Hiroshima in the Morning Read online

  It is perhaps ten o’clock at night on August 6, the anniversary of the atomic bombing. And these ties are flying up and away from me in the darkness, sometimes grey ghosts and sometimes glinting silver when the wind pulls them into the lights from the buildings and the full moon. On the flat black river in front of me is a flotilla of sampans and luxury boats, and of course, the kaleidoscopic paper lanterns.

  They are small, square bags of brightly colored papers, maybe eight inches in diameter. They float on thin wooden crosses, lit with small wicks. Some ten thousand lanterns: yellow, purple, blue, red, pink, orange, green.

  I arrived in the early evening, when the banks around the main launching platform resembled something of a carnival, with lines of people four deep and hours long. I floated with the crowds, watching the people around me break away to buy a lantern at any one of the many stalls on the banks; I watched them write their wishes on the paper, and the names of the people they wanted to remember, and then take them down to the water to be lit and sent on their way. I’ve been told that the lanterns are peculiar to this area of Japan, and are designed to console the souls of the dead, but I don’t understand exactly how they are consoled. I’ve asked myself: Do the lanterns call these souls back from wherever they are to spend a day among the living? Or is the anniversary a time when the souls will roam anyway, and the lanterns offer reassurance and remembrance that allows them to rest for another year? And what of the light itself—does the flame stand for memory, or love, or is it a safe place for the souls to inhabit while they are visiting?

  The questions will not let me rest. Are we calling the souls to us, or tucking them back into bed? Is the ceremony for them, or is it for us?

  This being Japan, of course, there is never an answer. What do the cellophane ties stand for? What’s going on onstage? What was your mother like? No matter how simple the information I am asking for is, or how I phrase any question; whether I give a slew of choices to select from or offer none at all, the response is invariably, “I don’t know.”

  Tonight, I must ask: What if there is no answer? What if there is no lapse between cultures or problem with translation, but simply no key that unlocks the meaning behind all these “I don’t knows”? I spent the evening with the peace activists at their lantern ceremony, the purpose of which I couldn’t quite figure out. We were south of the main launching spot for the lanterns, and the tide was running north for the first time in sixty years because of the full moon and so the lanterns did not flow by our chosen spot, but it didn’t seem to matter to anyone else. We put up our banner anyway. We ate musubis and drank green tea. I found out that Kimiko herself is a hibakusha; she was eight when the bomb was dropped, and she will tell me that story, sometime, when you are ready. Meet this Czech reporter, she said to me, and then I lost her. A guest from French Polynesia played Eric Clapton songs on a borrowed guitar as I waited to understand what I was just told, waited for the evening’s agenda, and was finally forced to confront the possibility that that moment might be all there was.

  It was just a song.

  I came to Japan to ask questions, but the longer I stay, the more inappropriate that feels. It’s not that my friends don’t want to answer, it’s more that it’s never occurred to them to break an idea or an object down. When I try to analyze, it brings the moment to a halt and I’m left with nothing—no explanation, and no experience either. It’s a bizarre world where questions obscure the answers, where they stymie forward motion rather than opening up a path, but that’s the world where I’ve found myself. An “ichigo ichi e” world, as one of Ami’s friends tried to explain to me. One time, one chance. Or, it is what it is, and it might be important. I must accept the moment I’m living in, embrace it entirely, then let it go so there’s room for the next moment. Living in this way, the meaning of everything will become clear.

  Or it won’t.

  MY MOTHER IS STANDING in the darkened hallway, one hand on the frame of the door to her bedroom, the light from that room illuminating part of her face. And on that face, tears, and terrible anger. Which day is this, and who was it who said the words that hang in the air and caused the explosion? I told you three times already! Why can’t you remember such a simple thing? She knows she should remember, and that she does not, and she’s terrified. But the outburst is terror too, and a plea, a hope against hope that this not remembering is stress, exhaustion, that she’s being lazy and if she could just pay attention we would all be restored. No one wants what is happening. No one can bear it. It’s a pain that cannot be borne. So we rush through it, through recrimination and apology; we rush to restore ignoring. My mother will come to lose that fear, and those will be days of greater harmony and also greater sorrow. She will come to a point of complacency, where she does not remember what she lost.

