When the Emperor Was Divine
Julie Otsuka








Julie Otsuka’s commanding debut novel paints a portrait of the Japanese internment camps unlike any we have ever seen. With crystalline intensity and precision, Otsuka uses a single family to evoke the deracination—both physical and emotional—of a generation of Japanese Americans. In five chapters, each flawlessly executed from a different point of view—the mother receiving the order to evacuate; the daughter on the long train ride to the camp; the son in the desert encampment; the family’s return to their home; and the bitter release of the father after more than four years in captivity—she has created a small tour de force, a novel of unrelenting economy and suppressed emotion.

Spare, intimate, arrestingly understated, When the Emperor Was Divine is a haunting evocation of a family in wartime and an unmistakably resonant lesson for our times. It heralds the arrival of a singularly gifted new novelist.






Julie Otsuka

WHEN THE EMPEROR WAS DIVINE


This book is for my parents

and in memory of Toyoko H. Nozaka













ACKNOWLEDGMENTS






Many thanks to Nicole Aragi, who so patiently waited, and to


Jordan Pavlin, for her editorial insight and care. Thank you, also,


to Maureen Howard, for her early encouragement and support.








EVACUATION ORDER NO. 19


The sign had appeared overnight. On billboards and trees and the backs of the bus-stop benches. It hung in the window of Woolworth’s. It hung by the entrance to the YMCA. It was stapled to the door of the municipal court and nailed, at eye level, to every telephone pole along University Avenue. The woman was returning a book to the library when she saw the sign in a post office window. It was a sunny day in Berkeley in the spring of 1942 and she was wearing new glasses and could see everything clearly for the first time in weeks. She no longer had to squint but she squinted out of habit anyway. She read the sign from top to bottom and then, still squinting, she took out a pen and read the sign from top to bottom again. The print was small and dark. Some of it was tiny. She wrote down a few words on the back of a bank receipt, then turned around and went home and began to pack.

When the overdue notice from the library arrived in the mail nine days later she still had not finished packing. The children had just left for school and boxes and suitcases were scattered across the floor of the house. She tossed the envelope into the nearest suitcase and walked out the door.

Outside the sun was warm and the palm fronds were clacking idly against the side of the house. She pulled on her white silk gloves and began to walk east on Ashby. She crossed California Street and bought several bars of Lux soap and a large jar of face cream at the Rumford Pharmacy. She passed the thrift shop and the boarded-up grocery but saw no one she knew on the sidewalk. At the newsstand on the corner of Grove she bought a copy of the Berkeley Gazette. She scanned the headlines quickly. The Burma Road had been severed and one of the Dionne quintuplets—Yvonne—was still recovering from an ear operation. Sugar rationing would begin on Tuesday. She folded the paper in half but was careful not to let the ink darken her gloves.

At Lundy’s Hardware she stopped and looked at the display of victory garden shovels in the window. They were well-made shovels with sturdy metal handles and she thought, for a moment, of buying one—the price was right and she did not like to pass up a bargain. Then she remembered that she already had a shovel at home in the shed. In fact, she had two. She did not need a third. She smoothed down her dress and went into the store.

“Nice glasses,” Joe Lundy said the moment she walked through the door.

“You think?” she asked. “I’m not used to them yet.” She picked up a hammer and gripped the handle firmly. “Do you have anything bigger?” she asked. Joe Lundy said that what she had in her hand was the biggest hammer he had. She put the hammer back on the rack.

“How’s your roof holding out?” he asked her.

“I think the shingles are rotting. It just sprung another leak.”

“It’s been a wet year.”

The woman nodded. “But we’ve had some nice days.” She walked past the venetian blinds and the blackout shades to the back of the store. She picked out two rolls of tape and a ball of twine and brought them back to the register. “Every time it rains I have to set out the bucket,” she said. She put down two quarters on the counter.

“Nothing wrong with a bucket,” said Joe Lundy. He pushed the quarters back toward her across the counter but he did not look at her. “You can pay me later,” he said. Then he began to wipe the side of the register with a rag. There was a dark stain there that would not go away.

“I can pay you now,” said the woman.

“Don’t worry about it,” said Joe Lundy. He reached into his shirt pocket and gave her two caramel candies wrapped in gold foil. “For the children,” he said. She slipped the caramels into her purse but left the money. She thanked him for the candy and walked out of the store.

“That’s a nice red dress,” he called out after her.

She turned around and squinted at him over the top of her glasses. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you, Joe.” Then the door slammed behind her and she was alone on the sidewalk and she realized that in all the years she had been going to Joe Lundy’s store she had never before called him by his name. Joe. It sounded strange to her. Wrong, almost. But she had said it. She had said it out loud. She wished she had said it earlier.

She wiped her forehead with her handkerchief. The sun was bright and she did not like to sweat in public. She took off her glasses and crossed to the shady side of the street. At the corner of Shattuck she took the streetcar downtown. She got off at Kittredge and went into J. F. Hink’s department store and asked the salesman if they had any duffel bags but they did not, they were all sold out. He had sold the last one a half-hour ago. He suggested she try J. C. Penney’s but they were sold out of duffel bags there too. They were sold out of duffel bags all over town.

WHEN SHE GOT HOME the woman took off her red dress and put on her faded blue one—her housedress. She twisted her hair up into a bun and put on an old pair of comfortable shoes. She had to finish packing. She rolled up the Oriental rug in the living room. She took down the mirrors. She took down the curtains and shades. She carried the tiny bonsai tree out into the yard and set it down on the grass beneath the eaves where it would not get too much shade or too much sun but just the right amount of each. She brought the wind-up Victrola and the Westminster chime clock downstairs to the basement.

Upstairs, in the boy’s room, she unpinned the One World One War map of the world from the wall and folded it neatly along the crease lines. She wrapped up his stamp collection and the painted wooden Indian with the long headdress he had won at the Sacramento State Fair. She pulled out the Joe Palooka comic books from under his bed. She emptied the drawers. Some of his clothes—the clothes he would need—she left out for him to put into his suitcase later. She placed his baseball glove on his pillow. The rest of his things she put into boxes and carried into the sunroom.

The door to the girl’s room was closed. Above the doorknob was a note that had not been there the day before. It said DO NOT DISTURB. The woman did not open the door. She went down the stairs and removed the pictures from the walls. There were only three: the painting of Princess Elizabeth that hung in the dining room, the picture of Jesus in the foyer, and in the kitchen, a framed reproduction of Millet’s The Gleaners. She placed Jesus and the little Princess together facedown in a box. She made sure to put Jesus on top. She took The Gleaners out of its frame and looked at the picture one last time. She wondered why she had let it hang in the kitchen for so long. It bothered her, the way those peasants were forever bent over above that endless field of wheat. “Look up”’ she wanted to say to them. “Look up, look up!” The Gleaners, she decided, would have to go. She set the picture outside with the garbage.

In the living room she emptied all the books from the shelves except Audubon’s Birds of America. In the kitchen she emptied the cupboards. She set aside a few things for later that evening. Everything else—the china, the crystal, the set of ivory chopsticks her mother had sent to her fifteen years ago from Kagoshima on her wedding day—she put into boxes. She taped the boxes shut with the tape she had bought from Lundy’s Hardware and carried them one by one up the stairs to the sunroom. When she was done she locked the door with two padlocks and sat down on the landing with her dress pushed up above her knees and lit a cigarette. Tomorrow she and the children would be leaving. She did not know where they were going or how long they would be gone or who would be living in their house while they were away. She knew only that tomorrow they had to go.

There were things they could take with them: bedding and linen, forks, spoons, plates, bowls, cups, clothes. These were the words she had written down on the back of the bank receipt. Pets were not allowed. That was what the sign had said.

It was late April. It was the fourth week of the fifth month of the war and the woman, who did not always follow the rules, followed the rules. She gave the cat to the Greers next door. She caught the chicken that had been running wild in the yard since the fall and snapped its neck beneath the handle of a broomstick. She plucked out the feathers and set the carcass into a pan of cold water in the sink.

BY EARLY AFTERNOON her handkerchief was soaked. She was breathing hard and her nose was itching from the dust. Her back ached. She slipped off her shoes and massaged the bunions on her feet, then went into the kitchen and turned on the radio. Enrico Caruso was singing “La donna è mobile” again. His voice was full and sweet. She opened the icebox and took out a plate of rice balls stuffed with pickled plums. She ate them slowly as she listened to the tenor sing. The plums were dark and sour. They were just the way she liked them.

When the aria was over she turned off the radio and put two rice balls into a blue bowl. She cracked an egg over the bowl and added some salmon she had cooked the night before. She brought the bowl outside to the back porch and set it down on the steps. Her back was throbbing but she stood up straight and clapped her hands three times.

A small white dog came limping out of the trees.

“Eat up, White Dog,” she said. White Dog was old and ailing but he knew how to eat. His head bobbed up and down above the bowl. The woman sat down beside him and watched. When the bowl was empty he looked up at her. One of his eyes was clouded over. She rubbed his stomach and his tail thumped against the wooden steps.

“Good dog,” she said.

She stood up and walked across the yard and White Dog followed her. The narcissus in the garden were white with mildew and the irises were beginning to wilt. Weeds were everywhere. The woman had not mowed the grass for months. Her husband usually did that. She had not seen her husband since his arrest last December. First he had been sent to Fort Missoula, Montana, on a train and then he had been transferred to Fort Sam Houston, Texas. Every few days he was allowed to write her a letter. Usually he told her about the weather. The weather at Fort Sam Houston was fine. On the back of every envelope was stamped “Censored, War Department,” or “Detained Alien Enemy Mail.”

The woman sat down on a rock beneath the persimmon tree. White Dog lay at her feet and closed his eyes. “White Dog,” she said, “look at me.” White Dog raised his head. The woman was his mistress and he did whatever she asked. She put on her white silk gloves and took out a roll of twine. “Now just keep looking at me,” she said. She tied White Dog to the tree. “You’ve been a good dog,” she said. “You’ve been a good white dog.”

Somewhere in the distance a telephone rang. White Dog barked. “Hush,” she said. White Dog grew quiet. “Now roll over,” she said. White Dog rolled over and looked up at her with his good eye. “Play dead,” she said. White Dog turned his head to the side and closed his eyes. His paws went limp. The woman picked up the large shovel that was leaning against the trunk of the tree. She lifted it high in the air with both hands and brought the blade down swiftly on his head. White Dog’s body shuddered twice and his hind legs kicked out into the air, as though he were trying to run. Then he grew still. A trickle of blood seeped out from the corner of his mouth. She untied him from the tree and let out a deep breath. The shovel had been the right choice. Better, she thought, than a hammer.

Beneath the tree she began to dig a hole. The soil was hard on top but soft and loamy beneath the surface. It gave way easily. She plunged the shovel into the earth again and again until the hole was deep. She picked up White Dog and dropped him into the hole. His body was not heavy. It hit the earth with a quiet thud. She pulled off her gloves and looked at them. They were no longer white. She dropped them into the hole and picked up the shovel again. She filled up the hole. The sun was hot and the only place there was any shade was beneath the trees. The woman was standing beneath the trees. She was forty-one and tired. The back of her dress was drenched with sweat. She brushed her hair out of her eyes and leaned against the tree. Everything looked the same except the earth was a little darker where the hole had been. Darker and wetter. She plucked a leaf from a low-hanging branch and went back inside the house.

WHEN THE CHILDREN came home from school she reminded them that early the next morning they would be leaving. Tomorrow they were going on a trip. They could bring with them only what they could carry.

“I already know that,” said the girl. She wore a white cotton frock with tiny blue anchors and her hair was pulled back in two tight black braids. She tossed her books onto the sofa and told the woman that her teacher, Mr. Rutherford, had talked for an entire hour about prime numbers and coniferous trees.

“Do you know what a coniferous tree is?” the girl asked.

The woman had to admit that she did not. “Tell me,” she said, but the girl just shook her head no.

“I’ll tell you later,” said the girl. She was ten years old and she knew what she liked. Boys and black licorice and Dorothy Lamour. Her favorite song on the radio was “Don’t Fence Me In.” She adored her pet macaw. She went to the bookshelf and took down Birds of America. She balanced the book on her head and walked slowly, her spine held erect, up the stairs to her room.

A few seconds later there was a loud thump and the book came tumbling back down the stairs. The boy looked up at his mother. He was seven and a small black fedora was tilted to one side of his head. “She has to stand up straighter,” he said softly. He went to the foot of the stairs and stared at the book. It had landed face open to a picture of a small brown bird. A marsh wren. “You have to stand up straighter,” he shouted.

“It’s not that,” came the girl’s reply, “it’s my head.”

“What’s wrong with your head?” shouted the boy.

“Too round. Too round on top.”

He closed the book and turned to his mother. “Where’s White Dog?” he asked.

He went out to the porch and clapped his hands three times.

“White Dog!” he yelled. He clapped his hands again. “White Dog!” He called out several more times, then went back inside and stood beside the woman in the kitchen. She was slicing apples. Her fingers were long and white and they knew how to hold a knife. “That dog just gets deafer every day,” he said.

He sat down and turned the radio on and off, on and off, while she arranged the apples on a plate. The Radio City Symphony was performing the last movement of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. Cymbals were crashing. Cannons boomed. She set the plate down in front of the boy. “Eat,” she said. He reached for a slice of apple just as the audience burst into applause. “Bravo,” they shouted, “bravo, bravo!” The boy turned the dial to see if he could find Speaking of Sports but all he could find was the news and a Sammy Kaye serenade. He turned off the radio and took another slice of apple from the plate.

“It’s so hot in here,” he said.

“Take off your hat then,” said the woman but the boy refused. The hat was a present from his father. It was big on him but the boy wore it every day. She poured him a glass of cold barley water and he drank it all in one gulp.

The girl came into the kitchen and went to the macaw’s cage by the stove. She leaned over and put her face close to the bars. “Tell me something,” she said.

The bird fluffed his wings and danced from side to side on his perch. “Baaaak,” he said.

“That’s not what I wanted to hear,” said the girl.

“Take off your hat,” said the bird.

The girl sat down and the woman gave her a glass of cold barley water and a long silver spoon. The girl licked the spoon and stared at her reflection. Her head was upside down. She dipped the spoon into the sugar bowl.

“Is there anything wrong with my face?” she asked.

“Why?” said the woman.

“People were staring.”

“Come over here,” said the woman.

The girl stood up and walked over to her mother.

“Let me look at you.”

“You took down the mirrors,” the girl said.

“I had to. I had to put them away.”

“Tell me how I look.”

The woman ran her hands across the girl’s face. “You look fine,” she said. “You have a fine nose.”

“What else?” asked the girl.

“You have a fine set of teeth.”

“Teeth don’t count.”

“Teeth are essential.”

The woman began to rub the girl’s shoulders. She told the girl to lean back and close her eyes and then she pressed her fingers deep into the girl’s neck until she felt her begin to relax. “If there was something wrong with my face,” the girl asked, “would you tell me?”

“Turn around,” the woman said.

The girl turned around.

“Now look at me.”

The girl looked at her.

“You have the most beautiful face I have ever seen.”

“You’re just saying that.”

“No, I mean it.”

The boy turned on the radio. The weatherman was giving the forecast for the next day. He was predicting rain and cooler temperatures. “Sit down and drink your water,” the boy said to his sister. “Don’t forget to take your umbrella tomorrow,” said the weatherman.

The girl sat down. She drank her barley water and began to tell the woman all about coniferous trees. Most of them were evergreens but some were just shrubs. Not all of them had cones. Some of them, like the yew, only had seedpods.

“That’s good to know,” said the woman. Then she stood up and told the girl it was time to practice the piano for Thursday’s lesson.

“Do I have to?”

The woman thought for a moment. “No,” she said, “only if you want to.”

“Tell me I have to.”

“I can’t.”

The girl went out to the living room and sat down on the piano bench. “The metronome’s gone,” she called out.

“Just count to yourself then,” said the woman.

“…THREE, FIVE, SEVEN…” The girl put down her knife and paused. They were eating supper at the table. Outside it was dusk. The sky was dark purple and a breeze was blowing in off the bay. Hundreds of jays were twittering madly in the Greers’ magnolia tree next door. A drop of rain fell on the ledge above the kitchen sink and the woman stood up and closed the window.

“Eleven, thirteen,” said the girl. She was practicing her prime numbers for Monday’s test.

“Sixteen?” said the boy.

“No,” said the girl. “Sixteen’s got a square root.”

“I forgot,” said the boy. He picked up a drumstick and began to eat.

“You never knew,” said the girl.

“Forty-one,” said the boy. “Eighty-six.” He wiped his mouth with a napkin. “Twelve,” he added.

The girl looked at him. Then she turned to her mother. “There’s something wrong with this chicken,” she said. “It’s too tough.” She put down her fork. “I can’t swallow another bite.”

“Don’t, then,” said the woman.

“I’ll eat it,” said the boy. He plucked a wing from his sister’s plate and put it into his mouth. He ate the whole thing. Then he spit out the bones and asked his mother where they were going the next day.

“I don’t know,” the woman said.

The girl stood up and left the table. She sat down at the piano and began to play a piece by Debussy from memory. “Golliwogg’s Cake Walk.” The melody was slow and simple. She had played it at a recital the summer before. Her father had sat in the front row of the audience and when she was finished he had clapped and clapped. She played the piece all the way through without missing a note. When she began to play it a second time the boy got up and went to his room and began to pack.

The first thing he put inside of his suitcase was his baseball glove. He slipped it into the large pocket with the red satin lining. The pocket bulged. He threw in his clothes and tried to close the lid but the suitcase was very full. He sat on top of it and the lid sank down slowly. Suddenly he stood up again. The lid sprang open. There was something he had forgotten. He went to the closet in the hall and brought back his polka-dotted umbrella. He held it out at arm’s length and shook his head sadly. The umbrella was too long. There was no way it would fit inside the suitcase.

THE WOMAN STOOD ALONE in the kitchen, washing her hands. The children had gone to bed and the house was quiet. The pipes were still hot from the day and the water from the faucet was warm. She could hear thunder in the distance—thunder and, from somewhere far off in the night, the faint wail of a siren. She looked out the window above the sink. The sky was still clear and she could see a full moon through the branches of the maple tree. The maple was a sapling with delicate leaves that turned bright red in the fall. Her husband had planted it for her four summers ago. She turned off the tap and looked around for the dish towel but it was not there. She had already packed the towels. They were in the suitcase by the door in the hall.

She dried her hands on the front of her dress and went to the birdcage. She lifted off the green cloth and undid the wire clasp on the door. “Come on out,” she said. The bird stepped cautiously onto her hand and looked at her. “It’s only me,” she said. The bird blinked. His eyes were black and bulbous. They had no center.

“Get over here,” he said, “get over here now.” He sounded just like her husband. If she closed her eyes she could easily imagine that her husband was right there in the room with her.

The woman did not close her eyes. She knew exactly where her husband was. He was sleeping on a cot—a cot or maybe a bunk bed—somewhere in a tent at Fort Sam Houston where the weather was always fine. She pictured him lying there with one arm flung across his eyes and then she kissed the top of the bird’s head.

“I am right here,” she said. “I am right here, right now.”

She gave the bird a sunflower seed and he cracked the shell open in his beak. “Get over here,” he said again.

She opened the window and set the bird out on the ledge.

“You’re all right,” the bird said.

