Title

PHANTOMS

a   novel

CHRISTIAN KIEFER

LIVERIGHT PUBLISHING CORPORATION

A DIVISION OF W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

Independent Publishers Since 1923

NEW YORK   LONDON

PHANTOMS is a work of fiction. Place names and descriptions corresponding with existing or historical locations and events are used fictitiously. The novel’s characters are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to real individuals, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Respectfully dedicated to the following individuals and families, removed from their homes in Newcastle, California and interred at Tule Lake, May 1942:

Asazawa

Daijogo

Endo

Enkoji

Hada

Hamaoka

Harada

Hashiguchi

Hikida

Hirabayashi

Hiraiwa

Hiranaka

Hironaka

Hirota

Hirozawa

Horiuchi

Ichikawa

Imamoto

Itano

Kanda

Kawahata

Kawayoshi

Kojima

Kono

Kurimoto

Kurosawa

Kushida

Masuda

Matsuda

Matsumoto

Mitani

Moriguchi

Muraoka

Nagafuji

Nakadoi

Nakagawa

Nakamura

Nakao

Nakashima

Nakata

Nakatomi

Nakayama

Namba

Nimura

Nishikawa

Noda

Nodohara

Nomura

Okusako

Omoto

Ooka

Osaki

Saeki

Sakai

Sakakihara

Sakamoto

Sakatani

Shinkawa

Sunada

Tahara

Takata

Tanaka

Tanihana

Tanno

Tokutomi

Tomita

Uyeno

Watanabe

Yamane

Yasuda

Yokota

Yonemura

Yoshida

Yoshikawa

Yoshimoto

The sorrow of war inside a soldier’s heart was in a strange way similar to the sorrow of love. It was a kind of nostalgia, like the immense sadness of a world at dusk. It was a sadness, a missing, a pain which could send one soaring back into the past.

—BẢO NINH

PHANTOMS

Chapter 1

1

RAY TAKAHASHI RETURNED IN AUGUST. BY THEN WE HAD put the whole thing behind us, or tried to, whatever concern or even guilt we might have felt replaced by that mixture of jubilation and despair brought on by the war’s end, for our boys were coming home and the war had changed them. Some held only absence where an arm or leg had once been; some were broken by experiences we could not see and never would. And of course others did not return at all, families receiving a Western Union telegram signed by a general of whom none of us had heard. Later would come the casket and the folded flag. But these were eddies of respectful quietude in a flow of celebration: parades and confetti and flags and bunting and a sense that we had done something honorable, that our boys had tested their mettle in Europe and the Pacific and had been rewarded with victory. We were proud of them. We were proud of ourselves.