The Japanese Girl

by Norman Sakai

Back in 1960 when this story takes place, I was Japanese. There’d been pressure since the war for us to say “Japanese-American” but that idea had never grown legs. For one thing, most of us lived in low-income, polyglot neighborhoods like East Los Angeles, where your race — I mean your real race, not some construct — was the most important thing about you. For another, we’d just spent the war in internment camps. The hyphenated term seemed a little pointless after that.

Anyway, I’m Japanese and I was born in Arizona during WW2 and grew up in Southern California in the decades that followed. I’m long retired now but I think about those days often. Here’s a story from 1960 that, for whatever reasons, keeps eating at me.

*

It was a school day in late November and one of the sansei girls was waiting to ambush me outside my Latin class. I could tell it was an ambush by the cagey smile on her face and by her acolytes, two tenth-graders flanking her like caryatides. Camille, better known as Tsubaki: not a very pretty name and not a very pretty girl. But with her hair teased high, her straps showing, and her pencil skirt cinched tight at the knees, she was fashionable, at least at Roosevelt. She took a step forward and pointed a finger at my chest. “Someone’s looking for you.” The tenth-graders covered their mouths, pretending to hide giggles.

“Yeah, okay. You planning to tell me who?”

But I already knew who, though the epithets changed from day to day: “Gumi-chan” or “Little Miss Efficiency” or “the Jap.” Today Tsubaki was less aggressive than usual. “Your girlfriend. She’s waiting by your locker. She says she’s got something to ask you.”

“I don’t have a girlfriend, Tsubaki.”

“Oh no?” Her smirk became an actual smile. More hidden giggles from the younger girls. “Better not tell Gumi-chan that.”

I turned to walk away but Tsubaki’s voice, brash and fake-solicitous, followed me down the hall. “Better watch out, David. That girl’s way older than you. And she likes guys. I mean, really likes guys. You know?”

I kept walking.

*

The sansei girls, try as they might, didn’t really belong in East L.A. None of us did. On your first day in junior high you got pushed up against a wall and some cholo went through your pockets, calling you Charlie Chan, Tojo, a fucking Jap spy. No headlock necessary, no blade, just a very tight fist of pure Aztec rage. Afterwards you went to the toilet and washed your face and you did the same thing the next time it happened. East L.A. was a terrible place.

We Japanese kids — we made up about ten per cent of the student bodies in the poorest parts of L.A. — were mostly the children of small truck farmers from the Central Coast and Central Valley but we’d never lived on farms. We’d been born in camps like Poston, Gila Bend, Manzanar, and Tule Lake. When the camps shut down, our parents declined to return to their old lives. They wanted something better. They came to places like East L.A.

Megumi joined our misery in eleventh grade. By then the toughest kids, the cholos and the outright sociopaths, had dropped out, only to be replaced by generally harmless but still vicious social packs like the sansei girls. Megumi came straight from Tokyo. Her father was climbing the corporate ladder at Sumitomo or Mitsui or some other zaibatsu, doing a tour in America. After that, the two of them would return to Japan and a marriage would be arranged for her by one of her aunts. There was no earthly reason for Megumi to be at Roosevelt instead of some tony private school in Pasadena. The sansei girls locked onto her like drones.

“She’s thick as a truck. All she ever says is sorry this, sorry that. You should see her in P.E. — now that’s fucking sorry.”

“Does she even have clothes that fit? I swear I’ve seen those clunky black shoes at Big 5. Who dresses her anyway, her obachan?”

They didn’t like her accent, her cadet-like posture, her small, round face. They hated the ponytail that sat high and tight on the back of her shiny black head. When she passed them in the halls, they tripped her. They slapped her head and cursed her. By Christmas she resembled a crumpled-up ball of paper.

Why did the sansei girls hate her so much? It’s hard to say. Maybe a little because she never reacted the way they expected: fight or flight. There wasn’t an ounce of either in Megumi. When she got tripped, she gathered her stuff together, straightened her shoulders, and continued down the hall. When she got told off, she lowered her head and looked contrite. I watched this go on for a while, then lost interest. My bowl of compassion, never very large, had gone dry years before. And Megumi was able to bear up, the abuse slowly subsiding as the school year went on, so eventually we pulled into summer without anything terrible happening. When I heard in July she was back in Japan I figured we’d seen the last of her. But come the fall, there she was again, sitting quietly in homeroom, ready for senior year.