She stroked the underside of his chin and he closed his eyes. “Silly bird,” she whispered. She closed the window and locked it. Now the bird was outside on the other side of the glass. He tapped the pane three times with his claw and said something but she did not know what it was. She could not hear him anymore.

She rapped back.

“Go,” she said. The bird flapped his wings and flew up into the maple tree. She grabbed the broom from behind the stove and went outside and shook the branches of the tree. A spray of water fell from the leaves. “Go,” she shouted. “Get on out of here.”

The bird spread his wings and flew off into the night.

She went back inside the kitchen and took out a bottle of plum wine from beneath the sink. Without the bird in the cage, the house felt empty. She sat down on the floor and put the bottle to her lips. She swallowed once and looked at the place on the wall where The Gleaners had hung. The white rectangle was glowing in the moonlight. She stood up and traced around its edges with her finger and began to laugh—quietly at first, but soon her shoulders were heaving and she was gasping for breath. She put down the bottle and waited for the laughter to stop but it would not, it kept on coming until finally the tears were running down her cheeks. She picked up the bottle again and drank. The wine was dark and sweet. She had made it herself last fall. She took out her handkerchief and wiped her mouth. Her lips left a dark stain on the cloth. She put the cork back into the bottle and pushed it in as far as it would go. “La donna è mobile,” she sang to herself as she went down the stairs to the basement. She hid the bottle behind the old rusted furnace where no one would ever find it.

IN THE MIDDLE of the night the boy crawled into her bed and asked her, over and over again, “What is that funny noise? What is that funny noise?”

The woman smoothed down his black hair. “Rain,” she whispered.

The boy understood. He fell asleep at once. The thunder had come and gone and except for the sound of the rain the house was now quiet. The woman lay awake worrying about the leaky roof. Her husband had meant to fix it but he never had. She got up and placed a tin bucket on the floor to catch the water. She felt better after she did that. She climbed back into bed beside the boy and pulled the blanket up around his shoulders. He was chewing in his sleep and she wondered if he was hungry. Then she remembered the candy in her purse. The caramels. She had forgotten about the caramels. What would Joe Lundy say? He would tell her she was wearing a nice red dress. He would tell her not to worry about it. She knew that. She closed her eyes. She would give the caramels to the children in the morning. That was what she would do. She whispered a silent prayer to herself and drifted off to sleep as the water dripped steadily into the bucket. The boy shrugged off the blanket and rolled up against the wall where it was cool. In a few hours he and the girl and their mother would wake up and go to the Civil Control Station at the First Congregational Church on Channing Way. Then they would pin their identification numbers to their collars and grab their suitcases and climb up onto the bus and go to wherever it was they had to go.




TRAIN


The train moved slowly inland. Somewhere along the western edge of upper Nevada it passed a lone white house with a lawn and two tall cottonwood trees with a hammock between them gently swaying in the breeze. A small dog lay sleeping on its side in the shade of the trees. A man in a straw hat was trimming hedges. The hedges were very round. They were perfect green spheres. Someone—maybe that same man or maybe that same man’s gardener— had planted flowers inside of a red wagon next to the mailbox. In front of a wooden picket fence was a victory garden and a hand-painted sign that said FOR SALE. Behind the house was the dry bed of a lake and beyond the lake there was nothing but the scorched white earth of the desert stretching all the way to the edge of the horizon. On the map the lake was called Intermittent. Intermittent Lake. Because sometimes it was there and sometimes it wasn’t. It all depended on the rain.

“I don’t see it,” said the girl. It was September of 1942 and her face was pressed up against the dusty window of the train. She was eleven and her hair was black and straight and tied back in a ponytail with an old pink ribbon. Her dress was pale yellow with wide puffy sleeves and a hem that was beginning to unravel. Pinned to her collar was an identification number and around her throat she wore a faded silk scarf. Her shoes were Mary Janes. They had not been polished since the spring.

“See what?” asked her brother. He was eight years old and his number was the same as the girl’s.

The girl did not answer. The lake had been dry for two years but she did not know that. She had never seen the desert before and although she had been a good but not outstanding student who had learned the meanings of many words she had yet to learn the meaning of the word intermittent. She looked down again at the map to make sure the lake was really supposed to be there. It was.

Without lifting her eyes from the map she stuck out her hand. “Lemon, please,” she said. Her mother leaned over and dropped a lemon into the girl’s palm. The girl stood up and opened the window and tossed the lemon out into the desert. It soared through the air and hit a gnarled trunk of blackened sage as the white house grew smaller and smaller in the distance. The girl had once been the star pitcher of a softball team and she knew how to throw.

“Don’t lose that arm,” her mother said under her breath.

“I wasn’t planning on it,” said the girl. She put the map away in the suitcase beneath her seat and sat down. An old woman walked by, swaying slightly from side to side, and the girl smelled something damp and musty that reminded her of rotting leaves. It was the smell of fine, old silk. The girl took a deep breath and closed her eyes but she could not get comfortable. The seats were hard and stiff and she had not slept since they had left California the night before. The girl had always lived in California—first in Berkeley, in a white stucco house on a wide street not far from the sea, and then, for the last four and a half months, in the assembly center at the Tanforan racetrack south of San Francisco—but now she was going to Utah to live in the desert. The train was old and slow and had not been used in years. Broken gas lamps hung from the walls and the locomotive was fueled by a coal-burning boiler. Some of the passengers were sick from the uneven rocking of the cars and the crowded compartments smelled of vomit and sweat and, very faintly, of oranges. The soldiers had left a crate full of lemons and oranges on the floor of the car earlier that morning. The girl loved oranges—she had not eaten a fresh orange in months—but she could not think of eating one now. The train lurched forward and she leaned over and put her head between her knees.

“I think I’m going to throw up,” she said.

Her mother gave her a brown paper bag and the girl opened it up and began to heave. Her brother reached into the pocket of his trousers and gave her a tissue. She crumpled it in her fist as her mother slowly rubbed her back. “Don’t touch me,” said the girl. “I want to be sick by myself.”

“That’s impossible,” said her mother. She continued to rub her back and the girl did not push her away.

TOWARD NOON the train passed through a town south of Winnemucca. The shadows fell close to the buildings and the sky above was bright and clear. The girl saw a large sign on the side of a water tower that said BUY U.S. WAR BONDS EVERY PAYDAY. She saw advertisements for Old Schenley Whiskey and The American Melody Hour. They were still in Nevada and it was still Sunday. Somewhere in the distance church bells were ringing, and the streets were filled with people in their Sunday clothes walking home from the morning service. Three young girls in white dresses whirled by beneath matching white parasols. A boy in a blue suit pulled a slingshot out of his jacket and took careful aim at three blackbirds up high on a wire. Closer to the edge of town, a man and a woman were riding their bicycles across a bridge and the girl wondered if they were together or if they just happened to be on the bridge at the same time. The woman wore dark sunglasses and short yellow pants that showed her ankles and she did not look like she had been to church. She was laughing, and her hair was loose and red and blowing behind her in the wind. The girl leaned out the window and shouted, “Hey!” but the woman did not hear her, she was too far away, she was coasting down the far side of the bridge and the man was pedaling right behind her.

The train blew its whistle and the girl felt a hand press down on her shoulder. She pulled her head back into the car and looked up into the face of a soldier. He was a young man with light brown hair that bristled out from under the edge of his cap. Beneath his right eye there was a dark mole and she could not stop staring at it. Then she looked at his eyes and she could not stop staring at them either. The soldier had very nice eyes. They were dark green and looking right at her. “Miss,” he said, “shades down, shades down.” His voice was soft and low and he did not smile but she knew that he would if he could. She did not know how she knew this but she did.

“Yes, sir,” she said. She pulled down the shade and the man and the woman on the bridge were gone. They were together, she decided.

As the soldier made his way down the aisle calling out, “Shades down, shades down,” in his deep, melodic bass, she chimed in with him softly under her breath. And then, in a voice that was not soft at all, she called out, “Sir!” She had not meant to call out “sir” but the word had come out anyway. “Sir!” she said again. She could not help herself. “Sir sir sir!”

The soldier did not hear her.

As she leaned back in her seat the old man in front of her turned around and said something to her in Japanese. His face was deeply tanned and his neck was thick with wrinkles from many years in the sun. One of his hands was missing two fingers. The girl shook her head and said she was sorry, she only spoke English.

“So so so,” said the man. He turned away and pulled down the shade and the car grew a little darker.

When the soldier reached the end of the car he touched the gun on his hip, lightly, with his right hand, to make sure it was still there, and she thought of how he had touched her shoulder the same way—lightly, and with that same hand—and she hoped he would come back again. Then the last shade went down and the darkness was complete and she could not see the soldier at all. Now she could not see anyone at all and no one outside the train could see her. There were the people inside the train and the people outside the train and in between them there were the shades. A man walking alongside the tracks would just see a train with black windows passing by in the middle of the day. He would think, There goes the train, and then he would not think about the train again. He would think about other things. What was for supper, maybe, or who was winning the war. She knew it was better this way. The last time they had passed through a city with the shades up someone had thrown a rock through one of the windows.

The train slowed and crossed a wooden trestle over the dry bed of a river and then there were no more towns by the tracks, there was only the highway, and it was all right to raise up the shades. The girl pulled on the string at the bottom of the shade and the car flooded with sun.

“Do you think we’ll see horses?” her brother asked her.

“I don’t know,” said the girl. Then she remembered the mustangs she had read about in National Geographic. The Spaniards had brought them over hundreds of years ago and now there were thousands of horses just roaming around, wild. Every autumn they came down from the hills to graze on the high desert plains. If a cowboy needed a new horse all he had to do was go out into the desert and get himself one. It was as simple as that. She imagined a cowboy snapping his fingers and a horse, a wild white stallion, galloping up to him in a cloud of hot swirling dust.

So she told the boy that they probably would. They probably would see some horses. Because there were more wild horses in Nevada than in any other state. She had read that in the National Geographic too.

“How many do you think we’ll see?”

“Quite possibly, eight.”

The boy seemed satisfied with this answer. He laid his head down on his sister’s lap and drifted off to sleep.

The girl was still too exhausted to sleep. She leaned against the window and tried to remember when her brother had first started talking about horses. It had begun, she was almost sure of it, at Tanforan. All summer long they had lived in the old horse stalls in the stables behind the racetrack. In the morning they had washed their faces in the long tin troughs and at night they had slept on mattresses stuffed with straw. Twice a day when the siren blew they had returned to the stalls for the head count and three times a day they had lined up to eat in the mess hall on the ground floor of the grandstands. On their first night there her brother had plucked the stiff horse hairs out of the freshly whitewashed walls and run his fingers along the toothmarks on top of the double Dutch door where the wood was soft and worn. On warm days he had smelled the smell of the horses rising up through the damp linoleum floors and on rainy days when she had stayed inside writing letters to her father in Fort Sam Houston or Lordsburg or wherever it was that he happened to be her brother had gone out in his raincoat and his red rubber boots and walked around and around the muddy racetrack. One night when the flies were very bad and they could not sleep he had sat up suddenly in his cot and told her that when he grew up he wanted to be a jockey. The boy had never been on a horse before in his life. “A jockey is a small man,” she had said to him. “Do you want to grow up to be a small man?” He could not make up his mind. Did he want to ride the horses? He did. Did he want to be a small man? He did not. “Ride horses!” Mr. Okamura had shouted from the stall on the other side of the partition. “Eat lots, grow up to be big American boy!” shouted Mr. Ito from two stalls down. The next day the carpenters had come and nailed wire mesh over the windows and after that the flies were never so bad and for a long time the boy did not talk to her about horses or anything else late at night, he just slept.

BY LATE AFTERNOON the train had run out of water. The sun shone through the dirty glass panes and the air inside was stuffy and hot. During the night in the mountains above Tahoe the steam heat had gone on and now they could not turn it off. Or maybe they could but they wouldn’t, the girl didn’t know. She was sweating and her mouth was dry.

“Look at this,” the boy said to her. He was leafing through the pages of a book—Big Game Hunting in Africa. He stopped and pointed to a glossy photograph of a wild bull elephant charging through the African bush. “What do you think happened to the man who took this picture?”

The girl narrowed her eyes for a moment and thought. “Trampled,” she said.

The boy stared solemnly at the elephant for a long time and then he turned the page. A herd of gazelles was leaping gracefully across the savanna. The girl stood up and walked to the front of the car to wait for the toilet.

As she took her place in line she reached up to fix the bow in her hair. Her mother had tied it for her that morning but she had made it too loose. The girl yanked the bow tight but the ribbon snapped and her hair came tumbling down. She tossed the ribbon to the floor.

“Are you all right?” asked the man behind her. His hair was flecked with gray around the temples but she could not tell if he was young or old. He wore round steel-rimmed glasses and a handsome gold watch that no longer told the correct time.

“I don’t know,” she said. “How do I seem?”

“I think you’re all right.” He bent over and picked up the torn ribbon and carefully tied the two ends together. His fingers were long and fine and they moved with great precision. He tugged once at the knot to make sure it would hold and it did.

“You can keep it,” said the girl.

“It’s not mine to keep,” said the man. He gave the ribbon back to her and she slipped it into her pocket.

“It’s hot in here, isn’t it?”

“Very,” said the man. He pulled out a handkerchief and began to wipe his brow.

As the train rounded a curve the girl felt her legs sway beneath her. She reached out and steadied herself against the wall. “Last night it was too cold,” she said, “but now it’s so hot I can hardly breathe. Everything keeps on changing.”

“Isn’t that right,” said the man.

She looked at the letters embroidered in gold thread on the corner of his handkerchief and asked him what the “T” stood for.

“Teizo. But my friends just call me Ted.”

“And the ‘I’?”

“Ishimoto.”

“Can I call you Ted?”

“If you like.”

“Are you a rich man?”

“Not anymore.” He folded up the handkerchief and put it away. “That’s a nice scarf you’ve got on.”

“My father gave it to me. He used to travel a lot. He bought it for me the last time he went to Paris. I asked him to bring me a bottle of perfume but he forgot. He brought me this scarf instead. It’s very plain, isn’t it?”

He did not answer her.

“He bought himself a pair of shoes while he was over there, too. Fancy ones with little holes punched into the leather. And wooden shoe trees to put inside of them at night.” She looked down at her scarf again. The edges were frayed and worn. “The thing is, I already had a blue scarf. He bought me one the last time he went to Paris.” She sighed. “This isn’t what I really wanted.”

Ted Ishimoto took off his glasses and held them up to the window. “Someday it might be,” he said. He blew on the lenses and then wiped them on his shirt sleeve. “Is your father with you on the train?”

“No,” said the girl. “They sent him away. He was in Missoula for a while and then he was at Fort Sam Houston. Now he’s in Lordsburg, New Mexico. He said there were no trees there.”

“No trees!” said the man and then he shook his head sadly, as though this were a strange and terrible thing. “Does he write to you?”

The door to the lavatory opened and a woman came out and smiled at the girl. “Your turn,” she said.

The girl looked at Ted Ishimoto. “Don’t go away,” she said. She went inside and stared at her face in the mirror above the basin and knew what she saw: a plain girl in a plain blue scarf. She turned on the faucet but the faucet was dry. She tilted her head back and said, “Aaaah,” and then she smiled, but only just a little, and only at the corners of her mouth. She didn’t look like herself when she did that. She looked like her mother, only not as mysterious.

When she came out she held the door open. “My father never writes to me,” she said, even though this was not true. He had written to her every week since his arrest last December and she had saved every single one of his postcards.

“That’s a shame,” said Ted Ishimoto. He reached for the door but she did not let go of it just yet. She pointed down the aisle. “Do you see that lady over there?”

He nodded.

“Do you think she’s pretty?”

“She’s lovely.”

“She’s my mother.

“Your mother is a very beautiful woman.”

“I know. Everyone says that. She’s watching us.”

“That’s her job,” he said. “She’s tired. I can see it in her eyes. Tell her everything will be all right.” He bowed quickly and stepped into the lavatory. “You’ll have to excuse me now.”

The girl let the door go and walked slowly back to her seat. In the middle of the aisle a young girl of five or six was playing with a dirty doll on the floor. The doll had curly yellow hair and big china eyes that opened and closed.

“What’s your doll’s name?”

“Miss Shirley.” The young girl held the doll up shyly. “Mama bought her for me from the Sears catalog.”

“She’s beautiful.”

“You can’t have her.”

“That’s all right.” The girl continued down the aisle. She walked past several snoring passengers and a man who had fallen asleep with a newspaper folded over his face. She saw a young woman reading Burma Surgeon and an older man reading the Webster’s Dictionary and underlining words with a red pencil. She saw two boys fighting for a window seat and a pair of middle-aged women sitting quietly side by side knitting identical pairs of thick woolen socks in preparation for the bitter winter months yet to come.

When the girl found her seat and sat down the old man in front of her turned around and said something to her again, and again she did not know what it was. She wondered where his wife was, or if he even had a wife at all. She looked for his ring finger but his ring finger was one of the fingers that was missing. “What’s he saying?” she whispered to her mother.

“Something about strawberries. He used to grow strawberries.”

“That’s very nice,” the girl said to the old man.

He bowed his head and smiled.

“He doesn’t understand you,” said her mother.

“Yes he does.”

Her mother took out a hairbrush from her purse and said, “Turn around.”

The girl turned toward the window and closed her eyes as her mother began to brush her hair. “Pull hard,” she said.

“What happened to your bow?”

“Harder,” said the girl. The brush made a sound like soft cloth ripping. “It fell out.”

“You’ve got such pretty hair. You should wear it down more often.”

“Too hot.”

“Who were you talking to back there?”

“Nobody,” said the girl. “A man. A rich man.” She paused. “Ted,” she said softly. “He said to tell you everything would be all right.”

“He can’t know that for sure.”

“He said you were beautiful too.”

“Did he?”

“Yes he did.”

“You shouldn’t believe everything a man tells you.”

The girl turned around and looked at her mother’s face. There were little lines around her eyes that she had not noticed before. “When did you stop wearing lipstick?”

“Two weeks ago. I used it all up.”

The girl stood up and shook out her hair. Outside the window she saw a restaurant on the side of the highway called Dinah’s Shack. Three big trucks were parked in front of Dinah’s Shack. There was no other building around for miles. Bright yellow lines were painted on the asphalt but the trucks had not parked between them. They had parked wherever they wanted to. The door to the restaurant opened and a man wearing boots and a cowboy hat stepped out into the heat of the day, laughing at something that someone inside—maybe it was Dinah—had just said to him. When he saw the train he stopped and watched the cars go by and then he touched the brim of his hat with his forefinger and walked across the lot to his truck.

The girl did not know what it meant when a man touched his hat. Maybe it meant the same thing as a nod, or a hello. It meant that you had been seen. Or maybe it meant nothing at all. She reached into the pocket of her dress and fingered the knot on her ribbon. Then she reached for her scarf and turned to her brother. “Tell me something,” she said, “is this not the most beautiful scarf you have ever seen?”

The boy sat up straight in his seat and blinked several times.

“Tell me the truth,” said the girl.

“I always do.”

“Well?”

The boy paused. “I remember you wore a prettier one last year.”

“I didn’t wear a scarf last year.”

The girl turned around and looked down the aisle to see if Ted Ishimoto had come out of the lavatory yet. She saw the door open and a young woman with a baby come out. The baby was crying and its face was bright red. The front of the woman’s blouse was wet. Ted Ishimoto was gone.

