A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding

by Jackie Copleton

  And he did. We both did. We went to the makeshift hospitals, stood in never-ending queues to register our missing, checked the piles of bodies stacked as if sandbags for cremation. Who knows how long we hunted for them? Hours, days, weeks? Time was as broken as the land. Every body we passed, every burnt or bleeding patient we saw, we hoped that it might be Yuko or Hideo, but we never saw their faces again.

  Fighting Spirit

  Konjo: This is a key word in understanding Japanese stoicism, which has been practised by the male population since feudal times. A man who possesses konjo is highly praised for he would stop at nothing in the course of duty, willingly subjecting himself to unbearable circumstances in the process. Thus konjo is a symbol of masculine spirit.

  Days before pikadon, I arrived unannounced at Yuko’s home. She was writing in a book with such intensity that she could not have heard me come through the door. I called out to her and she snapped the cover shut before she looked up to greet me. I saw in her face an expression of guilt and frustration at the interruption. ‘I was just sending Shige some news.’ Maybe I believed her, but during those first nights after August 9, I lingered over the memory of her sitting at her desk. What had she written and why? Had she confessed secrets to Shige that no longer needed to be revealed? Maybe she had not sent the letter, maybe it could be retrieved and erased if the contents proved harmful? I could allow my daughter and my son-in-law this kindness.

  Two nights after the bomb, while Kenzo continued the search, I stood in her garden. The blossom on the azalea bush looked too orange, the ash tree too large, the blood grass too alive for this shattered city. I opened the unlocked main door and stepped into the house. Laughter, tantrums and tears had once filled these rooms now so empty and silent. How quickly a home can become a mausoleum. A burnt incense stick lay on the table in the living room. In the kitchen, there was a vase of wilting red carnations. Hideo’s shirt hung on a peg near the range. Upstairs in Yuko’s bedroom I lifted back the drape of the mosquito net and lay on the unmade futon. I closed my eyes and smelled the sweetness of her on the sheets, a hint of lavender and the mustier odour of the summer damp that invaded their home. I sat up and looked around the room to the walnut cupboards and matching chest, the trunk beneath the window and the cabinet next to the door. Where would Yuko conceal a secret? I began to open drawers. I lifted up the folded cotton tops, thin sweaters and grey silks. I looked inside the cupboard and ran my hands over one of her nurse’s uniforms. I lifted the lid of the trunk and felt beneath winter blankets until my fingers touched something hard. A book. A diary. Yuko Watanabe. Beneath this one were several more, all the way back to Yuko Takahashi. I had expected to find a letter and instead uncovered a life. I collected them up, took them home and found a new hiding place.

  I guessed why Yuko kept a journal. She was like a photographer trying to capture the sunset before the last rays disappeared. We all need proof that certain things happened as we imagined they did, but those books were a dangerous indulgence. Leave no proof of transgressions, store them only in your mind. I had learned that lesson young. Some stories are best taken to the grave. Yuko had not written that diary for public record but for private comfort. No one would read my daughter’s confessions. Not me, not Kenzo, and not, as I feared then, Shige when he returned. We had no way of contacting him. We thought he was stationed somewhere in the Pacific, Saipan maybe, or Burma, perhaps New Guinea. But even if we had an address, we would not have told him about Hideo and Yuko. We believed such news should be heard not read.

  Kenzo was sure Japan couldn’t last out much longer, not with the Russians razing our troops in Manchuria, not with the Americans in Okinawa, not with young boys barely old enough to have girlfriends trying to steer planes into enemy ships. In the aftermath of pikadon, my own anger coursed through me but I could not say out loud the dark thoughts that I had carried. Kenzo had helped build those ships to carry our men away. Those factories by the harbour had brought the bomb to our city. Yes, he had done his duty, we all had, but look at the cost. The nation had two options: surrender or suicide, Kenzo said. The war was lost but its end was meaningless to me.

