CHAPTER 60 – Kaerō ka na (2)

Morning came.

The trio rode out in the Mercedes.

Kiritani watched the land flatten. Orchards gave way to scrub, then to long fields of pale stubble, then to nothing at all. He wondered if the US military had chosen the place for its psychological desolation. California was a verdant state, but here, the sky made a man feel small and insignificant.

Mount Shasta stood white and alone on the horizon.

He felt… Natsukashii. The word did not translate cleanly. Not nostalgia. Not homesickness. Closer to the ache of recognition than anything else, but sans the bittersweet feelings, because Kiritani could only recall the bitterness.

The Newfoundland called Eric drove without speaking. He was a good man. He understood what was about to happen. Eppie sat half-turned in the passenger seat. She was smiling at him now and then. This made Kiritani less sad, because Eppie-san being more nervous for Kiritani seeing Tule Lake than the man who had lived there was an amusing thought.

And so, they drove in silence.

Kiritani did not mind the silence. He was working himself up as well. The courage he tried to summon was not something he had expected to possess for the last fifty years. A week ago, he was trying to keep the cats warm in Central Park. Now, he was here, in this heated seat, in this heated car, with Eppie-san and Lee-san, going to see the place that took his papers.

Maybe he would cry?
The thought was amusing to Kiritani.

The landscape changed again. They were closer now.
Dust trailed the Mercedes.

He remembered the bus, the dust. The dust that found its way into everything. The rice, the bedding, the seams of his one white shirt. He remembered Tanaka, grinning through all of it, catching scorpions in a coffee tin and naming each one after the guards he despised. He remembered the latrines in August and the cold that rolled down from the mountains in winter, so cold that they had character. He remembered the women singing at night, very demurely, hauntingly, songs with no English.

The guards did not like that.
There were no more songs after that winter.

He remembered the day they gave him a number.
It was funny, now that he thought about it.
He had no passport.
No birth certificate.
No Social Security.

But he did have his number. TL-19204.

“TEE-EL-NINE-TEEN-TWO-O-FOR!” The warden’s accent was deeply southern. Kiritani could not understand a single word he said, which enraged the man on an existential level. Some years later, in New York, he had heard that they made a movie, “The List,” centred on one of Japan’s former allies, the Germans. The Fascists had tattooed numbers onto their prisoners. Kiritani’s, by comparison, was only a card.

The land began to fold itself into low black hills. Old lava, scorched and sleeping, led to a lake that no longer held water. Holding, instead, human misery.

“Mō sugu,” he told himself. Soon.

His hands, folded in his lap, had begun to shake. It wasn’t the vibration of the car. The car was very quiet, very expensive.

Eppie-san noticed. She was always watching. She reached back and laid her hand briefly over his, the way one steadies a cup in a moving car.

Kiritani breathed.

Sutte. In.
Haite. Out.

The car slowed.

Ahead, past a chain-link fence grown flaccid with disrepair, past a government sign that named the place in English. Suddenly, with no ceremony at all, they had arrived.

Flat. Vast. Sun-bleached.

Cruel.
It was a cruel landscape.
Here, cruel things had happened.

“We’re here,” Eric said quietly. “Sensei?”
Eppie held his hand as they exited. He needed the help.

Kiritani did not answer, because the old artist was no longer here.
He had gone inside already. He was twenty-one years old, with dust on his shoes, looking up at a sky that had not shown compassion in sixty years.

Cruelly, Kiritani realised too late that this was not a return:

Instead, the NO-NO-Boy had never left.

They watched the old artist amble, very slowly, through the gate alone.

In Eppie’s memory, in her world, Tule Lake had a formal visitor centre, rangers on site, ticketing… and, in the way of Lana’s America, it had a gift shop.

There was nothing here now save the dregs of memory.

The fences.
The stockade.
The motor pool.

And broken-down longhouses where the inmates were kept.

Kirtani moved slowly, deliberately, like a man entering a dream, slipping through history while walking in real time.

Screech—

The crunch of rubber on gravel turned them both around.

A second car pulled in behind theirs, dust still rising off its tyres. The woman who stepped out was familiar to them.

