Brazil-Maru

by Karen Tei Yamashita

  Yōgu just seemed to have appeared one day in Esperança. I had heard that he came from a very respectable family; his father was a Christian pastor in Japan. Yōgu must have been a difficult and rebellious youth, and it was said that he had tried to leave Japan as a stowaway three times. Three times he had been caught until his father had taken the advice of Momose-sensei and finally paid for Yōgu’s passage to Brazil.

  What Yōgu had done in those years previous to appearing in Esperança was something of a mystery to everyone. Some people said that he had lived with the Indians in the Mato Grosso and wandered around with no clothing. Others said that he had been a hired hit man in Pernambuco and had killed a man who’d trespassed on the land of a powerful colonel. Others said that he had been mining gold and diamonds in Goiás. He had a small scar on his forehead which you could see when his hair blew back. People said he got that scar in a knife fight, that he had barely missed losing his eye in that fight. Now that I think of it, everything surrounding the life of Hachiro Yōgu has somehow been exaggerated, even the parts that we knew intimately. Years later, Yōgu himself would probably not know what to make of these stories, but then his memory in later years was something of an enigma.

  Whatever Yōgu had been doing in those early years before he came to Esperança, it seemed to have been a rough business, for he arrived with knives in his boots, a pistol in his belt, and a rifle slung over his shoulder. He was dirty and mean and had a habit of spitting when he was nervous. He swaggered about and generally said very little. When he did speak, it was in a rough crude manner which relied on a liberal use of Portuguese epithets. That a colony of Christian intellectuals could adopt such a young man is testimony to our brand of intellectualism. It was Mizuoka who welcomed Yōgu as a sort of noble savage. This was what the Japanese race, unfettered by the tight island society of their past, might produce.

  Yōgu had arrived with a very worn, dirty, barely readable letter of introduction from Momose-sensei himself to Okumura. One day on our way to school, Saburo and I witnessed a strange scene: Okumura bowed in prayer with a smelly Japanese pistoleiro who grimaced at a mound of dirt in the already grimy and sweaty palm of his hand.

  “He’s one of us,” Saburo remarked in his rather smirking way and not without some delight. We watched with curiosity as Yōgu sulkily divested himself of guns and knives of every description before entering Okumura’s house. Beyond the door, we could see Tomi Okumura’s eyes pop out round as saucers.

  Okumura managed, somehow, to make Yōgu more presentable. After a bath and a shave, Yōgu seemed at first sight just one more young Japanese immigrant looking for a future in Brazil. But Okumura was unable to convince Yōgu that weapons were an unnecessary appendage in a place such as Esperança. After a great deal of measured reasoning, Okumura was able to limit him to a single pistol, which Yōgu wore on a large belt and holster at his side. He had about him the rugged look of a cowboy, the sort I have seen in American movies, but he probably got his demeanor from his rough Brazilian companions outside the colony. Some newcomers often mistook him for some sort of sheriff or deputy and derived a distant sense of security from his presence. But those of us who thought we knew Hachiro Yōgu saw a volatile and violent man whom Okumura had, by the grace of God, miraculously tamed.

  For many days after Yōgu’s arrival in Esperança, people wandered in and out of the Okumura household, convinced that Yōgu would commit some sort of horrid crime. My mother went boldly over to spend the evenings with Tomi Okumura under the pretext of Bible studies. She wrapped up her Bible in a furoshiki of purple silk and encouraged my father to go with her. “That person is a madman. The Okumuras shouldn’t have to shoulder the responsibility of housing such a person, even if he is Japanese, but if this is God’s will, then we must show some support.” As far as I could tell, Okumura himself did not share my mother’s concern.

  Saburo’s mother, Waka Uno, came to gossip with my mother. They agreed to trade off visiting with Tomi Okumura, each arriving on alternate nights with their Bibles in furoshikis.

  “I was so reluctant to leave last night,” shuddered Waka Uno. “Poor Tomisan. And he eats so much and has no manners, and he orders her around to get this and that. He puts his feet up on the table and eats right from the cooking pot. And then, when he gets mad, he throws things on the floor. He has already broken dishes and cups, so now she only serves him in metal things. She is such a brave woman.”

