The last stapled page clarifies nothing: a block of text copied, Luna will later learn, from a zuihitsu written by a Japanese American poet. Floating in the center of the page without context, it provokes a strange feeling, like falling into a chasm, the white gap between languages, where there is a sensation, tip-of-the-tongue, but no words to attach to it.
When nuns interviewed Koreans in Hiroshima after the bomb, the survivors drew a blank. When inadvertently questioned in Japanese, one began to wail and recall the horrors. Others could also recall it in Japanese, but not in their mother tongue.
What does it mean to remember in one language, but not the other, the mother tongue?
What does it mean to survive, witness to an attack so negating of life it gutted your brain, eradicated your voice, leaving you blank-faced with a mouth that opened only when prodded by the colonizer’s tongue?
Why did her father file all this here?
* * *
—
SHE SEES Watanabe one last time. She is out back, the contents of the house upended in the yard, when he stops by with her father’s favorite mug.
“Sorting the recycling?” He eyes the piles, rolling up his mental sleeves. “My wife and I are free tomorrow.”
“I’m pretty much done,” she says. And this is true. Her father has left little in the end: just shelves of books, a few clothes, and the boxes. The rest are leftovers carried over from the previous generation: the duct-taped rice cooker, pots with missing handles, an assortment of supermarket plates and bowls. It seems paltry, these inherited things he’d adapted his life to, living among them as though he were a bracket, a temporary graft in the family genealogy. Yet there is also something appealing about a life stripped to the essentials, everything in the process of being used up, its whole lifespan spent.
She says as much to Watanabe as she changes her shoes for what will be her last walk through the neighborhood. It is a clear day, the sky an opulent blue, and she can see that on a day like this the town does boast spectacular views of the country’s famed mountain.
“I suppose I do see what the fuss is about,” she says. “It’s surreal.”
Watanabe glances at the specter that has loomed over his entire life. “That mountain makes it too easy to believe we’re one big homogenous family.”
“I always thought that was a Western stereotype until I learned it’s also what this country sells. It’s a convenient narrative. Japan the homogenous; America the diverse. We can look at each other to confirm our own fantasy image of ourselves. It’s a flattering mirror. One in which minorities either disappear or are cloned.”
“Well, you’ve clearly inherited your father’s cynical streak,” he says. “From my vantage, America is diverse; unlike here, people can become American in America.”
Luna shakes her head, frustration rising. “America is black or white. I can’t tell you how often I’m asked where I’m really from. Most of the time, we’re not part of the national conversation, unless we’re needed as a model, the proof triumphant of the American Dream, or as faces for People of Color campaigns—or that’s how it can feel. Right now, we’re not the ones fearing hate crimes and roundups, but it’s easy to imagine—it’s not like it hasn’t happened before. All it takes is a war. It gets old figuring out where I belong.”
Watanabe considers this, the permutations of her grievances rooted in a history so umbilical to her identity as an American. “When your father discovered his Korean roots, he said it changed his relationship to his work. But did it change his sense of himself? I can’t answer that for him, but I know that, by the time I met him, his concern wasn’t where he belonged but how he wanted to fit in.”
“That’s an interesting distinction,” Luna says, feeling the loss of one more conversation she’ll never have with her father. “Not everyone has that choice, though. Being here, I keep thinking about Urashima Tarō. My father told us that story so many times my sister and I started dreaming of evil magic boxes.” She laughs. “It wasn’t until I read it for a class in college that I saw it as a cautionary tale about leaving home. It’s how I’ve been teaching it: as an allegory of exile. Now I wonder if it’s actually the opposite: a moral about being too attached to our roots.”
“Because Urashima Tarō could have stayed in paradise?”
Luna nods. “There’s also a price for staying, though: he has to give up his ties to the human world. He has to forget his roots—forget who he is.”
“Is that wrong? Can people never have a new life?”
Luna doesn’t answer right away. Is forgetting a prerequisite for a new life? “I suppose it depends on if memory is a choice. In Tarō’s case, he couldn’t forget because he’s human.”