  But in the half-light of the hallway and of memory, my mother’s eyes are still bright.

  THIS LATE, only a thin parade of lanterns meanders down the center of the river. From this distance, they are principally red and green and yellow, though I saw many different shades of blue being painted earlier; there’s one group, all red, nestled together in a float. The water is still now, so the soft lights serve mostly as a setting for the sampans, which putter by, dark and full of unlighted lanterns that they have scooped out of the river in their cleaning sweep. In one cluster, a lantern has begun to burn.

  What if I stop trying to define for a moment—if I let the ties be just ties, if the lanterns are only paper sacks? If I give up my questions and just sit, what do I see? The lights of Hiroshima, undulating in long lines along black water—a mirror, and maybe the inspiration for the flying ties overhead. The street car running across the T-bridge—a piece of the real world where people still need to get somewhere, a reminder of the trams and the people on them who turned into perfect charcoal statues on “that day.” If I walked toward the bridge and out of the shelter of cellophane feathers, I would emerge from the darkness by the A-bomb Dome, which sits like a half-forgotten nightmare across from the Peace Park. It is the dome itself—the skeleton of the dome, a helmet, spiked and dangerous, that makes it an icon. Tonight, with the lighting from the ground, it will be a beacon. In the morning, it will shrink—after all, much of the building is missing—and sink into its embrace of enormous trees.

  At this moment, the tide is beginning to turn.

  I have slipped away from my friends’ celebration to sit on the riverbank alone. I’ve moved from the discomfort of feeling I have too much space to actively seeking solitude—as much of it as possible. If I was asked—how do you define yourself?—I would have to think for a while. Once I would have said my identity is solid, settled somewhere half way across the world, and if I am finding it increasingly difficult to access at the moment, that doesn’t mean it’s disappeared.

  And yet, every night, when I sit down to write, my laptop is hot and heavy, and there is obligation in my keyboard. Brian has a list of friends and family who complain about how bad I am at answering their emails. How is the food? they ask. Seen any temples? In fact, my correspondence is not so deplorable. If I wish Brian was more interested in my experiences, there are still a few friends who respond to my reports, who hear my thoughts and answer with their own, who comment on my mission, which is increasingly important to me, of finding history in the stones.

  But in the great truth beyond fact—in my dreams, in the chaos of my daily language—the distance between me and most of them is growing.

  You are always going to be different. My mother’s words.

  THERE IS A SMALL SET of stairs leading down to the water where I sit for a moment near a photographer and his enormous tripod. He’s shooting a cluster of lanterns nudged together in the eddy near the bottom step. Looking right down into them, I can see drawings made by children, of and for the people they love. Judging from the pictures, I guess the children are about my son Ian’s age, which means that the creators of this particular group of lanterns have been in bed for quite a whi
le.

  My own sons will be waking up now, or possibly walking to school. I’ve lost track of days—is it a weekend? Is it vacation? Of course, it’s summer vacation, which opens the possibilities for what they’re doing now. It’s been six weeks since I left home, so conjuring their faces is easy. I can set them in their context—which is happiness, surrounded by family. I can see them at home. I can also imagine them here, looking at the lanterns, crouched beside me, my older son leaning back on his haunches with arms crossed, surveying from safety; my younger one in mid-leap, about to launch himself inadvertently into the water. I can feel the softness of his arm in my hand, the baby fat between my fingers. As we look, together, I can almost smell them.

  There is a sketch of a cat, Mommy. A sunny face labeled “Yuko.” There is a plane and a bomb and a small fluffy cloud. Over there, a school of fish. Urchins and starfish.

