by Joy Kogawa
By the time we reach home, the gas lamp is on in the house, sending out its hissing white light. Nakayama-sensei is at the table reading from the Bible in Japanese. It is the first time he has been to see us in a long time. Obasan has her head bowed and her eyes are closed. Uncle is quietly scraping out ashes from the stove with the flat paddle-shaped scoop.
I am not sure, as I remember the scene, whether I am told after I come in, or later at night when I am in bed, or if I am even told at all. It's possible the words are never said outright. I know that for years I simply do not believe it. At some point I remember Uncle's hand on my head, stroking it. I remember the strange gentle smile on his face when he sees my two hands in a ball raised toward him.
"'What you got?" he says in a soft voice.
My frog is a tiny green triangle in the large glass fruit bowl. Uncle has put his reading glasses on and is peering at it, nodding his head slowly. I take two of the tin cans from the pile in the corner and go out to look for mud and stones and ditch water.
The air is rapidly cooling outside and a few stars are visible in the shadowless twilight. The irrigation ditch by the roadside is close to the house. I dip the tin in and scoop a glop of water and mud. The feel of it is silkier than pancake batter. From the driveway I gather a handful of stones and one stone bigger than my fist that has a jagged wedge shape.
When I get back to the house, I remove my muddy shoes and set to work making and unmaking a home for the frog in the glass bowl. Eventually I settle on one arrangement—water in half the bowl, land in the other half. The rock forms the base of the land section and mud, grass, earth, and stones are piled on and around the rock. Near the top of the earth hill, I poke my thumb in to form a cave about the size of the frog. After the water settles. I plop the frog in. With its one good leg, it makes two glide-kicks and scrambles up the rock hill and heads straight into the cave headfirst. A quick turnabout and the frog's nose protrudes from the home, its tiny black needle-point nostrils facing the water. A good lookout place.
I do not know when Nakayama-sensei leaves. I only know there is a pervasive weight of gentleness, even from Stephen, that is strange and discomfiting. Only the frog remains unchanged.
The next day and all week long and every day after school or in the mornings, l feed the frog. The best and most eagerly eaten insect and the easiest to catch is the aphid, light and plump as a soap bubble. Flip, and it’s gone with barely a blink of the frog's eyes. Smaller flies, with half a wing removed, are a challenge. With its one good leg angling it forward, it pursues the crippled insects. Larger flies are generally avoided, though on several occasions it downs large bluebottles, blinking and gulping fiercely. Ants it hates, spiders it generally shuns, worms are of no interest, beetles are too brittle. I sometimes put flies in the bowl and cover the top with a pie plate, which they whap loudly with their shiny black bodies as they buzz about.
I wonder what will happen in winter when the insect supply dies.
"Without moving there is not eating," Uncle says when I ask.
"Try meat," Stephen suggests.
I squeeze a dot of hamburger on the end of a thread and swing it back and forth in front of the frog. It pushes itself out of the cave, its eyes fixed on the moving meal. It lunges once, then again, and the meat is gone, its eyes rotating as it swallows.
One morning, the frog is on the rim of the bowl, sitting there ready to leap. Another time it is on the table. Once I find it in a corner of the room covered in fluff. And then it is nowhere. The bowl sits empty on the table.
My last letter to Father has received no answer.
When the snow falls and covers everything, I hardly know that it is snow. The sky is the underbelly of a fish.
thirty-two
Perhaps, in the end, it's Penny Barker who really convinces me that Father is dead. I say the words so casually. "My father's dead.” It's as if I've known for years, yet when I actually hear myself talking I feel a strange shock as if I am telling a monstrous lie. It happens the first time Penny visits us in 1951, the year we move from her father's farm to our new house in town. In 1951, I'm in grade nine at Granton High School and Stephen is in his final year, completing grades twelve and thirteen in one year.
In all the time that we lived on the Barker farm, neither Penny nor her father and mother visited us in the hut at the back of their yard. It was just as well. There wasn't enough room for the four of us, let alone anyone else. Throughout high school, Stephen became increasingly angry about our cramped quarters on the farm. Finally we moved to a two-bedroom house about half a mile from the main street.
