Hiroshima in the Morning Page 15

  There is my world, and his world, and although both are duly described, neither can conjure the other. He is running a business, raising two kids in a city that’s been attacked, and he doesn’t have the time to look at the long emails I send about my adventures. It turns out he knows nothing about my trips to Tokyo or any of the main events of the last three months; the last thing he read was a brief description of the fisherman outside my window. He knows nothing of what the writer writes, of how I am recreating my life and why, only that I must be creating something because I am never available. And strangely, incomprehensibly, he has decided that he hates Japan, the place I have pinned my life on.

  He hates it.

  And me? I have lost the world I lived in; my ability to see him. I have lost my sense of myself, even my understanding of what I’m saying. I am telling him the eight weeks he’s proposing is a long time. Japan is expensive; there’s no child-care and I know he doesn’t want to be a househusband. I get around by bicycle, and in Japan, people don’t take their spouses and children out with them to work or social functions. If he wants to live here, make a life for himself, if there is something he wants to study or explore, then he can come now and be welcome. But he has no particular interests in Japan; he has not had any time to think about it because he has no time, period. No time to think, no time to breathe . . .

  We could be speaking in a foreign language for how far off the truth our statements are.

  I say: Of course I want you to come. Whenever and wherever; when you are ready; for however long you want.

  I can’t hear myself, except from a distance. I can’t see myself—how can I tell my own story, be my own narrator, how can I live my own life if I can’t hear my lack of attention the way he can, my desperation to escape? Panic—is it panic?—has set in; it has risen, fallen, swelled like the ocean, dropped like darkness, like a net from the sky. It tightens around me, and I am talking now, in circles and loops, compulsive in his silence. I am relying on logic, have blocked out all feeling, and yet I am backtracking, protecting, because there’s a breaking point here; this is no simple fight. I am giving in—perhaps this is guilt, then?—because I’m suddenly sure he will not.

  And yet, and still, protection has to reach into the future. I make one last pitch against my losses: if he wants to travel, to sightsee as a family, then three weeks might be better. I’m telling him how expensive things are, how traveling as a family means four times the price of one. I don’t even know what’s possible: I’ve barely left Hiroshima, except under someone’s auspices; have never asked for a hotel room, never tried to rent a car. This is the truth, and reasonable—precisely, exactly—but we are beyond mutual definitions, and these are not reasons he can hear.

  And the greater truth is, I don’t want to lose the last third of my fellowship. I don’t want to be forced to re-make the choice, minute to minute, between my work and my family. It seems I must already make that choice daily, that I’ve been fighting an unnamed, unlocateable “it” that believes I should not be here, and now, as it locates inside Brian, I wonder whether it has always been there or whether it has just possessed him. I want my husband back, the man who loves me, not the man who swallowed him, the one on the telephone. I don’t know how to reach him. I don’t know how to assure him I’m still there.

  He tells me how. That, even in the face of his fury, I can measure my love for him in days.

  He wants a yes or a no, and he wants it now. And so I am caught, making a decision I don’t want to make, not this way, in all this swirling resentment, with all the possible dangers I’m trying to convey, but he’s no longer listening and not even I can shift through all my excuses anymore.

  JANE IS STANDING. It has been more than thirty minutes and I must get off the phone.

  Pick a date, Brian is saying. Just pick one. Any date.

  This reunion has all the markings of a disaster, but cutting his time short would be even worse. Your dates are fine, I tell him. Your dates are great. November 16 to January 14.

  “We were living in Canada. We got no news, except that the atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima, and then we got a telegram from my grandfather saying, ‘Come home, just the four of you.’ Meaning, just leave everything and come.

  “I was fourteen. I had never been to Japan, and I didn’t know the Hiroshima dialect then. I couldn’t understand my grandmother and grandfather. Oh, it was terrible when we finally got back—it was fourteen or fifteen days on the freighter and then we got on the train and it was so crowded that you couldn’t go to the toilet. Men would jump out of the windows at the stations, but the women, you know, we had to kind of walk on people . . .

  “When we got to the station, my grandparents were there, my aunt was there, and all my relatives, and we were so tired but we still had to walk two and a half hours to get home. It was on the mountain, and it was dark, and they kept telling us, ‘Keep to the left, keep to the left,’ because the other side was a cliff. We had lanterns, but we couldn’t see anything. I was in a daze.”

  —Seventy-year-old Canadian Japanese woman

  UNDERGROUND

  THOSE WERE THE DAYS when I was invisible.

  My mother sits beside me on the subway train. It’s New York City, I am just out of college, in the days when the soles of my shoes still stuck to the dried soda on the vinyl flooring and the graffiti-stained windows would have shone like a church if they were not underground. In memory, the car is almost empty. We have our long, grey bench to ourselves; no one stands between me and the pole in front of me that I will swing past when I explode, flinging my body onto the opposite bench to glare across the way at my mother.

