A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding (7 page)

Kiza: Particular types of deviations from the prevalent norm of behaviour sometimes irritate certain kinds of people and are called kiza (mind-disturbing). It is especially so when an act of deviation is perceived as the outcome of an effort to imitate patterns of another culture that is seen as higher than that of
the community. This evaluation seems to apply most conspicu
ously to persons who are perceived to be obsequiously following Western patterns of behaviour.

‘I apologise again. Two visits in a day, I realise, is . . .' He shook his head. ‘I didn't handle the situation well earlier. I'm not sure how you deliver news like that?' He shivered in the cold. ‘I didn't realise how chilly it would be, stupid really, unprepared.' He blew into his hands. ‘I promise I mean you no harm, but can I come in? Just for a moment.' The whiskey was sour on my breath. I wondered if he could smell the alcohol. Maybe he would think it natural that I would dull the shock with a tipple? I needed to be careful; although my courage was reinforced, my judgement would be impaired. He pointed at the briefcase by his feet. ‘I have a parcel I promised to deliver to you. Then I'll go.' His voice sounded kind enough. There was a warmth to the intonation, despite the stiffness of its delivery.

‘From Natsu Sato?' He nodded. ‘She adopted you, she said in the letter.'

‘She did. She was a good mother to me.'

I looked beyond his shoulder to the tarmac street peppered with orbs of yellow from lamp posts. I could see no waiting taxi or rental vehicle. Curiosity and loneliness are terrible accomplices. ‘Please come in.' I prepared a small lie. ‘I have plans later so I'm afraid we can't talk for long.' I took care to avoid slurring my words. He stepped into the hall, saw the light in the kitchen and moved toward the glow. In a panic I realised he would see the bottle I had left on the table. ‘No, not that way, let's talk in the living room.' I closed the door and pointed to the black rectangle that marked its entrance. ‘The switch is on the left. One minute.' I walked to the bedroom, my stiff joints giving me the wide-hipped gait of a gunslinger. I pulled open the bedside cabinet drawer, where I kept a comb and breath mints. I freshened up and returned down the hall. He stood illuminated in his dark suit below the frosted glass and brass fittings of the ceiling lamp. His back was to me as he studied the contents of twelve identical black frames divided into three rows on the opposite wall. Kenzo had spent hours measuring out the gaps between the pictures with a ruler, pencil and spirit level. Here were more images of Nagasaki, of the family we had been. The photographs were our only homage to Japan among the Western furniture. The man glanced back and seemed too big for our room of moss-green walls, cream curtains, beige couch and pine coffee table.

‘These pictures are wonderful.'

I walked up to his side and pointed at one. ‘The botanical gardens at Nomozaki.' He nodded as he looked at
Kenzo and me with Hideo and Yuko, all dressed in summer yukatas, standing by a pond rippled with feeding koi, a picnic laid out on the grass. ‘And this is Shige, not long before he was shipped out.'

‘He looks good in the uniform.'

I said nothing. Shige had been reticent about his war service but duty-bound to perform it.

‘Please sit down.' I indicated for him to take the couch beneath the pictures. I switched on a lamp beside him and turned off the overhead bulb, which fell too harshly on those ridges of discoloured flesh and keloids. ‘Can I get you anything? Tea, or something else?'

‘Perhaps in a minute. I didn't know if this would be convenient? I should have called. I'm just so glad to be here. You must have so many questions?'

A beat before I replied, ‘And you too?' He seemed to hunch into himself at this, his enthusiasm checked, and there was a stab to my gut, of what? Some half-remembered emotion I didn't care to identify. I confess the gesture reminded me of my Hideo, so self-conscious, but I would not be so easily swayed. My next words were difficult to say and so I spoke them softly. ‘I think you should know, I went to my grandson's school that morning. I saw the bodies.'

He lowered his head, the way a shy person does, and this too was Hideo, perhaps, a hint of the man he might have become. ‘I know the statistics.'

‘We searched for so long. If we had thought for one minute Hideo had survived, we'd never have stopped looking.'

