In those days, almost every family in the neighborhood had lost a husband or son, now enshrined as “war heroes” on their family altar. So there was nothing my mother and grandparents could do but quietly accept the news of my father’s death. Uncle Genji must have felt sorry for me, with my endless questions about “heroic suicides.” Of all his nieces and nephews, I was the one closest to the age his daughter had been, and the one most eager to listen to his stories. I suppose I became something of a favorite.
One day my uncle came into the house dripping with sweat after carrying a bulging backpack home. He proceeded to dump a bundle of secondhand books in front of me, tied with string. “You won’t find anything like this in Tokyo anymore! Karuizawa’s still Karuizawa!” he said. He told me he’d bought them at a bookstore near Karuizawa station. They’d belonged to the daughter of some Tokyo family, apparently, who had moved out to their villa here—so if I read them, they’d help me become a lady too. Even better, he said, the war would be over soon, and when that happened, I wouldn’t have to hide from teachers and friends to read these things. Since the only books I’d ever seen were the flimsy ones we used at school, I couldn’t take my eyes off these volumes, with their hard covers and color illustrations. Not knowing what the English word lady meant, I asked him whether he’d read any of them himself. “Not my cup of tea,” he answered, a bit embarrassed. They were books for adolescent girls, by Japanese and foreign novelists.
My mother told me sometime later that he’d gone into Karuizawa that day to find out from people at the Mampei Hotel about the new bomb the Allied forces had dropped on Hiroshima. The hotel had the Red Cross and even some embassies billeted in it. He’d taken a bag of potatoes along, to trade for butter or sausages, but on his way to the hotel, the bookstore near the station had caught his eye.
I remember some B-29s roaring overhead, on their way to drop bombs on the town of Ueda, which wasn’t very far from us; and only a few days later, the emperor’s famous radio address to say we’d lost the war. Most of the grown-ups didn’t know what to do with themselves, but Uncle Genji came alive, like a fish finding water. He got enough money together for a ticket to Tokyo—how, I’ve no idea. My mother was worried that he wouldn’t be able to find anything to eat there, but he told her, “Nah, I’ll be okay. What’s important now is to be quick and get in ahead of everybody else.” Though she was obviously unhappy about his leaving, she knew he couldn’t stay on in her husband’s family home forever, so she didn’t try to stop him.
It wasn’t too long before we got used to seeing jeeps full of GIs rumbling by in a cloud of dust. Our school textbooks were now covered with lines of black ink to hide the banned phrases, and the teachers started using the word demokurashii. Evacuated city children began leaving in droves. Evacuees in Karuizawa began coming out where we lived with bundles of beautiful kimonos they wanted to barter for rice. I loved watching the city women: even though they wore the same wartime cotton trousers as my mother, nothing else about them—their faces, their figures, their accent, the words they used—was the same. I used to hide behind a wooden post and stare at them in fascination.
Then, my father’s younger brother came home from the army, and my mother married him. She seemed to be relieved just to have a husband. But, perhaps because I was the eldest and had such clear memories of my own father, I never got used to having a stepfather, even as time went by. Reading became my refuge. I would come home after school and do my chores, now with a baby half-brother strapped to my back, but I always found time to hide somewhere and read. Unfortunately Grandma, the one person in the family I felt close to, had a bad fall around then. She’d been feeding the chickens. She died not long afterward, and I felt lonelier than ever.
When I was ten or eleven, we heard a great boom one day: it was Mount Asama erupting. The lava flowed mainly toward Gunma Prefecture, so what we got was fine ash on our village. It fell with a whistling sound. That night, we stood in the yard, holding our breath—terrified. A stream of red rocks blew out of the volcano. I must have been mesmerized by the scene. When I recovered a little and turned around, I saw my mother standing some distance away holding the baby in her arms, leaning against my stepfather and staring at the northern night sky, also mesmerized. My little sister and brother were huddled against him too. “Daddy, Daddy!” they were calling out. Grandpa was with them. I felt apart from them, alone.
