Floating City Read online

  The last choice was to go west but keep going, all the way back to Japan. Though it wouldn’t be “back” at all for Frankie and his siblings, and all the rest of them who were born here. It was a foreign land with foreign people who might be evildoers who deserved to be melted. The Canadian Japs might be hated for living in a country that had helped drop the bombs. Surely there was little left in that defeated land now; as newcomers, wouldn’t they be resented for taking some of the last grains of rice?

  “No going back,” their mother declared. She held her prayer beads in her fist. She glared at Taiji and then Frankie. Then she returned to the business of brewing and selling sake; many in the camp needed a cup or two to help them decide on their fresh start.

  Aki fixed her eye on Yas. Frankie knew she’d go wherever he went, with or without the rest.

  They played rock-paper-scissors to help them choose. A clenched fist meant stay put; a splayed hand was go east; two fingers pointed like scissor blades was Japan.

  Taiji wanted scissors. He wanted Toyama and the Sea of Japan. He wanted to claim the Hanesaka rice fields, his birthright as eldest son foolishly abandoned for New World adventure. But what remained to claim? He’d heard that parts of Toyama had been firebombed, paper and wood houses cindered.

  Momoye again said no to Japan: no going back. Certainly not to Hiroshima, where her mother must surely have perished; their home had been close to the blast. For the first time in years, Frankie recalled the Priest’s followers, and wondered what had become of the Sad Girl. Gone. Up in smoke.

  * * *

  Seasons passed. The camp grew quieter. Every few days, someone knocked on their door, arms filled with things Frankie had procured for them. A rocking chair, a pitcher, a teapot—things they couldn’t fit in their suitcase or carry.

  “You know what they say, Frankie. You can’t take it with you,” Augusta laughed, quoting some movie. She’d begun stockpiling things for a new stage production at the Tashme Talent Theatre even though audiences had dwindled. Even though the boy with the red satin sleeves who’d grown into a handsome young man had left, boasting he was headed for Broadway or Hollywood.

  If Frankie didn’t head somewhere soon himself, he’d be a deadhead, a goner.

  * * *

  —

  Momoye began packing up a good shirt Aki had made for Yas and other items Frankie would need to wear or sell when he arrived. She collected every last coin from everyone in the family. They were pinning all their hopes on him, so it was only fair. He’d send for his mother and the rest of the family once he found a job and a place for them to live. He’d send for Reiko too.

  Two weeks before he was to leave, she told him she was pregnant. Should he stay?

  “Don’t be silly, Frankie,” she said. “We’ll be joining you in no time.” Her cheeks looked rosier than ever. He looked down at her belly. They married with the hasty scoldings and blessings of Miss Hawks and Miss McCracken and Jesus, as well as Buddha.

  Frankie felt rich; richer than anyone else leaving the camp—and not because of what others were giving him. His riches were safely tucked away on his person. He felt the coins and bills press into his side when Reiko hugged him tight before he hopped into a truck. He was soon to become a man with a family, not to be dogged by what lay behind him or daunted by what lay ahead, beyond the Land Beyond.

  “My Frankie,” she whispered in his ear, her curls brushing his cheek. Then she kissed him. More magic. “I’ll miss you.”

  Once he got onto the train at Hope, he felt the engine reverberating through him, carrying him away from Tashme. He was going to the biggest city he’d have ever seen. Vancouver didn’t count; all he’d seen of it was the PNE grounds and the inside of the livestock barns. First, of course, he’d have to check in at the police station in the town where he’d been instructed to resettle. He’d check in, yes, but then he’d board the next train to his true destination.

  Frankie’s legs twitched as he sat day after day by the window, watching the mountains and rivers give way to scrub and rock, to flat fields, then to leafy forests. Then to buildings and streets with cars and people. Finally, the train pulled into a dark tunnel and stopped at a place called Union Station.

  TORONTO

  CHAPTER 5

  Under the Chrysanthemum Forest

  By the time Frankie reached the Fujimoto house in the neighbourhood called Cabbagetown it was early—too early—so he settled himself on the doorstep. His mother didn’t know the family, but had arranged for Frankie to stay here thanks to the Tashme grapevine that wound its way back through Port Alberni to Hiroshima and, now, to Toronto.

