Hiroshima in the Morning Read online

  For as long as I can remember, I never wanted to be a mother. From age twelve, when I was babysitting the neighbors’ children for seventy-five cents an hour and spent the entire day locked out of the house while they ran wild inside it, motherhood was not for me. I was incapable of nurturing anyone younger than I was: I had a mental block—and a real antipathy—against making hats out of paper bags and other projects children supposedly liked to do. I had a recurring nightmare too: of a child who woke in the night wanting peanut butter, screaming for it when it wasn’t in the cupboards, at a time when the stores were closed, when it was impossible to procure; screaming until the only question was whether it would be me or the child who went out the window. Children were greedy by nature; they would not ever, even when I was exhausted, consider my needs. And if this abstraction was based on nightmare and not experience, it felt quite real. As real as the fact that I was also greedy. I wanted my own time, my own money. My own life.

  In order to test the possibilities of my own motherhood, I dreamed my way through a novel. I challenged my characters: Were they human? Loveable? Was it possible for them to heal? Under the protection of historical fiction, I explored the bonds and the effects of abandonment—someone else’s choices, someone else’s pain—until I had written my way out of my nightmares of peanut butter and into the still unconscious hope that love would not require me to be anything other than what I was.

  It was only days after I finished that manuscript that I became—accidentally—pregnant with my first child. Yet I still would not be aware of the link between them until it was pointed out to me by a stranger, several months after the novel was published. Even now, such a drastic, unconscious change makes me uneasy. If writing is truth-testing, a way for me to test the worst and see if I can bear it, then what am I testing now? I can feel myself moving again through my unconscious—it’s these odd dreams of my mother, for one; she is appearing quite often, even when I’m awake. If my first novel took me into motherhood, where will this one take me? My mother is part of the vehicle, but not the answer yet.

  “Many writers write to find out who they are, and what they think, and where they fit into the world. That’s what I am doing, but I am doing it by tracing the Japanese Americans. Because, even though I am one, I grew up having no idea about them—as a group, or even as members of my family.

  “I have grown up in peace and privilege, with no notion of war.

  “So, when you ask me what I am doing here in Hiroshima, I can say I am following the Japanese Americans. I am looking at history through their eyes. World War II, in particular, was very significant for Japanese Americans because they were caught in the middle, and distrusted by both countries. Being “outside” a country, though, also gave them a more objective look at the war. They didn’t have a government to spin out rhetoric and tell them what to think, to terrify them with visions of an enemy nation of fanatics and strange food. I am seeking the memories of a select few who were interned in the American camps and then repatriated to Japan to help me weave some very important missing experiences back into the fabric of our history—for Americans and for Japanese people:

  “Namely, what war looks like. What it smells like. What tiny bits of humanity are destroyed in each person, daily, in its great tide.”

  —author’s presentation at the YMCA, Hiroshima

  FIRST TESTIMONY

  THERE IS SOMETHING MUFFLED in the Japan I’ve encountered so far. As the goal of my own apartment remains out of reach, I have moved out of my hotel and into the World Friendship Center, a halfway house for peace pilgrims looking for a quick dip into Japan and its bomb history, with western bathrooms and breakfast. The rooms are clean, and if the location is not the most convenient in the city—ensconced on a tiny street behind the love hotels that line the river—the biggest drawback is the five day limit for staying there, after which point, there is another five day option across the river. After that, I am out of luck. I can stay in a hotel for the duration or do what the other stray foreigners in Hiroshima do: leave.

  Do I want to give up, or am I just tired of not knowing, and of not being able to say?

  On this, my first morning at the World Friendship Center, I will hear a noise in the part of the building I was told was the kitchen and come downstairs to find a young woman. In this moment, my life will change. I will meet Ami, a girl who looks much younger than I am, though she will turn out to be almost thirty, a volunteer who turns only partially to greet me, her hands busy on the counter with breakfast. I am too new in Japan to notice how casual Ami’s clothes are: a pair of jeans and a frilly, capped-sleeve white top; too unschooled in Japanese beauty to notice that her hair has been combed into a plain ponytail. There are no lines penciled on this female face, no makeup at all; only a mole on one fresh cheek.

