Authors: Jay Rubin
The Sun Gods (39 page)
The commemorative ceremonies had ended several hours earlier when Mitsuko heard Tomoko Wada being paged over the intercom. She had visitors, the voice said, at the front admitting desk. That was impossible. No one knew “Tomoko Wada” outside this hospital. She practically lived here, and the destruction of records had enabled her to preserve her anonymity for the past eighteen years. Could it be the police? Had she broken a law by adopting the identity of a stillborn infant?
She took the elevator down and turned right into the long, gloomy corridor. As she moved toward the rectangular glare at the far end, three silhouettes moved away from the admitting desk and stood there, facing in her direction. The two outer shadows belonged to men, one very tall, the other less so, and the middle one was a woman about her own size. As she drew closer, and her eyes adjusted to the light, she recognized her daughter, Mineko, now a beautifully grown woman. She stopped short and strained to see the others. The man to the left was surely no Japanese. No, he was blond and resembled the young Thomas Morton. Could this be Billy, standing before her? And the Japanese man to the right? His left arm was missing, but in his intense gaze, she recognized Frank Sano. Before she could recover from the shock of seeing her past arrayed before her, the blond man started moving toward her, holding his arms out.
What could they say to each other, what could they be to each other after all these years?
But the moment he clasped her in his arms, all her doubts were swept away.
“Mother!” he said. “Oh, Mother!”
THE END
NOTE ON SOURCES
This book is a novel,
its major characters and events entirely fictional, but the setting of the story is authentic. Characters often appear in situations which actually occurred, or they encounter people who were actually alive at the time. This factual information owes much to the contemporary press (
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
,
Seattle Star
,
Seattle Daily Times
); to the relocation camp newspaper,
The Minidoka Irrigator
; to a 1943 publication called “Minidoka Interlude: September 1942 â October 1943,” published by Residents of Minidoka Relocation Center, Hunt, Idaho; and to such books as the following:
Audrie Girdner and Anne Loftis,
The Great Betrayal: The Evacuation of the Japanese-Americans During World War II
(New York: The Macmillan Company, 1969).
Hiroshima-shi, Nagasaki-shi Gembaku Saigaishi Henshū Iinkai,
Hiroshima and Nagasaki: the Physical, Medical and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombings
(New York: Basic Books, 1981).
Kazuo Ito,
Issei
(Seattle: Executive Committee for the Publication of
Issei
, 1973).
Richard H. Mitchell,
Thought Control in Prewar Japan
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976).
Shotaro Frank Miyamoto,
Social Solidarity Among the Japanese in Seattle
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981).
Takashi Nagai,
The Bells of Nagasaki
, translated by William Johnston (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1984).
Personal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians
(Washington, D.C.: U.S.G.P.O., 1982).
Katsumoto Saotome,
Tokyo daik
Å«
sh
Å«
(Tokyo: Iwanami shinsho, 1971).
Monica Sone,
Nisei Daughter
(Seattle: The University of Washington Press, 1979).
Yoshiko Uchida,
Desert Exile: The Uprooting of a Japanese-American Family
(Seattle: The University of Washington Press, 1982).
Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston,
Farewell to Manzanar
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973).
Michi Weglyn,
Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America's Concentration Camps
(New York: William Morrow and Company, 1976).
In addition to the above sources used for this book, the reader may wish to consult some of the numerous publications, both factual and fictional, which have appeared in recent years. A particularly rich source of information is the web site www.densho.org, the mission of which is “to preserve the testimonies of Japanese Americans who were unjustly incarcerated during World War II before their memories are extinguished.” A portion of the proceeds from this book will be donated to Densho, to the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience (Seattle), to the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington State, and to the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum.
Many friends, family members and colleagues have helped bring this book to fruition, among them Todd Shimoda, Bruce Rutledge, Rick Simonson, Hana Rubin, Davinder Bhowmik, Ted Woolsey, Sara Woolsey, Ted Mack, Scott Pack, Motoyuki Shibata, Brooks Andrews, Jim Peterson, Ted Goossen, and Tess Gallagher. By far, the single greatest contributor has been my wife, Rakuko, without whose intelligence, imagination, determination and love, there would have been no book. She has been my coauthor every step of the way.