Brazil-Maru

by Karen Tei Yamashita

  When Yōgu recognized Haru and began to follow her around, a buzz of gossip went through the commune which Kimi properly ignored. She seemed only happy that Yōgu seemed to be responding to a jolt in his memory. Perhaps he would soon remember that they had been married and that the children he slept with were, in fact, his own. It was not for lack of telling Yōgu. Haru often pointed to Kimi. “Kimi,” she enunciated slowly. “Your wife! This one here, that one there: Your children!” But Yōgu did not remember this. What could this wife be? Yōgu needed a confirmation in his mind that was stronger than a simple declaration. He had felt the bat in his hands, and he had known intuitively what he could do with that bat. What was it that he should do with Kimi? But I guess Haru was different. She was the one he remembered. The key to everything must be kept by Haru.

  I saw that Kimi found solace from her trials in the piano. It was Akiko who gently urged her mother back to her place before the ivory keys. For a long time Kimi only stared at the keys and shook her head. “It’s been too long. Too long,” she protested. She rubbed her ruddy hands, thick and toughened by farm work and hid them under her apron.

  “Mama, please,” Akiko nudged. “Listen. I learned to play this.” Akiko played one side of a duet she had often played with Natsuko for me. She nodded encouragingly at her mother.

  Kimi cautiously placed her hands on the keyboard and began to join Akiko. By the time they had finished, a crowd of us had come to listen. We applauded. I looked at Kimi and smiled, and she buried her face in her apron. After that, Kimi found her way back to the piano, her old friend and companion. In a matter of time, she once again found her voice. It was not the sweet voice I remembered, but a fuller more mature voice, and though Kimi sang from renewed joy, there was always something sad about her voice. When I was back in Esperança, I often sat in the evenings listening contentedly to Kimi and Akiko and, sometimes, Kawagoe play. I could sit for hours listening to Kimi’s voice accompanied by the piano. Everyone drifted away to their houses to sleep, but I alone remained, sipping tea and urging Kimi to play just one more piece. A quiet communion began to exist between Kimi and me. In later years, I wondered why I had chosen Haru over Kimi. Kimi’s music soothed and invigorated me like a good massage. It’s true that my attentions to Kimi’s playing were mixed with regret and guilt and pleasure. Natsuko could never play the piano like this; she never had the drive to learn. I admit she did not merit a baby grand. Of course, I knew by this time that she had only wanted a large and beautiful piece of furniture. I knew this, but it no longer mattered; I had been absorbed by a passion from which I could no longer extricate myself. I wrestled with my emotions, craved the woman I had left in the city and wrapped myself in the nostalgia of another woman’s music. Meanwhile, my brother Jiro continued to fall into drunken stupors at the corner bar in Santa Cruz d’Azedinha. And on more than one such evening, you could hear the coarse voice of Haru yelling across the dark yard toward the light in the dining hall, “Kantaro! Come to bed!”

  One day, Akiko gathered with her friends. I could hear the flutter of girls in the dormitory where Akiko and her friends all slept together, but I suspected nothing. Akiko produced a small leather case she had been hiding under her bed. The case had been given to her by Natsuko. It had a small key and a lock and a small mirror on the inside cover. Inside, the case was filled with tiny brushes, sets of eye shadow, mascara, false eyelashes, lash curlers, lotions, powder, perfume, lipsticks and pencils. It was an assortment of Natsuko’s tossed-away makeup. All afternoon the girls hid away in the dormitory, looking at magazines that Akiko had brought from the city, comparing the women in the pictures, and painting themselves with the treasure in Akiko’s little case. Nearing mealtime, the girls were still ensconced in their activities, and it was boldly decided that they should appear together in their new faces at dinner. A few of the girls protested embarrassment, but finally, all were coerced into the idea. The appearance of the girls at dinner in full makeup produced a mild sensation of sorts. Some of the girls had gotten carried away in the project, applying several coats and colors of everything. There was a distorted theatricality about all of them, and some were quite unrecognizable. A murmur of amusement and disgust and no doubt some pleasure filled the hall as everyone nudged and pointed at the brazen thing they had done. But when I saw the girls, Akiko seated happily among them, giggling with delight, I jumped up from my seat in rage. There was within me an emotion I could not control. Even now I cannot explain my anger. Akiko had revealed something about my life in the city that should not be shown; she had betrayed me.