  However, Hachiro Yōgu became daily more manageable. This is not to say that he ever became civilized; he did lose some of his wildness, although there was always, it seemed to me, a slightly crazed look somewhere in his eyes. Most people attribute the change in Yōgu to Okumura’s unyielding persistence, in this case to integrate Yōgu into the productive life of Esperança. But I suspect that the true reason Hachiro Yōgu began to change was because of Haru Okumura, Okumura’s pretty seventeen-year-old daughter.

  In those days, there were few young and marriageable women in Esperança. Most women came married with families of their own. On the other hand, Esperança was teeming with young men looking for adventure, fortune, or at least a livelihood with a good future. Most of these young men were attracted to baseball and consequently to Kantaro Uno and his growing group of friends. They gathered in a large group at the Uno farm. They were not only attracted to the camaraderie of Kantaro’s group but also by the opportunity to talk frankly with Waka Uno who was, it soon got around, a very willing and able go-between in matters of the heart. If Waka Uno happened to like a particular young man, she would go to great lengths to send his credentials around. Of course, the young man would then have Kantaro take a presentable photograph, and Waka would send the photograph along with a carefully worded letter to an appropriate contact in Japan. Just as my mother was responsible for most of the births in Esperança for many years, it can also be said that Waka Uno was responsible for many of the marriages.

  Haru Okumura was special. Being only a boy at the time, perhaps my judgment is askew, but I am inclined to believe that she was special because she was a rarity, one single woman among so many young men. Yet many people assure me that Haru was considered a great beauty. This must have made some sort of impression on the noble savage, for Hachiro Yōgu began to remove his feet from the table when she entered the kitchen.

  By this time, my mother and Waka Uno had also found an answer to the problem of protecting the Okumuras: they sent a strong young man to visit every evening and make his presence felt as a sort of bodyguard. The strong young man they chose was Kantaro. And that was how Kantaro met Hachiro Yōgu.

  It must have been a strange meeting. Kantaro was becoming a very intense young man with a manner of talking much akin to Mizuoka’s philosophizing. But Kantaro was different from Mizuoka in that he seemed to be able to remove the scholarly dust from Mizuoka’s ideas and invest them with a sense of freshness and vitality. And more interesting yet, Kantaro somehow had tied baseball to Mizuoka’s philosophy about the New World and a new civilization. Yōgu shrugged at all of this as so much nonsense. Kantaro was a youthful positivist full of exuberance, dancing about a Yōgu who sulked warily, peering into shadows like a hunted animal. “Baseball?” Yōgu snickered. “You gonna play baseball in this hellhole of a Brazil? What stinking nonsense. Ha ha ha!”

  Kantaro walked around the room, measuring the distances, and set his box camera on its tripod. Unaffected by Yōgu’s words, he insisted, “Well, you can laugh, but I came here to make a new home. When you can make something anew, you have the freedom to experiment. Why don’t you give it a try?”

  “Experiment, he says. Experiment? Ha! Idiot. You wanna know why I came to Brazil? You wanna know why? I hated Japan. I wanted to escape from Japan. And don’t try to take my picture.”

  “Well, that may be,” Kantaro nodded and continued to position his machine. He looked through the lens at Yōgu. “But that’s all the more reason for you to want to take advantage of your freedom. That is what Esperança is all about.”
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  “Esperança? I don’t know why I ever came here. It looks like Japan here. All you Japanese walking around like you are God’s gift to Brazil.”

  “As a matter of fact . . .” Kantaro looked up and smiled.

  “God’s gift from Japan!” Yōgu roared, laughing hysterically.

  “Why did you come here? I mean, besides not liking Japan, why did you come to Esperança?”

  “Do you really want to know?” Yōgu leaned over meaningfully. “I’m hiding,” he hissed between his teeth. “What better place? Esperança, a loving Christian colony of Japanese intellectuals and communists. Aren’t you all hiding? I fit right in, don’t I?”

  “I suppose so,” Kantaro nodded.

  “Why don’t you take my picture with me holding my gun?” Yōgu produced his pistol and pointed it at the camera.

  “Don’t move,” Kantaro ordered.

  Yōgu sat back and posed arrogantly.

  “But why are you all so afraid? You think I don’t know? You think I think this is just Esperança’s way of greeting a newcomer: come sit in the parlor with poor Okumura-no-okusan and her sweet daughter, Haru, every night just to chat? Now they send you—a rotten excuse for a real man—Esperança’s best, to watch the animal in Okumura’s house! Well come watch if you want, but I don’t want to hear your foolish talk about freedom. You don’t understand anything!”

