by Min Jin Lee
Sunja wasn’t speaking to him, but she didn’t seem angry, either. She was facing the stove with her back turned to him. Hansu could make out the outline of her body in her camel-colored sweater and brown woolen trousers. The first time he’d spotted her, he’d noticed her large, full bosom beneath the traditional Korean blouse. He’d always preferred a girl with big breasts and a pillowy bottom. He had never seen her completely naked; they’d only made love outside, where she had always worn a chima. His famously beautiful wife had no chest, hips, or ass, and he had dreaded fucking her because she’d loathed being touched. Before bed, he had to bathe, and after lovemaking she had to have a long bath at no matter what hour. After she gave birth to three girls, he quit trying for a son; even his father-in-law, whom Hansu loved, had said nothing about the other women.
He believed that she’d been foolish for refusing to be his wife in Korea. What did it matter that he had a marriage in Japan? He would have taken excellent care of her and Noa. They would have had other children. She would never have had to work in an open market or in a restaurant kitchen. Nevertheless, he had to admire her for not taking his money the way any young girl did these days. In Tokyo, it was possible for a man to buy a girl for a bottle of French perfume or a pair of shoes from Italy.
If Hansu was comfortable reminiscing in her kitchen, Sunja was more than a little unsettled at the sight of him sitting at the breakfast table. From the moment she’d met him, she’d felt his presence all around her. He was an unwanted constant in her imagination. And after Noa vanished, it was as if she were continually haunted by both father and son. Hansu was now in her kitchen waiting patiently for her attention. He was staying for dinner. In all these years, they had never eaten a meal together. Why had he come? When would he go? It was his way to appear then disappear, and as she boiled water for their tea, she thought, I could turn around and he could be gone. Then what?
Sunja opened a blue tin of imported butter cookies and put some on a plate. She filled the teapot with hot water and floated a generous pinch of tea leaves. It was easy to recall a time when there was no money for tea and a time when there was none to buy.
“On the first of each month, Noa sends me cash with a brief note saying that he’s well. The postmarks are always different,” she said.
“I’ve looked for Noa. He doesn’t want to be found. I’m looking for him still. Sunja, he’s my son, too.”
How can you blame me for that? Hansu had once said to her. She poured him a cup of tea and excused herself.
The reflection in the bathroom mirror disappointed her. She was fifty-two years old. Her sister-in-law, Kyunghee, who’d been diligent about wearing her hat and gloves to protect her from spots and lines, looked much younger than she did, though Kyunghee was fourteen years older. Sunja touched her short, graying hair. She had never been lovely, and certainly now, she didn’t believe that any man would ever want her. That part of her life had ended with Mozasu’s father. She was plain and wrinkled; her waist and thighs were thick. Her face and hands belonged to a poor, hardworking woman, and no matter how much money she had in her purse now, nothing would make her appealing. A long time ago, she had wanted Hansu more than her own life. Even when she broke with him, she had wanted him to return, to find her, to keep her.
Hansu was seventy, yet he had changed very little; if anything, his features had improved. He still trimmed his thick white hair carefully and tamed it with scented oil; in his fine wool suit and handmade shoes, Hansu looked like an elegant statesman—a handsome grandfather. No one would have pegged him for a yakuza boss. Sunja didn’t want to leave the bathroom. Before she’d left the house, she hadn’t even bothered to look in the mirror. She wasn’t hideous or shameful to look at, but she had prematurely reached the stage in a woman’s life when no one noticed her entering or leaving a room.
Sunja opened the cold-water spigot and washed her face. Despite everything, she wanted him to desire her a little—this knowledge was embarrassing. In her life, there had been two men; that was better than none, she supposed; so that had to be enough. Sunja dried her face on a hand towel and turned off the light.
In the kitchen, Hansu was eating a biscuit.
“Are you okay living here?”
She nodded.
“And the little boy. He’s well behaved.”
“Mozasu checks in on him all the time.”
“When will he be home?”
“Soon. I better make dinner.”
“Can I help you cook?” Hansu pretended to take off his suit jacket.
Sunja laughed.
“At last. I thought you’d forgotten how to smile.”
They both looked away.
“Are you dying?” she asked.
“It’s prostate cancer. I have very good doctors. I don’t think I’ll die of this. Not very soon, anyway.”
“You lied then.”
“No, Sunja. We’re all dying.”
She felt angry with him for lying, but she felt grateful, too. She had loved him, and she could not bear the thought of him being gone from this life.
Solomon shrieked with happiness when the door opened. Rolling up his red sweater sleeves hastily, Solomon raised his left arm, bent into a sharp L, and his right hand bisected his left forearm to make an off-centered cross. The child made static sounds to announce the laser beams emitting from his left hand and held his fierce pose.
Haruki fell down onto the floor. He moaned, then made the sound of an explosion.
“Ah, the kaiju has been defeated!” Solomon shouted, and jumped on top of Haruki.
“It’s very good to see you again,” Mozasu said to Hansu. “This is my friend Haruki Totoyama.”
“Hajimemashite. Totoyama desu.”
Solomon resumed his pose.
