The Translation of Love

by Lynne Kutsukake

  “Fumi? Is that you? Are you home?” her mother suddenly called out, an anxious edge to her voice. She heard her mother’s slow, unsteady footsteps approaching the foot of the ladder. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

  “Tadaima. I just got back,” Fumi replied, shoving the photograph and the money into the bamboo basket where she kept some of her clothes. She picked up the scrap she had cut off and resolved to burn it later with the other garbage.

  14

  On Friday Nancy Nogami came over to Matt’s desk with a typewritten translation. It was past suppertime and the others in the office had already gone for the day. The typists usually left promptly at five o’clock, and she wasn’t in the habit of staying behind.

  “I was just wondering how you feel about translating stuff like this?” She held up a single sheet of paper between the thumbs and forefingers of both hands, and waved it in front of her chest like it was something too dirty to touch. “This one’s yours, I believe. I just finished it. Typed it up exactly as written.”

  Although they worked in the same office, Matt and Nancy hardly spoke. In fact, he couldn’t recall ever being alone with her.

  “Do you want to look at it again? I’ve got more, too.” She pointed to her desk. “Same topic. I guess I ended up with the whole batch.”

  “Just put them in the courier box, along with everything else. Same routine as always.”

  “So you think they should be sent to MacArthur?”

  “Well, that’s who they’re addressed to.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Miss Nogami, as you know, our assignment is to translate what comes in as it comes in. The content, if that’s what you’re getting at, is beyond our control.”

  “Of course, I know that.” She rolled her eyes, and something about the way she did it reminded him of his big sister. That look of tolerant exasperation.

  “It’s just that I really wonder whether these kinds of letters should be forwarded. I mean, do you think it’s appropriate?” Nancy brought the sheet of paper in her hands up to within inches of her face and started reading aloud.

  Dear General MacArthur,

  I am Michiko Hayato, age twenty-four. I am in good physical condition, and full of much energy and enthusiasm. I have heard that Your Excellency is working day and night for the building of our country and for the benefit of all Japanese citizens. I am filled with great hope for our future advancement.

  But Your Excellency is in danger of tiring if he works too hard without recreation. Your health is most important. Please retain your vigor and manliness. Please let me know if I may provide any service.

  Your most sincere servant,

  Miss M. Hayato

  Suginami Ward, Tokyo

  “Miss Nogami, you really shouldn’t—”

  “Wait a minute now. Here’s a beaut. This one is even better.”

  Dear Mr. Douglas, General, Supreme Leader,

  I have seen your picture in the Asahi Graphic Magazine. You are strong and tall, and I believe you are a good father. You are good-looking and healthy. I am also good-looking and healthy. I am ready to put my womb to your noble service. Our baby would be a handsome boy, a perfect new citizen for the new democratic nation of Japan. Please, let us have a baby who will bring Japan and America together in proud union.

  Yours with strong faith and sincere good wishes,

  Hiroko Ono

  Numazu City, Shizuoka Prefecture

  By the time she’d reached the end of the letter, Nancy’s voice was quavering. She sounded like she was about to break down in tears.

  “Miss Nogami, please.”

  “You guys think it’s funny, don’t you.” The quaver was gone. Her voice had snapped back to its old sharpness. “Downright hilarious.”

  He felt relieved that she wasn’t going to make a scene.

  “I heard MacIntosh and Wilson this afternoon in the hallway,” she continued. “They were laughing like a pair of hyenas.”

  “Well, they’re jerks. You never saw Lieutenant Baker laughing, did you.” He looked at her. “Or me.”

  “Lieutenant Baker is a gentleman,” she said with finality.

  “There are lots of gentlemen here,” Matt said. He wanted to add “I’m one, too,” but he preferred that she be the one to acknowledge that. She said nothing. Instead, her outrage seemed to be contagious, and now he felt angry, too. Until that moment, he had been fine, glad to see the end of a busy day, the culmination of a full week in which he’d worked hard and accomplished a lot. And now this woman standing in front of him was trying to make him feel lousy. Worse, she was succeeding.

  “I’m just doing my job, the way you’re doing your job,” he said.

  Nancy glared at him. “Sometimes I hate this job.”

  “Well, why don’t you quit? I’m sure there are lots of other people who wouldn’t mind doing it.” As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he knew what a mean-spirited remark it was.

  Nancy fell quiet. She walked to her desk and stood with her back to him. He could hear her shuffling papers and opening and closing her desk drawers. When she turned around, she had her purse in one hand and her scarf draped over her forearm.

  “You’re going?” he asked.

  She didn’t bother to nod. “See you next week.”

  Matt regretted his loose tongue. He knew she couldn’t quit. She needed the money and no job paid better than one working directly for the Occupation forces. Everyone wanted one of those.

  “My sister was studying to be a secretary,” he said, “before the war.”

  A faint smile seemed to cross Nancy’s face, although perhaps it was more of a grimace.

  “Simpson School of Typing and Shorthand,” he continued. “I can still see those green-and-orange textbooks.”

  “Humph.” Nancy crossed her arms. “So she’s probably a good typist.”

  “At one time she was, I guess. Pretty good.”

