The Japanese Lover

by Isabel Allende

  One day a woman from the city had come to the village to recruit young girls to work as waitresses in another country. She offered Radmila an amazing once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: passport and ticket, easy work and a good wage. She assured her that just from the tips she would be able to save enough to buy herself a house in less than three years. Ignoring her parents’ desperate pleas, Radmila boarded the train with the procurer, little suspecting she would end up in the claws of Turkish pimps in a brothel in the Aksaray neighborhood of Istanbul. She was kept prisoner there for two years, servicing between thirty and forty men daily to pay off her ticket, although the debt was never reduced because she was charged for her lodging, food, shower, and condoms. Any girls who resisted were beaten up, marked with knives, burned, or even found dead in an alleyway. Without money or documents escape was impossible; they were locked in, did not know the language, the neighborhood, or the wider city. If they did manage to evade the pimps, they came up against the police, who were also their most assiduous clients and whom they had to pleasure for free.

  “One girl threw herself out of a third-floor window and was left half paralyzed, but she still had to keep working,” Radmila told Irina in the half-melodramatic, half-didactic tone she used to refer to this wretched episode in her life. “As she couldn’t control her sphincter and constantly soiled herself, men could go with her for half price. Another girl became pregnant and performed on a mattress with a hole in it to fit her belly into; in her case, the clients paid more, because they thought that fucking a pregnant woman cured gonorrhea. When the pimps wanted new faces, they sold us to other brothels, and so we went down and down until we reached the depths of hell. I was saved by fire and a man who took pity on me. One night there was a blaze that spread to several houses in the neighborhood. Journalists arrived with their cameras, and so the police couldn’t turn a blind eye; they arrested us girls shivering in the street, but not one of the damned pimps or clients. We appeared on TV, where we were accused of being depraved and responsible for all the filth that occurred in Aksaray. They were going to deport us, but a cop I knew helped me escape and got me a passport.” Eventually, Radmila reached Italy, where she worked as an office cleaner and then in a factory. She had kidney problems, and was worn out from her experiences, drugs, and alcohol, yet she was still young and her skin had some of the translucent quality of her youth, similar to her daughter’s. An American technician fell for her, they got married, and he took her with him to Texas, where some years later her daughter also arrived.

  The last time Irina saw her grandparents, one morning in 1999 when they left her at the train that was to take her to Chisinau on the first stage of her long journey to Texas, Costea was sixty-two and Petruta a year younger. They were much more decrepit than any of the residents of over ninety at Lark House, who aged slowly and with dignity, with full sets of their own teeth or proper dentures. Irina had discovered that the process was the same: they advanced step by step toward the end, some more quickly than others, and lost everything along the way, for we cannot take anything with us to the other side of death. A few months after Irina left, Petruta’s head slumped over a plate of potatoes and onion and she didn’t wake up again. Costea had lived with her for forty years and concluded there was no point going on alone. He hanged himself from the beam in the barn, where the neighbors found him three days later, drawn by his barking dog and the bleating of the goat, which had not been milked. Irina learned this years later from a judge at the juvenile court in Dallas. But she never talked about it.

  * * *

  Early that autumn, Lenny Beal came to live in one of the independent apartments at Lark House. The new guest came with Sophia, his white dog with a black patch over one eye that gave her the air of a pirate. His arrival was a memorable event, as none of the few other male residents could compare to him. Some of them were married, others were in diapers on the third level, about to pass on to Paradise, and the rare available widowers held no interest for any of the women. Lenny was eighty years old, but nobody would have said he was more than sixty. He was the most desirable specimen seen at Lark House in decades, with a mane of white hair that ended in a small ponytail, his astonishing lapis lazuli eyes, his youthfully cut crumpled linen trousers, and the rope-soled sandals he wore without socks. He almost caused a riot among the ladies; he filled all the empty space, as if someone had let a tiger loose in this world of female longing.

