by Leslie Helm
It was late, and the windows were now sheets of black obsidian. I was holding Mariko in my arms and pacing the apartment. She had finally quieted. Marie and I were exhausted. I told Marie to go to bed, and I would put Mariko to bed. As soon as I tried to put Mariko in her crib, she started to cry. If I sat on the couch, she wailed. At two o’clock in the morning, Mariko finally fell asleep, her head lying on my shoulders. I inched down slowly on the couch, but as soon as my butt touched the couch, Mariko lifted her head and started to bawl. She was fighting me with every ounce of her power. At four o’clock, I surrendered. I climbed into the crib and sat there with Mariko asleep in my arms. As the light of dawn started to filter through the windows, Mariko was finally asleep. I could feel her heartbeat slow. I could feel the hard wood slats of the crib digging into my back as I too finally drifted to sleep.
When I awoke, Mariko was in the dining room having breakfast with Marie. When I bent over to give her a kiss, she turned her head away from me. My chest tightened. My new daughter had been barely home for a day and already, like my father before me and, perhaps, like his father before him, I was proving to be a terrible father.
In those first months, I tried to woo Mariko every way I could. I reached deep into the well of my memory as a child growing up in Japan. Clap your hands, then just close them, open them up again, and raise them high. Mariko knew many of the same games and songs I had learned as a child; for the first time, I felt truly blessed to have been raised in Japan. Marie had taken a sabbatical from work and since she could spend the whole day with Mariko, the two were growing closer by the day. But I had something else I shared with Mariko—a childhood in Japan. At bedtime, I pulled out my guitar and a Japanese songbook and sang until my voice went hoarse. Mariko loved to hear me sing. I found myself singing haunting melodies I had loved as a child, but whose lyrics I had never completely understood.
When was it?
Picking wild mulberries in the fields
With my nanny who was sent off to be a bride at fifteen.
Her family could not support her.
We saw the red dragonfly alight on a reed,
Set afire by the setting sun.
Mariko would often join me. Her voice was bright and loud and always on key. Soon she knew all the verses of even the longest and most complex songs. At first when I sang those sad songs, I thought of the pain Mariko had suffered in the first three years of her life—then I thought of my own bittersweet childhood in Japan. I remembered dancing in my yukata at the festival of the spirits, feeling awkward as the only foreigner in a ring of dancers; I remembered the elaborate gardens of a famous restaurant where, after dinner, they released thousands of fireflies. I would run through the garden chasing after that cloud of stardust that always seemed just beyond my reach.
It had been nearly a month since Mariko had come home with us. I was up early, making Sunday breakfast in our tiny kitchen. The morning sun lit up the apartment and warmed the kitchen floor. I turned to find Mariko standing by the refrigerator looking at me with her dark, sleepy eyes, her hair sticking out every which way. She was in her blue pajamas—the ones with tiny rocking horses that I had picked out for her. In her left hand, she held her teddy bear. I picked up an egg and held it out to her between my thumb and forefinger.
“Do you want to help Papa crack it?”
She looked at the egg,intrigued, but eyed me suspiciously. She did not move. My left hand stayed on the stainless steel bowl where I had already measured out the flour. My extended right hand, still holding the egg, grew heavy, but I did not move. We were two gunslingers facing off at high noon. Who would blink first?
Mariko furrowed her brows. She dropped her teddy bear and walked over to me. She took the egg from my hand. I lifted her up on the kitchen counter, then I leaned over her shoulder and put my right hand over her right hand to help her crack the egg on the edge of the bowl. Then I put my left hand over her left hand and guided her tiny fingers to pull the two sides of the broken egg shell gently apart. The glistening yellow sun of the yolk slid out and came to rest in a small depression in the flour.
“Again!” Mariko demanded. I took another egg out of the carton, though the recipe didn’t call for it. “I will mix,” she announced grandly, after successfully cracking the second egg.
I gave her the whisk and showed her how to mix. Her warm back leaned against my chest as she began to stir the batter. I gently kissed Mariko on the cheek. She turned her head briefly, as if I were distracting her, but she was okay with it. From that day forward, we often cooked together. Even today as a young adult, she likes to show off the scar on her wrist from when I let her get a little too close to a frying pan. She shows it as if it were a badge of our shared adventures.
Most mornings Mariko awoke before us and crawled into our bed. I would pick her up and place her between Marie and me. While Mariko lay on her back, Marie would smother her with kisses from the right side. I would attack her with kisses from the left. Mariko would giggle, showing us deep dimples on her big round cheeks. She was ticklish, but she always wanted more. It was Mariko’s favorite treat—the kiss sandwich.
WHEN THE HEAT AND HUMIDITY descended on Tokyo that first summer together, we rented a cabin at Lake Nojiri, a mountain retreat for Christian missionaries. The cabin was drafty and the bathroom dank and smelly from the open-pit toilet. Mariko was an early riser and, afraid to go by herself, she would shout, “toilet!” I would walk her to the bathroom and wait while she squatted over the hole and told me her plans for the day in her rapid-speak Japanese: “I’m gonna go on the swing, jump in the water from the tree, and draw a nice picture for Mama.”
