MUTT OTSU WATCHES THE AFTERNOON SUN filter through the sheer curtains in his Toronto living room. A slight breeze flutters across the sheers, rippling the lace border. Mopping his brow, he longs for the temperate saltwater breezes of his youth.
The dappled light on the walls is dancing in waves before his eyes. Combined with the stifling heat, the movement coaxes him to drift off. He dreams of his three sisters in Japan, whom he has never met. In his dream, Mutt is looking for them on the beach at Okada camp where he grew up. He does not know what they look like, so he calls their names as he strolls along the shore by the booming grounds.
“Shizue, are you here? Yoshiko, Mitsuko, where are you? I am your brother. Please come to me. We must talk.”
He calls their names over and over. No one else walks the beach. It must be Sunday, the only day in the week when the mill is not running. Still, it is unusual that no one is around. Glancing up the embankment toward the train tracks, he sees human bones and the tops of skulls protruding from an Indian midden. Mutt picks up his pace.
It is urgent that he find his sisters. He needs to explain why his mother never sent for them. They must not blame Tsune for abandoning them. It was not her fault, just her fate. Despite the fact that her parents owned an orchard in Japan and were quite wealthy, Tsune left the Tokyo suburb of Hakone with her husband in 1914 and crossed the Pacific in search of a better life. But working conditions and wages in Canada shattered Shinjiro’s dreams of returning to his family a wealthy man. In Genoa Bay, three more children were born while Tsune clung to the memory of her daughters in Hakone. She wrote home often, promising to send for them as soon as she could. But stomach cancer killed Shinjiro in 1923, the same year that her family was displaced during an earthquake in Tokyo. Destitute and pregnant again, Tsune lost track of her daughters in Japan. A canyon of unimaginable proportions cut her off from them and the wealth she had known in her youth.
Tsune never spoke of Shizue, Yoshiko, and Mitsuko, harbouring her pain silently for over thirty years. After the war, she relocated them and wrote many times before receiving an angry reply. She had disgraced them.
When Mutt finally learns he has sisters in Japan, he is stunned. With the help of his wife’s friend in Japan, he tracks them down. Now that Tsune is gone, it seems even more critical to coax forgiveness from the silence, for children abandoned by their parents suffered in Japan.
But they are not here; no one is. The deserted beach stretches before him. The sea is flat calm, lifeless but for a gull that screeches across the harbour, plopping excrement. Mutt shivers and turns to go, but his house isn’t there. All the neighbours’ shacks are gone too, along with the Okada’s store and the public bath. Terrified, Mutt scans the embankment for something, anything, to redeem his past. A wavering mirage halts along the railway tracks: tiny, shy Sunao is carrying her buckets to the well. Mutt calls her name, and she pivots in slow motion, gazing at him mournfully. He runs toward her, shouting, “Let me help you get water, Sunao. You shouldn’t work so hard.” But his feet feel like lead. It takes forever to reach the railway tracks. When he does, she shimmers into oblivion.
Mutt opens his eyes. His wife Mikiko is standing above him with a tall glass of water.
“You were dreaming. I heard you calling your sisters.”
He props himself up on an elbow and reaches for the glass. “Yes,” he says, taking a drink. “It was the strangest dream, Miki. At the same time that everything was so familiar it was like I was on another planet.” He lifts the glass to his lips and stares across the room.
“You’ve been thinking too much about your sisters ever since Shizue declined to meet you,” Miki says.
“Yes, it hurts. In a way, I understand why they don’t want to stir up the past. They are old now, but I can’t shake this feeling that a chunk of me is missing.” Mutt pauses. “Maybe it’s the idea of going back to Chemainus next summer, too. I want to see all my old friends, but there are so many ghosts in B.C.”
“What ghosts?” she asks.
“The same ones that you left behind, dear. The very same ones.”
Mataharu Otsu was born in Genoa Bay on September 19, 1920, Tsune and Shinjiro’s firstborn Canadian child. He is three when his father falls ill and loses his job at the mill. He dies shortly before Yasuyo is born, without leaving so much as a simple memory for his oldest son, let alone the other children.
