The area is designated as a historical preservation area, and old buildings cannot be demolished or remodeled. Next to the hotel are a row of small shops and restaurants, and on the wall at the end of the row is an etched sign indicating that the area is designated as a historical building.
The streets of Ichi-machi are lined with three- and four-story buildings, closely packed together. There is almost no space between the buildings. Restaurants, souvenir shops, general stores, and jewelry stores are lined up on the first floor, and hotels and boarding houses occupy the second floor and above. All of the buildings are over 100 years old.
Yasuko has stayed at many hotels where the glass door to the hotel led to only a narrow staircase. The guest rooms were on the second floor and above. There was no elevator, so she would struggle to drag her suitcase up the narrow, steep stairs, but the second time, she called out from below and a young man from the front desk came running to help. He said, "Ah, here he is. Here he goes," and easily lifted her luggage. After that young man quit, Yasuko and the 80-year-old Chinese woman who owns the hotel would sometimes totter together to carry the luggage, but since the woman only rented rooms to regular customers, she would often casually use guests to carry their luggage.
The hotel corridors were narrow and dark. The walls had been repainted many times, and the paint had been applied in multiple layers, revealing dents here and there. Since the hotel only caters to regular customers, it was always empty and quiet. The room rate was a bargain at $40, but it really was just a bed, a dresser, a chair and a table. There were no decorations, and the toilet and shower were shared. Most of the other guests were young students, or people who had low-paying jobs or were looking for them. Occasionally, newlywed couples stayed there for a short time. I also saw a Caucasian man with a big backpack go down the narrow stairs into a bright street after being refused by an older woman who told him, "There are no rooms available."
As Yasuko rounded a corner in a dark corridor, she passed an expressionless man walking by. Yasuko gasped at the strange sight of the man. The man was as thin as it gets, with long hair that reached his waist. She had been thinking a lot about Blanke Carriers lately, so she wondered if this was one of their survivors. An old cheap hotel, filthy men. It was as if the clock had been turned back 70 years.
The man's dirty T-shirt was stained with dirt that could not be removed no matter how much he washed it, and the fibers that were revealed every time he washed it barely covered his skin. However, there was no way that the Blanket Carrier had survived. First of all, he was too young. Even though he was young, it was unclear how old he was. The man refused to reveal any class or way of life, and rather, he was an ambiguous presence that never said anything. The man's strangeness bothered Yasuko, but being shy, she could not chatter away. However, when they met for the umpteenth time in the shared kitchen, she naturally blurted out, "Well, it's been a while. How are you?" She was surprised when he replied, "Oh, well, I'm fine." It was a response from someone who was clearly under-intelligent or unusual. His voice was also distinctive, and it felt like air was leaking out, like a glimpse of a thick message that had not been stirred up for a long time in the accumulated air.
After I started using this hotel many times, the lady started asking me for advice about the hotel. I also started to hear complaints, badmouthing, and rumors about a few guests. However, it was much later that I learned about this man named Urawa, and I only had a glimpse of him.
Urawa has wealthy parents in Kobe who want him to come back to Japan. Auntie also encourages Urawa to do so, but she ignores him. She also says that the reason he is so skinny is because he doesn't eat enough, and that he only eats a tomato sandwich once a day. No matter how much she encourages him, he won't eat anything else. Now that I think about it, I sometimes see him making tomato and lettuce sandwiches on toast with mayonnaise in the corner of the kitchen.
Yasuko first learned about Japanese seasonal farmworkers called blanke-carriers in a short story by William Saroyan. The story is about a Japanese man who is constantly tormented by the wounds of his past and cannot find a place to rest, wandering the Midwest spitting and screaming in self-loathing and anger. He always wakes up in the middle of the night screaming "You idiot!" but for a long time his employer, who does not understand Japanese, could not understand what he was saying. He once thought it was a person's name.
Yasuko then did a lot of research into the Blanke Carriers. She collected old literary magazines and records involving Japanese Americans. It was only natural, but Japanese American history had always been dominated by successful people. The pages were filled with men who had been successful in agriculture, various businesses, newspaper publishing, diplomacy, and charitable organizations, wearing high-collared shirts, ties, and suits and striking distinctive poses. There was no sign of the taciturn men who had continued to sit with their backs bent and stiff, covered in dirt and dust, in the hot sun of Southern California.
Only in dark old hotels could there be men with dirt from the fields and skin roasted by the sun. To devour a brief rest before the next harvest, they walked the corridors of cheap hotels like this one, and devoured Chinese food to the point of bursting at the stomach at the chop suey restaurant next door. This was the record that Shoemaker, a humanities scholar, had researched.
Angel Shoemaker worked with migrant workers to understand the realities of migrant workers during the Dust Bowl. She collected records of families affected by the Dust Bowl traveling from the South across the continent to find work on plantations in California. This story is also featured in The Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck, who also worked with migrant workers, but Shoemaker also added a chapter about Japanese blanket carriers.
Yasuko was intrigued by the scant records of Japanese migrant workers who traveled in pursuit of the harvest, carrying all their belongings wrapped in a blanket slung over their shoulders. An olive-colored, tightly woven military-issue blanket was lying on the ground, and a man -- undoubtedly Japanese -- wearing a loose military-issue coat with a rope tied around his waist was hastily spreading out his belongings and looking through them before setting off. Among the luggage were supposedly copies of Takiji's "The Crab Cannery Ship" and "The Communist Manifesto." What relationship could these books, which he had carried around for so long, have with the man screaming in his nightmares?
