Atonement for Iwo

by Lester S. Taube

  Back in his small room, he lay fully dressed on the bed, listening to the pounding of the tired organ he called a heart, feeling no release of relief, no sense of expiation, only a heaviness and inertia. When dawn began to steal through the single window of his room, he finally fell into a fitful slumber.

  CHAPTER 3

  It was almost noon when Masters descended to the narrow lobby of the hotel. To his surprise, Kimiko was waiting there, sitting stiffly erect on a chair in a corner. She rose as he came down the staircase.

  “Good morning, Mr. Masters,” she said. “I hope you will forgive my intrusion.”

  “That’s all right, Mrs. Tanaka. Have you been waiting long?”

  “Since eight o’clock,” she answered simply, directly, and he wondered if she had ever told a lie, even a white one, in her whole life.

  “I’m sorry. You should have asked the clerk to waken me.”

  “I did not mind waiting. Have you eaten?”

  “Not yet.”

  “May I join you, please?”

  “Of course.” He guided her out into the street. It was a bright, sunny day, warm and balmy, the street crowded with workers and shoppers going to lunch or idling the time away. “There is a tea room two blocks away,” he said. “Would that be okay?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  He studied her from the corner of his eye as she walked gracefully beside him, halfway between the short, quick step of the older Japanese women and the free swinging stride of a young girl. She seemed to be partial to suits, and wore a trim, linen skirt and jacket with a white, nylon blouse which accented the smooth, somewhat dusky lines of her throat. She was a very attractive woman and he enjoyed walking at her side.

  “Won’t you have trouble, taking off work all morning?” he asked.

  “I am the owner of the boutique, Mr. Masters. It is one of eighteen stores in my chain.” She was unable to conceal her pride, even with a great effort.

  He stopped. “I hadn’t thought of that. Yes, that lovely home of yours and the office at the store. I thought perhaps you were the manager. I congratulate you, Mrs. Tanaka.”

  As her eyes lowered and she bowed her thanks, he could see that she was pleased with his comment.

  At the restaurant she ordered a salad while he asked for a roll and tea. “Is that all you are eating?” she asked in surprise.

  He answered easily. “Doctor’s orders. I had a bit of a heart condition a year ago.”

  Her brow rose with sudden alertness. “Oh, Mr. Masters, please forgive Hiroko and me. We did not suspect. I also want to apologize for her manners last night. It was unforgivable.”

  He shrugged. “She had a right to ask the questions.”

  Kimiko shook her head vigorously. “You were a guest in our home and she embarrassed you. I am afraid that I built up the image of her father too greatly over the years and neglected to teach her self discipline.”

  “Aren’t you also bitter at the thought that I might have been one of the men who killed your husband?”

  She sighed. “I am bitter only when I remember the waste. The years have taught me to accept the manner of his death. It was a needless, senseless war, and I cannot forgive those who permitted it to occur. But I realize that my husband, and you, were soldiers who had to obey the commands of your superiors in doing what you considered was right.” She looked down at the table. “My heart is lighter knowing that he did not suffer and that he is with his companions. Twenty years of uncertainty, Mr. Masters, had brought to my mind many horrible pictures which made the loss even greater.”

  Their food had come, and they were eating while talking. Masters stopped chewing. “What kind of man was your husband?” he asked.

  A wistful smile tugged at her lips. “He was a great man. A kind, wonderful person.” Her face lit up as a thought came to her. “Do you have any plans for the weekend, Mr. Masters?”

  “No. I was going to check on a return passage to the United States, but a few more days won’t make any difference.”

  Her face registered dismay. “You will leave soon? Oh no.”

  “It’s not I must leave, Mrs. Tanaka.” He shrugged again. “There is just nothing here to keep me.” He paused as the thought struck. “In fact, there is nothing on the other end either.”

  “There is no family, Mr. Masters?”

  He sipped the remainder of his tea, then shook his head.

  Kimiko’s eyes lowered, like a high school girl about to ask a boy for a date. “Would you like to visit the area where my husband and I were raised?”

