Finally, he reappeared and said, “I guess I know where to find you if we have more questions,” and just like that he cut me loose.
The day was beginning to fade by the time I emerged, one of those enormous Japanese moons asserting its place prematurely in the sky. I wasn’t sure what to do with myself. It was too late to report for duty and I couldn’t bear the thought of answering the questions that were coming. I didn’t know how to answer them besides. Roebuck had said nothing about confidentiality, but I felt in possession of a terrible secret. I tucked my chin into my collar and hurried back to the barracks, an American flag snapping in the breeze atop nearly every building on the way.
Had I ever seen the barracks so abandoned? I wandered the halls, peeking into rooms, every bed made to pass inspection. No matter how orderly, grown men in close quarters will produce an oily, musty tang. I’d been living with that smell for so long I’d ceased to notice it, but it came back to me now in waves. When I heard the voices of men returning from work, I holed up in my room, listened to the barracks buzzing and creaking around me, the sound muted, distant. It wasn’t long before Rudy Grand knocked on my door.
“Where were you all day?”
“Nowhere.”
“Don’t be an ass,” he said. “That guy was CID.”
I just kept looking at him. He was holding a deck of cards.
“Wanna play a little gin?” he said.
“No, thanks.”
“I’ll spot you points.”
I said, “No, thanks,” again, and he turned to go but this idea popped into my head.
“You wouldn’t have a Bible by any chance?”
Rudy shrugged and headed off in the direction of his room, came back bearing a battered King James. When he was gone, I flipped pages until I found the Sermon on the Mount. Consider the lilies of the field and Do not give unto dogs what is holy and so forth. I read that over a few times, then skipped around to other passages like I might find some answers, but none of what I read made me feel better about anything.
Reports of Clifford’s death made the rounds but I kept my mouth shut on the subject, and for the most part people left me alone. I was the known associate of a traitor. I’d been interrogated by CID. My roommate had offed himself. All of which added up to as wide a berth as I desired.
Bunny’s note arrived on Friday, delivered to my desk by one of his many aides.
Your Saturday obligation is hereby terminated.
Handwritten on official SCAP stationery. Signed by Bunny himself. Just six words, but I knew exactly what he meant. At first, I blamed Mrs. Bunny. She’d made it clear that she did not approve of me, and for a few foolish minutes I considered storming up to Bunny’s office to protest. But I knew it was no use. He wouldn’t contradict his wife on my behalf, and the truth is I couldn’t blame either of them for wanting to put some distance between me and their son. As swiftly and awkwardly as I’d been ushered into Arthur’s life, I’d been shown the door, guilty by association.
That night, unable to sleep, I made up my mind to go looking for the room Clifford had shared with Namiki. I’m not sure what I hoped to find, but the idea that I might find something proved impetus enough. I knew the room was in the Oimachi neighborhood and Clifford had mentioned a bathhouse nearby. I figured I could take the bus out there, ask directions to the bathhouse and maybe somebody at the bathhouse could point me toward the lodgings of the American corporal and his onri wan. Which is exactly what happened. I set out on Saturday at the hour I’d normally have been headed for the residence. The bus driver told me where to find the bathhouse, and an attendant at the bathhouse knew where Clifford lived.
He gave me a landmark to look for—a bomb crater, twenty feet across, filled with rainwater and deep enough that in all this time the sun had failed to bake it dry. Four boys were horsing around in the water when I arrived. Naked. Shivering from the cold of it. I knocked at what I hoped was the right house and an old woman answered the door, her face as wrinkled as a crumpled paper sack.
“Your girl here,” she said, as if she’d been expecting me. “You rent room.”
I tried to explain who I was and that I just wanted to poke around, but she was insistent.
“She here. Nice face. One week two dollar.”
With her apron, the old woman shooed me across the patch of dirt that passed for a yard. The entrance to Clifford’s room was off the alley behind the house, and as I rounded the corner I heard her start in on those boys. Her Japanese was too fast for me to follow, but I could guess what she was saying. Put some clothes on. Keep your voices down. Where are your mothers? That water isn’t clean. What old women say to boys.