  Even Voigt, with all his years as an administrator, wondered what Lenny was doing there. Mature, well-preserved men like him always had a much younger woman—their second or third wife—to look after them. He greeted Lenny with all the enthusiasm he could muster between spasms from his hemorrhoids which were still torturing him. Despite the fact that Catherine Hope had been trying to help him at her clinic, where a Chinese doctor came three times a week to perform acupuncture, his progress was slow. The director calculated that even the most damaged ladies, the ones who sat staring into space as they delved into their past because the present was slipping away from them, would stand a chance of coming back to life thanks to Lenny Beal. He wasn’t wrong. Overnight blue-rinse wigs appeared, together with strings of pearls and varnished nails—all of which were a novelty for these ladies who despised artifice and had a tendency toward Buddhism and ecology.

  “Good grief! It looks like a geriatric home in Miami,” Voigt told Cathy.

  Bets were laid as to what the newcomer had been in his previous life: actor, fashion designer, an importer of Oriental art, professional tennis player. Alma put a stop to all this speculation when she told Irina to pass on the news that Lenny had actually been a dentist, although none of the residents could quite believe he had earned a living poking around other people’s teeth.

  Lenny Beal and Alma Belasco had met thirty years earlier. When they saw each other again in Lark House, they gave each other a long hug in the middle of the reception hall, and when they finally stepped back, both of them had tears in their eyes. Irina had never seen such a show of emotion from Alma, and if she had not been so convinced about the Japanese lover, she would have thought Lenny was the reason for all those clandestine meetings. She called Seth at once to tell him the news.

  “You say he’s a friend of my grandmother’s? I’ve never heard of him. I’ll check him out.”

  “How?”

  “That’s why I employ investigators.”

  Seth’s investigators were two former criminals, one white and the other black, both of them fearsome looking, who spent their time gathering information on cases before they were presented at court. Seth explained the most recent case to Irina. This involved a seaman who was suing a shipping company for a work accident that he claimed had left him paralyzed, but Seth did not believe him. His toughs invited the invalid to a shady nightclub, where they got him drunk and then videoed him dancing with a hostess. Armed with this proof, Seth was able to silence the other man’s lawyer; they made a settlement and were spared the trouble of a court case. Seth confessed to Irina that this had been one of the more honorable tasks that his investigators performed; others had been far more questionable.

  Two days later, Seth called Irina for them to meet in the usual pizzeria, but she had bathed five dogs that weekend and was feeling generous. She proposed that this once they go to a decent restaurant: Alma had put the obsession for white tablecloths into her head.

  “This time I’m paying,” she told him.

  Seth picked her up on his motorcycle and zigzagged with her through the traffic well beyond the speed limit until they reached the Italian district. They arrived with their hair plastered down from their helmets and their noses dripping. Irina realized she was not properly dressed for the restaurant—she never was—and the waiter’s disdainful look only served to confirm it. When she saw the prices on the menu she almost fainted.

  “Don’t worry, my firm will pay,” Seth reassured her.

  “This is going to cost more than a wheelchair!”

  “Why do you
want a wheelchair?”

  “It’s just a comparison, Seth. There are a couple of old ladies in Lark House who can’t afford the wheelchairs they need.”

  “That’s very sad, Irina. I can recommend the scallops with truffles. And a good white wine, of course.”

  “Coca-Cola for me.”

  “To go with scallops it has to be Chablis. They don’t serve Coca­-Cola here.”

  “Then I’ll have mineral water with a twist of lemon.”

  “Are you an alcoholic in rehab, Irina? You can tell me, there’s no reason to be ashamed. It’s an illness, like diabetes.”

  “No, I’m not an alcoholic, but wine gives me a headache,” replied Irina, who had no intention of sharing her worst memories with him.

