Authors: Jay Rubin
The Sun Gods (31 page)
Golden in the morning sunlight, Mount Fuji soared above the train, its snow-draped cone more perfect and graceful than he had ever imagined it. But, for all he cared, it might just as well be another slide in Professor Fleming's art history class. The Hayabusa would arrive in Tokyo at 10:30, and then what was he to do? Go to the Noh seminar? Discuss the meaning of the
michiyuki
in
Kanehira
? What was the point anymore? Mitsuko was dead. And poor Yoshiko, aged beyond her years: was she out there now on the bridge, communing with her sun gods?
He had come four thousand miles in search of two sisters who lived in the deepest recesses of his soul, only to find that his country and his father had destroyed them both. They were imprisoned without trial. One buried her husband in the desert sands. The other was betrayed by her husband and blasted to atoms along with thousands of others. Not in the first bombingâwhich was bad enoughâbut in the second, the one dropped
after
they had learned the horrible truth of what the weapon could do.
America, America, God shed his grace on thee.
All this in the name of Christian civilization. Of truth. Our truth. “He that believeth on him is not condemned, but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the light, because their deeds were evil.” Japan did not believe. Japan was evil. Its women and children had to be incinerated. Whatever good Christianity had brought into the world, that had been far outweighed by the evil it had unleashed by creating the devil. The world would not be safe until men stopped killing in the cause of righteousness.
His first thought on leaving Itsuki had been to cross the Shimabara Gulf for a pilgrimage to Nagasaki, but wandering aimlessly through unknown streets had seemed so pointless. Anything that was left for him now was in Tokyo. Tsugiko, Yoshiko's “tenant,” had given him the address of Jiro Fukai, the brother who paid for her upkeep. Perhaps, when the sense of loss had dulled somewhat, he would visit the man to learn what he might know of Mitsuko's end.
32
c/o Niiyama
Ogikubo 1-124
Suginami-ku
Tokyo, Japan
April 17, 1963
Dear Frank,
I should have written to you over a month ago, but I have not been able to find the words. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I have not been able to find the courage to tell you that Mitsuko is dead. I learned this from her sister, Yoshiko.
There should be a gentler way of breaking the news, and I have been hoping that, if I let some time go by, I would find the way, but the weeks have done nothing to soften the blow for me. I simply don't know how I can spare you.
I discovered Yoshiko Nomura living in a tiny village in the mountains of Kyushu. I recognized a lullaby that Mitsuko used to sing to me, and I was able to locate her home village when I learned where the song came from. Yoshiko looks far older than her sixty-one years, no doubt because of what she has been through. She lost almost her entire family--including Mitsuko--when the atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki.
Yoshiko's husband, Goro, must have died in Minidoka after you left. Yoshiko lives in a large, old house, but perhaps it would be more accurate to say that she lives in her own, little world. She keeps her old photograph albums close by, and I was able to see some photos of Mitsuko, one of them with me (age two) in her lap taken at some kind of picnic. I almost cried when I saw that. She was so beautiful!
Aunt Yoshiko gave me the wooden backing from a small hand mirror that Mitsuko had asked her to pass on to me. She knew right where it was, as if the thing had been left with her the day before. She told me that I was the one who broke the mirror glass itself, though how I did it I never learned. Since returning to Tokyo, I have had the glass restored but I keep the mirror in the back of my closet. It is beautifully made, but I am not emotionally ready yet to enjoy it as a memento.
There is another brother, Jiro, who pays for Yoshiko's upkeep. (The family name is Fukai, by the way. Come to think of it, I am not even sure whether Yoshiko is living in the old family home under the name of Nomura or Fukai.) He lives in a Tokyo suburb, and I am planning to look him upâprobably tomorrow after visiting one of the famous cherry-blossom viewing spots nearby. I think perhaps the beauty of the blossoms has been helping me the past few days.
The Japanese academic year ended shortly after my departure from Tokyo, and the new one has just begun, so I have not had school work as a distraction over the past few weeks. One welcome diversion has been supplied by my friend, David Green, who finally convinced me to appear on his English TV show. It was gratifyingly time-consuming, what with memorizing my little skit and going in early to have my face made up and to be coached by the Japanese teacher who runs the show and does the interview at the end. Apparently, Tamura-Sensei thought I did well enough to invite me back again. Now they're talking about a third appearance. The pay is all right, but I don't think my visa status allows me to make a regular habit of this, and once my seminar starts, I doubt if I will have time for such things.
