Brazil-Maru

by Karen Tei Yamashita

  Kantaro did not become involved in this argument between Tsuruta and Befu. Kantaro wanted to be a leader, to be outside of this argument. I know he was torn between his two friends, but he did not want to show weakness. Others had gotten into fights; it was better not to take sides. No one knew what to think anyway, so we watched Tsuruta and Befu fight. I know that Tsuruta was very brave. He never backed down, never lost his educated manner. Befu, on the other hand, fought cruelly, attacking Tsuruta personally. He could be very mean. I told Kantaro that it seemed mean to me, but he said that Tsuruta was strong enough to hold his own. It would be humiliating for Tsuruta if Kantaro stepped in to protect him. I told Kantaro that I protected my children no matter what. Kantaro said that Tsuruta was not a child. I still think that this was a mistake. Maybe Kantaro knows this, too, in his heart. Everyone followed Kantaro, and no one defended Tsuruta. On the outside, Tsuruta seemed very cool, but finally I think he must have been hurt very badly.

  “This!” Befu held up a large binder of paper at dinner one evening. “This, I want you all to take a good look at!”

  Tsuruta saw the binder and jumped from his seat. “What are you doing with that?” he exclaimed.

  “I found it,” smiled Befu. “I was just wondering what you found so interesting to write about. Here it all is, a confused mass of drivel about us, interspersed with poetry,” Befu laughed. “Poetic nonsense! Did I say poetry? And unsent letters to Mother. Poor Mother. What sort of son are you anyway? And what does he write about us?” Befu opened the binder to cite an example.

  “What is the meaning of this?” Tsuruta stepped forward to get his binder from Befu.

  Befu danced backward. “We might all be in this thing, I tell you. We have a right to know what you have written about us.”

  “It is nothing that interests you,” Tsuruta defended himself.

  “Ah, but the poetry. Poetic lyricism. Great poetry. A modern Basho, no less!”

  Tsuruta came forward, but Befu ran around the table, prancing about with the binder like a teasing child with a ball. Everyone was laughing. Befu tossed the binder to another who in turn tossed it away to someone else. Tsuruta foolishly ran about after the binder until it fell into Ichiro Terada’s hands. Tsuruta’s sad gentle eyes pleaded. I could see a wave of shame running over Ichiro, who held on to the binder until Tsuruta thankfully took it. Everyone jeered and cuffed Ichiro across his ears, but I secretly thanked him. Ever since then, I have liked that boy. Well, Ichiro’s not a boy anymore.

  Kantaro’s sister Ritsu was always lost among the men in her family. She wasn’t like my mother-in-law, Waka, who liked to talk and arrange marriages. Maybe she was more like Jiro, a kind of follower. She never had a mind of her own. I could never understand this, and I told her so. She was content to do what her mother suggested, what her brothers wanted, what her father liked. Time went on, and everyone forgot that Ritsu had grown up, that she was a pretty young woman with a sweet shy personality. Everyone except her mother remembered that Ritsu should be getting married soon. I saw Waka always looking over the new young men who came to our place. Finally, there were three men who were interested in Ritsu: Seijiro Befu, Heizo Kawagoe, and even the scholar Shūhei Mizuoka.

  Mizuoka got to know Ritsu when he was digging up an Indian mound on our land. He was out there every day with the boys, Saburo and Ichiro, puttering around in the dirt. At first, I went out with hot food in pots to feed them at lunch, but then I was pregnant, and it became difficult to walk very far. Ritsu went out in my place. She would sit on a log with them and eat lunch too. I always thought she was such a cute girl; I remember she was always tugging her pigtails. She liked to listen to Mizuoka tell stories about the Indians. Mizuoka was always the teacher lecturing, but maybe something about Ritsu made the teacher look up from his papers. I was surprised by this change in Mizuoka, as if something had hit him on the head. I could see his gaze following Ritsu everywhere. It was very obvious, but then men are so foolish anyway. Kantaro always laughs that Mizuoka let the rains destroy the mound because instead of looking at the clouds in the sky, he was looking at Ritsu. Even after the mound was destroyed, Mizuoka kept coming around to see Ritsu, giving her little Indian trinkets and telling her stories about going into the forest.

