My arrival in the United States of America was not promising. A mass of men, frightened and filthy, stinking and hungry—I among them—filed out of the China Hold onto the dock, squinting in the bright sunlight. I dragged my trunk with some difficulty down the gangplank. No one offered to help me. In fact, I was cursed by a man, as my slowness held up the line. Once on the dock, I stood there because a cluster of passengers blocked the way ahead of me. They were looking around, uncertain what to do. None of us knew what to do.

Some of the men had sensibly walked down the dock’s blackened boards to dry land. I could not do so, as the passageway was occupied by the confused knot of passengers, who appeared to be arguing about something. Up ahead, a crate had broken as it was being unloaded, and a sailor shouted and waved his hands at a dozen shrieking gulls who seemed to be mocking him as they investigated the crate’s spilled contents. I could see a white man in a white shirt and black vest standing on the pebbly shore, shouting at the men who had just disembarked. I could not hear what he was saying, and the men could not understand him. It was Babel.

Alaska was not yet one of the United States, but it was still American soil, having been purchased from Russia thirty or so years earlier—and that meant I was about to set foot in the same country as Stieglitz.

I looked back at the Ryojun Maru, rocking gently at the dock. It had brought us laborers over the heaving, angry sea—the distinctly misnamed Pacific Ocean—thrusting upward and back down over and over, until half the men had vomited onto the floor of the lower deck where we slept. From the dock, the ship looked massive, like a city block floating on the water, its smokestack thrusting up toward the sun, yet when we were on it, it had seemed as cramped and confining as a dungeon. I had often come up on deck (until I was inevitably caught by a scolding sailor and sent back down) to breathe healthful air and escape the underdeck beehive of my countrymen.

After a short time, the line of men—failed farmers, fugitives wanted by the authorities, and resolute men unwanted by anyone—started moving again toward the land. The weather in Sitka was cool but not cold, as it was the last week of May. The man in the black vest was still shouting and had begun gesturing. When I got closer, I could hear him telling the passengers to walk this way and load their belongings onto a cart waiting on the road. He spoke English with an accent I did not recognize. His face and hair were red. I couldn’t understand every word he said, but I understood enough, and translated for him, pointing to the road and telling them, “Nimotsu o kaato ni nosete.”

All heads turned toward me when I spoke. In my mind’s eye, I could see what they saw: a young man, short, in a black suit, a black tie, a white shirt with a two-inch collar, and a bowler hat. I contrasted with the others, whose clothing, mostly kimono but some Western garments, had already been shabby twenty-eight days ago, when we had boarded in Yokohama, and now were sea-worn and dirty from the long, hard, trans-oceanic journey. I looked like what I was, a school teacher, yet I was as rumpled and unwashed as they were, and as hungry. I had a glint of desperation in my eye. We all did.

The white man beckoned for me to come to him. I did so, dragging my trunk up the shore, leaving a grooved path behind me. Finally, I thought. Someone in charge.

“You! You speak English?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And Japanese?”

“Of course. I am a Japanese.”

“Tell the men going to the Red Gold Packing Company that the cart will be brought to a smaller steamship and loaded. Their things will be returned to them after they reach the cannery. They’ll make the rest of the trip on that second ship.”

I climbed up onto my trunk and shouted my translation. After a moment of uncertainty, the men moved toward the road and then began working as a team, lifting and loading, organizing the luggage so that the heavy trunks did not crush the cardboard cases underneath.

The Japanese bunkhouse provided by the company was appalling—not much better than the ship’s hold, truly. It smelled of rotten fish and human bodies. I would rather have slept in an army tent in the fresh salt air, but I had been herded with the others into this ramshackle building. In the air were buzzing mosquitoes, larger than any I had ever seen. The space rang with twangy country accents from all over. Men were claiming bunks close to the stove or the window or the door, arguing, laughing loudly in the unreserved way country people do.

I sat on an unclaimed bottom bunk and slid my trunk beneath it. The top bunk looked as if it already belonged to someone. The mattresses were thin and dirty, and there was no cushion for my head, but no matter. It was at least a little better than the ship, and I could roll up some of my clothing for a makura.

A man with a thick body and dirty fingers, ungroomed hair, and an unshaven face suddenly came and stood next to me as I sat on my bunk. “The top bunk is mine,” he said in a voice that was half grunt, half earthquake.

“That’s fine,” I answered, dipping my head in a bow-like gesture.

“I’ve had it for three weeks. It’s mine.”

“Fine, fine. The top bunk is yours. I am Matsu’ura, from Tokyo.”

