Hiroshima in the Morning (5 page)

The light, when I reach the west building, is dimmer. This exhibit starts with a flickering tableau framed in scorched, red brick arches. Several wax figures—a man, woman, and child, or is it two children? Surely it’s a woman because she hasn’t quite lost all her hair—drip red skin off their hands, pick their way through crumbling walls, against a backdrop of fire, arms extended like sleepwalkers. Here are the pored-over, larger-than-life-sized photos of the survivors resting on Miyuki Bridge, more than a mile and three hours from the explosion. Out of focus, or is it just that their hair has been tufted by the blast, turned into soft black cotton or stolen completely along with pieces of clothing, along with skin and other soft body parts that melted in the heat? There is horror here, finally, but it’s a thin scream only. A section of wall with shards of glass embedded in it, warped iron shutters from the clothing depot that stood
more than 2,600 meters away. There are tattered uniforms of schoolchildren, each arrayed on its own palate. Twisted eyeglasses. A belt, a bag, a lunch box filled with carbon.

Bits of nail. Bits of skin.

 

WHAT IS IT I WANT to feel? There’s a connection I am missing: a howl. There are people around me now, crying; they’re turning away from the unbearable, and all I feel is anger. I know what they do not: Hiroshima has been erased. Whatever the museum shows or cannot show, I myself erased it. I refused the bomb; I would not acknowledge it even when someone tried to tell me. I can’t expunge the vision of myself, nodding away Aunt Molly’s tears, smoothing the family history so it could be put away. This is my shame now: I was impatient for the tidbits of internment and impervious to the discussion of wholescale slaughter. At that point in my research, I was merely following a map I knew, savoring the confirmation of right turns, of alleys and the angle of light in the corners where certainty bloomed.

Now I don’t want to forget. Without memory, what is left? Only the present, which, as I’ve come to realize, may be less “real” than the past. If my mother is no longer who she once was, then when
was
she? When was the last time she was herself, at her best? And if I can’t say, exactly, if I can’t locate a specific person in the timeline and say “this is it; this is her essence,” then how do I comprehend my mother now? How do I comprehend Hiroshima?

The world is forgetting what happened here. The museum, for all its remembrances, is forgetting what happened.
Is this what peace is, this forgetting? I cannot accept this. Over and over, I have proven myself to be part of an amnesiac society—in my excuses, my inability to feel, my plain old refusal to acknowledge the existence of something that was right in front of me, I erased the
hibakusha
just as surely as the bomb did, and I cannot accept that this is what peace is supposed to be. I erased the girl without a face, and now I need to know: Who was she? What did she look like? I came to the Peace Museum to be confronted by this girl and hundreds of thousands like her, to be their witness, at last to see:

I came for resurrection. But all I found is the space inside me, and around me, opening, in the absence of certainty.

“T
here will always be people who seek you out. They like to talk to foreigners, practice their English. They will help you, and they are good to know. But look for the other people, even if it takes some effort. They are the ones who are worth finding.”

—Christopher Blasdel, grant administrator

“
Moshi, moshi
. . . uh, Professor Katayanagi-san wa . . . ”

Is it “wa” or “ga” I am looking for, and how do you say “gave me your name”? The ridiculous part is, I know this person speaks English, but somehow I’ve gotten it into my head that it would be more polite to begin in Japanese.

That is, if I knew Japanese.

“Would you like to speak in English?”

That’s her, not me. I introduce myself, and my project, and tell her the professor gave me her name because I’m looking for Nisei like her, Japanese Americans who would be willing to tell me what it was like to be “the enemy” in wartime Japan.

“Ah,” she says. “Isn’t it hot?”

It turns out that she is busy. Very busy. She has lots of family visiting in the summer. They are not coming soon, in fact they have just left, but still somehow, she slides away from me. I can’t get a direct answer—yes or no; she won’t give me anything to push against or respond to. I ask her to suggest a date when it might be more convenient for me to call, and she tells me about her grandchildren. I ask her to suggest a more suitable month and she wonders aloud why so many Japanese American children don’t know Japanese. She’s beyond slippery, she is completely ungraspable. Then, when I finally accept that she has rejected me completely, she tells me where she lives and offers, “But come by for tea
any time you’re in the neighborhood.” And I don’t know what that means.

