The Translation of Love

by Lynne Kutsukake

  “Hey,” Matt said softly. “I’m glad you didn’t do that. I don’t want to have to train another bunkmate, you know. You’re bad enough.”

  Eddie swallowed a mouthful of beer. The glass was still two-thirds full.

  “Let’s go,” he said, abruptly sliding off his stool. “This stuff tastes like piss, and it’s not having any effect. I have a feeling that no matter how much I drink tonight, I won’t be able to get good and blasted.”

  24

  Aya’s father, Toshio Shimamura, had succeeded in becoming invisible. Knowing this was what gave him the strength to do his job. Whether he was pushing his mop down the corridor or wiping windows or hauling out barrels of muck, no one gave him a second glance. The soldiers were used to him by now, the wiry gray-haired Japanese man with a mop whose wooden handle was almost as thick as his skinny forearms. He pushed his mop on the mess-hall floor, sometimes deliberately running it under the tables when the men were still eating, so that occasionally someone got mad and said, “Hey, watch what you’re doing. You just got my shoes wet.” And he would bow and bob his head up and down and pretend that he couldn’t speak English but it wasn’t really pretending because his English wasn’t that good and anyway it didn’t matter because nobody cared. They went back to eating and talking and gossiping and joshing around. They went back for seconds, and sometimes even third helpings. They filled their big American bellies with red meat and mashed potatoes and boiled peas and fat wedges of apple pie. They forgot about the skinny Japanese man who was cleaning the floor of their mess hall, and who would later clean their latrines.

  He was so invisible that once, when he’d had to clean in the office where the Nisei translators worked, not one of them even noticed him. They went right on shuffling their papers or chattering away in English or scratching their heads with the ends of their pencils, and if they happened to glance up, they looked straight through him. Why should anyone look twice at an old man with a broom pushing a pile of dust out the door?

  He hated this job, but he needed it. He hated his need and that it had forced him to go to Ozawa, who was the friend of a friend but not a good man. He hated how he’d begged for his help.

  The job was only temporary, filling in for someone else, but even so Shimamura found that the only way he could cope was to become invisible. To the people around him and to himself.

  Ironically it was one of the best jobs you could get, working for the Occupation forces. Everyone wanted a job like this, but not Shimamura. He had never told his daughter where he worked and he never would. She should go on thinking that he continued to pick up odd jobs on the street, as he had when they first arrived. The shame he felt came from working for hakujin—American, Canadian, they were all the same—after he’d sworn that he would never work for a white man again. Not after what the white people had done to him and his family. To all of them. What kind of man had so little pride?

  But he had to make money. He didn’t want Aya to work; she had to go to school and learn, there was no choice. He’d brought her to Japan and now he had to make sure she learned enough Japanese—good Japanese—to make something of herself here. It was the only thing that mattered. Everything was too late for him, but for her, it had to be a new beginning. And if he had to leave her on her own for much of the time, he was sure that she was all right. She was old enough to go to school by herself; she was old enough to manage. After all, hadn’t he gone to Canada when he was barely older than she was now, a mere youth of sixteen when he’d crossed the Pacific by himself to join his uncle, who had helped him find work in the sawmills?

  “The Occupation needs lots of English speakers,” Ozawa had said, “but your English is lousy. They want Nisei, not Issei like you.”

  “I know Ingurishu.” He was indignant.

  “Hardly!” Ozawa had snorted. “Your kind of broken English is no use. Well, let me see what I can do. I’m sure I can find something. I’ll ask my connections.”

  Shimamura hated that he’d bowed his head and then pretended to offer Ozawa some thank-you money.

  “That’s okay. Maybe you can help me some other way.”

  The first time Shimamura had gone into the dispensary was half by accident, half out of curiosity. The hallway was empty; it was that quiet time in the midafternoon when everyone was away doing their jobs, doing something else. The dispensary was at the other end of the corridor from the mess hall, and he had been looking for a sink in which to empty his dirty water to avoid lugging his bucket all the way back to the janitors’ room down two flights of stairs. He hadn’t expected the dispensary door to be unlocked, and he certainly hadn’t expected to find a room with a wide gleaming counter behind which were rows and rows of white cabinets. He opened one cabinet. The shelves were full of bottles of pills and glass vials and rolls of bandages and safety pins and syringes. Aspirin. Talcum powder. Tooth powder. Diarrhea pills. Suppositories. Everything a patient could need was in these cabinets.

  He heard footsteps coming down the hallway and quickly closed the cabinet. Grabbing his still-full bucket of dirty water, he faced the door.

  “Who the hell are you? What are you doing in here?” The man was in a medic’s uniform but his tie was askew, and although it wasn’t even three o’clock yet, his breath smelled of alcohol.

  Shimamura lowered his head and muttered “Sorry” in Japanese.

  “You’re not supposed to clean in here. Didn’t anyone explain?” The man’s face was florid but his voice was calm. “Here, look.” He gestured to Shimamura to follow him out into the hallway. Then he pointed at a sign high at the top of the door. RESTRICTED ACCESS. KEEP OUT. “I guess you can’t read that, can you. Anyway, it says don’t come in here. Those are the rules. Got it?”

