The Grave on the Wall. Brandon Shimoda
Driving out of Death Valley, we crossed a fox. Low and sleek, it drifted across the road. Our headlights caught its eyes. It paused, turned its head. Its eyes were green. It had the face of an old man. Who had not aged. It continued into the brush, at the pace of a body in total sympathy with its surroundings. I thought of the foxes in Hiroshige’s woodblock print, the foxes convening at the base of the enoki trees, arriving in a procession winding deep into the distance—bright, the brightness of full moons cast on rocks on a beach, each fox illuminated by a single flame (kitsunebi, foxfire), each flame an attendant, lighting their way.
Foxes, in Japanese mythology, can turn into humans, in some cases by means of climbing into their bodies. They are often portrayed as tricksters. Sometimes vengeful, especially when their territories or private acts—weddings, in particular—have been trespassed. But they can also be benevolent. It is determined, in large part, by the behavior of humans, how they impose themselves on nature and, posthumously, on each other.
Familiarity inspires affection—a crush, infatuation. What of the affection that is formed by being drawn into relation with a person or place, a landscape, that remains wholly unfamiliar? Midori was watching. To see if we could find him, hoping we would not.
My first published work was a short story about my grandparents. I wrote it my senior year of college. My workshop professor, the novelist Sheila Kohler, encouraged me to submit it for an award. It was fiction but ended up winning for nonfiction. It was called “Lighthouse.” In the story, I visit my grandparents on the coast of Oregon (where they never lived). One morning, Midori goes to the beach to take pictures of a lighthouse. He does not return. June and I look for him. We enter the redwoods leading down to the ocean and find him passed out on the path, camera around his neck. We struggle him up the path and back home.
“Lighthouse” was one of several stories I wrote about Midori, all of which had him wandering in the wilderness. My preferred method was to create a landscape in which Midori—an old man, a child—was free to do nothing, was free, like an actor without a script, to improvise. The freedom, however, was mine, imagined, and not entirely without manipulation. I was enthralled, even as I was frightened, by Midori’s dementia—the ways he lived in several times and places at once, the ways he withdrew or was withdrawn from us, his personality, his body, his breath, each moment, the ways I imagined the devouring of one’s brain might look like from within. That is what and how I wanted to write.
In this story, while Midori recovered in bed, I took his film to be developed. I wanted to see his lighthouses. Every photograph was of my grandmother—reading a book, standing at the kitchen sink with her back to the camera, sitting at the table with her elbows on a straw place mat and her face in her hands, watering her tomato plants, standing in the driveway with her work gloves . . . pictures of my grandmother in mundane poses, always off-center, haloes of light around her head or her hands, blurred-out backgrounds, foregrounds, lines radiating out from her eyes, her expressions minimal and relaxed, lacking self-consciousness.
We stayed in a motel in Lone Pine. In the morning we were going to the ruins of Manzanar, the concentration camp where 10,046 Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans were incarcerated. I thought of Midori’s first wife, about whom very little was known, and about whom no one said anything. She was incarcerated in Manzanar. She and Midori had separated not long before, in December 1941. She was named in Midori’s FBI file: Margaret Ichino.
June and I shared a room. I asked her questions across the brown carpet. My questions were the same ones I always asked. But the stories she told—which she had told, and which I had heard, many times—were transformed, somehow different. She looked, in bed, with the blankets pulled up to her chin, much younger, a teenager. She told stories, answered my questions, as if she was dreaming. As if the stories were from a life she had not yet lived. Her stories were prophecies, visions.
She listened to Midori’s stories for forty years. His stories were acts of burnishing the parts of his experience he wanted to share, to pass on. They were abridged, incomplete. Acts of negation, refusal. His stories included very little, if anything, about Oko or his dead grandfather or Yumi Taguchi, being left by his mother in Nakanose, three weeks on a steamship in the Pacific, meeting his father for the first time, growing up in Seattle, being the only alien in a family of citizens, Margaret Ichino, the hatred that forced him out of California, his incarceration in Missoula. His memory began to deteriorate.
After Midori died, June began writing her recollection of Midori’s life. Her blue and green journals cover the late 1800s through the late 1960s, with holes between events so enormous they become events greater than the events June remembers. She wrote in cursive. Her letters lean, virtuous, and stubborn, as if into a wind, as if they might fall forward or begin levitating. Then she stopped writing. But now, in Lone Pine, fresh from Death Valley and with the afterimage of the foxfire on the ceiling, the stories were set in motion again. They returned to their purest form, behind and beyond which the experience of June’s life with Midori was protected—from the future, my questions. Was peace being made with the fragments? Was she finally alone, free to reorder her memory?
I fell asleep watching the ceiling fan, the blades turning slowly enough for the space between them to inflate a flower of illuminated rays inside its languorous shadow.
The next morning, Kelly and I looked at the pictures June had taken with the camera we gave her. She had only taken one: Kelly and me, standing outside the jerky shack in Beatty, Nevada.
THE HOUSE THAT NO LONGER EXISTS
At night, the roofs resemble the sea. A cloud passes beneath the moon. The fields between the houses are blue. Trees line the edge of the fields. The roofs are tiled in waves. Clouded moonlight curls in the tiles. The trees are tall and feathered. The fields are low, white aisles between rows of blue. When the cloud passes, blue becomes green. Sleep is illuminated. Another cloud passes. Then everyone is awake.
Small villages support the dead. Then the moon is full again, and everyone is in bed. Small villages seen through breaks in trees overflow uninhabited space onto the road. If the sea, then a sea of tar, thick and rolled into motionlessness: a world waiting in the hiatus of sleep and not meant, while the people sleep, to be seen, except by the moon, ghosts on the road.
One day, Midori came home from school to find a note from his mother on his pillow.
I’ve gone to America. Will send for you and your brothers.
Suddenly the room, the whole house, felt old, unfamiliar. The light from outside formed alienating shapes on the floor, which advanced, very slowly, like the edge of water overflowing. Midori saw his mother standing on a boat, holding a small bag, staring straight ahead, into the first rays of America, distant as a planet.
Yumi Taguchi lived in a small house by a green river in Nakanose, Kumamoto. She lived with her son Kumaki (a doctor), his wife (name forgotten), and their two children, son and daughter (names forgotten). Yumi Taguchi’s husband, Kimata Shimoda, an alcoholic, was dead. Between the river and the house was a stone wall, with occasional breaks to the water.
One day, Yumi Taguchi’s other son Geiichi’s family arrived: Geiichi’s wife Kawaki and four sons Setsuo, Makeo, Yoshio, and Midori. Geiichi was in Hawaii. Kawaki and the four boys had been living on an island off the coast of Hiroshima, where Kawaki was from, and where Midori was born. After Kawaki’s father died, the family moved to Kumamoto. Now there were six young children in the house. Yumi Taguchi had never met her youngest grandson, Midori. He was six, almost seven. Kawaki did not stay long. She returned, alone, to Geiichi, leaving her sons to their education and their grandmother. For two years. I think this affected Midori’s whole life with a little sadness, June said.
It was not long before the day of their arrival became a distant memory, a rectangle of light at the end of a long, dark hall. Then it was not long after that the day of