Cathy rummaged through the bag: black gloves, black lace cascading from a tiara, crucifixes, a whip. She pulled out a jar.
“Oh that.” Bella pointed a pointed nail. “You’re gonna love it. Genuine kabuki face paint.”
The café filled up with all these white kids in leather, lace, safety pins, and chains, maybe from Fullerton, dressed to kill, and Cathy felt ecstatically important, maneuvering with trays and plates, until some guy made a pass at her, cooing, “China girl, you don’t even have to dye your hair.” A rumor spread that band members from Christian Death were there, interrupted by a second rumor that Sid Vicious was there. Then someone yelled, “You idiots! Sid Vicious is dead!” The entire café erupted into the chant Sid Vicious is dead! Sid Vicious is dead!
Bella strutted to the jukebox and sent the anthem charging through the café speakers: “Bela Lugosi’s Dead.” Bella pranced back into the aisle and screeched, “BELLA!” to which the entire café crowd responded in unison: Lugosi’s dead!
“BELLA!”
Lugosi’s dead!
Then, undead, undead, undead!
In the midst of this, Cathy saw Henry Noda arrive with another guy who could have been his twin. “You’re back.” She smiled.
“We never got introduced,” Henry said, though considering the new layer of kabuki makeup, she could have been anyone.
Bella came by. “Hey Fred,” she addressed Henry’s companion.
“Hey Bella.”
“My brother, Fred,” Henry said to Cathy, watching Fred walk away with Bella.
Henry sat by himself, and Cathy came back and forth between serving patrons.
“I’ve never been here late,” admitted Henry.
“Me neither.” Cathy shrugged.
“Really? I thought you were the kabuki girl.”
“Oh, that must be Bella.” She looked up to see her brother, Jim, arrive and frowned to see Jonny.
Jonny swaggered over to the table. “Hey Cathy, working tonight?”
Cathy shot up from the seat and left quickly. The guys slid into the booth.
In the kitchen, Bella and Fred were frantically making out, groping and tugging, tragically on the verge, boiling broth spilling over the pot. The cook had probably left for a smoke. Cathy tiptoed away, even in platform boots, and said to Jim, “Maybe you should take me home now.”
“Yeah,” he answered. “But let me talk to Bella first.” Before Cathy could object, Jim had left the table to look for Bella. Predictably, a crash of plates and pans and shouting came from the kitchen, though no one could hear it over the jukebox.
Leaving to assess the situation, Jonny sauntered back almost victoriously and announced, “Cathy, it seems Jim is a bit, shall we say, indisposed, but I can drive you home to Fullerton. No problema. Turbo horsepower at your service.”
But Henry said, “Jonny, you’re drunk,” and pushed him.
To Cathy’s surprise, Jonny fell over.
“Come on, Cathy.”
At midnight, the freeway was a dark eternity into starry headlights, eighty miles an hour, a swift blur through white and red. “I love the night,” she said.
“I work the night,” he said. “I don’t see daylight.”
“But I saw you at lunch today.”
“Helping my sister.”
“And your brother?”
“Can’t help him. Messed up. Ever since he returned from Nam. Stupid stuff like tonight.”
“What work do you do?”
“Produce market with my dad. Get the stuff to market before the morning.”
She chuckled. “I thought you might be a vampire.”
“You wanna interview me?”
“Did you read it?”
He laughed. “If I lived way out here, I’d be reading Anne Rice too.”
“But you know the book?”
“Do you want a reading list? I read everything. Keeps me from going crazy.” He drove awhile in silence, then asked, “Why do you want to be the kabuki girl?”
“What do you mean?”
“Bella I get, but you?”
O.K., so we got our heroine and hero in a car at night cruising the L.A. freeways, talking about life’s choices. The hero’s sister chose the revolution, but it never happened. The hero’s brother chose the military, but that too never happened, well, like he expected. Turned out he was mistaken for the enemy, and it was true; the enemy looked like him. After he killed people who looked like him, he came home, and no one thought he was a hero, least of all himself. Meanwhile, the hero stayed home to take care of his widowed dad, a silent and bitter man who felt shunned by his community. And with kids like that, he thought, what was the point? Then there was the heroine’s brother, who went after chashu ramen like he was going to get the chashu but only got stuck with the white pepper dregs at the bottom of the bowl. And the heroine’s new friend, who chose to try to save the family business, and her brother, who wouldn’t know a choice if it were placed in front of him. As for the heroine, catching her own flashing reflection in the dark windshield, she touched the chalky, super-white surface of her cheek and began to wonder on that midnight drive home if she were not still pretending.
