Brazil-Maru

by Karen Tei Yamashita

  But there was, I later discovered, another reason why Haru first rejected Kantaro, a reason considered but immediately discounted by everyone: Hachiro Yōgu. Yōgu lived in the corner of a small shed outside of the Okumura house. Like other young bachelors attached to families, he was hired to do the chores around the farm. He was, at first, as I’ve said, an impossible man, creating havoc in the Okumura household. Only such a stubborn man of solid faith as Okumura could have ever kept Yōgu. Tomi Okumura bit her lip and smiled frailly, obedient to her husband’s intentions, but Haru was never such an easy woman. One day, Yōgu sauntered into the kitchen, his muddy boots dragging in clumps of red dirt. Haru was washing dishes in a large basin of soapy water near an open window. “Hey you,” Yōgu growled, swinging his boots and all the mud onto the kitchen table. “Coffee. Make me some coffee.”

  In the next second Haru began throwing soapy pans, cups and dishes, the entire contents of her basin at the surprised Yōgu. “You want coffee?” she screamed hysterically. “Here is coffee!” She flung the dark muddy contents of a large pot at Yōgu, who had by then drawn his pistol and was shooting angrily into the kitchen ceiling. “Kill me!” screamed Haru. “Kill me!” she threatened, grabbing a large knife from her basin.

  Yōgu backed warily out of Haru’s kitchen and sulked around the house. As he passed her window, Haru flung the remaining dirty dishwater out the window at Yōgu. Yōgu stood for a long moment under the window, looking through the stinging suds at Haru as tears of anger spilled from her eyes. Her face was flushed, her breasts heaved beneath a calico dress, all outlined perfectly by the wooden frame of the open window. He could see her in a rainbow, a picture he would never forget. Yōgu fell in love with Haru Okumura, and he fell in love with the real Haru, the strong, angry, stubborn, often foolish but certainly courageous Haru.

  On the day that this happened, Saburo and I were walking home from school, and we could hear the shots from the road. We ran toward the house, and when we got there, we saw Tomi Okumura and Haru outside of the house struggling with a large hoe between themselves. “Mother!” Haru yelled. “Stop it! Nothing happened! Nothing happened!”

  Tomi Okumura fell back with a thud into the dirt with the hoe. She had run from the field with the hoe, which she must have intended to use on Yōgu. Yōgu was standing in the doorway of the shed with his wet hair and his shirt plastered to his body. Tomi Okumura flew at him like a protective mother hen, but Yōgu closed the shed door in her face. Before he closed the door, I thought I saw his gaze wander to Haru, who now wore a queer smile on her lips.

  If Haru reciprocated Yōgu’s affections in any way, no one really knew. She seemed to have the same smile for all her admirers but an intimidating scowl for Yōgu. Saburo and I walked as always, passing the Okumura’s house every day to and from school, and on several occasions I saw Haru looking out her window or sitting and staring from her porch. On those occasions, Yōgu was always nearby working, chopping wood or digging and setting posts for a new fence. Several times Saburo and I paused to watch Yōgu at his target practice, a series of bullet-ridden cans flying from a fence railing. In the distance, I could see Haru’s figure wandering to and from her window.

  One day, my father sent me to deliver a package of medicine to the Okumuras. When I arrived at the house, there was a young Brazilian sitting at Okumura’s table. It was the Baiano himself. I stood shyly near the door with my package, somewhat intimidated by the Baiano, but Tomi Okumura sat me down with a piece of cake. The Baiano was a young man in his twenties, but he already had a fierce reputation for being easily angered, and it seemed no mistake that despite his youth, everything in the nearby town of Santa Cruz d’Azedinha was under his control. The Baiano’s real name was Floriano Raimundo, but as it was said that he had come from Bahia in the northeast of Brazil, everyone had taken to calling him the Baiano. When the Baiano came to Santa Cruz d’Azedinha, he was only seventeen years old but already had earned his reputation. He had been bequeathed a large section of land surrounding Santa Cruz, which was, when he arrived, a mere outpost in the forest. The Baiano, people said, had received this land from a wealthy colonel to whom the Baiano had been employed, everyone suspected, as a skillful applier of pressure. The stories that surround the Baiano of this early period are similar to the ones you hear about Hachiro Yōgu. Both were schooled in the rugged ways of the men who came to open this frontier. The Baiano was not a physically large or imposing man; at seventeen, he could not have looked very impressive, a young upstart at best. I can only speculate that he must have seemed mad, an intense glint of craziness swirling in his eyes that made people very wary.

