The Truth about Death and Dying Paperback - 2003

From the jacket flap

""Yasu was simply crazy. But no crazier than the rest of the war."
Rui Umezawa's first novel weaves in and out of the lives of three generations of the Hayakawa family, starting during World War II in Japan and ending in present-day Toronto. The story is tragic, hilarious, lyrical and universal, tracing the legacy of war and the past on one family's fortunes and memories. Film director Atom Egoyan says: "This ambitious debut creates a dense world of overlapping events -- from the smallest details of domestic life to the grandest scale of atrocity and horror. Rui Umezawa presents this unique world of cause and effect with a carefully harnessed sense of despair, yearning and beauty."
Maimed physically and emotionally, Shoji Hayakawa leaves the devastation of post-war Japan and moves to the University of Milwaukee to teach physics. His father, Yasujiro, was the doctor in the village of Kitagawa, and an outspoken pacifist in dangerous times. Shoji and his wife Mitsuyo still recall their wartime childhood: bartering for food, evacuation to the countryside, returning to the burnt remains of the cities. Transplanted into suburban America, Mitsuyo's mother will watch life through the windows, marvelling at how absurdly people act even when they have everything they need: food, water, clothes, and no bombs.
Shoji has two sons, Toshi and Kei. Toshi is a gentle boy but sees the world with an abnormal intensity. Objects seem to speak to him. He has to lock himself in a closet to concentrate on his homework, and lies face down in the school corridor with his forehead pressed against the cool linoleum to calm himself. Exuberant but noisy, he is stopped from taking piano lessons. He is anembarrassment to his mother and to his angry brother Kei, who leaves for Canada to build a career as a rock musician. Mitsuyo, so demanding of Kei, considers Toshi insane and never expects anything of him. Yet Toshi, full of imagination, finds humour and wonder in the world.
"Quill and Quire called The Truth About Death and Dying an extraordinary first novel that "falls somewhere between Thomas Wolfe and Monty Python." The absurd sense of humour, the unforgettably comic scenes -- such as Yasu emerging naked from the bathroom clutching mushrooms, or dancing in the bomb shelter -- are inextricably entwined with tragic memories. With the dark shadows of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as Pearl Harbor always present, this novel examines how our sense of what is normal and what is crazy can be skewed, especially in times of war.
Of the passages that take place in wartime Japan, the author says they "owe most of their details to what was told to me by my parents, and to Japanese movies and comic books set during World War II. I grew up with stories of the war and pacifism, both at home and in the Japanese media. My father was never conscripted to fight, because he excelled so much at science and the government felt he would be more useful in a lab than on a battlefield.... My father would often recount, however, having to run and take shelter from bombs while going to university in Nagoya. For the rest of his life, he refused to watch war movies, because the whistling sound of bombs falling frightened him terribly."
"When I think about Japan in relation to the Second World War, more often then not, I'm remembering people who were treated like animals in Japanese POW camps. Or theChinese who suffered tremendously at the hands of the Japanese military in places like Nanjing or Manchuria.... However, one of the things I think the book illustrates is this: Japanese wartime atrocities were unforgivable, but at the same time, Japanese civilians like my father were suffering too."

"From the Hardcover edition.

Excerpt

SHOJI

Toshi’s father died with tubes sprouting from his body. Shoji had always been thin, but now, he looked ready to break. He lay unmoving, but certainly not at peace. His chest rose and fell regularly, in time with the rubber-and-metal pump whooshing and shushing beside his head. From the bottom of his baby blue hospital robe, his bare legs protruded like bread sticks. They were terribly uneven because of some freakish accident during the war, a very long time ago. Too long to remember. The right leg was straight and unblemished, the left twisted and scarred. When Toshi pictured his father in his mind, Shoji was always limping.

Toshi let free a sigh as heavy as the world. A nurse hovered at the door. The staff had noticed that whenever the lumbering young Japanese fellow was left alone in a room for longer than a minute, every monitor would start making loud noises. They never knew that the commotion sounded to Toshi like a call to arms. It gave him fabulous goosebumps.

Rainwater was tapping on the windows. There were days in Milwaukee when it felt as though the rain had been falling forever. After the family doctor had told them about Shoji’s cancer, the remedies started coming from all directions: Chinese medicine, prayers, ads in tabloid newspapers and friends calling to say they knew someone who was cured just by eating lots of oranges. Or was it grapefruit? Oranges or grapefruit. Who knew which? Or was it all just baloney?

“But Toshi,” Shoji said one night after a supper of beef kidneys braised with garlic and shallots, “I’ve been a scientist all my life. Even now, my dreams are of witnessing the glory of galaxies moving away from each other.” He still had his appetite then, and other than his deformed leg, Shoji was perfectly proportioned, lean but not too lean, and he had square bones. Toshi had noticed long ago that women smiled a lot around his father. His mother was flinging dishes into the dishwasher. Mitsuyo was doing everything more forcefully now. It was a dark, empty nothing outside the window. Clouds masked any galaxies that might have blossomed overhead.

Shoji said something about Doppler shifts that Toshi didn’t understand, but he squinted and nodded thoughtfully. He put a finger to the cleft of his chin. His father was smiling and crying at the same time.

“A scientist,” Shoji said, shaking his head. “All my life, I wanted to be nothing else.” Toshi sighed, his big shoulders wilting.

