about it, looking at her. “It’d never work,” he said.

  She rolled onto her side and draped her thigh over his hip and nestled closer to him. “I don’t care what happens to me,” she said. “I can handle Vincent, and I can live without a car. But this is your career, isn’t it?”

  Her concern touched him. She had such a sweet, beautiful face. Sometimes it felt as if making love to her was his only reality, and all else was an interruption. “Kiss me,” he said, and she did.

  IT WAS one of the rare times he stayed late at the office. Like every good bureaucrat, Tom was usually out the door at five on the dot, but Kimball Reeves had dumped a last-minute project on his desk. He wanted Tom to update the Earthquake Emergency and Evacuation Plan. A delegation from the Federal Emergency Management Team was visiting at the end of the week to confer with their counterparts in the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, and the Consul General wanted to review the plan first thing in the morning, before the country team meeting.

  As everyone left the embassy for the night, Tom sat in his office, checking disaster relief locations for each ward in the city. He assumed Reeves had known for weeks that the plan would need to be updated, but had delayed telling Tom until now just to spite him. Reeves had been complaining about Tom’s absences—his long lunches and mysterious errands that took him away from the office for two hours at a time. He needed to sharpen up, Reeves had warned him.

  Mrs. Fujiwara stopped at Tom’s door and said, “I go now, okay?,” and he swore he saw her smirk. Soon, the entire Consular Section emptied, and he was left alone, making up a list of essential supplies: drinking water, packaged foods, baby formula and diapers, a radio, flashlight, extra batteries, medications, feminine hygiene products, eyeglasses, cash, passports.

  As the cleaning ladies came in, he was writing a passage about pets: Each pet had to be in an airline-approved container with at least a ten-day supply of food and up-to-date health and rabies certificates from a licensed veterinarian. Even then, their evacuation could not be guaranteed and they might get left behind, in which case they would be destroyed as humanely as possible.

  He stepped out into the visa section to get a cup of coffee and clear his head. The cleaning ladies were in the waiting area, vacuuming and dusting, and he thought for a moment about his mother, cleaning offices at night in Brockton.

  The door to Benny’s office was open. Tom didn’t deliberate or hesitate. He didn’t think at all. He went inside and plucked the small key stashed underneath Benny’s pencil jar and used it to unlock the top left drawer of Benny’s desk and picked up Benny’s ring of master keys and put it in his pants pocket and returned to his own office.

  He waited for the cleaning ladies to leave, wondering if he was really going to do this. He would have to unlock the cabinets and take out Masahiro Yamada’s Visa Tracking Card from the Visa Card File, his Visa Refusal Form OF-194 from the Category II Refusal File, his Non-Immigrant Visa Application Form DS-156 from the A–Z File, and his Lookout Entry Card from the Lookout File. He would have to stamp “REF 5A OVERCOME” on all the forms and cards, and then forge Benny’s signature on each page, after which he would have to feed Yamada’s passport through the Burroughs machine to apply an official visa stamp in red, blue, and green ink. No one would notice, Tom tried to convince himself. The visa would be buried under thousands of applications, Tom told himself.

  But when he opened the Visa Card File and flipped through the reference cards to Masahiro Yamada’s, Tom discovered he would not have to forge anything after all. He checked the Category II Refusal File to make sure. Benny had already overturned the refusal. He had approved the visa.

  Tom finished updating the evacuation plan a little before ten that night. He walked home, starving—he hadn’t eaten dinner. On the back street behind the Grew House, he encountered a Japanese man with wooden clappers and a young boy holding a candle-lit lantern. The two of them yelled, “Hi no yojin!,” startling Tom until he realized they weren’t speaking to him but chanting the phrase over and over as they ambled down the street. “Be careful of fire,” they were saying—a traditional neighborhood fire watch that had somehow survived modernity.

  The next morning, he went into Benny’s office. “Thank you, Benny,” Tom told him.

  Benny stared at the paperwork on his desk. “Give me his passport, and I’ll have it stamped,” he said, and they were both too ashamed of themselves to look at each other.

