“YAKU!” MOM EXCLAIMED, a look of pure triumph radiating from her face. Her eyes had that delightful twinkle that I had not seen in months, if not years. Since I had moved her to The Plaza, an assisted-living facility in the Punchbowl neighbourhood of Honolulu, I’d never seen my mother looking so elated, so self-satisfied. I hesitated, wondering whether to tell her that the three Hanafuda playing cards that she had just laid down weren’t, in fact, the right combination for a yaku.

Ever since Dad passed away more than five years ago, my mother’s memory had been slipping. Initially it was just her short-term recall – forgetting things I’d just told her and repeating herself multiple times in the same conversation. But then her memory of past events began to falter, as she continually asked me when I would settle down and get married, not realizing that I had already been married and then divorced in a protracted, acrimonious battle.

Finally, after a battery of tests at a neurologist’s office, where she couldn’t remember the day of the week, her age, nor that George W. Bush was president, she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and prescribed Aricept. This was more than a year ago, and as far as I could tell the medication had failed to slow the progression of the disease.

Mom could still recognize the yakus of the ten-point Hanafuda cards because those were simple enough: three purple banners, or three plain red banners, or three red banners with writing. But the yakus of five-point cards were far trickier, and today she had mistakenly put together cards for the iris, chrysanthemum, and plum suits. Those three flowers, rendered in such delightful colours, might complement each other aesthetically yet they were mismatched for the game we were playing. But I decided to let that slide.

Before I played my next card, though, I noticed that, in addition to that victorious twinkle in her soft brown eyes, there was also a slight asymmetric upturn of the corner of her lips. That wry smile made me wonder if she had indeed made an inadvertent mistake. Maybe, I thought to myself, she’s testing me, like she used to do when I was a young kid. She’d purposely state something that was wrong – saying, for example, that Sacramento was the capital of Oregon or that Mars was the planet closest to the sun – just to see whether I knew enough to correct her.

I looked at my mother, who had just turned eighty-four, and I couldn’t quite figure out what she was up to, or if she was up to anything at all. She was still smiling as she rearranged the remaining cards in her hand, and her look of triumph at her mistaken yaku was too pure, too joyous. I quickly conceded my false optimism. I was hoping she was pulling my leg because then I could delude myself into thinking that her mind was still sharp and that she hadn’t been increasingly forgetting important things like the names of her many nieces and nephews, sometimes not even recognizing who they were. I might have even convinced myself that she would not, at some point, forget even my name, though I was her first-born child.

The one name that seemed to stay lodged in her memory was that of Loretta Sasaki, her childhood friend. Mom would often ask about her: how she was doing, where she was now living, what trips she might have recently taken. But I had no answers for my mother’s relentless questions about Loretta. I didn’t even know if she was still alive and, if she was, whether she was still living on Oahu. Unfortunately, the two women had had a falling out decades ago, resulting in Loretta becoming persona non grata, as far as my mother was concerned. I actually hadn’t heard Mom even mention her name in years but then, after she had to be moved into The Plaza, she suddenly began to reminisce about Loretta, talking frequently about her almost to the point of obsession. Early on I had hoped that this was a passing phase, but after the weeks turned into months, Mom always lapsing into “Loretta this” or “Loretta that,” I gathered that guilt was at the root of her gnawing preoccupation with her childhood friend, that my mother felt badly about their falling out and wanted to make amends before she passed.

Of course I wanted to do whatever I could to help ease her conscience, but I had no idea how to initiate a rapprochement, or even if a reconciliation were indeed possible. The problem was that, even if Loretta were still alive, I had no idea how to get in touch with her because my mother couldn’t remember her friend’s married name and neither could I. In fact, I’m not sure if, as a kid, I had ever learned it. Ever since I could remember Mom would just refer to her dear friend as Loretta or, if she included a surname, it was always Sasaki, Loretta’s maiden name.

Fortunately “Loretta” is a somewhat unusual first name for a Nisei woman so I thought I might try to find her through the Internet, but a Google search yielded nothing. Then I figured that maybe I could locate her through one of her relatives. But when I first looked at the Oahu phone book for “Sasaki,” I gasped. There was more than a full page of them, four columns with each name printed in such small type. Still, I girded myself one night and began calling those numbers, starting with Alan Sasaki, asking complete strangers whether Loretta might be a relative.

