Dreams of Speaking (8 page)

‘Yes,' she said. ‘I am writing, among other things, about the extraordinary existence of the telephone. I am writing a book – trying to write a book – about modern things: Xerox machines, neon lights, photography, astronauts.'

This work sounded meretricious, almost childish, as she announced it. But Mr Sakamoto beamed approval.

‘So we must be friends!' he declared. ‘We
must
be friends! I am so pleased to meet you, Black, Alice Black.'

Alice liked the sound of her name with the l's abraded.

It was such an easy meeting. Friends are an intersection, a route back to the world. Alice could not have foreseen that this Japanese man, this man, she would discover, who was sixty-eight, not seventy-five, from the city of Nagasaki, would greet her with such openness and affinity that it would be impossible not to befriend him. He too seemed responsive to something in Alice's manner – not just her project, but the earnestness of her isolation, the dedication to an intellectual cause, the pleasure in supposing the usual arcane, the familiar compelling. If there is a magnetic aspect to sensibility it is evident in friendships that arise from these merest conversations and shreds of sentences, talks that align particles of self in a sudden, energised correspondence.

Alice remembered at some stage that she had seen the video clip of ‘Instant Karma'. Yoko Ono wore a kind of bandage across her eyes, thick and white, as if she were not simply blindfolded, but wounded, or even blind. There were words on cards and peace-symbol armbands, and Lennon, with a thin beard and a
lazy tambourine. In front of the band, dancers were bobbing arhythmically, under strobe lights. They wore Carnaby Street gear and had fixed expressions. Alice had no idea what year this performance was from: it was something lodged in her girlhood, something as almost forgotten and as lost as a beached whale.

Mr Sakamoto fell back to sleep. Alice watched him rest his face in his hand, arrange his pullover as a pillow against the cold surface of the window, and then re-enter his own seclusion. He looked calm, she thought. Wise. When they arrived at the station he awoke with a jolt and was instantly communicative.

‘We must talk, Alice Black, about this world of modern things. This buzzing world.'

Mr Sakamoto gestured around him at the hubbub of the train station, with everyone rushing helter-skelter for the exits. He offered Alice a name card from his wallet and wrote on it the phone number of his hotel. Since she did not have a card, Alice scribbled her name and email address on a slip of paper.

‘Soon,' he said, reaching to shake her hand once again.

Mr Sakamoto turned into the crowd, walked a few paces and then looked back. He waved extravagantly, with a kind of Florentine flourish. Alice waved back in a huge reply. They were already mimicking each other, already blithe in their friendship.

Across the sky, superimposed, were the vapour trails of jet planes. Alice stood on windy Pont Marie, tilted her head, and looked up at the white lattice trails of international air travel. She was vaguely shocked that the territory of the sky could be so marked by transit, but also thrilled at the design, at the modern writ so ethereally. Below her, tourists passed beneath the bridge on a broad open boat. It appeared sturdy, like a workers' vessel, having the look of faux antiquity. The river was jade-coloured, rippled. Alice saw someone on the deck pause and take her photograph, as if she were a Frenchwoman-on-a-bridge, a genuine spectacle. She waved, and the photographer looked up, embarrassed, and turned immediately away.

Alice was walking to meet her new friend, Mr Sakamoto. They were to lunch at a small bistro on the Left Bank, and would
talk, he said emphatically, about this buzzing world. Alice moved through the cobbled streets with an air of anticipation, as if he were forty years younger, and her secret assignation.

Mr Sakamoto would raise his glass of red wine.

‘The difficulty with celebrating modernity,' he declared, ‘is that we live with so many persistently unmodern things. Dreams, love, babies, illness. Memory. Death. And all the natural things. Leaves, birds, ocean, animals. Think of your Australian kangaroo,' he added. ‘The kangaroo is truly unmodern.'

Here he paused and smiled, as if telling himself a joke. ‘And sky. Think of sky. There is nothing modern about the sky.'

‘Vapour trails,' responded Alice, pretending to miss his point.