  MRS. FUJIWARA told him Susan Countryman wanted to talk to him. “Which line?” Tom asked, glancing at the blinking lights on his phone.

  “No,” Mrs. Fujiwara said. “She is here.”

  “Where? In Tokyo?”

  “In waiting room.”

  She was sitting in a chair by the door, her suitcase next to her. Apparently she had come to the embassy straight from the airport.

  “Ms. Countryman?”

  She stood and turned around, and Tom was bewildered to see that she was black.

  She was a small woman, around thirty-five, her eyes hollow. She wore a burgundy polyester pantsuit and hugged her shoulder bag to her chest with both hands. Wearily, she said, “Could I speak to your supervisor?”

  In Reeves’s office, she produced a letter from her shoulder bag. Reeves read it, then handed it to Tom. The letter was from Congressman Vernon Beard of Virginia, a rabble-rouser if there ever was one, a famous civil rights activist, quick with accusations of racism whenever things didn’t go his or his constituents’ way. In the letter, he asked the Consular Officers to give Susan Countryman their full cooperation and bring the investigation of her sister’s disappearance to a conclusion as quickly as possible.

  “I feel like I’ve been getting the runaround,” Susan Countryman said. “I keep getting pawned off to that detective.”

  Reeves nodded. “What about that, Tom?” he asked in a grave tone that Tom had never heard him use before.

  “I’m sorry if it appears that way. I’ve tried repeatedly to get the police to follow up on the investigation, and I think they’ve done that, but there hasn’t been a lot to go on.” He summarized the turning points in the case, more for Reeves’s benefit than for hers.

  “They found out she was working in the sex industry?” Susan Countryman asked.

  He looked at her, still astounded she had come to Tokyo, and still nonplussed that she was black. She was very dark. She didn’t seem to be mixed-blooded. All along, he had assumed Lisa—and, in turn, her sister—was white. “It seems so. For research for her Ph.D.”

  “So it’s possible she got involved with organized crime,” she said. “It’s the same here as it is in the States, right?”

  “That’s a possibility.”

  “So she might have gotten in trouble with them.”

  “We don’t really know, to tell you the truth.”

  “But you and that detective think someone’s been trying to mislead you about what happened to her.”

  “Yes.”

  “You think she’s dead, don’t you?”

  He stared at her. She looked so exhausted. He remembered they had given the box with Lisa’s personal effects to Kenzo Ota. They should get the box for Susan Countryman, he thought. “Yes,” he said. “It’s been six months.”

  “Okay, then,” she said.

  Tom glanced at Reeves, and he knew they were both afraid she might cry.

  But she didn’t. She took a breath and asked, “If that’s the case, could I get a death certificate for her?”

  “Excuse me?”

  She explained that her parents had been killed in a car accident the year before. They had died intestate, and Susan and Lisa had had to go to probate to claim their parents’ assets and property, which was going to be evenly split between them. Yet once the proceedings were finalized, Susan had never gotten hold of Lisa to sign the co
urt papers. That was why she had been sending her telegrams. Now that Lisa was missing, the only way she could take over the estate was to obtain a certificate of death for Lisa.

  “I’m a single mom,” she said. “I’ve got three kids. I need to settle this. I can’t wait forever for the bureaucracy.”

  Tom felt disgusted. He was embarrassed for her. She hadn’t come to Japan for her sister. She’d come for the money. She was more concerned with money than her sister. “We don’t issue death certificates,” he told her. “The Japanese authorities have to do it, and by law, there has to be a number of years of continuous unexplained absence—I think it’s seven—before they’ll issue a certificate.”

  “Isn’t there something you can do?”

  “I’m sorry, no.”

  “Well, there might be something,” Reeves said. He pulled out the FAM from the shelf behind his desk. He flipped through the manual and read a passage, then showed it to Tom: Section 235 of Subchapter 7, Presumptive Death.

