The Souvenir (13 page)

After all the tense anticipation, there would be no invasion of the Japanese mainland. The doggies on Luzon went wild. As my father reported: “From the Colonel down to the Privates—the boys in town really rioted—just helping themselves to all the liquor available. I detailed a cook to get up and serve coffee all night long. What a night.”

Drunken revelry continued around the clock. The beer held out for days on end. “We can't seem to get back down to earth,” he wrote, also reminding his wife that when he finally got home, he would need “rest, plenty of rehabilitation. I always thought that term a great joke but it's true. What is really the matter is that I can't enjoy anything and the key to the answer is you. Also, it will take a long time if ever to forget the horrible things I've seen.”

I
COULDN
'
T FEEL
the plane's movement through the air. It felt as though it were simply suspended in space. I thought of my father suspended in anticipation, waiting thirty-five days off the shore of Nagoya on a “Navy tub” called the USS
Natrona
.

By September 24, 1945, his regiment had boarded troop ships in Lingayen Gulf in the Philippines bound for Japan. Instead of invading the mainland in what he and his buddies feared would be
a bloody nightmare, the Americans were about to join their fellow servicemen as the victorious and occupying army.

Nevertheless, the prospect of mingling with their all-too-recent enemies did not please the troops.

In the weeks of waiting on the ship, the men watched
I Married an Angel
with Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald in the mess
hall; they spent hours playing cards: “Insipid games like pinochle and we make the games so very important trying to concentrate on the playing and time goes by that way. Then we read anything we can get our hands on—magazines so very old, all kinds of trite fiction anything just to kill time and try to forget the rolling of the ship.”

There was constant friction on board between army doggies and navy men:

My father turned thirty on October 14, 1945. The army postal service came through, delivering to the tub nine letters from home (three from his parents in Los Angeles, six letters from his wife in Brooklyn), two pipes, and pictures of his little girl at her first birthday party.

The ship was abuzz with rumors, including one (false) that they'd have to go ashore without their weapons. No soldier who'd faced the Japanese infantry in the jungles of Luzon was happy about that.

O
N THE DAY
Lloyd and I arrived in Tokyo, the cherry trees were in bloom, the dollar had plummeted relative to the yen to the lowest point since World War II, and everyone was anxious about toxic nerve gas. The city was on high alert. Just a few weeks earlier, on March 20, the shadowy sect Aum Shinrikyo had released sarin nerve gas in the Tokyo subway, killing twelve people and injuring fifty-five hundred. In what one Cabinet minister described as “a war” between the sect and the Japanese government, citizens of one of the world's safest countries grappled with unaccustomed fear whenever they took subways or went to public places. Members of the cult and
their enigmatic blind guru, Shoko Asahara, had not yet been apprehended.

For our first two days in Tokyo, we stayed at the house of an American acquaintance whose husband was the Tokyo correspondent for network television. Marjorie's home was extremely comfortable, lavish by Japanese standards: two stories, four bedrooms, three baths. With the devalued dollar, the network paid an unfathomable twenty-four thousand dollars a month rent on the house. In the local shops, Marjorie showed me the hundred-dollar cantaloupes, beef at fifty dollars a kilo. A large pizza cost seventy-five dollars.

That spring was also the twentieth anniversary of the fall of Saigon, and Marjorie's husband was on assignment in Vietnam. Marjorie had her hands full taking care of two young children, ten and two, in a foreign city.

I quickly became friends with ten-year-old Laura, a wise, dreamy child with long brown hair and an infectious grin. She went to an elite international school in Tokyo and, like most kids in Japan, she was assigned hours of homework each night, an expectation that generated ongoing friction with her mother. Laura preferred to spend time making collages out of Japanese wrapping paper, creating imaginary stories with her dolls and stuffed animals, or drawing in her sketchbook.

Lloyd and I were offered the baby's nursery for a bedroom. We fell asleep quickly that first night, exhausted from travel and time changes. I woke in the predawn, jet-lagged and dream-drunk. I dreamed I'd come to Japan to find the Japanese pilot who'd dropped my father, alive and naked, over the Pacific Ocean.

It was a stunning fall, in slow motion as falls in dreams often are. There was the shock of seeing my father's pale flesh against the brilliant blue sky. He had a slight paunch and his black hair was gray, as it was at the end of his life. And he was falling, his
legs tumbling over his head and then around again … what was the expression on his face? In the dream, I tried to see—but I couldn't.

I lay still in the half-dark. My father did not die in the Pacific, I told myself. He came home, he raised a family with my mother. He ran a pharmacy. He cracked corny jokes. He wanted me to go to law school.