Tsune decides to pack up and move to Chemainus, where there is a larger Japanese community, where there are no memories of Shinjiro or his pain. They move into Okada camp, next to the Izumis, who are every bit as poor. Tsune goes into debt putting food on the table. Once Mutt sees his mother crawl on her hands and knees, begging for a bag of rice from the Okadas. She has accumulated close to a $100 debt, an astronomical amount of money no average working person could hope to repay. She also orders food from the travelling Vancouver merchants who work the island communities, until that debt outgrows their trust too. Tsune does what she can to bring in a few extra pennies, laundering work clothes for bachelors and making tofu. Every Saturday, Mutt and his brothers take turns pulling a wagon stacked with a pan of the slippery white bean cakes. They traipse over to Kawahara camp, where they sell it for five cents per square. Tsune gives these pennies to a neighbour who places orders for her when the merchants come around.
After several difficult months, Tsune remarries. It is not an arrangement that frees her from poverty or from shame, but the Otsu children are lucky. Tairyu Fujimoto loves them as if they are his own.
Mutt doesn’t go to school until he is nine because of severe eczema, which school officials fear is contagious. For years, Mutt and Tairyu share a bedtime ritual. Tairyu winds strips of a torn bedsheet around his stepson’s arms and legs to stop him from scratching the sores. The young boy co-operates, enjoying the gentle strength of his stepfather’s hands. But when Mutt wakes in the morning, the sheet often sticks where his scratching has broken the skin and drawn blood.
Mutt observes a morning ritual as well. Wrapping himself in a blanket on the veranda, he watches his younger brothers join friends on their way to school. He feels sorry for himself and daydreams the hours away. Sometimes he schemes how to get his brothers in trouble, often provoking them into fights at night when they are all in bed together. His brother Yoshiharu is a calm, mild-mannered soul, but Mits is different—easily riled and often wrangling for a fight himself.
Mits is short for Mitsuharu, and about the same time he inherits that nickname from the neighbourhood boys, the name Mutt sticks to Mataharu. Their brother Yoshiharu and little sister Yasuyo have already taken English nicknames to help them assimilate into mainstream culture, but Mutt and Mits have to find other ways to forge a link with the dominant culture.
Somehow Tairyu’s meagre salary is never enough to stretch through the month, due in part to merchants trying to collect old debts from Tsune. His job requires him to stand for long hours at a time, preventing waste lumber from piling up too high on the conveyor belt going to the burner. Mesmerized by the repetition, he knows no escape from this jumble of waste ends rolling through his life. To compensate, Tairyu expects his slippers at the door when he arrives home. Sometimes only one is there, so he kicks it into the kitchen where Tsune is cooking. Expressionless, she fetches the other slipper and goes back to work.
Sunday picnics at Bare Point break the monotony. The family lives for summer days at the point, a forty-five-minute hike away. Wanting an early start, Tsune is the first to drop her feet to the floor. But unlike most days when she pushes her weary bones into action, she steps lightly into the kitchen to prepare their picnic lunch.
The Otsus are the first to arrive and the last to leave. Tairyu carries the daughter Tsune has given him, as well as the picnic hamper. Once there, he spreads a blanket on the golden grass and lies on his back with little Akiko at his side. He points to the kami, or nature spirits, in the billowy clouds flying over-head, and whispers their Japanese names in her ear. They watch lions and elephants transform into emperors and lords high in the sky, content and warm in the summer sun.
The other children trail along with their mother. Struggling with a cardboard box en route, Mutt is impatient. “Come on, you guys,” he yells at his brothers. “Beat you to the Point.”
He races his brothers to the bluff and jumps on the flattened box. “Yippee!” he hollers, flying over grass that is like polished hay. Soon a horde of young boys join them. Before noon, dozens dot the hillside as they scream towards the sea on cardboard toboggans.
Tsune sits on the picnic blanket in a rare state of uninterrupted calm. Gazing along Stuart Channel, she puffs on her homemade cigarettes, reaching absently for a rice ball or pickle every now and then. Peace invades her body, and she surrenders herself with grace. She daydreams about her daughters in Japan, flinging silent blessings into the play of shadow and light combing the grass. Kami breezes caress her brow. As the day progresses, the auburn glow of Arbutus branches reaches deeper into the royal blue water. She tucks the silken dignified beauty into her mind’s eye, sustenance for the undignified week ahead.
The horizon was shimmering like silver when they arrived, but now afternoon is sliding below the bluff. The setting sun washes the sky in translucent lilac, and they trudge home, weary in the best possible way.
Tsune sweeps the fir floor, stooping to pick out dirt between the boards with a hairpin. Her daily routine is a litany of such chores. No matter that they live in a two-room shack. No one can say it isn’t clean: immaculate is more to the point.