  Akiko did not see me thunder down the aisle to her table, but she could feel the cold silence of everyone around her. In an instant, I had jerked her from the bench by her hair. I took a long cold look at her pretty features plastered in false lashes and thick mascara, beet-red lipstick, and ruddy rouge, all powdered and cologned by the cheap scent of lavender, mocking me. Then I slapped her hard across the face. She crumpled to the floor. My entire body trembled as I lunged down to grab her neck. At that, Befu and the dentist Takehashi sprang up and pulled me away. It was my father who ran forward between Akiko and me. “What are you doing? What does this mean?” Naotaro demanded.

  I struggled away from Befu and Takehashi. “Fool!” I cried. “Get out of my way!” At that moment, I struck out at my father’s face. When I pulled back, my fist was covered with my father’s blood. Naotaro was a small feisty man. He had been proud of me; he had even admitted that I had often been right. Remembering that I had sold our family rice harvest to send Yōgu to Japan, he always said, “The rice did belong to Esperança.” But Naotaro was also a stalwart Christian, a man with a kind and forgiving heart. He assumed that I must be the same. He had long thought of himself as retired. He spoke of his peace of mind, knowing that I would now take care of him and my mother. Now he looked at me in disbelief.

  But I had no respect for him. I was in charge. How dare he question my actions. “Get out of here!” I screamed.

  My mother came to rescue her bleeding husband, supporting him under her arm. It was a pitiful sight to see my elderly parents limping away like that, but I felt no remorse. I felt only my anger and my power to show it.

  Ichiro Terada was not there, but when he returned from his deliveries, Saburo told him of the incident. Akiko hid away in her room and wouldn’t come out. She would not see Ichiro, and he could not understand this. He felt anger and pain. What could Akiko have done to deserve such a thing? Why would Kantaro do such a thing? He could not see.

  “Talk to Kimi first,” suggested Saburo wisely. “She and Kantaro have an understanding.”

  I heard it all from Kimi. She listened to Ichiro patiently. She nodded kindly and smiled warmly at everything he had to say. But her answer must have struck him as strange, “Ichiro, you are a good man, and I could not wish more for Akiko, but you cannot protect her from Kantaro by simply marrying her. You must forget about Akiko. Pursuing her will only bring you pain.” Kimi would not say anything more.

  Ichiro did not understand this answer until it was much too late. I saw him wander off in the night to the mango groves, wandering around trying to untangle his confusion. When had I myself wandered the mango groves at night waiting for dawn, waiting for the light and rushing off to pound on Ichiro’s door, “Get up! We have a shipment to take to São Paulo!” And all the time full of my expectations of a woman and her piano. And when had I, in a fit of exhaustion, fallen asleep in those groves, only to awake in the dark with the shudder of my own sobbing. I remembered my friend Heizo’s hopeless solution and my useless recommendation to secure his manhood. I stared up through the dark shadows moving among the last of the ripening mangos, hanging like so many human hearts. The sweet stench of rotting fruit rose all around me.

  CHAPTER 13:

  Bank

  I have always lived my life with great feeling and emotion. There can be no other way to live life well. I have trusted my intuitions and followed my ideas. What is considered prac
tical or pragmatic has never been my concern. I have always abandoned what others believed to be sensible or rational; common sense is not a sense that I understand. Destiny cannot be fulfilled by common sense; it is not driven by anything that can be explained. If an ideal is to be achieved, one must abandon all thoughts of failure, all thoughts of impossibility. The achievement of an ideal is a great leap of faith. Nothing truly great has ever been achieved by common sense. Common sense does not drive a man to create a beautiful work of art, to love with great passion and abandon, to pioneer a new life from a virgin forest. The accomplishments of my lifetime cannot be measured or evaluated by common sense.

  The struggle to keep faith with one’s deepest intuitions, one’s greatest emotions, is not easy. The weak fall away from this great task, run away to their predictable lives, daily toil without greater meaning; a lesser place in history is left for them. My companions and I were not called upon for a lesser place; those who remain with me to this day remain with the strength of their convictions, the strength of their great destiny.

