“I walk very much, but I don’t climb high so much.” Then he smiled and said, “Very good now.” He got up and kept climbing. Hanako kept looking to see if her grandfather was all right, but he didn’t seem tired at all now.
It took two hours to reach the summit. The whole way up they moved in the shade of pine trees. But still they were sweating. When they reached the top, Hanako ran to an outcropping of tan rock and put out her arms as if she were hugging it. She didn’t know what kind of rock it was, but she saw a small stone on the ground and kissed it before putting it in her rucksack. She would save it as her special spending-the-day-with-Jiichan rock. Then they sat down to a lunch of rice and tsukemono—pickled vegetables.
Jiichan gazed out at the farmhouses in the distance. “First time I climb mountain in twenty year. Mountain special place to Japanese. Our whole country mountain everywhere.” Hanako didn’t say what she thought: I know. He was nodding away, then started humming before he stopped to speak again. “Twenty year ago I climb here with your father.” His eyes went out of focus. “That day he tell me he go back to America when he eighteen. So that sad memory, but it also good he tell me because then I know to enjoy next two year most I can enjoy.” He pressed his lips together and looked down at the remains of his lunch. “That night my wife cry very hard but very quiet so he not hear.” He smiled at Hanako. “And now you here, and every night she happy.” He nodded. “You special girl.”
Hanako looked down bashfully. She said, “Thank you for coming here with me. Now I have a Japanese mountain rock.”
“Girl who like rock. I wish I know this all my life. I see many rock in my life. I could have save for you. Then you have too many rock.”
They laughed and finished eating. As they climbed back down, Jiichan said over and over as if it amazed him, “Girl who like rock! I wish I know. I wish I know!”
CHAPTER
THIRTY-FIVE
When Hanako had first gone back to school after cutting her hair, everyone had noticed—she could tell by the way they stared—but nobody said a word. It was like she was this kind of strange America-gaeri who occasionally did kind of strange America-gaeri things that they all took note of, and then they went about their normal lives and forgot about her.
But she starting thinking about how at camp, random kids were often joining in with other groups of kids without being invited. She just needed to put herself forward.
So one day at recess, a group of girls gathered around Ayako, who apparently had received a note from a boy. Which boy, Hanako didn’t know. But she walked straight over to the group and lurked briefly at the edges. She cleared her throat the way Jiichan sometimes did, and a couple of girls glanced at her, but that was it.
“Was it Nori? He’s the cutest boy!” Hanako exclaimed in Japanese.
The girls all turned to her as one, and then Ayako said in a friendly voice, “Yes, he is!” As soon as she said it, they all looked around and giggled, as if Nori might have heard. Nobody seemed to mind that Hanako stood near them the whole time, listening and laughing when someone said something funny.
When the bell rang, one of the girls even looked back at her and said, “Come on!”
That just made her so happy that she half skipped all the way inside! If Wayne Collins got them back their citizenship, even if it took a year or two, she would have time to make some friends, she decided. She had no idea how long something like getting back your citizenship might take. In general, as she understood it, lawyers took a long time to do . . . whatever it was precisely that they did.
In class she felt pleased that she’d made so much progress today. Her mind wandered, thinking of her friends at Tule Lake and how some of them had abandoned her after they learned her parents were renouncing their citizenship. Others befriended her for the same reason. She had lost her best friend, Reiko, even before Papa renounced.
In 1943 the American government had given the Nikkei in camps questionnaires attempting to separate “loyal” from “disloyal” inmates. The government—Papa often just called them “they”—wanted to induct the “loyal” men into the army, so they needed to figure out who was a loyal American and who could be discarded as disloyal. Papa had said “they” were midlevel government workers: “Any old idiot can decide your entire fate. That’s the way government works.” Papa had spoken his mind on this questionnaire. Where it asked whether he would be willing to serve in combat duty, he said he would do it gladly, if his family’s civil rights were returned. There was another “loyalty question,” but he had answered “yes” to that. So that single answer, where he mentioned their civil rights, was why he was brought in for questioning and eventually branded “disloyal” and the family was sent from Jerome to Tule Lake.
He was a “no-no boy.” That’s what the “disloyal” people were called. Hanako remembered feeling shame at first. Yes, shame even of her own father, for being a “no-no.” All the way on the train to Tule Lake, she had felt ashamed. A lot of people from Jerome had been “no-nos,” though, more than at any other camp. So that helped a little. It was just that her best friend and her family were not “no-nos.”
Reiko. With her funny, loud laugh—and her speedy feet. When they were running away from mischief, Reiko always got way ahead and then waited for Hanako. They had been friends for a long time, because they’d gone to school together before the war and had both ended up in Jerome. Reiko’s father had answered “yes-yes” to the loyalty questions. Then he had been drafted and fought for the 442nd, the combat unit made up of Japanese American men. It became one of the most decorated combat units in American history. Its motto was “Go for broke,” and it had suffered massive casualties. Reiko’s father had been killed helping to liberate an Italian town. Reiko’s letter to Hanako about her father’s death had been filled with fury, as if his death were Hanako’s fault. But for no reason: Why was it Hanako’s fault? Reiko called Papa a coward. No matter how much that had hurt Hanako, in Tule Lake she had become incredibly proud of her father for standing his ground and asking for their civil rights back before he would serve. And she was incredibly proud of Reiko’s father and so sad that he had died. But she understood why they could no longer be friends. It was because both of their fathers had done what they knew was right, and those were two opposite things.