My seminar. I wish I could say I was looking forward to it. You know that I love the literature, but it is not what brought me to Japan in the first place, and now that my original purpose is gone, I wonder if I have enough innate interest to continue with the work. Odd: a few years ago, I might have been able to console myself with the thought that Mitsuko and I would be reunited in heaven. I can hardly believe that I was ever so literal-minded. I was brought up to decry “humanism,” but the people who taught me that view are far more guilty of a humanist bias, as if the entire universe were designed with the salvation of us puny human beings its only purpose. No, I am afraid that the God who put rings around Saturn was not aware of the moment the lives of Mitsuko and her family and the other victims in Nagasaki were snuffed out. The best we can do is to love and remember each other. It is with that in mind that I will seek out Jiro Fukai, so that I can learn and cherish more of the woman who gave so much of her love to me.
I will write again if I find out anything worth sharing tomorrow. Please let me hear from you. I enjoy your letters with their news of the folks at Maneki. And try to remember that you are not alone with your memories of Mitsuko.
Yours,
Bill
Musashi-Koganei was only six stops out from Bill's Ogikubo neighborhood on the Chuo Line. Half a mile north of the station were Tokyo's most famous cherry trees, stretching for nearly five miles along the Tamagawa Canal. A similar distance south was Maehara-cho, where Jiro Fukai lived. The blossoms, though doubtless very beautiful, would be mute. The man might have something to tell him.
Bill turned south. He bought a fancy tin of rice crackers from one of the little shops along the main street. With his obligatory gift and his double-sided calling cards (English on one side, Japanese on the other) he walked through the treeless neighborhood dotted with new middle class houses.
As in the older sections of the city, the numbering system designated tracts and blocks, not individual houses, and the parcels of land were numbered in the order of their development rather than their physical location. This meant that his map was useful only to a point, and he hoped to ask people on the street for directions to Tract 1, Block 11. But here, where houses were still separated by undeveloped stretches of mud, there were few people. He followed the narrow, graveled streets to a dead end at a large, fenced-in area where cars were driving around on the artificial lanes of an auto school.
Backtracking, he questioned a housewife carrying a shopping basket and then an old woman walking her dog, who finally showed him the way to a brown house with a small cherry tree of its own in the tiny front garden behind a six-foot cinder-block wall. Embedded in the wall was a small nameplate with the characters for “deep well”: Fukai. He opened the gate to find the cherry tree in full flower. The flagstone path and moss-covered
2 8 8
ground were dotted by round, pink petals. He had made the right choice: he could see cherry blossoms and meet Jiro Fukai.
Still not comfortable with the Japanese way of opening the outer door of a stranger's house and shouting for permission to enter, he pressed the doorbell and waited, gift in hand.
Nothing stirred in the house.
Again he pressed the button and waited. Now that he thought about it, if Mr. Fukai lived like most Japanese men, he would not be home until ten or eleven at night after a long day at the office followed by enforced socializing with his colleagues. But it was rare for houses to be completely empty. Usually there was someoneâa wife, a maid, a neighborâdoing
rusuban
(“absence-guarding”), who could accept a name card and suggest a more appropriate time to call. He tried sliding back the glass-paneled front door, thinking to leave his tin of crackers and a card in the entryway, but the door was firmly locked.
There were footsteps in the gravel behind him, and he turned to see a young woman round the corner of the cinder-block wall and stop at the open gate.
A single petal dropped from the cloud of blossoms overhead, its path through the motionless air a slow, sinuous diagonal. Nothing could stir so long as that pink disk was airborne, as if some ancient, unwritten law demanded that he and the young woman standing before him suspend all movement until the fragile membrane surrendered to the pull of the earth.
She was beautiful, her clear, oval face framed in straight, glossy black. The hair was parted in the middle and clung lightly where the sculpture of the throat began. The lovely, rounded cheekbones marked her unmistakably as a Fukai, but the delicate curve of the nose was something she did not share with Yoshiko or Mitsuko, and the mouth belonged to a face that had never known pain. The lower lip was slightly full and ready to smile.