  Six days after pikadon, Misaki was taking tea with me in the living room after I had spent the morning in Urakami. I found myself drawn back to that blasted plain as if one day, I would just happen to see Yuko sitting by some ruin. I imagined her calling out to me, ‘There you are, I’ve been waiting for you.’ Misaki’s family had been spared. Her daughter had been sent to work in a canning factory in a nearby village, her husband worked nights and had been asleep safe in their home, her son was stationed at a coal mine outside the city. I could feel her embarrassment that she had been so protected from the bomb when we had been so exposed. But I was glad for her. How could I not be? She was more a friend than a housekeeper, perhaps my only friend. Kenzo had employed her before we were married. More than twenty-five years had passed since we first met. Misaki was a little older than me, her hair was already shot through with grey, unruly in a bun. I looked at her hands resting in her lap, her chewed nails, the red, inflamed skin, the slight tremor in her fingers. I wanted to tell her that she need not feel such peculiar shame; I wanted to say that her companionship was succour to me, but instead I took hold of her hand, clammy in my own. Kenzo had phoned earlier to tell me to turn the radio on at noon when he said, his voice incredulous, Emperor Showa would address the nation. We listened to the announcer introduce the recorded message.

  Misaki stared at me in amazement. ‘I’ve never heard his voice.’

  He spoke in classical Japanese as whines and crackles cut into his speech. We listened as one might to a god.

  ‘To our good and loyal subjects, after pondering deeply the general trends of the world and the actual conditions obtaining in our empire today, we have decided to effect a settlement of the present situation . . .’

  Misaki looked at me. ‘I can’t understand, what’s he saying?’ I gestured for her to be quiet.

  ‘The enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilisation . . .’

  ‘Is he talking about us?’

  I nodded, but I was not sure.

  ‘Such being the case, how are we to save the millions of our subjects, or to atone ourselves before the hallowed spirits of our imperial ancestors? This is the reason why we have ordered the acceptance of the provisions of the Joint Declaration . . .’

  He spoke of hardships and sufferings, of paving the way to a grand peace by enduring the unendurable. Misaki sighed. ‘Why can’t he speak plainly? Is the war over?’

  ‘Beware most strictly of any outbursts of emotion . . . Unite your total strength . . . Cultivate the ways of rectitude, foster nobility of spirit, and work with resolution – so that you may enhance the innate glory of the imperial state and keep pace with the progress of the world.’

  We waited for the announcer to tell us what we did not understand: Japan had surrendered. We did not hug each other with joy or relief, we did not weep, we were not sure how to greet this news. ‘What will become of us?’ Misaki asked. I thought immediately of Shige. He would come home now surely? What joy, what sadness, too. Later when Kenzo returned from the shipyard, he and I stood under our ginkyo tree. We looked at the stars as I took a sip of the sake we had kept to mark the end of the war. ‘Why now? Why this day? Is our city the reason?’

  He held his glass up to the moonlight. ‘Don’t ask that question, wife.’

  ‘Were Yuko and Hideo taken for a reason, so that the war might end?’ I insisted.

  ‘They died because our enemy had bigger bombs, they died because America wanted to teach the world a lesson, they died because they do not matter.’

 
‘They mattered to us.’

  He downed his drink, grimacing. ‘We don’t matter either, Amaterasu, don’t you see?’

  We waited a month to hold the memorial. We would have delayed the day longer but we had heard nothing from Shige. The news from overseas was one of chaos following Japan’s surrender. But I clung to the belief he was still alive, somehow. He had to be. We couldn’t lose all three of them.

  His parents came to the city and we gathered at Oura Church, too numb to comprehend the size and depth of our grief. We were just one of thousands of families to mourn lost ones but these were our dead. Following the service, we invited guests to our home. What food we could find was served by a weeping Misaki. Some of our guests had lost relatives of their own. One of the wives told me that they were thinking of starting up a group for bereaved survivors so that they might draw support from one another. The thought of sitting in some cold hall or a stranger’s home appalled me, and maybe my face for once betrayed my true feelings. The woman’s husband took me to the side of our living room. He gripped my elbow as he spoke. ‘This life is often beyond reasoning. We will never make sense of this but neither must we allow it to defeat us. We owe such fortitude to those no longer with us.’ I tipped my head to the side as if I understood, but no kind words could heal the wounds inside me.