  One day, I saw Heizo Kawagoe staring at Ritsu, too, so I said, “Heizo, Ritsu is a cute girl, isn’t she? And she is shy like you.” Heizo turned very red. His face must have been so hot that he could hardly stand it. He suddenly ran off. Heizo was the sort who had difficulty talking. Everything was locked inside. He never confided in anyone. Later I wondered if Ritsu knew that Heizo watched her, and I asked her about this. She seemed confused to hear this. If you are shy, you think everyone is looking at you. Poor Ritsu. Poor Heizo. They thought everyone was looking, but no one really noticed anyway. I heard that Heizo had bad dreams, that he thrashed about at night. Someone thought he heard him mumble Ritsu’s name at night. Some nights he woke up crying. Everyone began to know these things about Heizo; it was very embarrassing to him. No one said anything, but everyone knew. He knew everyone knew, and it made things worse. I said to Kantaro, “Why don’t you talk to him. Better to talk than to dream.”

  “This is something that Heizo has to work out for himself,” Kantaro said. “If he is a man, then he will find a way. If he has a dream, he must pursue it.”

  “But Heizo is shy. Ritsu is shy too. Maybe they are meant for each other. Perhaps if you said something.”

  “Heizo has to learn that his life is only his own, that only he can take charge of it. If he truly cares for Ritsu, then he will have to take charge of his life. I cannot do this for him.”

  “But what about Ritsu?”

  “What about Ritsu?”

  “Perhaps she likes Heizo in return.”

  “What a nuisance you are. You keep out of this!”

  Kantaro was right. I can be a nuisance. I made Heizo get hot in the face. I feel bad about that because after all, Heizo knew what Kantaro knew: that he would not be the one chosen for Ritsu. Even if he could take hold of his manhood and find the courage to speak, he could not be like Seijiro Befu. Everyone knew that Befu liked Ritsu. How could Heizo be better than Befu? Befu the chicken genius, Befu the brilliant, Befu the tireless, Befu the patriot, Befu, Kantaro’s second-in-command. Heizo could not compete. What would Kantaro say? What would the others say? They might laugh. It would be humiliating to let the others laugh. Befu had made them laugh at Tsuruta. No. That could not happen to Heizo. Heizo remained silent. Befu boasted and laughed. He looked at Ritsu as if his very thoughts were fact. He spoke winningly with my mother-in-law, who loved Befu’s genial talk and quick wit. This was a man who would force some life into her quiet Ritsu. This was a man Waka herself would have liked to marry. A man with power and energy. A man devoted to her son Kantaro.

  Maybe after all, Ritsu really preferred Shūhei Mizuoka. Mizuoka wasn’t one of us. He came around to our place because of the mound and because of Ritsu. He was Kantaro’s teacher, but he was older and out of place, not like the young men on Kantaro’s baseball team. He was eccentric and a loner. He preferred books to people. He was nearly forty then, and Waka thought that was already too old, too set in his ways. Maybe that’s true, but then when you see how these other men turned out in their old age, Mizuoka was still traveling around, going back and forth to the forest when he was maybe past eighty. Ritsu was shy, but maybe she had her own dreams too. Mizuoka would have taken her away to the forest. It might have been for the better, but it is useless to think about these things now.

  People always talk about Kantaro and me as if we made a choice about getting married, but they talk about it because it was not a very normal thing to do. Ritsu did what most women did; she got married to a man chosen for her. Befu was overjoyed, but it was not really because he was getting married to Ritsu but because, in this way, he would be related to Kantaro. Kantaro always said that there is love between men that is different than that between men and women. Well, I ca
n understand this because what was between Befu and Kantaro was like a bonding of blood. It was a fierce thing between men. They would die for each other. I don’t think women think that way because they have their children. They would rather die for their children. But Kantaro was that way; he had great love for his friends. He loved Befu because Befu could be angry and passionate.

  Mizuoka came around foolishly with his books and Indian trinkets, but Waka was busy making arrangements for Ritsu’s wedding. And poor Heizo bothered his companions nightly with his bad dreams.

