The Best American Essays 2013 (15 page)

With the end of the war his life resumed its rightful course. He acquired a stepmother, a Juilliard-trained pianist who cherished him, and later two half siblings who looked up to him. He became interested in stamps, and at the age of eleven began traveling across Japan on his own to find and collect them.

He was a handsome boy, tall and skinny with an oversized head topped by a thick brush of hair. He had large, dark eyes and a searching, restless gaze; his grin was bright and sudden and took up his whole face. He received the highest marks in the country on the national exam to enter Tokyo University; while there he won awards, acclaim, and finally a fellowship to MIT. When he decided to take it, articles, one or two in Japan’s biggest newspapers, deplored the “brain drain” that was taking a mind such as his to America. He completed his doctorate in three years and in 1961, at the age of twenty-seven, began working at Princeton University’s Plasma Physics Laboratory.

At PPL, a hive of physicists, engineers, and technicians worked to create an energy source that was clean, limitless, and safe. Their plan was to use nuclear fusion: they would merge the nuclei of two hydrogen atoms into a single nucleus, as the sun does, and the stars. The new nucleus would be smaller than the original two, and the difference in the mass would convert into energy. Shoichi accepted their offer and stayed at the lab for forty years.

My sisters and I held his memorial service in a small room at the local Hyatt. We had looked into using the university chapel, with its stained-glass windows and soaring ceilings, and had been secretly relieved to find that it was booked for holiday festivities through December. The chapel, which seats two thousand, would have echoed even more than usual with only a handful of mourners in attendance.

In the end more than fifty people came, so many that we almost didn’t have enough chairs. Most of them were world-class scientists, three Nobel Prize winners in their midst. My mother’s old gang was there, as well as Ellie’s family, some former neighbors, and a few friends Shoichi had acquired since retirement—quiet men, shy and perhaps lonely, whom he had met through MIT’s alumni association. It was the turnout from the lab, which numbered more than two dozen, that had thrown off our count.

At the service, one of the last speakers said that Shoichi used to ask his women to make dishes for their church dinners. “Because,” she added, drawling, “of course he always had a woman.”

I winced. The audience laughed, but the remark seemed in poor taste, given that Toshiko-san was in the room—in the back row, where she had insisted on placing herself.

The service had been stocked with surprises, one or two even more startling than the fact that my father had continued the practice, initiated by Ellie, of attending church dinners. There was the letter, translated and read out loud by my older sister, from an old high school friend in Tokyo. Some of what the letter said I knew—tales of Shoichi’s effortless brilliance, for instance. But much of it was new. I hadn’t known that in high school he was popular with boys and girls alike, and friendly and generous to those less favored than himself. For as long as I could remember, he had been a poor conversationalist, an aggressive and mean-spirited debater, and a teller of boastful, embarrassing stories, the kind of person people avoided at parties and dreaded bumping into in the street. I hadn’t known that he always came in last in the 100-meter dash, and that his genial indifference to his lack of athleticism somehow added to his popularity and his aura of cool. I hadn’t even known that he still kept in touch with anyone from high school—sixty years ago!—let alone a man who would weep at his passing, write such a letter, and then round up every single graduate of their high school he could find so they could hold a memorial service of their own in Tokyo.

Another surprise was the picture that emerged of Shoichi as a young man. One after the next, his colleagues and former students told the same story: in the ’60s and ’70s, the lab was the premier center for fusion research in the world, overflowing with hope, idealism, and bright young men fired by the conviction that the discovery of a clean energy source lay within their grasp. And in that august company, Shoichi stood out. His brilliance—“that’s a word,” the first speaker from the lab said, “that I’m betting you’ll hear more than once today”—was legendary. If he was a little arrogant, prone to making mincemeat out of those with less ability—well, another speaker said with a shrug, with a mind like that, who could blame him?

They spoke of traveling across the country to study with him, quaking when they had to answer his questions, and angling for invitations to dinner at his house. They told of trusting that his genius would win the day for them, the lab, and mankind.

