The Pearl Diver

by Sujata Massey

  It was a good deal, but I couldn’t accept it—especially since I wasn’t in the mood to like anything at Saks. I also had other things that I wanted to do, such as grab lunch and then drop the kites off at the WJFS office, which kept afternoon hours only.

  “How about sushi for lunch?” I said brightly.

  We went to Tako, a casual Japanese restaurant on Wisconsin Avenue, right around the corner from WJFS. Hugh had introduced me to the deliciously smoky grilled eel here when I’d first visited Washington. Grilled eel should go on Bento’s menu, I decided as I looked around the packed restaurant. I wondered how Bento was doing, now that it had started serving lunch. I should have checked yesterday, I thought guiltily. I should have let Marshall know when the woodblock prints we’d chosen a month earlier would be back from the framer’s and ready to hang. All in all, it was fortuitous that I was going to see him at the restaurant that night.

  We each had miso soup to start. Norie pronounced it undrinkable, but it tasted yummy to me. My red snapper sushi was fresh and tender, but Norie was bent on comparing it to tai, a superlative, light-tasting fish that you couldn’t get in Washington, let alone most parts of the world outside Japan.

  “You liked an American fish yesterday,” I reminded her.

  “Yes, but it was cooked in the American fashion. That made it superb.”

  I scrutinized my aunt. “I think you observe a double standard. You think that Japanese food should only be cooked and eaten in Japan, and American food here?”

  “Usually, that would be the case. However, I’m sure the restaurant you are helping is wonderful. It has a Japanese chef, neh?”

  “Yes. An Iron Chef, actually. He’s called Jiro Takeda.”

  “I haven’t heard of him.” Norie frowned.

  “He’s very good,” I said. “I’ve learned a few recipes from him already. Andrea’s working under him in the kitchen right now, learning all about food preparation.”

  “I thought that she was a restaurant hostess?”

  “She ran into a little trouble the first night, so Marshall took her off that duty. I think she’ll be restored to hostess later on.”

  “But kitchen work is very special. Maybe she’ll learn so much that she can become a chef someday. Wouldn’t that be incredible?” Norie clasped her hands together.

  “Not exactly,” I said. “There are women chefs here, as I’m sure there are in Japan.”

  “Very few,” Norie said. “When I was a young lady, it was not considered a proper profession. Even today, I can’t say I’ve ever seen a woman sushi chef. They say our hands are too warm! Ridiculous, neh?”

  Would Norie have liked to cook as a professional? I didn’t ask her, but as we left the restaurant and walked around the corner to the Washington-Japan Friendship Society, I thought about how good she would have been. Her nabe dishes—simmered, deep-tasting complex broths in which a variety of seafood, vegetables, or meat cooked—were like nobody else’s. So many cold nights in Japan I’d gone to her house for dinner, and huddled with the others around the kotatsu table draped with a quilt to keep the warmth of the heater going below, to warm our legs. But the real warmth was Aunt Norie’s nabe pot.

  We were at the friendship society building now—or rather, the half of a 1930s single-story duplex that housed it. The other side of the building was a printing press, a little New Age venture that consisted of two long-haired, middle-aged white men infatuated enough with Japan to offer to help out with the printing of the forthcoming history. I explained this to Aunt Norie as one of the printers bowed solemnly to us through the window.

  “I just have to drop off these kites for the festival,” I said, holding up the shopping bag that I’d been lugging around all morning. “It will take only a few minutes.”

  The office was a small, cheerful room decorated with old Japan Tourist Organization posters advertising tourist destinations in Japan. There was a long table someone had probably gotten from a school, and it was covered with papers and envelopes. Evidently, a mass mailing was in progress. A seventy-something Japanese-American man in a striped sweater sat at the table folding papers with precision, then sliding each one in an envelope. I didn’t know him, so I just nodded and smiled and tried to catch the attention of Betty Nagano, one of my better friends in the group. Betty was somewhere in her seventies and very well preserved, with a face the shape of a full moon—a happy, smiling moon, like out of children’s storybooks.

