Brazil-Maru Read online

  Also by Karen Tei Yamashita

  Anime Wong

  Circle K Cycles

  I Hotel

  Letters to Memory

  Through the Arc of the Rain Forest

  Tropic of Orange

  Copyright © 1992, 2017 by Karen Tei Yamashita

  Introduction © 2017 by Susan Straight

  Cover design by Carlos Esparza

  Cover photograph © casadaphoto/Shutterstock.com

  Book design by Bookmobile

  First edition published by Coffee House Press in 1992

  Coffee House Press books are available to the trade through our primary distributor, Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, cbsd.com or (800) 283-3572. For personal orders, catalogs, or other information, write to [email protected].

  Coffee House Press is a nonprofit literary publishing house. Support from private foundations, corporate giving programs, government programs, and generous individuals helps make the publication of our books possible. We gratefully acknowledge their support in detail in the back of this book.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Yamashita, Karen Tei, 1951- author.

  Title: Brazil-Maru / Karen Tei Yamashita.

  Description: Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016057044 | ISBN 9781566895033 (eBook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Japanese—Brazil—Fiction. | CYAC: Historical fiction

  Classification: LCC PS3575.A44 B7 2017 | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016057044

  242322212019181712345678

  Remembering my father

  Contents

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INTRODUCTION BY SUSAN STRAIGHT

  PART I:Emile

  CHAPTER 1:Brazil-Maru

  CHAPTER 2:Esperança

  CHAPTER 3:Baseball

  CHAPTER 4:Haru

  CHAPTER 5:Kimi

  CHAPTER 6:On the Land

  CHAPTER 7:New World

  PART II:Haru

  CHAPTER 8:Compost

  CHAPTER 9:War

  CHAPTER 10:Kachigumi

  PART III:Kantaro

  CHAPTER 11:Natsuko

  CHAPTER 12:Piano

  CHAPTER 13:Bank

  CHAPTER 14:Santos

  CHAPTER 15:Twilight

  PART IV:Genji

  CHAPTER 16:The Silk Barn

  CHAPTER 17:Shiratori

  CHAPTER 18:New Blood

  CHAPTER 19:Liberdade

  CHAPTER 20:Dance

  CHAPTER 21:The Dream

  EPILOGUE:Guilherme

  Acknowledgments

  Many thanks to the following people and organizations in Brazil and the United States without whose help and support this work would not have been possible:

  Thomas J. Watson Foundation

  Shinsei-no-jo

  Yuba-no-jo

  Raymond and Ryoko Narusawa & family

  The Takiy family

  The Fujii family

  The Marques family

  Shojiro Matsubayashi

  The Lopes de Oliveira family

  The Escolano family

  The Sakai family

  The Yamashita family

  From 1975 to 1977, I interviewed numerous people within and connected to the Japanese-Brazilian community in the states of São Paulo and Paraná, in particular, the communities of Aliança, Bastos, Guaraçaí, Pereira Barreto, and São Paulo. These people are too numerous to name. I was everywhere received with kindness and the warm hospitality for which the Brazilian people are well known. I am greatly indebted to their support and friendship and to the wonderful stories shared by so many kind people.

  Special thanks also to Vicki Abe, David Duer, Ted Hopes, Allan Kornblum, Casey Krache, Mako, Mary Nakashima, Ryan Shiotani, Michael Wiegers, and Wakako Yamauchi for reading and critiquing early versions of the manuscript.

  Introduction

  BY SUSAN STRAIGHT

  For some novelists, the gaze turns inward, and the imagined world is a closely observed recitation of the life of one human, and perhaps a few who are in attendance or in love. But I have always loved the great social novels whose writers turn their gaze upon the panorama of teeming life in human places, where even when the individual voices are those woven ropes pulling readers through the landscape, the imagined world is a society whose inhabitants are navigating survival and family and desire and love. These characters are swerving and lingering, arriving and evolving, dying and still telling their stories. These are the lives etched through Karen Tei Yamashita’s fine novel Brazil-Maru.