  Before the first course they were served, courtesy of the chef, a spoonful of a blackish foam that seemed to her like it had been vomited by a dragon. Irina tasted it suspiciously, while Seth was explaining that Lenny was a bachelor, had no children, and had specialized in root canal treatment at a dental clinic in Santa Barbara. There was nothing noteworthy about his life, except that he was a great sportsman who had done the Ironman challenge several times—a crazy combination of swimming, cycling, and running that frankly did not sound very appealing. Seth had mentioned Lenny to his father, who had the impression he had been a friend of Alma and Nathaniel, although he couldn’t be sure. He vaguely recalled having seen him at Sea Cliff during Nathaniel’s final illness. Many loyal friends passed through to keep his father company in those days, and Lenny might have been one of them. For the moment, Seth had no more information about him, but he had discovered something about Ichimei.

  “The Fukuda family spent three and a half years in a concentration camp during the Second World War,” he told Irina.

  “Where?”

  “At Topaz, in the middle of the Utah desert.”

  Irina had only heard of the German concentration camps in Europe, but Seth explained what had happened, showing her a photograph from the Japanese American National Museum. The caption beneath the original stated that these were the Fukudas. He told her that his assistant was looking for the names and ages of each of them on the lists of the Topaz evacuees.

  THE PRISONERS

  All through their first year at Topaz, Ichimei often used to send Alma his drawings, but after that they became less frequent, because the censors couldn’t keep up and had to restrict the evacuees’ correspondence. Alma jealously kept those sketches, which provided the best glimpse into this stage of the Fukudas’ lives: the family huddled in one of the barracks; children doing homework kneeling on the ground with benches for desks; lines of people outside the latrines; men playing cards; women washing clothes in huge tubs. The prisoners’ cameras had been confiscated, and the few who managed to hide theirs were unable to develop the negatives. The only permitted photographs were optimistic ones that showed not only the humane treatment the prisoners received but the relaxed, cheerful atmosphere in the camp: kids playing baseball, adolescents dancing to the latest crazes, everybody singing the national anthem while the flag was raised every morning; on no account were the barbed-wire fences, the watchtowers, or the armed guards to be shown. One of the American soldiers eventually took a snapshot of the Fukuda family. His name was Boyd Anderson, and he had fallen in love with Megumi, whom he saw for the first time at the hospital, where she worked as a volunteer and where he had gone after cutting his hand opening a can of corned beef.

  Boyd was twenty-three years old. He was tall and pale looking like his Swedish ancestors, with a straightforward, friendly character that made him one of the few whites to gain the evacuees’ confidence. A girlfriend was waiting impatiently for him in Los Angeles, but when he saw Megumi in her white volunteer’s uniform, his heart was taken. She cleaned the wound, the doctor inserted nine stitches, and she bandaged it with professional skill without once looking him in the face, while Boyd stared at her so bedazzled that he didn’t feel the slightest pain. From that day on he hovered around her discreetly, partly because he did not want to abuse his position of authority, but above all because any mixing of the races was forbidden for the whites and was repugnant to the Japanese. Thanks to her moonlike face and the delicacy with which she moved through the world, Megumi could have had any of the most sought-after young men at Topaz, but she felt the same forbidden attraction for the guard, and also struggled with the monstrosity of racism, praying to the heavens that the war would come to an end and her family return to San Francisco so that she could tear this sinful temptation from her soul. For his part, Boyd prayed the war would never end.