  “Well, it’s too bad I never went to secretarial school. At least I would have learned how to type.”

  “You don’t seem like the type—to type, I mean.”

  “Damn right.” She paused, as if surprised at the language that had just come out of her mouth. “Oh, I’m sorry. Did I say that? Well excuse my French!”

  She and Matt burst out laughing at the same time.

  He learned that before the war broke out, Nancy had been sent to Japan to take care of her mother’s older sister. Her aunt suffered from rheumatoid arthritis and it was getting worse with each passing year. Her mother wanted to visit, but she and Nancy’s father were too busy running a small boardinghouse, so Nancy was sent in her mother’s stead. She was loaded down with suitcases full of food and clothing, all gifts for her aunt’s family and assorted relatives. When she got here, it seemed to her that her aunt wasn’t really all that sick but everyone was welcoming and she made the best of the opportunity she’d been given. Her trip was supposed to be three months, and her return ticket was scheduled for mid-December. Her aunt suggested that she extend her stay longer in order to spend New Year’s in Japan, but Nancy wasn’t even tempted. She wanted to get home. Of course, no one knew that war was about to break out and that there would be no more ships.

  “It must have been awful to be stranded here during the war.”

  She shrugged. “You learn you can get used to anything. My family back home didn’t exactly have a picnic, either, did they. The hardest part was not knowing. You can’t imagine what life was like then with no letters. It was torture.”

  She shifted her purse to her other arm and then turned her head to look at the clock on the wall beside Lieutenant Baker’s desk.

  Matt was suddenly conscious of how quiet the empty office was once they’d stopped speaking. The hum of the wall clock was all he could hear. “Miss Nogami,” he said, “are you usually busy on Sundays? I mean, I thought maybe you might like to go for a stroll.”

  She looked at him suspiciously. “What do you mean ‘a stroll’?”
/>
  “Do you think that’s a frivolous thing to do? Okay, maybe not that. Perhaps there’s somewhere you’d like to go. Some place you’d like to see.”

  She puffed out her cheeks and thought for a moment. “Sure. As a matter of fact, there is somewhere I wouldn’t mind going.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “I wouldn’t mind going to the zoo.”

  15

  After Fumi showed her the photograph of her sister, Aya felt an even greater shift in their relationship. Fumi was friendly in a new determined way, possessive in her attentions. Now that school was out for summer vacation, she insisted that they meet every day on the temple grounds or in the library ruins. She wanted to tutor Aya, as she had promised. Her enthusiasm for the idea of tutoring, however, far outstripped her ability to teach, and most of the time Fumi simply talked about herself or her family or whatever was on her mind. She described her father’s bookstore and how she used to accompany him when he had to deliver or pick up books. “My father says I’ve got a really good sense of direction,” she boasted. “I can find my way around anywhere.”

  When Fumi got tired of talking about herself, she peppered Aya with questions. “Do you have milk in Canada?” “Do people sleep with their shoes on?” “Does it snow every day?”

  Aya was relieved that Fumi never probed in a personal way. If she had asked what had happened to her mother, it would have been impossible to answer. And there wasn’t much to say about her father, either. Usually he was out until late at night doing his work. She knew it was hard, although she wasn’t sure exactly where he went or what he did. They spoke only about matters of immediate necessity, but it wasn’t so different from the way things had always been. For as long as she could remember, her father had been a silent man, and as a child it had seemed natural that she would communicate with him mainly through her mother. After all, she had always been her mother’s daughter, and always would be, she thought. Even now.

  Sometimes when she and Fumi were sitting among the ruins of the library, boys from school came by to taunt Aya. Whenever it happened, Fumi would shoo them away with a combination of threatening arm movements and invective so rough Aya couldn’t understand anything except the fiery tone of her voice.

  The summer days passed. The buzz of the cicadas filled the air with an urgent electric throb. Fumi had not covered any of the subjects in their school curriculum, but Aya was aware that her own hearing comprehension had vastly improved. More and more when she thought in Japanese, she didn’t hear her mother’s slow soft manner of speech. Her brain, her mind, her entire head was filled with Fumi’s voice.

  Aya was grateful for Fumi’s attention, but she knew nothing was for nothing. So when Fumi asked if she could do her a favor, Aya wasn’t surprised in the least. What did surprise her was the nature of the request.

  “I need a letter in English,” Fumi said. “A really important letter for a really important person.”

  Aya hated being reminded of her English. She hated anything that made her different. English set her apart, when all she longed to do was blend in and be the same as everyone else. Indeed, there were times when she wished she could cut out all the English parts of her tongue and make do with whatever was left. Cut out the parts of her brain that remembered all the other things, too.

  “What kind of letter?” she asked. “What’s it for?”

  “Well, it’s…” Fumi dug the toe of her sandal into the loose dirt.

  They were at the back of the temple grounds again, in the gloomiest section where the trees cast dark shadows. In the distance Aya could hear the sound of the Buddhist priest’s broom scraping the ground. Shaaa, shaaa, shaaa.

  “Remember the picture I showed you of my sister?”

  Aya nodded.