They are quiet as they concentrate on climbing the road corkscrewing up the slope, staggering houses, wrinkling walls, mocking the developers who had to concede to these mountains despite the technologies that brought them here. At the top, they pause to catch their breath before continuing through the backwoods where the houses are older, more resplendent, separated by stone walls above which Luna can see the domes of ornamental trees hinting at gardens often replicated on a grander scale in botanical parks. Next time—if there is a next time—will these be gone too, sold off by their inheritors to make way for the new?
“The thing I like about fairy tales is the variation,” Watanabe resumes. “In every version I know, Urashima Tarō suffers for his attachments and returns to shore. In every version, he opens the tamatebako. But I don’t think he’s punished for being human. The tamatebako is a mercy.”
The interpretation is generous, she thinks, but one that doesn’t change the known story. What if, she thinks, Urashima Tarō had remembered Otohime’s warning and not opened the box? Because in all the versions, that’s the unexplored story. She is reminded of her father on that last family visit here, how intent he’d been on showing them the sites, not the big established attractions they wanted to see, but the vulnerable local ones, trying to impart something of his own lived story. At the time, it was hard to understand. Now she finds herself gripped by what will happen when she leaves Japan with no ties left to return to.
“I always felt strange in my own country, even my own family,” Luna says. “But I feel strange here too. It’s strange to feel connected to a place you’ve only visited a handful of times as a child. It makes no sense. What does America or Japan—or, god, Korea—mean to me? What did it mean to my father? What should it mean in our world? Because as far as I can see, all it does is create destruction.” She swipes a fallen branch off the path. “I think I’m pregnant.”
Watanabe turns to her, surprised. Then he looks pleased, then mournful, then somber, as he shares this new weight of her father’s death. Luna is glad when he doesn’t sentimentalize it. “I like how in America people keep their ethnic roots, either as a middle name or with that convenient hyphen in your language,” he says. “But you never changed your last name.”
Luna remembers the decision, the agonized waffling before the wedding, the fear of untethering that seized her. “I suppose if I’m really pregnant I’ll have to sort that out. It’s funny. I’ve always pictured myself with a boy, but I’ve always been set on the name ‘Erin.’ I had a childhood friend with that name. My father made it sound so pretty the way he pronounced it. I used to wish it was mine.”
* * *
—
IN THE end her father’s roots are indeterminable. The Korean laborers, accounting for seventy percent of the workforce at Matsushiro, were indisputably the majority, but there were also three to five thousand Japanese workers and officers present, and it is ultimately unclear who had access to the ten or twenty women kept there to satisfy and subdue them. It is also unclear whether all the women were Korean, or whether, as in many “comfort” units, there were Japanese and maybe Chinese women as well. The biggest mystery is how a newborn had man
aged to survive the mountain site so prohibitive of life itself.
Her father might have come to a similar conclusion, judging by the most recent manuscripts she has found in the last box she discovered, hidden the whole time by the white sheet Watanabe had spread over it for the altar. The manuscripts are all dated this year, the newest not a week before his death, each an attempt to write not his history, it turns out, but his own story, beginning with the lacquered box his mother produced from the closet, the sealed lid hiding the registration card that would change his life—then nothing, the paragraph and sentence abandoned, sprouting question marks underlined twice, a particularity that chills Luna, who recognizes her own habits there.
Like all the rooms in this house, the study is bright, lit by a wide window below which sits his desk, now clear of the laptop and hard drive and the jar of pencils he’d kept there. Like the pencils, the laptop and hard drive were well used, but when she booted them up she found not a single file, each reset to factory condition. What finally undid her, though, was the plastic bag she found in the filing cabinet stocked with hanging folders that still hugged the shape of the documents her father had boxed up and scattered around the house. It contained picture frames, all empty, and a single scrapbook started in the 1950s that held photos of her grandparents and also, surprisingly, the one of Luna, Katy, and their mother stenciled like bright cutouts against the dim backdrop of their house in Urbana, but none of her father—just rectangles holding the places where he’d been. She found no letters, no postcards, not even one of the birthday cards they’d stamped and sent, and these are the things that will haunt her at odd hours throughout her life.