  In 1990, I visited Minneapolis as a newly published novelist with Milkweed Editions, but I also made a pilgrimage to Coffee House Press to meet Allan Kornblum, whose devotion to fiction, poetry, memoir, and fine letterpress editions was legendary. In my home, I have three framed letterpress quotations from Kornblum and first editions of Karen Tei Yamashita’s three early novels. Twenty-five years ago, in 1992, Karen Tei Yamashita, Dorothy Allison, and I all published ambitious social novels, and my admiration for these two women led us to become great friends who love to talk about narrative and landscape and social class and history, but always grounded in the singular narrative voices we know so well. Allison’s novel, Bastard Out of Carolina, and my novel, I Been in Sorrow’s Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots, were both set in South Carolina and elsewhere. But I remember reading Brazil-Maru that year, marveling at the clarity and depth of the landscapes of forest and field, plantation and river, near São Paulo, Brazil.

  Her novel is an immigrant saga, but of course not what a reader might expect because Yamashita always writes the unexpected. That is her power, for in the lush details are also her signatures: delicious irony, comic timing, intricate history, and intimate betrayals. It is love, power, ego, sex, biology, and betrayal that change history.

  In 1925, three families leave Kobe, Japan, on the ship Brazil-maru, bound for São Paulo and the surrounding undeveloped countryside around the city. Among hundreds of Japanese passengers who would be contract laborers for coffee plantations, nine-year-old Ichiro, the novel’s first narrator, recalls that the three families headed for Esperança were different: they were evangelical Christians headed for acreage they would own, their intent to found a new civilization. A utopian community.

  Ichiro watches on the boat as an ambitious and boastful young man, Kantaro Uno, dominates the conversation, having convinced three generations of his own family to make the journey. Kantaro Uno becomes the leader of Esperança for decades, through the combination of charisma, physical dominance, intellectual manipulation, and pure pride such men bring to the task of bending hundreds to labor and will. Yamashita’s narrative, though, is full of humor and the sly details of human assemblage and food and sex, and the absurd and tender scenes of how the women, of course, craft survival for all those generations of people, deposited by idealism in an alien world.

  “Perhaps a map would have been useless. We were somewhere slightly north of the Tropic of Capricorn in the middle of a country that covered half the South America continent. . . . Further to the west was the great forest of the Mato Grosso and Bolivia beyond, and to the north were the mining towns of Minas Gerais and beyond that, the rain forests of the Amazon. . . . To the south, the flat grasslands extended to Argentina and Uruguay. . . . We were a small, inconsequential dot on a virtually unmapped area. We were the tiny seed of a small beginning, one story among many.”

  The people of Esperança build homes of red mud, burn forests for cultivation, carve out fields for corn, and construct wooden barns for silkworms and incubators for their own special breed of chickens, and the women try to keep everyone alive. In the decades to come, at the behest of Kantaro
Uno, the community holds its residents separate from Brazilian culture: the children are schooled on Esperança, never learning Portuguese, and keep alive “true Japanese spirit” in their isolation. But of course, there is sex—and arguments, babies and elders, laundry and baseball, and more sex: sex as currency, exploration, and defiance.

  Haru takes the second part of the narrative in the novel, she who married Kantaro, who was beloved by other men but becomes the anchor of the community with her tenacious instincts for survival, her kindness and observance of the growing population of Esperança, even as Kantaro begins to make mistakes in leadership. Haru takes the story through Pearl Harbor, the war between the United States and Japan, and the fallout of that war on the Japanese residents of Brazil. Money seizures, arrests, persecution, and murder happen to people of Japanese descent, but Esperança is largely protected by its Brazilian neighbors. Inside the utopia, though, hard times and infighting cause the destruction of trust among some of the people Haru loves, and her narrative is by turns tender and then fierce, lyrical in the explanation of further betrayal and death. The war ends, but different factions of Japanese in Brazil enter a new and murderous battle of loyalty, and that battle comes even to Esperança.

