“You mean the sinologist is a reincarnation of the spy’s great-grandfather?”
Seiji smiled. “Besides the pavilion, the other correlation between the long-ago murder in China and the current murder in England is the presence of the infinite novel about time. It’s as though it too has traveled through the Labyrinth and, in a coalescent time, bound two apparent strangers, prefiguring not the murder but its precondition. Like a curse, it’s as if its appearance revived in the strangers a sleeping dynamic that had to play out in that cloistered room full of illustrious texts and objects deeply familiar to both. It’s as though the spy and the sinologist have been nudged into what turns out to be a recurring trap to which they’re inexorably drawn, like two captive rats who, trained to take a left at every crossroads, irresistibly fork their way into the center of a hall of mirrors filled with endless replicas of the pavilion, inside which the spy always, inevitably, encounters as if for the first time the sinologist in his different guises. You see, a curse is nothing more than a trigger. It can be anything. For some, it’s an unreadable novel about time. For others, a photograph. For still others, a story by an Argentinian writer. Or maybe a shared set of parents.”
The light flickered, the breeze like a passing truck; the curtains arced, and the room fluoresced, the afternoon sweeping across Seiji’s damaged face, flooding the dark aquarium of the TV; the neat pile of clothes on the overhead shelf; the tacked-up family portrait of a boy not yet mangled; the plastic jug the color of American mustard set beside the diminished man Masaaki now realized he’d soon lose. The walls shimmered; the air pulsated, a luminous agitation Masaaki would experience again only in the final moments of his own life, which would unexpectedly precede his brother’s, seizing him abruptly in his office one afternoon, eight weeks later. Lying on the floor, heart sputtering like a sparrow, he’d remember this light, the way it had teased the curtains all afternoon, simmering, then bubbling, then finally pouring in, a white vibration so pure it distilled every object into its glimmering essence, the golden beads tapping the air before releasing upward into a radiance where everything was as yet undifferentiated, where something and nothing were not yet opposites, where form, as yet unformed, had not drawn the jealous attention of time, with its corrosive wrath. This light, like the dizzying light of a maze, would feel familiar, its luminescence redolent of summer and childhood and their halcyon dreams where people, never lost, returned, like his ex-wife and two daughters and, these days, an image, like a memory, of two figures in a room.
Across from him, Seiji turned, his attention caught by a passing noise. Transfigured by light, the family resemblance was unmistakable, their father’s blunt features refined by their mother’s to unique but recognizable effect, and Masaaki, despite his envy, strained to remember him this way, in the bright eternity of this second before the curtains swept the air and the room gathered once more like an umbrella.
“Strange how light can obscure more than illuminate,” Seiji said. “We’ve been talking about the curse of patterns that repeat over generations; what I know is that patterns also repeat across a single lifetime. My first foray into politics, as you know, was right after the war. There was a man, legendary in the radical world. During the Occupation, I got a chance to meet him. Things didn’t go as planned. I arrived at his headquarters, an underground printing press. I knocked. No one answered. In retrospect, I should have left. Instead, I turned the knob. The first room I came to was dark. Blackout papers still covered the windows, a chink of light dribbling in like weak tea. I didn’t see the body right away; there was no movement left in it to catch any light. That was the context in which I met the Legend.” He lifted the jug, poured more water, and drank it.
“I was framed for that murder,” he continued. “I wasn’t guiltless. I should’ve respected the body that had served a life, but instead I helped the Legend. We bound the corpse, lashed it to a chair. We stuffed its mouth with cloth. It never occurred to me that I was helping him construct a crime scene meant to trap me. I was charged with murder and worse. I should’ve been sent to juvenile but wasn’t; I thought I’d be old by the time I got out. Three years later, I was dumped on the street. No explanation, but even a kid like me had friends. I looked for them, but in an interregnum three years is a long time; the world had changed, everyone had disappeared into new lives. I started from scratch. Several months later, an article appeared in the newspaper. The Legend had been found dead, bound and lashed to a chair, his mouth stuffed with a cloth. The killer was never caught.”
“You’re saying this is your pattern—your curse? Betrayal and revenge?”
