Hiroshima in the Morning Read online

  I am my mother’s daughter after all. People used to say we could be sisters.

  Time is the question. How will I know when time is short, where time should be spent, what to focus on? What of my own time: who should I give it to? I know what the answer should be, but still, I want it for myself. Everything I’ve given my family, so far, seems to have disappeared in one way or another. If this is all I have, all I will ever be, I cannot bear to let it go to waste.

  But on my own, I’m not doing much better. I am eating bits of burned, hard mochi, and trying not to yawn. Kimiko is the one asking the questions. Kimiko is the one taking the pictures. Kimiko can sense the changes in me, my losses; she knows what I need for the novel, and I trust her absolutely. I need her absolutely. I have no way to guess whether I am hiding or emerging, whether I am healing or being reckless; I can’t tell what she understands, or how she will do it, but with the foreign language blurring in my ears, I know Kimiko is the one who will rescue me.

  I need to be saved.

  “My grandfather was the second son. He was very short, like a monkey, but he was funny, optimistic . . . I liked him very much. He went to Hawaii to work on the plantations in 1895, and he married a woman from Hiroshima while he was there. It was a hard life. He was indentured for at least nine years. My grandparents had three children: my father, his younger brother, and a girl who died.

  “After the girl died, my grandmother brought the boys back to Japan to live with her in-laws. The life on those plantations was really appalling—I would have left too, but I don’t think it was acceptable in those days. My grandparents eventually got divorced and my grandfather remarried: that was all I knew.

  “But then one day, shortly before my father died, we were driving and he pointed to a corner on the street and said: ‘That’s where I said goodbye to my mother.’ The story is that, when he was five, his mother left her in-laws house forever, taking his two-year-old brother with her. He walked with her to that corner, which was quite a way from the house, and then went ‘home,’ crying all the way. I don’t know why she left. Maybe they kicked her out because she abandoned their son in Hawaii. But my father only saw his mother one more time in his life. It was on the day that she brought his younger brother back and left him too.”

  —Jane Osada

  OCTOBER 29, 2001

  THERE IS ONE SMALL TOWEL, one bit of white terry cloth. In length, if you are using body parts to measure, it should extend from the middle of an average Japanese woman’s breasts—just above the nipple—to just beneath her pubic hair. But of course, this is the essential bit of information I am lacking, which Kimiko holds, but doesn’t, in her amusement and our privacy, bother to offer. I know that, due to a curious sense of economy, this is the instrument I am supposed to cover with soap and water and use to scrub myself off before getting into the onsen water, and it’s the same instrument that will dry me off when I am done. There is a bucket too, that serves both as a stool (to sit on while washing) and a container for the wet towel.

  I HAVE BECOME Kimiko’s daughter, and her friend. She is the one who calls to find out how my day was, even after midnight because she can see my bedroom lights through her window across the river and knows if I’m awake. I am alone, she is alone, and though I didn’t ask her to, I appreciate the chat, late at night, the checking in, not much to say. Today, her latest gift to me, she is treating me to a day of lounging at a fancy spa on the tip of Shikoku. The family is coming soon, she says. She does not have to say the words, You need this. Between baths, we sprawl together on the comfy sofas in the lobby and nap.

  THIS IS THE FIRST TIME I have been privy to the lives of older women. In interviews, sad stories; in my friendships. Here, women who have lost husbands or left them; left children or had them leave or fought to get them back; who have struggled with life and come out the other side. Not monsters, just people. And successful in their own way: loved, forgiven, triumphant, with some regrets but no fatal blow. They look at me, the American taking a hiatus to chase her dream, and they give me what I need: their stories, unspun. I can only guess at the courage it must take to share their lives. And if their stories seem to circle in on their difficulties and choices about mothering, I have no need for their perfection, just as they seem to have no need for mine.