His father wasn’t interested in much about anything after he found out he was dying a slow and horribly painful death. Most days, he read in his study and hardly said two words beyond what was absolutely necessary. He didn’t even pardon himself when he went to the toilet to vomit. He never excused himself, and, even though he always closed the door, the bathroom wasn’t soundproof, so Toshi and Mitsuyo weren’t spared his suffering. Not completely. Never completely. Even when Toshi covered his ears and started singing “This Old Man” so loud his voice was hoarse the next day.

There was one instance when Shoji came to life, and that was to yell at his wife. He was sitting at breakfast. Mitsuyo was ladling him a bowl of clear broth brewed from bonito flakes because by then he couldn’t ingest much else. She was wondering aloud why all these terrible things were happening to them.

“To us?” said Shoji, his voice hoarse and frostbitten. “To us? When did you catch a terminal illness? This is happening to me, and has nothing to do with you.”

This was hardly fair, and Toshi thought hard about telling his father so. Toshi recalled how one day, when he and his younger brother were still in elementary school, the wind was gusting, and they saw a baby robin fall from a tree in front of their house. As soon as it hit the ground, it began flailing its wings in that pathetic, hyper-panicked way that frightened animals have.

Before Toshi and Kei could get to it, a neighbour’s dog, a huge black Rottweiler, materialized out of nowhere and took the baby bird in its mouth. They heard the muffled sounds of tiny bones being crushed. Kei screamed at the dog and threw a book at its face, which made it drop its prey and run off. But the baby robin was already dead. Whatever small flicker of light that had made it cry for food or its mother had flown from its tiny chest. Toshi felt a fragment of his heart break away and fall to the ground. His brother looked like he might never smile again.

“You crazy kids go inside!” yelled Old Man Garber in his thick Polish accent that sounded like gears grinding. He stood across the street on his porch, his thin, pale arms behind his back. What little hair covered the top of his head was neatly combed to one side, but his shirt-tails hung over his pants. His spine was petrified in an arc at his shoulders, making him hunch over. He had to look up in order to look ahead. An ugly grey cat named Mongoose sat by his ankles and licked its privates. “Big storm is brewing!”

The dimly lit foyer of their house was as quiet as an abandoned church when they returned with the dead bird. Mitsuyo had gone to the corner store on Oakland for some peanut oil. Shoji was home, though, in his study, behind the columns of paper, so they cried out for him. When there was no answer after a few tries, they went to find him.

“Why did you bring it back here?” was the first thing their father asked them when he saw it.

Kei’s face was wet with tears, like grass in the morning. “I thought you could help us bury it.”

Shoji looked at him as if he had just suggested they stuff it and put it on the mantel. “Bury it? Are you mad? It’s dead. Put it in the garbage.” And with that their father turned his gaze back down to the jumble of mathematical calculations that filled his note paper.

Kei wouldn’t stop crying as they buried the bird in the flower garden out back. The daffodils were in bloom. Even though Kei was crying, Toshi could hear him swearing under his breath. “Fuck you,” he said. “Fuck you.” The words sounded funny coming from such a small kid. And it was odd that anger was burning so brightly behind a curtain of tears. Kei was angry and brooding as far back as Toshi could remember. Brooding, handsome and intelligent, like their father. Toshi had been always aware of life’s unfairness in such matters.

Toshi couldn’t blame his father for not understanding, though. Like Old Man Garber, Shoji hadn’t seen. Kei and Toshi had been too close, and that’s why death had affected them so.

Just like how Shoji’s death was affecting them now because they were too close. So, in truth, the cancer wasn’t just devouring Shoji. It was eating away at everybody around him. But this was hard for Shoji to see, because he was the main course.

“And one more thing: I’d most appreciate your not asking ‘why this’ or ‘why that’ any more, if you’d please,” Shoji said. Mitsuyo didn’t say a word as she dragged her feet upstairs, massaging her greying temples, looking as forlorn as a rotting piece of wood drifting aimlessly at sea. Despite her thin frame, frailty didn’t suit her. Neither did the black-and-yellow sweater she’d thrown on that morning, but she was beyond caring. Her hair said she just didn’t give a flying shit as thin, coarse wisps reached out in patches like weeds. “It’s bound to drive all of us mad!” Shoji still kept yelling in the kitchen, to no one in particular.

But now that he was lying on a hospital bed, now that all he did was stare at the ceiling as if the emptiness fascinated him, Toshi could tell his father was ignoring his own advice. It was very apparent that Shoji was asking himself why, and that this was driving him crazy, just like he said it would. His eyes didn’t move, and his breathing was regular, controlled by the cold, metallic pump by his head–his indifferent surrogate lung. But you could tell he was upset. He was thinking to himself, Why? Why? Why?


From the Hardcover edition.

Media reviews

“An impressive rendering of time, memory, and the lingering effects of history … This ambitious debut creates a dense world of overlapping events -- from the smallest details of domestic life to the grandest scale of atrocity and horror. Rui Umezawa presents this unique world of cause and effect with a carefully harnessed sense of despair, yearning, and beauty.” -- Atom Egoyan

“This extraordinary first novel -- noisy, hilarious, and tragic -- falls somewhere between Thomas Wolfe and Monty Python.” -- Quill & Quire

“[Umezawa] is not interested in sentimental silver linings. Death -- and life, for that matter -- isn’t a carnival, it just is: simultaneously momentous and completely ordinary.” -- National Post