Resigned in Heart

Resigned in Heart

Ken Tokuno © 2020

For the second time in his life, Tomohiro’s biggest problem was having nothing to do. They had been in the Tule Lake Internment Center for a month now, but it seemed longer. Living in the middle of a desert was even worse than living on a farm. The wind pushed not only the heat, but a fine dust through cracks in the tarpaper walls. The War Relocation Authority allowed each family to have only one small room. His family, counting his in-laws, numbered seven. They had been adjusting to these quarters and trying to make them more comfortable and private, such as putting up sheets to create stalls within the communal toilets they shared with other families. 

All of the people here, most of them American citizens, had had their lives suddenly slashed away from them. They were first assembled at the Tanforan race track where they had to find room in old horse stables. Then they were packed onto trains with the windows covered and secretly moved to a location so remote that no one had ever lived within miles of the hastily erected “camp,” which was for all intents and purposes a prison. Their lives were bordered by barbed wire fences and guard towers. They needed to settle into some kind of routine and find some reason to wake up each morning. Former teachers, merchants, farmers, and housewives now had no jobs, no homes, no neighborhoods. What would they do? What kind of purpose did their lives have? Tomohiro already had one.

Sitting on the edge of his cot, Tomohiro Araki grasped his treasured box. Each internee was only allowed to bring what he or she could carry. It was the one thing he made certain he brought with him. He contemplated the plain pine wood and the silver lock for a few minutes, then removed the key he had kept around his neck. That key not been used for so many years he no longer remembered all that it would reveal. He only knew that it was something he had long wanted to revive. He yelled at his two sons rough-housing just outside the window to quiet down. Tomohiro had never found much use for his children. Opening the box, he unwrapped the papers he had tucked away those many years ago and found his old poems on the top, each inked in the formal style of Japanese characters. The first one read:

The rain does not stop.

It washes young buds from trees

Before April’s bloom.

His calligraphy had been so fine in those days, with its elegant brush strokes. He sighed. Years of hard work digging ditches and pulling weeds had damaged his hands so that they now could barely hold a pen, let alone a brush. As he read, however, the condition of his hands bothered him much less than the words inked there. Had he really written this? He could not remember writing this haiku, for it had been over twenty years ago, but he could remember his habit of writing at the small oak desk of his teaching office at Kansai University. The light had been so dim that he could barely see his own ink-well as he scratched the characters on the scrolls. For him, this was no hardship because the chance to be paid to write was something he had worked so very hard to achieve.

The University had hired him for his promise of being a great poet one day. It was an exalted position, a wish fulfilled for he loved nothing more than poetry. The works of the great masters brought him an ineffable joy that could only be matched when he was writing his own poems. The fact that he had to teach was an essential burden to him, for he had no hope that his boorish students would ever be able to appreciate the ancient arts of haiku, tonka and waka let alone write them at all well. He had hoped that the university would one day publish a volume of his work, but he never got that chance.

--

Professor Araki had been in his office when the college dean entered. This was serious since no one of anywhere near that rank had come to his office before. A student had charged Tomohiro with philandering. There would be a hearing. Tomohiro had no idea how to defend himself. In the few years he had been teaching poetry, he had had more female students than he cared to have and they often breached protocol to stare at him with what he could see was more than admiration for him as a teacher. A professor was a position of great respect and it was modern innovation to even have women in the college. Tomohiro had always been too engaged with his poetry to entertain any romantic notions about these frivolous women whom he did not feel belonged in his classroom. Despite his parents’ entreaties to marry, he had little use for female companionship. He once had gotten a poem from one of them, comparing him to a lofty pine tree. He had never responded to any of these flirtations, however, and could not imagine who might be bringing these false charges against him. 

As he feared, the hearing did not go well, as Tomohiro had no defense and no witnesses in his favor. The student had two friends who claimed that she had come to them crying after Tomohiro had allegedly attacked her. He was dismissed from his post as professor. It was a desolating loss for him. There was nothing else he wanted to do. He had loved the opportunity of writing poetry and thought he had done a good, no magnificent, job of encouraging mediocre students not only to understand poetry but to write it, to find and use their voices. Now, he had nowhere to go but his parents’ home, south in Kainan. Fate created an honorable option: his father had heard from a distant relative who lived in America and was seeking a husband for his twenty-year-old daughter. In less than a year, the marriage was arranged and sealed in the city record’s office. Tomohiro was going to America.