  “Ohayo gozaimasu,” I offer.

  “Good morning,” Ami says, and there it is: excellent English. For an instant, I allow myself to hope that this might mean true communication, until Ami begins apologizing for the absence of the American couple who run the otherwise empty center, who would surely have canceled their yearly vacation if only they could have divined that I would appear. It’s a speech as convoluted, as Japanese, as any I’ve heard so far, but her demeanor—when do I begin to sense it?—is not quite so deferential. Her back is to me as she assures me they will not fail me again, as they did in the stretch when the phone was not answered. Ami herself will do her best to take care of me, she is focused on her task, which is, of course, my breakfast.

  I do want egg salad for breakfast?

  Like, fried eggs on salad? I imagine saying this, with some hope, though the chopped boiled eggs are arrayed before me, their vaguely green yokes crumbling, along with the mayonnaise and raw onions I have never been able to stomach and can’t imagine eating in the morning.

  Ami has turned to place a cup of green tea on the linoleum card table. She smiles. “It’s my favorite. All Americans like it very much.”

  Where, oh where is the vending machine with cold coffee in a can when I need it and why did I ever leave the hotel? I want to refuse, but can’t think of what to say as Ami tosses the salad together and arranges it on lettuce on two plates. Instead, I drink my tea and answer Ami’s casual questions about what I’ve seen so far. Although her way of speaking does seem Japanese, as I have come to understand that term—overly polite, elliptical—her manner is direct, even amused as she notes my lack of progress with the egg salad. She devours her own and then asks, “So, you came here to speak to the hibakusha?”

  “Yes.” This is what I’ve been telling her for ten minutes.

  “And you still haven’t spoken to a single one?”

  Ami’s eyes are warmer than the question and something of a shock. I understand at that moment that no Japanese person has looked directly into my eyes since I got here. As I rerun the calls I’ve made, and the fact that no one has agreed to talk to me, Ami pulls my untouched plate towards her and begins to eat.

  “There are a lot of them, still, though of course they are dying,” Ami says. The point of this statement is unclear, though it sounds vaguely like an offer. “You’re in luck today, unless you have plans this afternoon? Yamada-san is coming.”

  Yamada-san, Ami says, is on the board of directors of the World Friendship Center. At one o’clock he will give his testimony about his atomic bomb experience “for the foreign visitors.”

  It will be my first interview, if you can call it that. It’s almost surreal how simple it is, and also how vague. I will hear a real survivor tell his story, and even though I stumbled onto it, still, it is progress. I want to ask Ami about the others, the “lots of them” she mentioned, but I can’t figure out how to do it without seeming greedy and inept. Ami’s question, You haven’t spoken to a single one? still stings; it’s something I would have expected of Brian perhaps, with its latent American sarcasm, but not from a Japanese woman who must surely understand how I cannot push. I find myself indicating that I
will be hard at work on my laptop in my room between breakfast and the testimony, though I can’t for a moment imagine sitting alone in my room waiting, and Ami assures me that she too is very busy this morning and will see me at one.

  Once Ami leaves, I step out into the streets of this new area of town, making a careful note of my turns so I can find my way back through the tiny houses that all look the same. The sun is beating down on the pavement—Hiroshima is a shockingly concrete and asphalt experience and the mushi atsui air calls forth more sweat than a sauna. I am looking for coffee and a doughnut, neither of which I will find, trying to hasten the morning. The center of the city, which I’ve already explored, is too far by foot and on the other side of the river—even though I know I still have hours to waste, my heightened pulse assures me I could never make it there and back before the hibakusha arrives. I can hear how that sounds, “the hibakusha,” but what else to call him? I have no image of him; he is not mine to imagine. I drift down the street, past the love hotels, distinguished by the fact that their garage entrances are fringed like car washes so no one can read the license plates inside, waiting for the moment when I can turn back to the World Friendship Center. My breath is catching in my chest, just as it does whenever I’m at the top of a roller coaster. It must be excitement, then, though I hate roller coasters. I follow the river, which is low and resembles the runoff from a well-used mop, trying to breathe.

