Foundlings, p.13
Foundlings, page 13
“Good morning,” he said to Michelle as she got out of the BMW. Her bright red umbrella was the only thing flashy about her this morning, no other sign of Yuki Kamikaze present. Gone were the black leather bikini top and any hint of tattoos. Her attire made her look more like another professor than a tattoo artist: black pants and a smart black jacket, her hair up in a bun.
“I suppose,” she answered as she closed her door and started coming around toward him. “I asked Grandmother if she wanted to postpone to a drier day, but she wasn’t having it. She says we picked today and she’s ready. I think she’s afraid she’ll back out if we postpone.”
“Well, good then,” Derek said. He didn’t relish the idea of dragging an eighty-seven year old woman out into the rain, but he also didn’t like the thought of having driven down from Camarillo for nothing. “Maybe we’ll need to make this quick and then go find somewhere dry where we can talk.”
“Okay.”
Michelle was next to him now, no handshake or any other greeting. He noticed that she smelled of perfume—something else different from the day he’d met her in Newport—and he realized that Michelle had two distinct identities: one for her grandmother, and maybe other members of her family, and another for her professional and social life. Derek found the public version more interesting.
She opened the BMW’s door, and helped her grandmother out of the car. Sayuri Nishio was short and stout with gray hair and gold-rimmed glasses. She looked serious. When she got out of the car, she kept her small brown purse with her and stood under her granddaughter’s umbrella looking at the area around them, barely giving Derek a glance.
“Grandmother, this is Professor Derek Chandler,” Michelle said. “Professor Chandler, this is my grandmother, Sayuri Nishio.”
Derek reached out his hand and the old lady took it, a quick, limp grip. “I’m pleased to meet you Mrs. Nishio,” he said. “Thank you for coming out in the rain this morning.”
She smiled, the first real sign that she’d even acknowledged his presence. “I hope it’s worth the effort,” she said, a hint of an accent in her voice. “I don’t like coming back to the past very often.”
She’s time traveling, Derek thought, realizing that the old woman was seeing him and the parking lot and the industrial area around them while simultaneously occupying her past on Terminal Island. What was this spot? he wondered. What did you do here all those years ago?
“Shall we?” Michelle asked.
She led the way to the memorial then. It was on a narrow strip of land near the tip of Terminal Island, not far from the entrance to the Federal Prison. The monument to Furusato had been erected in 2002, a replica of the gate to the village’s Shinto shrine and a statue of two fishermen, bent at the work of repairing their nets but looking off to the horizon. The three visitors paused before the plaque. It read, “From the early 1900’s until World War II, the fishing village of Fish Harbor on Terminal Island was a thriving community of 3,000 people—primarily Japanese immigrants and their U.S.-born children. The local canneries and fishing boats played a vital role in the American fishing industry. In the village’s neat rows of shops and homes people loved, laughed, worked, played and raised families. On February 25, 1942, all villagers of Japanese descent were given 48 hours to leave Terminal Island. By April the village was gone, homes and livelihoods taken away and villagers sent to internment camps. We remember these people, and the community of Terminal Island that was their home.”
Derek took out his phone and took a picture of the sign, and they spent a few more minutes walking around the statues. He felt uncomfortable. Neither Michelle nor her grandmother were saying anything. After all this time waiting to meet Sayuri Kunishima, just standing here and looking at statues in the rain was more than he could take. He wanted to start asking right away about Kichiro Nakamura, wanted to go against what he’d promised and start asking about Camarillo and what happened there and how Kichiro’s story had ended up in the wall.
All he said, though, was, “I think they put this up in 2002. Were you involved in the memorial, Mrs. Nishio?”
The old lady looked at him for a moment, almost as though she’d forgotten he was there. It was like she was trying to decide whether or not to be bothered to reply. And then she said, her voice small and hard to hear in the rain, “My husband helped with the project a little bit, but I never got involved.”
“You haven’t seen it before?” Michelle asked.
“I haven’t been on the island since 1942.” She turned her back on the statue. “Let’s go see Tuna Street.”
She pulled a compact umbrella from her coat pocket and popped the button on the handle so it unfurled, allowing her to walk independently ahead of her granddaughter, not bothering to see if Michelle and Derek followed. Derek looked to Michelle, who just shrugged. “I guess she’s not impressed,” he said.
“You never can tell. I think she’s trying to avoid what we came here for.”
Now Derek shrugged. He wanted more than anything to convey his tolerance and patience for the old woman, even if he didn’t feel those things. “If she cooperates, she cooperates,” he said, stifling his true feelings, wishing she would get on with it and just tell him what he needed to know.
Back at their cars, Sayuri got into the BMW without a word.
Michelle checked to see that her grandmother’s door had closed securely. Then she said, “You know the way?”
“I do.”
He had studied maps of the island online and had printed one out for the trip. Now he waited for Michelle to pull out of her spot first and then followed her up Seaside Avenue, the main channel of Los Angeles harbor on his left and Fish Harbor on his right, where Furusato had ceased to exist more than seventy years earlier. They turned off Seaside to Cannery and then onto Tuna Street.
