Hope in the West
Donald C. Wood
Published Dec. 2002, Skyline Literary
Magazine, 2(12): 45-47
Nobuhisa awoke
to the raspy trumpet–call of the crow. It was screaming at the
sky from its perch on the red metal roof near his second floor
window. The sun had just risen over the mountains far to the
east, casting its brilliant rays over his house and the sandy beach
nearby, and finally out over the Sea of Japan toward the
continent. He wiped his face from top to bottom with his hand,
which stretched his skin downwards, pulling his lower lip along with
it. Imaginary giggles floated through his ears. His habit
of wiping his face in that manner and distorting his expressions had
always elicited the most succulent, sugary laughter from Hiromi.
Of course, he knew that she did not laugh that way anymore, but he
imagined that the effect must be more impressive now – his skin had
aged so much since the last time he saw her.
With a groan,
Nobuhisa struggled to raise himself from his futon – a two or
three-inch thick cotton mattress that his wife had laid out on the
woven straw tatami mat floor the night before. Hers had already
been folded up and placed in the open closet across the room.
Before standing, he looked at the calendar he had received from the
fishing cooperative the previous December. “September
nineteenth,” he mumbled. Then he realized why he had imagined his
daughter’s laughter. It was the thirtieth anniversary. She
had been thirteen. He finally raised himself from the mattress,
his bones feeling every day of his eighty-one years. Hearing the
call of the crow again, he slid open the wooden, paper-covered shutter
covering the window, allowing the morning sun to flood the room with
all its force. Surprised, the crow flew away over the neighboring
rooftops with a last, great scream. He knew the bird would
return. Nobuhisa envied it – sometimes he wanted to scream, too.
After folding
his own futon, Nobuhisa slowly made his way down the stairs, gripping
the rail tightly. He was wearing only his long underwear – a
white long-sleeved top, and bottoms that went down to a point just
below his knees. His thinning white hair was a little
disheveled. “Ah, Otosan!” chirped his wife, Yaeko. “Good
morning!” She was making a special effort, he knew, hoping he
would not focus too much on the fact that it was September nineteenth –
the hardest day for him to face every year. A barely audible
grunt was all he offered her in return. She continued with her
breakfast preparations as he sat on the tatami mats near the sliding
doors opening to the garden and picked up the morning paper.
Yaeko always knew to set it there for him when the weather was
descent. As he read, he tried to avoid the article proclaiming
the prime minister’s upcoming visit to North Korea for fear of getting
too hopeful.
After eating a
quiet and simple breakfast of rice, roasted fish, miso soup – with tofu
and chopped green onions, natto (fermented soy beans), and some pickled
vegetables, Nobuhisa put on his trousers and a clean long-sleeved shirt
and went outside. First he turned toward the sea and walked down
the path behind his house to the dunes. Stopping near the sandy
piles, he gazed out over the water. The sun had already risen up
high over the eastern horizon behind him. He headed down the path
toward the spot where most fishermen kept their boats up on logs.
He could see that their catch was fair, but not spectacular. As
always, the smell of the nets and the fresh fish took him back to his
own days on the boats. He missed the freedom of the open sea and
of youth. He thought that he might have a game of shogi with his
old friend and former fishing companion, so he made his way inland,
past the fishing cooperative, and toward his friend’s house. When
he rang the doorbell, there was no response. Opening the door, he
stepped into the house and shouted, “Gomen kudasai! Ei-san!
Hoy!” Still there was no response.
Nobuhisa took
a circuitous route home through the narrow, twisting streets of his
hometown. Everywhere he walked, there were places where he had
played as a child. He passed the great ginko tree under which he
strategically sat to get a glimpse of what’s-her-name’s underpants as
she climbed it so very many, many years before, and he walked by the
park where he and his buddies had always bided their time, engaging in
boy’s games and playing with toys that had long since become quaint
collector’s items or devolved into cheap tourist trinkets. But
all of those memories had slipped back, further into his mind, until
they had become more like a collection of old black and white
photographs stored in a trunk somewhere. This was the effect of
losing the thing that had been most precious to him thirty summers
before.
Once he got
home, Nobuhisa went upstairs and slept on the bare tatami floor for
about an hour. Although it was September, it was surprisingly
warm for the time of year. As he dozed off he could not help but
think of Hiromi. In his dream, he found himself in the bath with
her, at the age of about three or four years. He had always
bathed her back then. They played in the hot water as snow fell
outside, dancing on the other side of the sweaty windowpanes. It
was their private paradise. He had always delighted in the way
that she grew, and felt the changes in her body with his bare hands
when he washed her until she reached the age of six or seven and
decided that bathing alone was best. Her legs had gradually lost
their fat and grown long and lean. Her arms the same, and her
stomach had transformed from a round, baby-like protuberance to a
smooth and flat surface as streamlined as a shark. He wondered
what she might look like now if she were still…alive. In all his
years, he had never enjoyed anything more than watching her grow, and
seeing her smile.
