Snakeskin Shamisen

by Naomi Hirahara

  “Hello, I’m Alan Kinjo, sensei’s son.” It was the other man who had played the shamisen at the Hawaiian restaurant.

  Up close the man, who was probably around G. I.’s age, wasn’t bad-looking. He was tall, with that familiar long face. His cheeks didn’t sag as much as his father’s, and his eyes were clear and bright, like he was ready to make any negative a positive. He wore a suit and tie and shiny dress shoes.

  Juanita rose first. “Juanita Gushiken,” she said, brushing her hand on her pants before extending it to Alan. Mas remembered that Juanita hadn’t bothered to wipe her hand before she had shaken his when they had first met at the Hawaiian restaurant. Mas merely mumbled his name from his seat.

  “I work a few miles from here,” he explained. He was apparently one of these Sansei with a Japanese work ethic. To these folk, it was unseemly for a grown man not to be working during broad daylight. “I check in with my dad during my lunch break.”

  One of these oyakoko children, who put their parents before their own selves. Mas wondered what it would be like to have a son or daughter like that.

  “Has he been ill?”

  “No, no. But being in his late seventies, well, you know how that is.” Mas hadn’t made it quite that far, but knew at his age, each additional year was actually worth five regular years.

  Alan then studied Juanita’s and Mas’s faces more carefully. “Are you two waiting to take a class?”

  “Us?” Juanita said. “Oh, no. Tone deaf. Never took up an instrument. Chose judo and kendo over piano lessons—do you know what I mean?”

  Alan left the plastic bag on a far table away from the living room. “I don’t think my kendo dojo even had a girl student. Wait a minute—I think there had been one, but she dropped out after some guy speared her in the chest.”

  Juanita grimaced. “Ouch. Well, she could have gotten him back easily, if she wanted to.”

  “She didn’t have the killer instinct.”

  “Oh, well, then. If you don’t have that, you’re done.”

  Mas watched Alan and Juanita dance back and forth with their words and felt a little guilty. Didn’t Juanita notice Alan Kinjo’s gold wedding ring? Was she betraying her loyalty to G. I.? And what was this about Juanita and her killer instinct? Mas could easily picture her in the full kendo garb—wooden face guard and black gi, martial arts outfit. It actually wouldn’t surprise Mas if Juanita had some of that samurai blood churning inside of her—that is, if Okinawans had samurai.

  “We’re actually here to talk to you and your dad about Saturday night. The man who hosted the party you two performed at was killed.”

  Alan’s face turned dark for a second, as if a cloud had passed overhead. He recovered quickly, smiling when there was no reason to smile. “We heard about it on Sunday from the police. Were you there too?”

  “Yes. The victim was actually a friend of a friend,” Juanita said. When did G. I. become just a friend? wondered Mas.

  “I’m so sorry. Yeah, we took off right after we performed. We had no idea what had happened until the police called us the next day.”

  “So you didn’t know him, Randy Yamashiro?”

  Alan shook his head. “The restaurant booked us at the last minute. We do a lot of gigs there. Maybe with a name like Yamashiro, they figured that an Okinawan performance would be appropriate.” The music in the next room grew louder, a weaving of treble and bass notes. Alan glanced at his watch. “It sounds like Dad is still with his students. Can you tell him I stopped by? And that lunch is here on the table?”

  Juanita nodded.

  “Thank you—Juanita, right? Juanita Gushiken.”

  “You’re good,” Juanita said, taking a business card from her front pocket. It was bent in the middle from her sitting down. Mas noticed for the first time that she never seemed to carry a purse.

  “Thanks.” The instructor’s son managed a limp wave to Mas and then went out the security gate.

  “Nice guy,” Juanita said, and Mas wondered if she was joking. Was that all it took to turn her head? A tall Sansei man with good hair and shiny dress shoes? And did she really need to give him her business card? Did her friendliness have to do with the case, or did she have more personal motives? Mas couldn’t help but feel protective toward G. I. Normally Mas would stay clear of affairs of the heart, but he didn’t want G. I.’s heart to be rolled over, flattened like hot tar over a broken road.

