KANAME IZUMI LOOKS OUT his Hamilton apartment window, watching thunder clouds roll over the Niagara escarpment to the southeast. In the forty-seven years since he relocated here, he has witnessed a good number of thunder-storms rage over Lake Ontario, drenching the earth for miles around and bringing temporary relief from the unbearable summer humidity. Now dollops of rain begin to assault the window, obscuring his view of the storm.
His wife is out teaching a dance class. Kaname sinks into his favourite armchair and broods in the late afternoon shadows. Perhaps it is a residual loneliness, left over from the day he and Shunichi Isoki took the train from Hastings Park to Lemon Creek in 1942. That was forty-eight years ago, but his memory of the storm en route is often triggered when thunder erupts nearby.
The pounding rain is hypnotic, and Kaname dozes off. He dreams he is sitting on the hard, wooden bench next to Shunichi as the train heads into the mountains. Suddenly he is sitting next to his brother Haruo en route to Hamilton in the fall of ’43. Haruo keeps disappearing. Kaname strides up and down the aisle, searching the faces of hostile strangers, and finally finds his young brother on the platform outside the coach. He reaches for Haruo’s shoulder, but his hand falls on Shunichi’s arm instead. Now huge claps of thunder are echoing across the Selkirk Mountains in southeastern British Columbia. Kaname is trying to shake the image of his wife waving goodbye from Hastings Park.
Her face is fading into the mountainside when his dream shifts to Haruo again. He is shivering so hard his teeth are clacking.
“What are you doing, Haruo?” Kaname asks.
“I’ve been walking the aisles from Medicine Hat to Winnipeg, and I can’t walk any more,” he replies, rubbing his arms. “This is the only place on this god-awful train where soldiers aren’t staring me down.”
In the brisk October wind rattling through the steel plat-form, Kaname joins his brother. Railroad ties blur beneath their feet as the train races ahead.
Kaname falls off the platform onto the seat beside Shunichi. Thunder rumbles and cracks like artillery on a battlefield. Forks of lightning slice open the dark, troubled sky. The train carries its passengers through the storm impassively, without stopping to let anyone on or off. They are about to enter a tunnel when he wakes with a start. His wife Chiyo is shaking him.
“Kaname, wake up. You’re having a bad dream,” she whispers.
He looks up at her pretty, freckled face and sighs. “What time is it?” he asks.
“Five o’clock.”
“I’ve only been dozing for fifteen minutes, but it seems like hours. I was on the train with Shunichi going to Lemon Creek, but it kept getting mixed up with the time Haruo and I came east. It was awful.”
Chiyo sits down beside him. “What made you dream about that?” she asks.
“The thunderstorm, I guess.” Kaname looks out the window. The sky above the escarpment is aquamarine. The storm passed as quickly as it came. “Look how beautiful and calm it is out there now,” he says.
The phone rings, interrupting the quiet.
Chiyo picks up the receiver and hands it to Kaname. “It’s Shunichi.”
“You’re kidding,” he says, reaching for the phone.
Half an hour later, Kaname hangs up and saunters into the kitchen where Chiyo is preparing dinner. He puts his arms around her trim waist. “We’re going back to Chemainus again,” he says cheerfully. Twirling her around, he asks: “Remember when we went back in ’65?”
“And we waded through all those weeds, looking for your mother’s grave to put flowers on,” Chiyo replies.
“Yes, and when we couldn’t find it, we just scattered the flowers around,” Kaname says.
“I didn’t think we’d ever go back after seeing those headstones in that pile outside the fence. It was disgusting, what they did.”
“Well, the drunkards who did it are getting their comeuppance now.”
“What do you mean?” Chiyo asks.
“Shunichi just told me that the Anglican minister in Chemainus is helping a Shinto-Buddhist group organize a memorial monument for the cemetery. They are going to secure those headstones to the monument so an earthquake can’t budge them,” Kaname explains.
Chiyo looks up. “That’s the best news we’ve had since we won redress.”
“And when we finally got the right to vote. Those were important, but this means more to me than anything any politician ever gave us. Anyways, the minister will dedicate the monument in a special ceremony, and Shunichi hopes we’ll be there.”
Chiyo squeezes his hand. “When will it be?”
“Next August. I’m going to phone my sister and tell her the news. Maybe her and Michiharu will travel back with us.”
As soon as Sunao hears her brother’s voice, she suspects something is up. When Kaname tells her, she gasps.
“Are you sure? Kaname, if this is another one of your pranks, I’ll. . .”
“Of course it’s not,” Kaname replies, laughing. “Would I tease you about something like this?”
Sunao pauses. “Well, no. I don’t suppose you would.”
“Shunichi was in Chemainus this summer and met the minister. They plan to dedicate the monument during next year’s O-bon festival. You and Mich should come back with us. What do you think?” Kaname asks.
“Oh, yes,” she replies. “I’m sure Mich will agree to go.” Sunao hesitates. “Wouldn’t Papa have been surprised?”
“I thought about that too. This would have made him so happy.”
