Hiroshima in the Morning Read online

  “Pretty soon, there wasn’t even rice, not even brown rice. I remember eating any kind of leaf from any kind of vegetable, and eating ordinary grass. When we ran out of vegetables, everything was eaten. Anything edible.

  “Here’s another kind of thing we had to eat. Inago, the small grasshopper. They said it had a lot of protein, nourishment, so we used to capture them in the rice fields. We’d dry it, cook it with shoyu or something just to get the flavor.”

  —Seventy-one-year-old male survivor

  THREE WOMEN

  I MUST BE MORE productive now. I have heard the stories of two survivors; I have notes and tapes and no clear idea of what they mean to me. If I had a plot rather than a vague urgency, rather than a need to know, as in Americans don’t know!, I might be feeling more accomplished. What was it that they did not know exactly; what was this need of mine, which I could taste but not identify? I’ve been asked, by Ami, by Kimiko, by everyone I’ve met in Japan: What’s your novel about? What do you want to know?

  I want to know what war is. What happens? Not who fights, or who dies, or how does the amputated family rise from the ashes, but: What is the subtle effect of fear, uncertainty, aggression, starvation? How do the things we can see and name, even when we think we’ve survived them, change the people who we are?

  Aunt Molly was an enemy in America. She was a misfit in Japan. Am-e-li-can they sang to her, but it was more than that, more than children in the street flinging stones at her ankles. She was outside their suffering. Outside her own.

  And there were others: women whose names I came across, Japanese Americans who found themselves in Japan for one reason or another during the war. One of them was a “girl monitor,” drafted by the Japanese government to translate Allied messages intercepted in the Pacific. Another was a young mother who was sent back during the war on an exchange ship, pulled from the internment camps, reaching Hiroshima just before the bomb. I found them in the books I read in the days before my second visit to Aunty Molly, written by a professor at a University in Tokyo. “Were we the enemy?” the title asked, and now I realize this is my central question. My new book is also about identity and survival.

  I have my answers ready now, or rather my questions: What does a person do in the face of rejection? Discarded by two countries, abandoned by family, what behavior is justified to save yourself? And, most importantly, when you are being torn in two directions, how do you decide who you are and where you belong? Kimiko is going to call the director of the Peace Museum and she wants to know what to tell him about my research. But when I try to communicate this new understanding of my novel to her, it seems too odd.

  “These women,” she says. “What are their names? There might be a record of them in the museum archives.”

  After a brief search, I have them. “Well, my aunt, of course. And here are two others: Yuko Okazaki and Irene Saeki.”

  “Who are these women again, what did they do?”

  I go over the few details I have, pairing stories with each name.

  “All right, then. I will speak to him about these people and we will see.”

  MAGIC

  Anything and everything can happen now—can materialize spontaneously any time the telephone rings in Japan.

  Today I have a new home; a grand place by Hiroshima standards with plastic floors in the living area, and two six-mat tatami rooms with sliding glass doors onto a balcony that looks out over the Otagawa, one of Hiroshima’s six rivers. The river is lined with cherry trees—it’s fairly wide and muddy green and tidal. At certain times of the day, children can play sand baseball in the river bed. I can see the city center from my balcony, and, once I get a bicycle, which Kimiko has promised to lend me, it will be no more than a ten-minute ride to wherever I want to go.

  Kimiko found it for me; it is right across the river from her house. She filled it with furniture and bedding, dishes and a desk all loaned by people I don’t know, people I will never meet. In addition to a full set of necessary furniture, I’ve been given a microwave oven that doubles as a toaster, an electric wok for making shabu-shabu, three toothbrushes, six bars of soap, and five medium-sized plastic bowls and buckets, all of which are for washing myself before I take a bath. And now, she is whirling in the center of the floor making magic: transformed from stern to child-like, from elegant dress to multi-patterned moving clothes, from “perhaps, we will see” to “get out of the way so they can bring it through the door.” It being a washing machine, a refrigerator, an air-conditioner.

