The Grave on the Wall. Brandon Shimoda
with the blue cover, she wrote, The rest of the boys passed their physical in time and joined the family, while in the journal with the green cover, she wrote, Because of the expense of staying in Yokohama trying to pass their medical exams, they gave up their dual citizenship and left on the next ship for Seattle.
Midori’s brothers were born in Hawaii. They were American citizens. Midori was conceived in Hawaii but was born in Hiroshima. He was not an American citizen. Between when he was conceived and when he was born, their mother returned, with his brothers, to Japan. He, along with his parents, was a Japanese national, ineligible for citizenship. He became, when he climbed the gangplank and entered the hole, an immigrant. He was the foreigner, and healthy. His brothers were unhealthy, and citizens. The city facing the small, floating city was Yokohama. The boat was leaving for Seattle.
It was the first week of September 1919. The small, floating city floated away. A mountain rose in the sky. It had the appearance of omniscience, of knowing and having known every passage of every era, all fortune and nightmare, including the pitiful saga of Midori. For a brief moment, a white cloud touched the mountain.
The crossing took three weeks. Midori slept underwater. Nothing but water in an immeasurable circle, and it seemed, to Midori, they were heading in no direction at all. For three weeks the world was an island, the horizon a stubborn defense. And yet, the boat met, every morning, the sun rising from it, and every evening, the sun in its wake.
On the boat with Midori were hundreds of young women. They were traveling across the ocean to meet men they did not know. These unknown men were the young women’s husbands. The young women knew the men only from photographs. Midori was, like the young women, going to meet a man for the first time. He too knew the man only from photographs. His father’s face was remote, yet burned with the energy of a firework, spinning, throwing off light. His father had given him his name, and because his father insisted his fourth child be a girl, he had given him a girl’s name: Midori.
Across the ocean, sparrows looked for camellias to sleep on, but they only found prickly sage.9 Shadows, soundless euphoria. A black wave, another ship on the horizon. The young women were paragons of what Midori was feeling: a small spasm lost in the reticence between home and the unknown. They were supposed to feel already a part. But home dissolved upon departure. They held their photographs as fragments of a map. Midori was their youngest. They honored his dreams. His dreams simplified the anxiety of their own. And yet, he wanted also to be the men they were going to meet. He wanted to be the relief of a known man.
Surely the young women knew his father, surely their men knew his father, surely all men know each other. Weeds floating out of the horizon prophesied hair on the heads of men. The young women stood as if on a balcony over a performance in the waves. Transfixed, the attending maids stared at the circles receding from the point where bubbles and foam were thrown up from the sinking bodies, until the last wave died and the bubbles ceased. Then one by one they offered a prayer, climbed the bulwark, and hurled themselves in the waters’ depths.10
In 1919, an estimated 267 Japanese picture brides were admitted into the United States through the Port of Seattle. Midori arrived on September 27. Looking into the crowd from the line of passengers filing down the plank, he recognized his father instantly.
Fifteen thousand years ago there was a lake. The lake was 3,000 square miles across, 2,000 feet deep, and contained by a massive ice dam. It is believed to have been the largest ice-dammed lake in the world. For 3,000 years, the dam broke and re-formed and broke, emptying and remaking the lake, carving canyons and rivers hundreds of miles west to the ocean. When the lake was empty, it was a valley. When the lake was remade, the valley floor was a lake bed. When the lake rushed out, the fossils were exposed. When the lake was remade, the fossils were buoyed by the rising water. The fossils rose from the water into the sky and hung in the air over the water, burnished by the sun into misshapen mirrors. When I arrived in the valley, the lake was 15,000 years gone, the sky was yellow, and the valley was filled with smoke.
On the wall of a barracks in a decommissioned military fort in Missoula, Montana, hang three black-and-white photographs of a Japanese man dressed in women’s clothing. The man is wearing a light-colored dress, white gloves, small black shoes, and a wig of black curly hair, and he is holding a purse. Two of the photographs show the man with other men, in suits and ties, one in a three-piece suit, one in a hat. The third photograph shows the man sitting in a chair facing into a mirror.
The photographs are surrounded by photographs of Japanese immigrants (Issei) and Japanese American men and women (Nisei) who were, by order of their president, forcibly removed from their homes along the Pacific coast and parts of the U.S.-Mexico border and sent to temporary detention centers, then to concentration camps in remote valleys, high deserts, and swamps, where they were incarcerated for the duration of a war being waged by the country in which they lived and were, in majority number, citizens, on behalf of the freedoms of which they had been stripped. Detention center, concentration camp: basic units of space the United States has devised for the populations it has written into its self-image as refractory, unassimilable, alien.
In the third photograph, an older man adjusts the young man’s black wig. A white slip is loose on the young man’s body. His feet, in black shoes, are resting on a small shelf below the mirror. He is not looking directly at himself but slightly away.
I saw, one morning, a man made of ash. He was short, not quite five feet, had no features, and was moving very slowly. Moments before, there had been a thunderclap followed by a flash of light. I was in the house where I grew up. I had just woken up. Every light in the house was on.
I was sleeping in what had once been my parents’ bedroom. Putting on my glasses, I noticed, first, that the lights were on in the room. The lights were also on in the bathroom, second, then, third, the whole house. Only the hallway was dark, which was when I noticed the man made of ash. He was in the hallway and was reaching the top of the stairs. His body and head and hair were black, a shadow, yet corporeal, with shadow smell, but not burning.
Midori had died a month earlier, in September 1996. I was not there when he died. I did not wash his feet. I did not see his corpse. I was not there when he was cremated. I was not at his funeral. My father and his siblings sat in a nondescript church, surrounded by white women they had never met, and wept. I could not see the man’s face but knew it was Midori. I found myself seized by the desire, arising from a terrible feeling that I had abandoned him in his dying, to see him every morning for the rest of my life. He was moving slowly into another room. By the time I had thrown myself into the hall, the man, Midori, was gone.
I followed him into the other room. The room was empty. It was the room I grew up in. The walls were white, with a patch of blue on the largest wall. The room was being painted. Two south-facing windows were warm. Out the window were trees: a row of tulip trees, then gray birch, thousands, interminable. Two slatted closet doors were closed. Furniture had been pushed into the center of the room and covered in white sheets. I went to the closet, slid open the doors. The closet was empty.
I was suspicious of the walls. Someone could slip into any crease, any shadow, and disappear. The patch of light blue took on the dimension of sky. I ran my hands along the sky, feeling for any misgiving, a seam that might open onto a second sky. The sky became the wall of an ancient, limitless monument. Weaker, crazed, I grew angry—at the room, the wall, the sky, the morning light, my inability to read this room in which I spent eighty-eight thousand hours, to recover, in its center, my grandfather. He had chosen to return to my room, so I felt, I feel, I need to preserve the room, my relationship with the room, in its present, uncontaminated form, for whatever might emerge from the wall.
When I called my sister Kelly to tell her that I had seen our grandfather, that he was in the house, she said:
It was a dream. You were dreaming.
But I’m awake, I said. I haven’t gone back to sleep.
9. Don Mee Choi, “Diary of a Translator,” The Morning News Is Exciting (Notre Dame: Action Books,