One evening, I parked the car behind a restaurant in the little village nearby and let Mariko down from her car seat. Suddenly she ran out into the street laughing joyously. I heard the sound of a revving engine. I raced after her and swept her up in my arms. At that instant, a dozen motorcycles roared by. Mariko looked at me wide-eyed. Motorcycle exhaust lingered in the air. My heart pounded. It had been just six weeks since Mariko had come to us, but already I could not imagine life without her.
One Sunday, Marie and I took a walk with Mariko between us. Every few steps we would go “wheeee!” and lift her up into the air. “Again,” she would demand. As we were walking by the boathouse, we noticed a new sign posted. “Newborn baby looking for Christian family,” it said. I wasn’t religious, but it was easy to believe, here in this Christian retreat, that God had a hand in putting that sign there, as Marie and I had our hearts set on having a second child.
That afternoon Marie was on the telephone. A Japanese pastor in the northern city of Fukushima was looking for a family to adopt a boy born to a teenage girl in a local hospital two weeks before. Japanese authorities didn’t like to put babies up for adoption until they were at least a year old so they could assure parents there were no birth defects. This Christian pastor thought the boy should be adopted right away and had asked a minister in Nojiri to find a family. Within a week of making the phone call, Marie, Mariko and I were on a bullet train bound for Fukushima. We borrowed a small bassinet and purchased a pack of paper diapers, a box of powdered milk and two milk bottles. The pastor met us at the station. He was surprisingly young and clearly nervous. We were also anxious. Mariko just skipped along the station platform singing her made-up songs.
Leslie Helm and wife Marie with Eric and Mariko.
“Mariko seems to be a happy child,” said the pastor, as if reassuring himself that we would be good parents.
“Mariko is excited about getting a younger brother,” I replied.
We had chosen a Western name, Eric, for the baby boy. His biological mother had named him Yuki, but we worried that name might subject him to teasing in America. We decided Yuki should be Eric’s middle name. The pastor took us to a bland meeting room in a hotel with a large conference table. Eric’s paternal grandmother and grandfather greeted us first. They were formal and polite. His maternal grandmother was warm and smi
led broadly. The young mother entered the room with Eric. She was a shy, quiet girl. She gave little sign of how she felt about giving up her newborn. Perhaps on the advice of the pastor, the birth mother had not seen Eric since the day he was born. I thought I saw a tear glisten as she handed the baby to Marie. Marie took a bottle of milk she had prepared and gave it to Eric. He drank hungrily.
While Marie was with the birth mother and the two grandmothers fussing over Eric, I looked on from a distance as I tried to make small talk with the pastor and the grandfather, an elegant man in his early forties who worked for the government’s forestry department. The formalities had been dispensed with quickly. The pastor had made sure all the papers were in order. Since the city of Tokyo had already approved us as adoptive parents, the authorities agreed to process Eric’s adoption application together with Mariko’s application.
As we visited with the birth family, we were having trouble finding something to say. The things we wanted most to know we did not feel comfortable asking. Why had the mother decided to have the child? How did she feel about giving up this baby to strangers who would very likely leave Japan? What was the birth father like? At a loss for words, we focused on Mariko, who bubbled with excitement about the baby. Then it was time to leave.
The pastor, the grandparents and the mother came to the train station to see us off. We all bowed. There was no hugging, but as we boarded the train, suddenly there were tears. We cried. They cried. How odd it was, this emotional farewell. They had been strangers a few hours before. Now they were family. Soon they would be strangers again. They waved to us as the train pulled away. We waved back. I thought about how Eric’s two grandmothers, his grandfather and the pastor had come together for us and would now return to their lives without the baby. Now we were a family of four. My two children were as Japanese as Hiro; I was something in between; and Marie was Caucasian. Each of us came from a different world, yet here we were bound together, ready to create something new for ourselves and be a family. When the train pulled out of the station, Mariko looked down into the little basket. She petted Eric’s downy hair. “Nen-ne, Erikku,” she said. “Go to sleep now.”
As the bullet train hurtled through the darkness, we sat in our seats peaceful and content. Little did we know of the challenges we would face as we forged a new identity for our family.
Lake Nojiri, ca. 1940.
THAT SUMMER OF 1992, MARIE and the two kids stayed at the cabin we rented at Lake Nojiri. I joined them most weekends, always looking forward to spending time with the family in the cool mountain air. During the week, when I was alone, I thought often of Charles, who took Japanese citizenship for business reasons and slipped out of his German identity, chameleon-like, when Germany became Japan’s enemy. I thought of Willie, who took the opposite tack, bravely—some might say foolishly—volunteering to fight for Germany’s interests in China to prove he was a loyal German. How did it feel then to be identified at the prison camp, above all, as a child of mixed blood? I have avoided that stigma because I look white. Yet that experience of being an outsider, of being part of Japan, yet separate, was always an irritant. It was like a persistent itch I longed to scratch but could never quite reach. What does it do to our sense of self when there is no group to which we belong, except, perhaps, to that ill-defined group of those who don’t quite belong anywhere? I found myself revisiting past events and viewing them from a new perspective—one that was both eye-opening and alarming.
