“Do you know Natsume Soseki?” Baker continued. “Kokoro is one of his most famous novels. I really hope you like it.”
Matt turned the book over in his hands. The characters for the title and the author’s name were stamped in gold leaf on the burgundy cover and down the smooth spine. Heart. The title Kokoro meant heart. The leather binding was soft to the touch, as if it had been caressed by many hands over the years. “It’s a beautiful book. It looks very expensive.”
“Oh, no, it was cheap. I got it in Kanda, the used-book district. I go there all the time. I’ll take you there.” Baker paused. “I mean, after I get back.”
“Do you…do you know how long you’ll be in Osaka?”
“Oh, you know the army. They won’t tell me anything except that I’m to work on some secret project where they need my translation skills. I guess I’ll find out later. It’s a temporary reassignment but I have no idea for how long. I was told to pack up all my things.”
“Oh, I see. And you’re leaving tomorrow?”
Baker nodded. “Yes, crack of dawn. You know, I really wish they’d given me more notice.”
Matt bowed his head and focused his gaze on the book he held in his hands. “Well, sir, it’s a good opportunity to see another part of Japan, isn’t it.” When he looked up, he met Baker’s eyes.
“Yes, it is…corporal,” Baker said softly.
“You’ll be just in time for the autumn leaves. The momiji in Kyoto are supposed to be beautiful. I hope you get to see them, sir.”
Baker didn’t reply.
Suddenly Matt thrust the book forward. “Are you sure you want me to keep this? Maybe you’d rather take it with you.”
Baker pushed the book back at him, and for a few electric seconds Matt felt Baker’s hands on top of his own. His grip was strong. “No! No, it’s for you. I want you to read it.”
They stared at each other, and then Baker pulled the book from Matt. He took out a pencil and started laughing as he wrote something on the inside. “Here you go, Matsumoto. It’s a loan. That way you have to give it back to me when I return.”
“Yes, a loan.” Matt laughed and hugged the book to his chest. “I’ll give it back to you. That’s a promise.”
Of course, Matt didn’t tell a soul about the book, and he wasn’t about to bring it out when the other guys in his barracks were around. He started taking it with him to the park, always carrying a dictionary along too because he had to look up a lot of words. It was the first time he’d ever tried reading a whole novel in Japanese and it was slow going. Sometimes he just liked holding the book in his hands—the feel of the soft leather cover on his fingers, the feel of Baker’s fingers on the backs of his hands.
Kokoro. Why had Baker given him a book called “Heart”?
From the time he was a child, Matt had learned to keep the matters of his heart private. In his family, the word “love” was never used. The stomach is the most important organ of the body, his father always said, patting the haramaki he wore wrapped snuggly around his belly, winter and summer. Got to keep it warm! His sister was thoroughly American, but even Diane never talked about love. She’d had her share of Nisei boyfriends before the war, and later there were others she met in the camp. She would walk up and down the dust-filled paths with them, from one section of the barbed-wire fence to the other. Observing them, it had always struck Matt as a bit mechanical, as if they were doing it out of duty or to put on a show for the guards in the watchtowers. To prove that romance was still possible, even here.
Matt’s habit of reticence and secrecy was so deeply ingrained that sometimes he wondered if he was guarding his heart from himself. What did his heart feel? What did his heart yearn for? Since coming to Japan, Matt felt this question arise with greater frequency. He considered the hearts of all the people he’d met here. There was Nancy, who was clearly unhappy and wanted to go home. She bewildered him. Sometimes she was confident and bossy, other times insecure and dependent. She expected him to take charge, but she wanted to tell him what to do. There was the missing woman, Sumiko, whose picture he carried with him all the time. She was an enigma. She was only a celluloid image, but why did her stare haunt him so? Then there was her little sister, Fumi. She was crazy if she thought that MacArthur would help her—MacArthur wasn’t going to help anyone. In that case, who would?