People were initially suspicious, many on the verge of hanging up, until I pleaded with them that my elderly mother, who was suffering from Alzheimer’s, was hoping to reconnect with her childhood friend. Then they’d usually be sympathetic, some even empathizing with stories of a relative who was similarly afflicted with dementia. But at the end of more than a month’s work, with my calling about a dozen numbers a night to finally reach the home of Yoichi Sasaki, with his daughter telling me that she had never heard of a Loretta in their family, I had nothing to show for my efforts.

Today, during our Hanafuda game, Mom has been talking about the times before the war – “the war,” in my mother’s vernacular, is always in reference to World War II. She was telling me something I had heard countless times before, about how she and Loretta would get dressed up in kimono to attend Saturday matinees at the Toyo Theater in downtown Honolulu.

“Of course,” she told me, “Loretta’s kimono was always more beautiful than mine, and her obi more hadena. Her family was so rich, you see. And, anyway, she was always the oshare type ever since we were kids. Loretta always had to have the nicest, the fanciest, the best of everything, not like me.”

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LORETTA AND MY MOTHER were both born and raised in the Palama neighbourhood of Honolulu, just outside of downtown. The two girls were nearly the same age (Loretta being just a week older) and both were the daughters of Japanese immigrants from the Hiroshima prefecture. They attended the same elementary and intermediate schools, as well as Palama Gakuen for after-school instruction in the Japanese language.

But there the similarities ended. Loretta was an only child, the daughter of a wealthy merchant who owned a small department store downtown. Mom had six siblings, and her father was a carpenter trained in building wooden Shinto shrines. Loretta was a popular extrovert in school, whereas Mom was a bookish introvert, more comfortable being by herself reading in a library than socializing with classmates.

Growing up the two girls may have been vastly different in personality, style, and temperament, but life would soon chart them on the exact same course. It was a painful path of traumatic dislocations.

Following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, the FBI quickly rounded up both girls’ fathers, first detaining them on Sand Island in Honolulu Harbor, and then shipping them to the mainland, where they were eventually imprisoned in a federal facility in Santa Fe. The girls themselves, along with their families, were sent to the Jerome concentration camp in Arkansas, incarcerated in hastily slapped together barracks on swampland infested with snakes, chiggers, and other creatures that they had never encountered before.

Just as they were getting used to their new environment – the cramped, grim living quarters and severe lack of privacy – their lives would be disrupted again. In September 1943, during the middle of the war, both Mom’s and Loretta’s families were compelled by the U.S. State Department to participate in a hostage exchange. Along with hundreds of other families of Japanese descent, they were sent on a ship that departed from New York Harbor and sailed south to Rio de Janeiro, where it stopped to refuel and replenish supplies. They then crossed the Atlantic Ocean, made a layover at Port Elizabeth, South Africa, and traversed the choppy Indian Ocean to arrive finally in Goa, India, which was then occupied by the British Army.

At Goa, they were exchanged, one for one like cattle, for Americans who had been stranded in Japan, Shanghai, Singapore, and other parts of Japan-occupied Asia when the war broke out. In essence, Mom and Loretta, who were U.S. citizens by birth, were exchanged for other Americans, but of fairer skin and lighter eyes.

From India, the hostages from the U.S. sailed for Japan on the Teia Maru, with stops in Singapore and the Philippines. Because the ship was badly overcrowded, Loretta and my mother had to sleep on bunk beds on the open deck along with the other teenage hostages, separate from their families who were crammed into small rooms below. After being at sea for more than two months, they arrived in Yokohama, where they were abandoned in a country ravaged by war. Buildings had been reduced to rubble, and people looked like they were dressed in pyjamas, their faces gaunt and bodies underfed. Both families from Honolulu made their way to Hiroshima, taking days on packed trains that were only running intermittently.

They settled on opposite sides of the prefecture, with Mom in Otake, on the western edge, and Loretta in Kumano, on the eastern side. They attended different schools but both suffered similar bullying from their classmates, criticized for their imperfect Japanese and teased for supposedly smelling like stinky cheese. Ostracized by their peers, the girls stayed in touch as best they could, writing letters to each other that often took weeks to arrive.

Then, on August 6, 1945, the United States unleashed the first nuclear weapon ever used in war, levelling Hiroshima. Fortunately, Mom and Loretta were living far enough outside the city centre to escape the initial blast and savage firestorm, but they suffered the subsequent black rain. They would worry for the rest of their lives how their bodies might have been defiled by exposure to the radiation.

