Me, Mas, Minnow, Twitchy, and Frankie get together to help out the guys who have to leave. At Stan Katsumoto’s family grocery, we sort through the shelves, marking down prices on rice and kombu and tea. When Mas isn’t paying attention, I tag him with a 50% OFF sticker, and Twitchy adds a 5¢ tag to the seat of his pants. One of the other fellas snickers. Mary, Stan’s younger sister, glowers at us. Me and Twitchy smother our laughter and stick Mas with six more tags before Mrs. Katsumoto looks up from the counter and goes, “Aiya, what are you doing? Masaru’s a handsome boy—we can get at least a dollar for him!”
I wish I could tell you what Mas’s face looks like, but me and Twitchy are already out the door, running down the block as Mas roars after us.
When we break for lunch, Mrs. Katsumoto posts a note on the door beneath the words, I AM AN AMERICAN. It’s a message to their customers, thanking them for twenty years of patronage.
Stan stares at it for a second, then cocks his eyebrow. “You sure about this, Ma? We don’t want them to get the wrong idea about us.”
“What wrong idea?” Mrs. Katsumoto asks.
“That we’re decent people or something.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Decent people don’t kick out other decent people, so if we’re decent, they can’t be decent.” He fans out his hands. “You’re going to cause an existential crisis, Ma! If white people aren’t decent, are they anything?”
She sighs and presses down a bit of tape with her thumbnail. “It’s the right thing to do,” she says, “for us.”
For us? The buzzing returns, sharp and metallic. You thank other people to make them feel good, and good is the last thing anyone should feel about what’s happening to us.
Mr. Katsumoto says nothing. He lowers his head over the counter, silently marking down packages of umeboshi.
After lunch, we go to help Tommy’s family lay out their belongings on the sidewalk: dishes they brought from Japan when they immigrated, kitchen appliances, extra towels, desks, Tommy’s record player and all his beloved records, their washing machine, lamps, rugs, books.
The bargain hunters descend before we’ve even got half the Haranos’ things out of the apartment. They come with pinched faces and tight fists, offering ten cents to every dollar’s worth of stuff.
For a while, we try to entertain Tommy’s three younger sisters. We let Aiko, who’s thirteen, hop and chatter around us as we move pieces of furniture onto the ketos’ trucks. Twitchy makes faces behind the bargain hunters’ backs for the littlest ones, Fumi and Frannie, who laugh and clap. But things get harder as the day wears on. Aiko accidentally drops a lamp and has to sit out the rest of the afternoon on the stoop. The twins start crying when their kokeshi dolls are sold, and nothing us or Tommy or their mom does can make them stop. Mr. Harano is stonefaced when their sofa goes for three bucks; their beds, for two each.
At the end of the day, they’re left with a few hundred dollars. A few hundred dollars for a lifetime of things that can’t go with them.
THINGS YOU CAN’T PUT A PRICE ON
the most perfect sand dollar I ever found at Ocean Beach, wrapped in a handkerchief Yum-yum gave me on our third date
The first families move out on Tuesday, April 28. They line up in front of the Civil Control Station in their Sunday best—the men in suits, the women in veiled hats and gloves—like they’re going to church instead of an internment camp. I wonder why they bother.
From the stoop across the street, me and Twitchy watch the bags stack up on the curb: first the steamer trunks, then the suitcases, and the canvas bundles expertly knotted at the top. The piles grow so high in places, you can’t see over them to the keto guard and his Springfield rifle posted by the doors of the Civil Control Station.
We say goodbye to Tommy, who promises to write, and to the rest of the Haranos. As they board their Greyhound bus, Fumi and Frannie start crying and grabbing at Mrs. Harano’s hair, and she shoves one of the twins at Tommy, who bounces her gently in his arms.
We can still hear them wailing as they drive away.
When the day’s over, there’s still bits of baggage left on the sidewalk: duffle bags, crates tied with rope, trunks painted with English and Japanese names. Relatives and friends are lugging away what they can, but there are people without relatives or friends, and their things are still on the pavement when the street lamps go on.
* * *
The night the last families are evacuated from the north side of Japantown, me and Frankie Fujita walk through the neighborhood together.
The deserted streets.
The abandoned businesses.
The boarded windows.
The darkened homes.
Half of this community amputated, the people I’ve grown up with shipped off to who-knows-where.
There’s hardly anyone around now—just me and Frankie and the shadows and the streetlights haloed in fog. We walk down the middle of the road like the kings of a hollow kingdom.
He’s practically humming with anger. I can feel it like a current coming off him.
Hell, I can feel it coming off me, too, growing stronger with every vacant house we pass.
My fists are electric.
We break into a noodle house. There’s not much left. The tables and chairs have all been sold off. There are a few blank spaces on the walls where wood carvings used to hang, but the rest is papered with menus in kanji and hiragana and English, peeling at the corners.
We rip it apart. We tear the daily specials from the walls. We throw napkin dispensers and empty tubs. Frankie shreds a string of paper cranes, sending them limply into the air like confetti. In the kitchen, I find a maneki-neko, a ceramic good-luck cat—big eyes and calico spots—and drop-kick it into the dining room, where it shatters.
One of the neko’s red ears skids to a stop in front of Frankie. He stares at it for a second. Then he laughs. It’s a horrible, humorless laugh, and his open mouth looks desperate and hungry, like he wants to devour the whole world.
* * *
When we make our way outside again, we find the Kitano brothers, Jim and Shuji, smoking on the corner of Bush and Laguna. Beside me, Frankie picks up the pace. He’s practically running at them, shouting, “Hey, Jimmy, you ugly son of a bitch, where’s that two dollars you owe me?”
I don’t remember Jim owing Frankie money, but he is a son of a bitch, and I’m itching for a fight, and who the hell cares anyway?
Before either of the Kitano brothers can say anything, Frankie slugs Jim in the jaw. Not hard. I’ve seen Frankie hit like a hammer, and this is nothing. This is a love tap.
He wants Jimmy to fight back.
And he does. Jim comes up swinging, and then they’re grunting and grappling on the curb, stumbling into the street.
Before Shuji can do anything, I clobber him. It feels good to hit something. To make something hurt.
We’re throwing punches. We’re getting bloody. The Kitano brothers are yelling, but me and Frankie are stern and fierce and the only sound we make is our breathing. Exhaling anger.
Shuji gets me good in the mouth, but I hardly feel it. No, I welcome it. I eat up the pain like breakfast.
Lights go on down the street. Someone’s shouting at us. Sirens wail in the distance.