Hiroshima in the Morning (30 page)

Ogura-san is not just remembering the bomb, he is using it, trying to anchor it by threading it through his life.
Tokita-san too. I wanted it to be tangible, and if it is not entire, not epic, the bomb still lives on in every deed they do. They are making peace, and it works better without anger, without blame. In thinking of myself in the Peace Museum, of Brian, of the US and its busy bombing, I understand how rare it is to heal.

And in the end, when the priest closes the map, when the photos are gone and we are drinking tea, I thank him. I apologize for taking his time, and for making him repeat his story, which must be so boring for him. He smiles and tells me that now is where the future lies. It is time again, chasing its tail. Time moves from present to past, Ami told me. He is telling me that the present—this instant—is everything, because in every moment, there’s a possibility that something wonderful is about to happen:

Each time we encounter another person in our lives,
he tells me
, it may be the last time, and it may be very important, something may happen in that moment to change both of our lives. Yes, I have done many interviews, but this time between us cannot be replaced. This is our time: just once, you and me.

I’VE SPENT THE LAST seven months assembling. Making a life collage, and hoping that, if I step back far enough, if others do, an image will appear. There are a million facts, a million stories: every writer will find a different one in the same rubble. Each of us will reconceive the story. We will build an argument; we will raise a truth. It may not resemble “the truth,” if there is such a thing—we may mistake someone else’s opinion for fact; we may be lying or hoping for the best. Every story also pulls from the future, and in that way, it is never finished.

It will change.

If I have learned anything in Japan, about memory, about identity, it is that our narrative is what we are all looking for. A way to explain ourselves to ourselves. A way to go forward. When we look back at those moments when life changed forever, we are looking for protection against life changing again—as it does, as it is doing at this moment. It is not the witness, the writer, who creates the character, but the character who creates the witness. The function of memory is not to record history, but to tell stories. It is never fact we want.

It is understanding, fiddling with the books.

In my own story, and my image of myself, I have been waiting for my narrative to assert itself. Family, war, peace—not even chronology can bring them order: each element
has to rise or fall into its place. In Japan, as a gaijin, I have lost my ability to label or declare them. I have no other eyes, or a social structure, to say what they mean and where they should go. And better still, I can continue to move them, and their buoyancy will shift. There is no balance, only the act of balancing. And therefore, there is no self. No snapshot to wave at the question: “Who am I?”

Just bits that rise and fall.

THE SHADOW IS UNDERGROUND in this very modern city. Beneath the Rest House in the Peace Park, a weeping, scarred basement still echoes the blast. There is such a basement in the bank, too; where people withdrew, dying, even in the vaults where babies were born to pregnant mothers the night after the bomb. There is an Army clothing depot further from the city center whose iron shutters were bent by the blast.

When nothing else remains standing, there is still memory in the stones.

I have come to the basement of Honkawa elementary school to say goodbye to Hiroshima. The school is just across the river from the Peace Park. Only two people survived the blast here—because they were late; they were standing where I am, taking off their shoes, and the concrete sheltered them. One teacher, one student. Were they the two who spent the night in the river, as Kimiko once told the story? She is here with me, with Ami and the others. I could ask her.

The walls around us have been clawed, as if by flying glass fingernails trying to escape. Even if this is not bomb damage, it is easy to feel the past in the stale air. But it’s not just the war I am feeling, it’s my own past: these last seven months in Japan as I am about to leave. This visit to the
basement is the last event I will attend with my friends, the Interpreters for Peace.

Next week, I will be back in New York.

There is a model in this basement, very much like the one in the Peace Museum. Hiroshima, after the bomb. I am surrounded by my friends, the people who taught me that peace is not something “between,” something brokered; it can only exist within. The woman who talked of giving water to a dying man is here; the woman whose feet still burn in the summer; the man who paints the pikadon every day. And my many friends, especially Kimiko, who adopted me, saved me, and accepted me for who I am. And as we spread out around the replica of the ruined city, each person with a story and a loss, they begin to point, one by one, to the place where they were standing on that fateful morning:

And from the dimensionless cityscape, their stories return to me.

WHEN I CLOSE MY EYES and remember Japan, I am on the river bank. Riding Kimiko’s rusty mama-san, Olive, with its seesawing seat and mute bell. Small wanderlust crabs scurry across the sidewalk. Cranes graze in the shallows. Crows call. In autumn, the sky becomes a new bruise in front of me; in the winter, the water threads a dark ribbon through frosty ground.

The sun and moon rise here, on the river in my mind. They both hang—red or white or yellow—like the end of my journey, eluding me as I ride forward as if to remind me that this is just the prologue and the adventure is to come. I remember once, the moon unfurled a ladder in the water so beautiful that I stopped my bicycle at a vending machine for a coffee and sat on the bank at midnight to watch the dance of white amid the dance of neon, unable to decide which was more beautiful:

But it’s not these images that I hold closest. It is the life:

I am breathing with my two sons beside the river. They have been throwing themselves down that bank for so long that my fingers are cold in my gloves and their cheeks are bright. The point of their game is to slide on the withered
grass on the soles of their shoes—not to tumble—and they have gotten the hang of it, so the magic is now lost. I pull them over to me, and we make a pile in the poky grass, then sort ourselves to lie on our backs in three parallel lines—the symbol “kawa” for river—with our feet toward the water, our breaths puffing at the sky. I had to come all the way to Japan to find them, and if I don’t know how to love them without also loving myself, I am beginning to believe they might forgive that. I have a commitment—if not an answer—to find a better way for us to be together.

