The Buddha in the Attic

A DISAPPEARANCE

The Japanese have disappeared from our town. Their houses are boarded up and empty now. Their mailboxes have begun to overflow. Unclaimed newspapers litter their sagging front porches and gardens. Abandoned cars sit in their driveways. Thick knotty weeds are sprouting up through their lawns. In their backyards the tulips are wilting. Stray cats wander. Last loads of laundry still cling to the line. In one of their kitchens—Emi Saito’s—a black telephone rings and rings.

DOWNTOWN, on Main Street, their dry cleaners are still shuttered. For Lease signs hang in their windows. Unpaid bills and business receipts drift by in the breeze. Murata Florist is now Flowers by Kay. The Yamato Hotel has become the Paradise. Fuji Restaurant will be reopening under new management by the end of the week. Mikado Pool Hall is closed. Imanashi Transfer is closed. Harada Grocery is closed, and in its front window hangs a handwritten sign none of us can remember having seen there before—God be with you until we meet again, it reads. And of course, we cannot help but wonder: Who put up the sign? Was it one of them? Or one of us? And if it was one of us, which one of us was it? We ask ourselves this as we press our foreheads to the glass and squint into the darkness, half expecting Mr. Harada himself to come barreling out from behind the counter in his faded green apron, urging upon us a stalk of asparagus, a perfect strawberry, a sprig of fresh mint, but there is nothing there to be seen. The shelves are empty. The floors, neatly swept. The Japanese are gone.

OUR MAYOR has assured us there is no need for alarm. “The Japanese are in a safe place,” he is quoted as saying in this morning’s Star Tribune. He is not at liberty, however, to reveal where that place is. “They wouldn’t be safe now, would they, if I told you where they were.” But what place could be safer, some of us ask, than right here, in our own town?

THEORIES, of course, abound. Perhaps the Japanese were sent out to the sugar beet country—Montana or the Dakotas, where the farmers will need help badly with their crops this summer and fall. Or perhaps they’ve assumed new Chinese identities in a faraway city where nobody knows who they are. Perhaps they’re in jail. “My honest opinion?” says a retired Navy corpsman. “I think they’re out there on the ocean, zigzagging past the torpedoes. They’ve all been shipped back to Japan for the duration of the war.” A science teacher at the local high school says she lies awake every night fearing the worst: they’ve been herded into cattle cars and they’re not coming back, or they’re on a bus with no windows and that bus is not stopping, not tomorrow, not next week, not ever, or they’re marching single file across a long wooden bridge and when they get to the other side of that bridge they’ll be gone. “I’ll be thinking these things,” she says, “and then I’ll remember—they already are gone.”

YOU CAN STILL SEE the official notices nailed to the telephone poles on the street corners downtown, but already they are beginning to tatter and fade, and after last week’s heavy spring rains only the large black letters on top—Instructions to All Persons of Japanese Ancestry—are still legible. But what it was, exactly, that these instructions spelled out, none of us can clearly recall. One man vaguely remembers a no-pets directive, as well as a designated point of departure. “I think it was the YMCA on West Fifth Street,” he says. But he’s not sure. A waitress at the Blue Ribbon Diner says she made several attempts to read the notice the morning it was posted but found it impossible to get up close. “All the telephone poles were surrounded by little clusters of concerned Japanese,” she tells us. What struck her was how quiet everyone was. How calm. Some of the Japanese, she says, were slowly nodding their heads. Others took notes. None of them said a word. Many of us admit that although we passed by the notices every day on our way into town, it never occurred to us to stop and read one. “They weren’t for us,” we say. Or, “I was always in a rush.” Or, “I couldn’t make out a thing because the writing was just so small.”

