A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding

by Jackie Copleton

  I handed the passport back to him. ‘Hideo is dead. I’m sorry.’

  He said nothing for a while and I could not tell if he was angry. Then he reached down for his briefcase, placed it on the couch cushion next to him and retrieved a brown parcel. The A4 envelope had been handled with care, the folds uncreased, the seal unbroken. He placed the package on the coffee table.

  ‘She asked that the parcel should be given only to you. I’ve not seen what’s inside. I’m intrigued, of course, but the instructions were you should read the contents first. I’m guessing it may be documents that Father collected, adoption papers, but I don’t know.’

  ‘Father?’

  ‘Jomei. Kenzo and Father were good friends, I understand?’

  Is that what the doctor had told him? It wasn’t so far from the truth. ‘When they were younger, yes.’

  What had Sato been up to all these years, what false memories had he created, how had he found this Hideo in an orphanage? But what I most wanted to know was: is that bastard still alive? Instead I offered my visitor a drink. ‘Would you like that tea now, or I have something stronger?’

  ‘Actually, if you’re offering, something stronger would be good.’

  ‘Did you come all this way to America just to see me?’ He said yes. ‘How did you find me?’

  ‘I used a private detective. You’d be surprised how many people go missing; there are agencies to help you find them.’

  ‘I see. So when did you find me?’

  ‘Last year.’ He saw me take in this information.

  ‘Why did you wait so long to come?’

  He sat back heavy against the couch. ‘To be honest, I was scared about what I would find, your reaction, my response. You build the day up in your head, knowing the reality can never be a match to the expectation, good or bad.’

  ‘Am I what you expected?’

  He replied with the smallest laugh. ‘I don’t think either of us are.’

  This made me smile. ‘So what made you finally get on the plane?’

  ‘A coincidence. I belong to a peace organisation, we speak all over the world, at conferences, schools, summits for non-nuclear proliferation. We raise funds, awareness, lobby for victims. There’s a conference here, my group was invited to send a representative, I volunteered.’ He dipped his head to the side. ‘Sometimes the universe sends you a sign you cannot ignore, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Would you have come otherwise?’

  He exhaled. ‘Eventually, I’m sure.’

  His own reticence was a relief to me. We shared this mutual caution for a moment and then I levered myself upright. ‘I’ll bring us some whiskey, Kenzo’s favourite. I’ll let you think of our toast.’

  ‘That’s easy.’ He looked back at the photographs behind him. ‘To my family.’

  Somehow we knew not to talk about Nagasaki, not yet. Instead he asked about America. Less concealment was needed about our flight to the West. I explained how Kenzo and I could not stay in the city and live with our loss. We needed to go somewhere so alien and so different that all our energy would be taken up by the strangeness of our new lives. Another part of Japan would not do. We needed unknown terrain, a challenging culture, a language that had not invented words such as pikadon. When the occupation began, some American naval officers came to Kenzo’s workplace. He had been chosen to show them around because of his seniority and his basic English skills. During his degree he had spent some time in Scotland, at the Glasgow Nautical College. The accent had nearly defeated him but he remembered enough vocabulary to communicate. When we decided to leave Japan he had spoken with one of these men, who, grateful for Kenzo’s help, had arranged through connections a job offer in California. We studied a map. Vallejo, where Mare Island Naval Shipyard was based, was twenty or thirty miles from San Francisco. There were other private shipyards in the state if the naval facility didn’t work out, the American said. The paperwork might be tricky but Kenzo’s skills were in demand. We held no goodbye parties, made no final pilgrimages, only Misaki was there to wave us off at the train station on July 19, 1946.