Toward the end of summer, Nora Noda had a small art show with her students in the gallery space of the Little Tokyo cultural center. Cathy drove the great gray Buick and Mr. and Mrs. Ishi into town to see the show. Henry was busy taking photographs.
“Oh,” exclaimed Mrs. Ishi, “such a lovely display.” She was especially appreciating the drawing by a second-grader of a basketball player in a jump shot. “Woody.” She tapped her husband on the elbow and pointed. “There’s Katz Noda. We haven’t seen him in years. He never comes to anything. He must be so proud of—well, relieved over Nora’s success.”
Mr. Ishi hailed Mr. Noda. “Hey there, General. It’s been years.”
Mr. Noda nodded.
Mrs. Ishi pulled Cathy over. “Cathy, you should meet the General. Oh, he’s not a real general. They just call him that because he runs the produce market. He’s just a gruff sort. Don’t be afraid. He’s an old friend of your dad’s. He’ll be delighted to meet you.” Pushing Cathy forward, Mrs. Ishi announced, “Katz, you should meet Cathy, Tosh Ozawa’s daughter.”
The General seemed to blanch, his face turning visibly sour. Before Cathy could speak or stretch out her hand, he turned, walked away, and left the gallery.
“Oh dear,” said Mrs. Ishi, but Mr. Ishi only shook his head.
Henry, having witnessed the scene, came over to make small talk, but Cathy wondered what Bella would have done. Cathy had toned down her makeup, put on a semblance of normal clothes, removed her lip ring, all for nothing. Oh well, the summer was ending, and so would this episode in her life. She could go back to her normal life and leave these J.A.s to theirs. Obviously she didn’t fit. She walked over to a table strewn with square colored papers. Nora was there with a group of children. “What are you working on?” she asked.
A girl looked up. “Paper cranes. Nora says we need to make one thousand.”
“How many have you made?”
“Two. Can you help?”
“Sure.” Cathy picked up a crane and examined it with curiosity.
“Don’t you know?” The girl made a small huff of exasperation. “So first you fold it this way.”
But there was one last night at the café. Well, you were there, so you should know what happened. Bella was in high form, queen of the night, and by now she had switched her affections to Fred, who generously divided his drugs with her, so they were continually in a zone. Jim wasn’t there; he’d retreated to school and scholarship, headed futuristically for his PhD. Jonny was there playing craps in the summer night with the punks on the sidewalk outside the café. Inside: the usual commotion of chop suey, white skin, black hair, and dilated pupils. This was going to be Cathy’s sayonara night. She was still an innocent high school girl observing the scene sober like one day she would write about it, but some idiot in the third booth yell
ed at her. “Fuck this egg fuk yung!” and flung a piece of it her way. She picked it out of her bodice and mashed the egg hash into his pimply face. Maybe it was her fault. And that’s how it started. Egg foo yung flying this way and that. Noodles colliding in air with Buddha’s delight and fried rice. When Cathy crawled out of the chaos, she could see Bella splashing tea and beer into faces and dragging the fools out. Cathy slipped around in grease and soup and managed to get out the door. Outside, Jonny was pacing around and screaming about his Supra. His beloved Supra, the only thing he really cared about. He’d lost it to craps. Predictably, just at that moment, our hero arrived.
Henry grabbed Jonny. “Where’s Bella? Why don’t you answer the phone in there?”
Cathy stumbled forward, slapping bok choy from her shoulders, and Henry stared at the noodles laced through her spiked hair. Well, that was the night Min Murata had a second stroke and died.
