The Souvenir Read online

  He describes some basics of prison life in Stalin’s Russia: little food beyond black bread and water, bitter cold, hard labor in a lumber mill and on construction sites. “What gave you the strength to survive?” I ask. “My strong desire to go back to Japan, to home,” he replies. “I was very young. I didn’t want to die in such a terrible place. Also, I have practiced judo since I was thirteen, so I had this strong wish not to be defeated.”

  Russian citizens who were not prisoners worked alongside the Japanese POWs on construction sites. Mr. Abe learned some Russian and they conversed. “I found them quite open-minded,” he says. “We didn’t feel that those people were our enemies. I feel that war broke out between the higher-ranking government officials, politicians—not between ordinary people.” He thinks Japan should apologize for its depredations in Asia to the Koreans and to the Chinese. “It is the right thing to do,” he says firmly. Then he sighs. “But apologies are the hardest thing for human beings to do.”

  In 1949, when he was finally repatriated, Mr. Abe’s family learned he was still alive, and Mr. Abe learned his father had just died. Five hundred and seventy-four of Suibara’s young men perished in Dai Towa Senso, “The Greater East Asia War,” as World War II is known in Japan. More would never be accounted for. The town, Mr. Abe says, “was unrecognizable. Everything was in disrepair. And the people’s minds were not at peace.”

  WE PULL OUT of the parking lot of the community center, winding through the narrow streets of Suibara’s central shopping district. Santa Claus cutouts decorate store windows and an ultracheery “Jingle Bells” trickles out from speakers mounted on street lamps. Mr. Mihara stops the van in front of an old rickety wooden building. “Come,” he says, “I want to show you something.”

  The huge building was once a junior high school. I peer through cracks in boarded-up windows: inside, a rusted woodstove, the remnants of a blackboard, chairs and desks.

  “Yoshio went to school here?”

  Mihara-san nods.

  On a lot behind the old school, a new building is under construction. I laugh as Mr. Mihara strikes an odd pose, standing on one leg with his arms outstretched behind him. He’s showing me the architectural design of the new school, which mimics a swan in flight.

  THAT NIGHT AT the Rhythm Inn, I stay up late, waiting until everyone has taken their bath so I can take mine in private. Many villagers come in the evening to bathe with their children in the communal bath.

  Near eleven p.m., too tired to wait any longer, I overcome my shyness and pad through the lobby in my slippers and yukata (robe) toward the women’s side of the communal bathing area. I place my robe and slippers in a wicker basket in the changing room and push open the door leading to the tub. A grandmother, her grown daughter, and her two-year-old granddaughter are immersed in the sunken tiled bath. As my guidebook instructs, I squat on a plastic stool under a shower faucet to wash and rinse before entering the tub. Then, self-conscious, I ease myself into the blissfully hot water.

  The two women smile at me. The young mother is pearly white with pendulous breasts; her daughter, whom the grandmother scrubs energetically, is plump and rosy. I can’t help but notice the sculpted curves of these three generations, their comfort with their own bodies, with the water, with each other.

  My tight muscles and tired mind give way in the moist heat. So many unknowables in a life, I think dreamily. Unknowables mixed with miracles. My father’s sister dying young of a tiny hole in her heart. Five thousand Siberian swans on a snowy lake. My mother hearing my father’s voice after two years’ separation. How a name on a piece of cloth could propel you halfway around the world.

  The baby girl splashes water at me; I startle out of my reverie and we all laugh. In Japan, I now realize, half the experience of bathing is sharing the bath with others. I love being here, naked and at ease with these women on this wintry night in Suibara.

  THE NEXT DAY, Masako, Mr. Mihara, and I drive to Suezo Shimizu’s house. Across the road from the house, a neighbor’s funeral is in progress. Elaborate floral wreaths brighten the weathered gray boards of the garage where a hearse idles. Black-robed Buddhist priests clang bells. Mourners mill about on the soggy grass; some hold bags of sugar, for reasons I never remember to find out.