Suddenly
Nobuhisa was awakened by the sound of his wife’s voice shouting at him
to come downstairs for lunch. He knew it was only due to her
being more than a little hard of hearing, so he did not let it get to
him. Sometimes he actually envied her poor sense of sound.
If, he reasoned, he could also close out the world like that, then he
might be able to recover all of his older memories and live in a
fantasy world rooted in his past rather than have to face the reality
of the present every day. Although he was older, Yaeko seemed to
be aging faster. Basically they ate leftovers for lunch, with
some fresh shrimp the neighbor had given them. She had fried it,
tempura-style, and they ate it with mild sauce and grated white radish.
In the
afternoon, Nobuhisa found himself gazing at the headlines of the
morning paper again. He kept going back to the article about the
historic visit of the nation’s premier to North Korea. “All they
want is money,” he thought. Nobuhisa had become quite
cynical. Time slipped by with breathtaking rapidity as he gazed
at the paper. Although he was oblivious to its passage, he was
surprised by the sound of the door being thrown open and a child’s
voice shouting “Ojisan! Ojisan!”
It was the
neighbor boy, Masato. He was ten years old – a precocious
kid. He had a way of popping in at any time – especially when
Nobuhisa was trying to take a nap. But the old man enjoyed his
company. It was always refreshing to see those explosions of
wonder in his eyes – eyes that reminded him of the old days – eyes that
took him back. “Ah! Masato-kun!” the octogenarian
exclaimed, rising and walking slowly toward the front door. When
he got there, however, he was surprised to see that Masato had brought
with him a young man. Taken aback, he paused, staring at the
visitor. “Ojisan!” cried the boy. “I’ve brought my English
teacher today. His name is David. Can we come in?”
Even though Masato had, technically, asked to enter the house, he was
already completely up on the step with his shoes off by the time he
finished his sentence. Not knowing quite what to think, Nobuhisa
simply motioned for the young man to step up into the house as
well. He was surprised from the very beginning. David’s
manners were impeccable. He removed his shoes very smoothly, took
a long look around and clearly said, “What a beautiful house you have,
Kawakita-san.” Nobuhisa was impressed. After a few
perfunctory greetings, Nobuhisa’s wife prepared large cushions for them
to sit on at the low table in the extra room, which also looked out on
the garden. As Masato greedily devoured a large container of ice
cream that Yaeko had bought for just such an occasion, David introduced
himself, with strikingly perfect Japanese. “Kawakita-san, I am
tutoring Masato and when I heard about you, I asked him if he would
introduce me. You see, I am very interested in personal
histories. In fact, after I finish my job here I plan to go back
to the States and start working on a PhD in folklore, focusing on oral
traditions.”
“Well,” Nobuhisa started, “that sounds fine but what do you want from
me? I’m just an old man.”
“Well, you’ve lived here a long time, and you even went overseas during
the war, right? I wanted to ask you about how things were around
here back then,” explained the polite guest.
“Well, I can tell you what I know,” replied Nobuhisa. “But let me
ask you something – where are you from?”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I’m from Wisconsin.”
“Wis…wis…kan…?” Old Nobuhisa managed to make quite a mess of the name
of David’s home state.
“That’s okay. It’s hard to pronounce.”
“Forgive me, but you look Asian and speak Japanese perfectly. Why
do you have a name like ‘David’?”
“My great grandparents immigrated to the US from China before the war.”
“Oh, I see… Where did you learn Japanese, anyway?”
“I studied in college and then I lived in Yokohama and studied at a
school there for three years,” David explained.
“Wow! You’re really good! I mean, really good!” exclaimed
Nobuhisa, as Yaeko brought cups of cold tea to them. “Well, where
should I start?” asked Nobuhisa, unsure of what he was supposed to do.
“Start anywhere you like,” answered his young guest.
“What do you want to hear about?”
“Well, what were things like around here before the war?”
“Oh, you’re going way back! Well, things were pretty different
than now, I’ll tell you. We used to roam the streets here freely
– never had to care about where we went or who we met. We knew
all the adults and they knew us. We were safe back then. My
father used to catch a lot of fish, and I’d help him – started going
out on the boat with him pretty early. All I ever really wanted
to be was a fisherman.”
“You were, weren’t you?”
“Yeah, I fished with my father until…”
“Until what?”
“Until I got a red card in the mail.”
“A red card?”
“Back then, when you got a red card, you had to go off to fight.”
“Oh, that’s when you were drafted.”