  IT WAS JUST YESTERDAY when Jane, too, took me out to “celebrate” at a restaurant that specialized in Okinawan food. “You’ll be okay,” she said, her face in profile. “My children survived. I told you—I was working a lot. I was traveling, for years I traveled . . . ”

  Was it the unspoken Jane wanted me to hear in the long pause that followed, or my own narrative? What was it she told me: my children stayed with my parents . . .

  “It worked out okay.”

  If Jane and I had barely spoken of her family, I’d said even less about my own. She watched me once, through a wall of glass, fighting with Brian, but that can be all she knows.

  “Did I tell you?” she asked then, “I was thinking the other day, about my grandmother.” And then she told me her father’s memory of the last time he saw his mother as a child. If our conversation seemed scattered, it was exactly on point: how do we know if we can be salvaged, and what will or will not survive? There are no guarantees, only explanations; only choices that must be made and never unmade. I knew what Jane was offering: a model for getting older. She was stepping in for my own mother, to show me how to suffer and survive.

  THERE IS ONE BASIC POOL inside the women’s onsen, and a heavy pour from a pipe that can be used to massage the shoulders. There is a shallow bed of water where four people can lie side by side with their necks resting on wooden pillows and sleep in the water. There is also an outdoor bath built from stones in the courtyard, and this is where I walk, naked among the shrubs where the breeze can lift the heat off my skin. Kimiko lets me go, lets me savor the day without comment. These are my final hours, and we both know it. On our way home, Kimiko will tell me about the modesty of the towel, but until then the tensile casing between me and the world, between me and myself, falls away and there are no rules for behavior. I am naked in Shikoku with a woman who accepts me exactly for whatever I am trying to be.

  SHE: “I had yellow blisters all over my body. It hurt so badly. My neck arms and legs . . . There was a first aid station set up at the junior high school, in the auditorium. We were lying on the floor. There was a high school girl next to me. She would cry and roll around and ram into me, which really hurt. Sometimes my husband would lie down between us so she couldn’t bump into me.”

  HE: “They put two tables together—that’s where they used to treat people. There was a big man, around forty years old, with severe burns from his neck to his bottom. They used a knife to scrape the burns clean since they had no medicine. There was no anesthesia, and the man was in great pain. It took five or six soldiers to hold him down.”

  SHE: “Then it was my turn. I didn’t want to be treated, even if it meant death.”

  HE: “But I forced her onto the table. I worried that she might bite her tongue because of the pain, so I stuffed a towel in her mouth.”

  SHE: “I was there for twenty days, and they scraped me every day. In the beginning, the pus and blood would ooze out like chocolate. It hurt so much, and it would continue to hurt for, oh, eight hours, until the pus formed again. I will never forget it. But it healed little by little from the outer edges. After about ten days, a thin skin formed over my burns and the pus no longer oozed out. So then I became able to endure the pain.”

  —Married couple, mid-seventies, survivors

  NOVEMBER 12, 2001

  A COATLESS MID-NOVEMBER afternoon. Blue sky. On Miyajima—a small island in the Inland Sea that has been dubbed one of the three most beautiful places in all of Japan—the maples are starting to turn. It is a steep, densely forested place, more like a mountain, or two, rising out of the sea, its clusters of ancient buildings nestled along the shore. Today, fall is looming: bits of ruby, burnt orange, le
mon-green scattered among the evergreens. The brilliance is still days away; it won’t explode until my family arrives.

  I should be home, getting all my loose ends xeroxed, tallied and scrubbed clean, but instead, I am firewalking.

  Behind me, the famous torii, huge and vermillion, floating more than one hundred yards offshore, the gate to the entire, sacred island. The tourist arcade of momiji manju and wooden rice paddles; the Heian-era Itsukushima Shrine; ornate pagodas; ancient timber halls. At the base of the stairs to Daisho-in, the Buddhist temple, on the first of hundreds of wide granite slabs, I’d put my hand out to brush the running golden handrail, to roll my fingers over each of the vertical spinning cylinders within it, each inscribed with kanji; they are a chant, more than one, and spinning them is the spiritual equivalent of prayer. I’d passed between the squat bald jizos sitting on either side of each stair, each gazing toward his balancing partner through my running feet. I am making the most of my last days of freedom, partaking in a ritual that has captivated me ever since I first heard of it.

