The Grave on the Wall. Brandon Shimoda
it exist? (I was afraid it did not exist.) It exists, she said, yes, but there is little reason to go. We were standing on the stairs beside a window looking onto the pines. Then she said, I went there once . . . It is famous for its sunrises. I marveled at the thought of a place giving birth to its own suns, separate from those of the rest of the world.
The bus from Katsuragahama to Oko does not run very often. It is very small. White, shaped like a loaf of bread. Lisa and I were the only people on the bus. The driver was formal. He did not look up once into his mirror. I imagined him announcing the names of the stops to an empty bus. The road followed the coast, people fishing off white rocks, with children, radios, plastic bottles of tea. The bus passed into trees, bamboo. Then back into the open. The driver announced Oko. The stop was four wooden school chairs lined up against a wooden building facing the harbor.
Oko is arranged up the side of a foothill at the base of a range of small mountains. The predominant color—gunpowder gray—is set by the ceramic roof tiles. The houses are a combination of light blue and burned wood. Above the houses are trees, dark green, to the top of the mountain, with the occasional granite exposure. The village comes right up to the sea, separated by a narrow road and a seawall.
It was mid-afternoon. The village was at peace. A canal ran along its western edge. Green weeds grew out of its stone walls. There were intermittent cascades, but the canal was otherwise flat, the water stretched like braided glass. There was an occasional bridge. I walked up the canal, then followed the narrow paths between houses. All the doors were open, but I could not see through the screens. I heard voices. Running water and dishes (lunch was over), but I only saw one person: an old man in a doorway wearing baggy pants tucked into white rubber boots. A large cat with mottled dark fur stretched in a gutter. Do you remember? it moaned. The you inside you? Golden curtains in the window of the schoolhouse. Gardens covered in green mesh. Bundles of kindling stacked against the burnt-wood houses. I envisioned snow falling in the middle of summer.
The torii gate in front of the shrine was made of old, gray wood. Two lightning-shaped pieces of white paper (shide) hung from a thick, colorless rope. I walked up the stone stairs. I passed beneath the lightning, then turned around and looked out through the gate—the lightning became eyebrows—over the roofs, into the sea. Fifteen islands were visible. The islands were the same. The sea was the same. Where the trees around Oko met the sky was not the same, so the sky was not the same, and maybe the sea and the islands were not the same either. Was the shrine the same? It resembled a shelter, beneath which a well of dark green water was sleeping. I am here by the well at your house, grandfather. I see a flicker in the dark when I pull water up by the rope.2 But I did not see Midori’s face in the water, divining the depth of his grandfather’s descent into dying. Nor did I see my great-great-grandfather’s feet, floating in the shadow of the reflection of his feet floating in an electrified cloud, in the air above Oko. I saw instead my great-grandmother.
I could imagine his had not been the main branch but an offshoot of the family
A branch family goes out into the world, it splits off 3
Midori never mentioned his mother. My father never mentioned his grandmother. No one in my family ever said her name. But her name was there, a snake-like map inside a circle on the wall above my grandparents’ bed:
I was told that the snake-like map inside the circle was my great-grandmother’s signature. That she had invented it when she was young. It evoked a part of my grandparents’ past that was obscure to me. And presided over its continuation in the obscurity of their dreams. But I was not told my great-grandmother’s name. As if I was being told, instead, to engage with the snake, get lost in the turns of its maze. Very little of the past was offered. The obscurity of the past resided in not understanding, when I was young, that there was any past. Everyone existed, as at the opening of a play, as they were, which made their aging strange and terrifying. An error. A breach. To go backwards, to imagine my grandparents as children, for example, or not yet born—that they had parents, who once were children, or not yet born—was beyond my imagination.
My nameless great-grandmother’s signature was as clear as it was incomprehensible. Was it a route she walked, that she wanted, needed, to remember? Maybe it was a map of Oko. If I could learn to read it, travel through it, would I be pronouncing, with my body, her name?
It was only after Midori died that I asked about his parents. The simplest question, who were they? Midori’s death, or departure to another place, opened up a pantheon of ancestors. He had to have gone somewhere. The pantheon of ancestors was the most likely place, because it was intuitional. I felt it. Therefore assumed it. The ancestors formed a place in which no single individual could be truly differentiated from the collectivity of the dead. And yet, the first ancestor who introduced herself to me as an ancestor, was my great-grandmother. Her name is Kawaki Okamoto.
Kawaki was born in Oko on the first day of February 1883. Her father left his wife for a young woman, about whom the only thing I was told is that she was deaf. She was an illegitimate child, June said, about Kawaki, but her father raised her like his own. A funny thing to say. But the narrative endured: Kawaki, born out of wedlock to a deaf mistress, embodied an offshoot, a branch family splitting off.
Her father (name unknown) was a contract laborer in Hawaii. He worked on a sugarcane plantation for three years, then in a flower shop in Honolulu, before returning to Hiroshima. One day a man came into the flower shop. The man was looking for flowers to give to the wife of the minister with whom he was staying. The man was from Kumamoto. He too had been a contract laborer, on a pineapple plantation—where he made $9 a month and shared a thatched-roof shack with five men, one of whom tried to kill himself by drinking a gallon of soy sauce—but left before completing his three-year contract. He escaped. And was living with a white minister and his family. The man’s name was Geiichi Shimoda. Okamoto helped Geiichi select the perfect flowers. He thought of his daughter back home and asked Geiichi if he had a wife. He did not. He asked if Geiichi would be interested in marrying his daughter. He showed him a photograph.
In the photograph, Kawaki is standing at the edge of the woods, her back to a body of water, which can be seen over her shoulder, articulated by lines of cloud-like waves. The illuminated limbs of a tree hang over the waves. There is a fog in the woods.
The body of water is not real. It is a painting, a backdrop. For presenting Kawaki, as a picture, to her husband, also unreal. Her gaze is steadfast yet distant, with a little fear at the barely legible edge of unknowing. She is holding a small bag with two fingers. She looks like she is going to drop it, on purpose. It will fall very slowly. Then open, like petals in water.
This was the photograph Okamoto showed to Geiichi. Two men, surrounded by flowers, deliberating over the fate of a young woman standing with her back to a fanciful ocean.
On the boat we were mostly virgins.4 I dreamed, at first, of young women flying over aureoles of light, the edges of their bodies illuminated.
On the passenger list of the steamship from Yokohama to Honolulu, Kawaki’s Calling or Occupation was listed as: Wife. She, like her unreal husband Geiichi, was a contract laborer. Picture brides were one of the unintended consequences of the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907, a political compromise between the Japanese government and anti-Japanese white Americans in California. On October 11, 1906, the San Francisco Board of Education called for the segregation of Japanese students in public schools, citing the need to save white children from being affected by association with pupils of the Mongolian race.5 (The Japanese population was relatively young, the number of Japanese students small; Chinese students were already segregated.) The agreement, coordinated by President Theodore Roosevelt and Secretary of State Elihu Root, appeased both sides of the one-sided war, by agreeing to desegregate San Francisco