Hiroshima in the Morning Read online

  This is going to be easy—that’s what I think. Walking next to Ellen, on our way to make some stroganoff, I can clearly envision how simple the next six months are going to be.

  AUNT MOLLY’S VISION

  AUNT MOLLY SAW THE CITY when it was not. She told me about it the first time we met, but I wasn’t listening. And my deafness then—almost eight years ago now—is the reason I’ve come to Japan.

  Molly arrived in Hiroshima in 1946. Too late to see the lily of the valley lamps that hung in telescoping arches over the Hondori shopping arcade, or the men in creased black suits and bowler hats, or the ladies they escorted. Ladies who trailed hems of flowers around their covert ankles, who were replaced by workers scurrying in monpe pants; men who were never replaced but simply disappeared. Too late for the bomb, for the sea of fire, the endless bed of concrete stones. My great-aunt was one of the few Americans who ever saw the burned-out city, but by the time she got to Hiroshima, people were already building shelters on the small plots of the wasteland where their homes had stood. Where their brothers and sisters had been incinerated. Where they’d returned to gather their mothers’ gleaming bones.

  In those days, if you hiked even a short distance up the mountains that ring the Ota River delta, you could still get a clear view through the ghost of what once was Hiroshima, miles away to the shore of the Inland Sea. But there was already a black market where people sold what they had, and bought what they could, and ate dog meat without caring what it was. There were soldiers (albeit Australian and English because the Americans were being housed in radiation-free zones) giving chocolate to begging orphans with the stock benevolence we have all come to recognize from the movies. Hiroshima was manageable by then—if not a city, then still a place. If not alive, then at least no longer dying.

  Or maybe she wasn’t too late. Molly’s children still remember joining the peace marches in Berkeley while they were in strollers, or at least old enough to cling to them, or to cling to the high hand of their angry and determined mother as the people on the sidewalks screamed “Commie go home.” They remember the antinuke meetings, the visit from the Hiroshima “maidens”—young, crippled, disfigured women who were sponsored by the Quakers to endure months of surgery to reduce their scars and repair the damage. They remember playing in the other room to avoid seeing rare footage of the wreckage that one of the antinukes got their hands on: even glimpsing it through a doorway would give Molly’s daughter nightmares for years. When I first went to California to interview my mother’s aunt, more than fifty years after the bombing, Molly was full of Hiroshima, haunted and desperate to get it out. She wanted to break the silence.

  But I didn’t want to hear.

  This is what haunts me now: How could I have come into adulthood in America without knowing about the atomic bombings? Once I was faced with a family member who’d actually been there, how could I have chosen to ignore? Perhaps I was afraid of the tremble that came into Molly’s voice when she talked about it, or of exposing my own ignorance. I found it much easier to stick to the topic I’d come to discuss: the internment camps, where Molly and the rest of my mother’s family had been banished during World War II. That was a wartime embarrassment I was familiar with—the makeshift barracks in the desert where the US put its own ethnically Japanese citizens—an episode I had control over by having already spent a year exploring its limits and parameters. My first novel was inspired by my mother’s discovery that she herself had been interned as a child, and my fantasies about what secrets and safeties such a silence might contain. Aunt Molly may, at that point, have been one of the few people still alive who had lived the unique Japanese American triptych of the internment, the American occupation of Japan and the atomic bomb aftermath, but I didn’t know that. The interview with her was one of the last I was doing to wrap up a book that had already taken shape. That was the truth: I had come with one topic, and couldn’t allow my aunt to stray too far from it. The bomb was too risky to conceive of. It was too big a world.

  But then, when so much time had passed that I could no longer vouch for a single detail of my meeting with Aunt Molly, I started having nightmares of my own. I was walking through an atomic wasteland. Fires burning, buildings at my feet. I had lost something; I was searching—I was walking on ashes through a place where I’d lived, that should have been familiar, but which would never again hold the things I loved, or even resemble the world I once knew.

  I didn’t know what I was looking for in my nightmares, only that I never found it. I woke with a fist in my chest, and an awareness that, of course this had something to do with Hiroshima, but also with my mother. I was embarrassed at knowing nothing, at ignoring my mother’s recollections of a time when she herself had been in Aunt Molly’s living room avoiding the “crazy peace people” with her cousins, so this was my mother’s history too, however glancing, that I had lost.

  A memory, then, from that interview: my great-aunt, single girl in her twenties, in a shiny black car with the doctors. They are going house to house; they are visiting the mothers of stillborn babies. Molly is a file clerk for the Americans, or a statistician, but she can also be an interpreter. She can ask the grieving mothers for the details—where were you when the bomb dropped?

  She can ask for the body of the dead baby.

  I remember her every word, “I thought we were helping.”

  When she found out—and how did that happen?—that she was the enemy, that the US government was classifying all that information so no one could fully understand what the bomb did, that they were offering no help and no medical care—and here begins the outrage—that’s when she became a peace activist.

