Hiroshima in the Morning

  There are four dancers on the small, raised platform. They’re surrounded by a low, orange railing, flanked by the copper lanterns, backed by the smaller lantern and the torii. They are older, stern-looking men—not lithe or beautiful, not breathtaking in their movements. What they are is a perfect fit in their setting. Their costumes are principally green and gold and orange—in traditional Japanese fashion, they are multilayered, thick and cozy, the prints overlap and do not quite match, the final drape is diagonal so that their sleeves, when they bring them together, are different colors. Their robes have long trains and their shoes are odd and elfin; their hats are helmets of brocade and gold with knobs and points and curls and feathers. The shoes are simple fabric creations in white with a center seam and a silhouette that suggests leprechauns, or maybe the comb of a rooster. The music, of course, is eerie and sad and somewhat screeching and clashing, and it doesn’t follow the dance, which is very simple and repetitive. The dance circles; arms sweep back and forth and hold; there is some stomping and heel work—it looks like a cross between hula, mime, and clogging.

  It is otherworldly, and exactly what we came for.

  There are only two dances. But I am standing with my family when my baby, my Daddy’s boy who has not come to me once in Japan if his father was also an option, climbs into my arms. The trains on the dancers’ robes are tracing tracks on the stage and the world beyond the torii has faded into white, much as the islands on the edge of the Seto Inland Sea drop out of view in the late day’s haze, and the shō is lifting into the air, when my son pats my head with one hand and dangles the other down from his perch to hold my hand. In the empty space beside me, I imagine my mother beside us, just a memory of her, and I know that I will finish what I started here, that there is not only one, unyielding choice. Life is both, not one or the other. Not opposites. And there is something more—born of my new self or allowed because of it, or perhaps always there but never seen until I reached this perspective—my joy in encountering my children. As my fairytale marriage enters the woods, there are breadcrumbs: my trust in the small fingers that are melting the snow in my hair.

  THE MAP

  HERE IS THE PRIEST with the map. Here are the yards of paper I first encountered on my trip with Ami to her family’s graveyard during Obon, and hundreds of photographs. If Ami urged me to look at Japan in context, here is one: the ruined past of the town that used to thrive on the point of land directly under the hypocenter. Nakajima.

  It was a bustling place, Toshiro Ogura tells me, his fingers wandering down the missing streets, pointing out buildings and landscape. In the Meiji and Taisho eras, there were movie theaters, cafes, billiard saloons, and lots of shopping on the main streets. It was a port: “Nakajima-cho” means the town in the middle of an island. Lumber, rice, and other crops were carried here by boat down the Otagawa. Also, from the islands in the Seto Inland Sea, fruits and vegetables arrived. Here, he shows me, the banks were lined with special steps that worked as wharfs. This is where the goods arrived. It was a living town, a busy mercantile, and business center, full of wholesalers and retailers.

  There were ten temples in the not-so-big town of Nakajima.

  This one, Joho-ji, near the bridge where the main street curves, about ten meters from where the memorial cenotaph is now, was his father’s.

  This is me, he points out, going through the photographs, the sixteenth generation of my family. This is my family, and this is me again . . . in thirteenth year of Showa (1938). This is Grandmother in front of the temple. This is Father, Mother, and this is my sister Reiko.

  In the rippling black and whites, the mother sits, the girl at her feet, her husband in Western clothes and a fedora. A family pose so familiar I feel I have seen these people before. Here, again, are the lily of the valley arches, the ladies in kimonos in better times. And over there, against the ubiquitous backdrop of wooden gates, a grandmother: small, and decorated, with careful hair. It is not that I know her. It’s that I know this search through memory.

  Ogura-san takes out another, newer map and points to the overlaps: the bridges that stand in both eras, the contours of the river banks; he superimposes the Peace Park, where the monuments hover over the past. He’s concerned that the city wants to pull down the Rest House, the only building left standing in the park, so that it can put up something clean and modern. He’s worried the government is trying to get rid of the few “dirty and old parts of the city” that are left. The old parts are our witness to the past, he says, and I understand. I’ve been in the basement of the Rest House, once a small kimono fabric store built in 1929, where almost no one goes. Above ground: the tourists and the brochures and the booth that will put your picture on stickers. Below: me in a hard hat, in a wet concrete ruin, where the shadow of Hiroshima lies.