Seiji rotated his cup. “The thing I admired most about the Legend was that he had the voice to mobilize millions. Granted, we were motivated by hunger, but the resonance we generated when we came together to demonstrate was revolutionary. Bodies have power. It just happened that the Legend and I met in the shadow of a dead one, its stillness as powerful as the resonance of bodies in a march, but instead of jostling us into solidarity, its presence obscured our alliance, distorted our choices, narrowed them to one.”
“So he had no choice, you had no choice, is that it?”
“The thing about betrayal is that it comes in many forms. Some are planned, others accidental: accidents of folly, accidents of circumstance. Then there are accidents of good intentions.” He met Masaaki’s stare. “The problem is that the body, the visceral self, doesn’t distinguish forms of betrayal; it registers only the fact, the blunt impact, the blinding locomotion.”
“That doesn’t mean revenge has to follow betrayal,” Masaaki said, the words rolling across the floor of his stomach. “We’re more than our bodies, our feelings.”
Seiji drained his cup. “I always assumed that the worst thing about betrayal would be the injustice. In fact it’s the disappointment. But to be disappointed there must’ve been an expectation, a hope. In my case, the corpse set the stage, but the spell was cast long ago by a magazine profile I read the spring I turned thirteen. I learned that the Legend and I shared a number of things. We lived in similar neighborhoods; our parents were of a similar political persuasion, which similarly cost us during the war. Like me, he was an only child, and that spring, housebound by curfew, I pictured us as brothers. So you could say it began with that magazine profile—that it was the journalist, the writer of the profile—our father—who set it in motion.”
Masaaki felt his whole body clutch. “What are you implying?” he asked. “Our father didn’t betray you.”
“As I said”—Seiji smiled—“patterns repeat across a single lifetime. Sometimes all it takes is an accident of good intentions.” He unpinned the photograph on the wall. “This was in the book you gave me.”
Masaaki felt the electric plunge as he reached for the image that he suddenly realized was the family portrait commemorating not Seiji’s first day of school but his own. He’d dug it up to show Seiji: the identical composition, the identical discontent on his own face as he stood flanked by their parents. He thought he’d misplaced it. “The key word is ‘accident,’ ” he said. “Bodies might be blind, but you’re too conscious—you can alter the pattern. I wanted you to see it. We look like we could be brothers—that’s all I meant.”
Seiji’s smile broadened. “Are you sure?” He put down his cup. His lips trembled. Then he laughed, a sudden bellow, the purity of his pleasure cut short by a choking sputter, a chaos of new coughing. Masaaki could hear the blood in it, the salt and metal. He stood to help, but Seiji waved him away.
“You should’ve seen your face,” he said, wiping his mouth. “I admit I was jealous when I saw the picture. But like the spy, my time is running out. I’m too sick to do anything except read stories written by an Argentinian writer who is compelling me to learn a thing or two about Taoism. Did you know some Taoists believe in heredity, the passing of, say, a curse, from one relative to another through the bloodline? The question is whether curses
, like viruses, can transmit through other means, other hosts—an object, a figure, even a jealous heart—and, like that, cross from one to another, as from a stranger to a stranger, a familiar.
“The first time I read the story, I was annoyed; I thought it offered nothing but a fatalistic cosmology. Now I see that it’s in fact about agency, how our actions can alter not just our personal trajectory but the larger one. You asked me once if I thought it was possible for humans to act for the benefit of the species, not just the interests of a nation, a culture, a religion. This is the conversation that prompted you to introduce me to that story.