  But Haru has daily battles, even as she remembers Kantaro’s vision of the land as a blessing: “When I think about it, my life has passed me by as it has any other immigrant, living day to day—cooking, washing, feeding, sewing, planting, weeding. I have tried to think like Kantaro that I have been a part of something special, but every day, people want to eat at the same hour. Children need their diapers changed. Old people must take their medicine. The dirt comes in with muddy feet.”

  That red earth which was Kantaro’s abiding passion, linked to idealism and power, fades from his love; Haru fades for him as well, her hands having become immersed in that dirt.

  When Kantaro resumes the story, after the war’s end, he could be content to relate his grand success: he is the leader of three hundred people farming hundreds of acres, growing rice and corn and sugarcane, raising poultry, and following his directives for life. He and Haru have five children. But of course, there comes a woman. An urbane, attractive younger woman in São Paulo, where Kantaro mingles with restaurateurs and journalists. Kantaro uses his money to buy her a piano, clothes, and books and gifts, and then a house for all he has given her. “My altruism was boundless; I was saving a human being, creating a new woman.” It is an old story. But Yamashita makes it as tragic and heartless as ever.

  There are now his city house and his country house. Haru tends to hundreds on Esperança, while Natsuko and Akiko, another young woman, tend only to Kantaro. This is satisfyingly utopian, for him. Eventually, he spends all the money generated by his dream commune on whatever he as a single human desires: on plane fare to Rio and Buenos Aires, on private drivers and more pianos, on strangers at a restaurant. “Money was not important; it was only a means to an end. Dreams were had to be realized. And the rice always belonged to Esperança.”

  It is a betrayal of his own blood.

  The final narrator is Genji, nephew of Kantaro Uno, and his observant, poetic, painterly, and often hilarious voice relates the downfall of Esperança. Sometimes Joycean, sometimes almost like Richard Wright, his boyhood and then adolescence and finally manhood mirror the community in the Brazilian heart. Genji, born in 1940 on Esperança, is among the one hundred followers who leave the original land to live in an old barn meant to house silkworms, as Haru powers her way into the place, intent on the survival of her people, not for Kantaro, but for her own strength as a woman. Genji watches Haru and Kantaro, and all the other hundreds, as a spy, an artist, an outsider and insider.

  They begin again. Weeding. “I thought that if weeds were stronger, they should win out, and we should find a way to eat them,” Genji says as a child. “We seemed to be eating everything else: sweet potato leaves, pumpkin flowers, mulberry tea.”

  Genji, obsessed with watching couples make love, with his own isolation and obsession with image and color and paint, is the observer of Kantaro’s decline and the incremental decline of the idea of utopian settlement. Kantaro’s need for control not only destroys his own family and splinters the community, but also isolates the children so that they have never been to Brazilian high school, let alone college, and cannot speak to those in the cities. Genji and some others leave for São Paulo but cannot escape their pasts. Even as Genji lives in the city with Guilherme, the final generation of Esperança, raised in the city as Brazilian, he cannot abandon Kantaro’s new idealistic vision and returns to forever link his fate with that of Esperança.

  Guilherme’s epilogue ends with lyrical and circular irony of events in 1976, in the forest of Brazil. Karen Tei Yamashita’s epic novel of ambition and idealism, migration and desire, explores in singular fashion the question of what makes a home—loyalty? kinship? chance?

  I write this in Oakland, the city where Yamashita was born, a city that has sheltered immigrants since the first humans arrived by land and sea, long before California was a “state.” Waves of indigenous peoples, Japanese and Russian and Chinese immigrants who arrived on ships, and Mexican Americans and African Americans who arrived by land to work on other ships have raised generations here; Southeast Asian and Middle Eastern and Ethiopian people who arrived by plane sit near me now. I write some of this introduction in a coffee shop named Nomad, owned by a Cambodian couple who greet me by name over the course of several days, as they do all their customers, who come inside for boiling water and leaves and ground coffee beans, some from Brazil, all of us immigrants and nomads, seeking stories like these.

