America, Present Day
I parked the Caddy in my father’s driveway, gathered my shopping bags and opened the door to his condo. “I’m back.”
The words echoed in the near-emptied space. I stood in the doorway, stunned the habitual greeting had slipped out.
I released an exhausted breath and stepped inside. In place of my father watching the baseball game with the volume too loud, there were boxes and booming silence. Pops’s things were, for the most part, packed and sorted. And as for his life, aside from his military records, I had nothing more to search except for his stories, which was why I’d stopped on my way and spent a small fortune on supplies. I had tacks, sticky tabs, dry-erase markers and three maps. One of the world and two of Japan: the first showed roads, rail and cities in detail, and the other was an oversize educator’s edition used in classrooms. It spanned six feet with gorgeous illustrative elevations and featured a write-on laminated finish.
Using a kitchen chair as a stepstool, I hung the large map of Japan on Pops’s emptied living room wall first. Beside it, I tacked up the detailed street guide and, above it, the world. I pinned my father’s letter, snapshots of his shipmates and the woman in the white kimono underneath, then I stepped back to take it in. An investigative wall was something I used as a journalist. By flagging locations and tacking up my research—in this case, my father’s past—it helped to see the bigger picture and zero in on possible connections.
I’d start with what I knew for certain.
Pops was active military from 1954 to 1957. He’d served primarily aboard the USS Taussig and, on it, crossed the Great Divide. I flagged the international dateline within the Pacific Ocean on the map, then found the US Navy base on the peninsula in Yokosuka and tagged that, too.
But what did I know from my father’s stories? I glanced at the naval base pin. Pops said a giant anchor weighing sixty thousand pounds sat at the entrance gate where he would sometimes meet his girl. I slid my father’s kitchen table into the middle of the living room as a makeshift desk, then searched the navy website on my laptop.
As a young girl, I had tried to understand. “If the anchor was so big and heavy, how did it end up on land?”
“An earthquake,” my father had said. “One so big it stirred a massive sea monster from a thousand-year sleep. When it woke, it swallowed the harbor of ships in its yawn.”
He said the anchor was all that was left behind. Maybe my father should have been the writer. I laughed to myself as I clicked through the navy’s photo gallery on my laptop: an aircraft carrier recently deployed, the navy exchange shop, a sign for family housing and—I froze—a massive black anchor. There it was. And while it wasn’t skyscraper tall as I’d envisioned as a girl, even tipped on the T-bar it reached higher than the gate.
Only it wasn’t at the front gate anymore. According to the caption it’d been relocated to the Womble Gate entrance in 1972. I added a pin to the map. Pops would have had a great story on how they moved it.
My gaze dropped to the photo of the woman in the white kimono. I needed to confirm the kimono was, in fact, a wedding dress or it didn’t tie in to my father’s “wedding under an ancient tree” story. Back at my laptop, I searched “Japanese traditional wedding kimono” and within seconds, I had several matches.
The same layered white fabrics and half-moon headpiece filled my screen. Unlike Pops’s photo, these images were crystal clear, showing intricate patterns woven into the outer robe with delicate stitch work along the padded hems. Captions called the dress a shiromuku and said they were often seen in traditional Shinto-style ceremonies held in the famous shrines near Tokyo.
Is that where my father had seen one? There were photos marked Tokyo.
Excited, I searched “shrines in Tokyo” and discovered dozens—some featured elaborate gardens, others war memorials and museums, and almost all claimed an ancient tree.
Tokyo earned a pin even if I couldn’t narrow down a shrine.
What else?
What about the “street of blue” where Pops took one step, found her staring and fell in love? My fingers danced across the keyboard to type the query, and in one simple search for “Yokosuka’s blue street,” my father’s story came to life.
I smiled, because there it was, just as he’d described. A dark asphalt street with imbedded blue and white stones that sparkled like a river of light. No wonder he stooped down to touch them, even in the photos it gave the illusion of movement.
In my father’s full “Blue Street” story, he’d said it started at the gangway and spiraled through the city like the path from The Wizard of Oz, but the street I found was straight and narrow and didn’t connect to the pier. A slight exaggeration, but it did exist. Just like the Great Divide, the gigantic anchor and the bride.