Derek would have found it depressing on a sunny day. In the rain, it was awful. The road was more potholes than pavement. On one side of the street were low buildings separated by empty lots and lengths of chain link fence; only one building had a sign on it in small white letters: Harbor View Restaurant. On the other side of the street was a broad expanse of nothing, a vacant lot with bare dirt and scattered bushes separated from the road by a longer expanse of chain link fence.
Derek pulled in behind the BMW across from the restaurant and waited for Michelle or her grandmother to get out of the car. He hadn’t thought there would be a restaurant on Tuna Street and wondered about going inside to conduct the interview.
“I may be getting lucky here,” he imagined himself saying to Lacey.
“It’s about time,” she said, teasing.
If it had been real, they would have laughed.
It wasn’t real, though, and he didn’t feel like laughing. The emptiness of the streets around him, the wide expanse of nothingness on the other side of the fence, and the steady barrage of raindrops on his roof and windshield all added up to an overwhelming sense of hopelessness. All the buildings that had rimmed Fish Harbor in the photos he’d been studying for the last few months, all the families, all the futures…everything—it was all gone. Things like the memorial and the names of the streets were really all that remained. The rest was tucked away in photos and memoirs and the memories of people like Sayuri Nishio. And how much longer would anyone who actually remembered Furusato still be around to let others in on the memories? Even so, he realized, the pictures and the stories were not the same as having been there before the village was razed. Derek felt as though time had put up another kind of barrier, something more substantial than the chain link fence beside his car, and it was going to keep him out of Furusato forever.
When more than a minute had passed and Michelle had not yet gotten out of the BMW, Derek began to feel concerned. Sayuri had seemed standoffish but not exactly hostile toward him, and he’d had no reason to think the planned interview wasn’t going to go well. Now he was starting to wonder.
He felt relieved, then, when the driver’s door opened after a couple more minutes had passed. Michelle got out, opened her umbrella, and came toward his car. She did not look happy. Derek hit the button for his window, and it slid down.
“My grandmother’s very upset,” Michelle said when she reached his car.
“Is it—” he began, thoughts of figuring out what had upset the old woman firing through his mind, the first step in solving the problem and moving on.
“We can’t do the interview.”
The depression he’d been feeling while looking at the remains of Fish Harbor now tripled for Derek. He hadn’t realized how hopeful he’d been about the interview until being told it wouldn’t happen.
“Are you sure? We can—”
“No. I’m sorry to have dragged you down here from Camarillo, but this is too much for her. I need to take her home.”
He took a moment to process what she’d said and then nodded. “I understand. I’m sorry it’s upset her so much.” He saw that Michelle was about to turn back to the BMW, and he almost panicked at the thought of getting this close to Kichiro Nakamura without actually finding out anything. “Do you think…do you think you could ask her just one question for me?”
He supposed he sounded desperate and knew that if he’d been dealing with Yuki Kamikaze, desperation wouldn’t have gotten him very far. In that persona, she seemed like the kind of person who would despise weakness, who had no sympathy for anyone who couldn’t tolerate pain or find a way out of a problem. But today, with her conservative clothes and hair, and all her tattoos hidden from her grandmother, she wasn’t Yuki Kamikaze, and maybe he stood a chance.
She glared at him for a moment, maybe angry that he’d convinced her to put her grandmother in this situation, maybe angry with herself for agreeing to it. Then her expression softened, but just a bit.
“One question,” she said. “If it upsets her even more, I won’t insist she answer it. Got it?” This last was delivered by Yuki Kamikaze, the look in her eye as sharp as the needles in her tattoo gun.
“Of course.” He flipped open his briefcase and removed a digital recorder. Handing it through the window, he said, “That’s the record button right there.”
Michelle looked at it and nodded. “What’s the question?”
“Ask her if Kichiro Nakamura was Japanese or White.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
Michelle nodded and walked away as he closed his window against the rain. He watched her get back in the car, and then he waited. The process of asking the question and getting an answer should have taken only seconds, Sayuri giving a simple yes or no and being done, but seconds passed and Michelle did not get out of the car again. More than a minute passed, and then two.
Finally, the car door opened and Michelle made a quick run through the rain, not bothering with her umbrella this time. Impulsively, he opened the car door and stood in the rain to meet her.
“Here,” she said, handing him the recorder. Her fingers were cold, and he supposed his were, too. He slipped the recorder into his pocket to keep it dry. “I hope that answers things for you.”
“Is she all right?” he asked.
“No, but it’s not your fault. It’s mine. I should never have brought her here.”
“Wasn’t it her idea?”
“You don’t give a little kid ice cream for dinner just because she insists. I’m kind of the parent now. I shouldn’t have let her talk me into it.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I hope she’s not too upset.”
“You didn’t do anything to upset her,” she said. “I still blame Franklin Roosevelt.”
Rain was dripping down her forehead and into her eyes. It softened her look. He knew the smile she gave him now was supposed to be bitter and ironic, but it didn’t quite come across that way in the rain.
“Thank you for coming,” he said. “Can I get in touch with you if…”
If I have more questions, he meant to say, but he knew it was absurd. Michelle had granted him one question, and it had been asked and answered. There was no point in asking for more. Still, it seemed somehow wrong to just end things this way.