“To his credit, the sinologist understood one thing: that the unreadable novel, more than a rhetorical experiment, is an alternative theory of the universe to stand against such luminaries of the Western Enlightenment as Newton and Schopenhauer. But like the spy’s great-grandfather, who was murdered before he could complete his great novel, the sinologist’s life is also cut short, maybe depriving him of another kind of enlightenment. A product of a whole tradition of Western thought, the sinologist rationally decodes the unreadable novel, deducing, convincingly, that the Garden of Forking Paths is not a physical place but a symbolic structure. But what he fails to grasp is that while time doesn’t unfold across a physical place, it unfolds across a space, the space of time. And it’s this failure that costs the sinologist his life and prevents our spy from altering the course of his action and the trajectory of history. Because it’s only in the space of time—the space of a moment, the space of the present—that choices are born. Ironically, the spy, the direct descendant of the great novelist, understood this. Forking through the idyllic countryside toward the sinologist’s pavilion, he momentarily forgets the war and the encroaching Irish captain, and his thoughts twirl on the fact that while the present moment is a speck in the vast history of our civilization, it’s only in the present, the moment of the now, where everything happens—where anything can happen.
“Like you, I put little stock in blood and bloodlines and other such notions that pass from generation to generation, shaping our loyalties. We’ve seen how effectively these notions, these scripts, given the force of culture, can be marshaled for national interest and preservation. But even culture, broken down into small daily acts we habitually perform—here lies the space, brief but capacious enough for us to seize the spectrum of our choices. We Japanese, for example, have many rituals to acknowledge space: the physical space of a place, the space of a threshold, as well as the shared space of a meeting, the social space born in a moment of an encounter. We mark this space with a bow. I’ve never given it much thought, except to defy the practice which I saw as one more subjugating custom of polite society. But since meeting you I’ve come to see this as a gesture not of self-abnegating obeisance but of vital self-negation, as we each pause at the threshold of our common space and lower our heads in deference, so that we might, together, even under the eternal augur of a curse, ceaselessly start anew in light.”
SIX
CROP
The crop had done well. Rows of vibrant green shoots knuckling out of the mud, springing like little children at the school bell. It would still take several seasons, but the transplant, Masayuki was sure, would eventually take, the best qualities of their rice, cultivated for generations at home in Niigata, given the chance for new growth here in California, all the way on the other side of the world. Until his cousin Mitsuru left for these shores seven years ago, in 1906, Masayuki had never imagined making what was for most a once-in-a-lifetime transpacific journey, and here he was crossing back and forth for the third time to help Mitsuru nurture these sprouts. It was gratifying to finally see the progress now, in 1913, and on this point Masayuki had no regrets, the excitement of working alongside Mitsuru worth almost any exorbitance. He and Mitsuru had always shared a passion for discovery, and Masayuki had grieved when his cousin left Niigata. Now Mitsuru went by Bob, and though Masayuki never learned whether the name had been chosen or issued to him, what was clear was that Bob, who answered only reluctantly to his original name, was determined to stay. This land had space, vast and unencumbered by primogeniture, the grip of old roots—or so it seemed.
Like most of Mitsuru’s projects, the odds hadn’t been favorable, and it had been a feat to coax their grain to thrive in a new environment that was, in many ways, hostile to transplants, despite the similarities they saw between Northern California and Niigata. Now, after six seasons, their crop was showing promise. A futurity.
Masayuki could report at least this much when he faced his wife, Taeko, who, in three weeks, would journey with their infant son from Niigata to the port of Yokohama to greet him when he disembarked the steamship Hikari, currently docked on this pier, waiting to depart this California bay. By then it would be five months since he’d last seen her, and the thought filled him with longing and apprehension. In all their years together, Masayuki had done little to draw Taeko’s scrutiny; if anything, it was this lack that sometimes provoked her exasperation. In the case of his months in California, it was her interest in Mitsuru’s health and romantic life that prompted her to do a little fishing in the memory lake of his heart, where, according to her, all the fish, bored by inattention, lay dormant. He was always curious what she’d dredge up, the slipped feelings and details she’d hold up wriggling between them for analysis. This year all his fish were wide awake, and it would not be Mitsuru she’d be concerned with.
At the ship’s entry, Masayuki looked up at the gleaming hulk thrumming with an ever more efficient engine he could feel in his legs. Indeed, Hikari was an apt name for a ship that carried the shine of the future.
