Her father blinked. Then he brushed her cheek. “It’s just for a time, until I sort things out. Anyway, you’ll be so busy,” he said, reminding her that school would soon be starting, and she’d have swim practice and sleepovers and Oatmeal Cream Pies and Suzy-U’s—
“Suzy-Q’s,” Katy corrected.
“Suzy-Q’s,” he said.
Obāsan gripped the collar of her blouse and began coughing.
Their mother jumped up. “Are you okay?”
Obāsan pointed at the water glass.
“She’s crying,” Katy observed.
“She just swallowed the wrong way,” their mother said, gently thumping Obāsan’s back.
Their father rose to refill her glass. At the sink, with his head bent, he looked worn, his back like someone else’s old coat.
Luna clutched her ear. “Are you divorcing us?”
Her father turned. “Of course not,” he said, but his face flushed a shade of red she only saw when he drank with his colleagues. Katy knocked back her chair and burst out of the room. “Liar,” she screamed. Luna covered her ears as the front door slammed.
Obāsan, coughing, got up. Tucking her chair neatly under the table, she quietly followed Katy outside. Through the sliding glass doors, still pale with summer light, they watched her approach the curled shape on the bench in Ojīsan’s garden. Luna slipped out of her own chair to join them, and nobody stopped her.
Outside, the cicadas were loud, the air a filtered gray, almost dizzying. When Luna reached them, Obāsan nudged Katy and made room for her. Luna sat against her grandmother, her steady warmth radiant, like the walls of their house in Urbana at midday but softer. It was a pleasant evening, the breeze dispersing her grandmother’s patter, pollinating the air with her twinkling words. Above, the clouds pinked, then blued. Obāsan patted their knees. “Hotaru,” she said, pronouncing the word she knew they knew because she’d taught it to them. And it was true: a whole galaxy of fireflies were flashing in the grass.
* * *
—
IN THE morning, they drove to the airport in the cloying rental car. Usually, they arrived early to shop for snacks and last-minute gifts, but today they didn’t even eat at the restaurant overlooking the runway. They headed straight to check-in and pretended not to see their father extracting his passport from their bundle. At the security gate, he took out the camera: two solemn children and a grim mother. Katy gasped. “We forgot the mikans!”
Luna pictured the mikans, plump and soft to peel; they always got a pack, bunched in a net, at the kiosk. “Can we get them?”
Her father glanced at the clock. “Maybe they’ll have them at Duty Free?”
Her mother, checking the zippers on the bags, didn’t reply.
“I’m sure they’ll have them at Duty Free,” he said.
Luna, though, was sure they didn’t. “They only have them there.” She pointed at the glittery shops down the concourse.
“Listen.” He knelt. “You’ll miss your flight. You can forgo them this once.”
Luna stared past him. “I want them.”
“All right,” he said. “We’ll make a deal. I’ll bring you a whole crate when I fly home.”
Luna studied her father, the glowing crate the size of a small mountain materializing between them. “Really?”
He nodded.
“Do you promise?”
Her father closed his eyes. When he opened them again, they were shiny with pain, his lips twitching as he worked to control them. Then his face tightened, and Luna knew he was shaping his words, words like “love” and “miss” and “soon,” which he would say because they were true—Luna knew they were true but not the entire truth, only what he wished most to be true. So she waited for it, that moment she knew would come, the moment when his tongue hefted his words for the last time. And when it came, the telltale pinch of his lips, just before he did it—opened his mouth and lied to her—she turned her head, the good side, away from him. But Luna didn’t need to hear his words or his exact tone—apologetic and full of promise—she could simply feel it, his breath like a small devastation inside her ear. And because she didn’t want him to suspect, or see him cry again, when he moved back to look at her, she gave him a full smile, as if she’d been listening and believed what he said.
