Requiem

grandparents had been born. He was told stories of his grandfather, who had gone out in a boat every day to catch fish. The grandfather had been a fisherman all his life, but he couldn’t bear to touch the scales and skin of the fish he caught. He could not bear even the smell of the fish.

Here, I interrupted. I knew about fishermen and how they came in and out of the bay in the fishing village where I had been born. I knew about the stink of fish on First Father’s clothes when he used to return to our house after fishing up and down the coast for weeks.

“Well, then, if he couldn’t touch the fish, how did your grandfather get them off his boat?” I asked. “He would have to sell them, wouldn’t he?” I had never heard of such a fisherman.

“I was told that he wore special gloves made from rubber when he handled the fish,” Okuma-san replied. “And when he became ill from the stench, he leaned over the side of his boat and emptied his stomach. But he remained a fisherman because it brought him a good living.”

It wasn’t the sea that claimed the lives of Okuma-san’s grandparents. They had died of a contagious disease, the name of which he did not know. He thought it might have been cholera. They had died within days of each other.

During that trip to Japan, Okuma-san was taken to Osaka by his father, who made the decision to leave him there so that he could attend school for a year. Okuma-san boarded with an older British missionary couple. Okuma-san’s father wanted him to learn about Japan in school, but he also wanted him to continue to speak English.

His father said he would be back in one year to bring him home. He promised that Okuma-san’s mother would accompany him when he returned the following year.

Okuma-san was amazed to live in a place where everyone was Japanese, and he enjoyed walking through the streets without being noticed. It was the first time he had not been surrounded by Caucasian faces, even though he was living with a hakujin couple.

But at the Japanese school he attended, things did not turn out quite so well. His teacher, his Sensei, was ill-mannered and short-tempered. He had dark eyebrows like bushes grown thick to keep outsiders from peering in to see the world of his thoughts. Okuma-san did not like the teacher or the school. He was taunted by other Japanese boys because he was different, and because he had come from a land across the ocean where none of the other boys had been. The Japanese he spoke was unlike that of the others, and this, too, gave him trouble. He had a hard time making friends. The man and woman with whom he boarded, a childless couple by the name of Dowson, were kind to him and treated him like a son. Still, he looked forward to the day his parents would return so that he could leave the school he disliked so much. His father and mother sent him two letters during the year: the first told him how much he was missed; the second gave their approximate arrival date and the name of the freighter on which they would be sailing. His father was going to meet with new business partners, because he had decided to import Japanese dishes, as well as silk and tea.

But the freighter never arrived in Japan. It went down in a storm in the Pacific, and Okuma-san became an orphan before his tenth birthday. The missionaries, Mr. and Mrs. Dowson, tried to get information, and when it was finally confirmed that his parents were dead, they decided to adopt him. It was not difficult to obtain permission, because they were British and he was Canadian, and because he had been born in the Empire. They taught him about England and travelled with him to that country in the same year. After that, his education took place in the great capital of London.

I interrupted again. “I know where London is,” I said. “King George lives there. Keiko showed me on the map at school. We have a picture of the King and Queen on the wall in our class and we sing ‘God Save the King’ every morning.”

“Well, London is the place I lived,” said Okuma-san. “And I sang the same anthem when I was a boy, and I walked past Buckingham Palace, where the King and Queen live, many times. When I was young, two other kings lived there: King Edward and a different King George.”

But life had turned out differently for Okuma-san, because in London, he was still an outsider. He did not look like anyone in the streets or at school. He learned to be quiet and to stay out of trouble. Whenever he could, he stayed indoors and read books in the library so the boys would not taunt him in the schoolyard.

I had never been to such a place, and Okuma-san told me about the library at his London school and the public library not far from the house where he had lived with the Dowsons. He had walked through rooms lined with shelves from ceiling to floor, every shelf stacked with books. More books than he had ever seen.

From the time Okuma-san was first adopted in Japan, and later, after moving to England, Mrs. Dowson recognized his love of music and taught him to play piano in her home. When he was in his early teens, he was sent to an advanced teacher. After the end of the Great War, his adoptive father died. Mrs. Dowson was left with little income, but she sold her house and moved the two of them to a smaller place. Knowing it was Okuma-san’s dream to continue to play piano, she provided him with enough money to travel to Vienna, where he spent the next three years studying music. He took extra classes in the German language at night. When his money ran out, he wrote to Mrs. Dowson to tell her he would have to come back to England. But the letter was returned to him by Mrs. Dowson’s brother, who told him she had recently died. That was when Okuma-san decided to return to North America. Now that he was a young man, he wanted to see if he could make a life for himself in the country of his birth.

I listened to these stories because I had never considered the fact that Okuma-san had once been a boy. Now I was forced to learn that he had lost not one set of parents but two. I did not like the way parents kept dying in his stories, nor did I like to think of him as an orphan, which was what I considered myself—even though my first family lived just along the row of shacks, a short walk from our doorstep. But one thing was different. When Okuma-san was adopted, he had been allowed to keep his Okuma surname, whereas I had not been allowed to keep the surname Oda. Nor did I want to, not anymore. If First Father did not want me, I reasoned, then I did not want his name.

Although I listened carefully to the things that had happened to Okuma-san, I was also waiting to hear a different kind of story. I thought about how he had arrived late at the camp, almost two years after everyone else. I did not ask about his wife, the singer, because he seldom talked about her. I had heard Mother say that the lines in his face were there because of grief over his wife’s death. But too many people died in his stories, and I did not want to hear more about death.

Then I thought of something else.

“Tell me about the bear,” I said suddenly. “How did you catch the bear when you first moved here to the camp?” This had been on my mind for some time, but I had never asked. I wanted to go to school and tell Hiroshi and Keiko that I had finally found out.

“Ah,” said Okuma-san. “It was fortunate for me that the bear cooperated.”

But that was all he would say.

Two wooden blocks clapped together. The clean knock of sound arrested all other noise in the room. An unseen hand wound the camp gramophone and set the music spinning. Unrecognized fathers took their places on the raised wooden platform, and I knew that First Father was among them. At school, Hiroshi had told me that Mother had been sewing a costume during the past several weeks, helping to prepare for the shibai, the winter play.

The storyteller stepped forward slowly, an air of magnificence about him. He made us wait, taking time to settle himself on a stool at the edge of the lantern-lit stage. A black curtain slid away from a painted backdrop and fell into darkness. No longer did I see a rough platform on wooden props. No longer did I see fisherman, farmer, mill hand, carpenter, cannery worker, storekeeper, factory hand. Instead, I saw imposing figures, the whirl of dark robes, makeup and mask, watercolours, banners of calligraphy fluttering before my eyes.

The story unfolded; a brand-new script had been created. All the roles, including women’s, were acted by the men. They had been practising for weeks, ever since the end of harvest. In the schoolhouse, after hours, props had been constructed and painted, and these had been pushed against the walls of the community room and covered over so we could not see what was on the backdrops before it was time for the performance. Even Okuma-san had put on his heavy coat and disappeared on weekends, working in secret alongside other men who were painting and nailing boards and planning the entertainment for this December night.

How we laughed, how we laughed, how our hands flew to our mouths. Between scenes, while backdrops were being changed, two men came out and sat at the front of the stage. Each man wore baggy trousers, hakama, and tabi, split-toe socks. They faced each other and