by John Okada
“Jap!”
His pace quickened automatically, but curiosity or fear or indignation or whatever it was made him glance back at the white teeth framed in a leering dark brown which was almost black.
“Go back to Tokyo, boy.” Persecution in the drawl of the persecuted.
The white teeth and brown-black leers picked up the cue and jigged to the rhythmical chanting of “Jap-boy, To-ki-yo; Jap-boy, To-ki-yo . . .”
Friggin’ niggers, he uttered savagely to himself and, from the same place deep down inside where tolerance for the Negroes and the Jews and the Mexicans and the Chinese and the too short and too fat and too ugly abided because he was Japanese and knew what it was like better than did those who were white and average and middle class and good Democrats or liberal Republicans, the hate which was unrelenting and terrifying seethed up.
Then he was home. It was a hole in the wall with groceries crammed in orderly confusion on not enough shelving, into not enough space. He knew what it would be like even before he stepped in. His father had described the place to him in a letter, composed in simple Japanese characters because otherwise Ichiro could not have read it. The letter had been purposely repetitive and painstakingly detailed so that Ichiro should not have any difficulty finding the place. The grocery store was the same one the Ozakis had operated for many years. That’s all his father had had to say. Come to the grocery store which was once the store of the Ozakis. The Japanese characters, written simply so that he could read them, covered pages of directions as if he were a foreigner coming to the city for the first time.
Thinking about the letter made him so mad that he forgot about the Negroes. He opened the door just as he had a thousand times when they had lived farther down the block and he used to go to the Ozakis’ for a loaf of bread or a jar of pickled scallions, and the bell tinkled just as he knew it would. All the grocery stores he ever knew had bells which tinkled when one opened the door and the familiar sound softened his inner turmoil.
“Ichiro?” The short, round man who came through the curtains at the back of the store uttered the name preciously as might an old woman. “Ya, Ichiro, you have come home. How good that you have come home!” The gently spoken Japanese which he had not heard for so long sounded strange. He would hear a great deal of it now that he was home, for his parents, like most of the old Japanese, spoke virtually no English. On the other hand, the children, like Ichiro, spoke almost no Japanese. Thus they communicated, the old speaking Japanese with an occasional badly mispronounced word or two of English; and the young, with the exception of a simple word or phrase of Japanese which came fairly effortlessly to the lips, resorting almost constantly to the tongue the parents avoided.
The father bounced silently over the wood flooring in slippered feet toward his son. Fondly, delicately, he placed a pudgy hand on Ichiro’s elbow and looked up at his son who was Japanese but who had been big enough for football and tall enough for basketball in high school. He pushed the elbow and Ichiro led the way into the back, where there was a kitchen, a bathroom, and one bedroom. He looked around the bedroom and felt like puking. It was neat and clean and scrubbed. His mother would have seen to that. It was just the idea of everybody sleeping in the one room. He wondered if his folks still pounded flesh.
He backed out of the bedroom and slumped down on a stool. “Where’s Ma?”
“Mama is gone to the bakery.” The father kept his beaming eyes on his son who was big and tall. He shut off the flow of water and shifted the metal teapot to the stove.
“What for?”
“Bread,” his father said in reply, “bread for the store.”
“Don’t they deliver?”
“Ya, they deliver.” He ran a damp rag over the table, which was spotlessly clean.
“What the hell is she doing at the bakery then?”
“It is good business, Ichiro.” He was at the cupboard, fussing with the teacups and saucers and cookies. “The truck comes in the morning. We take enough for the morning business. For the afternoon, we get soft, fresh bread. Mama goes to the bakery.”
Ichiro tried to think of a bakery nearby and couldn’t. There was a big Wonder Bread bakery way up on Nineteenth, where a nickel used to buy a bagful of day-old stuff. That was thirteen and a half blocks, all uphill. He knew the distance by heart because he’d walked it twice every day to go to grade school, which was a half-block beyond the bakery or fourteen blocks from home.
“What bakery?”
The water on the stove began to boil and the old man flipped the lid on the pot and tossed in a pinch of leaves. “Wonder Bread.”
