The Sun Gods

by Jay Rubin

  He came to a halt and gingerly looked around to see how far he had come, realizing with a start that he could see neither end of the bridge. He was suspended in space, the only sound the distant gurgling of the Momigi River far below.

  There was a thickening in the fog ahead. He moved toward it, thinking it must be the place where the bridge dipped to its lowest point. The closer he came, the less fluid the thick area seemed, and just as he was beginning to search for other explanations for its presence, it shifted on the bridge, causing the planks beneath his feet to tremble. It was alive, and it had a definite human shape. He took another step, then drew to a halt.

  As if in response to the pulse of energy his own movement sent along the bridge, the shape turned in his direction. It was an old woman in a faded gray kimono the color of the fog. The woman’s small, angular face was topped by a stark-white mass of hair. Through the mist, her dark eyes focused on him. She looked genuinely startled.

  Bill tried to speak, but he could force no sound from his throat. Could this be Mitsuko? She seemed far too old. After a few moments, she spoke to him in English: “Yes? Can I help you?”

  “My name is Bill Morton, and—”

  The woman’s knees buckled, and she grabbed hold of him, all but pulling him over the cable and down into the gorge.

  31

  BILL GRABBED THE CABLE, and shock waves ran up and down the length of the bridge.

  “Billy!” the woman cried, her voice muffled against his chest.

  Tentatively, Bill touched her shoulders as she clung to him. He hardly dared to speak as they swayed on the bridge.

  The desperate grip around his waist began to relax and she raised her face from his chest. “You … are so grown up! “

  Frank had told him that Yoshiko should be in her early sixties, but this woman seemed much older. The skin draped over her prominent cheekbones was deeply wrinkled, and her straight white hair seemed to belong to a woman in her eighties.

  “Do you recognize me?” she asked, looking up at him with tearful eyes. “I am Aunt Yoshiko.”

  She held her hand out. He took it and followed her from the bridge. She led him up a narrow path along the edge of a terraced rice field. They passed a cluster of small, weathered farmhouses with high, straw-thatched roofs, beyond which lay a field with close-cropped bushes arranged in long rows like giant green caterpillars lying side by side. Crouching amid the rows, two women in blue farm trousers looked up as they passed.

  She led him through a small cedar grove, emerging at the other side to find a much larger house. Its thatched roof was battered and pitted, the bare boards of the siding showing signs of rot. With most of its storm shutters closed, the house looked empty, almost abandoned. He sensed that he would not find Mitsuko here.

  He helped Yoshiko slide open the weather-beaten panel door that led into a dark, dirt-floored entryway. He pulled the door closed as she stepped out of her sandals up to the polished wooden floor. She turned toward him, bowing slightly, her bare toes peeking out from beneath her frayed kimono skirt.

  “Please wait,” she said, disappearing into the gloom. He heard the clatter of storm shutters opening, and the house’s interior began to lighten. Soon she returned with a lighted oil lamp and beckoned for him to step up to the wooden floor.

  The floor felt smooth and cold. He followed her down a corridor and through an open sliding door into a small six-mat room. In the center of the room was a low, square table, a quilt trailing down its sides and onto the floor. Beneath the table there would be a heating device, just like the kotatsu he used in Tokyo for keeping warm.

  “Dohzo,” she said, gesturing for him to sit on the floor and slide his legs in under the quilt. When he lifted the quilt, the smell of burning charcoal escaped. His legs fit into a sunken place in the floor warmed by charcoal instead of the usual infra-red lamp affixed to the underside of the table.

  In a blue porcelain hibachi next to the table, a cast iron kettle stood on a tripod over glowing coals, wisps of steam drifting up from the spout as the water boiling within produced a tiny, bell-like sound. The wall opposite was dominated by a large mahogany wardrobe. With her back to him, Yoshiko knelt before the wardrobe, yanking open the top drawer and rummaging in among its overflowing contents. She pushed the drawer closed again and turned to Bill. In a formal kneeling position, she reached out toward the table and set a small brocade case before him, its colors faded, and stray threads dangling from its edges. Hands on her knees, she looked at him and at the case.