  She was smiling at me now as she continued her conversation on the telephone. “Just get the cans of inari-zushi-no-moto, it comes in cute little cans with a picture of the stuffed tofu skins on the outside. And then, you’ll need to make rice.” Another pause. “Borrow or buy a rice cooker. They sell them at Asian stores as well.”

  Under my breath I said to Aunt Norie, “It sounds as if she’s trying to teach someone to make inarizushi for the festival.”

  “Inarizushi? Who needs a recipe for that?” Norie sounded incredulous.

  Betty had hung up the phone and was smiling at us. “Sorry, Rei. I was just speaking with one of our younger members. She’s never actually made rice, only had it in restaurants. Isn’t that a shame?”

  I didn’t know whether to feel flattered, or unnerved, that Betty didn’t consider me one of the group’s younger members. “Mrs. Nagano, I’d like you to meet my aunt Norie Shimura. She’s visiting from Japan.”

  “Betty, please.” Betty Nagano gave me a mock-scolding look, then bowed deeply and greeted Norie with the customary words in Japanese. Norie bowed even lower and uttered the matching pleasantries. Then the two ladies stood stiffly, smiling at each other. And the older man folding envelopes was looking with interest at Norie now.

  “This is my husband, Yuji,” Betty said. “You haven’t met Rei before, have you, Yuji? And this is her aunt, Shimura Norie-san. “

  From Yuji Nagano’s grunt, I could tell he was really from Japan, unlike his wife, Betty, who spoke good, ladylike Hawaiian Japanese. Now I remembered her telling me that Yuji had immigrated to Hawaii in the early 1940s with his rice farmer parents, but their dreams were put on hold when the whole family was sent to an internment camp after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. The Naganos lost their farm to unscrupulous people who’d promised to protect it for them during the war years, but at least Yuji had found the treasure of Betty—a close childhood friend from the camp whom he married in the 1950s.

  I wished I could tell this all to my aunt, who was bowing to Mr. Nagano and asking him where he came from in Japan. Nagano, fittingly, the province that bore his name.

  “I’ve brought you two carp kites,” I said. “I thought it might be useful at the festival. They really do fly, so the children might enjoy them.”

  “Oh, how nice of you. May I see?” Betty said, and motioned for me to take the first kite out of the shopping bag in which I’d been carrying it. As I laid it out, Mr. Nagano gathered up his papers and envelopes carefully, giving me room to unfurl the faded red-and-orange fish.

  “But this looks antique!” Betty exclaimed.

  “Oh, no, it’s just a bit old. Fifty years, I think. The other one’s the same vintage, but blue and green. I wasn’t sure which color you’d like better, or if you could use both.”

  “The kite was my brother’s,” Norie said. “I gave it to Rei years ago, when I was helping my parents organize. I couldn’t imagine why she wanted it.”

  “It’s so beautiful,” Betty said, looking at the kite in awe. “But I’m worried that it might be damaged if the children get their hands on it. It’s certainly not the kind of durable polyester kite we usually let them play with.”

  I paused and thought about what she was really saying. Maybe she didn’t like the kite, thought it looked too drab compared with the brightly colored ones wrapped in plastic that I saw stashed in a corner of a room.

  “If you’d rather we didn’t use it, that’s fine,” I said.

  “It looks old and a bit dirty,” Norie said quickly. She was identifying
with me and denigrating, in the true Japanese fashion, what we’d offered.

  “No, no, I really like it,” Betty insisted. “I just think we should put anything this special in a place of honor…maybe a display area where we’ll be promoting our community history book. Yes, that might draw people over to it quite nicely.”

  “I saw your call for submissions. I don’t think I’ve lived here long enough to be helpful in telling your history, but I could help in editing or something like that,” I offered. I had done so little for the society that I was embarrassed.

  “We don’t have much yet,” Betty said. “My husband’s not much of a writer, but he has the best memory of anyone, so he’s been talking at night and I’ve been trying to record it.”

  “Betty, was the society active during the 1970s?”