  Before Mas could form any more opinions, Kinjo’s students walked out from the back room, each carrying something in a black fabric case—most likely a shamisen. One was a young man with hair that looked like an old push mower had gone through it; tufts of varied lengths stuck out in different directions. Next came a Japanese woman with graying hair like a skunk’s pelt, and finally an older hakujin man with a beard. Both looked familiar, and Mas figured out that they had been the singers yelping at the Hawaiian restaurant. Kinjo followed them like a proud parent to three ducklings. “So rememba,” Kinjo told them. “Next Tuesday, rehearsal. Then Saturday, meet at OAA. Eleven A.M. sharpu.”

  At the door, the students all bowed, and Mas noticed the hakujin man looked suspiciously over at both him and Juanita.

  Kinjo returned to the back room for a few minutes and then emerged with a couple of cups of green tea. He placed each cup on the table in front of his guests and lifted the lid of the lacquerware, revealing arare—not just any rice cracker, but Mari’s favorite kind, shaped like stars and sprinkled with black specks of dried seaweed. Mas remembered Mari’s baby teeth chewing on the points of each star. Later, when she became a teenager, she complained that the crackers gave her “arare breath,” which Mas learned was not only bad breath, but equivalent to the smell of a dog sick with distemper.

  “Nan desho?” Kinjo finally asked after Juanita and Mas had taken a couple of sips of tea. Mas poked Juanita with his elbow, a signal that she needed to begin her spiel.

  “Well, Mr. Kinjo, as you’ve probably heard, a man was murdered on Saturday, and there was a sanshin found near the body.” Juanita slid the photo of the smashed shamisen over the glass tabletop until it stopped a few inches from Kinjo’s knee. His face paled, and Mas fought the urge to check if Juanita had also noticed the sensei’s reaction.

  “Have you seen that instrument before?”

  Kinjo lowered his chin toward his chest bone. He took deep breaths and then aimed his anger at Mas. “I already told this to the police. Why do you come and bother me like this?” he said in Japanese.

  Juanita stared at Mas, waiting for a translation. Kinjo kept going. “This was my sanshin. I told the police that I want it back.”

  “Yours? Honto?” Mas wanted Kinjo to be sure. And why would he still want it returned in its miserable state?

  “Look at the pegs,” Kinjo said. “That’s real ho-ne.”

  “What’s he saying?” Juanita mouthed in Mas’s ear.

  “Heezu shamisen.”

  “He mentioned the bone pegs, huh?” Juanita obviously knew more Japanese than she admitted.

  “Nobody else in America have,” Kinjo interjected. He also knew more English that he let on. “This peg kuro. Black.” He pointed to the dark middle peg and repeated it. “Nobody have that.”

  “When was the last time you saw it?”

  “Nineteen fifties.”

  Before Juanita was even born, thought Mas.

  “I’m surprised that you’d even remember it,” Juanita said.

  Mas could understand. He would always remember the 1950s. That’s the decade he acquired the tools of his trade: the Ford and also his Trimmer lawn mower.

  “Once you have something like that, you never forget.” Kinjo reverted back to Japanese. “I was hit by a dorobo, a no-good thief. That sanshin is mine; I can prove it.” He opened a drawer in the coffee table and proceeded to take out a stack of photographs.

  “Here.” Kinjo threw down a black-and-white photo of himself with two other Japanese men, all cradling shamisen in front of tar-paper barracks. K
injo’s was the only one with snakeskin; the other two were made out of cookie tins and cake pans. “Jerome, Arkansas.” He looked at Juanita. “I buy in camp.”

  “Camp? What? Where could you buy a sanshin at camp?”

  Tug and Lil had told Mas about internees purchasing clothing and other items from the Sears Roebuck catalogue. Nothing about Japanese traditional instruments.

  “An MP. Military police. He had been in Okinawa. Wounded and sent back to the States, to his hometown in Jerome.”

  “How come youzu lose it?” Mas had to ask.

  “I told you, it was stolen. Taken by someone in my very own band. And sold for much money, I imagine.”

  If what Kinjo said was true, then someone had gotten a raw deal.

  Kinjo turned on a lamp in the corner and reexamined the photograph in the light. It was obvious that the shamisen was like a child to him. His face had turned gray, like discarded chewing gum. “Ah—shimmata,” he said, as if the instrument had just experienced a death.

  “You knowsu Yamashiro?” Mas asked.