From the New Year’s cards Uncle Genji sent from Tokyo, we knew he had found a job on an American military base in a place called Tachikawa and that he was working as a head steward in the officers’ mess. The family guessed from his title that he’d done well for himself. But for some years, the only contact we had with him was those cards. I could barely remember what he looked like. Then, in 1952, during the New Year’s holiday, Uncle Genji came to visit, wearing a sharp suit, his hair slicked back. People couldn’t believe it. To his relatives he handed out packs of cigarettes called Lucky Strikes and chocolate bars called Hershey’s. At this point he really did seem like a foreigner. For his part, my uncle quickly saw that I didn’t fit in in the family now that it revolved around my stepfather. He may also have remembered how eagerly I used to listen to his stories about travel and foreign countries. When he heard that I would be graduating from middle school at the end of spring, he said, “After you’re done with school, why don’t you come to Tokyo and work?” He told me I could get a job as a maid on the base where he worked, and that girls could make much more money there than they would outside.
The words “U.S. base” should have made a country girl like me want to run and hide, but I felt only mildly surprised. My parents were of course concerned. They didn’t have the money to send me to high school—and, even if they had, I doubt if it ever would have occurred to them to give me a high school education. While it wasn’t like the old days, and most parents now wanted their children to get an education, they believed that finishing middle school was all a girl needed. My sister and I took it for granted that we would start work right away. But my parents were not so poor that they’d want to send us to Tokyo just to have fewer mouths to feed and get some extra cash; they would have liked me to get a job in a factory or find some other work nearby rather than go so far away.
So it fell to Uncle Genji to convince them. He assured them he would take full responsibility for me, adding that I should be making enough to send them some money every month. “It doesn’t look as if we have much choice, does it?” My stepfather sighed. He seemed guilty about the relief he felt. For her part, my mother made no effort to hide her relief. Even I could see that my inability to get along with my stepfather exasperated her.
SO THAT’S HOW I left for Tokyo.
Uncle Genji was waiting for me on the platform at Ueno station. I followed him as we changed from one train to another, until finally we got to a station so basic and countrified it didn’t seem possible it could still be in Tokyo. The dusty road we walked along was surrounded by barren land that stretched out to the horizon. His house, however, where I was going to live, featured all the conveniences of city life: running water, an indoor toilet, and a wood-floored kitchen on the same level as the rest of the house—no more cooking on packed dirt. It’s hard to believe, when I think of it now, but those basic things were thrilling to me, the little country girl.
I had learned only a few English phrases going to classes at the base when I found myself working during the day for a first lieutenant and his family, as their maid. Their entire house, I heard, had been imported directly from America, from the building materials down to the windowpanes, curtains, and furniture. The place was bright—almost too bright—and was filled with appliances I’d never even imagined: a toaster, an oven, a refrigerator, a washing machine, all shiny and smooth.
It was as if I had been thrown into life on the moon. Everything was so strange that I don’t think I felt the surprise I might have. Only later did I learn that you need a minimum of knowledge and experience to be truly surprised b
y something. For the next two years, I worked every day in that officer’s quarters, where the electric fans were on all day in summer and the Nichrome coil in the space heater glowed red all day in winter. By contrast, power outages were the norm just outside the base fence. I wasn’t mature enough to understand the extravagance of it all. It was only when my time there was almost up that the phenomenal prosperity of the base finally came home to me.
The one thing I was aware of, and just enormously grateful for, right from the beginning, was how much food there was. I grew up in the mountains, where we thought of a bowl of the thick noodles called hoto as a treat. We hardly ever ate freshwater fish, much less fish from the sea, which was strictly for special occasions. I hardly knew what meat tasted like, since we almost never had it. But at the base, for lunch every day, I got to eat food I’d never even laid eyes on before—ham and sausages and all sorts of nourishing-looking things. On top of this, a big bag of sugar was on a kitchen shelf, within easy reach. When I peeked inside and saw white sugar glittering there in all its plenty, my knees went weak—pure white sugar, not the brownish kind O-Hatsu used to put in hot drinks for me. I think that was one moment in my time on the base that came close to ecstasy.