She wore a blue-gray blazer of thickly woven material over a pale pink sweater, and a narrow, gray skirt. In shoes with a touch of elevation in the heels, she was unusually tall for a Japanese woman. Her right hand held the handles of a thin briefcase, and hooked over her left elbow was a small purse of brown leather.
After the petal floated down to the bed of moss at their feet, Bill bowed properly at the waist. The young woman hesitated for a moment before returning his greeting.
“Excuse me,” he said in his politest Japanese, “is this the Fukai house?” He had seen the nameplate, but it was all he could think of to say.
“Yes,” she replied. “Can I help you?” Her voice was soft yet confident.
“I was hoping to see Mr. Fukai, but no one seems to be home.”
“My father is at work, and my mother was going to go shopping at the Ginza today. Aren't you Mohton-san? I never miss Tamura-Sensei on NHK.”
He smiled and said in English, “Then perhaps we should be speaking in English.”
“Oh, no,” she replied in English, switching immediately back to Japanese. “My English is terrible. But your Japanese is excellent.”
“You must be a student,” he said, looking down at her briefcase.
“Yes, but don't ask me what I am studying.”
“What
are
you studying?” he asked, smiling broadly.
“English literature,” she said in Japanese with a little laugh. “I study at Tsuda College. It has an excellent English literature program, but I'm just a beginner in conversation. You're here studying Japanese literature, aren't you? I remember what you said when Tamura-Sensei introduced you.”
“That's right. I'm taking a seminar on Noh drama at the University of Tokyo.”
“I don't know anything about Noh,” she said, then added with a smile, “But I have read all of Fitzgerald's works.”
“All I've read is
Gatsby
,” he confessed.
“Good. Now I don't feel so bad about the Noh drama.”
“Do you mind if I ask your name?”
“It's Mineko,” she said without hesitating.
“Mineko. I like that. âChild of the mountaintop.'”
“Yes, maybe,” she said. “
Miné
does mean mountaintop.”
“Which Chinese character do you use to write the
miné
part?”
“I wish you hadn't asked me that. It's a little embarrassing. My parents decided not to write that part of my name with a character. They used the
katakana
syllabary. That way it looks like an exotic foreign word. It's actually very pretentious.”
“Don't worry,” he said. “You are not pretentious at all.”
She blushed slightly.
He wished that they could go on like this, talking about each other all day, but she said, “I believe you wanted to see my father?”
“Yes, I was in Itsuki a few weeks ago and got his address from his sister,” which was not exactly true, but close enough.
“You met Aunt Yoshiko? I have never met her. I've been begging them to take me to Itsuki for years. What were you doing there?”
Bill wondered where to start, what to tell her, what not to tell her. “It's a very long story. When I was a young boy, Yoshiko's sister Mitsuko used to take care of me, but she was repatriated during the war. One of the reasons I came to Japan was to see if I could find her. I did find Yoshiko, but she told me that Mitsuko died in Nagasaki.”
“Yes, it was a terrible thing,” said the girl. “All I know about her is that she and Aunt Yoshiko had to go to some kind of concentration camp in America during the war. I never knew my grandparents or my Uncle Ichiro, either. It's amazing that you still remembered a woman who took care of you when you were so youngâand that you managed to find Aunt Yoshiko in her tiny village.”
“I was hoping I could learn more about Mitsuko from your father.”
“You'll probably have to come back on a Sunday. That's the only day he's not at work. Although I wonder if he will talk to you. He ⦠I'm sorry to say this, but he hates Americans. He blames them for what happened.”
“I understand. But I want to see him anyway. I'll come back. Would you be so kind as to give him this?” He held out the wrapped tin of rice crackers, slipping a calling card under the ribbon.
“Thank you,” she said, bowing.
Bill looked at the Fukais' cherry tree. “I have time to go see the cherry blossoms now.”
“Oh! Do you know about the blossoms of Koganei?”
“I've heard about them, though I'm not sure exactly where they are.”
“Wait,” she said, smiling and edging past him to the door. She opened it with her key, set her briefcase and the tin of crackers in the entryway, and locked it again.
“I'll go with you,” she said.
He felt his heart thump. He knew that Japanese etiquette required him to insist that she not trouble herself, but he was unwilling to risk having her take him at his word. “That would be wonderful if you have the time,” he said.
Once they were walking side by side, he could not think of anything to say. Finally he asked, “Have you been studying English long?” Then he realized it was a stupid question. All Japanese children started studying English in middle school.