Obasan Read online

  OBASAN

  Joy Kogawa

  First published by Lester & Orpen Dennys Ltd., Canada, 1981

  Penguin Group (Canada) a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc., 1983, 2003

  David R. Godine Publisher Inc., U.S.A.,1982

  Reclam Verlag, Germany, 1993

  Doubleday, An Anchor Book, U.S.A., 1994

  De Geus, Netherlands, 1997

  Chuokoron, Japan, 1998

  Copyright © Joy Kogawa, 2012, Kagami Publishing

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Layout, Baye Hunter, Gordon Kogawa

  Copy Editor, Deidre Canute

  Cover photograph, courtesy Joy Kogawa

  Cover design, Baye Hunter

  Obasan / Joy Kogawa.

  ISBN 978-0-9691678-1-5

  1. Japanese Canadians-Evacuation and relocation, 1942-1945—Fiction. 1. Title

  www.joykogawa.ca

  Although this novel is based on historical events and many of the persons named are real, most of the characters are fictional. I wish to thank the Public Archives of Canada for permission to use documents and letters from the files of Grace Tucker, T. Buck Suzuki, Gordon Nakayama and in particular, Muriel Kitagawa, whose material was used freely, especially throughout the writing of Chapter Fourteen. This book is dedicated to the memory of my parents, and of those amazing people, the Issei.

  Joy Kogawa

  To him that overcometh

  will I give to eat

  of the hidden manna

  and will give him

  a white stone

  and in the stone

  a new name written….

  The Bible

  There is a silence that cannot speak.

  There is a silence that will not speak.

  Beneath the grass the speaking dreams and beneath the dreams is a sensate sea. The speech that frees comes forth from that amniotic deep. To attend its voice, I can hear it say, is to embrace its absence. But I fail the task. The word is stone.

  I admit it.

  I hate the stillness. I hate the stone. I hate the sealed vault with its cold icon. I hate the staring into the night. The questions thinning into space. The sky swallowing the echoes.

  Unless the stone bursts with telling, unless the seed flowers with speech, there is in my life no living word. The sound I hear is only sound. White sound. Words, when they fall, are pockmarks on the earth. They are hailstones seeking an underground stream.

  If I could follow the stream down and down to the hidden voice, would I come at last to the freeing word? I ask the night sky but the silence is steadfast. There is no reply.

  one

  9:05 P.M., AUGUST 9, 1972.

  The coulee is so still right now that if a match were to be lit, the flame would not waver. The tall grasses stand without quivering. The tops flop this way and that. The whole dark sky is bright with stars and only the new moon moves.

  We come here once every year around this time, Uncle and I. This spot is half a mile from the Barkers' farm and seven miles from the village of Granton, where we finally moved in 1951.

  "Nothing changes ne," I say as we walk toward the rise.

  "Umi no yo," Uncle says, pointing to the grass. "It's like the sea.''

  The hill surface, as if responding to a command from Uncle's outstretched hand, undulates suddenly in a breeze, with ripple after ripple of grass shadows, rhythmical as ocean waves. We wade through the dry surf, the flecks of grass hitting us like spray. Uncle walks jerkily as a baby on the unsure ground, his feet widespread, his arms suddenly out like a tightrope walker's when he loses his balance.

  "Dizzy?" I ask, grabbing him as he wobbles unsteadily on one leg.

  His lips make small smacking sounds as he sucks in air.

  "Too much old man," he says, and totters back upright.

  When we come to the top of the slope, we find the dip in the ground where he usually rests. He casts around to make sure there are no wild cactus plants, then slowly folds down onto his haunches, his root-like fingers poking the grass flat in front of him.

  Below us the muddy river sludges along its crooked bed. He squats and I stand in the starlight, chewing on bits of grass. This is the closest Uncle ever gets to the ocean.

  "Umi no yo," he always says.

