Daughter of Bad Times

by Rohan Wilson

  ‘When I saw you, I thought I was looking into a mirror,’ she says. ‘Only I was young and my hair was white again.’

  I pat her on the knee. It’s too casual, almost cold, and I regret it straight away.

  ‘My little girl.’

  I force a smile.

  Misaki Sakurai mops her nose then stuffs the tissue in her pocket. She’s blinking as she looks me hard in the face. Her eyes twitch back and forth, full of life.

  ‘You don’t remember me.’

  I press my lips together. ‘I remember a little.’

  ‘Really? You remember?’

  ‘Some things.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like, I used to eat mochi.’

  Sakurai-san presses her hands to her face. She’s tearing up. ‘Yes. Mochi.’

  ‘I had a toy robot that gave me high fives.’ This last phrase I say in an American accent that causes Sakurai-san to widen her eyes with wonder.

  ‘You speak English so well.’

  ‘It’s my first language.’

  ‘Oh, Lin-chan.’

  Lin. It’s always weird hearing my name said this way. Thing is, it’s the true pronunciation, the Japanese pronunciation. In Japan, it’s also the sound of an alarm clock. Lin-lin-lin. But which is the true me? Lin or Rin?

  Sakurai-san pulls the tissues and dabs her eyes. For a moment she seems to control herself by breathing deeply and dabbing but then her shoulders leap and her demeanour falls apart once more. ‘They told me it was an American family. They told me you would be loved.’

  So, we come to the bottom of it.

  All those down-reaching words seep back into my mind. Things I’d rehearsed in that black space between the dimming of the lights and the little death of sleep. Most important of these, the single word that child-Rin, in the cold hard beds of Alessandra’s apartment, had called so long and so loud: Mama. And then the question that always followed: why? Yet while my insides boil, outwardly I’m tight-lipped and straight-backed. I lower my gaze. My glasses buzz and I ignore them.

  ‘Where do you live?’

  ‘New York.’

  ‘So far away.’

  ‘I have a place near Battery Park that my mother gave me.’

  ‘Battery Park? Oh.’ Sakurai-san watches me with lively, glistening eyes. ‘Your mother must be very kind. She must care about you a great deal.’

  ‘Yes. She does.’

  For a moment nothing is said. Sakurai-san stares at me.

  ‘You’re so pretty.’

  I look away.

  ‘Your hair. I always imagine you with black hair.’

  ‘It used to be black. It used to be long. I changed it.’

  ‘Why?’

  I am looking at the Heart Sutra. Gone, gone, gone beyond. I’m not ready to answer her question yet. ‘Do you live here alone?’ I say, by way of distraction.

  ‘Yes. Since Airi died. It’s two years now since Airi died.’

  Sakurai-san stands and crosses to the butsudan, the shrine to the dead that every home has. This one is finished in black gloss timber with gilded plate and openwork carvings of birds. In the centre, like a miniature king in a miniature palace, is a statue of the Buddha posed cross-legged and half asleep. Around the Buddha are stacked various butsugu, the candles, sticks of incense, bells, burners, and then on brass serving bowls fresh mandarins, apples, and mochi cakes in packets of three for the dead to eat if they would. With great care, she removes a stack of framed photographs from the centre drawer and places them here and there on the tatami.

  These photographs are of smiling men and women. They look to me like any strangers you might see in the street. But they’re my ancestors: aunts, uncles, grandmothers, the strings to who were cut when I’d been taken to the east of America. Sakurai-san lays a few on a kneeling cushion in front of me.

  ‘This is Airi,’ she says and pushes forward a photo of a spry woman in her middle years hanging from a playground gym. Her hair is black and cut trim above the ears. She grins and swings and kicks.

  ‘Was she your friend?’

  ‘Well, I would say so. She was also my wife.’

  I laugh. Then I frown. ‘Sorry?’

  Sakurai-san holds out her left hand and on it is a ring of thick gold inset with red stones, maybe rubies, and with a white diamond as the centrepiece. I look at the diamond and look at Sakurai-san.

  ‘You were married to a woman?’

  ‘For ten years.’

  I open my mouth to speak but close it again.