  Before Shinkichi Kawagoe left, he played Wagner constantly. It was piped through the sound system to every house, to the bathhouse, to the kitchen, to the dining hall, to the barns, to the lumberyard, to the chicken pens, even to the outhouses. We heard it all day, every day, from dawn to dusk, until we were consumed by it and no longer heard it. Some people broke the wires connecting the speakers in their houses, but others found themselves wailing Wagner in their morning ablutions, while washing clothing, in the bath, turning weeds, gathering eggs, making love, in their sleep. The air we breathed moaned with the Valkyries; the sound seeped from the very pores of our skin, from the living nerves at the roots of our hair, in inert salty drops we could not wash away.

  Around this time, a man named Shiozawa was sent from the Nibras Bank by Umpei Sawada, our financial banker, to manage our accounts. He was not just there to look at our books, but to budget our money and supervise our spending and sales. This should have been an indication to everyone of our true financial situation, but even then, no one took the warning very seriously. It was inconceivable to my people that a production like ours—grounded in a workforce of three hundred people—could be failing.

  By now our operation had expanded to seventy poultry barns, each about forty meters in length. At five hundred layers a barn, we had some thirty-five thousand birds producing an average of thirty-three thousand to thirty-five thousand eggs a day. Another fifty or so smaller barns and coops were occupied by hatchlings, replacements, Befu’s experimental breeds, and young roosters for meat. Ichiro made two or more weekly runs of eggs to São Paulo, plus smaller runs to nearby towns and train shipments to more distant places. Befu was also supplying farmers with hatchlings for their budding operations. Saburo was involved with a team of men building chicken coops for farmers; they went all over Esperança to help establish new chicken ranches. It had once just been talk, that Esperança would one day be the egg capital of South America. Now it was true. We were the first and the largest such operation in South America; some people were calling me the King of Eggs. We had also cleared an area for a butchery with freezing compartments. Everyone had looked proudly on the plans for the most modern equipment, the first of its kind in Brazil. Ichiro had been told that he would get a new truck double the capacity of his present truck and with built-in refrigeration. Befu was talking about new incubators and a new disease-resistant breed of chicken called the New Hampshire which he was anxious to introduce in Brazil. Every day, Befu came up with some new plan for feed, which everyone scrambled around to implement. The women had been promised a large new gas stove with eight burners and a double oven. They were also talking about a new sewing machine and even a modern washing machine. My people were all immersed in these plans for a great future. They were sure that the bank’s concerns were bogus and, as time went on, that the bank was taking advantage of us, taking a larger, ever more sinister interest in our great production. The bank was an evil force, and Shiozawa’s efforts must be subverted in every possible manner. This was the only way to get the bank out of our concerns; we would make them throw up their hands and leave the proper business of poultry farming to us.

  Some people have said that it seems impossible if not foolhardy that three hundred people could have left the entire financial dealings of their operation, the hard-earned product of their labor, to one man. I was the sole manipulator of all our money. But this is not to have any understanding of our operation. Money was always simply a parallel consequence of building a great civilization. What was money after all? The children of our commune didn’t know what it was and had no use for it. We received our life from the land. The land was our storehouse. This was our ideal.

  Perhaps the illusion that we could confront the world solely with our production and ideals and my influence seems incredible, but people believed. I obtained enormous loans from the bank and had involved other prominent enterprises, including the Sarandi Cooperative. Sarandi had, based on my projections, also gotten loans to augment their operations to receive and furnish eggs and chicks throughout São Paulo, Paraná, and Rio. Everyone had joined this optimistic bandwagon to bring eggs to the New World. Everyone believed and wanted to believe. Was this such a bad thing?

  Some people think that I acted like one of the children in the commune, walking into stores and freely selecting items without a thought to pay. People thought that I was an innocent from the back country. “A great idealist,” they called me, an innocent who knew nothing of the rude pragmatic world. It may have been true that I did not know the value of the money I held in my hands, that I thought that the source of that money, the Nibras Bank, was unfathomable.

