Hiroshima in the Morning Read online

  At least I know better than to try to justify myself. I apologize. Keep apologizing. And whenever there’s a lull in the conversation, I apologize once more.

  “SO, WHERE ARE YOU GOING TO LIVE?” Kimiko asks me. This is the third time around for this question. A foreigner in Japan needs to have a sponsor in order to rent an apartment. Kimiko’s candidate for sponsorship is the Japanese government, since it sponsors the overall grant, or perhaps the grant administrators. She is not pleased to hear that, once here, I am entirely on my own.

  The repetition then, as I struggle to learn this cultural lesson: Is she asking me to suddenly remember I have a sponsor in my address book? Or to agree to stay in a hotel for six months? Or to take this problem to someone else?

  We are having miniature cups of coffee in the lobby of the hotel she reserved for me. Me, Kimiko, and the other two women, who have been introduced to me as “choir members.” Apparently, the professor is a singer among his many other talents, and these women are connected to him through song. They are speaking to me in Japanese. This surprises me; it’s the first time anyone has tried to converse with me in Japanese. I am trying to follow and I imagine Kimiko is annoyed that I don’t understand anything, which might be why the English translations, when they come, seem to contain about four words for every forty. The two choir members are smiling and nodding as they choreograph a stationary dance of self-congratulation for having successfully completed their mission, which was to hand over the names and telephone numbers of three of the professor’s Japanese American friends who I might want to interview. I appreciate their help, but I’m feeling just a little needy, and the simple fact that the greeting party seems somewhat outsized for the small bit of information I’ve been given makes me hopeful that there’s something more to come. But as the coffee cups empty, it doesn’t seem so, and on the truly important points—like where am I going to live for six months and could it really be possible I might not be able to find an apartment?—they fall silent.

  They take stock. I have a cell phone, some yen in my pocket, and an adequate budget. The hotel reservation Kimiko made is for a week, so there’s a place for my enormous bag at least until our biceps recover. The interview contacts have been duly passed on, so unless there’s something else I need . . .

  With this last good deed ticked off, with the gentle, closing snap of their notebooks, they palm the scalpel to cut the only cord I have and assume that now I can breathe and eat on my own. Probably, I can. Maybe I’ll be ready to try it tomorrow. But it seems I am not ready yet.

  “Would you like to have dinner?”

  Kimiko’s perfect lipstick is perfectly still, only her eyes move as she appraises me like a crocodile submerged in a river. I am sure she’s wondering why in the hell I can’t just live in a furnished hotel room for the next six months. My invitation to dinner is accepted, but it will have to wait until after eight, because she is very busy. Oh, and to get things straight, since I’ll be here longer than any other foreigner she has ever had to babysit . . .

  Tonight and for always, dinner will be dutch.

  JUNE 25, 2001

  IF I COULD ONLY GET MY MESSAGES, everything would be fine.

  If the “simple menu” on my cell phone had not simplified out the English instructions for how to retrieve my voice mail, perhaps I would be coping, not reduced to tears in a faded yukata in a chilly hotel room with the rain outside my window. If I was still in Tokyo, I could have walked up to any bleached blonde, Starbucks-drinking Japanese person I passed on the street; any school girl in pigtails and uniform and extremely loose and baggy athletic socks that look like leg warmers, that drag on the ground and have to be held on the leg by special glue; pick one, any one, even one in black lipstick, white vampire makeup, or platform shoes that are taller than her head, and that person could surely have shown the poor foreigner with her first cell phone—how is it possible that a New Yorker in the twenty-first century has never even held one in her hand before?—how to access that little icon.

  But in Hiroshima, in the streets and even in the J-phone shop, no one speaks English. Not the first sales clerk, who I literally drove into the back room with my question. Not the second, who was pushed out to face me after much giggling in the back, along the lines of—I understood this much—“You go out there, no you!”