  ‘Her stomach’—Sakurai-san touches her chest—‘her stomach was full of cancer. There was nothing to be done.’ She shakes her head. ‘Airi wanted me to look for you. We made some calls once. Nothing. The agency had closed. Gone. There were no records.’ She’s turning the ring on her finger. ‘Can I ask,’ she says. ‘How did you find me?’

  ‘It’s like we say in America. The golden rule.’

  Sakurai-san doesn’t understand the English. Her smile grows strained.

  ‘I paid someone,’ I say.

  Sakurai-san looks at me, blinking, then drops her head. ‘You’re very brave. If I was brave, I would have tried harder.’

  ‘It’s not bravery. I’m not brave. I’m angry.’

  ‘Oh.’

  I cup and re-cup my hands where they sit in my lap. I look out the window.

  ‘Yes,’ Sakurai-san says. ‘You should be angry. At me.’

  She shuffles the frames and pushes forward another photograph. It’s a young woman standing with an older white guy. From the gap between them, you can tell they’re not entirely comfortable together. Or perhaps it’s only the woman who is uncomfortable—the guy seems pretty happy about it, actually.

  ‘That’s my mother,’ she says. ‘Lulu. Her name was Lulu. She was so beautiful. Look at her eyes. Just beautiful. Her father was Australian. That’s him standing there.’

  ‘My grandmother was half Australian?’

  ‘Right. Which is why our skin is a little pale.’

  I look at the blue veins in my forearm.

  ‘We both have foreign blood,’ Sakurai-san says. ‘Strange, isn’t it?’

  Next, she lays down a photo of a woman in a white kimono with a black obi. Her dark hair is knotted in a style common some years back. I pick it up. The woman is standing under a blossoming cherry tree as the petals fall like snow. It looks faintly unreal, staged or falsified somehow.

  ‘Who is she?’

  Sakurai-san taps the picture. ‘It’s you.’

  Leaning down, I look more closely. This woman has a gently rounded face, flattish, yet with sharper cheeks and a child-sized nose. Her eyes are the large oval of a manicured nail. She has something of my forehead, the distance above the bridge of the nose. It could almost be real.

  ‘I had it made,’ Sakurai-san says. ‘There’s a place online that renders people at different ages. Mostly the dead. Mostly children. I sent them pictures of you from when you were little.’

  My fingers pass over this other girl’s hair. A fiction, a story, yet one that so resembles the real world you might be fooled. And there wouldn’t be any shame in it. I remember Yamaan talking to me about the Quran and why, even though he knew it wasn’t true, he still felt a duty to it. There’s no shame in believing a fiction, he’d said. Not if it affords comfort.

  ‘I speak to you every night,’ Sakurai-san says. ‘Every night at the butsudan. I say, Come to my dreams, Lin-chan. Come to my dreams then we can talk.’ Her lower lip crinkles as she holds back the feeling. ‘Oh yes. You visit me often. Mostly though you don’t speak. You’re too angry. Too sad.’

  ‘I’m sad in your dreams?’

  ‘I think maybe you’re lost. You cry. You won’t talk to me.’

  Her voice catches as she says this and I hear in it how hard life has been for her. Yet, I don’t feel any sympathy. She gave me away. She didn’t want me. These are the consequences of her choice.

  ‘I only have one memory of you,’ I say.

 
; Sakurai-san looks up. ‘You were four when I last saw you. I’m surprised you remember at all.’

  ‘I do. Just one thing.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You were sleeping on the floor. It was sunny. Your hair was white. I was trying to wake you.’

  Sakurai-san stares at me for a long time. Lost in thought it seems. Her eyes skip side to side. Then her brow furrows, quivering, and her lips tighten and her eyes begin to fill. ‘Sleeping,’ she says. ‘No, not sleeping.’

  A sudden tightening in my chest. The memory spools like a loop of video, always the same actions over and over, the falling of sunlight, shaking my mother, my mother never waking. It occurs to me now that what I’d felt at the time was a kind of panic. That’s why the picture remains so vivid.

  ‘Alessandra told me you were dead,’ I say. ‘Sometimes I thought I was remembering your death.’

  ‘I suppose you are, in a way.’

  Sakurai-san sorts through the photos. For a while nothing is spoken. She’s probably searching for the safest arrangement of words and her face is animated with micro shifts.

