Kaneko Fumiko — The One Who Talked Back

The Child Whose Name Was Not Called

"To be unregistered means you were born and yet not born."

In her grandmother's house in Korea, then ruled by Japan, the girl was told this. All she had done was ask for a box of paints that cost twelve sen (a small coin).

Years later, in the memoir she wrote in prison, she set these words down exactly as they were.

An unregistered child is a child with no family register. Nowhere in the government's books does the child's name appear.

The girl's name was Kaneko Fumiko. In her memoir, she calls herself "Fumiko."

Our story goes back several years, to Yokohama.

Fumiko was born in Yokohama in 1903. Her father and mother had never registered their marriage. Her birth was never registered either.

In her earliest memories, her father is a gentle man. Every evening he carried her on his shoulders through the curtain of the public bath. If her food was too hot, he tested it on his own tongue and cooled it before he put it in her mouth.

Those few short days were the only heaven she ever had, she wrote.

Heaven did not last. Her father drank all day, gambled at cards, and beat her mother.

The year she turned seven. Born in January, Fumiko was just the right age to start school. But a child with no register could not go to school.

Fumiko begged to go. Her mother tried to register her as her own child. Her father would not allow it, the memoir says.

"Don't be stupid. How could we register a child born outside marriage? A child like that will never hold her head up in life."

And yet he never put his daughter into his own family register either.

Two girls her age lived nearby. They wore dark red skirts and big red ribbons. Every morning they held hands and went down to school, singing.

Fumiko crouched at the foot of the cherry tree in front of her house and watched them. This is how she wrote about it later:

"Oh, if only there were no such thing as school on this earth, I would not have had to cry so much."

Then her father found a school that would take a child without a register. When she went to see it, it was a tiny room in a poor row house, six tatami mats wide (a tatami is a straw floor mat). The desk was an empty Sapporo Beer crate, tipped on its side.

Her father told her to keep quiet about it, Fumiko writes.

"Don't tell the uncles who come to our house that you go to that teacher's place."

Perhaps he did not want people to know his daughter went to a school for poor children.

She could not stay at that school long either. She had learned maybe twenty or thirty letters of the katakana alphabet when she stopped going.

Soon her father vanished from home. Her mother said bitterly that he had run off with her own younger sister.

Around then, Fumiko was allowed to go to a nearby elementary school, still with no register.

In the morning, the teacher read out the attendance book. Names were called, one by one.

"Only my name is not called. They get to the child next to me, and I am skipped."

So Fumiko arrived late on purpose. On the mornings she was on time, she lifted the lid of her desk while the names were called, stuck her face inside, and opened a book she did not need, apparently.

Soon after she started, her father suddenly came to see her one day. His face was thin and worn. Fumiko pressed her mouth to his ear and asked in a small voice:

"Buy me a rubber ball."

That night her father took her to a festival fair and carried her on his back as they walked. Fumiko chose two rubber balls with red flower patterns, one big and one small.

On the way home, in a dark alley, her father cried and made a promise, the memoir says.

"Then Daddy will come to get you. I will surely come to get you . . ."

He did not come.

The closing ceremony at the end of first grade. The other children received stiff certificates printed in type. Fumiko's was a sheet of paper folded in two, with a few small words written in brush.

When the principal handed it to her, it drooped and folded over.

That day, Fumiko was at the ceremony in a borrowed kimono that belonged to a boy she knew. She wrote that she wished she had never come at all.

Her mother, too, soon married into another man's house. Fumiko was left behind at her mother's family home.

The year she was nine. Winter was coming. Her father's mother came from Korea to fetch her.

The grandmother wore flashy clothes, and she brought a pile of gifts: red sashes and kimonos with long sleeves. After elementary school, she would send Fumiko straight to a girls' high school. If her grades were good, she could even go to a women's college. Her grandmother promised this, the memoir says.

The women in the neighborhood said, all together:

"What a lucky girl Fumi is . . ."

To cross to Korea, Fumiko's name was entered in a family register for the first time.

As the fifth daughter of her mother's mother.

I Was Born, and I Was Alive

Soon after they reached Bugang, in Korea, a guest came to her grandmother's house, looked at Fumiko, and said what a fine young lady she was.

Her grandmother was not pleased.

"Oh, she's just a child from a family I know."