  Everything in front of us is virgin land. From the beginning of time, the grass along this stretch of prairie has not been cut. About a mile east is a spot which was once an Indian buffalo jump, a high steep cliff where the buffalo were stampeded and fell to their deaths. All the bones are still there, some sticking right out of the side of a fresh landslide. Uncle could be Chief Sitting Bull squatting here. He has the same prairie-baked skin, the deep brown furrows like dry riverbeds creasing his cheeks. All he needs is a feather headdress, and he would be perfect for a picture postcard—"Indian Chief from Canadian Prairie"—souvenir of Alberta, made in Japan.

  Some of the Native children I've had in my classes over the years could almost pass for Japanese, and vice versa. There's something in the animal-like shyness I recognize in the dark eyes. A quickness to look away. I remember, when I was a child in Slocan, seeing the same swift flick-of-a-cat's-tail look in the eyes of my friends.

  The first time Uncle and I came here for a walk was in 1954, in August, two months after Aunt Emily's initial visit to Granton. For weeks after she left, Uncle seemed distressed, pacing back and forth, his hand patting the back of his head. Then one evening, we came here.

  It was a quiet twilight evening, much like tonight. His agitation seemed to abate as we walked through the waving grass, though his eyes still stabbed at the air around him and occasionally at me.

  When we reached the edge of the hill, we stopped and looked down at the coulee bottom and the river with the tree clumps and brush along its edge. I felt apprehensive about rattlesnakes and wanted to get back to the road.

  "Isn't it dangerous?" I asked.

  Uncle is almost never direct in his replies. I felt he was chiding me for being childishly afraid when he said abruptly, "Mo ikutsu? What is your age now?"

  "Eighteen," I said.

  He shook his head as he scuffed the ground. He sighed so deeply that when he exhaled, his breath was a groan. "What is the matter, Uncle?"

  He bent down and patted the grass flat with his hands, shaking his head slowly. "Too young," he said softly. "Still too young." He smiled the gentle half-sad, half-polite smile he reserves for small children and babies. "Some day," he said.

  Whatever he was intending to tell me “someday” has not yet been told. I sometimes wonder if he realizes my age at all. At thirty-six, I'm hardly a child.

  I sit beside him in the cool of this patch of prairie and immediately I am hidden with him in a grass forest. My hands rest beside his on the knotted mat of roots covering the dry earth, the hard untilled soil.

  "Uncle," I whisper, "why do we come here every year?"

  He does not respond. From both Obasan and Uncle I have learned that speech often hides like an animal in a storm.

  My fingers tunnel through a tangle of roots till the grass stands up from my knuckles, making it seem that my fingers are the roots. I am part of this small forest. Like the grass, I search the earth and the sky with a thin but persistent thirst.

  "Why, Uncle?"

  He seems about to say something, his mouth open as he stares straight ahead, his eyes wide. Then, as if to erase his thoughts, he rubs his hands vigorously over his face and shakes his head.

/>   Above and around us, unimaginably vast and unbroken by silhouette of tree or house or any hint of human handiwork, is the prairie sky. In all my years in southern Alberta, I have not been able to look for long at this. We sit forever, it seems, in infinite night while all around us the tall prairie grasses move and grow, bending imperceptibly to the moon's faint light.

  Finally, I touch his arm. "Wait here awhile," I say as I stand up and walk to the edge of the hill. I always pick at least one flower before we go home. I inch my way down the steep path and along the stretch where the side of the slope oozes wet from the surface seepage of the underground stream. Wild rose bushes, prickly and profuse with green, cluster along the edges of the trickle. I can smell them as I descend. At the bottom of the coulee I can hear the gurgling of the slowly moving water. I stand for a long time watching as the contours of the coulee erode slowly in the night.

  two

  SEPTEMBER 13, 1972.

  In the future I will remember the details of this day, the ordinary trivia illuminated by an event that sends my mind scurrying for significance. I seem unwilling to live with randomness.

