Rose was always there, even while I was being born. It was a breech birth; the midwife, soaked in her own sweat as well as some of my mother’s, had been struggling for hours and didn’t notice my three-year-old sister inching her way to the stained bed. According to the midwife, Mom was screaming unrepeatable things in Japanese when Rose, the first one to see an actual body part of mine, yanked my slimy foot good and hard.
“Ito-san!” The midwife’s voice cut through the chaos, and my father came in to get Rose out of the room.
Rose ran; Pop couldn’t catch her at first and when he finally did, he couldn’t control her. In a matter of minutes, Rose, undeterred by the blood on my squirming body, returned to embrace me into her fan club. Until the end of her days and even beyond, my gaze would remain on her.
Our first encounter became Ito family lore, how I came into the world in our town of Tropico, a name that hardly anyone in Los Angeles knows today. For a while, I couldn’t remember a time when I was apart from Rose. We slept curled up like pill bugs on the same thin mattress; it was pachanko, flat as a pancake, but we didn’t mind. Our spines were limber back then. We could have slept on a blanket over our dirt yard, which we did sometimes during those hot Southern California Indian summers, our puppy, Rusty, at our bare feet.
Tropico was where my father and other Japanese men first came to till the rich alluvial soil for strawberry plants. They were the Issei, the first generation, the pioneers who were the progenitors of us, the Nisei. Pop had been fairly successful, until the housing subdivisions came. The other Issei farmers fled south to Gardena or north to San Fernando Valley, but Pop stayed and got a job at one of the produce markets clustered in downtown Los Angeles, only a few miles away. Tonai’s sold every kind of vegetable and fruit imaginable—Pascal celery from Venice; iceberg lettuce from Santa Maria and Guadalupe; Larson strawberries from Gardena; and Hale’s Best cantaloupes from Imperial Valley.
My mother had emigrated from Kagoshima in 1919, when she was in her late teens, to marry my father. The two families had known each other way back when, and while my mother wasn’t officially a picture bride, she was mighty close. My father, who had received Mom’s photograph from his own mother, liked her face—her strong and broad jaw, which suggested she might be able to survive the frontier of California. His hunch was right; in so many ways, she was even tougher than my father.
When I was five, Pop was promoted to market manager and we moved to a larger house, still in Tropico. The house was close to the Red Car electric streetcar station so Pop didn’t need to drive into work, but he usually traveled in his Model A anyway; he wasn’t the type to wait around for a train. Rose and I still shared a room but we had our own beds, although during certain nights when the Santa Ana winds blew through our loose window frames I would end up crawling in beside her. “Aki!” she’d cry out as my cold toes brushed against her calves. She’d turn and fall back asleep while I trembled in her bed, fearful of the moving shadows of the sycamore trees, demented witches in the moonlight.
Maybe because my life started with her touch, I needed to be close to her to feel that I was alive. I was her constant student, even though I could never be like her. My face was often red and swollen, as I was plagued by hay fever from the long stalks of ragweed that crept into every crack of concrete near the Los Angeles River. Rose’s complexion, on the other hand, was flawless, with only a dot of a mole on the high point of her right cheekbone. Whenever I was near enough to look at her face, I’d feel grounded, centered and unmovable, less affected by any change in our circumstances.•
Excerpted from Clark and Division, by Naomi Hirahara. Published by Soho Crime. © 2021 Naomi Hirahara. All rights reserved.
