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:
The pattern of a crane, burnt into skin.
The shadow of a woman, etched into stone.
A hand without fingers. A mouth without lips.
The space where there was once a nose.
I came for resurrection. But all I found is the space inside me, and around me, opening, in the absence of certainty.
“There 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
JUNE 30, 2001
“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.
FAITH
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 Muse
um, 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.
JULY 1, 2001
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.
In the end, I went to 7-Eleven. At least it wasn’t McDonalds—where the windows are plastered with pictures of a bun that appears to be filled solely with mayonnaise and three small cocktail shrimp. More on that in the next installment of the gaijin in Japan!
HELPLESS
THERE’S A LITTLE GIRL in my head with Shirley Temple curls and freckles playing in a dust-swept road. She is the enemy. She looks about six, even though she shouldn’t be: my mother was not five when she was released from the internment camp, but no pictures survive from that time so age six is the youngest image I have of my mother, the only image I have from “wartime” was taken after the end of the war. Of course, this little girl—skirt flying, dancing with tumbleweeds—is not my mother, not exactly. She is my first character from my first book.
My mother could not remember the camps, so I invented them for her. That’s how my first novel began. I made them up, pulling from a mixed bag of the photographs that could be taken, from the questions that the man with the yearbook at the internment camp “reunion” had asked, the man who wandered through the community center full of former internees eating home lunches of sushi rice and teriyaki, searching for anyone in the room who was three when he was three in camp, who might have been in a nearby block, who might have been his friend.
I pulled from dreams.
I created the children first—this little boy, the little girl who was his friend—and even while I was doing interviews, gathering the details of how the brick floors in the barracks had to be shellacked to keep the dirt from rising, I must have known I wasn’t dreaming up a “book about the internment.” Write a potboiler, a kindly, grandfatherly man had told me in passing, in the halls of one of the elder homes I visited to do my interviews. That’s what people want to read. The facts are boring. His advice stuck, though I was never aware of following it. I began to fictionalize, to trace family ties that could never have existed but could still be realized and, more than that, could be made so persuasive that my mother could fill in her past with them, tucking her adopted life into bed each night without acknowledging its true parentage until it was hers by nurture. I recreated my mother’s memories befo
re she began to lose her own, and now she too cannot remember what is real. I have been left with fragments of my own creation, with fictions, and now that I am in Japan, I’m discovering new creations and new memories of my mother—older, different—of times with her that I never experienced.
Like my mother as America’s sweetheart.
Like my mother standing beside me, gazing at the A-bomb Dome. More a presence than a physical form, since I know she isn’t truly there, but still real enough in my mind and the edge of my sight: a ruffle of my nerve endings as I find myself being pointed toward a thin white crane, stepping out from behind a crumbling wall to pose on one foot before disappearing again in the field of rubble.
WRITING IS UNCHARTED TERRITORY. It is a dream state, stop and start; it is a tangle of words and emotions that may not yield a single page at the end of a day. People ask me: What is your book about? What do you want to know? and I always answer, even though I know the answers will change. My first novel was not, in the end, written just because my mother was too young to remember the internment; it was not, as I would often say, merely about family secrets and splintered lives. When I stopped trying to verify the facts and started using them to open my imagination, my story began to circle in on motherhood, and on all the terrible things a mother and child can do to each other. And in that very unconscious preoccupation, which I would have put a halt to had I become aware of it, the novel was about me.
Hiroshima in the Morning Page 4