  Walking through fire.

  In front of me, then: a wide clearing of dirt amid a quadrangle of temple buildings. It’s hard to see through the heads, six or seven deep, of Japanese tourists, but there is an altar on one end of the clearing, and in the center, a square pyre, stacked like open lattice Lincoln logs and stuffed with pine needles. There are eight monks preparing for the ceremony, robed in gold and white and heavily beaded; thick, black plastic cups strapped onto their foreheads on their closely shaven heads. Partially, intermittently, I can see they are arranging wishes on the end furthest from the altar.

  One thousand yen for a wish, and I have made one. On this crisp, unscheduled day, I dropped my money in a box, accepted a bit of pine plank and a Sharpie, and wrote down my name, birth year, address, and my wish. If it’s meant to be, I’m told, it will come true. Thousands of planks have been filled out and are waiting in the boxes. I don’t know what they’re waiting for; I don’t know what is meant to be, or appropriate to ask for, but I know what I want. I want to experience the world around me fully, without blocking, or organizing, or rehearsing my way on a map. I don’t want to be capable, or well-defined.

  I want to feel.

  My latest leap of faith taken—that Buddha can read English—I hand in my wish just as several men appear on the engawa that wraps the main temple and climb up onto the saddle of a large taiko drum. One drummer stands before the face, shouting, using his entire body to whip a baton against it. The blows get caught in the cleft of the hills and sharpen around us as the echoes of each are exactly superimposed. As I tiptoe to see, a few of the older people around me begin chanting softly.

  In the space, the monks have begun to purify each corner, first with fistfuls of rock salt that spray into my hair, then with water, then with wands of white paper chains, the kind I have seen visitors shake over each others’ shoulders when they enter the shrine. The monks are also chanting, but the ritual is oddly casual: in the highly stylized world of Japan, they act more like fast-food workers in America—muttering, gesturing, checking stock, moving boxes—as they complete their assigned tasks. The ceremony coheres bit by bit: by the time the paper wands come out, the chant is rapid and organized; once the monks grab their weapons, their movements are composed. I am no devotee of religious ceremonies, but this is my first opportunity to watch black-cupped human unicorns wield swords, or chop heart shapes into the air with cookie-cutter axes, or pull back a bow and shoot arrows into the crowd. The arrows arc in all the corners except mine, where one flies straight up and then straight down directly over our heads, leaving me to duck to avoid the lunging old people who are trying to catch it for luck. There is a brief mêlée, which ends with a stunned, grey-haired gentleman lying on the ground. I watch his body bounce, watch him get his senses and then his bearings, before he dusts himself off and joins the chant again.

  Two of the monks have picked up small broom-like torches and lit them on the flames on either side of the altar; my gaze leaves the man in time to see them plunged into the pyre. Smoke stirs softly: a puff, but very quickly it begins to boil with the same wild power I have seen rising off the ocean when lava hits the shoreline. It is a living creature in the center, stretching into screens and strands as it awakens. When the wind grabs it, the contour scatters and spreads, but the center continues to churn, animated, like the cumulus clouds in Hiroshima’s summer sky. Which means, not only does it have urgency, it also has edges, and shadows, and light.

  It’s over me, and I feel blessed. It’s high enough that I have no trouble breathing—I can feel the heat and watch the smoke dissolve, like sea spray, into droplets. There are, like there is in the summer sky, too many formations. But these surround me; they swallow me, I expect them to fall on my skin like rain.

  My mother is standing in the darkened hallway, the light from her bedroom room illuminating part of her face. Her eyes are still bright. If I hadn’t worked so hard to shut down my own terror, we might have created a different memory. This is what I want now. The courage to reach out to hold her. To linger, even in the pain, if it means getting my mother back.

