by Joy Kogawa
I fell and cried out. I woke into the room where Obasan sleeps, her skin-coloured mouth open—a small dry cave of a mouth. How unlike my mother's young heart-shaped mouth in my dream, her fingers deftly moving the long thread from knot to knot, drawing the flower closer to her lips.
Once I came across two ideographs for the word "love". The first contained the root words "heart" and "hand" and "action"—love as hands and heart in action together. The other ideograph, for "passionate love", was formed of "heart", "to tell", and "a long thread".
The dance ceremony of the dead was a slow courtly telling, the heart declaring a long thread knotted to Obasan's twine, knotted to Aunt Emily's package. Why, I wonder as she danced her love, should I find myself unable to breathe? The Grand Inquisitor was carnivorous and full of murder. His demand to know was both a judgment and a refusal to hear. The more he questioned her, the more he was her accuser and murderer. The more he killed her, the deeper her silence became. What the Grand Inquisitor has never learned is that the avenues of speech are the avenues of silence. To hear my mother, to attend her speech, to attend the sound of stone, he must first become silent. Only when he enters her abandonment will he be released from his own.
How the Grand Inquisitor gnaws at my bones. At the age of questioning my mother disappeared. Why, I have asked ever since, did she not write? Why, I ask now, must I know? Did I doubt her love? Am I her accuser?
Did you not know that people hide their love
Like a flower that seems too precious to be picked?
the Chinese poet Wu-ti asked.
My mother hid her love, but hidden in life does she speak through dream?
Her tale is a rose with a tangled stem. All this questioning, this clawing at her grave, is an unseemly thing. Let the inquisition rest tonight. In the week of my uncle's departure, let there be peace.
Obasan stirs and lifts her head, rubbing her eyes. She feels for the glasses dangling on her chest and attempts to get up. The rubber loops at the end of the chain that fit around the glasses are frayed and replaced by safety pins. When she has her glasses on she picks up the slippery blue pages from the coffee table and begins reading again.
thirty-six
I have gathered all the stained cups and dishes, the serving bowls and the teapot, and am cleaning them, removing the stains and grease, soaking them in a sink full of hot sudsy water. When I am halfway through I hear the sounds of two cars entering the driveway. The car doors close and there are voices in the yard. In a moment, there is a slow light rapping on the living-room door and Nakayama-sensei's voice calls "Gomen-nasai," announcing his arrival. He opens the door and calls "Gomen-nasai" again in a loud but gentle voice.
"O," Obasan says and begins to rise, holding the blue pages and the magnifying glass in her hands.
"Please, please." He comes into the room, removing his black felt hat and waving his hand in the rapid patting movement indicating she should not get up. His thin hair is so white it is almost luminous against his prairie-darkened face. Over the years, Nakayama-sensei has managed to visit Granton about once a month or so, when he is not traveling elsewhere.
Aunt Emily and Stephen are directly behind Nakayama-sensei. I am surprised at the amount of gray hair Stephen has. There is not so much that it streaks but the white is definitely visible as a light spray. He seems also to be slightly heavier than he was before, his face more full.
"Stee-bu-san?" Obasan says. She puts the papers and magnifying glass on the chesterfield and stands up tottering. With her two hands outstretched, she steps unsteadily toward him.
Stephen bends over and holds her hands with one hand as he removes his shoes with the other. He has just come in the door, and he already looks as if he would like to run out. His light black coat is pocked by large raindrops.
Aunt Emily also removes her shoes, then puts one arm around Obasan's shoulders. Obasan touches Stephen's coat where it is wet. "Is it raining?" she asks. Then she chuckles. "Even if there is rain or thunder, these ears cannot hear."
I take Aunt Emily's and Nakayama-sensei's wet coats and hang them on the hooks beside the kitchen, then pour water into the heavy kettle for green tea.
Stephen, still wearing his wet coat, is sitting in the armchair with his legs splayed out like splints.
"Everyone someday dies," Obasan is saying to him.
