Bill Fellenberg and his parents, Sachiko Takano and William Kipp Fellemberg, with permission.
Who can imagine the bitterness of a first suspicion that something in this object of complete love was not quite right?
-George Eliot, Daniel Deronda
What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it…
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
Sometimes a memoir writer can be a rascal or rapscallion, as the Brits would say, the prose pithy, the plot a romp like Catcher in the Rye, the tone wry, until a moment arrives—and it is always unexpected—when the action stops and the reader has to either close the book to catch her breath, or return to the sentences that have made her lose her breath, sentences such as these from William Yukikazu Fellenberg's Sayonara Cowboy:
"Whether or not it is true is irrelevant. I accept it as part of my mother's world of the kami, the ancestor spirits who inform events that swirl into the future. She tilts my chin, so my face turns up to hers. The salt spray spumes to the heights of where we stand. Before pieces of the ocean land on your lips, you know it is delicious."
I met William Yukikazu (Bill) Fellenberg in a writing workshop at a local library soon after I arrived in the Mid-Hudson Valley. He read aloud from his memoir and I was intrigued. We then met for a coffee and chatted about writing and the writing life. It was obvious that Bill had been writing for a long time, had the drive to tell his unusual story, and the discipline to bring a book to completion. Nonetheless, it took him ten years to finish. Born in Yokohama, Japan during the American occupation, his mother, Sachiko, was a Japanese "shopgirl," his dad, William, a soldier in the occupation army. He brought them to America and Bill grew up in New Jersey, mostly with his paternal grandparents. He learned English quickly. "During our first spring and summer with my grandparents in Millington, my voice found words and arranged them in the American way, all by itself," he writes, understating his supple adaptation. He developed a likable, albeit mischievous persona, got into and out of trouble, loved his grandparents and was loved by them with a protective intensity, more so whenever his too young and inexperienced father wandered away, returned, and wandered away again.
His mother never could adjust to life in America, and had a breakdown, it seems. Eventually, after much struggle and suffering, a decision was made: she must return to Japan. At just 8-years-old, but wise for his years, Bill was given the choice and decided to stay with his father. He felt guilt, the way a boy feels guilt, when he lied to his mother about his wish to return to Japan with her. The most heartrending passage in the book takes place on a ship in the New York harbor as Sachiko is about to sail away, leaving her husband and son behind forever. The son writes: "Back then, I could not grasp why she left and why I stayed. Did she abandon me, or did I abandon her?" That was a child's thought. As an adult, in conversation, Bill uses the word "deserted" to describe his mother's departure.
"Have you ever been to Japan?" I asked him during a recent Zoom conversation.
"I have not and I have some regrets. I may do a pilgrimage with my son, who my wife and I adopted from Korea, and his wife, born in China."
At one point, a friend with Japanese connections offered to help Bill search for his mother, but to no avail. Despite this sadness and trauma--a disappearance without return--Bill retained his optimism and found the courage to write about his complicated and challenging childhood with a strong and authentic voice. It's a book I could not put down and read in two sittings.
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