  The day after the memorial Kenzo and I accompanied Shige’s parents to our children’s home to start clearing away possessions. With so many people in need, we had decided to give clothes to the homeless and much of the furniture and kitchen utensils would go to shelters. Kenzo pretended to busy himself outside and Shige’s father sat in the day room drinking what was left of the sake while his wife and I began to pack away belongings. Too quickly the proof of their lives would disappear. They would be reduced to photograph albums and token mementoes and tricks of our memory. Shige’s mother and I started in Hideo’s room, the black air-raid curtains drawn back, the sun hot on our faces. I was folding up what few clothes he had as I knelt beside his futon. Sonoko had opened a wooden chest under the window. Colouring books, beanbags and a straw hat with a crease in the rim were piled next to her. She picked up a wooden cup attached by string to a ball. The toy was striped red and black, crude in its finish. She sat back and her mouth contorted in a way that made me realise she did not want to cry. Not here, not yet. ‘I gave this to him, two summers ago, when he came to Iōjima. My neighbour, Toshi, made it. Hideo found it annoying, he could never get the ball in the cup.’ She wrapped the string around the handle. ‘Do you mind if I keep this?’

  ‘Please. Take what you must.’

  She thanked me and next she pulled out a piece of paper from the chest and smiled. ‘Here, I think this is for you.’ She handed me a drawing, which consisted of little more than circles for the bodies and heads and sticks for arms. Underneath, he had written ‘Grandmother and Grandfather’.

  I felt embarrassed. ‘It could be either of us.’

  She looked inside the chest. ‘You were lucky to spend more time with him.’

  The truth made me blush. ‘We will keep looking for them.’

  ‘They are gone, Amaterasu. I think we must accept this. I think we already have.’

  I managed to look in her eyes. ‘What will you do?’

  She picked up one of the sweaters I had folded and held it to her face, breathing in the memory. ‘Carry on, endure, live. What else can we do?’ She ran her hands over the brown wool. ‘And you?’

  The words were even more hollow when repeated. ‘Carry on, endure, live.’

  And so I had, for nearly forty years, I carried on, I accepted Hideo was gone. Now the idea of him was back, not a boy, but a man, and every time I thought about him I saw pikadon and that empty home and that drawing. Grandmother and Grandfather. I returned to the bedroom and retrieved the sketch, the writing almost illegible, despite no sunlight to blanch the ink. In the kitchen I placed it next to Yuko’s diary.

  I had kept my promise. I had never read her journals. While I told myself I was doing a honourable deed by preserving her privacy, in reality, I was just a coward. I had turned away from what I could not face, but Yuko could sift the truth from the lies. She could bring Hideo truly back to life. Only my daughter would make me believe that this mutilated man was her son.

  An Omen

  Engi: In Buddhist philosophy, engi is the definite law that governs the mutation of the phenomenal world where all living things must die and nothing is permanent. In secular use, engi means an omen or luck. A dream about a snake is said to be a good omen and that about a fish a bad one. Good-luck charms are popular among shopkeepers who display them in their stores. Some charms are the exorcising arrows (hamaya), the decorated bamboo rake (kumade) and the figure of a beckoning cat (maneki-neko).

  I opened the first of Yuko’s diaries and ran my hands over the yellowed paper. The ink seemed almost too fresh, as if written weeks not years ago. This was not my daughter on the page, but these words were all I had. I started when the two of them began: July 29, 1936. They met in his office, a routine medical appointment, a young girl sent to a doctor by her father, a doctor who had been a family friend. The way she described the day, everything was heightened. The cicadas’ song, the sun on the stone curves of Spectacles Bridge, the smell of seafood as she passed Shinchi in the taxi, the grey slab of the hospital and the stillness of Sato’s office, all were bright and intense. She caught the details: the photograph of his dead brother in uniform, the cracks in the leather examination table and the Buddhist plaque on the wall, which said: ‘We eat, excrete, sleep and get up. This is our world. All we have to do after that – is to die.’

  If I close my eyes, I can see it all, locked inside her. Everything seemed to carry weight and portent. ‘He introduced himself and asked after Father. He said they had known each other for more years than I had been alive. I thought it strange I had never heard of his name before. He seems younger than Father but maybe that’s because he is taller, leaner, his hair thicker. His handsomeness made me shy. I felt self-conscious when he looked at me as if he could see a part of me I wanted to keep hidden. I’m blushing as I write this and it’s been hours since we met.’

