60
Tule Lake, California * February 11, 1943
When she was young and newly married, Shizue Yamada had harbored one fear above all others: that she would be unable to bear children. Once she was pregnant, that fear transformed itself into the fear that her epilepsy would jeopardize the baby—that a seizure would cause a miscarriage or a terrible birth defect. Shizue felt nauseated at the very thought—not of an impaired child, but of the guilt she would suffer knowing she was to blame for the child’s deformity.
In the years after her children were born, her primary fear went through another transformation. Shizue buried it deep within her own heart, perhaps believing if she never named it and told no one about it, it would have no power over her.
She watched her first child, Haruto, closely, and when he passed through adolescence without showing any signs of her affliction, she breathed a sigh of relief. It had been during her teen years when she had the first seizure; the doctors had told her the disease almost always made itself known then. The day Haruto turned twenty, Shizue had only one thought in her head: Healthy—my son is healthy! She began to relax. Mai was still growing but showing every sign of following in Haruto’s footsteps. Little Mai was healthy and hearty, if a little unruly.
So when the Yamada family was shuttled off to Tule Lake, Shizue developed a subconscious confidence in her children, and believed they would easily manage to endure camp conditions, unpleasant as they were.
When Mai had her first seizure, Shizue was horrified. She was certain the reason her daughter was suffering was her fault. She had let down her guard, growing complacent, and the fates had pounced on her daughter while Shizue’s back was turned.
The first seizure was mild; Shizue hadn’t witnessed it and Haruto had reported it, so she had only his description to rely upon.
“We were sitting outside, Mae was eating an apple, and her face suddenly went slack,” Haruto said. “I think she sort of passed out there for a second or two. Or maybe not. I don’t know. Her eyes were open but not seeing, moving strangely . . . I was speaking to her and she wasn’t responding. She doesn’t remember any of it now.”
Shizue’s heart lurched and a sudden chill gripped her body. She knew all too well what had happened.
“But it’s nothing . . . right, Ma?” Haruto asked. His voice indicated that he, too, was unconvinced of the event’s insignificance.
“Yes,” Shizue said, trying to keep her voice calm.
That afternoon Shizue went to the infirmary and demanded to see a doctor. Two weeks later, after she had made a proper pest of herself, the nurse finally relented and she was able to talk to an elderly man in a white lab coat who was, he claimed, only a part-time government employee and otherwise ran a small family practice across the border in Oregon.
“There are medications,” Shizue insisted, “that would help my daughter get through these episodes.”
“Anti-seizure medication?” The doctor frowned.
“Yes.”
“That’s complicated stuff. I’m afraid we don’t have access to those drugs here,” he said. “And anyway, it’s expensive.”
“She needs it,” Shizue continued to insist.
“I’m sorry. We can’t provide you with such things.”
“But . . . how can that be? If it is a necessity . . .”
“Those medications are luxuries,” the doctor corrected her. His tone had turned snippy. “There are quite a lot of people in need these days: Think of our American soldiers, all the things those boys need nowadays, and all because your countryman General Tojo took it upon himself to attack innocent people.”
He dragged the syllables out, spitting out the name “Tojo” while an ugly sneer moved across his face. Shizue was taken aback. She abruptly realized just how little help she could expect from the doctor standing before her. Without another word, she gathered her things and left.
From that moment, Shizue carried a ball of dread in the pit of her stomach. And it was just as she feared: After her daughter’s first seizure, the episodes increased in frequency. What was worse, however, was the fact that they increased in intensity until Mai was suffering from terrible, convulsing seizures that were unlike any Shizue herself had ever experienced.
Shizue found a man in the camp who tried the old kampo art of placing needles on the body, and for a time it seemed to help—until it didn’t. The man shook his head, apologetic. “There are herbs, but even if your husband can afford them, they’ll never let me get my hands on everything I need in here. They are convinced we’re all cooking up bombs.” Mai’s seizures eventually returned.
The worst was when one happened in the middle of the schoolroom, in front of other children. Mai was mortified and began to withdraw into herself. Shizue anguished as her daughter grew more introverted. Mai smiled less and less as summer approached, and the heat made it all worse; Mai’s laughter dried up along with the rainfall. She reminded Shizue of herself back in Japan, when Shizue thought of herself as nothing but a freak and a failure. Now her daughter was an exile among the exiled. And Shizue could do nothing.
