Three Lives of Tomomi Ishikawa

by Benjamin Constable

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I’ve got other priorities.’

  ‘OK,’ I said.

  * * *

  When we got outside, Beatrice kissed my cheeks.

  ‘Let’s call each other tomorrow and you can tell me how you got on,’ she said.

  ‘All right. Which way are you heading?’

  ‘That way.’ She pointed to the buildings on the other side of the street, indicating northeast. ‘I’m getting the J train. Charles Street is in that direction.’ She pointed to the west.

  I wondered whether it took self-control for her not to look back, or if it just happened naturally.

  * * *

  When I walked into the lobby of 15 Charles Street the doorman looked up.

  ‘How you doing?’ he said.

  ‘Hi. You may be able to help me. I’ m trying to find some information about somebody who used to live in this building. Have you worked here long?’

  ‘What name is it?’ he said, not answering my question.

  ‘Sasaki.’

  ‘Oh yes, Miss Sasaki’—his tone became softer and he shifted in his seat—‘she passed away a few years back now.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’ I didn’t want to go too far into the realms of dishonesty, but I tried to look as though this were a matter of personal regret to me in the hope it might make him more willing to help. ‘Could you tell me who lives in the apartment now?’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t give you that information without authorisation, sir.’

  ‘Yes, of course. Tell me, did you know the girl who Miss Sasaki used to look after, Tomomi Ishikawa?’

  ‘Oh yes, I know Butterfly. Is that who you’re looking for?’

  ‘Yes, she’s a friend of mine. I’ve kind of lost her.’

  ‘Maybe she wanted to be lost, in which case I don’t know if it’s my place to give you any information.’

  ‘Oh, she definitely wanted to be lost. But she’s in contact with me as well. She keeps sending me things.’

  ‘Things?’

  ‘Well—letters, emails, pieces of writing.’

  ‘Maybe you should ask her where she is then.’

  ‘All I have is this address. I don’t know how to contact her.’

  ‘Well, if she sends you emails, all you have to do is press the reply button.’

  ‘It’s not that simple, though. She’s dead.’

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘A few months ago.’

  ‘Aw Jeez, that’s terrible.’

  ‘She was a good friend of mine. She left me some stuff, letters and things she wrote before she died, and somebody keeps sending them to me. I think it might have something to do with whoever lives here.’

  ‘I’m sorry, mister, but I can’t help you.’

  ‘No, don’t worry, I think you already have. One more thing,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Miss Sasaki had a lot of plants. Do you know what happened to them?’

  The doorman smiled. ‘Butterfly gave most of them away to people in the neighbourhood. Every time she came down she had some potted flowers she was trying to get rid of. I took one for my mother; she’s in a home now.’

  ‘There was a small tree—do you know what happened to that?’

  ‘I’ve got an idea, but I’m not sure. Just around the corner to the right, there’s a cleaners shop, the guy there’s called Chan. He knows everybody around here. He knew Miss Butterfly. If anybody can tell you what happened to the plants, it’s him. He lent her a trolley for her to get the last ones out. Go and ask Chan.’ He looked at his watch. ‘He should still be there.’

  * * *

  In the cleaners, a small Asian man greeted me with a broad smile.

  ‘Hello, I’m looking for someone called Chan.’

  ‘I’m Chan,’ he said. ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘My name is Ben Constable. I’m a friend of somebody you know. A girl who used to live just round the corner called Butterfly.’

  He looked at me, pretending to scan his memory, while weighing me up.

  ‘Ah, Butterfly Ishikawa; she was Japanese.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘So what do you want from me?’

  ‘She told me that you lent her a trolley to carry all the plants when she moved out from her apartment.’

  ‘Yeah’—he nodded over to a four-wheeled trolley at the back of the shop—‘that’s it.’

  ‘I’m curious to know what happened to the plants. Where did she take them?’

  ‘Butterfly was a very crazy girl, you know?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She tried to give as many away as possible, but it was difficult to find good homes for them at nighttime. I took three, but there were too many.’

  ‘So what happened to the rest?’

  ‘She planted them.’

  ‘Where?’

  He hesitated, then pointed outside. ‘There,’ he said. In the middle of the road there was a triangular road island with a flagpole and a flowerbed overflowing with plants and a small red tree. ‘It was my suggestion,’ Chan said. ‘There was nothing there before, just dirt. I thought it would be nice to look at from my shop, and it might bring people in.’

  I felt short of breath. ‘Wow,’ I said. ‘I think that’s all I wanted to know.’

  ‘OK, no problem. Hey, what’s Butterfly doing now?’

  ‘Oh, she lives in Paris.’ I took the spur-of-the-moment decision to stop telling people that she was dead because it simply wasn’t my responsibility. Besides, she still wrote to me on a daily basis.

  ‘In France?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Very nice.’

  ‘Yes, it’s a nice place. Thank you again. Bye.’

  ‘You tell her Chan says hi.’

  I walked round to the other side of the traffic island and crouched down to look at the plants. The tree was only a couple of metres in height and had red heart-shaped leaves draped from the branches. This was Keiko Sasaki’s tree. She had potted it the day Tomomi Ishikawa was born.