  For several days no one had seen Tsuruta. We were accustomed to having him disappear to study and write, but Toshiko and I noticed he didn’t even come around to the kitchen to find food for himself. We went to his room only to discover that he was sick and feverish, his bedclothes soaked in sweat. I ran to Sei Terada’s house and made her come to see Tsuruta. What should I do? Tsuruta was so sick. She nodded and came with me. The symptoms I described—the blood in his sputum, his high fever, the cold sweat—could only mean one thing. We quarantined the room and sent everyone away.

  Tsuruta knew what it was. “Tuberculosis,” he said. “I had it in Japan. I went to the south of Japan to rest, and I got better. But when I went home again, it seemed to come back. Brazil,” Tsuruta rasped. “Brazil. They said it would always be warm in Brazil. I’ve been well all these years.”

  I nodded. “The rainy weather this season. You must have been out in the damp weather,” I scolded. “And it doesn’t look as if you’ve been eating well at all. Look at you. So thin.”

  “The stigma of the disease in Japan,” said Tsuruta. “It was such a burden for my mother.”

  “What nonsense,” I said. “No burden is so great that she would want to lose you. Here. Eat this. What are we going to tell her now?” I held up a large bowl of soup.

  Tsuruta sipped slowly, suddenly stopping to cough and sending the hot broth splattering about the bed covers.

  As I sopped up his mess and changed the sheets, he said, “I have failed in my duty to my family, to my mother.” Tsuruta said sadly, “At least my sister is now married.” On the wall was a picture of an elegant family dressed in beautiful Western clothing, a man and a woman and their two children. The little girl, who was perhaps three or four years old, sat in her father’s lap. The young boy stood to one side of his father. The gentle eyes and features could only be those of Akira Tsuruta.

  Kantaro came to visit. He stared for a long time at the people in the photograph—the man who was now dead and the woman who would never again see her son. I don’t think Kantaro really understood until then about Tsuruta’s loneliness. Somehow Tsuruta felt incomplete. Kantaro had come to Brazil with his entire family, leaving no one behind. He did not need a photograph to remember people he missed. He saw the weak figure of his old friend in bed and said gruffly, “Tsuruta, be strong. Get well. We are your family, and we need you.”

  I felt angry at Kantaro about his manner, but Kantaro could not think about death. He only thought about life. Maybe he and Befu and even Tsuruta had pledged themselves to die together, but this was not the same thing. He did not know what to do about Tsuruta who was too young to die. When Kantaro came, he hid his tears from Tsuruta. Tsuruta must die like a man. I felt sad about this. I didn’t know what to do. At first, I tried to remember things about Japan, about my grandmother or my cousins, something my mother told me, this or that. Somehow this made Tsuruta feel better. But I thought to myself that I would never see these people again, and that I could not turn back. It was only a memory. This was my home. My parents said so. Kantaro said so.

  Kantaro thought Tsuruta didn’t understand this. On the day Befu learned that he and Ritsu would be married, he came to Kantaro first. There were tears in his eyes, and he made a promise to Kantaro. “No matter what,” Befu said, “I will stand by you. I am obligated to you, friend, forever. I will die with you.” But Tsuruta was dying, and he had no such words for Kantaro. His thoughts only wandered back to Japan. I saw that Kantaro felt angry that he found comfort in these memories, as if these years struggling together on this new land were of little consequence.

  I cared for Tsuruta until he died. Toshiko was pregnant, so we kept her away, but she took care of my children too in those days. Sei Terada came often to help me. Every morning I opened the shutters, removed his bedclothes and put everything in the sun to air. I would be sweeping the room and Tsuruta would thank me and say the same thing every morning, “You are so kind to me.”

  And I would say, “I don’t know why I’m wasting my time on such a skinny man as you. I’m going to write a letter to that woman in the picture to tell her what a nuisance you are.”

