Hiroshima in the Morning

by Rahna Reiko Rizzuto

  We meander. Our day flows into the gaps; buildings with no sign of life outside them are magnets for Brian. This is how we end up at the entrance to a museum, where the docent comes out personally to invite us to remove our shoes. Shoes have been another challenge since the family arrived, heavily outfitted in laces, but Brian and the boys want to see it, so I follow them up a sloping tatami floor in stocking feet to a table where we pay a thousand yen and get a brochure with reproductions of paintings of two tigers drinking and a beautiful series of cranes.

  The museum reminds me of the castles and retreats we visited in Kyoto: wooden, with wide engawa—the sheltered wraparound porches and walkways—and tatami rooms with sliding paper doors that stand open so the paintings can be viewed without actually having to step inside. The boys like the tigers, but they are thrilled when our guide steps off the engawa and pulls a couple of leaves off a bush. He scratches a word into the leaf with a rock and within a minute, the leaf blackens around the cut and the word shows up clearly. Each boy gets to pick a leaf for his own name, and of course, Dylan wants to be the one who jumps into the garden to yank them off the bush. He is too young to write his name—he will oversee Ian’s careful letters, but once he’s sure the word is there, that he’s part of the family of leaves, he is drawn to greater interests. He wants to dance in stocking feet on the ground and play with the rocks. There is a peace in the sound of the insects around him, buffeting his simple pleasure. I am still full of hope, full of our best morning yet in Japan and our unity as a family.

  This feels like a place that my mother would love, a place where, if my boys were not so bustling, she might join me, her eyes closed, breathing deep, listening to the soundtrack of tinkling water. I have come to expect her now. She has been with me in Japan almost daily, even in a passing thought that feels like a brush of her hand or a kiss on my forehead. It’s not until then that I realize I’ve been living with my mother, and also that I haven’t felt her once since my own children arrived.

  She is missing.

  “Mom? Are you okay?”

  I can feel my eyes burning, become aware that they’re closed. I can feel myself gasp, convulse really. Ian’s voice brings me back. This is grief. I have to hold it inside me—it can’t be too hard, I don’t even know where it came from. Maybe it’s the stairs—I dreamed of my mother running up some stairs—but I don’t know. I open my eyes; Ian has gone to get his father.

  There is a family of leaves on the plank floor of the engawa. I imagine another one, written in childish letters, but would it say Grandma? Would Ian write her name? I consider these questions as if they were important, as if I was considering her signature on a contract. One that might say: I will always be there. I am listening for her, and suddenly so tired. I don’t want to look up, don’t want to go forward, I want my mother to return, to reassure me that she’s still here, but of course, she is not and our visit is over: the docent is trying to corral Dylan in the garden as he hops from rock to rock, and Ian is tugging his father along.

  Brian is watching me; I can feel him. I don’t look up until I actually do feel him, moving forward to brush my shoulder, as if to ask, Are you okay? I don’t know what Ian told him, but if Brian was frustrated before, if that was the expression I didn’t want to see, now he looks as if he thinks I might truly be losing my mind.

  WE WALK THE STEPS. For long stretches, we pretend we’re a train, with a walking stick on either side sandwiching us into a line. Taking turns—who is the engine, who is the caboose, who gets to make the “whoo whoo” noise—and I can’t even hear the birds. We march through the plazas, past the temples that I would have lingered on, to breathe. We swing around the corners, snapping the back end of the train as we pivot. I am going along; giving up, giving in. I feel so heavy, and so alone, but they don’t seem to notice, except that I am lagging too much, not sounding loud enough.

  Come on, Mom. Don’t let go.

  I don’t want to be the train. I don’t want to be the mother. I don’t want to be the zookeeper, either, the responsible one who has already spent too much of their visit saying: “Don’t pee in the furo. Don’t run on the shinkansen. Don’t jump up and down on the neighbors’ ceiling. Don’t touch.” I did it to myself, I know: I am the one who pitted one against the other, put my family in opposition to my work. I am the one who offered not to do the interviews, never to leave my family alone.

  But at this moment, childish as it is and selfish, I want some quiet. My mother is lost, and I am the mother now. I am not the woman she was, a mother who could make her child feel like there was nothing she would rather be doing than being with me, being my mother. No, I am a mother of peanut butter nightmares, unable to cope, unsure of when I began to feel so much and fall apart so easily.

  The “whoo whoo” noise is pressing into my head. I want to stop. Turn around. Take the next five hundred steps and disappear. I want to freeze the boys in time so I can figure out what I’m supposed to do now. How do I take care of these needs when I have so many of my own?

  “Whoo, whoo!”