  It felt good to finally plant his feet on ground he’d chosen. Frankie was no longer Jap nor enemy alien. After so many years, nobody—according to his mother—would tell him where he could or couldn’t go.

  Mrs. Fujimoto, her hair in curlers, cracked the front door to peer out suspiciously at Frankie. She looked him over with her tiny dolphin eyes, then finally opened the door wide. “Youkoso,” she said. Welcome.

  He met a familiar waft of smells: soy sauce, fish, pickled radish.

  She led him up a narrow flight of crooked stairs, then up a narrower one to the attic and a tiny room with a tiny window, where she left him. He hung up the shirt Aki had sewn for Yas and his wedding suit, which she’d made as well. He emptied out his suitcase and found a small package at the bottom, tightly bundled and knotted with twine. It took some time to unravel. Inside was a figure the size of his thumb carved from ivory with a hole up its middle, something his mother must’ve packed. It was a homely, bent figure in speckled robes leaning on a stick, its face turtle-like. Was it a priest? Frankie propped it on the dresser beside his wallet and one set of cufflinks, but it toppled no matter how he placed it. He tucked the figure in his pocket and sank down onto the mattress, neatly made up on the floor. He was tired after the long walk north from Union Station.

  Shortly past noon he woke to find an envelope slipped under his door. It was addressed to him in Aki’s handwriting, and sent from Hope. He’d never received a letter before, nor sent one. It had followed him here.

  Dear Frankie,

  We hope that you arrived safely in Toronto.

  I am writing with sad news. Yasumasu died four days after you left. Papa found him in the river.

  Mama reminds you to dress smartly.

  Your sister,

  Akiko

  He paced the room, lay down and got up, came back to the letter. How strange, the name, the words: Yasumasu. Died. The room began to slant ever so slightly; the floor, the walls, wherever he looked began to vibrate. He felt light, as if he were floating and couldn’t touch bottom. He couldn’t cry, tears or no. He opened the small closet in the corner of the room and curled inside, under the dangling tail of his brother’s shirt.

  He remembered Yas sliding himself in to ride the Sumallo River current amid Aki’s warning cries. Then her delight when she joined him. It was always the two of them, Frankie the odd man out.

  Four days after you left. Bad-luck number four again.

  * * *

  —

  Frankie set off early each morning as if he had a job to go to: the job of finding one. Though he didn’t quite know how to do that. Along the street, he passed houses filled with children, chins parked on windowsills, gazing out at him. Their homes were almost as shabby as the Tashme shacks, only made of brick; they’d crumble with age before being blown down by a winter wind.

  Block after block drew him into the rumble of the city. Cranes criss-crossed above and all around, buildings being torn down and built up. He dug his fists into his pockets and walked, head down. He saw an Oriental or two on the street, but again turned away.

  It was better, he decided, to be here instead of Tashme with the others, unable to match their tears. He had a job to do.

  He walked south, retreading the path he’d taken from downtown the night he’d arrived; he bought a newspaper along the way, passing shops and restaura
nts but no HELP WANTED signs. By day, Union Station was huge and grey, a hulking mass. With nothing and no one to beckon to him, he soon reached the water; the sun sparkled over it. To the east or west, shipping docks, silos and smokestacks stood in his path. He found a way through to the east, until he reached a small stretch of beach, where he watched waves crawl onto the shore.

  His mother would be sitting in her chair now, three hours back in time. She’d be praying for Yas’s spirit; maybe thinking of Frankie too, worrying about him in the distant city. Her head would droop; she might start to babble or chant to ward off the same bad luck that had taken Yas from them.

  At water’s edge, Frankie wadded up the newspaper and sat down on it. More about the Tokyo War Crimes Trial; he’d read enough. What they’d done—he never knew a Japanese could commit such acts. That any man could. What they’d done to the captured British and American soldiers. Even to Chinese and Koreans. He’d heard of samurai in olden days beheading their enemies; his mother had even boasted of their family being samurai class. Was there something in him, in all of them, in the blood? He remembered Mr. Fung’s posters showing the difference between a Chinese and a Japanese. Back in Tashme, they’d read about what the Nazis had done to the Jews.

