No-No Boy

by John Okada

  Defeatedly, he crushed the stub of a cigarette into an ash tray filled with many other stubs and reached for the package to get another. It was empty and he did not want to go into the store for more because he did not feel much like seeing either his father or mother. He went into the bedroom and tossed and groaned and half slept.

  * * *

  —

  Hours later, someone shook him awake. It was not his mother and it was not his father. The face that looked down at him in the gloomy darkness was his brother’s.

  “Taro,” he said softly, for he had hardly thought of him.

  “Yeah, it’s me,” said his brother with unmistakable embarrassment. “I see you got out.”

  “How’ve you been?” He studied his brother, who was as tall as he but skinnier.

  “Okay. It’s time to eat.” He started to leave.

  “Taro, wait.”

  His brother stood framed in the light of the doorway and faced him.

  “How’ve you been?” he repeated. Then he added quickly for fear of losing him: “No, I said that before and I don’t mean it the way it sounds. We’ve got things to talk about. Long time since we saw each other.”

  “Yeah, it’s been a long time.”

  “How’s school?”

  “Okay.”

  “About through with high school?”

  “Next June.”

  “What then? College?”

  “No, army.”

  He wished he could see his face, the face of the brother who spoke to him as though they were strangers—because that’s what they were.

  “You could get in a year or two before the draft,” he heard himself saying in an effort to destroy the wall that separated them. “I read where you can take an exam now and get a deferment if your showing is good enough. A fellow’s got to have all the education he can get, Taro.”

  “I don’t want a deferment. I want in.”

  “Ma know?”

  “Who cares?”

  “She won’t like it.”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “Why so strong about the army? Can’t you wait? They’ll come and get you soon enough.”

  “That isn’t soon enough for me.”

  “What’s your reason?”

  He waited for an answer, knowing what it was and not wanting to hear it.

  “Is it because of me? What I did?”

  “I’m hungry,” his brother said and turned into the kitchen.

  His mother had already eaten and was watching the store. He sat opposite his brother, who wolfed down the food without looking back at him. It wasn’t more than a few minutes before he rose, grabbed his jacket off a nail on the wall, and left the table. The bell tinkled and he was gone.

  “Don’t mind him,” said the father apologetically. “Taro is young and restless. He’s never home except to eat and sleep.”

  “When does he study?”

  “He does not.”

  “Why don’t you do something about it?”

  “I tell him. Mama tells him. Makes no difference. It is the war that has made them that way. All the people say the same thing. The war and the camp life. Made them wild like cats and dogs. It is hard to understand.”

  “Sure,” he said, but he told himself that he understood, that the reason why Taro was not a son and not a brother was because he was young and American and alien to his parents, who had lived in America for thirty-five years without becoming less Japanese and could speak only a few broken words of English and write it not at all, and because Taro hated that thing in his elder brother which had prevented him from thinking for himself. And in his hate for that thing, he hated his brother and also his parents because they had created the thing with their eyes and hands and minds which had seen and felt and thought as Japanese for thirty-five years in an America which they rejected as thoroughly as if they had never been a day away from Japan. That was the reason and it was difficult to believe, but it was true because he was the emptiness between the one and the other and could see flashes of the truth that was true for his parents and the truth that was true for his brother.

  “Pa,” he said.

  “Ya, Ichiro.” He was swirling a dishcloth in a pan of hot water and working up suds for the dishes.

  “What made you and Ma come to America?”

  “Everyone was coming to America.”

  “Did you have to come?”

  “No. We came to make money.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Ya, I think that was why we came.”

  “Why to make money?”

  “There was a man in my village who went to America and made a lot of money and he came back and bought a big piece of land and he was very comfortable. We came so we could make money and go back and buy a piece of land and be comfortable too.”

  “Did you ever think about staying here and not going back?”

  “No.”

  He looked at his father, who was old and bald and washing dishes in a kitchen that was behind a hole in the wall that was a grocery store. “How do you feel about it now?”

  “About what?”

  “Going back.”

  “We are going.”

  “When?”

  “Oh, pretty soon.”

  “How soon?”

  “Pretty soon.”

  There didn’t seem to be much point in pursuing the questioning. He went out to the store and got a fresh pack of cigarettes. His mother was washing down the vegetable stand, which stood alongside the entrance. Her thin arms swabbed the green-painted wood with sweeping, vigorous strokes. There was a power in the wiry, brown arms, a hard, blind, unreckoning force which coursed through veins of tough bamboo. When she had done her work, she carried the pail of water to the curb outside and poured it on the street. Then she came back through the store and into the living quarters and emerged once more dressed in her coat and hat.