The new house is at least a house. The yard is treeless with an outhouse at the back. A few yards from the back door, there is a cistern for the irrigation water. It's a deep cement hole with a square wooden box and lid. For the first few months, we use a pail on the end of a rope to get the water out. After that a water and sewage system comes to Granton and Uncle builds a bathroom on the days that he is not working at a nearby potato farm.
In our house, we have a living room, kitchen, one large bedroom, and one small room that is about twice the size of the pantry we slept in in Slocan. Uncle and Obasan have a double bed in the bedroom and I sleep on a cot separated from them by a pink flowered curtain hung from a clothesline wire. Stephen is in the other room with all his musical instruments. There's an old violin that Miss Giesbrecht sold to him for five dollars and a trombone that belongs to the school band. He has a glass-bottle xylophone, which he is always adjusting and tuning with water and a crayon mark showing the level for the right note. There are also several sizes of wooden-box and rubber-band instruments he made while he was on the farm. I don't know where he keeps the cracked wooden flute. I'm sure he hasn't thrown it away. On his desk he has a tiny crystal radio—one of the first things he made on the farm. Once he managed to hear a police conversation on it.
Now that we are in town, Stephen is able to stay after school to practice on the piano. He and Miss Gieshrecht are working together on a cantata for the music festival. A number of the girls in grade twelve are trying out for solo parts—even Penny Barker, who can't carry a tune, is auditioning.
I write a letter to Aunt Emily with a copy of the cantata and circle the sections that Stephen has composed.
"It's so sad your dad isn't here, Nomi," she writes back "He'd be so happy and proud to know how well Stephen is progressing."
The noon hour that Penny visits us is early in December 1951, following a warm chinook wind that has melted all the snow. She catches up to me in the hall after my first-period chemistry class and asks if she can drop by to see our new place.
"Sure," I say uneasily. I have not invited anyone to visit me before. I suspect she only wants to see Stephen and ask him to pick her for one of the leading parts.
The first thing she notices in the cluttered living room is the photograph taken when Stephen was born, showing both sets of grandparents, Aunt Emily, Mother, Father, Obasan, and Uncle.
"That's Stephen,” I explain, pointing to his bun face, and Penny squeals, hiding her teeth with her hands the way she always does when she laughs. "And that's my father holding him.''
"He doesn't look like your father," Penny says.
The Barkers and everyone else have assumed that Uncle and Obasan are our parents and we've never bothered to correct them.
"My father's dead," I reply as calmly as if I were offering the time of day. But a few moments after I say it, I find myself collapsed on the sofa with a sharp pain in my abdomen and a cold perspiration forming on my forehead.
After this, when my eyes pass over the few framed photographs on the kitchen sideboard, I stop and examine the small black-and-white snapshot of a graveyard scene. There are half a dozen unknown men and a white clergyman standing beside a freshly covered grave. Father was buried by a few friends in the spring of 1950 following an extensive operation at the New Denver hospital. His plot is close to the spot where Grandpa Nakane is buried. Grandma Nakane's
ashes, Stephen tells me, were buried with Father. In the snapshot one of the men is holding a pick with flowers tied to the handle.
"That's a friend of Dad's," Stephen says when I point him out. "He worked with Dad on the roads and always remembered how Dad stuck flowers on his pick to remind him of us and Mother."
About Mother and Grandma Kato, Stephen knows nothing. In 1949, he says, Nakayama-sensei went to Japan, the first Japanese Canadian to visit Japan after the war. Sensei promised to find out about Mother and Grandma Kato but the moment he stepped onto Japanese soil, his wallet, his address book containing all the names of our relatives, and his pocket watch were stolen by pickpockets. All he was able to learn was that the house in Tokyo where Grandma Kato's mother lived was gone.
"They must be dead," Stephen says, "If they weren't they'd write to us."
"But they don't know where we are."
