Brazil-Maru

by Karen Tei Yamashita

We scattered away like mice. I turned around to see her naked figure at the door, her distressed look of shame, and heard the continuing laughter of the men behind me. After that, Kōji did not join us again in our escapades around the ship. He became sullen and distant with both Saburo and me. I realized that he had come to think of that woman as his new mother, or at least that he had grown to like her. I felt sorry for Kōji, saying to Saburo that I would not like to be so alone as Kōji. Saburo shrugged, pushing his cap to one side, and said pompously that he himself would not mind.

  After this, Saburo and I lost interest in exploring the ship. We would wander around aimlessly with little to do. I often questioned Saburo about his brother’s camera, and Saburo joked that we might have taken a picture of the woman in the officers’ quarters that night. I couldn’t understand this sort of joking; I thought that the camera was something special, something noble, that naturally, it would only record important and noble things.

  I had heard Saburo’s oldest brother, Kantaro, talking with Mizuoka and my father, discussing the camera, discussing Brazil, discussing so many things I could not understand then. They spoke of something they called the true Japanese spirit and the possibility that this spirit could best be raised in a new country, free from the old ways. Once they pointed to me and said something about a French writer named Rousseau. “Here then is our Japanese Emile.”

  My father laughed and said, “We will make an experiment of you, Ichiro, in Brazil.”

  I was puzzled by this talk.

  Mizuoka smiled, “Don’t be frightened by this talk, Ichiro. All of us must be changed by life in Brazil. It is all for the best, but children naturally absorb change. You’ll see. Language, customs, manners, everything. You watch!”

  “A new start,” nodded Kantaro, looking at me with a significance I could not measure. I was an innocent child, and somehow Kantaro matched my innocence. It was as if he knew something important about me, and I was undeniably attracted to this secret that Kantaro must alone know.

  “Look, Ichiro,” Kantaro pointed suddenly from the deck. “Land! Brazil!” At that moment, I felt quite as important as the Carl Zeiss camera. A Japanese Emile. This might be a very important function indeed. Suddenly I sensed in myself the feeling that I had been envious of, that feeling of importance that the Unos seemingly all carried so well. I myself, a nine-year-old boy on a ship bound for Brazil, was suddenly someone among many. And feeling singularly important, I disembarked the Brazil-maru with my family at the Brazilian port of Santos, nodded proudly to Saburo and caught a glimpse of Kōji disappearing with his uncle and the woman into the receding surge of the crowd.

  The train sped on, the red dust rolling in clouds through the open windows at intervals. I did not know it at the time, but we were headed on the Noroeste Line to the far northwestern corner of the state of São Paulo on the very edges of a vast virgin forest whose borders were gradually receding with the cultivation of coffee, sugarcane, and pasture. In the 1920s, Esperança was one of many Japanese farming communities scattered in outlying areas throughout São Paulo and Paraná, and there was a growing community in the city of São Paulo itself. I watched the seemingly endless stretches of planted land and pasture, plantations of coffee trees and sugarcane and corn and scores of laborers bent at their tasks, scrawny dogs and children running down dirt paths, mules and oxen pulling heavily laden wooden carts, herds of frantic zebu flowing in long muscular rivers, everything and everyone churning that red earth. Sleepy towns and settlements spun past, and other passengers got off here and there. But we went on and on until we came to what seemed to be very near the end of the tracks. Where the train stopped did not seem to be a place for stopping at all. There was not even a platform built up next to the train. My mother and my brothers were all hoisted off the train, and our bundles and bags, except for a heavy suitcase with Mizuoka’s books, were all tossed out the windows.

  The Uno family and the scholar Mizuoka also disembarked at this strange place. We stood in a huddle at the side of a small red brick structure, which apparently marked the train station, watching the train pull off and chug away into the distance. There was a silence among us, as if we were watching the departure of our last contact with civilization. The morning sun was high in the sky and a damp humidity settled about us. My littlest brother, Yōzo, began to cry.