--

There were mostly women on the ship, picture brides. Tomohiro was used to having women stare at him so he barely noticed that, as demure as they were brought up to be, very few could avert their eyes as Tomohiro ducked his head upon entering the lower deck. His height had made such ducking a habit through all the low doorways in Japan. Ignoring the women, he coiled into a berth next to the hull where three other men crouched. He was not there to get to know them. He wanted to get to America, forget the recent past as soon as he could. It was a small consolation that he had never married, that his parents were dead and that he had long ago forsaken his sisters, all married and with some number of children whose names he could not recall.

All he took with him was a duffle bag filled with some clothes and three volumes of poetry: Basho, of course, the new master, Masaoka Shiki, plus a sample of his own efforts locked in a small box. His colleagues had often  told him that his poetry had not been published because he needed more heart, so he had ceased to share his work with them. He knew his poems were of the first rank. Now, he futiley tried to compose more poems despite lingering bouts of sea sickness. Aside from that he could think of nothing else to do with his time. As he read his recent poems, he could tell he had not written anything good. How could he, between his being fired and this endless sea voyage?

--

After being processed through the U. S. Customs Offices on Angel Island, Tomohiro took note of the cold gray fog that hung over San Francisco. He smelled the brine and heard the gulls as the shuttle crossed the bay. Scanning the small crowd of people greeting the new arrivals at the dock, he compared the older men to the worn photo of his new father in law, Mitsuo Kanagawa. Kanagawa-san was there in the back of the crowd. Greeting his father-in-law, Tomohiro bowed low in deference only to see a hand stretch out in that Western form of greeting. Beyond their first guttural greeting, they exchanged few words in their long ride to Marysville. Upon their arrival, they were greeted by his new wife, Akiko and an older woman who must be her mother. They waved at him and Kanagawa-san from the end of the bus station. They both wore the traditional Japanese kimono in honor of the occasion. Seeing his wife for the first time, Tomohiro wished he did not have to look at her. She was shaped like a bundle of rice and her head did not even come up to his chest. 

Akiko appeared overcome with joy and stammered: “It is with great warmth that I greet you and welcome you to my home, Aragi-san.”

“Akiko, shame. His name is Araki-sensei and this is not your home,” said her mother, Mie, who looked very much like an even shorter version of her daughter.

“Please. I regret that I should no longer be honored by the title of ‘sensei’ but thank you for remembering my name.” Tomohiro said to his mother-in-law, politely, but inwardly he was seething at Akiko’s ignorance. Even her pronunciation showed signs of a poor education and rural upbringing. How far he had fallen.

That night, although not a word passed between them, Tomohiro fulfilled the obligations of the marital bed and so their family began.

--

The Kanagawa family raised tomatoes. The plants thrived in the hot climate of the Sacramento Valley. The family did well since they raised the best tomatoes that anyone ever tasted. They were, literally, the fruits of the family’s hard labor. Other families had tractors or mules to do a lot of the hard work, but the Kanagawas relied completely on their raw hands, stout backs and sturdy legs. Since his father in law and his three brothers in law all worked extremely hard, Tomohiro could do no less despite his life-long loathing of manual labor. Each night after a fourteen-hour day irrigating, hoeing weeds, killing tomato horn worms, or fertilizing, he would take a hot bath in the traditional Japanese furo that his father in law had built. He felt that this was the only thing that could get him through life as the hot water soothed his aching muscles and relaxed his mind. His mind, it seemed to him, was not good for much of anything anymore as he wasted his talent on this labor that was aging him so fast.

When his father in law passed away, Tomohiro became the head of the family. The increased responsibility made him angry. He did not think his father in law would live such a short life. Part of him was glad, however, for he felt that old man Kanagawa did not like him very much. He wondered if this had anything to do with the way he treated the old man’s daughter, but didn’t all Japanese men expect their wives to be their servants?

“Akiko, this water is not hot enough to sooth my muscles. Put more wood on the fire.” It seemed he had to yell this at his stupid wife every night. She would have to massage his hands so that he could eat but she did it clumsily causing him pain he would never let show. He could not believe that he thought enough of her to inseminate her with one child let alone the two sons and a worthless daughter as they now had. His sons were made to work too, but Tomohiro looked forward to the day when they would do a lot more and, he hoped, spare him some of the burdens of this farming.

Sunday was the only day they did not work in the fields, although there were still many cleaning chores and shopping errands to be done. In the evening, Akiko would always have the best sashimi that the Sacramento region could provide for Tomohiro to eat. The fresh striped bass from the nearby Feather River was especially satisfying to him. He never thanked her for it; never even wondered where she got it or how she knew that he liked it so much. Still, as a result of these dinners, he was always less grouchy on Sunday evenings. It was the one evening that Tomohiro once had any hope to read poetry and to try to write.  He would sit in at the kitchen table as his children played noisily in the next room interfering with his concentration to the point where he would tell Akiko to make them quiet down, but with little effect, as they were very young and not attentive to their mother. Tomohiro would not stoop to admonishing little children and so, in time, he surrendered the one thing in life he most prized and started to nap on Sunday evenings. 