*

Twelfth grade was a big improvement over previous years. The proximity of graduation forced us to start acting more like grown-ups. A couple of the girls were getting married in June and a number of the boys had already signed papers at the recruiting offices down on First Street. Everyone else was talking about jobs or college. No one had much time for ragging on little Japanese girls, except for a few die-hards like Tsubaki.

Megumi and I were assigned to the same table in Biology, automatically making us lab partners. I got kidded at first, though not much. The frog dissection turned out to be more difficult than I’d expected, but Megumi was a pro from the start. Patiently she probed and debrided, teased one organ from another. She displayed the chambers of the heart, the lobes of the lungs and liver, the divisions of the gastrointestinal tract, then drew recognizable pictures of them in her notebook. “This urinary bladder, David. On test write ‘urinary bladder,’ not just ‘bladder,’ or maybe you get wrong.”

“I know that.”

“Oh . . . sorry.”

By November Megumi and I were spending a fair amount of time together. Sometimes I’d hear a remark — “Didn’t know you were so interested in Japanese culture, David” — and sometimes I’d see Megumi getting told off by Tsubaki or another of the sansei girls, but mostly we sailed along. Usually we ate our lunches together, then sat in the library until fifth period. I liked being around her. She was a girl and I hadn’t known so many of those before. I liked the way she raised her arms and canted her head when she was redoing the bands on her ponytail. I liked the shape her mouth assumed when she was lifting a glass of water to it. Sometimes she chattered and sometimes she didn’t. She could sit quietly for an hour, then quickly be on the move. To borrow a phrase from a novel I’d read that summer, she knocked me out, she really did.

*

Megumi was standing in front of my locker, looking quickly right and left. When she saw me approaching, she smiled happily. “David, you come to my house today?”

I’d been to her house a couple of times already but never invited her to mine. The idea of my mother finding out a girl had been there (and she would have found out — we had Japanese neighbors) was chilling.

“Sure,” I said, “but I have to go to work first.” I’d had a job since tenth grade. I left school after fifth period and took a bus to the County Hospital, where I shelved books and collated journals in the medical library six days a week.

“We cook dinner. My otosan come home at seven. We eat then.”

“So I’m eating at your house?”

She gave me her sad clown look, the corners of her mouth drawn down, to indicate she was being patient with me.

“Okay,” I said. “I can get there around six.”

Then, just as I was beginning to work the combination to my locker, she stopped me with one of the oddball, vaguely orphic questions she always seemed to have at hand. (The week before, she’d asked me which I thought would win in a fight, a human or a swan.) “You got wisdom tooth, David?”

My tongue began to explore my mouth but stopped. I didn’t really know what a wisdom tooth was. “I don’t think so. Why?”

“Oh, nothing. . . . Just . . . in Japan wisdom tooth much more common now than in Meiji time. I think interesting.” She looked down, her expression thoughtful. “My otosan tell me.”

“Do wisdom teeth mean something special in Japan?”

She looked at me and giggled. “No, David. Just something I wonder. Dumb head.” She gave the referenced object a tap with her knuckles, before quickly turning and walking away.

*

When I arrived at work that afternoon, Miss Green was at the check-out desk reading a novel. Catching sight of me, she looked at her watch and clicked her tongue, but she was only kidding. She was on my side.

I nodded a greeting as I walked past but she stopped me. “James T. Farrell?” she said. “Really?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Come on. I saw the book you were hiding under your jacket on Saturday. Studs Lonigan? Is that really what you’re reading?”

“So what’s wrong with that?”

“Come on, David, you’re a kid. How about something that starts you dreaming a little, like maybe Fitzgerald. Or Evelyn Waugh. Waugh can be a real kick.”

I didn’t say anything. When Miss Green started listing novelists and their qualities, I’d learned it was best not to interrupt. So I dumped my stuff in the utility room behind her desk and found a cart, walking it over to the cases of books and journals waiting to be reshelved.

She watched me for a minute, settling back in her seat. “How old are you, David?”

“Seventeen until April.”

“Seventeen. Well, seventeen’s a good age to be a cynic, I suppose, but let me disabuse you of an idea you seem to have picked up somewhere. Books like Studs Lonigan don’t depict real life any more accurately than something by P.G. Wodehouse. And Wodehouse is a better writer.”