  I spent money like water, denying Natsuko nothing; no small trinket was too expensive, no idea or plan impossible. Nothing was beyond my means. I bought everything: plush hotel suites, motorists at my beck and call for days at a time, plane trips to Rio and Buenos Aires. And who does not remember that I bought out Miyasaka’s for an entire evening? Money flew from my hands and lined the pockets of every adventurer with a good story. Takashi Inagaki was sent to Paris to paint. Natsuko’s old friend Junko set up a small bar and restaurant. An artist friend opened a gallery. A friend at the Sarandi Cooperative bought land and started an egg ranch. The Brazil Shimpo returned in full force. Money was not important; it was only a means to an end. Dreams were had to be realized. And the rice always belonged to Esperança.

  Ichiro must have begun to suspect that something was askew when the Sarandi Cooperative stopped handing him checks for payment of our shipments. Usually I would be there to receive our checks, but more often Ichiro took the checks and deposited them in the bank for me. Lately, I had ordered him to hold the checks or leave them at my city house with Natsuko. Then Ichiro was told by Sarandi that they had a directive from the bank to deposit our proceeds directly into our bank account. There would be no checks handed over to him or to me. Only later did he discover that I had not made payments on our loans for almost a year. In the meantime, I had incurred new loans at other banks and used the Nibras Bank as a guarantor. It became a habitual sort of thing for me to enter a bank, often a small rural bank with a small clientele, talk circles around an eager manager and come away with a new loan. But then, who in the vicinity hadn’t heard of our modern operation, of the hardworking Japanese who produced thirty-five thousand eggs a day? I had miraculously convinced dozens of banks to release thousands of contos to my name, all for the sake of a great plan and the three hundred productive people back in the rural miracle called Esperança. In the moment that Sawada toasted our first historic deal, I knew I had absorbed a method to deprive banks and wealthy investors of their money which could be enacted over and over again. Everyone participated in the dream, but the rice still belonged to Esperança.

  It should have been no surprise then that the bank eventually stepped in to reorganize our operation to keep money flowing back into the commune rather than into my hands. Shiozawa ca
me with his family and set up house in Esperança. He was a conscientious, responsible, and respected employee of the bank, and Sawada trusted him implicitly. Shiozawa was not the sort of person who could be swayed by my sort of talk. He was a man to follow specific orders and carry out specific plans. His honesty and tenacity made us dub him “Sawada’s Boy Scout.” I treated Shiozawa with bluster and smiles.

  The books of the commune were kept by Kawagoe, who had been a banker himself in Japan. Kawagoe and Shiozawa conferred over the books with a great deal of serious thought, but it turned out that Kawagoe had two sets of books—one which Sawada and Shiozawa saw and another which told a much bleaker story. According to Kawagoe’s optimistic bookkeeping, it seemed impossible that the commune was not doing better. Everything pointed to amazing productivity. Sawada and Shiozawa could only conclude that I was a poor manager and that if I could somehow be kept at bay, the commune would bring itself out of the doldrums within a year’s time.

  With these false calculations in mind, Shiozawa went eagerly to work. Nothing could pass in or out of the commune without his signature and approval. He saw to the buying of everything from a single bag of salt to a truckload of diesel. All of our shipments of eggs had to be accounted for. I can still see Shiozawa rising early in the morning to count the crates and check the gas mileage.

  Ultimately everyone must admit to sabotaging Shiozawa’s work. Everyone believed that this was the only way to convince the bank to stay out of our business. Kawagoe slipped me money as I left for the city, and I secretly signed contracts for more loans, putting Shiozawa’s legal name on all the documents. As these deals brewed in faraway places prepared to break the calm surface of Shiozawa’s tidy work, he was forced to deal with other problems that I had sent back to Esperança. For example, I closed a good deal on tires for the tractors and sent an entire truckload to Esperança. “Talk to Shiozawa. He’ll pay you on the spot,” I would say. Shiozawa was constantly kept busy sending my purchases back to where they came from. There was clearly no money to buy any of it, but I kept sending more on: fifty barrels of diesel, a new refrigerator, three new washing machines for the women, a truckload of flour, blankets and bedspreads for thirty families, twenty bolts of expensive cloth. It was a spectacle—Shiozawa chasing the orders around the commune before they could be unloaded, or loading them back on the trucks himself, and then shipping them all back to a dozen different sources.