  A dirt road crossed the tracks and stretched out and disappeared into the forest. Saburo and I followed Kantaro, who stood in the middle of the road, trying to decipher which direction to take. Perhaps a map would have been useless. We were somewhere slightly north of the Tropic of Capricorn in the middle of a country that covered half the South American continent. We had traveled across the rich agricultural center of Brazil. Further to the west was the great forest of the Mato Grosso and Bolivia beyond, and to the north were the mining towns of Minas Gerais and beyond that, the rain forests of the Amazon. To the northeast were the dry brushlands and cattle ranches graced by a long Atlantic coastline. To the south, the flat grasslands extended to Argentina and Uruguay. But I was unaware of this vast land of which we had become a part. We were a small, inconsequential dot on a virtually unmapped area. We were the tiny seed of a small beginning, one story among many.

  An old Brazilian man emerged from the brick house and yelled something, something we could not then understand.

  My father motioned to the Brazilian. “Esperança?” he asked the man.

  “Esperança. Sim. Sim,” nodded the man, pointing across the tracks and down the road.

  From that direction, I could hear a creaking sound and the thump of hooves upon the dirt, and very soon we could see a man in a cart pulled by oxen coming down the road.

  “A Japanese isn’t he?” Saburo nodded, squinting at the man in the cart.

  The old Brazilian waved at the man in the cart. “Okumura! Okumura!” he nodded and pointed.

  Takeo Okumura pulled his oxen to a halt and slid down from the cart. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, wiped the sweat from his darkly tanned forehead, and replaced a straw hat on his head. The old Brazilian came forward, and both men spoke cordially for a moment, shaking hands. This shaking of hands seemed very strange to me; I had never seen anyone do such a thing. Then we were all introduced: the Unos, Mizuoka, and my family, the Teradas. Soon the luggage was piled high on the cart alongside my pregnant mother, old Grandma Uno, and a few of the youngest children. The rest of us walked a certain distance behind the cart to avoid the dust churned up in its wake. The great forest arched above us, and we were alternately engulfed by its great density and surprised by large expanses of clearing, newly cut and charred by fire. We walked several miles before we reached a long but simple wood-slat house. Okumura’s wife, Tomi, emerged from this house and helped my mother and Grandma Uno from the cart.

  When we had all arrived at the house, Okumura stooped to the ground and grasped a fistful of dirt. He placed a bit of the dirt in everyone’s hands, and then he prayed. While Okumura prayed, I looked down at the soft red powder in the small palm of my hand. So this was Esperança.

  CHAPTER 2:

  Esperança

  My brother Kōichi was born just as my father tapped the water level in our well, and by chance I saw Kōichi at the very moment of his birth.

  My brothers and I had been given the task of packing mud into one remaining wall of our house. We were making a mess of it, but it did not seem to matter. Meanwhile, my father was busy digging a well. Kantaro Uno and Akira Tsuruta, another young man recently arrived in Esperança, had come to help us. Kantaro was pulling buckets of earth from the hole for the well, and Tsuruta was supervising our work on the mud wall. All of us, including my mother, were caked in red mud.

  There is a photograph of us taken by Kantaro of this very day. In fact, there are a great many photographs of this early period taken by Kantaro. It is a wonderful record of our lives and labor in those days. Kantaro would think nothing of stopping everyone in the middle of their tasks to record the felling o
f a great tree, the planting of a field of corn or rice, or in this case, to show us caked in mud in an effort to build our house and dig our well. In this photograph, you can see my mother literally moments before she lost that great burden in her belly.

  It was little Hiro who called down to my father at the bottom of the well. “Papa!” Hiro leaned over the edge looking down at least forty feet into the dark hole.

  “Get away from the edge!” My father yelled. “You’ll fall in!”

  Hiro moved back, but insisted, “Mama says not to worry because the water is already boiling.”

  My father tugged at the rope holding a bucket and called up to Kantaro, “We’ve hit water! It’s seeping in!”

  Kantaro started to crank the muddy contents of the bucket to the top of the well but found it much too heavy. He looked over the edge and saw my father climbing the rope hand-over-hand and scaling the walls. He emerged at the top and excitedly asked my little brother, “Water boiling?”

