“Well, you’ve clearly inherited your father’s cynical streak,” he says. “From my vantage, America is diverse; unlike here, people can become American in America.”
Luna shakes her head, frustration rising. “America is black or white. I can’t tell you how often I’m asked where I’m really from. Most of the time, we’re not part of the national conversation, unless we’re needed as a model, the proof triumphant of the American Dream, or as faces for People of Color campaigns—or that’s how it can feel. Right now, we’re not the ones fearing hate crimes and roundups, but it’s easy to imagine—it’s not like it hasn’t happened before. All it takes is a war. It gets old figuring out where I belong.”
Watanabe considers this, the permutations of her grievances rooted in a history so umbilical to her identity as an American. “When your father discovered his Korean roots, he said it changed his relationship to his work. But did it change his sense of himself? I can’t answer that for him, but I know that, by the time I met him, his concern wasn’t where he belonged but how he wanted to fit in.”
“That’s an interesting distinction,” Luna says, feeling the loss of one more conversation she’ll never have with her father. “Not everyone has that choice, though. Being here, I keep thinking about Urashima Tarō. My father told us that story so many times my sister and I started dreaming of evil magic boxes.” She laughs. “It wasn’t until I read it for a class in college that I saw it as a cautionary tale about leaving home. It’s how I’ve been teaching it: as an allegory of exile. Now I wonder if it’s actually the opposite: a moral about being too attached to our roots.”
“Because Urashima Tarō could have stayed in paradise?”
Luna nods. “There’s also a price for staying, though: he has to give up his ties to the human world. He has to forget his roots—forget who he is.”
“Is that wrong? Can people never have a new life?”
Luna doesn’t answer right away. Is forgetting a prerequisite for a new life? “I suppose it depends on if memory is a choice. In Tarō’s case, he couldn’t forget because he’s human.”
They are quiet as they concentrate on climbing the road corkscrewing up the slope, staggering houses, wrinkling walls, mocking the developers who had to concede to these mountains despite the technologies that brought them here. At the top, they pause to catch their breath before continuing through the backwoods where the houses are older, more resplendent, separated by stone walls above which Luna can see the domes of ornamental trees hinting at gardens often replicated on a grander scale in botanical parks. Next time—if there is a next time—will these be gone too, sold off by their inheritors to make way for the new?
“The thing I like about fairy tales is the variation,” Watanabe resumes. “In every version I know, Urashima Tarō suffers for his attachments and returns to shore. In every version, he opens the tamatebako. But I don’t think he’s punished for being human. The tamatebako is a mercy.”
The interpretation is generous, she thinks, but one that doesn’t change the known story. What if, she thinks, Urashima Tarō had remembered Otohime’s warning and not opened the box? Because in all the versions, that’s the unexplored story. She is reminded of her father on that last family visit here, how intent he’d been on showing them the sites, not the big established attractions they wanted to see, but the vulnerable local ones, trying to impart something of his own lived story. At the time, it was hard to understand. Now she finds herself gripped by what will happen when she leaves Japan with no ties left to return to.
“I always felt strange in my own country, even my own family,” Luna says. “But I feel strange here too. It’s strange to feel connected to a place you’ve only visited a handful of times as a child. It makes no sense. What does America or Japan—or, god, Korea—mean to me? What did it mean to my father? What should it mean in our world? Because as far as I can see, all it does is create destruction.” She swipes a fallen branch off the path. “I think I’m pregnant.”
Watanabe turns to her, surprised. Then he looks pleased, then mournful, then somber, as he shares this new weight of her father’s death. Luna is glad when he doesn’t sentimentalize it. “I like how in America people keep their ethnic roots, either as a middle name or with that convenient hyphen in your language,” he says. “But you never changed your last name.”
Luna remembers the decision, the agonized waffling before the wedding, the fear of untethering that seized her. “I suppose if I’m really pregnant I’ll have to sort that out. It’s funny. I’ve always pictured myself with a boy, but I’ve always been set on the name ‘Erin.’ I had a childhood friend with that name. My father made it sound so pretty the way he pronounced it. I used to wish it was mine.”
* * *
—
IN THE end her father’s roots are indeterminable. The Korean laborers, accounting for seventy percent of the workforce at Matsushiro, were indisputably the majority, but there were also three to five thousand Japanese workers and officers present, and it is ultimately unclear who had access to the ten or twenty women kept there to satisfy and subdue them. It is also unclear whether all the women were Korean, or whether, as in many “comfort” units, there were Japanese and maybe Chinese women as well. The biggest mystery is how a newborn had managed to survive the mountain site so prohibitive of life itself.
Her father might have come to a similar conclusion, judging by the most recent manuscripts she has found in the last box she discovered, hidden the whole time by the white sheet Watanabe had spread over it for the altar. The manuscripts are all dated this year, the newest not a week before his death, each an attempt to write not his history, it turns out, but his own story, beginning with the lacquered box his mother produced from the closet, the sealed lid hiding the registration card that would change his life—then nothing, the paragraph and sentence abandoned, sprouting question marks underlined twice, a particularity that chills Luna, who recognizes her own habits there.
Like all the rooms in this house, the study is bright, lit by a wide window below which sits his desk, now clear of the laptop and hard drive and the jar of pencils he’d kept there. Like the pencils, the laptop and hard drive were well used, but when she booted them up she found not a single file, each reset to factory condition. What finally undid her, though, was the plastic bag she found in the filing cabinet stocked with hanging folders that still hugged the shape of the documents her father had boxed up and scattered around the house. It contained picture frames, all empty, and a single scrapbook started in the 1950s that held photos of her grandparents and also, surprisingly, the one of Luna, Katy, and their mother stenciled like bright cutouts against the dim backdrop of their house in Urbana, but none of her father—just rectangles holding the places where he’d been. She found no letters, no postcards, not even one of the birthday cards they’d stamped and sent, and these are the things that will haunt her at odd hours throughout her life.