  I am almost sure that’s what Molly told me. I had no other source of information, so it had to come from her.

  But when I returned—just over a year ago, surrounded by silence, suffocating—to really listen to her story . . .

  Molly had finally forgotten.

  “That trip to Japan was the highlight of my life. I’m not sure why I decided to go. I wanted to see it, and on some level I knew I was doing something unique that had some historical value. But any young person going out and traveling, even if there isn’t a war, is going to be changed.

  “You see how other people are living, and how they look at things differently. They have different concepts. I was changed in that way. But the biggest thing was, I realized that I was not Japanese. That no matter what I went through in America, being evacuated—that was terrible—I was shocked that the Japanese Americans were being put into those camps because I really believed what I had learned in civics class, that if you were an American citizen, you were born with certain rights. I mean, I really believed that, and the next thing I knew, I was behind barbed wire. And it made me question—I mean there I was, a teenager, singled out and put in a camp—it made me question whether I was a real American.

  “But when I got to Japan . . . there was no way I was Japanese either. If I just walked down the street, kids would run after me and say: ‘A-me-li-can, A-me-li-can.’

  “And here I was, with a Japanese face. But they knew.”

  —Aunt Molly

  HIROSHIMA

  I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR HIROSHIMA. I have never seen a photograph, yet I will know it exactly. The rocks there will sing to me, the grass will smell like home. Or maybe the sea will smell like home. There is a legitimate question of what home smells like, whether it’s the ocean I grew up fishing in in Hawaii, or the smell of cooked rice, or a flower, or a spice that I’ve never bothered to catalogue because, how do you record such a thing, like a heartbeat or a breath? I have become a New York mother, but I was a Hawaiian child, and though it surprises me, it is still my earlier home that comes back to me on this island nation: in the commonalities of ginger and nori, and the edge of déjà vu. It is only now, when that child reincarnates so clearly, that I first encounter the possibility that that self was ever gone.

  Why am I here? And why do I keep asking myself why I am
here? I have always scorned and disbelieved anything that can’t be articulated, and yet I must know that “to collect data, to research . . . ” cannot account for the joy I feel, and the terror. I need this journey, and that vague awareness leaves me in the unfamiliar territory of instinct. If there is more than meets the eye, I can relax, and yet, I must be sure. I glance out the window as I blast through tunnels. Each time I pull my ears out of the darkness and pop them, the world is a little greener, the roofs more pitched, more tiled. But each glance is also more of the same, more of the subtle move out of the flatlands and away from the boxy grey cities that have flanked so much of my journey—subtle as so much of Japan has been so far, which is to say, so familiar and so different that I have no ability to judge. It is maddening: I cannot distinguish between what to keep and what to discard.

  Could I be so ill-equipped, and after so many years of successful living? Or have I refused to equip myself, preferring to stand weaponless in my new world? I have moved from ignoring to blithely refuting. If you sat beside me then, I would tell you—in the same voice that I would use to regale you with the transformation of New York’s subway—that I am not used to trains. That there aren’t any in the US, or at least, that our distances lend themselves to cars and airplanes, nothing like this sleek shinkansen, with its red, roving bubbles on the LED sign in the front of the car that inform me I am now traveling at more than 330 kilometers per hour. Perhaps it’s the jet lag, or my growing sense of being unmoored, but I am suddenly back in the time, more than fifteen years ago when I was just out of college, when Brian and I went from Madrid to Barcelona on a crippled, backwoods cousin of this train, through an endless countryside of farms and hills lit up with the small quick flames of cypress trees. That was the last train I rode in; the last time I found myself moving, bodily, between places I’d yet to imagine. We had been heading for Italy until the standby travel company that had already taken our money gave us the choice between Madrid or another night in the airport, so I was loose, on my first trip to a foreign country, in much the way I have been let loose now. Then, I had Brian beside me; the boy who grew up in Europe, who loved to please, to give. And what he gave was my first glimpse of a new world, my twenty-year-old hand in his, surrounded by his knowledge, navigated by him. If it seems too plump, too bright in my memory, that is what memory is—the youth and young love, the excitement of exploring, Jack and Jill, each amazing new sight a gift from him to me. I leapt then because he was leaping with me: going to Spain “because.” I can still taste the capers in my mouth, huge, grape-sized pockets of salt and puckering. I can still hear the old man who grew them asking if Brian and I had sex. I pretended not to understand the language, but the question made it clear: we were already married, from the moment we met. From age seventeen, we were together every minute that could be wrenched away from school or work.

