Page 4 of The Gods Will Sing Our Song

I have a handful of wood and metal A’s, along with a あ, the corresponding hiragana. Once I sort these, there will be variations of the other twenty-five English letters and forty-seven hiraganas to clean and put away in the drawers of our print shop, Aratani Print. Otōsan insists we need a wide range, and I’m usually a passionate proponent of artistic expression…until I’m faced with the task of cleaning and sorting the means of said artistic expression. When I’m on my deathbed someday, I swear I’ll feel the metal ridges of the letters and croak out a dirge about the alphabet.

My family trades in words. We press them onto paper in a variety of sizes and fonts, making posters for the YMCA, banners for high school sports teams, calendars for local shops to give as free gifts, and bulletins for the nearby temples and churches. I know about every ice cream social, fundraiser, and sports match within a fifty-mile radius.

Across the room, my sketch pad beckons. I cast it a longing look from my place behind the cash register. I’ve been working on a sketch of a yōkai monster, a hybrid between a wani and my own interpretation of the Nameless Faceless God, rising from the sea, much to Otōsan’s fascination and Mama’s horror. I should give the creature typeface in place of scales. Then he’d truly be a monster.

At least I can enjoy our shop while I work. It isn’t legally ours—my parents are issei and can’t own property—but Otōsan treats it like it is. Other families decorate their places with framed cross-stitches, lucky cat statues, and Grace, the lithograph of the old man praying over his meal, but Otōsan designed our shop like a British study. An elaborate gold frame featuring a reproduction of Pether’s moody A Castle and Lake by Moonlight hangs on the wall, next to the glistening curve of our katana. Brass Emeralite banker’s lamps with green shades create hazy low light. Otōsan has collected each piece one at a time over decades, aside from the katana, which is an heirloom. Mama thinks our money can be used for better things, but I’ll catch her admiring our shop in the evenings as the setting sun floods it with warm gold, turning the katana into a burnished sickle and the green shades on the lamps into electrified rectangles.

“Violet?” Mama calls from the kitchen, which is nestled between the shop and the rest of our home. “Focus and finish sorting. You should be done by now.”

She’s already decided I’ll go to college and major in English so I can become a teacher. My application for UCLA is under my sketch pad, along with a course catalog. Mama doesn’t know it, but I’ve circled art classes. It’s a far-fetched dream—I’m not certain what an art teacher would think about my work. I’m always drawing surreal monsters, ghosts, and spirits from Japanese folklore, oftentimes colliding with the Pacific Ocean, which Otōsan has taken me to ever since I was little. The features of the deities are exaggerated—Izanami’s hair unfurling so it swirls like the wind itself, or Susanoo’s eyebrows curving to mirror choppy surf.

Ignoring Mama’s words and finally giving in to my impulse, I get my sketchbook and resume a drawing I started the previous night—shinigami, spirits of death, emerging from the spindle of a seashell.

I take a shallow breath. Everything is quiet, but it’s too quiet. And it has been, ever since the bombing. No one goes anywhere. Government rules hem us in. We can’t be outside between eight p.m. and six a.m. We can’t travel beyond five miles from home. We can’t own firearms, radios, flashlights, or cameras.

My pencil digs deep, uneasiness making me gouge the paper with its tip. I wish I could scrawl things out of life just as I do drawings. I wish I could obliterate the hand slowly closing around us with graphite.

Then the door opens.

Four men enter our shop.

I should greet them. They are customers. They wear fedoras and stiff suits. It feels as though they are thunder, and our shop is the trembling sky through which they rumble. They have to be customers because I will not accept who they really are, even though I know.

I glance down at the packed suitcase, tucked beneath the register.

Just last week, I overheard Mama and Otōsan in the kitchen. I was sitting at the register avoiding homework, just as I am now. Mama was frying tempura and turning bamboo skewers of yakitori for dinner. Aratani Print breathed with the scents of mirin, sake, soy sauce, and pepper.

“When the FBI comes for me, I will be ready,” Otōsan said to Mama. I winced at the wheeze in his breath, leftover from the bad case of pneumonia he had last October. “They dragged Stephen Ito out in his pajamas and slippers. When Louella was able to bring him some things a week later, he was still wearing them. I will not go that way.”

I listened, muscles clenched, toes curled, wanting Mama to tell him he was overreacting. But I knew, deep in my soul, that he wasn’t. Ever since Pearl Harbor was bombed, Japanese men have been getting arrested by the FBI for any reason at all, from being in temple leadership to being in haiku clubs. For a moment, all I heard was the sizzling of the yakitori on the stove and the bubbling of the oil for the tempura. Then Mama said, “I will press your coat.”

Otōsan emerged from the kitchen, carrying his suitcase—the same one he uses when we go on road trips during the summer to Lake Tahoe or the sequoias. Never had he packed his suitcase to go somewhere without us. We’re always together. He set it down behind the register, next to where I sat.

“Otōsan—” I began.

“Don’t worry, sweetheart.” He spoke in such a cheerful voice that it startled me. “It’s only a precaution. I better make sure Mama’s miso soup tastes as good as it smells.”

Now Otōsan steps into the shop once again, and his presence shakes me from my reverie. His hand disappears into his pocket, and he joins me behind the counter. The men cross to us.

“Hiro Aratani?” one of them asks loudly. I hate the sound of Otōsan’s name in his flat voice. He draws out the syllables, mispronouncing it as High-ro.

“I am he,” Otōsan says. He pulls his hand from his pocket and looks at me. Sadness streaks through his eyes, there and then gone.

“Roy Jenkins…I’m with the FBI,” the agent says.

When I was little and Otōsan would take me to the beach, I’d place the tiny white shells I collected on the wet sand to be reclaimed by the sea. Only, sometimes the tide didn’t take them and they’d remain at my feet. Staring down, I always felt as though a primordial and ancient spirit inside the sea didn’t want my offering. Those memories wash over me now in a dark tide. Only this tide hasn’t simply rejected my shells but has sent something. These men.

My eyes trail over my sketch. I wish I could become one of the monsters I draw. I would rise, dripping with salt water, and expel these men from my home. Or drag them beneath the surface and hold them there until they drowned.

“You’re a community organizer,” Mr. Jenkins says, consulting a piece of paper. “We hear you print things in Japanese and distribute them.”

“I print materials for the local shops and clubs,” Otōsan says. “It’s mostly bulletins about community book clubs and Bible studies.”

“I see you have a weapon.” Mr. Jenkins points to the katana hanging on the wall. “Japanese for sure, from the looks of it. You got a radio, too. It’s contraband for you folk.”

“The radio doesn’t transmit,” Otōsan says. “It is a standard radio receiver. We use it for music. As for the katana, it’s a family heirloom and has hung there since we opened our shop two decades ago.”

But Mr. Jenkins isn’t listening. His gaze rapaciously crosses our Ludlow cabinet, steel table, proofing press, and platen press as though they are evidence of a great crime.