  Shimamura put on his best display of obsequiousness. He gritted his teeth and bowed again. He hadn’t noticed the sign, but he could read it. Although his English was rudimentary, some words he knew by heart. KEEP OUT. Words he’d come to hate more than any other words in the English language. JAPS KEEP OUT. He’d learned what those words meant pretty quickly.

  The man let out a big sigh. “Jesus, I wish they hired people who spoke better English. How hard can that be? Oh well, I guess it’s not your fault.” He reached forward and made to put his hand on Shimamura’s shoulder, but, as if thinking better of it, let his arm fall to his side. “Anyway, I don’t know how the heck you got in. The door’s supposed to be locked.” He spoke under his breath, muttering to himself, and made a big show of locking the door. Again he pointed to the notice, this time even more theatrically.

  KEEP OUT.

  If it hadn’t been for that sign, Shimamura might not have come back.

  After that encounter, he slipped into the dispensary at times when he knew the medic was sneaking a rendezvous with his Japanese girlfriend. It was safe then. He quickly discovered where the medic hid the key to the main door, and after a little exploring he found a ring of keys that opened the special cabinets, the ones that contained medicine. For the longest time he took nothing. He just looked: little white boxes labeled in English with the names of complicated drugs he couldn’t understand but whose value he immediately sensed. If it was locked up, it was valuable to the Americans. If it was valuable, he would take it. Benzedrine, codeine, laudanum, morphine, and much more.

  He didn’t care if he got caught. But somehow he knew he wouldn’t. Even if the doses were counted and someone got suspicious, he knew the medic would only be worried about being disciplined himself and would do anything to hide the discrepancy.

  It was always about the taking, not about the money. That was something Ozawa never understood. Shimamura regretted the day he had bragged to Ozawa about what he had discovered. “Bring me some.” Ozawa’s eyes had lit up. And later, “Bring me more, bring me whatever you can get your hands on. I’ll pay you.”

  Shimamura accepted the money, but he didn’t give everything to Ozawa; some he kept at home just to remind himself why he was doing what he was doing. And
if anyone had asked, he would have explained what should have been perfectly obvious: He took because white people took.

  First they took all the fishing boats and impounded them. Then they took all the cars and the trucks. They took cameras, shortwave radios, and anything that looked like an antenna. They took the farms. They took the restaurants, the grocery stores, the clothing shops, the houses. Shimamura didn’t have a boat or a store or even a car, just a small wooden house that had taken all his savings to buy. They took it.

  They called him an enemy alien and sent him to a road camp in the Rocky Mountains near the border between British Columbia and Alberta. The Japanese Canadian men would work on sections of the Trans-Canada Highway, clearing forest and building road. The land was rock-hard and unyielding; that was when Shimamura truly understood that this was a country made of stone. They gave him a pick to dig out the boulders and a shovel to scrape at the earth—only the white foremen could set the dynamite—and they paid him twenty-five cents an hour because, after all, this was Canada where they did not believe in slave labor. He would be paid, if only a pittance. But then they deducted the amount he owed for his food and bunk in the road camp, and because he had a wife and a child, they further docked his pay to help cover the cost of their internment in a ghost-town camp in the interior mountains that no one had ever heard of. By the time they added up all the deductions, there was next to nothing left.

  They took his dignity and his honor and his pride and his sense of self-worth and still it wasn’t enough. They took whatever they could but they always wanted more—his will, his bitterness, his anger. No, he wouldn’t give them his anger. That was his to keep. He wouldn’t lie down and be meek.

  So wasn’t it natural that he should want to take? That he should want to know just how it felt to take something from somebody else?

  It didn’t feel good, though. It didn’t make up for what he had lost. Because what he had lost was everything.

  25

  “Are you happy?” the GIs always asked.

  The Americans loved that word.

  “Happy to see me, honey?” “Let me make you happy, baby.” There were dozens of variations, but the key word to listen for was “happy.”

  Sumiko knew she had to smile. If she smiled, it meant she was happy, and if she was happy, the GIs were happy. It didn’t matter if she was depressed and homesick, she had to smile and pretend.

  Since Yoko’s departure, she no longer cared to go to the trouble of making close friends in the dormitory or dance hall. There were too many newcomers, some so young-looking Sumiko was sure they were lying about their age. One insisted she was sixteen, but she couldn’t have been much older than twelve or thirteen. Twelve, Sumiko thought with a shudder. That was Fumi’s age.

  She took the girl aside one day. “You shouldn’t be working in a place like this. Leave while you can.”

  But the girl had given her such a blank look Sumiko wondered momentarily if she were deaf or slow of mind. When she finally spoke, her voice was like a robot, flat and monotone. “You don’t understand. My father is dead. My mother is dead. I have a younger brother and sister, and I’m their sole support. I’ve tried other things, but we’re still too hungry. This is a really good job. You don’t understand how happy I am.”

  It was a good reminder, Sumiko thought. Whenever she started to waver about visiting home, she would think about that girl, and her resolve would be strengthened. No, she would not go home, not yet. Fumi should never be allowed to think this was a glamorous job. This was not a happy place.

