Chess Superhero
Mako Yoshikawa · The Missouri review · 2022
Chess Superhero Mako Yoshikawa (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution This material is copyright © 2022, The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. No part of this material may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher. Photo by Derek Bridges [End Page 104] In the summer of his eighth year, my stepfather, Jimmy, taught himself how to play tournament chess from a book. An achievement, to be sure, but one that dimmed beside the scores he'd racked up in his seventy-eight years. So I [End Page 105] was taken aback when he phoned to say that with my mother's health more stable, he wanted to take a nostalgia tour of the area surrounding Brandon, Vermont, the site of this self-education. But when he asked if my husband and I would accompany him there for a long weekend, I was all in. I needed Jimmy's help. My father, Shoichi Yoshikawa, had died almost a year before. He'd been bipolar, violent, and cruel, and for the past two decades—the entirety of my adulthood—we'd been essentially estranged. After his death, overcome with guilt and regret, I started combing through his life, hunting for the key to his rage and resentment. Was it disappointment in love? Frustration with work? Anger that he was bipolar or rancor at the racism he faced as a Japanese man in America? The search had ended up consuming me. The classes I taught were now a shambles, my marriage neglected, but my father remained a riddle. The solution was clear. I needed to give up my inquiry. There was no explaining my father. Time to accept that sorry truth and move on. And if anyone could help me achieve acceptance, it was Jimmy, so sane and serene despite his own troubled parent. My father, a Princeton University physicist, had moved in rarefied circles. He'd been friendly with John Nash, the Nobel-winning genius and schizophrenic of A Beautiful Mind fame, and after meeting him at my father's memorial, I read up on the illness. I learned that because schizophrenia and bipolar disorder both induce hallucinations, disordered thinking, and persecutory delusions, they can be hard to tell apart. To take just one famous case, Zelda Fitzgerald. She claimed to be in communion with Mary Stuart, William the Conqueror, and God. Locked up as a schizophrenic in her lifetime, she's considered just bipolar now. Yet schizophrenia afflicts just .5 percent of the population, while bipolar disorder is diagnosed in 2.6 percent, and schizophrenia is far more severe. Whereas a bipolar episode usually lasts around thirteen weeks, the average schizophrenic can lose all touch with reality for six months, and schizophrenic symptoms, which include voices in the head that can't be distinguished from real ones, are far more dangerous and difficult to live with and manage. Nash and Jimmy's old friend and chess buddy, Bobby Fischer, are two of America's more celebrated schizophrenics. There are others who achieved a different kind of fame: Andrea Yates, who drowned her five children in the bath; John Hinckley, Jr., who shot [End Page 106] Ronald Reagan for Jodie Foster; Mark David Chapman, who murdered John Lennon for Holden Caulfield; and David Berkowitz, aka Son of Sam, who confessed to killing young, dark-haired women under orders from his neighbor's black Lab. When I was seventeen, my moods were pinballing, and I was beset once again by the fear that stalks every mental patient's child. I took a chance and went to Jimmy, who'd come into our lives a month earlier, and asked if he ever worried that he'd inherited his mother's illness. He said he'd considered it only to dismiss it, and I asked why. "Because at my core, I'm a rational being," he said. "And in case you're wondering, so are you." More times and in more ways than I could tally up, Jimmy had saved me. Maybe he could again. ________ Jimmy likes...