  On the Fourth of July there was an Independence Day celebration, just as there had been six months earlier for the New Year. On that occasion the event had been a failure, because the camp was still not properly finished, and the Japanese had not yet become resigned to the fact that they were prisoners. In July 1943, however, the evacuees tried their hardest to show their patriotism and the Americans their goodwill, despite the dust storms and the heat, which seemed to bother even the lizards. Everyone mingled cheerfully amidst the barbecues, bunting, cakes, and even beer for the men, who for once were able to avoid the dreadful liquor made clandestinely from fermented tinned peaches. Boyd was among those detailed to photograph the occasion in order to silence those ill-intentioned journalists who denounced what they saw as the inhumane treatment meted out to the Japanese-­Americans. He took advantage of his assignment to ask the Fukudas to pose for him. Afterward, he gave a copy to Takao and surreptitiously passed another to Megumi, while he enlarged his own and cut out the figure of Megumi from the family group. This photo was with him for the rest of his life: he kept it protected in plastic inside his wallet and was buried with it fifty-two years later. In the family portrait, the Fukudas are standing in front of a squat black building: Takao has slumped shoulders and a dour expression, Heideko is small and defiant, James is in half profile and sullen looking, Megumi shows all the splendor of her eighteen years, and the skinny eleven-year-old Ichimei stands there with his mop of unruly hair and scabs on his knees.

  In this photograph, the only one of the family at Topaz, Charles is missing. That year Takao and Heideko’s eldest son had enlisted, because he considered it his duty, not in order to escape from confinement, an accusation some young men opposed to conscription made of these volunteers. He became part of the 442nd Infantry Regiment, made up exclusively of nisei. Ichimei sent Alma a drawing of his brother standing at attention before the flag, with a couple of lines of writing that weren’t censored, explaining he had no room on the sheet of paper to show the other seventeen young men in uniform who were off to war. Ichimei was so talented that in just a few strokes he succeeded in capturing Charles’s expression of extreme pride, a pride that went back to the distant past, to the earlier generations of samurai in his family who went into battle convinced they would not return, ready never to surrender and to die with honor, a conviction that gave them superhuman courage. When, as he always did, Isaac examined the drawing, he pointed out to Alma the irony that those young men were willing to risk their lives defending the interests of a country that was holding their families in concentration camps.

  * * *

  The day James Fukuda turned seventeen, he was led away between two armed soldiers. His family was given no explanation, but Takao and Heideko had anticipated this calamity, as their second son had been difficult since birth and a continual problem after their internment. Like the rest of the evacuees, the Fukuda family had accepted their situation with philosophical resignation, but James and some other nisei had protested constantly, first by breaking the rules at every opportunity and later by encouraging revolt. At first, Takao and Heideko put this down to the boy’s explosive nature, then to the waywardness of adolescence, and finally to a poor choice of friends. The camp warden had warned them several times that he would not tolerate James’s behavior. He put him in a cell for fighting, insubordination, and minor damage to federal property, but none of
this justified his being taken away to prison. Apart from the dissent of some adolescent nisei like James, the atmosphere at Topaz was one of complete calm. There were never any serious disturbances, the worst being the strikes and protests that took place when a sentry killed one old man who had got too close to the fence and didn’t hear the order to stop. The warden always took James’s youth into consideration and allowed himself to be swayed by the discreet maneuvers Boyd Anderson undertook in the boy’s defense.

  The government had sent a questionnaire to which the only correct answers were yes. All evacuees aged seventeen and over had to answer them. Among the leading questions, they were asked to be loyal to the United States, fight wherever they were sent—in the army in the case of men, and in the auxiliary forces for women—and to renounce their allegiance to the emperor of Japan. For issei like Takao, this meant giving up their nationality without having the right to become American, but almost all of them complied. The only ones who refused to sign, because they were American and felt insulted, were a few young nisei. They were nicknamed the No-Nos, and were regarded as dangerous by the government and rejected by the Japanese community, who from time immemorial had detested scandal. James was one of these No-Nos. Deeply ashamed when his son was arrested, his father shut himself in the barracks room assigned to his family and only left it to use the communal latrine. Ichimei would take him his food and then stand in line a second time to get himself something to eat. Heideko and Megumi, who also suffered from the trouble James had caused, tried to continue their lives as normal, heads held high despite the nasty rumors or disapproving looks from their own people and harassment by the camp authorities. The Fukudas, Ichimei included, were interrogated on several occasions, but thanks to Boyd, who had been promoted and protected them as best he could, they were never really threatened.