  He was about to say “not really”, but “yes” slipped out.

  “Thank you. Tomorrow is Saturday. Would it be convenient to leave at noon?”

  “That’s all right with me.”

  They rose from the table, he paid the bill and guided her back to the street. She turned and bowed. “Thank you for lunch, Mr. Masters.” Then bowing again, as if she was shaking his hand, she disappeared in the throng passing by.

  At noon the following day, Kimiko arrived at the hotel driving a new, expensive Datsun sedan. Masters eyed the wild Tokyo traffic as he climbed apprehensively into the car.

  “Good morning,” she said, moving smoothly into the streaming madhouse. She drove well, not challenging the wildness of the other drivers, and not being bluffed either, but fitting into the pattern and the flow calmly and without effort.

  Soon they were in the countryside, where Kimiko pointed out the points of interest, as if she was a guide for a special tour, and later stopped the car for lunch at an isolated hotel in the rolling hills. It had a small restaurant, containing less than a dozen tables, but since they had arrived after the rush hour, they were seated at once.

  “They have a marvelous fish soup,” she explained. “It will be good for you.” Masters raised a brow, and she suddenly blushed, then quickly ordered to cover her confusion.

  The soup was excellent, and so was the tea which they drank seated by a window that overlooked a grove of poplars and listened to the soft patter of conversation of the few other diners who had also come in late. They did not talk much, he and Kimiko, as if now was the time for silence, and it make him comfortable to realize that she knew it as well as he.

  He did not say anything either when the bill came. He could have eaten for two days in Tokyo for the same amount. The fact must have registered on his face, for Kimiko opened her mouth to say something, then closed it, as though she suddenly understood why he was staying at such a small, inexpensive hotel.

  It was past mid afternoon when she turned off the main road onto a narrow lane that was little more than a dirt path. The countryside was not a rich land, that Masters could see. It was hilly terrain, rocky, which tolerated only small patches of ground to be farmed. It was evident that the people had striven for countless years to conquer the barren, unfriendly hills by terracing the sides with barriers of stone and hand carrying earth up the slopes to lay over the hard, rock base.

  The danger to their livelihood was even more obvious in that fierce storms could easily wash away the stone barriers and carry down the soil the farmers had so laboriously built up.

  She stopped the car at the base of a jagged hill. About sixty or seventy feet up, a man working in a garden stood up and waved. He was a veritable ancient, bent and wrinkled, and his greeting brought forth from a hut situated to one side an old woman, equally bent and wrinkled. Kimiko lifted out a weekend bag, caught up Masters’ shaving kit, and locked the car doors.

  “I’ll carry those,” he said, as she started up the dirt path to the hut.

  “Please,” she said, smiling. “You are now in ancient Japan, Mr. Masters. It is the custom for the women to carry the parcels.”

  He eyed the petite, healthy woman in the light blue suit, wearing fine, Italian slippers on her feet, admiring the ripple of smooth muscles in the calves of her legs as she stepped lightly up the hill.

  She’s a helleva good looking forty, he thought. Then he began to follow her
up the path.

  On a small landing in front of the hut, she bowed low to the old man, and when Masters finally came up, huffing and puffing, she introduced him to her father, Mr. Ishkawa. He was about seventy years old, neatly dressed in blue work clothes, with a thin beard and merry, black eyes.

  Masters bowed. “Hajume mashinte,” he said, in the formal manner of greeting.

  Kimiko presented him to her mother, as old as her husband and with the same twinkle in her eyes, who unabashedly appraised him like she would a chicken in the market place.

  “You are the first American they have ever met,” explained Kimiko.

  The hut consisted of two tiny rooms with a shed at the rear, handsomely wallpapered and well furnished. Masters guessed that Kimiko had fixed up the place for her parents, and when he wondered why they chose to live the unsophisticated life of the hills when she possessed the means to provide a more comfortable existence, he remembered what the man at the Association for the Protection of Families of Soldiers had said that the farmer remained with his soil.