“Tachibana-SAN!” The teacher was rapping her stick on Hanako’s desk! That was all the sensei said, though. She started lecturing on poetry, no doubt what she’d been doing while Hanako wasn’t paying attention.
Sensei wrote a poem on the board, and they all recited it together:
From the white dewdrops,
Learn the way
To the pure land.
The bell rang, and after cleaning the floor, a couple of the girls said good-bye to her! She bowed her head respectfully as she said good-bye back.
She walked home down the quiet path, surrounded by trees and grass and blue sky. It had not been a bad day, not at all. Now everything was so peaceful. She could not imagine what it would be like to have bombs falling on her city. It just went to show that there was always something worse than your situation, and probably always something better as well. All she could do in life was what Papa said: “Do everything you can.” But it was also possible, she knew, that things could be so bad that there was nothing worse. She knew this because she had seen Hiroshima.
When she arrived home, Mama was outside rocking Akira, who was crying. Hanako dropped her backpack and ran up. “What is it?”
“He’s sorry he broke open his geode.”
Hanako saw the broken rock on the ground, and it was sparkly inside. Very pretty! Hanako knelt before him. “But it’s beautiful inside! Aki, it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen!”
Aki shook his head no. “I’m having a bad day. I want to go back to camp.” He grabbed Hanako’s arm and looked at her pleadingly. “I’m hungry. I haven’t had peanut butter since we got here! Let’s go back to camp.”
“Aki!” Mama
said in a moment of anger. “Don’t talk like that!”
“But I am!”
Hanako picked up his hands, noticed his sharpies were getting dull. “I tell you what. I’m going to cut your nails extra-pointy tonight. And I promise you that someday you can have everything you want to eat. I’ll cook . . . spaghetti and ice cream for you!”
He stopped crying. “How do you cook ice cream?”
Well . . . she hadn’t exactly meant to say that. “It’s a surprise.”
Akira seemed to be weighing her words, then carefully gathered up the pieces of the geode and cupped them in his hands. He was half smiling, his face satisfied. “Can I put these in your special bowl later?”
“Of course. You can have my bowl,” she said, and immediately regretted it, even though it made him happy.
They went inside, where he set the pieces of the geode on the kotatsu table so he could show everyone later. Next, they played what seemed like a hundred and twenty rounds of Go Fish. Akira was deeply involved, concentrating for several minutes sometimes before deciding what card to ask her for. Then someone knocked at the door. Hanako slid it open, and there was a little boy who looked about four. Down the walkway was a woman who must have been his mother. She was holding an unlit lantern, as it was still light out.
The boy held up a pair of small shoes. “I have nice shoes for rice,” he said.
His mother called out, “Look cute!”
“We don’t have rice, I’m sorry,” Hanako said. She thought about the wheat Jiichan had stuffed into the locker. The boy was quite adorable. But she said firmly, “We have nothing.” Tomorrow Jiichan was planning to sell the wheat in the locker on the black market while she was at school. They had “stolen” much more, and Jiichan separated the grain from the straw. They had quite a bit. Hanako tried not to think about it, in case the boy could read her mind. The boy ran to confer with his mother, and then they walked off. Hanako noticed that he was barefoot. Akira was leaning around Hanako.
“Konbanwa,” he called out to the boy. “Good evening,” though it wasn’t evening yet.
“Konbanwa,” the boy said back.
“He’s hungry,” Akira said. “I feel bad.”
“You’re hungry too,” Hanako said coldly. “That is more important.” To her. It was more important to her.
“Why is it more important if I’m hungry?” he asked curiously.
Mama interjected, “Nobody is more important than anybody else, Hanako.” That was a scold.
But Hanako raised her chin and refused to concede. To her, Akira was more important. But sometimes at night, when she felt hungry, she had an awful thought: that she was more important than anybody in the whole world. When you’re very hungry, that’s unfortunately the way you feel. Sometimes it took everything she had to be able to share a single carrot with her brother. It took such a big effort that she would feel worn out afterward, like she had just walked ten miles. Sometimes she would give him half her last carrot, and later in bed she would cry about it. Did that make her a terrible person? She just didn’t know.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-SIX
Hanako woke up in the middle of the night. She heard muffled yelling. For a moment she froze in fear, but then she pushed herself up and moved quietly to the bedroom door. She wondered if she should wake up Papa. But he was always so tired. She slid open the door, then closed it behind herself. The sounds were coming from the other bedroom. It had to be Baachan’s voice she was hearing, but it was so frantic and intense, it was unrecognizable to Hanako. Were her grandparents fighting? That seemed impossible to believe.
She crept toward their room, until she could hear more clearly. Baachan was sobbing. “You must tell them to stay! You must tell them!”
Hanako felt like . . . like something truly awful had just happened, like someone she loved had just died. She put her hands over her ears as Baachan yelled, but then she had to hear and took them off again.
