Brazil-Maru

by Karen Tei Yamashita

  I looked at Sawada in disbelief. “This is the end,” I whispered. “Three hundred men, women, and children. You cannot do this to them.”

  Sawada smiled sympathetically and said, “Sign here, Kantaro. You have no choice. My lawyers will take these papers to Esperança tomorrow and get the proper signatures from your brother Jiro and from Seijiro Befu. That will be the end of it.”

  I signed the document and ran from the room. I still had hope. I would not give up the commune, or the land, or my leadership. I would not give up the future. I knew where to find Ichiro, dozing in the seat of his truck. I rustled him from sleep. “Ichiro, get up! This is important! Everything depends on you! Go home now. Drive without stopping. Get back there and tell Jiro and Befu to sign nothing. When the lawyers from the bank come, tell them to keep quiet and to sign nothing!” He got in the truck and drove all night. He was back in Esperança just before Sawada’s lawyers arrived by plane. Jiro and Befu were adamant. They would not sign.

  In the meantime, Sawada went about trying to accomplish his objective with another strategy. He hid Natsuko. No one would tell me how he accomplished this, but by the time our relationship had been made public, it may not have been difficult to convince Natsuko to leave me. When I discovered Natsuko’s disappearance, I became frantic. I searched all over the city, breaking in on old friends and acquaintances, checking any possible place, following any possible lead. I ran into Kasai’s printing shop and accused my old friend of hiding Natsuko, but he denied everything. “Forget her,” Kasai said, rubbing his tired eyes beneath the thick spec tacles. “This has all gone too far.”

  “I can’t. I can’t.” I slumped down in exhaustion. “I have to find her.”

  “If you continue this nonsense, I will have to write about it,” Kasai warned. “You know, I’ve got no strings attached to you that aren’t made of friendship. If it takes putting everything in writing to make you come to your senses, I’ll do that.”

  My trembling hands came to my face, and I crumbled into a pitiful heap. “I tried to kill her,” I said.

  Kasai stirred. “What are you talking about?”

  “I tried to kill Natsuko. It was a moment so perfect, so peaceful. She looked so beautiful, so serene. I felt the moment so full, like a cup before it runs over. I felt that I could not come away from that moment without a deep sadness, an ache of disappointment. Have you ever felt that way? I felt so happy, so complete. How can I describe that moment? When I leave, I cannot control my need to return; I am consumed with jealousy. I have fought and suspected everyone, including you. I rush into the house at strange hours, thinking that I will find another man. I smell her clothes. I rummage through her drawers, through her purse. I want to know that all of her time is accounted for, that she is totally mine. But I can never be sure. I can never be sure. We argue uselessly over the slightest thing, the look in her eye when another man appears, a change in her clothing or her perfume, how many hours she has been practicing piano, but it is all the same argument. I am jealous, controlled by my passion, which is gnawing away at my insides, possessing my mind and my spirit. So I thought that this moment was a kind of apex, the height of a great love. I wanted to die. I wanted to die with her. I wanted to have her forever. So I brought my hands around her neck and squeezed. I stared into her eyes all the time, quivering with expectation, my short gasps and her breathlessness, watching her flush, watching her eyes roll, her body heaving, giving, leaving. I did not succeed. I crumbled, wrapping her in my arms, rocking her and pleading, pleading forgiveness. I cannot trust myself anymore. These hands. I might have destroyed the very thing I love.” I wept.

  “Go home,” ordered Kasai. He shook his head. “Go home to Esperança. You don’t belong here. You never did. Go home. You still have work to do. Go home.”

  By the time I returned, Shiozawa had already left. The bank’s lawyers had already come and gone with no new results, leaving Shiozawa with the same mess, the same interminable headaches. Shiozawa could see no end in sight. He could not be vigilant enough. There were too many of us to oversee, too many schemes, too many bills to pay. The figures never matched. The books never balanced. Nobody cared. We all smiled and fed him large portions of food he could no longer eat. No one believed him when he talked about the terrible financial burden which had been heaped upon the commune, the awful consequences of not paying your bills, of incurring debt, of bad credit. We only smiled as if he were joking. We slapped him on the back, and said, “Shiozawa-san, you work too hard. You need to relax. Country life is slower. You need to adapt your habits to country life.”