“Ms Lafitte,” Eppie bowed her head. “You’ve made it.”

“You’re late,” Eric grinned. “I guess this place is a bit far out.”

Lafitte wore her sunglasses pushed up, stabbed into her greying bun. She looked entirely too pleased for a woman with her level of journalistic integrity. Clearly, she was here to bear the good news.

“It’s you guys who are late,” she grinned at them, her pearly whites glistening in the cold sun. “I was here an hour ago. They’ve already gone in.”

“They?” Eppie felt her heart skip a beat. “You’re serious?”

“Absolutely serious,” Lafitte laughed. “They weren’t even hard to find. Did you know there’s a website? Tule Lake Pilgrims? No joke. The families who chose to stay in these areas actually run tours for displaced families to visit. I basically just… booked a tour. I wouldn’t call that investigative journalism…”

Eppie smiled at Eric. She was smiling so much her jaws ached.
Eric was smiling as well, but unlike Lafitte and Eppie, he was just happy to see them happy.

Out across the flat gold grass, Henry Kiritani kept walking, smaller with every step, shrinking away into the past, until the old camp swallowed him whole.

As a liminal memory in a floating world, Kiritani visited his past selves.

He walked the stockade and was shocked at how small it was, that such a small space could cage so many men at once. The bars were rusted now, and the place was choked with dust. The building itself was tender with age, sagging in the middle, no longer a threat. He laid two fingers against the broken windowsill and watched the dust drift from the gaps. He had spent eleven days in here once for the crime of asking a guard, politely, in English, where Tanaka had gone.

He walked from the stockade to Barrack 7, Block 42. There were no signs, no landmarks, but his feet remembered the distance. His body itself affirmed the space where the building had been. He could feel the doorway, or the ghost of it, the crampness of the room. The dust… the dust that got everywhere. There were eight people here at the beginning. Two by the end. NO-NO-Boys like him. There was a space where he kept his trunk. Inside were scraps of paper, scraps of cardboard. Inside were pictures of the camp. Of cats that had perished long ago.

His feet continued their pilgrimage. He arrived at the lake. There was a lake once. There were ducks, he was sure, and reeds. The American government had drained it two decades before the Japanese-Americans arrived. They had turned life into death. There was no lake. There were no tule, the name of the bulrush reeds.

Everyday, Kiritani stared at the life that was. The flat, grey-gold earth of the river bed, cracked a thousand directions, shattered singularly as if by some enormous bomb. He had drawn this lakebed a hundred times from memory. It was, in his mind, a great wound, a blight upon the sublime world.

He remembered telling Tanaka that he would have liked to swim in the lake that once was.

Kiritani wasn’t sure how long he had walked, but the butte looked bigger now.

Petroglyph Point, the guards called it. The Japanese families who could understand English said it was covered in ancient carvings, geometric patterns, made by the folk who owned this land before the Americans arrived, before the lake was drained, before they built a prison.

Kiritani found a piece of flat, dark, volcanic rock.

He sat, slowly, the way an old heron settles into place in the reeds.

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He found that his eyes had grown very heavy. The sun was warm on his face, despite the cold in the air. His clothes, his new clothes, were unbelievably warm. His hip ached. His ankles ached. His soul ached.

But he felt at peace.

He closed his eyes.

Would Eppie-san be sad if he never woke up? Knowing Eppie, she would probably cry.

He would just… rest his eyes, and—

“Ohayō!” a voice sounded beside his ear.

Kiritani’s eyes opened.

The young lady who stood over him was not Eppie san, but a little ojou, about six or seven, her black hair styled with a neat-cut fringe, staring at him with a seriousness that only guileless children and old senile men could manage.

There was something about this child… something very familiar.

Tanaka? No. Tanaka was a boy.

“… Are you dying?”

Kiritani choked on his own thoughts.
The question was so shocking that, for a moment, his body forgot it was 87 years old and decided to sit up.

“Hana! Mō! You cannot say such things!” a voice, an adult voice, old but not as old as his own, called out from Kiritani’s left. “Shitsurei deshita, Kiritani-sensei… she was raised American, this is my fault—”

Kiritani turned his face.