  This afternoon, when the phone call comes, it is one month after my last visit to Granton and I am standing in front of my grades five and six class at Cecil Consolidated, defending myself. The town of Cecil, Alberta, is one hundred and fifty-odd miles north-east of Granton and I have been teaching in the same room now for the last seven years. Every month or so, I try to drop in to see my uncle and my aunt, Obasan, who are both now in their eighties. But at the beginning of the school year, I'm quite busy.

  It usually takes me at least two weeks to feel at home with a new class. This year there are two Native girls, sisters, twelve and thirteen years old, both adopted. There's also a beautiful half-Japanese, half-European child named Tami. Then there's Sigmund, the freckle-faced redhead. Right from the beginning, I can see that he is trouble. I'm trying to keep an eye on him by putting him at the front of the class.

  Sigmund's hand is up, as it usually is.

  "Yes, Sigmund."

  "Miss Nah Canny," he says.

  "Not Nah Canny," I tell him, printing my name on the blackboard: NAKANE. "The a's are short as in 'among'—Na Ka Neh—and not as in 'apron' or 'hat’."

  Some of the children say "Nah Cane."

  "Naomi Nah Cane is a pain," I heard one of the girls say once.

  "Have you ever been in love, Miss Nakane?" Sigmund asks.

  "In love? Why do you suppose we use the preposition 'in' when we talk about love?" I ask evasively. "What does it mean to be 'in' something?"

  Sigmund never puts his hand up calmly but shakes it frantically like a leaf in the wind.

  I am thinking of the time when I was a child and asked Uncle if he and Obasan were “in love”. My question was out of place.

  "In ruv? What that?" Uncle asked. I've never once seen them caressing.

  "Are you going to get married?" Sigmund asks.

  The impertinence of children. As soon as they learn I'm no disciplinarian, I lose control over classroom discussions.

  "Why do you ask?" I answer irritably and without dignity.

  "My mother says you don't look old enough to be a teacher."

  That's odd. It must be my size: 5’1, 105 pounds. When I first started teaching sixteen years ago, there were such surprised looks when parents came to the classroom door. Was it my youthfulness or my oriental face? I never learned which.

  "My friend wants to ask you for a date," Sigmund adds. He's aware of the stir he's creating in the class. A few of the girls gasp and put their hands up to their mouths. An appropriate response, I think wryly. Typically Cecil. Miss Nakane dating a friend of Sigmund's? What a laugh!

  I turn my back to the class and stare out the window. Every year the question is asked at least once.

  “Are you going to get married, Miss Nakane?"

  With everyone in town watching everything that happens, what chance for romance is there here? Once a widower father of one of the boys in my class came to see me after school and took me to dinner at the local hotel. I felt nervous walking into the Cecil Inn with him.

  "Where do you come from?" he asked as we sat down at a small table in a corner. That's the one surefire question I always get from strangers. People assume when they meet me that I'm a foreigner.

  "How do you mean?"

  "How long have you been in this country?"

  "I was born here."

  "Oh,” he said, and grinned. “And your parents?"

  "My mother's a Nisei."

  "A what?”

  "NISEI," I spelled, printing the word on the napkin. “'Pronounced 'knee-say.' It means 'second generation’.” Sometimes I think I've been teaching school too long. I explained that my grandparents, born in Japan, were Issei, or first generation, while the children of the Nisei were called Sansei, or third generation.

  The widower was so full of questions that I half expected him to ask for an identity card. The only thing I carry in my wallet is my driver's license. I should have something with my picture on it and a statement below that tells who I am. Megumi Naomi Nakane. Born June 18, 1936, Vancouver, British Columbia, Marital status: Old maid. Health: Fine, I suppose. Occupation: Schoolteacher. I'm bored to death with teaching and ready to retire. What else would anyone want to know? Personality: Tense. Is that past or present tense? It's perpetual tense. I have the social graces of a common housefly. That's self-denigrating, isn't it.

  The widower never asked me out again. I wonder how I was unsatisfactory. I could hardly think of anything at all to ask him. Did he assume I wasn't interested? Can people not tell the difference between nervousness and lack of interest?