At meals he did not speak to anyone and the children did not speak to him. Tomohiro was disgusted with the fact that he had sent them all to Japanese school, yet the sons spoke little Japanese and none of it well. He, of course, refused to stoop to learn English. He refused to neglect his poetry, but he was always so tired at the end of the day. He felt that once the were out of debt he would have more time to ease his aching body and center himself once again. They were near that point in 1930 when the depression set them back and the work, if anything, increased.

With his sons Tomohiro avoided almost any kind of interaction. “Father,” his elder son, Masaoka, would say in English, “Can you help me with my math?” Tomohiro respected Masa’s studiousness, but his son’s face always looked like he was trying to stifle a yawn and reminded Tomohiro too much of his wife. Besides, his children knew he would never respond to them when they spoke English, so he never answered his son, but used his scowl to indicate his displeasure at the mere request. In fact, it was hard for him not to slap Masa’s flaccid face as punishment for the disrespect.

Sachiko, the 14 year old daughter and eldest child, was the only one who had tried diligently to learn her parent’s language. Perhaps it was because she reminded him of his own mother, Tomohiro would listen to her on occasion, but only if she used Japanese. Sachiko approached her father near the end of her sixth grade year. “Daddy, I have tried to translate this poem by a man named Keats into Japanese. Do you want me to read it to you?” 

“Ah.” said Tomohiro with as much pleasure as he could show. He had heard of Keats. He wondered how it would sound in Japanese.

Sachiko took her father’s utterance and not unpleasant expression as consent, so she began to read to him Keats’ “Endymion” as she had translated it.

“It is too long.” was all Tomohiro said, frowning, when his daughter had finished, but he also gave her a rare smile. He was delighted that he had at least one of his flesh interested in something he valued so greatly, even though the poem was not Japanese, not haiku, it was good. His daughter knew quality. He wondered why he should not be more encouraging of her effort.  She never tried to read him a poem again.

--

Now, at the age of sixty, in Tule Lake, he was free of the burden of farm work, though not the burden of his family. He could try to write poetry despite the stiffness in his fingers. In reading that first haiku, he decided that this was not was one of his best efforts, but he wondered then why he had placed it on top. He read the next poem and it was not even as good as the first, nor were any of the others. Perhaps, he thought, he had been away from poetry for so long that he had lost perspective. He knew he had once been a gifted poet. He dug deeper and found his volume of Basho’s haiku. He read several of them aloud; so elegant in their simplicity. He had always liked one:

Resigned in heart to

Exposure to the weather

The wind blows through me.

It was just as he remembered it. Why had he thought his own poems so wonderful? Were his old colleagues correct in suggesting that he had lacked heart? What did that even mean? What did Basho have in his heart that he, Tomohiro, did not? What was the point of this haiku? Standing he saw Sachiko just entering their shack.

“Sachiko.” He said, “Read your father’s poem.”

“Yes sir.” 

He showed her his poem about April’s bloom. 

“You wrote this?” she said. “I do not hear your voice in it. Maybe it needs more heart.”

“Ah.” said Tomohiro, but he was stricken by her words. She did not understand what her words meant to him. He recalled how often he would tell his students to find their voice and now his own daughter, a college student—or she had been until this cursed internment forced her to withdraw from the University of California—a student who had taken poetry classes did not hear his voice in it. Perhaps she did not know his voice? Or his heart.

That evening after dinner, Tomohiro sat down on his crude cot to write a poem. Nothing came to him. He sought a voice. He sought a subject. He was empty. What was he to do? As he gazed at the bare wood ceiling of their shack, he heard only the lisping of the wind through the walls. His teenaged children were no doubt doing their homework for the internment camp school. It was frustrating to him that he now had the time and the quiet he always thought he had needed to write, but there was nothing he could write about. He would sleep on it. In his sleep, he dreamt that he was writing a haiku as beautiful as anything as had ever read. He was overwhelmed with joy. He awoke in the dark and grabbed a flashlight to find his pen and tablet. 

The next morning was a Sunday and Tomohiro sat on his bed his pen in his hand and a tablet in front of him. The pen did not move. The tablet was blank except for a few drops of water. Just then, Sachiko appeared and asked him in faltering Japanese “Papa, what is the matter?” Trying to disguise the gesture Tomohiro brushed his tears and said, “I think there is too much dust in this hovel.” But he said it as if he was speaking to her for the first time in her life.