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.

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