  AND MAYBE, IF I HADN’T GONE to the school to meet Jane today, if I had taken the J-phone encounter as an omen and turned around on the wide, straight streets, retraced the perpendicular intersections, and walked through the other pedestrians who all look neat and conservative and purposeful and completely oblivious to me and back to my concrete hotel, I would still be myself. It was just that she seemed so familiar, so much like my grandmother, down to the rolled curls in her hair and the eyeglasses bouncing on her chest from a chain. We had a nice meal, and then coffee, and she promised to help me get some business cards, and gave me a few names of people who I might interview. And then, as I was leaving, she put her hand on my shoulder and said that I should call her anytime, because it can get a little lonely, and I found myself in tears. It was that space again, the space from the train opening up; the reminder that I have always had someone to ask, someone who would help; that I have never been lonely in my life. And though I kept telling myself that I’m not lonely now, I am excited, I can do this, my eyes seemed, just at that gesture, to disagree. I’m not like this, I wanted to assure her, I don’t cry. But I couldn’t form the words.

  OR IF I HADN’T DECIDED to write her a damned thank you note, maybe this wouldn’t have happened. Maybe if I had a real place to live and didn’t have to spend fifteen minutes digging through a suitcase, strewing wrinkled possessions around the room because I can’t find my stationery, and if I can’t find my stationery, I might as well never leave my hotel because I simply cannot survive in this world of never-ending gratitude without it. I can’t organize myself. I can’t find the quiet to write, or a place . . . I can’t even get access to my email. I want my keyboard. I want my printer. I don’t know what I’m looking for anymore; there is something I need but it’s not in the bag. It is not among the things. I want this to be easier, even as some part of me understands that it’s not so hard.

  I want my life.

  BUT FINALLY, TRUTHFULLY, maybe if I hadn’t called home. Not in this mood—though if I can’t talk to Brian when I’m frustrated, when can I call him? And who else can I call? There is no one—then maybe I wouldn’t be hearing his voice, the voice of a man I spent my entire adult life with, and finding myself unable to speak. In his voice, I can feel the embrace of the life I had, a sweetness, a fat that fills the rooms that he walks in, that would wrap itself around me if I walked in them too. I want to tell him that there are good moments here, that I have learned to drink cold coffee from a can out of a vending machine and that tomorrow the sky will be blue. I want to share that with him, and also to show myself that, although I may be inexperienced and not as prepared as I’d hoped, I am strong enough to meet these challenges, and those moments should not feel so thin. I have lived alone for a week: it is done, complete, no longer potential. Why does it feel so paltry in the grand scheme of all he has at home?

  I am trying to make my tears as soundless as possible, though of course he can hear them. And I know he is also crying, and even though I have been away from home for eight impossible, ridiculous days, he asks, in a voice that cracks, “What are we doing?”

  That’s when I realize that we are doing something. Not watching or waiting or marking time to the end, but taking action. My tears are not simply a bit of homesickness, they are for loss. We are in the process of change. I don’t know why we’re doing it, or what it is, and I dread it as fiercely as I want it.

  But the fact is: it is already done.

  JUNE 29, 2001

  ON MY BOOKSHELF, there is a photograph of a fat, naked infant. In his mouth, his mother’s nipple. On his arm: a long black burn. His belly is white and creamy. His head is bald and scarred;
it is the surface of the moon, pulling on his mother. Dark, pocked, thirsty.

  Turn the page and see a girl in a white blouse lying on tatami. Stained tatami, on her back. Her hair is intact, and one unharmed hand that waves in the air, afraid to land. She is alive, for the moment, but her face has been burned away. Her nose and lips flattened into feathery, white ash. The oval between her collar and her hair: white, grey, black, charcoal, dust. This girl lives on the bookshelf; she is alive in my mind. Her faceless image resides in me, her head without eyes. And the irony does not escape me that she was left, before the final darkness, with the flash of the atomic bomb—a vision, some say, of great beauty—and I am left with hers. I am looking for her in the Peace Museum, life-sized as she should surely be; I’m like a child digging at a wound to relish the pain, to extend it, feel it travel down my arm, into my elbow, until it rings in my ears. I want to face her. I want her to save me.

