Luna turns to Watanabe, who looks equally blank. “I’m sorry. Who is Miyagi-san?”
Yagi assesses them for a beat. Then her gaze slides to the portrait propped on the counter, and a look of disappointment crosses her face before grief covers it over. “Miyagi-san is one of our residents. He’s been with us since my father started our place right after the Occupation. Miyagi-san is your grandparents’ biological son. Your father’s brother.”
Luna stares at her. “You mean, he’s my uncle?”
“He never mentioned a brother,” Watanabe says, equally stunned.
“They only met about a year ago,” Yagi says. “Miyagi-san was separated from his parents during the air raids. Back then, my father managed a welfare shelter. The Heavenly Curtain Hotel’s House of Hope. It was literally stitched together with tarps.” She smiles. “Miyagi-san was just a teenager then, and my father liked him right away. I was born toward the end of the Occupation. Miyagi-san is like an uncle to me.”
“So he was in Tokyo all this time?” Luna asks. “I didn’t even know my grandparents ever lived there.”
“As far as I know, Miyagi-san was born in Tokyo,” Yagi says. “Like many after the war, there was no way for him to prove his identity, so he took odd jobs, mostly day labor, and helped my father around the shelter. He was involved in those peace protests too, but he was vague about his activities. He was always secretive.”
“How did they find each other?” Luna asks, trying to absorb the details.
“Miyagi-san volunteers at a nonprofit called Sanyūkai, an organization that helps the homeless. A couple of years ago, he got very sick and started talking about finding his parents’ grave. Most people ended up in common graves after the firebombing, so I don’t know what he expected, but with Sanyūkai’s help, he eventually found your father.”
“And they had no clue about each other.”
“Your father knew—your grandparents told him at some point—but his shock when he opened the door to see him alive—that’s a story I’ve heard many times.”
Luna tries to picture it: two men, unrelated but related, meeting for the first time at the threshold of their parents’ house. “I can’t imagine,” she says. “Did they get along?”
“Oh, they were always yakking on about something. I guess they had a lot to catch up on.”
She likes the image: the companionship of two orphan brothers. Then she pictures Miyagi in the corridor of this house, peering into the rooms, the lived spaces his parents had inhabited without him. “This is just so strange. How often did they see each other?”
“Maybe a couple of times a month,” Yagi says. “Until Miyagi-san got sick again this summer. It’s his lungs—from the firebombs. It was the same with my father—he was about your father’s age when he died.” She looks sorrowfully at Luna.
“How is he doing now?” Watanabe asks.
“He has good and bad days. Actually”—she brightens—“if you have time, maybe you can visit. I don’t think Miyagi-san ever imagined meeting his niece.”
Luna feels a stab of panic, the flutter in her throat not excitement but closer to fear. “He probably doesn’t know I exist.”
Yagi reaches across the table and touches her hand. “Let’s see. I know Masaaki-san has two daughters. You lived in the state of Illinois. I’ve seen a picture of you. You were probably nine or ten. There was a house in the background. I think it was your house in the town called Urbana.”
Luna feels a spiraling. “I don’t remember this picture.”
* * *
—
THAT EVENING, as she sorts more paper in the boxes into proliferating piles, a familiar twinge in her uterus propels her to the bathroom. Not yet.
When she finally lies down in the guest room, she dreams of an undersea journey to the Dragon Emperor’s palace, but when she gets there she finds herself in a windowless room, lit by a missing bulb, a cord dangling from the empty socket. There is no sound, no sign of life, and when she reaches to pull the cord, she realizes that even she isn’t in the room and wakes herself up. It is the first time she has had a dream in which she isn’t there.
