Hiroshima in the Morning Read online

  “Well, then, she’s just going to have to come home.”

  IT’S NOT HIS DECLARATION, but he’s reported it, which means that he wants me to hear it. If it was his statement, directly, I could respond: I’m not allowed to leave Japan; more than seven days out of country and my fellowship will be revoked. The choice could be spoken: my writing, my life, this chance for me that we agreed on versus someone else’s fabricated urgency.

  Time is different for me here. The time I have is short, immediate. Our house, on the other hand, does not have to be dealt with now, nor should it be; it is someone else’s anxiety. I’m surprised at how obvious this is to me, and how settled I must be here to reject my role outright. If I were still living in the pressure of New York life, I might feel differently. If so, it’s a fringe benefit that I don’t get caught up. These are the things I tell myself without seeing how foreign their lives are from my perspective. How, even when I steel myself almost nightly to have this conversation, I am always somewhat surprised that the issue is still there.

  Brian wants it to go away. He wants me to make it go away. This is more than his mantra; I can feel it. It crosses continents with a high whine, not the kind you can hear, or protest. Even though I’ve tried and failed, even though we both know I can do nothing long distance, we rehash the situation nightly, with me offering the kind of logic I would present to these people if only anyone would hear me, while Brian fumes on his bed sandwiched between our sons who are supposed to be watching twenty minutes of a relaxing children’s video.

  How can they be relaxed when he is yelling? How can they then fall asleep? Why would they want to talk to me when my tiny voice is competing with Barney, and when it’s that same tiny voice Daddy is yelling at? I’ve asked Brian if there isn’t some way to restage the scene to encourage the boys to talk to me, but in his current frame of mind, the time difference is my problem.

  Let me say hello.

  I can hear the prodding in the background as Brian waves the phone. Talk to your mother. She’s on the phone now. Just say hello. Talk to your mother. I can hear them negotiate: my older son wins, so my younger son gets on first.

  Hey, sweetheart, it’s Mommy.

  He is fine. Nothing is new. This is his report, adorned with a lot of silent nodding. If it falls short of my hopes, of my expectation that I might chat with them, hear their stories of the day, I know this boy is three years old, and I would not have expected to chat with him if I was home. But still—and now I am the one wanting—there’s a part of me that wishes that one of them could think up a just a single piece of news. I try to describe the food I’ve been eating, to see if I can gross him out, but he knows nothing of chicken liver on a stick. I tell him about the dog in the fisherman’s boat on the river in front of my apartment, and the birds that perch on my small balcony, waiting for him. I’ve told him these things before, but he likes animals and it seems that is all we have in common. Repetition, I decide, can’t be too bad.

  Don’t forget I love you, I remind him as he passes the phone to his brother. As I ready myself again to speak of the dog and the boat.

  I AM A BAD MOTHER: this is what I’m being told. Or rather, my mother-in-law has adopted a recurring email sign off—Your family needs you—and Brian doesn’t understand how I’m not miserable so far away. There’s no question that I’m temporarily absent; no question that I’m less of a mother in Japan than I could be in New York. But in the growing gap between my notion of good motherhood and everyone else’s, there is a question rising: what is a mother supposed to be?

  Brian was the one who wanted to have children. He had endless strategies for teaching boys to throw a baseball, despite the fact that he didn’t know if he would have boys, and that he didn’t own a baseball. Still, I didn’t know; I wasn’t sure; it wasn’t me, and when I tried to picture myself as a mother, I disappeared. I told him about my nightmares, about my failures as a babysitter, and the truth that I didn’t think I even liked kids. We went back and forth and back again, with me unable to commit, until Brian removed every obstacle I could think up: he would do it all. He would be the primary caretaker if I would just have them. If I would agree to help him out sometimes, if he needed help.

  That was our deal. And if, in the early days, I was needed constantly, it became both habit and comfortable. I turned out to have very definite ideas about the merits of homemade baby food, limitations on television, and whether boys should be encouraged to hate pink. I became a mother—that creature I couldn’t visualize. And there was so much to mothering that Brian and I actually believed, for the entire first year of Dylan’s life, that it was physically impossible for one parent to look after two children alone.

  No one questioned that I loved my children then. In fact, those who knew me, and knew of our deal, marveled at my abrupt domesticity. But now that I’m in Japan, people around Brian seem dubious. When he tells me of the most recent friend or work colleague who called him a “saint” for taking care of his children, I add that person to his list, because, what else can I do? I can’t assure him that he is, or remind him that that’s what he said he’d do; I can’t consider the underlying issues because opening myself to them is not harmless. I can already feel the soft silt of guilt that will come through that door.

  I remember the space I floundered in when I first got to Japan, the writhing umbilical cord in my gut that said he was the only person in the world I could turn to; this is his version, then—of missing me. I’ve been in Japan a month, and it’s all going according to plan, this is what I must remember. If I can convince him to ignore the house problem, find a way to help him view it through my perspective, the tension between us will ease. We once talked about him coming out for three months to spend time with me, so perhaps it won’t be too long until they are here.

