Country of Origin

by Don Lee

  After he had calmed her at the scene of the motorcycle accident, he had asked Mojo’s driver to drop him off in Akasaka and take Lisa home without him, and then he had disappeared. Later that week in Rendezvous, she had asked Mojo about Larry, but Mojo had merely said Larry was busy. Once again he invited Lisa out to dinner, just the two of them, and once again she had patted his hand and said, “I can’t go on a dohan with you, Mojo. You know the rules,” to which Mojo countered, “What dohan? Just dinner. Friend dinner.”

  David had not given her a phone number to reach him, but she called the main switchboard of the embassy and was eventually transferred to his office. He didn’t react at all to the fact that she was contacting him. No pleasure, no curiosity. “I need to ask you a favor,” she had said, and she told him everything. She asked if he could somehow break through the bureaucracy at Yokohama and learn the name of the woman who had worked in the Office of Naval Intelligence, the woman who might be her mother. Lisa had thought of getting back in touch with Omar Johnson for information, but she knew he wouldn’t have been able or inclined to help her.

  David had told her to give him a few days, and, true to his word, they now sat in the deserted bar in the middle of the afternoon. He handed her an index card with a name and an address on it: Tomiko Higa in Gotanda, three stops away on the Yamanote Line from Shibuya.

  “Are you sure this is her? This is my mother?”

  “I’m not at all sure,” David said. “There wasn’t even an Office of Naval Intelligence in Yokohama at the time. But there was a field office for the 500th Military Intelligence Group of the US Army, and she worked there, and she’s zainichi Korean.”

  Tomiko Higa was born in Kawasaki, an industrial city between Tokyo and Yokohama. She had grown up in the neighborhood of Sakuramoto, which was inhabited by nearly two thousand Koreans, and both her parents had worked in the Nihon Kohan Steel Mill. Tomiko had had passable looks and only average intelligence and was unremarkable in almost every way except for one thing: her voice. At the rather advanced age of twenty-two, she had broken into the music scene in Tokyo, and for over two decades she had made a career for herself as a ubiquitous, albeit second-tier enka singer and celebrity on TV. She was allowed to pass for Japanese, although it was common knowledge that she was Korean. There were hundreds of Korean singers and actors and baseball players in Japan, and everyone pretended not to notice. There seemed to be an unspoken agreement: as long as they stayed quiet, as long as they didn’t ask for too much, as long as they never asserted their nationalism, they could partake in a measure of adulation and privilege. But only to a point. Tomiko Higa never came close to being a superstar.

  “I don’t know how to thank you,” Lisa told David.

  “You shouldn’t get too excited. It might not be her.”

  They walked out together into the bright sunshine. It was three-thirty, and he said he had to go back to work. She wanted to suggest they recuse themselves to one of the many establishments nearby, on what was known as Love Hotel Hill, where she could properly convey her gratitude, but his decorum didn’t lend himself to that sort of proposition.

  “I’m sorry I kissed you the other night,” she said on the street. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”

  “You don’t have to apologize. You were upset.”

  They stopped at a corner and waited for the stoplight. “Can I ask you something?” Lisa said. “Are you happy in your marriage?”

  He took a moment to answer her. “I’m trying to be your friend, Lisa.”

  It wasn’t yes, and it wasn’t no. He needed time. He was old-fashioned. He believed in fidelity, whatever the state of his marriage, which was why Lisa had asked Ako Abe to do one more job for her—find out about David’s wife. A fickleness investigation. Love was full of vexatious mysteries, and there were knots in life. Lisa just wanted a photograph of his wife. She wanted to know what she was up against. She didn’t expect Ako to tell her that David Saito’s name was not really David Saito, but Vincent Kitamura, and that his wife was not really French, nor a financial consultant, but a photographer named Julia Tinsley.

  SEVENTEEN

  sOMETHING HAPPENED. Julia suddenly retreated from him, saying she needed to sort things out, she needed space, and she asked Tom not to call her or try to see her for a while. It threw him into despair. He wanted to call her. He wanted to go to her studio at the ISA or even to her apartment and see her. But he feared he might alienate Julia if he didn’t honor her wishes, and he left her alone.