  Kimiko has given me a place for my family when they arrive, a new home. Everything that has walked though her door is a gift to her—for who am I? She has tested her place in the fabric and found thick layers of friendship, and many people who are delighted to return her favors. I’m not the first person she’s been so generous with—Kimiko works regularly into the single digits of the morning for clients, colleagues, and friends—and this is her thanks: a new life for me.

  I HAVE BEEN IN HIROSHIMA for exactly fifteen days and at last the ground is under my feet. If it has not been as slow a start as I imagined, it has felt eternal. Tonight, I’ll be sleeping on the floor on a futon barely thicker than a winter quilt. I will be writing in my own home. Tomorrow, I’ll learn how to take out my own garbage. Kimiko is worried that it’s too complicated, that I’ll never remember which things go out on which days and how to wrap them, but she doesn’t realize that I want to learn. I’m looking forward to taking out my own garbage, because that was Brian’s job. Until I got here, I never realized that, in sharing our lives for so long, Brian and I each grew to excel in some things and to allow other talents to atrophy. If garbage removal doesn’t seem like a talent, still I want to bag it, wrap it, tape it, and set my alarm to make sure it goes out sufficiently early on the right day.

  And on the mornings when there is no garbage collection, what will I think when I open my eyes? Of course, I’ll be doing my research, but still I imagine a morning when I might not have to get up at all. This wasn’t possible in the hotels—too much transience—and before that? In all my thirty-seven years, as a daughter, a wife, and a mother, I’ve never had the luxury of waking with my eyes closed and thinking, without any recrimination or guilt, without any other person’s needs to consider:

  What do I want to do today?

  JULY 12, 2001

  ON THE RIVER at low tide, in the rain, there is a small sampan swinging on a pole. The pole is about twenty-five feet long and bamboo, considerably longer than the boat or the man who leans his shoulder against it. He is standing, in a rain jacket and hat and a white towel tucked under the hat to protect his neck, in a soft warm rain on the wide, muddy river—he is leaning on water that sighs when the rain hits it but otherwise does not move. The boat and the man are equally still. They are worn, and veiled by rain and clothes and tarps and towels.

  There is a black dog sitting in the bow of the boat.

  Behind them, there’s a bridge, weighed down with morning traffic. Miniature cars for the narrow street—minivans half the size I’m used to, narrow but high, like a single serving loaf of Wonder bread. They are lined up, stopped and yet revving with the energy of the day that’s just beginning. They are going somewhere. You can feel it. The cars link the twin flanks of boxy, concrete apartment buildings that zigzag down each river bank. It’s an uninspired landscape, if not downright ugly, and very much in opposition to the stereotype of Japanese “good taste” I keep hearing about; the stereotype that wrapping is everything and no one cares what’s inside. And it would be easy to condemn them if you didn’t know that every single structure in this area had been shattered and burned in 1945. Windows becoming scatter bombs, beams becoming guillotines, beds becoming funeral pyres. The remnants covered in ash, buried shortly by a new layer. This time of bodies. Flayed, ruptured bodies . . . bodies that survived for hours—powered mostly by shock and by habit—before falling wherever they stood.

  Women, babies. People once.

  And i
n the shallow river that they might have been heading for, the river that was once so full of people desperate for a deadly drink of water that you could walk across their bloated bodies to avoid the fevered bridge ties, there is now a man and a dog in a sampan.

  Fishing for clams.

  PART II

  IN THE MORNING

  Some things have to be believed to be seen.

  —Ralph Hodgson

  ON THE HILL

  HOW SIMPLE TO ERASE. It starts with a small, stubborn no, and Japan could be its birthplace: here, they have perfected the barely perceptible smile, the sliding maybe I’ve become so familiar with. If I’m making inroads now, if I’m gaining trust, I am still offered exactly what the person in front of me wants to give. Buckets for washing myself; a memory of grasshoppers. In Japan, you can refuse a sweet and still be presented with it, and with the great expectation of your satisfaction.

