Shadow Child

by Rahna Reiko Rizzuto

  From the end of 1943, the blockades had severely restricted Japan’s imports. People weren’t yet starving, or eating grasshoppers and rice husks, but rice had given way to barley, and with the men going off to war, the farms were being tilled by women who could not always get the seed they needed in time for the right planting season. To avoid starvation, people in the rural areas had flooded into the cities, where there was more food and factory work. After a few stunned months of trying to figure out how to use the land around the family home, Donald and Lillie had done the same, swapping places with Donald’s cousins for the place in the city, where Tateishi-sama would be closer to the doctors. They had lived in their small city apartment, undisturbed, for just under a year: a young mother, her infant son, her ailing elder father-in-law, and her shadowy, rarely seen husband, who started off with a badly sprained ankle from falling into a hole during field work and never gave up using his father’s cane in public.

  But then Lillie was drafted, along with a group of other English-speaking women, to translate the Allied communications for the military in the basement of a mansion on the castle grounds, a place so top secret that she couldn’t tell her own husband where it was. In a strange way, Donald seemed to resent her for it. It wasn’t that he had lost his enthusiasm for Japan or the Emperor’s victory. It was that she had a role that would not kill her.

  By early in 1945, the Japanese military was running out of weapons and ammunition, as well as food. And soldiers. The military had been mobilizing children for a while, so it wasn’t surprising to Lillie that once they began scraping the bottom to conscript teenagers and the elderly, they found Donald and his fake limp, too. But he thought it too much of a coincidence that he’d been overlooked by the military for a year, only to be found so soon after she herself was drafted. She must have accidentally let slip to her supervisors that he wasn’t really crippled, he insisted, though she assured him she had not.

  Lillie was shocked that he would think she would expose him to that. She knew, better than she could admit to him, that her husband’s future as a soldier would last only as long as it took to strap a grenade to his body and throw himself onto a tank. It didn’t matter that she, too, had been forcibly drafted, and that she’d fought back in her own small way, protesting that she barely knew how to speak Japanese, let alone write it, and giving in only when they threatened to arrest her for unpatriotic acts. She and the other English-speaking translators were practically held captive in their castle dungeon. The girls who lived too far away stayed in a nearby dormitory and were not allowed to leave.

  He blamed her, and there was no arguing with him. His silence was as bludgeoning as he intended it, but it was a relief compared to what came out of his mouth.

  Lillie held that silence as she scooped up her sleeping son and rose from bed. She took the candle from Donald to set it on the table. Then, with her sleeping father-in-law only a body’s length away and her son propped in her lap, she wordlessly sat and helped Donald sew a few coins into the hems and linings of his clothes. He would need them more than she and Tateishi-sama did. She had one meal a day now, with the military no less; she couldn’t remember the last time he forgot to point that out. That she was getting the best food in Japan.

  They had agreed on his escape: He would take Toshi and leave the city. The mere thought of being separated from her boy—for a day or a week, let alone the possibility of months—made her head swim, but Lillie didn’t have a choice. There were no other options. The Allies had begun bombing the big cities—Tokyo, Kobe—igniting the matchstick houses and turning people into charcoal, and everyone knew it was only a matter of time until Hiroshima was hit. Adolescents had been mobilized to rip down houses and create fire lanes, but no one seemed to think it was going to help, so the younger children were flooding into the countryside.

  Lillie couldn’t be the one to take Toshi to safety; her absence would be noticed immediately. But the military wouldn’t come looking for Donald until the day after tomorrow. If he was stopped, he could say that his wife had died suddenly and he was going to leave the baby with family and return. Surely they wouldn’t want him with a child in hand; it would only mean more work for them as they would have to farm Toshi out. If they came to question Lillie, it wouldn’t be until days later, and she would simply play dumb and express her pride that her husband had left to die in glory for the Emperor.

  Meanwhile, she would stay in the city and take care of Tateishi-sama. The old man cursed them both; the more helpless he became, the worse his temper grew. Hers grew, too. She knew Donald was right, that she couldn’t care for Toshi and also for her father-in-law and still report to work. It was logical. The best thing for her son. But she also knew what she would do in Donald’s place, if she were set free with Toshi—what she had tried to do already—and she couldn’t bite back the sour fear rising in the back of her throat.

  * * *

  Besides her son, the only bright spot in Lillie’s life since she left the farm was Hanako Harada. Originally from Hawaii, Hanako was Lillie’s partner on the translation team. They had been paired so they could help each other, since Lillie’s Japanese was so katakoto and Hanako’s English, at least when she put her pidgin accent on, was impossible to understand. Lillie had kept her distance at first, not wanting to get involved in the trouble she knew this brash girl would attract. But that was the thing she was to learn about Hanako: She got away with everything. Soldiers, schoolgirls, even the lieutenant colonel all loved her stories. Unlike Lillie, Hanako kept nothing secret, nothing safe. In the few months they had known each other, Lillie had come to yearn for the sound of Hanako’s voice every morning: the bravado and the lilt of Hawaiian pidgin; the wide grin and the barking laugh for which she had been sure Hanako would be hustled away, or maybe even jailed, when she first heard it. Hanako, more than anyone else, made Lillie feel safe.