He was the first to arrive at his cabin, a tiny room stiff with cleaning. Other than the bunk beds set up on opposite walls, there was only a common night table, above which a round window peered cataractically. He wondered if he should’ve stuck to steerage. As it was, he’d splurged on a second-class ticket, thinking he’d appreciate the company of a few bunkmates over the intimate anonymity of a constant crowd. Perhaps he’d misjudged. Sliding his luggage onto his mattress, he rejoined the bustle in the corridor. His legs often felt heavier on the return; this time, they felt numb, his whole body dragging anchor.
Above deck, the day was clear and getting clearer, the sky and sea differentiated by texture rather than color, each half meeting at the horizon beyond which lay the frontier of the next epoch. Masayuki, born in the previous century, knew he’d never live to see the advances that would penetrate earth’s outer borders. Yet, just over a decade into the twentieth century, technology had brought the continents closer, science feeding and curing a world that would surely one day want for nothing. Like his cousin, Masayuki believed in humanity, its intrinsic propulsion to evolve, and the coming ages’ limitless capacity to progress; he too was a born agronomist, impelled by life’s miraculous vigor to contribute to its vitality. Ultimately, he was a pragmatist, which was both his strength and weakness—and useful to his pioneering cousin, who’d tapped him for his own pursuits. Masayuki never regretted this exploitation, as others in his family called it; Mitsuru elevated him, Mitsuru who always dreamed in excess, reaching into a future that did not exist to seed an unborn world he’d insist was gestating in the air, in the water, in the soil, germinating across the earth.
But it was one thing to dream and another to be naïve, and Masayuki took care never to be naïve. As he saw it, there was a difference between blind faith and hope, and it was in the gully between the two that he always set his heart. It was the only way he could see to meet the future squarely. Taeko, like Mitsuru, valued his judgments, trusting their innovative sparkle. But he’d never before risked anything potentially irreversible.
* * *
—
ON DECK, Masayuki threaded his way to the railing, undeterred by the elbows and shoulders turning to resist him. Across the water plashing between the ship and pier, the crowd had slackened into listless clumps
, and it took him a moment to find the spot where, moments ago, he’d shaken hands with his cousin, then with Edward, the once scraggly mop of a boy who used to come around with his father, the sympathetic white man from whom Bob leased his land. Now a head taller than Masayuki, Edward was no longer a boy—he’d made that clear. Looking back, Masayuki should’ve seen it coming, Edward’s grown-up face pinking at the sight of Ayumi, Masayuki’s fifteen-year-old daughter, when they’d disembarked at the beginning of this summer.
Summoning his strength, Masayuki let his gaze drop to the shape beside Edward. Not her usual trenchant self, his daughter was scrunched between several doleful families, her pale face sullen and averted. He was glad she wasn’t looking, his child, no longer a child, who’d sat beside Edward in Bob’s parlor the previous week, back straight, letting Edward talk like a grown man about the merits of Ayumi making a life in California with him, an aspiring American agricultural scientist. What could he do? Ayumi, a rambunctious child, had always trailed after Mitsuru, reaching for the world beyond their town; his wife, far from discouraging it, had indulged Ayumi, raising little resistance when she first clamored to sail to California with her father. But this—this was different, he knew. And yet he also believed a part of Taeko would understand. In the past year Ayumi had become subdued and restless, her thoughts often elsewhere as she chewed her dinner or swept the hallway, snapping at anyone who interrupted her. Masayuki had thought it had to do with her brother, two years older and about to leave home to pursue his medical studies. But Taeko had been convinced it was her own pregnancy, so late in life, with their youngest son, the unexpected event burdening Ayumi with more household duties and perhaps a glimpse of her own future in Niigata. Despite the help she needed with the baby, Taeko, not a soft woman, had made arrangements with her own sister, who agreed to stop by twice a day so Ayumi could travel again with her father. No doubt Taeko, upon his return, would demand to know what the prospects were of a Japanese girl in America, but it was the image of his wife’s pity that had opened his mind as he listened to Edward and watched his daughter’s face radiate a hopeful ardor he hadn’t seen since she’d been a little girl. He’d consented. Ayumi, elated, had flushed, a vibrance that filled his chest, tickling every corner of it. It was only later that something heavier had tugged at her expression, and now this weight hit him full force, the pang like a prophecy of loss, his struck heart suddenly too large in its cage.
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