Hiroshima in the Morning (12 page)

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 while.

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.

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.

“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.”

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 graveyard, 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.

HERE IS THE ANGER I’ve been looking for. He is full of it, of hatred even; the world is black and white to him. He is the only person who rejects the plot of my novel as irrelevant and wants me to write a different book. It is his life’s mission to correct misinformation about the bombing, and he freely lists the people who’ve gotten “upset” when he has questioned their credibility, so of course I should expect him to question mine. He has very specific, detailed memories, but some of them, like his insistence that the Korean comfort women were happy businesswomen, or that the Nanjin Massacre is “another false story made up by some Japanese” are outrageous. And yet, he insists that he knows because he was there.

I am sitting in Kimiko’s living room, surrounded by a small group of translators and peace activists who have gathered to hear the Colonel speak. This man may be one of the only people left alive who has information about the girl monitors who worked in the Army headquarters. He is close to eighty, though he could pass for twenty years younger—a dynamic, smooth-faced man with twinkling eyes behind heavy glasses and white hair, and even though this is supposed to be an interview, he is seated in a chair with everyone arrayed around him on the floor, and he wants to start at the beginning, no, he wants to start
before
the beginning. He wants to start in Nanjin, when the chief of a special unit to
end the Sino-Japan war gave him permission to film a movie to “console the souls of the war dead.” He wants to tell us that he’s a perfectionist, the sort of twenty-six-year-old man who would make the soldiers redo their scenes over and over by flinging up his arms and yelling until they got it right. But first, he wants to inform everyone in the room that this writer is completely misinformed and misguided, and how lucky she is to have someone like him to set her straight.

There were no exchange ships between the US and Japan during the war, he tells me.

There weren’t any internees from the US camps in Hiroshima.

You have no sources, then. You have no proof.

It’s stupid to write a book about people that no one knows anything about.

 

IT’S THE MOST interesting interview I have experienced so far. Except that he won’t let me ask questions, and when I ask anyway, he won’t answer them. And when Ami tries to do a simultaneous translation for me, he tells her to shut up. I smile at her when she cringes, to assure her it’s okay, and since that smile would be required even if it wasn’t okay, I add some extra attentiveness and hope that works for everyone concerned.

After two hours, he is done with his introduction of himself; he has rehashed the now-familiar theory that the US refused to allow Japan to keep its imperial family in the Potsdam agreement because it had a four billion dollar bomb it wanted to drop and it didn’t want Japan to surrender before seeing what kind of damage the new weapon could inflict on Hiroshima; and he is backtracking into his life on the frontlines in New Guinea. I hazard a few questions about the novel that’s daily getting hazier in my mind: does he remember the Sentai Gardens, where the military headquarters were, and where the Nisei girls were kept confined to follow the Allied broadcasts?