“Is that the one up on Nineteenth?”
“Ya.”
“How much do you make on bread?”
“Let’s see,” he said pouring the tea. “Oh, three, four cents. Depends.”
“How many loaves does Ma get?”
“Ten or twelve. Depends.”
Ten loaves at three or four cents’ profit added up to thirty or forty cents. He compromised at thirty-five cents and asked the next question: “The bus, how much is it?”
“Oh, let’s see.” He sipped the tea noisily, sucking it through his teeth in well-regulated gulps. “Let’s see. Fifteen cents for one time. Tokens are two for twenty-five cents. That is twelve and one-half cents.”
Twenty-five cents for bus fare to get ten loaves of bread which turned a profit of thirty-five cents. It would take easily an hour to make the trip up and back. He didn’t mean to shout, but he shouted: “Christ, Pa, what else do you give away?”
His father peered over the teacup with a look of innocent surprise.
It made him madder. “Figure it out. Just figure it out. Say you make thirty-five cents on ten loaves. You take a bus up and back and there’s twenty-five cents shot. That leaves ten cents. On top of that, there’s an hour wasted. What are you running a business for? Your health?”
Slup went the tea through his teeth, slup, slup, slup. “Mama walks.” He sat there looking at his son like a benevolent Buddha.
Ichiro lifted the cup to his lips and let the liquid burn down his throat. His father had said “Mama walks” and that made things right with the world. The overwhelming simplicity of the explanation threatened to evoke silly giggles which, if permitted to escape, might lead to hysterics. He clenched his fists and subdued them.
At the opposite end of the table the father had slupped the last of his tea and was already taking the few steps to the sink to rinse out the cup.
“Goddammit, Pa, sit down!” He’d never realized how nervous a man his father was. The old man had constantly been doing something every minute since he had come. It didn’t figure. Here he was, round and fat and cheerful-looking and, yet, he was going incessantly as though his trousers were crawling with ants.
“Ya, Ichiro, I forget you have just come home. We should talk.” He resumed his seat at the table and busied his fingers with a box of matches.
Ichiro stepped out of the kitchen, spotted the cigarettes behind the cash register, and returned with a pack of Camels. Lighting a match, the old man held it between his fingers and waited until the son opened the package and put a cigarette in his mouth. By then the match was threatening to sear his fingers. He dropped it hastily and stole a sheepish glance at Ichiro, who reached for the box and struck his own match.
“Ichiro.” There was a timorousness in the father’s voice. Or was it apology?
“Yeah.”
“Was it very hard?”
“No. It was fun.” The sarcasm didn’t take.
“You are sorry?” He was waddling over rocky ground on a pitch-black night and he didn’t like it one bit.
“I’m okay, Pa. It’s finished. Done and finished. No use talking about it.”
“True,” said the old man too heartily, “it is done and there is no use to talk.” The bell tinkled and he leaped from the c
hair and fled out of the kitchen.
Using the butt of the first cigarette, Ichiro lit another. He heard his father’s voice in the store.
“Mama. Ichiro. Ichiro is here.”
The sharp, lifeless tone of his mother’s words flipped through the silence and he knew that she hadn’t changed.
“The bread must be put out.”
In other homes mothers and fathers and sons and daughters rushed into hungry arms after weekend separations to find assurance in crushing embraces and loving kisses. The last time he saw his mother was over two years ago. He waited, seeing in the sounds of the rustling waxed paper the stiff, angular figure of the woman stacking the bread on the rack in neat, precise piles.
His father came back into the kitchen with a little less bounce and began to wash the cups. She came through the curtains a few minutes after, a small, flat-chested, shapeless woman who wore her hair pulled back into a tight bun. Hers was the awkward, skinny body of a thirteen-year-old which had dried and toughened through the many years following but which had developed no further. He wondered how the two of them had ever gotten together long enough to have two sons.
“I am proud that you are back,” she said. “I am proud to call you my son.”