A child of terribly poor people, with no manners. She was so pitiful that I took her in. Her grandmother explained it this way to everyone, the memoir says, and told Fumiko to give the same answer when people asked.

She was allowed to go to school. Her name there was "Iwashita Fumiko," the name of her grandmother's family. And she was told, the memoir says:

"If you lose to a farmer's child, or do anything shameful, I will take your name away from you right away . . ."

She did well in her studies, she writes. At eleven or twelve she could multiply a four-digit number by a four-digit number in her head.

But in fifth grade, the name on her report card had changed to "Kaneko Fumiko." She still does not know why. In only half a year or so, had she already lost the right to the Iwashita name? the memoir asks.

She wanted harder, more interesting books. She asked. Her grandmother turned her down.

"Don't be cheeky. School books are plenty."

And then came the day of the paints.

New paints were all the rage at school. Twelve sen. Her uncle and aunt said they would buy them for her. Her grandmother put down her chopsticks and glared at Fumiko, the memoir says.

You are unregistered, she said. It is only by our charity that you go to school. And then she said it:

"To be unregistered means you were born and yet not born."

Fumiko did not get the paints.

Years later, in her memoir, Fumiko answered her grandmother.

"No matter how many times my grandmother says it means being born and not being born, I was born, and I was alive."

Her life slowly became the same as a maid's.

One year, on the second day of the New Year, at the table for zoni (the New Year soup), her grandmother's celebration chopsticks broke. They were the chopsticks Fumiko had put in a paper sleeve at the end of the year, and the middle had been eaten by insects.

Her grandmother shouted at her that she had tried to pray her to death. Fumiko was not allowed any zoni, and was made to stand outside in the freezing cold all day.

Fumiko became afraid of being scolded. If she broke a plate, she wrapped it in paper and pushed it to the bottom of a box. A broken comb she mended with grains of rice and quietly set in the box.

The way her grandmother's family punished a child turned her, in fact, into a twisted liar. So she writes.

Still, there were days when she could breathe.

One autumn, she went day after day to her uncle's mountain to pick chestnuts. She wore tabi socks and leg wraps against vipers, and knocked the chestnuts down with a stick. When a pheasant or a rabbit jumped out, Fumiko spoke to it out loud.

"Well, you startled me. You don't need to run away like that. Aren't we friends?"

She stood on the mountain looking down at the village and sang until her voice went hoarse. That day alone was the day I was set free, the memoir says.

One hot summer day, her grandmother spoke in an unusually gentle voice. If you don't want to go along as a babysitter for a relative, she said, just say so plainly.

Fumiko answered honestly.

"If I don't have to go, I really don't want to."

Her grandmother pushed her off the veranda, stuffed a chipped wooden bowl into the front of her kimono, and forced her out through the back gate, she writes.

She had eaten nothing since morning. The one who spoke to her by the well was a Korean woman from the neighborhood.

"If barley rice is all right, won't you have some? We have plenty of rice . . ."

Fumiko cried out loud. But she was afraid of her grandmother's eyes, so she turned the rice down. In her seven years in Korea, the memoir says, she was never so moved by human love as she was then.

Even the next day she was not forgiven. Fumiko left the house, meaning to die.

But on the way, the sound of cicadas reached her ears. The scenery was beautiful. Her mother was out there. Her father, her little sister, her little brother. Her friends back home. There were still things in this world to love.

As she thought this, her mind changed, the memoir says.

"Yes, I must take revenge, together with all the people who are tormented as I have been, on the people who torment them. Yes, I must not die."

In the spring she turned fourteen, she finished upper elementary school. They did not let her go to the girls' school she had been promised.

From that summer, her room was a storeroom fixed up for her, a little over three tatami mats. She was not allowed books or newspapers. She read only the old newspapers pasted on the wall, until she knew them all by heart, apparently.

At sixteen, in spring. An empty old wicker trunk had been put on a shelf in her room.

Her uncle told her that she had finished school, so she should go back to Yamanashi, and handed her five yen in pocket money. That was everything this house gave her.

On the train leaving the place where she had lived for almost seven years, not one tear fell, she writes. Instead she called out to the train, in her heart:

"But this time you have come to get me! You did not forget me!"

The father who had cried and promised, I will surely come to get you, never came.

What came for her was a train.

A Woman Like a Man

Even back in Japan, Fumiko had no place of her own.

