by Lee Langley
A small, square printed seal at the end of a letter from Nagasaki; Nancy’s voice, ‘It’s from Joey’s mother. Her name is Cho-Cho.’
One girl brought a new basket, smoothly and intricately woven.
‘My mother made it, from tule reed, sort of bulrush that grows here. It’s bound with string she unravelled from an onion sack in the garbage from the kitchen.’
A boy held up a tiny carved monkey made of jade.
‘Netsuke.’
‘Pretty.’
‘Useful,’ the boy said.
And Joey realised it was not enough to know the word. The use of this object required an explanation. The naming of parts should include the knowledge of its function, as in the poem Nancy had sent him, passed on from her British friend.
That lesson the class discussed netsuke, miniature sculptures, the word of two characters that meant ‘root’ and ‘to suspend’; the tiny object that long ago solved the problem of how to keep safe personal belongings in robes that had no pockets.
One of the older boys stepped in.
‘Small objects, such as coins, were placed in cloth containers and hung by a cord from a sash round the waist. The sash, obi, is—’
‘I know what an obi is.’
He picked it up, feeling the netsuke’s smoothness against his fingertips, returning the dark gaze of the monkey’s eyes.
Next day an elderly, silver-haired man appeared in the classroom door. Mr Murakami apologised for interrupting the lesson, but he had something to show Joey that might be of interest: a wooden carving, so small it fitted easily into his closed fist.
‘See no evil, hear no evil, ah, speak no evil – mizaru, kikazaru, iwazaru.’ He held out an exquisite carved trinity. Someone must have reported back that Joey liked monkeys.
‘Perhaps a play on words, our word for monkey is saru. This is a poor copy I have attempted of a seventeenth-century temple carving, in Nikko Toshogo shrine.’ He glanced round the room and said a few words rapidly, in Japanese. A ripple of laughter from the children.
Mr Murakami gave the slightest movement, a hint of a bow. ‘I have explained to them that I am too old to share their class. I must not interrupt you, sensei.’
The word, delivered with gentle humour, meant nothing to Joey until much later, when he was able to appreciate the nuances implicit in sensei, for which no English equivalent exists – he guessed the French maître came nearest. When he had moved from ignorance to a tentative, fumbling understanding of the cat’s-cradle complexity of Japanese semantics, Joey thought back to that moment and came close to tears.
He had not intended to contribute to the Show and Tell but after the lesson he found himself pulling out the bag from under his bed, rummaging around. Next day he reached into his pocket and placed a grimy wooden object on the classroom table.
Where Joey’s American classmates had been baffled by his possession of this unprepossessing article, there was no such puzzlement here, only shouts of recognition:
‘Komo!’
‘Hey, you got a spinner!’
For many of his class, as he now thought of them, the spinning top was a part of family childhood. Clustering round the table they clamoured to speak. One talked of tsukurigomai – tops with a hole, which made a humming sound, another of togoma made from bamboo. They touched his battered example, smiling.
A small girl picked it up and handed it to him, silently requesting a demonstration.
‘Once it was bright yellow and red,’ Joey said as he set it spinning. ‘The paint was shiny.’
The words were passed around. Heads nodded.
‘It came from Nagasaki. Where I was born.’ Then, ‘My mother is Japanese.’
Is Japanese. My mother. A woman in a dark dress. Seated, pale hands in her lap. Or maybe lying under rubble, crushed. Dead for real this time.
There was the usual murmur, the grandmother’s footsteps of phrases, words, information jumping from one to another. Heads nodding.
He saw they were all looking at him, but differently now, studying him doubtfully. He thought of Ichir ’s old joke: funny you don’t look . . .
He knocked on the door of Mr Murakami’s room.
‘Ah, sensei . . .’
‘Your carving,’ Joey said, ‘the monkeys.’
‘Ah. Useful exercise. I found a fragment, some wood by the perimeter fence. Hard. Good for carving, even with improvised tools.’
He waited, smiling at his visitor. The boy had not come to talk about monkeys.