It was her way of saying that she had made him what he was and that the thing in him which made him say no to the judge and go to prison for two years was the growth of a seed planted by the mother tree and that she was the mother who had put this thing in her son and that everything that had been done and said was exactly as it should have been and that that was what made him her son because no other would have made her feel the pride that was in her breast.
He looked at his mother and swallowed with difficulty the bitterness that threatened to destroy the last fragment of understanding for the woman who was his mother and still a stranger because, in truth, he could not know what it was to be a Japanese who breathed the air of America and yet had never lifted a foot from the land that was Japan.
“I’ve been talking with Pa,” he said, not knowing or caring why except that he had to say something.
“After a while, you and I, we will talk also.” She walked through the kitchen into the bedroom and hung her coat and hat in a wardrobe of cardboard which had come from Sears Roebuck. Then she came back through the kitchen and out into the store.
The father gave him what was meant to be a knowing look and uttered softly: “Doesn’t like my not being in the store when she is out. I tell her the bell tinkles, but she does not understand.”
“Hell’s bells,” he said in disgust. Pushing himself out of the chair violently, he strode into the bedroom and flung himself out on one of the double beds.
Lying there, he wished the roof would fall in and bury forever the anguish which permeated his every pore. He lay there fighting with his burden, lighting one cigarette after another and dropping ashes and butts purposely on the floor. It was the way he felt, stripped of dignity, respect, purpose, honor, all the things which added up to schooling and marriage and family and work and happiness.
It was to please her, he said to himself with teeth clamped together to imprison the wild, meaningless, despairing cry which was forever straining inside of him. Pa’s okay, but he’s a nobody. He’s a goddamned, fat, grinning, spineless nobody. Ma is the rock that’s always hammering, pounding, pounding, pounding in her unobtrusive, determined, fanatical way until there’s nothing left to call one’s self. She’s cursed me with her meanness and the hatred that you cannot see but which is always hating. It was she who opened my mouth and made my lips move to sound the words which got me two years in prison and an emptiness that is more empty and frightening than the caverns of hell. She’s killed me with her meanness and hatred and I hope she’s happy because I’ll never know the meaning of it again.
* * *
—
“Ichiro.”
He propped himself up on an elbow and looked at her. She had hardly changed. Surely, there must have been a time when she could smile and, yet, he could not remember.
“Yeah?”
“Lunch is on the table.”
As he pushed himself off the bed and walked past her to the kitchen, she took broom and dustpan and swept up the mess he had made.
There were eggs, fried with soy sauce, sliced cold meat, boiled cabbage, and tea and rice. They all ate in silence, not even disturbed once by the tinkling of the bell. The father cleared the table after they had finished and dutifully retired to watch the store. Ichiro had smoked three cigarettes before his mother ended the silence.
“You must go back to school.”
He had almost forgotten that there had been a time before the war when he had actually gone to college for two years and studiously applied himself to courses in the engineering school. The statement staggered him. Was that all there was to it? Did she mean to sit there and imply that the four intervening years were to be casually forgotten and life resumed as if there had been no four years and no war and no Eto who had spit on him because of the thing he had done?
“I don’t feel much like going to school.”
“What will you do?”
“I don’t know.”
“With an education, your opportunities in Japan will be unlimited. You must go and complete your studies.”
“Ma,” he said slowly, “Ma, I’m not going to Japan. Nobody’s going to Japan. The war is over. Japan lost. Do you hear? Japan lost.”
“You believe that?” It was said in the tone of an adult asking a child who is no longer a child if he really believed that Santa Claus was real.
“Yes, I believe it. I know it. America is still here. Do you see the great Japanese army walking down the streets? No. There is no Japanese army any more.”
“The boat is coming and we must be ready.”
“The boat?”
“Yes.” She reached into her pocket and drew out a worn envelope.
The letter had been mailed from São Paulo, Brazil, and was addressed to a name that he did not recognize. Inside the envelope was a single sheet of flimsy rice paper covered with intricate flourishes of Japanese characters.
“What does it say?”