  My walk turns out to be longer than I thought it could be in that neighborhood, and when I return, Ami is there as well, arranging individually wrapped cookies on a plate. She greets me without commenting on my absence and waves in the direction of the living room, where people are beginning to assemble. I gather myself, thankful for the notebook I thought to bring outside with me, hovering near Ami until there are several old Japanese women on the sofas, and a family of long-legged Australian teenagers in hot pants and tank tops, and a bag of shrimp chips. It takes me forever to cross the hallway, the living room growing larger with every step, but when Ami seems to have assembled everything there is to serve, I reach the threshold.

  In the part of the room I couldn’t see, there are two chairs, and in them, already waiting, are a female translator and an older man with only one ear. That side of his head is facing me, facing the door so anyone entering can see it clearly. They are dressed formally, in somber suits in the heat.

  I find myself moving slowly on the edges, not to startle. I am the last one to arrive. I find a space on the floor and sit quickly, pen ready, in silent protest to the idle chatter around me that had led me to imagine, from the hallway, that the guest of honor had not yet arrived. Surely these people can understand this is not entertainment? The man in the chair does not acknowledge us. I give him my attention, to show respect; to assure him that I understand how important his story is. I try to find a way to look at his face but not the side of his head where the skin has run like wax and there’s only a pinhole where the ear canal is.

  He begins, without preamble, at the moment the bomb was dropped. He was a third year schoolboy, conscripted by the military as most students were. He was one of many young people who were making pistols for zero fighters, and that morning, that split second before, they were receiving instructions for the day’s work, even though by that time, there were no materials to actually make the guns.

  He says it felt like being thrown into a furnace.

  He talks, or, rather, he recites the events of the day and the weeks and months that followed. His voice alternates with the interpreter’s, both absolutely without expression; the story spins out, or rather it races past us, even with the pauses for interpretation, it does not linger. The dictation I am taking contains gruesome outcomes visited on groups: scorched, carbonized bodies mounding the river banks. A list appears, of deaths: his classmates, his teachers, his mother, his aunt. He was expected to die too, this fourteen-year-old boy. This he states. A simple fact.

  “We were numb,” he says. He is numb now, this man whose face has melted on one side. He was one of a handful of children who survived and he has lived the last fifty-six years without an ear. How can he sit there without crying? How can he relive this experience in front of a bunch of gaijin munching shrimp chips?

  What must it be like to carry the bomb on your body? It defines him. But of course, it defines them all.

  The story is finished, but more than that, it is complete. He wraps up with some brief comments about the need for nuclear disarmament and then falls into silence. No one seems to hear this last bit. A few hands are raised, a few questions asked. Something is missing—this testimony had all of force of the books I’ve been reading, which is to say that it’s too easy to set it down, but at the same time, he was faithful to his story. What had he said? It was like seeing through a camera, a different dimension. This is how it still feels.

  The man leaves quickly when the questions have dwindled. Ami sees the visitors out, and joins me in the living room.

  “It’s terrible, isn’t it?” Ami asks.

  I don’t know how to respond. I want to ask if there’s more, if it’s always like this. If it is, I’ve come here for nothing. I am replaying the audience’s questions, noting that they were never addressed to him, but to the translator about “him”—as though he was an object. Was it him, then, or the circumstances? Ami’s expression, which I’d earlier thought to be familiar in its transparency, is now unreadable, and I don’t know how to ask her without seeming rude.

  My notes, in my own hand, are enigmatic. “Yes.”