I rolled over next to Lloyd. His skin was clammy and hot. He was burning with fever, the onset of a nasty flu. I opened my eyes, disoriented. Humpty Dumpty leered in the half-light. The toddler's rocking horse was an emperor's ghostly white stallion.

I pulled on a robe and tiptoed down the hallway to the kitchen to make tea, to try and clear my head. Marjorie was already in the kitchen, herself jangled awake by a nightmare. “There were Asian men planting landmines all over the house,” she whispered loudly. “One of them was crouched over the kitchen sink.”

All over Tokyo—maybe all over Japan—an epidemic of nightmares had broken out. The horror of the subway gassings had people in its grip. No wonder Marjorie was nervous; some of Laura's schoolmates narrowly missed being on the subway train that had been gassed a month earlier.

A groggy Laura appeared at the kitchen door as we stared into our tea. It was Saturday, no school. “What's the plan?” she asked.

Marjorie was adamant that we should not take the subway anywhere. When Aum Shinrikyo members vacated their compound, they took their bags of sarin nerve gas with them. “CNN reports say they're planning a kamikaze attack on a big crowd of people,” Marjorie said. She'd been up late watching the news and her eyes were red.

Laura stirred her hot chocolate. “What's a kamikaze?”

“Like terrorist bombers,” her mother explained, “like in Israel where they do a suicide bomb into a crowd of Jews.”

“Oh,” said Laura, alarmed. “I don't think I'll go outside at all.”

“No, you'll survive,” her mother insisted.

I
PILED THICK
blankets on Lloyd, tried to make him comfortable with hot tea and aspirin. Getting sick at the beginning of our adventure was not part of the plan. What could I do to make him feel better? He insisted I go out without him. Marjorie was a wreck from lack of sleep and the baby was fussy, so Laura and I set out on foot together for Meiji Shrine, the largest Shinto temple in Tokyo.

We wound our way through the maze of streets toward Meiji. The Jingumae neighborhood was designed in medieval times to deliberately confuse any enemy who might approach the shrine. We emerged on the main boulevard into the thick of consumer culture: We passed a Gap store, Banana Republic, a Benneton boutique, Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonald's, a billboard for Kirin beer featuring a grinning Harrison Ford.

We reached the Outer Gardens of Meiji Shrine, and entered under the huge tori gates. I'd read that on October 21, 1943, this was the place where thousands of drafted students from Japan's colleges and universities gathered for the biggest public send-off of the war. Thirty-five thousand young men stood at attention with rifles on their shoulders, facing bleachers filled with sixty-five thousand people. A cold rain fell, and for three hours the new recruits were bombarded with patriotic rhetoric, which was also broadcast to the nation. A new recruit named Shinshiro Ebashi, who until his induction was a student at the elite Tokyo Imperial University, set the tone with his speech: “We, of course, do not expect to come back alive as we take up guns and bayonets to embark on our glorious mission of crushing the stubborn enemy.” Prime Minister Tojo also addressed them: “The decisive moment has come when one hundred million of us take up battle positions and overcome the hardships confronting our fatherland.”

Tojo reminded the new soldiers that the United States and Great Britain were also sending their students to war. “But I do not have a shred of doubt that you will overwhelm them in spirit and in combat capability.” After the rally, the recruits marched through the streets of Tokyo to the plaza facing the Imperial Palace, where they shouted “Banzai!” for the emperor.

I thought about those young men standing out in the rain as we walked down the long pebbled pathway toward the shrine. Laura was walking with her eyes focused intently downward. I grabbed her arm just before she collided with someone coming the opposite direction.

“Be careful,” I entreated her.

“Looking for acorns,” she muttered.

It began to rain lightly. I insisted Laura open her red umbrella. She could not have cared less about getting wet. She was determined to continue her search through the pebbles for an acorn. Suddenly, she let out a squeal. Among the numberless stones, she'd found a real prize: a tiny carving of a squirrel. I was dumbfounded. She was ecstatic.

“It's like finding a needle in a haystack!” I exclaimed. Laura didn't know the aphorism. “Well,” I said, “It's so improbable. What are the odds? A million to one? That you'd find a carved squirrel among all these pebbles? Not a million to one, a billion to one.”

“Or,” Laura said, squinting her eyes, “what are the odds that you would find that flag?”

Her skillful segue took me aback. “Well, after my father died, I needed to go through his things.”

“Well, what are the chances you would even look for it down in that storage locker?” she said. “In fact, what were the chances your father would even survive a war?”

She knew she didn't need to wait for a reply. “Not very good,” she said. “Not very good at all.”