“Anyhowsu, the nursery in San Juan Capistrano. You knowsu, the place where the birds come.” Mas had heard that swallows were supposed to visit the quaint town every spring. He didn’t know if the story was fact or fiction, but he wasn’t surprised to hear that Haruo had been charmed with the idea of a cloud of swallows descending on the town’s old mission every March.
“I tellsu you, datsu a nice place. Cool. Not far from ocean. I’m thinkin’, when I retire, I should move to dis place,” said Haruo, knowing full well that retirement would never be in the cards for either him or Mas.
“So I get out of truck and see greenhouse, four of them, plastic, all lined up. I tellsu you, Mas, smellsu so good, like a ladies’ cologne. Then when I go in, smell like wax. Danjo’s wife doing hand tailorin’, you knowsu, put flower in wax, then cold water.
“I go ova, take a closer look. I rememba whatchu say about flower, hair in the middle. Then I checksu what she doin’, and then I shout out, ‘Thatsu it, thatsu it.’ I solve Mas’s mystery.”
Haruo took a deep breath and then spoke so loud that even Tug and the two girls could hear. “They use shuji brush for the wax. Hand tailorin’. Those brushes gotsu animal hair, Mas. You get me?”
Mas nodded. He was familiar with hand tailoring, as he had some friends up in Mountain View, not far from San Francisco, who were in the flower nursery business. Apparently the pollen from the gardenia flowers got on ladies’ fancy dresses, so they dipped the half-open flowers in warm wax to seal the pollen. But Mas remembered seeing it done by hand, no brushes.
“And they gotsu New York customers,” said Haruo, who proceeded to read off a list of five flower shops in Manhattan and Brooklyn. The effort Haruo expended to recite his story had taken its toll. Afterward, he seemed to deflate like a punctured balloon, and weakly excused himself to finish out his sleep.
“What’s shuji?” Mari asked after Mas hung up the phone.
“You know, Japanese calligraphy. Didn’t you take it in Japanese school?” Joy took the end of her pink braid and mimicked a brushstroke on the kitchen counter.
“Must have missed that session.”
As a teenager, Mari regularly ditched her Saturday language classes, opting instead to smoke cigarettes three blocks away on a corner of Koreatown. Mas had seen her one Saturday on his way to a customer in Hancock Park.
“What’s this about the animal hair?” asked Tug.
Mas explained Detective Ghigo’s identification of the deer hair on the gardenia flower.
“Makes sense,” agreed Joy. “Those Japanese calligraphy brushes are usually made of deer hair. Some use goat, horse, or even raccoon. But your regular Western brush is either synthetic or made of hog or sable hair.”
Mari laughed. “Wow, you belong on Jeopardy!, girl.”
“Well, brushes, they’re my tools of the trade now. Anyway, you’re the one who went to Japanese school for thirteen years. You should know all that cultural stuff and at least a thousand kanji, right? In my measly two-year experience, I barely got through katakana and hiragana.”
In Japanese, there are three levels of writing: two phonetic versions, katakana and hiragana, and then the highest level, kanji, modern-day hieroglyphics. All three types could be traced back to the Chinese.
Mas had no trouble remembering katakana and hiragana -there were only about forty symbols in each-but kanji, numbering in the tens of thousands, was another matter altogether. Over the years, Japan had simplified kanji, but Mas was actually more at home with the complicated versions issued during the Meiji Era in the late 1800s. Kanji after kanji had been drilled into Mas’s head by a fierce junior high schoolteacher until school was eventually canceled during World War II. Mas sometimes felt that he belonged more to the era of Meiji, “Enlightened Rule,” than today’s era, Heisei, or “Peace Everywhere.”
Joy, the daughter of two Nisei, had probably felt like a fish out of water during her two years of Japanese school. Most of the students during Mari and Joy’s time had at least one parent direct from Japan. To hear words built from the sounds a, i, u, e, o would be as natural as drinking water to them. But there apparently was a price to be paid for knowing Japanese so well. To be American, Mari told Mas one time, meant that you knew only one language: English.
“I was jealous of you,” Mari said to Joy. “Lucky girl, that’s what I was thinking. You could go to sleepovers and watch Saturday-morning cartoons like the rest of the kids. No one would think of you as an FOB.” FOB, Mari had used that term a lot in high school, Mas remembered. Now, what did it mean? Fresh Off the Boat, Asian immigrants like Chizuko and other so-called newcomers.
“But now, see,” Joy argued. “‘Made in Japan ’ is cool. Video games, manga, everyone is getting into it.”
“That’s what Lloyd says, too. But he doesn’t understand that it wasn’t cool when we were growing up.”
“Well, he’s a white guy. What do you expect? They can go crazy for geisha and samurai, but it ain’t gonna change the color of their skin.”
“Joy-” Tug called out sternly.
Mari sat frozen, her mouth partially open, her tea mug steaming in her hands. Even Mas was surprised by Joy’s harsh tone.
“I’m sorry,” Joy said. “You know I’m just teasing you.”
A friendship that went back to preschool obviously counted for something, because Mari shrugged her shoulders. “Just wait until you get serious with someone, Joy,” Mari said. “I’m going to give you such a hard time.”
Joy exchanged a look with her father and retreated like a hermit crab into its shell at low tide. Mas didn’t understand what was going on with Tug, Joy, or Lil, for that matter. Tug had explained that Lil couldn’t come to New York City because she had to babysit their son Joe’s children. But the grandchildren had never stopped Tug and Lil from traveling together to Mount Rushmore and Branson, Missouri. Why, all of a sudden, would it prevent Lil from coming to the East Coast?
Tug slipped the end of his pipe into his mouth. Mas knew that Tug had no intention of lighting his pipe; it just felt good to bite down on something at times like these. Tug seemed deep in thought for ten minutes straight. When Joy pulled on her coat to leave, Tug finally spoke. “Heard of some of those flower shops Haruo was talking about, Mas. Have a friend who’s a florist. I saw him at church last Sunday. I’ll make sure he’s going tomorrow. So, how about it, Mas-you game to go with me?”
Mas dislodged a piece of bacon from underneath his lower denture. The last place he wanted to spend his Sunday morning was cooped inside a Christian church or even a Buddhist temple. But if that’s where the answers were, that’s where they had to go.
“You guys aren’t playing detective, are you?” asked Joy. “You better just leave that to the cops. No telling what kind of trouble you can get into. This is not Pasadena. It’s not even L.A. ”
Normally Mas would have agreed with Joy. But things had changed for Mas recently. He had been running away from life, from the Bomb, for more than fifty years, but finally he’d had to face his past; in the same way, he had to find out who had killed Kazzy Ouchi, or else the future sequence of events would ball up into a boulder, sending them all off the edge.
With that the Yamadas left, soon followed by Mari, who went to relieve Lloyd at the hospital. Mas was drying off a glass when Lloyd returned. As Lloyd sat drinking one of his dark foreign beers, Mas quietly told him that Takeo had been named the new member of the Ouchi Foundation board. Lloyd was not surprised. “I knew that,” he said. “Kazzy did mention to me that when he died, Takeo would be next in line. We can help guide the future of the garden and the museum. Not be just hired hands anymore.”
Mas pursed his lips. What would Detective Ghigo call this? A damn good motive.