This wounded Shizue in a way she had always feared, a way that went far deeper—and, she was sure, she deserved. Shizue was highly adept at blaming herself for anything that pained her children, and now she was convinced she had poisoned her own daughter by passing along her epilepsy. Every day Mai suffered, Shizue took another portion of guilt and blame into her heart, as though her heart were a stomach and she were consuming a never-ending sickly cake. She wanted her family to know she would never forgive herself for the pain she had passed along to her child. As it would turn out, she was too skilled in this manner.
Shizue had just returned from stitching bandages at the camp’s community workshop. When she walked in and saw Mai, she knew exactly what had happened. Mai was draped awkwardly across the bed—not Mai’s own bed, but the bed Shizue shared with her husband. She wouldn’t lie there on purpose, Shizue knew. But there Mai was, facedown, her head turned to the side, her eyes open, her tongue covering her teeth in a strange manner.
She had suffered a terrible seizure, alone in their horrible single-room bungalow. Books were knocked off a makeshift shelf and a chair was turned over; it looked as though she had thrashed about quite a bit, convulsing violently before choking on her own tongue, her complexion turning blue from a lack of oxygen.
Thirty minutes passed where Shizue did not dare to move or speak. She barely drew breath.
At first, all she could think was I must be thankful I am the one to find her now, not one of the Akimotos.
The Akimotos were fine enough people. That was not the issue. But, being fine people, they did not deserve the horror and shock of finding a dead body in their home, any more than Mai deserved the dishonor of having her lifeless corpse discovered by virtual strangers.
Shizue stood there, memorizing her daughter’s vacant eyes, until eventually Shizue’s body began to react to the pain. She could not stop herself; she began to wail. She wailed like a wild creature, alarming people around their barracks. Still wailing, Shizue curled her own body around her daughter’s on the bed. Together they made a forlorn sort of snail shell, tears soiling the bed like a wet snail’s trail. Internees poked their heads into the bungalow to see what was wrong. Eventually, Haruto came walking along, puzzled to see a small throng of people gathered as he returned home.
“Oh, God,” Haruto exclaimed when he broke through the crowd around the open door and found his mother and sister. He tried to say more but his voice broke. Among her son’s unique attributes was a bold lack of fear, but Shizue remembered hearing his voice that day and thinking, Finally, in my fearless son’s voice . . . there is fear there . . . All those times she had wanted Haruto to have the good sense to be afraid of things as a child—for his own safety, so he wouldn’t touch the hot stove or try to swim in the river when the current was dangerous—his voice had never adopted a single tremor of fear. Now that it had, she was sorry to hear it.
Kenichi, too, when he came home, immediately went into shock. He had always understood that the U.S. government would likely take his land, his possessions—perhaps even his freedom to speak his mind. But he had never considered that the government might cost him either of his children. He stood there in disbelief as his wife and son mourned his lifeless daughter.
“It was too much,” Shizue lamented. “This life, the poor nutrition, her adolescence . . . I knew it would come, this storm . . . I asked for medicine but they refused . . . they refused to give us any . . .”
“Shhhh.” Her husband tried to comfort her. With an anguished heart of his own, he had alerted the camp officials at the infirmary. After thirty minutes or so, they responded by sending men with a stretcher.
They took Mae away. For a while it was strange to Harry, who, despite having seen the body, caught himself perpetually expecting his little sister to come back, to come bouncing in from playing outside. Even the camp guards seemed apologetic. Kenichi was able to arrange for cremation and an urn. Friends they had made in the camp suggested they hold a small funeral service, but Kenichi refused. “We will take her home, where she belongs,” he insisted. No one pointed out the fraught nature of his words. Where did any of them belong anymore? They were strangers in their own country. Who knew what had become of the houses they’d raised their children in?
Shizue was never the same after that. Her own seizures grew worse, a fact that was perhaps a relief to her: She felt she took comfort in the notion of punishment. When she realized this latter fact about herself, she knew what she must do if she ever hoped for relief.
It ought to have been shocking. But one month later, when Kenichi came into the bungalow to find his wife hanging from the rickety, hastily thrown-up beam that ran through their barracks as the structure’s main support, his heart was deeply aggrieved but he was not surprised. There was a note. A simple apology, a prayer for forgiveness, the brushstrokes steady and elegant, written in beautiful kanji.