Yet in less than a day, Luna will wheel her carry-on up the aisle of the plane, jittery with exhaustion but anticipating the moment she will see her husband and tell him the news. It’ll be a portentous moment, the flash of excitement and fear awakening a restlessness inside her. For just hours before her flight, after declining Watanabe’s offer to see her to the airport, she’ll rush around her grandparents’ house, shutting off the gas and electricity, locking doors and storm windows, knowing she’ll be the last family member to set foot in it. It’ll be a peculiar moment, already imbued with nostalgia, the once cold rooms, warmed by familiarity, reminding her of the hours she spent rooting for answers and finding only traces of a man seemingly bent on evicting himself. Or at least that will be what she’ll be forced to conclude, the walls and corridors now forever incontestable in their silence. And for the first time she’ll feel herself surrender, the old hurt and budding regret crushed beneath the weightier sorrow of departure and the slow panic of the uncertain future opening her chest.
What, for example, should she do with the boxes?
When Luna calls Watanabe, he will offer her his shed, and she will eagerly accept, even though it will make no sense. In fact, it would be satisfying to see her father’s boxes gutted and broken down, the piles of flat cardboard cut to size and bound for recycling. For her part, she will take only three things: the scrapbook, the folder, and the mug. By then it will be clear there is no one there in that house. She has waited too long. They waited too long. They had already passed each other in the night.
PAVILION
Isolated more than twenty miles beyond the gate of Dugway Proving Ground [in Utah]…lie the remains of German-Japanese Village, where replicas of German and Japanese buildings were constructed…to test incendiaries for use in World War II. Even today special clearance is required to get to what remains of the testing site, and locating it amid the interconnecting labyrinth of seemingly nameless and featureless roadways is difficult.
—DYLAN J. PLUNG, “THE JAPANESE VILLAGE AT DUGWAY PROVING GROUND”
“It’s funny,” Seiji said when Masaaki walked into the cloistered room billowing with light blown in through the cheap powder-blue curtains. “Here you are, coming in from the sunshine to visit me in the dark, but we’re not all that different, are we?” A statement iridescent with—was it mockery?
Masaaki closed the door, cutting off the light from the boardinghouse hall and leaving the man before him backlit, his oval head and craggy shoulders looming like prehistoric cliffs. In the last month, Seiji had declined alarmingly, his spindly frame bereft of flesh, his head, once vigorously snowcapped, as threadbare as a combed beach. The war, concluded almost sixty-five years ago, had ravaged his throat and lungs, leaving the peaks and valleys of his health chasing each other unpredictably. The boardinghouse manager, who’d been renting to Seiji for decades, claimed she’d seen him worse, but it was clear that for him the peak had never seemed so far. From here, there would only be valleys.
Masaaki leaned his satchel against the wall and sat in his usual spot at the foot of the futon, the worn tatami faintly sour: the imprint of generations of sweat. “How are you feeling?” he asked.
Seiji ignored him, and for a moment they listened to his wheeze, the shuck and whistle steady in the loom of his chest. In the window, the curtains settled, the light folding its glittery wings, and the gray room revealed itself: the tidy sketch of the overhead shelving, the rounded cube of the analog TV as anachronistic as Masaaki’s bottle-bottom glasses in the twenty-first century. Masaaki unzipped his bag and extracted his water.
Despite everything, here he was again in the poorest heart of Tokyo visiting this man, his brother, who he’d met only a year ago when Seiji turned up at his house in a rural pocket of Kanagawa, looking for information about his parents. The meeting had been sublime. Seiji, separated from his parents during the American firebombing of Tokyo in the spring of 1945, had learned of his parents’ survival only weeks before he found his way to Masaaki’s door. And Masaaki, who’d discovered Seiji’s existence only as an adult, when he learned that he himself had been a war orphan adopted by their parents during the American Occupation, had only a blurry impression of Seiji captured in the one photograph that had survived the war: a tattered family portrait commemorating Seiji’s first day of school, framed and crowned with a black ribbon designated for the dead. The two men had spent hours that first day pinning down dates and events, endlessly circling back to confirm this or that detail—So, your biological parents were Korean, that’s all you know? So, our parents were in Tokyo until at least July 1945?—as though afraid to let the timeline rest. Masaaki wasn’t sure when their excitement had turned shackling. Seiji’s roving gaze, which had lingered over the cut glass ashtray, the dusty turntable and record collection, had fixed on him.