  The Baiano had spread out a large map of Esperança and the surrounding area. There was a red line drawn across an existing dirt road and cutting through the forest to the town where we had first arrived by train. “Okumura,” he spoke with authority despite his youth, “I estimate three months of hacking away at that forest. If you can get your crew together, I’ll get mine. You start from this end. We start from our end. Meet in the middle. This road is essential to the development of this area.”

  Okumura nodded and answered in Portuguese, “I will bring it up at our next meeting, but I think everyone agrees that a road is needed. Now, will you join us for a modest meal?”

  Okumura stepped outside to wash his face from the well, but the Baiano remained in the kitchen. His eyes turned to a large bowl of some strange meat. “Dona,” he addressed Tomi Okumura, “what might that be?”

  At this moment, Yōgu stepped into the kitchen, his face glowing from his evening bath. He seemed to enter the kitchen rather warily.

  Tomi Okumura answered the Baiano’s question. “Frog legs. My husband likes them very much,” she said in halting Portuguese.

  “Frog legs?” The Baiano repeated with a certain disdain. “You will excuse me, Dona, but rattlers, armadillos, alligators—I know there’s people who swear by them, but it’s never my preference. Only meat I’ll ever put between my teeth is beef.” The thought of eating frog legs obviously dismayed the Baiano. “You Japanese are more adventurous than most.” He shook his head.

  Yōgu said nothing. He hated frog legs. Yōgu moved his gaze toward the door of the kitchen and watched with some expectation as Haru moved into the kitchen with a large basket of washed vegetables. Haru ignored Yōgu and smiled graciously at the Baiano. Then she did a funny thing which I will never forget. She walked over to the large bowl of skinned frog legs, the shiny pink meat glistening in her mother’s concoction of lime juice and salt. Right there, oblivious to the astonished stare of the Baiano, Haru picked up a raw frog leg and began to chew noisily, ripping the meat off the tiny bones with her teeth and swallowing everything with great relish. The Baiano, who had a reputation not unlike Yōgu’s for killing men and beasts that might get in his way, watched Haru with a morbid interest, and when the Baiano later recalled this incident, he compared it to several stories about animals he had seen eating other animals.

  A bright dancing look of delight flashed across Yōgu’s face as Haru continued to chew and pick at the frog legs. She might have eaten several more except that Tomi Okumura removed the bowl from Haru’s hungry reach. I was never quite sure why Haru had eaten those raw frog legs, whether it was to shock the Baiano or to impress Yōgu, or because she was very hungry. In speaking of a woman who was considered to be at one time the beauty of Esperança, this incident must indeed seem strange. Of course, Yōgu thought Haru all the more beautiful because of it. I do not, however, think it stranger than Yōgu’s attachment to his pistol or Kantaro’s devotion to baseball. All of us who came to and grew up in Esperança were roughly hewn, completing our education with life in quite unpredictable ways. That Haru could be beautiful and also slightly wild is hardly surprising.