"What happened, Nomi?" he asks with his back to me.
"I don't know really," I answer. I am slicing the stone bread to serve with the green tea. "I haven't got the details from Dr. Brace."
Aunt Emily puts her bag down behind the armchair and comes into the kitchen. She looks for a dish towel to wipe the teacups.
"The Barkers were here just a while ago."
"Yeah?" Stephen sits up and takes off his coat jerkily. He grunts as Obasan tries to help him with it. Stephen has made himself altogether unfamiliar with speaking Japanese.
Nakayama-sensei has picked up the magnifying glass and paper that Obasan left on the chesterfield and is glancing at the top page when Aunt Emily goes into the living room with the tray of teacups.
She stops short when she sees what Sensei is holding. All the rest of her papers are piled up on one edge of the coffee table.
"Everyone someday dies," Obasan is saying again, softly to herself.
Nakayama-sensei puts the papers and magnifying glass on the coffee table, then leaning back and with his mouth close to Obasan's ear, he says, "Should there be prayer?"
Obasan replies by bending forward in a prolonged bow.
I come into the room with the plate of buttered bread and kneel beside the coffee table. Everyone's head is bowed and we sit together in the stillness for a long time.
At last Nakayama-sensei stands up. He begins a long prayer of thanks in Japanese.
Stephen has his elbows on his knees and is feeling his chin lightly with his fingertips as he listens with his eyes fixed on the floor. I also have my eyes open. At one point, Stephen takes a corner of bread and breaks it off, then, changing his mind, he sticks it back on the slice. At the end of the prayer, Aunt Emily says "Amen," and we sit together in the silence once more. When Nakayama-sensei sits down, Aunt Emily opens her eyes, but Obasan's head remains bowed. "It is good you are here," Nakayama-sensei says to Aunt Emily and Stephen. "You have come well."
Aunt Emily nods and takes her papers off the coffee table, making room for the teacups. Sensei leans forward to help and removes the blue papers and magnifying glass.
"Letters from a long time ago," Aunt Emily says to Sensei.
"Is that so?" Nakayama-sensei says, glancing down through the bottom of his bifocals. His lips gradually become pursed in concentration as he reads the top page. When he comes to the end of the page, he stops.
"About this, I had no knowledge," he says in a low voice.
"What is it, Sensei?" I ask.
He puts the first page aside and reads the next and the next, groaning quietly. When he is finished he puts the papers down and addresses Aunt Emily.
"Has there been no telling?"
"No," Aunt Emily says quietly.
"It is better to speak, is it not? They are not children any longer."
Aunt Emily nods slowly. "Yes," she says softly. "We ought to tell them. I always thought we should. But…kodomo no tame…." She fingers the buttons on her sweater and looks at me apologetically. "There was so much sad news. Mark was dead. Father was ill. The first time I came to Granton I brought the letters thinking we should tell them everything, but we decided to respect Nesan's wishes."
"Please, Aunt Emily," I whisper as she turns aside. "Tell us."
Aunt Emily takes the letters and reads the pages, handing them back to Sensei when she is finished.
"What is written?" I ask again.
"A matter of a long time ago," Sensei says.
"What matter?"
Nakayama-sensei clears his throat. "Senso no toki—in the time of the war—your mother. Your grandmother. That there is suffering and their d
eep love." He reads the letters in silence once more, then begins reading aloud. The letter is addressed to Grandpa Kato. It is clear as he reads that the letters were never intended for Stephen and me. They were written by Grandma Kato.
The sound of rain beats against the windows and the roof. The rain is collecting in the eaves and pouring in a thin stream in the rain barrel at the corner near the kitchen door. Tomorrow I will fill the plastic bucket and bring the soft frothy water in—use it to water the houseplants and wash my hair.
Sensei's faltering voice is almost drowned out by the splattering gusts against the window. I stare at the gauze-curtained windows and imagine the raindrops sliding down the glass, black on black. In the sound of the howling outside, I hear other howling.