  He could get no peace, no sleep. Dark shadows surrounded his tired eyes. He was thin and drawn, and his stomach seemed to be a clenched fist of continual pain. He walked around with a bottle of medicine which Sei Terada gave him. He had dispensed with taking that medicine with a spoon; instead he took regular swigs throughout the day, several as he might enter any crisis. All night he wrestled with the enormous figures which daily grew larger. It was an accountant’s nightmare. One day, Shiozawa could no longer distinguish the nightmare in his sleep from the one he experienced daily. We saw him in his nightclothes one morning, running down the road, screaming, “Stop! Stop the New Hampshire shipment! Stop! Please! Stop!” Behind him ran his wife in frantic despair.

  So they took Shiozawa away. They had to bundle him up in blankets and gag him. Haru went out to sit in the small waiting room at the airfield with Shiozawa’s wife while they waited to leave. Haru held her hand and tried to console the poor woman. If Haru felt sympathy, no one else seemed willing to admit these feelings about Shiozawa’s demise. There was, in fact, a great deal of rejoicing back at the commune, as if we had won a battle in a longer war. “The Boy Scout is gone!” we all exclaimed. “They’ve sent him away to the funny farm!”

  Shiozawa’s departure must have made some impact on Shinkichi Kawagoe, who could sympathize with Shiozawa’s zeal to keep balanced books. Kawagoe had known for years about the commune’s real financial situation; he himself had manipulated the books to hide the truth. He admitted freely to doing so, almost as if it had been a sort of experiment, the realization of a hidden desire to manipulate numbers to some other purpose. He had always known that embezzling money by manipulating books entailed a certain skill. In this case, Kawagoe made no real money for himself. He went to a lot of trouble to make things look good for us. He did this while changing the records on his phonograph, humming to Beethoven, Mozart and, later, Wagner. The memories of Heizo’s suicide and Kimi’s running off to the Amazon with Yōgu had faded. When Kimi returned with her ten children, Kawagoe felt a renewed sense of the old reasons for leaving his comfortable banker’s life in Japan for the Christian ideals of nurturing the spirit and the land in the New World. His grandchildren were beautiful and strong, happy children who clambered around him to sing when he played the piano. Their hands and faces were smudged with the red earth, with the sticky juices of tropical fruit. They were bright and curious—quick learners. He loved all of them. He moved onto New World Ranch to be with his grandchildren, to share his love for music with them.

  Kawagoe’s wife, Kinu, was simply transported to a small house on the commune. She did not like to be near people, so the Kawagoes resided in a small house quite a distance from the other houses, clustered in communal blocks. Many had never even seen Kinu Kawagoe, who was said to remain all day alone in her bed, listening to Kawagoe’s piped-in music and sipping tea and broth. Haru and my mother and others felt it their duty to make Kinu feel welcome; they took small trips out to her distant cottage to talk and be with her, but soon everyone realized that Kinu did not really like people and that she did not like living on the commune or in the country. She missed her distinguished life in Tokyo as the wife of a prominent banker, and although it had been nearly twenty years since the Kawagoes had immigrated to Brazil, Kinu had neither forgotten nor forgiven her husband for making that, in her opinion, disastrous decision. She looked wanly on at her grandchildren,
each of whom reminded her of Kimi’s marriage to Hachiro Yōgu. She could only abide their noisy antics for moments at a time. She complained that the children tired her, so they left her alone, forgetting that they had a grandmother. The memory or the notion of a grandmother faded as before, when they lived in the Amazon.

  Notions of many things seemed to fade. The notion of a father faded at New World. Indeed, Yōgu had become another child among a larger band of many children, but the idea of fathers in general was lost upon children raised in a commune. I, Kantaro Uno, was the leader. This was all that most children understood. Mothers were many, some more popular than others, but Haru was a mother to everyone. In the same way, Kimi seemed to lose her identity as a mother and wife to a specific family.