Hiroshi Sakamoto was born in Nagasaki, in 1934, into a wealthy family who lived on the south-eastern hillside of the city, overlooking the harbour. Below, they could see ships of many nations on the turquoise water and the day-to-day arriving and leaving of vessels of commerce and trade. Further out, there were small fishing boats dotted around the bay; these too swept in and out, regular and irregular as the weather permitted. The view extended to promontories, sky, to the horizon of the ocean. They could see rain approaching in blue veils and clouds mass and unfurl. It was expansive and mobile; it was a view that encouraged journeying. Up and down the steep slopes of the hillside moved figures, sedan chairs and heavy carts, so that one could believe one sat high upon a world of relentless labour.

Hiroshi's father, Osamu, had inherited a fortune, being the only heir to a centuries-old saki business. The raking and cooling of rice, the smell of fermentation, the rituals of purifying water and the appeasement of spirits, these were all encoded so thoroughly in Osamu as a child that no one would imagine that his interests would turn to the production of steel. Although he maintained the saki business, almost purely for sentimental reasons and the tremor of nostalgic pleasure whenever he smelled rice at its final stage and saw women
bent with large fans above steaming trays, he was seduced by industrial manufacture and the intricacy of machines. In the late 1920s he visited America with a translator in tow, and saw there the production-line assembly of motorised vehicles, welders and machinists contriving the engines of aircraft, and women with nimble hands, each producing a little component of a Wurlitzer wireless. Although he found America crass, ugly and with no civic decorum, when he returned to Nagasaki Sakamoto-san told his associates: ‘I have seen the future, and it works,' and set about establishing a chain of factories in the Nagasaki prefecture. By 1934, his premises produced both the tiny cogs of watches and the girders for a bridge, and metal items of assorted shapes and sizes in between, some for the Mitsubishi dockyards, some for the munitions factories.

Hiroshi had two older sisters, Sachiko and Mihoko, who doted on their younger brother and were clever and witty. They attended an exclusive girls' school in the centre of the city, at which they were taught English and French, as well as traditional academic studies and female accomplishments. Hiroshi remembers his sisters chattering trilingually, making jokes and exchanging confidences in a plait of languages. Sometimes, in the space of one or two sentences, Sachiko and Mihoko shifted linguistic registers, so that no one knew exactly what they were talking about, and Hiroshi was often frustrated to the point of tears when he could not follow their secretive, erratic conversations.

When he was six his father employed two private tutors – a Japanese scholar, Masa Tanaka, almost eighty, who was a famous practitioner of the art of
haiku
, and a young man from Manchester, England, who was not particularly scholarly, but adored his own language with singular devotion. Harold O'Toole was twenty-six years old, had startling blond hair, and fell almost at once in love with Sachiko,
who had turned seventeen the week he arrived. Hiroshi detected his foreign tutor's divided attentions and strove to excel, anxious to impress the young man with his English language fluency and his penchant for difficult vocabulary. By the time he was eleven, in 1945, Hiroshi was reading classic English novels and adopting regional accents as a form of play – although still not quite commanding the pronunciation of ‘l'. Harold O'Toole – who had been protected from internment during the war by the wealth of the Sakamotos – was still love-struck by Sachiko, but by then she was interested in a young biology teacher, a Christian, who worked at the Chinzei middle school. Only when Hiroshi was an adult did he learn from his mother that Mihoko had been in love with Harold O'Toole, and that this mismatch of feeling, this mis-crossing of desires, had caused the family much worry and distress.

Of the day in August 1945, when the world changed, changed utterly, Mr Sakamoto disclosed very little. Alice must not be offended, he said; he had never told his wife or two adult daughters the details of his experience. The outline was simply that he and his mother had been saved, but that the rest of the family had perished. Almost everyone he knew had perished. Sachiko and Mihoko had perished. His father. Mr O'Toole. The biology teacher in Chinzei middle school. Almost 74,000 people in the explosion alone. His Japanese tutor, who at the time of the explosion had been in the mountains meditating by a stream, survived, but wished he hadn't and committed suicide two weeks after the blast. Poetry, said Mr Sakamoto, was no longer possible.