I pinned the location on the map, then stepped back and stared in awe, because, like Dorothy, I’d been swept away to another world. A familiar one. One where my father belonged. For the first time since I’d read that letter, a sense of harmony returned. Through my father’s stories, the man I knew had returned, and in looking at that map, I saw him everywhere.
If only I could forget the letter and everything it implied. I wanted to. I was desperate to talk to him. To understand. I kept spinning over the same two questions. Was my father’s letter an attempt to clear a guilty conscience or a life’s regret of unfortunate circumstance?
I was desperate to believe it was the latter, that everything I knew of my father held true, but his secret shook me to my foundation, and to rebuild it, I needed proof. But I wasn’t finding anything, and while my father’s stories held truth, they weren’t giving me answers.
What if I never got them?
My gaze dropped to the envelope tacked below the map. I’d already checked the address several times only to find the house as numbered didn’t exist, but it was a safe assumption the city on the mailing address was correct.
I located Zushi on the opposite coast from the base and placed a pin on the map. It was a mere ten-minute trip by train. But in the 1950s? Minutes later I had my answer. Zushi Station opened in 1889, and while the travel time was extended, the lines did connect. I flagged it and, with a thick red dry-erase marker, traced a route between the two.
The seaside town was small, which surprised me. According to my father’s “Tea with a Merchant King of Empire” story, it was a traditional house that time forgot. Within such a small area, how many traditional homes could there still be? Back on my laptop, I searched “traditional houses in Zushi, Japan,” and while I scrolled the results, I remembered his words.
Her home sat at the top of a small hill, and she’d said I’d know it by the curved, clay roof tiles.
When I asked him why they were curved, he’d said to ward off evil spirits because demons only traveled in straight lines. For days after that story I’d spun in circles, taking the meaning as literal. I laughed under my breath, because here I was, a grown woman, searching for the home’s literal description.
But it paid off. Photos showed buildings in Zushi with curved roof tiles, but none were homes, and not all were old. Two were converted into ryokans or hotel-like inns, and three were refurbished as restaurants. Since all had curved roofs, all five locations were printed and pinned underneath the map, but there had to be an easier way. I needed someone who knew the area, someone in Japan whom I could call and ask questions, but who?
Yoshio Itō at Tokyo Times.
I straightened at once. I’d worked with him on a piece about the safety of Japan’s nuclear reactors and then again when their Democratic Party leader fell under suspicion of taking bribes. Although Yoshio didn’t live near Zushi, he spoke the language, and as a Japanese citizen and local journalist he might have access to records that I didn’t.
I scanned the envelope after blocking off my father’s PO box with tape, then emailed Yoshio, requesting “off the record” help in locating the property. That was all I told him. Aside from past online chats, shared resources and work-related email correspondence, Yoshio and I were strangers, and this was personal.
Thunder rumbled.
I’d lost track of time and the afternoon had lost its light. I peered out the window. One thick drop of rain followed another to splatter on the walk. The Caddy! I had left it out and the top down. I scrambled to find Pops’s key chain, then raced out the door.
Just as I pulled into the garage, the sky cracked open. Heavy drops pummeled the cement and pounded at the gutters like a hundred angry fists. Filled with nostalgia, I stepped from the car and stood with hands slung in my pockets to watch the downpour.
One summer my father and I had been out in the yard when a storm came on just as quick. Pops set up lawn chairs in the garage to wait it out and made up stories about my chalk drawings running pastel rivers down the drive.
Lightning lit the sky. I unfolded one of Pops’s lawn chairs and took a front row seat. He was missing a heck of a show, and I was missing him.
After a while, I stood, pushed the button that closed the garage and stepped inside, tossing his keys on the counter. Something I’d done at least a dozen times in the last week or so, and yet, I froze, eyes fixed to them. There were four. A typical house key for the condo, the original set for the Caddy and one for a padlock.
The self-storage unit.
My father had agreed to downsize and move into the retirement community a year or so after my mother had passed. We got rid of most of the furniture, yard equipment and everyday items he’d no longer need, but moved what had been in the home’s attic to a self-storage facility.
That was years ago, and I’d forgotten.
Within minutes, I had my bag, and was back out the door.