These random thoughts floated through his mind as Matt made his way toward his favorite bench in the park. He couldn’t wait to continue reading again. So when he reached the section where the footpath curved and the bench came into view, he was mightily annoyed to see that someone else was on his bench. Not just sitting on it, either, but lying down, stretched out along the entire length. Some drunk or derelict, he supposed, sleeping off a bad night. Who else would fall asleep like that in the middle of the afternoon? By the time he was within a few feet, however, Matt could see that the figure was too small to be a man. It was a woman.
She had her back to him and her shoulder blades stuck out through her thin cotton yukata like a pair of wings. Something about the way her body was awkwardly bent reminded him of a grasshopper. Her feet were bare, the soles dirty and calloused. A pair of wooden sandals was tucked underneath the bench. She did not appear properly attired for the cooler weather. As he was staring at her, she casually rolled over. “Hello,” she said, gazing up at him sideways. She looked like a teenager, not much older than a girl.
“I’m sorry. I thought you were asleep.”
“I wasn’t asleep.” She pushed herself up into sitting position and her long braid swung forward. “I’m just killing time.”
“I see.”
“If they ask me to leave the room for a while, I always come to the park. This is a good place to kill time.”
“Who asks you to leave your room?”
“The big sisters. It’s not my room anyway, it’s theirs, so I have to do what they ask, don’t I. When they bring a GI friend over.”
Matt frowned.
The girl continued. “I really like it here. It’s quiet and peaceful, don’t you think?” She looked up at the tree overhead as if seeking confirmation from the vegetation. “Say, can I ask you a question?”
He nodded.
“How come you’re dressed like a GI?”
“I’m an American.”
“But you look Japanese.”
“I’m Japanese, too. I’m Japanese American.”
The girl pondered this for a moment, then broke into a grin. “I want to go to America.”
“Really.”
She grinned again and nodded vigorously. The space between her two front teeth gave her an impish appearance, and it was hard not to be infected at least a bit by her enthusiasm.
“Japan is nice, too, you know,” he ventured. “This is a very nice country.”
“America is better. It’s got everything. Someday I’ll go.”
“Well, I hope you will.”
“Oh, you bet I will! Say, what’s your name?”
“Matsumoto. What’s yours?”
“My name’s Hisa—I mean, Betty.” She had a slight lisp and pronounced it beh-chi.
“Betty?”
She nodded.
“That’s a nice name. I’m pleased to meet you, Betty.”
She beamed. “Me, too.” Suddenly she pointed at his watch. “What time is it?”
“Almost four o’clock.”
“Oh, I have to go. I might have killed too much time!” She quickly slipped her feet into her sandals. “Bye bye,” she said in English, waving her hand.
It wasn’t until after she’d passed out of his range of sight that he noticed a scrap of paper on the bench where she’d been sitting. He picked it up. Heti, Bety, Betti, and other English names had been written in hesitant wobbly letters—the girl had been trying to spell her new name. On the other side of the paper she’d written in Japanese characters: Ginza, Yurakucho, Hibiya, Nihonbashi over and over, as if practicing the kanji or learning a new geography. Matt thought of the girl’s si
lly smile as he put the paper back on the bench and turned to his book. He began reading, but after only a couple of pages he gave up. No, he didn’t feel like reading. Something about the girl had made him think of that other girl, Fumi, and now it was hard to concentrate. Matt sighed and glanced at the empty space on the bench beside him. The scrap of paper had already blown away.
27
Ever since they had delivered the letter, it was hard for Fumi to contain her impatience. She was back at school, but who could concentrate on studying when so much was happening in real life? She could barely sit still.
Her mother seemed to have an endless number of chores to keep her occupied after school and on the weekends, but whenever she could, Fumi sought to escape the confines of her home and neighborhood. The wide world was waiting, and she felt an overpowering urge to embrace it.