The child Hiroshi and his mother moved to Tokyo, where she had relatives. When Tadeo, his mother's brother, returned from the war, they all lived together in a small apartment near a bombed-out suburb. At length Uncle Tadeo discovered
Osamu's overseas bank accounts, and the existence of two remaining factories in Honshu, and the makeshift family, bleak with grief, moved to a larger dwelling in a better area.

Hiroshi was a restless young man who could settle to nothing and was afraid of attachment. He entered an intellectual world of remote theorems and calculations, and at one time entertained the idea – somewhat vengefully – of becoming a theoretical physicist. But some ‘perversity', he said, intuitively prevailed, so that in post-war Japan, when others turned to pragmatism and the business of reconstruction, he found himself reading
haiku
, and English novels and European poetry in translation. He felt like a being from another planet. In Tokyo, cacophonous with the manufacture of new buildings and the incessant clang of metal, he lost himself in the quiet domain of seventeen syllables, the make-believe lives of raven-haired heroines and country gentlemen, and the storm and stress of faraway poetic emotions. Often he dreamed of his sisters, and his father, and of people now gone. In his dreams his sisters always spoke in a language he could not understand and he would wake himself, weeping.

After an uneventful few years at university, Hiroshi began travelling. His uncle indulged him, funding his nephew's whims, while at the same time sending gently hectoring letters about the need to find a profession and accumulate wealth. On a pretext of scholarship, Hiroshi found himself settling for a time in Edinburgh, a city he admired for its unusual combination of stately complacency and rough-at-the-edges commitment to life. The Scots, declared Mr Sakamoto, are a people given to mischievous intelligence and the cultivation of irony. At a bookshop he met and fell in love with Clare MacDougall, whom he had first encountered sitting in lilac shadow in the classics section, on a small oak stool, reading a battered second-hand edition of Homer. She
was attracted to his foreignness, his upright posture, the neat pert bows with which he greeted her, his low respectful voice; he, to what he perceived as her explicit sameness: she had black eyes and hair, a flat face and a small nose, and she read with a transported intensity he immediately recognised as his own. They courted in the usual way – walks up to the castle, drinks at the pub, the occasional swift kiss in a wynd or on the doorstep of her home – but perhaps both knew it would come to nothing. Clare's two brothers called Hiroshi a ‘Jap', and treated him with vicious and undisguised contempt. Her parents were appalled – and told her so – that she would ‘walk out with a yellow man', for all the world to see. Not much irony there, Clare had commented. When Clare refused to stop seeing Hiroshi, her brothers beat her. She arrived at their dinner date with a broken cheekbone and a blue bruised face, and tearfully announced that it was all too difficult. In the candlelight of the café, she looked like a young woman ruined. Hiroshi had seen enough of wounded bodies to want not to be the cause of any more, so he made a quick decision and left Edinburgh the next day. They wrote letters to each other for almost three years. When Clare announced her engagement to a man working in the Bank of Scotland, the letters between them abruptly ceased.

Against his uncle's advice and wishes, Hiroshi returned to Nagasaki. With a portion of his inheritance he purchased a saki company – one still teetering on the edge of oblivion after the death of most of its workers in 1945 – believing he could remake the family tradition and honour his father. Under his control for six months, the saki business was a moderate success; however, Hiroshi found he had no feeling or instinct for the processes and practices that had so occupied his family over generations, and in the end appointed a manager and returned to his books. He watched
the gradual redevelopment of the city of Nagasaki – the tram tracks, the schools, the stores and harbourside – but no longer felt any connection to the place he had grown up in. Every building was new and unrecognisable, and the hammering, hauling, carting, scaffolding, seemed to continue both day and night, even now, fifteen years after the unmentionable event. The population who had remained included many burns victims, gaunt figures with melted skin and woeful eyes. They appeared everywhere as a kind of indictment. Hiroshi felt obliged to stay, but hated being there; he hated coming across a burned person and the reminder of what cannot be repaired.

