Free Snakeskin Shamisen by Naomi Hirahara Page B

squirrels scamper from one side of the road to another. The squirrels here looked different from the ones in Altadena. Instead of being chestnut brown and plump, their tails were shaggy and black. Mas was wondering what that difference meant, when he finally saw Juanita wave to him from the side of her truck. He waited for her to back out of the driveway and then eased the Ford onto the far-right side of their sloping driveway.
    “I dunno you live wiz family,” Mas said after he had settled into the passenger seat next to Juanita.
    “Yeah, it works out pretty nicely. They have their space, and I have mine. My parents have a restaurant business. Peruvian food. A chain of three restaurants. Antonio’s.”
    So-ka
, Japanese Peruvian. Mas had had a hunch. He had had dealings with Japanese Peruvians, namely a gambler named Luis Saito, who had fed him a powerful liquor, pisco, in a black bottle in the shape of an Indian warrior. Mas was even familiar with Antonio’s; he passed by the Hollywood one whenever he went to a friend’s house in the Uptown area above Koreatown.
    “That’s probably why I can’t have a desk job. I’m not used to sitting around. I can’t stay in one place.” Typical
gasa-gasa
girl, Mas thought. Like Mari, before she had a
gasa-gasa
baby of her own.
    Mas mentioned what he heard at the Yamadas’. “Some ole lady named Gushiken ova there at Keiro. Some relation?”
    Juanita shook her head. “My relatives are all back in Peru. I just barely knew my grandpa. He came to visit every other year. He died last year.”
    “Sorry.”
    “Yeah, it’s almost surreal, you know. When someone you don’t see often dies. It seems like they are still around in their part of the world.”
    Mas felt like that about his own parents, who had passed away after he had returned to America. He had not been back to Hiroshima for more than fifty years. He hadn’t taken the trek up to his mountain family grave site, looked at the names of his mother and father carved in the long granite obelisk. That would have made their deaths final, and Mas preferred their demise to lack finality.
    Juanita explained that she had never gone to Peru. Her relatives ended up there after the quality of life in Okinawa had become so poor. “I mean, Okinawa is so beautiful, even better than Hawaii, but after the Japanese took over, they made everyone work on the sugar plantations, taxed them up the wazoo. No wonder when Peru, Brazil, and the rest of the Latin American countries started recruiting laborers from Okinawa, a bunch of them went over. Turns out that life in Peru wasn’t much easier, but it became home, at least for my grandparents. And my dad for a short time.”
    During World War II, Antonio Gushiken and his parents had been literally kidnaped by the Peruvian government and brought over to a detention camp in Crystal City, Texas. It had been a deal made by the U.S. and Peruvian governments. With a fresh batch of people with Japanese surnames, the U.S. could now trade these hostages for American POWs. It didn’t matter that the Crystal City prisoners had little connection with Japan and that their first names were Antonio, Pedro, Juanita, and Maria.
    “My dad doesn’t talk about it much,” said Juanita. “He was a kid, of course. My grandparents eventually decided to go back to Peru, but my father stayed.
    “I’d like to visit sometime. Go to Machu Picchu—you know, the lost city of the Incas.”
    Mas nodded. He had seen video footage of the ruins on a Japanese TV show on UHF and was amazed that such a place could exist. It was a sprawling stone palace amid jagged mountains and swirling mist. Mas knew that he himself could never see Machu Picchu, but sincerely hoped that someone he knew could.
    They made more small talk until Juanita revealed the day’s plan of action. “We’ll meet the UCLA professor and then go over to the
shamisen
player’s house. Luckily, the professor lives in the South Bay. She agreed to meet us