  Hiro nodded. “She said the baby is coming.”

  Kantaro ran off with Hiro saddled on his back to get his mother, while Akira Tsuruta gathered me and my brothers Eiji and Yōzo about him and showed us how to make animals and small people with the red clay mud. I began to enjoy this activity, but my father called me and washed me down as best he could—rusty water dripping away from my hair, face, and arms in a clayey puddle. “We might need your help, Ichiro,” he said. “It will take Uno-no-okaasan a while to get here. You keep clean and stay nearby in case I need you.”

  I stood outside the house, watching enviously from a distance as my brothers, under Tsuruta’s instructions, built a castle modeled, he said, after the great Himeji Castle itself. There was soon a road leading to a small village with houses and temples surrounded by fields of rice. “This is the house of a famous samurai,” I could hear Tsuruta say, “and here is where the sake merchant lives and here, a famous woodblock artist. Oh yes, and here is the school.” Then they created soldiers on horses, nobles, merchants and farmers, and small animals. Very soon, drying in the hot afternoon sun, was a tiny complicated red relief of an old world left behind not so long ago.

  I felt angry about being left out and walked sullenly around to the back of the house, where we had been patching the wall with red mud. Here and there the damp mud had fallen away from the bamboo slats, and I could see into the house. I peered through the gaps in our handiwork, poking here and there with my fingers. Suddenly I stopped short. Through the wall I heard my mother’s low groan, and then I saw my new brother—Kōichi, my father would name him—emerging from my mother in a thin film of blood. My father said, “Ah, it’s a boy. It’s a boy. Born in Brazil! Born in Brazil!”

  About this time too, Grandma Uno became very ill. My father was called upon as a pharmacist to prescribe medicine, and Kantaro Uno came often to our new house to get medicine or to ask my father to see his grandmother.

  One day, Kantaro came by on a horse. In those days, none of us even thought of buying such an animal. Once again, the Unos had expended money for something most people thought of as a luxury, and even my parents, who weren’t ones to talk, thought that the horse was an unnecessary expense. “A mule would be put to better use,” commented my father, “but this horse can only be used for riding.” Kantaro’s horse was a beautiful spirited white Arabian with a long mane and tail. I heard that Kantaro had made some sort of deal with a local Brazilian fellow who had lost a bet in a game of craps.

  Kantaro rode that horse everywhere, no matter the distance, even though most people thought nothing of walking several miles to accomplish some task or to deliver some message. The Unos were in fact our neighbors, and you could see, though distantly, the back of their bathhouse from our back door. But I admired Kantaro on his horse, trotting down the dirt paths and across our newly cleared fields, the horse’s long tail swishing in long silver strands in the sunlight. Despite the backbreaking labor of those early years, Kantaro seemed invigorated and even charmed by the challenge of the work. Some people would have said that this was because Kantaro himself did not labor, that he left the real work of the Uno farm to his parents and to his younger brother Jiro. But to me, Kantaro fulfilled a kind of dream for a young boy, and in those days, I wanted to imitate that particular combination of pride and freedom that Kantaro had so easily adopted.

  “Terada-san,” Kantaro would call, walking his horse up to the house.

  “How is your grandmother?” my mother asked, tiny Kōichi now strapped to her back.

  “Not so well. She hasn’t been up since yesterday.”

  “It’s the heat,” my mother said. “Make sure she takes sips of cool water as often as possible.”

  Kantaro nodded. He handed my mother a bundle of green leaves. “Mustard greens, cabbage, and green onions. My mother sends them. There might have been more if it weren’t for the ants.”

  My mother thanked Kantaro. “I’ve never seen such large leaves,” she exclaimed.

  “It’s this land. Everything grows quickly and bigger here. Isn’t it something!” Kantaro declared. “If only my grandmother would recover enough to let me take her around this new country. I’ve been riding everywhere, and there is infinite space for the spirit and the imagination.”