He looked me over. “All right, Matsu’ura from Tokyo. I’m Taku from Yokohama.”

He did not bow, and he spoke to me as if we were familiar with one another, without the respectful language that the others on the ship had used toward me. Back home, this would have seemed unforgivable, but here I was grateful. On the ship, many had viewed me with suspicion. Some had said I was a spy for the company, or a debt collector. Others had been obsequious, hoping to gain some advantage through association with me. I hated that. I was glad to have someone to talk normally with.

“This place is the shithouse of Alaska,” Taku continued.

“Ah,” I said. “I can smell that.”

He laughed loudly, from his belly. Then he kicked my trunk with his bare foot. “If this is valuable, whatever it is, hide it.” He gestured at the others with a jerk of his head. “Thieves.”

“It’s my cameras. I am a photographer. Do you know about photographs?”

“I’ve seen them, but not the thing that makes them,” Taku said.

“I’ll photograph you sometime.”

“Sounds valuable. Maybe I’ll steal it.”

I couldn’t tell if he was joking. “Is there going to be food?” I asked.

“Yes, in the mess hall. But it’s shit. There’s better food in the company store.”

“When? I’m hungry.”

“Pretty soon.”

He climbed onto the top bunk, stepping on my bed to do so. He had not asked what I was doing in Alaska. Maybe he assumed that I had done something terrible back home, committed a crime maybe, and was fleeing the authorities. Leaving Japan to work in a salmon cannery was no one’s first choice. I was grateful that he hadn’t asked.

After our meal—a small portion of chipped beef in a salty sauce, on top of a large quantity of potatoes—I was summoned to the office of the cannery’s superintendent, Mr. Andersen. I didn’t want to go. I was still exhausted from the ocean passage and just wanted to rest. But in his office, furnished with a scrolled wooden desk, he told me he had learned from the foreman that I could speak English. He said I could be useful when it came to communicating with the Japs. He was a young man, very fair, with fine features. I stood respectfully before him.

“Where did you learn your English? Missionaries?” he asked.

“No, sir. I had a teacher at university. Mr. Block, an American.”

“At university?”

“Yes, sir. My uncle sent me there to learn English, German, literature, and philosophy. He runs a school. I trained to be a teacher.”

He asked what sorts of things had been part of my education, and I told him.

“You’ve read Shakespeare and Aristotle?” His face contorted with incredulity. He pronounced his r’s the same way Japanese did.

“The classics in translation, sir. My Greek is very bad. But the Shakespeare in English.”

“Anything Norwegian, by chance?”

I thought for a moment. “I have read one play, but it’s modern. By a writer named Henrik Ibsen.”

“Yoss! You’ve read Ibsen?” he exclaimed.

“A Doll’s House, sir, in a Japanese translation.”

Mr. Andersen slapped his thigh. “That’s remarkable! What did you say your name was?”

“Sakae Matsu’ura.” I said my given name first and my surname second, so as not to confuse him.

“Matsura,” he repeated. “What the devil are you doing here?”

“I would like to work here, sir. I’m a hard worker.”

“Of course, of course. But what are you equipped to do?”

“I can learn to work in the salmon cannery. I learn quickly.”

“Of that I have no doubt.” He scratched his temple. “But I can’t have an educated man work the line. I have another purpose for you. Would you be willing to translate for my foreman? It’s hard to get workers to do exactly what you need them to do when you don’t speak the same language.”

“Would that be all? Just translate?”

“Well, no. We wouldn’t need that every day. But I can’t have a civilized man who reads Ibsen chopping the guts out of salmon.” Mr. Andersen paused. “‘The valued file distinguishes the swift, the slow, the subtle.’ Recognize that?”

“Isn’t that from Macbeth, sir?”

He guffawed with pleasure. “Herregud. You’ll have a ‘station in the file, not in the worst rank of manhood.’”

I smiled, but wondered whether his choice of quote was appropriate. After all, Macbeth had been talking to men he was hiring to murder his friend.

Mr. Andersen asked about my religious affiliation and was pleased to hear that I was a fellow Protestant, a Presbyterian. He was a Lutheran himself, he said. “You’ll work in the company store. And on Sunday, come to supper with me and the wife. She’ll be very interested to meet you.”

That’s how I came to work at the company store. It was easy, compared to the grueling cannery work I heard described by the others. In fact it was rather boring, and not physically demanding.