‘The class is going well?’
‘Yeah. I was expecting trouble, but they’re . . . quiet.’
‘Ah. You are enjoying the benefits of giri.’
‘Which is . . . ?’
‘Difficult to translate . . . A mode of behaviour, an ethical code instilled into us, a mix of duty, obligation, a sense of justice and morality. We are bound by giri towards our parents but also . . .’ a smile ‘towards our teachers.’
‘So that’s why I’m having such an easy ride. Tough for the kids.’
‘They would not think so. Giri is so important that Japanese have been known to commit suicide rather than break it.’
It was not easy for Joey to explain why he was there. He wanted information, he needed answers, but the field of his ignorance was so vast that he was unable even to formulate the questions.
‘It’s hopeless. I’m bogged down in the detail before I even get to the big issues. Where should I begin?’
A long, doubtful intake of breath. Mr Murakami seemed to be overcome by an attack of tics and twitches: he shook his head repeatedly, clicked his tongue, rubbed the back of his neck, apparently lost in thought. In time Joey would become familiar with a traditional Japanese reaction to a tricky question. This first time he anxiously watched the small elderly man going through what appeared to be a painful process.
After a lengthy silence, Mr Murakami spoke. He offered the view that the Japanese were good at small things, their skill less suited to the grand gesture. Joey was relieved.
‘Small I can handle.’
If truth be told, he was unsure what the big gesture was.
‘This word I’ve heard . . . wabi-sabi? I can’t seem to work out the meaning.’
‘Ah. Not a word but a phrase; not one meaning, but many . . . wabi-sabi is to do with Tao and Zen, which are universes in themselves. All things are impermanent. All things are imperfect. All things are incomplete. Let us say wabi-sabi involves the – ah – transience of life, the pleasures of impermanence, the beauty of imperfection. A cracked vase has its own beauty.’
He registered Joey’s growing consternation: ‘One is entering a maze. Easy to get lost!’
But a draughty hut in a tar-paper barracks in an unforgiving landscape was as good a place as any to take the first step.
‘We cannot hurry; you may find pu-ro-gress somewhat slow.’
But with time, Mr Murakami said reassuringly, they would advance. He added, less reassuringly, that progress involved kokoro which meant ‘the heart of things’ or ‘feeling’ and this too would need exploring, though one could never be confident of having indeed reached the heart of things.
‘I’m wondering,’ Joey said, ‘if a foreigner can ever understand Japan. It’s looking-glass country: the closer you get to it, the further off it is.’
Mr Murakami brought out a Japanese word – kaizen – which might be translated as ‘continuous improvement’, though he feared – a small smile – that there was no precise American equivalent. However, they would press on.
As they explore together that faraway country of Joey’s birth, its history, the reasons for one thing and another, the beginning of this or that, Joey feels himself slowly spinning. Between waking and dreaming he touches fugitive moments, fragments of long-forgotten experience. He has more than one past to remember.
Unwinding, he hangs suspended in a state of non-existence. He had thought he was examining a matter of identity, the old question: who am I? Travelling deeper i
nto the maze he finds the question is more: what is an I?
‘There are many words for I and for You, each with its own meaning, its own restrictions. There are also echo-words, words that . . . simulate the sound or the feeling of a word. This is important . . .
‘Take the word: “flows”. A clear stream flows sara-sara, which gives the sense of the water. A fine lady walks saya-saya with the sound of the movement of her clothes . . .’
‘Yes!’
Joey’s exclamation was jubilant. Nancy read him a poem once, where a poet watches his lady walk towards him, and it taught the boy a new word, which now bore fruit in saya-saya.
‘There’s an English poem. “Whenas in silks my Julia goes, then, then methinks how sweetly flows that liquefaction of her clothes” . . .’
And Mr Murakami nodded. Liquefaction. ‘Ah, yes.’ He reflected aloud that after all, English had more in common with Japanese than he had thought, and they were making progress.
‘Next we might look at puns, pivot words – kakekotoba – wordplay, you would call it. This will be amusing.’