  Reeves said to Susan Countryman, “If we can get the police to submit a written advisory opinion with all the relevant facts and data, stating she was reported missing and is presumed dead, we can give you an amended FS-192, a Report of Presumptive Death of an American Citizen, which might be enough to settle the estate.”

  “Will the police do that?” she asked.

  “I think we can bring it to bear,” Reeves told her. “It’s not a definitive finding we’re asking for.”

  “Can I ask you a question?” Tom said to her.

  She nodded.

  “Were you adopted?”

  “What? Of course not,” she said, indignant. “She was adopted.”

  “She was born in Yokohama. Was her mother Japanese?”

  “That’s the assumption.”

  “And the assumption was also that her father was an American in the Navy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Was he black?”

  “Why does that matter? We never knew for sure, okay? The rumor was that he was some kind of mulatto. The mother was a bargirl. Lisa was in an orphanage until she was four, when my parents adopted her.”

  “Did she ever find out who her birth parents are?”

  “No.”

  “Did she want to?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Hang on,” Reeves said. “Can I see her picture?”

  Tom had the case file with him. He extracted the passport photo of Lisa Countryman and handed it to Reeves.

  “I didn’t put it together because I never asked her name,” Reeves said. “She came to the embassy in March or April. She was only here two minutes. She was looking for her adoption records, and I told her the US Consulate in Yokohama closed in 1971 and they transferred all their records to Nagoya. I sent her to Nagoya.”

  Tom looked down at the photograph of Lisa Countryman. Why hadn’t he noticed them before, the contradictory facial features, the parts that didn’t quite fit together, as on his own face? She was revealed to him now.

  “She was here to find her mother,” he said.

  FIFTEEN

  KENZO AND KUNICHI were summoned to the US Embassy, and in a conference room, they met with Tom Hurley, Kimball Reeves, Susan Countryman, and Mrs. Fujiwara, who acted as translator. Both Kenzo and Kunichi kept glancing at Susan Countryman, and Kunichi finally said to Mrs. Fujiwara, voice lowered, “Excuse me, please do not translate this, as I’m sure it would appear rude, but does this mean that the missing woman’s biological father was a kokujin?” A Negro. Mrs. Fujiwara nodded.

  In the car going back to the station, Kunichi told Kenzo to write an advisory opinion that Lisa Countryman was dead.

  “What about her birth mother?” Kenzo asked. “ It would be negligent not to follow up on her search for her. This woman could’ve been the last person to see her.”

  “Yes, okay,” Kunichi said. “Make a few inquiries, purely as a formality, then write the report.”

  “The regulations call for a due and diligent investigation.”

  “How much time have I allowed you to spend on this case? You’re completely incompetent.”

  “You won’t let me talk to the Atsuta woman or any of her hostesses. You won’t let me put out posters or even classifieds or ask the newspapers or the TV—”

  “You’re lucky you still have a job, Ota. Weren’t you listening at the meeting? No one in that embassy, not even her sister, gives a shit what really happened to Lisa Countryman. They want to pretend that everything possible was done, but really they just want the case closed. Wrap it up and write the report, or I’ll have Yamada do it for you.”

  Yamada. Kenzo kept seeing Yamada’s piss-yellow car parked outside the station, and each time, he felt tempted to vandalize it—scratch the paint or bend the antenna. He imagined Yamada and Miss Saotome were having a good laugh at his expense. He hadn’t seen or talked to Miss Saotome since spying her with Yamada. Whenever he left or returned to his apartment, Kenzo had been careful to skulk around corners and dash quickly in order to avoid her.

  He wished he had never met her. He had been doing fine before he met her. But it was too late now. She had done a terrible thing to him—the worst thing a person could do to another—and it was now irrevocable. She had awakened the loneliness in him, reminded him of his need for other people.

  On the train to Yokohama, he looked over the file from the US Consulate’s archives in Nagoya. They had made Lisa Countryman go all the way to Nagoya to fetch the documents, but with a simple phone call, Tom Hurley had been able to get photocopies of the file delivered to the embassy the next morning via diplomatic pouch. Most of the papers were US immigration forms: Form I-600 Petition to Classify Orphan as an Immediate Relative, Form I-604 Report on Overseas Orphan Investigation, Form IR-3 Immigration Visa Application for Orphans Adopted Abroad.

