Country of Origin

by Don Lee

  “Your investigation stopped there?”

  “I really tried my best. I was very sorry to disappoint Lisa Countryman, but that was as far as I could go.”

  “When was the last time you saw or heard from her?”

  “Sometime at the end of May, I think.”

  “There’s nothing else you can tell me?”

  “Hm?” She seemed to hesitate, then shook her head no. “You really don’t know what happened to her?” she asked. “Or do you have an idea but won’t tell me?”

  Kenzo momentarily entertained a wild theory—that Naval Intelligence or the CIA was somehow involved in Lisa Countryman’s disappearance—but he dismissed it as ludicrous. Even when he went to the Human Resources Office in Yokohama the next day and, like Ako Abe, was refused the employment records, he understood it to be a matter of bureaucracy, not malfeasance.

  He had nothing more to go on, and he was prepared to write the advisory opinion that Lisa Countryman was dead, just as Kunichi wanted. But then he received a phone call from a woman. She said she needed to speak to him, and when he asked her to come to the station, she said she preferred to meet him outside. They agreed on the Almond coffee shop in Roppongi.

  At three o’clock, he walked into Almond, and a woman in her late twenties—nicely dressed and made-up—waved him over to her table.

  “You’re Inspector Ota?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Sit down,” she said. After he took a seat, she told him, “My name is Emi Fukuda. I used to work with Lisa Countryman at the club Rendezvous. The man you’re looking for, the nisei she went on dohan with, his name was David Saito.”

  SIXTEEN

  LISA HAD been so unprepared for it—the phone call. She had been at her Berkeley apartment, chopping vegetables to make paella. It was four-thirty, a cold but bright Sunday afternoon in September, and the phone rang.

  She couldn’t understand what Susan was telling her. It was incomprehensible. Not that Susan was being inarticulate. On the contrary, she was calm, coolly professional, the consummate nurse, as if she were breaking the bad news to a patient’s relatives. Yet these were her own parents. She sounded a little regretful, maybe, but utterly bloodless.

  It took some time for the police to piece together what had happened. Richard and Lenore had been at the beach at Fort Story. He was reading a book, and she went in the water for a swim, even though it was near sunset and a bit nippy out. When Richard glanced up and searched for her, he couldn’t see Lenore. He rose and looked and looked, and, becoming frantic, paced the sand at the water’s edge, calling out for her. It was dusk, and there were no lifeguards—it was after Labor Day—and no passersby except for one woman. “My wife,” he screamed to her. “I can’t find my wife.” Finally he saw Lenore, floating face-down. He ran into the light surf and dove in, and he and the woman carried Lenore out, and once ashore they began performing mouth to mouth and an approximation of CPR on her—he’d never been trained, why hadn’t he taken a Red Cross course? “Call an ambulance!” he told the woman, but she didn’t move. She knew Lenore was beyond the possibility of revival. She was dead. She had been under too long. In fact, although drowning was the official cause of death, an autopsy would show that she had suffered a stroke while swimming, a massive cerebral hemorrhage from which she would have never recovered. But Richard didn’t know that. He lifted her in his arms and carried her to the car and raced down the road for a hospital.

  They found the car on Atlantic Avenue, the driver’s side crushed and sheared after it had hit a telephone pole. They estimated that Richard had been traveling in excess of eighty miles an hour, and he had died instantaneously. They assumed he had lost control of the car, and said so in the accident report. Maybe he had leaned behind him to check on Lenore, who was laid out on the back seat, and when he turned back around, he saw he was drifting off the road and overcorrected, crossing the center line to the other side. Yet it was mysterious. He had been on a straightaway, and there were no skid marks. Had he intentionally crashed the car into the telephone pole? Lisa tended to believe that he had—not able to bear the thought of living without Lenore.