Shoichi had shared in their idealism. In the early ’60s, one speaker said, he had turned down a career in the barely nascent field of computers, even though he was certain that was the wave of the future. He’d been equally certain he could create a clean energy source and had deemed that the more critical step for humanity.

My father had been nine when atomic bombs decimated Hiroshima and Nagasaki; it made sense that he would grow up dreaming of harnessing nuclear power for peaceful and productive ends. But I hadn’t realized people once thought the lab might change the world. In the late ’80s, which is when I remember it best, it seemed quiet and a little sleepy, a place where smart men toiled dutifully over equations and tinkered with equipment. The optimism had leached out of them by then; they knew that if the lab did achieve its goal, it would not be in their lifetime. The problem was not that they had been wrong. They could, and did, create energy from fusion. But it took immense pressure and heat for the process to work, and the energy required to produce those conditions was always more than they could create. Theoretically they were on target, but for all practical intents and purposes they had failed.

Nor had I known that adoring students and colleagues once surrounded my father. The image clashed so violently with what I remembered that had my mother not said later that her memories of those times matched the speakers’ exactly, I would have assumed they’d made it all up. Shoichi lived just a few miles from the lab, but most of his colleagues hadn’t seen him for years. With each breakdown and hospitalization, their friendship with him had cooled, and when he retired, in 2000, it must have seemed easier to forget him. I can’t blame them. By then illness, medication, and electroshock treatments had done their damage. His mind was diminished and his body bloated. His hands shook, and his gaze was restless but no longer searching.

I wondered at first if the speakers were waxing nostalgic about Shoichi to compensate for their long neglect. But then I realized that they too had been disappointed by their careers. They weren’t famous; none of them had won the Nobel Prize. Their nostalgia was not for Shoichi so much as for those heady days at the lab when their ambition and their idealism had run side by side and success had seemed around the corner. Or if the nostalgia was for him, it was for the man he had been as well as for their own younger selves.

The fact that my father had “always had a woman” was not a surprise. He had liked the company of women, the more the merrier. Toshiko-san knew it, and probably many in the room did as well. He was boastful enough that it was difficult not to know this about him.

“Toshiko-san is the primary mourner here,” my older sister said in her opening remarks, “no question.” More than once I turned around to search for her, a trim, plainly dressed woman with an open face, fighting tears by herself in the back. But the room was too packed; I could not see past the fourth row.

Despite my sister’s words, at the reception afterward it was to us, the daughters, that the guests came to pay their respects, never mind that we hadn’t been involved in our father’s life in any serious way for years. Indeed, Toshiko-san probably received fewer expressions of sympathy than my mother, who had flown in from England to attend the service.

When they met, my father and Toshiko-san were both widowed and in their sixties. She had grown up dyeing kimonos with her family in Kyoto, hard work a fact of her childhood. During the Occupation she met an American soldier—an African American from Alabama and, as it later turned out, an alcoholic with a temper—who took her home with him. Together they had six children, one of whom she lost to pancreatic cancer. Not an easy life, yet somehow Toshiko-san emerged with her good humor intact.

She had moved in with Shoichi early on, but without ever giving up her own apartment, and for reasons that were never clear—his breakdowns, his moods, his untidiness, or his roving eye?—moved back into her own place after about a decade. He took her on trips to Japan, Europe, and Canada and cruises to beaches in sunnier climes; they ended their relationship more than once but always found their way back to each other. When I came to visit, they would take me to their favorite Japanese restaurant, where we’d share large boats of sushi. She would have too many beers and clamber to the front of the room to sing karaoke, mostly sappy songs, Christopher Cross and the like, her voice wavering in and out of tune, as my father watched and smiled, nodding his head ever so slightly to the beat.

She never called him by name. Instead she used the term
sensei
, an honorific title meaning “professor”—a sign of respect, maybe, or a joke, a way to gently mock him and bring him down to earth. I was grateful for it, since it made him laugh.