  Those were the days I can’t remember, unless I try, and then only in shards. In shatters—not a word or at least not the right one, but it’s the one that comes to me now and how I felt then. Who knows what was wrong, where this frustration and anger came from? I can’t remember if I was still in therapy then—as a teenager I had the disconcerting ability to cut people dead if ever they hurt me, at least beyond the trivial, and I spent some fruitless time discussing that with a college-subsidized shrink. In instances of betrayal, I cut off my own heart for safety. And if it was a pulsing, poisonous safety—heat and nausea that washed through me every time I saw the person—at least I’d found a way to identify the enemy and remove myself from further risk; a solution for which therapy had no such guaranteed alternative.

  But perhaps that period in my life was not this time.

  I was not married yet. I must still have been starting the career that would go nowhere, of catering to people who wanted to be famous, and who either believed they were not because I was bad at my job, or that my success in garnering attention for them was not really mine but the natural consequence of their wit, their magnetic personalities. In my mother’s presence—and why ask where we were going, where we were coming from, why “the guys” weren’t there?—I was suddenly struck by the feeling that no one really knew me. What was inside did not fit the outside, and I wasn’t sure where the outside came from or what the inside was. Just as now, it was unclear: I had no alternate identity or unacknowledged talent to claim. But I had rage. The wrong persona had been ascribed to me, and I accused my mother, flung it at her that she didn’t even know who I was.

  I was afraid. Afraid of not recognizing myself, suspicious that the split I felt in my persona was proof that my true self was unacceptable. Worse: unlovable.

  It was not just those dreams I had that I was registered for a class I didn’t know about, whose final exam I now had to take—in those dreams I always had a day when I might still try to learn everything in the textbook, there was a gauntlet to run, an interlude in which I could try to change the future, even knowing the future was unchangeable, that I would fail. I was not just a perfectionist, not just an overachiever with deep insecurities—in those dreams I was face to face with a world that was not what I was led to believe it was. I was bewildered, inadequate, but still somehow preoc
cupied with control, tormented by the possibility that I might still be saved, salvaged, that this class could be passed and then swept under the rug, and I wouldn’t have to be other than I was.

  There was no reconsideration in my dreams. No way to drop the course, change the major, to open oneself to an alternative universe and trust in the future.

  My mother said, that day on the train, underground, that of course she knew me. Calmly, as if—you are my child. It was both impossible in its assumption and deeply scary. She offered to prove it. What if she was wrong and I was truly invisible in the world?

  What if she was right?

  There were things my mother said. I don’t remember the words. I can see it happening, but I cannot hear. I have lost my mother’s declaration of love; her words vanished, no one to say them, no one to remember, as if it never happened, but I cannot allow that. There were things my mother said; these must survive. These things were true, more real than any thought I’ve ever had about myself, and I need them now. I need to hear my mother’s voice, the mother who loved me—you are my child—and if I cannot, just now, remember her words, still, the feeling of being unearthed, the strike of the shovel and the slow release of pressure from the soil on my head, these I will never forget.

  “I was eight, and I was outside my house when the bomb exploded. There was a bluish flash, and I was blown off my feet, and then it was dark, and there was a strong wind, and the roof tiles, everything fell down on me. I couldn’t find my father, and the fires began, and, well, I decided to run away.

  “That’s when the black rain started. And there was nowhere to hide from it, and no one knew what to do.

  “There were so many people lying in the streets, burned and bleeding. The next day I went to the shrine near my house because I wanted to see the city. The stone steps of the shrine were covered with the dead and dying. They pulled on my legs, saying ‘help me, help me,’ saying it desperately, begging me for water and I was so scared that I couldn’t move because their eyes were popping out, and they looked so hideous. There was no way to treat them, but I gave some of them water.

  “And then they died. I will never forget that. They drank the water, and I was so happy, I thought I was being good, that the water was cold and good. And then, there were several men and women, I could see their agony; they fainted and stopped moving and all the life ran out of them. I didn’t touch them but I could see. And I thought: I killed this person, and I have to keep it a secret. Later that day, my father warned me not to give any of the victims water and I felt so guilty. I felt guilty for years.

  “I never told him what I did. I never talked about it either, not for forty-five years, until he passed away.”

  —Kimiko Uchida

  TRIP TO THE SUBURBS

  I AM STANDING in the dark, in the cold, trying to see some trace of where the old kitchen might have been behind this pre-war house that has no electricity. This is the coldest part of Hiroshima prefecture, where the ski resorts have begun making snow for the winter on this late October day, and I am increasingly underdressed in my fleece pullover. Just before all the light left the sky, I was being shown an old, rusted furo—an iron tub I could barely have crouched in. Then, a heavy container for water, and then the night was pitch black—no moon or stars; all the houses were lightless since it was 6:30 p.m. on a Sunday night in the country. Minatoya-san, the woman who brought us here, is still valiantly trying to explain what this house she grew up in looked like, but I can’t see anything and Kimiko, who stayed up all last night telling me her story and has been translating nonstop all day, is no longer making sense—though it could be me who can no longer hear. This day has been long in the making, Kimiko has been mulling and rejecting towns to find the perfect suburb for me, a country village to set part of my novel in, and Minatoya-san has given the gaijin at least seven hours of her time so far. For my part, I got into the back seat of the car and promptly fell asleep because, on the winding mountain road with no food in my stomach, the alternative was to be sick.