  Kantaro, wrapped up in his reading, his passion and his outpouring of ideas both spoken and in his voluminous letters, never, I believe, quite saw Haru as Yōgu must have seen her. Had Kantaro lived with the Okumuras as Yōgu did, pe
rhaps his perception of her might have been very different, but perhaps not. In baseball, Kantaro showed himself to be a young man of great determination; he did not like to lose. He had set his heart on what he determined must be the best and most beautiful: the lovely daughter of the leader of our community. Certainly, like all young men, he must have seen the small things in Haru that teased his desire—the wisps of fallen hair, the curve of her lips, the movement of her body, the music in her voice—but at the same time, this Haru that Kantaro saw was a Haru that he imagined, a Haru that lived among the pages of Tolstoy’s great romances, flirted in distant ballrooms, lived, laughed, suffered, and felt greatly.

  This is not to say that there were not in Esperança women of learning; perhaps even more astonishing than Shūhei Mizuoka’s scholarship in this backwoods Japanese farming colony in Brazil was the degree of education held by a few of the women. Kantaro’s mother was educated at a famous women’s Christian college in Tokyo. My own mother was educated and trained in midwifery. There were women versed in tea ceremony and flower arrangement, and there was a club of women who gathered occasionally to write poetry. In those days, when most Japanese immigrants—men and women—found themselves on coffee plantations struggling from daybreak to darkness in backbreaking labor, it seems more than amazing. I saw my mother struggle with her duties on our farm, care for five rambling and rambunctious boys and work tirelessly with pregnant mothers and their growing children. Unlike the men, who could abandon their work on the weekends for baseball, women had to accomplish innumerable chores—washing, mending, cooking—in those spare moments after the work in the field was done. Women like Waka Uno saw their education and cultural talents put to quite different uses, and I doubt if anyone really practiced tea ceremony or flower arranging. Still, it was the nature of Esperança to brag of this basis for a new civilization, and for this reason, we were called the ginbura or Ginza-strolling colonists, as if to say that we had come to Brazil much in the manner of a stroll along the Ginza, bringing with us the chic sophistication of that Tokyo district. Visitors were always impressed by two things which seemed to be an outward expression of our cultured inhabitants: the flower beds which graced the humble simplicity of our houses and the sweet song of a woman accompanying herself with a piano.

  The piano arrived in Esperança about the same time as Hachiro Yōgu. It was shipped at great expense from São Paulo for Kimi Kawagoe, the daughter of a former banker turned Christian convert. If Haru was slightly wild, Kimi was completely tamed. She had, in contrast to Haru, a very controlled elegance, the sort people seem to admire in the Empress of Japan. Kimi had enjoyed a rarefied education, an education meant originally to prepare her to marry into a fine family. What Kimi was doing in Esperança might possibly be explained, but what she was doing in Brazil is beyond all comprehension. Kimi was slightly older than Haru. She had a younger brother named Heizo, who played second base with Kantaro. In those days, Kimi often seemed like a pretty bird in a cage, her singular expression of freedom from so many self-imposed social restrictions being her voice. Singing and playing the piano was Kimi’s way of bearing her life in a rustic setting. There were several young men interested in Kimi at the time, but she responded to them with extremely reserved politeness.

  The preoccupations of courting and the attendant gossip were temporarily curtailed by the prospect of taking the Esperança baseball team to São Paulo for a showdown with the city team. This game was accidentally arranged by Takeo Okumura through a boast—thought to be rather uncharacteristic of our stoic leader—about having a strong team of hard-hitting young men who could easily defeat the older and more complacent São Paulo team. Of this victory, Kantaro had no doubt, and he went about training his team with an even more rigorous schedule than before. There was a great deal of excitement generated by the prospect of going to São Paulo to play baseball. For us, living in the rural backwaters, the distant São Paulo was and still is a great metropolitan center. There was a great deal of pride involved in showing our best.