  As soon as we docked at San Francisco I felt overwhelmed by the size of everything: the roads, the cars, the flat-roofed diners, the people, but I was glad of the unremitting assault on my senses. Horns beeped, newspaper vendors shouted, radios blared. Bosses at the shipyard had found us a home and sent us a picture of a white wooden house with two bedrooms, a patch of grass at the front. We hired a black Chevrolet and drove to Vallejo. We stopped to look around by the ferry terminal, its blue roof shaped like a circus top, and I knew we had made a terrible mistake. Even in this new continent, the past followed us. The yellow and blue houses built on the hills overlooking the water reminded me of those that had perched on the inclines of Nagasaki. I could not tell Kenzo this but as the days passed to weeks and then months, I couldn’t hide my unhappiness. He thought my struggles were with the culture. Yes, even a simple trip to the shop was a trial. I would stare for minutes at shampoos or cans and wonder what they contained if no picture gave a clue. I’d count out coins in my purse while trying to understand what price the shop teller had said. I didn’t mind these inconveniences or embarrassments. They filled my mind and my days. No, it was Vallejo itself. When I finally confessed the real reason, he shook his head, exasperated. ‘The hills and the Pacific? That’s what you object to? Have you any idea how big that ocean is?’ What a burden I was, but I couldn’t stand the connection. This town and Nagasaki were joined by that water. The Pacific might as well have been a puddle.

  Kenzo began to look for another job and heard of one at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard. His reputation and his talent outweighed any concern about his nationality. He brought out a new map, found Pennsylvania and traced with his finger the confluence of the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers. ‘See, the Atlantic.’ I smiled. ‘Thank you. I like the look of this place.’ He laughed, ‘What, just from the map?’ I nodded. ‘This will be good for us.’ But pikadon followed us wherever we went. Years later, I learned laboratories at the yard had been used to help develop the bomb. Thankfully Kenzo was dead and saved from this mocking fact – unless he had known and chose not to tell me. We found a small townhouse nearby and by December 1947 we had begun the next chapter in our American story. If you could overlook our country of birth, we were typical in the Buick car we drove, the electrical appliances we bought, the cocktail hours we indulged in. But for some of our neighbours we would always be the enemy, especially those whose sons or uncles or co-workers had not returned home from the Asian jungles, French villages, or our shared ocean. Kenzo ignored the muttered comments, the blatant racism. America had given us a second chance and he was grateful. ‘This is a meritocracy,’ he declared. ‘Rewards come to those who work hard, we can live the life we deserve.’

  I smiled at this memory and my guest.

  ‘Did the culture shock get better with time?’

  I filled my glass, the alcohol freeing my reserve. ‘To be honest, we learned how to behave through the movies. We’d go every week, Saturday matinees, mostly. Kenzo loved those films, he’d watch anything: musicals, westerns, romances, Doris Day, Hitchcock, Bob Hope. He hoped my seeing them would improve my vocabulary.’ I paused, just briefly, realising despite the circumstances how good it felt to speak Japanese again. ‘One day we went to see Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Have you seen it?’ He shook his head. ‘It’s ludicrous. There’s a small town, where aliens grow from seeds into exact replicas of the residents. These impostors look like the townsfolk but they have no emotions, you see?’ He laughed, said he liked the sound of the plot. ‘Kenzo was so taken by this film. He felt that we should be like the aliens. All we needed to do was assimilate into our new world.’ I laughed, self-conscious. ‘Let’s just say, we learned to act American even if our emotions were always a bit off.’

  ‘I have not expressed my sorrow at your loss. I hope he didn’
t suffer.’

  I looked up at the picture of Kenzo in the park. How to explain a death after the event? How to condense the months of suffering into a few minutes? He had been such an active man, always on the go. I think he might have hidden how unwell he felt for a long time but the symptoms were too severe to hide: back pain, vomiting, fever. His kidneys were failing him. He spent three months in hospital as doctors, initially confident of his recovery, began to talk of end-of-life options. In the last days, his body raged with thirst. He became confused and frightened, then delirious talking to me as if I was his mother and not his wife. The chatter quietened and he took the shallowest of breaths, his eyes closed, as if he was enjoying an afternoon nap. I thought he might just drift off, but at the end, he managed somehow to turn back to life, for one final glimpse. I felt his gaze upon me as I sat next to his bed. We looked at each other, but I don’t know if he saw me. He said nothing and I recognised in the blackness of his pupils that some other presence or thought had caught his attention. It seemed he knew death was there, in the room, and he was helpless in its shadow. I shouted his name to let him know he was not alone. He took one last gasp, and then he was gone.