She was always on the lookout for junk, an activity which was by no means frivolous. Whenever she found something discarded on the street—a scrap of cloth, a cracked plate, a cushion splattered with mud—she investigated and usually picked it up to take home to her father who, ever since their bookstore had burned down, made his living collecting old newspapers and magazines for recycling. He went all over the city begging for unwanted papers, which he hauled in a makeshift wooden cart. Along the way, he often picked up other garbage. Not everything had value, of course, but Fumi had learned from him that sometimes you could be surprised. Scraps of material, for instance, might still have buttons attached or even a fancy clasp, and a cracked plate could be fixed with some glue. A few times she had been lucky to find empty tin cans, which were valuable for the metal they contained. Her father sold what he collected to a variety of dealers, most of whom gave him a pittance for his troubles.
Occasionally her father met people who were desperate enough to sell their books for next to nothing. He would pile what they gave him into his cart, head for a sunny corner, and spread the books neatly on the roadside. Then he waited for customers. A book here, a book there—often he made no money at all—but it was almost like the bookstore days again. He told Fumi that nobody wanted to read the classics anymore. Penny romances and pulp magazines were the current rage. Some of the covers she’d seen were illustrated with men and women embracing, their lips almost touching, and the captions promised exciting stories of romance and love. When she’d asked if she could read them, her father had winced and said they were too contemporary for a young girl like her.
Sometimes people recognized him as the former owner of Tanaka Books. Fumi had been with him a few times when it happened. “Is it Tanaka-san? How nice to see you. You look so healthy.” But all the while the person was studying her father’s dusty clothes or staring at the wooden cart and its contents. People liked to compare. To measure how far another had fallen was to confirm how fortunate you were.
Akiko and Tomoko still made Fumi laugh with all the naughty things they said about other girls in their class—how Michiko’s father wore a toupee or how Sanae tried to straighten her bowed legs by binding them with string—but Fumi now spent most of her time with Aya. She was grateful that Aya was not a talker or a gossip. It had been a big risk confiding in her and asking for help with the English letter. A different type of person might easily have pressed for some kind of advantage. Fumi shuddered to think what that would be like.
That letter! She counted on her fingers—eight weeks had passed. What was taking so long? Why was her sister not home yet? Didn’t General MacArthur say he was here to help the Japanese people? Wasn’t she one of the people he was supposed to help? Even if he was a busy man, that didn’t lessen her sense of frustration. She yearned for his full attention but had to content herself with the pictures of him she saw in the newspaper. He was often seated at his desk, pen in one hand and pipe in the other, gazing straight into the camera. Whenever Fumi saw one of these pictures, she whispered: “Listen to me! Answer me!” She did not know how long it was reasonable to wait for a reply.
One Sunday Fumi persuaded Aya to accompany her to Kanda. It was only a twenty-minute walk.
“I’ll show you where my father’s bookstore used to be,” she said. “I hardly ever show anyone where it was.” The truth was that she sought an excuse to see it again for herself and didn’t want to go alone. Lately she felt a desperate need to confirm that the store had existed, as if that fact would also prove that her family had once been whole.
While few stores in the book district had escaped damage during the wartime bombings, some were hit much harder than others. Tanaka Books had been located on a narrow side street at the far end of the district, and when it caught fire, it and the bookstores on either side burned completely to the ground in a matter of hours. The winds had been against them, and the books and wooden bookcases had provided the perfect fuel. They were supposed to be thankful that no one was in the store at the time. Fumi’s father had never owned the land or the building, just the contents, all of which were lost. Once the store was razed, the plot of land on which it had stood looked ludicrously small, a space hardly bigger than a closet. Without walls, a roof, or a floor to define the space, without the books themselves to suggest function and purpose, there was nothing but a square of gray, dust-filled air.
“Hello, girls. You want to buy a pot?” A thin woman wearing a dirty apron sat on the ground where the bookstore had been. She pointed her chin at Aya. “You there, you need a democracy pot for your family?” At the woman’s feet lay a small pile of battered saucepans. Some were burned black on the bottom.