She reached into her suitcase and took out a worn pack of playing cards and began to shuffle the deck. “Pick a card,” she said to the boy, “any card.”

The boy did not answer her. He was looking for something in his suitcase.

“All right,” she said, “I’ll pick a card.” She pulled out a card from the middle of the deck and slipped it out the window. “Guess what card that was.”

“I am not in the mood for cards right now.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” said the boy. “I forgot my umbrella. I thought I brought it but I didn’t.”

His mother gave him an orange. “You can’t remember everything,” she said.

“And even when you can you shouldn’t,” said the girl.

“I wouldn’t say that,” said her mother.

“You didn’t,” said the girl.

“We’ll find you another umbrella when we get off the train,” said his mother.

“We’re never getting off this train,” said the girl.

“We are,” said her mother. “Tomorrow.”

The boy began to hit the side of his head with the orange.

“Stop that,” said his mother.

The boy stopped. He bit down hard into the thick skin of the orange and the juice ran down his chin.

“Not like that,” said his mother. She took the orange and began to peel it slowly in one continuous motion. They were in no hurry, after all. “Like this,” she said. Her hands were thin and white and had only recently begun to spot with age. She had married late and had her children late and now she was aging early. “Are you watching me?” she asked.

“Yes,” said the boy. He opened his mouth and she placed a section of orange on his tongue.

The girl slipped the remaining cards one by one out the window until there was only one card left in her hand: the six of clubs. She could think of nothing special about the six of clubs. She turned the card over and looked at the photograph of Glacier Falls on the back. The summer before last her father had hired an Indian driver—a Hindu, he had called him—to take them to Yosemite and they had stayed at the Ahwahnee Hotel for a week. She had bought the deck of cards at the gift shop and her brother had bought a red wooden tomahawk. Every night they had eaten dinner in the fancy dining room beneath the enormous chandeliers. The waiters had worn tuxedos and called her miss and whatever she had asked for they had brought to her on a round silver tray. Every night she had asked for the same thing. Lobster. The lobster at the Ahwahnee was very good.

She wrote down her name across the six of clubs and slipped the card out the window.

TOWARD EVENING the train was near Elko. A man on the side of the road was stepping out of an old red truck. A woman sat in the passenger seat, staring straight ahead. The girl knew what the woman was staring at. She was staring at nothing. There was nothing out there to see. The man kicked the door of the truck over and over again as steam rose up from under the hood. “That’s right, just kick and kick,” said the girl. A raven flew across the sky and then the truck disappeared.

Her brother tapped her arm.

“What is it?”

“Trampled,” he said. “That man was trampled.” He licked the tip of his finger and drew an X through the dust on the window.

The girl opened her suitcase and gave him a piece of paper and a pencil. “Here,” she said, “you can draw on this.”

The boy drew a large square and inside of the square he drew a little man in a suit with giant shoe trees for feet. “That’s Papa,” he said. He added a mustache but something about the mustache was not quite right.

“Too wide,” said the girl.

“That’s it.” He erased the mustache and part of the man’s mouth and then he drew the mustache again, only not as wide, but forgot to fix the mouth. He gave the pencil back to his sister. “You draw,” he said.

She took the pencil and drew a sky full of stars above the man’s head.

“Give him a hat, too.”

She drew a wide black fedora with a tiny feather tucked beneath the hatband. The girl was very good at drawing. The year before last she had won first prize at Lincoln Elementary School for her line drawing of a pinecone. She had simply concentrated on seeing the pinecone and the drawing had drawn itself. She had hardly looked down at her pencil at all.

Soon the boy fell asleep and she took out her father’s postcards from her suitcase. One of them showed a tiny man fishing on the bank of a river. Beneath him were the words Greetings from Montana, The Treasure State. Another one showed the highest stack in the world. The highest stack in the world was in Anaconda, Montana. She flipped through the pictures of the Indian pueblos and the ancient cliff dwellings until she came to the postcard of the largest and finest auditorium in New Mexico: the Seth Hall Gymnasium at Santa Fe High School. Seth Hall looked like an enormous adobe house, only with cross bars over the windows. On the back of the card her father had written her a short note: Finally, summer has arrived. I am in good health and hope you all are well. I know your birthday is coming up soon. Please let me know what you would like and I will order it from the City of Paris department store in San Francisco and have them send it to you. Be good to your mother while I am away. Love, Papa. At the bottom of the card there was a P.S. and then a line of text that had been blacked out by the censors. She wondered what it was her father had wanted to tell her. She had not written him back—every day was like every other day and she could never think of anything new to say—but the blue silk scarf and the tiny bottle of Sweet Serenade perfume had arrived in the mail on her birthday anyway. She had used up the Sweet Serenade a long time ago. Now she could not even remember what it smelled like.

Outside the window dusk was falling. The mountains glowed red along the ridge tops and behind them the sky had turned deep violet. A soldier—a different soldier from before—walked through the car calling out, “Shades down.” From sunset until sunrise they had to keep the shades drawn. She put the postcards away and pulled down the shade. Her mother placed an old wooden suitcase beneath the window and sat down on the lid so the girl and boy could have the seats to themselves. “Lie down,” she said to them. “Try and sleep.”

LATER THAT EVENING the girl awoke to the sound of breaking glass. Someone had thrown a brick through a window but the gas lamps were broken and it was too dark to see. She was sweating and her throat was dry and sore and she wanted a glass of cold milk but she could not remember where she was. At first she thought she was in her yellow bedroom in the white stucco house in Berkeley but she could not see the shadow of the elm tree on the yellow wall or even the yellow wall itself so she knew she was not there, she was back in the stalls at Tanforan. But at Tanforan there were gnats and fleas and the awful smell of the horses and the sound of the neighbors on either side fighting until late in the night. At Tanforan the partitions between the stalls did not reach all the way up to the ceiling and it was impossible to sleep. The girl had slept. Just now she had slept. She had slept and dreamed about her father again so she knew she was not at Tanforan, either.

She called out for her mother.

Her mother reached out from her seat on the suitcase and put her hand on the girl’s forehead and smoothed back her wet black hair and said, “Hush, baby,” and the girl, who still could not remember where she was, remembered that her mother had not called her baby for a long time, not since the summer White Dog had run away and not come home for a week. This was before White Dog had grown old and tired and hurt his leg on the lawn mower. This was when White Dog was still a noisy white dog that would bark at anything no matter how big that thing was. This was when the girl was still eight and her father had let her walk alone to the corner store on a Sunday with a handful of pennies while he stood on the front porch and watched. She had come home with a fat copy of the San Francisco Chronicle and they had sat in the kitchen drinking large glasses of steaming hot cocoa and reading the comics—first Dick Tracy and Moon Mullins and then her favorite, Invisible Scarlet O’Neil—and nobody else in the house had been awake. Now she was eleven and she could not remember where she was. It was late at night and her mother was calling her baby and asking her if she was all right.

“Of course I’m all right,” said the girl. “I just want a glass of milk.” She reached out into the darkness and ran her fingers along the smooth siding of the train. “Where’s White Dog?”

“We couldn’t take him with us.”

“Where is he?”

“We left him at home. We’re on the train.”

The girl sat up in her seat and grasped her mother’s hand. “I dreamed about Papa,” she said. “He was wearing his fancy French shoes and we were in a boat going to Paris and he was singing that song again.” She began to hum because she could not remember the words.

“‘In the Mood,’” her mother said.

“Yes, that’s it, “‘In the Mood.’”

“What kind of boat was it?” the boy whispered.

“A gondola.”

“Then you were in Venice.”

“All right,” said the girl, “let’s just say that I was.” She pulled back the shade and looked out into the black Nevada night and saw a herd of wild mustangs galloping across the desert. The sky was lit up by the moon and the dark bodies of the horses were drifting and turning in the moonlight and wherever they went they left behind great billowing clouds of dust as proof of their passage. The girl lifted the shade and pulled her brother to the window and pressed his face gently to the glass and when he saw the mustangs with their long legs and their flying manes and their sleek brown coats he let out a low moan that sounded like a cry of pain but was not. He watched the horses as they galloped toward the mountains and he said, very softly, “They are going away.” Then a soldier with a flashlight and a broom came walking down the aisle. The girl let the shade fall back against the glass and told the boy to return to his seat.

“Where’s that brick?” asked the soldier. “Over here,” someone answered. The girl sat quietly listening to the soldier sweeping up the shards of broken glass. “Shades down,” she said to herself. “Shades down.” Then she closed her eyes and she slept.

SOMETIME DURING THE NIGHT the train entered Utah. It crossed the barren stretch of the Great Salt Lake Desert and then the Great Salt Lake itself. The lake was dark and shallow and had no outlet to the sea. It was what it had always been—an ancient body of water where nothing ever sank—but the girl did not see it. She was sound asleep but even in her sleep the sound of the rippling water came to her. An hour later the train stopped at the station in Ogden for water and ice, and the girl, who was thirsty, still slept. She slept through Bountiful and Salt Lake City and Spanish Fork and did not open her eyes until the train arrived at Delta the next morning. When she woke she did not remember the sound of the rippling water but it was with her, without her knowing. The sound of the lake was inside of her. At Delta, armed soldiers with bayonets escorted them off the train and the girl climbed down the metal stairs one by one with her suitcase and stepped out onto solid ground. The air was still and warm and she could no longer hear the low moan of the engine or the clicking of the wheels against the iron rails.

She covered her eyes with her hand and said, “It’s too bright.”

“It is unbearably bright,” said her mother.

“Keep walking, please,” said a soldier.

The boy said he was too tired to walk. His mother put down her bags and reached into her purse and gave him a piece of Chiclets gum she had been saving for weeks. He popped it into his mouth and then he followed his mother and sister between the double row of soldiers to the buses that had been waiting for them to arrive since before dawn.

They climbed onto a bus and the bus drove slowly down the shady streets of the town. They passed a courthouse and a hardware store and a diner full of hungry men eating breakfast before work. They ran through a yellow light and swerved to avoid hitting a stray dog. They passed block after block of white houses with wooden porches and neatly manicured lawns and then they were at the edge of the town. For several miles they drove past nothing but farms and alfalfa fields and the scenery was very pleasant. Then the bus turned onto a newly tarred road and drove in a straight line past the occasional clumps of greasewood and sage until it arrived at Topaz. At Topaz the bus stopped. The girl looked out the window and saw hundreds of tar-paper barracks sitting beneath the hot sun. She saw telephone poles and barbed-wire fences. She saw soldiers. And everything she saw she saw through a cloud of fine white dust that had once been the bed of an ancient salt lake. The boy began to cough and the girl untied her scarf and shoved it into his hand and told him to hold it over his nose and mouth. He pressed the scarf to his face and took the girl’s hand and together they stepped out of the bus and into the blinding white glare of the desert.




WHEN THE EMPEROR WAS DIVINE


In the beginning the boy thought he saw his father everywhere. Outside the latrines. Underneath the showers. Leaning against barrack doorways. Playing go with the other men in their floppy straw hats on the narrow wooden benches after lunch. Above them blue skies. The hot midday sun. No trees. No shade. Birds.

It was 1942. Utah. Late summer. A city of tar-paper barracks behind a barbed-wire fence on a dusty alkaline plain high up in the desert. The wind was hot and dry and the rain rarely fell and wherever the boy looked he saw him: Daddy, Papa, Father, Oto-san.

For it was true, they all looked alike. Black hair. Slanted eyes. High cheekbones. Thick glasses. Thin lips. Bad teeth. Unknowable. Inscrutable.

That was him, over there.

The little yellow man.

THREE TIMES A DAY the clanging of bells. Endless lines. The smell of liver drifting out across the black barrack roofs. The smell of catfish. From time to time, the smell of horse meat. On meatless days, the smell of beans. Inside the mess hall, the clatter of forks and spoons and knives. No chopsticks. An endless sea of bobbing black heads. Hundreds of mouths chewing. Slurping. Sucking. Swallowing. And over there, in the corner, beneath the flag, a familiar face.

The boy called out, “Papa,” and three men with thick metal-rimmed glasses looked up from their plates and said, “Nan desu ka?”

What is it?

But the boy could not say what it was.

He lowered his head and skewered a small Vienna sausage. His mother reminded him, once again, not to shout out in public. And never to speak with his mouth full. Harry Yamaguchi tapped a spoon on a glass and announced that the head count would be taken on Monday evening. The boy’s sister nudged him under the table, hard, with the scuffed toe of her Mary Jane. “Papa’s gone,” she said.

THEY HAD BEEN ASSIGNED to a room in a barrack in a block not far from the fence. The boy. The girl. Their mother. Inside there were three iron cots and a potbellied stove and a single bare bulb that hung down from the ceiling. A table made out of cratewood. On top of a rough wooden shelf, an old Zenith radio they had brought with them on the train from California. A tin clock. A jar of paper flowers. A box of salt. Tacked to the wall beside a small window, a picture of Joe DiMaggio torn from a magazine. There was no running water and the toilets were a half block away.

Far away, on the other side of the ocean, there was fighting, and at night the boy lay awake on his straw mattress and listened to the bulletins on the radio. Sometimes, in the darkness, he heard noises drifting from other rooms. The heavy thud of footsteps. The shuffling of cards. Over and over again, the creaking of springs. He heard a woman whispering, “Lower, lower, there,” and a man with a high voice singing, “Auf wiederseh’n, sweetheart, auf wiederseh’n.”

Someone said, “Just say sayonara, Frank.”

Someone said, “Bon soir!”

Someone said, “Please shut up, please.”

Someone else belched.

There was a window above the boy’s bed, and outside were the stars and the moon and the endless rows of black barracks all lined up in the sand. In the distance, a wide empty field where nothing but sagebrush grew, then the fence and the high wooden towers. There was a guard in each tower, and he carried a machine gun and binoculars and at night he manned the searchlight. He had brown hair and green eyes, or maybe they were blue, and he had just come back from a tour of the Pacific.

ON THEIR FIRST DAY in the desert his mother had said, “Be careful.”

“Do not touch the barbed-wire fence,” she had said, “or talk to the guards in the towers.

“Do not stare at the sun.

“And remember, never say the Emperor’s name out loud.”

The boy wore a blue baseball cap and he did not stare at the sun. He often wandered the firebreak with his head down and his hands in his pockets, looking for seashells and old Indian arrowheads in the sand. Some days he saw rattlesnakes sleeping beneath the sagebrush. Some days he saw scorpions. Once he came across a horse skull bleached white by the sun. Another time, an old man in a red silk kimono with a tin pail in his hand who said he was going down to the river.

Whenever the boy walked past the shadow of a guard tower he pulled his cap down low over his head and tried not to say the word.

But sometimes it slipped out anyway.

Hirohito, Hirohito, Hirohito.

He said it quietly. Quickly. He whispered it.

ON THE TRAIN RIDE into the desert he had slept with his head in his sister’s lap and dreamed he was riding an enormous white horse by the sea. When he looked out toward the horizon he could see three black ships out on the water. The ships had sailed all the way over from the other side of the ocean. The Emperor himself had sent them. Their sails were white and square and filled with wind and their masts were straight and tall. He had watched as they slowly turned toward the shore. Then he was awake and the train was rocking from side to side and in the seat behind him a woman was quietly singing. It was dawn and his sister was sound asleep. She was wearing her yellow summer dress with the little white flowers because in the desert, where they were going, it would be summer a lot.

IT WAS NOT LIKE any desert he had read about in books. There were no palm trees here, no oases, no caravans of camels slowly winding across the dunes. There was only the wind and the dust and the hot burning sand.

In the afternoon the heat rose up from the ground in waves. The air above the barracks shimmered. It was ninety-five degrees out. One hundred. One hundred and ten. Old men sat outside on the long narrow benches, not talking, whittling away at pieces of wood as they waited for the hours to pass. The boy played marbles on the laundry room floor. He played Chinese checkers. He roamed through the barracks with the other boys in his block, playing cops and robbers and war. Kill the Nazis! Kill the Japs! On days when it was too hot to go out he sat in his room with a wet towel over his head and leafed through the pages of old Life magazines. He saw the bombed-out cities of Europe, and the Allied soldiers in Burma, fleeing to India through the hot steamy jungle. His sister lay on her cot for hours, staring, transfixed, at white majorette boots and men in their bathrobes in the Sears, Roebuck catalog. She wrote letters to her friends on the other side of the fence, telling them all she was having a good time. Wish you were here. Hope to hear from you soon. Their mother darned socks by the window. She read. She made them paper kites with tails woven out of potato sack strings. She took a flower-arranging class. She learned to crochet— “It’s something to do”—and for one week there were doilies under everything.

Mostly, though, they waited. For the mail. For the news. For the bells. For breakfast and lunch and dinner. For one day to be over and the next day to begin.

“When the war is over,” the boy’s mother told him, “we can pack up our things and go home.”

He asked her when she thought that might be. In a month maybe? Two months? A year, tops? She shook her head and looked out the window. Three young girls in dirty white frocks were playing ladies in the dust— “Oh, bother,” they cried out, and, “Hullo, have some tea?”—and in the distance there were ravens riding the updrafts. “There’s no telling,” she said.

ON THE OTHER SIDE of the wall by his bed lived a man and his wife and the wife’s elderly mother, Mrs. Kato, who talked to herself night and day. She wore a pink flowered housedress, and tiny white slippers, and she carried a cane, and in the evening, after supper, the boy often saw her standing in her doorway with a small wicker suitcase, trying to remember the way home. Did she go left on Ward and then right on Grove? Or was it right on Ward and left on Grove? And when had they taken down all the street signs, anyway? Whose bright idea was that? Should she continue to wait for the bus? Or should she just start walking? And when she finally got there, then what?

“The daffodils,” the boy called out to her softly.

“Oh yes, of course. I must remember to plant the daffodils. And the fence still needs mending.”

She said she could hear her mother calling for her in the distance, but that lately her voice had begun to sound farther and farther away.

“I guess that’s to be expected,” she said.

She said, “Oh, well,” and, “So it goes.”

She said, “There’s something strange about this place, but I can’t figure out what it is.”

She said, “Everyone here seems so serious.”

THE MAN SCRUBBING pots and pans in the mess hall had once been the sales manager of an import-export company in San Francisco. The janitor had owned a small nursery in El Cerrito. The cook had always been a cook. A kitchen’s a kitchen, it’s all the same to me. The waitress had worked as a live-in domestic for a wealthy family in Atherton. The children still write to me every week asking me when I’m going to come home. The man standing in front of the latrines shouting out, “Hallelujah, Hallelujah,” had been a vagrant on the streets of Oakland. That’s him! The Hallelujah guy! The old woman who did nothing but play bingo all day long had worked in the strawberry fields of Mt. Eden for twenty-five years without taking a single vacation. Me happy, come here. Better than Mt. Eden. No cook, no work, just do laundry fine.

One evening as the boy’s mother was hauling back a bucket of water from the washroom she ran into her former housekeeper, Mrs. Ueno. “When she saw me she grabbed the bucket right out of my hands and insisted upon carrying it home for me. ‘You’ll hurt your back again,’ she said. I tried to tell her that she no longer worked for me. ‘Mrs. Ueno,’ I said, ‘here we’re all equals,’ but of course she wouldn’t listen. When we got back to the barracks she set the bucket down by the front door and then she bowed and hurried off into the darkness. I didn’t even get a chance to thank her.”

“Maybe you can thank her tomorrow,” said the boy.