  From time to time, Sumiko went by herself to Wada’s bar, a place she used to frequent with Yoko after work. It was not like the other bars and snack clubs that catered to GIs. It was far enough away from the main Ginza district that the customers were ordinary working-class Japanese. Mr. Wada, the owner, had lost everything during the war—his wife, his son, his home, his business—yet he had somehow never lost his determination to keep on going. To Sumiko, he was an inspiration. When Wada first started out, the “bar” didn’t even have four walls. It was an open-air stall that stood all by itself in the middle of an empty field. The counter was made of a broken door laid sideways. Gradually he made significant improvements, cobbling together pieces of scrap wood and bamboo screens and straw mats and anything else he found discarded nearby until he’d created a modest establishment with four sturdy walls and a roof. It was just a tiny square of space, but to Sumiko it felt comfortable and inviting. The progress of Wada’s bar had always struck her as a way of measuring how things were improving in the city, and perhaps that was why she liked it. That, and Mr. Wada’s delicious noodles. Often he fed her without charge.

  He always asked her the same question: “What are you doing here?” Meaning what was she doing working in a dance hall. “Go home,” he would say. “You don’t belong here.” She would try to explain her problem with the debt, but he pooh-poohed this.

  “Don’t let yourself be bullied,” he said. “Your dance-hall owner is a cheap punk, nothing more. His sphere of influence doesn’t extend one foot beyond his doorstep. Besides, that type is lazy. When was the last time you saw him go after someone who left the dance hall? Why would he bother when he’s got an endless supply of women?”

  “Maybe you’re right, but…It won’t be too much longer, I hope.”

  “All right, but at the very least, you should go see your family. They must be worried.”

  She told him about her fears that she would influence her impressionable younger sister.

  “How old is your sister?”

  “Twelve.”

  “Hmm. That’s a tricky age. Half child, half adult, not a child anymore but not an adult, either. But maybe you don’t give her enough credit. You seem to believe she can’t think for herself.”

  “It’s not that. There are a lot of temptations.” Sumiko didn’t like to recall how she herself had fallen for some of those very temptations.

  Wada kept a picture of his wife and son in a small altar that he’d set up behind the counter. He said he talked to his wife every day and asked her for advice. “The one thing she couldn’t help me with was the name,” he said. “You and Yoko were the ones who named my bar.”

  “Your place doesn’t have a name,” Yoko had said one night.

  “What do I need a name for?”

  “It’s good for business. Something in English would make your place really stand out.”

  “Okay, so how about My Bar?”

  Yoko wrinkled her nose. “That’s boring.”

  “Tell me a better name, then.”

  “How about Lucky Strike, like the cigarettes?” Sumiko suggested.

  Yoko clapped her hands together. “That’s it! Let’s call it Bar Lucky.”

  “Lucky, huh,” Wada said. “Well, I suppose it can’t do any harm.”

  He found someone to embroider the words BAR LUCKY in large English letters onto the navy blue noren that hung over the doorway. Although the curtain was now soiled from the grease of so many heads that had brushed against it going in and out, Wada said it would be bad luck to take it down for even one day to wash it.

  Once Sumiko had asked Wada about those days right after the war ended and how he’d managed. She had been in a self-pitying mood that day—homesick and also missing Yoko’s companionship—and maybe unconsciously wanted to hear about someone else’s suffering. Wada became pensive.

  “The war was terrible. I saw men do awful things, unimaginably horrible things. It was a miracle that I survived. Our commander went insane; those of us who had not been killed in combat were all slowly dying of dysentery or cholera or starvation. But I was determined to make it home. When I finally returned, I discovered that my house had burned to the ground and my wife and young son were dead. At that moment I realized what a stupid mistake I’d made. I shouldn’t have tried so hard to stay alive. What was the point? Now I was going to have to figure out a way to do myself in, and this would require some real effort. I went to
the Sumida River and marched back and forth along the banks trying to decide the best place to jump in. I can’t swim, so I figured this was a foolproof method. But something kept pulling me back, quite literally. Every time I tried to jump, I felt a tugging on my pant leg, but when I turned around there was no one. And then I knew it was my son. He was seven when he died, but I hadn’t seen him for three years because I’d gone to war, so he was four when I remembered him last. Such a small boy, he had a habit of pulling on the back of my pant legs when he wanted my attention.”

  Sumiko could hardly breathe. “So it was a ghost. Your son came back as a ghost.”

  “I don’t know about that, but I do know that I suddenly realized that I owed it to him to continue living. He was so young when he died, he’d hardly had any chance to experience the bounty of life. So then and there I resolved that I would live my own allotment of life but also his share, the part that he didn’t get to live. I think we owe it to the dead to do that. We’re luckier than they are, so we have a responsibility.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Sumiko cried out, ashamed of what she’d done. “I didn’t mean to make you relive such a painful experience.”

  “It’s all right,” Wada said quietly. “Anyway, there’s nothing I can do about it. I have to accept it.”

  26

  “I think you might enjoy this,” Baker said when he handed Matt the book.

  The exchange had taken place after five o’clock when they were alone in the office. The official announcement of Baker’s transfer had been made only the day before.