“Have mercy, Ultraman. Kaiju Toto must say hello to your grandmother.”
“It’s good to see you,” Sunja said.
“Thank you for having me.”
Solomon moved in between Sunja and Haruki.
“Kaiju Toto!”
“Hai!” Haruki bellowed.
“Papa bought me a new Ultraman yesterday.”
“Lucky, lucky,” Haruki said, sounding envious.
“I’ll show you. C’mon!” Solomon pulled on Haruki, and the grown man hurtled dramatically toward Solomon’s room.
Hansu kept a file on every person in Sunja’s life. He knew all about Detective Haruki Totoyama, the elder son of a seamstress who owned a uniform manufacturer in Osaka. He had no father and a younger brother who was mentally disabled. Haruki was a homosexual who was engaged to an older woman who worked for his mother. In spite of his relative youth, Haruki was highly regarded in his precinct.
The dinner table talk was happy and relaxed.
“Why can’t you move to Yokohama and live with us?” Solomon asked Haruki.
“Hmm. Tempting, nee? Then I can play Ultraman every day. Soooo. But, Soro-chan, my mother and brother live in Osaka. I think I’m supposed to live there, too.”
“Oh,” Solomon sighed. “I didn’t know you had a brother. Is he older or younger?”
“Younger.”
“I’d like to meet him,” Solomon said. “We could be friends.”
“Soo nee, but he’s very shy.”
Solomon nodded.
“Grandma is shy, too.”
Sunja shook her head, and Mozasu smiled.
“I wish you could move here with your brother,” Solomon said quietly.
Haruki nodded. Before Solomon was born, he had not been very interested in children. From a young age, having a handicapped brother had made him wary of the responsibilities of caring for another person.
“My girlfriend Ayame prefers Tokyo over Osaka. Perhaps she would be happier here, too,” Haruki said.
“Maybe you can move here when you get married,” Solomon said.
Mozasu laughed. “Soo nee.”
Hansu sat up straighter.
“The Yokohama chief of police is a frien
d. Please let me know if I can be of service if you’d like to transfer,” Hansu said, making an offer he could realize. He took out his business card and handed it to the young officer, and Haruki received it with two hands and a small bow of the head.
Mozasu raised his eyebrows.
Sunja, who had been quiet, continued to observe Hansu. Naturally, she was suspicious of his help. Hansu was not an ordinary person, and he was capable of actions she could neither see nor understand.
5
Nagano, January 1969
A maze of filing cabinets and metal desks created a warren of office workers in the business offices of Cosmos Pachinko. In the thicket of furniture, Risa Iwamura, the head filing clerk, was not very noticeable. By any conventional measure, Risa was, in fact, appealing in her face and form. However, she possessed a distant manner, preventing ease or intimacy with those around her. It was as if the young woman were turning down her lights to minimize any possibility of attraction or notice. She dressed soberly in white blouses and inexpensive black poly skirts requiring little maintenance; she wore the black leather shoes of an old woman. In the winter, one of her two gray wool cardigans graced her thin shoulders like a cape—her only ornament, an inexpensive silvertone wristwatch, which she consulted often, though she never seemed to have anywhere to go. When she performed her tasks, Risa needed little guidance; she anticipated the needs of her employers faultlessly and executed the tasks without any reminders.
For nearly seven years, Noa had been living in Nagano, passing as a Japanese called Nobuo Ban. He had worked assiduously for the owner of Cosmos Pachinko and had settled into a small, invisible life. He was a valued employee, and the owner left him alone. The only thing that the owner brought up every January when he gave Noa his bonus and New Year’s lecture was marriage: A man of his age and position should have his own home and children. Noa had been the head of the business offices ever since Takano, the man who had hired him, had moved to Nagoya to run the multiple Cosmos businesses there. Nevertheless, Noa continued to live in the pachinko parlor dorms and took his meals regularly in the pachinko staff cafeteria. Although he had already paid Hansu back for the Waseda tuition and board, Noa still sent money to his mother each month. He spent almost nothing on himself beyond what was absolutely necessary.
After this year’s New Year’s lecture, Noa thought deeply about his boss’s advice. He had been aware of Risa. Although she never spoke of it, everyone knew that she came from a middle-class family with a sad scandal.
When Risa was fourteen or so, her father, a beloved doctor at the local clinic, had dispensed improper medication to two patients during the flu season, resulting in their deaths. Shortly thereafter, the doctor took his own life, rendering his family both destitute and tainted. Risa was effectively unmarriageable, since a suicide in a family could indicate mental illness in her blood; even worse, her father was perceived to have done something so shameful that he felt that he needed to die. The relatives did not come to the funeral, and they no longer called on Risa and her mother. Risa’s mother never recovered from the shock and no longer left the house even to run errands. After Risa completed secondary school, Takano, a former patient of Risa’s father, hired her to do clerical work.
Noa had noticed her beautiful handwriting on the files even before he noticed her. It was possible that he was in love with the way she wrote the number two—her parallel lines expressing a kind of free movement inside the invisible box that contained the ideograph’s strokes. If Risa wrote even an ordinary description on an invoice, Noa would pause to read it again, not because of what it said, but because he could detect that there was a kind of dancing spirit in the hand that wrote such elegant letters.