“If you want another tattoo?” she asked, an eyebrow raised. It was as though she knew what he’d wanted to ask and also felt there was no further point in digging up her grandmother’s past.
“Yes.”
“Yeah, sure. Don’t go anywhere else.” She pointed at his chest, where the tattoo of Lacey’s smiling face now hid beneath his clothes. “Anybody else’s ink’ll look like crap next to that. Don’t ruin it by going to amateurs.”
He smiled. “Thanks.”
“Bye,” she said and turned without another word.
He got back in his car and watched the BMW pull away. Michelle turned around in the street and then drove past him. She gave a quick wave as she did, her grandmother looking in his direction, too, but not seeming to see him at all. The old woman looked past him, at the chain link fence and the ghosts that must have been beyond it.
Derek sighed and then pulled the recorder from his pocket, setting it for playback.
Michelle’s voice came from the speaker. “Grandmother, Mr. Chandler wants to know if Kichiro Nakamura was Japanese or American.”
No! Derek thought. That’s not what I asked. Japanese or White! He wasn’t after nationality but rather ethnicity. It might be a subtle difference to some and no difference at all to others, but to him and for the sake of his research, it meant everything.
Only silence followed Michelle’s statement. Derek pictured the old woman sitting impassively in her seat, refusing to acknowledge her granddaughter. Then Michelle spoke again, this time in a language Derek could only assume was Japanese. He had not realized she was fluent in her ancestral language, but given the nature of her tattoos and the strong feelings she expressed about her heritage and what the Japanese immigrants and their children had suffered during internment, he was not surprised to find she had made the effort to stay connected to the language along with the rest of the culture. He could only hope that she was asking the question the right way now that she did it in Japanese.
This time, Sayuri hesitated only a few seconds and then began to speak, but also in Japanese.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Derek said. He wondered if Michelle had found this funny and felt the urge to call her cell right now to tell her what he thought of her. But then Michelle’s voice came onto the recording over her grandmother’s as she hesitantly translated in between pauses to listen further to what Sayuri was saying.
“Kichiro Nakamura was a Terminal Islander,” she said, “so he wasn’t Japanese or American. None of us were…We were all Terminal Islanders. The Japanese we spoke was not the same as what they speak in Japan. Our accent and dialect were different. And we were not Americans either even though so many of us were born here in Fish Harbor…Kichiro was a good boy. He was best friends with my brother Tomojo. They were a year older than me, so when they had to leave the island for…”
She interrupted her grandmother now, asking another question in Japanese. When Sayuri answered, a bit sharply, Michelle continued. Derek assumed she had needed clarification about a word or phrase before translating it. “When they left the island for middle school, I was jealous. I wanted to go, too. I had a little crush on Kichiro, and it didn’t go away for a long time. A lot of the girls liked him because he was so different.”
Here, Derek sat up straight and leaned forward, his body language the same as if the old lady had been talking to him face to face. How was he different?
“But he never noticed,” she continued. “He always had his head in a book or a magazine, and he and Tomojo were always plotting things I never understood. Poor Tomojo. He was such a good boy.”
Sayuri had stopped speaking now, and so Michelle stopped translating. Instead, she spoke directly to Derek. “I’m pretty sure my great-uncle was killed in the war. You should be able to look him up. Tomojo Kunishima. That may be all I can get out of her for now.”
No! Derek thought. Please!
“I know that’s not what you were after, though. I’ll try one more time.”
“Thank you,” he said aloud, all the irritation he’d felt toward Michelle a few minutes earlier completely gone now.
Again he heard her speak in Japanese, the words “Kichiro Nakamura” part of her question.
“Kichiro Nakamura,” Sayuri began. Derek expected more Japanese to follow, but this time she spoke in English, saying, “was one of us, but not. He was so much like all the rest of us that no one ever seemed to notice that he was different. I know I forgot all about it.”
“So he was white?” Michelle asked.
“Yes,” Sayuri said, “as white as your father, dear. But as much Nisei as all the rest of us Terminal Islanders. It was confusing, I suppose, to some people. It was even confusing to Kichiro. That was why…”
“What?” Michelle prompted.
Sayuri said something else in Japanese.
“She’s done,” Michelle said. “She says she’s not going to talk about the rest. I hope you have your answer. Please don’t bother her any more, Mr. Chandler. I’m sorry if this hasn’t been what you expected.”
The recording ended.
No, Derek thought, not exactly what I expected.
Kichiro Nakamura had been white. He was not a lost voice in Japanese American letters. But what was he? And what did he represent? Derek started the recording again, skipping ahead to the portion where Sayuri spoke in English, trying to pull further clues from her words.
He sat wondering about Kichiro Nakamura, the same way he’d been wondering for months. Was it even your real name? he asked himself. Or were you really Charlie Drummond? And how did you end up with the Nakamuras?
While he had listened to the recording, the rain had let up. Only a few drops fell on the windshield now. Derek set the recorder on the car’s console and got out of the car. The smell of the ocean was strong here, along with the scents of fish and oil. Not pleasant smells, he thought, but he supposed a person would get used to them soon enough and not notice after a while.