  Lisa flew to Virginia Beach, and almost immediately she and Susan argued. About everything. First of all, what to do about their parents’ burial. As retired career Navy, Richard was entitled to a funeral with military honors and interment in Hampton National Cemetery, just across the bridge from Norfolk, and Lenore could be buried with him. Susan, though, claimed that their father and mother had always said they wanted to be cremated and have their ashes spread into the ocean through a burial at sea.

  “I never heard them say that,” Lisa said. “When did they ever say that?”

  But Richard’s best friend, another Navy veteran, confirmed those wishes and arranged for the services.

  They had to be cremated one by one—two hours at a time, at a temperature of two thousand degrees, cooking them to dust. Lisa and Susan were both there when Richard was placed inside the chamber, but Susan didn’t stay for the actual cremation. She had to go home and tend to one of her three kids, who was sick with a stomach virus, she said. Alone, Lisa sat outside the chamber for the entire two hours, oddly feeling the need to be vigilant. She was afraid someone else’s ashes might be mixed with her parents’, and it frustrated her that, as much as it would have hurt her to witness, she couldn’t supervise the sweeping of their bone fragments into the cooling pan, couldn’t oversee the processing of their remains into particle.

  She called Susan when it was Lenore’s turn.

  “Ally’s really sick still,” Susan said. “I don’t think I can come. You go on ahead.”

  Lisa couldn’t believe her cavalier attitude. With each day, she became more incensed with Susan and her children. During the burial at sea, she let her kids—her daughter seemed to have made a miraculous recovery from her stomach virus—run around the deck of the boat as if they were on a picnic. During the wake, she let them play games and laugh. How could Susan let her children be so disrespectful? Didn’t she care? Didn’t she feel anything?

  But the real fight was to be over their parents’ house in Virginia Beach. Susan said that once the formal legal matters were settled in probate court, dividing the estate among the two sisters, she wanted to sell the house and split the proceeds. Lisa balked at the proposal.

  “I don’t see why you’re sentimental about this house,” Susan said. “You’ve never even lived here.”

  This was true. After shuttling all over the world, Norfolk had been their father’s last active post, and they had been assigned to naval housing on Sewells Point, Lisa attending Maury High School. When she left for UVA, Richard had retired, and he and Lenore had bought the three-bedroom rambler in Virginia Beach. Nevertheless, Lisa had come to the house every Thanksgiving and Christmas and sometimes during the summer for six years. It was the only permanent home she had ever known.

  A few days after the burial, she sat with Susan at the kitchen table. “Why don’t you move here?” Lisa asked.

  “That’s preposterous,” Susan said. “What am I going to do? Commute a hundred miles each way to work?”

  “Why couldn’t you get a job here?”

  “In this economy? Besides, I’m not going to uproot my kids. They’ve got it tough enough as it is.”

  “Let’s rent it out, then. Like you said, the economy’s lousy. It’s not a good time to sell. We should hang on to it for a couple of years and wait for the market to rebound.”

  Susan picked up their empty coffee cups, poured water in them, set them in the sink, and sat back down. “To tell you the truth, I need the money. Mark’s checks have been bouncing. He got laid off, and without child support, I’m deep in shit.”

  “There’s hardly any mortgage on this place,” Lisa said. “You could save a lot of money living here.”

  “What do you know about money? You don’t know anything. You’ve never had a real job. You’ve been in school your entire life, paid for by Mom and D
ad, thank you very much.”

  “That’s not fair. I’ve done it all on fellowships and loans.”

  “They’ve been helping you out every step of the way. Talk about child support.”

  “Maybe I’ll move here,” Lisa said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Maybe I’ll transfer to Old Dominion or William & Mary.” It was an impulsive suggestion. She didn’t even know if those schools had Ph.D. programs in cultural anthropology.

  “Look,” Susan said, “we’re going to split everything fifty-fifty, but I think I should have more say in the decision. I’m the oldest.”

  “And because you’re related by blood and I’m not?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Because I was adopted?”

  “Come on.”

  “You’ve always hated me,” Lisa said.

  “Let’s be grown-ups, okay?”

  “The shit you used to pull on me.”

