A Place to Belong Read online

  Mama had looked up and bowed her head and waved her hand, as if to say, “Oh, no, no, no. No!”

  Akira stuck his fingers in his ears. The woman looked exhausted, and she seemed to be alone. Had she crossed the entire ocean by herself with that crying baby?

  “Oh, I’ll take the baby!” Hanako exclaimed. “You sleep!” She gently pushed Akira off her lap.

  The woman looked surprised, caught halfway between saying yes and saying no.

  “I’m good with babies! I took care of my brother when he was little!” Hanako insisted. “I’m a genius with babies!”

  At that the woman smiled and bowed her head, holding out the tiny child to Hanako. Hanako fingered some loose hair back behind her ears and eagerly reached out. The infant shrieked as Hanako took it, but the mother seemed relieved and immediately shut her eyes.

  Hanako leaned in and said, “Hi. You’re cute!” The baby let out a bloodcurdling scream. It seemed to hate Hanako! Its next shriek was louder still, like somebody was killing it! Hanako glanced over, but the mother still had her eyes closed. Then Mama was there, taking the baby. It grabbed desperately at Mama.

  Hanako sat back and looked sheepishly out the window. They were going through a tunnel. Mama was making funny cooing noises, and finally, the baby quieted down. Hanako sneaked a peek. It was sucking peacefully on one of Mama’s fingers.

  Just through the tunnel, the train stopped at another station. Though this was supposed to be a chartered train that the deportees had paid for, a mass of Japanese soldiers in their khaki uniforms and caps pushed on board. One of them—he wasn’t wearing pants!—dove for the empty area next to Akira, but Hanako stood up and shouted, “Acchi e itte!” Meaning “Go away!” Her heart was pounding. Akira sat rail-straight.

  The soldier moved back into the aisle, and Hanako sat down again. Some soldiers wore coats, while some wore only their uniforms. Two had no shirts. They kept coming and coming, filling every space, small men with sunken cheeks, dirty faces, and black eyes that Hanako knew had seen worse things than she ever would, ever. She could tell that just from looking at them. Maybe they had done some of those worse things themselves. Horrible things. A year ago she would have been terrified of these men. And now here they were, small and dirty. She could see there was no need to be scared.

  It was impossible for anyone to move through the crowded aisle to the bathroom, and as the train started going forward again, Hanako saw a man hold a small boy out the window so the boy could pee. From that point on, whenever the train stopped, a grown-up or two would hop out the window to pee and then quickly jump back in. Then one man didn’t jump back in on time, and as the train started, he tried to catch it, his fingers clutching at the window. But the train gained speed, and he was left behind. Hanako stared back at him, astonished. He was . . . gone. He had come across an ocean to get left behind!

  The train chugged along. Out the window were sleepy towns, assortments of dark wooden buildings that seemed untouched by war yet worn and cracked by age. Unpaved roads. Pretty slanted tile roofs. Old wooden signs with kanji, the most complicated of the three ways of writing Japanese. A kanji was basically a word. Each kanji was made up of separate lines, called “strokes,” and a single kanji could have more than thirty strokes—sometimes many more. Someday Hanako would need to memorize thousands of kanji. Right now she knew a hundred. She did not know any with thirty strokes, but she knew the kanji for “military ship,” which had twenty-one. Her teacher had taught the class that one because they would all be boarding a military ship soon. The other complicated kanji Hanako knew also had twenty-one strokes, and it meant “demon.” This was a word that came in handy on the days when you hated white people like Mr. Best—the Tule Lake director—or Mr. Taylor, both of whom sometimes seemed like demons who smiled. But there were Japanese demons too; she knew that.