  I looked at my guest. ‘Did your private detective tell you the date of his death?’

  He nodded. Three days before August 9. Life’s cruel calendar. We sat in silence, the whiskey low in the bottle, until my visitor roused himself. ‘You said you had plans? I should go.’ He pointed at the package. ‘I hope what you find is not too distressing.’ He placed his glass on the table and rose to his feet. I did the same.

  ‘I’m sorry for my doubt. You seem so sure.’

  ‘I have no definitive proof, no, but this is what I’ve been told and what I believe: my name is Hideo Sato, birth name, Watanabe. I was born in Nagasaki. I am forty-six years old. I am your grandson. I can only hope the package confirms this.’

  ‘And if it doesn’t?’

  ‘Then you never have to see or think of me again.’

  Problem Solving

  Haragei: The term is a compound of hara (belly) and gei (art). Literally, it means belly-art. Most dictionaries define it as the verbal or non-verbal act one utilises to influence others by drawing upon one’s power of accumulated experience in an attempt to solve a mutual problem. Haragei will enable people to reach mutual understanding without confrontation.

  My daughter had shown skills as an artist from a young age. Perhaps she inherited the technical flair from Kenzo and maybe the love of colour and shape from me. Who knows how talent forms? Maybe she was only good because she practised. When aged no more than five or six, she would sit with paper at our table and ask me to draw a picture that she would attempt to copy. My efforts were clumsy but I would try my best to re-create a horse or a crane or a carp. Rubbing her nose, or singing away, she would choose a crayon and trace the outline. Soon she did not need my crude attempts to inspire her. Under the shade of our camphor tree, I would make flowers of raw silk for my hair while Yuko drew on fresh sheets of mulberry paper. As the years progressed, she moved on to thick oils and fine inks bought from an art shop not far from our home. She worked with bright colours: greens and reds and yellows, which she transformed into scenes from Nagasaki, our home and me in my brightest kimonos. Not long after her fifteenth birthday, we passed a print shop displaying old etchings of foreign sailors unloading goods and geishas strolling next to them under parasols. Yuko said she wished she had that kind of talent and I assured her she did. Shy suddenly, she said Himura, her art teacher, had said she would benefit from formal training, an apprenticeship, perhaps. ‘Would that be possible?’ She looked hopeful, flushed at the thought. Kenzo and I had discussed the matter and resolved to wait a year, to see if her interest remained. Lately, she had not been drawing as much and so I presumed the apprenticeship had only been a passing fancy. I did not realise she was still sketching, only these were images she could not show me. I found out why on October 16, 1936.

  The church bells had chimed seven times when Yuko ran into the house. She said she had been taking tea at her friend Miho’s house and had lost track of the time. I watched her bound upstairs, saying she would change before dinner. I noticed she had left her bag by the front door, and poking out, just an inch or two, was her sketchbook. I was pleased and instinctively reached for it. She had always shown me her work, keen for approval or gentle critique, and so there was no reason for me to think I was invading her privacy. As I turned the pages, sand drifted from the creases and fell to the floor. I saw the sea and a diving platform, rocks by a coppice, a man holding a bucket as he made his way down a path by the beach, two children playing in a field, dragonflies, sketched in detail, and then I reached the picture of a man in swimming trunks, reclining on a towel, asleep. Iōjima, August 22, 1936.

  I will never forget the agony of that discovery, the sickness in my stomach, the rage and the confusion. How did they know one another? How had they met? And as I stared at that face, that body, the anger turned to dread as one more ugly question formed in my mind: what had he done to my daughter? The thought of that moment in the hall still stops me dead in my tracks, whatever I am doing. Every cell in my body wanted to climb those stairs and confront Yuko. I wanted to hit the truth from her, beat Sato from our lives. Had he done this on purpose? Had he sought her out? Why? What was she to him? I could think of no reasonable explanation. Thoughts came at me like the wind in a typhoon, uncontrollable, rising up and then falling away. This was not her fault, I told myself. Whatever had happened, Sato would be to blame.