  “Why would I know such a person?” Kinjo responded in Japanese. Did Mas imagine that his sagging cheeks were slightly quivering? And Kinjo’s eyes: why were they incessantly blinking—pachi-pachi, pachi-pachi?

  What connection would he have to a fiftysomething Sansei from Hawaii? Was it merely a coincidence that Kinjo had been playing the shamisen at the same place where his old shamisen had been left at a murder scene?

  “I have another class coming.” Kinjo rose, unlocked the iron security gate, and held it open. “My son is getting a lawyer. I told police that the sanshin was stolen and that we need it back.”

  Mas had little knowledge of police procedure, but he bet that the instructor would not be getting his shamisen—if it indeed was his—any time soon. Juanita would have probably agreed if she understood what Kinjo was saying.

  They went outside, only to be blocked from a clean exit. The bearded hakujin man was still there, sitting on the stairs, running a pocket knife along a dead broken branch. Mas remembered sharpening his pencils back in Hiroshima in the same way. But what was the purpose of doing such a thing to a branch?

  “Excuse me,” Juanita said, stepping around the man. Mas followed Juanita, not bothering with the excuse. The man squinted up at Mas, the blade firmly held in his left hand. Mas noticed that the man’s fingers were long and tapered, the fingernails filed neatly, as if they were cared for by a professional. His face, on the other hand, was cherubic; he was Santa Claus on a diet. “Konnichiwa,” he said.

  Mas did a double take. The skinny Santa Claus was greeting him in Japanese.

  “I heard you asking questions of sensei.”

  Juanita backtracked and stood beside Mas on the Bermuda grass. “We’re just curious about a few things.”

  Mas wondered why Juanita didn’t just identify herself as a PI, but figured that she didn’t want to reveal her cards too early.

  “Curiosity killed the cat.”

  “Pardon?” asked Juanita.

  “You heard me. It’s not the best thing to be sticking your noses into other people’s business.”

  “And what are you doing right now?”

  Mas nudged Juanita. No sense in getting into a knockdown, drag-out fight now. They had to save those times for when it really counted. He didn’t know if this man was acting as Kinjo’s protector or enforcer.

  “No trouble.” Mas held up his hands as if he were a surrendering cowboy.

  “Then we’re in agreement.” The skinny Santa Claus then left the lawn.

  Thankfully, at that moment, Juanita’s cell phone rang. She answered, and from the tone of her voice, Mas could tell it was G. I.

  “Mas,” she said, handing him the phone. “G. I. wants to talk with you.”

  Mas angled the small phone to his ear. “I’m here with Brian, Randy’s brother,” G. I. told him. “I need you to help me find a good mortuary. A reasonable one.”

  G. I., who was lucky enough to still have both parents back in his hometown of San Francisco, apparently figured that Mas would be an expert on death in L.A., and he wasn’t that far off. Mas had buried his wife, Chizuko, as well as some assorted gamblers and gardeners with no relatives to speak of nearby. Mas didn’t know much about world politics or celebrities, but he did know how you were supposed to handle last rites, at least in the Japanese American world.

  He told G. I. not to worry, that he would help him out. They made arrangements to meet the next day. As he finished the phone call, Juanita headed back to her truck. No matter how much ground they managed to cover today, the investigation would have to be interrupted tomorrow. Last rites took precedence over justice, at least for tomorrow morning.

  chapter four

  Ichiro “Itchy” Iwasaki was an old friend of Mas’s from his poker-playing days at Wishbone Tanaka’s lawn mower shop. He had little cupped brown ears like those of a monkey, and he often pulled his right earlobe before making a bet. Mas had watched to see if there was some kind of pattern. Did it mean that he had a good hand? Was he bluffing? Sending a message to another player? Or was it just a nervous twitch? In the dead of winter Mas noticed that Itchy had stopped pulling on his ears. In the summer, it started up again. Mas found out later that Itchy was a regular at the public golf course in Monterey Park. Golfer’s sunburn, Mas figured. Not any kind of deliberate gambler’s signal.