But kokoro lay far ahead.
Meanwhile, Mr Murakami suggested a cup of tea; on the wood-burning stove he had improvised a means of heating water.
On one wall of the hut, a scroll was suspended from a rusty nail; a scribble of lines, mostly grey or black, not an object Joey would expect to be hung on the wall like a Georgia O’Keeffe poppy or a Wyeth landscape.
Without giving any sign that he had noticed Joey’s observation of the scroll, Mr Murakami raised the subject of Joey’s drawings: he would consider it an honour to look at one or two, some time. Once again Joey became aware that he had been an object of interest. Mr Murakami handed him a small, porcelain cup of greenish liquid. Sipping it, Joey wondered what the Japanese for ‘vile flavour’ might be.
‘Do you consider yourself an artist?’
‘No. I consider myself at best a craftsman.’
‘Ah.’
Mr Murakami then remarked on the curious fact that until quite recently there had been no word for ‘art’ in Japanese.
‘The word that comes closest is geijutsu, which you could translate as “form and design”. You might say that for us, art is the same as living, both should include functional purpose, and spiritual simplicity.’
He took down a book of woodcuts from a shelf built of scavenged planks and began, slowly, to turn the pages.
‘The Japanese artist is a poet rather than a painter. He disregards the laws of perspective and of light and shade. He is attempting to capture the feelings evoked by the memory of a scene, the feelings that he experiences between waking and dreaming.’
Joey took the book in his hands, while Mr Murakami talked of calligraphic quality, strength of line – ‘perhaps due to the Japanese way of drawing from the elbow, not the wrist, as is the case in Western art.’
The memory of a scene . . . the feeling between waking and dreaming . . .
Somewhere a wheel is turned and with infinite slowness he is flayed, the flesh gradually stripped from his body leaving him peeled of his American sense of self. But what will take its place?
41
As summer slipped away the sky took on a dirty yellow tinge, the sickly trees around the perimeter lost their foliage and withered leaves dropped slowly, like stained snowflakes, lying in drifts on the hard ground. In the camp a division could be seen as clear-cut as the red, white and blue layered angel-food cake served up on the Fourth of July. The split was generational: the children had classes and team games. The young men clustered, buzzing like wasps, radiating resentment. The older internees watched and waited, with the patience a lifetime of experience had taught them.
As the temperature dipped, the barracks simmered. Labour disputes, hostility, long-drawn-out pain of one sort and another merged and flared into riots. There was an accidental shooting: a man shot allegedly trying to escape. The soldier was punished: for ‘misuse of official property’ – a bullet – and fined one dollar.
For Joey, increasingly sunk in the past, when the present intruded as it did now, it collided bruisingly with a lost world described by those who were still able to revive its essence. Real life jolted him out of the seductive tranquillity of contemplation where he was living a dream; guided by old hands his telescope moved across the landscape of the past to show him ancient courts and emperors, warriors, ceremonies, the forming and refining of a closed realm.
And there was the more recent past, Perry’s five black-hulled American frigates that steamed into Edo harbour in 1853, and what followed, as one century gave way to the next. Within the cramped horizon of the camp he explored unknown worlds, absorbed the small tragedies and triumphs of ordinary people; their hopes and disillusion.
He moved through the barracks, passed from one bleak room to the next, sitting cross-legged, listening to these quiet people, some fluent, others faltering, as their voices drew him into their past.
. . . ‘My grandmother was a picture-bride . . . she saw my father first time on Ellis Island. Before that, just photos; he proposed by letter. She was wearing a hat with flowers. She pulled out a flower and gave it him . . .’
. . . ‘My grandfather came from Osaka to Oregon. A farmer. He grew cabbage and squash. Never a day off in forty years . . .’
. . . ‘My father went to college. He studied science, mathematics. Masters, Ph.D . . . . My mother gave thanks he died before Pearl Harbor.’
. . . ‘My family has a shop – had a shop – we sold shoes. American shoes are too big for Japanese feet, we imported small sizes . . .’