  The only document relevant to Kenzo was the official adoption decree from the Yokohama Family Court. It gave him Lisa Countryman’s original Japanese name, Mayu Kaneda; the name of the orphanage where she had lived, Nonohana-no-ie; and the name of the ward in Yokohama that had had jurisdiction over her adoption, Aoba-ku. With those pieces of information, Kenzo thought it would be relatively easy to track down Lisa’s natural mother.

  In Japan, privacy rights of individuals were superseded by the importance of the family. Until the American Occupation, the family had always stood as a legal unit, liable for any member’s actions. Everything that happened in a family was recorded in the koseki tohon, the family register, which was kept at the ward office of the family’s legal domicile, whether anyone still lived there or not. The koseki went back generations and detailed all marriages, births, deaths, divorces, adoptions, criminal convictions, occupations, relocations. Read carefully, the koseki could reveal all manner of familial impurities, from alcoholism to congenital defects. Together with juminhyo, certificates of current residence, koseki made it virtually impossible to hide the whereabouts of a Japanese citizen, which made them very valuable. They were supposedly kept confidential, but lawyers and the police could access them, and, with a little finessing, so could bill collectors, potential employers, and even nakodo like Miss Saotome, matchmakers checking for signs of improvidence in the betrothed. Lisa Countryman’s koseki would have both her adoptive and natural parents’ names.

  But when Kenzo arrived at the Family Register Subdivision of the Aoba Ward Office, he learned a koseki was not going to help him. There was no koseki for Mayu Kaneda, or for anyone she might have been related to.

  “I don’t understand,” Kenzo said to the woman clerk.

  “I don’t, either,” she said.

  “If her mother was Japanese, even if her father was a gaijin, she’d still be a Japanese citizen, correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “Then she should have a koseki.”

  “Unless,” the clerk said, raising her finger in the air, “she was abandoned.”

  Of course, Kenzo thought. How stupid of him. To bear a shiseiji,
a love child, who was also konketsu, mixed-blooded, especially if some of that blood was black, was extremely shameful. Lisa Countryman had been abandoned.

  “But that still doesn’t clear up everything,” the clerk said.

  “No?” Kenzo asked.

  “Even if both her parents had been unknown, as long as she was born in Japan, she would have been deemed a citizen. The mayor would’ve given her a name and started a koseki for her.”

  She suggested Kenzo go upstairs to the Child Guidance Center, where the adoption for Mayu Kaneda had been processed.

  “Before I leave, can I ask you,” Kenzo said, pulling out Lisa Countryman’s photograph, “was this woman here? It would have been sometime in the spring.”

  She looked at the photo and frowned. “This is supposed to be her?” she said. “She looks white.”

  “You’ve never seen her before?”

  “No, but maybe Mariko or Miyuki has.”

  She talked to the other two clerks, and Mariko came over and said she remembered Lisa Countryman coming to the office. “What did you tell her?” Kenzo asked.

  “I told her I couldn’t help her,” Mariko said to him. “She’s a gaijin. I can’t release koseki to gaijin.”

  The clerk at the Child Guidance Center, a pudgy young man with greasy hair, was snippy and officious. He told Kenzo to get a cup of coffee, it’d take him a while to retrieve the documents from storage. Kenzo killed a half hour at a coffeehouse, and still he had to wait an additional thirty minutes for the clerk, who finally plunked a thick file down on the counter for him.

  Kenzo never imagined so many documents were required for an adoption. Richard and Lenore Countryman had had to submit copies of their passports, military IDs, immigration forms, medical and psychological examinations, police clearances, income tax forms, bank statements, property deeds, and character references. Everything was there—all translated and notarized—except for one thing. “Where’s the birth certificate?” Kenzo asked.

  The clerk grimaced. He rubbed his eye, then flipped through the file. “Here,” he said, pointing to a smudged, blotchy carbon copy.