The men probably didn't keep in touch as they continued their journey. But they did get to know each other, and when they met, they would sometimes glance at each other briefly from the corner of their eye, then look away. In a hotel hallway like this, or in the kitchen. Then they would hurriedly board the bus that had come to pick them up and leave.
I wonder if one of them was a haiku poet named Nakamura Isaburo, who also had the pen name Seiran.
In his final years, Shoemaker had been planning to write a book from the letters and clippings that he had collected and stored in brown envelopes full of them. The letters included those left behind by Nakamura Isaburo, who collapsed during a trip and died in General Hospital, a county facility for poor sick people who could not afford medical care. He had planned to read through them and later edit them. Yasuko was introduced to him and was supposed to help translate the haiku in the unfinished book.
The old woman, whose body was bent so much that it looked as if it would break in two, looked up at Yasuko from her wheelchair, still retaining a strong memory. Stacks of old papers were piled up on her lap, neatly organized with tabs of various colors protruding from them. You'd think she'd immediately move the stacks onto Yasuko's lap so she could read them, but instead, with trembling hands, she pulled out one of the papers and handed it to Yasuko, saying, "Here's this." It was a copy that appeared to have been taken from a letter.
The scholar began to talk quickly about Seiran. It seems that Nakamura Isaburo's father had come to America earlier, and called his son over when he was about 15 years old. This was before the war. "Apparently," Mr. Shoemaker said, tapping a stack of papers with his bony hands, "the father was a stowaway or something."
"Yes," Yasuko replied without any sign of surprise. "Apparently it was quite common back then."
"Yes, yes."
His time with his father was short, and he moved from one farm to another in California, processing plants to other farms, never settling down. The letters were written to Isaburo by friends and acquaintances, and it seems that Isaburo had carried them around for a long time. The addresses on them give a glimpse into his wanderings. The addresses spanned the prolific agricultural areas of central California. I wonder if the letters Isaburo had sent had somehow returned or been retrieved. The stack of letters on Shoemaker's lap was quite substantial.
Yasuko fought the urge to reach out and snatch the stack of papers from the old woman's lap. Finally, she handed one to her as if out of pity.
"There is a short poem at the end of this letter. Can you read it?"
It was probably copied from an old, discolored letter. The letters had been enlarged and darkened, making them even more difficult to read. Yasuko scanned over it quickly. The pencil writing was clumsy and uneven, but strangely enough, it was easy to read. It was a free-style haiku.
Yasuko once went to the state archives to read microfilms of a Japanese newspaper published by a now-bankrupt newspaper company. Around the 1920s, the newspaper provided its readers with a literary column once a week. It contained a wide variety of content, including haiku, tanka, senryu, poetry, novels, and critiques, and she had collected the works for a friend from her university days who was studying the haiku poet Shimoyama Itso, who lived in the United States. Itso was a champion of free-style haiku, and he published many works every week in the literary column at the time. She had sent all of Itso's works she had copied to her friend, but was the name of Nakamura Isaburo or Nakamura Seiran anywhere in the literary column? Yasuko closed her eyes and tried to remember.
Shoemaker stared for a moment at the silent woman before him, who seemed to be praying to God. Why had this man, who had already died 70 years ago, used Japanese to shut himself off in such a narrow world and write poetry? Why couldn't he have lived a life like an insect, working in silence, eating in silence, and sleeping in silence? Why did he have to dig up the faint fire that remained like an ember, scratch up the ashes, and leave behind this extravagant waste? Shoemaker was irritated by the woman, who continued to close her eyes.
Only Isaburo Nakamura was moving strangely in front of her eyes. Then, ghosts from the past gathered in the hotel and began to move vividly around Yasuko. When she used the shared shower and toilet, there were eyes peeking through the gaps in the curtains. The narrow space of the toilet was packed with beings that were always moving and holding their breath.
At that moment, a strange voice suddenly came from the street below the hotel. He was shouting loudly, but I had no idea what he was saying. It sounded like he was giving a long election speech. Looking down from the window of my third-floor room at the street, I saw a young black man on a bicycle, zigzagging across the width of the road, raising his right hand, then his left, and yelling. Cars stopped one after another on the busy road. I went down to the lobby below and asked an older woman who was drinking coffee, "What's that?" She didn't even look up from the Chugoku Shimbun she was reading, with her arms spread out and her shoulders hunched.
"Every single day, every single day."
"You don't need to call the police."
"What for?" the lady calmly flipped through her newspaper.
"Isn't that dangerous? That person could get hurt."
"Oh, you've been doing that for years. You're not dead."
In between yells, he yells "Uh, uh, uh-huh." "What are you talking about? I understand."
"No idea." Idiot government, idiot mayor, ladies and gentlemen. Listen up, the lady muttered. Oh, you're kidding. It doesn't sound like that at all.
*This story was one of the finalists in the Japanese category of the Little Tokyo Historical Society 's 2nd Short Story Contest.
© 2015 Michie Wakabayashi