  Since my last conservation with Brian, I have been saying yes to every opportunity that presents itself, even if it means dinner at eleven p.m. and writing in the few, fading minutes before sleep. I’m surprised to realize I’ve been doing so for quite a while. I’ve reached a point where I am gathering, collecting life without requiring it to be relevant. I am doing what Ami’s friend talked about—ichi go something—engaging in each moment. Before, I was doing it in leisure, turning a tea cup in my hands time and again and slowly, not to catalog every detail and therefore own it, but to acknowledge its existence. Now, though, with the premature finale of my life in Japan looming, I’m getting greedy.

  Should I give up my insistence that I will continue my interviews and research once my family arrives? Am I wrong to stand up for myself in my arguments with Brian, especially when I don’t know exactly what I’m standing for? Before I came to Japan, this stubborn gut feeling was rare; it was so easy for me to get “talked out” of something. It wasn’t that I was forced; I accommodated the most peaceful solution. But now that I can feel my gut, now that it’s awake and fighting for the needs I can still meet, I’m surprised at how unyielding Brian’s opposition is.

  We are in Kaki, and before that, in Geihoku, in Yawata, but I have no orientation, and no idea where those places are. Earlier today, I visited a large traditional farmhouse with a thatched roof made of pampa grass rising easily thirty or forty feet high. The entire exterior was composed of sliding doors—paper screens and stucco—so that in the summer, the farmhouse was completely open to the outside. It was designed, in this very cold weather, to let the hot summer air rise out of the living space and the breeze circulate. The interior was a single, enormous room, with tracks and sliding doors in various places so that each area could be opened or closed and its shape shifted like a puzzle.

  The farmhouse was a tourist attraction, and the guides were several very old, bent, and tiny women who were also selling produce and farm products outside. After conferring briefly with Kimiko, they invited us in and began telling stories about their lives in the “old days.” We sat around the irori, a rectangular hearth cut out of the tatami floor with a small wood-burning fire, and a hook hanging over it for an iron tea kettle or pot, where one of them grilled mochi for their guests. They led a brief tour, showed off the interior barn where animals were kept so they didn’t freeze to death in the winter. It had been turned into a storeroom, for baskets and buckets and sieves; for the farming equipment: arching two-handled saws, cone-shaped sun hats and raincoats made of untamed straw. They showed off the kitchen, and the two white-stone ovens just for cooking rice. In the old days of these women’s lives, it was a woman’s job to start the fire and make rice and get the house ready before everyone got up. I was reminded of one of my very modern peace activist friends who, in the year 2001, still rises every morning a half an hour before her husband wakes up “so he can feel like the house is not sleeping.” This youngish wife makes no elaborate breakfast—the rice is warm, the miso soup simple—so it’s not as if she needs all that time for preparation. It is his comfort, and his request, and after he’s gone to work, she goes back to sleep for an hour until her work day begins.

  The women talked about the war, and how people made their way back from the bombed city. How many hours it took to walk—uphill, downhill—if you ever wanted to leave. I watched them speak. I looked at their missing teeth, at their faces so gnarled they looked as though beauty had never touched them. Not that they weren’t beautiful in their waning years, in their baggy monpe clothing and their indigo-dyed head wraps; not that they weren’t beautiful when they were young. But they looked as if they’d lived a life in which there was no use for a bit of powder on their cheeks, a kimono with a gay pattern and a flattering color instead of one that was chosen for the warmth. What was it like to live a life without artifice? Where your sole measure was what your body could endure, how many hours of work you could complete, whether you co
uld pull a plow when you had no animal to do it? Not by what you said you were, or could do, but by what you produced.

  My life, right now, is the opposite. I’m allowing my interviews to go anywhere, logic and factual details be damned. My days alternate between life and death: between solitude, and hiding from Brian and America, and experience—loving every circle of my bicycle’s wheel as I ride along the river, every trip, every person. I have dropped out of my own “old days” before Japan; I am avoiding the constraints and expectations that have become far too visible by refusing to see them, in much the same stubborn way as a young child believes that a person ceases to exist when he leaves the room. I have been put on notice, and every moment is a moment stolen, a different kind of cheating—the cheating of staying in Japan, and standing strong, but not of actually doing the work. I have not begun my new novel; my interviews are not even transcribed. My writing has been narcissistic: reams of paper on what I did that day, but no manuscript to show for it. I’ve been unable to produce what I came to write.

  Unable to face what I truly fear.

  It is not my fellowship I’m afraid of losing. It’s my life. Every time I forget a word, I think, so this is how it begins. I can tell myself I am trying to function in two languages now. I can recall my father’s assurances that writers access words at the much slower pace of their fingers; I can treasure the slips of others who comment carelessly that their minds are sieves and they must be getting old. Then, too, pregnancy can rob you of your memory; more than once when I was pregnant I walked into a room and forgot what I went there for. But wouldn’t I get that back? Not every woman who has given birth suddenly forgets the word for “television.” Even if I don’t own one, isn’t that a bad sign? And how will I know if there really is a problem, if this thing that is stealing my mother is also in my body and I, too, have only two decades left?