“I’m sure you noticed too. The coincidence,” Seiji resumed now. “The two of us thirteen years apart and utterly unrelated, but orphaned by the same war and sharing the same parents. It never crossed my mind they’d survived and adopted a child. What’s interesting is that, all along, you were just on the other side, growing up in the bright world you inhabit, advocating for the future in your world of front doors and windows, while I advocated for it in mine crowded with back doors and alleyways, out of sight of yours. I keep returning to this fact, like a fly to light, or maybe a rat to water in a drought.”
Masaaki said nothing. The parallels had struck him too, their biographical correspondences a fortunate convenience, their antiwar commitments a shared interest they could huddle around over coffee on intermittent afternoons. And for months they did huddle over bottomless cups in one or another hole-in-a-wall kissaten, Seiji regaling him with tumultuous tales of his early activities, the historic clashes with the riot police through the sixties and seventies over the ongoing American military presence in Japan. Masaaki, who had followed these events on television, found the personal perspective riveting. But over the weeks and months, the stories, even the man himself, began to feel oppressive. Beneath the patter, there was always an undercurrent. It was nothing concrete—a pause over the rim of Seiji’s coffee cup, a catch in the slice of his setting gaze, as elusive and as beguiling as an eel. It worked on him. He began to dream, figments returning to him in milky flashes until
he had it, reconstructed, in his head. The backdrop changed as often as he and Seiji changed kissaten—an old habit of an old militant, Seiji liked to joke—but the scene was always the same: two men facing each other, one older than the other, the younger poised with a question he never asks, the opportunity cut off by the older man’s quicker draw. The words varied—sometimes a comment, other times a question—but the tone never did, and a louring sense of inevitability would pin Masaaki as though to a script. When the scene played out, it would end these visits—that was the assumption, perhaps his hope, admitted only in his dreams.
“It was strange to find out my parents survived,” Seiji continued. “Over the decades, I dreamt up hundreds of scenarios to allow them this outcome. Almost always, I was the linchpin, the crafty son who’d lead them through the bombs to safety. I rehearsed this again and again, as if repetition could change reality.” He chuckled, a chalky scratch that rustled up a mess of coughs. Masaaki offered his water bottle, but Seiji waved it away. “In the times I didn’t play the hero, it was my parents who’d find me, weeks or months or years later. At no time did I imagine you. But it’s you I found. It was like turning a blind corner I’d spent years forging and finding a figure I didn’t put there. I kept asking myself, which is worse: to never know your parents, or to discover they’d adopted a new child and moved on?”
Masaaki cracked open his water bottle; the warm liquid rolled down the desert of his throat. He too had weighed this question. An orphan who’d never known his parents, he’d nevertheless grown up with a mother and father taken, as it happened, from the very man sitting before him. Objectively, it was nobody’s fault except humanity’s violence, but it was a fragile comfort. The same war might have orphaned them both, but their differences were stark, Seiji’s face and body mottled by incendiaries while Masaaki lived his entire life in comfort, cradled by the very country whose imperial ambitions had subjugated and killed his biological parents. Now Seiji’s appearance only deepened his guilt, amplifying the anxiety he’d lived with since he learned of his adoption: that his life, even his identity, had been borrowed. And not only borrowed, it turned out, but usurped from someone who’d been relegated to society’s fringes to dream up blind corners around which he might find his parents. The irony was that Seiji could’ve found them if he’d looked twenty, maybe even fifteen, years earlier—an easy thought for Masaaki, with his laptop and Internet and the benefits of mainstream life he’d been accorded. Instead, their parents had left Masaaki the house and the family plot, its chamber spacious enough to accept him when his own time came. It had seemed an inevitable conclusion: to rest with this family history had cloven. Now he wasn’t sure he belonged.
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