Obasan

by Joy Kogawa

  I'm going to the Custodian tomorrow and then to the Commission again. Maybe the permit won't be given at the last minute. What if I transfer the Slocan papers to someone else and then don't get the Toronto permit? There could be trouble with all these forms and deferments.

  Well, I'm going to go ahead, repack everything and hope. The mover, Crone, is sending our boxed goods, beds, and Japanese food supplies—shoyu, rice, canned mirinzuke, green tea. I'm taking the Japanese dishes, trays, and bowls. Can't get any more miso now.

  I'll just have to live on hope that Aya and the kids will be all right till we can get them to Toronto. I tell myself that at least they’ll have their own place till then.

  What will it be like, I wonder, in the doctor's house? I’ll wire them as soon as I get the permit and we'll head their way for the time being. Do we eat with the family? First thing I'll do when I get to Toronto is go out at night.

  In Petawawa there are 130 Nisei interned for rioting and crying “Banzai”, shaving their heads and carrying "hino-maru” flags. Damn fools.

  May 21.

  Dearest Nesan,

  Aya and kids are leaving with others bound for Slocan tomorrow. RCMP came in person to order Kunio off to camp. Rev. Shimizu and Rev. Akagawa had to leave immediately.

  Yesterday I worked so hard—tied, labeled, ran to Commission, ran to bank, to Crone movers, to CPR, washed and cooked and scrubbed. Dad is saying goodbye to the kids now. They're spending the night in the church hall at Kitsilano. I'm going over there too as soon as I pack this last item.

  Merry Christmas, Nesan.

  This is the last word in the journal. The following day, May 22, 1942, Stephen, Aya Obasan, and I are on a train for Slocan. It is twelve years before we see Aunt Emily again.

  fifteen

  I am sometimes not certain whether it is a cluttered attic in which I sit, a waiting room, a tunnel, a train. There is no beginning and no end to the forest, or the dust storm, no edge from which to know where the clearing begins. Here, in this familiar density, beneath this cloak, within this carapace, is the longing within the darkness.

  1942.

  We are leaving the B.C. coast—rain, cloud, mist—an air overladen with weeping. Behind us lies a salty sea within which swim our drowning specks of memory—our small waterlogged eulogies. We are going down to the middle of the earth with pickaxe eyes, tunneling by train to the interior, carried along by the momentum of the expulsion into the waiting wilderness.

  We are hammers and chisels in the hands of would-be sculptors, battering the spirit of the sleeping mountain. We are the chips and sand, the fragments of fragments that fly like arrows from the heart of the rock. We are the silences that speak from stone. We are the despised rendered voiceless, stripped of car, radio, camera, and every means of communication, a trainload of eyes covered with mud and spittle. We are the man in the Gospel of John, born into the world for the sake of the light. We are sent to Siloam, the pool called "Sent." We are sent to the sending, that we may bring sight. We are the scholarly and the illiterate, the envied and the ugly, the fierce and the docile. We are those pioneers who cleared the bush and the forest with our hands, the gardeners tending and attending the soil with our tenderness, the fishermen who are flung from the sea to flounder in the dust of the prairies.

  We are the Issei and the Nisei and the Sansei, the Japanese Canadians. We disappear into the future undemanding as dew.

  The memories are dream images. A pile of luggage in a large hall. Missionaries at the railway station handing out packages of toys. Stephen being carried on board the train, a white cast up to his thigh.

  It is three decades ago and I am a small child resting my head in Obasan's lap. I am wearing a wine-coloured dirndl skirt with straps that crisscross at the back. My white silk blouse has a Peter Pan collar dotted with tiny red flowers. I have a wine-coloured sweater with ivory duck buttons.

  Stephen sits sideways on a seat by himself opposite us, his huge white leg like a cocoon.

  The train is full of strangers. But even strangers are addressed as "ojisan” or “obasan”, meaning uncle or aunt. Not one uncle or aunt, grandfather or grandmother, brother or sister, not one of us on this journey returns home again.