  The fire has become a furnace, blazing thirty feet into the air, rippling the monks out of shape. People are coughing; eyes are stinging; the chant is growing with the sheets of blowing flame. Each monk has a box—more than one—of our wishes. And their job, at the four corner stations, is to glance at each wish and then to throw them in bunches into the fire.

  Eight monks. Forty-five minutes. Ten dollar wishes flung in fistfuls into the pyre so they will burn, cool, turn to ash. This is what we will walk on: our hopes, private needs, and impossible fantasies, all of them absorbed through the soles of our feet. Every image is vivid, every person, every smell. My wish is in the smoke, and on the path before me: I am more porous. I am standing in line, inching closer as the pilgrims in front of me step forward in twos, bits of each of us clinging to them, to the others, our hopes for the future working their ways into someone else’s heart.

  Into our own.

  “We were waiting for my sister to return. Moto. She was sixteen. They had conscripted her to work in the munitions factory, so she was on Misasa Bridge when the bomb was dropped. She was terribly burned.

  “I really, really hate this. This part is the most difficult. But it is also the truth. At the time, there were air raid warnings frequently. When the sirens were blaring, there was a blackout regulation, so we covered our light bulbs with umbrellas, and then a dark cloth so that just a spot shone on the floor. The night after the bombing, all of the lights were off, so inside and outside it was really dark. My mother sat on the veranda all night, waiting. She wouldn’t come in.

  “The next day, a man came to tell us where Moto was, and they brought her home, lying on a door. Her clothes were tattered and stuck to her skin. She died the next night, calling, ‘Mother, help me, please.’ And that condition, my sister’s agony, her terrible burns, her skin slithering off . . . that scene, that terrible scene, it was common at the time. If I try to talk about it, to put it another way, the flash and the absolutely terrible . . . to try to convey it in a single word, our experience of the war as children, it was a poor . . . hard . . . scary . . . life.

  “A very painful, frightening life.”

  —Seventy-year-old male survivor

  A LACK OF WORDS

  I FOUND IT AT LAST. The shadow.

  It’s in his tears, his insistence on running through his story—not for me, not in answer to my questions—but for himself. He starts where he wants to, and finishes in the same place. He lost his sister in the bombing, and he still has her clothes.

  He paints the pikadon in watercolors every day.

  Here is a man who was eaten by anger. His speeches so full of rage that Ami spent three months searching for a go-between to ask if he would talk to us. He has traveled the world, scolding and condemning. I wanted to feel this, to hear what he has to say.

  But my role t
oday is not to interview. It is to sit while he relives it, while he tries to make sense of it, while he releases the pressure that will rebuild in him too soon. With his first words, I realize he has let go of the anger he was famous for. And now, in his outpouring, there is no space between him and his story. No wall to protect him from his anguish—only terrible healing.

  His sister’s face is as clear for him as it was that day; her cries; his mother’s grief, his mother’s refusal to leave the veranda, to give up, to allow that the war might have taken her child. He brings them with him, to this rented room in a community center where he must sit in a chair because of his pain. He is feeling ill, he always feels ill, this day is worse than others but not as bad as some, yet he insists he will speak; he has even brought a folder with pages of proof. Of life before the bombing, and after, of his family as they existed in his mind. He has his pikadons, and he wants me to have one.

  He is ready.

  And for an hour, his sister Moto will come home. His mother will smile, his friends rise from the dirt, the skies will not tremble. He will get on the train to deliver the miso paste to his oldest sister instead of being knocked to the ground. He will not see the pikadon, a grain of rice, tinged with yellow and growing, or the fireball he has put in my hands: red as blood, speckled orange, small as a flame, a blossoming flower, with the heart of an angry rainbow, edged in black as it grows. For an hour—if he allows himself to feel it—joy will come back with the sorrow, and his wishes too; he can have his own heart back, beating with the knowledge that someone else knows.