  The unit they were working for was hidden in a mansion just north of the main castle. They were intercepting shortwave radio broadcasts from the Allies. Only girls had been drafted, all Nisei: American girls who had been visiting family in Japan when the war broke out and were stranded here. Some of them were as young as thirteen. “Mo’ betta than pulling down buildings to make fire breaks,” Hanako observed, as if they’d been offered a choice.

  Their job was to listen and to translate. They weren’t supposed to talk. They couldn’t talk about America because it was the enemy. They couldn’t talk about what their lives were like here and now: with young boys throwing rocks at them in the streets for being American; how there had been so little for so long and now there was almost nothing. But what they really could not talk about was the truth that Japan was losing the war. They had lost Saipan, the Philippines, Iwo Jima, and reports were coming in that the Battle of Steel in Okinawa might also end in defeat. On the night shift, the Allied radio operators told stories about how the “Japs” were slaughtering their own civilians rather than letting them be taken. Women and children were walking off cliffs. It was propaganda for sure, but it was equally true that there was something in the air now of death: a sense that they had all been walking toward a cliff and it had finally come into sight. The soldiers in the south were giving townspeople grenades to kill themselves, so said the propaganda, and the soldiers in the castle complex around Lillie were muttering at the waste because there was no more lead to make bullets and few grenades left.

  But they could talk about Hawaii. Even though Japan had bombed it, it wasn’t truly America. It stood between two worlds, not a part of either. Little girls in Hawaii, Hanako said, ran around barefoot and chased tadpoles in the creeks beside their houses. There were cherry blossoms there, just like in Japan, and kids packed one musubi for lunch at school. On Sundays, there was shave ice with adzuki beans in the middle of a hot afternoon. There was no war in Hawaii, no internment camps. Everyone belonged.

  Because Hanako was who she was, she was allowed to talk about Hawaii. And because everyone longed for a safe home. She to
ld them she had grown up on a sugarcane plantation; she had eight brothers and sisters, but her entire family returned to Japan just after she was born. She stayed behind, hānaied to her childless aunt Suzy, who owned her own home. Hanako only traveled to Japan because her grandmother was sick and her aunt had asked her to pay their last respects. She was to deliver a jade pendant that Suzy had been given when she was married, and then return to Hawaii.

  With so much family in Japan, it wasn’t clear why Hanako had been living alone in Hiroshima and teaching English at the school for girls when the war began. None of the monitor girls questioned her story, even though it was clear that the pendant she referred to was the one she wore around her neck and often fingered when the air raid sirens blew. It was enough for all of them to know Aunt Suzy and Uncle Joe were out there, that there was a place without prisoners and ritual suicide, a place where they could be embraced as family. It was enough to hear Hanako’s lilting voice in the early-morning hours when not even the radio operators could stay awake. She was their sanctuary in the growing darkness.

  Aunt Suzy and Uncle Joe love little children, Hanako told Lillie, making a space in paradise for Toshi also.

  All they had to do was stay safe until the war ended. In the dark of the night, sewing coins into the hem of her husband’s old coat, Lillie had one goal: that she and Toshi live through this.

  If she could make sure of that, Hanako would bring them both home.

  Hana

  After I opened the case, just as I expected, my nightmares became constant. Me with Kei’s scar in my palm. Me with my face slashed in two. I knew the photograph was causing it. Grief emanated from it, a throbbing ache that seeped through my body and into everything I touched. I wasn’t the loved one. How had I ever thought I was? But that loss was only part of what was haunting me. Now I understood that there had been another child who Mama cherished, and I had no idea who he was. I took the fragments out of the envelope and mounted them on an old scrap of poster board with stick glue, matching them as carefully as I could to minimize the frayed white lines so I could see him. The answer to a question that I had never thought to ask.

  What if I had gotten it wrong? I thought then. What if my mother was hounded not by spirits, but by real people? This boy, for example. What if it was he who disappeared? The boy in the black-and-white photo was old enough to stand, but looked fragile; at his wrists and ankles, you could clearly see his bones. His hair was thick and dark, spraying off his head like a funnel of spiked grass. His outfit was white, a long, billowing sailor suit with dark trim. It was a quick, candid photo, taken somewhere warm or at least in a warm season; I knew because his knees and lower arms were bare. He wasn’t moving, and yet his hair spun around his head.

  Who was this child?

  Look at your hair, Mama had said one time when she was lying down, but not to us. It’s like a helicopter flying in the sky.

  It was an odd thing to say—how could hair be like a helicopter? My little-girl mind had tried to picture it. Did it hover, or pinwheel in the wind? It sounded light, the way she said it; the word floated like a dandelion in the wind, not thrumming like the propellers on the military carriers that sometimes dove in from the camp up near the volcano. And what would the spirit in her fever dream look like with this soaring hair?

  Now, I knew. But knowing raised more questions than it answered. A suspicion was forming, rising along with my memories. Whoever he was, the boy was a secret, and that secret threatened to upend everything I had ever suspected about who Kei and I were meant to be.