  I could hear Yuko upstairs, singing some folk song. Why had I not been more curious about all those missing hours? Why had I not noticed the bored lethargy that overcame her in the morning followed by the rush of activity come the changing light of afternoon. So transparent in hindsight the reason for her red cheeks as she ran to the mirror to brush her hair, the show of vanity, a new and disconcerting trait, lips ready to impart the explanation for another sudden departure.

  What could I do to keep my daughter safe? She had been led astray but she was a loyal daughter corrupted only by this outside force. Sato had to be stopped. He must be stripped of his power, of his control over her. I would wipe him from our lives. This was my duty as a mother. I still try to believe all that followed I did only for her and no other reason, but who knows? Perhaps it is too easy to paint vile actions with the gilded hue of noble intent. I tore the drawing from the sketchbook, and sat there, waiting in the dark for Kenzo to return. I had no hesitation about telling my husband. He needed to know. As I had done he would want to act immediately and I would have to persuade him of the need for patience.

  I only had to wait twenty minutes before he walked into the room. He had been working long hours and was always tired. The navy had grown to a formidable size since the turn of the century. Vessels once built abroad were now assembled at domestic shipyards. Japan had become bold, ignoring naval restrictions, snubbing negotiations with the West, expanding its territories. The country’s interest in mainland Asia had strained its relationship with other world powers and divided the military at home. Maybe Kenzo already knew what was on our nation’s horizon, the blood coming in the dawn. He looked at me kneeling by the table, the sketch in front of me. ‘Why are you sitting in the dark?’ He clicked on a light. ‘Amaterasu, what’s wrong?’ He sat down next to me, picked up the piece of paper. ‘What is this? Did Yuko draw it?’ I felt the rage return. ‘Why do you have this? This is Sato.’

  ‘I found it in Yuko’s bag. I don’t understand. How do they know one another?’ His silence betrayed him. ‘You? You introduced them? Why, Kenzo? Why would you do such a thing?’

  He shook his head in disbelief. ‘I met him in the street by chance. We had a drink. We talked. We had another drink, and another. It was good to see him. I had forgotten how much I enjoyed his company. So much time had passed, it seemed harmless.’

  ‘What did you talk about?’


  ‘Work, friends from university, I don’t know, golf.’

  ‘And Yuko?’

  ‘She wasn’t sleeping, remember. She wasn’t eating. I mentioned we were worried about her. He told me to send her along for an examination.’

  The question tore from me. ‘Why? You know what he’s like. You know his tastes.’

  ‘The picture means nothing. There will be an explanation.’

  ‘Kenzo, must you make me say it? Don’t you see what this is?’

  He shook his head. ‘There will be a reason.’

  ‘The reason is obvious.’

  Kenzo pushed the drawing away and clasped his head in his hands. He looked up, as if remembering he should be angry at this offence. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘In her room.’

  ‘This must stop now.’ He growled the words and began to stand up.

  I reached for his hand to stop him. ‘Wait.’

  ‘What? We must tell her we know this minute. Send her away. To my sister. Fukuoka.’

  ‘And Sato?’ He said nothing. ‘You would let him go unpunished?’

  ‘Of course not. I will speak to him.’

  ‘Speak?’

  He bristled. ‘What would you have me do?’

  ‘We must make her realise what he has done here. We need to make her look beyond the fantasy she is caught up in. She needs to see what this means to us, to Sato’s wife, to our friends, your colleagues, the city gossips. Otherwise we’ll lose her. She’ll blame us when we drive them apart. She’ll crawl back to him somehow. He’ll win. We’ll be the enemy.’ I thought of all the lies I had told people over the years, the ones I had needed to tell and the ones that had fallen easily from my lips; fictions Kenzo was content to facilitate if it meant I would be his. ‘Sato must force their separation, not us.’

  ‘But we cannot let him –’