On the surface, the two-story home has changed little. A patina has darkened the hardwood corridors and stairs, and a deep creak has settled into its bones, but otherwise everything seems unchanged, the corded telephone, the rack of guest slippers neatly in their place, all the windows, half-frosted for privacy, still dressed in 1980s elegance. Even the linens, though spotted and frayed without her grandmother’s upkeep, appear not to have been replaced. It is as though her father, the sole occupant of the house for well over a decade since his parents’ deaths, left no mark. It unsettles her, like walking into a wax museum of her own memory, its staged perfection emphasizing its barrenness, all its inhabitants departed, the silent walls and corridors turned against her trespass. Switching on the heater, Luna ventures down the hall to the only door left closed. Once her grandfather’s sickroom, it has since been converted into her father’s study, and it is here that Watanabe, her father’s closest friend and colleague, has assembled a temporary altar to hold the urn. In the morning, she and Watanabe will inter it in her grandparents’ grave at the nearby temple.
The altar is plain, just a white sheet covering a squat platform, the urn and a large monochrome portrait sharing space with a vase of flowers and two offering bowls, one holding rice, the other water, along with an incense burner, several sticks of incense, and matches—an allegedly unorthodox setup for which Watanabe has apologized, though he has done this for Luna, postponing the urn’s interment and instead stopping by to refresh the food and flowers for almost three weeks while Luna completed her teaching duties at Berkeley. She is grateful, of course, though it is the photograph that transfixes her, her father’s face older than she has ever imagined it but peering out with an expression she instantly recognizes: a temporary seriousness breaking into delight. It loosens a lid she has forgotten. Unlike her mother and sister, her resistance to her father has softened over the years, but so much about him was buried by her parents’ transpacific separation, then divorce, the weekly international calls dissolving into annual birthday cards that conveyed little of his personality. It pains her that she never visited him—something she considered several times in recent years, prodded by her career (literature of the Japanese diaspora), tethered, as she is well aware, to her absent father, her illusory home. But like many things in her life, she put it off, the immediacy of the present unfailingly easier to prioritize. This fact digs close to her bones, and as she stands in the kitchen rinsing the offering bowls, two things come to her: the mellow timbre of his voice even when he scolded her, and the unrelated fact that her period is due and she is unprepared.
It is later, after she returns from the convenience store and calls Watanabe to inform him of her arrival, that Luna sees the boxes.
* * *
—
THIS IS what she knows about her father: Born sometime in the spring of 1945, he, like many of his generation, spent his life captive to the Second World War, his research, the initial reason he crossed the Pacific to the United States, taking an unexpected turn when his parents confessed that he was an orphan—a Korean war orphan—they’d adopted during the American Occupation. Her father, an exacting academic, would’ve objected to the term “war orphan,” arguing that he’d been orphaned not by the war but by Japanese colonialism, which had forced his biological parents across the Korea Strait. Either way, what gripped him was the document his parents had shown him: a registration card bearing the name of his birthplace, Matsushiro, a small castle town in central Japan where, during the war, a labyrinthine underground bunker complex was built. Comprising miles of interlocking tunnels and designed to include a subterranean palace, the complex was never finished, but months before the war’s end, certain of Japan’s defeat, this was where the emperor expected to hide, negotiating the terms of surrender regardless of the human cost. Most records were destroyed, but historians estimate that five to ten thousand Koreans had toiled there, digging into the mountains with picks and axes, hundreds killed by dynamite blasts and cave-ins as well as malnutrition and other diseases Japan knew it had no resources to treat. Many who survived were abandoned, some executed for schematic secrecy, and among the incriminating sites excavated, several showed proof that military sex slaves had been housed there. Does this mean her father was a child of a forced Korean laborer, perhaps of a sex slave? All Luna knows is that his discovery of Matsushiro and his adoption spiraled him into a maze that catalyzed his return to Japan. The question is what he found at the center, the end of his trail.
* * *
—
WATANABE ARRIVES the next morning with containers of homecooked food. An unfussy, earthy man, he fills her father’s fridge and assesses her warmly, pointing out her family resemblance: same chin and mouth; same thick hair black enough to shine blue. Which is fair: Luna has taken after her father almost entirely, a fact that has already caused confusion here, her American accent hiccupping her interactions because, visually, she passes.
“Ready?” He hands her the urn and carries the portrait to the backseat. A social advocate with a legal background, he met her father four years ago while poking around an old Imperial naval base for demographic information about the suicide pilots stationed there during the war. By the time they left the crumbling base, they were strategizing ways to protect and preserve neglected war sites and their stories. Luna could picture their partnership right away, their skills complementary rather than overlapping, both men interested in grounded activism. It corroborates the image she has carried of her father.
