Hiroshima in the Morning (18 page)

LIVING WITHOUT LANGUAGE calls the authority of words into question. I’ve encountered this in my interviews—when the
hibakusha
tell their story, the same one, over and over, their experience becomes the story: they lose the ability to see what was over the hill, what the ruins of the kitchen looked like, if they are never asked. Memory is not history, as I once thought. Memory is narrative, and they are rewriting their lives. Their experiences, which precede words, are reshaped by the words they use for description. If they were stuck once, in their rosy peace narrative, visions of biohazard teams swarming New York offices have expanded their vocabulary now.

I have always believed “things” and their definitions were one and the same. But here, since Japanese often does not translate directly into English, I’ve discovered that much of what I once would have called “words” are truly “codes.” As a writer, I should understand: I’ve always used these codes to convey a general outline, then brushed in a few details that might not already have been assumed.
Bathroom
, for example, brings up a fairly standard image in America, so I can emphasize the color of the tile, or the soap scum around the sink handles, or the array of partial shampoos on the lip of the tub.

As a person, though, do I know the weight I’m wielding? In Japan, I’ve given up on words, not wanting them to
choose my life and constrict my vision. If I am asked now, could I describe myself? Would I be my description?

Why is it that my strongest sense these days is not of who I am, but what I don’t want to be?

I keep encountering the opposite of what I thought I was looking for. When I consider Japan, look at the differences between me and the people around me, I end up confronting my own culture. “Bathroom” is completely non-descriptive in Japan, but it’s not the mistranslation that has me tangled. It’s the unforeseen labels of my own homogenous culture; the assumptions, even the religion, inherent in certain concepts.

Motherhood, for example.

Why is
mother
the single, most determining splinter of a woman’s identity—more than female, Japanese American, college-educated, Hawaii-raised; more than writer, more than daughter, more even than wife? What is this label, and what does it feel like inside this label? What is it to be this code?

There is a narrative we are creating called motherhood. We define it in relation to others—by what mothers do for their children, what our own mothers did for us. It’s a rigid story, without permutations or breathing space. It is measured in sacrifice and loss:

My mother worked two jobs for me
or
she never worked so she could take care of us full-time.

I was a mother once. But if I can no longer find myself in this story, am I still?

IT’S A SMALL, DRY ISLAND covered in bunny rabbits who chase down tourists for their
arare
crackers and will eat out of my hand. A shifting, calico mass meets the ferry, which only Ami and I disembark from, and, as we wander together around the deserted bend to the wide grassy grounds of the government-run hotel where we’ll be staying the night, I am reminded of my children on the stage at their school pretending to be “hundreds of cats, thousands of cats, millions and billions and trillions of cats.” The rabbits shy up close to the edge of the sandy beaches where Ami and I are sitting on a fence, fully clothed despite the weather. They loiter outside the poison gas museum to wait for us.

Okunojima, the island we are visiting, was taken over by the military during the war and turned into a bustling compound for poison gas production and experiments. Fifty years ago, factories dotted the land, veined with wide pipes, strung with deadly drums and cisterns, pumping who knows what from the plentiful combs of exhaust pipes. Now, if you take one of the creaking mama-san bikes that the hotel rents out on an honor system, you can see what little remains. Bits of bunkers set back into hillsides. An abandoned brick arch. A naked floor.

The small museum consists of one room with the exhibits described only in Japanese. Nondescript bags and rusted canisters and tubing. Gas masks. The photos of tatters and
boils, of human devastation, need no translation. Ami points to a series of panels that describe brutal experiments:

The poison gas was used in China, but, despite the hooded, heavily padded protective garments displayed in both adult and child sizes, many of the casualties were workers and schoolchildren who lived on the island. In the waning days of the war, when desperation was at its height and the Japanese Navy and the Air Force were out of weapons and manpower and even sufficient fuel to reach its enemies’ shores, Japan began filling balloons with poison gas to float them across the Pacific Ocean. Of the nine thousand spheres they launched, a couple hundred landed in America, causing a number of small brush fires. Who knows where the rest landed, what damage they may have caused to the environment, perhaps even to Japan itself? How can anyone be so bent on destroying the enemy that they can take such terrible risks with their own safety?