Later, Luna will learn words like “biculturalism” and “fracture” to explain the pain that will skim her heart whenever someone mentions something that reminds her of summer in Japan. Like her father, she will learn to find solace in the rigor of academic practice, and in this way she’ll compensate for the loss, which she will not confront until she is in her late twenties, pregnant with her first child, her home a happiness that will blemish her, the way it will touch and terrify her deeper than any hurt. Then she’ll discover that, despite the anguish and disappointment, she’d loved her father, loved him irreplaceably.
But for now Luna has no words to describe this feeling, this weight, which has traveled from her ear to her chest, constricting the tears that are refusing to come, even here, at the boarding gate, where they can see him waving behind the glass panel that now separates them. For now, Luna is focused on the plane, where she will sit between her sister and mother, enjoying her orange juice and peanuts, not knowing that it will be years before she’ll see him again, older and unable to look directly at her.
THREE
ALLEGIANCE
He was a man of principle, Masaharu told himself. After all, he’d kept his head, even in the midst of that nonsense war, which had gone much too far—anyone could’ve told anyone that by the dismal end of it. Even the Emperor, the coward, sacrificing more lives just to save a good patch of his own skin. And now in this burnt-out clutter of defeat, his head was still screwed on tightly, despite the rationed-out years no one could justify now. Only when the Americans made their appearance, dotting the wasteland with their trucks and jeeps, did he become aware of a coldness at the center of his being, a coldness that nipped the belly of his heart before sliding away like a silver fish, back into the black depths of his soul. Then again, maybe this had always been his flaw: his vulnerability to feelings that jeopardized his principles. Masaharu had to allow that.
That morning, they’d had breakfast as usual, he and his wife: thin barley gruel and half a sweet potato. And, as usual, he’d raised his chopsticks, imagining a magnificent breakfast he’d once considered plain: white rice, salted sanma fish, miso soup. He slurped the gruel, snatching hints of the sweetness of white rice, the bitterness of the sanma, relishing them. But the potato was an emaciated stump, unsalvageable even by imagination. He ate it in one bite.
“Would you like mine too?” his wife asked, finishing her smaller bowl of gruel.
Last night he’d watched her from the window of their rented room, carefully roasting the potato, its purple skin blistering in a nest of flames—just like a boy’s leg. He speared her untouched potato and swallowed it whole, choking on it.
“Do you want anything else before I go?” she asked, nesting her bowl in his.
Masaharu grunted and slid his chopsticks toward her. A year older than him, his wife was an elegant woman he’d chosen for himself—and for his parents, who’d been anxious to see him married. Of course, like everybody else, she’d thinned out considerably over these years, but she’d done so evenly, with none of the sinking and hollowing he saw in the flesh of others. Still, she barely filled her clothes now, no matter how often she took them in. Masaharu lay back on the grimy tatami floor, wondering why she still asked after his wants when, clearly, every want had to go unfulfilled. Possibly it was habit, thirteen years of being a wife, although Nishi Masako—as he still thought of her sometimes in her maiden name—had never been the subservient type. She’d always made sure he knew what she minded and what she did not. She was a resolute woman, certainly a match for himself.
Tucking
her hair behind her ears, she wiped the counter that contained the sink where they also kept their toiletries. Every Sunday, it was the same: his brain withdrew into its stony vault while his wife prepared for work—a typing job secured by an acquaintance of his. It still got to him that she was the one with a job now—but for her to have picked up an extra day? It was enough to fell any man. But actually, that wasn’t true, Masaharu thought; Sunday or not, they’d never been short of talk until, one October evening four weeks earlier, she’d returned from work refusing to speak. Her silence was unprecedented, so when the next morning she still didn’t explain herself, he’d decided to respect it.
“Well, if there’s nothing else.” His wife pulled on her sandals, and this time it was Masaharu who did not look at her, even though he could feel her eyes boring into the side of his face.
She picked up her cloth bundle and closed the door behind her.
* * *
—
LISTENING TO his wife’s footsteps clanking down the metal stairs, Masaharu wondered again when the idea had come to him, or rather, when it had taken hold of him, this concrete need to act. It couldn’t have been long after that silent October evening. But actually, that wasn’t true either, Masaharu thought now. As a journalist, that need had fueled his whole career, though it had never gripped him this way. Except, he thought, one other time. It was March then, eight months ago, the worst night in their thirteen years of marriage.
