Brazil-Maru

by Karen Tei Yamashita

  Uguisuyama was right—by plane, the Mato Grosso was only a few minutes away from Esperança.

  Uguisuyama said, “Before we look at the land, I have a stop to make.” I looked down, but I couldn’t tell where we were.

  Kantaro asked, “Where are we landing?”

  “Just over the border. Bolivia.” Uguisuyama spoke to the pilot. He couldn’t speak Portuguese. He was trying to speak in Spanish or something. The plane landed in a field. There was someone waiting with boxes. Uguisuyama and the pilot jumped out. They hauled the boxes into the back of the plane. Kantaro was quiet. I just kept on smoking. We got back up in the air. Below, everything was thick green forest.

  “This is it,” pointed Uguisuyama. “There are several thousand acres of land. I want to buy it, if you will agree to send a group of your people to occupy it, plant, build, live on it.” He laughed at Kantaro. “Just like those old days you are always talking about, eh? Esperança was the beginning, but this is the future. First thing I want to build is an airstrip. Don’t worry. You’re not going to be isolated.”

  Kantaro’s mouth dropped. He just nodded. He was thinking about something.

  “There is no telling what we will find on that land below us!” Uguisuyama was pleased.

  I stretched my neck to see. The pilot was trying to say something to Uguisuyama, but he didn’t understand. The pilot was getting very excited. Very excited. I knew the crazy look in his eyes because I knew the crazy look. I could feel the plane going down, getting closer to the green forest below. We were falling. Falling. I could feel the fall in my ears. Everything went silent. Then the plane was just skimming along the tips of the trees. We were bashing into branches. Crashing into green tangle. Crashing. Falling. Then silence.

  I awoke. It was dark. Boxes were all over me. I pushed them away. They were Uguisuyama’s boxes from Bolivia. I pushed my way to the front of the plane. I saw Uguisuyama and the pilot and Kantaro. They were all pushed into the front of the plane. And the plane was pushed hard into the earth. I crawled to Kantaro and pulled him to one side. I looked into his eyes. They were open. They were dead. Uguisuyama’s fancy camera was smashed. The strap was twisted around Kantaro’s neck. His body was stiff, but some places were soft. Uguisuyama’s face was already covered with ants. Maybe I had been asleep a long time. I looked at Kantaro carefully. To remember. In case I ever got some paper and a pencil. I was the only one who knew. No one else knew.

  I looked in the boxes. I was hungry, but there was no food. The boxes were all filled with strange metal things that looked like bugs, like centipedes with long black spines and silver feet. They were in narrow plastic boxes. Useless. I looked for paper. I stuffed all the paper in my pockets. I took the pens and the cigarettes from Uguisuyama’s breast pocket. I crawled away from the wreck.

  Outside, all around I could see the sunlight dancing. Dancing with little feet. I remembered being in a dark basket peeping through the basket, seeing the light flicker, a prism of light flickering through the straw. But this time, I was not a prisoner.

  EPILOGUE:

  Guilherme

  I saw this delicious but fleeting state in which love and innocence inhabit the same heart.

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  The Reveries of the Solitary Walker

  Jacira Raimundo and I were married in Europe. We had both been political exiles for more than twelve years and have since returned to Brazil under the terms of political amnesty. My father, Shigeshi Kasai, was the publisher of the Brazil Shimpo. He died a year ago at the age of ninety. Although he was almost blind, he continued to write a column for his newspaper until his death. I have since taken over his publishing business. Jacira and I now have two children.

  Jacira’s father, Floriano Raimundo, is better known in Santa Cruz d’Azedinha and Esperança as the Baiano. He is a bent old man with an arthritic knee who supports himself with a cane. He is also hard of hearing. He has, since his wife’s death, moved away from Santa Cruz and has lived for the past years alone in the forest of the Mato Grosso. Because of his isolation in the forest and his growing deafness, he seems to have difficulty talking. When I first met him, he had emerged on a whim from the forest, as if he knew that Jacira had come home. He seemed amused that my father Shigeshi Kasai was an old friend of Kantaro Uno, but of that episode in his life concerning Uno, he would say nothing.

  I had met Kantaro Uno when I was a boy. He was my father’s friend, but that was all. I only began to wonder about him when Genji Befu, Uno’s nephew, came to live with us. I surmised that nisei living in the rural interior were isolated and followed the old traditions. I lived in the city and was raised a Brazilian. My friends were mixed, many of them non-Japanese. To me, the Japanese community, referred to as the colônia, was a confined world. It amazed me that there could be so many thousands of us all over Brazil involved in so many kinds of work, and yet we could seem so provincial, so small.

  People in the colônia talked behind my father’s back, saying it was Shigeshi Kasai’s luck to have a radical for a son, but I wasn’t like Masafumi who assaulted banks or Sueli, who fought with guerrillas in Araguaia. These nisei joined an armed revolt, while I thought a military dictatorship could be brought down with a pen. I was young, full of idealism, foolishly prepared to struggle for my country. Many of my friends were tortured, disappeared. What was Kantaro Uno’s place compared to this struggle? A small insular statement within a confined world. I tried to make Genji see my point of view. Perhaps I confused him, but he saved my life. When I returned to Brazil, I was curious to know what became of him.