  When Shinkichi Kawagoe came to tell his daughter that he had decided to leave the commune, she had somehow lost her notion of being a daughter to this man. Kawagoe did not want to leave Kimi and her children behind. He wanted to take all of them with him somehow, but he could not. He was an old man. He had given up everything to our cause and would have to start all over again, but he could no longer stay, knowing what he knew. “Things are in a very bad way here, Kimi. I know everything. Shiozawa has told me everything. I have heard things from Sawada. I know because I have been keeping the books. Everything is pointed downhill. I don’t know where we will go or what I will do now, but I want to prepare a way for you to all leave eventually.”

  “Leave?” Kimi looked at her father with surprise.

  “Yes, leave. We will all have to leave one day. This will all come crumbling down. Kantaro has spent everything several times over, mostly for that woman in the city. I will go first with your mother, and when I can, I will send for you.”

  “I cannot leave.”

  Kawagoe looked at his daughter in confusion.

  “I promised Kantaro. I promised him that we would not leave, no matter what. And he has promised that we would always be taken care of.”

  “It is an illusion.”

  “I must stay at his side. I cannot leave.”

  “What are you to Kantaro? A woman with ten hungry children and a husband who has lost his mind! You are only a burden on this failing operation.”

  “Then I will only be a burden to you. Take my mother and leave. It is her only wish, not to die in this place. Take her as she has always wanted to the city, to another life. As for me, there is no other life left to me. Everything ended a long time ago.”

  “I will call for you. I will not leave you here.”

  Kimi looked upon her aging father, a man whose dreams had been crushed one by one. When she had returned with her brood from the Amazon, Shinkichi Kawagoe was renewed by the idea that he must once again take hold of the situation, become a father and a grandfather to his family. Kimi could not bring herself to tell her father that this too was an illusion. She nodded quietly and said nothing.

  That evening Ichiro returned from São Paulo with Hachiro Yōgu. How many days had he been gone? Perhaps two weeks. He was dirty and in need of a shave, reminding us of those days when he first arrived in Esperança. He did not speak a word on the entire trip back. Ichiro must have asked him what he had been doing in the city all those days by himself, but he would not answer. Every now and then, he might spit out the window onto the road speeding beneath the wheels. As the truck arrived, Yōgu dashed out to the kitchen. I could hear the clatter of pans and the commotion of badgering women as Yōgu interfered with their work. I was already seated, sullenly drinking my soup, nursing the wounds of lost love and endless debt, while Befu sat in silence beside me. Suddenly Yōgu burst from the kitchen with an enormous knife, jumping onto the tables and kicking over the large pots of rice and soup. He pranced over the tables in his muddy boots, knocking over pitchers of water, kicking plates into the laps of the surprised diners. From his throat, there came a long loud guttural roar that filled my ears and my heart. Even now I can hear the terrifying sound of Yōgu’s roar, the fast heavy thud of his boots against the surface of the long table. Yōgu’s features were crazy with rage, his entire body a single muscular weapon of revenge. He held the kitchen knife high in the air, secured in his fist like an old memory. I rose, backing away from the table in fear. But for a moment of hesitation, I would surely have been killed, my neck slashed neatly in a clean and sudden cut, but just as Yōgu was about to reach his destination, Befu slammed his arms across Yōgu’s path, sending Yōgu flying from the table. In a second, Ichiro and others pounced on Yōgu, grabbing at his wild arm, the knife flailing everywhere.

  “Haru!” Yōgu cried. “Haru! Haru! Haru!” he screamed over and over again, until the knife fell from his hand. Even then, Yōgu shook them all away like so many flies and stood for a moment alone, heaving like a wild bull and staring at me.

  Suddenly, he spat onto the ground with a familiar contempt. And I saw the old Hachiro Yōgu turn on his heels and walk away.

  The next morning Hachiro Yōgu was gone. Eggs had not been boiled for breakfast, and we did not wake to the potent smell of Haru’s hot strong coffee. Everything was strangely askew.

  People wandered out to see Shinkichi Kawagoe and his wife leave. Ichiro helped Kawagoe load his tremendous collection of classical records onto the back of the truck. “I’ve left the Wagner behind,” Kawagoe said. It was true. People could still hear Tristan singing to Isolde.