  She is not here.

  PEACE MUSEUM

  FOLLOW THE MAP TO THE PEACE MUSEUM. Cross the bridge, past the heat shimmers, stay on the concrete. Where the Otagawa splits and becomes two rivers, there is a peace park. It’s the slim finger of land that lies almost directly under the bomb’s hypocenter, the spot that Hiroshima now calls “ground zero.” It was once a town called Nakajima, a thriving neighborhood that served as a hub for shipping and open air markets; now, it’s a subtle oasis of more than seventy monuments, statutes, and broken stones, with names like “the merciful consoling Kannon for the mobilized A-bomb victim students.” Look for the Peace Museum at the base of the park: it’s the grey block building on the grey stone plaza; it sits perpendicular to the grey slab walkway extending to, and through, the elegant, arching stone cenotaph that contains a register with the names of all the confirmed victims of the A-bomb—seventy-seven volumes in size. If you stand in the center of the plaza, on the other side of the Peace Museum, you can line up the cenotaph so that it frames the A-bomb Dome. The dome is one of the only ruins left in Hiroshima, a great, spiked skeleton of the Czech-designed Industrial Hall, which escaped total destruction only because the blast was almost directly overhead so there was no horizontal force to blow it over. Once the very image of European grandeur, its broken brick walls now stagger as if the builder suddenly lost his train of thought.

  The Museum begins with the crawl of air conditioning on sweat, a fifty-yen admission ticket, and a commercial against nuclear weapons. I slip around that easily; the voiceover is unctuous, and the sentiment—one small step for man, one giant leap for peace or something along those lines—is not what I came for. If it doesn’t start with a bang, still I am confused by the deluge of excuses for the bombing: the walls are lined with images of Hiroshima as a military city; of its residents celebrating the occupation of Nanking. The displays in the first room, on the first floor, assure me that the US only decided to develop the bomb because they thought the Nazis were trying to do so. Two freestanding slabs are papered in letters protesting the nuclear tests by governments around the world, each signed by Hiroshima’s succession of mayors. There are nearly six hundred letters, almost identical, as if, one leader to another, there was nothing new to say.

  Hiroshima has made a protest to your government against nuclear testing as many as twelve times only in terms of the last year . . .

  Such an action is absolutely not permissible . . .

  We vehemently protest . . .

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

  Hiroshima has made a protest.

  In the center of the room, there is a cityscape: an aerial view of Hiroshima after the explosion. It’s a barren circle with rivers, a couple of shattered walls, and a handful of sticks scattered near the edges. You could call it a model, except that that word implies a third dimension. When the bomb exploded over Shima Hospital, every building within a one-kilometer radius, except for three or four made of reinforced concrete, was completely demolished. I know this; why can’t I feel it? I have read about the firestorms that ripped through thirteen square kilometers and turned everything to ash, but they are not here. People and animals were vaporized, carbonized, melted, crushed, poisoned, maimed, and burned. Everyone within one thousand meters of the hypocenter was dead by the end of the day if not immediately. Almost everyone within two thousand meters died within weeks. I have seen these pictures, read the tallies. All I know of this city, this country, this journey I am taking comes from the books that say those who drank water died. Those who ate fruit may have had more of a chance than the others. Those who weren’t even in the city, but were hit by the black rain, or worked in the rescue effort, also died. Total casualties over time: some two hundred thousand people.

  And now, I am standing in the resurrection of the model, in a cold, quiet building shaded in grey. On the second floor, in the next hall, the next rooms, I am awash in the dedicated revival of the city. This is Hiroshima’s “life must go on.” There is all sorts of hope here, and good will, and I know this is the “Peace” Museum, but isn’t that a euphemism? Isn’t this a museum of war? It is not only that I have yet to encounter any of the images that brought me here; I cannot see the point to building a paean to forgiveness. Forgiveness is forgetting, erasure, absence; it’s all the blanks in my family’s history, the expediency of accepting what isn’t real. The Peace Museum is the one place, if there is one place, that could hold America’s feet to the fire and say: look what you did here.