  Sometimes, as they passed a village, there would be people standing by the tracks, just watching the train pass, as if they had nothing better to do. Beyond the old towns, beautiful mountains rose at the horizon. So far today, she’d seen different types of mountains: dark ones with snowy ridges, green-covered ones, and one unreal mountain with a blue-gray disk-shaped cloud right above it. Maybe that was one of the special, holy mountains of Japan. She tried to remember her school lessons. Japan was a country of mountains, many of them volcanoes. The people called their nation Nippon, which meant “land of the rising sun.” As the train continued, they traveled through many more tunnels dug through the mountains. Hanako felt a little panicked in the longer tunnels. It seemed like they would never end; she had never been in the center of a mountain before. When they’d finally emerged from an especially long one, night had fallen, and there was not a light to be seen outside the train. In the camps there had been constant searchlights lighting the barracks through the cracks in the wood, day and night. So this kind of darkness was something she hadn’t seen in a long time.

  The baby had settled on one of Mama’s shoulders as Mama sang to it. Akira rested against Mama’s other shoulder, listening to the song with a faraway look in his eyes.

  Nenneko, nenneko, nenneko ya!

  Netara o-kaka e tsurete ina!

  Okitara gagama ga totte kama!

  Sleep, sleep, sleep, my child!

  If you sleep, I will go home to fetch your mother!

  If you stay awake, the goblin will catch and bite you!

  The baby seemed quite satisfied with life! Hanako took out a bag of crackers and sucked on one. Then a feeling washed over her, and she looked around to see that every single soldier was watching her. She felt suddenly that she was in a bubble. She took out another cracker, reached through the bubble, and held the cracker out toward the man with no pants who was now sitting in the aisle. His mouth dropped open as he took the katapan and bowed solemnly. “Arigatō, arigatō.”

  “Dōitashimashite,” she replied.

  “Oh, here,” Papa said, noticing. He reached into his coat pocket, drawing out another bag of katapan and handed the crackers out to the men nearest them. The men reached out eagerly, their faces breaking out in smiles as they mumbled, “Arigatō.” It was so odd to feel lucky—lucky to have food, lucky to have a seat. Hanako had not felt this lucky in a very long time.

  Then Papa put an arm around her and kissed the top of her head. “How have your Japanese studies gone?” he asked. “You have a good accent.”

  Hanako felt a flicker of pride at that. “I’ve learned a lot, but I’m not nearly fluent, and I can’t write well,” she admitted. She paused. “It’s been harder than I expected.”

  He nodded. “It’ll come. Your grandparents will help you.”

  She studied the deep slashes, like his skin had hardened and cracked. They were not normal wrinkles—there was no better word for them than “slashes.” Those were new; he hadn’t had them when he left Tule Lake. She asked tentatively, “Was it bad where you were in North Dakota?”

  He seemed to think that over. “Well, as I’ve told you, it was very cold. The German POWs were amazed that we were Americans and yet in the same jail as them. They asked why I was there, and I said for trying to negotiate with the director of Tule Lake.”

  What had happened was that there had been a farm truck accident that injured five inmates and killed one. As a result, workers went on strike. They demanded improved safety and working conditions and compensation for anyone injured on the job. Mr. Best responded by firing everyone and bringing in strikebreakers from other camps. The strikebreakers’ pay was fifteen times higher than the strikers’ had been. One night Hanako had actually knelt with her father and dozens of other strikers while they prayed that their spirits would not be broken. She did not know whom they were praying to, and she didn’t think they knew either. Or maybe they did. The man leading the prayer had spoken more advanced Japanese than she could then understand. But the prayer was mesmerizing; she had felt sure nobody’s spirit could possibly be broken now.

  So then the national director of all the
camps in the country, Mr. Myer, visited Tule Lake. It was kind of amazing that he was there; he personally knew President Roosevelt. In general, Papa said, the people running the camps were “low-level flunkies,” so everybody was curious about Mr. Myer. A negotiating committee met with him and Mr. Best to discuss camp grievances. More than five thousand Tule Lake inmates gathered outside the administrative area to peacefully support the negotiating committee. She and her father were even there for about half an hour.

  Later that night she woke to someone pounding on the door, crying out, “Come! Come! They’re stealing our food!”

  Papa jumped out of bed, and she ran after him—they were going to lose their food! A big crowd had formed. “That’s our food!” men were shouting out. All of a sudden there was a half groan, half roar that moved through the crowd until it reached Hanako. She screamed, though she didn’t know why. Suddenly, people started running. Papa pulled her away, but when they stopped, Hanako looked back to see several inmates being savagely beaten, one with a baseball bat, by guards.