I no longer understand what war is. When I was growing up, war was the thing that happened when bad people were hurting good people and it was our job to stop them. If it became murkier from there; if the bad guys could be pretty dastardly, and the good guys quite misguided, there was still no room for balloons full of poison killing not only their children, but your own. There were rules, and the aim was still, nominally, peace.

But what is peace? I no longer understand peace either.
How can the power to blow up two hundred thousand people in one stroke be peace?

It is not death that undoes me, but rampant destruction. It’s the cusp of helplessness, the knowledge, too late, that
this is wrong
. It is me, in my imagination, frozen as something terrible unfolds in front of me. Not anything I intended, but exactly what I wrought.

When is
after the bomb
? When will it finally begin? When the world is flat—a desert of sand where once two of the greatest skyscrapers stood—when there is no longer even a window to look out onto the black world of ash, how long will we continue to think, “this can’t be real”?

For how many days, or months, or years, will we wake up unprepared, expecting to see the old world, the one we wanted, the one that we thought we had the right to in those far away days when we were innocent?

MIDDAY HIROSHIMA. Me on my bicycle. I am navigating the sidewalk on my way to lunch with Jane, weaving behind old ladies, tourists, office girls chatting on their cell phones, teenagers chatting on their cell phones, business men chatting on their cell phones . . . We should all simply implant our phones in our ears—it would cut down on the swerving as the women in long skirts connect long distance while riding their mama-san bikes in high heels. Once I saw a woman on a bike holding a cell phone to her ear in one hand and an umbrella in the other. The umbrella-holding hand was the one resting on the handle bar.

My cell phone rings.

I am late. I am always late when I come to see Jane because she gives me an arrival window, and I always shoot for the last few minutes of that window, even though I know she’s probably ready fifteen minutes before I could possibly appear. I wouldn’t answer this call, except it has to be Brian, and I missed his call last night for the second time this month. I have excuses—I didn’t get home when I expected to and the time difference is difficult; our telephone plan only allows me to call him at home, not at work, and he’d left by the time I could have reached him—each excuse is real even if, together, they are overabundant. I am hurried, in a hurry; still, I imagine that five minutes now and a date for later is better than nothing. I begin with an apology, as
I dismount my bike to talk, my eyes on the corner ahead where I have to turn. I have no time now, but he should tell me what his schedule is so we can set a time to have a good long conversation . . .

Some time in the future. When it’s convenient.

There’s a noise on the phone that is not a word.

Brian feels abandoned. Again, still, daily, every moment. He is angry, and insists Jane can wait though he has nothing specific to say. Nothing to report, nothing pressing except that I never answer when he calls—

He can never reach me—

Where was I back in July when the boys were puking all night in the hall?

I’ve voiced none of these responses. I am simply listening. Or maybe, in truth, I am not listening. Maybe I’m waiting for the sound to end. The voice that’s getting lower, sarcastic, unreasonable; that’s now accusing me of not caring about my children; that’s telling me about a story he read or heard on the radio, something about a father who only gives his kids five minutes a day. I am silent—this is what I do when I feel threatened—and I know that will backfire too. Brian hates it when I shut down like this. Years ago, before we were married, he broke his hand in several places one night because I started cooking dinner in the middle of a fight. I am separating, splintering. I cannot engage in this, so I try to escape. My silence is the reason his voice is changing;
I know it on some level, but I’ve arrived at Jane’s office now—she has seen me, has risen; I have signaled through the glass-fronted window of the lobby to please give me another minute. I am caught in her full view as the lunch hour ticks on, with a phone to my ear, and a husband on the other end who has clearly moved from the cautious omission we were practicing so well together into direct accusation. From hoping that I will offer to come home to condemning me for staying.

I didn’t expect this. It’s not so much that I couldn’t have guessed at this underworld, but I never thought it would rise up with such sudden violence.

I was counting on it
not
to rise.

Please, Brian, please. I’m sorry, but this isn’t the right time. I can’t . . . We need to talk about this later . . .
I’m getting frantic under Jane’s gaze, so these words come out. Unbeknownst to me, she’s invited a colleague to join us, and now both women are waiting on the sofa on the other side of the glass. But my pleas make him angrier, and he insists he wants to set his dates to come to Japan. He wants to know when, and how long, and he must decide this minute, at two in his morning.