The alley was hung with laundry down the length of it. Another house backed up to this one, and so on down the line. There was an old-fashioned bike with a big front tire leaning against the wall. Clifford’s door was open. Inside, a second woman, much younger, was sorting through a basket of what I presumed were Namiki’s clothes, and I understood the landlady’s mistake. She assumed we were together. I could make out the rim of this woman’s ear where it peeked up through her hair, the line of her jaw where the hair draped away from her face. Without making my presence known, I watched her select a slip from the basket and carry it over to a chipped and blurry mirror on the wall. She held the slip against her body, pinning it in place under her chin and smoothing the silk with both hands. Her left arm was white to the elbow with scar tissue. What looked like burns had curled her hand into a claw.
“Fumiko?” I said, and she whirled to face me, hiding her burned hand behind her back. She started jabbering in Japanese. I was pretty sure she was trying to convince me that she had permission to take the clothes.
“I don’t care,” I said.
Wide-eyed, still uncertain, Fumiko nodded and I stepped inside. This room had suffered in the air raids. Two of the original walls were intact but the other two were cobbled together with roofing tin and salvaged wood, some kind of putty in the seams. The planks of the floor were mismatched, the gaps between them wide enough in places that you could see through to the dusty, shadowy region under the house, a kingdom of rats and spiders. A bare bulb dangled from the ceiling. Cold seeped in from everywhere. But the room was clean and the futon was draped with mosquito netting in a way that looked exotic. By way of decoration, advertisements had been clipped from American magazines and tacked up on the walls. Pretty young housewives pushing New Brite mops and washing pots and pans in Bon Ami. Movie stars would have been one thing, but for some reason the sight of all those beaming women engaged in such ordinary tasks left me reeling. I flopped back on the futon. Through the mosquito netting, Fumiko looked wavery and indistinct.
“What happened to your hand?” I said, and she said, “Bomu,” in a voice bored with answering that question, and I wondered if she blamed Tojo and company or us. She spoke again in Japanese. It took a moment to process what she’d said. A letter. He’d left a letter. I swung myself upright and brushed the mosquito net aside.
“Where?”
Fumiko pointed at a table and there it was—not a suicide note, not an explanation or apology, but his weekly letter to his mother, forgotten, I guessed, in the scramble to skip town.
For once, Mother Dear, I have real news. Your Clifford has got himself a girl. She’s beautiful and smart and I know you’ll like her even though she’s Japanese. Don’t panic, sweetheart. This is not your ordinary Jap. She works as a model in a department store and she loves everything American. She won’t even eat rice anymore—too Japanese! Her name is Namiki and I’ve been seeing her for a while. I wanted to tell you about her the day we met but I needed to be sure of everything before I wrote. I remember the stories you used to tell about how Dad chased you for so long and how you never loved him and then one day something changed and suddenly you did. I knew I loved Namiki right away and now I know she loves me too, and you better get used to the idea because I intend to bring her home.
I figured Fumiko would wan
t to know what the letter said but the idea of piecing together some kind of translation made me tired. She was standing at my back, watching me, waiting. I felt like I owed her something. I closed my eyes for a second, then folded the letter into a square, tucked it in my hip pocket, and offered her Eguchi’s job.
IX
When we first arrived in Tokyo, fourteen months before, all enlisted men assigned to the Occupation were required to watch a film called Our Job in Japan. The film had been produced by the War Department, and its purpose was to go beyond fear and propaganda and educate us on the nature of the locals. I hadn’t paid much attention, to tell the truth. That was September, and the room was warm enough to make you drowsy. It was like one of those days when you got to watch a film strip in grade school—a pleasant change of pace but boring nevertheless. What I remembered most about the film was the image of a hovering cartoon brain and the narrator’s voice assuring us that, scientifically speaking, the Japanese brain was just like ours, composed of the exact same tissues, firing with the same electrical impulses. Feed any brain negative data, like tyranny and oppression, and it will lead to negative behavior like Pearl Harbor and Bataan. That’s what the narrator said. Feed it positive data, like democracy and freedom, and positive results, like going to church and donating to charity and so forth, will inevitably follow. Our job in Japan was to nourish the Japanese brain with the example of our kindness, with our innate American decency.