  "Well," I say, turning around and facing the general tittering, "there are many questions I don't have answers for."

  “Sigmund's hand is waving still. But you're a spinster," he says, darting a grin at the class. More gasps from the girls.

  "Spinster?" I grimace and have an urge to throttle him. "What does the word mean?"

  "Old maid," Sigmund says impudently.

  Spinster? Old maid? Bachelor lady? The terms certainly apply. At thirty-six, I'm no bargain in the marriage market. But Aunt Emily in Toronto, still single at fifty-six, is even more old-maidish than I am and yet she refuses the label. She says if we laundered the term properly she'd put it on, but it's too covered with cultural accretions for comfort.

  "I suppose I am an old maid," I say glumly. "So is my aunt in Toronto."

  "Your aunt is an old maid too? How come?"

  I throw up my hands in futility. Let the questions come. Why indeed are there two of us unmarried in our small family? Must be something in the blood. A crone-prone syndrome. We should hire ourselves out for a research study, Aunt Emily and I. But she would be too busy, rushing around Toronto, rushing off to conferences. She never stays still long enough to hear the sound of her own voice.

  "What's her name, Teacher?"

  "Emily Kato," I say, spelling it. "That's 'Cut-oh,' not 'Cat-oh' or `Kay-toe.' Miss E. Kato." Is there some way I can turn this ridiculous discussion into a phonics lesson?

  Someone is sure to ask about her love life. Has Aunt Emily ever, I wonder, been in love? Love no doubt is in her. Love, like the coulee wind, rushing through her mind, whirring along the tips of her imagination. Love like a coyote, howling into a “love 'em and leave 'em” wind.

  There is an urgent knock on the door and I'm glad for the interruption.

  "Would you answer the door, please," I ask, nodding to Lori, the Native girl who sits at the back and never says anything.

  The secretary's smiling face pokes in the doorway and she says, "There's a phone call for you, Miss Nakane, from Granton."

  I tell the class to carry on. It's one of my more useful orders. "Carry on, class." And I walk down the hallway to the principal's office, leaving a hubbub behind me.

  The principal is standing with his back to me, his almost bald head looking like a faceless face. Hi
s soft hands are behind his back and he is pulling on his fingers one after another. It reminds me of the time I tried to milk cows.

  The phone is off the hook and an operator's voice answers me.

  "Miss—scratch—scratch. Go ahead, please." The connection is full of static sounds and I press the receiver hard against my ears.

  "Hello? Pardon me? Who is it?"

  It's Dr. Brace from the hospital in Granton. His voice in my ear has the quality of an old recording. I can't believe what he is saying.

  "Who? My uncle?"

  There is an odd sensation like an electrical jolt but not so sharp—a dull twitch simultaneously in the back of my head and in my abdomen. And then a rapid calming.

  "Be still," the voice inside is saying. "Sift the words thinly." I am aware that I cannot speak.

  I don't know if I have said goodbye to Dr. Brace. I am holding the receiver in my lap and the principal puts his hand on my shoulder.

  "Bad news, Naomi?" he asks.

  I stare blankly at him.

  "Your uncle?" His brow is furrowed sympathetically. I nod.

  He lifts his hands in a gesture of offering but I cannot respond. My mind is working strangely, as if it has separated and hovers above me, ordering me to action from a safe distance, like a general.

  What must I do now? Call Stephen. It's 3:15 P.M. What time is it in Montreal? I don't have his number here. Nor Aunt Emily's. I'll phone them later. Must go back to the classroom and make notes for the substitute. How many days' absence should I take? Normally we’re allowed a week off….

  When I return to the classroom, I am in time to see Sigmund dashing for his desk from the blackboard, where something has been erased. I assign the class free reading till bell time.

  By five-thirty I am on the road for Granton. Driving conditions are rather poor this evening. There's a drizzle of rain that is making the road slippery in places. It's taking me longer to drive down than it usually does. But I'm not in a great hurry to see Obasan.