“I don’t even know where she lives. I don’t even know what day it is.”

“It’s Tuesday, Mama.”

AT NIGHT he woke up crying out, “Where am I?” Sometimes he felt a hand on his shoulder and it was his sister telling him it was all just a bad dream. “Go back to sleep, baby,” she’d whisper, and he would. Sometimes there was no answer. Sometimes he heard the wind blowing through the sagebrush and he remembered he was in the desert but he could not remember how long he had been there, or why. Sometimes he worried he was there because he’d done something horribly, terribly wrong. But then when he tried to remember what that horrible, terrible thing might be, it would not come to him. It could be anything. Something he’d done yesterday—chewing the eraser off his sister’s pencil before putting it back in the pencil jar—or something he’d done a long time ago that was just now catching up with him. Breaking a chain letter from Juneau, Alaska. Flushing his dying pet goldfish down the toilet before it was completely dead. Forgetting to touch the hat rack three times when the iceman drove by. Sometimes he thought he was dreaming, and he was sure that when he woke up his father would be downstairs in the kitchen whistling “Begin the Beguine” through his teeth as he fried up breakfast in the skillet. “Here it comes, champ,” his father would say, “one hobo egg sandwich.”

HIS SISTER HAD LONG SKINNY LEGS and thick black hair and wore a gold French watch that had once belonged to their father. Whenever she went out she covered her head with a wide-brimmed Panama hat so her face would not get too dark from the sun. “Nobody will look at you,” she said to the boy, “if your face is too dark.”

“Nobody’s looking at me anyway,” he replied.

Late at night, after the lights had gone out, she told him things. Beyond the fence, she said, there was a dry riverbed and an abandoned smelter mine and at the edge of the desert there were jagged blue mountains that rose up into the sky. The mountains were farther away than they seemed. Everything was, in the desert. Everything except water. “Water,” she said, “is just a mirage.”

A mirage was not there at all.

The mountains were called Big Drum and Little Drum, Snake Ridge, the Rubies. The nearest town over was Delta.

In Delta, she said, you could buy oranges.

In Delta there were green leafy trees and blond boys on bikes and a hotel with a verandah where the waiters served ice-cold drinks with tiny paper umbrellas.

“What else?” asked the boy.

In Delta, she said, there was shade.

She told him about the ancient salt lake that had once covered all of Utah and parts of Nevada. This was thousands of years ago, she said, during the Ice Age. There were no fences then. And no names. No Utah. No Nevada. Just lots and lots of water. “And where we are now?”

“Yes?”

“Six hundred feet under.”

ALL NIGHT LONG he dreamed of water. Endless days of rain. Overflowing canals and rivers and streams rushing down to the sea. He saw the ancient salt lake floating above the floor of the desert. Its surface was calm and blue. Smooth as glass. He was drifting down through the reeds and fish were swimming through his fingers and when he looked up through the water the sun was nothing but a pale wobbly speck a hundred million miles above his head.

In the morning he woke up longing for a glass of Coke. Just one, with lots of ice, and a straw. He’d sip it slowly. He’d make it last a long long time.

A day. A week. A year, even.

EVERY FEW DAYS the letters arrived, tattered and torn, from Lordsburg, New Mexico. Sometimes entire sentences had been cut out with a razor blade by the censors and the letters did not make any sense. Sometimes they arrived in one piece, but with half of the words blacked out. Always, they were signed, “From Papa, With Love.”

Lordsburg was a nice sunny place on a broad highland plain just north of the Mexican border. That was how his father had described it in his letters. There are no trees here but the sunsets are beautiful and on clear days you can see the hills rising up in the distance. The food is fresh and substantial and my appetite is good. Although it is still very warm I have begun taking a cold shower every morning to better prepare myself for the winter. Please write and tell me what you are interested in these days. Do you still like baseball? How is your sister? Do you have a best friend?

THE BOY STILL LIKED BASEBALL and he was very interested in outlaws. He had seen a movie about the Dalton Gang—When the Daltons Rode—in Recreation Hall 22. His sister had won second prize in a jitterbug contest at the mess hall. She wore her hair in a ponytail. She was fine. The boy did not have a best friend but he had a pet tortoise that he kept in a wooden box filled with sand right next to the barrack window. He had not given the tortoise a name but he had scratched his family’s identification number into its shell with the tip of his mother’s nail file. At night he covered the box with a lid and on top of the lid he placed a flat white stone so the tortoise could not escape. Sometimes, in his dreams, he could hear its claws scrabbling against the side of the box.

He did not mention the scrabbling claws to his father. He did not mention his dreams.

What he said was, Dear Papa: It’s pretty sunny here in Utah too. The food is not so bad and we get milk every day. In the mess hall we are collecting nails for Uncle Sam. Yesterday my kite got stuck on the fence.

THE RULES about the fence were simple: You could not go over it, you could not go under it, you could not go around it, you could not go through it.

And if your kite got stuck on it?

That was an easy one. You let the kite go.

There were rules about language, too: Here we say Dining Hall and not Mess Hall; Safety Council, not Internal Police; Residents, not Evacuees; and last but not least, Mental Climate, not Morale. 

There were rules about food: No second helpings except for milk and bread.

And books: No books in Japanese.

There were rules about religion: No Emperorworshiping Shintos allowed.

IN LORDSBURG, the girl said, the sky was always blue and the fences were not so high. Only fathers lived there. At night they could see the stars. And during the day, eagles.

Our father does not worship the Emperor. She said that too.

“Does he ever think about us?” asked the boy.

“All the time.”

HIS FATHER WAS a small handsome man with delicate hands and a raised white scar on his index finger that the boy, as a young child, had loved to kiss. “Does it hurt?” he’d once asked him. “Not anymore,” his father had replied. He was extremely polite. Whenever he walked into a room he closed the door behind him softly. He was always on time. He wore beautiful suits and did not yell at waiters. He loved pistachio nuts. He believed that fruit juice was the ideal drink. He liked to doodle. He was especially fond of drawing a box and then making it into three dimensions. I guess you could say that’s my forte. Whenever the boy knocked on his door his father would look up and smile and put down whatever it was he was doing. “Don’t be shy,” he’d say. He read the Examiner every morning before work and he knew the answers to everything. How small a germ was and when did fish sleep and where did Kitty McKenzie go after they took her out of her iron lung? You don’t have to worry about Kitty McKenzie anymore. She’s in a better place now. She’s up there in heaven. I heard they threw her a big party the day she arrived. He knew when to leave the boy’s mother alone and how best to ask her for ice cream. Don’t ask her too often and when you do, don’t let her know how much you really want it. Don’t beg. Don’t whine. He knew which restaurants would serve them lunch and which would not. He knew which barbers would cut their kind of hair. The best ones, of course. The thing that he loved most about America, he once confided to the boy, was the glazed jelly donut. Can’t be beat. 

HIS MOTHER SAID it aged you. The sun. She said it made you grow old. Every night before she went to bed she daubed cream on her face. She rationed it out as though it were butter. Or sugar. It was Pond’s. She’d bought a large jar at the pharmacy the day before they had left Berkeley. “Got to make it last,” she said. But already she had almost used it all up. “I should have planned ahead,” she said. “I should have bought two.”

“Maybe three,” said the boy.

She stood in front of the mirror tracing the lines along her forehead and neck with her finger. “Is it the light,” she asked, “or are there bags under my eyes?”

“There’s bags.”

She pointed to a wrinkle by her mouth. “See this?”

He nodded.

“A recent development. Your father won’t know who I am.”

“I’ll remind him.”

“Tell him…” she said, and then her voice drifted off, and she was somewhere far away, and outside a hot dry wind was blowing up from the south and across the high desert plains.

ALWAYS, HE WOULD REMEMBER the dust. It was soft and white and chalky, like talcum powder. Only the alkaline made your skin burn. It made your nose bleed. It made your eyes sting. It took your voice away. The dust got into your shoes. Your hair. Your pants. Your mouth. Your bed.

Your dreams.

It seeped under doors and around the edges of windows and through the cracks in the walls.

And all day long, it seemed, his mother was always sweeping. Once in a while she would put down her broom and look at him. “What I wouldn’t give,” she’d say, “for my Electrolux.”

One evening, before he went to bed, he wrote his name in the dust across the top of the table. All through the night, while he slept, more dust blew through the walls.

By morning his name was gone.

HIS FATHER used to call him Little Guy. He called him Gum Drop, and Peanut, and Plum. “You’re my absolute numero uno,” he would say to him, and whenever the boy had woken up screaming from dark scary dreams his father had come into his room and sat down on the edge of his bed and smoothed down the boy’s short black hair. “Hush, Puppy,” he whispered, “it’s all right. Here I am.”

AT DUSK the sky turned blood red and his sister took him out walking along the outer edge of the barracks to watch the sun go down over the mountains. “Look. Look away. Look. Look away.” That, she told him, was the proper way to look at the sun. If you stared at it straight on for too long, you’d go blind.

In the darkening red twilight they would point out to each other the things that they saw: a dog chasing a porcupine, a tiny pink seashell, the husk of a beetle, a column of fire ants marching across the sand. If they were lucky they might see the Portuguese lady strolling along the fence with her husband, Sakamoto, or the lady with the white turban—she’d lost all her hair, they’d heard, overnight on the train—or the man with the withered arm who lived in Block 7. If they were very lucky, the man with the withered arm might even raise it—the arm—and wave to them.

ONE EVENING, while they were walking, the boy reached over and grabbed the girl’s arm. “What is it?” she asked him.

He tapped his wrist. “Time,” he said. “What time?”

She stopped and looked at her watch as though she had never seen it before. “It’s six o’clock,” she said.

Her watch had said six o’clock for weeks. She had stopped winding it the day they had stepped off the train.

“What do you think they’re doing back home?”

She looked at her watch one more time and then she stared up at the sky, as though she were thinking. “Right about now,” she said, “I bet they’re having a good time.” Then she started walking again.

And in his mind he could see it: the tree-lined streets at sundown, the dark green lawns, the sidewalks, boys throwing balls in backyards, girls playing hopscotch, mothers with pink quilted mitts sliding hot casseroles out of ovens, fathers with shiny black briefcases bursting through front doors, shouting, “Honey, I’m home! Honey, I’m home!”

When he thought of the world outside it was always six o’clock. A Wednesday or a Thursday. Dinnertime across America.

IN EARLY AUTUMN the farm recruiters arrived to sign up new workers, and the War Relocation Authority allowed many of the young men and women to go out and help harvest the crops. Some of them went north to Idaho to top sugar beets. Some went to Wyoming to pick potatoes. Some went to Tent City in Provo to pick peaches and pears and at the end of the season they came back wearing brand-new Florsheim shoes. Some came back wearing the same shoes they’d left in and swore they would never go out there again. They said they’d been shot at. Spat on. Refused entrance to the local diner. The movie theater. The dry goods store. They said the signs in the windows were the same wherever they went: NO JAPS ALLOWED. Life was easier, they said, on this side of the fence.

THE SHOES WERE black Oxfords. Men’s, size eight and a half, extra narrow. He took them out of his suitcase and slipped them over his hands and pressed his fingers into the smooth oval depressions left behind by his father’s toes and then he closed his eyes and sniffed the tips of his fingers.

Tonight they smelled like nothing.

The week before they had still smelled of his father but tonight the smell of his father was gone.

He wiped off the leather with his sleeve and put the shoes back into the suitcase. Outside it was dark and in the barrack windows there were lights on and figures moving behind curtains. He wondered what his father was doing right then. Getting ready for bed, maybe. Washing his face. Or brushing his teeth. Did they even have toothpaste in Lordsburg? He didn’t know. He’d have to write him and ask. He lay down on his cot and pulled up the blankets. He could hear his mother snoring softly in the darkness, and a lone coyote in the hills to the south, howling up at the moon. He wondered if you could see the same moon in Lordsburg, or London, or even in China, where all the men wore little black slippers. And he decided that you could, depending on the clouds.

“Same moon,” he whispered to himself, “same moon.”

ON NIGHTS when he couldn’t sleep he liked to think of the house they had left behind. He could still picture his old room very clearly: the One War One World map of the world on the wall, the Joe Palooka comic books spilling out from under the bed, the cowboy-and-Indian curtains his mother had sewn for him the summer before last, gently billowing in the breeze. He’d look out the window and see his father down below in the yard, plucking the caterpillars one by one off the snow pea plants with his long wooden chopsticks. He’d see the stone lantern covered with moss in the garden, and the statue of the fat round Buddha with its head thrust back, laughing up at the sky. He’d see his red Schwinn with the wide balloon tires leaning against the porch and on a good day he’d see Elizabeth Morgana Roosevelt on the other side of the white picket fence, playing with her little dog in the sun.

ELIZABETH HAD LONG YELLOW HAIR and a Pekinese dog named Lotus and was not related to the president in any way. The day before they left she had come to the house and given him her lucky blue stone from the sea. It was smooth and round and hard, like a bird’s egg. Or a perfect blue eye. “When you come back,” she said, “we’ll go to the beach.”

He had slipped the blue stone into his pocket and taken it with him to the assembly center at the Tanforan racetrack. Every night, in the horse stalls, he had slept with it under his pillow. At the end of the summer, when they were ordered to move inland, he had brought it with him on the train to Utah. He had promised to write her a letter the minute he got off the train.

THEY HAD BEEN off the train for a while now, but he had not written her a word. Still, her letters continued to arrive in the mail. She was the only one of his friends from before who had remembered to write. She told him about the blackouts in Berkeley, and the shortages of meat and butter. She said that her father was now an Air Raid Warden, and that her mother no longer wore silk stockings. She said that Greg Myer’s brother had been shot down in the Battle of the Coral Sea and there was now a gleaming gold star in the Myers’ front window. She told him she’d seen some Okies from the shipyard downtown, standing in line at the movies. They really did wear cowboy boots, she said. And she sent him things. A picture of a prancing stallion she’d seen at the Navy Relief Horse Show. A book of riddles. A tulip bulb, which he had named Gloria and planted inside of an old rusty peach can he had found behind the mess hall.

He wondered if Gloria was still alive, down there, beneath all that dirt—“Tamp it down, hard,” his sister had said—and if she was, would she be able to make it to spring?

A MEMORY FROM BEFORE: his sister arriving home from school with her new jump rope trailing behind her on the sidewalk. “They let me turn the handle,” she said, “but they wouldn’t let me jump.” She had cut the rope up into tiny pieces and tossed them into the ivy and sworn she would never jump rope again.

EVERY WEEK they heard new rumors.

The men and women would be put into separate camps. They would be sterilized. They would be stripped of their citizenship. They would be taken out onto the high seas and then shot. They would be sent to a desert island and left there to die. They would all be deported to Japan. They would never be allowed to leave America. They would be held hostage until every last American POW got home safely. They would be turned over to the Chinese for safekeeping right after the war.

You’ve been brought here for your own protection, they were told.

It was all in the interest of national security.

It was a matter of military necessity.

It was an opportunity for them to prove their loyalty.

THE SCHOOL WAS OPENED in mid-October. Classes were held in an unheated barrack at the far end of Block 8 and in the morning it was sometimes so cold the boy could not feel his fingers or toes and his breath came out in small white puffs. Textbooks had to be shared, and paper and pencils were often in short supply.

Every morning, at Mountain View Elementary, he placed his hand over his heart and recited the pledge of allegiance. He sang “Oh, beautiful for spacious skies” and “My country, ’tis of thee” and he shouted out “Here!” at the sound of his name. His teacher was Mrs. Delaney. She had short brown hair and smooth creamy skin and a husband named Hank who was a sergeant in the Marines. Every week he sent her a letter from the front lines in the Pacific. Once, he even sent her a grass skirt. “Now when am I ever going to wear a grass skirt?” she asked the class.

“How about tomorrow?”

“Or after recess.”

“Put it on right now!”

The first week of school they learned all about the Nina and the Pinta and the Santa Maria, and Squanto and the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock. They wrote down the names of the states in neat cursive letters across lined sheets of paper. They played hangman and twenty questions. In the afternoon, during current events, they listened to Mrs. Delaney read out loud to them from the newspaper. The First Lady is visiting the Queen in London. The Russians are still holding in Stalingrad. The Japs are massing on Guadalcanal.

“What about Burma?” the boy asked.

The situation in Burma, she told the class, was bleak.

LATE AT NIGHT he heard the sound of the door opening, and footsteps crossing the floor, and then his sister was suddenly there by the window, flipping her dress up high over her head.

“You asleep?”

“Just resting.” He could smell her hair, and the dust, and salt, and he knew she’d been out there, in the night, where it was dark.

She said, “Miss me?” She said, “Turn down the radio.” She said, “I won a nickel at bingo tonight. Tomorrow we’ll go to the canteen and buy you a Coca-Cola.”

He said, “I’d like that. I’d like that a lot.”

She dropped down onto the cot next to his. “Talk to me,” she said. “Tell me what you did tonight.”

“I wrote Papa a postcard.”

“What else?”

“Licked a stamp.”

“Do you know what bothers me most? I can’t remember his face sometimes.”

“It was sort of round,” said the boy. Then he asked her if she wanted to listen to some music and she said yes—she always said yes—and he turned on the radio to the big band channel. They heard a trumpet and some drums and then Benny Goodman on the clarinet and Martha Tilton singing, “So many memories, sometimes I think I’ll cry….”

IN THE DREAM there was always a beautiful wooden door. The beautiful wooden door was very small—the size of a pillow, say, or an encyclopedia. Behind the small but beautiful wooden door there was a second door, and behind the second door there was a picture of the Emperor, which no one was allowed to see.

For the Emperor was holy and divine. A god.

You could not look him in the eye.

In the dream the boy had already opened the first door and his hand was on the second door and any minute now, he was sure of it, he was going to see God.

Only something always went wrong. The doorknob fell off. Or the door got stuck. Or his shoelace came untied and he had to bend over and tie it. Or maybe a bell was ringing somewhere—somewhere in Nevada or Peleliu or maybe it was just some crazy gong bonging in Saipan—and the nights were growing colder, the sound of the scrabbling claws was fainter now, fainter than ever before, and it was October, he was miles from home, and his father was not there.

THEY HAD COME for him just after midnight. Three men in suits and ties and black fedoras with FBI badges under their coats. “Grab your toothbrush,” they’d said. This was back in December, right after Pearl Harbor, when they were still living in the white house on the wide street in Berkeley not far from the sea. The Christmas tree was up, and the whole house smelled of pine, and from his window the boy had watched as they led his father out across the lawn in his bathrobe and slippers to the black car that was parked at the curb.

He had never seen his father leave the house without his hat on before. That was what had troubled him most. No hat. And those slippers: battered and faded, with the rubber soles curling up at the edges. If only they had let him put on his shoes then it all might have turned out differently. But there had been no time for shoes.

Grab your toothbrush.

Come on. Come on. You’re coming with us.

We just need to ask your husband a few questions.

Into the car, Papa-san.

Later, the boy remembered seeing lights on in the house next door, and faces pressed to the window. One of them was Elizabeth’s, he was sure of it.

Elizabeth Morgana Roosevelt had seen his father taken away in his slippers.

THE NEXT MORNING his sister had wandered through the house looking for the last place their father had sat. Was it the red chair? Or the sofa? The edge of his bed? She had pressed her face to the bedspread and sniffed.

“The edge of my bed,” their mother had said.