Aya shook her head and backed away.
Fumi spoke up. “My father used to have a bookstore here.”
“Where?”
“Right where you’re sitting.”
“Is that so? I never heard that.” The woman shrugged.
“Why are you selling pots and pans here?” Fumi asked.
“Why not?”
“Most people around here sell books, don’t they?”
“Pots are better than books. You can’t eat with a book.” The woman laughed and her tongue stuck out between a gaping hole in her front teeth. “Move along now. If you’re not buying, don’t block my other customers.”
It seemed impossible that the lumpy patch of soil where the woman sat had once supported her family’s business. Fumi tried to picture the exact spot where her father used to sit behind the cash box, the place where they kept the ladder for climbing up to the top shelves, the cupboard where Sumiko stored the dustcloths and supplies. But she couldn’t remember. The pots had asserted their right to take up residence on the site and they had taken over for good.
As soon as they were out of earshot, Aya asked why the woman had called her wares “democracy pots.”
“Because that’s what they are. That’s what they’re called.”
“But why?”
“How should I know! Everything’s democracy now.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you angry.”
“I’m not angry.”
Fumi was walking faster and Aya had to rush to keep up. “Was it a nice store?” she asked. “It doesn’t look like it was very big.”
“Of course it was a nice store.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You can’t help it. You have no imagination. Just because you can’t see anything now doesn’t mean it wasn’t nice in the past.”
“You’re right. I’m sorry.”
“Oh, stop apologizing.” Fumi abruptly turned the corner. “Well, that’s enough. Let’s go home. We can take a shortcut down this back lane.”
The lane was very narrow and lined on either side with shacks made of corrugated sheeting. There were no spaces between the shacks and no windows in any of the walls. Although it was a sunny day, in the lane it was as dark as if a thunderstorm were brewing. It didn’t look like many people ever came down here.
“Let’s hurry,” Aya said, pulling the collar of her blouse close to her neck.
“Oh, look.” Fumi pointed her finger s
traight ahead. “Hey, do you see that?”
In a patch of tall weeds against one of the walls something caught their eye. Aya realized it was the metal strap around a wooden bucket, the kind of bucket that people here used for everything from storing rice to making pickles to hauling water. The bucket was nestled in the weeds, and someone had tried to hide it by laying some long stalks of grass across the mouth. The effort had been done too hastily, though, for the bucket was clearly visible.
“A bucket,” Fumi said eagerly. Her bad mood was completely forgotten. “I bet my father can use that.”
“We should leave it alone. It’s not ours.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. It doesn’t belong to anyone. I’m going to take it.” Fumi stomped on the weeds to flatten them and brushed the stalks of grass from the top. “What did I tell you. Look, there’s something inside.”
Aya leaned forward. Inside the bucket was a rolled-up bundle of cloth, a blue-and-white print covered with a pattern of bamboo shoots. In contrast to the dirty bucket, the cloth looked clean and new.
“It looks like someone’s yukata, doesn’t it,” Fumi said. “A nice yukata, almost brand new.”
“Do you think the person is going to come back for it?”
“Not likely. But if they do, well that’s too bad, because I’m taking it home.”
“You can’t.”
“I can. You can tell this was thrown out.” Fumi reached into the bucket and pulled out the bundle. “Oh, there’s something inside, I can feel it. You know, it might be something valuable.”
Aya watched as Fumi put the bundle on the ground and began unwinding the material. They shouldn’t be doing this, she thought. They were going to find something bad, she just knew it—stolen goods or a piece of rotting fish—but she felt helpless to stop Fumi, who was practically grunting as she struggled to loosen the tightly wrapped cloth. Then, maybe because she was thinking of rotten fish, Aya became aware of a bad smell.
“Ugh!” Fumi jumped back so hard she fell on her rear end.
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