  He distracted himself with work and spent his off-hours with Jorge and Benny, who could, undoubtedly, intuit what was going on but remained silent about it. They were trying to be supportive, and Tom resented them for it, knowing they believed this was what was best for him.

  The third week of December, they went to the Sanno Hotel for the Sunday afternoon feature. Usually they avoided the Sanno, the military transit billet in Akasaka. The sprawling white stucco hotel was open for R&R to all ranks, and it had a pool, a bustling arcade of stores, barber and beauty shops, a spa, and several restaurants that seemed to feature continuous buffets with prime rib the size of tree trunks. All of it was staffed by non-Japanese Asians, mostly Filipino and Korean, with a giggling gaggle of non-Japanese Asian women, mostly Thai and Vietnamese, serving as accoutrements, hanging on to the arms of red-faced officers and GIs like so much insignia. The Sanno was an anachronism in modern, cosmopolitan Tokyo, a gauche, Cold War, colonial outpost, but it offered something Tom and his friends could not resist: American movies, only a few months old, projected onto a large screen in the basement ballroom, where the bar was always open and they could sit comfortably at tables and chairs.

  It was there, for the four-thirty show of All That Jazz, that Tom saw Julia. He was at a corner table with Benny, and just before the lights dimmed, he spied her across the ballroom, slipping into a seat saved for her by Pete and Betty Congrieves.

  Everyone stood for the national anthem, and when it ended and the previews began playing, Julia left the Congrieveses’ table and headed for the bar. Tom followed her. Jorge was in line for drinks and waved, but Tom ignored him.

  “Can we go somewhere and talk?” he asked Julia, and he pulled her out of line to the adjoining lobby.

  “What’s going on?” Tom asked.

  “Nothing’s going on.”

  “Don’t do that.”

  “I’m going through a bad time right now,” she said.

  “I’m not having much fun, either.”

  “I think we need to end it.”

  “Why?”

  “I always told you this would be temporary.”

  “Did your husband find out about us?”

  She shook her head.

  “Then what? What is it?” he said too loudly. “Why are you being like this?”

  “Let’s not do this,” she said.

  “I want to talk about this.”

  “Well, I don’t particularly want to. There’s nothing really to say. It was fun, but now it’s over. Let’s just walk away, all right?”

  “Like adults, you mean.”

  “Yes.”

  “Like two ships fucking in the night.”

  They were within earshot of the ballroom, and a couple sitting at a table near the entrance glanced over to them.

  “I want to be with you,” Tom told her.

  “You don’t even know what it means to be in a relationship.”

  “I want to do things with you. Go out to dinner. Take a walk. Wake up in the morning with you.”

  “God, give me a break.”

  “Hold your hand,” he said, and he grabbed her hand.

  She yanked her arm away from him, and she inadvertently smacked her knuckles against a pane of decorative wall glass, sounding a loud, piercing rap and causing her to cry out in pain.

  The man from the table by the entrance stood up.

  “Are you okay?” Tom asked Julia.

  The ticket-taker poked her head around the corner. �
��Daijobu?” she whispered.

  “Did you hit her?” the man from the table said, approaching.

  “Fuck off,” Julia told the man, and briskly walked back into the ballroom.

  Tom took off the other way, stomping up the stairs.

  “Hey,” Jorge called to him, and he met him halfway up the staircase. “What are you doing? Do you even know? You’re making a fool of yourself.”

  “I don’t need this, Jorge. Not from you.”

  “I’m trying to help you.”

  “Like hell.”

  “I’m trying to be your friend.”

  “You just want to gloat.”

  “You will never learn,” Jorge said. “You think you’re inside, but you’ll always be outside.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “You’re blind to who you are.”

  “Christ, listen to yourself. What is it with this self-righteous Che Guevara act, huh?” Tom said. “I’m sick of it. I’m sick of you. I can’t help it if you hate yourself.”

  “You’re a putz, you know that? Uncle Tom.”