That evening she had lit a bonfire in the yard and burned all of the letters from Kagoshima. She burned the family photographs and the three silk kimonos she had brought over with her nineteen years ago from Japan. She burned the records of Japanese opera. She ripped up the flag of the red rising sun. She smashed the tea set and the Imari dishes and the framed portrait of the boy’s uncle, who had once been a general in the Emperor’s army. She smashed the abacus and tossed it into the flames. “From now on,” she said, “we’re counting on our fingers.”

The next day, for the first time ever, she sent the boy and his sister to school with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in their lunch pails. “No more rice balls,” she said. “And if anyone asks, you’re Chinese.”

The boy had nodded. “Chinese,” he whispered. “I’m Chinese.”

“And I,” said the girl, “am the Queen of Spain.”

“In your dreams,” said the boy.

“In my dreams,” said the girl, “I’m the King.”

IN CHINA the men wore their hair in long black pig-tails and the ladies hobbled around on tiny broken feet. In China there were people so poor they had to feed their newborn babies to the dogs. In China they ate grass for breakfast and for lunch they ate cats.

And for dinner?

For dinner, in China, they ate dogs.

These were a few of the things the boy knew about China.

LATER, HE SAW CHINESE, real Chinese—Mr. Lee of Lee’s Grocers and Don Wong who owned the laundry on Shattuck—on the street wearing buttons that said, I AM CHINESE, and CHINESE, PLEASE. Later, a man stopped him on the sidewalk in front of Woolworth’s and said, “Chink or Jap?” and the boy answered, “Chink,” and ran away as fast as he could. Only when he got to the corner did he turn around and shout, “Jap! Jap! I’m a Jap!”

Just to set the record straight.

But by then the man was already gone.

Later, there were the rules about time: No Japs out after eight p.m.

And space: No Japs allowed to travel more than five miles from their homes.

Later, the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park was renamed the Oriental Tea Garden.

Later, the signs that read INSTRUCTIONS TO ALL PERSONS OF JAPANESE ANCESTRY went up all over town and they packed up their things and they left.

ALL THROUGH OCTOBER the days were still warm, like summer, but at night the mercury dropped and in the morning the sagebrush was sometimes covered with frost. Twice in one week there were dust storms. The sky turned suddenly gray and then a hot wind came screaming across the desert, churning up everything in its path. From inside the barracks the boy could not see the sun or the moon or even the next row of barracks on the other side of the gravel path. All he could see was dust. The wind rattled the windows and doors and the dust seeped like smoke through the cracks in the roof and at night he slept with a wet handkerchief over his mouth to keep out the smell. In the morning, when he woke, the wet handkerchief was dry and in his mouth there was the gritty taste of chalk.

A dust storm would blow for hours, and sometimes even days, and then, just as suddenly as it had begun, it would stop, and for a few seconds the world was perfectly silent. Then a baby would begin to cry, or a dog would start barking, and from out of nowhere a flock of white birds would mysteriously appear in the sky.

THE FIRST SNOWS FELL, and then melted, and then there was rain. The alkaline earth could not absorb any water and the ground quickly turned to mud. Black puddles stood on the gravel paths and the schools were shut down for repairs.

There was nothing to do now and the days were long and empty. The boy marked them off one by one on the calendar with giant red X’s. He practiced fancy tricks on the yo-yo: Around the World, Walk the Dog, the Turkish Army. He received a letter from his father written on thin lined sheets of paper. Of course we have toothpaste in Lordsburg. How else do you expect us to brush our teeth? His father thanked him for the postcard of the Mormon Tabernacle. He said he was fine. Everything was fine. He was sure they would see each other one day soon. Be good to your mother, he wrote. Be patient. And remember, it’s better to bend than to break.

Not once did he mention the war.

HIS FATHER HAD PROMISED to show him the world. They’d go to Egypt, he’d said, and climb the Pyramids. They’d go to China and take a nice long stroll along that Great Wall. They’d see the Eiffel Tower in Paris and the Colosseum in Rome and at night, by the light of the stars, they’d glide through Venice in a black wooden gondola.

“The moon above,” he sang, “is yours and mine….”

THE DAY AFTER THE FBI had come to the house he had found a few strands of his father’s hair in the bathtub. He had put them into an envelope and placed the envelope beneath the loose floorboard under his bed and promised himself that as long as he did not check to make sure that the envelope was still there—no peeking, was his rule—his father would be all right. But lately he had begun waking up every night in the barracks, convinced that the envelope was gone. “I should have taken it with me,” he said to himself. He worried that there were large messy people now living in his old room who played cards night and day and spilled sticky brown drinks all over the floor. He worried that the FBI had returned to the house to search one more time for contraband. We forgot to check under the floorboards. He worried that when he saw his father again after the war his father would be too tired to play catch with him under the trees. He worried that his father would be bald.

FROM TIME TO TIME they heard rumors of spies. Takizawa, people whispered, was a government informer. Possibly a Korean. Not to be trusted. So be careful what you say. Yamaguchi had close ties to the administration. Ishimoto had been attacked late one night behind the latrines by three masked men carrying lead pipes. They say he was providing the FBI with the names of pro-Japan disloyals.

“WHAT DO I miss the most? The sound of the trees at night… also, chocolate.”

“And plums, Mama. You miss plums.”

“That’s right, I miss plums. I’ll always miss plums.”

“Maybe not always.”

“True, maybe not. There’s something that’s been bothering me, though.”

“What is it?”

“Did I leave the porch light on or off?”

“On.”

“And the stove. Did I remember to turn off the stove?”

“You always turned off the stove.”

“Did I?”

“Every time.”

“Did we even have a stove?”

“Of course we had a stove.”

“That’s right. The Wedgewood. I used to be quite the cook once, you know.”

SLOWLY THE BOY SPUN the dial. He heard organ music playing on the Salt Lake City station. Then rhumba music. A swing band. An ad for Dr. Fisher’s tablets for intestinal sluggishness. “Folks,” a man asked, “do you feel headachy and pepless in the morning?” “Nope,” said the boy. Then the news came on, and the Western Task Force was landing in Morocco, and the Central, at Oran, and in the Pacific Islands the American forces were dying all over the place.

He closed his eyes and imagined himself fighting with Hank and the Raiders down in the Solomon Islands. Or flying reconnaissance over Mindanao. Maybe he’d take a direct hit over Leyte and he’d have to eject. He’d float slowly down to earth beneath a flaming silk parachute and land softly in some bushes, or on a white sandy beach, and General MacArthur would wade up onto shore and give him the Purple Heart. “You did your best, son,” he’d say, and then they’d shake hands.

NOW WHEN THE GIRL UNDRESSED — always, the quick flick of the wrists and then the criss-crossing arms and the yellow dress billowing up over her head like a parachute in reverse—she asked him to turn away. She told him about the seasons and hibernation. She said that any day now she’d be bleeding. “It’ll be red,” she said. She told him that Franklin Masuda had a terrible case of athlete’s foot—“He showed me”—and that someone had stuffed a newborn baby into a trash can in Block 29.

“What did it look like?” the boy asked.

“You don’t want to know.”

“Yes I do.”

She said that Mrs. Kimura was really a man, and that a girl in Block 12 had been found lying naked with a guard in the back of a truck. She said that all the real stuff happened only at night.

The boy said, “I know.”

One night he found her squatting outside beneath his window with a tin spoon from the mess hall.

“I’m digging a hole to China,” she said. On the ground beside her lay the tortoise. Its head and legs were tucked up inside its shell and it was not moving. Had not moved for several days. Was dead. My fault, the boy thought, but he had not told a soul. Night after night he had lain awake waiting to hear the sound of the scrabbling claws but all he had heard was the banging of a loose door in the wind.

She placed the tortoise in the bottom of the hole and filled up the hole with sand and then she shoved the spoon deep down into the earth. “We’ll dig him up in the spring,” she said. “We’ll resurrect him.”

HE WAS THERE, above his mother’s cot. Jesus. In color. Four inches by six. A picture postcard someone had once sent to her from the Louvre. Jesus had bright blue eyes and a kind but mysterious smile.

“Just like the Mona Lisa’s,” said the girl.

The boy thought He looked more like Mrs. Delaney, only with longer hair and a halo.

Jesus’ eyes were filled with a secret and flickering joy. With rapture. He’d died once—“for you,” said his mother, “for your sins”—and then he’d risen.

The girl said, “Mmm.” She said, “That’s divine.”

LATE AT NIGHT, in the darkness, he could hear his mother praying. “Our father, Who art in heaven…”

And in the morning, at sunrise, coming from the other side of the wall, the sound of the man next door chanting. “Kokyo ni taishite keirei.”

Salute to the Imperial Palace.

NOW WHENEVER HE THOUGHT of his father he saw him at sundown, leaning against a fence post in Lordsburg, in the camp for dangerous enemy aliens. “My daddy’s an outlaw,” he whispered. He liked the sound of that word. Outlaw. He pictured his father in cowboy boots and a black Stetson, riding a big beautiful horse named White Frost. Maybe he’d rustled some cattle, or robbed a bank, or held up a stage coach, or—like the Dalton brothers—even a whole entire train, and now he was just doing his time with all of the other men.

He’d be thinking these things, and then the image would suddenly float up before him: his father, in his bathrobe and slippers, being led away across the lawn. Into the car, Papa-san.

HE’LL BE BACK any day now. Any day.

Just say he went away on a trip.

Keep your mouth shut and don’t say a thing.

Stay inside.

Don’t leave the house.

Travel only in the daytime.

Do not converse on the telephone in Japanese.

Do not congregate in one place.

When in town if you meet another Japanese do not greet him in the Japanese manner by bowing.

Remember, you’re in America.

Greet him in the American way by shaking his hand.

NONE OF THE OTHER FATHERS had been taken away in their slippers. Ben Okada’s father had been arrested in his golf shoes while practicing his swing on the lawn. Woodrow Teshima’s father had been arrested in black wingtips and a rented tuxedo at a Buddhist wedding in Alameda. And Sugar Sawada’s father, who had already lost a foot and some of his memory—only the bad ones, Mrs. Sawada had always insisted, with a friendly wink and a smile—in the First World War, had bowed once toward the east before being hauled away drunk in his single black boot, waving his crutches and shouting, “Banzai! Banzai! Banzai!”

Sometimes the boy comforted himself with the thought of Tommy Tanaka’s father, who had been wearing white toe socks and an old pair of wooden geta when the FBI had caught him red-handed in the garden, cutting down last year’s chrysanthemum stalks.

Geta, the boy decided, were worse than slippers.

Much worse.

“SOMETIMES,” SAID HIS MOTHER, “I’ll look up at the clock and it’s half past five and I’m sure that he’s on his way home from the office. And then I’ll start to panic. ‘It’s late,’ I’ll think to myself. ‘I should have started the rice by now.’”

THE TREES APPEARED suddenly, and without warning, on a sunny day in late November. They were willow saplings, trucked in on flatbeds from some faraway place. The mountains, perhaps. Or the banks of a river. Someplace where there was water. All day long the men in each block planted the trees in front of the mess halls and at evenly spaced intervals along either side of the firebreaks. Sweat covered their brows as the broad blades of their shovels twisted and flashed in the sun.

At the end of the day, when nobody was looking, the boy plucked a small green leaf from a tree and slipped it into his pocket. The next morning he put it into an envelope and sent it to Lordsburg.

“THE SOIL’S TOO ALKALINE,” said his mother. “Those trees won’t last through the winter.” She stood by the window in her nightgown slowly brushing her hair. Outside it was beginning to snow. Two searchlights crossed in the darkness and fanned out across the fence and then they went out. A few seconds later they went on again. She pulled out a gray hair from her head and let it fall to the floor. “I’ll sweep it up in the morning,” she said. Then she turned to him. “I lost an earring on the train. Did I ever tell you that?”

He shook his head.

“It fell off somewhere between Provo and Nephi. I haven’t felt right ever since.”

He watched as she twisted her hair into a rope and pinned it up in a bun. Her hair was dark and shiny in the light but her eyes were tired. “You look okay,” he said. He did not remember his mother wearing earrings on the train.

She closed her eyes for a moment and then she opened them wide. “I wonder where it went.”

“What did it look like?”

“It looked like a pearl,” she said. “It was a pearl.”

“Maybe it rolled behind the seat.”

“Or maybe,” she said, “it’s just gone. Sometimes things disappear and there’s no getting them back. That’s just how it is.”

He picked up the gray hair off the floor and held it up to the light. She looked at him and then at the strand of her hair in his hand and then she turned off the light and they stood there quietly in the darkness watching the snow fall across the black barrack roofs. The snow was clean and white and blowing in gusts. “I had no business wearing those earrings in the first place,” she said after a while. “No business at all.”

BY MORNING the snow had turned to slush and a bitter wind was blowing down through the Wasatch Mountains. “Bundle up,” said his mother. She ripped out the pages from the Sears, Roebuck catalog and stuffed them into the cracks in the walls. She covered the knotholes with the lids of tin cans. She brought back buckets of coal from the coal pile that occasionally appeared in the middle of the road and she lit a fire in the stove. When the War Relocation Authority announced it would be distributing military surplus from the First World War she stood in line for two hours and brought back ear-muffs and canvas leggings and three size 44 navy pea coats.

The boy put on a coat and stared at his reflection in the broken mirror. His hair was long and uncombed and his face was dark brown from the sun. The coat hung down past his knees. He narrowed his eyes and stuck out his two front teeth.

I predge arregiance to the frag… 

Whatsamalla, Shorty?

Solly. So so solly.

He poked his thumb through a hole in the wool. “Moths,” he said.

“Try bullets,” said the girl.

Their mother pulled out a needle and a spool of black Boilfast thread. She pulled out a thimble. “Let’s have a look,” she said.

THE TEMPERATURE DROPPED to ten degrees. Five. More than once, to twenty below. Ice weighed down the thin black branches of the trees and the sheets on the laundry lines froze into strange wind-blown shapes. They are frozen white sails, the boy thought to himself. Some days the wind blew from every direction all at once and the boy could not walk without falling. Small birds lost their way and dropped out of the sky. Hungry coyotes crept in beneath the barbed-wire fence and fought with the stray dogs for scraps of food. A man disappeared and was found frozen to death three days later, ten miles west of the mountains. His face was calm and smiling, they said. His eyes were closed. He had simply lain down beneath the stars and gone to sleep. Below his head, folded into a perfect red square, was a piece of tattered old silk. In his hand was the tin handle of a bucket. They could not pry it loose from his fingers.

THE GIRL STOOD in front of the cracked mirror, staring at the red dot on her chin. She touched it again and again. She said, “Darling, kissy kiss.” She said, “Just one.” Then she frowned and she bared her teeth. They were small and bright and round, like hard glittering stones.

Gently he tapped her arm.

“What?” she said, but she was not talking to him. She was talking to her reflection in the glass. “What? What? What?”

“The horse meat.”

“What about it?”

“Where do they get it?”

She puckered her lips. “From horses.”

“What kind?”

She looked at him in the mirror. “The dead kind.”

He turned the mirror around so it faced the wall.

She went to the window and looked out across the black windswept barracks. Far away, on the other side of the fence, giant tumbleweeds were slowly rolling across the basin. Some of the horse meat, she explained, came from the racetrack. If a horse went down with a broken leg they destroyed it after the race and sent it to the cannery. But most of the horse meat came from wild horses. “They round them up in the desert,” she said, “and then they shoot them.” She asked if he remembered the wild mustangs they had seen through the window of the train and he said that he did. They had long black tails and dark flowing manes and he had watched them galloping in the moonlight across the flat dusty plain and then for three nights in a row he had dreamed of them.

“Those are the ones,” she said.

THREE IN THE MORNING. The dead time. Empty of dreams. He lay awake in the darkness worrying about the bicycle he’d left behind, chained to the trunk of the persimmon tree. Had the tires gone flat yet? Were the spokes rusted and clogged with weeds? Was the key to the lock still hidden in the shed?

But it was the little tin bell that troubled him most. His father had not fastened it securely to the handlebars. “I’ll put in the screws tomorrow,” he’d said. This was a long time ago. This was months and months ago, when the air still smelled of trees and freshly cut grass and the roses were just beginning to bloom.

“You never did,” whispered the boy.

By now, he was sure of it, the little tin bell was gone.

On December 7 it will have been a year since I last saw you. I read your letters every night before I go to bed. So far the winter here has been mild. This morning I woke up at dawn and watched the sun rise. I saw a bald eagle flying toward the mountains. I am in good health and exercise for half an hour after every meal. Please take care of yourself and be helpful to your mother.

FOR FOUR DAYS after his arrest they had not known where he was. The phone had not rung—the FBI had cut the wires—and they could not withdraw any money from the bank. “Your account’s been frozen,” the boy’s mother had been told. At dinner she set the table for four, and every night before they went to bed she walked out to the front porch and slipped her house key beneath the potted chrysanthemum. “He’ll know where to look,” she said.

On the fifth day she received a short note in the mail from the immigration detention center in San Francisco. Still awaiting my loyalty hearing. Do not know when my case will be heard, or how much longer I will be here. Eighty-three Japanese have already been sent away on a train. Please come see me as soon as possible. She packed a small suitcase full of her husband’s things—clothes, towels, a shaving kit, a spare pair of eyeglasses, nose drops, a bar of Yardley soap, a first-aid book—and took the next train across the bay.

“Was he still wearing his slippers?” the boy asked her when she returned.

She said that he was. And his bathrobe, too. She said that he had not showered or shaved for days. Then she smiled. “He looked like a hobo,” she said.

That night she had set the table for three.

IN THE MORNING she had sent all of the boy’s father’s suits to the cleaners except for one: the blue pin-striped suit he had worn on his last Sunday at home. The blue suit was to remain on the hanger in the closet. “He asked me to leave it there, for you to remember him by.”

But whenever the boy thought of his father on his last Sunday at home he did not remember the blue suit. He remembered the white flannel robe. The slippers. His father’s hatless silhouette framed in the back window of the car. The head stiff and unmoving. Staring straight ahead. Straight ahead and into the night as the car drove off slowly into the darkness. Not looking back. Not even once. Just to see if he was there.

CHRISTMAS DAY. Gray skies. A bitter cold. In the mess halls there were pine trees decorated with stars cut out of tin cans and on radios throughout the barracks Bing Crosby was singing “White Christmas.” Turkey was served for supper, and candy and gifts from the Quakers and the American Friends Service were distributed to the children in every block. The boy received a small red Swiss Army knife from a Mrs. Ida Little of Akron, Ohio. May the Lord look down upon you always, she had written. He sent her a prompt thank you note and carried the knife with him in his pocket wherever he went. Sometimes, when he was running, he could hear it clacking against his lucky blue stone from the sea and for a moment he felt very happy. His pockets were filled with good things.

THE WINTER SEEMED to last forever. There were outbreaks of flu and diarrhea and frequent shortages of coal. They had been assigned only two army blankets per person and at night the boy often fell asleep shivering. His hands were red and chapped from the cold. His throat was always sore. His sister left the barracks early in the morning and did not return until long after dark. She was always in a rush now. Her cheeks were flushed from the cold. “Where are you going?” “Out.” She ate all her meals with her friends. Never with the boy or his mother. She smoked cigarettes. He could smell them in her hair. One day he saw her standing in line at the mess hall in her Panama hat and she hardly seemed to recognize him at all.

Their old life seemed far away and remote to him now, like a dream he could not quite remember. The bright green grass, the roses, the house on the wide street not far from the sea—that was another time, a different year.

