T. Boyle - The Women

But I see, once again, that I’ve gone on too long here. Suffice to say that I experienced the usual abuses and deprivations, the local jail (or should I say hoosegow?) at first, then, after President Roosevelt issued his infamous executive order 9066, removal to a relocation center in Arkansas and finally to the Tule Lake camp in the north of California, where the most radical and suspect aliens were interned. I won’t take time here to describe the appalling conditions of the uninsulated tarpaper barracks into which we were crowded, the lack of cooking facilities or waste and sewage disposal, the threats and insults of the guards or the anomalous and quite mad fact that hundreds of South American Japanese, many of whom no longer even spoke the language of Dai Nippon, were extradited and interned with us. Nor will I say anything about the national administrator of the internment program, Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, except to repeat his rationale for all this suffering, humiliation and deprivation of basic human rights not only for resident aliens like myself but for the Nisei who were born in America — that is, “A Jap’s a Jap.”

Wrieto-San wrote me from time to time. My fellow apprentices, many of whom enlisted and went off to fight despite Wrieto-San’s disapproval, sent me books and foodstuffs and for Christmas that first year a quart bottle of Canadian Club reserve whiskey that smelled, tasted and went down like the pure distillate of freedom itself. Still, for long stretches of time that seemed as vast as the desert scrub that fell away from the two knobs of desiccated rock that were all we had to stare at, I didn’t care what became of me. I’d lost Taliesin. Lost Wrieto-San. Lost my dignity and status as a human being. If I’d known then how long the war would go on or that the scene in the courtyard would be the last time I’d lay eyes on Wrieto-San till after it was over, I don’t think I would have been able to endure.

But of course I did endure — that is what we are put on this earth to do. We Japanese have a saying, Ame futte ji katamaru: the ground that is rained upon hardens. Or, if you like, adversity builds character. So it was with me. I read, learned to cook, worked the vegetable patches we planted that first spring, helped to insulate and fortify the barracks, putting to use everything I’d learned at Taliesin, from my farming skills to the hands-on construction techniques that Wrieto-San, in his casual way, expected us to develop sui generis. And I drew — drew a whole lifetime’s worth of work. Plans for houses, industrial buildings, imaginary cities every bit as bold as Wrieto-San’s Broadacre City (the model of which I had the honor and privilege of working on at Taliesin), anything to bank the fires of creation against the bleakness and destruction that was my life during those years.

After the war, radicalized by my treatment and fearful of the raw accumulation of racial hatred blistering the heartland, I didn’t return to Taliesin as I’d initially hoped, but instead went back home from California to the devastation of my own country. There I met my wife, Setsuko, and worked on various projects — imagine an ancient and venerable civilization in ruins so hopeless and extensive they swallow the horizons like some nightmare vision out of the Book of Revelation — until the accumulated sorrow became too much to bear (Hiroshima! Nagasaki!) and my father arranged for me to go to Paris, where I spent ten productive years with the firm of Borchardt et fils, rehabilitating structures damaged during the war and designing a whole array of apartments, town houses and maisons du pays.

I mention my Parisian sojourn only as it relates to the story of Wrieto-San, which, I must keep reminding myself, is the object of these prefatory remarks. The connection resides in tragedy, a shared experience of a great and inconsolable loss, because here, I confess, O’Flaherty-San and I are somewhat out of our depth. Wrieto-San’s first encounter with Mamah Borthwick Cheney occurred before I was born, and I was just seven years old when the cataclysm to which it ultimately gave rise occurred. And while this is hardly the place for apologies of any sort, I should say that O’Flaherty-San knows the material solely in an abstract way, though he is a marvel of imaginative re-creation — I can only thank the gods or the fates or whatever you want to call them that he has never had to experience a loss of this magnitude, and I hope, for his sake and my granddaughter’s, that he never does.

But Wrieto-San did, and I believe it was the formative experience of his life, the deep well of sadness out of which all his later triumphs had to be drawn, and thus I warn you that the tone of the ensuing pages must necessarily grow more somber and reflective. I wasn’t there. I didn’t meet him until eighteen years after the murders at Taliesin. And yet, strangely, terribly, his tragedy echoed down the years in the sudden unfolding of my own, in the hammer blow of fate that struck me down as surely as any madman’s axe, and my heart and spirit are with him, even now, two long decades after he has passed from this world.

Picture a rainy November evening, the streets gray against the accumulation of darkness and the thousand honeyed lights of the shops and cafés along the rue du Montparnasse, the soft hiss of the automobile tires, the sadness of the skies. I am at work still, head bent over a tricolored rendering and the graceful flowing lines of my soft pencils, thinking of dinner, Setsuko, my infant daughter asleep in the next room and my son, Seiji, a quiet night at home, agedashi tofu, soba, a cup of sake. Seiji is four years old. He wants a cat — a kitten — but the propriétaire will not allow it. Unless I make it worth her while. And I will — I will make it worth her while. This is what I am thinking as my hands and eyes work independently of my brain, bringing three dimensions to life in two — until the phone rings, that is. And the picture darkens: a young wife in kimono and clogs, one hand gripped tightly to her son’s and an umbrella thrust over her head, running in the rain to catch her bus, and the taximan, whose breath reeks of vin rouge, and who is late in applying the brake of his automobile. Late. Very late. Too late.

Will you forgive me if I find my fingers trembling over these pages as I struggle to close out this scene once and for all? I merely want to communicate something, some deep knowledge that twists in my hara with an edge as sharp as any sword’s, and, in a way, to present my bona fides, as morbid as that may sound. I’ve suffered. Wrieto-San suffered. We all have suffered. Even O’Flaherty-San, in his own way. But I simply cannot leave Wrieto-San here as if on some charnel heap of memory — I still hear his voice in my dreams, I continue to revere him and the recollection of him and all that he gave me in his supreme mathematics of addition, only addition. And so I present one final moment, my last memory of him.

It was in the late forties, after the war at any rate, and I was on my way to Paris. I got it in my head that I should show my wife the country where I’d spent so many years, the invincible land of the two-fisted giants who’d conquered us with their can-do spirit, their hot dogs and baseball, and the grand cities arising out of the plains and the factories that were like cities in themselves and all the wide-open untenanted reach of the lone prairie that could have swallowed our humble island country ten times over. And Taliesin, of course. Taliesin, above all. If I was honest with myself (and I was, or began to be, somewhere between Utah and Wyoming, as the night closed down over the lunar crags of the Uinta Mountains and Setsuko huddled beside me in terror of the gaijin porters and for the first and last time in my life I hoped people would take me for a Chinaman), I would have admitted that it was Wrieto-San and Wrieto-San alone who was drawing me all the way across the Pacific to his side as if he were the magnet and I the needle. I had to see him. Had to show him that I’d survived Tule Lake and the grisly business of rebuilding Japan. And more: I wanted him to admire Setsuko, wanted to trumpet my connection with Borchardt et fils, wanted him to pat me on the back and reassure me and tell me what a fine figure I’d made of myself.