  I have been invited to the headquarters of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, where there is tea in the chairman’s office and windows that slide open to look out on a few well-placed shrubs. This is the organization that Aunt Molly worked for, which launched my journey. It’s housed on the top of Hijiyama, the only hill in the delta that is downtown Hiroshima, the hill that’s most famous for being the only shelter from the blast of the bomb. Now, it is home to the organization that began as the first wave of American medical researchers, home to their grey, tin, bisected cylinders—Twinkie barracks—which were erected in 1951 overlooking a sprawling, multilevel cemetery filled with war dead. The placement of these facilities, their purpose, their very existence, can cast a quiet cloud over the faces of the people I am interviewing. Now I hesitate to say that my aunt worked there, and hasten to add that, when Molly applied, she had no idea what they were doing.

  Which was: measuring the power of their unknown weapon in the bodies of the wounded. Providing no treatment, withholding the results of the tests. Classifying research and disavowing any “significant” lingering effects or genetic mutations from the radiation.

  I can’t think of this place without the anger, the accusations, that accompanied my introduction to it. The ABCC were the people who tried to take your baby’s body, who sent their car for you if you didn’t report on your own to the doctor’s office and gave you nothing in return. Their betrayal was not only in the fact that they had no intention of healing, but in the expectation that they were the doctors, and if there was no refuge in them, there was no refuge at all.

  Except that, these are no longer the people. In 1975, the ABCC ceased to exist. It was replaced by the Radiation Effects Research Foundation, or RERF, which differs from its predecessor in that it more specifically sets out its identical mission—research, not medical treatment—and is directed jointly by the US and Japanese governments, which was claimed to have been the case all along. Same facilities, same staff when the progress of time is accounted for. These people are interested in my aunt, though none of them have ever heard of her. I tell them that Aunt Molly worked for one year as a file clerk or maybe in the statistics department in 1946 or 1947, when there were only twelve or fifteen people on the staff. I tell them the name of Molly’s boss, and that she was bussed in from the nearby town of Kure. But somehow Aunt Molly neglected to tell me, until long after my visit, that she was known by her maiden name when she worked there, and that her first name was mispronounced as “Marie.”

  The name change will forever obscure my attempts to find her there.

  Still, the ABCC staff—I think of them this way because I’ve never heard anyone off the hill refer to the RERF—are very nice. I’m escorted there by an energetic, mountain-climbing man who used to work for the Commission in the 1950s. The librarian turns out to be the very warm and helpful daughter of one of the women who escorted the Hiroshima Maidens, the disfigured girls my aunt first told me about, to the US for surgery. I am a writer on a grant from the two governments that fund this place, so I’m greeted by the chief of the director’s office, by a representative from the general affairs section; I’m invited for a brief tea with the chairman himself. There is a private showing of a video presentation on the RERF and its research. Their entire organization, it seems, is open to me.

  There is, among the staff, a slight reticence in talking about the past. They’re excited about the research they’ve just begun on the effects of radiation on the children of the hibakusha, and also about the results of their more recent studies that show much higher rates of cancer in people who were exposed to the atomic bomb, as well as low-to-medium levels of exacerbation of many other kinds of illnesses. If the ABCC declared, in its first ten years, that there were no such effects, well, they are not the ABCC. Let us talk instead about Electron Spin Resonancing, and how RERF scientists are using it to measure doses of radiation and correlate chromosome aberration frequency in lymphocytes. The RERF contradicts the ABCC wholesale, without ever admitting that it is a contradiction. The mistakes, the manipulation, the evil if there was an evil, are simply gone.