And just as I failed to recognize all that the base had to offer, I remained blissfully ignorant of its temptations. The base was actually quite a strange place, now that I look back. Not all the maids on the base were girls from nearby farms by any means. Many of them had the polish of a city education and were comfortable wearing Western clothes. Rumor had it that one of the women who spoke fluent English—they weren’t just maids—even came from an old aristocratic family. All of us were aware that we’d be less marriageable if people knew where we were working, yet young women still flocked there. They must have had their reasons, or else were just restless, risk-taking types. On the base, discipline was strictly observed, but once you stepped outside, the atmosphere was bawdy, filled with signs of loose living. The temptation to misbehave was strong because you could have a good time with the GIs after work or on weekends and even earn some extra cash. Fortunately I was still too young—only fifteen years old—and such a late bloomer anyway that I didn’t put Uncle Genji in the position of having to be all that vigilant.
My uncle lived near a station called Nakagami, three stops from the Tachikawa base on the Oume Line. Mixed in with the cheaply built new houses in the area were a few older ones scattered about. Uncle Genji earned quite a good salary compared with most people then, so he rented one of those larger prewar places, and sublet the extra rooms. A couple of women called for some reason “onlies”—mistresses of American soldiers, who had worked their way up from streetwalking—were apparently among his boarders, but with his niece moving in, he threw them out. When I arrived, a black soldier and his Japanese wife had one wooden-floored room and a spacious eight-mat tatami room. A war widow who was alarmingly skinny and pale lived in another four-and-a-half-mat tatami room; she’d left her child with her parents and was also working as a maid. We all shared the kitchen, toilet, and bath, except for the black GI, who showered at the base.
In addition to renting out the spare rooms, Uncle Genji had had a woman living with him. All the different pots and pans in the kitchen were one sign, but also, when I came, it seemed he was in the middle of getting rid of this girlfriend. One night, a woman showed up with a heavily powdered face and a limp kimono, its collar greasy from wear. She asked him for money, and the two of them started shouting. I realized later that she must have been the one who’d been living there. She seemed to be desperate. She kept on pestering him. He had the sort of callousness that’s necessary, probably, in a man who carries on with lots of women; he stood his ground and flatly refused to give her any. I heard him shout, “I’d rather give money to a dog!” When she finally left, he told me with a scowl still on his face to scatter salt at the front door—an old custom to purify the place. Not long afterward, another woman in a kimono, probably a geisha of some sort, started coming over. This one wasn’t slovenly like the other one. She used to come in and say the most ordinary, domestic things—“Did you find that rubber hose I was looking for, boss?”—in a shockingly husky voice.
Other people came by, looking for advice from the “boss.” Some were his friends from before the war; others were cooks or waiters he supervised at the mess. I couldn’t get over it, that this was one and the same person as the uncle who had lived with us. The building he worked in was also a splendid affair, with the Stars and Stripes flying high over it and armed MPs standing guard at the entrance. Someone like me would never have been allowed to set foot inside. My uncle spoke fairly fluent English; once in a while, I saw him leaving the base in a jeep, chatting with an officer. Knowing the guards wouldn’t search him in those circumstances, he used to smuggle out bottles of whiskey or packs of cigarettes which he sold on the black market.
And he was a very good-looking man. In the morning when he was shaving, he would raise his chin, lean back and, looking into the mirror, proclaim, “I am the Valentino of the Orient.” He did this almost every morning.
“Maybe people should call me Rudolph instead of George.”