  “Have you ever played baseball?” Kantaro insisted, unperturbed.

  “Baseball! Baseball! Is that all you can think about? Of course I played baseball.”

  “Well, I’m the best,” remarked Kantaro.

  “Is that so?”

  “We practice every afternoon at five until the sun goes down. If you can really play, I’ll expect you at the field.” Kantaro snapped the shutter. It’s the portrait of the Hachiro Yōgu we all remember.

  As it turned out, Yōgu played baseball. He played with his pistol at his side, and despite what should have been an impediment, Yōgu was extremely fast. It was soon apparent to Kantaro that Yōgu was a natural shortstop—nothing seemed to slip by him. There are many stories about Yōgu and baseball, the truth of which no one is sure. But Saburo and I were there the day when Yōgu joined the team, and I can testify to this particular story. Saburo and I had run over to the field from school that day as we often did. Saburo stopped short and nudged me as I ran into him, “Look, Emiru. It’s him. Is he really going to play?”

  Yōgu stood at one end of the field in the stance of a man who had come to accept a duel. He watched while Kantaro put the team through a series of preliminary exercises: stretching, sit-ups, push-ups, jumping jacks, running in place. Kantaro had an extremely efficient and regimented method of baseball training, which he did not veer from. As time went on and the stakes became greater, the program became even more severe in nature.

  Kantaro seemed to ignore Yōgu at first, and the team formed units to field, catch, and bat. Kantaro began to pitch and, after pitching to several batters, motioned to Yōgu to join the line of batters. Yōgu sauntered up with a bat, spitting territorially around the plate.

  Saburo squatted down to watch, but I stood anxiously. There was a wonderful tension in the air, and Kantaro played that tension very coolly. I watched my hero eye Yōgu coldly, assessing his competitor, collecting energy from within. Yōgu spat nervously. I held my breath. Kantaro snapped the ball, and it seemed to me that it spun to its mark like lightning.

  “Filho da puta!” growled Yōgu in Portuguese.

  A second pitch came homeward.

  “Strike!” I spoke out loud in spite of myself.

  This time Yōgu had spun around as he wildly lashed with his bat. I could not help but suppress a smile of glee, but Saburo pulled his cap over his forehead and muttered glumly, “Hit it. Why can’t you hit it?”

  After that, there was a series of pitches which Yōgu popped foul. “That’s it,” prompted Saburo. “Hit it.” And then, unexpectedly, Yōgu slammed the next pitch high into the air. Kantaro himself ran beneath the ball, waiting for it to fall neatly into his glove. Suddenly there was an explosion which made Saburo jump up, and the ball shattered in the air. Then we all looked with astonishment at Yōgu, who was calmly examining the hot barrel of his pistol.

  CHAPTER 4:

  Haru

  There has been much discussion over the years as to how beautiful Haru Okumura really was and what exactly attracted Kantaro Uno to her side. Now, when you look at that old grandmother, it seems astonishing that she could have been the participant in a great love story told over and over by the old-timers of Esperança.

  There are many photographs taken by Kantaro of Haru, and she appears in the them with the innocent bloom of life and the same happy smile recognizable today. As I have said, some people believe that it was the dearth of women that made Haru so attractive, but I am also inclined to believe that it was Kantaro’s passion that singled out Haru from all others. Certainly, when Kantaro was an old man, he himself wondered at Haru’s former reputation and concluded that he himself had made her beautiful. That aging men like myself and Kantaro should talk so callously about the former beauty of a woman is, of course, laughable, if not unforgivable. Yet, I am reminded of my own uncontrollable passion for a young woman of great beauty; the anxiety I suffered is now only a memory. Like Kantaro, I myself wonder at the madness of my youthful attraction.

  To my boyish mind, Kantaro Uno was a marvelous hero on a white horse, and it seemed impossible that anyone could resist that wonderful image. Of course, my best friend Saburo had very little concern for the great exploits of his older brother and passed off my admiration with scorn.

  “Tell me about the darkroom, Sabu. I want to know,” I asked Saburo. “What does Kantaro do to make the pictures turn into pictures?”