  Papa lifted her up, and she could hear his feet pounding on the ground. He grunted as he ran, maybe from the weight of her. At some point he said breathlessly, “I have to put you down. Can you run?”

  “Yes!” she cried out, and together they ran home—they lived halfway across camp. When they reached their little barrack, she fell into bed and curled up in a ball. Mama and Akira never even woke up.

  The next morning, when Hanako tried to go to school, she saw inmates being teargassed as they walked through the barracks. The camp was filled with tanks, and jeeps mounted with guns. After that, when Hanako and the other kids walked to school each morning, the soldiers in jeeps would stare at them like they were criminals. Once, the military invaded her barrack without knocking, shouting and demanding to know if they were hiding “contraband.” They took one of Mama’s kitchen knives. Mama held on to Akira the whole time, his whole body pressing against hers, his face terrified and astonished. To be honest, on that particular day, Hanako hadn’t felt astonished to see their “home” invaded. She had reached her limit previously, and now this was just more of the same.

  The soldiers had begun running their hands over the floor as if searching for a trapdoor. They looked under the beds, saying, “Are they here?!” They turned on Papa, shouting the same thing. They screamed at Mama, which made Akira wail. Hanako suddenly felt calm but alert—she thought fiercely to herself, Please, Papa, don’t tell them anything.

  “I don’t know who you mean,” Papa said, but Hanako knew he did. They were trying to find the negotiating committee’s main leaders, who were hidden somewhere in the camp. Since nineteen thousand people lived there, it would not be easy to find these men.

  Soon, however, the leaders turned themselves in, so as not to cause harm and distress to the rest of the inmates.

  And then one day they came for Papa as well, because they’d found out that he had met several times with the negotiating committee and had helped come up with the negotiation points. They knew this because there were Nikkei spies among the inmates.

  Papa and more than two hundred other men were imprisoned in the stockade, some for as long as nine months, without a hearing or trial. Among the reasons the army was holding the men: “general troublemaker,” “too well educated for his own good,” and “definitely a leader of the wrong kind.” “Too well educated for his own good” was what Hanako’s father was accused of, and he spent seven months in the stockade. He was not well educated at all—he’d never even finished high school in Japan—but anyway, that was what he was accused of.

  Now, on the train, Hanako noticed that Papa’s head was still tilted over, his back slumped. His eyes were open, though completely dead. She thought about those teenage boys, with their straight spines and heads held high. With their swagger. They had not been broken, not the way Papa seemed like he was, with his slashed cheeks and empty eyes. Then a funny expression passed over his face. It was almost no expression at all. It was like all of a sudden he didn’t even want to go on another moment. Too tired.

  She wasn’t sure what to say. She tried this: “Don’t worry, Papa. We’re going to have the best life in history!” Words such as those had always worked with Akira. But Papa didn’t even seem to have heard her. Then the life came back to his eyes. “Yes, yes,” he said almost desperately. “I hope you will, Hana, you and Aki. Let that be our goal.”

  CHAPTER

  NINE

  Despite the jerking of the train, Hanako must have slept, because when she looked at her mother again, the baby was gone. She turned to see it sleeping now with its own mother, its face completely at peace. That gave Hanako a sudden feeling like all was right with the world! Then she turned to the window—and let out a gasp, then a soft cry. Hiroshima! The City of Seven Rivers. The red sun rising in the sky. Only, the city was almost all rubble! Everywhere she looked was chaos—piles and piles of wood and rock and metal. Quite a few single poles and blackened tree trunks stuck up from the ground, and here and there a skeleton of a building rose forlornly. Hanako gaped—the destruction stretched on and on, only seeming to stop at the mountains rising on the horizon. Almost as if the spirits she knew lived in the mountains of Japan had stopped the chaos from spreading. Was that how it would work? She didn’t know much about bombs, or spirits.