Her father in Hamamatsu tried to marry his daughter off to her mother's younger brother, an uncle who was a temple priest. He was after the temple's property, an aunt from her father's household later confessed to Fumiko. When that plan fell through, her father kicked her.

In the spring she turned seventeen. According to the memoir, Fumiko told her father:

"I'm going to Tokyo tomorrow."

It was not a request. In her pocket, train fare included, she had barely ten yen.

In Tokyo, Fumiko began what was called "kugaku," working her way through school. Work to earn a living, study to rise by her own strength. English at the Seisoku English School in Kanda, math at a school called Kensugakkan. She was sick of girls' schools.

She also explains why she chose boys' schools. It was a feeling like revenge: even competing with men, she would not lose. And a vanity she herself did not clearly see played a part too, she says.

She found work from an ad on a utility pole: a newspaper shop. The owner hesitated, saying a woman could never stand it. According to the memoir, Fumiko pleaded earnestly:

"I have already lived through a great deal of hardship. Compared to that, I can do anything. Besides, as you can see, I'm a woman like a man."

The job was selling the evening paper at a stand called Mihashi, in Ueno.

She had to shout out the evening paper for sale, again and again, at the top of her voice. But the voice would not come. It stuck in her throat. It took ten days before she could shout properly.

One summer evening, in the setting sun, her throat dry and her voice gone, a maid from a nearby soba noodle shop brought her a clay kettle and a teacup. Inside was the thick, muddy water the soba had been boiled in.

"Thank you, thank you."

She thanked the woman over and over as she drank, Fumiko writes. It felt good, truly good.

She sold standing up, from evening until past midnight. She went to bed at one or two, and in the morning took the shop's child to kindergarten. By the time she got to school, first period was over. In class, she only dozed.

Stubbornness was no use. However much my will wanted it, my body would not agree, she writes. Fumiko quit the newspaper shop.

Her next business was selling powdered soap at night stalls.

A lamp set on the ground, old newspapers, and fewer than thirty bags. She had no table, so she spread newspaper on the bare ground and laid the bags out. Her neighbor was an old second-hand book seller who loved sake.

"Miss, your shop is awfully gloomy. Like a ghost might come out . . ."

Laughing, the old man would ask Fumiko to watch his stall while he went off to drink a cup of sake. If only an old man like this were my grandfather or my father, she thought, the memoir says.

When it rained four or five days in a row, she earned not one sen. Fumiko switched to going from house to house with a bag.

But she could not find the courage to step into anyone's house. She just walked all day. Finally, beaten by hunger, she went into one entrance and offered the soap. She was turned down. As she went outside, she writes, she heard laughter from inside.

"My goodness, how annoying. Nearly every day now an orphanage comes around."

She had been mistaken for a beggar.

Even so, that same day she found a woman washing clothes in an alley and made her pitch: there was an oil stain on a child's cotton kimono, and this would surely get it out. One bag sold for twenty sen. Fumiko went straight into a dumpling shop and ate two plates of rice-cake sweets, apparently.

The person who cared about Fumiko most at that time was a young man named Ito. They had met while she was still selling newspapers. It began when a man who bought a paper late at night said, with a smile, the memoir says. He was a rickshaw man: by night he pulled a rickshaw, and by day he went to a math school.

"You and I are in the same school, the same class."

Ito had probably noticed she was a working student when he saw her dozing in class. Fumiko sewed him a floor cushion, and gave him her tips when they piled up.

On the night of November 30, 1920, beside Shinobazu Pond, Ito said goodbye. He could no longer be satisfied with seeing her as just a neighbor. His faith was wavering too. So from tonight, they would part, he said.

Watching Ito walk away without looking back, Fumiko thought, what a cowardly apostle of love, she writes.

By then Fumiko had gone to work as a live-in maid at a sugar shop in Asakusa. She did not settle on any wages. She had been taught that you do not talk about money.

In this house Fumiko got up earlier than anyone and worked. When the shop owner's son's friends came, she wanted to show she was not a mere maid, so she talked about school. Once she looked into a math notebook and said, this part is wrong.

What a petty, miserable thing to do. Even now, every time I remember it, I shudder, the memoir says.

From early morning to midnight, three months and one week. On New Year's Eve she finally left the shop, and on the train home she opened the paper packet she had been given.

