I can’t help but think that I’ve failed Itai-san.” Yuki said from his spot in a sleeping bag on Mas’s bedroom floor.
Mas wished the boy would shut up and sleep, but he was clearly too wired from their encounter in the Japanese garden. Luckily, Detective Williams answered his cell phone and agreed to meet Zahed at the police station. Yuki wanted to stay, but Mas convinced him to crash at his house in Altadena. His ankle needed attention; Lloyd helped by cooling it with Blue Ice and settling him in a spot where he could elevate his leg. Takeo served as Yuki’s personal butler, running to retrieve a towel from the linen closet to wrap the ice to mitigate the coldness.
Lloyd also had been energized, not by the conflict but by the setting. As he’d never gone over to the pitiful Japanese garden before, every corner of it fascinated him. After tending to Yuki’s foot, he began sketching out the garden on a piece of graph paper, calculating where to build additional slopes in the dirt that had been flattened by the elements. Maybe he’d even build a koi pond.
Mas sighed. “Youzu figure out Zahed’s secret,” he said to Yuki. “You knowsu about Missus Kim being Neko’s grandma. No mo’ mystery.” He didn’t mention anything about Amika being a Zainichi Korean. He figured that was Amika’s personal business; she could reveal it whenever she wanted to.
“But we still don’t know who killed Itai-san. And the police are probably going to label it a suicide. That’s something a traditional Japanese would do. Not Itai-san. He didn’t care that he didn’t have a penny to his name. He didn’t care about such things.”
“Just nenasai,” Mas admonished him to sleep. “Nuttin’ we can do now.”
Mas felt like he’d slept only for a few hours when Yuki started talking again. “Ojisan, can we use your computer printer? I saw one in the living room.”
Mas cracked open his eyes and saw sunlight coming through the slats of the blinds, so it was later than he thought. “Yah, go ahead.” He returned to his pillow.
Yuki wasn’t moving. “Not sure how to set it up.”
Mas sat up, took a deep breath, and pushed himself erect. His bare feet carried him to Mari and Lloyd’s bedroom. He knocked, saying, “Mari, we needsu your help.”
She opened the door immediately. “What? Oh, good morning,” she greeted both Mas and Yuki, carrying laundry in her arms. Mas checked the clock in her room. Past the time Takeo was taken to school. “How’s your foot? Lloyd told me you injured it last night.”
“Okay,” Yuki said. “Not too bad.”
“He needsu to print sumptin,” Mas interrupted.
She set down the clothes she’d been folding. “Sure.”
Mas returned to his bed, but he couldn’t get back to sleep. He heard the two of them speaking in broken English and broken Japanese, attempting to forge some kind of communication. Then he heard the printer humming and spinning its gears. Mas finally got out of bed again to see what was going on.
Mari was standing over the printer, checking how the paper was feeding.
Mas walked into the living room in his worn-out slippers, the same ones he wore when Chizuko was alive. Yuki looked up. “I’ve made my own notes on Itai’s computer,” he explained to Mas. “Just seeing if I’ve missed something here.”
Yuki’s notes were in Japanese. It seemed like he had enough for a book, judging from the number of pages being spit out by the printer. A few pages fell to the floor, and Mari picked them up. One page had a photo of the former Swedish ocean liner, the Gripsholm.
“Why do you have a photo of the Gripsholm?” she asked.
“You know?” Yuki asked incredulously.
Mas was also surprised.
She turned to her father. “Remember when I was working on that proposal to do a documentary on Japanese Peruvians, like Juanita’s parents? They were practically kidnapped during World War II and brought over for a possible prisoner of war exchange. They never left Texas during the war, but a lot of other Japanese Peruvians went on the Gripsholm. And Nisei, too. Even children. I guess it may have been the worst for them, having no choice in the matter. It was like they were repatriating to Japan, only their home was really America.”
“Itai-san do research. Interested in many things.”
“Yeah, not many people know about the Gripsholm story. I wonder if Itai was able to talk to some of the people who stayed in Japan. I think most of them came back to America.”
Mas then remembered what Wishbone had told him. “Went all the way ova to India or sumptin.”
Now it was Mari’s turn to be impressed. “That’s right. That’s where they did the transfer of prisoners. Those from America had to get on the Teia, and those from Japan went on the Gripsholm.”