I thought back to the sunny afternoon in August 1991, just a month before my father’s death, when I had taken the subway to a Tokyo suburb for an assignment. I was standing on the street corner when a white Mercedes Benz with tinted windows pulled up in front of me. The driver, a young Japanese albino wearing a brightly colored Hawaiian shirt and his white hair in a crew cut, opened the door for me. He was my ride. I was on my way to meet with a yakuza boss to do a story on Japan’s mafia-like gangsters.
As the driver navigated his big car through the narrow streets, I noticed something odd about his right hand as it rested on the steering wheel—his pinky was a short stub. It reminded me of a scene from a Japanese movie about yakuza in which a gangster chopped off his own pinky with a butcher’s knife as a way of making amends to his boss for botching an important job. I shuddered. Gangsters could turn violent if they believed someone was impugning their honor. Yet I had to ask. Screwing up my courage, I leaned forward. “So what happened to your finger?”
When the driver turned his head, his pale face flushed a bright red. “I wrecked the Boss’s car,” he said, embarrassed.
I sank back into the plush leather seats, feeling a mixture of amusement and relief. Perhaps he was a gangster, but he seemed like a sweet kid.
He parked in a quiet neighborhood and led me to a small, second-floor apartment, leaving me in a small living room. At the far end of the room, a five-foot-high wood carving of a cobra stood ready to strike, a gold sake cup in the snake’s mouth. A samurai sword hung on the right wall at chest height.
A middle-aged man with a pockmarked face strode into the room, followed my eyes to the sword and smiled. “We need that to defend ourselves,” he said. “The police won’t let us have guns.”
It was hard to know if it was just bravado. I knew the Boss’s parent organization was expanding into new areas in Tokyo and faced threats from rival Tokyo gangs, but did they really fight with samurai swords?
The Boss went to the galley kitchen and poured himself a glass of milk. “Bad liver,” he explained as he sat down on a sofa and beckoned me to sit on the easy chair beside him. He was a short, stocky man with a blunt nose and thick eyebrows. He wore a batik shirt, a heavy gold bracelet, a gilded John F. Kennedy silver-dollar belt buckle and a diamond-studded Rolex. He had an ugly scar under his jaw that moved when he spoke.
Apologizing in advance for being rude, I asked him about his driver’s lost pinky.
“I never asked him to do that, you know, but it was a nice gesture,” he said with a smile. “It made me feel like a father toward him.”
For the first time I was afraid. When I was growing up in Japan, the only time we heard about gangsters was when warfare broke out between gangs or when the papers would run photos of gang members all dressed up in their dark suits waiting for a prominent member’s imminent release from prison.
The conventional view in Japan was that yakuza were a necessary evil. In a society without a developed consumer loan business, yakuza were a source of credit. In a society where the courts were inaccessible, the yakuza helped resolve disputes. In popular movies, the yakuza were often portrayed as heroes of the downtrodden. Police tolerated them because they absorbed fringe elements of society—misfits, members of the untouchable tribe and half-castes. They took these people who were excluded from mainstream Japanese society and employed them in organized criminal activities like gambling and prostitution, preventing them from getting involved in more serious crimes.
However, in the bubble era of the 1980s, yakuza had emerged as a serious social problem. Developers, frustrated by strong tenant laws, used gangsters to drive renters out of buildings they wanted to demolish so they could build large, new buildings. In addition, the yakuza were getting involved in the stock market and expanding overseas.
I had gotten this Boss’s name from a long list of gang members that a Japanese investigative journalist friend had gotten from a police contact. This Boss had been the only one on the list willing to talk. I asked him about the décor in his room. The snake, he explained, was a symbol of virility. The shrine in the kitchen was a reminder of the traditional Japanese values that yakuza honored.
When I asked him about the police crackdown on the yakuza, however, the Boss gave me a wry smile. His right eye twitched as he pulled out a stack of business cards from his pocket and spread them on the table like a pack of playing cards. I could see at a glance that many of the cards were from police detectives. “We have our contacts,” he said. “They won’t bother us.”
Now as I look back, I realize there was something else. The Boss reminded me of my father. It was his spirit of defiance, the “me against the world” attitude. Like Dad, he pretended not to care what anybody thought of him, and yet I knew it was all that mattered. Perhaps it all came down to this: Although their lives moved in vastly different orbits, this gangster and my father shared something important—they were outsiders who hungered for respect.
As I thought about it, I realized that the world of the gangsters and the world of the mixed-blood foreigner were not as far apart as I would have liked to think. Half-castes, as they were referred to then, often lived in a murky world in Japan. Many of my mixed-blood childhood friends adopted the foot-dragging saunter and tough dialect of the chimpira—punk gangs from which yakuza recruited. One of the few avenues open to half-castes in those days was the entertainment world, a world filled with gangsters.
Perhaps because of our family’s outsider status, my father sometimes found himself dealing with yakuza. One of the last big deals Dad handled in Japan was the sale of his Uncle Jim’s summer house on the seashore in a small neighborhood called Maiko on the western edge of Kobe. Dad told Jim’s family that the buyer was a gangster. Only a gangster can pay such an exorbitant sum for a house in cash.