WHO WAS WINNING the war? Who was losing? His mother no longer wanted to know. She had stopped keeping track of the days. She no longer read the paper or listened to the bulletins on the radio. “Tell me when it’s over,” she said.

On days when there was hot water she went to the laundry room and washed all their clothes on the wooden washboard. Otherwise she had no tasks. She did not apply for a job as a nurse’s aide at the hospital, or as a timekeeper down on the project farm. The pay— sixteen dollars a month—was not worth it, she said. She did not give blood to the Red Cross or sit with the other mothers knitting wool socks and mufflers for the GIs who were fighting for freedom overseas.

Most days she did not leave the room at all.

She sat by the stove for hours, not talking. In her lap lay a half-finished letter. An unopened book. She wore a thick woolen scarf around her head to keep in the heat. A pair of baggy trousers. A heavy sweater. When the dinner bell rang she sat up with a start. “What is it?” she asked. “Who’s there?” In her mind there were always men at the door. We just need to ask your husband a few questions. She would stare down at her hands in her lap, as though surprised to find them still there. “Sometimes I don’t know if I’m awake or asleep.”

“You’re awake,” the boy would tell her.

SHE SAID she no longer had any appetite. Food bored her. “Go ahead and eat without me,” she said. The boy brought back food for her from the mess hall—a plate full of beans, a mound of pickled cabbage—and pressed a fork into her hand. But before it had even reached her mouth she stopped and stared out the window. “What is it?” he asked her. “Tell me what you want. Do you want rice?”

She said she didn’t want rice. She didn’t want anything anymore. Not a thing.

But every once in a while she got a faraway look in her eyes and he knew she was thinking of some other place. A better place. “Just once,” she told him, “I’d like to look out the window and see the sea.”

ONE DAY she said she couldn’t bear it anymore. The wind. The dust. The endless waiting. The couple next door constantly fighting. She hung a white sheet from a rope and called it a curtain and behind the white curtain she lay down on her cot and she closed her eyes and she slept. She dreamed. Of warm nights in Kagoshima and chirping bell crickets and red paper lanterns drifting one by one down the river. “I was a girl again. I was five years old and fishing for trout with my father.”

“What kind of fishing pole?” asked the boy. “Was it bamboo?”

For the first time in months he thought he saw her smile.

“Yes it was,” she said. “Bamboo. Bamboo.”

IN THE HOUSE where his mother was born there were rice paper windows and sliding wooden doors and tatami mats that lay side by side on the bare wooden floors. In the evening she would catch fireflies in the rice paddies and bring them home in a brown paper bag. All night long she would sit at her desk and practice writing Chinese characters by the fireflies’ pale glowing light.

She said she’d had six older sisters and one younger brother who’d died of scarlet fever when he was four. “I still think of him every day,” she said. She said that once a year, on her birthday, her mother would make her rice with red azuki beans. “That was a treat,” she said, and then she grew quiet. She closed her eyes and lay very still on the cot. She lay there for a long long time, breathing slowly in and out until the boy could no longer tell if she was awake or asleep.

TWO NIGHTS BEFORE they had left for Tanforan he had helped her bury the silver in the garden beneath the statue of the fat laughing Buddha. It was spring, and the earth was black and damp and full of worms. He had watched them squirming in the moonlight.

“Hurry up,” his mother had said.

He had touched the worms with his shovel. Some of them he had cut in half. Then the moon disappeared and a light rain was falling and water was dripping down through the leaves and the branches and onto his mother’s face.

But even before the rain, he remembered now, her face had been wet.

“WHEN I FIRST MET your father I wanted to be with him all the time.”

“I know what you mean.”

“If I was away from him for even five minutes, I’d start to miss him. I’d think, He’s never coming back. I’ll never see him again. But after a while I stopped being so afraid. Things change.”

“I guess so.”

“The night of his arrest, he asked me to go get him a glass of water. We’d just gone to bed and I was so tired. I was exhausted. So I told him to go get it himself. ‘Next time I will,’ he said, and then he rolled over and went right to sleep. Later, as they were taking him away, all I could think was, Now he’ll always be thirsty.”

“They probably gave him a drink at the station.”

“I should have brought it to him.”

“You didn’t know.”

“Even now, in my dreams, he’s still searching for water.”

IN THE MIDDLE of the night the boy thought he heard a sound. The steady thwack of a rope against dirt. He sat up and looked out the window and saw his sister jumping rope in the moonlight in her yellow summer dress. Her legs were long and thin. Her knees were scabbed. Her calves were pitted with scars from the sand and grit that blew night and day in the wind. She shouldn’t be wearing dresses, he thought to himself.

He went out and stood to one side of the door in the darkness. She did not see him and continued to jump. First on one leg, then on the other, then with her arms crossing and uncrossing until the rope pulled up short on her shoe and she tripped. She stomped her foot once in the dirt and tossed down the rope. “You better come in now,” he said quietly. “You’ll catch cold.”

She looked over at him. “How long have you been standing there?”

“A long time.”

“How did I look?”

“Good. You’re a good jumper.”

“I’m terrible. I don’t even deserve to hold the rope.”

He walked over to where she was standing and picked up the rope and looked at it. It was white and frayed. A piece of old clothesline she must have cut down from a pole. He imagined a line of white sheets sailing up into the air and out beyond the fence. “You better come in now,” he said again.

“I’m not here.”

He did not answer her.

“I’m a terrible jumper.”

“You’re awful.”

“The worst.”

He held out the rope to her. “Take it,” he said.

She grabbed one end of the rope and with the other end held tightly in his hand he led her slowly back into the barracks.

IN THE MORNING she woke burning with fever. Their mother brought her a tin cup filled with water and told her to drink but the girl refused. She said she wasn’t thirsty. “Nothing’s passing through these lips,” she said. She pulled back the blanket and began to pick at a scab on her knee. The boy grabbed her wrist and said, “Don’t.” She turned away and looked out the window. A woman in a pink bathrobe walked by carrying a chamberpot toward the latrines. “Where are we?” the girl asked. “What happened to all the trees? What country is this anyway?” She said she’d seen their father walking alone by the side of the road. “He was coming to take us away.” She looked down at her watch and asked how it had gotten to be so late. “It’s six o’clock,” she said. “He should have been here by now.”

IN FEBRUARY a team of army recruiters arrived looking for volunteers, and the loyalty questionnaire was given to every man and woman over the age of seventeen.

Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty, wherever ordered?

The man next door answered no and was sent away along with his wife and his wife’s mother to join the other disloyals at Tule Lake. The following year they were repatriated to Japan on the U.S.S. Gripsholm.

Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and faithfully defend the United States from any or all attack by foreign or domestic forces, and forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese Emperor, or any other foreign government, power or organization?

“What allegiance?” asked the boy’s mother. She said she had nothing to forswear. She’d been in America for almost twenty years now. But she did not want to cause any trouble—“The nail that sticks up gets hammered down”—or be labeled disloyal. She did not want to be sent back to Japan. “There’s no future for us there. We’re here. Your father’s here. The most important thing is that we stay together.”

She answered yes.

They stayed.

Loyalty. Disloyalty. Allegiance. Obedience.

“Words,” she said, “it’s all just words.”

INSIDE THE RUSTED PEACH TIN, a sudden burst of yellow.

The boy touched the petals with his finger again and again. “Gloria,” he whispered. It was March, and the nights were no longer so cold. The scorpions had become numerous again, and the earth was beginning to soften. The girl shoveled up spoonfuls of sand from beneath the barrack window but she could not find the tortoise. “He left without us,” she said.

Only the willow trees had not survived the winter. Their sap had not risen. Their branches were still bare. The girl broke off a twig and put it between her teeth. “Dead,” she said.

Secretly, the boy blamed himself. I shouldn’t have plucked that leaf…. 

He began taking long walks again, only alone now, without his sister. Beyond the fence he saw the dark shadows of the clouds floating across the sand. In the distance, the mountaintops still dotted with snow. Sometimes a jackrabbit crossed his path, or a stray dog hurried by carrying something dark and furry in its mouth. Horned toads leaped across the dry white stones. Lizards basked in the sun. And somewhere out there in the desert a lone tortoise was wandering slowly, steadily, toward the thin blue edge of the horizon.

THERE WERE DAYS, after rain, when the air suddenly filled with the sharp tang of sage. His mother would rise up from her cot and go to the window and take a deep breath. “Unearthly,” she’d utter.

ON A WARM EVENING in April a man was shot dead by the barbed-wire fence. The guard who was on duty said the man had been trying to escape. He’d called out to him four times, the guard said, but the man had ignored him. Friends of the dead man said he had simply been taking his dog for a walk. He might not have heard the guard, they said, because he was hard of hearing. Or because of the wind. One man who had gone to the scene of the accident right after the shooting had noticed a rare and unusual flower on the other side of the fence. It was his belief that his friend had been reaching out to pick the flower when the shot had been fired.

At the funeral there were nearly two thousand people. The casket was strewn with hundreds of crepe-paper flowers. Hymns were sung. The body was blessed. Years later the boy would recall standing beside his mother at the service, wondering just what kind of flower it was the man had seen.

A rose? A tulip? A daffodil?

And if he had plucked it. Then what?

He imagined exploding ships, clouds of black smoke, hundreds of B-29s falling down in flames from the sky. One false move, pal, and you’re dead.

THE HEAT RETURNED. The sun rose higher and higher in the sky. The war did not end. In May the first group of army volunteers left the barracks for Fort Douglas, and a four-year-old girl in Block 31 was stricken with infantile paralysis. Several days later, the street signs appeared. Suddenly there was an Elm Street, a Willow Street, a Cottonwood Way. Alexandria Avenue ran from east to west past the administration offices. Greasewood Way led straight to the sewer pump. “It doesn’t look like we’ll be leaving here any time soon,” said the boy’s mother.

“At least we know where we are,” said the girl.

Now he’ll know where to find us, thought the boy.

The days were long now, and filled with sun, and there had been no mail from Lordsburg for many weeks.

EVERY DAY SEEMED to pass more slowly than the day before. The boy spent hours pacing back and forth across the floor of his room. He counted his steps. He closed his eyes and recited the names of his old classmates whenever a dark ugly thought—he’s sick, he’s dead, he’s been sent back to Japan—tried to push its way into his head. He asked his mother when she thought the next letter from Lordsburg might arrive in the mail. Tomorrow, maybe? “Tomorrow’s Sunday.” What about Monday? “I wouldn’t count on it.” What if he stopped biting his nails and remembered to do everything the first time he was told? And said his prayers every night before bed? And ate all of his coleslaw even when it was touching the other food on his plate? “That might just do the trick.”

SUMMER WAS a long hot dream. Every morning, as soon as the sun rose, the temperature began to soar. By noon the floors were sagging. The sky was bleached white from the heat and the wind was hot and dry. Yellow dust devils whirled across the sand. The black roofs baked in the sun. The air shimmered.

The boy tossed pebbles into the coal bucket. He peered into other people’s windows. He drew pictures of airplanes and tanks with his favorite stick in the sand. He traced out an SOS in huge letters across the firebreak but before anyone could read what he had written he wiped the letters away.

Late at night he lay awake on top of the sheets longing for ice, a section of orange, a stone, something, anything, to suck on, to quench his thirst. It was June now. Or maybe it was July. It was August. The calendar had fallen from the wall. The tin clock had stopped ticking. Its gears were clotted with dust and would not turn. His sister was sound asleep on her cot and his mother lay dreaming behind the white curtain. He lifted a hand to his mouth. There was a loose molar there, on top, way in back. He liked to touch it. To rock it back and forth in its socket. The motion soothed him. Sometimes he’d taste blood and then he’d swallow. Salty, he’d think to himself, like the sea. In the distance he could hear trains passing in the night. The pounding of hooves on the sand. The faint tinkle of a tin bell.

He’d close his eyes. That’s him, he’d think. He’s on his way.

HE COULD COME BACK on a horse. On a bike. In a train. On a plane. In the same unmarked car that had once taken him away. He could be wearing a blue pin-striped suit. A red silk kimono. A grass skirt. A cowboy hat. A halo. A dark gray fedora with a leaf tucked up under the brim. Maybe he’d touch it—the leaf—and then he’d raise his hand slowly into the air, as though he were Jesus, or the man with the withered arm, or even General Douglas MacArthur. “I have returned,” he’d say. Then his eyes would light up and he’d reach down into his pocket and pull out a single white pearl. “I found this by the side of the road,” he’d say. “Any idea whose it might be?”

It could happen like that.

OR MAYBE the boy would be lying in bed one night and he’d hear a knock, a soft tap. “Who is it?” he’d say. “It’s me.” He’d open the door and see his father standing there in his white flannel bathrobe all covered with dust. “It’s a long walk from Lordsburg,” his father would say. Then they would shake hands, or maybe they’d even hug.

“Did you get my letters?” he’d ask his father.

“You bet I did. I read every single one of them. I got that leaf, too. I thought of you all the time.”

“I thought of you too,” the boy would say.

He’d bring his father a glass of water and they would sit down side by side on the cot. Outside the window the moon would be bright and round. The wind would be blowing. He’d rest his head on his father’s shoulder and smell the dust and the sweat and the faint smell of Burma Shave and everything would be very nice. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he’d notice his father’s big toe sticking out through a hole in his slipper. “Papa,” he’d say.

“What is it?”

“You forgot to put on your shoes.”

His father would look down at his feet and he’d shake his head with surprise. “Son of a gun,” he’d say. “Would you look at that.” Then he’d just shrug. He’d lean back on the cot and make himself comfortable. He’d pull out his pipe. A box of matches. He’d smile. “Now tell me what I missed,” he’d say. “Tell me everything.”




IN A STRANGER’S BACKYARD


When we came back after the war it was fall and the house was still ours. The trees on the streets were taller than we remembered, and the cars more run down, and the rosebush our mother had once planted alongside the narrow gravel path that led up to the front steps of our house was no longer there. We had left in the spring, when the magnolia trees were still in bloom, but now it was fall and the leaves on the trees were beginning to turn and where our mother’s rosebush had once stood there was only a clump of dead weeds. Broken bottles were scattered across the yard, and the juniper hedge by the side of the porch looked as though it had not been watered, even once, during the years we had been away.

We carried our dusty suitcases up the narrow gravel path. It was late in the day and a cool breeze was blowing in off the bay and in the yard of the house next door a man in his shirt sleeves was slowly raking leaves. We did not know him. He was not the same man who had lived in that house before the war. He leaned on his rake and nodded once in our direction but our mother did not wave to him or nod her head, even slightly, in return. There were many people, she had warned us, who would not be happy to learn we had come back into town. Perhaps this man was one of these people—a member of the American Legion, or the Homefront Commandos, or one of the Native Sons of the Golden West—or perhaps he was simply a man with a rake our mother had chosen not to see, we did not know.

At the top of the porch steps she reached into her blouse and pulled out the key to the front door, which she had worn, on a long silver chain, the entire time we had been away. Every morning, in the place where we had lived during the war, she had reached for the key as soon as she woke, just to make sure it was still there. And every evening, before she closed her eyes, she had touched the key one last time. Sometimes, in the middle of the day, she had stroked its jagged ridges with her thumb as she stared out the barrack window. Once, when she thought no one was looking, we even saw her put it into her mouth and close her eyes with delight. It was spring, and the air smelled of sage, and she was reading a letter from our father. We turned our heads away. The key had become a part of her. It was always there, a small, dark shape, dangling—visibly and sometimes invisibly, depending on the light, and what she was wearing, and even, at times, it seemed, on her mood—just beneath the surface of her clothes. If she took it off, surely terrible things would happen. Our house—that faraway speck on the map—would fall down, or go up in flames, or simply disappear. The war would last forever. Our mother would cease to be.

But now we watched as she pulled the chain up over her head—she did this effortlessly, naturally, as though it were something she did every day—and slid the key into the lock. Her hands were steady. Her fingers did not tremble. The wind was blowing through the branches of the trees and in the yard next door a man we did not know was slowly raking leaves. Our mother had not waved to him. She turned the key once in the lock. She turned the key twice. We heard a click and then the door swung open and she took off her hat and stepped into the foyer and after three years and five months we were suddenly, finally, home.

THE HOUSE DID NOT smell good. We did not care. The paint was peeling away from the walls and the window frames were black with rot. Shreds of lace curtain dangled in front of the soot-covered panes and the floor was littered with empty food tins and shards of broken glass. Against the far wall where the piano had once stood we saw our mother’s felt-covered card table beneath a pile of old newspapers. Nearby, in the corner, three folding chairs. A metal stool. A broken gooseneck lamp. The rest of our furniture was gone. It did not matter. We were home. We were lucky to be home. Many of the people who had come back with us on the train had no homes to return to at all. Tonight they would be sleeping in hostels and churches and on cots at the YMCA.

We put down our things and ran from one room to the next shouting out, “Fire! Help! Wolf!” simply because we could. We flung open the windows and doors. The smell of the sea blew through the empty rooms of the house and soon the other smell, the smell of people we did not know (they drank milk, they ate butter, they ate cheese, all these things our mother claimed she could tell from their smell) began to fade away.

We had not smelled the sea in years.

In the kitchen we turned on the faucet and watched the water come pouring out of the pipes. At first the water was brown with rust and then it ran clear. We lowered our heads to the faucet and drank. Our throats were dry from the long ride back and our clothes were covered with dust. Our mother let the water run over her hands and then she turned off the faucet and wiped her hands on the front of her dress and walked out the back door and into the yard and stood on the tall weedy grass in the shade of the trees as the leaves fell all around her.

This was a strange and unfamiliar sight: our mother, in shade, beneath trees. We watched as she caught a falling leaf in her hand and held it up to the light. We watched as she let the leaf go. In the place we had come from there was sun but no shade and the only time we ever saw trees was at night, in our dreams.

MANY PEOPLE HAD LIVED in our house while we were away but we did not know who they were, or where they had gone, or why we had never received a single check in the mail from the man who had promised to rent out our house. This man was a lawyer, his name was Milt Parker, he had shown up at our door the day after the evacuation orders had been posted and offered our mother his services. “I’ll take care of everything,” Mr. Parker had said. But where was he now? And where was our money? And why had our mother been so quick to open the door to a stranger? Because strangers had knocked on our door before. And what had happened? Nothing good. Nothing good. They had taken our father away.

“Fool,” our mother said now, “I was a fool.”

Upstairs, in the rooms where we had once slept, and dreamed, and many times fought, we found soiled mattresses and old magazines filled with pictures of naked young men and women. Their bodies were perfect. Their skin, smooth and pale. Their limbs were wrapped around each other in ways we did not yet know were possible. “You’ll know soon enough,” we heard our mother utter softly, under her breath, as she tossed the magazines aside, although later she would deny that this was true. (But it was true, she had said it, we would know.)

At the end of the hall, in the room where she had locked up our most valuable things—the View-Master, the Electrolux, our collection of old Dime Detectives, the wedding china that she had set out only on Sundays (Why didn’t we use those dishes every day of the week? she would later ask)—there was hardly anything left at all. Empty boxes were scattered across the floor, and on top of the windowsill, lined up in a neat row, stood the remnants of some long-ago game of Monopoly: a pair of white dice, a tiny red hotel, the smallest green wooden house in the world.