Sunao clears her throat. “Yes, well, I better go now. Talk to you soon.”
After hanging up, she wanders about her apartment in a daze. The day she learned that the Japanese graves were desecrated she felt flattened, as if on the receiving end of a ten-pin bowling ball. This is a different kind of shock. Al-though it isn’t devastating, it is no less stunning. The thought of her father missing this event stirs an uneasiness in her gut, made more vulnerable by her daughter’s death in recent years. She recalls an old friend comforting her one day, saying, “The world is not evenly divided.” Its meaning was not lost on tiny Sunao. Tragedy was a constant in her family, but she did everything in her power to rise above it and find the good in life.
Sunao and Kaname’s father, Goshichi Izumi, was an adventurous eighteen-year-old when he emigrated to Canada in 1900. His older brother accompanied him from their village in Kumamoto on the island of Kyushu to the docks in Yokohama. When he boarded the cargo ship, Goshichi knew he would not see his brother again. Sad and a little afraid, he waved goodbye and ran to the bow of the ship to face the future alone.
Like most immigrants, he didn’t know a word of English when he disembarked in Victoria. Luckily, the owners of the Osawa Hotel helped him get established. He found work as a houseboy and on farms around Victoria, gradually working his way up island to the Cowichan Valley. Getting accustomed to life in this foreign frontier was difficult, but he had a goal: to break free from the desperate cycle of poverty his family suffered in Japan.
When he learned that a woman he knew in Kumamoto had left her drunken husband in Canada and returned home, Goshichi sent for her to join him. He was about to start over in Genoa Bay, and he needed a wife. Towa was waiting for him at the Victoria docks a few months later. Leaving Japan again had not been easy, but at least she knew where she was going. Having been married once already, Towa knew she could not reject his proposal. It was highly unlikely there would be others.
It is a golden day in September 1913 when she arrives in Genoa Bay. The isolated sawmill town on the east coast of Vancouver Island is built on forested slopes that plunge into a deep harbour. Descending the trail to the shack where she will live with her new husband, twenty-eight-year-old Towa braces herself against the base of an ancient Douglas fir. A mere four feet nine inches, she has no delusions about this rugged land. Goshichi stops beside her.
“Are you all right?” he asks.
“Oh, yes. I just need a moment.” She lifts her hem and yanks on a stray thread. Goshichi waits patiently, which con-firms her earlier instincts. “Life here may be my undoing,” she thinks, “but at least this man is kind.”
Goshichi is unsuccessful securing a job at the sawmill, so he delivers firewood in a horse-drawn cart to the homes haphazardly scattered above the bay. The couple manage on the pennies he earns, but poverty is grinding down the resolve Goshichi cultivated across the Pacific. He shares his hopes and fears with Towa, gaining strength from her steady, plodding will to carry on.
In 1914, they bury their firstborn in the Duncan cemetery. Although Towa never speaks of her infant daughter again, she visits her grave during O-bon every August. Kaname is born in May 1916. A firstborn son does not enter the world without responsibilities. Named after the part of a fan that holds it together, Kaname signifies importance. Five more children follow him over the next eight years. In 1925, when Haruo is one, the sawmill in Genoa Bay shuts down.
The Izumis join the exodus from the area in 1926, moving north to the more prosperous town of Chemainus. Goshichi gets a job as an oiler at the sawmill. The pay is better, but not good enough to support his growing family in comfort. Kaname is ten and Sunao is six when they settle into one of the poorer homes in Okada camp. Over the next four years, Towa bears three more children. One, a baby boy, dies on March 13, 1928, three days after he is born. Towa and Goshichi bury Nobuyuki on a wet March afternoon and carry on as if his birth and death were an aberration, their grief mitigated by the absence of another mouth to feed.
As the oldest daughter, Sunao stays home from school to help with household chores while her mother recuperates. She will be nine in three months and enjoys her brief holiday from school, never imagining that housework will all too soon be-come a way of life.
One of about twelve families in Okada camp, the Izumis live in primitive conditions and think little of it. Raw sewage floats in the bay where kids swim and fish among the booming grounds outside their door. Water from a nearby spring is their only means of refrigeration, so cold that jello sets in it.
The neighbourhood is spotted with small vegetable gardens and wells. The community bathhouse is kiddy-corner to a hard dirt playground, where the Izumi children mingle with the Okada, Otsu, Sakata and Shigetomi children. Among them, Kaname is possibly the wildest. A prankster extraordinaire, he often entices his two brothers, Mitsuo and Satoshi, to join in the fun.
Sometimes they are simple gestures that do little harm. Many times, they traipse to a farm on the outskirts of town to pick apples. If the cows are being milked, Kaname stands where the farmer can squirt it into his mouth directly from the cow’s teat. His brothers double over with laughter as Kaname hams it up all the way to the apple orchard. Windfalls are all they can afford, so Kaname instructs his brothers to cover the good apples with a layer of bruised ones. When the farmer opens their sacks, he says, “Oh, windfalls, eh. That’ll be twenty-five cents.” And off they go.