It is September 1929, and Mutt is getting ready for his first day of school. He buttons his shirt as he strolls to the outhouse over the creek, which they share with neighbours. His eczema is getting better, but Mutt is preoccupied. He has waited so long to join his brothers and friends at school. Now that the time has come, he is nervous and insecure.
The outhouse door swings shut behind him as he walks up the back stairs into the kitchen. Tsune is setting steaming bowls of rice on the table as he climbs onto the wooden bench.
“Mama, I’m not very hungry,” he says, eyeing the rice. “You, not hungry? What’s the matter?” Tsune asks.
“I don’t want to go to school.”
“What? You’ve been moaning about not being able to go since you were six.”
“But I’m going to be three years older than everyone in my class. Mits is only seven, and he’s already a grade higher than me. Everybody’s going to make fun of me,” Mutt says, pouting.
Mits walks in, chanting, “Old sickie, old sickie. .. .”
“Hush! Don’t talk that way,” Tsune says, glaring at Mits.
Mutt is close to tears, and Mits gives him a shove as he sits down beside him. “You rat! I hate you, I hate you,” Mutt screams.
“Stop it, both of you. Mits, go see what Yasuyo wants. I can hear her calling,” Tsune orders.
Scraping bits of butter and sugar onto several slices of white bread, she turns to Mutt. “You know better English than your brothers did when they started school. You’ll be the smart one in your class.”
Mutt watches her make their lunch. “If I don’t like it, can I come home, Mama?”
“Don’t worry. Just obey your teacher. You will be okay.”
Doubtful, he picks up his bowl of rice and begins eating. His brothers join them while Tsune packs their sugar sandwiches. They can’t afford baloney or other fancy fixings, so she substitutes sugar. None of the Japanese Canadian children eat Japanese food at school, knowing they will be ridiculed. But bread costs more than rice, so Tsune often packs them lunches to eat at the Japanese community hall. On the first day, how-ever, they will have sandwiches to eat next to their hakujin classmates.
As the boys push out the door, Tsune waves each one goodbye. “Remember, do as you are told,” she calls out. They run ahead, barely paying attention. Mutt is the only one to turn and wave, feeling a weird mix of excitement and dread.
It takes them almost an hour to reach the other side of Kawahara camp. They play tag through the mill site and out onto the streets, where they join boys and girls from Kawahara camp ambling toward the school playing field. Mutt is having too much fun to worry by the time the bell finally rings. His years as a student begin in earnest. As Tsune predicted, he does just fine.
Later that fall, Tairyu falls ill and can’t work. Food grows more scarce in the Otsu kitchen again. Tsune sends Mutt to catch fish, and she harvests vegetables from the garden. But she grows anxious again, wondering how they will manage if Tairyu doesn’t get better. The pain is so bad he has to go to the hospital, where the doctor explains he is dying of stomach cancer. At least mill employees do not face hefty medical bills for hospital treatment. It is one of few ways in which the mill takes care of its workers, regardless of race.
Tairyu sends for his lifelong friend, Iwajiro Imagama, who is living in one of the Chemainus bachelor camps.
“I am dying, Iwajiro,” he begins.
“Yes, I know. Can I help?”
“There is one thing, a very big favour,” Tairyu whispers, fidgeting with the edge of the sheet. “Tsune cannot manage on her own. She is a good woman, but she needs a man to help raise the children. Will you promise to look after them when I am gone?”
Iwajiro meets Tairyu’s gaze. “Yes, I will do as you ask. I do not have your patience with children, but I will do what I can.”
“Thank you, Iwajiro. Before you know it, the boys will be old enough to look after their mother themselves.”
“I suppose. Well, I should go. You are weary.”
After Iwajiro is gone, Tairyu sinks further under the bed-covers. Having taken care of his family, he waits for death to free him from pain.
An hour later, Mutt and his brothers arrive for lunch. Tairyu cannot eat what the nurse brings, so the boys divvy it up among themselves. His bed is in a small cottage built for tuberculosis patients, although none convalesce there now. Screen windows allow fresh air and sunshine to circulate, and tangy, saltwater breezes temper the sour smell of sickness.
Mutt hates to see his stepfather so sick, but he eats his share of the lunch while Tairyu tosses about, moaning. Perched on the edge of his bed, they tear into sandwiches with meat and gulp down mouthfuls of soup.
“Do you think he knows we are here?” Mits asks when they are done.
“Shh. Maybe, maybe not,” Mutt whispers. “Let’s go.”