The drive is pleasant but disquieting. Luna has anticipated changes, but this is a different town, with cookie-cutter houses sprouting in the backwoods, the bamboo and Zelkova groves corralled to a patch of community park. So different from what she remembers from her childhood visits, the winding footpaths and weedy shrines passed out of local memory, “local” now being a collection of outsiders, mostly suburbanites and retirees deposited by the economy’s ever receding tide. Gone too are the neighborhood pharmacy, the shadowy stationery store, the bank of rice vending machines she once begged to operate. There was also a dank tunnel used, if she remembers correctly, as an air raid shelter during the Second World War, but she finds she can’t ask. It’s ridiculous, this place that figured so little in her life, but it prickles her throat, the erasure of her past made concrete by this evidence of change and the foolishness of memory that has clung to what was always a chimera, a tantalizing echo of the mind’s desire to preserve an ephemeral moment.
“Everything’s different. I feel like Urashima Tarō,” she says, taking in the new hair salon, the chain convenience store, the renovated produce mart with stacks of instant food boxes out front. She is reminded of the boxes she found at the house. “Was my father thinking of moving?” she asks, watching the road curve into a pretty mountain forest. Her father’s death, she knows, was unexpected: a heart attack.
“Not that I know of. Why?” He squints at the tip of the temple roof emerging above the trees in the distance.
She tells him about the boxes, seven in all, shoved into inconspicuous corners—under the coffee table, behind half-open doors—as if left there by a forgetful child. “They’re full of paper—research, I think, but they’re random.” Since graduate school, Luna has followed her father’s career, periodically running his name through academic search engines, thrilling at the discovery of a new article, the proximity of his views to hers a secret pleasure she wants to resent. But last year, three changes hijacked her attention: she finished her dissertation, got a job at Berkeley, and got married. The next time she searched her father’s name was after Watanabe’s phone call; heart stuttering, she combed through the results, but there was nothing new. Last night, seeing the boxes, she felt the same apprehensive excitement, but when she slit the tape, all she found were typed pages, the topics ranging and unrelated to any of his previous output, many of them fragments with no beginning or end, the dropped punctuation and missing citatio
ns eerie, like looking at a featureless body. She turned on all the lights in the house. “It’s odd—I remember him being meticulous.”
“Maybe they were meant to be recycled?”
“They were sealed, as if for a move—or maybe storage.”
Watanabe has no reply. Following the signs to the temple lot, he parks, and they sit for a moment. Then, gathering the urn and portrait, they climb the shady steps to the main hall.
* * *
—
THE SERVICE is simple, with the elderly priest and his son taking turns to recite the sutras, the rhythmic beat of the mokugyo fish drum overriding the regiments of progressive time, transporting her to an adjacent sphere that seems harmonized with her jet lag. Rocked in the hammock of sound, hypnotized by her father’s monochrome gaze observing her from the altar, she almost misses her cue to offer incense, and the hour vanishes, the final silence releasing her to earth, but barely. She carries the feeling with her to her grandparents’ grave, a square plot with a stone pillar. She never thought this would be how she’d see them again, their names carved into granite, their two urns stowed side by side in the shallow chamber beneath. She feels curiously uplifted to see her father’s urn join theirs, his a lighter gray but with the same domed lid. It is a pleasant day, the sun burning the morning chill, and it is only when Watanabe hands her the portrait retrieved from the priests that the finality hits her. And maybe this is true for Watanabe too, his face bereft beyond sympathy. She is glad the proceeds from her father’s house will fund the initiative he started with Watanabe.
“When my father left our family, he was looking for his biological parents,” Luna says as they wind back down the mountain forest. “Do you know if he found anything?”
Watanabe shakes his head. “I know he went to Matsushiro a few times.”
Matsushiro. The last time she heard the name was through the static of the telephone straining to bridge the distance of the still new divorce. Now, hearing it come so readily from Watanabe’s mouth, it registers sepia-toned and slightly bitter, like oversteeped tea. Almost sixty-five years after the end of the Second World War, the battle over the narrative of history and who might control it—her father’s lifelong concern—seems to be intensifying, not lessening, with regional stability hanging in the balance as the world, strained by old frustrations and new restlessness, creaks and shifts, exposing unresolved fault lines normally buried under market priorities. In fact, Luna has arrived to find the whole of East Asia focused on whether the new Japanese prime minister will visit the Yasukuni shrine, home to two million uniformed war dead, including Class-A war criminals from the Second World War. During the American Occupation, authorities proposed burning down this emblem of nationalism and building a dog track—a perfect encapsulation of American democracy if ever there was one—but the shrine, permitted to survive, has endured as a symbol of Japan’s refusal to face its war responsibilities. Most prime ministers, under heavy media scrutiny, have distinguished their personal pilgrimages from their official ones, often refraining from the latter for diplomacy, but several have made visits amid international outcry and even made noise, despite popular opposition, about revising the country’s pacifist constitution—a move continually encouraged by the United States government, which started pushing for it almost immediately after ghostwriting that very same constitution during the Occupation. Luna recalls how upset her father used to get reading his Japanese newspapers in the living room of their Victorian nestled just off campus in Urbana. She cringes to remember how urgently he tried to explain, but it seemed so distant, utterly irrelevant. It was the same when he discovered his roots. “So he talked about it? His identity, I mean,” she says.