  And there are words also, words that bump my heart, in their bubble block letters, a smiley face beneath them with pink spots on the cheeks: NEVER REPEAT THE EVIL.

  “Amazing Grace,” a hymn that was played at my parents’ wedding and my own, is being piped over and over through a reed flute I cannot see. The unsung words float with the lanterns, and it’s hard to imagine the day when the bomb dropped, when the banks were not neatly paved, when the spot where I’m now sitting was choked with bodies. I’ve been told that, of the thousands who were in this spot, only a single teacher and student survived, and both spent their first long night in the river surrounded by the dead.

  But now the moon, which throws a light bright enough for me to write by; the ubiquitous cicadas; the cool of the evening—all of these things have brought peace. Earlier, at my friends’ celebration, I was asked to say something about how the lanterns made me feel. I thought of saying something about the ghosts, but I couldn’t because I had yet to see a lantern. Now, without an explanation to rely on, I am beginning to feel them.

  They laugh in bright colors in the dancing candlelight. They cry together, arms holding each other upright.

  They do seem consoled.

  VACATION

  “MAYBE WHEN THIS IS ALL OVER, we should take a vacation,” Brian says. “Go to China.”

  “China?”

  “Or Vietnam. You like the beach. The kids like the beach.”

  “Mmmm.” I acknowledge his words with a sound that’s becoming more Japanese daily. It is midnight in New York, and we’re taking a quiet moment to plan our future. I conjure an image of my children playing in the surf on the beaches in Hawaii. “Ian sounded a little sad last night when I talked to him. Or not very talkative.”

  “He’s fine. He’s five. Phones are strange for kids. It’s like you’re a ghost.”

  “Mmmm.” I don’t like the sound of that but I know what he means. I am constantly having to say to my youngest, “Honey, are you still there? Mommy can’t hear you when you nod you know. You have to make a noise.” I switch gears again, back to the point. “We could stay in Japan. Do some exploring. I’ve barely seen it.”

  “Yeah, but you like the beach. Maybe we should go back to Bali. The kids would like that.”

  “What about Kyushu?” I offer. “Remember that email I sent you, with the link to those crazy mud baths? It will be warm there. Or we could go north, to the onsens where the monkeys come down to the outdoor baths.”

  “Monkeys?”

  “I sent it last week, maybe the week before. Didn’t you read it?”

  Brian sighs. “I don’t know. I’ll look for it. It’s at work. I don’t always have time to read my email at work, especially those long things you send. That’s why I need a vacation.”

  “Mmmm,” I say again. I try to make it sound encouraging. Brian is tired. He’s taking care of everything. “Let’s take one then. I’d love to. Japan is more expensive than Bali, but we’d save on airfare. Did you look at the last links I sent you? You’re going to love it here.”

  “I don’t want to do mud baths,” he says, getting ready to sign off. I can hear it in his voice: the conversation is over. “I want to go scuba diving. Now that’s a real vacation. You like to scuba dive.”

  “There were no crematoriums after the bombing, so we took my brother-in-law’s body to a small, nearby park. His oldest son went back to the farm where he had been evacuated to get some twigs and logs. We mixed the dry wood with green timber and lay it in the bottom of a hole dug in the park ground, then we put the body face down on a wooden doorframe over the firewood. I don’t know why you face the body down, but that’s what we were told to do. Once his body was covered with firewood, we surrounded it with sheets of tin roofing and lit the fire. It burns gradually—that’s why you mix the green wood in, otherwise, the body doesn’t burn completely.

  “We waited the whole night—it takes one night to cremate a body—and in the morning, we took the children to gather up their father’s bones. At a crematorium, they would have given us long chopsticks to pick through the bones, but we didn’t have those so we stripped some of the bamboo lattice from inside the plaster walls and used that instead.

  “I tell people today, if you can cremate a body, you can do anything.”