“If you say so, Miss Green.” I didn’t really care what she thought of Farrell — he was new to me, hardly a favorite — but she was getting on my nerves now. Probably it was that “let me disabuse you” remark. Or maybe I just disliked being lectured. Anyway, I noisily dropped some journals onto my cart.

She straightened up. “Hey, take it easy on the JAMAs, David. Some of those’ll need to go out for binding, you know.”

“Sorry.”

For a minute she studied me. When she spoke again, her voice had lost most of its edge. “You know, if I said something you didn’t like, I’m sorry. But you’re gonna have to grow a thicker skin than that when you get to college, especially if you’re ever in a seminar. I’m nothing compared with kids who’ve just discovered they can get themselves listened to. They can be merciless.”

“I know that.”

“You do? . . . Well okay then. Anyway, go ahead and read whatever you like but you need to remember that reading novels should primarily be fun. That’s all I was trying to say. . . Hey, when are you taking your SATs?”

I shrugged. I began steering my cart toward the stacks.

She watched me for a minute, then shook her head and laughed. She picked up the novel she’d been reading when I’d showed up (Muriel Spark). “Well okay then. But don’t start getting too comfortable just yet, David. I have many ideas.”

*

When was I taking the SATs? I wasn’t planning to take them at all. For one thing, none of the public colleges in California required them in those days. For another, I’d already taken the PSATs and the experience wasn’t something I wanted to repeat.

In tenth grade my counselor, a well-known hard-ass we called “the Sarge,” had decided I should take the PSAT/NMSQT, but my mother balked at the fee (“Five dollars? I can buy groceries for a week with ten”). Their stand-off went on for a month, with me caught in the middle. Then one evening the Sarge phoned my house and proceeded to flatter and coax my mother into writing a check. He told her he thought I’d win a scholarship. She was furious for weeks after the results came out. That’s when I went looking for a job.

Then, at the beginning of twelfth grade, after I’d nearly forgotten about the whole thing, those exams resurfaced. Or rather, an admissions officer at a famous eastern university wrote to me. He said he’d reviewed my test scores and transcripts, plus a letter from my counselor, and he was writing to offer me a place in next fall’s freshman class. His university was willing to waive a large portion of the costs, depending on my family’s financial situation. In addition, his office was arranging a summer-long series of special tutorials to help students like me adapt more easily in the fall. “We sincerely want you to be a part of our community,” he wrote. “We feel we can make a positive difference in your life, and that you can make as great an impact on the life of our university.”

I should have been thrilled, right? I should have been walking on air. But that’s not what happened. By the time I finished reading that letter, my insides were twisting like a fish on a hook. I took the letter out to our incinerator and burned it. That helped for about a week.

*

At eight-thirty that night I was sitting in the parlor of Megumi’s old Victorian house in Boyle Heights. Her father had already come and gone. Shortly after dinner (beef yakisoba with fresh napa and onions from Megumi’s garden), he’d pulled on his jacket and headed for J-Town, just a couple miles west.

When we’d finished cleaning up, Megumi and I put our legs under the kotatsu in the parlor. It was by far the warmest spot in the room. Despite the November chill a big picture window across the room was open. I shivered.

“She like you,” Megumi was saying about Tsubaki, “maybe for long time.”

“Yeah, but I don’t like her. She’s a pain. And she’s been mean to you.”

Megumi giggled. “Not so bad. Very common at Japanese school. Tsubaki unhappy girl, get mean sometimes. . . You know she like you?”

“Yeah, I guess. But she’s got a face like a frying pan.”

“Hmm. Smart girl though. Different place, she do better.”

“Megumi, let’s forget about Tsubaki, okay?”

“Okay.” She lifted her arms and redid the bands on her ponytail. “So what you want to do, David?”

To one side of the kotatsu the companions of Megumi’s usual evenings were neatly laid out — a Japanese-English dictionary, textbooks I recognized from school, notebook paper carefully filled with English cursive. Also, sheets of fine stationary with characters in kanji and hiragana arranged in lines like poetry. I shivered again. Megumi stared at me, frankly curious.

So I told her about the eastern school. And unusual for me then, I told her everything, all the facts, without a lot of spin: the offer of aid, the summer-long tutorials, the panic that flooded my belly whenever another letter arrived. (And, god knows, there’d been plenty of mail: forms and questionnaires to be filled out and returned, catalogues, handbooks, announcements. I’d even received a letter from a woman whose family would be hosting me during the tutorial sessions beginning in July. She asked me what church I attended, which foods I couldn’t eat. I never answered her. I burned everything.)