  The noise has changed, is now a challenge. Dylan is racing downhill, Ian trying to catch up behind him. They are galloping, heading for the next set of stairs; something terrible is about to happen and Brian and I both yell at them to stop. There’s a man on the top of the stairs, directly in front of Dylan’s charge. My son seems to be flying toward him, his feet cycling beneath him to keep up with his body’s gravity. There is no way he’s going to avoid hitting the man. I can see it in my mind’s eye—bodies falling together, tumbling over each other down the long, stone stairs. I am waiting for the collision when suddenly Ian has overtaken his brother; he gets between them and throws his arm around Dylan just in time to swing him around the startled man. As I watch, Ian’s body takes the momentum, absorbing it easily as the boys seem to dance together on what looks like the horizon. Then, without looking to us for approval, without even thinking, my young American son, the one with green eyes and dark blonde hair who never fails to take care of his little brother, says a word to beg the man’s pardon, with perfect Japanese inflection:

  “Sumimasen!”

  The man bows slightly to my children as I begin to smile, and then the boys are gone—down the stairs.

  “Then the war crimes trials started in Shanghai. We were told to interrogate this general, who was in charge of the Japanese military forces in Taiwan. He was very cooperative, very calm—it was winter and he was wearing a nice large overcoat. He requested that we release his men since he, because of his rank, was fully responsible for every act of the soldiers under him. We were all very impressed by him; he had none of the arrogance that you sometimes see. He said, ‘You are officers and you know that a senior officer’s order cannot be ignored, so whatever they did, they were ordered to do by me, and I will take responsibility for every act.’

  “Then, that night, after he signed a full confession, he took out the arsenic that he had hidden in his coat and committed suicide.

  “During the trials, there were several non-commissioned and commissioned officers—colonels, like that—who were convicted of torturing American airmen shot down over Shanghai and Taiwan. Some were given long-term prison sentences, and some were given the death sentence. There was a special wing where these prisoners were being held, and on the nights when they were having executions, all the Japanese prisoners in the wing would stand at attention in their cells, and when the man who was going to the execution chamber walked by, they would all sing this Japanese song . . . it’s a war song, but a very quiet song, about a soldier: he is going to war and may never come back but he is doing it for his country, and for his . . . And they would all start singing.

  “It’s an eerie feeling, you know, when you see that, all of them singing and saluting, each individual before he goes to the chamber—I don’t know how to explain it. It’s a funny feeling. The song is very soft and sad, like: ‘You are going to your death.’ I saw that, standing on the side. It’s—in
side, it tightens you up. And, uh, you can say, ‘This is war, you can’t help it. Both sides are doing things. You can’t help it.’ You can think: ‘Well, that’s it,’ but, uh . . .

  “You have to be there, and see it, and hear it. It’s not a nice feeling. It’s sad.”

  —Eighty-year-old Japanese American man

  PROMISES

  THE SONG IS VERY SOFT and sad, the man’s voice says. Inside . . . it tightens you up. The voice is past, taped in Tokyo on that afternoon when Ian could not reach me. Please don’t use my name. I have nothing special to say anyway.

  If it still seems that I can no longer write, at least I can transcribe what I have gathered. This man was a Japanese American, an “enemy alien” in Tokyo who was visited often by the secret police, who was hired, at the end of the war, by the Americans to help with the War Crimes interrogations in Shanghai. He was a translator, probing for instances of torture, of slaughter and rape, of following orders. Was it justice? I asked him then, and neither of us knew the answer. The tribunals were a gesture, no more than a sampling, because, isn’t war atrocious? When you’re facing down the enemy—when you both think you are right, and the other is wrong—where can fairness come from? Where is humanity?

  In the absence of new interviews, the old ones whisper. The Colonel proclaiming himself a hero; the young boy giving a heroes’ welcome to empty boxes of remains. I am unlocking their voices in my room, playing their tapes, my earphones muffling the sound of the boys jumping on the futon. I am plugged into the past, scanning the tapes for purpose. For a pitch to make to Brian that he won’t reject.

  Lily Onofrio is coming; I have just received an email confirming that next week Lily will be visiting Japan. I have been waiting for months, hoping to meet her; I’ve been reading everything I can find about her story, and there are many questions I want to ask. This is the one interview I need and now, in this untouchable time, she is coming at last—coming to Fukuyama to visit her brother, and she will speak to me there.

  This pitch sounds rushed and overly logical, even to me. Ami has gotten a television crew interested in the story. Maybe I do not want this coverage; maybe the crew will only get in the way. TV could make it explainable, though. Even inevitable. But how can it feel inevitable when I have never broached the subject once?

  When the bomb drops, our lives must change: utterly, and forever. The only question is, will we look up or not? Will we recognize that moment when it happens, or only long after it has past? Will there be many moments—a procession, a spiral, a cloud—or only one, one we will live over and over again, until we can feel the world we knew slip out from under our feet and a new one come up to catch us, for good or bad, before we fall?

  Here is the truth: I don’t want to have to stay home to be loved. I don’t want to believe I am loveable only as I was. If this is what we have come to, I will not let it stand unspoken. I will not say no to myself any longer, and I can only pray Brian will not say no to me.

  I know that the promise I’m about to break is one that I made, an offering, unasked for. If this is true, it should be simple enough to change my mind. My lingering fear is that I promised because Brian was asking, that it is a test—them or me—that I am about to fail.

  I am going to Fukuyama to see Lily. There are no excuses anymore—no optimistic twisting. Jane’s sister is dead. One of the other women I wanted to base my story on is dead too. But Lily is coming, Lily who may be one of the few people left alive who knows both the camps and the ruins of Hiroshima; one of the few people I can talk to who has not forgotten.

