Ramon remained lucid all afternoon—enough time for Mrs. Moriuchi to come in, and make the offer to handle his health and legal affairs. He agreed, and a lawyer representing the hospital helped draft a power of attorney agreement. But by evening, Ramon had slipped back to the place where he’d been until recently.
Now Dr. Nigawa was confident that Ramon would recover—if not physical movement, at least the ability to communicate. I knew I should have been happy about the turn in Ramon’s condition, but knowing what he’d been like before, I was still regretful. The stroke’s effects couldn’t be completely undone—just as my own actions at the Imperial Hotel continued to haunt me.
The problem, Mr. Harada said when he made his regular early evening phone call to me, was that the police wanted to know the name of the female accomplice who’d also gotten a hotel keycard. All I had to do was tell them her name so they could take her in for questioning and decide for themselves whether she was subject to any charges.
“I can’t do it,” I said to Hugh after I’d hung up the phone. “I know the power of reputation in Japan, and throwing away my friend’s life for a little less hassle in my own is not worth it. We’ll just have to be patient. Maybe after Eric’s convicted, the pressure will be off the police to be so hard on me.”
“Rei, I suspect I know whom you’re protecting. Just tell me, and maybe I can talk to her, uh, parents and we’ll all come up with a way to handle this as a family. We can turn your situation around. If Mr. Harada thinks the police are holding firm to their line, it’s not something to ignore.” Hugh was lying behind me on the futon, stroking the slight swell of my bare stomach. It was pleasantly filled with pork tenderloin grilled with a Jamaican jerk seasoning—hard to find in Tokyo, but I’d cobbled together the ingredients from three specialty stores.
“They can’t arrest me. If they really wanted to, they would have.” I moved his hand down farther, trying to distract him. We’d had this conversation too many times.
Hugh moved his hand back to the safe zone. “Even if they decide not to arrest you, they can deport you. That’s what Harada said to me earlier today.”
“Well, why didn’t he say it to me, too? Deportation is—absurd,” I said. “I’ve been here for years. I have family roots, people to stand up for me.”
“Deportation is a peaceful action that many governments take against foreigners who don’t toe the line. Look at America,” Hugh said. “Grown adults have suddenly been bounced back to their homelands after the INS has dug up information on marijuana possession or some other stupid misdeed done while the person was a teenager.”
“If I’m deported, I’ll die from the shame. What will my parents think?” I groaned. The fact was, just as Aunt Norie and Uncle Hiroshi had no idea that I was on the verge of arrest, neither did my parents. I’d let them know that Eric Gan had been arrested after confessing to attacking Ramon Espinosa, and that the San Francisco police were going to investigate his role in Rosa’s murder. But that was all.
“I think your parents will be more relieved to have you home with them than in a Japanese prison,” Hugh said. “Listen, you can go to San Francisco, build a new life there. I’ll follow you. Your mother once said something about giving us the third floor to make over into our own flat—after we’re married, of course.”
“Are you thinking that we’d have to live in my parents’ house?”
“Why wouldn’t we want to?” Hugh snorted. “There can’t be a more beautiful house to live in, and besides that, I like your parents! Your dad has his moody moments, but don’t we all? Your mother’s always been wonderful to get along with—”
“It’s not the right solution,” I said.
“It’s not what we would have wanted originally, yes, but it makes sense. We could live there while I continue work on the case. I’ll talk to the managing partner at Andrews and Cheyne about it. The advantage to shifting me to San Francisco is I’ll be close to the headquarters of Sharp, Witter and Rowe and have quicker access to the Asian Pacific Rim.”
“You’ll travel all the time,” I said.
“A lot,” Hugh said. “But even if we lived here, I’d travel a lot. You know that.”
“I want to stay here as long as I can,” I said.
But Hugh was right. The letter from the government came the very next day. It advised me that my working visa had been revoked and I was being requested to leave the country within seventy-two hours. My option, should I decide not to be voluntarily deported, would be to face a criminal trial.
“Seventy-two hours,” I said. “Do you think they mean seventy-two hours from when they posted the letter—it’s dated two days ago—or from the time I actually received this letter, which was just a few hours ago?”
“I’d say today. But hush, the agent’s finally taken me off hold. Yes?” he raised his voice. “I’m calling about my frequent flier account.”
I walked away, totally discouraged. Hugh had reacted in the most bizarre way possible. Instead of rushing to comfort me, he seemed obsessed with getting me out of the country without having to pay for it, since the government kicking me out wasn’t giving me the courtesy of a paid ticket. The problem was the government required that I travel on a one-way ticket, and that was not the kind of ticket the frequent-flier program was used to issuing. Hugh was outraged. I just wanted to cry. I didn’t want to leave the country. I wanted to stay put. But it seemed clear that fleeing Japan was the safest option.
As Hugh put on his best BBC accent, I stared at the letter, which hadn’t been out of my hand for the last few hours. I knew why the police were punishing me. I’d refused to tell them the name of my so-called accomplice, the mystery woman who’d helped me secure the hotel keycards.