IT IS OUR CHILDREN who seem to have taken the disappearance of the Japanese most to heart. They talk back to us more than usual. They refuse to do their homework. They are anxious. They fuss. At night formerly brave sleepers are now afraid to turn off the light. “Every time I close my eyes I can see them,” one child says. Another has questions. Where can he go to find them? Is there school where they are? And what should he do with Lester Nakano’s sweater? “Keep it or throw it away?” Over at Lincoln Elementary an entire class of second graders has become convinced that their Japanese schoolmates have gotten lost in the forest. “They’re eating acorns and leaves and one of them forgot her jacket and she’s cold,” one girl says. “She’s shivering and crying. Or maybe she’s dead.” “She’s dead,” says the boy beside her. Their teacher says that the hardest part of her day now is taking roll. She points out the three empty desks: Oscar Tajima, Alice Okamoto, and her favorite, Delores Niwa. “So shy.” Every morning she calls out their names, but of course, they never answer. “So I keep marking them absent. What else am I supposed to do?” “It’s a shame,” says the school crossing guard. “They were good kids. I’ll miss them.”

THERE ARE CERTAIN MEMBERS of our community, however, who were more than a little relieved to see the Japanese go. For we have read the stories in the papers, we have heard the whispered rumors, we know that secret caches of weapons were discovered in the cellars of Japanese farmers in towns not far from ours, and even though we would like to believe that most, if not all, of the Japanese here in our own town were good, trustworthy citizens, of their absolute loyalty we could not be sure. “There was just so much about them we didn’t know,” says one mother of five. “It made me uneasy. I always felt like there was something they were trying to hide.” When asked if he had felt safe living across the street from the Miyamotos, a worker at the ice factory replies, “Not really.” He and his wife were always very careful around the Japanese, he explains, because “we just weren’t sure. There were good ones and bad ones, I guess. I got them all mixed up.” But most of us find it difficult to believe that our former neighbors could have posed a threat to our town. A woman who used to rent to the Nakamuras says they were the best tenants she’s ever had. “Friendly. Polite. And so clean, you could practically eat off their floors.” “And they lived American, too,” says her husband. “Not a Japanese touch anywhere. Not even a vase.”

WE BEGIN TO RECEIVE reports of lights left on in some of the Japanese houses, and animals in distress. A listless canary glimpsed through the Fujimotos’ front window. Dying koi in a pond over at the Yamaguchis’. And everywhere, the dogs. We offer them bowls of water, pieces of bread, leftover scraps from our tables, the butcher sends over a fresh cut of filet mignon. The Koyamas’ dog sniffs politely and then turns away. The Uedas’ dog bolts past us and before we can stop her she’s out the front gate. The Nakanishis’ dog—a Scottish terrier that is a dead ringer for the President’s little black dog, Fala—bares his teeth and won’t let us anywhere near. But the rest come running out to greet us, as though they have always known us, and then follow us home, and within days we have found them new owners. One family says they would be more than happy to adopt a Japanese dog. Another asks if there are any collies. The wife of a young soldier who was just called up for duty takes home the Maruyamas’ black-and-tan beagle, Duke, who follows her from room to room and won’t let her out of his sight. “He’s my protector now,” she says. “We get along just fine.” Sometimes, though, in the middle of the night, she can hear him whimpering in his sleep and she wonders if he is dreaming of them.

A FEW OF THE THEM, we soon learn, are still with us. Gambling boss Hideo Kodama, a prisoner at the county jail. An expectant mother at the public hospital who is more than ten days overdue. That baby just doesn’t want to drop. A thirty-nine-year-old woman at the asylum for the insane who wanders the halls all day long in her nightgown and slippers, quietly mumbling to herself in Japanese, which nobody else can understand. The only words of English she knows are “water” and “Go home.” Twenty years ago, the doctor tells us, her two young children were killed in a fire while she was out in the fields with another man. Her husband took his own life the next day. Her lover left her. “And ever since then she just hasn’t been the same.” On the southern edge of town, at the Clearview Sanitorium, a twelve-year-old boy lies in a bed by a window, slowly dying of tuberculosis of the spine. His parents paid him one last visit the day before they left town and now he is all alone.