Once he and his brothers get caught fishing out of season. The fishing inspector takes them to the police station in Lady-smith and gives them a lecture. Ironically, the time they are caught is the time they hadn’t known they were doing any-thing wrong. Nervous of being thrown in jail, Kaname tries to think of an explanation his parents will accept. But after chastizing them, the inspector releases them to walk the fifteen miles home.
Another brush with the law has a funnier ending, at least for Kaname. He is with some hakujin boys stirring up trouble in Chinatown. A Chinese man calls the police to get the boys out of his yard, but when the police officer arrives, the boys lead him on a wild chase through backyard vegetable gardens. It is dark, but the boys know their way like rabbits in a warren. They are particularly careful to avoid the barrels of urine recessed into the ground, which the Chinese use as garden fertilizer. Hiding nearby, Kaname roars with laughter when he hears the cop swearing. He is pulling himself out of a barrel, dripping. The chase is over.
Then there is Hallowe’en. Moving outhouses and throwing dirt into the community bath are commonplace pranks that Kaname often instigates. But he can’t resist the spontaneous urge to be more creative, like lifting a fence from a front yard and tying it onto the school flagpole. In the morning, some-one’s fence is hoisted up for all to see—the irate owner in the principal’s office demanding the culprit be punished.
If Kaname isn’t making trouble, he isn’t happy. During cold winters, he and his friends climb the hill to Chinatown with buckets of water to throw down the path. Workers coming home from the mill find the only way up the icy hill is on their hands and knees—with the boys pelting snowballs at them from the bushes and the men swearing back in Chinese.
One summer Kaname watches his brother Satoshi plant a patch of watermelon. After he’s gone, Kaname sifts through the earth, replacing the watermelon seeds with cucumber seeds. When the plants first sprout up, they look just like watermelon. Satoshi tends them every day, pleased with their progress. One day he comes home from school and the flowers are out.
“That’s cucumbers,” he says, eyeing Kaname.
“Are you sure you planted watermelon seeds in there?” Kaname asks.
“I’m darn sure I planted watermelon!” Satoshi quips, angrily.
“How come cucumbers are coming up then?” Kaname asks.
Satoshi grunts and slumps away. He suspects his brother is the culprit but has no proof. Grudgingly, he harvests a bumper crop of cucumbers over the summer.
Sunao, who isn’t party to Kaname’s pranks, idolizes him. Satoshi could fill her in if she’d listen, but she believes her oldest brother can do no wrong.
Kaname hates school with a passion. He spends a good deal of time in the corner, often as punishment for taking a bath-room break against the teacher’s orders. He is ecstatic when he finally finishes grade eight and begins working. With a big grin, Kaname drops his wages into Towa’s hands at the end of a day. He only earns ten cents an hour to weed fields on local farms, but every bit helps. Money aside, he never comes home empty-handed. The farmer tells him to help himself to what-ever crop he is growing, and Kaname takes full advantage of the offer.
“How about your animals?” Kaname asks one day, keeping a straight face.
“No, no. I didn’t mean animals. Vegetables or fruit—you’re quite welcome,” the farmer replies, shaking his head and chuckling.
Sometimes he splurges and dashes into Okada’s store for gum and candy. Stuffing them into his pockets, he runs to the beach and jumps into a skiff that he rows to Kuper Island. Although the nuns at the residential school won’t let him ashore, they have little power to stop his dinghy rocking near the beach. Seeing him approach, hordes of students dressed in dirty rags race to the shoreline. They scramble over each other, desperate for the candy he lobs at them from his skiff. Kaname feels sorry for these children from the local Cowichan tribes. Few families are more poor than the Izumis, but at least they aren’t wrenched from home and imprisoned in horrid schools.
His friends on the Westholme reserve take him spear fishing when the salmon spawn up Chemainus River. He can’t see the sockeye from the bank at all, but in no time his Indian tillicum dangles a fish on his spear. Kaname rubs his belly, knowing he will eat well tonight. Then there is the elder from Westholme. Kaname sits with his Japanese and Indian friends on the railroad tracks, listening to the old man tell stories. One day he tells them that Chemainus is their word for a bag of clams. The idea that they are living in “a bag of clams” sets them off, and the little group on the tracks rocks back and forth laughing.
The Sun-now’-netz people, who live on the beach nearby, offer Kaname his first taste of the surreal. Whenever someone dies, they dance, wail and beat drums around a fire until dawn. Occasionally, he wakes in the night to the haunting rhythm of the vigil echoing across the bay. He listens in the dark, a little in awe of the colourful, crazed world around him.
Sunao finishes grade five the summer that Kaname goes to work in the logging camp at Paldi. It is 1933, and the cut in their father’s wages has created more hardship. So when Kaname gets a job as a faller, they celebrate. At seventeen, he is beginning to live up to his name.
He knows nothing about falling huge Douglas firs, but he soon learns. The only Canadian of Japanese descent among a camp of Japanese immigrants, he is treated like a favourite son. The men return from their gambling sprees in Duncan with more chocolate bars than he can eat in a week. He doesn’t go home that first month, waiting for his paycheque and occupying himself on weekends by looking after the cook’s little baby.