“It is good for the children to go,” Jiichan was saying in Japanese. “They are hungry for better food than we can give them. They need a good education. There is no future for a tenant farm girl in Japan except to get married and work on a farm she will never own. She will never make money, and then she will die. They must leave.”
“Please, please tell them to stay! You are his father—he will listen to you!”
Then there was no more talking or shouting, just sobbing.
Hanako stood in the dark living room undecided. Should she go to their room or back to hers? She closed her eyes and thought hard. Then she opened her eyes and moved forward.
She waited outside their door for a few more minutes, then said softly, “Baachan?”
The crying immediately stopped. Jiichan opened the door. “We have awoke you?”
“I get up in the middle of the night all the time, almost every evening,” she said, though she hardly ever got up in the middle of the night. She was almost as tall as Baachan, but she suddenly felt very small and very young. “We can stay, Baachan,” she declared.
“I am sorry,” Baachan said. She leaned over, trying to bow, but she couldn’t because of her back. Then she knelt down. “I am sorry. I should not have said. You must leave; I know this.”
“We can stay, though,” Hanako insisted. “We don’t even have anywhere to go in America.”
“You will find your place,” Jiichan said urgently, like it was extremely important for her to leave Japan.
“Anyway, we have more time, maybe two year with you,” Baachan said. “It will be happy time of my life. I will not cry when you leave. I promise I will not cry again.”
“Oh, I cry all the time!” Hanako said. “There’s nothing wrong with crying. Look at Akira—he cries almost every day!”
“The child may cry to the parent,” Baachan said, swatting at the air. “I must not cry to you. You are try to grow up. It does not help if I cry.”
Jiichan placed his hand fondly on Baachan’s back. “You old woman! You cry your whole life! You will not stop now!”
Baachan smiled then, and he smiled too. They seemed to have forgotten Hanako was standing there as they smiled at each other. He wrapped his arms around her, and Hanako knew it was time for her to slip out. She moved through the living room slowly, so as not to walk into anything, and when she lay down, she felt wide awake. But she did not feel like crying, not at all. She just felt . . . like she wanted to lie here forever, in this house, surrounded by her family. She concentrated on her family being all around her. Akira was whimpering, though, very sadly. Nobody had said so, but she knew that if she did not have much future in Japan, neither did he. He would end up working on the farm as well. Not owning it or anything. Not making money. Just working to survive. Six days a week if he was lucky, seven if he was not. If they stayed, that was surely his fate.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-SEVEN
The next day was Saturday. The Japanese had a half day of school on Saturdays. But nobody had woken Hanako up, and when she got out of bed, she saw that it was too late to leave now. The house seemed silent, and in the living room she found a note saying that Mama had taken Akira next door, where they’d been invited for tea. Everyone else would be at work, even though Hanako could hear that it was raining. There was a knock on the door—Hanako was in her underwear—so she put on her coat and ran to answer.
It was Kiyoshi! And very suddenly her anger returned! It just exploded inside of her! What did he want from her now? At least he’d bothered to knock this time.
Kiyoshi held out something wrapped in newspaper. His face was proud as he bowed deeply, still holding out the package. “This is for the rice,” he said in Japanese.
She froze while the anger began to fade away. His hair was wet from the rain. And where was Mimi? Kiyoshi stood up straight and pressed the package into her hands. So she reached out and slowly unwrapped it. It was a kimono—a purple one. It made her heart flutter like butterfly wings. She could not say it was beautiful, exactly—that
is, not beautiful in the way a wedding kimono was. But it felt like nice silk, and the flower decorations were pretty.
Upon pulling out the kimono to inspect it further, Hanako saw that it was prettier than she had thought. The bottom six inches were a darker purple, and then the very bottom was trimmed in lilac. There were scattered white flowers in the dark purple section. It was actually quite dramatic. She put it on over her coat; she had never worn a kimono before. It was too big, so it would be even bigger on Baachan.
She felt different, like she was in a different world, in a different time, like this kimono had the power to transport her. She imagined being older, standing next to a man she loved. Baachan and Jiichan would have been happy the day they married. Baachan would not have thought that someday her back would be bent. Probably she would have hoped for more than one child. Hanako felt as if, in this kimono, she could understand how Baachan felt on her wedding day.
Then she remembered that Kiyoshi was standing there. He was looking at her with genuine curiosity. She took off the kimono and carefully folded it up. She wasn’t even sure when Baachan’s birthday was, but she would save it for then. She inhaled deeply; the air smelled of rain. So she had done a bad thing by hinting to Kiyoshi about the rice, but now a good thing had come out of it. Maybe she would never be in the right on this subject, but at least she would not be so terribly in the wrong now. Maybe.
Kiyoshi bowed. “You might not think it, but I try to be honorable. That’s how my parents raised me. Is it good enough for the rice?”
“Yes, there’s something very special about it.” Actually, she used the word irei, which meant “unprecedented” or “exceptional.” She wasn’t sure that was the way irei was supposed to be used—was it too formal? But she was concerned with something more important. “I was wondering, where did you get it?” Hanako asked. “Did you steal it?”
“I worked for it.”
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