The Grave on the Wall. Brandon Shimoda

       THE PERIOD OF SUMMONING RELATIVES

      My grandfather had one memory of his childhood in Hiroshima: washing the feet of his grandfather’s corpse. He was six or five or four. He stood in the doorway of the room where his grandfather’s corpse had been prepared. His grandfather, covered in a white towel and lying on a thin futon in the middle of the room, looked like he was sleeping. There was a sponge in a large white bowl of lucid water, and a robe, tightly folded, in the corner. My grandfather’s mother and three older brothers nodded at him to enter.

       He looks like he is dreaming.

      He studied his mother and brothers before kneeling beside them. He touched one of his grandfather’s feet. The first touch was the most daunting. The vein. He was afraid it might come apart in his hand. The skin was the texture of the rooms in which he spent time with his grandfather. But the seasons had been extinguished. He sank the sponge in the water, wrung it out, and touched it, tentatively, to his grandfather’s sole.

       Like he is dreaming us into the room with him, washing his body. Dreaming my thoughts, even; that I think he is dreaming.

      He knew his grandfather was dead. His brothers told him. How did they know? A bead of water sank into the tatami.

      He had a dream about a woman being lured from deep inside a cave to its mouth, where a mirror hung from a branch and was burning. A grandfather is a strange, somewhat impossible work of conscience, especially when old, especially when in a state of decline, on the verge of appearing to dream.

      My grandfather’s name is Midori Shimoda. He was born on an island off the coast of Hiroshima. He was born three years in a row, 1909, 1910, 1911, depending on whose memory is being consulted. According to my grandmother, June Shimoda, he was born March 26, 1911. According to records kept by the FBI—the file opens April 7, 1942—he was born a year earlier, March 26, 1910. According to a biography accompanying an exhibition of early-twentieth-century Japanese American photography at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, he was born a year before that, March 26, 1909.¹ His death, after nearly two decades with Alzheimer’s, unfolded across a number of years, the final year being 1996. He died in the United States. He had long forgotten the island, its name, that he was born there. It had been eighty years since he left the village of Oko, stepped off Kurahashi onto a boat to cross the Ondo Strait to Honshu. Eighty years since he moved, with his mother and three older brothers, to Nakanose, in Kumamoto, where his father was from, where his grandmother (his father’s mother), Yumi Taguchi, had prepared space in her house. That is where he lived before immigrating to the United States. He returned to Japan only once, in 1983. Japan was, by then, as much a curiosity—changeless, always changing, filled with faces assumed yet uncanny—as it was his birthplace and ancestral homeland.

      Midori was nine when he left Japan. He was in his seventies when he returned. Not only had the homeland changed, but most of the places he visited (Kamakura, Kyoto, Miyajima, Nagoya, Takayama), he was visiting for the first time. Land, not home, maybe not even land. The maybe not even land in which he was most likely to encounter his ancestors—whether they were home or not—were in Nakanose and Oko. He did not visit either of them.

      I visited Nakanose the summer of my thirty-third year. I visited Oko the summer of my thirty-eighth year. No one in my family had visited either place in almost one hundred years. Nakanose no longer exists. Oko is on the edge of extinction. I went to where Nakanose once was, and to Oko, to visit Midori, but within a basic confusion. The grandfather I had in mind was old; if I was seeking him there, I would have to be seeking a child.

      Kure is thirty minutes by train from downtown Hiroshima. Kurahashi is twenty minutes by bus from downtown Kure. Katsuragahama is thirty minutes by bus from the Ondo Bridge, spiraled on both ends, bright red. It is the closest town of any size to Oko. Katsuragahama has hot springs, a shipbuilding museum, an inn, a beach, and, between the beach and the road, a grove of five hundred pine trees. In the seventh or eighth century, a poet sat beneath the pines and, facing the sea, wrote an ode. To the pines, to what he felt to be their perfection. The ode enfolded a lamentation on what the poet felt, by comparison, to be his perilously misshapen life. The pines held the sound of the waves and the poet’s silent labor. The poem is one of the many thousands of poems in the Man’yoshu (Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves) and is inscribed on the face of a large stone that sleeps beneath the pines. The day I arrived, it was raining. The poem and its characters were leaking.

      I asked