Water had seeped through a crack in the ceiling and on the walls there were brown stains and words scrawled in red ink that made us turn away. “We will paint them over,” said our mother, and several months later, when we had money to buy paint, we did, but for years we could not get those words out of our heads.

THAT NIGHT, the night of our first day back in the world, the world from which we had earlier been sent away, we locked all the windows and doors and unrolled our blankets on the floor of the room at the foot of the stairs that looked out onto the street. Without thinking, we had sought out the room whose dimensions—long and narrow, with two windows on one end and a door at the other—most closely resembled those of the room in the barracks in the desert where we had lived during the war. Without thinking, we had configured ourselves exactly as we had in that long narrow room during the war: our mother in the far corner, away from the windows, the two of us lying head to toe along the wall on the opposite side of the room. Without thinking, we had chosen to sleep, together, in a room, with our mother, even though for more than three years we had been dreaming of the day when we could finally sleep, alone, in our own rooms, in our old house, our old white stucco house on the broad tree-lined street not far from the sea.

When the war is over, our mother had said.

As we tried to fall asleep in that white stucco house we could not stop thinking of the stories we had heard about the people who had come back before us. One man’s house had been doused with gasoline and set on fire while his family lay sleeping inside. Another man’s shed had been dynamited. There had been shootings in the valley, and gravestone defacings, and unannounced visitors knocking on doors in the middle of the night.

Nice to see you again, neighbor. How long do you plan on staying in town?

There aren’t any jobs here. I’d think about moving on if I were you.

People around here have got plans for you.

Plans, we wondered. What kinds of plans?

For what seemed like hours we lay awake beneath the blankets in our very best clothes—“We will not be caught dead in our pajamas,” our mother had said— waiting for the sound of gunfire, or a sharp rap on the door, but all we heard was the wind in the trees and the passing of cars outside on the street and finally, toward dawn, the familiar sound of our mother snoring.

WE WERE FREE NOW, free to go wherever we wanted to go, whenever we pleased. There were no more armed guards, no more searchlights, no more barbed-wire fences. Our mother went out to the market and brought back the first fresh pears we had eaten in years. She brought back eggs, and rice, and many cans of beans. When our ration books arrived, she told us, she would buy us fresh meat. She dug up the silver she had buried in the garden before we had left and she set the card table for three. The knives were still sharp. The forks and spoons had not lost their shine. As we sat down in our chairs she reminded us to eat slowly, with our mouths closed and our heads held high above our plates. “Don’t shovel,” she said.

But we could not help ourselves. We were hungry. We were ravenous. We ate quickly, greedily, as though we were still in the mess hall barracks, where whoever finished first got seconds and slow eaters were left behind to make do with only one serving.

Later on, in the evening, we turned on the radio and heard one of the same programs we had listened to before the war— The Green Hornet—and it was as if we had never been away at all. Nothing’s changed, we said to ourselves. The war had been an interruption, nothing more. We would pick up our lives where we had left off and go on. We would go back to school again. We would study hard, every day, to make up for lost time. We would seek out our old classmates. “Where were you?” they’d ask, or maybe they would just nod and say, “Hey.” We would join their clubs, after school, if they let us. We would listen to their music. We would dress just like they did. We would change our names to sound more like theirs. And if our mother called out to us on the street by our real names we would turn away and pretend not to know her. We would never be mistaken for the enemy again!

THE TOWN SEEMED much the same as before. Grove Street was still Grove, and Tyler Street still Tyler. The pharmacy was still there at the end of the block, only now it had a new sign. The mornings were still foggy. The parks were still green. Swings still hung down from the trees (swings will always hang down from the trees) and children—well fed, laughing, with their heads tossed back into the wind—still swung. The girls on the streets still wore black Mary Janes. Their mothers still wore black pumps. The old man in the rumpled gray fedora was still standing at the corner calling out for his lost dog, Isadora, who had run away long long ago. Perhaps he is standing there still.

In the windows of the houses on our block we saw the faces of our old friends and neighbors: the Gilroys and the Myers, the Leahys, the Wongs, the two elderly Miss O’Gradys, from whose yard not a single tossed ball had ever been returned. They had all seen us leave, at the beginning of the war, had peered out through their curtains as we walked down the street with our enormous overstuffed suitcases. But none of them came out, that morning, to wish us goodbye, or good luck, or ask us where it was we were going (we didn’t know). None of them waved.

They’re afraid, our mother had said.

Keep on walking.

Hold your head up.

Whatever you do, don’t look back.

Now when we ran into these same people on the street they turned away and pretended not to see us. Or they nodded in passing and said, “Gorgeous day,” as though we had not been away at all. Once in a while someone would stop and ask our mother where we had been—“Haven’t seen you for a while,” that person might say, or “It’s been ages ”—and our mother simply lifted her head and smiled and replied, “Oh, away.”

For it was true. We had gone away and now we were back but our father had yet to come join us. In his letters he said he would be released any day now, any day. But when that day would be he could not say for sure. It could be tomorrow, or two weeks from tomorrow. It could be in six months.

Would he know who we were when he stepped off the train? (We were older now, and darker, from all the years in the sun. We had grown.)

What would he be wearing?

Would he have any hair left?

What would his first words be? (I’d like to… I’d love a… You don’t know how I’ve…)

And was it true, what we’d heard? (Disloyal… a traitor… a great fan of the Emperor’s.)

LATE AT NIGHT, in the barracks, we used to lie awake on our cots and discuss chocolate. We used to dream of milk shakes, and sodas, and toasted ham-and-cheese sandwiches. We used to dream of home. Did they miss us? Were they talking about us? Had they even noticed we were gone? Would they look at us funny when we came back because of where we had been? And so it seemed like a dream to be able to walk down to the corner store and buy a bar of candy and an ice-cold bottle of Coke. The girl behind the counter was older now, and prettier. She wore dark red lipstick and was swaying back and forth to a song on the radio whose words we did not yet know. When she saw us she turned down the music and stared.

“Coke’s still a nickel,” she said softly.

On our way home we looked for the place on the sidewalk where we had once carved our initials but that place was no longer there. We drank our Coca-Colas. We ate our chocolates and tossed the wrappers into the wind. We plucked a handful of flowers from someone’s front yard. We counted Okies on the street. We counted Negroes. We counted gold stars in our neighbors’ front windows. At the corner we stopped and bought a copy of the Gazette for our mother, who had sworn off the papers long ago. All that war news just wears out my eyes.

But now, now she could not get enough of the headlines.

Shirley Temple had just gotten married?

“Impossible!”

No nylon stockings in the stores until spring?

“If I’d known I never would have bothered to come back.”

And no two-way stretch girdles?

We saw her look down at her stomach in despair.

“Just suck it in!”

“What do you think I’ve been doing all these years?”

We tossed the flowers into her lap and ran back out onto the street.

THE WAR RELOCATION AUTHORITY had sent each person home with train fare and twenty-five dollars in cash. “It doesn’t add up,” our mother had said. Three years. Five months. Twenty-five dollars. Why not thirtyfive, or forty? Why not one hundred? Why even bother at all? Twenty-five dollars, we later learned, was the same amount given to criminals on the day they were released from prison. With this money our mother bought us each one new pair of shoes a full size too large. “You’ll grow into them,” she told us as we stuffed wads of tissue into the toes. She bought us new underthings, and washcloths, and a thick cotton mattress that we took turns sleeping on in the front room at the foot of the stairs until the night the whiskey bottle shattered the window. After the night the whiskey bottle shattered the window we dragged the mattress upstairs and slept in the room that faced the back of the house—the room with the words on the walls. Over the words our mother taped pictures of flowers torn from an old nursery calendar, and across the windows she hung some split rice-sack curtains so no one could see inside, and in the evening, when it began to grow dark, she wandered through the front rooms of the house turning off the lights one by one so no one would know we were home.

EVERY DAY, all around us, more and more men were coming home from the war. They were fathers and brothers and husbands. They were cousins and neighbors. They were sons. They arrived, by the thousands, on the huge battle-scarred ships that sailed into the bay. Some of them had seen combat on Okinawa and New Guinea. Some had fought on Guadalcanal. Some had made D-day landings in the Marshalls, on Saipan, Tinian, Luzon, and Leyte. Some had been found, more dead than alive, in prison camps in Manchuria and Ofuna at the end of the war.

They shoved bamboo splinters under our fingernails and made us kneel for hours.

We had to stand at attention with our hands at our sides while they beat us.

We were just numbers to them, mere slaves to the Emperor. We didn’t even have names. I was 326. San byaku ni ju roku.

We had to make deep bows, even to the coolies and the rickshaw runners.

If we go easy on the Japs we’re crazy.

Best day of my life? The day Harry dropped that beautiful bomb.

There were victory parades in their honor, with horses and trumpets and great showers of confetti. Mayors on windy platforms stood up and gave speeches, and children in red, white, and blue waved the flag. Squadrons of returning B-29s swooped down out of the sky and flew overhead in perfect formation as down below, on the streets, the crowds roared and wept and welcomed the good men home.

We kept up with the stories in the papers. More Rescued Prisoners Tell of Japan’s Torture Camps. Some Forced to Wear Metal Bits, Others Starved to Death. Trapped Yanks Doused with Gasoline and Turned into Human Torches. We listened to the interviews on the radio. Tell me, soldier, has it made a big di ference to you, losing your leg? We looked at ourselves in the mirror and did not like what we saw: black hair, yellow skin, slanted eyes. The cruel face of the enemy.

We were guilty.

Just put it behind you.

No good.

Let it go.

A dangerous people.

You’re free now.

Who could never be trusted again.

All you have to do is behave.

On the street we tried to avoid our own reflections wherever we could. We turned away from shiny surfaces and storefront windows. We ignored the passing glances of strangers. What kind of “ese” are you, Japanese or Chinese?

AT SCHOOL our new teachers were kind to us, and the students in our classes polite, but at lunchtime they would not sit with us, or invite us to join in their games, and not a single one of our old friends from before— friends who had once shouted out to us, Your house or mine? every afternoon, after school, and in whose backyards we had dug holes and built forts, friends whose mothers (tall, slender women in sparkling white kitchens) had invited us to stay for supper (“We’ll call your mother”) and whose fathers, on clear nights, had shown us the stars (“Now stand still and look up!”), friends with whom we had gone skating, every winter, at IceLand, and whose birthdays (Jimmy Buchanan, May 26, Edison Wong, October 3, the Trudeau twins, Cora and Dora, June 29) we still remember, to this day—came up to us to say, “Welcome back,” or “Good to see you,” or even seemed to remember who we were.

Perhaps they were embarrassed—we had written to them (hello, how are you, it’s very hot here in the desert) but only one person (Elizabeth, Elizabeth, where had she gone?) had bothered to write back.

Or maybe they were afraid. (Later, we would learn that the postman, Mr. DeNardo, had told them that anyone who wrote to us was guilty of helping the enemy. “Those people bombed Pearl Harbor! They deserved what they got.”)

Perhaps they had never expected us to come back and had put us out of their minds once and for all long ago. One day we were there and the next day, poof, our names had been crossed off the roll books, our desks and lockers, reassigned, we were gone.

And so we mostly kept to ourselves. We moved silently through the halls with our eyes fixed on some imaginary point far off in the distance. If there was whispering behind us—and there was—we did not hear it. If the other students called out to us unkindly—and they did, not often, but often enough—we did not hear them. In class we sat in the back where we hoped we would not be noticed. (Keep your head down and don’t cause any trouble, we’d been told, weeks before, in a mess hall lecture on “How to Behave in the Outside World.” Speak only English. Do not walk down the street in groups of more than three, or gather in restaurants in groups of more than five. Do not draw attention to yourselves in any way.) We spoke softly and did not raise our hands, not even when we knew the answers. We followed the rules. We took tests. We wrote compositions. The Happiest Day of My Life. What I Did Over My Summer Vacation. What I Would Like to Be When I Grow Up (a fireman, a movie star, I’d like to be you!). We stared out the windows. From time to time we glanced at the clock (soon the bell would ring and it would be after school and we could go home). Always, we were polite.

We said yes and no and no problem.

We said thank you.

Go ahead.

After you.

Don’t mention it.

Don’t worry about it.

Don’t even think about it.

When our teachers asked us if everything was all right we nodded our heads and said, yes, of course, everything was fine.

If we did something wrong we made sure to say excuse me (excuse me for looking at you, excuse me for sitting here, excuse me for coming back). If we did something terribly wrong we immediately said we were sorry (I’m sorry I touched your arm, I didn’t mean to, it was an accident, I didn’t see it resting there so quietly, so beautifully, so perfectly, so irresistibly, on the edge of the desk, I lost my balance and brushed against it by mistake, I was standing too close, I wasn’t watching where I was going, somebody pushed me from behind, I never wanted to touch you, I have always wanted to touch you, I will never touch you again, I promise, I swear…).

After school we gathered our books and walked home along the clean, sunlit streets, past the yellow fire hydrants and the bright green lawns now covered with leaves. Sometimes groups of boys would appear out of nowhere and circle us slowly on their bicycles without saying a word. Sometimes we heard whistling behind us but when we turned around there was nobody there. Sometimes one of us would suddenly stop on the sidewalk and point to a neighbor’s front window. Wasn’t that our mother’s Electrolux Mrs. Leahy was pushing back and forth across her living room floor? Didn’t the Gilroys’ mohair sofa look awfully familiar? Hadn’t we seen that rolltop desk in Mr. Thigpen’s library somewhere before? One day we even thought we saw our father himself flapping his arms up and down like a stork in Mrs. Murphy’s pale pink bedroom—what on earth was he doing over there?—but it was only Chang, the Murphys’ new houseboy, plumping pillows.

AT NIGHT we often heard footsteps on the stairs. The sudden creaking of floorboards. Strange sounds coming from the kitchen. Somebody was opening the cupboard. Somebody was raiding the icebox. Somebody was whistling to the tune, “Let me straddle my old saddle beneath the western sky….” Somebody was tapping, softly, at the back door (It’s him!). We’d go out into the hall and see our mother standing in the darkness by the window in her thin cotton nightgown, peering out through a gap in the curtains. “Just keeping an eye on things,” she’d say. Or she would motion us over and point to the dark empty spot in our front yard. “Where’s my rosebush?” she’d whisper.

During the daytime she spent hours scrubbing the layers of dirt off the floors. “Who were these people?” she asked us again and again. She dusted and swept and cooked. She washed the windows with lemon juice and vinegar and replaced the broken glass panes with tin squares. On sunny afternoons she went out into the backyard in her work gloves and her floppy straw hat and she raked up the fallen leaves into piles, which we jumped in and scattered once more to the wind. She cleared the weeds from the overgrown pathways. She pruned back the hedges. She tore out the rotting trellis from the middle of the garden, which had seeded itself and gone wild. Deep down in the underbrush, she found things. A doll’s head. A lady’s black silk stocking. A stone Buddha lying facedown in the dirt. “So that’s where you were.” We lifted it for her gently, brushed off the fat belly, saw the enormous round head, uptilted, still laughing.

In the evening, as darkness fell and casseroles rose and men did or did not come home from the office, we often found her sitting on the high metal stool in the kitchen with her back to the window, slowly filing her nails.

“So quiet,” she’d say.

WE USED TO LIVE in the desert. We used to wake, every morning, to the blast of a siren. We used to stand in line for our meals three times a day. We used to stand in line for our mail. We used to stand in line to get coal. We used to stand in line whenever we had to shower or use the latrine. We used to hear the wind hissing day and night through the sagebrush. We used to hear coyotes. We used to hear every word spoken by our neighbors on the other side of the thin barrack wall. Where’s my razor, where’s my comb, who took my toothpaste… ? We used to steal lumber from the lumber pile when the guards were not looking. We used to steal gum from the canteen. We used to place nails on the tire tracks left behind by the Jeeps that made the rounds at the end of the day. We used to go swimming in the irrigation ditch. We used to play marbles. We used to play hopscotch. We used to play war. I’ll be MacArthur and you be the enemy! We used to try and imagine what it would be like when we finally returned home.

Our phone would ring off the hook. (“How was it?”)

Neighborhood ladies bearing angel food cakes would line up at our front door to welcome us back (“Yoo hoo, we know you’re in there!”).

On Saturday afternoons we’d arrive at the picture show just as the lights were going down and make everyone stand up in their seats to let us pass by (“Excuse me, pardon me, pardon me…”).

On Sundays we’d spend all day in the park flying kites.

We would accept all invitations. Go everywhere. Do everything, to make up for all the years we had missed while we were away. Yes, the world would be ours once again: warm days, blue skies, the endless green lawns, cold frosted glasses of pink lemonade, bicycles skidding across the gravel, little white dogs on long leashes with their noses pressed hard to the ground, the streetlamps coming on every evening at dusk, in the distance the clang of the trolley cars, small voices crying out, No, I won’t, the sound of screen doors slamming, the quick patter of footsteps running across driveways, mothers with wet hands—Mrs. Myer, Mrs. Woodruff, Mrs. Thomas Hale Cavanaugh—stomping out onto front porches and shouting, Just wait ’til your father gets home! BUT OF COURSE it did not happen like that. The days grew suddenly cool. The skies turned damp and gray. Children everywhere picked up their socks. They cleaned their rooms. Mr. Myer never came home (shot down on his eighth raid over Rabaul). Mr. Woodruff never came home (disappeared in Bataan during the first months of the war). Mr. Cavanaugh came home but he was not the same man—the man with the telescope who had once shown us the stars—as before.

“Gassed,” we’d heard one man say.

“Addicted to morphine.”

“Ran into him just the other day at the Safeway. That man’s shell-shocked. Doesn’t even know his own name.”

“It’s Daddy,” we imagined little Anna Cavanaugh whispering furiously into her father’s good ear.

“What? What was that you said?”

Then we remembered our own father, who had been taken in for questioning in his bathrobe and slippers on the night of Pearl Harbor, and we felt ashamed.

Is the Emperor a man or a god?

If a Japanese battleship is torpedoed in the Pacific do you feel happy or sad?

Which side do you think will win the war?

IN NOVEMBER the last of the leaves turned from yellow to brown and blew down in drifts from the trees. The nights were long and cold now and our money had almost run out. Most evenings for supper we ate cabbage and rice. Once a week, on Saturdays, we ate sardines from the bait shop. We used the same napkins for several days in a row. On the nights that we bathed we used the same bathwater. Our mother counted out every penny, every nickel and dime. She made up new rules. Change out of your street clothes the minute you come home from school. Don’t let the water run while brushing your teeth. Whatever you do, don’t waste. Save that bread bag. I’ll use it to wrap up your sandwich tomorrow. Save that piece of string. I’ll add it to my lovely string ball. Finish your carrots. Remember, there are children starving in Europe. Don’t throw away that rubber band. That tin can. That drop of fat. That sliver of soap. When our shoes began to wear thin before we had grown into them she fitted them with pieces of cardboard and told us to avoid any puddles that might lie in our way. The next day she began looking for work.

The ads in the papers all said help wanted, will train, but wherever she went she was turned down. “The position’s just been filled,” she was told again and again. Or, “We wouldn’t want to upset the other employees.” At the department store where she had once bought all her hats and silk stockings they would not hire her as a cashier because they were afraid of offending the customers. Instead they offered her work adding up sales slips in a small dark room in the back where no one could see her but she politely declined. “I was afraid I’d ruin my eyes back there,” she told us. “I was afraid I might accidentally remember who I was and… offend myself.”