  Ami has been watching me struggle with her question, and now she smiles. “Yes,” she says. “I know lots of hibakusha . You are in luck.”

  SELFISH

  IAN TELLS ME: “Seven times! I vomited seven times!”

  Dylan breaks in—both my boys are on the telephone because this, finally, is a story, a massive event that Dylan participated in by vomiting only three times but he adores his older brother and expects him to lead so he is reveling in Ian’s greater bounty, ratcheting up his awe of his brother—and I laugh, grateful to be an audience member instead of the midnight mop brigade. They’re creating family lore that will be proudly declared and laughed at for years to come; a memory being rehearsed in my ears:

  “Do you remember the night when I threw up seven times in the hallway? And then Daddy said: ‘Ian, are you going to vomit again?’ And I said: ‘No’ and then I turned and went ‘blaaaaahh’ all over the floor?”

  Brian gets on the phone to confirm, to add the loads of laundry, the hours of no sleep, the final count of beds affected into the boys’ report of the evening. He wants to know whether pillows can be washed or if he should throw them out, and he adds this number in too, with a calculation for their replacement. He is tired—that is part of his message—but he’s also proud to have taken the family through the fire.

  Brian misses me. Not as another set of hands in the bathtub or forty-five minutes more of sleep; his mother is there on an extended visit to help out during my absence, there to swap naps as they all try to recover. He misses my calm, the simple peace that comes from knowing that there’s someone in the world who knows your needs better than you do, and that person is there to meet them before you have to ask. And although he doesn’t say it so directly, there’s a quality to his delivery, to the lovingly detailed minutia, that assumes I would want to participate, even in a night of endless regurgitation. That I would want to know it all, to have him relive it with me, so I can take up my pose inside our family frame.

  Home is farther away, after only two weeks. There’s no danger I’m forgetting my life there, in fact I remember it so clearly I could tell Brian the exact number of amoxicillin bottles I’ve poured down the throat of one child or the other in my years of young motherhood. Which one cried, which one I had to sit over, lying him on the ground and pinning his arms with my knees so I could hold his mouth open and get the medicine in. The memory of one son catching the medicine in his mouth and spitting it back into
my face is my first thought when Brian adds the latest ear infection to his list of domestic upheaval, but to remind him of it now seems churlish. I can’t figure out why it should seem so.

  I listen, and murmur comfort about the ear infection. I murmur comfort about his mother’s lengthy visit and some problem I dismiss with the people who live downstairs. I am waiting for the last three days of their life in New York to be thoroughly covered, for my turn to speak, because I finally have some progress to report. I’ve done an interview, with another one lined up. I tell him how odd it was—perhaps the effect of translation—how the answers felt packaged, pre-prepared. I tell him about Ami, who has agreed to help me with the translations and how we’ve been talking about how to get the real story.

  I can hear myself, hear that I am rushing to fill a silence, that I’m reporting, not having a conversation, and that Brian hasn’t spoken. As I wait for his reaction, I find myself talking—I don’t even know about what. I push on, trying not to hear the empty space between us. I want him to know that the trip is not a failure; I am not a failure. He doesn’t have to know I did nothing to set the interview up.

  “That’s great,” Brian says. “No apartment?”

  The boys have to start their day, he tells me—it’s Saturday morning and time to get going. And it’s late for me, too; time to go to sleep. I dumped too much on Brian just now. I don’t know why my mind wandered so far toward my own preoccupations.

  “I miss you,” I say, stopping myself from adding, “Really.” It’s my imagination that he isn’t listening, or his lack of sleep. “Tell the boys I miss them too.”

  “We ate the remnants of dried beans. They used to crush the beans to make oil, and take the meat for food, then they’d take the skin off, crush it together and somehow make it into a round cake. That’s what they were feeding the horses, but they kept some for human consumption, and I remember that was rationed too. We ate those. We would break it into little pieces and put it in water and try to make some kind of soup.