The City (The City 1)

Even Japanese orphans residing in institutions run by nuns and by the Salvation Army were transported to Manzanar, where a camp orphanage was established for them. Caucasian foster parents caring for Japanese and half-Japanese babies were forced to surrender those children to the War Relocation Authority.

Manzanar, like the other ten camps, was self-sufficient. It had its own hospital, post office, a few churches, schools, playgrounds, football fields, baseball diamonds, tennis courts.…

The barracks apartments were small, sixteen by twenty feet, providing no privacy, which was especially stressful to the women. The government contractor used inferior materials; the workmanship was poor. Summer temperatures topped 100 degrees. Winters were cold and snowy. The internees did their best to improve accommodations, but comfort was not easily achieved. The barbed-wire fences and eight guard towers surrounding the 540 acres of the main camp made it impossible to imagine that this was ordinary life.

The internees beautified their surroundings with rose gardens and rock gardens, with ponds and streams and a waterfall. When a nursery wholesaler donated a thousand cherry and wisteria trees, internees created a park of considerable grace.

Eventually they were offered the opportunity to sign loyalty oaths, swearing allegiance to the United States and agreeing to serve in the U.S. military if called. Those who did so could leave the camp if they could find sponsors either for jobs or schools in the East or Midwest. Nearly two hundred from Manzanar eventually served in the armed forces, and one of them, Sadao Munemori, received a posthumous Medal of Honor.

No one was physically brutalized in any of the camps, and they were paid for the work they did, if not well. Two of those interned at Manzanar died of gunshots during a protest of their incarceration, but there were no other deaths by violence among the ten thousand.

In the fourth book, the one that concerned only Manzanar, I found the tailor’s surname in the index and paged to a passage about the deaths of Mr. Yoshioka’s mother and sister.

Each of the thirty-six residential blocks in the camp had its own mess hall and attached kitchen. Kiku Yoshioka and her daughter, Mariko, were members of the culinary staff for their block. A leak from a propane tank had led to an explosion and a flash fire fueled by cooking oil spilling from shrapnel-pierced containers. They were the only two unable to escape. Mariko was seventeen, two years older than her brother, and her mother thirty-eight.

Omi Yoshioka and his son, George, had been eating lunch in the adjacent mess hall when the explosion rocked the building. Kitchen staff burst through the connecting doors, chased by billows of fire. Even before Omi and George could determine that Kiku and Mariko were not among those who escaped the flames, they heard familiar voices screaming and entreating God. They tried to enter the kitchen, but the heat proved too great, and suddenly there were, as well, masses of blinding smoke. Disoriented, they themselves had to be rescued from the mess hall.

The book contained three signatures of photographs, and in the second group, I found the official black-and-white internment-camp photos of Kiku and Mariko. Kiku appeared solemn and beautiful. The daughter smiled shyly and was even lovelier than her mother.

A tragic past, as long suspected. But not distant relatives lost in the momentous, ever-echoing man-made thunder of Hiroshima, not just two souls among many thousands atomized as a terrible consequence of Japan’s war crimes and its refusal to surrender. This was a loss more intimate, random, haunting, impossible to rationalize by resort to history or to the necessary brutalities of war.

I sat in the silence of the library for a long while, staring at those faces.

A public Xerox

machine required a nickel to make a copy.

I folded the copy twice and put it in a jacket pocket.

I left the four volumes on the book-return counter.

The librarian asked me if I had found everything that I’d been looking for, and I said yes, but I didn’t say that I wished with all my heart that I’d found nothing.

Not a single cloud threatened the December sun, and all the way home, I walked in crisp, cold light.

42

Mrs. Lorenzo came to our apartment on New Year’s Eve. My mother would be very late getting home from Slinky’s, and she didn’t want to wake me at 3:30 or 4:00 in the morning to bring me upstairs from the widow’s place.

I was allowed to stay up to watch the New Year’s celebrations on TV, Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians at the Waldorf Astoria or whatever, but music wasn’t everything to me. Although only in fourth grade, I read at a seventh-grade level, and to celebrate, I preferred a novel to watching people be silly on TV. Two days earlier, I had checked out Robert Heinlein’s Podkayne of Mars from the library, and it was extremely cool. I went to bed with the book, a glass of Coca-Cola, and a bowl of pretzels.

I finished the Coke, the pretzels, and three-quarters of the novel before falling asleep shortly after midnight. When I woke at 8:40 in the morning, I found a note from my mother on the nightstand: Sweetie, going to bed almost four ayem. Will sleep till noon. Then you and me and a fancy hotel for a late lunch!

In the kitchen, I quietly made toast and built two open-face sandwiches of thickly spread peanut butter and sliced banana. I washed them down with a glass of regular milk and then with a glass of chocolate. I figured if I ate this aggressively every day for a month, I’d still gain only an ounce. I’d given up daydreaming over those Charles Atlas bodybuilding ads in magazines. I conceded the portly end of the piano business to Fats Domino; maybe I would call myself Skinny Kirk. Better yet, Skinny Bledsoe.

I let myself out of the apartment, intending to loiter on the fifth floor to listen for activity in Mr. Yoshioka’s apartment. I had heard nothing from him since I’d gone to Metropolitan Suits on Thursday morning, three days earlier. I was anxious to know if he had learned anything or had any ideas about what we should do next.

As I locked the deadbolts, I noticed a three-by-five envelope propped against the baseboard to the left of the door. There was no return address and no indication for whom the contents were intended. I opened it and withdrew a note card on which four words were neatly printed: INFORMATION HAS BEEN OBTAINED.

On the fifth floor, when Mr. Yoshioka opened the door, I smelled coffee brewing. “Happy new year, Jonah Kirk.”

“Happy new year, sir. I’m thinking of calling myself Skinny Bledsoe.”

As he closed the door, locked the deadbolts, and engaged the security chain, he said, “Is that how you wish to be addressed?”

“Not yet. I’ll probably have to be eighteen to get my name legally changed.”

“Then I will restrain myself until you have done the deed. We will convene in the kitchen.” He led me there. “Would you care for anything to drink?”