Hiroshima in the Morning Page 13

  When I was thirty-six, I took my four-year-old son to pre-kindergarten for the first day of school. And when it was time to go, he turned to me with his small, trembling chin, and said: “Mommy, I will always remember you.” Now, in Hiroshima, I am thirty-seven, and a man in his seventies who will not talk about the war or the bombing tells me about his mother:

  I still talk to her everyday, though she’s been gone more than thirty years.

  I miss her so.

  DO YOU THINK ABOUT WAR?

  AMI AND I ARE looking for beer.

  We find it in an outdoor beer garden set up just northeast of Hiroshima Castle; we grab a plastic table and some Kirin in paper cups. It’s Sports Day. On this gravel and dirt rim around the moat, in the field of red and white striped Kirin umbrellas, we have found fair food, and some kind of game Ami can’t identify being played beneath a huge balloon—a child’s head on the body of a globe. There are children, everywhere; most of them small.

  There is a pause—this day is a pause. I have not spoken to Brian in several days, and in this silence, the world is saved. The taihens are fading, I am not such a magnet anymore for strangers who swerve off their paths to ask, America-jin, desuka?, followed by it’s terrible: taihen. If I have been ranting, against the rhetoric and fears that are urging retaliation; if I once thought vulnerability would bring empathy—I am still naïve, still very much alone.

  Hiroshima has made a protest to your government . . .

  . . . a rash act, ignoring the wishes for survival of the human race . . .

  We vehemently protest . . .

  In Hiroshima, now, there is more fear. In this pause, this beer garden, we have come to test it. Long before September 11, I asked Ami to help me “find the shadow,” the emotion that must have been burned into the persons of every Hiroshima citizen, even those who were not yet born. This is my quest—to find the past in this very modern city—and in the wake of the taihens and the realization in the eyes around me that America is not as civilized as was once supposed, I have begun to glimpse it. What Ami’s interest in all this is, though, I’ve never been sure.

  “Let’s talk to people,” she says. Her cup is empty. “How about that guy? Are you ready?”

  I freeze. Talk to people? About what?

  “Anything. You pick the questions. I’ll translate. What about those two?”

  Wait a minute. A question. A question? Think of one.

  “What about him?”

  “I don’t know . . . ” What don’t I know? What more is there to hope for? “Okay. Here’s a question. Ah . . . .hmm . . . ‘Do you think about war?’”

  “Sumimasen!” Ami calls to get the attention of two high school-aged boys, and suddenly they are at the table. Rangy, slouching, one of them is wearing a towel on his head folded over as if he escaped from a beauty salon. Their hair is dyed; one is showing a strip of very taut belly above his pants. Both have cell phones.

  Very polite.

  Yes, I guess I think about war.

  They are talking about America, and Bush, and what will happen next with the same level of interest as they might have responded to Do you think about camping? No mention of World War II. So I ask, “Do you think about World War II and the atomic bombing?”

  Not really.

  Is there anything in this city, about this city, that makes you think about the bombing?

  Well, there is the Gembaku Dome . . . But, not really.

  Domo arigato gozaimashita.

  The next two sumimasens yield nothing. An older woman who does not want to talk, a bald man with a lost child in tow who promises to return but doesn’t. Then a couple in their fifties walks by.

  “Do you think about war?” Ami asks them.

  Yes, oh yes.

  Yesterday, the woman begins, they went to Iwakuni and saw the place where the kamikazes took off during the war. Sixteen-year-old boys who wanted to give their lives to protect their mothers. So she has been thinking a lot about war. These boys are just like the ones in Afghanistan: indoctrinated. They are going to give their lives. She has tears in her eyes. Ami is trying to do a simultaneous translation under her breath, but the woman is focused on me, communicating her concern, her eyes red, and I am trying to communicate back empathy and agreement. The woman is on the proverbial roll—no questions would even be heard—Bush is doing the wrong thing, and Hiroshima should respond; Hiroshima has a responsibility to teach the world what war truly is. She keeps talking about food and water, that they should be the focus, not bombing civilians. She gets into a riff, where food and water chase each other around with not bombing civilians and the kind man standing with her is looking thoughtful and trying to talk, but there is no room. She is leaning toward me, taking off her glasses to wipe her eyes, still talking about food and water, clutched by her conviction that bombing civilians is wrong.

  It seems it could be the beginning of something. When the couple is gone, we are giddy. We could do this, from time to time, in a spare moment, Ami says: grab people, ask them questions. I consider this offer as I look at my friend, younger than I am; I have met the parents she lives with, who are not hibakusha themselves; I’ve gone on excursions with her, thanks to her vaguely jobless state. Ami asks for nothing—no money, no favors, no compensation for her tireless translations. It’s her pleasure, she says; she is a peace activist. She is doing something good, something that presents itself in the world as needing to be done. But now, as I look into this face I’ve come to recognize in silhouette and half-light—the beauty mark, the outsized smile—I have to ask:

  “Why do you do this? All of this, for me. Why does it matter?”