That night, the sky, for once, had been empty of the planes that had begun to burn the country built mostly of wood and paper. Like many people, they’d been ignorant of the realities of incendiaries, and all they’d done to prepare, he and his wife and their thirteen-year-old son, Seiji, was dig a shelter two meters deep and cover it with corrugated tin. When the sirens went off, his wife had headed to the foyer to gather their evacuation bags while he made his way to Seiji’s room. In the time it took to cross the hall, there was a series of whistling sounds, followed by a succession of eerie thuds, then an eruption of footsteps as people flooded the streets. It took a moment for the incendiaries to flare, but when they did there was a new combustion of noise: the crash of splintering wood, the juddering roar of the flames as gales of heat and smoke rushed to engulf them. By the time Masaharu and his wife staggered into a district shelter, the whole neighborhood had been razed, the two safest evacuation sites—the Olympic-sized swimming pool and the concrete high school—gutted. All Masaharu and his wife could say for sure was that Seiji wasn’t in the house when the siren went off that March night, and afterward he never turned up, not at any shelter, or at any school, or among the things scraped and salvaged from the gummed-up pool.
A hollow clomp resounded on the concrete landing. In a minute his wife would pass under the window on her way to the train station. Masaharu stood. All month he’d asked himself why—why that silence?—and a nameless dread had coalesced in his chest. For here was his wife, a survivor of one of the worst horrors to befall a mother—what could possibly have unnerved her now? Yet she’d come home silent, unable to seamlessly carry on with their domestic routine—an unsettling anomaly for his wife, who’d been trained by years of war to evade the patriotic police.
At the crosswalk, his wife paused, and Masaharu drew back from the window, knowing she’d sensed his presence. They were synchronized in this way, even more so than he and Seiji, who’d resembled each other, casting the same determined shadow when they walked or showing the same propensity for irritation when efficiency was thwarted. She’d connected to Seiji this way as well, the two of them orbiting each other as if their umbilical cord had never been cut. It was something Masaharu had cherished: his little family cell, his wife at the fulcrum keeping them in balance. He’d vowed to do everything he could to keep them intact, even if it meant a little personal compromise.
Masaharu reached for his jacket and cap. Patting his pockets for his keys, he closed the door and quietly descended the metal steps.
* * *
—
TO ACCOUNT for the unpredictability of the world, his wife had taken to leaving early, and she stood on the platform now, with over a half hour to spare, gazing out at the wooded hill studded with scaffolding twenty-five meters high, the framework for what was to become an enormous bust of the Kannon, the Buddhist goddess of mercy. Sixteen years ago, in 1929, a volunteer group had begun building the structure, only to be interrupted five years later when conflict with China became imminent. Like everything else, the Kannon, ally of the common people, was sacrificed for war. When Seiji was born, they’d taken the train from their home in Tokyo to visit Masaharu’s brother, an esteemed surgeon in Shizuoka, and glimpsed the construction from the train window. It seemed anachronistic to build such a monument at a time of such modernization and militarization, and they were moved. It was the reason they’d decided to come here to Ōfuna, this intact but unfamiliar city, three months ago, when they’d fled Tokyo after learning that a second “new type” bomb had razed Nagasaki. If the Americans were willing to obliterate a Christian city, Tokyo’s fate seemed sealed.
“I didn’t notice it before, but the Kannon was being built with Her back to Tokyo,” his wife had observed the day they arrived in Ōfuna, clutching their few belongings scavenged from the bombed-out ruins of Tokyo. “Pity they stopped Her construction—it’s a shame. I’m not surprised we’re being obliterated.” She gazed up at the abandoned scaffolding. “Our government certainly deserves nothing less than this. This defeat,” she said, the word popping like a rogue balloon.