  Itchy had been a janitor at L.A. City Hall but, after getting laid off, had taken a temporary detour in the Japanese American funeral business. In L.A., there were at least a couple of mortuaries that specialized in Japanese American death. They knew how to collect koden, money from mourners to alleviate the family’s financial burden of burying or burning their dead. You slipped a twenty-dollar bill or maybe an extra ten (for someone beyond a passing acquaintance) into a sympathy card. The registrars made sure that you wrote your name and address on the back of the envelope, and within two weeks’ time you would receive a printed thank-you card with a book of twenty stamps inside. The Japanese always had to do okaeshi—something in return. Mas never knew how the tradition of giving stamps had started in America—probably just the practicality of Japanese immigrants. Like lightbulbs and toilet paper, everyone needed stamps. In Japan, you would give probably five to ten times more in cash, but would receive a ceramic vase or a dish half your gift’s value in return. Mas would take stamps over a flower vase any day.

  Some people preferred giving and receiving checks instead of cash, because there were occasional incidents of theft during funerals. Chizuko had been appalled to hear of such crimes, but nothing surprised Mas. Where there was money, there were crooks. If the potential victims were overcome and blinded by emotion, all the better.

  To make ends meet after losing his janitorial job at City Hall, Itchy had picked up the dead bodies from people’s houses or nursing homes. But after a few months, he couldn’t handle touching them anymore. He didn’t understand why the bodies got so cold and stiff so fast, he told Mas. What was it about the pumping of blood that kept one’s legs and arms so soft and pliable? One time when he was loading an old lady’s body into the mortuary’s 1975 white Cadillac hearse (they saved the shiny black one for funerals), the stretcher tipped over and the body fell onto the driveway. Wasting no time, Itchy lifted her by her armpits. Rigor mortis had set in, leaving her fingers outstretched like claws. As he dragged her into the hearse, her fluffed-up hair smashed against his face. All he remembered was that she smelled like sour milk and baby powder.

  Itchy had gone from funeral work to gardening, but a new mortuary started by an old Latino neighbor of his in East L.A. had called him back to service. This time Itchy would not have to touch the dead bodies but deal only with the living, specifically the Japanese relatives of the deceased. He’d have a nice second-floor office overlooking a plaza in Lincoln Heights.

  Lopez, Sing, and Iwasaki Mortuary specialized in cheap funerals, which you’d think would attract a crowd. Itchy’s neighbor Mr. Lopez wa
s obviously trying to hit the Latino, Chinese, and Japanese markets. A perfect plan in Lincoln Heights, where Mexican seafood restaurants and Chinese Vietnamese auto repair shops stood side by side. But the idea backfired, because mortuaries were like churches; people seemed to prefer them separated and segregated. It reminded Mas of his favorite Neapolitan ice cream—strawberry, chocolate, and vanilla were packaged together, but the solid lines of flavors never blended into each other.

  Normally Mas wouldn’t patronize a mixed bag like Lopez, Sing, and Iwasaki, but since G. I. had told him that Brian Yamashiro wanted a deal, Mas knew that Itchy Iwasaki was their man. Mas assumed that the funeral back in Hawaii would be elaborate, so he guessed it made sense to shave a few dollars from the cost to transport the body on the plane.

  Itchy was a plain talker who didn’t mince words. He wasn’t the type to hold anyone’s hands or convince them to buy something beyond their reach. He was thorough with his questions: Burial or cremation? Cardboard coffin (covered with a cloth and topped with flower bouquets, of course), sixteen-gauge steel, bronze, or copper? They wouldn’t have to suffer through small talk, fake sympathy, or sales pitches.

  Itchy was sitting in front of Mas now. He had grown much paler since joining the mortuary business, and his ears seemed like they were drooping.

  “Your friends coming soon?” he said. As he moved his swivel chair up to his desk, the springs squeaked.

  Mas nodded. G. I. was bringing Randy’s brother, Brian, who was staying at a Holiday Inn in Burbank.

  “Was this Randy Yamashiro the guy who won the jackpot in Vegas?”

  Mas nodded. “Brotha takin’ care of everytin’.”

  “So what’s the brother’s story?”

  Mas sat on the edge of a metal-framed chair so that his feet could remain on the ground. “Un?” Mas grunted.

  “Buddhist, Christian? Okanemochi? Has money?”

  “Banker,” Mas said, not knowing if a person who dealt with money on a daily basis actually had any in their pocket. “Chotto kechi mittai,” he added, remembering how Brian had borrowed money from Juanita for his cab fare. It sounded better in Japanese than in English: It looks like the guy’s cheap.