They tiptoe outside. “Race you back to school,” Mits says. “We’ve still got half an hour to play.”
They run with full bellies, masking their sadness for a while. They do not speak of Tairyu’s sickness, or of his death when it comes, but each boy grieves. He was a good father for four years, and they miss his loving, if sometimes stern, ways.
Mutt is nine and Tsune is forty-six when twenty-year-old Iwajiro makes good on his promise and moves into the Otsu home. Although a resourceful man, he does not have a job at the mill. A two-horsepower outboard propels Iwajiro’s row-boat around islands in Stuart Channel, where they search for cascara trees. There is a market for the medicinal properties in the bark, but most of the trees grow on private land. To avoid getting caught, they go early in the morning.
Mutt enjoys these outings, putting through the velvety waters of the channel past island outcrops and rocky reefs where large brown sea lions loll about. All eyes are on shore as they circle an island, looking for the distinctive silhouette of the cascara sagrada. When they find some, they scramble ashore and peel the bark before the landowner spots them. Mutt likes the thrill of taking risks and the gypsy-like camp life on these excursions, for they do not go home until their bags are full. Once home, they dry and chip the fragant bark before sending it to Vancouver.
The boys help Iwajiro harvest and sell firewood as well. Tsune continues doing laundry and making tofu to bring in a little extra. Somehow they manage, helped along by harvesting as much food as they can from the sea. During the extreme tides of the winter months, Iwajiro wakes the boys up at mid-night to go clam digging in the bay.
“Tonight’s the night. Let’s go,” he bellows. Half asleep, Mutt puts on his pants and sweater in the dark room where everyone sleeps. He stumbles to open the door, and the penetrating damp rushes through him. Even though the moon is full, he grabs a coal oil lantern. The tide is halfway out the bay, and they walk for half an hour before digging, their shadows like sticks crossing silver-streaked rivulets on the beach. The boys make a game out of who can fill his bucket the fastest. Digging through the mud is hard work, but carrying the heavy buckets home is even harder. After they have had their fill of clams, Tsune salts and dries what is left.
Digging for horse clams is fun too, although it doesn’t require the extreme low tide or the midnight excursion. The Otsu boys watch women grabbing the penis-like muscle before the clam can retreat into the mud. Husbands and friends tease them, while children stand around giggling at this unusually uninhibited public display.
As the Depression worsens, the Otsus live on the edge. They are not alone. Mutt’s friends are equally poor, especially Kiyoshi Nishimura, who lives on the back end of Chinatown. They ogle Hitoshi Okada when he walks past one lunch hour, eating a sandwich filled with sliced egg.
“Did you see that?” Kiyoshi says, turning to Mutt.
“See it! I can smell it. Phew.”
“Hey, Hitoshi. Got any more?” Kiyoshi yells.
Hitoshi ignores them and keeps walking.
Mutt changes the subject, wanting no extra reminders of the gap in his stomach. “Want to see if any Japanese ships are at the wharf tomorrow?”
“Sure,” Kiyoshi replies.
Indian longshoremen are packing the hold of a cargo ship with lumber for Japan when the boys arrive Saturday morning. This is a favourite pasttime; just being near the ships is great fun. They go aboard and visit the Japanese crew. The sailors listen to their stories, but not for long.
“Do you boys have any sisters?” one sailor asks.
“Oh, yes. And we have a shortwave radio too,” Mutt replies. “Want to see?”
The sailors look at each other. Ready for any excuse to go ashore, they follow Mutt and Kiyoshi to Okada camp. They crowd around the shortwave in the Otsu’s kitchen and listen to news from home, while the boys vie for their attention all morning long.
As Mutt nears the end of grade seven, he knows his years at school are drawing to a close. One day, Iwajiro tells him there is a job at the mill.
“I want to finish my grade eight first,” Mutt pleads.
“Well, if it’s that important to you,” Iwajiro replies, shrugging his shoulders, “I won’t stand in the way of your schooling. We can manage one more year.”
Mutt is stunned. Feeling cocky just the other morning, he had mouthed off when Iwajiro ordered him to do his chores. Iwajiro reached for the iron on the cookstove to hurl at Mutt, but the iron was hot. Burning pain fuelled his rage even more. Like countless times in the past, Mutt fled outside to hide for hours while Iwajiro’s temper subsided.
“Do you really mean it?” Mutt asks.
“You’ve got my answer, now go.”
Mutt wanders off, shaking his head in disbelief. He had been afraid to ask, fully expecting Iwajiro to blow up and order him to get a job.