  The concentration camps, the POW camps, were nothing like Tashme. Tashme was summer camp that went on too long. Yet it was all war. Hirohito, the divine emperor, forced Americans to drop bombs on his own people: left them no choice, in order to end the war and save lives—lives that weren’t Japanese. In the papers, the faces of survivors in Hiroshima looked not so different from his, from anyone’s in Tashme. Like family left behind.

  On the way back, Frankie caught his reflection in windows he passed. He thrust his chin forward and his shoulders back to make himself look and feel more at home. He missed Reiko. He missed her at his side as they walked Tashme Boulevard. He ought to be substantial all on his own, a man who had a right to be here and to stay if he so chose. Someday, he swore to himself. He clinked the coins in his right-hand pocket: these were nothing if not substantial.

  * * *

  —

  The chrysanthemums in Mr. Fujimoto’s backyard had grown nearly as tall as the Norwegian maple trees that lined the streets and reached up from the ravines of Toronto. Their stalks were thick as tree trunks, and the smallest petals clustered in their blossoms were plump as Frankie’s thumb. Mr. Fujimoto showed Frankie the chrysanthemum insignia of the imperial family on a coin he took from his pocket. In Japan, he’d grown flowers majestic enough to grace Yasukuni Shrine, where the war dead were honoured, he claimed. But he would never allow that now, not with Japan’s war criminals exposed and the emperor disgraced. He shook his head sadly.

  No one in Cabbagetown knew or appreciated any of that. The neighbours merely complained to Mr. Fujimoto that the flowers blocked their sunlight and radio reception.

  “Ha!” laughed Mr. Fujimoto. “They need bigger windows and better radios!”

  Through autumn rain and winter chill, the forest of chrysanthemums formed a canopy that held in warmth; it once sheltered a homeless family, undiscovered by Mr. Fujimoto until spring when they cheerfully relocated to the nearby Necropolis.

  Mr. Fujimoto was as devoted to cultivating his chrysanthemums as he was to growing his own family. Fifteen Fujimotos were living in the narrow two-storey row house. Mr. Fujimoto had uprooted himself and his bride from Japan long before the war to start a strawberry farm south of Vancouver. He’d been canny enough to sell the farm before Pearl Harbor had been bombed and the Custodian of Enemy Alien Property came knocking. He didn’t get a fair deal, but enough to bring his family east and buy this brick house in which to keep them safe and close; so close they slept head to toe on the floor of two rooms, three generations of Fujimoto family, including those who’d married into it. Some of his children had married in Toronto before the war, despite slim pickings. Each had shone as a beacon on streetcars, in shops and church, drawing to them their own kind from among the throngs.

  “Tired,” Mr. Fujimoto told Frankie with a weary droop of his mouth. “Tired and getting old.” He lamented the five nights a week he slept uptown as a live-in gardener. He missed his family slumbering around him, their breath hovering together, another grandchild on the way. “Time is short,” he told Frankie, and his work was shrinking it even more. That Friday evening, Mr. Fujimoto sank deep into his garden chair, longing to be settled there once and for all.

  It turned out that the Tashme grapevine had also wound its way to Mr. Koga. As a Japanese national, Mr. Koga had weathered the war years in a prisoner of war camp in northern Ontario only to be deported to Japan with his wife and Port Alberni–born daughters. They’d joined his wife’s family in Hiroshima Prefecture, outside of the city.

  Frankie sat with Mr. Fujimoto after he’d finished watering his forest. “Burdock roots, flower bulbs,” Mr. Fujimoto told him. Survivors and the repatriated were scrabbling for food to eat. There was little rice, little of anything growing. The earth was scorched. Mr. Fujimoto had just received a letter from Mr. Koga. He and his family were malnourished and painfully constipated. Mr. Koga’s hair and nails had fallen out; his skin had flaked to a raw pink as if he too were sick with radiation illness. Mr. Koga’s back was already bent; Frankie could not imagine him any more ground down.

  “What little there is goes to anyone but repats,” Mr. Fujimoto said. “They call them traitors.”