  I rummaged in my bag and pulled out a pen. Fuck. I turned it round in my hand, examining it in the street light. Surely you can’t stab somebody in the heart with a pen! I called Cat and he walked towards me down the road from the direction of Jefferson Market Library.

  ‘Will you keep me company, Cat?’

  He sniffed the tree and then walked a couple of feet away and sat like a lookout on the corner.

  I broke the earth with the pen and scratched the mud away. Cat got up and looked around and I carried on digging. Then he came over and nudged me. He wanted me to look at something. I could see into Chan’s shop and there was a woman talking to him. He passed some clothes on a hanger over the counter and the woman walked out. I lowered my head so it didn’t look like I was watching, but she wasn’t looking at me anyway. She walked off in the direction I’d come from without turning back. My eyes were tired and blurry and I couldn’t make her out in the light. She looked like someone I could have known, but then anybody could be somebody I know and I wouldn’t recognise them.

  ‘It’s all right, Cat; I don’t think she was interested in us.’

  Cat looked at me and I glanced back up the road at the woman walking away. I carried on scraping away at the ground. I struggled between the roots, but managed to dig a hole of about eighteen inches and a little bit underneath the tree. And then I struck plastic. I knew it. I knew it. The tree was important, I knew it would be. It took me a further five minutes to wrench the package out. Carefully sealed within polythene and duct tape was a notebook. I pushed the earth back into the hole and tried to brush my hands clean.

  As I walked away, Chan leaned out of the door and called, ‘You people are crazy,’ laughing at me.

  ‘She left something for me under the tree.’

  Chan looked curious. ‘What is it?’

  ‘I don’t know yet.’

  ‘Well, I hope it was worth all that digging.’

  ‘Yeah, I hope so too.’


  ‘You wanna wash your hands? You look like you could use a clean-up.’

  ‘Yeah, thanks.’

  Chan showed me to a sink and while I scratched away at the ground-in dirt on my fingers I said, ‘I wonder how she managed to get the tree all the way from her apartment and plant it here? It’s bigger than she is.’

  ‘She had help,’ said Chan, and winked.

  I grinned at him. I wanted to thank him for helping her, but it was none of my business.

  ‘So you saw her bury that?’ I asked, nodding at the package.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you never wondered what it was?’

  ‘I asked her what it was.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She said it was a present for someone important. I guess that’s you.’

  ‘But she didn’t even know me then.’

  ‘OK. Perhaps you better put it back.’

  I looked at him and thought for a moment. ‘Did you never think to go and dig it up?’

  ‘No. It wasn’t for me.’

  ‘But weren’t you curious to know what it is?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s a notebook filled with her writing. It’s like a story or a journal.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because it’s for me. Look.’ I tore through the plastic and pulled out the notebook and I handed it to Chan. He flicked through the pages in awe and then started reading. I made an involuntary noise and he looked at me.

  ‘It might be kind of private,’ I said apologetically. ‘It’s about her father.’

  He shut the book quickly. ‘I’m sorry. It’s none of my business.’

  ‘No, that’s fine. I just wanted to show you what it was, so you’d know it was for me.’

  ‘That’s OK. I know it’s for you. I wouldn’t have let you dig it up if I didn’t think it was.’

  I was impressed.

  ‘Hey,’ he said, as if he was about to change the subject, ‘do you know the girl who lives there now?’

  ‘Lives where?’

  ‘In Butterfly’s apartment.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh, I saw you looking at her when she walked out. I thought you might know her, that’s all.’

  ‘I don’t know anyone in New York.’

  ‘Well, if you’re a friend of Butterfly’s, you know me.’

  21

  Daddy

  Takeo Ishikawa (1942–2001)

  Before he died, Daddy went a bit mad. I hadn’t seen or heard from him in a few years. I tried to contact him after Komori died, but he never got back to me. My mother told me he had moved out to the desert in California, and that he had become a recluse. Then in the spring of 2001, he called me out of the blue. He told me he would like to see me and I agreed to visit.

  I took the plane to Las Vegas and hired a car. I drove northwest into the Mojave Desert, and across the state line into California, to a town called Death Valley Junction, population twenty (although I only saw one). There was a hotel and I booked a room under a made-up name, then wandered around until sunset. The only other functioning building was a theater called the Amargosa Opera House. It gave weekly shows written and performed by its owner, an old woman who painted the interior with murals of an audience so that she would never have to play to an empty house.

  The next morning I followed the directions I’d been given and drove for an hour or so, pulling off the highway and up a dusty track. The house was visible from below: a modernist glass block from the 1960s perched high above me among the rocks.

  The track arrived at the back, where there was an empty space for cars, although none were on show. From this side, the building had white walls jutting out to form shaded enclosures and a ramp that led up to the roof. Daddy appeared from a shadowed doorway. He was older than I remembered, his skin gray and hanging from his face. His hair, also gray, hadn’t been cut for a few months, although he had made an effort to shave and groom himself. He reached out his arms and smiled pathetically. I made a kissing noise close to his cheek and held stonelike as he hugged me.