  “I don’t know where she is. All I know is she has a job dancing with Amerikajin. I want to find her and make her come home.”

  Aya thought about the photograph Fumi had shown her with the woman standing next to the GI. “Is the letter for the American soldier? Is that why you want it in English?”

  “Oh, no.” Fumi looked genuinely puzzled. “I want to write a letter to MacArthur-san.”

  Aya felt her jaw drop. “To General MacArthur?”

  Fumi nodded.

  “You can’t write to someone like that.”

  “But everybody is writing to him. Please, Aya, you’re the only one who can help me. Please write the letter for me.”

  “What do your parents think of your idea?”

  Fumi shook her head vehemently. “I can’t tell them. They wouldn’t understand at all. They would try to stop me.”

  It was quiet. The cicadas had suddenly fallen silent and even the mosquitoes seemed to have stopped buzzing.

  “Please. I need a letter in English. You’re the only one I can ask.”

  Fumi bowed her head low in supplication, and Aya immediately felt foolish, and then humiliated, and then angry. Nobody ever bowed to her. It was always the other way around, she was supposed to bow to them. That’s what her father said. Bow to everyone, bow as low as you can. It made her feel uncomfortable, the top of Fumi’s dark head pointed straight at her. It was as if Fumi had stopped being her friend and had found a new way to make fun of her.

  “Okay,” she said, mostly because she wanted Fumi to stop bowing. “Okay, I’ll do it. Tell me what you want to say.”

  In the end Aya had to compose the letter on her own because Fumi, for all her natural facility at talking, did not know how to write. She seemed indifferent to the words.

  “If you dictate the letter to me, I’ll translate it into English,” Aya said.

  “Just say I want Sumiko to come home.”

  “But you have to tell me what to write,” Aya insisted. “It’s your letter.”

  “I don’t know. Something like ‘Please find her.’ ”

  “Okay.” Aya wrote down the words. “What else?”

  Fumi thought for a minute. “You said you are here to help the Japanese people. Please help me.”

  Aya wrote that down, too. “Isn’t there anything else you can think of? Where does your sister live? Where did she go?”

  Fumi furrowed her brow. “I don’t know. If I knew where she was, I wouldn’t have to ask for help, would I.”

  “But you must have some idea.”

  “Somewhere…in a place where…I don’t know, some kind of dance hall. In the Ginza.”

  “Oh…” Aya wished she hadn’t asked.

  “I really miss her,” Fumi whispered softly. “I want her to come home.”

  The expression on Fumi’s face in that moment was so forlorn Aya couldn’t bear to ask another question. Don’t worry, she thought. I can write a good letter for you. I know how.

  At the school run by the Nisei teachers in the internment camp, Aya was often praised for her English compositions. She could write a nice sentence, and she understood the importance of good spelling and neat handwriting. She even liked memorizing all the rules for grammar and punctuation. Before the evacuation, in Miss Carmichael’s grade-three class, she had learned how to write in a smooth cursive script that looked almost like an adult’s, and every day Miss Carmichael had made them practice spelling new words. No child was too young to learn the proper use of the King’s English, Miss Carmichael liked to say. It was the most magnificent language in the world.

  Of course, Aya had never written to a total stranger before, but she was surprised by the power she felt in using words to command a person’s attention. Simple marks on a piece of paper, simple words, which, if arranged in just the right order, could compel even a general to stop and take notice.

  It took her many attempts before she finally drafted something that she thought might work. If she wanted to catch her reader’s attention, she knew the letter needed to be a little dramatic, perhaps even hint at a bit of danger.

  Dear General MacArthur, she began writing.

  16

  Matt had arranged to meet Nancy at the entra
nce to Ueno Zoo at ten thirty on Sunday morning. He leaned against a wooden pole near the ticket booth and tried to look as casual as any man waiting for a friend. Today he’d decided to wear his civvies, black slacks and a plain white shirt, an outfit that helped him blend into the crowd. But he knew his sturdy leather shoes were a dead giveaway. Most people here had terrible, ill-fitting shoes that fell apart in the first heavy rainfall.

  While he was waiting, two uniformed GIs with their Japanese girlfriends approached the entrance to the zoo. The GIs stayed behind, letting the women go up to the ticket booth. Matt shoved his hands in his pockets and pretended to stare up at the trees. It felt good to be incognito, free to dissolve into the background landscape. The men didn’t take any notice of him, but one of the girlfriends shot Matt a brittle smile as if to say, See, I don’t need Japanese men like you.

  “I don’t know how I got talked into this,” the taller of the two men said. “There can’t be much here. Just a bunch of smelly animals.”

  “Hey, Lily, tell them they should let us in for free,” the other man shouted. “We’re bringing you freedom, aren’t we?”

  Matt watched the foursome saunter into the zoo and realized he’d been waiting for Nancy for twenty minutes. He couldn’t imagine her ever being late for any appointment. He hoped she wasn’t playing a trick on him, but that didn’t seem like her, either, and he couldn’t remember what had possessed him to suggest that they spend time together outside the office.

  And then suddenly there she was, running across the pavement toward him. It was all he could do not to laugh out loud—she looked so comical, her short legs and arms pumping in unison.