Unable to fall back asleep, she lies in the dark, watching the moonlight stencil the guest room window on the floor, and finds her thoughts drifting back to the last time she saw her father. After four years of separation, he’d returned to the States to make the divorce official. Like most of her childhood, the memory has survived largely voiced-over by her sister’s rehashing of all the incriminating things their father had said and done in the two hours they’d spent with him, but recently Luna’s recollection has been quieter, the years having peeled back the noise, baring the moment in starker detail, starting with Katy’s refusal to tolerate him in their house. They ended up at a restaurant, Luna oppressed by her pasty chicken dinner with its mound of mashed potatoes inexplicably shaped into a cone, and the way her father kept mushing it down as he chatted on, asking questions and encouraging answers, his face flickering, then dimming, going out all together when he got up to pay. They drove back to the house and stood in the yard while his face slid into a watery mess so disconcerting even Katy conceded to his snotty anaconda hug. Luna too conceded, but a peculiar numbness had slackened her body, and she found she couldn’t move, not even to accept his gift: an illustrated, bilingual edition of Urashima Tarō, which, with its cartoonish colors, Luna could tell was meant for a child much younger than her. Now she sees the point had been the dual-language feature probably meant to invite her to learn his language. As it happened, Luna did learn, and the fairy tale became a kind of epigraph to her career, but of course her father will never know this. It must have been then, just before he climbed into his rented sedan, that he snapped the photograph Yagi had seen, but that moment, like many others in her life, is gone, curated out of her memory by the great adjudicator of experience.
* * *
—
THE HOUSE of Hope is a short walk from the station. A historically segregated neighborhood of tanners, butchers, and executioners, the area has since been integrated into neighboring districts, its myriad workers’ lodgings now attracting foreign backpackers increasingly conspicuous among day laborers, the unemployed, and the homeless, almost all men, many of them once part of the postwar workforce recruited to rebuild the country. Watanabe points out Sanyūkai. The building looks derelict, but there is a lively throng outside gathered by the organization’s outreach efforts and its lifeline services. Farther down, among a boxy coterie of illuminated signs, they find Yagi’s boardinghouse, its tinted glass doors busy with notices advertising rooms in Japanese and English.
Yagi warms and rises from behind the counter when she sees them. “Miyagi-san was hoping you’d come,” she says as she retrieves a set of keys from the pegboard and leads them through the hall, past the kitchen, the toilet, the communal bath, then up the stairs to a corridor crowded with doors, the occasional murmur of the television brightening the hall. Miyagi’s room is at the far end. Knocking gently, Yagi listens, then inserts the key.
The room is tiny and as dark as the curtains allow. In one corner there is a nightstand with a myopic black-and-white TV; above it, a shelf with a few folded clothes and several books. A futon takes up most of the tatami floor, Miyagi’s body indistinct under the covers. Luna can just make out a hospital mask covering his face, and she is reminded of her grandfather, his sudden presence warping her sense of time, folding the two halves of her life into a single dimension of space. The experience is dizzying, almost exhilarating. Yagi shakes off her sandals and kneels beside the unmoving man.
“We don’t have to wake him,” Luna says from the doorway.
“At some point, everyone has to eat, do their business, see a few faces.” She checks Miyagi’s forehead. “He was excited to meet you.”
Luna wonders if this could be true; luminously pale, Miyagi looks unearthly
. Watanabe, perhaps sharing her thoughts, catches her eye. She wonders how well Miyagi was the last time her father saw him. She wonders if he knows about his brother’s death.
Yagi turns down the covers, refills the water cup, her movements practiced and unflinching. Miyagi, discomfited, directs an uncertain voice into the room. “It’s just me, Miyagi-san.” She touches his hand. “You have visitors today, remember?” She introduces Luna and Watanabe, repeating their names several times before helping him sit up. In the gloom, he looks diaphanous, a black cutout.
Yagi molds his hands around his water cup and changes his mask before gathering the laundry and the water jug. “He should be fine for about a half hour,” she says, shuffling into her sandals and nudging Watanabe to follow her out.