"They'd write to the church. They'd write to somebody. They must," Stephen repeats, "be dead."
I write a stream of letters to Aunt Emily asking about Mother, but she too only echoes Stephen's bleak words. "They must be dead." She has written, she tells me, hundreds of letters, to friends of friends, distant relatives, to churches, hospitals, government officials, police, and Red Cross agencies, but there have been no clear clues to their whereabouts. One of Grandma Kato's nephews reported that he visited Mother in a Tokyo hospital a few times but then lost track of her. A Canadian missionary wrote that a young English-speaking Japanese woman arrived one night at their women's hostel begging for help for her mother. She was given the medication she sought, plus some food, and left, returning the next day to thank them. But whether that was Mother was uncertain. Sometime later that same missionary, Miss Best, reported that another English-speaking woman had shown up who might have been Mother. She was very ill and refused to give her name. Miss Best took her to the nearest hospital.
If that woman was your mother," Aunt Emily writes, "she died that month. I have no other leads. I have come to the conclusion after all this time that Grandma and your mother are both dead."
Eventually I too stop hoping that they are alive but sometimes I find myself imagining that they are somewhere, surviving somehow. I think of them in a mountain village being cared for by strangers, or in a hospital suffering from memory loss. I never speak of my thoughts to anyone.
In Aunt Emily's file, there are two government letters about Mother and Grandma Kato that tell me clearly they survived the war and were in touch with her.
The first is a terse note about Grandma Kato, Mrs. K. Kato, written in 1950.
Dear Madam,
I have your letter of April 18 concerning your application for readmission to Canada from Japan of Mrs. K. Kato. I note that Mrs. Kato, who was born in Japan, returned to that country and it would seem evident that she has accordingly relinquished any claim to Canadian domicile which she might previously have acquired. As Japanese nationals are not admissible under existing regulations I regret to inform you that no encouragement can be offered with respect to her desire to return to Canada at the present time.
There's also another puzzling letter about Mother and a child who I assume is a cousin of mine on Grandma Kato's side.
Dear Miss Kato,
This refers to your letter of April 18 concerning your application for readmission to Canada of your sister, Mrs. Tadashi Nakane, Canadian-born, also for the admission of her four-year-old adopted daughter and niece.
The status of Mrs. Nakane has been carefully reviewed and it has been decided that she has retained her Canadian citizenship and therefore would be readmissible to Canada. However, the child is a national of Japan and as such is inadmissible under existing immigration regulations. It is regretted that the Department is unable to extend any facilities for admission of the child at the present time. It is assumed that Mrs. Nakane would not desire to come forward alone, leaving the child in Japan, and therefore it can only be suggested that the matter of her return be left in abeyance until such time in the future as there may be a change in the regulations respecting admission of Japanese nationals which would enable the Department to deal with the application of the child.
What I do not understand is Mother's total lack of communication with Stephen and me. Aunt Emily has said nothing more on the subject. I assume nothing more is known.
On the other hand, there was a puzzling incident one night during her first visit to us in 1954.
thirty-three
By 1954, Obasan, Uncle, and I have grown accustomed to the new quiet in the house. Stephen has been away for two school years, having left Granton for Toronto in the fall of 1952, after winning top marks at the music festival.
From the local and district festival in May that year Stephen, Miss Giesbrecht, and the choir went on to win first place in the larger southern Alberta festival at Lethbridge.
One of the adjudicators from Toronto praised Stephen profusely, both as a choir leader and as a pianist, and the newspaper reported, "Stephen Nakane—a young man with a future."
He was modest enough to leave the clipping behind, saying, "Don't need that." What he did need was the calendar from the Royal Conservatory of Music he had received. He also took a list of recommended names of teachers from the adjudicator with letters of reference to each. His new address book had only Aunt Emily's address in it.
"A good thing she is there," Uncle said. "A good thing there is enough room for you."
"Write to us, Stephen," I shouted as he watched us from the train window. I was feeling proud of him and thinking of Momotaro going off to conquer the world.