The last weekend in July, Kaname gets a ride out of camp to Duncan. He boards a bus for Chemainus, his first real pay-cheque hot in his hands. It isn’t a lot of money, but it is more than he has ever earned. Proud of every penny, he is itching to turn it over to his mother. He has been a bit homesick too, and thinks of his brothers and sisters as the bus chugs along the winding, bumpy road. Almost more than anything else, he looks forward to a game of baseball. He shakes his head, wondering how he’ll survive a summer without baseball.
The bus lets Kaname off at the Horseshoe Bay Inn, and he runs down the hill to the cluster of homes along the shore. He is hot and thirsty when he finally strides up the back steps into the kitchen. Towa is stirring the laundry over the stove with a big stick, her forehead dripping. Kaname’s youngest sister Toyo is climbing over the rough kitchen benches and squeals when she sees him. He tweaks her cheek and tickles her belly, then walks over to Towa.
“It’s good to see you, Kaname,” she says. “We missed you.”
“I was homesick, Mama, but it was worth it,” he replies, grinning as he holds up the cheque. Drying her hands on her hips, Towa takes it from him gingerly and bursts into tears.
Less than a month later, she is dead.
Kaname is lying in his bunk at the end of his shift one August afternoon, feeling disgruntled about missing the baseball season. He is watching shadows from the forest play on the ceiling when several co-workers file into the bunkhouse. Kaname knows they were at someone’s funeral earlier and thinks it odd when they suddenly stop talking. Then he overhears a whisper: “We ought to tell him. We really should.” Looking up, he sees Mr. Kawabata shuffling over.
“Your mother got sick at Mrs. Nagano’s funeral this after-noon. She might be in the hospital in Duncan, so you better go and see her.”
“What happened?” he asks.
“It’s best if you go now. Plenty of time to get to Duncan before dark.”
Kaname frowns and jumps off his bunk. After throwing a few things in an overnight bag, he hitches a ride on the road. He arrives at the hospital to find his father sitting by his mother’s bed.
“What happened, Papa?” Kaname asks.
“Your mother fainted at Mrs. Nagano’s funeral, so we brought her here,” Goshichi replies. “She is breathing, but she won’t open her eyes or talk to me.”
“Did you talk to the doctor?”
“Yes, but I don’t understand him.”
Kaname nods and puts a hand on Goshichi’s shoulder. “I’ll be right back.”
Kaname finds a nurse and learns that his mother has had a stroke and is in a coma. He returns to her room.
“It’s not good, Papa. Mama had a stroke.”
Goshichi looks up at his son. His eyes are clouded. He shakes his head and stares at Towa again.
Kaname observes her left leg moving a little and looks at her passive face. He has never thought of his mother as a beauty. Taken individually, her features are strong, but her forehead is too short and her eyes too narrow for her broad cheeks and full lips. None of that ever mattered. A kind, loving woman, she gave all for her family. At forty-eight, she is spent.
Nothing is changed when Kaname joins his father beside Towa’s bed the next morning. The doctor enters and confirms their fears. “I don’t know when she will die, but there is no hope,” he says.
Goshichi nods, forcing a smile. Kaname begins to translate, but his father puts a finger to his lips. He already knows. Suggesting they leave the hot, stifling room for a while, Kaname leads his father into the shade on the back steps of the hospital.
“It’s just a matter of time, Papa,” he says, sitting down beside him.
Goshichi stares ahead. A widower at fifty-one with a family of eight, he must take the tragedy in stride. But there is a frailty about him that concerns Kaname. He seems hollow, like an empty clamshell rattling in a rock crevice, vulnerable to the next rising tide.
His wife has already begun her journey into the spirit world when they return to her room. Kaname wants to cry, but no tears come. He thinks perhaps they will come later, when the world takes shape again and feeling returns.
The family holds a vigil in their living room that night. Towa lies in the open coffin that local carpenters hammered together earlier. Sunao sits in a corner, watching people come and go all night long, their shadowy forms tinged by candle-light as they drift through blue incense smoke. The candles light the way for Towa’s journey through the afterworld. Over the next forty-eight days, the Izumis will light many more to guide her soul toward its destination.
A Shinto-Buddhist priest from Vancouver conducts the funeral in the Chemainus cemetery the following afternoon. Stone-faced, Goshichi places a simple wooden marker next to the grave of his three-day-old son.
Towa’s death does nothing to ease the family’s financial burden; it just adds grief to the mix. Although loathe to leave, Kaname boards a bus for Paldi. Goshichi returns to his job at the sawmill, rising at five o’clock every morning to grease the machinery before the early shift begins. His fifteen- and six-teen-year-old sons take farming jobs and whatever else they can find. Now thirteen, Sunao slips into Towa’s shoes, mothering, cooking and cleaning for the entire family. Her four younger siblings range in age from ten to two. Every morning she faces an endless pile of dirty work clothes and diapers. Although she isn’t especially fond of school, she never imagined she’d have to quit for this. No amount of tears changes a thing. Adolescence bypasses Sunao.