  JULY 25, 2001

  THIS IS THE WORLD of the umbrella. When I first got to Tokyo, it rained almost every day, and everywhere I looked, a stream of brightly colored domes: flowing out of the train stations, flooding the streets, trickling along the iris garden at the Meiji shrine in Harajuku. Here in Hiroshima, where it is getting quite hot and sticky, the streets are filled with sun umbrellas, and most of them are black. There must be a secret to explain this, but it’s not coming through in translation. I can’t help but recall that, when the atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima, the people wearing white clothes were protected, but any dark-colored design, especially black, was incinerated, and left deep burns in patterns on the skin.

  In the black umbrella, protection and target are one and the same.

  I IMAGINE THE hibakusha everywhere. Of course, they are here—even with the immediate deaths and the lingering cancers, they are around me. But, with a past like Hiroshima’s, I didn’t expect this curious silence. It seems original: the descriptions I have read of the burning city emphasize it—babies with long shards of glass sticking out of their heads who do not even whimper; people with skin literally dripping from their bodies who move like ghosts. And even in those accounts that describe pain and panic, there’s a quality of distance so great that it’s as if someone turned off the sound and rubbed out all the color. The most compelling picture of Hiroshima is the one that has no voice: the reverse shadow that was burned into the stone step when the person sitting there was incinerated.

  It is shadows I am thinking of. The past should cast a shadow on who we are now. If there is a puzzle, then here’s another piece of it: my mother, who forgot that she was interned long before she began truly forgetting; my family, who never mentioned it, who hid the photographs, for whom to heal was to forget. I am the descendant of a group of people who built a wall down the center of their lives, between the internment and their future, and thrived on the disconnect. That silence came partly from embarrassment. They were interned, and released, and the experience wasn’t terrible enough to complain about, especially in contrast to the other atrocities of the war. But there was something else too: they were asked to prove their American-ne
ss. And so my cousins are all only half Japanese, like I am. All of us English-speaking, all of us pizza-eating, melting pot Americans.

  If the internment wasn’t terrible “enough,” it was still shot with shame and difference. The only way to escape, to be safe, was to be what someone else wanted you to be. In the case of Hiroshima, this need to scour the face that we show the outside world, to clean up the city so that healing, not keloids, walks among us, has become a municipal obsession. I’m reminded of the Maiden I spoke with: even if the hibakusha are being eaten by cancer, they—we, none of us— don’t have to play the victim. It’s not a question of optimism or pessimism, of strength or of vision. It is identity. Choice. If we don’t want to appear wounded, then all we need to do is to present ourselves as untouched.

  Now that I am in Japan, I’m beginning to sense this mechanism in myself: there is a distance, a small gap, between the neat labels I present on the outside, and the more turbulent urges I’m finding inside. This is nothing special, not the consequence of some hidden trauma, it’s simply easy: the external persona quiets the questions. It’s polite.

  How are you? I am fine.

  But in this sea of black umbrellas, there is something in me, a possibility teasing the edges of my thoughts, that wonders if this adaptation—this ability to reshape one’s persona—isn’t both a blessing and a curse? My own Japanese American family is proof that you can transform yourself so thoroughly you become the thing you appear to be. If you choose the wrong persona, though, who are you, and what are you left with then? If Brian’s vision of me is not quite my own vision, is that just a simple misunderstanding born of the fact that we’re apart? Am I changing, or was I never that person in the first place?

  LILY

  “I AM SORRY they are dead,” the director of the Peace Museum tells me, as if he himself killed the women I’m looking for. “But have you heard of a woman named Lily Onofrio? She was also in the internment camps and she’s a hibakusha. We have some relics from her family in the museum.”

  Lily Onofrio. Tule Lake.

  Yes.

  “Lily Onofrio is in Hiroshima?”

  “Her family used to live here. Her address is in California. But she comes back to Japan sometimes for treatment.”

  A box of ashes tied to an old man’s chest.

  Lily didn’t want to go to Japan, isn’t that what the story was? Or she changed her mind at the last minute. Lily’s mother-in-law died in the camps, I remember. Her mother-in-law in the box.

  I remember the anthology where I first read Lily’s story, how her chapter was bisected by photographs. Lily was a young mother—her infant was sickly, almost died. She was separated from her husband and then sent, after the war, to Japan against her will. Lily’s story was very much the story of Tule Lake, the camp for “traitors,” and the internees who were labeled dissidents and moved there. It was about the tortures and the stockades and the shootings—the worst of the internment. My first book was about a different camp, one of the most peaceful ones. Was Hiroshima in the version of Lily’s story I read so long ago? Did I gloss over it then too?

  I have the book somewhere, back in Brooklyn. I can read it again, find out how much I’ve forgotten, how much I must remember in some unconscious stream in my brain.

  Brian can send it to me.

  “Yes, I’ve heard of Lily,” I tell him. “I would be so grateful for her address.”

  TOO LATE

  IT IS TOO LATE for my mother to join me here. I can’t shake that knowledge, the sense that I should have done this years ago so my mother could see Japan. It’s not just that my writing is attached to her history, or that this country is the home of her first language. My impulse has always been to expand my mother’s horizons, because her life in tiny town Hawaii seemed so small.