  Tom shoved him in the chest, and Jorge fell back a step on the stairs before he could catch himself. “Yeah, that’s good, cabrón,” Jorge said. “You’re a real man.”

  He went to the cocktail lounge, where a duo—a man on guitar and a woman on synthesizer, both Filipino—was singing Beatles songs in broken English.

  The Soviets were building up forces around Poland. Three American nuns and a lay worker had been murdered in El Salvador. Iran was demanding $24 billion to release the hostages. But all anyone could talk about was John Lennon, shot dead on December 8 by Mark David Chapman.

  Tom had always known it might come to this, that inexplicably Julia might decide to cut him off and he would simply have to accept the edict, no matter how cruel or fickle, because he would be powerless to do anything else. She had once said she had no control of her life, but he had even less. What was it he could do?

  Three—or was it four?—drinks later, as the duo was butchering “Hey Jude,” Tom saw Pete Congrieves passing through the cocktail lounge. He didn’t think anything of it until, after a few minutes, Congrieves returned and stood over Tom’s table.

  “Mind if I join you?”

  It was strange—his presumption. He didn’t bother to introduce himself or engage in any formalities. He just sat down and flagged over a waitress in a mind-bogglingly short dress.

  “Could I get a Chivas and Seven with a twist?” Congrieves said.

  The waitress wrote down the order on her pad and looked to Tom to see if he wanted a refill.

  “I’m fine for now,” he said.

  “Get another,” Congrieves said. “Bring him another.”

  “Scotch rocks?” the waitress guessed. She hadn’t been taking Tom’s orders.

  “Yeah.”

  “Hanguk pun isimnikka?” Congrieves asked her in what Tom recognized as Korean.

  “Ne.”

  “Kurongot katesoyo. Komawoyo, agassi.”

  After the waitress left, Congrieves said to Tom, “You don’t speak Korean, do you?”

  “No.”

  “A shame. I’m sure it breaks your mother’s heart.”

  What did he know about his mother? Tom wondered. How did he know he was half-Korean? Had Congrieves done some sort of background check on him?

  Even sitting down, Congrieves seemed to loom over him. His thick blond hair was on the longish side, and his skin was ruddy with vigorous health. He looked to be in his early forties. He was powerfully built underneath his sweater, and he had a faraway gaze in his eyes that made him appear as if he were posing for a magazine ad.

  “I was stationed in Seoul for two tours,” Congrieves said. “The country’s still very primitive, but I loved it there. I prefer the Korean temperament to the Japanese. Their emotionality is very raw and open. Everything is on the table. They’re a very passionate people. What about you?”

  “What?”

  “Have you enjoyed living in Japan?”

  “Yes.”

  “You like the Japanese?”

  “I suppose I do.” Tom was uncomfortable with the unpredictable zigzags in Congrieves’s conversation, and he had an inkling that Congrieves was doing it on purpose, keeping him off-guard as a method of establishing dominion.

  “There’s a term in Korean, chin-il-pa,” Congrieves said. “It means lover of Japan. It was what they called collaborators during the annexation. Maybe they’d say you’re chin-il-pa.”

  The waitress brought over their drinks, and for a while the men said nothing, listening to the duo break into “The Long and Winding Road.” Congrieves was staring at the muted TV above the bar, on which the Far East Network was broadcasting the news, showing a mob of Iranians chanting and burning American flags.

  “A lovely state of affairs,” Congrieves said. “Do you remember Carter’s malaise speech?”

  “Of course.”