The first year is the worst. By the time she turns fourteen, turmoil is beaten out of her. The transition to adulthood took its toll, but now she accepts the unrelenting pace and labours under the yoke of domesticity like other women in the neighbourhood.
Several times a day, she crosses a trestle near the mill’s train tracks to get water for laundry. Unaware that her future hus-band has his eyes on her, she struggles with the buckets, water sloshing over the edge as she trundles along the tracks.
Kaname continues working as a faller through the autumn and winter months. But one day in early spring he slips and cuts his knee badly. He waits for the logging train to take him out of the bush on its late afternoon run to the sawmill. By the time he gets to the hospital he has lost a good deal of blood. His friend Hitoshi Okada comes to visit after he gets stitched up.
“Don’t go back to Paldi,” Hitoshi says. “Come and work with us on the boom.”
“It’s a deal,” Kaname says, beaming. “That’s the best news I’ve had in years.”
“Well, we know what your family is going through. They need you around,” Hitoshi says. “I remember how awful it was after my Mama died, and Papa does too. Work on the boom has slowed down, but we could still use an extra hand. Besides, we need you on the ball team this summer.”
“Watch out, then,” Kaname shouts. “I’m going to play ball like you’ve never seen,” he adds, grinning.
Hitoshi laughs. “Chemainus just isn’t the same without you around, Kaname. Nobody knows how to make trouble like you.”
As soon as his knee heals, Kaname is on the boom, learning his job from one of Hitoshi’s older half-brothers. Osamu is tough and fearless, but Kaname has no trouble measuring up. Working the boom without a life jacket forces a certain respect for the unpredictable sea, but his body reacts instinctively to the slippery rolling logs under his feet.
“Gee, Kaname, you’re not bad for a beginner,” Osamu says.
“Must have been all those times I ran the boom to fish under the train trestle when I was a kid. But, have you ever worked in the bush?” Kaname asks.
Osamu pulls his tobacco and rolling papers out of his shirt pocket. “You know, I never have. Here, want one of these?”
Kaname isn’t a smoker, but after a few days on the job he figures he may as well join in. It is a choice between standing around and smoking or working while the others goof off. “Sure, thanks,” he says, piling tobacco onto the paper.
“Well, falling big timbers isn’t easy. In fact, it’s downright dangerous. But you know there’s something to be said for having both feet on the ground while the earth shakes around you,” Kaname says.
“This is the only work I’ve ever done, so I wouldn’t know,” Osamu replies, looking out to sea. “We’d better get back to work, buddy. Clouds moving in.”
Kaname looks up. An angry black mass is rolling high up in the sky. “Right,” he says, grabbing his peavey pole. “Let’s get going.”
An hour later, Kaname looks at the bank of trees on the hill behind his house. Huge limbs are thrashing about wildly and two trees crash to the ground. The boom is rolling in the swells underfoot. He should have packed it in already and looks up to see Osamu waving him in from the wharf. Falling in now would be just as precarious as riding the boom in the dark, when a cable pulls it towards the mill before shutting down. He’d never be found alive if he falls. Osamu paces as Kaname scurries back to the wharf, unharmed.
Kaname isn’t fearless, but he likes the job and the camaraderie of being one of the boys on the boom. Before long, his brothers Satoshi and Mitsuo are working on it too. Sometimes they get mischievous, forcing too many logs onto the cog that feeds them into the mill, causing the chain to break. One of the millwrights has to come and weld a new one on, so they take a smoke break and swap tall tales. Osamu gets fed up letting his partner bum his tobacco. Finally, Kaname starts buying his own.
On her trek to fetch water, Sunao trips along the mill’s train tracks above the shore. She often sees her brothers huddling out in the bay, clouds of smoke mingling with the damp, grey mist that hangs in the air. Despite the penetrating chill, she wishes she were a boy.
After hauling her buckets back home, she sets a big tub on the pot-bellied stove and pours the water in. She punches down the dirty work clothes with a big wooden stick and carves shavings of Sunlight bar soap into the mix. After boiling it awhile, she scrubs it on a scrub board until her fingers are raw. Her childish hands are not big or strong enough to wring the water from heavy work clothes and bed sheets. Kaname does it willingly when he comes home from work and often helps prepare supper too.
One night he boils some burdock root and everything in the pot turns black. He finds Sunao changing Toyo’s diaper in the next room.
“I’ve ruined dinner, Sunao.”
“How?”
“You’d better come see.”
Toyo follows her big sister into the kitchen, and Kaname picks her up. Sunao lifts the lid on the pot.
“Oh, Kaname, you have to soak burdock, but don’t worry. It just looks bad. It’ll taste okay.”
Soon everyone sits down to dinner, facing bowls of black vegetables. Goshichi digs in and says, “Oh, this is good, Kaname. You’re a good cook.”
He winces. “You never complain, Papa.”