  WHEN THE TRAIN PULLS THROUGH the last ring of mountains, Hiroshima is suddenly new. In its buildings, in their height and orderly placement, newer than most of the cities I’ve seen so far. Of course it makes sense—the whole place was crushed by the atomic bomb in 1945 and then burned to the ground by the intense heat, so of course there are no ancient pagodas, no historically winding streets—but it is not what I expected. Not the home I was sure I’d see. It strikes me then, with the force of the first time, that I’ve entered a foreign world. Not foreign as in Japanese, but as in the fact that I can’t imagine what tomorrow will look like, let alone what I will do on that day. On this train, without a fearless leader, I am experiencing a new sensation. A laxity, a sense of not being quite attached, head to spine to fingers; a sense of being too small to claim the vast space in my seat, or to walk the aisles of the shinkansen without tumbling over my toddling feet. If I had to put words to this new feeling, I would have to say it seems to approach the definition of “lost,” at least a little. Or maybe it’s the feeling of being lost that’s approaching me—there on the train, a seated target—maybe it is loss, not surprise, that ripples through my tongue every time a bite from my ekiben turns out to be salty instead of sweet, fishy instead of vegetable-based.

  Perhaps loss has been with me all along.

  I survived Tokyo. Saw sights, got my very first cell phone, met the people who managed my fellowship, and smiled the “making conversation with strangers at a wedding” smile. And now, when by rights I should be savoring this moment of time apart, of time alone, which has never truly existed in my life, instead, I am thinking of Ellen. As the train begins to wind down its journey, I understand that Ellen’s image is the last thing I recognized, my parents’ friend who accompanied me all the way to my seat on the shinkansen and then—having tucked my packages overhead and settled my lunch—stood with goodbye tears in her eyes until the warning signs flashed that the train would be leaving, until she could no longer resist the urge to tuck my hair behind my ears and hug me close. If I can no longer assume my way through Japan without articulation, then I must now do something to move forward, and I don’t know what, or how. I take out my contact numbers—the only link I have with tomorrow—and run my fingers across them as if to straighten out the digits. I have two organizations listed, and two women: Jane Osada, the Japanese American ex-boss of a friend of my mother-in-law who has invited me to lunch tomorrow, once I am settled; and Kimiko Uchida. But Kimiko, who I haven’t even met yet, is already mad at me.

  RUDE AWAKENING

  MY MOTHER-IN-LAW IS STANDING on the platform when my train pulls into Hiroshima station. At least, the woman in the middle of three, the one in charge of pointing and peering through the windows, looks just like my husband’s mother. The same salt and pepper bob, same broad mouth, high cheekbones. She is clearly equally exacting since the trio is waiting, not just where my car will pull up, but within two rows of my seat. This somewhat stern-looking ghost from my present has to be Kimiko Uchida.

  I am no one Kimiko knows. Christopher, who administers the grant, had put me in touch with a friend from his somewhat distant past: a professor, close to eighty, the kind of gentleman who responded to my gift of a copy of my novel with a letter in perfect English, full of praise and apologies for his inability to understand the nuances of the prose. He lived in Hiroshima, and though he did not experience the atomic bombing, he knew a few people who did—Japanese Americans, more to the point; people who speak English. But just before I left New York, the professor was diagnosed with stomach cancer and hospitalized.

  Enter Kimiko, his former student and the founder of a volunteer organization that promotes “peace activities” especially for foreigners. I’d written to her at his suggestion, and she told me to get in contact with her when I arrived—conspicuously without the elaborate niceties he included in his letters. But a week or so before I was scheduled to leave, my usually silent phone rang in the middle of the night with the news, from Kimiko, that the professor was ill, followed by a slew of questions: Which hotel should she reserve for me? When, exactly, was I arriving? What was my budget? And my other requirements?

  We battled the cell phone crackle, the long distance time delay, her humility, and the way her sentences trailed off into phrases like “and so” and “like that” before they could include the essential details of her thought. I thanked her profusely and told her please not to bother herself on my account, the hotel reservation was so much more than I could have hoped for. I would be sure to get in touch with her when I got to Tokyo. And then, while Kimiko continued to make plans for a greeting party at the train station, as she made lists of who would be doing what to help me—all unbeknownst to me—she stumbled onto a tiny piece of information I’d neglected to mention. Namely, that I had also contacted Jane Osada, and she was planning to help me too.

  I’d thought Kimiko’s offer was simply a required formality so I politely declined because I didn’t want to be trouble. But what I would come to learn was, she had an obligation to help me—not just a request from a former teacher, but quite possibly a deathbed request—and she had absolut
ely no choice but to put everything else aside and complete many tasks to make my life easier. To her, my “please don’t trouble yourself” was not a refusal at all, it was simply a way to say thank you so much for all the help that I know you will work like a dog to give me anyway. And by not mentioning I knew Jane, by creating a situation where there was even the slightest possibility of someone else duplicating the strenuous efforts I didn’t know she was making on my behalf, well, I was just plain rude.

  And my apologies, when all this came to my attention, still have not been accepted.

  I can tell this by the tone in which Kimiko says it’s not a problem. I can feel it in the NASCAR pace we’re using to drag my luggage from the train platform to her car. When we can’t seem to find a working elevator to get me and my American-sized possessions to the parking lot, I am sure of it. I am one of those bad gaijin—the kind who, when someone doesn’t seem to understand her request, just repeats it louder, shouting if necessary, in English because these people around her must all be deaf.