  My mother smiled at this talk of Kantaro’s, but I wondered then what he could mean. “Yes,” my mother agreed, “we are very fortunate. Very fortunate.”

  “Well, I promised to see Mizuoka this afternoon. Tsuruta and a group of us are thatching his roof.” And Kantaro was off in a gallop down the road to Mizuoka’s.

  Shūhei Mizuoka had been slow at getting his land cleared and his house built. Although he was a bachelor without a family, he had invested as everyone else in a plot of land. Having neither wife nor children with their more immediate needs, Mizuoka felt that clearing land for planting and a house was of secondary importance. He liked to walk over to see his particular piece of land, observe its dark-green and foreboding density in a wistful manner from the road, and then walk back to Okumura’s long house and spend the rest of the day reading. He was, everyone said, a scholar, more concerned with the expected arrival of a large shipment of books he had personally packaged and mailed himself from Japan than with building a house. “I can’t get on with my work until those books arrive,” he would say.

  “Well,” my mother would laugh, “perhaps Mizuoka can be convinced that he needs a house to shelter his books.”

  When our well was dug and our bathhouse built, my father, too, went off to help Mizuoka complete the preliminary needs of people settling new land. By then, Akira Tsuruta had joined Mizuoka as a sort of hired hand, but Tsuruta, like Mizuoka, was an intellectual sort, a poet, and while full of good intentions, not what one might call a good workhorse. Kantaro Uno soon befriended the young poet Tsuruta and could always be found working at Mizuoka’s place with one or two additional young men. Traveling about Esperança on his horse, Kantaro had a way of meeting people and convincing them that they could spare a day or two to help Mizuoka raise a roof or put up a fence. With the additional help of so many concerned neighbors, Mizuoka’s place began to take the shape of a small productive farm, despite the fact that Mizuoka himself took little interest in it. I had heard that Kantaro’s father, Naotaro, complained of Kantaro’s absence from his chores at home, but then, as time went on, Kantaro left more and more of his work at home to his brother Jiro. It became common to hear that Kantaro and his new group of friends had cleared so-and-so’s land or dug so-and-so’s well. In those early years, we all struggled together as a community, and I think Kantaro, wandering about on his horse with his personable ways and his positive talk, somehow bound us together by bringing us news and collective help.

  Every so often, even now, I dream of our first house in Esperança. Perhaps because it was built of mud and sticks which I myself pressed together with my own hands—like Tsuruta’s miniature mud village—I have an especially fond memory of that first house.

  The house was conside
red temporary, but nonetheless, we lived in it for several years and for many years after that used it as a shed. The house was made of wood and bamboo slats between which we packed mud. Despite its limited size, this house was built with divisions: two bedrooms and a kitchen, where we spent most of our time. My father built crude but functional beds, chairs, and tables. Okumura’s wife, Tomi, showed my mother how to make mattresses by piecing together flour sacks and filling them with dried corn husks. At night I liked to settled down into the rustle of the corn husks and stare at the thatching in the roof above.

  Takeo Okumura came by personally to assist in building the clay wood-burning stove, which was then torn apart and built up several times again until it would work without smoking the entire house. I do not know what the secret was to making a good stove, but there was a Brazilian who finally came and built such a good stove that my mother would later often remember the skill of that stove man. Even when she was able to use a modern gas stove, she mentioned with a certain nostalgia the taste of food on the old clay stove of our first house.

  In the first days after we arrived in Esperança, we lived in a long wood-slat and tile-roofed structure which housed our three families together. The long house was built by Takeo and Tomi Okumura and two other of the first families to arrive in Esperança. It had already housed several families before us and would house many more new arrivals after us. It was constructed as temporary housing for newly arriving settlers until they could clear their lots and build their own dwellings. In those days, such a house was considered luxurious. The materials—wood and tile—were transported in at great sacrifice and on several loads by cart and bull. Okumura felt that new immigrants needed simple but comfortable and safe housing in their first days in Esperança. The mud structures we would build to live in were known to harbor insects with infectious diseases. In later years, the long house would be transformed into the co-op offices.