After supper Kaname daydreams about the Thanksgiving turkey dinners he once enjoyed at Shige Yoshida’s home. He remembers the trek along the road past the cemetery, down to Mr. Howe’s farm on the outskirts of town where Shige’s family lived. Satoshi, Mitsuo, Kaname and Sunao ran through piles of autumn leaves en route, the pungent smell of burning leaves filtering through the crisp, cold air. As they approached the Yoshidas, the smell of roast turkey sharpened the ache in their bellies.
Turkey was a short-lived, almost unimaginable luxury, but the sea offers an ongoing supply of fish and clams. Sunao especially likes going digging for clams in the winter, when their flavour is enhanced by the cold. At low tide on moonlit nights, the Izumis join other Japanese and Indian families in the bay. Their shadows lengthen over the bubbles in the mud as they set down coal oil lamps and buckets and dig in. Pockets of half-bent bodies are silhouetted against the silver sand, while the squishy sound of mud sucking boots echoes across the bay.
Time passes and the family gradually overcomes its grief, settling into routines that include as much recreation as they can squeeze between the long hours of work. Kaname and his brothers play baseball and fish in the summer. Everyone goes swimming and on picnics to Bare Point, where the world floats before them like a saucer of slippery mercury. Sunao takes up tennis with friends at the rough courts the Halheds let them use at the back of the bay.
Sunao still does most heavy household chores, but her sister Misao is old enough to take care of the children now. So when Michiharu comes calling, Sunao drops everything. Nothing beats riding in the back of Takayoshi Kawahara’s pickup truck on Saturday nights. She cuddles up close to Michiharu as they laugh down the road, believing this strong, warm body next to hers is nothing short of heaven-sent.
Oddly enough, Sunao’s mother was the first person Michiharu met when he came to Chemainus, earlier the same year she died. He was a timid seventeen-year-old away from his isolated home in Tofino. Towa, holding her youngest child on her hip, introduced herself. “Welcome to Chimunesu. I’m Towa Izumi and this is Toyo.”
“I’m Michiharu. I work in the mill with my brother-in-law.”
“Have you come a long way?” Towa asked.
“I’m from Tofino, on the west coast of the island. It is wild there.”
“Is that so? Well, I hope you will like it here.”
Overcome with her warm welcome, Michiharu confessed, “You are such a nice mother—and the first stranger to speak to me.”
Towa studied his face. “My oldest daughter is Sunao. Please, look after her for me.”
Surprised, Michiharu stuttered some reply, and they went their separate ways. She could not have known that he would marry Sunao eventually, thousands of miles from Chemainus and their shacks on the shore. But she saw that he was kind, which was all that mattered.
Many years before Sunao marries Michiharu, Chiyoko Hashimoto marries into the Izumi family. She knows Sunao better than Kaname from the year her family lived at the back end of Chinatown, next to Hong Hing’s pig pen. Chiyo and Sunao were friends in grade one that year, but she lived most of her childhood in Steveston, Victoria and Duncan.
When she is thirteen, her parents send her to Americamura in Japan to be with her grandmother for awhile. Her grandmother intends to teach her about life and marriage.
“You must marry before you are twenty-one, or you will be an old maid for the rest of your life,” she says.
“I don’t believe you, Baa-san” Chiyo replies. “I’ll get married when I want to.”
“Listen. Do as I say or you will be sorry.”
She impresses this old-fashioned superstition on her pretty granddaughter with such fervour that Chiyo decides she will not marry until she is twenty-one. With equal fervour, she is also determined not to marry the oldest son in a big family. But like most young women of her generation, she will learn that the decision is out of her hands.
Five years later, Chiyo is back in Duncan when the gobetweens, the Okadas and Shiozakis, introduce her to Kaname. A vivacious eighteen-year-old with a mind of her own, she has no advance warning.
“This is the man that you are supposed to marry,” says Chiyo’s mother.
“Oh,” she replies, stunned.
“He’s a nice fellow. He’s going to look after you.”
“Really?” Chiyo asks, full of doubt. The tall, slender man frightens her, but she turns to him and smiles weakly. “Hello,” she says.
“Hello,” Kaname replies, shuffling his feet.
After they are engaged, they still don’t know what to say to each other. Chiyo has never heard his easy laughter or notorious jokes. He is too uptight to reveal his marvelous wit and warm sense of humour. Like most men of his generation, Kaname grew up with stringent, implausible expectations of women. Suddenly he realizes how little he understands the opposite sex. The prospect of marriage is every bit as daunting to him as it is to Chiyo.
One day, Chiyo says to her mother, “I know I’m going to have to marry him, but he’s such a scary person to live with all through my life. And he’s got so many brothers and sisters. I always used to tell myself never to marry the eldest son.”
“The eldest son in a big family is the best person to marry, because he will be very understanding and kind,” Koto replies.
“Oh, what’s the point, Mama? You know it can be dreadful, marrying the eldest. Why don’t you tell the truth?”
Koto throws her daughter a look. Chiyo sighs and goes to her room. She will do as she is told.
