Later, Luna will learn words like “biculturalism” and “fracture” to explain the pain that will skim her heart whenever someone mentions something that reminds her of summer in Japan. Like her father, she will learn to find solace in the rigor of academic practice, and in this way she’ll compensate for the loss, which she will not confront until she is in her late twenties, pregnant with her first child, her home a happiness that will blemish her, the way it will touch and terrify her deeper than any hurt. Then she’ll discover that, despite the anguish and disappointment, she’d loved her father, loved him irreplaceably.
But for now Luna has no words to describe this feeling, this weight, which has traveled from her ear to her chest, constricting the tears that are refusing to come, even here, at the boarding gate, where they can see him waving behind the glass panel that now separates them. For now, Luna is focused on the plane, where she will sit between her sister and mother, enjoying her orange juice and peanuts, not knowing that it will be years before she’ll see him again, older and unable to look directly at her.
THREE
ALLEGIANCE
He was a man of principle, Masaharu told himself. After all, he’d kept his head, even in the midst of that nonsense war, which had gone much too far—anyone could’ve told anyone that by the dismal end of it. Even the Emperor, the coward, sacrificing more lives just to save a good patch of his own skin. And now in this burnt-out clutter of defeat, his head was still screwed on tightly, despite the rationed-out years no one could justify now. Only when the Americans made their appearance, dotting the wasteland with their trucks and jeeps, did he become aware of a coldness at the center of his being, a coldness that nipped the belly of his heart before sliding away like a silver fish, back into the black depths of his soul. Then again, maybe this had always been his flaw: his vulnerability to feelings that jeopardized his principles. Masaharu had to allow that.
That morning, they’d had breakfast as usual, he and his wife: thin barley gruel and half a sweet potato. And, as usual, he’d raised his chopsticks, imagining a magnificent breakfast he’d once considered plain: white rice, salted sanma fish, miso soup. He slurped the gruel, snatching hints of the sweetness of white rice, the bitterness of the sanma, relishing them. But the potato was an emaciated stump, unsalvageable even by imagination. He ate it in one bite.
“Would you like mine too?” his wife asked, finishing her smaller bowl of gruel.
Last night he’d watched her from the window of their rented room, carefully roasting the potato, its purple skin blistering in a nest of flames—just like a boy’s leg. He speared her untouched potato and swallowed it whole, choking on it.
“Do you want anything else before I go?” she asked, nesting her bowl in his.
Masaharu grunted and slid his chopsticks toward her. A year older than him, his wife was an elegant woman he’d chosen for himself—and for his parents, who’d been anxious to see him married. Of course, like everybody else, she’d thinned out considerably over these years, but she’d done so evenly, with none of the sinking and hollowing he saw in the flesh of others. Still, she barely filled her clothes now, no matter how often she took them in. Masaharu lay back on the grimy tatami floor, wondering why she still asked after his wants when, clearly, every want had to go unfulfilled. Possibly it was habit, thirteen years of being a wife, although Nishi Masako—as he still thought of her sometimes in her maiden name—had never been the subservient type. She’d always made sure he knew what she minded and what she did not. She was a resolute woman, certainly a match for himself.
Tucking her hair behind her ears, she wiped the counter that contained the sink where they also kept their toiletries. Every Sunday, it was the same: his brain withdrew into its stony vault while his wife prepared for work—a typing job secured by an acquaintance of his. It still got to him that she was the one with a job now—but for her to have picked up an extra day? It was enough to fell any man. But actually, that wasn’t true, Masaharu thought; Sunday or not, they’d never been short of talk until, one October evening four weeks earlier, she’d returned from work refusing to speak. Her silence was unprecedented, so when the next morning she still didn’t explain herself, he’d decided to respect it.
“Well, if there’s nothing else.” His wife pulled on her sandals, and this time it was Masaharu who did not look at her, even though he could feel her eyes boring into the side of his face.
She picked up her cloth bundle and closed the door behind her.
* * *
—
LISTENING TO his wife’s footsteps clanking down the metal stairs, Masaharu wondered again when the idea had come to him, or rather, when it had taken hold of him, this concrete need to act. It couldn’t have been long after that silent October evening. But actually, that wasn’t true either, Masaharu thought now. As a journalist, that need had fueled his whole career, though it had never gripped him this way. Except, he thought, one other time. It was March then, eight months ago, the worst night in their thirteen years of marriage.
That night, the sky, for once, had been empty of the planes that had begun to burn the country built mostly of wood and paper. Like many people, they’d been ignorant of the realities of incendiaries, and all they’d done to prepare, he and his wife and their thirteen-year-old son, Seiji, was dig a shelter two meters deep and cover it with corrugated tin. When the sirens went off, his wife had headed to the foyer to gather their evacuation bags while he made his way to Seiji’s room. In the time it took to cross the hall, there was a series of whistling sounds, followed by a succession of eerie thuds, then an eruption of footsteps as people flooded the streets. It took a moment for the incendiaries to flare, but when they did there was a new combustion of noise: the crash of splintering wood, the juddering roar of the flames as gales of heat and smoke rushed to engulf them. By the time Masaharu and his wife staggered into a district shelter, the whole neighborhood had been razed, the two safest evacuation sites—the Olympic-sized swimming pool and the concrete high school—gutted. All Masaharu and his wife could say for sure was that Seiji wasn’t in the house when the siren went off that March night, and afterward he never turned up, not at any shelter, or at any school, or among the things scraped and salvaged from the gummed-up pool.
A hollow clomp resounded on the concrete landing. In a minute his wife would pass under the window on her way to the train station. Masaharu stood. All month he’d asked himself why—why that silence?—and a nameless dread had coalesced in his chest. For here was his wife, a survivor of one of the worst horrors to befall a mother—what could possibly have unnerved her now? Yet she’d come home silent, unable to seamlessly carry on with their domestic routine—an unsettling anomaly for his wife, who’d been trained by years of war to evade the patriotic police.