  I had learned the meaning of Kei’s name one afternoon after she dropped out of the weekend sewing class Mama had enrolled us in. It was a tough year: the first year of intermediate school, and our new principal had decided that twins had to be separated and had put Kei into a less gifted class. There was no reason for it; Kei was nothing if not clever. She was not happy to be in the B class, so she went on strike. Anything she could quit, she quit.

  On Kei’s last day in the sewing class, we were learning how to cut patterns. A simple shift with darts, more fitted than anything Mama would let us wear. Once we had pinned and measured everything and were making our patterns, Miss Shima pointed out that Kei’s was lopsided. She held it up—all of Kei’s mistakes for the benefit of the whole class—then refit her, only to find out that Kei’s measurements were meticulous. Her body was defective, not her cutting skills.

  Our patterns were two sizes bigger than for most of the girls. With Arnie in the family, there was an abundance of food in the house, or maybe it was the beefy Caucasian half of our missing father that suddenly started growing, but by age twelve we were already as big as our mother, with budding but still larger breasts. We felt huge in those days—though today we stand about five foot six and our breasts and hips and thighs are all proportionate and, frankly, small—I still remember obsessing over whether my thighs would touch, or worse stick together, when I sat down. I knew, if I offered myself up, that one of my shoulders would be higher, too, my hips just as tipped, “like a little teapot,” as Miss Shima had pantomimed. I could hear the happy screams of TALL and STOUT! that were already gathering for recess, and I couldn’t bring myself to keep Kei company.

  At that point in our lives, Kei and I were still sisters, if not exactly friends, and if she had announced her decision to withdraw from the class outright, I would have quit, too, in solidarity. Instead, she orchestrated a series of last-minute punishments—for a line of laundry dropped into the dirt and broken dishes in the sink—designed to get herself grounded so she wouldn’t have to go. I could see the cloud wash over Mama’s face every time Kei misbehaved, and I did everything I could to smooth things over between them. I folded two stacks of shirts when Kei wouldn’t do hers, and convinced Mama we should switch off on chores instead of doing them together so I could pretend to be Kei. When I tried to reason with Kei, she called me a prig and told me to get off my high horse—language she’d surely picked up in the B class. She was reveling in her black sheep status, suddenly needing everything to be the opposite.

  On the first day Kei left me to go to Miss Shima’s alone, we were learning needlepoint, which would have bored Kei to death anyway, since her only interest in sewing was to learn how to make store-bought clothes look homemade. Miss Shima assigned us family crests: the family crest being a Japanese thing, and most of us in the class being some kind of Japanese. She was a young Japanese American woman recently arrived from the mainland—a katonk, some of the kids called her, slang for the empty sound that her mainlander’s head would supposedly have made if you hit it. Mama would have nothing to do with Miss Shima—she avoided the “Japanese-y types” as she called them, which was strangely prejudiced, given that she was Japanese American herself. But then, Hawaii was at odds with itself about race: On one hand, everyone got along; on the other hand, there were distinctions, even within a single ethnic group. There were those who were born in the islands, those who came from the mainland (as we called the rest of the United States, having just joined the nation), and those enigmatic strangers who arrived from their originating country and had little in common with us. The mainlanders were considered to be the best—they were cultured—which meant that all the mothers except ours loved Miss Shima and overlooked her unseemly interest in a country that was the enemy just a little too recently for comfort. But the girls were different. They teased her behind her back for her perfectly haole voice.

  No one wanted to make a family crest. Most of us didn’t even know if our families had one. Miss Shima explained that crests should be circular—something maybe having to do with the shape of the hand guards on samurai swords. At that point in my life, I still imagined myself an artist, though by then I had abandoned my childish monsters in favor of capturing things that were actually there. Now that I was supposed to draw what I saw, I had gotten a little controlling: always sketching in one direction, from the bottom left-hand corner up. Something to do with not wanting to smudge the page.
If I got stuck on something, if I couldn’t replicate what I saw in a way that satisfied me, I couldn’t finish. Other people could skip over it and come back later, but I didn’t want to waste my time getting 90 percent of the picture right and then be unable to complete the nose. If it wasn’t perfect, it was over.

  But that precision was impossible in needlepoint. I was forced to create something a little more abstract than my usual pictures. It was a triad of three barely interlocking circles. I shaded them as best I could with hints of black and gray.

  One of the girls swore her family crest was a gingko leaf and resisted Miss Shima’s suggestion that she locate it inside a circle—maybe the frustration started there. Or maybe it was the impossibility of trying to stitch curves in a rectangular grid. When we were finished and Miss Shima was trying in vain to match our attempts to our original ideas, she came over to me.

  “What is it?” she asked, after praising the subtlety of my stitches. She was overly enthusiastic whenever anyone in the class did anything right, and she tended to single me out.

  “Us.” I used my quietest voice. “And Mama.”

  Mama was the top circle; Kei and I the smaller two on the bottom. I can still see the black strokes of our hair falling through the stitches, and the suggestions of shoulders, the floor. Although those pre-Arnie days of Mama fainting and telling us fevered stories were long gone, they were still a part of me. Or maybe I was lonely.