On November 9, 1940, Chiyo marries a man she is afraid of in a gold-trimmed pastel orange kimono she doesn’t want to wear, nowhere near the charming white United Church of her dreams. Instead, Bishop Aoki performs the Shinto-Buddhist ritual in the Izumi household on a clear day. Outside the living room window, steam rises off the booming grounds as cold air meets salt water warmed by the Japanese current. She is nine-teen; her groom is almost as naïve at twenty-four.
After the reception, Chiyo and Kaname drive to Nanaimo to spend the night, hoping to catch a boat to Vancouver the next day. But they can’t find anywhere to stay and drive back to Chemainus in silence. They are within walking distance of home when they book into the Horseshoe Bay Inn. With luke-warm enthusiasm, they decide to make Victoria their destination in the morning.
The newlyweds wake to falling snow. Lying in bed, they watch the flakes drift soundlessly past the hotel room window. About four inches cover the ground when they board a bus to Victoria a short hour later. Travelling south, Chiyo admires the evergreen forest through the flurry. Branches laden with wet snow arch toward earth, and soft drifts nestle into amber crooks of Arbutus branches. She sighs. The cool caress of silk against flesh comes to mind as snow blankets the woods.
The honeymoon is fun, if short-lived. They go sight-seeing in Victoria, and discover the Takata Gardens on the Gorge waterway. An amusement park with a Japanese tea garden, it isn’t as popular as it was when Chiyo was a child. They stroll through the Japanese garden, stopping to admire exotic fish and ducks in the pond. Gazing at a gentle waterfall upstream, she surrenders herself to the future.
But after moving into the Izumi household, Chiyo is miserable again. She spends her first three days going door-to-door with Osamu Okada’s wife to introduce herself to the women in the community. At each household, Chiyo makes a formal request for co-operation, followed by a good deal of bowing. At the end of each day she cries, for she is neither Chiyo Hashimoto nor Chiyo Izumi. She is Kaname’s wife. Right now, she would rather be an old maid.
Winter and spring pass. Chiyo is settling into her new identity and home, while Kaname is getting accustomed to his role as husband. The summer after their wedding, they take a bold step together. On July i, 1941, the couple goes to a sawmill-sponsored dance in the company hall. Canadian dancing is strictly against the wishes of the issei, who consider the close body contact in public immoral. Fed up with these old-fashioned ideas, Chiyo and Kaname decide to go anyway. They are the only couple of Japanese descent in the place.
A live band is playing “In the Mood” when they walk into the dance hall. Some hakujin people jeer at them, but Chiyo notices welcoming smiles from others. After all, it is the first of July, a time for community spirit and celebration. Kaname leads Chiyo to a table at the back, where they scan the crowd for familiar faces. Tapping their toes, they wait for a second wave of courage to pluck them from their seats and push them onto the dance floor. It finally comes when the band plays “Blueberry Hill,” one of their favourite songs. Some hours later, they stroll home hand-in-hand, every dance spent.
During the following weeks, issei talk about their immoral behaviour and peers are reluctant to speak up on their behalf. Kaname responds by organizing a dance with his friends. The issei reluctantly agree to allow it, providing they close down precisely at midnight and don’t smoke or serve liquor. The night of the dance, several issei peer through the windows. Whether out of curiosity or hoping to nail them with transgressions, Kaname never knows. He and Chiyo kick up their heels along with scores of friends. The Chemainus Japanese community is finally coming of age in Canada.
Five months later, Kaname attends a wedding that sears his memory for the event that it precedes. On December 6, 1941, one of the community’s judo experts marries the barber’s daughter in a simple ceremony in the groom’s home. Mitsuyuki Sakata takes Masaye Nishimura as his wife the day before an era closes.
The morning after the wedding, Kaname and Chiyo are finishing their breakfast when Noboru Yoshida bursts into their home.
“Did you hear?” he asks. “Japan bombed Pearl Harbor this morning.”
Kaname doesn’t believe his friend. There has been a lot of talk in the commmunity lately, but he is skeptical of claims that Japan is winning the war in Asia. He has had arguments with some issei, but his own father is quiet. A peace-loving man, Goshichi doesn’t want any part in war or talk of it.
Kaname switches on the radio. Listening to the news, he draws a deep breath. Something akin to an icy fist lodges itself in the pit of his stomach.
Within the month, Kaname and several friends receive conscription notices. Although they don’t have the right to vote, they are willing to fight for their country. After passing their physicals, they go to the recruiting office in Victoria.
“Who sent you here?” the recruiting officer asks disdainfully.
“What do you mean?” Kaname snaps back. “Here are our notices.”
“Sorry, boys. We don’t need you now,” the officer replies curtly.
Kaname wants to punch his pug face, but turns abruptly and storms out with his friends. Enraged and humiliated, they return to Chemainus on the same train that will take their fathers to road camps in two months.
No one celebrates the arrival of the New Year in 1942. January I has always been a day of open houses and much drinking of sake. When he was little, Kaname tingled with excitement as the big day approached, dreaming of all the special treats women were preparing. His family could not afford special treats at any time of year, but the community was generous to everyone, and those less fortunate took full advantage of an opportunity to eat until they were full.
