The friend in Shanghai (whom my mother had stayed with for so long that my father had to bring her back) was someone of particular importance to my family. She had grown up as the only child in a mansion on a hill overlooking the village, and she and my mother had been friends for most of their lives. We called her the Shanghai Auntie. The better part of my mother’s journal entries consisted of detailed transcriptions of the letters the Shanghai Auntie had sent from China, where she was living after her marriage.
Seeing those old journals again reminded me of my mother’s system for keeping me supplied with reading material during the war. Early on I had fallen in love with the children’s fantasy novel The Wonderful Adventures of Nils and had read it over and over again. My mother used to take some of the thick cotton army socks we received as part of wartime rationing and fashion them into small bags. She would fill the bags with rice and then set out for the nearby cluster of houses, whose occupants were living under perpetual threat of air raids, and she would trade the rice — a precious commodity in those days — for stacks of Iwanami Bunko paperbacks. That was how I came to discover The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a transformative book that became the cornerstone of my personal Great Wall of Literature.
As for Nils, the Swedish classic had been a gift from another childhood friend of my mother’s. They had attended the local elementary school together, but then (unlike my mother, who remained in the village) her friend had gone off to an all-girls high school in Matsuyama and later matriculated at a women’s university in Tokyo. I learned about this for the first time as an adult, from surreptitiously reading my mother’s journals.
When I had originally seen these journals, in my younger days, I had only skimmed the contents, jumping quickly from page to page. Now I was planning to reread them carefully, one by one. After perusing several journals and finding nothing useful, I reached for a newer volume, which was bound in colorfully patterned chiyogami paper. To my disappointment, in this journal, too, my mother seemed to be endlessly fixated on wallowing in the feelings of restless nostalgia triggered by the letters she received from the Shanghai Auntie. The entries didn’t even touch upon the object of my current quest: information about my father’s past, especially the events that transpired in the years leading up to and including 1945. Indeed, it was almost as if my mother had written the journals in such a way as to erase any traces of my father’s presence in her daily life.
I realized that I would need to cast a wider net in my subsequent examinations of the red leather trunk, but since I had stayed up until the wee hours of the morning reading my mother’s journals, it was after noon the following day when I embarked upon the second phase of my reconnaissance mission.
Because I had laid out the contents of the red leather trunk in roughly organized categories, the various piles had overflowed from the desk onto the bookshelves and even the floor. My father’s correspondence, which would ultimately be the main focus of my scrutiny, had not yet returned from the copy shop, so naturally my eye was drawn to the fruits of my mother’s secret penchant for journaling. Her private archives included a great many clippings from newspapers and magazines, which had been folded for so many years that they had become brittle and friable. They often disintegrated in my hands when I attempted to smooth out the creases.
I addressed this problem by carefully placing the age-yellowed clippings between random pages of a few of the heavier books from the bottom shelves of the bookcase — for example, the two-volume set of The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Some of the older clippings were already in shreds, so I patched those relics together with lavish applications of transparent tape. As I went along I quickly skimmed each clipping, then added it to the appropriate pile. The headlines were eclectic, to say the least: LONDON NAVAL-PREPAREDNESS PACT; THE PRORLEM OF INFRINGEMENT ON THE RIGHTS OF THE SUPREME HIGH COMMAND; MAJOR SLUMP IN RAW SILK PRODUCTION; DEBT IN RURAL AGRICULTURAL COMMUNITIES IS NEARLY $42 BILLION. There were articles about other social issues and current events, such as the Musha Incident in Taiwan (or Formosa, as it was known in those days), and all those clippings seemed to be from the year 1930 or thereabouts.
Five years before I was born, my mother was showing a nascent interest in the affairs of the wider world. Evidently the correspondence that began after her cherished friend (the Shanghai Auntie) went off to live in China had been very instructive for my mother. Her education continued when she traveled alone to Shanghai, to visit that friend, and then remained there for much longer than expected. Indeed, if my father hadn’t gone to China and bodily dragged my mother home when he did, I would never have been born!
One of the news clippings made reference to a historical event I remembered hearing about from my mother as a bedtime story: a bloody uprising by more than eight hundred aboriginal natives of Formosa, who staged a rebellion armed only with bamboo spears, makeshift cudgels, and wooden poles. In retrospect, it struck me as a strangely sanguinary tale to share with a child, but my mother had presented it factually, as something that really happened a long time ago. Perhaps, I realized now, she had been drawing a parallel with the local farmers’ insurrections that were such an important part of our folklore.
Another clipping that caught my eyes was a full-color advertisement for Sapporo beer. The ad, which appeared to have been custom-printed, showed a scantily clad young woman who managed to look both very modern and distinctively Japanese. The image dislodged a recollection from a remote corner of my memory, and I recalled hearing that someone who was a colleague of the founder of the famous beer company was closely connected with the Shanghai Auntie’s family, and as a result my mother had happened to make the influential brewer’s acquaintance when she was young.
There were also a dozen or so clippings of newspaper articles with more photographs than text, either pertaining to the Shanghai Incident of 1932, or else with headlines like CELEBRATION IN MUKDEN OF THE FOUNDING OF MANCHURIA. One photo showed a quiet procession (too sedate to be called a parade) of bizarrely tall Chinese people. Another clipping bore the stark headline: LINDBERGH BABY FOUND DEAD.
I once read an essay by Maurice Sendak in which he recalled a day in his childhood when he went out for a walk with his parents and happened to pass a newsstand where he glimpsed the horrifying photograph of the kidnapped baby’s dead body. (I actually wrote a novel that explored the concept of changelings and was inspired in part by the work of that genius of children’s literature.) At the time, I was seized by what I assumed was nothing more than a false or sympathetic memory of the harrowing photo, but I realized now it must have been a genuine recollection of having seen this newspaper clipping at some point during my own childhood.
While I was attempting to put all the clippings in chronological order, guided by the neat pencil notations at the top that gave the newspaper’s name and the date (most of which preceded my birth), I began to see a path to getting back on track with the newly resurrected drowning novel. The articles appeared to be wildly disparate, but I thought I discerned a pattern in the way they had been selected. That is to say, I suspected my father’s influence must have played a significant role in my mother’s evolving interest in political and international affairs, which seemed to be at odds with her own natural inclinations.
So, I decided, I would try to find the relevant accounts either in the letters to my father, or in the drafts of his replies. I would also need to reread my mother’s journals, paying close attention to how the entries had changed over the years. With those concrete clues in hand, maybe if I just kept digging — and if I could manage to incorporate the long-held ideas I’d expressed in The Silent Cry and had overlaid, in that book, with the area’s popular folklore — perhaps I might be able to chronicle my father’s life and death as it paralleled and reflected this dark period in Japanese history. The thing is, in his own way my father gave a great deal of thought to the history of the age he lived in, but his rigidly ideological views caused him to plan an action so extreme that it would have been laughable if the outcome hadn’t gone beyond mere absurdity to the point of becoming pitiful and, ultimately, fatal.