Like Mary Ozawa had admitted to Mrs. Ishi, she and Tosh only went to Little Tokyo for funerals and, maybe, Nisei Week. But this time, their kids, Jim and Cathy, came along, though folks must have glanced sideways at Cathy’s version of formal black funeral attire. The family sat solemnly in the front pews and followed all the rituals, listened to all the stories about Min and his wife and the Hiroshima Café. And that’s when Cathy found out that Min Murata, Katz Noda (the General), and her dad, Tosh Ozawa, were all kibei educated in Hiroshima before the war, that the three had been close buddies who banded together to ward off bullies because they were considered neither really Japanese nor really American. When they returned to America just before Pearl Harbor blew up, each made different decisions that changed their lives forever. Min Murata left for Montana and opened a Chinese café, avoided camp. Katz and Tosh got hauled off to camp, but when the loyalty questions came up, Katz checked no and Tosh checked yes. The two got into a heated argument and never spoke to each other again. Katz renounced his citizenship and went to Tule Lake, and Tosh signed up for service, got sent to Fort Snelling, and prepped to be an interpreter in the Pacific.
After Min’s funeral, folks gathered at the café. After forty years, Katz and Tosh sat together, an uneasy truce, deep in a red booth next to the jukebox, Min’s old enka music dropping in one forty-five after another. A draping spray of black origami cranes cascaded from the ceiling above. They looked out at the J.A. crowd, all eating chow mein and fried rice between what Mrs. Ishi called “Bella’s Halloween posters.”
Katz broke the silence and nodded at Jim and Cathy. “Nice kids.”
“Sanseis,” Tosh muttered. “Think they know better.”
“Rebels.” Katz took a sip of tea. “I should know.”
“Yeah.” Tosh knew. He read the Rafu. “Henry turned out.”
“Should have left after the wife died. Thought he should take care of me. I can take care of myself.”
“Fred survived the war.”
“That’s saying a lot. I told him not to go, but you know that argument. Stubborn like you. Said he wasn’t going to be a coward like me.” Katz’s eyes filled.
Tosh closed his eyes and spoke into the table. “Didn’t know what he was talking about. Don’t be so hard on him. He saw stuff. It doesn’t leave the mind. I should know.”
Mitoko Murata came to the table, dressed in a simple but stunning black silk shift, white pearls hugging her neck, elegant and still beautiful. The men rose. She put her hands into theirs and squeezed.
So pretend for a moment you’re American. Pretend you’re Japanese. Pretend you’re nisei. Pretend you’re kibei. Pretend you’re sansei. Pretend if you mix and shake it up enough, no one will know the difference, that even you won’t know.
The PersuAsians
Eight years is a long time. In eight years, you can get married, divorced, and end up being a single parent with an eight-year-old kid. In eight years, you can get into college, drop out, go to prison, turn it around, and still get an advanced degree in the history of consciousness. In eight years, you can go from being a clueless colored kid to protesting and getting arrested for occupying the third floor of Arts & Sciences to subsequently joining a communist collective and preparing for the revolution, then coming up for air to get a law degree and run for public office. In eight years, you can start a band, cut a single but mostly do covers in clubs, bury the drummer from an overdose, regroup, change your name and musical genre, go on the road as the opening act, get a contract, make one LP only to discover (years later) that your music topped the charts in some town in the former Yugoslavia, where youth held on to freedom because of your words.
So what do you do when your old boyfriend shows up after eight years? It’s so much water under that bridge, like metric tons, like megawatts, then possibly drought, sewage, gray water, dead bodies, environmental disaster. In eight years, you figure every cell in your body, principally the surface ones that, as far as you’re concerned, count—your skin, your hair, your nails—could have been, a thousand times over, reproduced and exchanged. What could possibly be left of the old you? Of course, when you’re eighteen years old, you don’t take the long view, but then again, not even when you’re twenty-six, pushing thirty.
On the other hand, mukashi, mukashi, a nisei pushing Medicare, Walter Kikukatana traced, not literally but perhaps metaphorically, his lineage back to the sun goddess Amaterasu Omikami, inspired by reading Joseph Campbell’s four-volume opus, The Masks of God. Walter was a widower who had made a lot of money in the import-export industry, a business his entrepreneur wife ran, and when she died, he was left with a profitable business that he passed on to his cousins, not without keeping for himself a respectable nest egg that he proceeded to spend. The Kikukatanas enjoyed a kind of high-society life, being the benefactors of almost every J.A. event or institution in the community. They were always on the pages of the Rafu Shimpo, looking glamorously gracious and bejeweled, standing next to George Takei or Daniel Inouye or James Clavell. Liz Kikukatana, Walter’s first daughter, a former Miss Nisei, was especially photogenic and, after her mother died, accompanied her father to all public appearances, dazzling the traditionally bland (truth be told, properly boring) J.A. crowd. The youngest daughter, Mary, married Charles Nezuyabu, and had the most expensive and fabulous wedding anyone could remember in recent J.A. history, if you were lucky enough to get an invitation. Mary and Chuckie quickly had a bunch of kids, and everyone forgot about the wedding.
