The woman nods slowly. “I’m sorry. My name is Yagi. I run a boardinghouse in Tokyo.” She rummages in her handbag and produces a business card: HOUSE OF HOPE. The address is unknown to Luna, but Watanabe homes in on the area, and in a moment he and Yagi are discussing landmarks. Luna, unsure what to think, invites them inside.
The house is messier than she thought, the stacks of paper taken out of the boxes edging into the hall. As she ushers them into the kitchen, she notices Yagi, clearly a stranger in the house, looking around with quiet curiosity. Luna can’t decide if she’s relieved. When they settle, Yagi tells them about the boardinghouse and Luna’s father’s weekly visits since the summer. “Miyagi-san really looked forward to it. So when your father didn’t come for three weeks in a row…”
Luna turns to Watanabe, who looks equally blank. “I’m sorry. Who is Miyagi-san?”
Yagi assesses them for a beat. Then her gaze slides to the portrait propped on the counter, and a look of disappointment crosses her face before grief covers it over. “Miyagi-san is one of our residents. He’s been with us since my father started our place right after the Occupation. Miyagi-san is your grandparents’ biological son. Your father’s brother.”
Luna stares at her. “You mean, he’s my uncle?”
“He never mentioned a brother,” Watanabe says, equally stunned.
“They only met about a year ago,” Yagi says. “Miyagi-san was separated from his parents during the air raids. Back then, my father managed a welfare shelter. The Heavenly Curtain Hotel’s House of Hope. It was literally stitched together with tarps.” She smiles. “Miyagi-san was just a teenager then, and my father liked him right away. I was born toward the end of the Occupation. Miyagi-san is like an uncle to me.”
“So he was in Tokyo all this time?” Luna asks. “I didn’t even know my grandparents ever lived there.”
“As far as I know, Miyagi-san was born in Tokyo,” Yagi says. “Like many after the war, there was no way for him to prove his identity, so he took odd jobs, mostly day labor, and helped my father around the shelter. He was involved in those peace protests too, but he was vague about his activities. He was always secretive.”
“How did they find each other?” Luna asks, trying to absorb the details.
“Miyagi-san volunteers at a nonprofit called Sanyūkai, an organization that helps the homeless. A couple of years ago, he got very sick and started talking about finding his parents’ grave. Most people ended up in common graves after the firebombing, so I don’t know what he expected, but with Sanyūkai’s help, he eventually found your father.”
“And they had no clue about each other.”
“Your father knew—your grandparents told him at some point—but his shock when he opened the door to see him alive—that’s a story I’ve heard many times.”
Luna tries to picture it: two men, unrelated but related, meeting for the first time at the threshold of their parents’ house. “I can’t imagine,” she says. “Did they get along?”
“Oh, they were always yakking on about something. I guess they had a lot to catch up on.”
She likes the image: the companionship of two orphan brothers. Then she pictures Miyagi in the corridor of this house, peering into the rooms, the lived spaces his parents had inhabited without him. “This is just so strange. How often did they see each other?”
“Maybe a couple of times a month,” Yagi says. “Until Miyagi-san got sick again this summer. It’s his lungs—from the firebombs. It was the same with my father—he was about your father’s age when he died.” She looks sorrowfully at Luna.
“How is he doing now?” Watanabe asks.
“He has good and bad days. Actually”—she brightens—“if you have time, maybe you can visit. I don’t think Miyagi-san ever imagined meeting his niece.”
Luna feels a stab of panic, the flutter in her throat not excitement but closer to fear. “He probably doesn’t know I exist.”
Yagi reaches across the table and touches her hand. “Let’s see. I know Masaaki-san has two daughters. You lived in the state of Illinois. I’ve seen a picture of you. You were probably nine or ten. There was a house in the background. I think it was your house in the town called Urbana.”
Luna feels a spiraling. “I don’t remember this picture.”
* * *
—
THAT EVENING, as she sorts more paper in the boxes into proliferating piles, a familiar twinge in her uterus propels her to the bathroom. Not yet.
When she finally lies down in the guest room, she dreams of an undersea journey to the Dragon Emperor’s palace, but when she gets there she finds herself in a windowless room, lit by a missing bulb, a cord dangling from the empty socket. There is no sound, no sign of life, and when she reaches to pull the cord, she realizes that even she isn’t in the room and wakes herself up. It is the first time she has had a dream in which she isn’t there.
Unable to fall back asleep, she lies in the dark, watching the moonlight stencil the guest room window on the floor, and finds her thoughts drifting back to the last time she saw her father. After four years of separation, he’d returned to the States to make the divorce official. Like most of her childhood, the memory has survived largely voiced-over by her sister’s rehashing of all the incriminating things their father had said and done in the two hours they’d spent with him, but recently Luna’s recollection has been quieter, the years having peeled back the noise, baring the moment in starker detail, starting with Katy’s refusal to tolerate him in their house. They ended up at a restaurant, Luna oppressed by her pasty chicken dinner with its mound of mashed potatoes inexplicably shaped into a cone, and the way her father kept mushing it down as he chatted on, asking questions and encouraging answers, his face flickering, then dimming, going out all together when he got up to pay. They drove back to the house and stood in the yard while his face slid into a watery mess so disconcerting even Katy conceded to his snotty anaconda hug. Luna too conceded, but a peculiar numbness had slackened her body, and she found she couldn’t move, not even to accept his gift: an illustrated, bilingual edition of Urashima Tarō, which, with its cartoonish colors, Luna could tell was meant for a child much younger than her. Now she sees the point had been the dual-language feature probably meant to invite her to learn his language. As it happened, Luna did learn, and the fairy tale became a kind of epigraph to her career, but of course her father will never know this. It must have been then, just before he climbed into his rented sedan, that he snapped the photograph Yagi had seen, but that moment, like many others in her life, is gone, curated out of her memory by the great adjudicator of experience.