  “Open it,” she said.

  It was unexpectedly light. He eased the flap back and the object inside slid into his palm. A disk of oiled wood, its dark polished surface glowed in his hand. Great care had been lavished on the carving of a bird flying across the sun. The sun itself was a round disk-within-the-disk, its perimeter surrounded by flames. He turned the piece over on his palm to find a circular hollowed-out area in which the wood was rough, only the outer edge having been rubbed with oil.

  “You broke the mirror,” said Yoshiko. “You were very naughty. Do you remember?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe not.”

  “She wanted me to give it to you.”

  He swallowed hard and looked again at the carved bird and sun. “Where is she?” he asked. “Is she living here with you?”

  “No …” Yoshiko said vaguely.

  “Is she in Japan? Don’t tell me she went back to the States.”

  Yoshiko shook her head, swaying the straight, white thatch of hair. “No, not back to America. She was with my parents and my younger brother, Ichiro …”

  “She was with them … ?”

  “In Nagasaki.”

  So now his search was truly over. He would never see her again.

  “I’m so sorry to have to tell you that.”

  Bill hung his head. He felt as if everything—the waiting on tables at Maneki, the discussions with Frank Sano, the endless hours of language study, the courses on Japanese literature and history and society, the Fulbright application, the flight across the Pacific, the dark journey from Tokyo to Yatsushiro and on to Hitoyoshi, Toji, and finally Momigi—had lost any meaning they might have had.

  “She loved you so much,” said Yoshiko. “She would have been thrilled to see you.”

  “I was so sure … especially when I found you …”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to say.”

  “Uncle Goro? Isn’t he here with you?”

  “He died in the relocation camp. I am alone.”

  Yoshiko went back to the tall wardrobe, opening the lower drawer, which was as crammed full as the top one. She lifted a large photograph album from the top of the pile and set it on the table. Bound in disintegrating leather, the album began with formal wedding portraits, the young man in a high, stiff collar, the woman in typical Shinto garb, her tsuno-kakushi headpiece that supposedly covered the “horns of jealousy.”

  “These are my parents, Tsunejiro and Somé Fukai,” Yoshiko said.

  Bill wondered if a search for Mitsuko Fukai would have been any easier.

  Yoshiko’s brothers appeared next. Ichiro, one year younger than Yoshiko, was shown in an elaborate robe in his mother’s arms being presented at the shrine at the age of seven days. Even Jiro, six years her junior, had beaten Yoshiko into the album. Yoshiko’s picture first appeared when she was seven years old. Her parents brought her to the local shrine for Shichi-go-san, the “Seven-five-three” festival in which parents with children of those ages present them to the gods with thanks that they have reached these important points in their lives safely. “This was my first obi,” she said, pointing to the broad sash around the waist of the happy little girl in kimono.

  “What year was that?” Bill asked.

  “Meiji forty-one … 1908. Of course, I was only six by Western count.”

  If she had been six in 1908, then she had been born in 1902. She was only sixty-one now. The years had been hard on her.

  Mitsuko was
shown at her first Shichi-go-san, at the age of three—or two by Western count—in 1914. Sweet and chubby, she could have been any of the fancily dressed little girls he had seen at the Meiji Shrine.

  The Fukai children grew up as the pages flipped by before him. Mitsuko was skin and bones after shedding her baby fat, but had wonderfully bright eyes and a happy smile. She was definitely the best-looking member of the family.

  The next album started with the bespectacled Goro and Yoshiko’s wedding pictures. Mitsuko was still a little girl in the family portrait.

  The scene changed to Seattle, and most of the images of Yoshiko and her husband were swallowed up in large group shots taken at the Japanese Christian Church.

  “I even remember the address,” Yoshiko said. “Nine-oh-nine East Terrace Street. Goro and I were in charge of the Sunday school.”

  It occurred to him that he hadn’t noticed any religious paraphernalia in the house—neither cross nor Shinto god shelf nor Buddhist altar. “You must have been very active in the church.”

