The Sun Gods

by Jay Rubin

  She held him tightly, praying with all her might. Let the sun explode. Let it wrap the earth in its blazing embrace. Let it fuse this hate-filled globe into a single, molten mass, ending war and parting and suffering forever.

  PART FIVE:

  1959

  26

  THEY USUALLY MET at midnight, after Bill finished work at the restaurant. They would go to quiet places, where Frank would wander back freely across the years, his black, intense eyes staring out into the night. The year was no longer 1959 but 1942, when Frank first met Mitsuko at Puyallup, or 1943, when Frank left his hospital bed in Minidoka to find that Mitsuko had returned to Japan on a repatriation ship.

  As Frank led him through the dark passageways of the past, Bill could almost hear Mitsuko singing to him, but it was as if they were on opposite banks of a rushing stream. Her lips were moving. The song was for him. But the melody never reached him.

  Frank could do nothing to help him hear it. “We were living in that tiny vacuum world in Minidoka. It was only after I started looking for her that I realized how little I actually knew about her.”

  “When did you start looking for her?” Bill pressed him.

  “Not for several years. I was angry with her, angry with everything. That’s why I joined the 442nd. I figured I’d just go out there and get killed and it would be all over. They sent me to Bruyéres. That’s where this happened.” He patted the empty sleeve. “After the war, the government paid for me to finish school. They paid me for my arm, too. I had some pretty good cash for a while. Bought myself a fancy car.”

  “The DeSoto?”

  “The DeSoto.” He smiled. “A lot of the other guys bought cars, too, but they frittered their money away. There was a lot of anger. The government had locked up our families and sent us out to die, but when it was all over, it was the same old story: no jobs for Japs. So I went back to school. Majored in economics at the U.W. Then I tried working for Boeing for a while, but I didn’t have the engineering background to go very far with them. Besides, I wasn’t too crazy about the military side of things at Boeing. I started investing on my own. I did all right for myself. Even got a pretty wife.”

  “You’re married?”

  “No, not anymore.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah, so was I. When my marriage went sour, I realized I hadn’t ever gotten over Mitsuko and started looking for her. By then, it was already 1953 and I hadn’t seen or heard anything about her in ten years.”

  “Nineteen fifty-three,” said Bill. “I must have been fifteen then. That’s when I saw you at the bus stop, isn’t it?”

  Frank nodded. “I had almost nothing to go on. I knew her sister and brother-in-law—”

  “She had a sister?”

  “Her name was Yoshiko. Husband was Goro Nomura.”

  “Doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “I figured they would have come back to Seattle, but they weren’t in the phone book. I knew both the husband and the wife had been active in the Minidoka protestant church, but that was some kind of united church and I didn’t know which one they had actually belonged to in Seattle. I tried calling a few and asking for them, but no luck. A couple of the Japanese churches never got off the ground again after the war. You know—their people went East or the Issei members died off.”

  “Issei?”

  “First-generation Japanese in America, the ones who immigrated. I’m a Nisei—second generation, but the first generation born here. A lot of the ministers were old, and some of the Issei just didn’t make it through the winters or summers in the desert. That’s what happened to the Japanese Christian Church. I’m almost certain that’s the one the Nomuras would have attended. It’s still over there on Terrace, all boarded up.”

  “What a shame—for them and for us.”

  “The more churches they close, the better if you ask me,” Frank spat. “I’m amazed anybody could have come through the war thinking they had any kind of god watching over them.”

  “It’s not that easy to give up something you’ve always lived with,” Bill said.

  “You just have to think about it with an open mind. It takes about ten seconds to see what nonsense it is.”

  “Yes, but …” Bill was not sure enough of where he stood on these matters to become involved in a debate. His father had seriously shaken his faith, and what Frank had been telling him dealt it another blow. But still, doing ministry work in Japan seemed like a good idea—all the more so since he now knew that Mitsuko had gone back there. Bill said, “You were talking about your search.”

  Frank looked at him and chuckled. “Sorry,” he muttered. “Religion’s a sore spot with me. Still, it’s got something to do with my search, too, because next I went to see your father.”

  Bill had to look away, but Frank went on speaking as if he had noticed nothing.

  “I really hadn’t wanted to approach your father except as a last resort. I figured I could at least learn the name of his old congregation and get in touch with those people. He was easy enough to find in the phone book, so I went to see him in Magnolia. He didn’t want to tell me anything. He practically threw me out.”

  “I’m not surprised,” said Bill with a scowl. “He didn’t want to be reminded of what he’d done.”

  “As long as I was in Magnolia, I thought it might be some consolation if I could get a glimpse of you. You were a great little kid. I always liked you, so I drove over there and hung around outside for a few hours. Finally it dawned on me you weren’t a little kid anymore, and I wasn’t going to see you except coming or going to school. I tried again the next morning early. The weather was bad, so I had to drive right up to the curb. Sorry. I must have scared the daylights out of you.”

  Frank spent a whole evening describing to Bill a fruitless two-week trip he had made to Tokyo after failing to turn up anything in Seattle.

