She has always prided herself on not showing pity or feeling sorrow for the patients, but with Mr. Shikagawa, she can’t help feeling, every afternoon when she sees this, a range of emotions from amazement to pride to sorrow.
“There isn’t that much to do today, only the one tape,” he says. “Today was one of those mostly thinking days. Some people call them ‘wasting time’ days, but they are necessary, maybe the most necessary.”
“You don’t have to explain all that, Mr. Shikagawa. I remember my mother telling me that I was lazy, that all I did was some diving in the morning. She didn’t understand. She never knew what it took to be a diver, as I don’t understand things about writing.”
She goes over to the small closet and takes out the typewriter, sets it on the table next to the cassette player. After wiping the saliva from the player, she presses the rewind button and listens to it hum, thinking how incredible these machines are, how a person’s voice can be on this thin tape. Just thinking about how it is possible makes her anxious.
She presses the play button. There are some noises, which she knows are Mr. Shikagawa moving around, getting settled. She has become aware of the different noises when he is changing his sitting position, taking a drink. When he is taking a longer pause or a rest, she hears him moving closer to the machine, hears his breath as he searches with his tongue for the button to shut off the cassette player. Those are abrupt. Today, there is only one side of a sixty-minute tape. Some days there are two tapes, but, as he said, today has been a thinking day.
The first words she hears are
clang, bang, din, boom,
chime, peal, toll.
She types them, then rewinds the tape a little to make sure she has transcribed them correctly. There is about a minute of silence, then the words
reverberate
and
gong
. He repeats the word
reverberate,
then again,
reverberate.
“Please type the words
echo
and
duplicate.
”
She adds both of them to the list, knowing that this is how he searches for the right word, that the tanka is for the most part written, that he is playing with the combination of syllables and sounds and emotion that all fit tightly, perfectly into the thirty-one syllable poem, the five-sevenfive-seven-seven line pattern. There is another group of words:
parabolic, elliptical, half-moon, bowl, umbrella
. She repeats this pattern of turning on and off the cassette player, typing, rewinding, repeats it until she comes to her name being spoken and she knows that she has reached the end of today’s work.
“Come in, Miss Fuji.”
“Good afternoon, Mr. Shikagawa.”
“I told you that you don’t have to knock.”
“I know that you tell me that every day, but I will continue to knock.”
“You’re a stubborn person, Miss Fuji.”
“As are you.”
And then she hears the sound of Mr. Shikagawa sliding across the floor and the abrupt click as he shuts off the cassette player.
As the tape is rewinding, Mr. Shikagawa asks her to please read the words she has typed.
“Clang, bang, din, boom, chime, peal, toll, reverberate, gong,
echo, duplicate.”
“Cross out all of them except for
peal, reverberate, echo,
duplicate.
”
She reads over the list a couple of times, and by the time she is finished, she has crossed out well over half of the words. He seems satisfied, slaps the base of his palms together several times. Now she knows for certain that he is happy with his day.
“That’s wonderful, Miss Fuji. Thank you for your help.”
“You’re welcome. Is there anything else you need?”
“No thank you. I’m going to rest for a while before dinner. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Okay, Mr. Shikagawa.”
She stands up and places the typewriter in the closet, moves the small table with the cassette player into the far corner, where Mr. Shikagawa will not fall over them. She writes the date on the tape, places it in the plastic box, and puts it on the far right side of the shelf, which is packed with more than a year’s worth of cassettes, more than a year’s worth of words.
ARTIFACT Number 1454
A letter
She holds the letter, which was sitting on the table next to Mr. Shikagawa’s cassette player.
“It’s from Tokyo; the seal of the Imperial Palace is on the back.”
“I sent them a poem of mine for the New Year’s tanka contest.”
“Should I open it?”
“Unless it’s in braille, I can’t do much with it.”
She opens it carefully, preserving the seal. The letter is brief. She looks at it again.
“Are you going to read it to me?”
“Yes, I’m sorry.”
She isn’t sure where to begin—with the positive or the negative.