The image of that brain came back to me in the weeks following Clifford’s death, with winter creeping in, alone in the quiet darkness of my room. I saw this brain like a luminous purple sponge behind my eyes, and I tried to convince myself that surely Fumiko was grateful for the opportunity I’d provided, that I was supplying a positive example with my thoughtfulness and generosity, just as the narrator had instructed, but then I’d picture her on her knees in the empty barracks, working a scrub brush around a commode, and it was hard to feel entirely affirmed. Twice a week, Fumiko rode her bike out to the barracks. Tuesdays and Fridays. I had no trouble convincing the men. Eguchi was in jail and nobody else had come up with a replacement. Fumiko even took in mending on the side for extra cash. Leave your frayed-cuff pants or your hole-y socks on the foot of your bed and they would vanish, only to reappear a few days later good as new. Most mornings, we had reported for duty by the time she showed up, and by the time we got home she’d already pedaled off into the night. It was like sharing the building with a fastidious ghost.
So I’d picture her scrubbing the john or darning socks in the dim light of the room she shared with her mother, and I’d start thinking about my own brain, all the data I’d received in my whole life, what kind of person I’d become as a result. And then other brains would come floating up as well, these cartoon brains looming inside my own. I wondered about my wife’s brain and Arthur MacArthur’s brain and Bunny’s brain, but my wondering always looped back around to Clifford and Namiki. I’d picture their brains side by side, lit up like control panels, gauges flickering, monitors blinking, the great red warning lights of their love, and I’d try to imagine the precise combination of data that led them to do what they had done. I understood the basics. It was easy enough to grasp the motivation behind Clifford’s crime and I believed he had committed it, despite my fondness for him, and I could imagine the desperation he must have felt, that both of them had felt, when it became apparent that Clifford would be caught. But that’s just information. That’s just raw data. The act itself failed to compute.
Eventually, my brain would wear itself out and I’d sag backward into sleep and then it would be morning, light streaming in through the window like nothing terrible ever happened in the world. I’d roll out of bed and hit the showers and shuffle off to another day of typing while Fumiko made the barracks clean.
I avoided the mess hall after Clifford’s death. I didn’t mind the gossip and the looks. What I couldn’t bear was sympathy. I took meals at my sake bar instead. I’d drink too much and wonder if Clifford had ever considered me his friend, if he’d ever considered me at all except when I could be of service. I told myself it didn’t make sense for me to be so thrown.
One morning, a Friday, a few weeks before Thanksgiving, I slept through reveille for the first time since I’d joined up. I came to, wistful with hangover. I registered the quiet and the quality of the light on the walls, somehow thinner than usual, and the back of my neck went prickly. I snatched my watch up off the table, but I already knew I was late. Ten minutes later, I was taking the stairs three at a time while simultaneously tucking in my shirt and combing my fingers through my hair when I met Fumiko as she climbed. Her eyes widened as I came barreling toward her and she pressed herself against the wall. She was carrying a broom and mop over her right shoulder, an old ten-gallon paint bucket in her left—her burned—hand. In the bucket, she carried wash rags and scrub brushes and bottles of whatever local potion she used to rid the barracks of our smell. She was wearing monpe pantaloons. She had a bandanna tied over her hair. I took note of all this even as I missed a step and lost my balance and careened into the air. The next thing I knew I was curled up on the landing, bleeding from a gash at my hairline and Fumiko was beside me, asking if I was all right in Japanese. Her face was very close. I noticed that her eyebrows were thick and black, set off by the paleness of her skin. She wiped the blood from my forehead with her bad hand.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Thank you. Arigato. I’m OK.”
