After Japan surrendered on August 14, 1945, the process of closing the concentration camps began. The Fukuda family received twenty-five dollars and train tickets to a city in central Arizona. As with all the other evacuees, they would never publicly refer to those years of humiliation when their loyalty and patriotism had been called into question; life without honor was worth little. Shikata ga nai. They were not allowed to return to San Francisco, where they had nothing to go back to anyway. Takao had lost the right to rent the plots he used to cultivate, as well as his house; there was nothing left of his savings or of the money Isaac Belasco had given him when they were evacuated. He had a constant wheezing in his chest, coughed incessantly, and was wracked with back pains. He felt incapable of resuming work in the fields, the only job available to someone in his condition. To judge by his chilly attitude, his family’s precarious position mattered little to him; sadness had frozen into indifference. Although the issei could finally acquire citizenship, not even that could lift Takao out of his despair. For thirty years he had wanted to have the same rights as an American, and now that he had the chance, all he wanted to do was to return to Japan, his vanquished homeland. When Heideko tried to get him to accompany her to register with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, she ended up going on her own, because her husband’s only reply was to curse the United States.
Yet again, Megumi was forced to postpone her decision to study medicine and her desire to get married, but Boyd, who was transferred to Los Angeles, did not forget her for a moment. The laws prohibiting marriage and cohabitation between races had been abolished in most states, but a relationship like theirs was still considered scandalous; neither of them would have dared tell their parents they had been together for more than three years. For Takao Fukuda it would have been a catastrophe; he would never have accepted that his daughter was with a white, especially not one who had patrolled the barbed-wire fences of his Utah prison. He would be forced to repudiate her and thus lose her as well. He had already lost Charles in the war and seen James deported to Japan, from where he did not expect any more news of him. Boyd Anderson’s parents had earned their living with a dairy farm until they were ruined in the thirties and ended up managing a cemetery. They were scrupulously honest, very religious, and tolerant over racial matters, but their son was not going to mention Megumi to them until she had accepted a wedding ring.
Every Monday Boyd began a letter to her, and went on adding paragraphs each day, drawn from The Art of Writing Love Letters, a manual in fashion among soldiers who had come back from the war and had left girlfriends scattered around the world. On Friday, he would post the letter. Every second Saturday, this methodical man set himself the task of telephoning Megumi, although this did not always work out; on Sundays he went to the racetrack to bet. He lacked the real gambler’s irresistible compulsion, and the vagaries of fortune made him nervous and affected his stomach ulcer, but soon he had discovered he was lucky with horses, and used his winnings to supplement the pittance he earned. In the evening he studied mechanics, as his plan was to leave the armed forces and open a garage in Hawaii. He thought that would be the best place to settle, because it had a large Japanese population, which had been spared the indignity of internment even though Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor had taken place there. In his letters, Boyd tried to convince Megumi of the advantages of Hawaii, where they would be able to raise children with less racial hatred, but children were the last thing on her mind. Megumi maintained a slow but tenacious correspondence with a couple of Chinese doctors to discover how she could study Oriental medicine, as the Western kind was denied her. She quickly learned that here too, the facts of being a woman and being of Japanese origin were insurmountable obstacles, just as her mentor Frank Delillo had warned her.
At the age of fourteen, Ichimei started going to secondary school. Since Takao was paralyzed by melancholy and Heideko could speak no more than a few words of English, Megumi had to be her brother’s guardian. On the day she went to enroll him, she thought Ichimei was bound to feel at home, because the building was as ugly and the surroundings as barren as at Topaz. The school principal, Miss Brody, received them. She had spent the war years trying to convince politicians and public opinion that children from Japanese families had just as much right to education as all Americans. She had collected thousands of books to send to the concentration camps. Ichimei had bound several of them, and remembered them perfectly because each one had an inscription by Miss Brody on the title page. He imagined his benefactor as being like the fairy godmother in Cinderella but found himself confronted by a woman built like a tank, with a woodcutter’s arms and the voice of a town crier.
“My brother is behind with his studies. He’s not good at reading or writing, or arithmetic,” an embarrassed Megumi told her.
“What are you good at then, Ichimei?” Miss Brody asked him directly.
“Drawing and planting,” whispered Ichimei, without raising his eyes from the tips of his shoes.