“
Moshi, moshi
. . . ”

It’s variations on the theme two more times. By the third call, I give up the notion of speaking Japanese, but English doesn’t seem to help my cause. I speak to a gentleman who is ill and doesn’t feel like he can help me. I speak to a woman who’s not well either, and who also feels that it is perhaps too hot at the moment to have a conversation. She is not an exceptional person, she doesn’t really have an interesting story, and would surely waste my time. But all I have is time. I try to channel the flow of the woman’s response, to assure her she can help me immensely, that I can see her any time of any day of any month in any place she finds convenient. I can arrange a meeting well in advance; I can do it on ten minutes notice; it will be air conditioned; I will feed her . . . I am grasping, groveling. I want a yes, but any answer, even a no, would be better than this sliding maybe.

She invites me to call her back in a month.

IF I MADE A LIST of the things I am, the word “capable” would appear on each line. I am the writer and also the scientist. I don’t free write; I don’t waste time. I have faith in
this self who would never strike out in a direction without knowing where she wants to end up. Why then, in Japan, can I get nothing done?

I am browsing books in the stacks of the library because I can’t find anyone to agree to an interview. No one seems to understand my Japanese, which is to say that my Japanese is not understandable. I’ve become a writer who cannot read, cannot decipher the signs—those conveniently posted train schedules, the menus, the headlines. I am a writer who cannot write: I cannot copy down the word for something I want to show to a clerk. I am not fluent in the dual life of kanji characters; I am not fluent even in the usual hour for lunch. I have called the two organizations I had contact information for and am still waiting for a live voice to answer the phone at the World Friendship Center. While I wait, I’ve spent three days in a row sprawled on the vinyl floor between the sliding stacks in the Peace Museum library, writing things down. I’m collecting facts I never could have found in New York, facts I will surely need. I’m filling pages, plugging coin after coin into copy machines—surely this could be called progress? Why then, do they feel dead to me? They’re dragging me down, distorting my story until another day is over and I pick up my boorish American body and my illicit sports drink and go back to my hotel with a single book and a single question: how can I begin to imagine with all these facts in my head?

I am tired.
I am done
, that’s what I think to myself, though I still haven’t done an interview let alone found a place to live. The law of the land that insists all foreigners
must have a local sponsor to rent an apartment seems to be incontrovertible. People from countries that do not wield chopsticks apparently cannot be trusted to put wet garbage into paper bags or take their empty shampoo bottles with them when they leave. Kimiko has said she might be able to arrange this later, “when you are ready.” Instead, she suggests I should meet her friend, the director of the Peace Museum, but again this is vague, and since I’ve been spending most of my days in the Museum library, a required hello to the man who runs it is not on the top of my priority list. What I need is housing, a place large enough for my family when they arrive, but every time I ask, Kimiko exhibits mild surprise that the question is still floating between us. It’s clear that I’ve become a bully, the answer is no, and yet, since there’s no one else who can help me, no other way to get a yes, I can’t let it go. I have lost faith in myself, am beginning to dread the way each conversation with Brian opens: “Did you find a place to live?” Every
no
an agitation. It raises the question of why I am here, and why I should remain if I’m so incapable of something I could have done in New York with one phone call.

 

I REMEMBER THAT PHONE CALL, the one when I was still in college. I was moving out of the dorm after my junior year and into an apartment with Brian. It was my father’s reaction I dreaded—his role was to object, on upright, moral grounds, and my mother’s was to make peace and deflect tension. So it was a surprise when my mother was the one to fret about how young I was, much too young to live with
a boy, and even more of a surprise when my father shut her up by pointing out that Brian could change the light bulbs, and
take care of things
. What things those might be, and why he thought I couldn’t take care of them myself, didn’t occur to me. I was delighted to have gotten away with it—that’s how it felt, like sneaking out, rather than growing up. It was not the adulthood I had dreamed of because in no way did I think of myself as adult.