On January I, 1942, Kaname goes for a walk to Bare Point, leaving Chiyo and Sunao to brood at home. It is a New Year’s to remember for its leaden silence. In other years, Okada camp was a flurry of people going to and from houses, stopping often to exchange hearty wishes. But Kaname has no sense of renewal today. Standing at the edge of Bare Point, he studies the horizon. Space melts: grey sea with grey sky, then, nothing.
The day the RCMP come for Goshichi, Sunao is sitting in the living room. She can just make out the shape of her brother’s deft movements as he works the boom in the bone-chilling damp. She is thinking how calm the sea is when she hears the knock. Everyone in the family has known it might come any day, but she has persistently refused to acknowledge it. Losing her father revives all the hurt of Towa’s passing nine years before. Waving goodbye, she aches for protection from harm. The sense of security she seeks is universal. Unwittingly perhaps, the hakujin community is shoring up its needs at her expense.
As Goshichi leaves, Chiyo urges him to take care of himself in the road camp.
“Don’t do too many hard jobs, because you are getting old, Papa,” she says.
“I’m not old,” Goshichi retorts, insulted. A few weeks later, he turns sixty in one of the Rocky Mountain road camps.
Months later, the rest of the family is settled in Lemon Creek. Kaname learns his father is on a bus to New Denver. When he finds him, Kaname sees a man ten years older than he was some eight months earlier. Goshichi lost little in material goods when the RCMP led him away, for he had little to lose. But his pride diminished with his stamina until he rattled inside, a distant shadow of the teenager who fled Kumamoto bursting with dreams of wealth and adventure in a faraway land.
When the Izumis leave Chemainus on April 21, 1942, they walk out of their home as if they will be back later that day. Everything is intact. Dishes and bags of rice remain inside cupboards. The homemade hemlock table is ready for setting. Clothes hang in closets, along with boxes of photographs. A butsudana sits on Sunao’s bedside table. It was her mother’s small but elaborate Buddhist shrine, with which she had wor-shipped her ancestors when she was alive. Sunao could not fit it in the suitcase. She tiptoed toward the closet and stopped, holding it to her chest as she glanced around the room.
“Don’t hide it,” she whispered. “Leave it to protect our home from harm while we’re away.”
Muttering a quick prayer, she set it on the beside table and left. She never saw it again.
Decades later, Kaname searches for his roots in Japan. A relative of Chiyo’s drives them up mountainous, winding roads near Kumamoto. After making a few inquiries, he learns a cousin is living nearby. Akino Sakai has never met them and does not know to expect them.
She is bent over her terraced fields when they arrive.
“Hello, cousin,” Kaname begins. “I am Goshichi’s son, from Canada, and this is my wife Chiyo.”
The woman looks up and bursts into tears. “You must be Chiyoko, the beautiful bride in the picture. I’ll never forget that picture. Oh, you haven’t changed at all,” she says, hugging them both. “You must come in. I never make pastry, but this morning something told me I was going to have visitors,” she mutters, dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief.
They follow her into her humble home and sit on cushions on the floor. Soon the conversation turns to the past. They learn that Akino-san was pregnant when her husband was conscripted into the Japanese navy. He never returned, leaving her to raise their only son.
Before they leave, Kaname asks if there are any family graves nearby.
“Oh, yes. Come with me,” Akino replies. She pulls up some flowers in her backyard and traipses through a neighbouring field. Kaname and Chiyo follow, not exactly dressed for trek-king through the bush. Kaname is brushing aside a cobweb just as they reach a little cemetery.
Akino takes them to the Izumi section and lays the flowers down. Kaname tries to read the names, scraping off a plush layer of moss from the headstones. He runs his fingers over the calligraphy. There, basking in the sun on a mountainside, are the graves of his grandparents, uncles, and aunts.
The next day, they switch trains four times to visit Akino’s brother in the north. Now in his eighties, Kaname’s cousin is very feeble, but his wife is thrilled to meet them.
“We heard about you during the war, you know,” she begins. “Everyone said all these families were coming back. We thought you would too, so we kept some of our rice rations aside.”
“But you needed that rice yourselves,” Kaname exclaims, feeling flushed.
“It was just a little every day. We sent you a letter, but fifty days later it came back. We thought, ‘Oh, they must be all killed in the war.’ We kind of gave up.”
Kaname takes a deep breath and mumbles, “We never realized you would be worried about us.” Wiping his eyes briskly, he exchanges glances with Chiyo. How could he have possibly anticipated his Japanese relatives would care?
On the island of Shikoku a few weeks later, Kaname’s old booming ground mate hears he is around. Osamu Okada, one of the unfortunates to be repatriated after the war, searches every hotel in the city. In his shirt pocket, he carries an old picture of Kaname, leaning on his peavey pole, smoking a soggy cigarette and grinning. Osamu is about to give up when he finds them. He is so happy all he can do is cry.