  ‘Look at me now. I’m just a middle-aged woman the same as everyone else. But if I roll up my sleeves’—which she then began to do—‘the picture changes.’

  Sakurai-san holds out her arm. The palest white shot through with veins. Across both wrists are old scars, long and pink and curved, like a strain of parasite burrowing below the skin. Dozens of them.

  All at once I understand.

  ‘The first time,’ she says, ‘I used pills. The neighbour found me. You were crying. Screaming. The neighbour came to see why. That’s what you remember.’ Sakurai-san pulls down her sleeve. She smiles and shakes her head. ‘After that I used knives. What a stupid person I was.’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘Something was wrong, that’s all.’

  ‘I wanted to sleep. I wanted to sleep through the pain.’

  I wait for her to go on. Sakurai-san smiles, her lively eyes as wet as ever.

  ‘Doctors got involved. The Ministry of Health said I couldn’t raise a child. It was dangerous for you. That’s what they said. I was only eighteen. A girl. Of course, I had to agree.’ Here, she makes a sweeping motion with her hands, as if this marked an end point. ‘So, you were taken.’

  I look at her for a long time before speaking. ‘Taken where?’

  ‘Akashi Gakuen children’s home. Yes. You weren’t there for long.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘One year.’

  I look away out the window. The house across the road has stands of bonsai arranged along the front wall in ceramic pots, in plastic buckets, in styrofoam crates. Dozens of them. Misshapen and deformed through the clipping and cutting.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘These are difficult questions. I shouldn’t be asking.’

  ‘No. Please. Ask me anything. Please.’

  I watch a woman in an apron spray water over the trees.

  ‘You need to know,’ Sakurai-san says. ‘This is you. You grew out of this history.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I owe you the story. Let me tell it to you.’

  I turn to her. ‘Why did you leave me in the children’s home?’

  She makes a snorting sound. ‘They ordered me to hospital,’ she says. ‘When they released me, I had nowhere to go. My mother, Lulu, was long dead and my father had remarried.’

  ‘My grandfather.’

  ‘Yes, your grandfather,’ she says and she loses her smile. ‘Your grandfather the pig. Forget the pig.’ She gathers the photos together and puts them aside. ‘Leave him to lay in his filth.’

  I look at the butsudan and at the pictures piled on the tatami for an image of him. I want to see this man who inspires such contempt.

  ‘For months I was in a women’s shelter,’ she says. ‘Only place that would take me. That’s where I used a knife on my arm.’ She nods. Her eyes seem to smile without her mouth. ‘I was useless to you. To everyone. I was useless even to God. And I missed you so much.’

  She’s nodding her head like everything she says is true but then she leans back and looks up at the ceiling and it’s clear that she’s grown distant from that fragile girl.

  ‘They had me,’ she says and smiles, ‘they had me sedated. I was a danger to myself. They wouldn’t let me out until I calmed down.’

  I shift a little. I’m sitting on folded legs, the way you always do in Japan. I can’t get comfortable.

  ‘Sometime then, while I was doped up. This was in fifty-three, I think. Sometime in fifty-three I had a visit from Usami-san.’

  Emi Usami. I can almost hear the clocks striking. ‘I’ve met her,’ I say. ‘That’s how I found you.’

  She locks her hands in her lap. ‘Found me. Yes. I thought so. Usami-san was the only one who knew.’ A long moment passes where she locks and relocks her fingers, her knuckles whitening, all webbed with tendons. ‘There was an American family ready to offer a home to a child as bright and beautiful as you. They would do anything to have you. Pay any sum. Bend any rules. There was a lawyer who brought agreements to sign. I didn’t understand any of it.’

  My legs are killing me. I want to stand up and kick them. I want to break something.

  ‘I could say that she paid me a lot of money to let you go and that would be true. I could say that I wasn’t fit to be a mother and that would also be true. I could say that in my heart I knew you would be happier with another family. That is certainly true.’

  Sakurai-san lifts her eyes and they are dark and wet and red at the edges. ‘But I won’t say those things. I was weak and I was wrong and I let them take you when I didn’t want to. That’s the truth. You were the daughter of my bad times and I was too weak to protect you.’ Then she bends and presses her forehead to the tatami in a deep, formal bow. ‘Honto ni gomenasai,’ she says. ‘Yurushite kudasai.’