  It is said that there are more than one million Japanese immigrants and their descendants living in Brazil today—the largest such population outside of Japan. Japanese-Brazilians, well into the second and third generations, participate in every facet of Brazilian life—social, political, and economic.

  Japanese immigration to Brazil has followed patterns of their exclusion from the United States. In 1908 when the Gentlemen’s Agreement was signed to limit Japanese immigration to the United States, the first shipload of some eight hundred Japanese arrived at the port of Santos in the state of São Paulo. In the 1920s, when Exclusion Acts were passed by the United States government, the slow stream of Japanese immigrants to Brazil became a flood, and thousands came to Brazil to work as contract laborers on coffee plantations. By 1940 more than 190,000 Japanese had passed through the port city of Santos, disembarking from any one of 32 Japanese steamships that crossed the oceans in over 300 trips. While the vast majority of these immigrants came to Brazil as contract laborers, a small percentage came as settlers, buying tracts of land and colonizing farming communities.

  The story that follows is based on the lives of a small population of such settlers. It is a particular story that must be placed in its particular time and place. It is a work of fiction, and the characters are also works of fiction. Certainly it cannot be construed to be representative of that enormous and diverse community of which it is but a part. And yet, perhaps, here is a story that belongs to all of us who travel distances to find something that is, after all, home.

  PART I:

  Emile

  Emile has little knowledge, but what he has is truly his own. . . . Emile has a mind that is universal not by its learning but by its faculty to acquire learning; a mind that is open, intelligent, ready for everything. . . .

  Emile has only natural and purely physical knowledge. He does not know even the name of history, or what metaphysics and morals are. . . .

  Emile is industrious, temperate, patient, firm, and full of courage. His imagination is in no way inflamed and never enlarges dangers. He is sensitive to few ills, and he knows constancy in endurance because he has not learned to quarrel with destiny. . . .

  In a word, of virtue Emile has all that relates to himself. . . . He lacks only the learning which his mind is all ready to receive . . .

  He considers himself without
regard to others and finds it good that others do not think of him. He demands nothing of anyone and believes he owes nothing to anyone. He is alone in human society. . . . He has lived satisfied, happy and free insofar as nature has permitted. Do you find that a child who has come in this way to his fifteenth year has wasted the preceding ones?

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  Emile, or On Education

  CHAPTER 1:

  Brazil-Maru

  It was 1925. São Paulo, Brazil. I stuck my head out the window, straining to see the beginning and the end of the train as it chugged slowly up the side of the mountain. The tepid heat of the port of Santos below rose around us in a soft cloud that silently engulfed my view of the now distant port and the ship and the shimmering ocean beyond. The creeping altitude and the rocking train seemed to lull the minds of the passengers so recently stunned by our first impressions. I had seen it myself from the ship below—the sheer green wall lifting into a mass of shifting clouds, daring us to scale it.

  How many other Japanese immigrants had already witnessed this scene? Since 1908, they had arrived at this same port in shipload after shipload until there were thousands of Japanese, the majority laboring on coffee plantations in the state of São Paulo.

  I had stumbled down the gangway clutching a bundle entrusted to me. My mother was carrying little Yōzo on her back. Eiji clutched her dress with one hand, and Hiro held on to Eiji. My father lumbered down with our heavy bags. Although I was only nine years old, I was still the oldest and had to take care of myself. I saw the scholar Shūhei Mizuoka already on the dock struggling with his bags loaded with books. For a moment I sensed a need to look back at the ship we were leaving, and there at the top of the plank was Grandma Uno still standing transfixed, staring at this idea we all had traveled so far to see, this Brazil.

  Below, dockworkers pushed loaded carts or trudged under heavy sacks, their soiled shirts patched with circles of sweat. It was not the first time I had seen people of other colors and features. We had followed a route around the earth, sailing south from Japan through the South China Sea to Singapore, then on to Ceylon and the Cape of Good Hope; the ship had docked on the coast of India and the tip of Africa, but still I stared as the ship traded its human cargo for coffee and bananas.