The person who had been doing the job before was an Italian named Guiseppe, or Joe, as he preferred. Joe was also educated. Upon meeting me, he opened a bottle of beer and poured it into two glasses. He told me that had been a classical scholar at the Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II. He would have been happy to live and die in Napoli, just an old man collecting books and boring younger men with his story of the day when Garibaldi—also named Guiseppe!—ate at his table and slept under his roof. But Joe had accidentally insulted an Archbishop in Napoli and feared for his life. “It was a misunderstanding,” he assured me. “I paid him a compliment: I said he had the intelligence of a brickmason. Tell me—why is that an insult? It’s a good thing. A brickmason is more intelligent than an archbishop.”

Consequently, Joe had fled to Alaska with his cousin from a nearby village. His cousin, Joe explained, was the youngest son of a fisherman, who had heard that they needed experienced fishermen in Alaska. As it turned out, Joe had ended up in the company store.

But now Joe planned to move to Sitka and open a general store. I was his replacement. He explained to me how the store operated. The men were given metal tokens—“scrip”—representing the pay they would receive at the end of the fishing season. They could use the scrip to buy things at the company store. But it was really a racket, he said, to take the company’s workers’ pay back. The prices at the store were inflated, and the scrip wasn’t worth anything anywhere else. Even if it had been, there was no other store for two hundred miles. So, by the end of the season, many men found they had spent their entire pay in advance, on cigarettes, Pilot bread, clothing, useless gadgets, and boxed food. “It’s a dirty scheme,” Joe said. “Those men work and receive no pay. That’s like slavery, no?” I had to agree.

He also told me it could be a lonely job, and that frightened me a little. I was always happiest when among friends, joking around, laughing, listening to stories. When I was alone for a long time, I felt smaller and smaller until it seemed as if I might disappear. Since leaving Japan, I had felt that way often, even when surrounded by fellow Japanese. Especially with other Japanese.

Joe showed me the ledger and the cash box and told me about the infrequent deliveries of goods, which came in huge quantities and thus caused storage problems. He told me to set traps for the rats. I clenched my jaw—I hate rats. They frighten and disgust me. He also warned me never to give merchandise on credit, even if someone begged for it, because then a worker would reach the end of the season and actually owe the company money, meaning he’d have to keep working for nothing until he paid off his debt. And that really was slavery.

When evening came and we closed the store, Joe left, and I never saw him again. I guessed that he’d been waiting impatiently for someone to relieve him, like a soldier on watch. I hoped he would find happiness. He had left behind a postcard of Mt. Vesuvius, and I tacked it up on the wall of the store in case he ever came back for a visit.

When I got back to the bunkhouse, I found Taku and some of the other men sitting around playing cards—hanafuda, the flower-card game. I asked if I could join them.

I could tell that some of them were uncomfortable with the idea, but I told a few jokes and lost some money, and after a while they became more relaxed around me.

I asked them what it was like, working on the line.

“Shitty,” Taku said. “And dangerous.”

They explained the process to me. The fishing scows came in with their catch, and the men hoisted them up to the cannery deck—that was called brailing, young Kenta said—and spilled them onto the floor. Often as many as eighty thousand fish came from one scow.

“Sometimes you have to walk knee-deep in salmon, sensei,” Ito said with sarcasm. “It’s slippery—easy to fall.” Ito, a thin nasal-voiced man who avoided eye contact with me, liked to call me sensei, but not in a respectful or friendly way; it was sardonic, mocking. They all knew I worked at the store.

The men would feed the fish onto a belt, where they were gutted. The heads and guts were thrown down through a hole in the floor into the water below. That’s why gulls and sharks were always under the dock, an older man with a cigarette said. The men chopped off the fish heads and cut off the tail and fins. They washed the slime off the fish in a shallow saltwater tank. No one liked working at the slime table.

Then the fish were descaled and filleted by a gang with sharp knives. “Sht, sht, sht—done,” said a portly man. “Five seconds, done.” Sometimes a man on the fillet team would accidentally cut his hand and get blood on the fish, but it didn’t matter because salmon is red already, so who would notice?

“Unless the cut is bad,” said another man. “Then you have to wash and bandage it so you don’t bleed to death.”

“But then you’ve slowed the line,” said the portly man, “so the foreman screams at you like you’ve insulted his father.”

At the next station, the salmon were cut up, put into cans by hand, and weighed. If a can was too heavy, the men took some fish out; if it was too light, they put a few pieces in. Then the cans of fish were salted and sent to a machine, operated by two men, that soldered on the lids. Next, the sealed cans were loaded by a four-man team into a retort, to be cooked. When the cans came out, steaming and hot, they were rinsed in lye, labeled, and packed for shipping.