  My mother took care of the children.

  It was my self-appointed responsibility to do what she hadn’t. To live the life that could be claimed vicariously; even when I knew my mother worried about some of the things I did, I also knew that she marveled when I accomplished them, when I was safe another day. That was my greatest success—to be alive and well somewhere else—and there were calls in the middle of the night to double check, every time the evening news reported that someone somewhere in another New York borough had been mugged. My parents managed to stretch an uneventful 1950s existence into a lifetime. They raised me in a place where children could spend an afternoon without adults, diving beneath the lips of underwater caverns, because somehow, in the lazy shelter of this barefoot world, it was not ever possible to be harmed. Crime was rare, because anonymity did not exist, and besides, it wasn’t practical. Stolen cars turned up in a field of sugar cane once the tank was empty, because it was an island after all.

  If it was odd that a woman who was so safe would worry so obsessively about her daughter, I imagined it was, in fact, the placid nature of my mother’s life that left her unequipped to deal with even the possibility of danger. When I was in college, my parents used to come to the big city every summer to visit me, and I would show them around, showing off, completely forgetting that my father lived in Greenwich Village when he was in college, and that the first time I ever visited New York, as a young teenager, my parents took me there, and my mother and I buckled our purses onto the epaulets of our raincoats so we wouldn’t be robbed. My parents, too, ignored the past and allowed me to be the worldly one.

  In response, I honored my mother’s fear.

  For all my plucky posture, I lived in New York very carefully, triple checking whether or not I had my keys, was heading in the right direction on the subway; I bought a lock that featured a steel bar that went all the way into a hole in the floor when Brian and I moved into our first apartment so there was no way to force the door. If my mother’s fear had no root, it had branches, and I lived with her scenarios in my head: being knocked over by a bicyclist, picked off in a drive-by shooting, cornered by a gang of boys. It was Brian who chose New York. I followed him because it was where he went to college; I stayed because it was where he got a job. When we were together, it was exciting, but alone, I was easily exhausted. I narrowed my parameters: became the kind of person who always took the same route because that was what I knew, what worked, and there was a comfort in knowing it intimately, down to the length of each traffic light and the name of the vendor selling stale donuts on the third corner. In that way, I survived.

  Japan, and especially Hiroshima, is a place without threat. My mother could have moved here by herself, discovered her history on her own. There is no protection to organize, no peace to make, no responsibilities.

  She would have loved it.

  Time moves, Ami told me, from present to past. That’s what the Buddha said. Here, I have time on my hands to remember, so it should be no surprise that I am moving into the past to linger there. My past is still the place where my mother is always there when I need her. When I think of my mother—a woman who never did something for herself instead of for me, who spent her life driving me to the store, sewing my prom dress, hugging me when I did something wrong—I can still feel how I demanded that; how I resented it; how I loved my mother entirely. Though I never brought myself to admit it, in all those years when I didn’t want to be a mother, it was partly because I didn’t want to be my mother. And yet, I’ve also always known I wouldn’t have wanted her to be any other way.

  AUGUST 1, 2001

  I REMEMBER A TIME—we were sitting together on my sofa in New York, me and Mom. We used to spend hours hanging out, “solving the world’s problems” she used to call it, so it makes sense that it was just the two of us.

  She was talking about children. Again. How her children were the joy of her life. She did more of that as I got older. She didn’t say, You’re thirty now, you’re getting old, but she did say things like, I would hate to see you lose your opportunity.

  It was a time in my life when things were going well. Brian and I had had some problems, but we were working them ou
t—we were both working really hard—and I was finally exactly who I wanted to be. I’d quit my job and, for the first time since I was a teenager, I was writing. I was whitewater rafting. I was in love with my husband. I was happy.

  This memory is real, if anything can be called real anymore. I didn’t know how to explain myself to her. The life she lived, the family connections, the caretaking that she found important—I didn’t want that. It was messy, too easy for me to get derailed. So I just told her. I told her what I had: there I was, thirty years old, finally an adult, finally empowered. I was building an identity for myself as a writer, adding a little strength, a little daring; my new life was set up exactly right. This is what I’d been looking for, what I worked toward. This is what I possessed, and I was going to keep it.

  She looked confused at first, and then amused. “But sweetheart,” she said, “your life isn’t over. It’s going to change. That’s what life is. You can’t hold onto things the way they are, even if you want it. It’s always going to be different.”

  PEACE NIGHT

  ON THE EDGE of the Otagawa, some three feet below me, smooth stones embedded in a concrete bank slide into the river. I am sitting just north of the Aioibashi, the T-shaped bridge that rests on the crown of the Peace Park, which is said to have been the target for the atomic bomb. Over my head, tens of thousands of cellophane ties have been strung on long ropes across the river. There are hundreds of ropes, beginning from one point on the opposite bank and extending into the tops of the building on this side. In outline, they suggest a sail, though in practice, the cellophane merely traces the wind rather than catching it. I’ve been riding by them daily on my borrowed bicycle, watching them multiply over the last two weeks as the anniversary of the bombing approached, but now that the day is here, I still don’t know what they mean.