I couldn’t do it. If Chika were charged with a misdemeanor for aiding and abetting me, it would decimate the Yokohama Shimuras. Aunt Norie would be cut dead by the neighbors. Uncle Hiroshi, whose new job was still tenuous, might be fired. As would Tom—because who would entrust themselves in the care of a physician known to have a convicted sister and cousin?
No, I decided, staring out at my gray street, no matter how many people were to give up their comfortable ways to help me, as a foreigner who’d broken a law I had no rights. It would be the same situation if I were an Arab who overstayed her visa in the U.S. It wasn’t racism working against me—deportation was the way nations got rid of threats without causing international outrage.
Fifteen minutes later, Hugh got off the phone, triumphant. He’d secured a business class seat for me after having convinced the airline that I was his wife, albeit with a different surname, and needed a one-way evacuation for emergency reasons. I would be checking in at 2 P.M. exactly three days from now.
“It was just a little white lie,” Hugh said, kissing me on the neck. “Come, let’s go out to dinner to celebrate beating the system. They might make you leave, but they can’t make you pay. And Mr. Harada and I will work double-time to figure out a way to get you back in—even if it’s as a tourist!”
A little white lie. I thought back to the conversation I’d had with my father just a few weeks ago, the conversation about Buddhist rules. You could still go to heaven, he’d said, if your gentle lie was employed to ensure the well-being of society. The rule didn’t work, obviously. The white lies I’d told to get myself into Eric’s and Charles’s rooms had brought me nothing but hell.
31
The next day, Hugh worked. I was on the phone all day, paying off accounts. With what little I had left, I went upstairs to my landlady to pay the next month’s rent, and to try to explain.
“I don’t want to move,” I said tearfully to Mrs. Takashi. “It’s because of a sudden problem. I’m needed at home. I’m sorry for the inconvenience. Of course, I expect you to keep my security deposit.”
“I know it’s hard,” she said softly, looking away. “The neighbors—they have been bad. Little Kentaro-chan, he was the one who did that crazy thing with your food delivery. I heard about it
later, and I spoke to his mother about it. I wish you wouldn’t leave.”
“Well, it’s not just Kentaro,” I said, although I was relieved to have an answer about the tear gas attack. “I know the majority of the neighborhood is not comfortable with—with my fiancé staying here.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Mrs. Yuto told me. She knows everything and everyone—”
“Yuto-san has lost her mind. She doesn’t think clearly anymore. Everyone likes you, Rei-chan. You grow such pretty orchids at your window. You buy food from neighborhood merchants. You are very quiet—generally.”
I blushed, wondering if she was considering the occasional times I had friends over for dinner and drinks—or the more recent, intimate nights with Hugh. She did live upstairs.
“When I come back to Japan, I’ll say hello,” I promised. “But I think Hugh and I should get married and then try to find a place to live that’s spacious. We need room for children.”
“Children?” Mrs. Takashi’s face creased with delight. “Oh, how delightful. I didn’t know you wanted children!”
Nobody knew. I hadn’t even thought of it that much myself. But now I was faced with the depressing certainty that my children would grow up with peanut butter and chicken nuggets, not tofu and sushi. They would never taste the real shavings of a genuine aged fish.
I turned away in tears, and got on with the rest of my business. I hired a company to pack up everything in the apartment—they couldn’t come until five days later, but Hugh assured me he’d oversee the process. My worldly goods would go into storage and either be shipped to San Francisco or remain in wait for me, should I ever be allowed to reenter Japan.
I made a list of the people to whom I owed an explanation for my leaving Japan. The Yokohama Shimuras were the ones I loved most—but the hardest to explain things to, so I set them aside. I went out for good-bye drinks with Richard Randall and his partner Enrique, plus Mariko, Karen, and Simone. The day after that—my second-to-last day—I made phone calls to everyone else I could think of and paid a quick visit to Mr. Waka, proprietor of the neighborhood Family Mart. Like Mrs. Takashi, he was convinced that it would be easy for me to get a visa back into the country, once Eric was formally convicted of his crimes and concern about the case died down. He sent me out with a cheerful good-bye and a box of chocolate-flavored Pocky Sticks. I munched them, thinking how much they tasted like cardboard, as I walked along to Mr. Ishida’s antiques shop.
“Ah, what a nice surprise,” Mr. Ishida said as I made my way through all the big pieces to the back room, where he was sitting at the tea table reading the newspaper and sipping a cup of tea. A small iron kettle sat steaming on the space heater nearby.
“I see the staircase tansu is sold. Congratulations,” I said.
“Yes. I never heard more from Sharp-san, so I sold it to a Japanese gentleman who came in the store the other day. I was quite impressed—he was willing to pay full price for it without much of an inspection. His name is Murano. Have you heard of him?”
“The name sounds familiar, but he’s never bought from me. He sounds like a high roller.”
“Well, I hope he comes back for more. With the current economy, the high rollers are few and far between. My profit from that sale took care of my rent for the next eight months!”
“That’s good fortune,” I said. “I wish I were so lucky. Actually, I have something difficult to tell you.”
“Yes, of course. But first, you must have some tea.”
