The Japanese Lover

by Isabel Allende

  “What’s going to happen to my brother?” Megumi asked Anderson.

  “I don’t know, Megumi. They could have sent him to Tule Lake in California, or Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. The Federal Bureau of Prisons is in charge of that. I guess he won’t be released until the war is over.”

  “People here say that the No-Nos are going to be shot as spies . . .”

  “Don’t believe everything you hear, Megumi.”

  Takao was completely changed by his son’s arrest. During the first few months at Topaz he had taken part in the community and filled the empty hours growing vegetables and making furniture from the wooden crates they got from the camp kitchen. When there was no more space in their cramped barrack room, Heideko encouraged him to make things for other families. He asked permission to teach the children judo, but this was denied; the camp commander was afraid he might give his pupils subversive ideas and put his soldiers’ security at risk. Takao continued practicing in secret with his own children. He lived in anticipation of their release: he counted the days, weeks, and months, crossing them off on the calendar. He thought constantly of his ill-fated dream of setting up a plant nursery with Isaac, of the money he had saved and lost, of the house he had been paying for over many years, which had now been repossessed. Decades of effort, hard work, and fulfilling his obligations, only to find himself imprisoned behind a barbed-wire fence like a criminal, he would say bitterly. He was not sociable. The crush of people, the inevitable lines, the noise, the lack of privacy all irritated him.

  Heideko on the other hand blossomed at Topaz. Compared to other Japanese women, she was a disobedient wife who confronted her husband arms akimbo, and yet she had lived her life devoted to her family and to the laborious toil of agriculture, without the slightest suspicion that the spirit of activism lay dormant within her. In the concentration camp she had no time for despair or boredom; she spent her days resolving other people’s problems and struggling with the authorities to obtain the apparently impossible. Her children were captive and secure behind the fence; she had no need to watch over them since eight thousand pairs of eyes and a detachment of the armed forces were doing that for her. Her chief worry was making sure that Takao didn’t collapse completely; she was running out of ideas for what he could do to keep busy and not have time to think. Her husband had grown old: the ten years’ age difference between them was very noticeable now. The forced proximity of life in the barracks had put a stop to the passion that had previously rubbed the rough edges off living together: for him, affection had turned into exasperation, and for her, into impatience. Out of a sense of shame toward the children, who shared the same room, they tried to avoid contact in the narrow bed, which meant that the easy relationship they’d once enjoyed gradually withered. Takao took refuge in rancor, whereas Heideko discovered her vocation for service and leadership.

  * * *

  Megumi had received three marriage proposals in less than two years, and no one understood why she had rejected them, except for Ichimei, who was the intermediary between his sister and Boyd. Megumi wanted two things in life: to become a doctor and to marry Boyd, in that order. She finished secondary school effortlessly at Topaz and graduated with honors, but higher education was beyond her reach. A few universities back east did accept a small number of students of Japanese origin, chosen from among the most brilliant in the concentration camps, and these lucky ones could get financial help from the government, but James’s arrest was a black mark against the Fukudas, and so Megumi did not have that option. Nor could she leave her family; with Charles absent, she felt responsible for her younger brother and her parents. So she worked in the hospital alongside the doctors and nurses who had been recruited from among the prisoners. Her mentor was a white doctor by the name of Frank Delillo. He was in his fifties; stank of sweat, tobacco, and whisky; and was a complete failure in his private life but a competent and selfless doctor. He took Megumi under his wing from the very first day, when she appeared at the hospital in her pleated skirt and starched white blouse to offer her services as an apprentice. They were both recent arrivals at Topaz. Megumi began by emptying bedpans and cleaning up, but showed such willingness and ability that Delillo soon appointed her his assistant.

  “Once this war is over, I’m going to study medicine,” she told him.

  “That could take longer than you think, Megumi. It’s going to be hard for you to become a doctor: you are not only a woman, but a Japanese one.”

  “I’m an American, the same as you,” she retorted.

  “Have it your own way. Stick close to me and you’ll learn something at least.”