  “Come, Ichiro,” she said, “we must go and see Kumasaka-san and Ashida-san. They will wish to know that you are back.”

  The import of the suggested visits made him waver helplessly. He was too stunned to voice his protest. The Kumasakas and the Ashidas were people from the same village in Japan. The three families had been very close for as long as he could recall. Further, it was customary among the Japanese to pay ceremonious visits upon various occasions to families of close association. This was particularly true when a member of one of the families either departed on an extended absence or returned from an unusually long separation. Yes, he had been gone a long time, but it was such a different thing. It wasn’t as if he had gone to war and returned safe and sound or had been matriculating at some school in another city and come home with a sheepskin summa cum laude. He scrabbled at the confusion in his mind for the logic of the crazy business and found no satisfaction.

  “Papa,” his mother shouted without actually shouting.

  His father hastened out from the kitchen and Ichiro stumbled in blind fury after the woman who was only a rock of hate and fanatic stubbornness and was, therefore, neither woman nor mother.

  They walked through the night and the city, a mother and son thrown together for a while longer because the family group is a stubborn one and does not easily disintegrate. The woman walked ahead and the son followed and no word passed between them. They walked six blocks, then six more, and still another six before they turned into a three-story frame building.

  The Ashidas, parents and three daughters, occupied four rooms on the second floor.

  “Mama,” screamed the ten-year-old who answered the knock, “Mrs. Yamada.”

  A fat, cheerful-looking woman rushed toward them, then stopped, flushed and surprised. “Ichiro-san. You have come back.”

  He nodded his head and heard his mother say, with unmistakable exultation: “Today, Ashida-san
. Just today he came home.”

  Urged by their hostess, they took seats in the sparsely furnished living room. Mrs. Ashida sat opposite them on a straight-backed kitchen chair and beamed.

  “You have grown so much. It is good to be home, is it not, Ichiro-san?” She turned to the ten-year-old who gawked at him from behind her mother: “Tell Reiko to get tea and cookies.”

  “She’s studying, Mama.”

  “You mustn’t bother,” said his mother.

  “Go, now. I know she is only listening to the radio.” The little girl fled out of the room.

  “It is good to see you again, Ichiro-san. You will find many of your young friends already here. All the people who said they would never come back to Seattle are coming back. It is almost like it was before the war. Akira-san—you went to school with him I think—he is just back from Italy, and Watanabe-san’s boy came back from Japan last month. It is so good that the war is over and everything is getting to be like it was before.”

  “You saw the pictures?” his mother asked.

  “What pictures?”

  “You have not been to the Watanabes’?”

  “Oh, yes, the pictures of Japan.” She snickered. “He is such a serious boy. He showed me all the pictures he had taken in Japan. He had many of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and I told him that he must be mistaken because Japan did not lose the war as he seems to believe and that he could not have been in Japan to take pictures because, if he were in Japan, he would not have been permitted to remain alive. He protested and yelled so that his mother had to tell him to be careful and then he tried to argue some more, but I asked him if he was ever in Japan before and could he prove that he was actually there and he said again to look at the pictures and I told him that what must really have happened was that the army only told him he was in Japan when he was someplace else, and that it was too bad he believed the propaganda. Then he got so mad his face went white and he said: ‘How do you know you’re you? Tell me how you know you’re you!’ If his mother had not made him leave the room, he might even have struck me. It is not enough that they must willingly take up arms against their uncles and cousins and even brothers and sisters, but they no longer have respect for the old ones. If I had a son and he had gone in the American army to fight Japan, I would have killed myself with shame.”

  “They know not what they do and it is not their fault. It is the fault of the parents. I’ve always said that Mr. Watanabe was a stupid man. Gambling and drinking the way he does, I am almost ashamed to call them friends.” Ichiro’s mother looked at him with a look which said I am a Japanese and you are my son and have conducted yourself as a Japanese and I know no shame such as other parents do because their sons were not really their sons or they would not have fought against their own people.

  He wanted to get up and dash out into the night. The madness of his mother was in mutual company and he felt nothing but loathing for the gentle, kindly-looking Mrs. Ashida, who sat on a fifty-cent chair from Goodwill Industries while her husband worked the night shift at a hotel, grinning and bowing for dimes and quarters from rich Americans whom he detested, and couldn’t afford to take his family on a bus ride to Tacoma but was waiting and praying and hoping for the ships from Japan.

