A Fortuitous Connection

When I first started this blog a year and a half ago, I was just experimenting with another form of writing....  I had no idea it was going to lead me to an invaluable source for my new novel.  As I've mentioned before, I’m currently writing an historical novel partly inspired by my great grandfather, Dr. Kozo Shimotakahara’s life as a doctor at a Japanese-Canadian internment camp during the Second World War.  But never did it occur to me that someone with a connection to Kozo would stumble across one of my blog posts and contact me to send me this photograph of my great grandparents taken on their wedding day.

Over the past month, I’ve learned a lot about Kozo’s life from my new online friend, Todd.  Todd came across my blog when he did a Google search on Kozo Shimotakahara’s name – not knowing exactly who the man was.  He’d become intrigued by Kozo upon noticing his signature upon his great grandmother’s and her cousin’s death certificates, so he gathered that Kozo had been a Vancouver doctor before the war.  When he found the above wedding picture in his parents' possession, he figured that the Shimotakaharas might have been old friends of his great grandparents from the old days of Japantown.  It seems that when Kozo first arrived in Canada he stayed at a Japanese Christian Missionary in Victoria, BC, where Todd's great grandfather was a preacher.  The original photo was mottled with dirt and dust specks, so Todd skillfully photoshopped it (thanks Todd!)

As we discussed in our flurry of emails, Kozo and his wife Shin don’t look terribly happy on their wedding day.  Perhaps this is simply due to the limitations of photographic technology at the time: the poser had to remain perfectly still and hold the same expression for a long time, which could be cumbersome.  But I can’t help but read a certain hardness in both their faces – their stone-chiseled lips send chills down my spine.  Clearly, these are two incredibly willful people, as one might expect of a Christian missionary (Shin was one of the first in Japan) and a pioneering doctor (Kozo was the first Japanese-Canadian doctor and also a highly religious man).

Despite all the mythologizing in my family, discrepancies and lacunae about their lives abound.  My grandmother, who was our family historian, used to write hortatory essays based on the stories Kozo had told her.  According to her, Kozo left Kagoshima-ken, Japan at age fourteen  with a mere 5 yen, which his mother had earned by selling eggs, and immigrated to Vancouver where he worked as a houseboy and enrolled in elementary school to learn his ABCs.  Later, he went on to graduate from University of Chicago medical school.  I could never understand how Kozo became a doctor just like that.  Yet Todd has discovered a more textured narrative through some fascinating genealogical research.  He has sent me a border crossing record, photocopied from Vancouver Public Library, stating in the registrar’s slanted, slightly smudged writing that Kozo entered the United States on September 24, 1911, to attend Valparaiso University in Indiana.  He had $50 on him and was 5 feet, 2 inches tall.  A bit of online research reveals that Valparaiso was a Methodist, no frills institute of higher learning that did not have a med school.  So I wonder if Kozo enrolled there and then proceeded to University of Chicago, or whether his journey took a more circuitous route?  And why did he never tell anyone in our family about this interlude in his life?  Although I may never know for certain, these periods of struggle and self-formation when he was a young man tease at my imagination and after a while he ceases to feel like my ancestor – he becomes a character alive in my head.

Book #31: Not So Hard-Boiled After All

"I regret that in one respect my father and I were too much alike.  We both have a great natural reserve that makes it almost impossible to open ourselves to others.  I think he would have liked to confide in me more, but I wasn't ready at that time to push for a more revealing relationship."   -Jo Hammett, Dashiell Hammett: A Daughter Remembers

Yesterday evening, I was puttering around the library doing research on Dashiell Hammett.  It almost felt like back in my geeky grad school days.  But no, I'm not working on some dry dissertation, I'm writing what I truly want to be writing - my memoir about how reading changed my life.  One chapter deals with The Maltese Falcon.  My dad and I read this novel together a few years ago, during a rocky period in both our lives, when everything was spiralling out of control like in film noir.  As my dad and I were reading it together, I came to see him as bearing some remarkable similarities to the cynical, hard-boiled anti-hero Sam Spade, and the question of what had made him this way compelled me to delve into his past and discover some family secrets....  (More on this later....  I'm writing this chapter as we speak).