  Megumi took him literally. She clung to Delillo and ended up sewing cuts, setting bones, treating burns, and helping at births—nothing more complicated than that, as the most serious cases were sent to the hospitals in Delta or Salt Lake City. Although her work kept her busy ten hours a day, some nights she managed to get together for a while with Boyd, thanks to the protection of Frank Delillo, who apart from Ichimei was the only one in on their secret. Despite the risks, the lovers enjoyed two years of clandestine meetings, with luck on their side. The desert was so barren there were no hiding places, but the young nisei found ingenious ways to avoid their parents’ supervision and prying eyes. Megumi however could not hope to do so, because Boyd’s helmet and rifle made it impossible for him to burrow like a rabbit among the sparse bushes available. The headquarters and living quarters of the whites, where they might have found a nest, were at some distance from the camp. She would never have gained access had it not been for Delillo’s divine intervention. Not only did he obtain a pass for her to get through the checkpoints, he also conveniently absented himself from his room. There, in the midst of the disorder and dirt in which Delillo lived, with ashtrays full of cigarette butts and empty bottles scattered around, Megumi lost her virginity and Boyd found heaven.

  Ichimei’s passion for gardening, inculcated by his father, became even more intense at Topaz. From the outset, many of the evacuees who had earned a living in agriculture before the war set themselves to grow vegetables, undeterred by the desolate landscape and harsh climate. They watered by hand, counting each drop, and in summer protected the plants with paper tents, and with bonfires in the depths of winter. Thanks to their care, they managed to get the grudging desert to produce vegetables and fruit. There was never any lack of food in the canteens—the evacuees could fill their plates and come back for more—but without the determination of the gardeners they would have had only canned food to eat. Nothing healthy grows in a tin, they used to say. Ichimei attended the school classes and spent the rest of the time in the vegetable plots. He was soon known by the nickname “Green Fingers,” because everything he touched germinated and grew. At night, after lining up twice for food, once for his father and a second time for himself, he would carefully bind the storybooks and school texts sent by distant teachers for the little nisei. He was a polite, thoughtful boy, who could spend hours in one spot, staring at the purple mountains against the clear blue sky, lost in his own thoughts and emotions. It was said of him that he had a monk’s vocation, and that in Japan he would have been a novice in a Zen monastery. Although the Oomoto faith discouraged proselytizing, Takao surreptitiously preached his religion to Heideko and his children, but Ichimei was the only one who practiced it with fervor, because it fit in with his character and with the concept of life that he had had since childhood. He followed Oomoto with his father and an issei couple from another hut. There were Buddhist and several Christian services in the camp, but they were the only ones devoted to Oomoto. Heideko accompanied them occasionally, but without any great conviction; Charles and James had never been interested in their father’s beliefs, while Megumi, to Takao’s horror and Heideko’s astonishment, converted to Christianity. She put this down to a premonitory dream she had in which Jesus appeared to her.

  “How do you know it was Jesus?” a furious Takao demanded to know.

  “Who else goes
around wearing a crown of thorns?” she replied. She had to go to religion classes given by the Presbyterian pastor, followed by a short private confirmation ceremony attended only by Ichimei, out of curiosity, and Boyd, profoundly moved by this proof of her love. Naturally the pastor surmised that her conversion owed more to the guard than to Christianity, but he did not object. He gave them his blessing, wondering in which corner of the universe this couple would be able to find shelter.