Suddenly alone, Luna tugs off her shoes and sits at the foot of the futon. Propped against the wall, cup tipped on his chest, Miyagi looks asleep again. In the window, the curtains ripple, the cold slip of air carrying the tang of smoke. She wonders what her father must have felt coming here, to this world Miyagi has been relegated to spend his life. The curtains flip; light splashes the wall, and Luna sees a photograph tacked up near Miyagi’s head: a family portrait of a grade school boy flanked by his parents—her grandparents? She cranes to look and startles to find Miyagi observing her, his eyes alert.
“I’m Luna,” she says. “You knew my father—your brother.”
Miyagi continues to observe her. Then he raises a shaky finger and draws down his mask, revealing a narrow chin, an old man’s mouth, a face gripped by keloid scars. One rarely sees such disfiguration here, the culturally unsightly still often hidden, and she wonders if this is also why he kept to the margins. “Is that you?” she asks, pointing at the photograph. Miyagi doesn’t respond, and heat rises to her ears. She finds it hard to reconcile his eyes with the rest of him, their lucidity belonging to another time. “You must be standing with your parents—my grandparents.”
Miyagi continues to stare, and Luna finds herself searching for an exit strategy. Then his mouth moves, and again she feels the pull of his gaze. She leans closer. She catches the wheeze and rattle clotting his chest, the phlegmy reek wafting from his mouth, the acridity of medicine mixed with something organic. She picks out a sound—a word: konomi. Preference. For what? Then there is a thud in the hall, the clatter of shoes as Watanabe returns, and when Luna turns to greet him, Miyagi grips her wrist. The contact is so sudden Luna flinches, but Miyagi doesn’t let go. Trembling, he lifts himself, a muscular energy moving him, anger and alarm transfiguring his face as he begins to shout. From down the hall, she hears Yagi running. In a moment she is at the door, scattering her sandals, directing Luna to step back as Miyagi convulses into a violence of coughing.
* * *
—
THE TRAIN is quiet ahead of rush hour, and they glide the few stops to the office her father shared with Watanabe, the aftershock of the afternoon vibrating between them. Several times, Watanabe has mentioned a folder he feels she should have, but Luna knows it’s also his way of inviting her to the place where her father spent most of his time before his death. After the boardinghouse, the office, a single room in a five-story walk-up, feels almost spacious, though with little more than a table, two chairs, and a bank of filing cabinets, it resembles a low-budget TV police interrogation room, marginally improved by the dorm room fridge, the small hotplate and kettle, a crown of American mugs ringed around a plate of bagged tea. Her father, she remembers, was never without a mug, nursing it close to his chest as he chatted up a neighbor or colleague, throwing out incorrect playground slang whenever Luna and her sister Katy drifted within earshot. It made Luna laugh but drove Katy mad, the difference between them encapsulating the family divide. Luna never knew where she belonged.
Watanabe scrapes back a chair. “This was your father’s spot.”
Luna assesses the foldout, its gunmetal frame and vinyl seat. When she sits, she finds it comfortable, the sun pressing on her back, the practical tabletop spread in front of her. Her father must have enjoyed it here, but all she can picture is his stiff back peeling away from the chair, his clammy forehead smacking the corner of the table. She stands.
“Do you think my father was planning to ask Miyagi-san to move in with him?”
Watanabe turns, hands poised over the file drawer. “That could explain the boxes.”
“Does it? There’s plenty of room in the house; he didn’t have to pack. Why do you think my father never mentioned him?”
Watanabe pauses again, then shakes his head. “Your father never did anything without a reason, but I admit it was a surprise.”
Luna pictures her father in Miyagi’s dark room. Orphans from opposite sides of history: it’s as though the war had swapped their destinies, catapulting her father into what might have been Miyagi’s life, and Miyagi into what could easily have been her father’s life had he not been adopted. She can’t imagine that the irony was lost on her father: he, the son of the colonized, living the life of the colonizers’ son, while Miyagi labored on the fringes, building structures that would never benefit him. It’s a grotesque reversal, and there should be no room for resentment or guilt, but feelings follow their own paths. She thinks of the photograph on Miyagi’s wall, its odd placement, as though tacked up to be seen—by her father? She banishes the image of Miyagi’s outrage.