In the last two years of his life, he and Toshiko-san saw each other only once a week. They met every Friday for about an hour at a mall on Route 1 that stood almost exactly between their homes. Yet even if they saw little of each other, they talked. Toshiko-san told us after his death that he would call her twice a day, at nine in the morning and nine at night. She didn’t have to explain the reason for this ritual. The archetypal absent-minded scientist, Shoichi was indifferent to the progress of the clock. If he insisted on such precise times, it was because he was worried about his body lying there, undiscovered, for hours or even days.

As it was, the funeral home director said that based on the decomposition of his body, a full day must have passed before he was discovered. Shoichi had not phoned at night, but since that had happened before, Toshiko-san decided to wait for the morning call. When that didn’t come, she had flown into a panic and sped the eight miles to his house.

She banged on the door and then ran around tapping on all the windows. She had the key but was too frightened to use it. She went to the neighbors, a nuclear physicist and his wife. They had lived next door since I was a baby and were used to helping out; the last time my father was found raving in the backyard, clad in nothing but boxer shorts on a brisk February day, it was they who called me. With them, Toshiko-san went into the house to find Shoichi dead on his bed, the television blasting.

Five days later, my sisters and I assembled with Toshiko-san at the funeral home for a viewing of the body. Shoichi had requested a cremation; the viewing was just for the four of us.

He was dressed in a gray suit. His face looked sunken. The room was cold and dimly lit.

It was a while before I realized that Toshiko-san was talking. “Look like he’s sleeping,
neh
.” She was rocking back and forth, her eyes streaming. “Wake up,
sensei
. Wake up.
Itsumo nebo
. Look at him, so handsome in his suit.” She turned to us, and we—huddled silently together in a corner, my younger sister red-eyed—gaped back. “You see how handsome he is?” she said. Then she turned back to the body. “What’ll I do without you,
neh, sensei?
Who’s gonna take me on nice cruises?” Reaching into the coffin, she gave him a push on the shoulder, hard enough to leave an indentation. “Wake up,
wake up
.”

When she and Shoichi met at the mall on Route 1, they would stroll, look into store windows, and chat. Sometimes they would have lunch or a snack, but this was never the primary purpose of the visit. She would reminisce about events from her past as well as theirs, catch him up on her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and scold him for scrounging at flea markets and accumulating yet more clutter. He would ask a question or toss in a remark here or there; at times he threw his head back and laughed, something he did rarely in the last few years of his life, and then only with her. He’d have little news to impart of his only grandchild, whom he had met just two or three times; in his last decade he and my older sister were seldom in touch. But I like to think that at least once during those weekly walks he broke his customary silence to speculate about his granddaughter and that Toshiko-san wondered with him. Did she still play with stuffed animals? Had she mastered fractions yet? How tall had she grown?

An Asian man and an Asian woman, stooped and gray-haired, their conversation slipping from Japanese to English and then back again: anyone seeing them would have taken them for a long-married couple, out shopping for a toy for a great-grandson.

Toshiko-san had loved my father. But my younger sister was right—his feelings for her were open to question. He had been resolute in his refusal to marry her. Whenever I’d ask him about it, he reminded me that she was seven years older than he was. He didn’t want to bury another wife. Ellie’s death, from complications resulting from diabetes, had been too hard. He couldn’t go through that again.

I’d point out that Toshiko-san was in great health and that women usually outlived men. And besides, isn’t it better to live for the moment? Was there something else he wasn’t telling me?

It made no difference what I said. He wouldn’t change his mind, nor would he explain further.

So perhaps he hadn’t loved her. Was it possible, though, that he hadn’t loved any of his women?

At the end of the memorial service one of his MIT friends had come up to me. He said that in the weeks leading up to his death, Shoichi had remarked that manic depression had ruined his life. I hadn’t been able to collect myself enough to respond, and the man ran off before I could find out his name, so I couldn’t call him later to ask what aspects of his life my father had meant. I assumed at the time that he had been referring to his career. Only later, and only because of the train of thought that the talk with my sisters had started, did I wonder if he could have been talking about his personal life too.