“It is nearly time to harvest,” my father said as I approached. I glanced out at the fields and saw that he was right—the rice plants were as high as our waists. After we harvested, we would dry the stalks on bamboo frames and then sell them to the makers of tatami.
“There is a good crop this year,” I commented. “It should yield a high price.”
“Your brother has become an able farmer,” he said. “I am giving him more and more responsibility with every passing season, and you see he is very successful.”
“My brother is becoming a man. I believe I detected a gray hair this morning when he leaned over his bowl of rice.”
My father smiled at this and then kicked the ground. His knee-high boots were splattered with mud. “Your mother thinks we might be losing you, Junichiro. She says that even when you are here, you are not really here.”
“It is just the opposite, Father,” I said, feeling a tightness in my throat. “Even when I am not here, I will always be here.”
He pulled himself up to his full height, which did not quite equal my own. “So it is true that you are leaving us.” He looked straight ahead as he said this, and I followed his example.
Even though I was taller than my father, I felt like a little boy. “I have been offered a chance to study at a university in America. An American family I met in Karuizawa is willing to pay my passage and university fees.”
My father absorbed this news silently for a moment. “And why do you need to go to America for schooling? What is available to you there that you cannot find here?”
I could think of no way to answer that would make him understand, so I continued staring out at the fields. A crow dipped down among the rows of rice; the scarecrow my brother had devised, wearing our old clothes, did not seem to bother it at all.
My father kicked the ground again and spoke. “I will not stand in your way, Junichiro. But this opportunity is both more and less than you think. It will change you in ways you can’t anticipate now. And if you go, you will never again see your father.”
I glanced at him, and then turned my head away. “Of course I will see you, Father. It is only four years.”
“Four years can be a lifetime. And the world you are about to enter will open up into many others.” He paused and looked out at the hills. “It does not surprise me that you’re going. You, of all my children, are always looking forward, always seeing what’s around the next bend. But you must remember to feel the ground that is right beneath your feet. Live where you are, not only where you think you should be. Otherwise, you will end up living nowhere.”
I opened my mouth to speak, but he raised his hand and bid my silence.
“I wish you luck. You have been a good son.”
I looked at him again, surprised by the emotion in his voice, and saw that there were tears in his eyes. But before I could say anything, he turned away and walked wearily back to the house.
I will never understand how he knew what would happen once I made the trip to America. But he was right about everything. My father was always right. And one week later, when my tearful family accompanied me to the train station in Karuizawa, my father embraced me long and hard, which he hadn’t done since I was a child. We disengaged and I bowed to him deeply, hoping my respect and love were clear. And as I sat and lay and wandered on the ship for two weeks, I kept wondering whether I had made the right choice. Eventually, I would gain success and fame of a level I could not have imagined. But the man I sought to please—as he seemed to know already—was lost to me forever.
CHAPTER FIVE
October 9, 1964
The morning after my meeting with Bellinger, I took the cover off my automobile for the first time in months, coaxed the engine to life, and drove west toward the Fairfax district. I drove slowly, so as not to strain the large old car, passing the Chaplin studio on La Brea and the Pickford-Fairbanks studio on Santa Monica. I turned left at Fairfax and eased the car down into that lovely old neighborhood. All the buildings there—the Spanish-style apartments and English Tudor houses—look much the same as they did when they were built in the ’20s. Once one crosses Melrose, the businesses, markets, and bakeries become solidly Jewish, and the sounds of Hebrew and Yiddish fill the air. Here is the famous Canter’s Deli, filled with elderly Jews in the daytime, and with wildly dressed young people of every religion, I have heard, in the hours after midnight. On the east side of the street is Fairfax High School. And just across from the high school, a theater.
I remembered this theater; I’d even been here once or twice to see second-run films. It was a logical place to choose as a venue for old-time movies. Although much smaller than the lavish theaters where our pictures once played, the details were right, from the curved glass windows and cupped silver change hole of the ticket booth, to the ornate, gold-plated light fixtures, to the old piano that had once been