He scratched his chin, grinning awkwardly at us. When the train left, he waved a half-salute.
Obasan kept standing in the same spot after he was gone, her hands folded in front of her.
In the spring he returned.
"A grown man now," Uncle said. But at nineteen, he hardly seemed grown up to me.
The following Christmas he was in Europe as part of a young artists' tour. He also won first prize that winter for an original piano composition. It was Aunt Emily who sent us the news.
No big deal," he wrote, when I sent a card of congratulations.
The Granton District News headlined "Local Musician Makes Good" with a review of his successes.
This spring, 1954, he is back again. When he stands around the yard, chewing on grass stems with his hands in the pockets of his old bomber jacket, he looks as if he never left Granton. It's hard to imagine him onstage somewhere in Europe. If he has changed at all, perhaps he is less surly—less easily angered. But he still seems irritable and is almost completely non-communicative with Obasan.
She mends and re-mends his old socks and shirts which he never wears and sets the table with food, which he often does not eat. Sometimes he leaps up in the middle of nothing at all and goes off, inexplicably, no one knows where.
How, I wonder, does he get along with Aunt Emily?
"What is she like, Stephen?" I ask. Since I have not seen her in twelve years I can hardly remember her at all.
"She's not like them," Stephen says, jerking his thumb at Uncle and Obasan. He shows me a recent photograph of Aunt Emily standing behind a frail Grandpa Kato in a wheelchair. The picture was taken this year. They are strangers to me.
In June, a letter comes telling us that Aunt Emily will be coming for a visit, arriving on the 4:40 train of June 22.
It is so hot the afternoon of her arrival that even the train heaving into Lethbridge reeks of oily perspiration and gasps as it stops in front of us.
The only others waiting at the station besides Uncle, Stephen, and me are a small cluster of Hutterite people—three dark-gowned and kerchiefed women with a miniature dark-gowned and kerchiefed child and a bearded man in a collarless black suit. They all wear thick glasses and stand silently, not facing us.
A slightly chunky Japanese woman, wearing glasses and a gray cotton suit, steps off the train into a hot gust of cinders and dust. She shields her face from the sp
itting steam and walks towards us waving one hand wildly. Her black solid hair flames like a cape to her shoulders. I lift my hand hesitantly.
Uncle, with his bowlegged rolling gait, hurries up to greet her, but Stephen reaches her first and grips her suitcase.
When he carries it, he leans so heavily to one side that his limp becomes noticeable. I hang back.
"I can't believe it," Aunt Emily says, shaking her head in greeting as they approach me. She pushes her glasses back up the short nose of her round face with the back of her hand. When she smiles, her tadpole eyes almost disappear beneath the surface of her face.
We walk through the train station to the half-ton pickup angled in front. She is asking Uncle and me questions, one after the other, and shaking her head over and over as she looks at me.
Stephen puts her suitcase into the back and starts the old engine turning, slamming his foot down on the gas till the motor sputters and races to a roar. Uncle prompts her in beside Stephen. I lean heavily against Uncle to avoid squishing her. When she takes off her hat there is a fierce streak of white in front.
"Everyone gets older," Uncle says, noting her hair. “Emi-san is what age now?" He answers himself. "Nearing forty already. Is there to be no marriage?"
Aunt Emily dismisses the subject with a "knh" through her nose. "And you're how old now, Nomi? Seventeen? School finished yet?"
It is odd to hear someone besides Stephen calling me by my childhood name. "The finals are next week," I reply.
The pickup chugs the two blocks to Nakagama's, the Japanese store, where we pick up some salted kazunoko—herring roe on slabs of seaweed—fresh tofu, which they luckily have, and a can of mochi. The next stop is the Spudnut shop where Stephen runs in to buy a dozen sticky doughnuts for fifty cents, then past McGavin's Bakery with its giant hand holding a giant loaf, and on down the highway beyond the stockyards. Both windows are down and we stop eating doughnuts till we are past the strong manure smell. Uncle rolls his window up as he always does, saying in disgust, "Ah kusai—what a smell!"