A year later, Mutt regrets the decision. There is nothing at the Chemainus sawmill, so he gets his first job falling timber in the MacKay Lake area for Mayo Singh. Almost seventeen, he begins working with tough Japanese immigrants much like his guardian—volatile and short-tempered.
He hasn’t been on the job long when he has his first fight with his co-worker.
“Go stick it,” Mutt shouts, fed up with being ordered around.
“I’ll kill you, you creep,” he says, picking up his axe.
Mutt drops his gear. They are deep in the bush, and the undergrowth is thick, but Mutt outruns his co-worker back to camp. Terror of the axe propels him over huge fallen logs and through chest-high salal. The next day, they work together again, Mutt having apologized for his remark. But on another occasion, the same faller saves his life.
“Clear away,” he shouts.
Mutt leaps sideways instantly. Broken limbs, ten feet wide, rebound from a tree they just felled and crash where he was standing. Mutt’s heart is racing. He has narrowly escaped one of the most common causes of death in the bush.
A week later, another fellow is not so lucky. Mutt drops what he is doing when he hears the whistle some distance away. Vaulting over logs, he crashes through the brush to the edge of a ring of loggers sawing like madmen. A bucker is pinned under a forty-foot log.
It is pouring rain, muffling the slippery frenzy of saws cutting wet fir. Mutt looks around. No one speaks. He stares at the stricken face peering out from the end of the log and feels sick. Little rivers of rainwater skirt around his feet. Life in the forest is momentarily halted, replaced by an eerie silence that rings much louder than the normal clamour of a working crew.
The men free the bucker, but it is too late. When their straw boss sits him up, blood trickles from his mouth.
“Heart is still beating, but it’s almost gone,” the boss announces. Five minutes later, he is dead.
Mutt didn’t know the man, but that night at dinner he and his friend, Michio Inouye, don’t have their usual appetites. The only other logger Mutt’s age, Michio is also Canadian-born. They often eat a dozen bowls of rice before leaving the mess hall, sometimes well after other workers drag themselves back from the public bath to bunk down. But not tonight.
The incident has a sobering effect on everyone in camp. Sometimes accidents are unnecessarily fatal, due to the length of time it takes to get from the bush to the hospital. Thinking about it, Mutt feels weary. In two weeks he will go home for his monthly visit, a short-lived reprieve that always seems an eternity away.
The worst thing about going home is the stinging reminder of all he is missing: girls, baseball in the summer, friends his own age, to name a few. The six-day work week at Mayo drags on him. He doesn’t begrudge his earnings to his mother, but he berates himself for not taking the Chemainus job when he had the chance. As the logging progresses, the camp moves further into the bush. The landscape is a bleak mix of clear-cuts, railway tracks, and makeshift camp buildings. To make matters worse, he contracts asthma. It will plague him for the next thirteen years. The men do their own laundry, cut their own hair, work, eat, and sleep. Mutt keeps a diary on the monotony for something to do.
On his way back to camp one Sunday afternoon, he gazes out the window and mopes, knowing his friends are playing ball. Then he remembers the package of cherry Jello he tucked into his bag. He holds onto the thought of smooth, cold jelly sliding down his throat and feels better. As soon as he gets to camp, he mixes it with cold water and sets it under the bunk-house to gel. Even that simple treat eludes him, however. Every day for a week, he lifts the bowl out to find it is still a bright red liquid. He pours it out in disgust and never tries again.
Mutt nears the end of his first year in Mayo when a job opens up at the Chemainus sawmill in 1938. He is on the site the next day, learning how to lubricate all the machinery from Goshichi Izumi and Yoshi Higashi.
Yoshi, nicknamed Gene after Gene Autry, was born a week later than Mutt in 1920. The oldest in a family of eleven, Yoshi can hold his own with his abusive father now, as can Mutt with Iwajiro.
The young men get along well at work and become good friends. On Saturday nights, they visit “the girls,” talking and joking until one or two o’clock in the morning. Neither has a girlfriend as such, but they are well liked by the young women in town.
Early one Sunday morning in July, Mutt and Yoshi are walking down the alley in Kawahara camp after leaving Tosh Yoshida’s home. The air is balmy; constellations are lucid in the black sky.
“Shall we go to work for an hour and get our job done?” Mutt asks.
“Yeah, then we can play ball tomorrow afternoon,” Yoshi replies.