“It’s terrifying, Megumi. All I can think about when I’m in class is the Sarge calling me into his office to find out what the hell’s going on. Then he’ll phone my mother and yell at her and after that it’ll be a circus. Her friends will come buzzing around with their kids, hoping something will rub off. My relatives will start calling. My uncle who’s a doctor up in Berkeley will probably offer to pay something. He’s always talking about helping me with college. I doubt my father would allow that but by then it won’t make any difference. I’ll have to go.”

Megumi looked at me. “Why you not happy, David? Very famous school.”

Through the open window I could hear laughter out on S. Boyle. I thought of the small bodega down the street and the old guys who gathered out front every afternoon and evening.

I said with sudden conviction, “Because I’m not a dreamer, Megumi. I don’t think some famous man is going to take a great liking to me. Or that some terrific girl will invite me home for Christmas. That stuff’s never gonna happen. What’ll happen is, I’ll sit in the library for four years and study like a mole, wasting all my parents’ savings and making no real difference to myself or anyone else, just so some white guys in fancy ties can feel good about what they’re doing. A boy from one of those camps and some slum out in Los Angeles — very shy but, really, he’s doing quite nicely. . . Can you see it, Megumi? I’m just so . . . I don’t know . . . so fucking puny.”

Megumi had been sitting in half-profile, her head outlined by an angle of light from the kitchen. Now, though her hands were already beginning to tremble, she leaned forward and touched my face. Anxiously she searched my eyes. We stayed like that for a long half-minute, until she abruptly drew back and dug her hands into her lap (“Sorry, I embarrass us”). Trembling badly now, she lowered her head and seemed to shake it.

I didn’t say anything. At first I had no idea what was going on — but then I sort of did. And I realized something else too, something Tsubaki must have known all along. Megumi and I weren’t ready to do much of anything yet.

So we sat there for what seemed like an age. I watched the floor beneath the open window fill with moonlight. It made me think of boldness. I’d never been bold. Finally I said, “I’m feeling better now, Megumi. Thank you.”

And I suppose I got it right, or as right as I could in the circumstances. After a couple of beats she looked at me and nodded, a short, quick movement that somehow expressed both disappointment and relief. She even managed a hesitant smile, oddly gracious.

Mercifully for both of us, the phone chose that moment to ring. Megumi got up and hurried to answer it. After listening for a minute (“Hi . . . hi . . . ,” bowing to the thing), she giggled and began talking in rapid Japanese. I remained at the kotatsu.

A sharp breeze kicked up outside. In the window’s old-fashioned planter, small pink flowers gone white in the moonlight swelled and twisted like maenads. For several minutes I sat and listened to Megumi conversing happily in a language I’d refused to use since I entered kindergarten. Finally, still a little punchy, I climbed to my feet and signaled good-night to her and went home.

*

I’ve been a reader long enough to remember when novels and stories had codas, and to like them for it, so here’s mine.

After Christmas break the eastern school’s admissions office stopped sending me mail and never started up again. And the Sarge never called me into his office, never even gave me a questioning look when we passed in the halls, so eventually I realized he knew a lot less about what was going on than I’d imagined. Anyway, by February the eastern school was no longer one of my problems.

And Megumi. After that night in November I never took my worries to her again. They found their places among the other things we didn’t talk about, like the war, her mother, the camps, and our respective futures (“Future not happen yet, David”). And in early June, the week after we graduated from Roosevelt, I saw her off on a flight from LAX to San Francisco. From there she was flying to Honolulu, then on to Tokyo, via a brand new JAL DC-8. Her father was sitting nearby reading a newspaper, so we didn’t get emotional the way some of the people around us were doing. We just grinned like jack-o-lanterns and waved good-bye with both hands, like Japanese schoolchildren.

And finally Tsubaki. Life plays many games. About a year after graduation I ran into her at Bullocks Pasadena where she was working as a salesgirl. By then she was wearing her hair in a style that flattered her face more, made it seem smaller. Her clothes were neat and preppy. Her tag read “Sue.” By the end of summer we were together nearly every day. (“Please don’t, David.” “What?” A slow pause, then a reluctant nod of her silky black head.) Tsubaki turned out to be a terrific girl.

 

Norman Sakai is a retired physician presently living in Northern Arizona. He is married and has three children, one of whom sadly died last year.