After the war, Mom met and married my father, who was stationed in Japan as an interpreter for the U.S. occupying force. She moved back to Honolulu with him, and I was born a year later. Loretta also eventually relocated back to Honolulu, thanks to a loan of $150 from the U.S. government. In Hawaii, the two women reconnected with each other as they began their adult lives in post-war Honolulu.

Suffice it to say that Loretta and my mother understood each other in ways that no other living person could. They were among the very few people who were eyewitnesses to the start of World War II – the devastating Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor – as well as its end – the horrific atomic bombing of Hiroshima. They experienced what it was like to be shipped off to a U.S. concentration camp in Arkansas, and they both suffered the traumatic indignity of being deported by one’s own country in a hostage exchange. As the two teenage friends experienced the flashing white light and malevolent mushroom cloud in Hiroshima, what must have been going through their minds, realizing that their own country had not only forsaken them but had also unleashed such an unimaginable weapon of destruction virtually at their doorsteps?

For me, growing up in Honolulu, Loretta was often a part of my earliest memories. Like many Nisei women, my mother didn’t drive, so Loretta would pick us up in her silver Buick to have lunch together or to shop at the Fort Street Mall downtown. Sometimes we’d go to the Ala Moana Beach Park, where the two friends would spend hours talking while I’d play in the sand or take my inner tube to float in the calm waters there. Looking back at those times, I regret not listening more closely to their conversations. Once in a while, I would hear snippets about “camp” or about the “Gripsholm,” the ship that had transported them from New York Harbor to India, but I was so young that those stories held little interest. Occasionally the words “genbaku” and “hibakusha” would surface in their talks. I liked the sound of those words, thinking they might pertain to a fun kind of adult game like mahjong. Much later I would learn that they referred to the atomic bomb and to the survivors of that devastating weapon.

Every so often, Loretta and Mom would engage in an extended conversation in Japanese, a language beyond my comprehension. Loretta would be smoking a cigarette, which was always poised delicately between her index and middle fingers, her wrist tilted elegantly backward, as the two women talked within their own bubble, completely oblivious to the outside world. After one of those lengthy conversations, with Loretta nearly finishing her pack of Virginia Slims, I asked my mother what they had been talking about, and she shrugged, “Oh, nothing.”

Eventually Loretta married, my parents had three additional children, and I saw my mother’s friend less and less. Then the two women had a major falling out that, even today, perplexes me. The only time I ever did hear my mother speak cross words about her childhood friend was after Loretta had travelled with her husband to Europe, visiting England, the Netherlands, and France. When the couple had returned to Hawaii, Loretta visited us one afternoon, showing Mom all the photos she had taken of the major tourist attractions they had visited. She had also brought some omiyage, souvenir gifts from her travels: a beautiful scarf from Harrods in London, miniature hand-painted wooden shoes from Amsterdam, and a small oil painting from Paris. In the framed artwork, two alluring young women were walking hand in hand through a busy street, pedestrians rushing around them, the Eiffel Tower in the distance.

As Mom admired the painting, Loretta told her, “Next time I want to go to Spain and Italy, and you know what I really want? I want for the two of us to go together. Wouldn’t that be just too sugoi for words!”

That day, after Loretta had left, Mom seemed agitated as she began cooking dinner. She clanged dishes and pots, reaching for this utensil or that ingredient, and she chopped onions with an added aggressiveness. I sat on a kitchen stool watching her silently, and then the words came tumbling out.

“That Loretta, she thinks it would be so easy for me to travel. Just go flying off with her the next time she has an itch to visit Europe. So simple, just pack a suitcase and get on a plane and fly to wherever.”

Then, a long silence. Finally, as I sat there, a disconcerting sense of guilt burgeoning within me, I had to ask, “Would you want to go with her if you could? I mean, if you didn’t have a family?”

Mom shook her head as she continued grating a knob of ginger, the fragrant scent filling the air. “I had more than my fair share of excitement and travel during the war, thanks to the U.S. government, so no more trips for me.”

Not fully grasping what she had just told me, I persisted. “But what about a short trip,” I asked, “maybe to Maui or the Big Island?”