  “What a yokel. Goddamn peanut farmer. Malaise, my ass. There’s no crisis of the American spirit. There’s no national psychosis. There’s nothing wrong with the American people. We’re a great people. Paralysis, stagnation, drift—those were the hallmarks of his administration, not the body politic. Good God, human rights as a tenet of foreign policy? There could be nothing more naïve. There’s only one immutable fact of life, and that’s the inherent need of one people to assert their superiority over another. It’s always brutal, and it’s ugly, and it’s unavoidable—not for the faint of heart. We shouldn’t be trying to impose values. We should impose stability, and that’s what we do. We make things better. I’m not going to insult your intelligence and talk about ideology. We know ideology is relative. Today’s fascists become tomorrow’s allies. It’s all very fluid. I might even allow hypocritical. But people are tribal by nature, which is dangerous, because the ineluctable tendency is to want the tribe to be bigger. You draw the lines, and if everyone stays within them, we all benefit. But you waffle, you let them start thinking they can defy you, the paradigm breaks down. It gets all fucked up. Then you have countries you defeated and occupied and redeveloped emasculating you. You have no-name shithole banana republics pissing in your face. You have parasitic ragheads burning your flag.”

  He downed his drink. “Forgive me. I have a habit of proselytizing. I almost went to divinity school.”

  “What do you want from me?” Tom asked.

  Congrieves said to him, “I’m not only Vincent’s boss, I’m his friend. Julia’s, too. I want you to stop bothering her. No more little scenes like the one today. Stop embarrassing everyone. She doesn’t want to see you anymore.”

  “Did she ask you to tell me that?”

  “I’m acting on everyone’s behalf, including yours.”

  “Go fuck yourself.”

  “I appreciate the good wishes, but I know you don’t mean them. I know about you. I know about Roberto Ramirez and your fun and games in São Paulo. I know what you do when pressed. You do what you’re told, like a good little Ricky. You wouldn’t want people to hear about São Paulo, would you?”

  Tom didn’t answer him.

  “I thought as much,” Congrieves said.

  KENZO OTA came to Tom’s office and asked for his help with a couple of leads, beginning with access to Yokohama’s Naval Intelligence employment records.

  “I don’t know what I can really do,” Tom told him. “If they won’t give them to you, what makes you think they’ll give them to me?”

  “You are embassy.”

  “I don’t have a lot of leverage,” he said. “Much less than you might think.”

  “You can try, yes?”

  “I’ll try,” he said.

  “I am sorry. One more,” Ota said. He explained that he had gotten a tip about a nisei named David Saito, but was having problems locating him. The Immigration Bureau mysteriously did not have a record of a David Saito in Tokyo. Was a David Saito registered with the embassy?

  “Let me check,�
�� Tom said. The name seemed familiar. He buzzed Mrs. Fujiwara in the next office and asked her to look through the Master Card Index of Registered Americans for a Form FS-176, 176S, or 299 that belonged to a David Saito. While they waited, Tom asked Ota about the tip. “What’s his connection to Lisa Countryman?”

  “Oh, maybe nothing. I think nothing,” Ota said cagily.

  “It doesn’t sound like you’re expediting an advisory opinion on the case. It sounds like you’re investigating it more actively.”

  “No, no,” Ota said. “Give opinion very soon.”

  “That’s not what I’m asking. I want you to investigate it.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes,” Tom said. He had been thinking about Lisa Countryman, that it could have just as easily been him, abandoned in an orphanage, and he felt guilty for not having done more on her behalf. “Maybe no one else cares what happened to her,” he told Ota, “but I think we owe it to her to find out.”

  Mrs. Fujiwara reported that a David Saito wasn’t in their files, and Ota left the office, letting Tom return to the matter at hand, yet another trivial task, which was to decide about the “Light Up America” vigil.

  Back in the States, radio stations nationwide had been urging Americans to burn candles and shine flashlights for precisely 417 seconds on Christmas Eve—a second for each day that the fifty-two Americans had been held hostage in Iran. The White House had just announced that the national Christmas tree, which, except for the star of hope on top, had remained unlit for the second year, would be illuminated for the vigil. Now expats and embassy staffers and their dependents wanted to know how to participate in Japan. They wanted details. Should their vigil take place at exactly the same time, ten p.m., Eastern Standard Time, on Christmas Eve, which meant noon on Christmas Day in Tokyo, or should they do it on Christmas Eve, local time? Where? At the embassy, or at the Grew House? Should something be sung? “America the Beautiful,” “God Bless America,” Christmas carols? Would someone make a speech or say a prayer? Would it be appropriate to have a reception afterward?