“What you say?” Yuki asked.
“What?”
“Youzu say ‘Teia’ ?”
“Yeah, the Teia. There were two ships involved—the entire voyage took eight weeks or something—and the Teia was pretty rough, as I understand it. May I?” she gestured to the laptop, and Yuki nodded.
Mari pulled the charging laptop toward her as she settled in a chair next to Yuki. “Does this have an English mode?” she asked. Yuki nodded, and after making the adjustments, Mari tapped the keyboard and swiped the trackpad. “Yes, here it is.” On the screen was an image of a military ship. On the bow she could see its name painted in both English and Japanese kanji, “Teia Maru” and 
. Mari read some of the caption. “This ship was formerly the Aramis. A French ship. It was taken over in 1942 by the Japanese and renamed Teia.”
Mas found Itai’s notebook underneath the papers and pointed to the kanji on its cover and also on the back of the laptop. “Teia.”
Mari pursed her lips. “Wow, he was obsessed with it. The ship wasn’t just a passing interest. He must have been connected to it personally somehow.”
Mas agreed. But Itai was too young to have been on it himself.
Mari was getting drawn into the mystery. “Wait, let me find my research.” She retrieved her laptop from her bedroom and they waited as it booted up.
“I have the ship’s manifest here somewhere. So what’s his family name again?”
“Itai,” Mas said and then corrected himself. “Look for Hirose.”
“Hirose. Yup. There’re four. Bunjiro, Tsuyo, Kanzo, and Hideaki.” She also had information about their ages. Bunjiro and Tsuyo were father and mother, respectively. Kanzo was sixteen, Hideaki was twelve.
“Not Sunny.” Mas frowned.
“Well, Sunny is obviously a nickname.”
Mas thought of the two possible Japanese characters for Hideaki. It could be “excellent” or could be “light.” He and Yuki were on the same wavelength. “Hideaki,” they said in unison.
“Why Sunny say nothing?” Yuki said in English.
Yes, Mas thought. He’d mentioned the camp in Arizona, but nothing about being in Japan, even when Mas mentioned that he himself was there during the war.
“Maybe he was hiding it for some reason,” Mari said.
“Of all the documents on Itai-san’s computer and thumb drive, it was the Gripsholm folder that was erased.” Yuki bit his fingernail in thought.
And who’d had access to the computer and thumb drive? Sunny.
“Did you check Itai’s email inbox and outbox?” Mari asked.
Yuki was able to follow that much of Mari’s English. “Yes. That empty, too.”
He began twirling his finger on the computer’s track pad and clicked a couple of times. “Chotto matte. An email came in a couple of days ago.”
Mari got up and read the message out loud over Yuki’s shoulder: “Dear Mr. Itai, I’m sorry we could not meet last Tuesday. I’ve since returned to Hawaii. I’ve tried to contact you via phone, but I’ve received no response.
“I have to admit that I was very disappointed in your change of heart concerning the manuscript. Our editorial board was very excited about your cousin’s memoir, as stories about Japanese Americans on the prisoner exchange ship the Gripsholm are rare.”
“There’s a mention and attachment of a manuscript in a previous correspondence,” Yuki said. He lowered his head toward the bottom of the screen and slowly read in English: “The Teia Chronicles: The Memoir of an American on a Prisoner Exchange Ship during World War II, by Kanzo Hirose.”
Mari looked back at her computer screen, where the list of the Gripsholm manifest was displayed. “That must be him. Hideaki’s older brother.”
“Chotto,” Yuki said, after running his fingertips on the trackpad. “Itai-san make message.”
Mas got out his glasses and joined the two in front of the screen to read Itai’s original message:
Dear Mr. Niiya,
I’ve had a change of heart. I would like to withdraw my manuscript about my late cousin’s experience on the Gripsholm.
I am cancelling my meeting with you tonight.
Sincerely,
Tomo Itai
“He sent this on his phone,” Yuki pointed to some minuscule numbers and letters. “Itai-san sent this on the day he was killed. Very early on Tuesday morning.”
“He must have been very close with his cousin,” Mari commented.
“Whyzu you say dat?”