  ARIZONA

  In December 1944, a few days before the Supreme Court unanimously declared that no American citizens, whatever their cultural background, could be detained without reason, the Topaz military commander, escorted by two soldiers, handed Heideko Fukuda a flag folded into a triangle and pinned a purple ribbon with a medal on Takao’s chest, while the funereal lament from a trumpet tightened the throats of the hundreds of people gathered around the family to honor Charles Fukuda, who had died in combat. Heideko, Megumi, and Ichimei wept, but Takao’s expression was indecipherable. Over the years spent in the concentration camp his face had stiffened into an impassive, proud mask, but his hunched-over bearing and stubborn silence bore witness to the broken man he had become. At fifty-two, nothing was left of his capacity for pleasure at the sight of a plant growing, of his gentle sense of humor, his enthusiasm to create a future for his children, the soft tenderness he had once shared with Heideko. The heroic sacrifice made by Charles, the eldest son who was meant to support the family when he no longer could, was the final blow. Charles had perished in Italy, like hundreds of other Japanese-Americans in the 442nd Infantry Regiment, which became known as the Purple Heart Battalion due to the extraordinary number of medals for valor it had been awarded. That regiment, made up entirely of nisei, was the most decorated in US military history, but this would never be any kind of consolation for the Fukudas.

  After Japan surrendered on August 14, 1945, the process of closing the concentration camps began. The Fukuda family received twenty-five dollars and train tickets to a city in central Arizona. As with all the other evacuees, they would never publicly refer to those years of humiliation when their loyalty and patriotism had been called into question; life without honor was worth little. Shikata ga nai. They were not allowed to return to San Francisco, where they had nothing to go back to anyway. Takao had lost the right to rent the plots he used to cultivate, as well as his house; there was nothing left of his savings or of the money Isaac Belasco had given him when they were evacuated. He had a constant wheezing in his chest, coughed incessantly, and was wracked with back pains. He felt incapable of resuming work in the fields, the only job available to someone in his condition. To judge by his chilly attitude, his family’s precarious position mattered little to him; sadness had frozen into indifference. Although the issei could finally acquire citizenship, not even that could lift Takao out of his despair. For thirty years he had wanted to have the same rights as an American, and now that he had the chance, all he wanted to do was to return to Japan, his vanquished homeland. When Heideko tried to get him to accompany her to register with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, she ended up going on her own, because her husband’s only reply was to curse the United States.

  Yet again, Megumi was forced to postpone her decision to study medicine and her desire to get married, but Boyd, who was transferred to Los Angeles, did not forget her for a moment. The laws prohibiting marriage and cohabitation between races had been abolished in most states, but a relationship like theirs was still considered scandalous; neither of them would have dared tell their parents they had been together for more than three years. For Takao Fukuda it would have been a catastrophe; he would never have accepted that his daughter was with a white, especially not one who had patrolled the barbed-wire fences of his Utah prison. He would be forced to repudiate her and thus lose her as well. He had already lost Charles in the war and seen James deported to Japan, from where he did not expect any more news of him. Boyd Anderson’s parents had earned their living with a dairy farm until they were ruined in the thirties and ended up managing a cemetery. They were scrupulously honest, very religious, and tolerant over racial matters, but their son was not going to mention Megumi to them until she had accepted a wedding ring.

  Every Monday Boyd began a letter to her, and went on adding paragraphs each day, drawn from The Art of Writing Love Letters, a manual in fashion among soldiers who had come back from the war and had left girlfriends scattered around the world. On Friday, he would post the letter. Every second Saturday, this methodical man set himself the task of telephoning Megumi, although this did not always work out; on Sundays he went to the racetrack to bet. He lacked the real gambler’s irresistible compulsion, and the vagaries of fortune made him nervous and affected his stomach ulcer, but soon he had discovered he was lucky with horses, and used his winnings to supplement the pittance he earned. In the evening he studied mechanics, as his plan was to leave the armed forces and open a garage in Hawaii. He thought that would be the best place to settle, because it had a large Japanese population, which had been spared the indignity of internment even though Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor had taken place there. In his letters, Boyd tried to convince Megumi of the advantages of Hawaii, where they would be able to raise children with less racial hatred, but children were the last thing on her mind. Megumi maintained a slow but tenacious correspondence with a couple of Chinese doctors to discover how she could study Oriental medicine, as the Western kind was denied her. She quickly learned that here too, the facts of being a woman and being of Japanese origin were insurmountable obstacles, just as her mentor Frank Delillo had warned her.