  “Yes, indeed. It was formed in the late forties to help the war brides who’d started coming over.”

  “Are there records of members from the seventies?”

  “Sure. It’s all in that file cabinet in the corner.” Betty paused. “If you don’t mind my asking, why are you interested in this particular time period?”

  I took a deep breath. “I’m curious about your membership rolls because I have a close girlfriend whose mother came here from Kysh during that time. The daughter and mother lost touch, and the daughter’s hoping to find out what happened.”

  “Oh, really? What’s the range of years that you want to see, and what is her mother’s name?” Betty had already gone to the file cabinet, and had opened the middle drawer.

  “1971 through 1974,” I said. “The woman’s name is Sadako Tsuchiya. Her married name was Norton.”

  “Oh! The girl from Kysh who was married to a black soldier?” Betty asked.

  “Yes, actually.” I was stunned by Betty’s quick response.

  “Your friend is her baby girl!” Betty’s voice rose. “Oh, I always wondered what happened to her! The police came to us after Sadako-san disappeared to ask if anyone had seen her. Unfortunately we hadn’t. I always wondered how the husband and baby got along.”

  “After Sadako disappeared, her husband put Andrea—the baby you remember—in foster care. She’s thirty now. We work together at Bento,” I said.

  “She’s a very troubled girl,” Norie said in Japanese. “She doesn’t know if her mother is alive or dead. And she has no real family to care for her now.”

  “It was a tragic situation,” Betty said, looking at a paper she’d pulled from a file. “We had a subcommittee of ladies who would visit all the war brides to make sure that they were all right. Sadako Norton was very resistant to help. I went a few times with them to see her—yes, here’s my name in a progress report.”

  “What do you have there?” I moved close to Betty, to read over her shoulder.

  “This is a progress report—we did them for all the people we visited, whether it was war brides or invalids. Most of them are pretty brief, but with Sadako, there was so much visiting and follow-up there’s a fairly extensive record. You can look at this one, if you like.”

  I sat down at the table, across from Mr. Nagano, and examined the report written in ballpoint pen on a sheet of ruled paper so old that it had yellowed. It was a monthly report on the war brides visited, with a number of different women’s names, addresses, and phone numbers. Three women—Betty, Joanie Iwata, and Fumiko Sugiyama—had sprung a surprise baby shower on Sadako by arriving at her apartment in Arlington three months after she’d given birth to a girl. The basket they’d brought contained baby clothes, books, bottles, and diapering essentials, all paid for from the gift fund at WJFS. They’d also brought along sweet-bean cakes that Betty had made, and brownies from Joanie.

  How kind they were, I thought as I read on. Sadako’s door had been chained, and she’d looked out nervously at the ladies, who’d spoken to her in Japanese, reminding her that they were her friends. At last, she’d unlatched the chain and let them inside. The apartment was sparely furnished but clean, and the baby named Akiko slept quietly in a cradle.

  “Akiko!” I exclaimed aloud. “Andrea doesn’t know she was ever called that. I wonder if it’s the same baby.”

  “Yes, of course. We knew her real name was Andrea, but we went along with Sadako to make her feel better. A lot of us have Japanese and English names. I’m not really Betty, you know, but I’ve gotten used to it. Yuji’s just—Yuji. I can’t imagine him any other way.” Betty glanced fondly at her husband, whose ears pinkened.

  “What else does it say?” Norie entreated, squeezing onto a chair next to me.

  I continued my translation of the English-language document I was reading. “Sadako asked them to sit down in the living room, and she made tea to serve with the sweets. She thanked everyone for the gifts, and confessed that Akiko-chan had a difficult disposition. Her husband was disturbed by the baby’s nighttime crying.”

  “I’ll tell you why. She wanted to breast-feed, but her husband was against it,” Betty said, shaking her head.

  “Why on earth?” I asked, instinctively crossing my own arms over my chest. It felt slightly fuller. I guessed that was a by-product of my weight gain.

  “At that time, there was still a debate about which was better, breast or bottle. To some, the breast was considered old-fashioned and backward,” Betty said.