  MY MOTHER DOES NOT COME to me until I leave the compound and walk to where I’m standing now, on the edge of the road, looking out at the terraced military cemetery of war dead. I feel her, and wait, taking in the jumble of stone beneath me, wondering whether no one is visiting because it’s too hot—which is the most often uttered comment I’ve heard so far in Japan—or because the families who would care for these graves perished in the bomb. I’m getting used to my mother’s presence and fully expect that she’s here to give me another puzzle. The last time she visited me, I was standing in front of the A-bomb Dome. There, she ‘showed’ me a white crane disappearing into the rubble. The bird took me back to my wedding, for which my mother’s entire family folded one thousand white origami cranes for good luck. My grandmother had not been happy with the color—white for death, white for modern young people in Hawaii—and I was still working out what my mother meant for the crane to tell me, other than that I should call home. I’d called—mother’s orders after all—and it was a nice conversation. Brian was sleepy, he’d been out late to a concert the night before; he and the boys were going to a baseball game together later. These adventures had defused some of the testiness that had recently been creeping into our conversations. For the moment, all was calm.

  I am also happier. I am settled in my apartment; I have a few friends, including Kimiko’s small group of peace activists who invited me to a party on the riverbank on August 6, the anniversary of the bombing. The activists are a diverse group, some very political, others very religious; some hibakusha themselves and others just folks with time on their hands. Ami will join us. I don’t know yet which category she fits into: she’s a single woman, an only child living with her parents, so she has plenty of time to organize interviews for me, to translate them, to show me a bit of Japan. My freedom, not only my lack of daily duties but also the odd conclusions I often draw from the left field of being American, intrigue her, and she’s begun taking me to see some of the traditional arts that are still practiced here, like Noh. She is watching for something in my reactions, an urgency, maybe, a sign that it matters; I can sense it but am trying not to shape my response accordingly. And if Brian is still not terribly interested in my activities, I choose not to dwell on that. At least he has pictures of my new apartment now to place me. Sometimes, I try to tell him about my interviews: the hibakusha’s insistence that they hold no grudge against America for dropping the bomb and killing their families; their emphasis on their sacrifice and their duty, which is nothing less than to save the world. They have a strange idea of peace—they believe it exists now, that all we have to do is get rid of those nuclear weapons and there will never again be a war. It seems naïve—not because I’m against disarmament, but how do they disregard all the wars around the globe since the 1940s? I don’t dwell on this with Brian, though; he switches off so easily.

  Today, overlooking the cemetery, my mother is quiet. I know that, if I turn to see her, she’ll disappear. It mak
es sense that I have no image to accompany my mother’s presence. I imagine her as a soul curling up in the softness of her body, inhabiting less and less of the outer layers. It’s a slow process: first the skin is not her own, then the fat. We know little about my mother’s dementia and less about how it will progress; until she dies, we can’t even be sure which one she has. The poet in me takes refuge in this, or perhaps it is the child, imagining that it’s not my mother who is confused and losing, but interaction that has become too much work.

  There is then and now for my mother, just as for the ABCC. Then I often locate in my late teens, when my mother and I used to eat Ritz crackers with cream cheese and mango chutney after school and talk about my day. I had an endless stream of friends who wanted in on those chat sessions, who wanted the kind of advice and comfort their own mothers couldn’t give. My mother sparkled—so precise, so empathetic. So intelligent that no one could believe she hadn’t finished college.

  Now I am sworn to silence. There’s a ban in my family against anyone knowing—my father’s request, his worry that it will depress her if anyone says the wrong thing—and we honor it, even if it draws us inward as a family, as friends and colleagues see less and less of her so information doesn’t leak. If it’s lonely sometimes, it also means that I can forget, for stretches of time, that this is a death sentence. From far away, my mother is always healthy; the slips of mind, of memory, become an impossible dream. From far away, though, I can be lulled into turning toward my mother—for advice, a commingling that can no longer be had—until the small, stubborn “no” in my head reminds me that it’s less painful to forget what I had with my mother than it is be reminded of what I’ve lost.