Finally, we get to the middle daughter, Anne. Ah, Anne. Ooo baby, baby. So when Anne was three years old and her mother died, quite immediately Mrs. Kikukatana’s soul sisters—Mrs. Aka, Mrs. Ekubo, and Mrs. Nendo, not necessarily related—all stepped in to fill the void. Mrs. Nendo actually moved in and started to cook and clean and change diapers. Maybe some people thought that there was some hanky-panky going on between Mrs. Nendo and Walter, but that was all nonsense. Actually everyone thought that after a reasonable mourning period, Walter would marry Mrs. Aka, but Mrs. Aka knew better. She liked her own house, perfectly clean, perfectly quiet. And anyway, she’d been married before. If Mrs. Nendo cooked and cleaned, Mrs. Aka raised the three little girls, got them into music lessons, Japanese language school, followed their homework assiduously. Mrs. Aka was the boss. Mrs. Ekubo dropped in from time to time with mochigashi and See’s candy and expensive toys and frivolous apparel, and everyone had to run around and make tea and small talk about her last trip to Japan to keep her happy, but that was about it for her contribution. Anne got raised by three nisei moms. If the original Mrs. Kikukatana was a businesswoman who would’ve had little time for her daughters, this was perhaps a fortunate change, although Anne would never know.
The soul sisters were a clutch of childless aunties who called themselves the Girls. They were accomplished women who weren’t going to let Walter fritter away the chances of Elizabeth’s daughters. As for their actual chances, the oldest, Liz, was simply beautiful; the aunties sent her to modeling school, where she learned to walk, do her hair and makeup, and wear expensive clothing. Anne, by com
parison, was pretty, but in the family that meant plain, plus she was a nerd. In the day, no one said “nerd,” but the family called Anne “the brains,” as if they could put her on Jeopardy for some quick cash. Older sis Liz’s life and accoutrements came to Anne like hand-me-downs, and Anne mixed and mismatched all those marvelous outfits. By the time all this—high fashion and elevated knowledge—trickled down to Mary, she was just plain spoiled.
Mrs. Aka convened the Girls. She called Mrs. Nendo, who called Mrs. Ekubo, and they all met at Marie Callender’s for lunch. Mrs. Aka squeezed the sliver of lemon and stirred two lumps of sugar into her iced tea. “We have, shall I say, a situation?”
Mrs. Nendo looked over her bifocals, querying, “Situation?” then back at the menu. “Oh, I can’t decide. Pot pie or pot roast?”
“Michi, pot pie. You always do the pot pie,” observed Mrs. Ekubo.
“Girls,” Mrs. Aka interrupted, “we have a situation.” Her eyes drilled into her soul sisters as if this could be the Bay of Pigs.
So, a little background on the so-called situation. Fred Fuyuchi and Harvey Senshi grew up buddies since grammar school. Additional buddies were Jimmy Mameda and Kenji Nojo. They all lived within a five-block radius spiraling from the then-center of Japanese America, which means we’re talking inner city. If they had angrier political bents, they might’ve been another colored formation of the Panthers. If more delinquent, an Asian gang. But they were your B+ sansei, staying cool but out of trouble. They addressed each other like badass pirates. Fred was the Captain. Harvey, who had a bum leg crushed in a car accident, was Ahab. Jimmy was First Mate. Kenji was the Admiral, though the only thing commanding about Kenji was his low, booming voice and a baritone that could dive into the lowest reaches of the bass clef. On the high end of the clefs was Fred, a tenor with a falsetto that made him the Smokey Robinson of Japanese America. This foursome, in the gravity of the inner city, crooned, choreographed, and styled themselves into the PersuAsians. Think it over. Someone had to show that sanseis were in the groove.
Sansei and Sensibility Page 17