“Tell me the worst part first; then I’ll know what follows will be no worse.”
“It says that you can’t go to the Imperial Palace because of your disease. You would be dependent on the help of someone and you can’t present yourself that way in front of the Emperor.”
“So that means that the good part is that they selected my poem.”
“Yes, they did.”
Mr. Shikagawa smacks his palms together.
“Aren’t you angry?”
“Why should I be?”
“For refusing you the chance to go.”
“My work has been selected; it’s been recognized. That’s what matters, Miss Fuji. My words have meant something to somebody.”
“But they should be shared with the rest of the country.”
“That isn’t necessary. We know.”
She can’t let
it go. Most of the night, she sits working on a letter, wishing that Mr.
Yamai were here now or Miss Min, how they were so comfortable with words. They would have the letter done in no time.
It is three nights before she finishes and another few days before she gathers the courage to send it off. She never expects a response and she doesn’t get one. So she writes another one, like the first, and this time she doesn’t wait a week to send it off, but does so that same day. And she sends off a letter each week, so that by the end of the month, she has sent five. Silence.
She is propping up the tomato plants in the gardens near the administration building when she sees him walk out. Before she has time to talk herself out of it, she has approached him, her work gloves removed, and speaks.
“Hello, I am a patient here. May I have a moment of your time?”
“Sure. I’m Mr. Takamura; I represent the Eleventh District.” He takes out a business card from his pocket and presents it to her.
She tells him of the letters she has sent off and what happened to Mr. Shikagawa, all the time hoping that no one in the offices will see her speaking to him. He listens, nods a few times, inhales deeply.
“I’m not so sure I can do anything about that.”
“That’s what I thought. But I thought that if this were corrected, or at least checked into, there would be many of us over here who would think very favorably of you. And now, of course, we have once again been given the right to vote.”
He looks at her a second, then quickly to the Inland Sea behind him. When he turns around and asks her for her name, she knows that she has struck that seam of opportunity in him.
Four days later, she receives two registered letters. The first is from the Imperial Palace, written by the Emperor’s assistant, who is in charge of the New Year’s tanka contest. He apologizes profusely, saying they have received none of her letters and that there must have been some sort of miscommunication about Mr. Shikagawa’s poem. The letter says that since Mr. Shikagawa is disabled and cannot present himself properly in front of the Emperor, he cannot be invited to the Imperial Palace, but someone would be most welcome to come and read his poem for him.
The second registered letter is a note.
“I’m glad that I could be of some help to all of you.”
The note is signed “Representative Takamura.”
ARTIFACT Number 3002
A speakerphone
Mr. Shikagawa tells her the numbers and she presses each of the ten of them. She pushes the speaker button, places the phone back on the hook, and they listen to the rings. One. Two. Halfway through the third, a soft “Hello” comes out of the speaker.
“Hello, Kiku?” Mr. Shikagawa responds, fidgeting; his nervousness has him moving all over the floor.
“Hello? Who is this?”
“Masahiro,” he says. This is the first time she’s ever heard his real name. He has always refused to tell her what his name was prior to coming here. And now she hears it, but she isn’t sure that the person on the other end can understand him; she remembers how it was also difficult for her and how she had to concentrate on what he was saying to understand, to follow the conversation.
Without thinking, she moves close to the speakerphone and talks.
“Kiku, this is Miss Fuji from Nagashima Leprosarium. Your brother is calling to tell you that his poem has been chosen to be read at the Imperial Palace on New Year’s.”
Then a loud drone comes out of the speaker, and she looks around, wondering what she did, how she disconnected the phone. She sees Mr. Shikagawa move back away from the phone, sliding his body across the floor, bumping into a table, which he doesn’t feel. The phone drones, and she tries to find the button to shut it off. After pressing two or three of them, she finds the correct one and the droning stops.