She did not bother to pick up the letter. “To you who are a loyal and honorable Japanese, it is with humble and heartfelt joy that I relay this momentous message. Word has been brought to us that the victorious Japanese government is presently making preparations to send ships which will return to Japan those residents in foreign countries who have steadfastly maintained their faith and loyalty to our Emperor. The Japanese government regrets that the responsibilities arising from the victory compel them to delay in the sending of the vessels. To be among the few who remain to receive this honor is a gratifying tribute. Heed not the propaganda of the radio and newspapers which endeavor to convince the people with lies about the allied victory. Especially, heed not the lies of your traitorous countrymen who have turned their backs on the country of their birth and who will suffer for their treasonous acts. The day of glory is close at hand. The rewards will be beyond our greatest expectations. What we have done, we have done only as Japanese, but the government is grateful. Hold your heads high and make ready for the journey, for the ships are coming.”
“Who wrote that?” he asked incredulously. It was like a weird nightmare. It was like finding out that an incurable strain of insanity pervaded the family, an intangible horror that swayed and taunted beyond the grasp of reaching fingers.
“A friend in South America. We are not alone.”
“We are alone,” he said vehemently. “This whole thing is crazy. You’re crazy. I’m crazy. All right, so we made a mistake. Let’s admit it.”
“There has been no mistake. The letter confirms.”
“Sure it does. It proves there’s crazy people in the world besides us. If Japan won the war, what the hell are we doing here? What are you
doing running a grocery store? It doesn’t figure. It doesn’t figure because we’re all wrong. The minute we admit that, everything is fine. I’ve had a lot of time to think about all this. I’ve thought about it, and every time the answer comes out the same. You can’t tell me different any more.”
She sighed ever so slightly. “We will talk later when you are feeling better.” Carefully folding the letter and placing it back in the envelope, she returned it to her pocket. “It is not I who tell you that the ship is coming. It is in the letter. If you have come to doubt your mother—and I’m sure you do not mean it even if you speak in weakness—it is to be regretted. Rest a few days. Think more deeply and your doubts will disappear. You are my son, Ichiro.”
No, he said to himself as he watched her part the curtains and start into the store. There was a time when I was your son. There was a time that I no longer remember when you used to smile a mother’s smile and tell me stories about gallant and fierce warriors who protected their lords with blades of shining steel and about the old woman who found a peach in the stream and took it home and, when her husband split it in half, a husky little boy tumbled out to fill their hearts with boundless joy. I was that boy in the peach and you were the old woman and we were Japanese with Japanese feelings and Japanese pride and Japanese thoughts because it was all right then to be Japanese and feel and think all the things that Japanese do even if we lived in America. Then there came a time when I was only half Japanese because one is not born in America and raised in America and taught in America and one does not speak and swear and drink and smoke and play and fight and see and hear in America among Americans in American streets and houses without becoming American and loving it. But I did not love enough, for you were still half my mother and I was thereby still half Japanese and when the war came and they told me to fight for America, I was not strong enough to fight you and I was not strong enough to fight the bitterness which made the half of me which was you bigger than the half of me which was America and really the whole of me that I could not see or feel. Now that I know the truth when it is too late and the half of me which was you is no longer there, I am only half of me and the half that remains is American by law because the government was wise and strong enough to know why it was that I could not fight for America and did not strip me of my birthright. But it is not enough to be American only in the eyes of the law and it is not enough to be only half an American and know that it is an empty half. I am not your son and I am not Japanese and I am not American. I can go someplace and tell people that I’ve got an inverted stomach and that I am an American, true and blue and Hail Columbia, but the army wouldn’t have me because of the stomach. That’s easy and I would do it, only I’ve got to convince myself first and that I cannot do. I wish with all my heart that I were Japanese or that I were American. I am neither and I blame you and I blame myself and I blame the world which is made up of many countries which fight with each other and kill and hate and destroy but not enough, so that they must kill and hate and destroy again and again and again. It is so easy and simple that I cannot understand it at all. And the reason I do not understand it is because I do not understand you who were the half of me that is no more and because I do not understand what it was about that half that made me destroy the half of me which was American and the half which might have become the whole of me if I had said yes I will go and fight in your army because that is what I believe and want and cherish and love . . .