  As Okumura had predicted, the Esperança team came away victors, claiming a title we would hold for many years hence. From this time on, baseball rapidly spread among the Japanese settlements, and wherever a new settlement grew up, a new baseball team was naturally formed. Kantaro and his teammates traveled as far south as Três Barras and Londrina in Paraná and as far west as Campo Grande in Mato Grosso to play baseball and garner points for a much disputed series. And everywhere the Esperança team went, people remembered Kantaro Uno, the determined young pitcher with the fastest pitch in the colony, the young Japanese immigrant who played baseball because he had come to live in Brazil. “People always ask the same questions,” said Kantaro. “How is it that people in the rural backwoods, pioneering a new settlement and opening virgin forests, have the time to play baseball? I always answer that we in Esperança have come to build a new life, and sports, like other cultural pursuits, must be a part of this new life. In the mornings, we open new roads and clear new land. In the afternoon, we play. Without this element of leisure, how could we be a whole people? We in Esperança have come to Brazil to settle and to create. We are unlike others who have come here to make money and return with monetary wealth to Japan.” Many people thought this talk so much nonsense, the justification of Christians and socialists who had not found acceptance in Japan, but many others were impressed.

  It was said that after Kantaro returned from that first victory in São Paulo, there was a definite change in his demeanor; he returned more aggressive, more certain of himself. This seems natural enough for a young hero and team leader, but years later I heard an interesting story about the team’s visit to São Paulo. It was during this visit that Kantaro first met Shigeshi Kasai, the defiant young publisher of the first Japanese newspaper in Brazil, the Brazil Shimpo. Kasai was a journalist with a very witty and often wicked pen. The establishment within the Japanese colony was horrified that anyone could write, especially in Japanese, the sort of editorials and stories Kasai delighted in. This establishment quickly financed a second newspaper of a more conservative tone, which haughtily flaunted its respectability. But Shigeshi Kasai was, among other things, an occasional gambler, and he gambled that this competition would help sell an even greater number of newspapers for him. In fact, people, despite their private or public opinions, were always curious and amused by the newspaper feud. Kasai also played third base for the São Paulo team, but he was immediately impressed with the captain of the Esperança team, the mean pitcher from the backwoods whose head was filled with romance and high ideals. There was later some gossip that Kasai entered a pool of bets favoring the Esperança team over his own.

  Looking back into the old issues of the Brazil Shimpo, there is an interesting description by Kasai of the Esperança team:

  I have had the honor of meeting the fine team of men from Esperança. If ever the São Paulo team, of which I myself am a member, deserved to lose a game, it was this one. There is no comparison to their worthiness as opponents, their force of spirit, their intuition as a team. Exceptional men are to be found pioneering and opening the virgin lands of the rural interior.

  What Kasai did not mention was the short excursion he gave the innocent Esperança team into the basement print shop of his newspaper business. This was a dirty, cluttered place splattered with black ink, type set into tiny pigeonholes everywhere, paper piled in stacks. “Please excuse the mess,” he apologized to the team, wiping his spectacles with a handkerchief soiled with ink. “It’s really unforgivable to perform a ceremony of this nature in such an environment, but certainly the Emperor will forgive his poor subjects on the other side of the world.” The team members stood soberly before a velvet-covered box supposedly housing a photograph of the Emperor.

  It was common in those days in schools and public ceremonies in Japan to pay homage to the picture of the Emperor. A command was given, the veil lifted, and everyone bowed before the picture. Kantaro and his team hadn’t had to bow before the Emp
eror’s picture since leaving Japan. They supposed that this must be the sort of thing that you do in the city after winning a baseball game. They had not questioned this act in Japan, and they were not about to question it in São Paulo. Only Yōgu fidgeted nervously in the crowded print shop basement. “I’m not doing this, Kantaro. This is not baseball,” he growled under his breath.

  “Do it anyway,” murmured Kantaro.

  “I should have brought my gun.”

  “What for?”

  “I don’t like this,” he complained.

  Suddenly Kasai had the velvet curtain removed from the box, and all the team members bowed their heads, never daring to look at the revered face. Kantaro felt Yōgu nudging him from the side. “Filho da puta! Filho da puta!” he cursed.