  At their door, the Shimizus greet me with great warmth. Suezo looks frailer now than he did three years ago. He squeezes my hand heartily and inquires after Lloyd. Yoshinobu, his nephew, is there with three daughters in tow, two new babies since I last visited. The three Shimizu sisters—Hanayo, Hiroshi, Chiyono—all join us at the long table in the tatami room, as well as cousin Yasue Shimizu and four childhood friends of Yoshio Shimizu—Hisashi, Yukio, Tatue, and Tokue—plus assorted neighbors. I notice Yoshio’s flag, now framed and behind glass, in a special alcove in the corner.

  After introductions all around, the party breaks into smaller convivial groups. The women huddle at one end of the table, talking and laughing. I sit with the men, the war veterans, who drink beer and swap stories. Yoshio Shimizu’s childhood friends reminisce—how Yoshio used to play hooky from school (“but always told the truth about it”), how they all played war games together. They tell me that like so many young boys eager to escape the farmer’s harsh life for the romantic adventure of military living, Yoshio enlisted. He wanted to go. I hadn’t imagined it that way.

  The funeral procession next door is about to depart. I join the Shimizu family in their front yard to pay respects to the deceased—an eighty-eight-year-old grandmother. Somehow, it feels right to be standing as part of this family, bowing together with them as the hearse drives out of the narrow alley. Hiroshi Shimizu sprinkles salt on me before I reenter the house, a custom not unlike the Jewish tradition of washing your hands after visiting a cemetery.

  Back inside, we reassemble at the table and continue eating and talking. I learn from Suezo that in the war the Shimizu family lost not one but three sons: Heijiro, Yomatsu, and Yoshio.

  Two shy young girls enter the room, carrying their English textbooks. They want to practice speaking English with me. Suezo asks me to explain to his young niece and her friend the story of the flag. With Masako’s occasional intervention, I do. Suezo watches us, pleased. The two girls listen, eyes wide. They’re trying to make sense of how this flag has brought an American woman from Los Angeles to eat lunch in their great-uncle’s living room.

  Together, I realize, we are creating a new transfamilial history. At Passover a year ago, my own siblings and niece and nephews gathered in Palo Alto, where as part of the holiday text, my brother Larry read aloud a poem I had written about the flag of Yoshio Shimizu. Through a traumatic encounter on a battlefield, our families—Steinman and Shimizu—share a story. Each family will continue to tell it in their own way.

  When it’s time to leave, Suezo bows and offers a warm hand to say good-bye. This is probably the last time I’ll see the elder Shimizus. Masako translates Suezo’s softly uttered parting words: “You have given us back Yoshio. The government only sent sand in a box.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Flyover

  BEFORE DAWN, I walk around the gourd-shaped lake. I stop in front of the bronze statue of Jusaburo Yoshikawa, the farmer whose love and perseverance ultimately made the swans feel welcome on Lake Hyoko. “It won’t do to just watch the swans and feed them,” the Swan Father used to admonish the villagers. “You must become a swan yourself.”

  Several swan duets are in progress this morning—heads thrust forward and back in rhythmic sequences, there’s much wing-flapping and preening.

  As the day brightens and the flock lifts off, I turn down a road in the direction of the mountains, past fine old two-story farmhouses with blue-tiled roofs. The farmers have clothed their fruit trees and shrubs with “coats” of twine and bamboo sticks; some are provided with their own umbrellas, to lessen the weight of snow on their branches. Neat rows of taro and kale stretch out into the distance. Strings of daikon, garlic, onions, and lotus root dry on racks hanging
from barn eaves. A woman rinses a bucket of rags in an irrigation canal. There are few people around, and no one pays me much attention.

  I pass a room-size wooden shrine in the middle of a small cedar grove. The gate opens easily; I walk in. At the edge of the copse, I stare out at a rice paddy where a few swans glean the stubble. Occasionally they call to one another, a drawn-out melancholy bugle. The swans would have already disappeared from Suibara by the time Yoshio was a boy. Unlike his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather before him, Yoshio would have never heard the haunting wails of the whooper flock on Lake Hyoko when he walked out to the rice fields before dawn on a dark winter morning.