“Right.” Nobuhisa gazed up at the ceiling, exposing his wrinkled
neck. “It didn’t matter whether you wanted to go or not – no one
really wanted to – because once the word got out, everyone was ready to
send you off. In these small neighborhoods with the houses so
close, there was no way to hide – nowhere to go. Once that red
card came, you were as good as dead.”
“Everybody knew?” asked David.
“Sure. Back then they used to say ‘tonari-gumi.’ It was the
way that we were organized into little groups of five households, and
if a kid from one household tried to escape and avoid going off to war,
all households in the group would be punished by the authorities.
It really was sort of a feudal way, I guess!” Nobuhisa let out a
small laugh. Getting serious again, he continued, “All I wanted
to do was stay out there on the water with my father, but that red card
came and I was trapped.”
“Where did you go?”
“They sent me to the colony in Manchuria first, then I had to go into
China and fight their soldiers.”
“But you survived.”
“Yeah. Every single friend I made there died, but somehow I made
it. I was there for three years, and then I found myself a
prisoner of Russian troops. They treated us pretty badly. I
spent five months in a camp somewhere in Siberia – ate garbage to stay
alive. In the end, there was a kind nurse who arranged to have me
sent back home when I was at death’s door with a bad case of
pneumonia. I was lucky. I could return to my parents.”
“Wow! That’s interesting.”
“No – there’s nothing interesting about it!”
“No? Did you ever go back to the continent again?”
“No…never.” Nobuhisa sighed and took a sip from his teacup.
“Even now, when I look to the west, all I can ever see is pain…and
death. There was never anything good over there for me.”
“But once you came home, everything was okay, right?”
“Well, not really. Nothing was ever the same after that.”
“What do you mean?”
“As I said, we used to run free all over the place. This whole
town was our playground. But after the war it seemed like we
couldn’t trust just anybody anymore. We didn’t have much to
believe in. Everything they taught us before the war was
wrong. We had to rethink everything. And then, you couldn’t
be so sure about your neighbors anymore – exactly who might be thinking
what…and all these strange religious groups popping up here and there
like that game where you have to whack the gophers with a plastic
mallet as they come up out of the holes. But the worst thing was
that young people weren’t as safe to go out and run about as freely as
we used to. And there were all these cases of people just
disappearing. When your own child is one of them, you have to see
the world differently.”
“Your…child disappeared?”
“My only child – my daughter. She vanished thirty years ago
today.”
“I’m sorry. That’s terrible.”
“That’s okay. You didn’t know.”
“People say that they may have been taken away by spies.
Do you think that’s true?”
“I think so. I think she’s over there somewhere. At least…I
think she was taken over there. Why, I don’t know.”
“I hope you can find out.”
“Hope…that’s a difficult concept.”
“But you have a lot of good memories of old times in this town, right?”
asked David, trying to change the tone of the conversation.
“Sure. Everywhere I go I see places where I played as a child.”
“Tell me more about how things were up until you got that red card.”
Nobuhisa
talked about his early years for another two hours. As he spoke,
he wondered why the strange young guest would be so interested in such
mundane matters. It was refreshing and encouraging, although
confusing, to be asked to reflect on his distant past, and as he spoke
he began to feel some small part of the great burdens he had borne
since going off to fight on alien territory across the sea slipping
away. It was a nice change. During the course of their
conversation, young Masato had gotten bored of watching children’s
television programs and gone home. After David had excused
himself, with the promise to meet again soon and learn how to play
shogi from Nobihisa, the old man grabbed the evening paper from the
mailbox near the door. Following a short trip to the bathroom, he
sat down in his favorite spot to read over the front page before the
sun set. Another article about the prime minister’s trip to North
Korea had been printed. This time, it was reported that obtaining
clear information on whether any of the missing Japanese people were
actually there would be at the top of his list of matters for
discussion. Combined with the good mood he had been left with
after meeting the young guest, the new news brought him more hope than
he had ever felt over the last thirty years. “From China, huh?”
he thought to himself, gazing out at the sunlight in the trees.
He immediately stood.
Nobuhisa
slowly climbed the stairs and entered his bedroom. Opening the
larger window that faced south, he stepped onto the balcony and went to
the western side of it. There was a large board he had attached
some years earlier to keep himself from having to gaze out toward the
west too much. After all, he loved the rising sun because it was
shining over him and then out to the continent – passing over the good
places first and the bad places next. But he detested
sunsets. To see the sun setting over the western horizon only
emphasized his loneliness. Today, however, he felt
different. He tore down the old board, and it cracked in his
hands from the pressure. He then gazed long and hard at the great
red sun as it descended over the land that had brought him only
sorrows, and finally – through teary eyes – he could see at least one
small glimmer of hope in the west.