. . . ‘We have fishing boat . . . No time to sell when internment came; we tie up boat in harbour . . .’
. . . ‘Before she came to America, my mother arranged the flowers every week in the Baptist church in Nagasaki—’
Nagasaki? Would she have known a girl called Cho-Cho who married an American sailor?
But the flower-arranger, Mrs Shioya’s mother, was part of a vanished past where everyone was long dead. Unlike Cho-Cho who lived on, unreachable. Unless she, too, was now a statistic.
42
Nancy had found a college in Massachusetts that would accept Joey; where he could continue his studies. She wrote to give him the news, ending with a happy flourish: ‘So as of now, you’re out of there!!’
Afterwards she realised she should have picked up from his letters the way he was thinking. His reply came as a shock.
‘Dear Nancy, it’s good of you to go to all that trouble, but I want to stick around and see what happens here. I guess camp is the place for us enemy aliens. I have to keep this short – there’s a concert tonight and we need to rehearse. Who’d have thought school flute lessons would pay off! Not that I have more than a few bars to play, but it’s tricky stuff: would you believe Charles Ives?’
Joey and the band came out of the canteen hut into a riot: internee coal workers demanding better wages had been fired. Docility exploded into rage, the air filled with flying bricks and insults. Mortified, Joey realised that while he and the band had been rehearsing a concert of American music inside the hut, men had been marching to a different beat outside.
Autumn ushered in a bitter season: dishes of Thanksgiving dinner lying untouched – ‘Thanksgiving? For what?’ Japanese festivals were celebrated without joy; Christmas an uneasy mixture of coloured lanterns and carol-singing. Santa Claus figures made of cheese and sticky rice, and decorated trees that looked neither Japanese nor altogether American. A bleak New Year.
*
Joey was on his bed, eyes closed, open book on his chest, when Ichir threw open the door.
‘Are you asleep?’
‘I’m deep in the Mexican pueblo with Ruth Benedict.’
‘Tell her to get screwed.’
‘Ichi, they’re so Japanese. The culture of restraint—’
‘The whole camp’s buzzing.’ A baffled shake of the head.
‘There’s a loyalty questionnaire. I just read it. It’
s garbage. Joey, these guys are nuts. They want us to swear loyalty? To a country that’s put us behind barbed wire. Does that make sense?’
‘They’re always paranoid—’
‘There are two special questions that need a yes to get you through. They want everyone to renounce Japanese citizenship. Who do they think they’re kidding? Some of the old people, that’s the only citizenship they have, the government never would allow them to become US citizens. It’s lose–lose: if they sign they’ll be stateless.
‘And they have to agree to renounce allegiance to the Emperor. People are totally bewildered, scared: it’s like they’ve been supporting the Emperor till now. Like when did you stop beating your wife. The old ones are in tears. All over camp, you can hear them crying. They’re lost, Joey, we’re all lost. What the fuck is going to become of us?’
Without waiting for an answer he slammed out of the hut. Joey got up and watched him walking away fast, shoulders hunched, rubbing his eyes and shaking his head from side to side, like a dog shaking off water.
Joey suspected this would turn out to be one of those camp myths, but it was genuine: ‘The loyalty questionnaire must be completed by all internees over 17 years of age.’ Men and women ranging from the resentful to the bewildered, some not even able to read English, were confronted by a long list of questions that must be answered, signed and witnessed without delay.
*
The admin office door was open but Joey waited outside, watching the slightly overweight lieutenant studying papers. Finally he looked up and indicated with a slow blink that he was available. He waited, jaws moving, gum shifting from side to side. Silently Joey dropped his documents on the desk. The lieutenant squinted at the papers, drew them towards him with the flat of his hand and glanced at them with a glazed, almost exhausted look. He glanced up, then back at the papers.
‘Okaay . . .’
Joey recognised the tone, a familiar symptom of suspicion. At the filing cabinet the lieutenant checked the papers against documents in a folder. The sight of an apparently all-American internee threw him. The officer found himself on the back foot and didn’t like the position.