  The destruction, though . . . there was so much of it. It was beyond comprehension—it couldn’t possibly be real! She was starting to feel mindless. Like she wasn’t exactly there. Like her brain was frozen. Papa and Akira were talking, but for some reason, their voices sounded so far away that Hanako couldn’t make out what they were saying. She gave her head a shake. Then she woke up. It seemed her mind adjusted to what she was seeing, and she could think again.

  What she thought was how the city would have been full of people going about their lives before they were burned, flattened, ripped open. There were probably so many ways to die in destruction like this. It was strange, she could almost see it, the moment it happened. But then she had to turn away. Akira was pressed as far away from the window as he could get. He looked terrified, as if a bomb might fall at any time: now, even. Mama still slept.

  Planes and bombs. She knew these were a big part of the war. She imagined Akira growing up, flying a plane and dropping a bomb. What have I done? This is what she imagined he would think in such a moment. Maybe it was the question that many people had asked themselves, Americans and Japanese and Germans and everybody else in the war. Every soldier, every general, every leader. They had done what they thought they had to do, and then they had asked themselves, What have I done?

  She could suddenly grasp that over the past several years, really big things had been happening—huge, enormous things—with many millions of people involved, even at the exact same time that she hid in their little barrack, even on the night she saw that man hit with a baseball bat. So much more had happened, to other people, not just her, her family, and the Nikkei imprisoned. She just felt amazed—smacked in the face, almost—that so much BIG stuff had happened while she sat in her barrack.

  Papa glanced at her, his face pale. He dropped his eyes to the floor and said, “There was a rumor in Bismarck that the US dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Then, on the ship, people told me it was true,” he was saying. “But I didn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it. It didn’t make sense.”

  “Just one bomb?” Akira asked, looking over.

  “Just one. I don’t really understand it. On the ship they said it had to do with an atom. That’s why it’s called an ‘atomic bomb.’ ” Papa looked at Akira. “Do you know what an atom is?”

  “No.”

  “It’s a tiny, tiny, tiny, little thing. It’s so tiny that you can’t see it. That’s what doesn’t make sense.”

  Akira looked at him suspiciously. “Maybe other people can’t see it, but I can see it. I have good eyes.” This was true; his vision was better than 20/20.

  Papa gave a small smile. “It
’s so tiny that even you can’t see it.”

  Akira cocked his head, as though unsure if Papa was joking with him.

  Then Papa said a little desperately, “Make me smile more, Aki, make me.”

  But Akira just kept looking at Papa with his head cocked. “Papa, I can see anything,” he said stubbornly.

  “I don’t know how, but these tiny little things you can’t see can destroy a city,” Papa went on. “Maybe you can grow up, study science, and explain it to me.”

  “I don’t want to grow up,” Akira said flatly, crossing his arms over his chest. “Mama! Mama!”

  Mama sat up abruptly, her eyes flaring open as she saw out the window.

  “Mamaaaaa!”

  Mama pulled Akira toward her, pressing her face into his hair.

  Hanako stared back out the window and wondered what time the bomb had been dropped. She thought of all the people who might have been walking the streets when everything around them exploded. How would that feel? Would they have felt intense heat? Or just a force like a tornado? Both, she decided: You would blow through the air with your hair on fire. She imagined her family, hurtling into the sky with their hair in flames. Stop. She willed herself to stop imagining.

  Hanako didn’t think she would be able to walk out there. Were they going to have to do that?

  “But, Papa?” she said.

  “What is it, Hana?”

  Tears started pouring out of her eyes. She shut them tightly. It felt good to cry, but awful, too. “What if it never ends?” she asked.

  “If what never ends?”

  “Everything. All of this. Everything bad.”

  He brushed the tears from her cheek. “It’s over. The war is over. It looks bad out the window; that’s war. But now it’s over. I haven’t really studied war. But I think when it’s over, there’s a time of rebuilding. I’m certain of it. Everything gets better. All right? It has already ended.”

  “But what if it hasn’t?” What rises falls; what falls rises. That’s what Papa told her once. But what if things hadn’t stopped falling yet?