Only the view of the harbour remained essentially the same. There were more ships, these days, but the water was a clear turquoise blue and the view across to the shimmering horizon was, as ever, transfixing. The sky seemed larger now, and the hills more steep, especially since there were still areas of deforestation and small young trees. Hiroshi stood at the front of his wooden house – built in the traditional style – and stared for hours at the ocean and the sky, at the forces that pull the rain and the clouds, at the screen of colours that swapped back and forth the day and the night with what seemed such perpetually meaningless insistence.

At length, desperately lonely, Hiroshi noticed a pretty young woman of a good family who was not Clare MacDougall, but whom he believed eventually he could love. Mie was a small woman who seemed delicate to the point of fragility, and Hiroshi felt tenderly protective towards her. He found himself bending over her, looking at the top of her head, then her face would upturn and she would smile at him directly. It was an offering, a benevolence, amid the city's waste. When they married, he thought she looked like a doll. Perhaps he had been too long abroad, but the white face powder and
the heavy kimono and the elaborate decorations in her hair, presented his bride as an ornamental stranger. During the ceremony Hiroshi had irrepressible misgivings, but decided then and there that he would be a devoted husband. His mother cried. Uncle Tadeo looked pleased. It was a late spring morning and the cherry blossoms were at last beginning to fall. Loose petals flew in the air like snowflakes. He was reminded that there was lightness, as well as gravity, that there are presences in the wind, unassuming, and precious possibilities.

Mie had two daughters, Akiko and Haruko, and Hiroshi rejoiced. In his children he was healed. In his children there was a future, and the swapping of day and night at the end of the ocean was now the meaningful marker of their daily growth. Akiko and Haruko were cheerful and without burned history. They laughed at the slightest pretext and were inclusively sociable. Hiroshi read them storybooks and bought them sweets and electronic toys. He liked nothing more than to walk along the street holding hands, one daughter on each side, watching their linked shadows, a wobbly triangle, proceed in silhouette over the earth before them. When they both went to school he found it difficult to adjust. He would wait at the school entrance to walk them home, and then become annoyed when they wanted to close off and watch television. He looked at their backs, crouched in the flickering light. He thought often of Harold O'Toole and Masa Tanaka, and still believed in the superiority of words over images.

Mie died when her oldest daughter was twelve. Her leukemia was probably the consequence of radiation exposure; in any case her death fell over the household like radioactive ash. Akiko became sullen and withdrawn and as an adult would later suffer depressive episodes and acts of self-harm. Haruko was more resilient, but still altered by the loss and robbed of her unselfconscious delight. It was she to whom
Hiroshi secretly felt closer, but in truth he could talk to no one of what Mie had come to mean, of her quiet solidity, of her offer of redemption. His mother came to live with them, but she was by then withered and ill, and Hiroshi feared that his children would meet with a second death. When she died just two months later, he felt at the point of collapse. And it was his mother's death, not Mie's, that threatened to derange him.

It was then 1972 and Hiroshi was at last experiencing the grief of 1945. It was as if he had held it under control for all these years, just to have it now bubble up to the surface, released through the fine jagged fissures a single death might cause. He ceased eating and sleeping. When he slept for what seemed only a moment, he was engulfed by nightmares. When he was awake he encountered long-ago visions. For the sake of his daughters, he pretended stability, but Hiroshi was shaken daily by the deep seismic forces of what had never been confronted or resolved. One day Uncle Tadeo visited and took the girls with him back to Tokyo, to stay for a time with their relatives. Hiroshi spent four weeks in a clinic by the ocean where, chemically sedated, he entered another kind of time and began in dread negation to sleep. It was the drowned sleep of drugs, it was obliteration. Outside his window the water swelled and subsided, swelled and subsided, a truly dull repetition. A dozen dead oceans, Mr Sakamoto said, a hard rain. Hiroshi discovered that the clinic was exclusively for
Hibakusha
, for atomic bomb survivors. There were people with decades-old burns scars and conspicuous injuries, but there were also people like him, who bore no visible scar at all, but who had seen what was unassimilable and been occupied by loss.