Anyway, I have to confess that the chapter feels like it's missing something, and I'm starting to feel very anxious about it.  Nauseous, actually.  I get that way when I'm writing.  Insomnia, teeth grinding, bizarre cinematic dreams.  So this was why I found myself at the library late last night....  I found myself wanting to know more about the author himself, because I'd gotten it into my head that the key to understanding my father lies in gaining insight into Hammett and Sam Spade.  Not exactly a logical leap, I'll admit.  But this is how my mind works.  

How lucky I was to stumble upon a memoir written by none other than Hammett's own daughter!  Jo Hammett's Dashiell Hammett: A Daughter Remembers gives an unflinching look at the man and the convoluted dynamics of father-daughter relationships, where the daughter is caught between idolization of her old man, guilt at having not done enough when he was dying, and an ever-present yearning to have been closer to him when she had the chance.  Hammett was no model father, indulging in bouts of drinking and womanizing and plagued by illness, yet Jo Hammett gives a surprisingly balanced portrait of her eccentric dad.  What emerges is a portrait of a very shy, self-conscious person, who needed drink in order to be around people at all, and his solitude was intrinsically tied to his ability to write.  Lillian Hellman, his long-time lover, understood this about him and often remarked on how his lust for solitude had taken its toll on her, cutting her off from society, especially as the couple aged. 

In a particularly moving scene, Jo Hammett writes about visiting her father at his San Francisco Post Street apartment, where he wrote The Maltese Falcon; she remembers the elevator, with its folding brass grille, closing.  For anyone who has read the novel, this memory is clearly reminiscent of the final scene, where the femme fatale is led out in handcuffs, yet Jo Hammett focuses instead on how trapped her father must have felt in that elevator - stomach constricted, air sucked out of his lungs.  He suffered from claustrophobia all his life.  Not a tough guy like Sam Spade, the Hammett she brings to life is full of vulnerability and depth.  Exactly the characteristics I want to bring out in my dad.

Photo from: here

Book #25: That Accident Which Pricks Me....

"This second element which will disturb the studium I shall therefore call punctum; for punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole - and also a cast of the dice.  A photograph's punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)."   -Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

Since my father retired, he has been digging into family history.  The other day while I was at work, he sent me the above photo, which he found upon googling "Minidoka" - the camp where my grandmother was interned during the Second World War.  "I think your grandmother is in this photo," his email read.  "Third girl from the right, in profile.  Zoom in."

And there she is. 

A whoosh of gratitude came over me - had the camera caught her a moment before or after, her face might have been obscured, like the girl on the far right.  Quelle chance!  Then weird thoughts started rushing through my mind.  I found myself looking at the styling of her hair and wondering how, while living in an internment camp, she could manage to keep it freshly curled and glossy (while I, from the comfort of home, can barely make the effort to blow dry).  But imprisoned and made to rake mud, my grandmother would not let herself go and, though I knew that should make me happy, it made me feel sad.  Her dress remains smartly pressed, despite everything.  And while the other girls are working, she appears to me to be only pretending to work - something about the whimsical tilt of her head.  She's caught in a moment of fantasy or denial, her mind a thousand miles away.

The frailties and defenses of her personality seem to be encapsulated in that image....  For the grandmother I knew some fifty years later was a complex, cryptic woman.  She was often cool and remote in person, but had a penchant for florid language (I recall receiving a postcard that said "the stars are like chrysanthemums" and thinking, Huh?).  She shied away from talking about the past, even when my father would press her, until the very final days of her life when she began to give in.  She was a woman who seemed ill prepared to be a mother or grandmother, preferring to play the role of a younger aunt, dressing half her age.

It was as if she always wanted to remain a girl - as if some beautiful moment in her adolescence had been stolen away.

Looking at this photo makes me think of Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida, which I read years ago (back in my geeky, academic days).  At the time, I thought I understood what Barthes meant in coining the terms punctum and studium to describe two different and opposed kinds of experience upon looking at photographs.  By studium, he means the cultural and political dimensions of a photograph, all the ways in which it can be rationally discussed and made comprehensible to an audience.  By sharp contrast, punctum refers to a viewer's private experience of a photo - a purely subjective response.  To experience punctum is to feel idiosyncratic details jump out and grab you with such emotional force that you feel pierced, wounded. 

At the time of reading Camera Lucida, I had been deeply moved by certain photos which I'd viewed in various museums, galleries and books.  But I cannot say that I'd felt pierced.  Until now.


Photo from: here