  “Emiru, who cares? I don’t want to hear any more about that camera or those photos or about him.” This seemed to be a case of sibling envy, which I put aside as I did so much of Saburo’s growing cynicism. However, when I heard that Haru Okumura had rejected Kantaro’s offer of marriage, I felt a great deal of confusion. Perhaps women had a very different perception of what is wonderful. Besides, marriages were arrangements, decisions by parents and families which no young man and, especially, no young woman would reject. But Haru had rejected Kantaro. This created a flurry of gossip in the colony and much speculation. If Haru could reject the most eligible young man in Esperança, the captain of the baseball team, the documenting photographer with the Carl Zeiss box camera, the personable and charming young man on the white horse, a person who many treated as a sort of aristocratic prince from a formerly well-to-do but fallen family, and a man who was beginning to articulate a newfound exuberance among the young men of Esperança, then who does Haru want to marry anyway?

  The colony buzzed back and forth with new developments, but Haru remained impassive. Kantaro, on the other hand, seemed oblivious to his failure, which he deemed temporary in nature. Meanwhile, Waka Uno and Tomi Okumura had run into some misunderstanding and were now not talking to each other. I heard all the gossip in my mother’s kitchen; pregnant women steadily descended upon our house, keeping my mother informed of new developments.

  “Do you think it could be that Yōgu?” someone considered with some outrage.

  “Haven’t you noticed the change in him? He takes a bath every day now.”

  “Maybe he is holding the Okumuras hostage.”

  “Nonsense. He’s become a very close friend of Kantaro’s. Kantaro has brought him around all right.”

  “I heard Haru is secretly interested in that shy one who works for the co-op.”

  “The accountant?”

  “No. The little driver.”

  “Ridiculous. He’s too skinny. If he picked up a bat, he’d fall over on his face!”

  “That Kantaro is so handsome. What’s the matter with Haru anyway?”

  “Have you thought about it? Maybe it’s not Haru. Maybe Okumura-san doesn’t like Kantaro.”

  In the me
antime, Kantaro visited Haru every evening after baseball practice. He was relentless in his visits. He could be found in the Okumura kitchen each night without fail, his horse grazing quietly beneath a great paineira tree at the side of the house. Kantaro was often accompanied by other young men, all hopeful of being recognized by Haru in some manner, believing that their chances were just as good as Kantaro’s. Often the entire baseball team was seen milling around Okumura’s place, spilling out into the yard, washing vegetables for Tomi, resetting a fallen fence or patching a barn roof. Haru politely greeted all the men, serving coffee, baking large sheets of cake and patting hot rice and pickles into balls.

  Not only did Kantaro visit Haru daily, he spent his evenings at home writing Haru long letters. No one really knew what these letters were about. All they knew was that Kantaro presented Haru with a letter almost daily. It is said that she herself never responded, certainly not in a written form, to any of Kantaro’s letters. Many people have since expressed a curiosity to read the contents of those passionate missives. Kantaro himself felt that they were a special document of this period in his life, of romance and purity of feeling and the youthful energy that portended a great future. I have imagined these letters as if I myself had known Kantaro’s thoughts in those days. I am sure that they were not love letters in the ordinary sense nor even proclamations of Haru’s beauty, but that they were an outpouring of belief, a testament of ideals. The letters carried, I am sure, Kantaro’s sentiments about his life in Esperança and must have been sprinkled with the principal ideas of those writers Mizuoka had encouraged him to read, the Russian writer Tolstoy and the Japanese philosopher Mushanokoji, for example. I would often see Kantaro ambling home from Mizuoka’s on his horse. If it were still light enough to see, Kantaro would be immersed in a book, the horse left to bring its traveler home without direction from the rein. I believe it is fair to say that Haru could make little out of those letters and that they must have confused rather than impressed her. Haru was, after all, a simple girl; she had come to Brazil with her parents when she was twelve years old, before she had completed her education. The Okumuras had had no time to bother with the education of a daughter, even if they believed in such an extravagance. They had struggled tirelessly to build a Christian colony for Japanese settlers, the benefits of which were certainly far in the future. Takeo Okumura was an educated man, but he was also a man of few words—Haru would not have gleaned an education from him—and Tomi Okumura was a hardworking woman from a farming family whose reading must have been limited to delving occasionally into a puzzling scripture in the Bible. The most Haru could have done with Kantaro’s letters was to count them occasionally and arrange them by date. When you consider Kantaro’s passion from Haru’s point of view, it is easy to see why she might have rejected his offer of marriage. While flattered to be the center of so much attention, Haru must have felt unequipped to manage such fervent outpourings, much less the minutiae of his philosophical wanderings.