I pushed to my feet and patted myself all over to be sure. I felt a little woozy and the cut was deep enough that I needed a trip to the infirmary, but otherwise I thought I would survive. Fumiko took a step away from me and slipped her bad hand into her sleeve. Both of us were embarrased. I offered to help her carry her supplies, but she refused, so I stood there at a loss while she gathered her things and climbed the stairs without looking back, the paint bucket swinging against her leg.
The following Tuesday, with seven stitches in my brow, I dawdled over my coffee and my shave until everyone had left for work. I kept a vigil on the street from the window in my room. I watched Fumiko lean her bike against the building, then counted to a hundred in my head, trying to give her enough time to collect her supplies from the storage closet in the basement. Finally, I headed for the stairs, slowly this time. When Fumiko saw me coming, she said, “Ohayo,” and stepped aside to let me pass. I replied in kind and continued on my way and that was all.
At the OPS, Captain Embry razzed me for being late but didn’t make as big a stink as he could have, and for the rest of the day I banged out pages for the army. Nothing had changed. But I felt somehow as if it had. This change was neither good nor bad, but I took a kind of comfort in it just the same.
I repeated this routine on Friday and again on Tuesday and each time my interaction with Fumiko was the same. At the end of the week, Captain Embry called me into his office and offered me a chair and shut the door behind us. He took a seat behind the desk, rubbed his face with both hands, his cheek bulging with tobacco.
“Well.” He gave me a sympathetic smile. “I guess I should have called you in a while back but I figured you needed … room.”
I kept my mouth shut while he fidgeted.
“How you holding up?” he said.
“Fine, sir.”
“Good,” he said. “The only thing to do is put your head down and march.”
“Yessir.”
“Listen, you know I’m no hardass. I’m an insurance salesman. But I can’t let you keep going on the way you been. It’s not fair to the others.”
He tipped his chin in the direction of the door.
“I understand, sir,” I said.
“If you’re late again,” he said, “I’m going to have to write you up.”
“Yessir.”
“All right, then,” he said.
“Can I ask you a question, sir?”
“Shoot.”
“What happens to the bodies?”
His face fell. It
looked like he’d swallowed his chew.
“The what?”
“Of military criminals. I’ve been wondering what they do with the bodies.”
“Hell, son, I don’t know. I guess they send em home like all the rest.”
“That’s what I thought,” I said.
For Thanksgiving, 300 turkeys were shipped alive to Tokyo by a patriotic poultryman in Oklahoma, and a number of these arrived in the mess hall at the Imperial Finance Ministry, dressed, of course, soaked all night in brine, burnished now and glistening from the ovens, somehow unruined by cooks whose talents ran more naturally to stew. The men were allotted three cans of beer apiece, and the meal was supplemented by canned cranberry sauce from the PX and rice grown in Japan and brown gravy, which the cooks had no trouble whipping up. Brown gravy was a specialty of the house. It should have been a pleasant afternoon and I suppose it was for most of the men, but I took one look at all that food laid out on the tables, felt all those voices washing over me, and retreated to my sake bar.
Plenty of locals were bustling about. Maybe an hour of daylight left. I thought about Fumiko as I walked, her eyebrows, her earlobes, the touch of her fingers on my brow, and I wondered if the locals had a holiday like Thanksgiving. And then I wondered if one day there would be a Japanese holiday commemorating their liberation by the powerful but bighearted Americans, all the blessings thus entailed.
As I neared my sake bar, I passed the panpan girls on their stoops. The night wouldn’t get busy for hours yet, and a few of them still had curlers in their hair. The boys that worked the street like carnival barkers—Hey hey, GI, you meet my sister?—were knotted around a barrel fire on the sidewalk, voices rising and falling like grown men. Not one of them bothered to ask if I was interested in a girl.
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