Watanabe finds the folder and secures it in a manila envelope before handing it to her. Luna is curious, but she’s glad for the excuse not to look.
“I have to say, that was strange back there,” he says, watching her wedge the envelope into her tote. “Right before Miyagi started yelling, he looked at me. It was like he knew me.”
Luna feels a quiver in her belly. “Actually, just before you came back to the room, he said something. ‘Konomi,’ I think.”
“As in ‘preference’?”
Luna nods. “All of a sudden he was so present—just there.” It feels unfair to think she just met her last known relative on this side of the world, only to find him across a crease in time she can’t reach. “I can’t believe I actually met my uncle.”
Watanabe watches her rub her wrist still garlanded with the memory of Miyagi’s fingers. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask. Did you ever try to contact your father?”
Luna has braced for this question. She tells him about her first year in graduate school, where, for the first time, she found herself among people who, unlike her sister and mother, recognized themselves in her. It was an empowering experience, desolate in the end, the inelastic limits of community banishing her for those parts of her that didn’t fit. She thought of her father. A simple correspondence, maybe a scholarly one: weeks of false starts and tangled emotions, she gave up.
“Back then I wanted too much too specifically, and I was afraid of being disappointed. I was twenty-one; I assumed I had time,” she says. “It’s what happens when your life is shaped by someone who isn’t there. My father was who I thought of when my family and friends fell short of understanding me. And he felt real. That’s the thing about absence. It retains the possibility of a return even if it’s not probable. And it made a lot of things possible. It let me imagine another place where I might belong. It helped that I look like him.” This, she realizes, is true. Funny how the ties of blood, expressed physically, have the power to seduce you into believing the bond is real, elemental enough to transcend the gulf of time and distance, when, really, it’s likely nothing more than a mirage granted the force of reality by mundane evidences habitually reinforced, like the tension that used to crimp not only her mother but also their neighbors whenever they saw her father’s shape lurking in her face. “I guess he’s gone,” she says.
Watanabe is quiet for a long moment. “It’s complicated for you,” he says, finally. “For what it’s worth, I know he always assumed you’d visit.”
* * *
—<
br />
IT IS past seven by the time Luna returns to the house. Settling at the kitchen table, she slides the folder from the envelope and spreads its contents, sweeping the receipts to one side. She spent her whole train ride learning her father’s lunch habits: noodle sets (¥990); curry specials (¥1090); the occasional bookstore purchase, including, curiously, a translation of Jorge Luis Borges’s labyrinthine stories. The rest of the folder is more personal. She couldn’t face it on the train.
The least complicated is the registration card. Time has buffed it to a featureless shine, but the name of the town, Matsushiro, is still clear, as is the year of issue, the twentieth year of Shōwa, along with the red lacework of stamps pressed into the surface like lipstick.
What pains her most are the glossy brochures from the 1980s collected from various international schools around the city. All her life Luna was led to believe her father’s departure was unilateral; now, it seems that at the very least he’d envisioned their life here. At most there had been talk between her parents that failed. Useless now to reassign blame, if there is blame to reassign, but she feels her world tilt, the story of her life poised to change.
The third item is mysterious: an address in Niigata scrawled on a notecard. A friend? A colleague? Another family member? All she finds when she looks it up is an unremarkable dot in a region famous for its rice production.
The final item is the most haunting: a sheaf of stapled pages containing a smattering of newspaper clippings, retrieved, it seems, from microfiche. The scan is good, preserving the analog texture of ink on newsprint, each article, just two or three lines, a variation on the same theme: unidentified women of “dubious” ethnicity and profession found murdered in red-light areas during the Occupation.
Inheritors Page 16
