Yet in less than a day, Luna will wheel her carry-on up the aisle of the plane, jittery with exhaustion but anticipating the moment she will see her husband and tell him the news. It’ll be a portentous moment, the flash of excitement and fear awakening a restlessness inside her. For just hours before her flight, after declining Watanabe’s offer to see her to the airport, she’ll rush around her grandparents’ house, shutting off the gas and electricity, locking doors and storm windows, knowing she’ll be the last family member to set foot in it. It’ll be a peculiar moment, already imbued with nostalgia, the once cold rooms, warmed by familiarity, reminding her of the hours she spent rooting for answers and finding only traces of a man seemingly bent on evicting himself. Or at least that will be what she’ll be forced to conclude, the walls and corridors now forever incontestable in their silence. And for the first time she’ll feel herself surrender, the old hurt and budding regret crushed beneath the weightier sorrow of departure and the slow panic of the uncertain future opening her chest.
What, for example, should she do with the boxes?
When Luna calls Watanabe, he will offer her his shed, and she will eagerly accept, even though it will make no sense. In fact, it would be satisfying to see her father’s boxes gutted and broken down, the piles of flat cardboard cut to size and bound for recycling. For her part, she will take only three things: the scrapbook, the folder, and the mug. By then it will be clear there is no one there in that house. She has waited too long. They waited too long. They had already passed each other in the night.
PAVILION
Isolated more than twenty miles beyond the gate of Dugway Proving Ground [in Utah]…lie the remains of German-Japanese Village, where replicas of German and Japanese buildings were constructed…to test incendiaries for use in World War II. Even today special clearance is required to get to what remains of the testing site, and locating it amid the interconnecting labyrinth of seemingly nameless and featureless roadways is difficult.
—DYLAN J. PLUNG, “THE JAPANESE VILLAGE AT DUGWAY PROVING GROUND”
“It’s funny,” Seiji said when Masaaki walked into the cloistered room billowing with light blown in through the cheap powder-blue curtains. “Here you are, coming in from the sunshine to visit me in the dark, but we’re not all that different, are we?” A statement iridescent with—was it mockery?
Masaaki closed the door, cutting off the light from the boardinghouse hall and leaving the man before him backlit, his oval head and craggy shoulders looming like prehistoric cliffs. In the last month, Seiji had declined alarmingly, his spindly frame bereft of flesh, his head, once vigorously snowcapped, as threadbare as a combed beach. The war, concluded almost sixty-five years ago, had ravaged his throat and lungs, leaving the peaks and valleys of his health chasing each other unpredictably. The boardinghouse manager, who’d been renting to Seiji for decades, claimed she’d seen him worse, but it was clear that for him the peak had never seemed so far. From here, there would only be valleys.
Masaaki leaned his satchel against the wall and sat in his usual spot at the foot of the futon, the worn tatami faintly sour: the imprint of generations of sweat. “How are you feeling?” he asked.
Seiji ignored him, and for a moment they listened to his wheeze, the shuck and whistle steady in the loom of his chest. In the window, the curtains settled, the light folding its glittery wings, and the gray room revealed itself: the tidy sketch of the overhead shelving, the rounded cube of the analog TV as anachronistic as Masaaki’s bottle-bottom glasses in the twenty-first century. Masaaki unzipped his bag and extracted his water.
Despite everything, here he was again in the poorest heart of Tokyo visiting this man, his brother, who he’d met only a year ago when Seiji turned up at his house in a rural pocket of Kanagawa, looking for information about his parents. The meeting had been sublime. Seiji, separated from his parents during the American firebombing of Tokyo in the spring of 1945, had learned of his parents’ survival only weeks before he found his way to Masaaki’s door. And Masaaki, who’d discovered Seiji’s existence only as an adult, when he learned that he himself had been a war orphan adopted by their parents during the American Occupation, had only a blurry impression of Seiji captured in the one photograph that had survived the war: a tattered family portrait commemorating Seiji’s first day of school, framed and crowned with a black ribbon designated for the dead. The two men had spent hours that first day pinning down dates and events, endlessly circling back to confirm this or that detail—So, your biological parents were Korean, that’s all you know? So, our parents were in Tokyo until at least July 1945?—as though afraid to let the timeline rest. Masaaki wasn’t sure when their excitement had turned shackling. Seiji’s roving gaze, which had lingered over the cut glass ashtray, the dusty turntable and record collection, had fixed on him.
“I’m sure you noticed too. The coincidence,” Seiji resumed now. “The two of us thirteen years apart and utterly unrelated, but orphaned by the same war and sharing the same parents. It never crossed my mind they’d survived and adopted a child. What’s interesting is that, all along, you were just on the other side, growing up in the bright world you inhabit, advocating for the future in your world of front doors and windows, while I advocated for it in mine crowded with back doors and alleyways, out of sight of yours. I keep returning to this fact, like a fly to light, or maybe a rat to water in a drought.”
Masaaki said nothing. The parallels had struck him too, their biographical correspondences a fortunate convenience, their antiwar commitments a shared interest they could huddle around over coffee on intermittent afternoons. And for months they did huddle over bottomless cups in one or another hole-in-a-wall kissaten, Seiji regaling him with tumultuous tales of his early activities, the historic clashes with the riot police through the sixties and seventies over the ongoing American military presence in Japan. Masaaki, who had followed these events on television, found the personal perspective riveting. But over the weeks and months, the stories, even the man himself, began to feel oppressive. Beneath the patter, there was always an undercurrent. It was nothing concrete—a pause over the rim of Seiji’s coffee cup, a catch in the slice of his setting gaze, as elusive and as beguiling as an eel. It worked on him. He began to dream, figments returning to him in milky flashes until he had it, reconstructed, in his head. The backdrop changed as often as he and Seiji changed kissaten—an old habit of an old militant, Seiji liked to joke—but the scene was always the same: two men facing each other, one older than the other, the younger poised with a question he never asks, the opportunity cut off by the older man’s quicker draw. The words varied—sometimes a comment, other times a question—but the tone never did, and a louring sense of inevitability would pin Masaaki as though to a script. When the scene played out, it would end these visits—that was the assumption, perhaps his hope, admitted only in his dreams.