  The house was open-plan and unexpectedly cool, its floor-to-ceiling glass looking out over the rocks and desert for endless miles. The furnishings were 1960s modernist design pieces. I guess they were chosen by a professional. Daddy would never have gone to the effort to acquire taste, good or bad.

  “Nice place,” I said.

  “Thank you. It belonged to an architect, I don’t remember his name.”

  “Why do you live here?” I asked.

  “I feel safe.”

  “Safe from what?”

  “Everything.”

  The first hour or so was uncomfortable. He asked me how my mother was and he inquired about my job. I tried to tell him as much as I could, trying to fill time and hoping we would stumble on something of genuine interest to us both to make it a successful visit. But he had an agenda.

  “I’m pleased you did so well at college.”

  “College was years ago, Daddy,” I said.

  “I know, I just never had the opportunity to tell you how proud I am of you.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I have never thought about your future or your happiness, Butterfly. I have always tried to keep myself separate from your life. Yet as I get older I am starting to understand how wrong I have been about so many things. I wanted to say sorry. I wanted the chance to explain.”

  “That’s OK. I turned out all right in the end.”

  “Well, we learn to survive in all kinds of conditions, and you have truly flourished despite the wrong that has been done to you. That is a wonderful thing. But however wrong a parent can be, it is always innocent of intention. You do know that, don’t you? I never consciously wanted bad for you.”

  I’d traveled three thousand miles to come and see him. It was obvious he had stuff to get off his chest, but it didn’t mean that I wanted to hear it. Maybe he had found God or something. It wasn’t my problem, but I let him talk. Maybe I would learn something, and I could always tell him to shut up if it got too intense. Or I could leave and be as angry as I wanted.

  “I’m sure you did your best,” I told him, but even as the words came out I knew that I didn’t believe them.

  “It’s true, I was trying to do my best. But it was the best for Keiko. And I guess in a way the best for me. I never took your feelings into account.”

  “Don’t talk about Komori, please.”

  “But she’s part of the explanation.”

  “You just disposed of her like she had no value to you.”

  “That’s not true, Butterfly,” he said. “I loved her.”

  “Oh, so that’s why you abandoned her. Your life must be full of love.”

  “No, you don’t understand. I was in love with her and she was in love with me. We have always been in love, since we were children. We were lovers. Nothing in the world existed outside what we shared.”

  “Wait, wait. What you’re saying doesn’t make any sense. You and Komori were lovers?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t understand. You grew up together. Your families were best friends. You went everywhere together. If you were in love, why weren’t you a proper couple?”

  “It couldn’t happen like that, I’m afraid.”

  “Huh? There was nothing to stop you having your dream life together. Why did you abandon her? You married Mom and had me. You abandoned Mom, you abandoned me. You’re one shit lover, father, husband, everything.”

  “We couldn’t be together.”

  “Why, what stopped you?”

  “As you know we were both born in Manchuria, which was a territory in northeast China that Japan had annexed in the thirties.”

  “Yes.”

  “As the war came to an end, the families of businesspeople and the administration grew closer to each other. There was little food and the Russians were coming. Chinese families were dying of starvation. We were all hoping to be repatriated, but we were at war a
nd nobody knew when there would be the time or resources to get us back to Japan, so we waited to see whether we would die or be saved.”

  “So?”

  “One day, the army told us that the women and children would be leaving immediately. We had to leave only with the things we could carry. We knew those who stayed behind would probably be killed or taken prisoner by the Russians. Chinese families who had cooperated with the Japanese risked exclusion at best; starvation or execution were more likely. The Sasaki family were close to their Chinese servants. They didn’t want to leave without them. But there was no choice. There were no resources to protect the Chinese. So the Sasaki family made a deal with the servant family and took their daughter, passing her as their own. She was given a Japanese name, a Japanese identity and came back with us.”

  “I didn’t know Komori was adopted. You’re talking about Komori, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. Do you understand now? Keiko was Chinese.”

  “Hold on, are you telling me that the reason you couldn’t marry her was that she was Chinese?”

  “It wasn’t just that.”

  “What, that she was a servant girl?”

  “We were from two different cultures.”

  “What the hell difference does that make? Anyway, her culture was Japanese! Everything about her was Japanese. She was brought up in a Japanese family. Besides, you lived in America. The land of the free where anything is possible.”

  “There was social pressure. Sadly, the people of my parents’ generation didn’t even regard the Chinese as human.”

  “The Sasakis did. They adopted Komori. They brought her up as their own.”

  “They were unusual. Others weren’t so kind. They didn’t expect her to be a real Japanese lady. People thought she would be a secretary, or a nurse, or a mistress.”

  “Fuck. So you just went along with that. You were the brilliant boy who could do anything, go anywhere. If love was so important to you, why wouldn’t you go against the culture of your parents?”

  “I did. I followed her family to California and then to New York. The Sasakis went back to Japan and Keiko and I stayed. We had run away. We had freed ourselves from history.”

  “This whole story stinks like shit. It sounds like you’re just making excuses for your lack of commitment, for wanting to own her, while you fuck around and marry a respectable Japanese girl, but never do the right thing by your mistress. Never make her your equal. And then when she was dying you abandoned her.”