On the base, he went by the name of George, a name he had used since his days on the ships. Well-read foreigners in the first-class cabins used to ask him whether his name had any connection with that of the romantic hero of The Tale of Genji. The Chinese characters were different, of course, but that was beside the point. Being compared to an imperial prince, the epitome of aristocratic beauty and refinement, seemed to be going a bit too far—so Uncle Genji changed his name on board to George.
All the housework at his place was my responsibility, but it was still an easier life than on the farm, where I’d had to look after the three younger children and my grandfather, who got more and more feeble, and do my share of chores, indoors and out, starting with hauling buckets of water. At Uncle Genji’s, I could finish the housework and still have time to read for an hour or so before I went to sleep, even on weekdays. I bought the cheap secondhand paperbacks they sold in the bookstands right next to rude magazines for men. On weekends, after finishing the cleaning and laundry, I used to take a book out to the narrow veranda and read until there was no more light.
As I said before, most of the maids at the base were either farm girls from around there, or city girls commuting from different parts of Tokyo. Since I didn’t fit into either category, I found myself without any friends with whom to spend my days off. I know I grew up on a farm, but when I heard other girls saying, “I’ve gotta take a piss”—and then saw them relieve themselves right by the side of the road, in broad daylight—I felt I hadn’t much in common with them. It was easy to forget that as a child I’d thought nothing of squatting down in the middle of a rice field myself! I didn’t try to make friends with the city girls, either. They intimidated me, with their smart way of talking.
Perhaps out of pity, or because he was fed up with me hanging around reading all weekend, my uncle occasionally took me into central Tokyo. We’d go to Shinjuku or the Ginza and see a double feature, foreign movies usually. Once when we saw a hit Japanese film called What Is Your Name? he cried more than I did and looked a bit ashamed afterward.
It was interesting to watch Tokyo being rebuilt right in front of us. Yet in all the bustle of those weekend crowds, you still sometimes came across a disabled veteran, one leg dressed in a white bandage, with a cane propped by his side, playing a sad accordion. He was asking for small donations. Most passersby would veer away and walk quickly on.
The war was fast receding into history.
By 1951, a year before I started working at the base, the Occupation was, for all intents and purposes, over, with the signing of the Treaty of San Francisco. When I arrived, the golden days of the base—by which I mean the days when the place buzzed with energy and activity—were on their way to being a thing of the past. Conscripted GIs were heading back home and being replaced by people my uncle referred
to as “square heads,” making the base less and less exciting. In fact, by the time he got me the job, he was apparently already thinking about finding a new job for himself. Though he was the reason I was there, he used to say, “This is no place for a young girl.”
In May of 1954, he learned that one of his fellow workers—someone he was close to, a cook for the officers—had given notice. This cook had managed to get his old job back, at the Imperial Hotel. It was then that my uncle decided that he was ready to leave the base as well.
The morning after the farewell party for the cook, Uncle Genji and I were sitting on the tatami having breakfast when he put down his newspaper, looked me in the face, and said, “I wish I knew what to do about your future, Fumiko.” This started a whole lecture. “You know, it can be difficult, being a girl. With your mother, it was easy. She wasn’t any smarter or prettier than the next girl, so she wasn’t too unhappy with the life she ended up with. But there are other cases. A girl with a pretty face but no brain expects too much out of life, and gets disappointed. A girl with a good head and a plain face won’t aim so high, but can end up living a life that’s way beneath her. It’s not like you’re bad-looking, Fumiko, but you’ve really got it going for you up here, in your head. You’ve always been clever. If you came from a rich family, then it wouldn’t matter how you looked or how smart you were. But guess what? You don’t, so I don’t know what to do with you.”
In elementary and middle school my grades had always put me at the top of the class. I distinctly remembered a teacher saying she wished I was going on to high school.
“Isn’t it the same for boys?” I asked my uncle.
“Are you kidding?” he said, trying to play down the discouragement he could hear in my voice. “All a man has to be is smart, and then he’s set for life. But guys who are good-looking on top of being smart, like me, nothing can beat them!”
A True Novel Page 26