  “Yes, very active in those days.” She smiled as if indulging in nostalgic thoughts. “But not anymore.”

  “Oh? Why not?”

  “After I came back here,” she said matter-of-factly, “I found out that the Christian god does not exist.”

  “‘Found out’? How did you find it out?”

  “I heard it out there,” she said, motioning vaguely toward the bridge. “The only gods are the sun gods,” she went on. “A new one comes into the world each day.”

  She spoke of these momentous things as though she might be explaining to him how to cook rice or run the bath water.

  In another of the group photos, Bill saw a blond, youthful Thomas Morton towering over rows of Japanese and standing by a banner reading “Japanese Christian Sunday school.” Bill had never seen his father smiling in such a genuinely happy, open manner, chin held aloft, his collar button ready to pop with pride. He wished he could have known him then.

  Turning the page, Bill inhaled sharply. Not even two years old, he was in the lap of a Japanese woman in her twenties seated on a blanket spread on a lawn. His mouth and fingers were smeared with grains of rice. In the woman’s face he could recognize the lively eyes of the skinny little Mitsuko, but here she was a beautiful woman, her long hair pulled back in a bun. She was not looking into the camera but at the child in her lap, and the smile she gave the little boy made the grown-up Billy’s heart melt. It was almost unbearable to think that she was dead. He would never see her, never hold her.

  Yoshiko let him gaze at the picture for a few minutes before turning the page. The next pictures were of the two sisters posing before tourist sites in Washington: Mount Rainier, the Columbia Gorge, Hurricane Ridge. But in these pictures she wore a touch of melancholy. One shot with the Olympic Mountains in the background clearly showed the double peak of The Brothers. It could only have been taken from one place: the bluff across the street from the house where he had grown up in Magnolia. To think that, as a boy, he had walked on the very patch of ground where she had once stood.

  He found no pictures of Mitsuko with his father. Instead, the pages in this part of the album had rough patches, where the paper corners holding the snapshots in place seemed to have been torn away and rearranged. The pictures here showed him somewhat older—perhaps three or four. The last few pages in the album were empty.

  “These are all the photos,” Yoshiko said.

  Just then the house shook as someone struggled to open the front door. Bill leaned toward the window and slid the shoji back just in time to see a figure in blue mompe trousers darting away from the house. It appeared to be one of the farm women they had passed earlier.

  “Just a moment,” said Yoshiko, gliding from the room. A few seconds later, she returned holding a tray with two steaming bowls of noodles, which she placed on the table.

  “What a pleasant surprise,” Bill said.

  “Follow me to wash,” Yoshiko said. She led him to a dark lavatory where a rusty pump fed into a slate sink. She pumped icy water for him while he washed his hands and face.

  They ate the noodles in silence. The only sound was the soft ringing of the iron kettle on the hibachi. Yoshiko snagged the noodles with her chopsticks and slurped them up in the time-honored Japanese manner. Thanks to the steam and peppery seasoning, Bill warmed up enough to remove his coat for the first time.

  “Delicious noodles,” Bill said, drinking down the last of the soup. “Who made them?”

  “Tsugiko,” she said. “A tenant of ours. It’s one of her duties.”

  By then, the mist had lifted, and streaks of sunlight played across the shoji paper. He was feeling sleepy.

  Yoshiko said, “Why don’t you take a walk while I clean up?”

  “I could use some fresh air,” Bill said.

  Retracing their earlier path through the cedar grove, Bill came to the field with the hedges that looked like giant caterpillars. Everything was a rich green now in the sunlight.

  “Konnichi wa,” he called to the woman working in the field.

  She glanced up at him, dipping her head uncertainly.

  He stepped down between the long hedges and approached her. “Tsugiko-san deshoh ka?” he asked—“Would you be Tsugiko?”

  When she nodded shyly, he thanked her for the delicious noodles. He was probably the first foreigner she had ever met, and he was not sure that his Tokyo Japanese was making sense to her. He tried asking about this crop she was tending, and she answered clearly enough that it was tea.