Mom stopped what she was doing and turned to face me, her eyes narrowing as she spoke. “Loretta and I are two very different people,” she said, her voice enunciating every syllable. “She doesn’t have children so, sure, she can travel and see all those amazing sights and eat at those fancy restaurants. Loretta has no idea what it’s like to raise a family, absolutely no idea at all.” And with that, Mom turned back to her cooking.

Not sure what else to say or do, I slunk off to the living room to look at the painting from Loretta. The two young women, both with scarves flowing in the wind, their cheeks flush with excitement, looked so carefree and lighthearted, yet there was also a hint of mischief in their faces, as if they were about to embark on some forbidden adventure. I could easily see Loretta in that painting but not my own mother, and I realized then what Mom was really trying to tell me: “Loretta has no idea what it’s like to be me.”

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MOM STRUGGLED with Alzheimer’s for an extended three years. It was devastating, watching the woman who raised me slip away week by week until, not only did she no longer recognize her four children and five grandchildren – including her warubozu grandson Kyle, her favourite – but we could no longer really recognize the matriarch of our family anymore.

Yet one day near the end of her life, as I was showing her an album of old photos, trying to elicit some fragment of the mother I knew, we came across a picture of her and Loretta in what looked like downtown Honolulu. The two girls must have been in their early teens, maybe only a year or two before the Pearl Harbor attack. In the photo, the two are eating shave ice with Mom smiling shyly, her head turned slightly downward, while Loretta stares straight into the camera, looking so confident, so self-assured. Little did the two teenagers know the traumatic turmoil their young lives would soon suffer.

My mother looked at that photo for a few seconds, then out of nowhere her mind seemed to jump start back into being. “Loretta always had to have azuki beans and ice cream with her shave ice,” Mom told me, “but I could only afford the shave ice.”

Hoping to capitalize on this one moment of clarity, I was full of questions: “Where did you buy the shave ice? What flavour was your favourite? Who took this photo? Your hair looks so short; was it always that short when you were a teenager?” But just as quickly as that portal to the past had opened, it collapsed on itself, and that vacant, lost, uncomprehending look returned to her face.

That day was the last time that I had anything remotely resembling a conversation with my mother, beyond her indicating to me that she was cold or hungry or uncomfortable because her skin was itchy. As her Alzheimer’s progressed toward its terrifying conclusion, her memory loss became so severe that her body forgot even how to drink water or swallow food.

Mom’s funeral at the Hosoi Mortuary was a small gathering, mainly of her immediate family and her many nieces and nephews and their children. Her favourite niece – my cousin Carolyn – gave a beautiful, touching eulogy full of sweet, heartfelt anecdotes that helped me to remember the woman that my mother was before Alzheimer’s had ravaged her mind.

At the end of the service, a woman around my age approached me to offer her condolences. “Hi, I’m Anne Watanabe. I’m so sorry about your mother. My Auntie Loretta and your mother were such good friends.”

I felt dizzy, overcome with a rush of emotions. There were so many things I wanted to ask Anne but I found myself babbling about how much Loretta had meant to my mother, how I didn’t understand why the two friends had had such a falling out, how I had tried to locate Loretta in hopes that the two friends might have a reconciliation. Anne looked at me with such sympathy, and I knew even before she spoke the news she was going to deliver. “My auntie passed away a while ago,” Anne said, her eyes filled with compassion. “It was lung cancer, not surprising I guess, considering the way she used to smoke.”

As we reminisced about the two Nisei women, something dawned on me. “By the way, I always thought Loretta was an only child. I didn’t know she had a niece.”

“Oh, I’m from her husband’s side of the family. I’m the daughter of his sister. I might not be a blood relative but Auntie Lol spoiled me like I was her own daughter. Oh the fancy birthday and Christmas gifts I’d get from her! She was so extravagant, almost to a fault.”

“And my mother was just the opposite, so reserved and frugal.”

“Auntie used to tell me that, whenever they’d go out to lunch, your mom would always order the cheapest thing on the menu.”

“Yup, that’s my mom,” I laughed. “Even if it was a dinner in her honour, like her birthday, she would still order the cheapest thing, usually chicken. And I don’t think she particularly liked chicken.”

“That’s too funny because my auntie would usually order something fancy and expensive, just to try it.”

“Makes you wonder how those two could have ever been such close friends,” I chuckled.

“But I guess it makes sense,” Anne said, “when you think about all they went through together during the war. Unbelievable the experiences they had. Oh, and the shame and humiliation to be deported like that.”