‘I understand. I'm sure you did everything you could.
Your doubts are natural. Can I show you something?' He reached into his inside jacket pocket and pulled out his passport. I opened the document at the page with his personal details. Here was Hideo Sato, a teacher, born February 22, 1938. The birth date was correct but that didn't make it right. I ran my finger over his photograph, the scars exposed under the flash of the photo booth. He wanted to know who he was. Maybe this man thought his request an easy one.

I handed the passport back to him. ‘Hideo is dead. I'm sorry.'

He said nothing for a while and I could not tell if he was angry. Then he reached down for his briefcase, placed it on the couch cushion next to him and retrieved a brown parcel. The A4 envelope had been handled with care, the folds uncreased, the seal unbroken. He placed the package on the coffee table.

‘She asked that the parcel should be given only to you. I've not seen what's inside. I'm intrigued, of course, but the instructions were you should read the contents first. I'm guessing it may be documents that Father collected, adoption papers, but I don't know.'

‘Father?'

‘Jomei. Kenzo and Father were good friends, I understand?'

Is that what the doctor had told him? It wasn't so far from the truth. ‘When they were younger, yes.'

What had Sato been up to all these years, what false memories had he created, how had he found this Hideo in an orphanage? But what I most wanted to know was: is that bastard still alive? Instead I offered my visitor a
drink. ‘Would you like that tea now, or I have something stronger?'

‘Actually, if you're offering, something stronger would be good.'

‘Did you come all this way to America just to see me?' He said yes. ‘How did you find me?'

‘I used a private detective. You'd be surprised how many people go missing; there are agencies to help you find them.'

‘I see. So when did you find me?'

‘Last year.' He saw me take in this information.

‘Why did you wait so long to come?'

He sat back heavy against the couch. ‘To be honest, I was scared about what I would find, your reaction, my response. You build the day up in your head, knowing the reality can never be a match to the expectation, good or bad.'

‘Am I what you expected?'

He replied with the smallest laugh. ‘I don't think either of us are.'

This made me smile. ‘So what made you finally get on the plane?'

‘A coincidence. I belong to a peace organisation, we speak all over the world, at conferences, schools, summits for non-nuclear proliferation. We raise funds, awareness, lobby for victims. There's a conference here, my group was invited to send a representative, I volunteered.' He dipped his head to the side. ‘Sometimes the universe sends you a sign you cannot ignore, wouldn't you say?'

‘Would you have come otherwise?'

He exhaled. ‘Eventually, I'm sure.'

His own reticence was a relief to me. We shared this mutual caution for a moment and then I levered myself upright. ‘I'll bring us some whiskey, Kenzo's favourite. I'll let you think of our toast.'

‘That's easy.' He looked back at the photographs behind him. ‘To my family.'

Somehow we knew not to talk about Nagasaki, not yet. Instead he asked about America. Less concealment was needed about our flight to the West. I explained how Kenzo and I could not stay in the city and live with our loss. We needed to go somewhere so alien and so different that all our energy would be taken up by the strangeness of our new lives. Another part of Japan would not do. We needed unknown terrain, a challenging culture, a language that had not invented words such as pikadon. When the occupation began, some American naval officers came to Kenzo's workplace. He had been chosen to show them around because of his seniority and his basic English skills. During his degree he had spent some time in Scotland, at the Glasgow Nautical College. The accent had nearly defeated him but he remembered enough vocabulary to communicate. When we decided to leave Japan he had spoken with one of these men, who, grateful for Kenzo's help, had arranged through connections a job offer in California. We studied a map. Vallejo, where Mare Island Naval Shipyard was based, was twenty or thirty miles from San Francisco. There were other private shipyards in the state if the naval facility didn't work out, the American said. The paperwork might be tricky but Kenzo's skills were in demand. We held no goodbye parties, made no final
pilgrimages, only Misaki was there to wave us off at the train station on July 19, 1946.