Sensei pauses as he reads. "Naomi," he says softly, "Stephen, your mother is speaking. Listen carefully to her voice."
Many of the Japanese words sound strange and the language is formal.
thirty-seven
There are only two letters in the grey cardboard folder. The first is a brief and emotionless statement that Grandma Kato, her niece's daughter, and my mother are the only ones in the immediate family to have survived. The second letter is an outpouring.
I remember Grandma Kato as thin and tough, not given to melodrama or overstatement of any kind. She was unbreakable. I felt she could endure all things and would survive any catastrophe. But I did not then understand what catastrophes were possible in human affairs.
Here, the ordinary Granton rain slides down wet and clean along the glass leaving a trail on the window like the Japanese writing on the thin blue-lined paper—straight down like a bead curtain of asterisks. The rain she describes is black, oily, thick, and strange.
"In the heat of the August sun," Grandma writes, "however much the effort to forget, there is no forgetfulness. As in a dream, I can still see the maggots crawling in the sockets of my niece's eyes. Her strong intelligent young son helped me move a bonsai tree that very morning. There is no forgetfulness."
When Nakayama-sensei reaches the end of the page, he stops reading and folds the letter as if he has decided to read no more. Aunt Emily begins to speak quietly, telling of a final letter from the Canadian missionary, Miss Best.
How often, I am wondering, did Grandma and Mother waken in those years with the unthinkable memories alive in their minds, the visible evidence of horror written on their skin, in their blood, carved in every mirror they passed, felt in every step they took. As a child I was told only that Mother and Grandma Kato were safe in Tokyo, visiting Grandma Kato's ailing mother.
"Someday, surely, they will return," Obasan used to say.
The two letters that reached us in Vancouver before all communication ceased due to the war told us that Mother and Grandma Kato had arrived safely in Japan and were staying with Grandma Kato's sister and her husband in their home near the Tokyo Gas Company. My great-grandmother was then seventy-nine and was not expected to live to be eighty but, happily, she had become so well that she had returned home from the hospital and was even able on occasion to leave the house.
Nakayama-sensei opens the letter again and holds it, reading silently. Then looking over to Stephen, he says, "It is better to speak, is it not?"
"They're dead now," Stephen says.
Sensei nods.
"Please read, Sensei," I whisper.
"Yes," Aunt Emily says. "They should know."
Sensei starts again at the beginning. The letter is dated simply 1949. It was sent, Sensei says, from somewhere in Nagasaki. There was no return address.
"Though it was a time of war," Grandma writes, "what happiness that January, 1945, to hear from my niece Setsuko, in Nagasaki." Setsuko's second child was due to be born within the month. In February, just as American air raids in Tokyo were intensifying, Mother went to help her cousin in Nagasaki. The baby was born three days after she arrived. Early in March, air raids and alarms were constant day and night in Tokyo. In spite of all the danger of travel, Grandma Kato went to Nagasaki to be with my mother and to help with the care of the new baby. The last day she spent with her mother and sister in Tokyo, she said they sat on the tatami and talked, remembering their childhood and the days they went chestnut-picking together. They parted with laughter. The following night, Grandma Kato's sister, their mother and her sister's husband died in the B-29 bombings of March 9, 1945.
From this point on, Grandma's letter becomes increasingly chaotic, the details interspersed without chronological consistency. She and my mother, she writes, were unable to talk of all the things that happened. The horror would surely die sooner, they felt, if they refused to speak. But the silence and the constancy of the nightmare had become unbearable for Grandma and she hoped that by sharing them with her husband, she could be helped to extricate herself from the grip of the past.
"If these matters are sent away in this letter, perhaps they will depart a little from our souls," she writes. "For the burden of these words, forgive me."
Mother, for her part, continued her vigil of silence. She spoke with no one about her torment. She specifically requested that Stephen and I be spared the truth.