  Years ago, when I began reading my father’s letters, I wanted to imagine his war as fully as I could. After I learned the name inscribed on the mysterious flag, I wanted as well to imagine his foe. “It is not enough to just think about Yoshio, you must become Yoshio,” the Swan Father might have said. Now, in this sheltered grove, I stand motionless and quiet, observing the rise and fall of my breath. Yoshio might have played here, I think to myself. I don’t presume to become Yoshio, but eventually, he does come into focus.

  In the December morning chill he wears only his thin navy-blue school uniform. His hair is cropped short and, without his school cap, his bare scalp is exposed and vulnerable. He shivers, stamps his feet.

  Yoshio gazes through cedar boughs at rice paddies stretching miles toward the sharp dark contours of distant mountains. At the edge of the nearest field, unpicked fruits on a leafless persimmon shine like New Year’s lanterns against the dull gray sky. From a gnarled branch, a vulture stares down on a flock of mallards.

  The cedar grove is behind a small ancestor shrine on the Nakayama family farm, on the dirt road that leads out of Suibara. The weathered beams of the shrine are embellished with carved boars and dragons. The few chrysanthemums—pale pink, yellow, crimson—still bloom beside the modest torii gate weighted with winter snow.

  Inside, on the altar, the family has left offerings for their ancestors—rice cakes wrapped in bamboo leaves, dried persimmons, a clay jar containing miso paste. Yoshio’s stomach rumbles; he hasn’t eaten since early morning, and even then the meal was sparse. Soon he’ll cut across the fields and head home for a lunch of soba noodles and pickles, then go back to school. Or … maybe he won’t. It could be one of those days he doesn’t make it back to the classroom, lingering in his private world though he knows he’ll be punished when he returns tomorrow morning.

  Mrs. Nakayama, his elementary school teacher, used to plead with him to obey the rules. She was kind, like his own mother. “Don’t you want to learn as much as possible, Yoshio-san?” she’d ask and then smile. “You must come every day if you want to go to university, if you want to be something else besides a farmer.” Nakayama-sensei was understanding and easy. Onori-sensei, his current teacher, didn’t hesitate to whack a student with his bamboo rod when necessary. Just yesterday, Yoshio’s friend Tatue earned a beating because his lunch was wrapped in a newspaper that contained a photograph of the emperor. Juices from pickled daikon had dripped onto the emperor’s left boot.

  The emperor’s photo was not something to be treated casually. Every morning at school they stood at attention to recite the Imperial Rescript, facing the special alcove where the emperor’s portrait was displayed. In a special notebook at home, Yoshio kept photos of the emperor he’d clipped from newspapers. Among his favorites was one showing the emperor at Yasukuni Shrine, praying for fallen soldiers.

  Someday soon, Yoshio will become a warrior for the emperor. He is confident of passing the conscription physical, that he will be a “Class A” soldier. He won’t wait for the red envelope to be delivered to his house, like his brother Heijiro had. Yoshio makes a fist, flexes his arms. He is strong from years of farmwork, from chinning himself on the branches of the trees in the cedar grove.

  This grove has long been one of his favorite places. He knows the spaces between the trees. He knows the distance from the shrine to the closest edge of the rice field. How cedar cones feel in the palm of his hand—their shape and weight. He knows just how much effort it takes to lob one past the farthest tree; they make excellent ammunition. He’s hidden here before to ambush his friends in their games of “Destroyer-Torpedo.” He thinks through the rules: torpedoes beat battleships; destroyers beat torpedoes; light cruisers beat destroyers; heavy cruisers beat light cruisers.

  Yoshio keeps his play rifle stashed behind some tombstones in a corner of the grove. A wet snow begins to fall, landing gently on his bare head, stinging his cheeks. He ignores it, digging out the rifle, its bamboo barrel fixed to the stock with sisal cord, and runs his hands over the smooth wood. He wishes it were real, like the ones he’s seen soldiers carry while training at Takada Military Headquarters, just a few miles across the valley. Their crisp uniforms, the sound of their boots thudding on the road, impressed him at first sight. He remembers his very first glimpse of real soldiers—almost six years ago—on the drill field, when recruits trained for duty in Manchuria, after the China Incident.