  Enemy alien here and there.

  Mrs. Fujimoto brought cups of tea, casting Frankie a wary glance, just as she had when she’d first opened the door to him. She hadn’t said a word to him since. Other family members slunk past, too shy to introduce themselves.

  “Koga can’t sleep, even after two bottles of sake,” Mr. Fujimoto said.

  “He needs Canadian Club,” Frankie replied, and he and Mr. Fujimoto laughed ruefully. In his letters, Mr. Koga fretted about his daughters’ chances to marry now that the family was more lowly than Untouchables. Yet they had to be wary of suitors with radiation sickness, for fear of deformed offspring. Who knew how many generations would be tainted by the poison in their bodies?

  That was the least of his worries. Japan was a country of limbless men. The suicide pills issued to soldiers to avoid capture often failed, leaving arms and legs gangrenous. Men hobbled home from all over Asia after Japan surrendered, a caravan of wretched torsos, never saying what they’d seen or done. Mr. Koga’s youngest daughter had grown fond of one legless soldier who ground his knuckles along rubbled streets, riding at her side atop a board fitted with wheels.

  Mr. Fujimoto began to hum the Kimigayo. Frankie recognized the Rising Sun anthem; Taiji used to play the record on drunken nights in their floating house.

  “I am blessed by Buddha,” Mr. Fujimoto declared, gazing up at his chrysanthemums. “The soldiers were foolish. They believed the emperor that they’d become gods in paradise.” He sighed. “The cherry blossoms, the maple leaves, the chrysanthemums—these are the only benevolent spirits.” Mr. Fujimoto got up and went inside. Frankie listened to the low rumble of traffic in the distance. Big as it was, the city was otherwise quiet. In the falling light, the chrysanthemums towered above, their heads held high, like nature’s kind keepers.

  * * *

  —

  WAITER WANTED read a sign in a diner window on Parliament Street. Frankie took off his hat, pushed open the door and set one foot inside. The diners looked at him, then looked away. No Japs—not in the booths and not behind the counter. The war was over but nothing had changed.

  He walked on, westward until he reached a patch of Chinatown. He spent a few of his precious coins on a bowl of noodles amid the voices he couldn’t understand. He envied them, together still like the Japs used to be. What had become of Mr. Fung? he wondered. Perhaps he’d live past a hundred and become, if not the richest, the oldest Asiatic in Port Alberni, as his father had.

  By evening, Frankie found himself strolling the Cabbagetown necropolis. It was as quiet as the
graveyard near Tashme, quiet enough that he could feel in his chest the slow thump of his loneliness. But then the blood flushed through him: Reiko. He’d barely let himself think of her since being away, their bodies in the grass, his sunk into hers. It hurt to be without her.

  He’d been in the city for weeks now, wandering. His mother, Taiji, Aki, Julia and Augusta, along with Reiko and the unborn baby, waited at one end of a tipped scale, with him perched on the other end, alone. He sensed Yas there too, a shadow that weighted the scale against him even more. Mr. Fujimoto promised to find him work, but time was threatening to overtake him. His money would not last forever.

  Marching past the grave markers, he felt something new and cold in his belly, gnawing him restless. He was afraid.

  * * *

  —

  Another letter arrived from Mr. Koga. Mr. Fujimoto shared it with Frankie after dinner. They sat under the chrysanthemums. Mrs. Fujimoto brought tea, with her usual sullen glance at Frankie.

  Strange stories were swirling in Hiroshima’s black dust. “They’re waiting for a shaman priest to come save them.” Mr. Fujimoto half-smiled.

  Frankie sat up. “Who?”

  Thousands were suffering and dying most painful deaths. Now that the emperor was no longer divine, followers of this priest were praying for his return. “A healer,” said Mr. Fujimoto.

  Mr. Koga reported the believers walking on hot coals with bare soles. It was the story Momoye had told Frankie when he was housebound: the Priest’s miracle. Could it be?

  “They say this priest brought at least one dying man back to life,” Mr. Fujimoto read from the letter. “Then he deserted his followers and left Japan.”

  “Where did he go?” asked Frankie, though he knew the answer.