  Where is the bomb?

  MY MOTHER’S FACE sways in and out of darkness as she and I move through the museum, eyes checking in with each other as another door shuts behind us, before the new one slides open. A different museum, a distant time. We are the only visitors in the Museum of Tolerance, the only two being moved from room to room through life-sized, too-real sets of the Holocaust, an audio narrative telling us what is happening now—to the Jews we are today, during this enforced, hour-long tour, this programmed exhibit from which there is no way to turn back.

  We have been given name cards, each with an alter ego, a Holocaust survivor or victim, though we won’t find out which until the doors to the last room have closed.

  It is 1999, I am in Los Angeles to promote my first book and my mother has joined me, gaily and repeatedly chattering about flying from Honolulu to meet me “in the middle.” It’s unusual for my mother to travel alone, odd that she would want to sleep in the same hotel bed. At the time, I thought it was just her excitement about my novel, which she’d come to see as her own, based on her life story, though it wasn’t. Now, one museum to another, remembering my mother’s face hovering in the dark replica of the gas chambers, I wonder if she had a different impulse that she left unspoken—if she could feel menace in the words that were already spilling out of her head, the thoughts she couldn’t access, even the small acts she had performed then lost track of—and she’d been trying to create new memories, just in case. In hindsight, my mother seemed anxious, and we both were cold in the rooms that turned inevitably into stone walls and death. When we were finally released into the light of Los Angeles to plug our name cards into the waiting machines, we found neither one of us had been spared.

  Now, I cannot shake the vision of the card in my mother’s hand, or, rather, the hand itself, how veined it was, and thin. I cannot shake the shame that the memory I created, even inadvertently since neither of us knew anything about the Museum of Tolerance except that it was walking distance from the hotel, was one of shepherding my mother unsuccessfully past death. My mother died in the Museum of Tolerance, and if I did too, if everyone will, it is still a punch in the gut. My mother died. Is dying.

  It is a question of time, and time is the question. How does one spend it? When does the part about living your life to the fullest begin to shift into just making do, and then into suffering, and how do any of us know where we are in this process? When I first found out about my mother’s illness, I wanted to leave my life and go home to sit vigil with her. I didn’t. She said sh
e was fine, didn’t want to have to “entertain” visitors; she wanted to hear the news of the world, the news of my growing young family. She let me imagine I was pleasing her by taking active, almost frantic care of my children, instead of avoiding the pain, the boredom, the anger, that came with waiting for death.

  Of course, death is not on the current docket. Death is a melodrama. It is erosion we are dealing with. Already, my mother is not who she was. I can measure that by my father’s words, “Sometimes she makes more sense than I do,” which come more frequently, and ring more hollow. They safeguard all her flashes of wit and wisdom.

  But with every passing day, there is less of her.

  THE HIROSHIMA PEACE MUSEUM is almost empty in the heat of this weekday. It is as if history itself has become a tomb best forgotten. I know this can’t be true, that busloads of schoolchildren and tourists must visit all the time, and that today they just happen to be touring pop art instead. As I walk down a long corridor, a bridge, to the west building, the silence around me heightens my feeling of dislocation and niggles at my growing belief that this whole Japan trip was a bad idea. Brian is unexpectedly moody. I have been in Hiroshima almost a week, and the fact that I’ve been unable to report progress—no discoveries, no interviews, not even a home yet—has him at a loss. What have I traded this time for, these twelve days we did not spend together in New York? Though I know I’m not being lazy, that I am trying everything I can to get started, what Brian has refrained from saying is also true: I didn’t plan well. There was a time when I thought six months was too long, that I could wrap up my research in three weeks, a month tops. What happened to that efficient person? It’s a question neither one of us is ready to ask.