  He lays his rifle in its niche and begins to cover it carefully with cedar boughs, but before he finishes, he is distracted by a loud hum in the sky. Glancing up, he sees a glorious sight: a squadron of Youth Air Soldiers tipping their wings over Suibara. A flyover! He can tell they are crossing over the schoolyard, showing off for the students returning from lunch. Yoshio forgets his hunger, his hesitation to return to the classroom, the noodles waiting for him at home, and sprints back toward the wooden school building in the center of town.

  A few students stand in the yard, blue uniforms flecked with snow, staring up in wonder at the lucky flyers. Yoshio tilts his head toward the squadron above; he thinks he can see the pilots’ faces. They look so proud.

  Before the last plane has disappeared from the leaden sky, the school principal materializes on the front steps. He exhorts the lagging students to join the others already gathered in the assembly hall. Yoshio kicks off his shoes and rushes inside. No stove has been lit; the hall is freezing cold. The students sit in half-circle rows on the floor, facing the front of the room. The object of their focus: a radio placed on a simple wooden table, turned on full volume. The stirring cadence of “The Battleship March,” the unofficial navy anthem, issues from its speaker. Crackling sounds. Then the stunning announcement: “News special. News special. Beginning this morning before dawn, the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy have opened hostilities with the United States and England in the Western Pacific.” Yoshio hears the strange word “Honolulu.” The principal, flushed and excited, exclaims, “Wonderful!” Onori-sensei shouts out, “We really did it!” The students erupt into cheers.

  Yoshio can hardly wait for the bell to ring, hardly wait to rendezvous with his friends at the Nakayama family shrine where they can now make plans for fighting a real war.

  After he enlists, his friends and family will walk with him through the streets of Suibara to the train station. Before he departs for Takada military headquarters, they will all sign their names on his yosegaki, the white silk banner with the bright red circle, the one he will wear inside his helmet wherever he is sent, a talisman to protect against danger.

  AFTERWORD

  To the New Edition

  On Halloween night, in the last months of his life, my dad invited my mother to take a drive with him to watch the sunset at the Marina Del Rey, twenty minutes from their condo. They took the elevator to the underground garage and climbed into their shiny black Chrysler New Yorker.

  The New Yorker was the first “luxury” car my father had ever bought. Real leather seats and all the extras. He’d bought it a year earlier, as a surprise gift for my mother after her cancer went into remission.

  They drove west down Jefferson Boulevard toward the beach when a thin plume of smoke spiraled out from under the hood. My father swerved to the side of the road and stopped the car. They both scrambled out. Wisps of smoke became billowing black clouds, then bright oran
ge flames. Heart pounding, my father instinctively reached for the vial of nitroglycerin in his pocket.

  It was nearly dark and the night was chilly. Traffic whooshed by. The people in their cars wore Ronald Reagan masks and devil’s horns, vampire’s capes, and blond Marilyn wigs. My father popped another nitroglycerin.

  I didn’t learn about the incident until the next day. “Your father came home, poured himself a glass of brandy and went straight to bed,” my mother reported.

  The car was a total loss. A manufacturing error caused the fire. They could only get Blue Book for it, a fraction of the original cost. Impossible to sue Chrysler—a mega-corporation is immune to that sort of litigation.

  The next day my father woke early, called a taxi company, slipped out of the house without waking my mother, drove to a Honda dealership in Santa Monica and bought not one but two brand-new cars. He who had never bought anything Japanese bought two new Hondas. Straight cash.

  His war was over.

  MY FATHER’S WAR lasted nearly sixty years. He woke with it. He slept with it. We all felt it. His wounds were not visible. He would not talk about his experience. He didn’t know how and neither did his family.

  I write this on the fourth anniversary of the Iraq war. Every day, young men and women return home from Iraq and Afghanistan with life-altering injuries—psychological, physical, and moral. Their war won’t be over anytime soon. Nor will the war be over soon for the young children of the soldiers who will not be returning, or for their lovers, spouses, parents, siblings.