  “I don’t know why I went,” he said. “A kind of sentimental journey, I suppose. I didn’t know her last name—she was Mitsuko Morton, as far as I knew—and it wasn’t likely she would have kept the foreign name in Japan. I tried the American Embassy, but they couldn’t help at all. About the only thing I had to go on was the name of her sister and brother-in-law, but I can’t read the language, and my spoken Japanese is a mess, so I hired a girl to go through the Tokyo phone book and try calling all the Nomuras. You should see how many Nomuras there are in the Tokyo phone book—and that was back when not many people in Japan had phones. None of them knew Goro or Yoshiko. Of course, maybe they weren’t even in Tokyo. Talk about looking for a needle in a haystack!”

  One of the few mementos Frank still had from Minidoka was a brittle, yellowed copy of the camp newspaper, the Irrigator, with a Japanese section that had been written by Mitsuko herself. Holding the fragile sheet, Bill felt he could almost touch the hands of the woman who had inscribed the graceful characters.

  “She designed the masthead, too,” Frank said. “She was a very talented lady. Used to make you toy boats and things. I don’t suppose you’ve got any of those hanging around.”

  Bill shook his head. The Japanese masthead was like a little woodblock print, with a meandering stream and cattails, a water tower and some low buildings sketched in behind the two vertically-written words “Minidoka” and “Irrigator.” Oddly, the name of the camp was spelled “Minedoka” in Japanese. Maybe it just sounded more natural that way.

  Turning back to the English section, Bill said, “Here’s an article on a Gallup poll.” He could hardly believe the figures. “Thirty-one percent were opposed to letting any Japanese-Americans come back to their homes after the war! That’s incredible!”

  “It still burns me up to think about it.”

  “What hatred there must have been! But at least the relocation camps weren’t as bad as the Nazi concentration camps,” Bill offered hopefully.

  “How do you know?” Frank shot back, dark eyes burning past the sharp curve of his nose.

  “Well, they didn�
��t gas people.”

  “No, but we didn’t know that at the time. And the Jews didn’t know they would be gassed. We went just like the Jews—docile, cooperative, good little Japs. We were plain lucky General DeWitt had his superiors to answer to. If he’d had his way, he’d have buried us all out there in the desert.”

  The more he learned from Frank, the more impatient Bill became to get to Japan. Now he had a real reason to go there, and preaching the Gospel was not it.

  “Don’t be in such a hurry,” Frank said. “If you really want to go and find her, you’ll have to know a lot more Japanese than I do. I was lost.”

  “I’ve picked up a fair amount working at Maneki.”

  “Don’t make me laugh. You need more than a few set phrases. And you’ve got to learn to read and write. I see you’ve picked up a little of the phonetic script, but you have to memorize thousands of characters if you want to read anything. It’s murder. After I got back here, I tried to brush up my Japanese and learn the writing system. I took a course at the U.W. but I gave up after a couple of months. I’ve got to work for a living, I don’t have time for flash cards. And even if I did manage to get enough language under my belt, I can’t go and live there for months at a time. You’re not going to find her in a week or two.”

  “I can’t wait, though. I’m ready to quit school now, forget about graduating, and just go.”

  “Well, how are you going to pay for it? Ask your father for the money? Have you got a trust fund socked away?”

  “I could get a job once I got there.”

  “I suppose so, teaching English. But that’s all you’d be doing all day. You wouldn’t have time to study Japanese or do any searching. No, I’m telling you, there’s only one way: learn the language here before you go, and get a scholarship to support you while you’re there.”

  “How long would that take? More than a year, I’ll bet.”

  “Way more than a year. Four or five, I’d guess.”

  “Four or five years? I want to go now.”

  27

  TO BILL, THE UNIVERSITY of Washington had always seemed a hopelessly large, hopelessly secular institution. It was where the scientists labored to disprove the word of God, where the communists held their secret meetings, where beer-swilling fraternity men tortured and debauched new inductees into their dens of iniquity. He recalled having once driven through the sprawling campus in the back seat of his father’s car. They had kept the windows closed tight the whole time.

  Since then, he had had no occasion to visit the university. The assumption had always been that he would attend Cascade-Pacific College, and he had gone there without question. Now that he thought of it, it seemed as if his entire life had been spent within walking distance of home. Occasional excursions across the Ballard Bridge to Clare’s neighborhood hardly counted. As he pulled into the broad mall of the main entrance on 45th, it struck him that a mere ten-minute drive was all that separated his closed, little world from this unknown territory. The university campus was a cool, green park, filled with drooping pines.

  At the registrar’s office, he tried to register as a “transient student” in the university’s beginning Japanese course but was told he had to be tested before he could be admitted to the course’s second term, the winter quarter, which would start after New Year’s. He found his way to the office of a Professor Tatsumi, who immediately began speaking to him in Japanese when Bill told him why he had come.

  Professor Tatsumi was a soft-spoken man in his early sixties with no more than a few wisps of hair running in straight lines across his shining pate. He wore tortoise-shell glasses that seemed to have trouble clinging to his broad, flat nose. His first question to Bill in Japanese was “What is your name?”

  Professor Tatsumi chuckled—in a restrained, courtly sort of way—when Bill gave his name, and by the time Bill had replied to two or three more questions, the professor was shaking with laughter.