When Noa asked her to dinner one winter evening, she replied, in shock, “Maji?” Among the file clerks, Nobuo Ban was a fascinating topic of discussion, but after so many years, with so little change in his behavior, the interested girls had long since given up. It took two dinners, perhaps even less time than that, for Risa to fall in love with Noa, and the two intensely private young people married that winter.
On their wedding night, Risa was frightened.
“Will it hurt?”
“You can tell me to stop. I’d rather hurt myself than hurt you, my wife.”
Neither had realized the loneliness each had lived with for such a long time until the loneliness was interrupted by genuine affection.
When Risa got pregnant, she quit her job and stayed home and raised her family with as much competence as she had run the file rooms of a successful pachinko business. First, she had twin girls; then a year later, Risa gave birth to a boy; then a year after that, another girl.
Every month, Noa traveled for work for two days, but otherwise he kept to a kind of reliable schedule that made it possible to work six days a week for Cosmos and raise his family attentively. Curiously, he did not drink or go out to clubs, even to entertain the police or to be entertained by pachinko machine salesmen. Noa was honest, precise, and could handle any level of business complication from taxes to machine licenses. Moreover, he was not greedy. The owner of Cosmos respected that Noa avoided mizu shobai. Naturally, Risa was grateful; it was easy to lose the affections of a husband to an ambitious bar hostess.
Like all Japanese mothers, Risa volunteered at the children’s schools and did everything else she could to make sure that her four children were well and safe. Having so many little constituents kept her from having to involve herself with those outside her family. If her father’s death had expelled her from the tribe of ordinary middle-class people, she had effectively reproduced her own tribe.
The marriage was a stable one, and eight years passed quickly. The couple did not quarrel. Noa did not love Risa in the way he had his college girlfriend, but that was a good thing, he thought. Never again, he swore, would he be that vulnerable to another person. Noa remained careful around his new family. Though he valued his wife and children as a kind of second chance, in no way did he see his current life as a rebirth. Noa carried the story of his life as a Korean like a dark, heavy rock within him. Not a day passed when he didn’t fear being discovered. The only thing he continued to do from before was to read his English-language novels. After marrying, he no longer ate at the employees’ cafeteria. Now he allowed himself lunch at an inexpensive restaurant where he ate alone. Over lunch, for thirty minutes a day, he reread Dickens, Trollope, or Goethe, and he remembered who he was inside.
It was spring when the twin girls turned seven, and the family went to Matsumoto Castle for a Sunday picnic. Risa had planned the outing to cheer up her mother, who seemed to be retreating further into herself. The children were overjoyed, since they would get ice cream on the way home.
The doctor’s widow, Iwamura-san, had never been a competent woman; in fact, she was often helpless. She had remained childishly pretty—soft, pale cheeks, naturally red lips, and dyed black hair. She wore simple beige smocks and cardigans, closed only on the top button. Her expression was perpetually one of a small child who had been disappointed by her birthday present. That said, she was hardly ignorant. She had been a doctor’s wife, and though his death had destroyed her cherished social ambitions, she had not relinquished her wishes for her only child. It was bad enough that her daughter worked in pachinko, but now she had married a man who worked in the sordid business, cementing her caste in life. On her initial meeting with Nobuo Ban, she had guessed that there was something unusual about his past, since he had no family. No doubt, he was foreign. She felt suspicious of his character; however, there was also something so sad beneath his fine manners that reminded her of her dear husband, that the widow felt compelled to overlook his background as long as no one ever found out.
A sparse crowd was forming in front of Matsumoto-jo. A famous docent, popular with the locals, was about to lecture about Japan’s oldest existing castle. The old man with wispy white eyebrows and a slight hunch had brought an easel with him and was setting up his poster-sized photographs an
d visual aids. Noa’s third child, who had barely eaten anything except for half a rice ball, bolted from his seat and darted toward the guide. Risa was packing up the empty bento boxes and asked Noa to stand near Koichi, a tiny six-year-old boy with a remarkably well-shaped face and head. He had no fear of strangers and would talk to anyone. Once, at the market, he told the greengrocer that his mother had burned the eggplant the week before. Adults enjoyed talking with Koichi.
“Sumimasen, sumimasen!” the boy shouted, pushing his little body through the group listening carefully to the guide’s introduction to the castle’s history.
The crowd parted to let the boy stand in the front. The guide smiled at Koichi and continued.
The boy’s mouth was open a little, and he listened intently while his father stood in the back.
The guide turned to the next image on the easel. In the old black-and-white photograph, the castle leaned dramatically as if the edifice might collapse. The crowd gasped politely at the famous image. Tourists and children who had never seen it before looked at the image closely.
“When this magnificent castle started to list this much, everyone remembered Tada Kasuke’s curse!” The guide widened his heavy-lidded eyes for emphasis.
The adults from the region nodded in recognition. There wasn’t a soul in Nagano who didn’t know about the seventeenth-century Matsumoto headman who’d led the Jokyo Uprising against unfair taxes and was executed with twenty-seven others, including his two young sons.