  At ground zero of the world’s first atomic bombing, it is peaceful. We sit on the edge of the moat, looking toward the white-winged castle on the opposite bank, framed in an angular skeleton of scaffolding. This was the headquarters of the regional military during the war, now being refurbished, put on view.

  “You have been to the Peace Museum,” Ami ventures. “What did you see?

  “I was in elementary school,” she continues. “We went as a class. I was maybe nine? Ten? It was a group of us, silly girls, oohing about anything, making a fuss. We were supposed to answer questions about what we saw, and in the first rooms, so many kids were crowded around the same boxes. I remember I was looking for something interesting . . . ”

  Then she tells me about Shin’s tricycle.

  Shinichi Tetsutani was three years old when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. He was playing in the yard on his beloved tricycle at that moment, and he died later that day. His father buried Shin’s tricycle with him because he couldn’t bear to think of his three-year-old boy alone in the ground. Forty years later, when Shin’s bones were moved to the family plot, the charred and twisted tricycle was donated to the Peace Museum. And because of this single, rusted exhibit, Ami can no longer step foot into the Peace Museum.

  “No one,” she says, and her voice is shaking, “should have the power to make another person—any other person—bury his three-year-old son.”

  The sun is setting, catching us in pink and gold; the tips of the trees are flaming; the rising night is calling the stars out; people are gathering their families and going home. In the last drops of the day, an occasional carp floats out of the depths of the water. Orange and white, appearing and disappearing.

  What did I see when I went to the Peace Museum? How could I have missed a story like Shin’s?

  I remember my anger, my impatience. I was looking for proof, for missing pieces, perfectly formed to fit into my puzzle. I wanted answers but I didn’t want to answer. And in my anger at my own great capacity to ignore what was in front of me, I managed to blind myself with my own self-absorption. It was the young woman from my book who I wanted and her only: it was her face. If I could restore her identity, if I could see her, then I could finally see beyond her, to history as it was, to my mother, and even to myself.

  But what did I see?

  “Parent
s who lose a child,” Ami says in the quiet, “they have no purpose. That’s why I care. There are so many stories about the hibakusha—too many to absorb. But there is always one story that will stay with you. Always.

  “You just have to find it.”

  OCTOBER 9, 2001

  EIGHT A.M. Kimiko calls and wakes me up to say that the war has begun. The United States bombed Afghanistan last night.

  “On August 5, my uncle, two aunts, and two cousins came to visit us. They brought rice and vegetables from their hometown in the country. Of course, none of us could have imagined that an atomic bomb would be dropped the next day.

  “They were trapped in the house. I remember my two cousins were missing. They had left the house just before I did, headed in the other direction. And we still don’t know how or where they died.

  “I was only eight hundred meters from the explosion. I was trapped too, and badly burned; my face was swollen and all of my skin peeled off. My mother was also burned. It’s all coming back to me now. The glass shards sticking out of my mother’s skin. Ahhh . . . I remember.

  “We couldn’t go home, so we went to my aunt’s house, but we were driven away even though we had nowhere else to go to. They called us murderers, and blamed us for my cousins’ deaths. They were at our house, so we were responsible. I remember there was some talk that our burns were contagious, that it was an epidemic, which might also have been the reason. They might have been afraid.

  “Whatever it was, my mother and I were driven out in the middle of the night.”

  —Seventy-one-year-old female survivor

  GO-GO BOOTS

  MINI SKIRT, waist length hair—who is this woman with the sidelong smile? The parted lips, the secret, hovering?

  My mother.

  The last time I was in Hawaii, my father charged me with getting rid of the evidence. Too much had accumulated, too much that they would never need. I was put to work: the tosser of mildewed shoes and half-used bottles of foundation. I was also to be the repository of my mother’s lost proficiencies: of her cookbooks, now that my father had taken over the meals; the novels she could no longer stick with; clothes she could no longer wear. My mother followed me around, wanting to try on everything, turning the books over in her hands to declare they looked so interesting! On one of those days, when I was going through the cupboards, I found the stacks of old photo albums and put them aside for later. I knew what was in them; I wanted to revisit them alone.

  It was not the time to ask my father, even had he been beside me, how old my mother was in this photograph. She seemed so young, but when I did the fashion math it was clear that, unless she was a true visionary and trendsetter, she was already married in these photographs, and more than that, I was already born. This, then, not “my mother before,” but my mother.

  Who is “mother” separately from the rest of us?

  My mother cannot answer. But I can ask her anyway.

  It has occurred to me that I am losing my mind, a grown woman dreaming of her mother. In the absence of Brian, or perhaps in our estrangement, or maybe in the nascent presence of my unconscious self, I feel unaccountably fragile—me, the formerly sturdy daughter. There are days when I see my mother in the crowd and imagine she is here, in Japan. I imagine her dead, and that this is where the dead go, that this may be the next place for her as she moves through many lives; this is the place that will make up for all the things she didn’t get to do in the life when she belonged to me. I know it’s ridiculous, yet, in those moments, I want to chase her, push past the strangers, to speak. But I don’t have the words.