Ten minutes later, they punch in. Yoshi sets off for the south end of the complex, while Mutt starts where Tairyu used to sort waste lumber on the conveyor belt. Everything is still. In order to oil the bearing on the drum, Mutt steps onto the conveyor belt and reaches over a ten-foot drop where the belt winds toward the wood burner. But he slips over the edge, banging his head on the drum as he grazes past, his freefall cut short by the lower level of the stationary belt. Later, he doesn’t remember any of this; he has no memory of anything beyond reaching for the bearing. If it hadn’t been for his groaning, Yoshi might not have found him.
A week later, he is still unconscious in the hospital, causing fears that he might not live. Friends visit without his knowl-edge. He wakes to an ice pack on his throbbing head. For the first time in months, he does not write in his diary.
Mutt works another three years at the Chemainus mill. In 1941, he returns to Mayo, where he can boost his wage by five cents to forty-five cents an hour. The mill’s reasoning that Orientals don’t need equal pay to Caucasians because their standard of living is lower infuriates Mutt. As a Canadian, he wants to better himself as much as the next man. For its part, the Caucasian community resents Orientals working for less. Naturally, the mill brass hire cheap labour—especially cheap, industrious labour—whenever they can, denying white men those jobs. Racial intolerance deepens because of economics and the ongoing struggle to survive.
Mutt doesn’t return to Mayo as a faller but as a rigger, which is slightly less dangerous if just as demanding. But he isn’t there long when Japan bombs Pearl Harbor. He and his counterparts are ordered back to their hometowns almost immediately. Despite all the upheaval in his young life, Mutt cannot fathom the turn of events that follow.
As the evacuation date approaches, Mutt and his brothers spend hard-earned cash on heavy Cowichan sweaters. Learning that it is cold where they are moving, they buy the sweaters for everyone in the family. Tsune is almost sixty, ever so proud that her sons can afford this luxury. She focuses on the little things that make her feel good, but her world is shrinking: the blackened windows at night, the finger-printing, the curfew, the rounding up of issei men, including Iwajiro. For almost twenty years, the shack facing the booming grounds has been home. Her youngest daughter, Akiko, was born here, and it is here also where the children have grown into fine, respectable people. Life has only just begun to smooth out its sharp, jagged edges when it opens its unseemly maw again.
Walking down the wharf toward the SS Princess Adelaide, Mutt battles rage. Like corrosive acid, it stings, tempered somewhat with the more subtle ache of worry. The uncertainty is a terrifying void. He sees tears in his mother’s eyes and his own burn with anger. The all-powerful God he worshipped at the Anglican church suddenly strikes him as a very bad joke. It is politicians and hateful people who wield power, not a benevolent God. This is what he learns as he turns his back on home, where ashes from his diaries lie in a soft heap.
Chaos comes in large doses in Hastings Park. People are flung together like animals herded into pens. Allowances for individual idiosyncracies give way to bitter feuds, creating hos-tile factions and tense enmity. Those suspected of pandering to the authorities are threatened and sometimes beaten. Those who follow orders are shunned by men who passively but firmly refuse to co-operate, choosing to be prisoners of war rather than acquiescent victims. Rumours are rampant, including one that young men being shipped to Ontario road camps will be sent overseas as cannon fodder.
All of it drives Mutt crazy, along with the tick mattresses that aggravate his asthma. Within days of arriving in Hastings Park, he boards a train heading toward Jackfish, a road camp northeast of Lake Superior. Accompanied by his brothers and two Chemainus friends, Mutt weeps as the train chugs out of the station. He watches Tsune and his sisters, Yasuyo and Akiko, shrink into a tiny huddle on the platform as he wrestles with the oppressive sensation of going nowhere fast.
Soon, Fraser Valley farms roll by. Mutt knows that Japanese families cleared and cultivated the land for over forty years. Now it is falling into the hands of hakujins, possibly the kin of soldiers guarding his journey east. Guns and cold eyes impress on him the nature of his crime: to be born of Japanese parents.
He arrives in Jackfish on May 1, 1942, not long after spring break-up. Mutt hauls out the camera concealed in his belongings. Photography has been his favourite hobby since he bought the camera with coupons when he was fifteen. Rather than hand it over to the authorities, he smuggled it out of Chemainus in his duffle bag.
The landscape in Jackfish is far from inspiring, but Mutt wants to document where he is. He climbs a nearby bluff and snaps a wide shot of Canadian Shield country. The hollow where the camp lies has been clearcut and is as inviting as Mayo on a bad day. Having just crossed mile after mile of prairie, Mutt surveys the great span of rock and forested bluffs. It is bleak, to be sure, but at least it isn’t flat. Then he shivers, longing for the rush of waves breaking on shore some 3,000 miles due west.