  At the age of fourteen, Ichimei started going to secondary school. Since Takao was paralyzed by melancholy and Heideko could speak no more than a few words of English, Megumi had to be her brother’s guardian. On the day she went to enroll him, she thought Ichimei was bound to feel at home, because the building was as ugly and the surroundings as barren as at Topaz. The school principal, Miss Brody, received them. She had spent the war years trying to convince politicians and public opinion that children from Japanese families had just as much right to education as all Americans. She had collected thousands of books to send to the concentration camps. Ichimei had bound several of them, and remembered them perfectly because each one had an inscription by Miss Brody on the title page. He imagined his benefactor as being like the fairy godmother in Cinderella but found himself confronted by a woman built like a tank, with a woodcutter’s arms and the voice of a town crier.

  “My brother is behind with his studies. He’s not good at reading or writing, or arithmetic,” an embarrassed Megumi told her.

  “What are you good at then, Ichimei?” Miss Brody asked him directly.

  “Drawing and planting,” whispered Ichimei, without raising his eyes from the tips of his shoes.

  “Perfect! That’s exactly what we need here!” Miss Brody exclaimed.

  For the first week, the other children bombarded Ichimei with the insults against his race that were common during the war but that he had never heard at Topaz. He did not know either that the Japanese were more hated than the Germans, and he had not seen the comics where they were portrayed as degenerate and ruthless. He accepted the jibes with his usual placidity, but the first time a bully laid a finger on him, he threw him through the air with a judo move he had learned from his father—the same one he had used years earlier to show Nathaniel what martial arts were capable of. He was sent to the principal’s room to be punished. “Well done, Ichimei,” was her only comment. After that crucial feat, he was able to go through the four years of schooling without ever being attacked again.

  February 16, 2005

  I went to Prescott, Arizona, to see Miss Brody. It was her ninety-fifth birthday, and many of her ex-pupils gathered to celebrate. She is doing very well for her age, and recognized me as soon as she saw me. Just imagine! How many children passed through her hands? How can she possibly remember them all? She recalled that I painted the
posters for the school parties, and that on Sundays I worked in her garden. I was a dreadful student, but she always gave me good grades. Thanks to Miss Brody I’m not completely illiterate and can write to you now, my dear friend.

  This week that we have not been able to meet has been an eternity. The rain and cold have made it especially sad. And I’m sorry, but I haven’t been able to find any gardenias to send you. Please call me.

  Ichi

  BOSTON

  During the first year of her separation from Ichimei, Alma lived in anticipation of his letters, but as time went by she grew accustomed to her friend’s silence, just as she had done to that of her parents and brother. Her aunt and uncle did their best to protect her from the bad news from Europe, in particular about the fate of the Jews. Whenever Alma asked about her family, she was told such outlandish stories that the war sounded more like something out of the legends of King Arthur she had read with Ichimei in the garden pergola. According to her aunt Lillian, the lack of any correspondence was due to problems with the mail system in Poland, and in the case of her brother, Samuel, because of security measures in England. She told Alma he was carrying out vital missions for the Royal Air Force that were both dangerous and secret, and so had to remain in strict anonymity. Why should she tell her niece that her brother had been shot down with his plane in France? Isaac stuck pins in a map to show Alma how the Allied forces were advancing or retreating but did not have the heart to tell her the truth about her parents. Ever since the Mendels had been stripped of their possessions and forced into the terrible Warsaw ghetto, he had received no news of them. He sent large sums of money to organizations trying to help the people in the ghetto and knew that the number of Jews deported by the Nazis between July and September 1942 had reached more than two hundred and fifty thousand. He also knew about the thousands who died every day of starvation and illnesses. The wire-topped wall separating the ghetto from the rest of the city was not completely impermeable, for some food and medicine could be smuggled in, and the horrific photos of children dying of hunger could get out, so there were some means of communicating. If none of the methods he had employed to locate Alma’s parents had met with any success, and if Samuel’s plane had crashed, it was reasonable to assume that all three were dead, but until there was irrefutable proof, Isaac intended to spare his niece all that pain.