Watanabe, catching the shift in her tone, glances at her. “Not really. But his commitment to the Korean people’s stories during the war touched a lot of people. You should’ve seen the funeral wreaths.”
To be a product of a history—to feel the weight of that legacy—Luna feels a flash of envy. It gave her father a clarity of purpose she feels she lacks. With fewer people left every year to tell the lived stories, she can understand why he invested in the past—to expose not just the buried roots of history but the fragile bedrock of the future vulnerable to the human propensity not only to forget and repeat but to be ignorant and led. “It must have been fulfilling,” she says, modulating her tone. “These days the past gets buried so quickly. People don’t see the relevance, or they don’t want to. Even my students get defensive about things that happened two hundred years ago. A country like Japan can be at the forefront of a peace movement, but that’s not what’s happening. I can see why he came back.”
Watanabe flicks the turn signal and joins the midday traffic radiating from the town center. “Like your father, I became politically aware during the sixties and seventies. Your country had your movements; we had ours, and one of our flash points was the future of your military in our country. I’m proud that most of us continue to be allergic to war, but will that change? Will our government force that change? What will people do?” He talks about China and North Korea, the logjam with South Korea. “The truth might be that we’ve all come to rely on this history. It’s the perfect narrative. It helps our neighbors nationalize, which helps our government rally its base, the voters who want a stronger Japan. Your father was tireless, but his frustration was real. It took a toll.”
Luna, chastened, swallows her own sense of futility infecting her heart. “It’s such a bind.” She tells him about an article she read about a Japanese scientist working on an irrigation system in a Chinese village. His happiest moment hadn’t been his project’s success but the villagers’ acceptance of him after months of hostility and mistrust; they couldn’t believe the Japanese could be kind. “Of course, we’ve hung onto our version of the narrative too, in America: World War Two was our last ‘unambiguous’ war. It still gives us leverage. It’s easy for us to tell others to move on, get along, not drag around old issues.”
“It’s not so different here, thanks to our economy,” Watanabe says. “In very different ways, I think for countries like yours and mine, the issue is that war has become a metaphor. There are real wars, real costs to wars, but they’ve largely been outsourced, and daily life is peaceful.”
And this, she thinks, is true. The perfectly paved streets flanked by perfectly unlittered sidewalks fluttering with festive bargain banners: even here, beyond the cities’ cosmopolitan polish, there is little to remind people of the war. At the same time, the war is omnipresent, rearing up in conversations not just as history but as current event. This morning, she found herself riveted to a news program discussing the problem of American military misconduct in Okinawa. It was just a segment among the day’s topics, but it was a jolt. Murder, drunk driving, burglary, with rape and battery of women and children leading the list. In Italy and Germany, the American military respects national laws; here, quite literally, it gets away with murder, disrupting cities and neighborhoods in other ways too: sonic booms at all hours of the night; new tactical vehicles no doubt too unstable to practice over American cities routinely careening out of the sky, loose parts sometimes striking school grounds. She knows there have been protests, but the daily congregations around American bases have been a surprise, little of it picked up by the media back home. If yesterday her accent made her self-conscious, today she feels ashamed. She has never felt so American. “Everything feels so volatile; it’s an eerie peace. I find it remarkable that people here aren’t more resentful of America.” She wonders if resentment too can be outsourced, and to where, but doesn’t ask.
* * *
—
THEY SEE the woman standing by the gate when they come around the curve toward the house. She is short, maybe in her fifties, dressed in a style not of this town. Watanabe doesn’t recognize her, and Luna catches herself matching the woman up with her father, surprised by the twinge of possessive suspicion th
at constricts her chest.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” the woman says when they emerge from the car. “I’m looking for Masaaki-san. He—oh.” She stares at the monochrome portrait.
“You knew my father?”
“Your father?” The woman’s eyes leap to Luna’s face. “I didn’t—”
“I live in America,” Luna says, perhaps a little brusquely.
The woman nods slowly. “I’m sorry. My name is Yagi. I run a boardinghouse in Tokyo.” She rummages in her handbag and produces a business card: HOUSE OF HOPE. The address is unknown to Luna, but Watanabe homes in on the area, and in a moment he and Yagi are discussing landmarks. Luna, unsure what to think, invites them inside.
The house is messier than she thought, the stacks of paper taken out of the boxes edging into the hall. As she ushers them into the kitchen, she notices Yagi, clearly a stranger in the house, looking around with quiet curiosity. Luna can’t decide if she’s relieved. When they settle, Yagi tells them about the boardinghouse and Luna’s father’s weekly visits since the summer. “Miyagi-san really looked forward to it. So when your father didn’t come for three weeks in a row…”
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