  “Where did you learn your Japanese?” the professor asked in English.

  “Is it really that bad?”

  “No, actually it’s surprisingly grammatical. And your pronunciation is pretty good, too, which is the main thing we’ve worked on this quarter. I’m tempted to let you in if you think you can catch up with the others. Buy the textbook and work on it over winter break. We’ll bring you up to speed next quarter. One last question, though: why do you want to study Japanese?”

  He wanted to answer simply, “I need to go to Japan to search for my mother,” but he was not ready to answer all the questions that would raise. “I’m studying for the ministry at Cascade-Pacific, and I’m thinking of doing missionary work in Japan.”

  “That’s nice, I guess,” the professor said.

  “You guess?”

  “You seem so motivated, you’d probably make an excellent graduate student. Let’s see how you do next quarter. Our literature program’s pretty good, if you’re looking for an area of study to apply your Japanese.”

  As his senior year went by, Bill began to imagine that he was a kind of Paul Bunyan, trying to gain a foothold in two parts of the city at once. The foot at Cascade-Pacific was planted firmly on hard ground, while the one at the university skipped nimbly from log to log in a gushing river of language that never slowed down.

  At Cascade-Pacific, he knew where he was. Sometimes, on the small campus, he had the feeling that he knew all too well where he was, especially when he would bump into Clare or her friends. Gradually, he began spending more time than necessary among the university’s anonymous hordes, where the work he did was endlessly exhilarating. Scheduling conflicts made it necessary for him to petition the college dean to excuse him from daily chapel attendance, a privilege rarely granted at Cascade-Pacific.

  Toward the second half of winter quarter, his grades in Japanese began to decline somewhat, and nothing he did seemed to remedy the situation. Bill took his worries to Professor Tatsumi.

  “Most students would be perfectly satisfied with grades like yours,” he said.

  “I’m not just earning grades,” Bill protested. “I want to learn the language inside out.”

  “That’s very admirable, but you’re going about it all wrong.”

  “What do you mean? This course is like a monster. It’s eating up the time I need to devote to my course work at Cascade-Pacific, and still it’s not satisfied.”

  “But the difficulties you’re having are not language difficulties,” Professor Tatsumi observed. “Students come to me constantly with the same misconception. They think they can ‘learn the language’ as though it were some kind of abstract skill that existed in a vacuum—like learning algebra. Language doesn’t work that way. Language is immersed in culture. You just don’t know anything about the country and its culture—the ‘background’ knowledge that everybody inside the culture can safely assume everybody else knows without further explanation. If you really want to learn Japanese ‘inside out,’ you’re going to have to learn about Japanese culture inside out.”

  “But—”

  “Now, wait a minute, I was just getting to my pitch.” Professor Tatsumi smiled broadly, his tortoise-shell glasses riding up on the wide bridge of his nose. “You’re one of the best students I’ve had in years. Why don’t you apply to do graduate work here?”

  “You mentioned that possibility before, but I’m going into the ministry.”

  “I remember. But you’d make a first-rate academic.”

  “Thanks, Professor. I will think about it.”

  Bill had never imagined that a compliment could cause him such distress. He had been taking his calling for granted so long now that the appearance of another alternative was forcing him to question why he was going into the ministry when serving God had dropped to his second priority. The cause that lived closest to his heart was the search into his past, and it was to this that he was now devoting the greatest portion of his energy—not that it was yielding tangible results. But the more he learned, the closer he felt t
o his memory of Mitsu.

  Bill was called into Dean Foster’s office at the end of April. He could only imagine that the dean was going to reprimand him for lack of interest in his courses at Cascade-Pacific. Instead, he stared in disbelief when the cherub-faced dean declared that, owing to his outstanding academic record and his avowed goal of missionary service, Bill had been chosen to make the Robert L. Houston Memorial Address at the graduation ceremony this June.

  “Thank you, sir … thank you very much. But I can’t do it,” he replied, astonished himself to realize the truth and finality of his own words.

  Dean Foster’s face flushed a bright pink. “Now, see here, Morton, this is a great honor. I’ve already informed your parents and they’re tickled to death.”

  “I don’t know what to say, sir. I never imagined …”

  “I’d say that makes you all the more suited for the honor. A sign of true humility.”

  “Believe me, sir, it’s not humility. I’ve changed my plans. I don’t think I will be doing missionary work.”

  “You don’t think so? You’re not sure, then.”

  “No, I’m not going to. I’m definitely not.” He was smiling now, and he felt his heart pounding.

  “This is a very serious business, Morton. I do wish you had informed us earlier of your decision.”

  “But I couldn’t. I made it just now.”

  “Do you mind telling me why? I was under the impression you had been studying Japanese at the university specifically to prepare yourself for missionary service.”

  “I was.”

  “If this is some kind of whim …”

  “Call it a flash of insight. Something has happened to my faith over the past year, something I haven’t quite worked out for myself. I only know I have lost some of the certainty it takes to make believers out of non-believers.”

  “In other words, you’ve been accepting a 25% ministerial discount on tuition, and now that you’re about to graduate—”