In the photograph, Kawaki is standing at the edge of the woods, her back to a body of water, which can be seen over her shoulder, articulated by lines of cloud-like waves. The illuminated limbs of a tree hang over the waves. There is a fog in the woods.
The body of water is not real. It is a painting, a backdrop. For presenting Kawaki, as a picture, to her husband, also unreal. Her gaze is steadfast yet distant, with a little fear at the barely legible edge of unknowing. She is holding a small bag with two fingers. She looks like she is going to drop it, on purpose. It will fall very slowly. Then open, like petals in water.
This was the photograph Okamoto showed to Geiichi. Two men, surrounded by flowers, deliberating over the fate of a young woman standing with her back to a fanciful ocean.
On the boat we were mostly virgins.4 I dreamed, at first, of young women flying over aureoles of light, the edges of their bodies illuminated.
On the passenger list of the steamship from Yokohama to Honolulu, Kawaki’s Calling or Occupation was listed as: Wife. She, like her unreal husband Geiichi, was a contract laborer. Picture brides were one of the unintended consequences of the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907, a political compromise between the Japanese government and anti-Japanese white Americans in California. On October 11, 1906, the San Francisco Board of Education called for the segregation of Japanese students in public schools, citing the need to save white children from being affected by association with pupils of the Mongolian race.5 (The Japanese population was relatively young, the number of Japanese students small; Chinese students were already segregated.) The agreement, coordinated by President Theodore Roosevelt and Secretary of State Elihu Root, appeased both sides of the one-sided war, by agreeing to desegregate San Francisco schools while restricting further immigration from Japan in the guise of establishing new criteria for the issuance of passports to Japanese laborers. Three classifications of laborers were to be permitted: relatives of someone already in the United States; those returning to their homes; and laborers assuming control of land already in possession. Yobiyose Jidai: The Period of Summoning Relatives. Women could become relatives of Japanese men in the United States by marrying them. Proxy weddings (shashin kekkon, picture marriages) were performed in Japan. The women were marrying men they had never seen. Except in photographs. They married the photographs first.
The women were given pamphlets by immigration training societies on how to dress and bathe and walk like a western woman, how to sit on a toilet, how to cook food that would not offend their white American neighbors. They were not, due to legislation dating back more than one hundred years, permitted to become American, but they were expected to behave American. They were expected to be both exemplary and invisible.
The proxy weddings in Japan were not recognized in the United States. When the young women arrived, after three weeks at sea, they were married a second time, in mass ceremonies on the docks. A young woman is a bride and the groom doesn’t always belong to the human species.6 The men often looked considerably different from the men in the photographs—older, 10-15 years on average, less attractive; or not the men at all, brothers, friends, cousins. Between 1908 and 1920, over 10,000 Japanese picture brides immigrated to the United States. The unintended consequence of the Gentlemen’s Agreement was the first generation of American-born children of Japanese ancestry, the Japanese Americans. The Ladies’ Agreement followed in 1921, ending the emigration of picture brides. The last passport issued to a picture bride was dated February 29. It was valid through the first of September.
In the first of Akira Kurosawa’s dreams, a young boy stands at the gate of his family’s house and stares into the rain.7 His mother comes up behind him with an umbrella. You can’t go out today, she says. The sun is shining, but it is raining. Foxes hold their weddings on days like this. They hate it if anybody watches.
The boy defies his mother and walks out into the rain. He enters the woods. Trees are tall and feathered. The rain falls in curtains. Out of the mist and rolling fog comes the sound of rattles and drums: a fox wedding procession. There is a bride and a groom and twelve attendants. The bride is wearing the traditional white hood (tsunokakushi, resembling a squid mantle). The procession moves very slowly. The boy watches from behind a tree. The foxes see the boy spying on them. They turn their heads in unison. The boy, seeing them seeing him, runs away.
When he gets home, his mother is standing at the gate. You saw it, didn’t you? You saw something you shouldn’t have. Her voice is lower than before. An angry fox came looking for you. He left this, she says, pulling a tanto knife out of her robe. You are to atone by cutting your belly open. Go quickly and ask for forgiveness. Until they forgive you, I cannot let you back in.
But I don’t know where their home is, the boy says.
Of course you do, his mother says. On days like this, there’s always a rainbow. Their home is beneath the rainbow.
She slides the door closed. The boy, gripping the knife, leaves the house in search of the fox’s home. He walks into a field of richly colored flowers, mountains rising before him.
It was not the canal or the narrow paths or the lightning hanging from thick colorless rope or the torii or the shrine but everything and nothing at once that evoked my great-grandmother. I felt her sleeves, her arms inside her sleeves. Was there a flag somewhere channeling the ocean in incisive, wave-like snaps? Her sleeves breathed a silken coolness. I felt the nostrils of caves and a sudden decrease in temperature, the exhalation from an old, expired earth. But her arms were warm, a warmth that was, within the silken coolness, euphemistic. Her arms were familiar. I had been inside the sleeves before. There was a memory of a light once having illuminated the sleeves. Not just her arms, her whole being.
How can I explain the embrace of a ghost? Arms open and extended, not even arms. The whole body extended and open. But the embrace, arrested, is unconsummated. The two embracing bodies never touch. An irremediable abandonment burns, like a swallowed polestar, down the spine.
I traveled one hundred years and thousands of miles to connect with a place that may or may not have had anything to share with me about my past. I started with Midori and the feet of his grandfather’s corpse. The pilgrimage was to that. But the ghost, in Oko, was me.
I stood with my back to the shrine, looking through the torii gate at the sea, and where I had been feeling at peace, I now felt anxiety. I wanted to get closer to the feeling of my great-grandmother, but I did not know where to go. I chose a narrow path back down the hill and wove my way through its maze.
In the second of Kurosawa’s dreams, a young boy, serving crackers to his sister and her friends on Hinamatsuri (Doll’s Day), sees a young girl in a light pink robe in the hall of his family’s house.8 The boy asks his sister who the girl is, but his sister insists there is nobody there. He slides the door back. The hall is empty but for a potted spray of peach blossoms. Have you got a fever? his sister asks. The boy, agitated, goes into the hall.
At the end of the hall is an open door. Standing in the bamboo outside is the girl in the light pink robe. The moment the boy sees her, the girl turns and runs into the bamboo, accompanied by the sound of a small bell.
He follows the young girl through the bamboo into his family’s peach orchard. The orchard is terraced up the side of a hill of bright green grass, but there are no peach trees, only stumps, and as soon as the boy enters, he is met by a troop of guards. On the terraces above are kings and queens and their retinue of maids and musicians. Fifty-nine figures, the life-sized incarnations of Hinamatsuri.
Listen carefully,