  —Seventy-eight-year-old female survivor

  AUGUST 14, 2001

  STOP BY YOUR ANCESTRAL GRAVEYARD. Pull the car over on the sidewalk—you won’t be long. You’ll need one thousand yen to buy a paper “lantern” to decorate the grave. White for someone who died this year, multicolored if your spirits need less guidance to find their way back to their world. The lanterns are six-sided, pyramid-like, buckets on a stick. Green, then magenta, then yellow, turquoise, red, and deep purple. Some are flecked in gold, all have something in kanji written on one panel; they have small horned tabs and accordion dangles, and there should be many at each gravestone, one for every visitor, every ancestor gone. When you have chosen one and tucked it in, neaten the sticks around the gravestone, get some water in a bucket and ladle it over the top of the stone to make sure your family is clean and not thirsty.

  Pray, bow, and then, “let’s go.”

  THIS BROKEN, IRRADIATED tombstone I am kneeling in front of is from a temple in Nakajima, one of ten temples in that perished town that was directly beneath the explosion; it was recovered very near the spot where the cenotaph in the Peace Park stands now. The priest who is standing beside me inherited that temple from his father, more in spirit, obviously, than in substance. He would like to think that his parents, their parishioners, his friends and neighbors, that all of them died instantly. He knows his sister—a fifteen-year-old student who was crushed in a nearby munitions factory—did not.

  This is Ami’s ancestral graveyard on her father’s side. We’ve already stopped at the maternal family grave. Despite what I was told about long family pilgrimages by train to honor ancestors during Obon, there is no family here today. It’s just me, and this quiet girl who’s become my friend. All our actions have been quick and painless. We are on our way to have dinner at Ami’s house—I’m the guest of the only child, and though I did not want to intrude, they are alone, and happy for the company.

  But first, we have to pay our respects to the temple priest, Toshiro Ogura. Here I am, the white woman; we need to introduce her, assure him that she has a purpose here, a sponsor (the Japanese government!), that she is appropriate (and we thank goodness that she wore one of the two over-the-knee skirts she brought from New York for this “conservative” culture). And when Ogura-san finds out that I am writing about the atomic bombing, he shows me an incredible map, square yards of paper, labeled in kanji, of every building that used to stand in Nakajima. Here is where his temple used to be. Where his life was until he was twelve. Here is the lost city, the answer, a map like no other. This is how my own life turns when I least expect it, how Hiroshima is layered: death, tradition, dinner. This is how I get an invitation to come back again to see the map of what the pre-atomic world looked like. Sometime. When it’s convenient. And then the priest’s wife takes me back to the gr
aveyard, to the mossy stones that were recovered from the ruins of the temple.

  This is my fall to my knees.

  My path to the frayed and broken tombstone on Obon.

  “So, I say to people, ‘You are stupid if you trust what those comfort women say about all that nonsense.’ Those are false stories. I was there in Korea, so I know.

  “Those Korean comfort women were gathered by Korean people who owned their own businesses. We had nothing to do with it. But we left them alone when they started telling all those false stories because it’s so ridiculous. Some Japanese veterans admitted that what those Korean women say is true, but they are all stupid. They just want to get people’s attention. The Nanjin Massacre is another false story made up by some Japanese.

  “Korean comfort women wore Japanese kimono on purpose and pretended to be Japanese to get more customers. They were happy because they earned a lot of money like that. Japanese comfort women were more popular than Korean ones, of course, and so the Japanese ones could charge twice as much. I remember that those Korean comfort women were really happy doing their jobs. I wasn’t interested in those women myself though.

  “So what they’re saying about us threatening them at gun point to become comfort women is totally false. It’s nothing but ridiculous. That’s why we don’t take it seriously. And one other thing is, we Japanese believe that we don’t really have to speak up to let the world know the truth. We know that the truth will come out in the end no matter what. So, we just let people say whatever they want to say. It’s degrading to confront those Korean people.