  Maybe the words would be about the go-go boots. The clicking heels, the extra inches, the center of the world thrown forward with her hips. The life I wasn’t aware of as a child, the textures—leather and the feathers woven into the tunic sweater in the photo—that she must have felt against her cheek but can’t remember. When would she have worn these? How, in a life that always seemed defined by all she didn’t do, could my mother have also been a woman? And what kind? How can it be only now, at age thirty-seven, that I am learning that a mother is also a woman? A female adult, with her own name?

  This is my problem, my challenge. And if that sentence keeps recurring, if my personal narrative has become the litany of problems I never knew I had, of assumptions that have constricted my vision so completely I don’t even know where opinions end and axioms begin, it is still true, a fact: every minute of my life has been lived within relationship. Defined by relationship. Child for the first half, then wife. This is the beginning of blindness—the ease of that track, the impossibility of wandering off the path—this is how attention begins to atrophy. Before coming to Japan, I never thought of myself as auxiliary, nor did I think of my mother that way . . . but of course I must have felt it because I did not want to be a mother; I did not want to give up the independence I had, at least in my imagination, only to find myself buried so deep beneath the needs of others I could no longer breathe. I must have noticed I was missing definition because I am here, in Japan, following a small group of people who, after having obeyed every rule and requirement of citizenship, found themselves abandoned in the rubble of the end of the world.

  And more than just a definition: an instinct, a feeling.

  Who was my mother alone? She went from her parents’ house to her husband’s at the tender age of nineteen, in much the same way I did at seventeen, though with more legal formality. She’d protested that I was too young to live with a boy, Oh, honey, you have your whole life ahead of you, don’t rush into anything. If it is meant to be you will find each other . . . later . . . when you are older. The fact that Brian could change the light bulbs, “take care of things,” these quieted her but did not change her mind. At the time, I was surprised because my mother liked Brian, because she was the one I counted on to approve domesticity, her daughter settled, happy. Now, with this new perspective—perhaps no truer than any other?—she is, differently, but still, surprising. She wanted me to have my youth.

  Did she also miss out on her own youth? I wonder now: a woman whose children had all left home by the time she was my age; a woman who was free again at an age when I can still feel in my body what youth is, maybe now more than ever; who had less than two decades of that freedom before she began to lose her mind? Only the girl in the go-go boots can answer that question.

  I can ask her now.

  “In spring 1945 when the children were evacuated, I was attending Nakajima elementary school, which was called Nakajima National School during the war. I was twelve years old.

  “When I parted from my parents and my sister, I was very, very sad. At first, I only thought about what they were doing now in Hiroshima without me, but then, I began thinking about the past. I regretted the fact that I wasn’t good to my parents. They always worried about me. I thought, ‘When I go home, I will do this or that, all these good things, and I will make them happy.’ I always thought I would be going home soon because Japan was winning the war, as we were taught.

  “My most vivid memory during the evacuation is hunger and homesickness. I ate almost all edible weeds that I could get. Some kind of locusts and leopard frogs were served on the table. So we were having a very, very hard time. Long before the evacuation, food was already scarce. We couldn’t get rice, so substitutes like soybean cake and soybeans were distributed.

  “During the evacuation, there was one occasion when our parents were coming to visit us. We children wanted to make them happy, so we got together and talked about how we could do that. It was a very hot season. We soaked and cooled towels in a cold well for our parents and waited. It was just a half-day visit, and it was the last time most of the children would ever see their parents.

  “My aunt came to get me on September 15, one month after the war was over. The rest of my family had died.”

  —Sixty-eight-year-old man

  OCTOBER 10, 2001

  NOON IS TEN P.M. in New York and my oldest son is crying beca
use he misses me.

  Noon is Lance Murikawa over coffee at the International House in Tokyo, third interview in eighteen hours, my second of the day, with a tape that does not roll in the first thirty minutes. Noon before, I was on the shinkansen where keitaidenwa are not allowed. I am living on the other side of time, always inconvenient when I call home; I am speeding through the time I have here, shuffling the top cards that Tokyo has to offer—people, books, resources I can’t find in Hiroshima—all of these and the latest bits of news too. Today, I will look at the articles my father has sent on the percentages of Americans who want Arabs to be put into internment camps in the wake of the terrorist attacks, and about the escort system that has been put into place in my own Brooklyn neighborhood by a Japanese American child of the internment to help the Muslim women get back and forth safely to the grocery stores. Tonight, I am giving a lecture.

  It’s been a month since the attacks and the world is still shifting, uneasy. Brian and I call regularly, but we don’t talk. We have no reports to make, no days to share, and it may be my imagination but every time our conversation has run its course from little to nothing, I can feel Brian smirk: the thing he was waiting for did not happen, whatever unnamed “thing” that is, and he takes satisfaction in knowing that I failed once again just as he predicted—in ticking it off the list.

  I have not spoken to my boys in days. They don’t ask for me. Not until this night strikes New York and Ian is gasping for air amid his tears because he misses me; when he suddenly needs to hear my voice and he is trying to leave a message on my voicemail, trying to say words, make sounds, when my five-year-old son is trying to reach me but I don’t hear it—not until the tape is over and lunch is finished, long after he has turned over into restless sleep.