  “Ancient history, Lisa.”

  “I’m sorry they loved me more.”

  “What? What did you say?”

  “They loved me more. You know they did.”

  Susan laughed softly. “You’re pathetic. If you weren’t so spiteful, I’d feel sorry for you.”

  They did, Lisa thought. They had loved her more. And why not? Susan had been such a cold, joyless child, a mean, misanthropic sourpuss without a generous bone in her body, exploiting every chance to be cruel to her adopted sister. She had been jealous of Lisa, of the way Richard and Lenore had doted on her, jealous of her light skin and straight hair, of her intelligence and voice—a musical talent that seemed inherited, while Susan was tone-deaf, sulking in her bedroom whenever the other three broke into sing-along. Susan had never suspected that Lisa, in fact, had been jealous of her, that she had wanted to look like her, truly and unquestionably black, that she had wished, more than anything, she could call Richard and Lenore her real parents.

  They settled nothing about the house that week, or the week after. What they did do was bicker over their parents’ possessions—their mementos, clothes, the family photographs, what to give away, what to keep, who would get what. Susan wanted to take some of the furniture right away—a handmade chest from the Philippines, a panel of screens with inlaid pearl from Taiwan—but Lisa said no, and then worried that Susan might rent a van and try to ferret away pieces in the middle of the night. By the time Lisa returned to school and Susan to her job, they were no longer speaking.

  They each hired an attorney. There was not an insignificant amount of money involved: Richard’s pension, the life insurance, Social Security, their mutual funds and savings, and, of course, the house. Susan’s lawyer filed a suit of partition to force a resolution and sell the property. Eventually the court agreed and ordered the sisters to inventory what was inside the house and decide on an equitable distribution of the items. It dragged on for months, dozens of back-and-forths through the attorneys about the dispensation of a vase or a picture frame. Lisa wavered and wrangled over every trivial piece. Susan just wanted it finished. She wanted the money. Finally, it was done. There was nothing more for Lisa to contest. The only thing left to do was sign the papers.

  IT WAS the brochure that sold her, the English version of the brochure for the Abe Detective & Research Office, which read: “It is the supporter whose truth which is hid is the best. It has already cried, and it falls asleep, unnecessary. It is exactly that it is troublesome with the knowing cultivated so far, your worry thing. Anything give OK in such cases as the flirtation, conduction, annoyance, missing, stoker measure, fickleness investigation. A new fact may be hidden behind the love. Love is full the vexatious mystery. There are some knots in the life. Trouble thing is done consulting sincerely. Secret strict observance.”

  Lisa had known it would not be easy to find her birth mother, but she hadn’t thought she would be stymied from the start. She had gotten brushed off at the US Embassy in Tokyo, told to go to the US Consulate in Nagoya, and when she got there, the Vice Consul had said before he could give her the records, she had to provide documentation she was Mayu Kaneda. It took weeks for the Commonwealth of Virginia to mail her a certified copy of the circuit court order that had legally changed her name to Lisa Countryman. She took the train back to Nagoya, showed the order to the Vice Consul, and at last was handed the records, but they didn’t tell her anything she hadn’t already known. She had found the same forms in the file cabinet in her father’s study. She did a little research and learned about koseki, went to Yokohama, and was summarily turned away by the Family Register clerk in the Aoba Ward Office. The clerk would not even look at her documents.

  She had no idea what to do next, until one night she was riding the subway home, the last train of the night, 12:17. The subway car was empty except for a few drunk salarymen who were passed out on the velveteen benches, their shoes neatly placed on the floor. Lisa was thinking she might have to hire a Japanese attorney and petition to obtain access to the koseki—did they have freedom of information laws in Japan? Then she looked up in the subway car and saw an ad for the Abe Detective agency: “We Find Ways When There Is No Way.”

  The moment she walked through the door of the agency, she felt reassured. Ako Abe was sympathetic and maternal, and she seemed confident she would be able to help Lisa.