  The train smells of oil and soot and orange peels and lurches groggily as we rock our way inland. Along the window ledge, the black soot leaps and settles like insects. Underfoot and in the aisles and beside us on the seats we are surrounded by odd bits of luggage—bags, lunch baskets, blankets, pillows. My red umbrella with its knobby clear red handle sticks out of a box like the head of an exotic bird. In the seat behind us is a boy in short gray pants and jacket carrying a wooden slatted box with a tabby kitten inside. He is trying to distract the kitten with his finger but the kitten mews and mews, its mouth opening and closing. I can barely hear its high steady cry in the clackity-clack and steamy hiss of the train.

  A few seats in front, one young woman is sitting with her narrow shoulders hunched over a tiny red-faced baby. Her short black hair falls into her bird-like face. She is so young, I would call her "o-nesan”, older sister.

  The woman in the aisle seat opposite us leans over and whispers to Obasan with a solemn nodding of her head and a flicker of her eyes indicating the young woman.

  Obasan moves her head slowly and gravely in a nod as she listens. "Kawaiso," she says under her breath. The word is used whenever there is hurt and a need for tenderness.

  The young mother, Kuniko-san, came from Saltspring Island, the woman says. Kuniko-san was rushed onto the train from Hastings Park, a few days after giving birth prematurely to her baby.

  "She has nothing," the woman whispers. "Not even diapers."

  Aya Obasan does not respond as she looks steadily at the dirt-covered floor. I lean out into the aisle and I can see the baby's tiny fist curled tight against its wrinkled face. Its eyes are closed and its mouth is squinched small as a button. Kuniko-san does not lift her eyes at all.

  "Kawai," I whisper to Obasan, meaning that the baby is cute.

  Obasan hands me an orange from a wicker basket and gestures toward Kuniko-san, indicating that I should take her the gift. But I pull back.

  “For the baby," Obasan says, urging me.

  I withdraw farther into my seat. She shakes open a furoshiki—a square cloth that is used to carry things by tying the corners together—and places a towel and some apples and oranges in it. I watch her lurching from side to side as she walks toward Kuniko-san.

  Clutching the top of Kuniko-san's seat with one hand, Obasan bows and holds the furoshiki out to her. Kuniko-san clutches the baby against her breast and bows forward twice while accepting Obasan's gift without looking up.

  As Obasan returns toward us, the old woman in the seat diagonal to ours beckons to me, nodding her head, urging me to come to her, her hand gesturing downward in a digging waving motion. I lean toward her.

  "A baby was born," the old woman says. "Is this not so?"

  I nod.

  The old woman bumps herself forward and off the seat. Her back is round as a church bell. She is so short that when she is standing she is lower than when she was sitting. She braces herself against the seat and bends forward.

  "There is nothing to offer," she says as Obasan reaches her. She lifts her skirt and begins to remove a white flannel underskirt, her hand gathering the undergarment in pleats.

  “Ah, no no, Grandmother," Obasan says.

  "Last night it was washed. It is nothing, but it is clean."

  Obasan supports her in the rock rock of the train and they sway together back and forth. The old woman steps out of the garment, being careful not to let it touch the floor.

  "Please—if it is acceptable. For a diaper. There is nothing to offer," the old woman says as she hoists herself onto the seat again. She folds the undergarment into a neat square, the fingers of her hand stiff and curled as driftwood. Obasan bows, accepting the cloth, and returns to Kuniko-san and her baby, placing the piece of flannel on Kuniko-san
's lap. Both their heads are bobbing like birds as they talk. Sometimes Kuniko-san bows so deeply, her baby touches her lap.

  Leaning out into the aisle I can see better, and the old grandmother nods, urging me to go to them. Kuniko-san is wiping her eyes in the baby's blanket, revealing the baby's damp black hair.

  The baby doll I have brought has a hard lumpy brown wave for hair on the top of its hard head. I hold it on the train's window ledge on its buttocks and short bow legs in its pajamas and blue wool hat.