Three five-yen bills were inside.

I felt more like mocking myself than being angry at anyone. So says the memoir.

A Clumsy Proposal

When the new year began, Fumiko went back to her relatives' house and went to night school while helping with the housework.

A friend from school lent her a socialist pamphlet. Reading it, Fumiko was not surprised.

Socialism gave me nothing new at all. It only gave me a theory saying that what I had felt in my own life so far was right. So she writes.

At that time she had a man she liked: Segawa, a student she had met in Yamanashi on the night she went to see a movie.

The end of summer, 1921. The morning she stayed at Segawa's lodging, Fumiko asked what he would do if a baby came. Segawa answered, yawning, the memoir says.

"What would I do if a baby came? I don't know about that . . ."

And he started playing the violin. In the end I was just a plaything, Fumiko realized, she writes.

The next one she loved was a Korean young man who lived in the same boarding house. They promised to make a home together. Each time they met she asked, haven't you found a house yet? Then he told her he was going to study in Germany with a friend, so this was goodbye.

That night Fumiko drank whiskey until her legs gave out, apparently.

Fumiko left her relatives' house and moved into an oden (stew) restaurant in Hibiya as a live-in worker. It was a place where socialists and newspaper reporters gathered. The deal was that she would wait on customers by day and go to school at night.

At night school she made a friend, Niiyama Hatsuyo. She was about two years older, and worked as a typist by day. She had lung disease.

Fumiko wrote in her memoir about a time they talked about death. Hatsuyo said that perhaps what people fear about death is the pain of the moment of dying. Fumiko disagreed. It is sad, she said, to leave this world forever.

Hatsuyo asked back:

"Have you experienced death?"

"Yes, I have."

From then on they were the best of friends. Fumiko had always wanted to read, but she could not afford to buy books. Hatsuyo lent her book after book.

One winter day, at an acquaintance's lodging, Fumiko was shown the proofs of a magazine. In one corner was a short poem. The author: Pak Yeol, a young man from Korea.

Asked what was good about it, Fumiko answered, according to the memoir:

"Not that something is good in particular. The whole thing is good. I don't even mean good, it is just powerful. I feel that I have found, in this poem, what I had been searching for for a long time."

The same day she was asked what she would do about school.

"School? School doesn't matter at all."

Work your way through school and become great. That had been her one and only aim. But what is the worth of being called great by other people? The memoir says:

"I have been too much the slave of other people. Too often the plaything of men. I was not living myself."

Some time later, on a cold night, Fumiko met Pak Yeol himself.

A thin man of twenty-three or twenty-four, with black hair down to his shoulders. He wore a blue worker's uniform and a brown overcoat. The buttons were nearly torn off, the cuffs were in tatters, and there was a hole at the elbow.

When Fumiko spoke to him, he only gave short answers.

"Is that so?"

Then, in a clear voice, he said this and left the room.

"Excuse me."

Fumiko asked through someone to let her meet him again. Ten days passed, then twenty. Pak Yeol did not come. I felt as though Pak had confirmed that I had no worth, and felt lonelier still, the memoir says.

Just when she had given up and nearly decided to become a typist like Hatsuyo, on March 5 or 6, 1922, Pak Yeol wandered into the oden shop. Fumiko served him rice and simmered tofu and radish.

The next night the two went up to the third floor of a Chinese restaurant in Jimbocho.

The Chinese tea they were given came in a cup with a lid. If you took off the lid, tea leaves might get into your mouth, but leaving it on seemed odd. Neither of them knew how to drink it. Pak Yeol said he had never been in such a grand place, so he didn't know, but it was something to drink, so they should just drink it. He slid the lid slightly aside and drank. Fumiko copied him, apparently.

Then Fumiko got to the point.

"I'll be direct. Do you already have a spouse? Or even if not, someone . . . well, something like a lover?"

If he did, she went on, she still wanted him to be with her, even if only as a comrade.

"I am single."

What a clumsy proposal it was. What a ridiculous scene. Thinking back, I want to burst out laughing, and my face turns red. But at that moment I said it with the utmost seriousness, Fumiko writes.

Pak Yeol described himself like this:

"I am nothing. I am just like someone who couldn't manage to die and keeps on living."

When it came time to pay, Pak Yeol pulled crumpled bills and copper coins out of his overcoat pocket.

"I'll pay. Today I have money."