ARTIFACT Number 1132
A photo of the building of the bridge
Nearly every day, they go, and there is talk of it. She listens, once in a while asking a question to feign interest, but she never goes. And for the next two and a half years, as the six-hundred-foot bridge connecting Nagashima to the mainland is being built, she only knows of it but never sees it. Doesn’t ever see it because the only place on the island from where one can see the bridge is the rocky piece of shore that juts out into the channel, where she used to go and wave to the children.
She doesn’t ever remember Mr. Shirayama being so passionate, so excited about something.
“Don’t you see, Miss Fuji? This is a sign that we are gaining some acceptance, some understanding from the outside.”
“You said that when the Blue Bird Band went and played their concerts. That was how long ago? But what does it matter to you? You don’t ever want to go out there.”
“It’s a victory; they are all small victories. That’s what’s important, Miss Fuji.”
“We are all getting much too old for small victories. Besides, a bridge isn’t going to change people’s minds about us. With or without this bridge, it is going to be the same.”
“A small step forward is better than one back.”
Until this autumn day, he has remained positive about the bridge and what it could mean. But when she sees him, she knows something has pierced his spirit.
“What happened, Mr. Shirayama?”
His eyes are on the Inland Sea and she knows where he is looking. The pathway to Key of the Hand Island is open and they cross it, but they don’t climb the steps to where the small shrine and the urns of the unborn are, but simply sit on the steps under the giant
torii
gate, and this is where he tells her.
“Officials from the Ministry of Health have decided to put up a barrier across the road on our side of the bridge. They will begin construction on it this week. None of this was in the original plans. Everything was going so well, Miss Fuji.”
“Don’t let them do it.”
“They have already decided. The official said that the barrier is there to help protect the patients. He said that the island is a place where patients get treatment and that people and cars have no business here and should not be let in. But isn’t that what the bridge is all about, Miss Fuji, to bring us together, for a free exchange with society? A barrier is no better than the channel.
Why are they even building the bridge? Is it only for show?”
She wants to shout at him. But she sits there and stares at the pathway they have crossed and how it leads to Nagashima and the dirt road that she has walked on thousands and thousands of times, and she knows that she will walk it thousands of times more in the coming years.
“Don’t let them do it, Mr. Shirayama.”
The western end of Nagashima is a steep seventy-foot climb through the pines and bamboo and then another gradual half mile up through a thick forest of trees. Several weeks before they begin cutting a road through this area, Mr. Shirayama and half a dozen other patients make their way up through here and they arrive at the bridge construction site wet and filthy.
Their flashlights send beams bouncing off the land and to the channel waters below. Across the span, on the Mushiage side of the bridge, flashing red warning lights blink on and off. The silhouette of the giant crane looms over them. The gray arch-shaped bridge has been set in place a few weeks ago; below it, except for the large beams holding the arch in place, is nothing but the channel forty feet down.
There is the barrier, similar to one of those put up at a railroad crossing, a large pole that can be raised and lowered to allow cars through. Already it has been embedded in cement.
“I’m not sure how we are going to remove this thing. It is bigger than I thought,” Mr. Shirayama says, bracing the flashlight under his arm, holding it on the barrier.
They stand without speaking.
“Well, we should get a little rest before the workers come,” Mr. Shirayama says.
“Rest?”
“Yes. If we can’t remove it, then they will have to remove us from it.” Mr. Shirayama takes the roll of rope from around his shoulder, sets it on the ground, and sits atop it, bracing his back against one of the posts of the barrier. The others do the same, and they remain that way. Several have shut their eyes and are sleeping for the next couple of hours, and the first light of day seeps out of the Inland Sea.
At first, When he isn’t in his room, she thinks that he is maybe over at Key of the Hand Island. But when she checks the tide schedule and sees that low tide isn’t until later that evening, she goes down to his work shed and checks. He isn’t there; the place is all organized, as if he hasn’t been there today, but he has always kept it that way. She goes over a very short list of places that Mr. Shirayama might be at two o’clock in the afternoon. The only other places on that list are the gardens, where she is almost certain he isn’t, because he told her that they picked everything last week, and the Lighthouse, which—since the Blue Bird Band stopped playing several years ago—has been turned into a storage facility for discarded things.