In all my high-school days, until we heard from Sensei that her grave had been found in Tokyo, I pictured her trapped in Japan by government regulations, or by an ailing grandmother. The letters I sent to the address in Tokyo were never answered or returned. I could not know that she and Grandma Kato had gone to Nagasaki to stay with Setsuko, her husband who was a dentist, and their two children, four-year-old Tomio and the
new baby, Chieko.
The baby, Grandma writes, looked so much like me that she and my mother marvelled and often caught themselves calling her Naomi. With her widow's peak, her fat cheeks and pointed chin, she had a heart shaped face like mine. Tomio, however, was not like Stephen at all. He was a sturdy child, extremely healthy and athletic, with a strong will like his father. He was fascinated by his new baby sister, sitting and watching her for
hours as she slept or nursed. He made dolls for her. He helped to dress her. He loved to hold her in the bath, feeling her fingers holding his fingers tightly. He rocked her to sleep in his arms.
The weather was hot and humid that morning of August 9. The air-raid alerts had ended. Tomio and some neighbourhood children had gone to the irrigation ditch to play and cool off as they sometimes did.
Shortly after eleven o'clock, Grandma Kato was preparing to make lunch. The baby was strapped to her back. She was bending over a bucket of water beside a large earthenware storage bin when a child in the street was heard shouting, "Look at the parachute!" A few seconds later, there was a sudden white flash, brighter than a bolt of lightning. She had no idea what could have exploded. It was as if the entire sky were swallowed up. A moment later she was hurled sideways by a blast. She had a sensation of floating tranquilly in a cool whiteness high above the earth. When she regained consciousness, she was slumped forward in a sitting position in the water bin. She gradually became aware of the moisture, an intolerable heat, blood, a mountain of debris and her niece's weak voice sounding at first distant, calling the names of her children. Then she could hear the other sounds—the far-away shouting. Around her, a thick dust made breathing difficult. Chieko was still strapped to her back, but made no sound. She was alive but unconscious.
It took Grandma a long time to claw her way out of the wreckage. When she emerged, it was into an eerie twilight formed of heavy dust and smoke that blotted out the sun. What she saw was incomprehensible. Almost all the buildings were flattened or in flames for as far as she could see. The landmarks were gone. Tall columns of fire rose through the haze and everywhere the dying and the wounded crawled, fled, stumbled like ghosts among the ruins. Voices screamed, calling the names of children, fathers, mothers, calling for help, calling for water.
Beneath some wreckage, she saw first the broken arm, then the writhing body of her niece, her head bent back, her hair singed, both her eye sockets blown out. In a weak and de
lirious voice, she was calling Tomio. Grandma Kato touched her niece's leg and the skin peeled off and stuck to the palm of her hand.
It isn't clear from the letter but at some point she came across Tomio, his legs pumping steadily up and down as he stood in one spot not knowing where to go. She gathered him in her arms. He was remarkably intact, his skin unburned.
She had no idea where Mother was, but with the two children, she began making her way towards the air-raid shelter. All around her people one after another collapsed and died, crying for water. One old man no longer able to keep moving lay on the ground holding up a dead baby and crying, "Save the children. Leave the old." No one took the dead child from his outstretched hands. Men, women, in many cases indistinguishable
by sex, hairless, half-clothed, hobbled past. Skin hung from their bodies like tattered rags. One man held his bowels in with the stump of one hand. A child whom Grandma Kato recognized lay on the ground asking for help. She stopped and told him she would return as soon as she could. A woman she knew was begging for someone to help her lift the burning beam beneath which her children were trapped. The woman's children were friends of Tomio's. Grandma was loath to walk past, but with the two children, she could do no more and kept going. At no point does Grandma Kato mention the injuries she herself must have sustained.
Nearing the shelter, Grandma could see through the greyness that the entrance was clogged with dead bodies. She remembered then that her niece's father-in-law lived on a farm on the hillside, and she began making her way back through the burning city towards the river she would have to cross. The water, red with blood, was a raft of corpses. Farther upstream, the bridge was twisted like noodles. Eventually she came to a spot where she was able to cross and, still carrying the two children, Grandma Kato made her way up the hillside.