  “I understand you are one of Aunt Yoshiko’s tenants,” he said.

  The woman broke into ringing laughter, and her hand came up to hide her mouth. “Did she tell you that?” she asked. “There are no more tenants in Japan. General MacArthur ended all that. This farm is ours now.”

  “Well, maybe she just said it from habit.”

  “No, she knows better, but I am sure she still thinks of us as the family’s tenants. Her brother sends us money every month to take care of her.”

  “I hadn’t realized there was another brother. I understand Ichiro was killed in Nagasaki.”

  “Yes, everyone but Jiro. He lives in Tokyo.”

  Golden in the morning sunlight, Mount Fuji soared above the train, its snow-draped cone more perfect and graceful than he had ever imagined it. But, for all he cared, it might just as well be another slide in Professor Fleming’s art history class. The Hayabusa would arrive in Tokyo at 10:30, and then what was he to do? Go to the Noh seminar? Discuss the meaning of the michiyuki in Kanehira? What was the point anymore? Mitsuko was dead. And poor Yoshiko, aged beyond her years: was she out there now on the bridge, communing with her sun gods?

  He had come four thousand miles in search of two sisters who lived in the deepest recesses of his soul, only to find that his country and his father had destroyed them both. They were imprisoned without trial. One buried her husband in the desert sands. The other was betrayed by her husband and blasted to atoms along with thousands of others. Not in the first bombing—which was bad enough—but in the second, the one dropped after they had learned the horrible truth of what the weapon could do.

  America, America, God shed his grace on thee.

  All this in the name of Christian civilization. Of truth. Our truth. “He that believeth on him is not condemned, but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the light, because their deeds were evil.” Japan did not believe. Japan was evil. Its women and children had to be incinerated. Whatever good Christianity had brought into the world, that had been far outweighed by the evil it had unleashed by creating the devil. The world would not be safe until men stopped killing in the cause of righteousness.

  His first thought on leaving Itsuki had been to cross the Shimabara Gulf for a pilgrimage to Nagasaki, but wandering aimlessly through unkno
wn streets had seemed so pointless. Anything that was left for him now was in Tokyo. Tsugiko, Yoshiko’s “tenant,” had given him the address of Jiro Fukai, the brother who paid for her upkeep. Perhaps, when the sense of loss had dulled somewhat, he would visit the man to learn what he might know of Mitsuko’s end.

  32

  c/o Niiyama

  Ogikubo 1-124

  Suginami-ku

  Tokyo, Japan

  April 17, 1963

  Dear Frank,

  I should have written to you over a month ago, but I have not been able to find the words. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I have not been able to find the courage to tell you that Mitsuko is dead. I learned this from her sister, Yoshiko.

  There should be a gentler way of breaking the news, and I have been hoping that, if I let some time go by, I would find the way, but the weeks have done nothing to soften the blow for me. I simply don’t know how I can spare you.

  I discovered Yoshiko Nomura living in a tiny village in the mountains of Kyushu. I recognized a lullaby that Mitsuko used to sing to me, and I was able to locate her home village when I learned where the song came from. Yoshiko looks far older than her sixty-one years, no doubt because of what she has been through. She lost almost her entire family--including Mitsuko--when the atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki.

  Yoshiko’s husband, Goro, must have died in Minidoka after you left. Yoshiko lives in a large, old house, but perhaps it would be more accurate to say that she lives in her own, little world. She keeps her old photograph albums close by, and I was able to see some photos of Mitsuko, one of them with me (age two) in her lap taken at some kind of picnic. I almost cried when I saw that. She was so beautiful!

  Aunt Yoshiko gave me the wooden backing from a small hand mirror that Mitsuko had asked her to pass on to me. She knew right where it was, as if the thing had been left with her the day before. She told me that I was the one who broke the mirror glass itself, though how I did it I never learned. Since returning to Tokyo, I have had the glass restored but I keep the mirror in the back of my closet. It is beautifully made, but I am not emotionally ready yet to enjoy it as a memento.