Life quickly settles into a lackadaisical routine. The work is light but boring, as is camp life in general. One day a train passes by en route to Petawawa with Japanese Canadian prisoners of war. The men drop their tools and wave, but the POWS spit at them vehemently. They are gambari-ya or diehards, who consider the road crew soft “yes” men because they do as they are told. In defence, Mutt and his companions accuse the gambari-ya of being unpatriotic toward Canada. The hard feelings will last long after the war is over.
Back in camp at the end of the work day, Mutt takes off with his camera. The possibility of a moose or bear wandering up by the lake takes his mind off these unsettling times. Being in the outdoors gives him a sense of freedom, and he heads for it whenever he can.
The following week he convinces a buddy to hide with him under a piece of cloth in the garbage dump to get a picture of one of the black bears that rummage through there regularly. To his horror, an approaching bear doesn’t start eating garbage. Slowly, it rumbles closer to them, its nose twitching and sniffing along the ground.
“Maybe the bear is going to attack us,” Mutt whispers. “We better go. Let’s run.”
His friend nods, eyes big. They fling off the cloth and race for cover. The bear, equally scared, lumbers off too. The camp cook greets them with jeers and laughter. Breathless, Mutt collapses onto a bench and smiles. “Whose cockeyed idea was this anyways?” he asks.
“Yours, yours,” a chorus of men replies, slapping their thighs and doubling over with laughter.
Mutt laughs too. “Guess I’ll leave that shot for another day.”
As summer progresses, Mutt and Kiyoshi Nishimura go from Jackfish to Black camp, then Empress to Schreiber, the most westerly camp on this stretch of the Trans-Canada. Black flies are like the boredom: incessant.
Empress camp is the exception. A nearby French-Canadian community welcomes them to their regular dances. The first time Mutt goes with his friends, a local official spots them walking along the railway tracks.
“You guys got no business walking on the railroad,” he yells, shaking his fist.
Mutt turns and stares. “We’re not doing any harm, sir.”
“I don’t want no backtalk from a Jap,” he shouts. “And I don’t want no Japs walking this rail line, you hear.”
They turn back to camp, moaning about the long road into town. It winds through many more miles of country than the railroad, so they wait for dark and walk the tracks again, passing unnoticed. After that, the young men wait until sun-down before setting out for a town dance.
The trek is worth the trouble. This community loves to shake the hall down, often with only an accordion and a guitar. More than the music, there are girls. Mutt and his friends have not seen women for months, let alone dance with them. Anita, Lucille and Mary swing like fashion models in their arms. Mutt is baffled by the warm welcome, and asks Lucille why they are all so friendly.
“Well, why not?” she replies, her blue eyes quizzical.
“Because no one else is. Not regular whites anyway,” Mutt says.
“Oh, they’re brainless scaredy-cats,” Lucille says. “Don’t pay them any mind,” she adds, swinging blonde curls across her shoulders. “Viens, let’s dance.”
Walking home under the stars much later, Mutt mumbles Lucille’s words over and over: “Don’t pay them any mind.” He is euphoric from dancing with her all night and blissfully free from worry. Lucille’s smile swims before him, a warm, happy memory for keeps.
Life in the road camps is relatively short-lived. Mutt, Kiyoshi Nishimura, and Mitsuo Izumi are the last three to leave Schreiber when the camp closes down that December. Rather than work in northern pulp mills, the young men get permission to work for a lumber company in Toronto. The train jostles them toward their destination, stopping at Petawawa to pick up a Japanese Canadian POW. He wears baggy overalls with a red circle in the middle of his back and slumps between his escorts, quite ill. Mutt shudders, unable to reconcile the war criminal label attached to someone so sick. Despite the resentment he feels about the gang spitting at them in Jackfish, Mutt knows that the man is no criminal—only that his stand on civil rights has exacerbated the racism. He suppresses an urge to extend a comforting hand and stares out his window. The scenery is even more bleak than the day he arrived.
Two days before Christmas in 1942, the young men arrive in Toronto. They track down McCaul Street in the Jewish community, one of few neighbourhoods where landlords won’t slam the door in their faces. After finding a room to rent, they plant their belongings on the floor and look around.
“Well, at least we’ve got a roof over our heads,” Mutt offers.
