“At Mitsutan, let’s see, she was super-friendly with one of the clerks, Yumiko Yokoyama. They talked all the time.”
“Is there a number or address for your grandfather I could have missed?” I didn’t want to let go of the idea of Setsuko’s phantom parent.
“I told you that she never gave me as much as his name. I looked in the F’s for father and O’s for Otsan. Under O there is something strange: an address in Kawasaki City and a long number. It’s too long to be a phone number and the area code would be wrong, anyway.”
She passed the open book to me. This entry, the first on the page, was different from the others, which generally were a name, phone number, and address. Here the address was simply followed by the number 63992 and the code 62–22–3. Didn’t soldiers and sailors have serial numbers? Here was more evidence I could bring to Yokosuka.
“You’re right, it really is weird,” I said. “We can stop in at the address and see who’s there. It will fit in nicely on the way back from Yokosuka.”
“What are you talking about?” She sounded unenthusiastic.
“I need to run down to Yokosuka for a couple of hours today and thought you might want to come. You want to find out who your grandfather is, don’t you?”
“As the bodyguard, I ought to have a word in this,” Richard interjected. “Yakuza are everywhere. Personally, I think Mariko should stay home to redo her nails and watch videos with me.”
“Mariko’s got her dreads on, and it will just be for a little while. I need to talk to a retired sailor in Yokosuka who may remember your grandfather. If she introduces herself, I’m sure he’d be compelled to help.”
“Talk to me straight, not to him!” Mariko complained.
“Okay, Mariko, it’s only an hour away,” I entreated.
“I know,” she said impatiently. “It’s my birth-place. I lived there with Kiki when I was small.”
“You can guide me, then!” I was thrilled.
“I’ll come. Given one condition,” Mariko said.
“Anything,” I said rashly.
“Richard comes with us, too.”
17
At first glance, Yokosuka seemed a fusion of small-city Japan and big-city America. Young men in oversized jeans tripped to a break-dance beat that blared from a boom box held on someone’s shoulders. Billboards advertised corn dogs and American-sized Levi’s jeans. Beyond a traffic circle filled with taxis and Japanese buses lay the sparkling blue bay and ruins of an old military watch tower and broken-down cement wall.
“That part was Imperial Navy ground before Americans came,” Mariko told me. “See the old rail-way treads in the grass? They brought weapons and supplies in that way. Now it’s all a community park. I learned to swim in the pool over there.”
“You must have been adorable!” Richard had flirted with her steadily, making me wonder if it was possible for a leopard to develop stripes.
“So adorable half the mothers wanted me out of the pool.” Mariko chewed her lower lip. “After we got out of the water, they used to warn the girls to dry off in the shade so they wouldn’t get tan like me.”
“You know a lot about Japanese history,” I said to change the subject and make her feel better.
“All I know is my stupid, lousy life!”
We walked about ten minutes, passing a gleaming hotel tower and a giant shopping mall Mariko said were new. At the base entrance, an actual yellow line was drawn on the road, a border between U.S. and Japanese territories. I hadn’t expected to see that, nor the dark gray police bus parked on the sidewalk.
Something was up, I judged from the line of tense-looking officers wearing riot gear. I followed their line of unblinking observation across the street to a cluster of twenty or so middle-aged Japanese people dressed in business suits. They stood silently, holding signs in Japanese and English reading REMEMBER HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI and STOP NUCLEAR WAR FOREVER.
I watched Americans and Japanese enter the base through separate passages, opening wallets to show identification and holding open shopping bags for inspection. Taking a deep breath, I started off for the entrance marked AMERICAN.
A polite Marine who looked barely eighteen sent me into a small office where a different guard sat underneath a sign reading A MARINE ON DUTY HAS NO FRIEND.
Accordingly, I used my warmest voice to ask him the whereabouts of the veterans’ club.
“You’re not a military service member, ma’am?” His voice was startlingly deep for such a young man.
“I’m an American citizen.” I took out my California driver’s license, which he looked at briefly and dismissed.