  Reiko brought in a tray holding little teacups and a bowl of thin, round cookies. She was around seventeen with little bumps on her chest which the sweater didn’t improve and her lips heavily lipsticked a deep red. She said “Hi” to him and did not have to say look at me, I was a kid when you saw me last but now I’m a woman with a woman’s desires and a woman’s eye for men like you. She set the tray on the table and gave him a smile before she left.

  His mother took the envelope from São Paulo out of her dress pocket and handed it to Mrs. Ashida.

  “From South America.”

  The other woman snatched at the envelope and proceeded to read the contents instantly. Her face glowed with pride. She read it eagerly, her lips moving all the time and frequently murmuring audibly. “Such wonderful news,” she sighed breathlessly as if the reading of the letter had been a deep emotional experience. “Mrs. Okamoto will be eager to see this. Her husband, who goes out of the house whenever I am there, is threatening to leave her unless she gives up her nonsense about Japan. Nonsense, he calls it. He is no better than a Chinaman. This will show him. I feel so sorry for her.”

  “It is hard when so many no longer believe,” replied his mother, “but they are not Japanese like us. They only call themselves such. It is the same with the Teradas. I no longer go to see them. The last time I was there Mr. Terada screamed at me and told me to get out. They just don’t understand that Japan did not lose the war because Japan could not possibly lose. I try not to hate them but I have no course but to point them out to the authorities when the ships come.”

  “It’s getting late, Ma.” He stood up, sick in the stomach and wanting desperately to smash his way out of the dishonest, warped, and uncompromising world in which defeated people like his mother and the Ashidas walked their perilous tightropes and could not and would not look about them for having to keep their eyes fastened to the taut, thin support.

  “Yes,” his mother replied quickly, “forgive us for rushing, for you know that I enjoy nothing better than a visit with you, but we must drop in for a while on the Kumasakas.”

  “Of course. I wish you could stay longer, but I know that there will be plenty of opportunities again. You will come again, please, Ichiro-san?”

  Mumbling thanks for the tea, he nodded evasively and hurried down the stairs. Outside, he lit a cigarette and paced restlessly until his mother came out.

  “A fine woman,” she said without stopping.

  He followed, talking to the back of her head: “Ma, I don’t want to see the Kumasakas tonight. I don’t want to see anybody tonight. We’ll go some other time.”

  “We won’t stay long.”

  They walked a few blocks to a freshly painted frame house that was situated behind a neatly kept lawn.

  “Nice house,” he said.

  “They bought it last month.”

  “Bought it?”

  “Yes.”

  The Kumasakas had run a dry-cleaning shop before the war. Business was good and people spoke of their having money, but they lived in cramped quarters above the shop because, like most of the other Japanese, they planned some day to return to Japan and still felt like transients even after thirty or forty years in America and the quarters above the shop seemed adequate and sensible since the arrangement was merely temporary. That, he thought to himself, was the reason why the Japanese were still Japanese. They rushed to America with the single purpose of making a fortune which would enable them to return to their own country and live adequately. It did not matter when they discovered that fortunes were not for the mere seeking or that their sojourns were spanning decades instead of years and it did not matter that growing families and growing bills and misfortunes and illness and low wages and just plain hard luck were constant obstacles to the realization of their dreams. They continued to maintain their dreams by refusing to learn how to speak or write the language of America and by living only among their own kind and by zealously avoiding long-term commitments such as the purchase of a house. But now, the Kumasakas, it seemed, had bought this house, and he was impressed. It could only mean that the Kumasakas had exchanged hope for reality and, late as it was, were finally sinking roots into the land from which they had previously sought not nourishment but only gold.

  Mrs. Kumasaka came to the door, a short, heavy woman who stood solidly on feet planted wide apart, like a man. She greeted them warmly but with a sadness that she would carry to the grave. When Ichiro had last seen her, her hair had been pitch black. Now it was completely white.

  In the living room Mr. Kumasaka, a small man with a pleasant smile, was sunk deep in an upholstered chair, reading a Japanese newspaper. It was a co
mfortable room with rugs and soft furniture and lamps and end tables and pictures on recently papered walls.

  “Ah, Ichiro, it is nice to see you looking well.” Mr. Kumasaka struggled out of the chair and extended a friendly hand. “Please, sit down.”

  “You’ve got a nice place,” he said, meaning it.

  “Thank you,” the little man said. “Mama and I, we finally decided that America is not so bad. We like it here.”

  Ichiro sat down on the sofa next to his mother and felt strange in this home which he envied because it was like millions of other homes in America and could never be his own.