  In the end, Tsuruta wanted to talk about everything, about his home, his family, his life in Brazil, things that came to mind, things he wanted to share, but all of these things were told in small pieces as he coughed up what remained of his rotting lungs, gasping for air until there was none. Tsuruta began to tire easily and could soon only speak in whispers and gasps. I filled everything in, chattering foolishly, remembering other times, hoping Tsuruta would forget his suffering. Sometimes I read to Tsuruta until he fell asleep. But one day Tsuruta did not awake, and only the sound of my foolish voice lingered on.

  Before Tsuruta died, Befu married Ritsu. It was another one of our country weddings. Waka put herself out to make the cake, and Toshiko and I worked without rest to make the food. Kantaro and the others built a large open-air roof and long tables and benches. I took my old wedding gown and pinched in the sides to make it fit on Ritsu, who was a little thinner than I had been. Like every wedding, the wedding couple sat in front of an enormous cake. There were the usual speeches and songs and poems. Ritsu hardly even looked up from the uneaten food on her plate. Someone had brought several large cases of beer from São Paulo for the wedding. In those days beer was very scarce in Esperança, and it was considered a daring way to celebrate Befu’s wedding. But Kantaro and Befu and the others always liked to be daring. Befu had been drinking beer with the others and was red in the face. He sat next to Ritsu with a happy dazed look, so different from his usual look. Since our place was rather out of the way, most people left early in large batches atop tractors, trucks, and carts pulled by mules. By nightfall, only those who lived at New World remained, happily passing the beer around. Not too far away I sat in a small room trying to feed Tsuruta a little cake. Mizuoka, people said, had left Esperança suddenly, probably run off to the Mato Grosso. And unknown to anyone, Heizo Kawagoe had wandered off, armed with a small pistol. From somewhere the sound of a shot reverberated through the forest. I wandered out from Tsuruta’s room, wondering about this sound, but Toshiko and the few women who lived with us had already wandered off to bed, and all the men had drunk themselves into a stupor, one by one dropping off into a deep sleep. I saw Kantaro sleeping there among them. I thought he had a peaceful smile on his face; he was still so young and handsome then. I remember seeing one young man, perhaps it was Ichiro Terada, staggering from his seat, thinking he would try to find his bed. Instead he fell over into a plate of food, his cheek coming to rest comfortably in a soft mound of leftover cake. And I saw the wedding couple still sitting at the head table. Befu was slumped over, snoring into his fancy silk tie, but Ritsu was still sitting there in my wedding gown, looking around, bewildered. All around were snoring young men, bodies flung across and under tables. I saw their stupid and innocent expressions caught in the soft moonlight. The sweet stench of beer and vomit and sweat rose around them with the drone of cicadas and the hiss of mosquitoes in that hot December night.

  CHAPTER 9:

  War

  The next day after Ritsu and Befu’s wedding, we heard that Japanese bombers had attacked Pearl Harbor and Japan had declared war on America. Brazil was in agreement with America, and suddenly we were cut off from our birthplace. People in Esperança felt confused about this. My parents had left Japan because they were Christians, and they were saddened by these events. They felt, l
ike Tsuruta, that war was a great mistake. Some people said privately that this had always been the reason they left Japan, to escape the military. My father-in-law, Naotaro Uno, remembered his experience in military service. He had been bullied for being a yaso, a bad name for Christians. He admitted that he and Waka had decided to come to Brazil so that Kantaro would not have to serve in the military. I know Seijiro Befu must have heard this, but he pretended not to. Waka told me that she was very relieved that her sons would not have to go to war. But everyone spoke quietly and only among trusted friends; there were many like Befu who favored the war and spoke of those who did not as weaklings and traitors. I heard that outside of Esperança, most Japanese felt as Befu did. In the colonies, there was a lot of propaganda about Japan. Japan was a superior nation led by a divine emperor. Truthfully, people like me in Esperança did not know what to make of the war. We felt torn and confused to realize that we had lost our dearest ties to our families and friends far away. Even though correspondence was always very difficult, it was hard to accept the idea that now we could not even write letters. After a while, people felt resigned to these things. In Brazil, we were so far away from the war itself. Kantaro said we would have to wait and see. I wondered what would happen to us in Brazil, what would happen to us in Esperança. It always took a while for things to happen in Esperança. We were too far away to really matter. Stories reached us first.