  One room was the traditional living dining room, containing a kotatsu in the center. This was a wood lined hollow in the floor, three feet square and eighteen inches deep, with a table rising about a foot above it.

  He nearly burst out laughing when he thought back almost fifteen years to the time an artillery major and he had taken off for a weekend while attending an air ground course at Camp Drake just outside of Tokyo. They had visited a neighboring village for the express purpose of tracking down a somewhat famous whorehouse that boasted of extraordinary beautiful partners and unusually low prices, and while the owner was sending out for the girls who lived nearby, the major had sat at the kotatsu and opened a bottle of scotch. His girl had arrived soon after, a splendid looking whore, with the information that Masters’ woman would be along a bit later.

  They had played strip poker to while away the time, and soon the major was so cock eyed drunk that he was barely able to read the cards. Masters had really stacked them after that. Within a short time, the major was almost naked and pulling up the blanket being used as a tablecloth around his waist to keep from chattering from the cold. The girl, who did not know what in the devil the game was all about, was taking off her clothes and laying them on the pile building up beside Masters. She struggled to the end to keep her breasts from being exposed, even to the point of giving up her panties first, and finally they were bared, half mooned, dusky melons with large, proud paps which tightened from the cold, and she had called the owner, who slipped a small, charcoal burning hibachi under the kotatsu to keep them warm.

  It was fortunate that Masters’ whore had finally come, for the major was not so drunk that he could not see the glint in Masters’ eyes as he stared at the naked girl seated next to him ...

  Kimiko’s mother served tea and sweet, coconut cakes, then sat down and chattered away at her daughter. But Kimiko listened with only one ear, for her attention was principally focused on Masters and her father struggling courteously to talk to each other.

  As soon as it was politely possible, she led Masters outside and they sat on a bench overlooking the small plot of land her father had been working.

  “Over there,” she pointed to a hill a couple of miles away, “is the home of Ito, my husband.” She rested her head against the wall of the hut and lifted her face towards the dying sun, closing her eyes to reminisce.

  She remained silent as though caught up by swells of memory which overwhelmed her, reaching far into each corner of her brain and focusing an intense light on the pictures that years could never dim, pictures which had been taken out countless times to be burned deep into memory cells, so that slipping from mind to awareness was an automatic, effortless action. Finally, her eyes opened.

  “My parents had seven children, Mr. Masters. I was next to the youngest. This piece of land,” she motioned at the garden, perhaps twenty five by fifteen feet, “was all they had. Underneath it is rock, and we searched every day for earth to build it up. We were very poor. Three of my brothers and sisters died when they were quite young, another brother was lost at sea in the navy, and a sister was killed during an airplane bombing at Osaka. The only one left is a sister who lives in Sendai.”

  Masters nodded. “I can see that life here must have been a hard one. But it’s difficult for me to picture you as having been a country girl.”

  “It was Ito who was responsible, although he came from a family which was even more impoverished than ours. There were eleven children, of whom two died in infancy. Education was an absolute luxury. About five miles down the road is a small schoolhouse where most of the children would attend until they were twelve or thirteen years old, then they would seek work on a large farm or in the villages. Work was hard to find, so most of them helped their parents in the garden.”

  Her lips parted in a wistful smile. “I have heard many Americans comment on how beautifully our fields were tended. There were always so many children to help that a weed could not exist in this land.

  “Ito was three years older than me, and we left school about the same time. He was thirteen years old then. As he was the oldest son, he labored very hard in the fields.”

  Her eyes closed again and her voice lowered. “I was fourteen years old when he told me I would be his wife. I was very happy, and in the evenings when work was ended he would eat quickly and come for me so we could sit up there,” she pointed, eyes still closed, to a ledge about thirty feet up, “and talk of what we wanted from life.

  “There was never any money, so Ito searched until he found a farmer who had books. In a land of hard working people, I never saw a boy work so long and so hard as he did to get those books. During the first few hours we were able to meet each week, he insisted that we study together.”