“Well, I mean, he’s obviously representing his late cousin’s interests.” She turned to Yuki. “‘Late’ means dead. Usually a closer surviving relative, like a child, would receive the rights to such a document.”
“Howzu about brotha?” Mas said.
“If this Sunny is indeed Kanzo’s brother, then, yeah, I wonder why Itai was representing the memoir and not Sunny.”
Mari wanted them to call the police, but Mas declined. They’d gone through so much for Yuki’s investigation. They deserved to see Sunny’s reaction face to face.
They didn’t bother to call first. It would be better to catch the old man off guard. And besides, what would a seventysomething retired bachelor be doing on a late weekday morning?
Yuki and Mas assumed correctly, because Sunny’s Toyota Corolla was parked in the driveway. The garage was presumably stuffed with junk, based on Sunny’s interior decoration.
He came to the door with a half-eaten tuna sandwich in one hand. “Hello,” he said congenially. After studying Yuki’s and Mas’s faces, his own became more grim.
“Come in, come in,” he said, leaving the door ajar and walking through his maze of possessions.
He threw his corner of bread crust into the kitchen sink and rejoined his guests in his living room. “Ocha?” he asked, offering green tea again, although he seemed to know there’d be no takers.
Mas was trapped next to the table and bench that he first thought was for woodworking. Some kind of sanding drum was attached to the table, and then he remembered seeing the exact same contraption in the garage of a customer who had a side business making jewelry. His customer’s work involved all sorts of chemicals—some of them semi-lethal—that he’d been careful to store. In fact, he often told Mas to take care when he walked through the garage into the backyard.
“You’zu make jewelry wiz dis thing,” Mas said abruptly. Yuki glared as if to ask, What are you doing?
Sunny steadied himself with a stack of boxes.
“Lotsu of chemical involved in dis machine.”
Yuki quickly caught on. “Cyanide, Ojisan?”
“You don’t want your brotha’s book published, so you killsu your cousin,” Mas declared.
Sunny looked out the top of the living room window, a forlorn look on his face. Now his round face resembled more the moon than the sun.
“That wasn’t his book to make decisions about. My brother Kan is dead, and so are our parents. I’m the only living one in my brother’s memoir. It wasn’t right for Tomo to give it to the publisher without my permission.”
So Sunny was indeed Hideaki.
“Did you read the book? Since you know about it, you must have,” said Sunny. “I couldn’t get past the first thirty pages.”
Mas had no idea what was in that manuscript. But he figured that whatever it was, it brought up memories that Sunny wanted to forget.
“I hated being on those ships.” Sunny’s back and arms now leaned against the boxes of soy sauce. “The Gripsholm, but more the Teia. It was like a floating prison with no room to sleep. No water for showers, so we had to sit out on the deck when it rained to wash our bodies. And it was bitterly cold, with no decent food. Our rice had worms in it. When I was a little boy, I dreamed of traveling to wild and exotic places, but not like that.”
Gohan with worms? Mas remembered those times of want.
“I came back to the US as soon as I could. But I told no one that I was on the Gripsholm. Nobody understood that we hadn’t renounced our citizenship. We weren’t being repatriated to Japan, and we weren’t POWs. We were kidnapped. I was drafted during the Korean War and was happy to fight for America. I put my past, the Gripsholm and the Teia, behind me.” He grasped his right fist in his left hand, the rings on his fingers shining in the morning sun.
“Now Tomo was going to spill the beans about my private life while I’m trying to enjoy my retirement? My war buddies won’t read my brother’s memoir, but they’d hear about it. I’ll be forever connected to the Gripsholm.” It was obvious that Sunny was scared out of his mind about his secret past being revealed. Had he been looking over his shoulder his whole life?
“Do you know how many men in my unit during the Korean War were either killed or wounded in action? Everyone talks about World War II or even the Vietnam War, but we lost a lot of men in the Korean War, too. I’m a patriot. Will people remember that?”
Sunny was now sitting on the floor, his possessions crowded around him, possessing him. He looked like he had melted, collapsed from his memories. Mas could relate, but his pain was no justification for murder.
“We go to police, Hirose-san,” Yuki said, helping the old man to his feet.
Sunny realized that it was time. “Yes, yes,” he said. “But I need a ride.”