“Oh, so your aunt talked about what happened to her during the war?”

Anne nodded but, before I could say anything else, my cousin Carolyn caught my eye. She seemed to need help with one of the caterer’s workers, who was carrying a large platter of inarizushi but wasn’t sure where it should go. Noticing my distraction, Anne said, “let’s get together for lunch sometime. I left my phone number in the condolence card.”

Several weeks later Anne and I did meet for lunch at a trendy new restaurant in Kakaako. It was just the sort of restaurant that Loretta would have taken Mom to, but my mother wouldn’t have been able to enjoy herself. She would look at the fancy dishes and exorbitant prices – $38 for truffle-braised short ribs – and feel intimidated. Inevitably, she’d order one of the simplest and cheapest dishes – more than likely the grilled chicken breast with lemon-thyme sauce for $17. And then she’d pretend that, of everything on the extensive menu, the chicken was what she wanted most. Or maybe Loretta would succeed in goading my mother into trying something more adventurous, regardless of price.

“I’ve decided,” Anne said, her face breaking into a gentle smile as she looked up from her menu to catch my eyes, “that we should both order the chicken with the lemon-thyme sauce.”

I laughed, more to myself than to Anne, as I realized that she was thinking the same thing that I was. “Actually,” I told her, “I think you should have another dish, maybe something you’ve never tried before, and I’ll be the one to have the chicken, in honour of my mom, of course.”

“Okay then, I’ll have the short ribs,” she said, “in honour of Auntie, of course.”

Anne then raised her glass of wine and tilted her head with an expectant expression, signalling that a toast was in order. “To your dear mom and my dear auntie. Something tells me they’re up there right now, watching us. Maybe they’re even reminiscing about their childhoods, growing up in Honolulu.” As Anne and I clinked glasses, I couldn’t help but smile as I thought about the two friends, such different women but so inextricably bound by a shared past of epic upheavals that might have defied the imagination of even a skilled novelist.

As we ate, Anne filled me in with the missing details of Loretta’s life. She told me that her Uncle Ted, Loretta’s husband, passed away when her aunt was in her mid-fifties, leaving Loretta bereft. “The two of them were so extremely close, truly each other’s soul mates, maybe because they never had children. So it was always just the two of them. And boy how they loved traveling together. I can’t even remember how many times they went to Europe.”

But after Ted’s death, Loretta retreated into herself, continuously watching U.S. soap operas during the day and Korean dramas at night. “I could barely entice her to leave her home, even for family celebrations,” Anne said. “Thankfully, just to provide her with something to do and impose some structure in her life, I was able to find her a part-time job at Liberty House in the Ala Moana Center.”

“Wait, your aunt used to work there?”

“Oh yeah, at the cosmetics counter for Chanel. She used to get me the store discount whenever I needed anything.”

“No way!” I exclaimed, startling Anne. “My mother used to shop there all the time, but I think she’d only buy Shiseido products.”

“Oh geesh, Chanel was on the opposite side of the cosmetics department, away from the Shiseido counter. Still, so odd that they never once bumped into each other there.”

Anne stared at me as we digested what we’d just learned, our minds awash with a maddening stream of hypotheticals. If only the Chanel and Shiseido products had been located closer together. If only my mother had once thought to venture past her Japanese cosmetics and sampled a European brand. If only Loretta had, perhaps while rushing off to her afternoon break one day, noticed a familiar face perusing the Shiseido line. And if they had met, they could have rekindled their friendship, maybe lunching with each other every so often or even going to the movies together again.

If only, if only, if only.

We ate in silence for a few minutes and, as we were finishing our meals, Anne asked, “How was the chicken?”

“To be honest, it was a bit dry, but I’m sure my mother would have claimed she loved it.”

Without missing a beat, Anne said, “The spare ribs were cooked just right, so soft and tender, but that sauce was much too rich for me, although I bet Auntie would have proclaimed it the best meal she’d ever had.”

We looked at each other, our faces giving way to conspiratorial smiles. And then we chuckled, ever so quietly at first, then a louder chortle, which eventually expanded into full-throated, unrestrained laughter. I soon felt my eyes beginning to tear. “To my wonderful mother and to your amazing aunt,” I said, as Anne and I raised our glasses for one more toast to the two women with the most remarkable friendship.

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