This Light Between Us: Part One

Next to him, his parents are singing with religious fervor and abandon.

The Japanese hymns have been replaced, and the archaic King James English with its thees and thous is throwing them off, making their thick accents even more garish.

After the song ends, Pastor Ken smiles at the congregation and exhorts them to greet one another.

Somebody’s fishing boat has been vandalized, or worse, pillaged.

Not Henry and Joe and Bruce and Tim and Cindy and Janet and Susan. But now Fusanosuke and Hideo and Kaito and Hidejiro and Hitomi and Kayo and Megumi. The exotic, the yellow, the inscrutable. The enemy.

When he walks out into the hallway ten minutes later, it’s as if he’s grown a second head and become covered in leprosy.

Every eyeball turns toward him. Whispers, whispers. And stares, glares. He keeps his eyes down. He has never felt so conspicuous.

On Tuesday he flat out told Billy Hosokawa and me that he didn’t want us reciting the Pledge of Allegiance anymore...defiling the flag.

But even now her words—every curlicue and loop of each character indelibly etched into his mind—bring a small smile to his face, and make his heart, even after almost three years, beat a little faster.

He was usually an uncomplicated man of authority, and this authority was absolute and total. Over his wife. His boys. Over the chickens whose necks he wrung and slashed, over the land he tilled and browbeat into submission.

Even seemingly over the weather itself by sheer force of his indomitable immigrant will.

Father went from being a leader in the Japanese community, a towering being of complete authority—almost a deity—to what he was. An immigrant. A foreigner. A mocked, clueless, misplaced immigrant, put in his place by white boys, kowtowing to all.

At home, away from the outside world where he is regarded a dithering fool, he is the accepted anchor of this family, giving stability and protection.

“How can they just take Father?” Alex says, incredulous.

I used to be Charlie the fiery girl, Charlie the funny girl, Charlie the girl full of joie de vivre, Charlie the girl with fire in her eyes.

Father would gently lift Alex into a sitting position, his sweaty head flopping forward, and lean him against his wiry, tensile farmer’s body.

On the outside, they had the appearance of togetherness; but it was, in fact, a stubborn tug-of-war. An apt image of their initial years of marriage.

His chapped, tireless hands sifting through enough soil to fill Fuji-san; the way he gripped shovels and axes, dug trenches to handle excess rainfall, mixed fertilizer, planted strawberry seeds one by one, weeded grass, pulled out sickly strawberry plants, pruned fruit trees, cut leaves after harvest, removed large tree stumps, propagated rhododendron plants, fixed broken machinery and flat tires and plumbing in their home.

And at night—she’d mumbled this while tossing down one last cup of sake before collapsing into a drunken stupor—when those same rough, sun-blackened hands reached for her in the dark, their hangnails and calluses grating across her skin, she would let them: because of everything they had touched and healed and nurtured into submission, because of how they had so ruthlessly, doggedly, miraculously fashioned into being in a harsh and alien land, this farm, this home, this family.

I walked to the Maison des Lettres on rue Soufflot, and listened to some records. Schumann's concerto and then Mozart's requiem mass.

“You overslept,” Mother chides, but she’s smiling about something.

Led by the All-American quarterback and charismatic leader, Captain Frank Maki, our boys are poised to deliver a resounding victory!

Frank smirks caustically. “Only because everyone’s talking about it in town. Public Proclamation Number Three, or something.”

He is afraid of meeting the inadvertent gaze of another Nisei, and finding in their eyes the same burning shame.

Alex waits with trepidation for the unwanted news that Ernest Schwinn, the second-string quarterback—a nervous, twitchy sophomore—has replaced Frank Maki as quarterback.

On that day, Frank will stomp home disconsolate and moody, and refuse to speak or eat.

Sometimes during picking season when Filipino itinerant workers are hard to find, the fathers help each other out, working well into the night.

Alex steps on some discarded peanut shells. The cracking sounds seem inordinately loud, shotgun blasts.

He has the brusque air of a man in charge granting favors.

People are exhausted, having spent the last few days scrambling to get their affairs in order. Rushing to lease or sell their land. To pack and store what they cannot carry with them. To liquidate every asset, selling off their cars, boats, freezers, for pennies on the dollar.

After church service, Mother, Alex, and Frank—who’s been morose and silent since the football-game incident—stop by the hardware store to pick up a few last-minute items.

He wishes he could grab it, make time stop. Or even make it go backward to when life was simpler, to before the Pearl Harbor attack, when everything was normal. When life was calm. Not this raging river full of frothy whitecaps and swirling eddies, pitching him helplessly toward the crest of an unknown, plunging waterfall.

An air bubble is caught in his throat, making his voice high-pitched and vacuous.

Her head cants to the side.

Their father—a successful businessman in the burgeoning grocery industry—was taken away months ago.

Walk in a straight line, he instructs, two abreast and no more.

Because this is a terrible injustice, and we’ll never live it down as a community, as a nation. It’ll be a blight on us.

The children, most riding a train for the first time, are excited; but even this initial wave quickly gives way to restlessness. To placate them, grandparents unwrap candy they’d meant to give on the second or third day (or the fifth or seventh, for they still haven’t a clue how long the journey will be).

Even before dawn, half the train is awake. The stink of halitosis, the moist tinge of diarrhea, the cries of the colicky newborn fill the carriage.

The setting sun behind them has rendered them into mere silhouettes and Alex can’t make out their expressions.