not see through them again until spring. Thick needles of frost had built up inside the walls; Okuma-san held a chair and steadied it while I stood on the seat and broke off the larger brittle needles near the ceiling. Like every other tarpaper shack in camp, ours was not airtight, though Okuma-san had done what he could to seal the cracks. At night, the boards snapped and groaned and the place breathed with a hoary rasp. I’d become used to the winter noises here, in the way I had been familiar with distinctive sounds in my earlier homes: the tide seeping up under the house of my birth on Vancouver Island; the winds gusting through the boards and knotholes in the home of my first family.
There had been recent changes in our camp. Four families had packed up their meagre belongings and departed the first week of December. They left their homemade furniture behind and travelled together, all of them heading for Ontario. Their shacks were now being used for storage of wood and for food that could be kept frozen.
The United Church had helped these families to find work—two of the older girls would be domestics; their parents were to be caretakers and short-order cooks. One man was to have a job working for a laundry, another for an optical company.
Ba and Ji had received a new letter from California. Sachi wrote that half the population, almost five thousand prisoners, had now left Manzanar. Unlike Canada, the United States had decided to permit Japanese Americans to return to the West Coast. Despite this, many were moving east because their homes in the coastal regions were no longer available to them, and their jobs were gone. Sachi’s husband, Tom, had applied for a job in Nebraska, using his engineering background, and that was where they were heading. Although Sachi was expecting the baby in April, she was going to try to get temporary work as a steno, to help with the income after they settled.
Since Christmas, two babies had been born in our camp. Ba had helped with the deliveries, and both babies were girls. The parents had to keep the wood in the oil-drum stoves piled high and burning constantly to make certain that the new babies would be warm enough.
Also, a man had died of pneumonia—one of the elders. I hated to use the outdoor toilets at any time, but when someone died I became worried about the footless ghosts that were said to gather in the woods behind the building, even though I still hadn’t seen one.
As for the war, it wasn’t any easier than before to get news about what was happening either in Europe or in the Pacific. There was still no radio in camp. We did learn, from letters, that many Japanese Canadian men had been recruited to work with the British and Australian armies. And that the Canadian army needed men to teach the Japanese language to soldiers who would be working in Pacific operations.
For a few days, our worries were set aside because New Year’s Day was the biggest celebration of all. It was the custom for families to visit back and forth for two or three days over this period. On New Year’s Eve, I ran back to the house of my first family because I was allowed to bathe in the bathhouse with Hiroshi and Keiko on this special night. We scrubbed extra hard, remembering the warning of the adults: anyone who forgot to bathe before midnight would turn into an owl.
Everyone in camp, including Okuma-san, had been making special foods and there was a festive air, despite the bitter cold. Mother came to visit, and helped with
My gift from Mother was a shirt, one of Hiroshi’s that had been cut down and resewn. She also gave me a new pair of thick knitted socks and a navy blue bow tie. If the tie had been cut down from one that had belonged to First Father, I was never to know.
Okuma-san had something for me when I woke on the first day of 1945. It was a surprise, hidden on a shelf behind his books, and I wondered how I had not known it was there waiting for me. After I dressed on this special day, and put on my bow tie, and wet my hair and parted it with a comb, Okuma-san presented me with a small brown box, about four inches long and two inches high. He took it down from the shelf and held it out in both palms. He placed it in front of me, on the table.
“Lift the cover,” he said. He was smiling.
A half-moon indent on either side of the box permitted me to lift the lid with one hand while holding the bottom section in the other. Tucked inside was cream-coloured paper, tightly rolled and shaped like a cylinder. So neatly did this roll fit the space, the box had to be turned upside down to free it. A thin black ribbon attached to the outer edge had been wrapped around the roll several times to keep it from unravelling.
“This is a scroll, a scroll painting,” said Okuma-san, not without pleasure. He helped me unfurl the crisp, curled paper, and showed me how to use my right hand as an anchor. With my left, I rolled the scroll down the length of the table.
“I think you will want to see what this artist drew a long time ago. Eight hundred years ago. Can you imagine so much time going by? It is a famous piece of art in Japan. And here we are, sitting at a table in this camp in British Columbia, looking at the work.”
I said to myself, “Eight hundred years.” But so much time was a vagueness that was not easily pictured.
Okuma-san went on. “The artist was probably a priest. He might have lived in a monastery. This is not the original, but a copy. I treasure it because it was a gift from my father when he first took me with him to Japan when I was a boy. It was given to me before he boarded the ship to return to Canada. As I have told you, my parents were lost at sea during their voyage back to get me the following year.” He added this so softly, I wondered what else he was remembering from that time. But he continued.
“The artist drew the scroll with brush and ink. What we have here is the colour of charcoal. The paper is darker than it was at one time, because I opened it so many times when I was a child.”
I was anxious to keep unfurling. My right hand was secure as an anchor, but as the scroll opened, it became longer than my left arm could reach. I saw, too, that at the centre, a wooden dowel was attached to the inner edge. The wood for the dowel, said Okuma-san, had come from a cherry tree. He helped me to steady the unravelling scroll so it would not spring closed suddenly or fall to the floor. Once it was open all the way, he held the dowel and rewound the scroll so that we could start at the beginning again. This time, I scrolled left, slowly, by myself, and paid more attention to what the artist had drawn and to what the story was about. The opening images were of grasses and shadowy lines suggestive of hills and tree trunks. Animals were playing in water, perhaps a lake. The water then narrowed and might even have been a rolling river that flowed in the background.
The animals that splashed and played were rabbits and monkeys and frogs. Two monkeys were scratching each other’s back. The rabbits—hares, Okuma-san called them—were diving and swimming around the edges of the scroll. There were hills on either side of the wavy lines that depicted the river. The hills were drawn in simple strokes, soft and grey.
I stared. How was it possible to show a tree blowing in the wind this way, with only a few dark lines and a bit of shading? I watched the animals frolic down the length of the table while Okuma-san helped reroll the parts I had already seen. In this way, the two of us controlled the speed at which the pictures were displayed and, at the same time, kept the scroll from slipping off the edge of the table. A monkey raced in and out of the scene, among the frogs and hares, holding a switch in his hand while he ran. The river faded; a road began. A fox at the edge stood like a human and held his full, bushy tail between his legs. A large frog was shouting at the fox, and another hare suddenly appeared. I continued to unfurl, and saw a large lily pad tied to a frame made from branches. The lily pad was being used as a target for bow-and-arrow practice. Hares and frogs were in separate groups, aiming their arrows and testing their bows as if for a competition.
Leafless trees showed the passage of time and distance; these were deliberately spaced and rugged and blowing helter-skelter. After that, the hares began to dominate the activity. There were long-whiskered hares with short-tufted tails; hares with fans, or with cages they carried suspended from long poles; hares with fishing rods made from branches; hares talking, laughing, running, leading a deer with a long rein, inspecting a tied and captured boar. Badgers and monkeys squatted comically, wearing loose robes. A dead frog was sprawled on its back. There was a chase, a dance, tiny mice peering around the edges of the scene. I felt that I could make up my own story. I could create many stories from the pictures. Trees and shrubs began to leaf and flower as the scroll went on, but a single line of hill was always constant in the background. And then, all the animals in the foreground began to roll on the ground with laughter. Or so it seemed. A sober monkey sat smoking; a frog in the lotus position