It is unusual for me to be thinking so much of my mother. There’s been no time during her illness to dredge up memories, and no room in the life of one family to dwell on what might be happening across the ocean. Now the past is coming unbidden. Little hauntings, memories rising and even twisting themselves, elongating into what I might have wished had happened, rather than what actually did. The conversation with my mother now seems longer than it must have been. Once we got beyond my announcement that I was moving in with my boyfriend, it turned to consultations, at least in my memory, about the relative merits of futons and pillows over more structural furniture. My mother would have liked that—the small details, feeling that she’d contributed to some important decision; she would have liked hearing I was safe, being assured by humor and the petering out of every topic of even remote importance. It is still my habit to be funny in the long emails I write home from an internet café near my hotel, regaling Brian and my father and my friends with my abortive attempts at lunch and the girls at the J-phone shop. I get few responses, possibly the effect of having to painstakingly type
in all the addresses each time and the fact that AOL keeps bouncing my mail back, but I do it for myself; it’s my way of feeling not so alone. It takes a while to get into the mindset of the intrepid traveler, a woman who would never mention her nostalgia for those things she once was equipped for, her new dread of the scope of sheer opportunity, and the exhaustion of always having to be prepared. Brian never comments on my travelogue, nor do my children, so I write for the image of my father at his computer, waiting. In my mind, he prints out my notes and carries them into the TV room where my mother spends most of her time now, and I can hear my mother’s laughter at the funny stories from Japan that my father reads out loud—I write, in that way, for my mother.

LUNCH IS:

Ramen from 7-Eleven.

Two
daifuku
—soft mochi balls filled with red bean paste, which no self-respecting Japanese person would eat more than one of—and an Asian pear.

Something from the bread shop that looks like a sausage twisted in bread dough.

Yakitori
sticks from 7-Eleven.

Chocolate bars from 7-Eleven.

In New York, we don’t even have a 7-Eleven. Do we? I don’t think I’ve ever seen one before.

 

TODAY, I FORGOT that the Japanese generally eat lunch only between 12:05 and 12:55 p.m., and that most restaurants close by around two. At three-ish, I realized I hadn’t yet had anything but coffee. There is—according to the guide books—a building with two entire floors of stalls devoted to
okonomiyaki
—a local delicacy, a sort of crepe omelet with different fillings cooked on a stainless steel fast food frying surface which also doubles as a serving platter (meaning you pull your chair up and eat off it). I decided to check it out—to eat out alone for the first time since I got to Japan.

The building is in the center of the shopping district, just south of the arcade, but it looks like any office tower. The lighted directory outside appeared to be advertising restaurants, so I went up the stairs. On the second floor, there was a maze of counters, capital I or L or U shaped, hugging small, open preparation areas, partially obscured by the noren hanging curtains printed with the names of each of the businesses. Every stand had been closed and clean for so long I couldn’t even smell the evidence of lunch gone by. I kept going, to the third floor, gaining both confidence and nervousness from the sheer lack of people. Here, a few of the stands were still open. Older women, their skin dry from cooking, their hair wrapped in cloth, made me stop in the entrance of the hall, just by being there. I could see that their stalls were menuless and mostly devoid of other customers
to deflect attention, customers who could have shown me by their actions what I was supposed to do. I realized that, although I know the words for beef, chicken, fish, and vegetables, somehow I was thoroughly unprepared to sit down and try to order a dish I’d never actually eaten, especially since, at this place, it seemed that the diners cooked their own food. I stood there for perhaps a minute, entertaining the sudden fear that I would accidentally order chicken skin and jellyfish and then have to eat it while the owner stood a foot away. Picture me: weighing the thought of crunching on cartilage against the awkwardness of simply standing in the doorway. As the seconds went by, that became a reason to go.