WITH EACH PASSING DAY the notices on the telephone poles grow increasingly faint. And then, one morning, there is not a single notice to be found, and for a moment the town feels oddly naked, and it is almost as if the Japanese were never here at all.

MORNING GLORIES BEGIN to grow wild in their gardens. Honeysuckle vines spread from one yard to the next. Beneath untended hedges, forgotten shovels rust. A lilac bush blossoms deep purple beneath the Oteros’ front window and then disappears the next day. A lemon tree is dug up over at the Sawadas’. Locks are jimmied off of front and back doors. Cars are stripped. Attics raided. Stovepipes pried loose. Boxes and trunks are hauled up out of basements and loaded into pickup trucks under cover of night. Doorknobs and lighting fixtures go missing. And out on Third Avenue, in the pawn and secondhand shops, exotic items from the Far East briefly surface before making their way into some of our homes. A stone lantern appears among the azaleas in a prizewinning garden on Mapleridge Road. A painted paper scroll replaces a picture of a naked bather in a living room on Elm. On block after block, Oriental rugs materialize beneath our feet. And on the west side of town, among the more fashionable set of young mothers who daily frequent the park, chopstick hair ornaments have suddenly become all the rage. “I try not to think about where they came from,” says one mother as she rocks her baby back and forth on a bench in the shade. “Sometimes it’s better not to know.”

FOR SEVERAL WEEKS some of us continue to hold out hope that the Japanese might return, because nobody said it would be forever. We look for them at the bus stop. At the florist. As we’re walking past the radio repair shop on Second Avenue formerly known as Nagamatsu Fish. We glance out our windows repeatedly just in case our gardeners have snuck back, unannounced, into our yards. There’s always a slight chance Yoshi might be out there raking leaves. We wonder if it wasn’t somehow all our fault. Perhaps we should have petitioned the mayor. The governor. The President himself. Please let them stay. Or simply knocked on their doors and offered to help. If only, we say to ourselves, we’d known. But the last time any of us saw Mr. Mori at the fruit stand he was just as friendly as ever. “He never mentioned to me that he was going away,” one woman says. Three days later, however, he was gone. A cashier at the Associated Market says that the day before the Japanese disappeared they were stocking up on food “like there was no tomorrow.” One woman, she says, bought more than twenty tins of Vienna sausage. “I didn’t think to ask her why.” Now, of course, she wishes she had. “I just want to know they’re all right.”

HERE AND THERE, in scattered mailboxes all throughout town, our first letters begin to arrive from the Japanese. A boy on Sycamore receives a short note from Ed Ikeda, who was once the fastest sprinter at Woodrow Wilson Junior High. Well, here we are at the reception center. I never saw so many Japanese in my life. Some people do nothing but sleep all afternoon long. A girl on Mulberry Street hears from her former classmate Jan. They are keeping us here for a little while longer and then they are sending us over the mountains. Hope to hear from you soon. The mayor’s wife receives a brief postcard from her loyal maid, Yuka, who showed up at her door on her second day off the boat. Don’t forget to air out the blankets at the end of the month. The wife of the assistant pastor at the United Methodist Church opens a letter addressed to her husband, which begins, Darling, am all right, and her whole world goes suddenly dark. Who is Hatsuko? Three blocks away, in a yellow house on Walnut, a nine-year-old boy reads a letter from his best friend, Lester—Did I leave my sweater in your room?—and for the next three nights he is unable to sleep.