As soon as we docked at San Francisco I felt overwhelmed by the size of everything: the roads, the cars, the flat-roofed diners, the people, but I was glad of the unremitting assault on my senses. Horns beeped, newspaper vendors shouted, radios blared. Bosses at the shipyard had found us a home and sent us a picture of a white wooden house with two bedrooms, a patch of grass at the front. We hired a black Chevrolet and drove to Vallejo. We stopped to look around by the ferry terminal, its blue roof shaped like a circus top, and I knew we had made a terrible mistake. Even in this new continent, the past followed us. The yellow and blue houses built on the hills overlooking the water reminded me of those that had perched on the inclines of Nagasaki. I could not tell Kenzo this but as the days passed to weeks and then months, I couldn't hide my unhappiness. He thought my struggles were with the culture. Yes, even a simple trip to the shop was a trial. I would stare for minutes at shampoos or cans and wonder what they contained if no picture gave a clue. I'd count out coins in my purse while trying to understand what price the shop teller had said. I didn't mind these inconveniences or embarrassments. They filled my mind and my days. No, it was Vallejo itself. When I finally confessed the real reason, he shook his head, exasperated. ‘The hills and the Pacific? That's what you object to? Have you any idea how big that ocean is?' What a burden I was, but I couldn't stand the connection. This town and Nagasaki were joined by that water. The Pacific might as well have been a puddle.

Kenzo began to look for another job and heard of one at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard. His reputation and his talent outweighed any concern about his nationality. He brought out a new map, found Pennsylvania and traced with his finger the confluence of the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers. ‘See, the Atlantic.' I smiled. ‘Thank you. I like the look of this place.' He laughed, ‘What, just from the map?' I nodded. ‘This will be good for us.' But pikadon followed us wherever we went. Years later, I learned laboratories at the yard had been used to help develop the bomb. Thankfully Kenzo was dead and saved from this mocking fact – unless he had known and chose not to tell me. We found a small townhouse nearby and by December 1947 we had begun the next chapter in our American story. If you could overlook our country of birth, we were typical in the Buick car we drove, the electrical appliances we bought, the cocktail hours we indulged in. But for some of our neighbours we would always be the enemy, especially those whose sons or uncles or co-workers had not returned home from the Asian jungles, French villages, or our shared ocean. Kenzo ignored the muttered comments, the blatant racism. America had given us a second chance and he was grateful. ‘This is a meritocracy,' he declared. ‘Rewards come to those who work hard, we can live the life we deserve.'

I smiled at this memory and my guest.

‘Did the culture shock get better with time?'

I filled my glass, the alcohol freeing my reserve. ‘To be honest, we learned how to behave through the movies. We'd go every week, Saturday matinees, mostly. Kenzo loved those films, he'd watch anything: musicals, westerns,
romances, Doris Day, Hitchcock, Bob Hope. He hoped my seeing them would improve my vocabulary.' I paused, just briefly, realising despite the circumstances how good it felt to speak Japanese again. ‘One day we went to see
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
. Have you seen it?' He shook his head. ‘It's ludicrous. There's a small town, where aliens grow from seeds into exact replicas of the residents. These impostors look like the townsfolk but they have no emotions, you see?' He laughed, said he liked the sound of the plot. ‘Kenzo was so taken by this film. He felt that we should be like the aliens. All we needed to do was assimilate into our new world.' I laughed, self-conscious. ‘Let's just say, we learned to act American even if our emotions were always a bit off.'

‘I have not expressed my sorrow at your loss. I hope he didn't suffer.'

I looked up at the picture of Kenzo in the park. How to explain a death after the event? How to condense the months of suffering into a few minutes? He had been such an active man, always on the go. I think he might have hidden how unwell he felt for a long time but the symptoms were too severe to hide: back pain, vomiting, fever. His kidneys were failing him. He spent three months in hospital as doctors, initially confident of his recovery, began to talk of end-of-life options. In the last days, his body raged with thirst. He became confused and frightened, then delirious talking to me as if I was his mother and not his wife. The chatter quietened and he took the shallowest of breaths, his eyes closed, as if he was enjoying an afternoon nap. I thought he might just drift off, but at the end, he managed somehow to
turn back to life, for one final glimpse. I felt his gaze upon me as I sat next to his bed. We looked at each other, but I don't know if he saw me. He said nothing and I recognised in the blackness of his pupils that some other presence or thought had caught his attention. It seemed he knew death was there, in the room, and he was helpless in its shadow. I shouted his name to let him know he was not alone. He took one last gasp, and then he was gone.