  “I cannot make any promises, but this should not be impossible,” she said. “In Japan, we keep very good records, and, with the right approach, almost everything is available. But I want to give you a piece of advice. I want you to prepare yourself. What if I find your mother? What are your expectations? What is it that you really want from her?”

  What was it that Lisa really wanted? She wanted to recognize where she came from. She wanted to know who she was. She wanted to have a history. She had gone to Yokohama and stood outside the Nonohana-no-ie orphanage, and it had only stirred a vague picture of gray walls and dormitory futons and cafeteria meals. She had no recollection, really, of anything before the age of four, arriving in Norfolk, where everything had been so foreign, strange—these black people who claimed to be her parents, the white people on the naval base, this new language. She hadn’t known what was happening, or why, yet within a year she was speaking flawless English, and her new experiences, her new family, began replacing whatever memories she had had. She rebuilt her world, her identity, and she forgot about Yokohama, lost her Japanese. Then, abruptly, they were overseas again, in the Philippines, another Navy base, another country.

  They seemed to move all the time, and instead of feeling more secure with Richard and Lenore, she felt, with each new post, petrified. She was afraid she might not be good enough, she might do something wrong, and would be left behind at another orphanage. She did her best to be obedient, quiet, studious, neat, but she grew alarmed as she got older and turned whiter. She could no longer pass as black, as Richard and Lenore’s own child, and she could sense their embarrassment whenever they were in public, strangers staring at them, wondering what relation she had to this black couple. Unable to conceal that she had been adopted, Lisa began telling other children that her real parents had been killed in a car accident, a more appealing genealogy. Susan would always dispense with that gentle notion quickly enough, braying that Lisa was the illegitimate child of a Jap hooker.

  What did Lisa really want? She wanted someone to love her and protect her and never leave her. She wanted to belong somewhere, to someone. She wanted, for once in her life, constancy.

  Ako Abe’s revelation that she might be zainichi Korean was a shock and, to say the least, confused the issue. “I’m not half-Japanese?” Lisa asked.

  “I’m still looking into it,” Ako said.

  “What’s a zainichi Korean?” she asked.

  They were ethnic Koreans who were permanent resident aliens of Japan, remnants of the colonization of Korea from 1910 to 1945. Millions of Koreans had been dragooned to Japan to serve as slave laborers in coal mines, factories, and shipyards—and n
ot a few to work as comfort women. After World War II ended, the majority had returned to Korea, but about a quarter of them had stayed, fearing a worse fate in their homeland. Many of them had been born in Japan and spoke only Japanese. Like their compatriots in Korea, they had been forced to relinquish their language, their religion, their culture, even their names, given Japanese ones. But unless they became naturalized—a virtual impossibility—they lived as second-class noncitizens in Japan. They had to be fingerprinted for Alien Registration Cards, they couldn’t vote, they were banned from working as schoolteachers or civil servants and discriminated from most private jobs, branded as inferior, lazy, prone to crime and violence. Consequently, they did everything they could to pass as Japanese, and they lived in terror of being found out.

  In that light, it seemed almost charitable that Lisa’s mother had left her at the orphanage door. She would have been saddled with the worst stigmas imaginable: a half-breed, a bastard child, a dirty Korean, a nigger.

  Ako worked tirelessly, and after a month, tracking down the hospital nurses, the owner and patrons of Club Zoo Fly, civilians who had worked on the Navy base, she narrowed the search down to one woman, a suspected Korean, who in 1955 took a five-month leave of absence from her job in the Office of Naval Intelligence, but that was where she ran into the roadblock about the employment records and, suddenly and dishearteningly, the investigation ended, without her having learned the woman’s name.

  AT LISA’S suggestion, they met at the Stockholm Farm Lounge, a bar in Shibuya that predictably had no associations with anything Swedish or agricultural. It was in the basement of an office building—a small dark room with a slate floor and leather club chairs and an open fireplace in the center. It was the first time she had seen David Saito since the night of the kaiseki dinner.