PEOPLE BEGIN to demand answers. Did the Japanese go to the reception centers voluntarily, or under duress? What is their ultimate destination? Why were we not informed of their departure in advance? Who, if anyone, will intervene on their behalf? Are they innocent? Are they guilty? Are they even really gone? Because isn’t it odd that no one we know actually saw them leave? You’d think, says a member of the Home Front Commandos, that one of us would have seen something, heard something. “A warning shot. A muffled sob. A line of people disappearing into the night.” Perhaps, says a local air-raid warden, the Japanese are still with us, and are watching us from the shadows, scrutinizing our faces for signs of grief and remorse. Or maybe they’ve gone into hiding beneath the streets of our town and are plotting our eventual demise. Their letters, he points out, could easily have been faked. Their disappearance, he suggests, is a ruse. Our day of reckoning, he warns, is yet to come.

THE MAYOR URGES us all to be patient. “We’ll let you know what we can when we can,” he tells us. There was disloyalty on the part of some, time was short, and the need for action was great. The Japanese have left us willingly, we are told, and without rancor, per the President’s request. Their spirits remain high. Their appetite is good. Their resettlement is proceeding according to plan. These are, the mayor reminds us, extraordinary times. We are part of the battlefront now, and whatever must be done to defend the country must be done. “There will be some things that people will see,” he tells us. “And there will be some things that people won’t see. These things happen. And life goes on.”

THE FIRST BLAST of summer. Leaves droop on the branches of the magnolia trees. Sidewalks bake in the sun. Shouts fill the air as the final school bell rings and classes once more come to a close. Mothers’ hearts fill with despair. Not again, they groan. Some of them begin looking for new nannies to take care of their young children. Others advertise for new cooks. Many hire new gardeners and maids: sturdy young women from the Philippines, thin bearded Hindus, short squat Mexicans from Oaxaca who, though not always sober, are friendly enough—Buenos días, they say, and Sí, cómo no?—and willing to mow their lawns for cheap. Most take the plunge and drop off their laundry with the Chinese. And even though their linens might not come back to them perfectly pressed, and their hedges are sometimes unruly, they do not let it bother them, for their attention has turned to other things: the search for a missing boy named Henry, last seen balancing on a log at the edge of the woods (“He’s gone away to join the Japanese,” our children tell us), the capture of seven soldiers from our town in the battle of Corregidor, a lecture at the annual Pilgrim Mothers’ Club luncheon by recent Nazi refugee Dr. Raoul Aschendorff, entitled “Hitler: Today’s Napoleon?” which draws a standing-room-only crowd.

AS THE WAR rages on families begin to leave their homes less and less. Gasoline is rationed. Tinfoil, saved. Victory gardens are planted on weed-strewn vacant lots and in kitchen after kitchen, the green bean casserole quickly loses its appeal. Mothers rip up their girdles to donate to the rubber drive and exhale fully for the first time in years. “Sacrifices must be made,” they exclaim. Cruel fathers cut down their children’s tire swings from the trees. The China Relief Committee reaches its target goal of ten thousand dollars and the mayor himself personally wires the good news to Madame Chiang Kai-shek. The assistant pastor spends another night out on the couch. Several of our children attempt to write to their Japanese friends but can’t think of anything to say. Others don’t have the heart to deliver the bad news. There’s a new boy sitting at your desk in Miss Holden’s class. I can’t find your sweater. Yesterday your dog got run over by a car. A girl on North Fremont is discouraged by the postman, who tells her that only a traitor would dare exchange letters with the Japanese.

NEW PEOPLE BEGIN to move into their houses. Okies and Arkies who’ve come out west for the war work. Dispossessed farmers from the Ozarks. Dirt-poor Negroes with their bundles of belongings fresh up from the South. Vagrants and squatters. Country folk. Not our kind. Some of them can’t even spell. They work ten and fifteen hours a day in the ammunitions plants. They live three and four families to a house. They wash their laundry out of doors, in tin tubs in their front yards. They let their women and children run wild. And on the weekends, when they sit out on their porches smoking and drinking until late in the night, we begin to long for our old neighbors, the quiet Japanese.