  Another doll I have brought is a Japanese child doll my mother gave me before she went to Japan. It was meant to be mostly ornamental and has an ageless elegant face—tiny red bow lips open slightly in a two-toothed smile, clear exact eyes with black pupils in the center of the dark brown irises, tiny pinprick nostrils. Its hair, like mine, is a stiff black frame, the bangs a straight brush across the forehead. The right hand is a round fist with a hole in the middle. She carries a stick with a colourful box at the end and two threads with beads. Sometimes I replace the stick with a curved green wire branch on which are clustered tiny hard red lacquered dots for cherries and delicate five-petalled paper flowers. The red flowered kimono, which is not for removal, has been removed and the doll is no longer pristine and decorative. The legs, though wired in place, are dislocated and she cannot stand on her own. The fingers of her left hand are broken. Obasan suggested I take another but she is my favorite doll. She wears an oversized orange print dress from one of the other dolls in the kitchen bin, plus a coat. I stand her up to look out of the window at the passing scenery. Her feet clack against the pane.

  "See," I whisper to her.

  The doll does not respond. If she understands, she nods or she bows full tilt, but if she is unsure, her feet clack irritably.

  Stephen is scowling as Obasan returns and offers him a rice ball. "Not that kind of food," he says. Stephen, half in and half out of his shell, is Humpty Dumpty—cracked and surly and unable to move.

  I have seen Obasan at home sometimes take a single grain of cooked rice and squash it on paper, using it for paste to seal parcels or envelopes. If I could take all the cooked rice in all the rice pots in the world, dump them into a heap, and tromp all the bits to glue with my feet, there would be enough to stick anything, even Humpty Dumpty, together again.

  Unlike Stephen, the doll is quite happy and secretly excited about the train trip.

  "Want that?" she asks Stephen, looking at him with her bright almond eyes and pointing to a sandwich.

  Stephen ignores her and stares at the treetops zipping past the window.

  "Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,” she says to herself, "Humpty Dumpty had a great fall...."

  Getting no response from Stephen, I turn to my other toys—the red, white, and blue ball, the Mickey Mouse with movable legs which can rock and walk by itself down an incline, the two chicks from the sewing-machine cabinet, a metal cicada which can be squeezed to make a "click click" sound.

  Stephen ignores everything and stares out the window at the changing shapes of sky. In a fit of generosity I take my ball and give it to Stephen. "You can keep it," I say solemnly. "It's yours." I put it in his jacket pocket, where it forms a fist-size lump.

  The train moves in and out of tunnels, along narrow ridges that edge the canyon walls, through a toothpick forest of trees. Eventually the doll grows sleepy and falls asleep in the blanket that Obasan has arranged on her lap. Obasan's hand taps my back rhythmically and her smooth oval face is calm.

  sixteen

  Twenty years later, in 1962, Aunt Emily wanted to take a trip through the interior of British Columbia. Off we went—Uncle, Aunt Emily, Obasan, and I—through Banff, down the Rogers Pass, through Golden, and Revelstoke, Uncle pointing out a small side road, which he said was the place his work camp had been. I drove through what was left of some of the ghost towns, filled and emptied once by prospectors, filled and emptied a second time by the Japanese Canadians. The first ghosts were still there, the miners, people of the woods, their white bones deep beneath the pine-needle floor, their flesh turned to earth, turned to air. Their buildings—hotels, abandoned mines, log cabins—still stood marking their stay. But what of the second wave? What remains of our time there?

  We looked for the evidence of our having been in Bayfarrn, in Lemon Creek, in Popoff. Bayfarm and Popoff were farmlands in Slocan before the tar-paper huts sprang up. Lemon Creek was a camp seven miles away carved out of the wilderness. Tashme—formed from the names of Taylor, Shirras, and Mead, men on the B.C. Security Commission—also rose overnight, fourteen miles from Hope, and as quickly disappeared. Where on the map or on the road was there any sign? Not a mark was left. All our huts had been removed long before and the forest had returned to take over some of the clearings. What remained the same was the smell of pine and cedar. The mountains too were unchanged except for the evidence of new roads and a larger logging industry. While we stood there in Slocan, we could hear the wavering hoot of a train whistle as we used to years before. But the Slocan that we knew in the forties was no longer there, except for the small white community which had existed before we arrived and which watched us come with a mixture of curiosity and fear. Now, down on the shore of Slocan Lake on the most beautiful part of the sandy beach, where we used to swim, there was a large new sawmill owned by someone who lived in New York.

  We left Slocan and drove toward Sandon. The long desolate road led to such a dark and isolated location, I left in a hurry. What a hole!

