* * *
—
THE HOUSE of Hope is a short walk from the station. A historically segregated neighborhood of tanners, butchers, and executioners, the area has since been integrated into neighboring districts, its myriad workers’ lodgings now attracting foreign backpackers increasingly conspicuous among day laborers, the unemployed, and the homeless, almost all men, many of them once part of the postwar workforce recruited to rebuild the country. Watanabe points out Sanyūkai. The building looks derelict, but there is a lively throng outside gathered by the organization’s outreach efforts and its lifeline services. Farther down, among a boxy coterie of illuminated signs, they find Yagi’s boardinghouse, its tinted glass doors busy with notices advertising rooms in Japanese and English.
Yagi warms and rises from behind the counter when she sees them. “Miyagi-san was hoping you’d come,” she says as she retrieves a set of keys from the pegboard and leads them through the hall, past the kitchen, the toilet, the communal bath, then up the stairs to a corridor crowded with doors, the occasional murmur of the television brightening the hall. Miyagi’s room is at the far end. Knocking gently, Yagi listens, then inserts the key.
The room is tiny and as dark as the curtains allow. In one corner there is a nightstand with a myopic black-and-white TV; above it, a shelf with a few folded clothes and several books. A futon takes up most of the tatami floor, Miyagi’s body indistinct under the covers. Luna can just make out a hospital mask covering his face, and she is reminded of her grandfather, his sudden presence warping her sense of time, folding the two halves of her life into a single dimension of space. The experience is dizzying, almost exhilarating. Yagi shakes off her sandals and kneels beside the unmoving man.
“We don’t have to wake him,” Luna says from the doorway.
“At some point, everyone has to eat, do their business, see a few faces.” She checks Miyagi’s forehead. “He was excited to meet you.”
Luna wonders if this could be true; luminously pale, Miyagi looks unearthly. Watanabe, perhaps sharing her thoughts, catches her eye. She wonders how well Miyagi was the last time her father saw him. She wonders if he knows about his brother’s death.
Yagi turns down the covers, refills the water cup, her movements practiced and unflinching. Miyagi, discomfited, directs an uncertain voice into the room. “It’s just me, Miyagi-san.” She touches his hand. “You have visitors today, remember?” She introduces Luna and Watanabe, repeating their names several times before helping him sit up. In the gloom, he looks diaphanous, a black cutout.
Yagi molds his hands around his water cup and changes his mask before gathering the laundry and the water jug. “He should be fine for about a half hour,” she says, shuffling into her sandals and nudging Watanabe to follow her out.
Suddenly alone, Luna tugs off her shoes and sits at the foot of the futon. Propped against the wall, cup tipped on his chest, Miyagi looks asleep again. In the window, the curtains ripple, the cold slip of air carrying the tang of smoke. She wonders what her father must have felt coming here, to this world Miyagi has been relegated to spend his life. The curtains flip; light splashes the wall, and Luna sees a photograph tacked up near Miyagi’s head: a family portrait of a grade school boy flanked by his parents—her grandparents? She cranes to look and startles to find Miyagi observing her, his eyes alert.
“I’m Luna,” she says. “You knew my father—your brother.”
Miyagi continues to observe her. Then he raises a shaky finger and draws down his mask, revealing a narrow chin, an old man’s mouth, a face gripped by keloid scars. One rarely sees such disfiguration here, the culturally unsightly still often hidden, and she wonders if this is also why he kept to the margins. “Is that you?” she asks, pointing at the photograph. Miyagi doesn’t respond, and heat rises to her ears. She finds it hard to reconcile his eyes with the rest of him, their lucidity belonging to another time. “You must be standing with your parents—my grandparents.”
Miyagi continues to stare, and Luna finds herself searching for an exit strategy. Then his mouth moves, and again she feels the pull of his gaze. She leans closer. She catches the wheeze and rattle clotting his chest, the phlegmy reek wafting from his mouth, the acridity of medicine mixed with something organic. She picks out a sound—a word: konomi. Preference. For what? Then there is a thud in the hall, the clatter of shoes as Watanabe returns, and when Luna turns to greet him, Miyagi grips her wrist. The contact is so sudden Luna flinches, but Miyagi doesn’t let go. Trembling, he lifts himself, a muscular energy moving him, anger and alarm transfiguring his face as he begins to shout. From down the hall, she hears Yagi running. In a moment she is at the door, scattering her sandals, directing Luna to step back as Miyagi convulses into a violence of coughing.
* * *
—
THE TRAIN is quiet ahead of rush hour, and they glide the few stops to the office her father shared with Watanabe, the aftershock of the afternoon vibrating between them. Several times, Watanabe has mentioned a folder he feels she should have, but Luna knows it’s also his way of inviting her to the place where her father spent most of his time before his death. After the boardinghouse, the office, a single room in a five-story walk-up, feels almost spacious, though with little more than a table, two chairs, and a bank of filing cabinets, it resembles a low-budget TV police interrogation room, marginally improved by the dorm room fridge, the small hotplate and kettle, a crown of American mugs ringed around a plate of bagged tea. Her father, she remembers, was never without a mug, nursing it close to his chest as he chatted up a neighbor or colleague, throwing out incorrect playground slang whenever Luna and her sister Katy drifted within earshot. It made Luna laugh but drove Katy mad, the difference between them encapsulating the family divide. Luna never knew where she belonged.
Watanabe scrapes back a chair. “This was your father’s spot.”
Luna assesses the foldout, its gunmetal frame and vinyl seat. When she sits, she finds it comfortable, the sun pressing on her back, the practical tabletop spread in front of her. Her father must have enjoyed it here, but all she can picture is his stiff back peeling away from the chair, his clammy forehead smacking the corner of the table. She stands.
“Do you think my father was planning to ask Miyagi-san to move in with him?”
Watanabe turns, hands poised over the file drawer. “That could explain the boxes.”
“Does it? There’s plenty of room in the house; he didn’t have to pack. Why do you think my father never mentioned him?”
Watanabe pauses again, then shakes his head. “Your father never did anything without a reason, but I admit it was a surprise.”
Luna pictures her father in Miyagi’s dark room. Orphans from opposite sides of history: it’s as though the war had swapped their destinies, catapulting her father into what might have been Miyagi’s life, and Miyagi into what could easily have been her father’s life had he not been adopted. She can’t imagine that the irony was lost on her father: he, the son of the colonized, living the life of the colonizers’ son, while Miyagi labored on the fringes, building structures that would never benefit him. It’s a grotesque reversal, and there should be no room for resentment or guilt, but feelings follow their own paths. She thinks of the photograph on Miyagi’s wall, its odd placement, as though tacked up to be seen—by her father? She banishes the image of Miyagi’s outrage.