This is what we have.
Ichi go, ichi e.
With every encounter, we might be changing who we are forever, and when it is over, we might never see each other again. On this early winter day, the sky is grey cotton and the river is lead, and we are being tickled by the same grass blanket at our necks. Glove to glove, holding hands: now, a different kanji.

We have hope. We are trying to read omens. When the time is right, we will know what they mean.

 

On the river at low tide,
in the rain, there is a small sampan swinging on a pole.

 

The pole is twenty-five feet long and bamboo, considerably longer than the boat
or the man who leans his shoulder against it.

 

He is standing, in a rain jacket and hat, and a white towel tucked
under the hat to protect his neck, in a soft warm rain,
on the wide muddy river—
he is leaning on water that sighs
when the rain hits it but otherwise doesn’t move.

 

The boat and the man are equally still.
They are worn, and veiled by rain, clothes, tarps, and towels.

 

There is a black dog sitting in the bow of the boat.

 

Behind them, there is a bridge, weighed
down with morning traffic.
Miniature cars for the narrow street.
They are narrow, high, like single serving loaves of Wonder bread.
They are lined up, stopped, yet revving with the energy
of the day just beginning.

 

They are going somewhere. You can feel it.

 

The cars link the twin flanks of boxy, concrete apartment
buildings that zigzag down each river bank.
Uninspired, downright ugly,
they would be easy to condemn if you didn’t know
that every single structure
had been shattered and burned in 1945.
Windows becoming scatter bombs,
beams becoming guillotines, beds turned into funeral pyres.
Wreckage covered in atomic ash, and then another layer.

 

This time, bodies. Flayed, ruptured, bodies that survived
for hours—powered mostly by shock and by habit
—before falling where they stood.
Women, babies. People once.

 

And in the shallow river they were
heading for, the river once so full of people desperate for a deadly drink

 

of water that you could walk
across their bloated bodies to avoid the fevered bridge ties,
there is now a man and a dog in a sampan.

 

Fishing for clams.

I went to Hiroshima in June 2001 as a US/Japan Fellow to live for six months and to research a novel. I interviewed many survivors and spent a lot of time with the peace activists; the September 11 attacks exploded my world; my marriage unraveled. But just as memory records blame and relives joy in ways that others who were there may not agree with, this version of events is distinctly my own creation.

This narrative was written to explore how we tell our stories. The voices of the atomic bomb survivors are “fact”—culled from transcripts and translations from more thirty hibakusha testimonies. The rest I have recreated with deliberation: I have changed names, omitted extraneous details, and occasionally fiddled with the clock. Ami is a composite character—the consequence of having had so many different people help me during my time there, including more than ten interpreters. I am also sure that, over ten years, my memory has failed me. Ultimately, this memoir is best read as a reflection of who I believe myself to be as I write these words.

 

My deep gratitude to the US Japan Commission, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs for the fellowship that became a life-changing opportunity. The generosity and assistance of the Hiroshima community was astounding and indispensable; I could not have begun my research there without the help and friendship of so many people, including Christopher Blasdel, Professor Kan Katayanagi, Keiko Ogura, Marie Tsuruda, Masumi Takabayashi,
Hiko and Nancy Tokita, Mary Hamaji, Professor Rinjiro Sodei, Shoichi Fuji, and Kenji Mito. My wonderful guides, translators, and friends include Megumi Shimo, Mika Yoshida, Kazuko Enami, Stephen Outlaw-Spruell, Toshikazu Sumida, Noritoshi Narita, Shizuo Inoue, Michiko Yamane, and Keiko Miyamoto. I was also given great support by the Hiroshima Interpreters for Peace, the Hiroshima YMCA, the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, the Chugoku Shinbun, the International House of Japan, the American Consulate in Japan, the World Friendship Center, and the Radiation Effects Research Foundation. Also, in California, the Friends of the Hibakusha. More than thirty people shared their stories with me, including Hiromu Morishita, Keiko Murakami, Michiko Yamaoka, Nobuko Ueno, Isao Aratani, Dr. Hiroe Hamano, Dixie Setoyama, Yachiyo Kato, Dr. Fumiko Kaya, Yasuko Uemoto, Suzie Sunamoto, Tatsuko Yasui, Kosuke Shishido, Pierce Fukuhara, Mitsuko Yamamoto, Nobue Hashimoto, Mamoru Hamasaki, Pe Hak Te, Chieko Tabata, Hajime Tsukamoto, Dr. and Mrs. Takeko Nakayama, Chioko Kono, Violet Kazue de Cristoforo, Tokio Yamane, Mr. Kanaoka, Akira Nakano, Katsuko Kaimatchi, Tadashi and Sumako Matsuyanagi, Yasuhiko Taketa, Dr. Kohei Daikoku, Rev. Ryoga Suwa, and the others who asked me not to acknowledge them by name. I will never forget their courage and their honesty.