  Some people came out just to see what Kinu Kawagoe looked like. People were not surprised to see that her skin was the color of white porcelain for having never been out in the sun, but most were shocked that Kinu was not, after all, the invalid they had expected. She had come out of her house by herself, walking with a small suitcase packed with her belongings. Certainly she walked slowly and very carefully, but she did walk. She nodded to everyone with dignity. When Ichiro stepped forward to help her into the truck, she refused his help. “I have waited nearly twenty years for this moment,” she whispered. “I can do it myself.”

  Kawagoe looked around and grimaced. The Wagner he had left playing was skipping, Tristan wailing the same thing again and again. He sat for a moment with his eyes shut, his head bowed. With great effort he suppressed the sob that rumbled from the center of his belly. He suppressed everything, turned to smile at his grandchildren clustered near the truck. Then he nodded with a blank face at the road ahead, and Ichiro knew enough to gun the motor and drive away.

  That night, Kimi sat at the piano and played all night. People could hear the sound of the piano reverberating endlessly through the night air, and when the cackle of laying hens and the crowing of cocks broke the dawn, they could still hear the unbroken soliloquy of Kimi’s rendered heart.

  CHAPTER 14:

  Santos

  Over the years, I have been called many things: a great idealist, a romantic, a dissimulator, a dictator, an actor, even a monster. Shūhei Mizuoka said as much himself many years later, but even he knew that I could not so easily be explained away. The sum of a man’s life is more than a mere word. Some have said that I have changed over the years, but who does not change? Who does not grow and grow old? And yet who is not always the same person? Perhaps the people who have said these things about me are jealous, jealous to see that another man has lived his life and destiny to the fullest. As I have said, at every moment in my life, my cup has been brimming over.

  Some may think that I had forgotten Haru, but I admit that I could not live without her. Perhaps I took my good wife for granted, but so did everyone else. If it is true, as I have been told, that Haru disappeared, many things we assumed would happen as a daily matter of course must have ceased to occur in quite the way we had come to expect. I know Befu liked two soft-boiled eggs every morning. This I’m told was forgotten, and he got hard-boiled eggs. No one could make strong coffee the way Haru did, and some people complained about that (some people never liked my wife’s coffee anyway). And Haru always had a basket of food ready for Ichiro to take on his trips to São Paulo. She knew he liked hot tea in a thermos and a ha
lf-dozen rice balls and pickles. All of this would have been forgotten. I confess I was too busy to even notice at the time, but ever since I gave my old man a beating, he and my mother had taken to eating away from the dining hall in the quiet of the teahouse. My mother had been ill for several weeks, and Haru carried a tray of food out to my parents at every meal. Naotaro had to hobble into the kitchen to ask apologetically about their meals. Some people had special dietary requirements that Haru never seemed to forget. “No!” I could hear her barking. “That’s not for you, Takeshita-san! What would the doctor say? This is for you! If you die, I don’t want anyone blaming me!”

  I heard some say that Haru’s special food was awful stuff but that you had to eat it obediently or she would shove it down your throat. Well, I always said that she was well meaning and very conscientious; Haru enforced goodwill. No one crossed my wife willingly, no matter what they thought about her food or her manner of doing things. Haru was always consulting with Sei Terada and brewing special teas for someone with rheumatism or high blood pressure or a common cold. If Haru had left, people would have missed the awful food and teas and her bossy way of administering both things that were supposedly good for them and things they were particularly fond of. “I don’t know why you like these soft eggs, Befu-san,” she complained. “Raw eggs would do as well.” But she cooked them just the same, the very way he liked them.

  It was not just food; there were other small things that would have ceased to happen. It was Haru who swept out the bachelors’ dorm every morning. It was Haru who gathered their clothing and washed and mended it all. It was Haru who cleaned out the bathhouse and made sure there was soap and a pile of clean towels. It was Haru who watered the flowers along the side of the dining hall. It was Haru who tended the herb garden and dried the leaves for special teas. It was Haru who, with Sei Terada, looked in on all the sick people and made sure that they got their meals and took their medicine. It was Haru who made new clothing for the youngsters and shirts for the men out of the cotton sacks that had held flour and feed.