  “It was an evacuation all right," Aunt Emily said. "Just plopped here in the wilderness. Flushed out of Vancouver. Like dung drops. Maggot bait."

  None of us, she said, escaped the naming. We were defined and identified by the way we were seen. A newspaper in B.C. headlined: "They are a stench in the nostrils of the people of Canada." We were therefore relegated to the cesspools. In Sandon, Tashme, Kaslo, Greenwood, Slocan, Bayfarm, Popoff, Lemon Creek, New Denver, we lived in tents, in bunks, in skating rinks, in abandoned hotels. Most of us lived in row upon row of two-family, three-room huts, controlled and orderly as wooden blocks. There was a tidy mind somewhere.

  Some families who had gone ahead or independently had been able to find empty farmhouses to rent. In Slocan, several families lived in an abandoned bunkhouse at an old silver mine. Our own house was just a two-room log hut at the base of the mountain. It was shabby and sagging and overgrown with weeds when we first saw it on that spring day in 1942.

  “Thank you, thank you," Obasan says to a man, an ojisan in a gray cap who reaches up and puts an arm around Stephen hesitating at the top of the train steps. I pick up Stephen's crutches and follow him as he is carried through the slow crowd of boxes and bodies. People are bustling about on the wooden platform in groups, carrying luggage here and there. Even in all this crowd, there is a stillness here. The sudden fresh air, touched with the familiar smell of sawdust, is crisp and private. Yet there is a feeling of open space. Through a break in the crowd, I can see a lake with a sandy beach and drift logs. All around its edge are mountains covered in trees, climbing skyward. The highest, farthest mountains are blue and purple and topped with white snow.

  I am holding Obasan's hand and looking around when I hear Stephen say, "Hello, Sensei." Sensei is the word for teacher. I look up and recognize Nakayama-sensei, the round-faced minister with round eyes and round glasses from the Anglican church in Vancouver. He is talking to Obasan and to the man who helped Stephen. The boy carrying the kitten is holding the hand of a woman in a blue dress who is waiting to speak to Nakayama-sensei.

  “It is not so far," Sensei says to Obasan. "I will show you the way." He turns to the woman in blue and nods gravely, says a few words to the ojisan and to a missionary, then disappears into the crowd.

  Except for Stephen on his crutches, we all carry bags, furoshiki, suitcases, boxes and follow Ojisan down the middle of the road, past the gaunt hotels swarming with people, like ants in an overturned anthill. Ojisan puts down his heavy box and we wait till he r
eturns with a homemade wheelbarrow.

  "Ah, joto, joto," Nakayama-sensei says, rejoining us, "excellent, excellent."

  We arrange our luggage and follow Nakayama-sensei and Ojisan down the street again, turning to the left past a building with the sign "Graham's General Store”, and we walk up the flat gravel road through the valley to the mountain's foot. There are no streetcars here, no sidewalks or large buildings. On either side of the road are a few houses, smaller than the ones in Vancouver.

  As we pass a wooden bridge over a creek, I think of the curved bridge over the goldfish pond at Obasan's house, and the bridges Stephen and I made in the sand to the desolate sound of the sea, and the huge Lions’ Gate Bridge in Stanley Park, and the terrifying Capilano swinging bridge that trembled as we crossed it high up in the dangerous air.

  Perhaps it is because I first missed my doll while standing on this bridge that often in the evenings, when I cross it, I feel a certain sadness.

  Obasan, carrying a large furoshiki, waits for me as I linger looking down at the water burbling over the stones and a crow hopping on the bank.

  “Where is my doll?" I ask, calling to her. I am not carrying anything since putting the bag of food and the furoshiki I was given onto Ojisan's pile.

  Obasan looks startled and utters that short sharp word of alarm.

  "Ara!"

  She puts down her furoshiki and opens it, then calls to Ojisan.

  He and Obasan examine the boxes on the wheelbarrow, lifting them off one by one.

  "Ojisan will find your doll,” he says heartily as I reach them. He squats down and faces me.

  "The others are in the bin in the kitchen,” I tell him.

  His round face, crinkly with laugh lines, bounces like a ball. I do not doubt that he will bring them all. He slaps his knees as if the deed is already accomplished.