  It has since become known that Kantaro Uno died in a plane crash in the forest of the Mato Grosso in 1976. This was substantiated by detailed drawings, sketched in ballpoint pen on pieces of paper and scattered in the forest from place to place. The drawings were of a cartoonish nature, drawn out in small boxes to show the sequence of events. These drawings were collected by Indians in the area. An amateur archaeologist by the name of Shūhei Mizuoka happened to see them and recognized the caricatures. He was also able to read the inscriptions written in Japanese. Mizuoka noted that the inscriptions were penned by a rather mediocre hand with a limited knowledge of Japanese. He surmised that these drawings must have belonged to Genji Befu, who was also in the plane at the time and known to have a talent for drawing. From the pictures, it could be seen that the Japanese businessman Shintaro Uguisuyama and the Brazilian pilot were also killed in the crash. Another interesting detail of these renderings were the boxes of electronic materials which seem to have been thrown forward and jumbled in the crash. It seems that the plane was carrying contraband of some sort, probably computer chips.

  Stories later filtered through the community about some crazy Indian who spoke an unknown language and who was at loose in the forest armed with a big shotgun. Supposedly, he was the last of his tribe, everyone killed off but him. There was talk of stores of food and cigarettes disappearing, and this pilferage was generally attributed to him. He always left his mark with strange drawings in soot on the walls or on pieces of paper or scratched in the dirt by some sharp implement. Few people, however, could confirm having seen this lost Indian.

  Shūhei Mizuoka, who had recovered the drawings from the Indians, planned to make a special expedition into the forest to find the fallen aircraft. However, he was quite elderly and died. His widow put his ashes in a large Indian funeral urn which was said to have been unearthed by Mizuoka from an Indian mound discovered in Esperança proper. This urn is presently displayed in what has become a museum of the artifacts Mizuoka collected over the years. Mizuoka’s widow is the caretaker of the museum and will point out the urn if asked. She has a curious manner of addressing the urn, crossing herself, then pressing the palms of her hands tightly together and pronouncing, “Namu amida butsu pai nosso amen.”

  It is possible to meet the descendants and followers of Kantaro Uno today. They continue to live on the same land in a communal manner similar to the one they have lived i
n for decades. The simplicity of their lifestyle—the harsh unfinished wooden structures, communal kitchen, dining hall, laundry and bath—may be surprising to those used to urban life and niceties. Despite the rustic quality of their everyday living conditions, the poultry ranch itself is equipped with the most technically sophisticated incubating and breeding facilities. Embedded in the obvious simplicity, too, are certain amenities of the modern world: a television, a video cassette recorder, and a Sony camcorder (all used in common), for example.

  It is also possible to visit the members of the second commune, which Genji called “the others.” Their living style is quite similar. They are located a good distance from the original commune, and their concerns are completely separate. There is obviously a long-standing rift between the two communities. The nature of this rift seems to have been economic in nature—ultimately a disagreement about how to recuperate losses after a bankruptcy which occurred in 1954.

  Jacira didn’t know Genji, but she knew the people Genji called “the others.” This half of Uno’s original group lived on the Raimundo family ranch until they were able to buy land of their own. Jacira grew up in the extended family of their commune, playing with their children, and she considered these people to be her family. To me, who had tried to disassociate myself from the colônia, this came as a surprise. “I told you I’m Japanese,” she laughed at me. She admits her involvement in political events was influenced by an ideal of cooperation she learned from these people. “Self-sufficient with three meals a day,” she emphasizes. “In the Brazil of today that is something from which we can learn.”

  It is not unusual to make comparisons between the two communes, noting that the original commune led by Kantaro Uno seems, outside of its poultry venture, to be involved in artistic pursuits, while the second commune considers itself largely a pragmatic, social, and economic experiment and pursues an agricultural objective of diversifying its produce.

  Both communities have and continue to receive journalists, researchers, historians, even television reporters with their video cameras, who come to document the lives of these people. Ichiro Terada, who is seventy-six years old and a member of the second commune, says this: “We who came to live in Esperança were a kind of experiment. It’s only right we share our experiences. Perhaps we didn’t create the great civilization envisioned by our founder Momose-sensei, but we were a part of a great movement of migrant peoples from many parts of the world and within Brazil itself. I think that Esperança was not an end in itself: it was part of something larger.”

  Until Kantaro Uno’s death, youth in the original commune had not received any education beyond middle school. Like Genji, they have probably found it difficult to live and work outside the commune. They have chosen to remain in the commune, raising families and a new generation of children. The second commune has chosen to provide for those youth wishing to pursue college and careers outside and, as a result, grows year by year smaller and more elderly in its membership. Significant, however, in both communes is the strength and vitality of the elderly, who find themselves useful and active to the end of their lives.

  Ichiro Terada proudly announced recently that his grandson passed the college exams in agronomy. He feels this achievement personally because he explains, “The Japanese have origins in the land. And having settled virgin soil, our responsibility to the land is great; farming is our contribution.” On the other hand, he speaks with concern about his granddaughter, who graduated with honors in architecture. Unable to find steady work in Brazil, she is one of over 150,000 Japanese-Brazilians who are currently in Japan working as menial labor.

  Recently, a curious article was forwarded to Jacira by her father from the Mato Grosso. It reads,

  Three days ago, the so-called Indian of the Lost Tribe was found dead, killed probably while helping himself to someone else’s food or store of hidden goods. He was described as a very slight, bowlegged, unkempt man with long dirty black hair, thin strands falling in a tangled beard from his face. He was found shot through the head and clutching a rusty old carbine, empty except for the red earth pushed into the tip of its disintegrating barrel.

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  New and Reissued Works by Karen Tei Yamashita

  Letters to Memory

  Through the Arc of the Rain Forest

  Tropic of Orange

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