  She has something to tell me that I need to know.

  BREATHING

  BREATHE.

  Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe again.

  I am past the point of caring whether I am crying, whether I am yelling, whether Brian is pounding his chest with such fury and desperation that I imagine his sternum might actually break. Neither one of us can hold it down when the children are asleep or hold it back until the children are gone. I am beginning to experience sobbing the way a sick person experiences vomiting. I feel it coming; I fight against it; I do not want under any circumstances to give into it and lose control.

  And yet, when I have lost my mind to my tears, lost any concern for presentation, any ability to move or to censor what I’m saying, I am liberated. It is truthful, and animal, and when it’s over, I am empty.

  ASK

  WHEN THE CHILDREN are finally, possibly asleep, I leave. Do I say where? Would he believe me? Do we talk at all in these days, except to the children or in their presence, when they begin to cling to one or the other of us—sometimes even me now, but only out of fear, I suspect, since I am the one who left. I have taken Kimiko’s old rusty mama-san out for a ride in the December evening, in my two layers of clothing and the men’s jacket I bought at the Gap in the Shareo because nothing in the women’s section fit me. My nose is running and freezing at the same time as I pedal faster to keep myself warm. When I’m tired, I will look for a set of stairs tucked near a bridge, the kind I like to hide in when I sit beside the river, sheltered from the wind.

  Two nights ago, it was cold in our apartment, the heater set up in the bedroom for the children, so Brian and I sat at the kotatsu that Kimiko lent us for warmth, our lower bodies beneath the blanket at the table in the main room, and I made tea. That is where I finally told him about Lily, that I needed to travel to Fukuyama to do one last interview. That is where his hands flew up and he came to his feet in a gesture that seemed born in the moment he first saw me in Narita airport. Where his words still linger in the broken air: “That’s it. Do what you want from now on. I’m going back to New York.”

  There is no moon tonight along the river. The sky is clouded, so it’s not so cold. I have dropped my bike in the grass and made my way to the set of stairs where I watched the paper lanterns launch from the landing at the Peace Park. How long ago that seems. It’s dark here, but no one will bother me. The stone wall that doubles as the arch of the T-bridge is cold, and rough against my head. There’s nothing here to keep me from my thoughts.

  Brian’s expression was as appalled as mine when he heard his own threat. His words unimagined by both of us. We left them there, both of us hoping he would not enact them, both of us knowing these were not idle words. If I had worried about my own responsibility for the slow disintegration of our marriage, it never occurred to me that he would end it. That he could, simply, end it.

  “Where is Fukuyama?” he asked. It was the beginning of an offer to follow me there, a willingness to backpedal; we could carry our struggle with us, draw it out without end. I heard his voice echoing off the walls of old conversations: The boys will be bored while you are working.

  “You don’t want to come,” I said.

  “You don’t want us to.”

  I could feel how it would go—Brian and the boys on the train. Me sitting with Lily while Brian waits somewhere nearby, hanging over me, a deadline, the exact pressure of being late to meet someone who is waiting on a busy corner. Could I invite them to Lily’s brother’s house? Send them to a castle, but who knew how long that would take? Interviews were just not a series of questions, they were experiences I wanted to think about afterward, mirrors I wanted to look into, thoughts to record in my notebooks for days. If Brian came too, impatiently waiting, wherever I settled him, for “it to be over,” I would have to rush to put Lily away.

  You won’t let us come because you don’t know how long it will take? That’s bullshit.

  I can no longer say what I’m doing. Not what I’m really doing, not even what I think I’m doing. I had no answer for him that night, only the stubborn truth that I did not want him there.

  Brian says I’m a wreck. That I have fallen apart. That I have taken myself apart, disassembled who I was and left everything on the floor, where it spins and kicks but is no longer working. I am not the childhood sweetheart he married, I am no one he recognizes. I have forgotten who I was at home, and be
fore that, who I was pre-children, and before that even, I forgot my very childhood.

  But if I have a different view, that there was no mold for me in Japan so I’ve grown as I needed to, he is firm in his opinion that I should have definition, that we should both know who I am.

  Who am I?

  My mother knows. She always did, and that was my safety. That I existed in her, entire, even when I could not put a name to myself or face the emotions and impulses inside me. Now I cannot seem to stop them from taking me over, but she is still the only one who can tell me what I should do now.

  I could ask her.

  Come back to me.

  By the river where I watched the paper lanterns, the only light is from the cars that pass like ghosts on a mission. I close my eyes, waiting to feel my mother beside me. If there is a world of spirits, then surely we are also them incarnate, and we can call them to us.

  Who should I be?

  At one time in my life, I was embedded in my mother. In her knowing, and seeing, before I was consciously able to project what I thought I was. Before I was old enough to get mixed up in that projection, she knew me. What did she say to assure me? What words did she use, even when I was an adult, on the subway train, about to have a breakdown; how did she tell me you are my child? And if she is the only one who might still recognize me, is it me who is already gone?