AT THE END of summer the first rumors of the trains begin to reach us from afar. They were ancient, people say. Relics from a distant era. Dusty day coaches with coal-fired steam engines and antique gas lamps. Their rooftops were covered with bird droppings. Their windowpanes blackened by shades. They passed through town after town but made no stops. They blew no whistles. They traveled only after dusk. Ghost trains, say those who saw them. Some say they were climbing up through the narrow mountain passes of the Sierra Nevadas: Altamont, Siskiyou, Shasta, the Tehachapi. Some say they were heading toward the western edge of the Rockies. A timekeeper at the station in Truckee reports seeing a blind lifted and a woman’s face briefly revealed. “Japanese,” he says. Although it happened so quickly it was impossible to know for sure. The train was unscheduled. The woman looked tired. She had short black hair and a small round face and we wonder if she was one of ours. Laundryman Ito’s wife, perhaps. Or the old woman who sold flowers every weekend on the corner of Edwards and State. We just called her the flower lady. Or someone we might have passed by countless times on the street without really noticing at all.

IN AUTUMN there is no Buddhist harvest festival on Main Street. No Chrysanthemum Feast. No parade of bobbing paper lanterns at dusk. No children in long-sleeved cotton kimonos singing and dancing to the wild beating of the drums until late in the night. Because the Japanese are gone, that’s all. “You worry about them, you pray for them, and then you just have to move on,” says one elderly pensioner who lived next door to the Ogatas for more than ten years. Whenever he starts to feel lonely he goes outside and sits on a bench in the park. “I listen to the birds until I begin to feel better again,” he says. “Then I go home.” Sometimes several days go by and he doesn’t think about the Japanese at all. But then he’ll see a familiar face on the street—it’s Mrs. Nishikawa from the bait shop, only why won’t she wave back hello?—or a fresh rumor will float his way. Rifles were found buried beneath the Koyanagis’ plum tree. Black Dragon emblems were discovered in a Japanese house on Oak. Or he’ll hear footsteps behind him on the sidewalk but when he turns around there’s nobody there. And then it will hit him all over again: the Japanese have left us and we don’t know where they are.

BY THE FIRST FROST their faces begin to blend and blur in our minds. Their names start to elude us. Was it Mr. Kato or Mr. Sato? Their letters cease to arrive. Our children, who once missed them so fervently, no longer ask us where they are. Our youngest can barely remember them. “I think I saw one once,” they say to us. Or, “Didn’t they all have black hair?” And after a while we notice ourselves speaking of them more and more in the past tense. Some days we forget they were ever with us, although late at night they often surface, unexpectedly, in our dreams. It was the nurseryman’s son, Elliot. He told me not to worry, they’re doing all right, they’re getting plenty to eat and playing baseball all day long. And in the morning, when we wake, try as we might to hang on to them, they do not linger long in our thoughts.

A YEAR ON and almost all traces of the Japanese have disappeared from our town. Gold stars glimmer in our front windows. Beautiful young war widows push their strollers through the park. On shady paths along the edge of the reservoir, dogs on long leashes strut. Downtown, on Main Street, the daffodils are blooming. New Liberty Chop Suey is crowded with workers from the shipping yard on their lunch break. Soldiers home on leave are prowling the streets and business at the Paradise Hotel is brisk. Flowers by Kay is now Foley’s Spirit Shop. Harada Grocery has been taken over by a Chinese man named Wong but otherwise looks exactly the same, and whenever we walk past his window it is easy to imagine that everything is as it was before. But Mr. Harada is no longer with us, and the rest of the Japanese are gone. We speak of them rarely now, if at all, although word from the other side of the mountains continues to reach us from time to time—entire cities of Japanese have sprung up in the deserts of Nevada and Utah, Japanese in Idaho have been put to work picking beets in the fields, and in Wyoming a group of Japanese children was seen emerging, shivering and hungry, from a forest at dusk. But this is only hearsay, and none of it necessarily true. All we know is that the Japanese are out there somewhere, in one place or another, and we shall probably not meet them again in this world.