“Yeah,” Kiyoshi mumbles absently.
“Not much to look at, is it?” Mitsuo says.
“No better, no worse than what we’ve ever had, I suppose,” Mutt says.
“Oh, better for me,” Kiyoshi says. “Anthing’s better than waking up to Hong Hing slaughtering his pigs next door.”
“I guess!” Mitsuo says. “But camp was better in one way.”
“What’s that?” Mutt asks.
“We got fed.”
Road camp wages didn’t amount to much after board was deducted, but they pool what they have and walk over to the neighbourhood store. Two days later they eat canned chicken noodle soup for Christmas dinner, perching on the edge of their beds.
“What’re you thinking about?” Mutt asks Mitsuo, breaking the awkward silence.
“I’m wondering what Mama is cooking right now.”
“In those shacks they wrote about?” Kiyoshi says. “Not much, I bet.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right,” Mitsuo says.
“At least they’re together,” Mutt says.
“We’re not there.” Mitsuo replies.
“No, but everybody else is. Being so far away and thinking of them holed up in shacks somewhere, not knowing what’s gonna happen next. . . . It’s awful,” Mutt says.
“Yeah,” Mitsuo whispers.
“From what I hear on the radio lately, we may not get back together for years,” Kiyoshi says.
Mutt gets up and washes his bowl mindlessly. He misses the cockroach skittering along the baseboard as he strolls toward the window. He sits on the sill and watches snow falling from a black sky, not thinking, not speaking.
After two years working for the lumber company, Mutt and his roomies inquire about a better paying job in a Standard Sanitary factory. Night shift jobs paying fifty cents an hour are available, five cents an hour more than they are earning now. They quit their lumbermen jobs and arrive at Standard Sanitary with a bag lunch for the four p.m. shift, only to learn that the entire foundry is threatening to strike if “Japs” are hired. They walk home and eat their baloney sandwiches on the front steps of their boarding house.
Obliged to report to the job placement officer who keeps track of where they are, Mutt and his friends are sent to pick peaches in St. Catharines the summer of 1944. Mutt suffers with his asthma, swearing he’ll never pick fruit again. He resorts to soaking in a hot bath at night, where he can rest without worrying about waking his co-workers with his al-most constant wheezing.
Back in Toronto at the end of the summer, Mutt takes a job the placement officer finds him at a machine shop. When the war ends a year later, he is free to go as he pleases and choose his own line of work. He begins applying for jobs in the clothing business, a radical departure from anything he has ever done.
In 1946, Mutt sees his sister Akiko for the first time in four years. He is gazing out his window when she walks by. An innocent sixteen-year-old when he left the coast, Akiko is a young woman now. Her thick black hair is all done up like a fashion model. Wearing a short skirt, she strolls along looking at street addresses, stopping in front of his boarding house.
Mutt’s fingers slide down the window pane, smearing the glass. “Oh my God,” he mutters. “What happened to my sister?”
Down the street, Iwajiro, Yasuyo, and his mother are traipsing along. Tsune is a bit slow on her feet, but otherwise looks healthy and in good spirits. He flies down the stairs and out the door.
“I can’t believe you’re all here!” Mutt shouts, grinning. He suppresses an urge to twirl them round, one by one, right there on the street. He is even happy to see Iwajiro.
“Yes, son. We’re here,” Tsune says. “To stay.”
In 1947, Mutt meets a seamstress named Mikiko Ohashi at Ontario Boys’ Wear. She is sweet and kind and teaches him all the tricks of the trade. Life is more stable now, and they can laugh again. After dating for a while, they decide to marry. But Mikiko’s father is a devout Buddhist, and custom dictates that the marriage be performed in the religion of the bride’s family. Baptized in the Anglican church in Chemainus, Mutt will have none of it. They talk about eloping, but finally Mikiko’s father gives in. Unhappy but resigned, he allows his daughter to marry in the neighbourhood United Church in 1949. Mikiko joins the Otsu household, raising a family and looking after her in-laws. In 1956, Iwajiro returns to Japan and marries; eleven years later, Tsune dies at the age of eighty-four.
Meanwhile, Mutt works his way up to a supervisory position with Tip Top Tailors, overseeing the production of suits. After retiring in 1985, he and his wife join the annual winter trek many eastern Canadians make to warmer climes. Over the years, their itinerary includes Florida, South America, Fiji, Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, and Japan.
Sadly, he never meets his Japanese sisters, but he always comes home with a tan that glows.