  I’m sorry. Please forgive me.

  ROYAL COMMISSION INTO THE EAGLEHAWK MIGRANT TRAINING CENTRE RIOT

  THE HONOURABLE OSCAR AMBROSE IPP AO QC

  PUBLIC HEARING

  DAY 12

  TRANSCRIPT OF PROCEEDINGS AT HOBART

  ON THURSDAY, 16 MAY 2075 AT 2.00 P.M.

  MS SAKURAI: I was aware of that. Yes.

  MR KELLY: Were you also aware that the uploading of internal communications, private emails, or any data owned by Cabey-Yasuda Corrections was a crime?

  MS SAKURAI: Yes.

  MR KELLY: You went ahead with that course of action anyway? In the full knowledge that you were breaking the law?

  MS SAKURAI: Yes.

  MR KELLY: So in effect, Ms Sakurai, and let me make sure I have this correct, in effect you hacked the private, legally protected emails and communications of your colleagues—

  MS NGUYEN: I object. Commissioner—

  JUSTICE AMBROSE: Sorry, how do you object to that really?

  MS NGUYEN: (unclear)

  JUSTICE AMBROSE: Listen—

  MS NGUYEN: I will continue objecting to my learned friend referring to Ms Sakurai’s actions as hacking.

  JUSTICE AMBROSE: Listen, I understand—

  MS NGUYEN: She did not hack.

  JUSTICE AMBROSE: I understand that. Yes.

  MS NGUYEN: My learned friend continues to refer to her actions as hacking when it’s been established that she had the authority to access those communications.

  JUSTICE AMBROSE: Yes, sorry, that has been established. We know she didn’t hack anything. The question Mr Kelly wants answered is whether Ms Sakurai appreciated—

  MS NGUYEN: (unclear)

  JUSTICE AMBROSE: —the gravity of what she was doing.

  MS NGUYEN: Mr Kelly is trying to colour Ms Sakurai’s testimony and present her as a revolutionary or an anarchist when she is nothing of the kind.

  JUSTICE AMBROSE: Whatever Ms Sakurai is or isn’t will become clear if we let her answer Mr Kelly’s questions.

  Yamaan

  Imagine a volcanic plume—a tall, slowly turning pillar of smoke full
of red blasts of fire. Inside the cloud you see apartment towers lean and topple. You see a luxury yacht speared into the facade of the president’s palace. You see the dead floating in their thousands. That’s what we saw, those of us saved by the police. They trawled around and around, plucking the wet and wailing people from the sea. The problem was not the people. The problem was where to take us. We came past Malé and it was a blazing ruin. Have you ever seen fire burning on water? Some say it’s beautiful. It’s not. It’s terrifying. So Malé was gone and the wet, wailing people had to be taken somewhere.

  Let me explain what happened that day—the day of the August disaster. At the time, I knew few details outside what I witnessed from the police boat but in the days and months after, I learned a lot from other survivors. The tsunami warning came during Friday prayers. Some I spoke to said they understood at once that the sea walls around Malé would flood; others said they felt no cause for panic. Perhaps it depended on where you got your information. It came out in later inquiries that government broadcasters downplayed the danger. Either way, those who stayed in the streets died quickly, drowning once the water filled the area inside the sea walls like a bowl. Those in the buildings above water level, including my mother in our apartment, survived a little longer, maybe as long as an hour. Some were killed when three container ships broke anchor and bulldozed through the city, pushed by the force of the waves. A lot of the buildings by the harbour simply collapsed. Then, once the oil fire started from the spillage of these ships, there was no hope. Malé became a fireball.

  To deal with us, the Sri Lankan military re-opened a refugee camp called Menik Farm. We few survivors were shipped there in the days that followed. Survivors. That’s all we were. We had lived but the essence of us had washed away. We sat and did not speak. The camp was just a square of earth cut from the jungle. Over the next few days we helped the United Nations staff cover the red dust with tents stamped in blue with the UN lettering. Rows of these tents covered the land around like the corrugations in roofing iron. I had never seen a more hopeless sight in my life.