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Kikuko took a deep breath and turned to me. “Can I tell him now?”
“Please do.”
“I’m guessing based on the four lunches for the four of us that this meeting isn’t a happenstance?” Malachi asked looking between us. “So what do you need to tell me?”
Kikuko’s black eyes looked back at him. “Why Kosuke and I are the future legends of this town.”
Giving her my full attention I eagerly waited for her to start. After all, when else would I get to see a real master rakugo? Long before theater, films, and even novels, there was rakugo—the art of storytelling. Everyone could tell a story, but very few people could become one. Rakugos could act the part of dozens of characters making you believe that each and every one was a separate individual contained in one being.
Not anyone…but Kikuko Yamauchi.
9. THE COMING LEGEND OF KOSUKE & KIKUKO YAMAUCHI
MALACHI
She sat on her knees and placed a small paper fan in front of her. We quietly waited, Esther and me, watching as she took off her hat, revealing her hair which was sliver and black, and placed it behind herself. When she looked up at us both she smiled, and when Kikuko smiled it spread across her entire face. Her eyes became small, and due to her age, she had wrinkles around her mouth but she wore them proudly.
“Forgive me, it’s been so long since I did this.” She spoke softly as she took a deep breath, picked up her fan and started.
“The girl was six and did not understand the fear around her…” She began squeezing the fan as if she were going to snap it in two. “Why her mother walked quickly, even in the daytime, clenching her hand, and yes her whole hand because the girl was small, the smallest of the Sato children, and as the only girl, her mother held her as if she feared they would never touch again.” She opened her fan and slightly fanned herself. Joyfully adding “A thought, a possibility, a chance that had never once crossed the little girl’s mind because she didn’t know America, even though that was where she was born, that was where she was raised, and where she was. America wasn’t just a place or a country, it was her. The land of the free and home of the brave was her. So she walked freely to her tutor’s home on the corner of Maple and Fifth Bank. She even stayed late some days, and because she was brave she didn’t fear the dark.”
All of sudden she snapped the fan close gripping it with both hands. Her smile dropped and her eyes seemed dull now as her voice became stiff but not emotionless. Instead, it was filled with a mixture of confusion, pain, and sorrow.
“She didn’t fear the dark so the monsters did not come in the dark. They didn’t come with claws, or razor-sharp teeth, or beady red eyes. Because they were not monsters, they were people. And though they wielded no claws, they still held a weapon in their hands—paper. Important paper. The paper told the small girl that she wasn’t American, she was Japanese and because of that she could no longer walk freely, and her father told her to never show the bravery in her heart because it would be mistaken for treason.
“The small girl still did not understand, but followed the rest of her kind, she now had a kind and separated herself from the other kind, the kind that took them away from their house on Fifth Bank to their new home at Camp Bella Vista—called so because there were Italians there too. The Italians told the girl what her parents and siblings didn’t want to tell her; that America was at war, a world war, and they were fighting a particular kind. So they couldn’t be that kind anymore. Camp Bella Vista wasn’t a camp but a prison with a beautiful view.
“The girl cried because she didn’t understand, she was both kinds, she wanted to be good for both kinds, but that was treason, and so every day, out by the fence, she cried even as the snow started to bury her those first weeks in March.”
She hunched over as her body shivered and the more I looked at her, the less she seemed to be there until I blinked and I was looking at the small girl sitting in the snow by a fence sobbing so badly her breathing was nothing more than gasps, and when she managed to get enough air into her lungs, she cried even more.
March 1942 - Camp Bella Vista, Montana.
“How can you be crying?” A young boy towered over her. His black hair was wet with snow and his white ears were slowly turning bright red from the cold.
The girl looked up at him and wiped her face. “I’m sad!”
“I know, but how can you have any tears left?” he asked curiously as he stuck his round face directly in front of hers.
“What?” She pulled her head back and stared at him.
He kept staring at her. “You cried here yesterday, and the day before yesterday, and the day before that. How do you have tears left?”
“I drank the ocean! Leave me alone!” She pushed him away and stood up from her seat of snow as she marched angrily to another part of the barbed-wire fence.
“You have snow on your butt!” he yelled after her.
She jumped as if she’d been kicked and spun around to glare at him while simultaneously putting her hands behind her back. The boy laughed at her.
“Bye, crybaby!”
“I’m not a crybaby!”
“Yes, you are!”
“No, I’m not!”
“Hey!” The both jumped at the sound of the officer’s voice. His black boots crunched the snow under it as he walked forward, his brown rifle resting on the shoulder of his olive brown uniform jacket. The boy ran over to the girl and took her hand.
