Watanabe finds the folder and secures it in a manila envelope before handing it to her. Luna is curious, but she’s glad for the excuse not to look.
“I have to say, that was strange back there,” he says, watching her wedge the envelope into her tote. “Right before Miyagi started yelling, he looked at me. It was like he knew me.”
Luna feels a quiver in her belly. “Actually, just before you came back to the room, he said something. ‘Konomi,’ I think.”
“As in ‘preference’?”
Luna nods. “All of a sudden he was so present—just there.” It feels unfair to think she just met her last known relative on this side of the world, only to find him across a crease in time she can’t reach. “I can’t believe I actually met my uncle.”
Watanabe watches her rub her wrist still garlanded with the memory of Miyagi’s fingers. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask. Did you ever try to contact your father?”
Luna has braced for this question. She tells him about her first year in graduate school, where, for the first time, she found herself among people who, unlike her sister and mother, recognized themselves in her. It was an empowering experience, desolate in the end, the inelastic limits of community banishing her for those parts of her that didn’t fit. She thought of her father. A simple correspondence, maybe a scholarly one: weeks of false starts and tangled emotions, she gave up.
“Back then I wanted too much too specifically, and I was afraid of being disappointed. I was twenty-one; I assumed I had time,” she says. “It’s what happens when your life is shaped by someone who isn’t there. My father was who I thought of when my family and friends fell short of understanding me. And he felt real. That’s the thing about absence. It retains the possibility of a return even if it’s not probable. And it made a lot of things possible. It let me imagine another place where I might belong. It helped that I look like him.” This, she realizes, is true. Funny how the ties of blood, expressed physically, have the power to seduce you into believing the bond is real, elemental enough to transcend the gulf of time and distance, when, really, it’s likely nothing more than a mirage granted the force of reality by mundane evidences habitually reinforced, like the tension that used to crimp not only her mother but also their neighbors whenever they saw her father’s shape lurking in her face. “I guess he’s gone,” she says.
Watanabe is quiet for a long moment. “It’s complicated for you,” he says, finally. “For what it’s worth, I know he always assumed you’d visit.”
* * *
—
IT IS past seven by the time Luna returns to the house. Settling at the kitchen table, she slides the folder from the envelope and spreads its contents, sweeping the receipts to one side. She spent her whole train ride learning her father’s lunch habits: noodle sets (¥990); curry specials (¥1090); the occasional bookstore purchase, including, curiously, a translation of Jorge Luis Borges’s labyrinthine stories. The rest of the folder is more personal. She couldn’t face it on the train.
The least complicated is the registration card. Time has buffed it to a featureless shine, but the name of the town, Matsushiro, is still clear, as is the year of issue, the twentieth year of Shōwa, along with the red lacework of stamps pressed into the surface like lipstick.
What pains her most are the glossy brochures from the 1980s collected from various international schools around the city. All her life Luna was led to believe her father’s departure was unilateral; now, it seems that at the very least he’d envisioned their life here. At most there had been talk between her parents that failed. Useless now to reassign blame, if there is blame to reassign, but she feels her world tilt, the story of her life poised to change.
The third item is mysterious: an address in Niigata scrawled on a notecard. A friend? A colleague? Another family member? All she finds when she looks it up is an unremarkable dot in a region famous for its rice production.
The final item is the most haunting: a sheaf of stapled pages containing a smattering of newspaper clippings, retrieved, it seems, from microfiche. The scan is good, preserving the analog texture of ink on newsprint, each article, just two or three lines, a variation on the same theme: unidentified women of “dubious” ethnicity and profession found murdered in red-light areas during the Occupation.
The last stapled page clarifies nothing: a block of text copied, Luna will later learn, from a zuihitsu written by a Japanese American poet. Floating in the center of the page without context, it provokes a strange feeling, like falling into a chasm, the white gap between languages, where there is a sensation, tip-of-the-tongue, but no words to attach to it.
When nuns interviewed Koreans in Hiroshima after the bomb, the survivors drew a blank. When inadvertently questioned in Japanese, one began to wail and recall the horrors. Others could also recall it in Japanese, but not in their mother tongue.
What does it mean to remember in one language, but not the other, the mother tongue?
What does it mean to survive, witness to an attack so negating of life it gutted your brain, eradicated your voice, leaving you blank-faced with a mouth that opened only when prodded by the colonizer’s tongue?
Why did her father file all this here?
* * *
—
SHE SEES Watanabe one last time. She is out back, the contents of the house upended in the yard, when he stops by with her father’s favorite mug.
“Sorting the recycling?” He eyes the piles, rolling up his mental sleeves. “My wife and I are free tomorrow.”
“I’m pretty much done,” she says. And this is true. Her father has left little in the end: just shelves of books, a few clothes, and the boxes. The rest are leftovers carried over from the previous generation: the duct-taped rice cooker, pots with missing handles, an assortment of supermarket plates and bowls. It seems paltry, these inherited things he’d adapted his life to, living among them as though he were a bracket, a temporary graft in the family genealogy. Yet there is also something appealing about a life stripped to the essentials, everything in the process of being used up, its whole lifespan spent.
She says as much to Watanabe as she changes her shoes for what will be her last walk through the neighborhood. It is a clear day, the sky an opulent blue, and she can see that on a day like this the town does boast spectacular views of the country’s famed mountain.
“I suppose I do see what the fuss is about,” she says. “It’s surreal.”
Watanabe glances at the specter that has loomed over his entire life. “That mountain makes it too easy to believe we’re one big homogenous family.”
“I always thought that was a Western stereotype until I learned it’s also what this country sells. It’s a convenient narrative. Japan the homogenous; America the diverse. We can look at each other to confirm our own fantasy image of ourselves. It’s a flattering mirror. One in which minorities either disappear or are cloned.”