Masaharu glanced about them. Defeat was surely imminent, but there was no telling who might be listening, even here in this noisy station crowded mostly with refugees like themselves. He took her arm and steered them toward an exit. “It’s not like you to be superstitious. If I didn’t know you, I’d think you were saying that if She’d been completed, if She’d been facing the right way, She wouldn’t have forsaken us.”
A prickly light gathered in her eyes. “The Kannon would never forsake us. She’ll never forsake her people. No matter which way Her back is turned.”
Her vehemence surprised him, and he quickly agreed. “The important thing is that we’re here—and we’re better off here,” he added, even though he knew Ōfuna was home to one of the country’s most brutal POW interrogation centers. Though he was unaware of any American or other white prisoners there, with defeat hanging around their necks, he didn’t want to consider the ramifications of living in proximity to such an institution. “Let’s see who we can convince to let us a room,” he said. But his wife, inconsolable, refused to brighten, even after they secured a room in a boardinghouse and slumped onto the tatami floor. For there was now no denying they were here. And as Masaharu sat with this thought, it dawned on him that what had upset his wife had perhaps been his word forsake. After all, it was she, Nishi Masako, who’d made the final decision to turn their backs on the raining bombs and pitted streets that had refused to yield even the bones of their only son.
Now, watching her wait for the train, Masaharu wondered what she saw in the ugly scaffolding. Did she see hope, the promise of redemption? Or only regret, the guilt of choosing to move on?
But his wife, a mask of serenity, betrayed only that the shade had begun to chill her.
* * *
—
THE TRAIN rattled to a stop. Masaharu pushed through the crowd to the car he saw his wife board. Would she sit or stand? Even thirteen years of marriage couldn’t help him predict that. He lowered his cap and slid into line, composing an explanation in case she happened upon him.
He spotted her right away, sitting at the opposite end of the car, her coat folded neatly on her lap, her cloth bundle perched above it like an oversized mikan. Darting behind a spindly but tall man, he took up his position, only to be jostled by a throng of katsugiya smugglers transporting rice on their backs. Cooing and swaying, they eddied around him, their precious
bundles, convincingly wrapped in the kind of obuihimo his own mother had once used to carry him, pressing him down the aisle. Two more seats, and sure enough, his wife’s eyes fastened onto him.
“Are you on your way to Tomita-san’s?” she asked, amused by his contortions.
Masaharu grunted. Tomita Yoshiaki was a fellow journalist, a diehard Communist who’d been released from jail after the Allied Forces abolished the Peace Preservation Law once used by the government to suppress “unpatriotic activity.” Tomita, initially censured for questioning the legitimacy of the Japanese presence in Manchuria, had been arrested for criticizing Japan’s increasingly aggressive foreign policy. He was detained for ten years, a light sentence compared to the hundreds who’d been incarcerated for upwards of twenty. Masaharu took off his sweaty cap. “I forgot we were meeting today. On a Sunday,” he mumbled, grateful for the pretext.
“Tomita-san is a zealot. If you weren’t so busy brooding, we could’ve left together,” she said, handing him her handkerchief.
Masaharu wiped his face, ignoring her gentle jab. “Tomita needs to be careful. We don’t really know how open American-style democracy is.”
“I’m sure Tomita-san isn’t keen on returning to jail. Besides, he might have some job leads for you,” she said, turning to acknowledge a young woman who’d bumped against her while attempting to unscrew a canteen. She had a small child and a sizable bundle on her lap, the verdant fragrance of tea perfuming her. She bowed apologetically, including Masaharu in the gesture.
“Can I help you with that?” A woman facing them gestured at the canteen. She was wearing a Western-style dress and a pair of Western-style shoes, and her nails were painted a garish red. Oddly, she’d left her face bare, perhaps in consideration of this train ride, or perhaps simply to minimize hostility. The elderly woman next to her sniffed. She was clutching her own bundle, possibly some kimonos she hoped to barter on the black market. The tea peddler glanced about uncomfortably but handed over the canteen. Masaharu turned back to his wife.
Inheritors Page 4