  Her eyes opened. “I do not know how he did it, but before he was nineteen years old he passed a test for draftsmanship and was offered a post in Kyoto as a junior draftsman.”

  She turned to him. “In your country it is not unusual for a poor boy to advance, so this story must seem rather trite.”

  “I was poor when I was a kid, too. The whole world was poor.”

  Kimiko was jolted. “Forgive me, Mr. Masters, if I offended you in any way.”

  “You didn’t offend me. But go ahead - continue.”

  It took her a moment to recollect herself. “Well,” she went on, “to us, it was like finding gold on the street. We were married immediately, then went, halfway on foot, to Kyoto. It took eight days to get there, and until Ito drew his first pay, we slept in parks and alleys, and soon afterwards I found work in a factory. In a few months we were enormously rich.” She fought off a tear. “When I look back, we had saved perhaps the sum we spent for our lunch on the way here.”

  Masters looked up, realizing that she had understood his reaction at the restaurant.

  “But to us,” she continued, “it was everything in the world. Ito, however, would not permit us to save any more. He insisted that we spend it for night school. We could have had a nice room with a kitchen, but no - we lived in a hovel as large as the shed there and spent the money to learn.

  “Then Hiroko was born, but I kept on working and we were very, very happy. Ito was promoted twice, becoming the foreman of his section, and we rented two beautiful rooms with a kitchen - and even sent home small sums to our parents. But always we had to go to school. Once I said it cost too much to have a woman watch over Hiroko while I was at school, and Ito became angry - so I never said it again.

  “Then Ichiro was born...” Her voice trailed off.

  “Your son?” prompted Masters.

  Kimiko rose and almost ran through the garden to an outcrop of rock, pressing her face against it. Masters stood up, surprised, then followed her. He saw that she was trembling. He placed a hand on her arm.

  “What is it, Mrs. Tanaka? Are you ill?”

  She shook her head, and Masters moved to one side to see her face. She turned it from him, but not
before he saw the tears streaming down her cheeks.

  Soon she controlled herself with a great effort, and reached into a pocket to take out a handkerchief to wipe her eyes. “It is nothing,” she said, and from the firmness of her voice he knew that the conversation was ended. She suddenly observed that it was getting dark. “Come, it is time to eat now.”

  In honor of the American guest, her mother had prepared a large bowl of sukiyaki, vegetables fried with onions and lightly seasoned with sugar, soya sauce, and a few drops of sake. It was kept warm by a candle burning underneath, and next to the bowl was a platter of thin slices of raw meat, each the size of a half dollar.

  Kimiko served Masters, placing bits of meat on top of the vegetable mixture to heat as they ate, and putting only small portions onto his plate so that the meat was always warm and not overcooked.

  “My father,” said Kimiko, when Masters finally leaned back with a satisfied sigh, “asks why you have come to Japan.”

  Masters answered Mr. Ishkawa himself. “To visit. I had been here in nineteen-fifty-two during the Korean action, and liked it.”

  “Are you a soldier?” asked the old man.

  “Not any longer. I was in the life insurance business, but am now on a physical disability pension.” Kimiko had to help him explain it, especially what a physical disability pension was.

  “I hope your heart will not be affected by the climb,” said Kimiko apprehensively.

  “Frankly,” replied Masters, smothering another groan from having overeaten, “I haven’t felt as good in years.”

  “I am glad.” She glanced at him and asked casually, “Did you visit Tokyo when you were on leave in Japan?”

  “Yes, I attended two army courses at Camp Drake.” He grinned. “After the Korean hills, coming to Japan was like entering a new world.”

  The old people were fidgeting, and Kimiko laughed. “Go,” she said. They politely excused themselves, hastened to the other room, and in a few minutes Masters heard the sounds of a television set. “Imagine that,” exclaimed Kimiko, still chuckling. “Television in the countryside. My parents are still overwhelmed by it. They had never seen a motion picture in their lives until now.”