Fumiko stopped him.

"It seems I'm the richer one."

Soon the two made a promise to live together. That night they walked in Hibiya Park. Neither had ever owned a watch. When Fumiko said she had to be home by nine, Pak Yeol went to a police box to check the time, apparently.

"Seventeen minutes to nine."

At parting, Fumiko asked whether he wasn't lonely, having no home.

"I am lonely."

Last spring he had caught a terrible flu. No one cared for him, and for about three days he lay groaning in a cheap inn with nothing to eat or drink, Pak Yeol told her.

Watching Pak Yeol jump onto a streetcar, Fumiko writes that she said in her heart:

"If we are to die, let's die together. Let us live together and die together."

The memoir from prison ends on this night.

So You're Kaneko Fumiko?

From May 1922, Fumiko and Pak Yeol began to live together. With friends they formed a group and put out a newsletter of their own.

A little over a year later, on September 1, 1923, the Great Kanto Earthquake struck.

The memoir she wrote in prison begins from just before noon on that day.

"Upheaval, anxiety, and finally that absurd rumor and riot."

A groundless rumor spread that Koreans were rioting, and many Koreans were killed. Two days later, on September 3, Fumiko was taken to the police along with Pak Yeol.

For what reason? I have no freedom to speak of it, the memoir says, and nothing more.

Some time later, Fumiko was called into a room at the court. It was the place where a judge questions you before the formal trial.

The judge looked at Fumiko closely and said, the memoir says:

"So you are Kaneko Fumiko?"

He was a judge named Tatematsu. He introduced himself as the one in charge of her questioning. Fumiko smiled and answered:

"Is that so. Please go easy on me."

First he asked about her honseki, the place where one's name is entered in the family register. Fumiko's answer was this:

"Well, if you put it like that, it's a bit awkward. In fact that place, Suwa village, is called my registered home, but I have never lived there as long as two years."

A child who grew up with her name never called was now being called by name by a judge.

That judge ordered Fumiko to write down her life so far.

Fumiko wrote. She only wrote the story of how she grew up, as she was ordered, she says at the start of the memoir. This is her memoir. More than anything, she adds, she wants the world's parents to read it.

Later the manuscript was entrusted to a comrade, Kurihara Kazuo. In asking him to revise it, Fumiko made a request:

"As for the style, please keep it simple and direct, and break it up as much as you can so that it does not become stiff."

The parts that are record all stand on facts. And she wants to find life in the place where the facts are, she also writes.

The two were indicted for high treason. It is a crime punished by death for anyone who tries to harm the Emperor, the Empress, the Crown Prince, and others.

The authorities said the two had tried to get bombs and attack the Emperor and the Crown Prince. In questioning, it is said, Pak Yeol spoke as if he admitted the plan. But nothing had actually happened. Later, some came to see the case as one that was used for political purposes and made to look bigger than it was.

On March 25, 1926, the Supreme Court, then the highest court in Japan, sentenced both of them to death.

On April 5, an imperial pardon came, and the sentences were reduced to life in prison. Pak Yeol is said to have said he would refuse the pardon. As for Fumiko, the story goes that she tore up the notice of the reduced sentence right in front of the prison warden.

On July 23 of the same year, Fumiko died in a prison in Tochigi. She was twenty-three.

The prison announced it was suicide. Her family did not believe it. Her body had been buried in the prison cemetery. Fumiko's mother, the lawyer Fuse Tatsuji, and her friends tried to dig it up and check. Even so, what happened remains unknown.

Her ashes were taken by Pak Yeol's older brother and buried in Pak's hometown, Mungyeong, in Korea.

She was the child whose name was skipped at the morning roll call, when the teacher reached the child next to her.

The child who watched the others going to school from the foot of the cherry tree in front of her house. The half-sheet certificate that folded limp. Told she was born and yet not born; given a name, and then having it taken away.

Even for that child, there were people who held out a hand.

The Korean woman who said, if barley rice is all right. The maid from the soba shop who brought soba water in a kettle to the newspaper seller who had lost her voice. The old second-hand book seller who asked her to mind his stall. Hatsuyo, who lent her the books she had longed to read, one after another.

At the end of her memoir, Fumiko writes:

"Before long my existence will be wiped from this world."

And then the very last line, before she put down her brush:

"Blessings on everything I love!"