I was about to cut him off and say that on this, my last full day in Japan, I had no time for a cup of tea, but then I realized it would never happen again. This would be the final ritual, the ending exchange between me and the man who was like a grandfather to me. So I sat down and took the blue-and-white cup he offered me. After I finished my tea, he said, “So, what is it?”
I’d been able to talk about my deportation with righteous anger to everyone else, but I didn’t have the energy anymore. I told Mr. Ishida, in a low voice, that because I had chosen to withhold information from the police, I was being asked to leave the country the next day.
“You are withholding information for an important reason, yes?”
“It’s very important, I think. If I were to give up a certain name, it would put an innocent person in trouble. I made her do something silly that she didn’t fully understand. Though it led to my being able to break a law, she didn’t commit any crime. She’s innocent, but I don’t trust the legal system here to regard her as that.”
“You used to revere Japanese culture,” Mr. Ishida said slowly. “Something’s changed.”
“I still love Japan and its people. But I’m afraid of the military. I know what the military did in the past when powerless women were shipped overseas to service Japanese soldiers. I’m being sent away, too—not for such a horrific purpose, but because I’m seen as a person with no rights. A foreigner who can’t be trusted.”
“Did you know that after the war, many of the military officers found employment in the Japanese police? That’s why it’s so tough. And secretive.”
“I didn’t know that,” I said. But it was interesting—and believable—that the group I considered my enemy was really just a reincarnation of the forces that had abused Rosa and Ramon.
“I was a young man during the war,” Mr. Ishida said. “Just sixteen. My father was already dead from tuberculosis, and American bombs had killed my two sisters. I was the only child my mother had left, and I was drafted to serve in China.”
“Oh, my goodness. I had no idea,” I said.
“As you know, we Japanese like to think of the past as being over. But it’s never been possible for me.” Mr. Ishida turned to survey all the old furniture around him. “I buy and sell old things because I want to be surrounded by reminders of what things used to be. I don’t have a television or computer because I strive to live in the manner that my family did, before we all lost our innocence. I think you are much the same.”
“Well, I collected my family history looking for those kinds of things,” I said. “But what I found, ultimately, is the worst kind of skeleton.”
“Oh? You don’t mean real bones—”
“No.” I smiled, reassuring him. “What I mean is I learned that my great-grandfather was quite terrible. He wrote a coda of Japanese superiority and recorded it for millions of schoolchildren to read. And to make matters even worse, he tutored Emperor Hirohito. For all we know, Hirohito kept the war going such a long time—and permitted the military to brutally abuse other Asians and all its prisoners of war—because of what my great-grandfather taught him.”
“Words are not like bayonets,” Mr. Ishida said.
“What do you mean? It’s clear that my ancestor was a significant contributor to the buildup of nationalism before the war. I know I’m supposed to revere my ancestors, but when it comes to this man, I’m quite ashamed.”
“We are all ashamed of the war,” Mr. Ishida said. “Ashamed because we had believed the emperor was God, and then saw him humiliated by the Americans. Ashamed because we were humbled into a starvation state, and then so eager to accept the food given to us by the occupying forces. Ashamed because our Buddhist culture tells us not to kill except in self-defense, and we did otherwise.”
I paused, not quite sure of what he was saying. “Did you have to, Ishida-san?”
“Are you asking me, did I kill someone? Yes!” Mr. Ishida’s voice was louder than I’d ever heard it. “Many people. I was in Nanking. The situation that is barely mentioned in today’s junior high textbooks, always with the codicil it might not have really happened. Well, Shimura-san, I can tell you that it did happen, because I was there.”
I was stunned. The most horrific war scene of the twentieth century, and my mild-mannered, antiques-loving mentor had been part of it. Of all the men I might have guessed had war guilt, I would have never thought of Mr. Ishida.
“There are so many memories.” Mr. Ishida sighed. “T
hey still come to me at night. I remember it being like an ocean, our army and theirs, surging together. You saw the different colors of the uniforms, but soon you couldn’t tell, because it was all covered with blood. But the faces—I’ll never forget. The Chinese boys’ faces looked so much like our faces. In a different era—before the war—we might have played in sports competition together, shared rice afterward. But that time was gone forever.”
“Please, Mr. Ishida. You don’t have to tell me any more—”
“Ah, but I do. It shouldn’t have been like that. I knew it was wrong. But I kept going with my bayonet, because that’s all I had at that point in the battle. And I was afraid I’d be shot by my commanding officer for disloyalty.”
“Please, you’ve told me enough—”
“I wasn’t alone in my feelings of fear and disgust, Shimura-san. There were other young men who didn’t want to be there. We talked about it between ourselves. We kept out of the center of the city, where others were torturing and killing women and children. But still, we had to show we were part of the team. So we served with our troops, and we carried our bayonets.”
“Did you serve until liberation in 1946?”
“No, I was shipped home shortly after Nanking because of serious injuries I suffered. I was wounded in a way that precluded me from ever becoming a father. So I never married. And in a sense, it was good that I didn’t have children. This way, there is nobody to be ashamed of me.”
“Oh, Ishida-san! What I said about my great-grandfather must have made this all come back. I’m so sorry.”
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