“The lye tank is a good job and a bad job,” one of the men told me. “It’s clean, and you don’t have to touch the fish at all, but the lye is dangerous. A man was blinded last year when the tank splashed him in the face.”

“And the whole cannery is very loud,” said Matsumoto, the portly man. “You can’t hear someone talking to you even if he’s right in front of your face.”

“We ship three hundred and fifty thousand cans a season,” said Ueno, the older man.

I felt tired just listening to the whole process. And during the busiest time of the season, the men worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week.

“I’m a fisherman,” said Taku abruptly. “I didn’t come here to gut fish all day. That’s women’s work.”

It was true that, in Japan, women would clean the fish in the kitchen before cooking them. Men caught the fish and brought them home.

“I came here thinking I was going to work on a fishing scow,” Taku continued.

The other men sighed and set their cards down. This was clearly a familiar grievance.

“I’m a fisherman! I worked on my father’s fishing boat in Yokohama, ever since I was a little boy. In Sagami Bay, out by Oshima and Toshima islands. But here I’m a wasted resource!” He slapped his cards down. “I should be hoisting a net or trimming a sail, not gutting salmon all day. Even scrubbing a deck would be better than this! I’m a man, after all.”

“We’re all men,” said Matsumoto. “But this is the job. We do the job, and then we go back home with money—more money than we ever could have gotten there.”

“No money at all there,” said Ueno.

“But at least there—” Taku began.

The argument was interrupted by a Chinese man named Chen, who sometimes came over from the Chinese bunkhouse to drink and gamble with the Japanese. I didn’t like the look of him. Dressed in indigo-dyed saam and fu, he had come to tell Taku that his woman was at the door.

Sure enough, standing in the doorway to the bunkhouse was an Indian woman, wearing a shirt made of some sort of spotted leather. She did not step through the door.

Taku made a noise indicating irritation, then got up and walked over to her with heavy, thumping footsteps. They spoke, but I couldn’t hear any of their words. Were they speaking Japanese? Some Indian language? I couldn’t tell.

Taku burst out in an angry exclamation. He raised his hand, and the woman stepped back so that I could no longer see her. It looked as if he was going to strike her. His voice certainly carried the threat of violence. But, in a moment, she was gone and the door was closed.

That night, after lights out, I quietly asked Taku about the woman.

“Ha. Her name is Ha. I told her not to come here, but she doesn’t listen.”

“Why shouldn’t she come here?”

“This is the Japanese bunkhouse. It’s no place for her. But she comes anyway. Japanese women will do what you say, but not Indian women.”

“Hm,” I said neutrally. I could think of several instances in which a Japanese woman had not obeyed her husband’s command. At my uncle’s school, more than one mother had enrolled her daughter over the objections of her husband. But I didn’t mention this. “Where does she live?”

He gestured vaguely. “Over there. With her people.”

“Does she work at the cannery?”

“What’s it to you?” he demanded.

“Nothing,” I said, “nothing,” and dropped it.

Frank Matsura’s remarkable life is mostly unknown, although he’s a historical figure. Readers deserve to learn his story as part of the multicultural character of American history, a part that doesn’t get enough attention. Matsura was an American pioneer and artist who, from 1903 to 1913, documented a diverse community in Central Washington State with honesty, compassion, and a respect for both settlers and indigenous people. In doing so, he broke through racial barriers with charm and wit, to become a loved and respected member of that community.

In my novel, the first step on his journey is working at an Alaskan salmon cannery in 1901. Here he goes by his birth name, Sakae Matsu’ura, but he will be remembered by history as “Frank Matsura,” a name he gives himself in a later chapter. His life counters the narrow, stereotypical image of the Japanese immigrant. Although his story contains Japanese immigrants who do fit this image—hard-working laborers with no money and a modest amount of education—Frank himself does not. He is highly educated, of samurai lineage, and from middle-class means. He enters the novel as a Japanese man in America but will end the story as an American who rejects his obligations to Japan and consciously claims America as his adoptive country.

The first chapter shows him straddling an awkward position between his Japanese countrymen and the cannery boss, who is more similar to him in terms of his education and admiration for America. The novel will portray the ruthlessness of capitalism and how it has driven American progress at the expense of non-white workers. Andersen, the cannery boss, embodies this capitalism. It will also show how anti-Asian racism manifested itself in early twentieth-century America. I think few readers, including Asian-Americans, know much about things like the anti-Chinese riots of the late nineteenth century and “The Iron Chink,” a salmon-gutting machine that included a racial slur in its name to indicate that it would replace Asian workers. Frank Matsura’s story offers a counterbalance to these atrocities.