  Mr. Nagano’s chair made a loud scraping sound as he moved away from us. Clearly, we were embarrassing him.

  “Would it be better if I just photocopied this and took it home to read?” I asked Betty quickly. I also wanted something to show Andrea.

  “You know, the records really shouldn’t leave the office—especially this business because it’s such sad personal information.” Betty sighed. “But, it’s been interesting, living through this story again. This makes me think we should include some mention of the stresses war brides faced, not naming names, of course.”

  “What were the stresses?” I asked.

  “The girls who came with their husbands to America lost that Japanese family support, so it was like landing on a new planet. Not only would the women be dealing with an alien world, but their husbands were seeing them in a new way. The girls who had been so alluring now couldn’t navigate the supermarket or chitchat with the neighbors or drive a car or bake a casserole.”

  “Just a minute!” Norie interjected. “Japanese ladies can drive, and we shop in huge supermarkets, and some of us have ovens—I do, for instance—”

  “Obasan, she’s saying that thirty years ago it was different,” I said.

  “Yes, and I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend anyone. It was different then. It was a hard, hard world for the women, and many times the husbands would be impatient or bored with them and file for divorce. Unfortunately, the war brides didn’t know about their right to alimony. So they lost everything after the divorce except for their children. That’s why we stepped in.”

  “Now I am hearing this, I am worried about Sadako even more,” Norie said. “Will you read some more, Rei-chan?”

  “All right,” I said, still feeling a bit tentative. “The ladies’ committee reported that someone in their group suggested that Sadako sleep with the baby in the baby’s room, the way it’s done in Japan.”

  “Very correct,” Norie said. “I slept with my children until my daughter was six and my son eight. Males need more coddling, don’t they?”

  Yuji frowned, and I looked down quickly to continue reading. “Sadako said that they had only one bedroom and her husband preferred that the baby sleep apart from them so his sleep wasn’t disturbed. So the baby stayed in the living room.” I raised my eyes from the paper and added, “At least she had friends to whom she could vent these frustrations.”

  “Not as much as she needed,” Betty said. “I remember, we tried so hard to get her to join our young mothers’ group, but she said she couldn’t. It was the time before the Metro connected everything, and, of course, she couldn’t drive. And I seem to remember that she was nervous about the American
buses. She thought she wouldn’t get off at the right place and she’d be lost forever. Not that we could help her anymore. I recall that when we attempted to visit her two months after that welcome-baby call, her husband wouldn’t let us in.”

  I shivered. “What did he say?”

  “She was resting. It could have been true, or maybe not. But we never went out there again because he’d been so unpleasant and some of the ladies became nervous.”

  “And if she was afraid to get on buses, she would have been virtually trapped at home.” I shook my head. “It’s such a strange perspective for someone from Japan, where there’s so much public transportation.”

  “She was from the sea, not the land. That was why she was afraid,” Mr. Nagano spoke up, surprising me.

  “What do you mean? I heard she was a pearl diver, but I didn’t believe it,” I said.

  “Maybe she was an ama-san,” Norie suggested.

  “Yes, yes, that’s what she did. She was an ama-san,” Mr. Nagano said.

  “What exactly is an ama-san?” I asked both of them.

  “Ama means ‘sea,’” Norie said. “So an ama-san is a woman sea diver—someone who dives for things like oysters and abalone. There are some still working in Ise and other areas.”

  “Andrea’s mother was supposed to have come from Kysh.” Now I felt sorry that I’d so quickly dismissed Andrea’s belief that her mother had been a pearl diver. She had been a diver, all right, but probably for something like abalone.

  “She was from a small place, she told us once,” Mr. Nagano said. “Her town still has several hundred women divers. They can earn, in a single day, what a woman would have to work all month to earn as a shop clerk. The men might row the boats, but it is the women who do the underwater harvesting. They work with a female partner, from after the tide goes out in the morning to two in the afternoon. In the old days, they used to just work in summer, but now, with wetsuits, they can work year-round.”