The following week she found a job in a shirt factory sewing on sleeves but was fired after one day. Couldn’t keep my seams straight. She left an application at the neighborhood drugstore. I thought the owner might remember me. Finally she began cleaning house for some of the wealthy families who lived up in the hills. The work, she insisted, was not hard. You just smile and say yes ma’am and no ma’am and do as you’re told. If she was asked to scrub the floors she got down on her hands and knees and she scrubbed the floors. If the leaves of the miniature indoor tree needed dusting she picked up a damp rag and dusted the tiny green leaves one by one. If the lady of the house was lonely and wanted to talk our mother put down her rag for a moment and listened. “I know what you mean,” she might reply. Or, “That’s a shame.” She was friendly, she told us, but not too friendly. If you’re too friendly they’ll think you think you’re better than they are.

On her days off she took in washing and ironing to make a few extra dollars. She strung up clotheslines across the backyard and whenever we looked out the window we could see the private undergarments of people we did not know—the lonely shipping heir, the jovial bachelor doctor, the glamorous war widow whose young husband had died on Omaha Beach (“Introduce her to them!” we’d suggested to our mother as she hung up their things side by side, to which she had replied, “It’s too soon”)—floating ghostlike between the bare black branches of the trees.

With the money she earned our mother bought new lace curtains for the windows that faced out onto the street. She polished the rusty brass knocker. She set out a welcome mat on the steps by the front door. Little by little, she accumulated things. One of her employers gave her a set of dishes and a camel’s hair coat that looked as though it had never been worn. Someone else gave her two silver candlesticks, which she took to the pawnshop the very next day. At the Salvation Army she bought us our own dressers and beds and from that day on we each slept alone—our mother, downstairs, in the bedroom she had once shared with our father, and the two of us, by ourselves, in our old rooms upstairs.

THE TELEGRAM WAS DELIVERED on a foggy wet morning in December. Leaving Santa Fe Friday. Arrive Sunday, 3 p.m. Love, Papa.

For the next several days we did nothing but wait for the hours to pass. We went to school. We came home. We stared at the clock. He’s in Albuquerque now. He’s in Flagsta f. He’s crossing the Mojave…. Our mother cleaned and she cooked. She carried the telegram with her, in her pocket, wherever she went—to work, to the post office, to the market to buy bread. Sometimes, in the middle of supper, she pulled it out and examined it under the light just to make sure that the words were still there, or that they had not mysteriously rearranged themselves, while she was not looking, into some other message.

“What if it’s not real?” she asked us. Or had been delivered to our house by mistake? Or sent to us, as a joke, by the same man who called up in the middle of the night to tell us where we could go?

It’s real, we told her. No joke.

ON SUNDAY, near dusk, our father’s train pulled into the station. A light rain was falling and the windows of the train were streaked with water and soot and all we could see on the other side of the glass were dark shapes moving. Then the train came to a stop and a small stooped man carrying an old cardboard suitcase stepped out of the last car. His face was lined with wrinkles. His suit was faded and worn. His head was bare. He moved slowly, carefully, with the aid of a cane, a cane we had never seen before. Although we had been waiting for this moment, the moment of our father’s return, for more than four years now, when we finally saw him standing there before us on the platform we did not know what to think, what to do. We did not run up to him. We did not wave our hands wildly back and forth and shout out Over here! to him. And when our mother pushed us gently, but firmly, from behind, and whispered, Go to him, all we could do was stare down at our shoes, unable to move. Because the man who stood there before us was not our father. He was somebody else, a stranger who had been sent back in our father’s place. That’s not him, we said to our mother, That’s not him, but our mother no longer seemed to hear us.

He put down his suitcase and looked at her.

“Did you… ” she said.

“Every day,” he replied. Then he got down on his knees and he took us into his arms and over and over again, he uttered our names, but still we could not be sure it was him.

OUR FATHER, the father we remembered, and had dreamed of, almost nightly, all through the years of the war, was handsome and strong. He moved quickly, surely, with his head held high in the air. He liked to draw for us. He liked to sing for us. He liked to laugh. The man who came back on the train looked much older than his fifty-six years. He wore bright white dentures, and he’d lost the last of his hair. Whenever we put our arms around him we could feel his ribs through the cloth of his shirt. He did not draw for us, or sing songs for us in his wobbly, off-key voice. He did not read us stories. On Sunday afternoons, when we were bored and could think of nothing to do, he did not tie pieces of bent tin onto twigs and put on shadow plays for us from behind hanging white sheets. He did not make us stilts.

Of course, our mother was quick to point out, we were too old now for stilts, too old to be read to, too old for shadow plays from behind hanging white sheets.

Yes, yes, yes, we replied, and too old to laugh!

He never said a word to us about the years he’d been away. Not one word. He never talked about politics, or his arrest, or how he had lost all his teeth. He never mentioned his loyalty hearing before the Alien Enemy Control Unit. He never told us what it was, exactly, he’d been accused of. Sabotage? Selling secrets to the enemy? Conspiring to overthrow the government? Was he guilty as charged? Was he innocent? (Was he even there at all?) We didn’t know. We didn’t want to know. We never asked. All we wanted to do, now that we were back in the world, was forget.

IN THE BEGINNING he wandered slowly from one room to the next, picking up objects and looking at them in bewilderment and then putting them back down again. “I don’t recognize a thing,” we heard him whisper. In the afternoon he lay down on the couch and let himself drift off into sleep only to awaken, moments later, with a start, not knowing where he was. He sat up and shouted out our names and we came running. “What is it?” we asked him. “What’s wrong?” He needed to see us, he said. He needed to see our faces. Otherwise he would never know if he was really awake. On the train, he told us later, he had dreamed again and again that he’d fallen asleep and missed his stop.

He wore the same loose baggy trousers every day and was convinced that someone was watching the house. He did not like to use the telephone—You never know who might be listening—or to eat out in public. He rarely spoke to anyone unless he was spoken to first. Why go looking for trouble? He was suspicious of everyone: the newspaper boy, the door-to-door salesman, the little old lady who waved to us every day as we passed by her house on our way home from school. Any one of these people, he warned us, could be an informer.

They just don’t like us. That’s just the way it is.

Never tell them more than you have to.

And don’t think, for a minute, that they’re your friend.

Little things—the barking of a neighbor’s dog, a misplaced pen, an unanticipated delay of any sort—could send him into a rage. One afternoon, after a long wait at the bank, he pushed his way to the front of the line and began pounding on the floor with his cane. “I don’t have all day!” he cried out. We turned away and pretended not to know him. None of the other customers in line said a word. “You think they care?” he shouted at us as we slowly made our way toward the door. We covered our ears with our hands and kept on walking.

HE NEVER WENT BACK to work. The company that had employed him before the war had been liquidated right after Pearl Harbor and there was no job for him to return to. Nobody else would hire him: he was an old man, his health was not good, he had just come back from a camp for dangerous enemy aliens. And so he stayed at home, day after day, poring over the newspaper with a magnifying glass and scribbling down words in a little blue notebook. Sometimes he went out into the yard and watered the grass, or he swept off the front porch. And every afternoon, when we came home from school, he fixed us a snack: jelly and crackers, or a plate full of apples carefully peeled and sliced.

He always seemed happy to see us. “So tell me the news,” he called out to us the moment we walked through the door. We sat with him in the kitchen and talked about school. The weather. The neighbors. The same things we’d talked about before the war. Nothing more. He leaned forward in his chair as though he were listening but no matter what we said—a moth flew into Miss Campbell’s ear during dictation, Donald Harzbecker has been grounded for life—his response was the same. “Is that so?”

Always, it seemed, he had something else on his mind.

Maybe he was thinking of our mother. Maybe he missed her and was hoping she’d come home from work soon. Maybe he was trying to imagine her, at that very moment, as she gazed back at her own reflection for the hundredth time in the toilet bowl of some stranger. Still there? Or perhaps he was remembering the promise he’d made to her, years before, right after they’d first married—You’ll never have to work —and he felt bad that he hadn’t come through. There were heavy blue veins around her ankles now, and her hands were red and rough, and every evening when she climbed up the front steps her feet seemed to move more slowly than they had the evening before. Or it is possible he wasn’t thinking of our mother at all. It is possible he was troubled by something he’d read in the paper earlier that morning— Lend Lease Diapers Used as Turbans by African Sheikhs! or Jap Emperor Repudiates Own Divinity!—and he’d had about as much news as he could take for one day.

BIRDSONG GREW FASTER, and shriller, and the chill slowly lifted from the air. Our mother rose early every morning and made us breakfast, then tied a white scarf over her head and hurried off to catch the next bus. She wore a shapeless black dress, sensible shoes, no lipstick. In a large brown shopping bag she carried an assortment of brushes and rags. Got to make it all shine. She moved briskly and did not complain. “Be good,” she called out to us on her way out the door.

It was a relief, she told us years later, to wake up every morning and have someplace to go.

As the days grew longer our father began spending more and more time alone in his room. He stopped reading the newspaper. He no longer listened to Dr. I.Q. with us on the radio. “There’s already enough noise in my head,” he explained. The handwriting in his notebook grew smaller and fainter and then disappeared from the page altogether. Now whenever we passed by his door we saw him sitting on the edge of his bed with his hands in his lap, staring out through the window as though he were waiting for something to happen. Sometimes he’d get dressed and put on his coat but he could not make himself walk out the front door.

Every once in a while we’d try bringing him his hat and inviting him to come out with us for a walk but he just smiled and waved us away. “You people go on ahead,” he said.

In the evening he often went to bed early, at seven, right after supper—Might as well get the day over with—but he slept poorly and woke often from the same recurring dream: It was five minutes past curfew and he was trapped outside, in the world, on the wrong side of the fence. “I’ve got to get back,” he’d wake up shouting.

“You’re home now,” our mother would remind him. “It’s all right. You can stay.”

THE FIRST SIGNS of spring: mild days, buds in the fruit trees, no more long lists of the dead. The mothers were all back in the kitchen now. The last of the fathers on our block—those who could—had come home, they were safe. The sun was in its place. There, up above us, but not too high. Strength was slowly returning. Speech was beginning to come back. In the school yard. At the park. On the street. They were calling out to us now. Not many of them. Just a few.

At first we pretended not to hear them, but after a while we could no longer resist. We turned around and nodded, we smiled, then continued on our way.

For two weeks in April the magnolia trees blossomed with pale white flowers and the skies were blue and clear. Purple hyacinths and narcissus came up in the garden, and tall stalks of mint, and every evening, at dusk, we wandered out into the yard and watched the starlings gathering in the trees. At night we slept with the windows wide open, and in our dreams we could hear singing and laughter and the endless turning of the leaves in the wind and in the morning, when we woke, for one brief moment we could almost forget we had ever been away.

In May, when the heat settled in and roses everywhere burst into bloom, we wandered the streets every day after school in search of the rosebush our mother had once planted in our front yard. At first we saw it wherever we looked—in the Gilroys’ front yard, and the Myers’, and lying low among the rhododendrons in the prize-winning garden of the Misses O’Grady—but upon closer inspection none of these rosebushes turned out to be ours. They were too big, or too small, or their petals too pale, and after a while we gave up and turned our attention to other things. But we never stopped believing that somewhere out there, in some stranger’s backyard, our mother’s rosebush was blossoming madly, wildly, pressing one perfect red flower after another out into the late afternoon light.




CONFESSION


Everything you have heard is true. I was wearing my bathrobe, my slippers, the night your men took me away. At the station they asked me questions. Talk to us, they said. The room was small and bare. It had no windows. The lights were bright. They left them on for days. What more can I tell you? My feet were cold. I was tired. I was thirsty. I was scared. So I did what I had to do. I talked.

All right, I said. I admit it. I lied. You were right. You were always right. It was me. I did it. I poisoned your reservoirs. I sprinkled your food with insecticide. I sent my peas and potatoes to market full of arsenic. I planted sticks of dynamite alongside your railroads. I set your oil wells on fire. I scattered mines across the entrance to your harbors. I spied on your airfields. I spied on your naval yards. I spied on your neighbors. I spied on you— you get up at six, you like bacon and eggs, you love baseball, you take your coffee with cream, your favorite color is blue. I crept into your house while you were away and sullied your wife. Wait, wait, she said, don’t go. I touched your daughters—they smiled in their sleep. I smothered your firstborn son—he did not struggle. I stole your last bag of sugar. I took a swig from your best bottle of brandy. I pulled out the nails from your white picket fence and sold them to the enemy to melt down and make into bullets. I gave that same enemy your defense maps for free. The Boeing assembly plant is here. The oil refinery, there. “X” marks the spot where they make the camouflage nets. I sent him aerial photographs of your major coastal cities. I radioed to his submarines the location of your troop ships. I leaned out my second-story window and signaled to his aviators with my red paper lantern. Come on over! I left my lights on during the blackout. I went out into the yard and tossed up a few flares just to make sure he knew where to find you. Drop that bomb right here, right here where I’m standing! I cut arrow-shaped swaths through my tomato fields to guide him to his next target. Straight ahead to the air force base! I told him all about you. Tall and handsome. Big eyes. Long nose. Broad shoulders. Perfect teeth. Nice smile. Firm handshake. Solid family man. A joiner. Member of the Elks. The Kiwanis. The Rotary. The local Chamber of Commerce. Mows his lawn every Saturday and goes to church on Sundays. Pays his bills on time. Enjoys the occasional night out with the boys. Wife stays home and takes care of the kids. I revealed to him your worst secrets. Short attention span. Doesn’t always remember to take out the garbage. Sometimes talks with his mouth full.

Who am I? You know who I am. Or you think you do. I’m your florist. I’m your grocer. I’m your porter. I’m your waiter. I’m the owner of the dry-goods store on the corner of Elm. I’m the shoeshine boy. I’m the judo teacher. I’m the Buddhist priest. I’m the Shinto priest. I’m the Right Reverend Yoshimoto. So prease to meet you. I’m the general manager at Mitsubishi. I’m the dishwasher at the Golden Pagoda. I’m the janitor at the Claremont Hotel. I’m the laundryman. I’m the nurseryman. I’m the fisherman. I’m the ranch hand. I’m the farm hand. I’m the peach picker. I’m the pear picker. I’m the lettuce packer. I’m the oyster planter. I’m the cannery worker. I’m the chicken sexer. And I know a healthy young rooster when I see one! I’m the grinning fat man in the straw hat selling strawberries by the side of the road. I’m the president of the Cherry Blossom Society. I’m the secretary of the Haiku Association. I’m a card-carrying member of the Bonsai Club. Such a delightful little people! Everything so small and pretty! I’m the one you call Jap. I’m the one you call Nip. I’m the one you call Slits. I’m the one you call Slopes. I’m the one you call Yellowbelly. I’m the one you call Gook. I’m the one you don’t see at all—we all look alike. I’m the one you see everywhere—we’re taking over the neighborhood. I’m the one you look for under your bed every night before you go to sleep. Just checking, you say. I’m the one you dream of all night long—we’re marching ten abreast down Main Street. I’m your nightmare— we’re bivouacking tonight on your newly mowed front lawn. I’m your worst fear—you saw what we did in Manchuria, you remember Nanking, you can’t get Pearl Harbor out of your mind.

I’m the slant-eyed sniper in the trees.

I’m the saboteur in the shrubs.

I’m the stranger at the gate.

I’m the traitor in your own backyard.

I’m your houseboy.

I’m your cook.

I’m your gardener.

And I’ve been living here, quietly, beside you, for years, just waiting for Tojo to flash me the high sign.

So go ahead and lock me up. Take my children. Take my wife. Freeze my assets. Seize my crops. Search my office. Ransack my house. Cancel my insurance. Auction off my business. Hand over my lease. Assign me a number. Inform me of my crime. Too short, too dark, too ugly, too proud. Put it down in writing—is nervous in conversation, always laughs loudly at the wrong time, never laughs at all—and I’ll sign on the dotted line. Is treacherous and cunning, is ruthless, is cruel. And if they ask you someday what it was I most wanted to say, please tell them, if you would, it was this:

I’m sorry.

There. That’s it. I’ve said it. Now can I go?




A NOTE ON SOURCES


The author gratefully acknowledges the following works for their help in writing this book: The Great Betrayal: The Evacuation of the Japanese-Americans During World War II, by Audrie Girdner and Anne Loftis; A Fence Away From Freedom: Japanese Americans and World War II, by Ellen Levine; Citizen 13660, by Miné Okubo; Jewel of the Desert: Japanese American Internment at Topaz, by Sandra C. Taylor; and Desert Exile: The Uprooting of a Japanese-American Family, by Yoshiko Uchida.




About the Author


Julie Otsuka was born and raised in California. She is a graduate of Yale University and received her M.F.A. from Columbia. She lives in New York City.




Copyright


FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, OCTOBER 2003

Copyright © 2002 by Julie Otsuka, Inc.

Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

The chapter “Evacuation Order No. 19” appeared, in slightly different form, in Scribner’s Best of the Fiction Workshops 1998, edited by Carol Shields, John Kulka, and Natalie Danford.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

Otsuka, Julie.

When the emperor was divine: a novel / by Julie Otsuka.—1st ed.

p. cm.

1. Japanese Americans—Evacuation and relocation, 1942–1945—Fiction. 2. World War, 1939–1945—California—Fiction. 3. Japanese American families—Fiction. 4. Concentration camps—Fiction. 5. California—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3615.T88 W48 2002

813’.6—dc21 2002020814

www.anchorbooks.com

www.randomhouse.com

eISBN: 978-0-307-43021-2









Acclaim for Julie Otsuka’s

WHEN THE EMPEROR WAS DIVINE







“Exceptional…. Otsuka skillfully dramatizes a world suddenly foreign…. [Her] incantatory, unsentimental prose is the book’s greatest strength.”

    

—The New Yorker












“Spare, incisive…. The mood of the novel tensely reflects the protagonists’ emotional state: calm surfaces above, turmoil just beneath.”

    

—The Boston Globe












“A timely examination of mass hysteria in troubled times…. Otsuka combines interesting facts and tragic emotions with a steady, pragmatic hand.”

    

—The Oregonian












“Prose so cool and precise that it’s impossible not to believe what [Otsuka] tells us or to see clearly what she wants us to see…. A gem of a book and one of the most vivid history lessons you’ll ever learn.”

    

—USA Today












“With a matter-of-fact brilliance, and a poise as prominent in the protagonist as it is in the writing, When the Emperor Was Divine is a novel about loyalty, about identity, and about being other in America during uncertain times.”

    

—Nathan Englander, author of For the Relief of Unbearable Urges 












“Shockingly brilliant…. It will make you gasp…. Undoubtedly one of the most effective, memorable books to deal with the internment crisis…. The maturity of Otsuka’s… prose is astonishing.”

    

—The Bloomsbury Review 












“The novel’s voice is as hushed as a whisper…. An exquisite debut… potent, spare, crystalline.”

    

—O, The Oprah Magazine












“At once delicately poetic and unstintingly unsentimental.”

    

—St. Petersburg Times 












“Her voice never falters, equally adept at capturing horrific necessity and accidental beauty. Her unsung prisoners of war contend with multiple front lines, and enemies who wear the faces of neighbors and friends. It only takes a few pages to join their cause, but by the time you finish this exceptional debut, you will recognize that their struggle has always been yours.”

    

—Colson Whitehead, author of John Henry Days












“Heartbreaking…. A crystalline account.”

    

—The Seattle Post-Intelligencer