  Ogura-san is talking about the restoration. He’s afraid that visitors to the Peace Park cannot feel what happened there, but instead are relieved that the hypocenter was quite near to a park so there were not many people affected. He is talking about now, about the future, but in the pictures he is flipping, the past is unrelenting. The family.

  This is me, the sixteenth generation of my family.

  He is the only survivor. Everyone in his family was killed. One hundred and seventy of the two hundred people in his father’s parish also died. Almost no one in the bustling town of Nakajima survived. His context, then: he is an orphan. His fifteen-year-old sister, forced to make weapons parts in a munitions factory in Tenma-cho, was injured and suffered for a day before she died. He was bounced around between cousins while he was growing up. I think of Tokita-san and wonder why this man isn’t filled with anger. Looking back, he says, off hand, I have something I feel strange about. No one around me spoke ill of the United States.

  As if blame was too inconsequential for the vast emptiness that was there.

  And sadness, too. In the newspaper articles I read about this man, the relative who finally came to get him after the war says he was a stoic boy who didn’t cry when he heard the news of the deaths of his parents and his sister, but instead tried to comfort her. I ask him about this, but he doesn’t remember what he was thinking. He remembers seeing Hiroshima again: I was overwhelmed. I was shocked. I felt hollow, and looked around. He struggled, he tells me that, and I think of him, a young boy, alone. Struggle is good, he says. Sometimes, you have to go on alone.

  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:

  Ichi go, ichi e.

  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.

  “Here is a photo of the ruins of my father’s parish after the A-bomb. You can see that there are still tomb-stones in the graveyard. This is me, a high school student. I didn’t know the parishioners’ names, but I knew that, during Obon and in the New Year, people would come back and visit their ancestors’ graves, so I put up a post and placed a glass bottle at the bottom of it. I put a note in the bottle asking people who visited the g
raves to write down their whereabouts. Gradually the news came, and I started to visit those families’ homes.

  “I had thought, ever since I could remember, that I should succeed to my father’s temple, but I also knew I did not have sufficient mental training to be a priest. I didn’t think I was worthy of being paid as a priest, on one hand, but I needed some economic support too, so I thought I would become a medical doctor. It was ideal: a doctor deals with the physical condition of people, and a priest deals with their mental condition. But it was too much work to do both, so I came back to the starting point. Which was, to be a priest. Now I think it was a good decision.

  “In life, there are many elements you can choose, but there are others you cannot do anything about. When I found out that I was orphaned, I didn’t like it. I thought it was not what I intended, and for some time my state of mind was unstable. There were moments I could have fallen away from a straight, just path. But gradually I realized that this was my life, that I could not exchange mine for any other person’s. I have come to realize I have been supported by many people, and I owe my existence to them. Being an orphan was my background and backbone. If I had not lost my parents and I had led an easier life, I would not be the person I am now. I think of my past in a positive way.

  “These days, I visit prisons in my role as a chaplain. I always tell people there that it is very good if you do not fall. But people are apt to trip. If you get up back on the right track, then the experience will enrich your life. If you don’t get up, you reach the end, and you lose. But getting up is great.”

  —Toshiro Ogura

  WRITING

  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.

  “Historically speaking, the motivation for world wars is made up and written down after the fact. When the war starts, there is a fiddling with the books. The good and bad books are kept separate.

  “In the history books—it doesn’t matter which one you look at—all you read about is war. When it began, when it was won, who was the hero, that sort of thing. It’s a big mistake. Peace has outweighed war one hundred fold; cannons firing, guns shooting are but an instant, and yet the message of the history books is that war is a probable thing.

  “If we don’t record peace, how can we see that war is an aberration? There is no splendid war.”

  —Seventy-seven-year-old male survivor

  UNDERGROUND

  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:

  I was at the parade grounds.

  I was in my front yard in Ushita.

  I was on the Misasa Bridge.

  I was in the kitchen, and my house was here.

  I was lucky because I was in Ujina when the bomb dropped.

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

  KANJI

  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:

  The flotilla of lanterns guide the dead safely home.

  My fisherman, in his yellow raincoat, digs for clams.

  The rising sun paints a pink flock of clouds.

  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 th
em 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.

  OF THE DAY JUST BEGINNING

  Hiroshima, 2001

  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