  He asked what was wrong and she said she could not sleep longer than a couple of hours a night. Her stomach was unsettled, she had lost her appetite. She said, ‘I think my parents are being too anxious for me. It’s summer, it’s probably just the heat.’ He told her to remove her kimono but she could keep her under-kimono on. She climbed onto his examination table. ‘I could feel my face burn when he slipped the stethoscope between the cotton. The cold metal against my chest made me flinch. The room was so quiet I could hear birdsong from outside.’ Next he wanted her to lie back. ‘His fingers prodded into my flesh, firm but gentle. I felt my veins and skin and muscle and bone; I was alive in the purest sense of that word.’ He wanted to know her age and she told him she was sixteen. He washed and dried his palms as she dressed. They sat opposite each other. ‘What do you intend to do by way of a profession?’ ‘Mother had told me a girl of my class need only be a graceful and attentive wife but I did not tell him this. I said I did not know.’ He asked her what she liked to do and she told him that she drew. He said Japan had plenty of artists, and housewives; our new Japan needed scientists, teachers and nurses, not poets and printmakers. He said our personal aspirations had to match our country’s ambitions.‘I told him he sounded like Father and he smiled. “So what would you say to him if he were here now?” I thought for a moment. “I’d say, don’t scientists need some beauty in their lives?”’

  He laughed and walked to the door. ‘Come on, there’s something you should see.’ They made their way down to the ground floor and walked along a corridor until they reached the children’s ward. The doors were open and the white gauze curtains billowed in front of the windows. The air smelled of disinfectant. To their left, a boy was asleep, next to him lay an older boy, who was reading a book. Fa
rther down the room, a nurse fed a girl water from a glass. He turned to her and said, ‘I’m sure you draw well, Yuko, but your fingers may have other skills. You can play a role in this nation of ours, and not just by producing sons.’ Her cheeks reddened at this and they walked back to the reception area of the hospital and out through the front doors. Sato lit up a cigarette and checked his watch. He told her he could find nothing wrong except mild exhaustion. Maybe this was a hard time for a girl her age, perhaps she had worries of some nature? School had been the biggest part of her life, the future was less certain, she might have some concerns about the months or years ahead? ‘I listened to him talk. I liked his low voice, his steady speech. I liked the way the mole on his chin moved when he talked. I liked the way he shielded his eyes from the sun.’ He prescribed exercise, daily swims or bicycle rides, but she said she could not do the former and ‘Mother did not allow the latter’. He said, ‘You don’t swim? We are an island nation. The sea is everywhere.’ Yuko told him that she had never had the need and this amused him. ‘Why doesn’t your mother let you ride?’ She hesitated before she bent down and moved the layers of her kimono to reveal a white scar that ran the length of her shin. ‘I was eight, my first bicycle, my last bicycle.’ They smiled at each other. ‘Well, swimming it must be.’ He paused. ‘I may have a solution.’ He happened to know someone who was excellent in the water, a patient teacher. What did she think? Yuko asked who the person was. Another smile. ‘Me.’ That was how this all began: swimming lessons.

  They arranged to meet the following week and as she left the hospital a tall, thin woman in an olive-green kimono passed her with a parasol in one hand and a small bamboo box in the other. Yuko wrote she had never seen such a face before. It were as if sunlight had burned the woman’s features away to nothing more than clean lines of brow and cheek and chin, a perfect beauty. Yuko made her way to the main road and waited until she was on the edge of the path before she turned to watch the woman run her hand across Sato’s chest and smooth the lapel of his jacket. The woman folded her parasol and he took it from her. As the sun slipped behind a cloud they headed into the dark, cool interior of the hospital. ‘As I made my way home, I realised right there, right then, that the world had changed irrevocably for me. I felt some new sensation, a spike of joy in my heart. This man, cold metal on my flesh, hands on my skin. What to say? He feels like a secret. The world has shrunk and yet expanded at the same time. I do not understand why but it exhilarates me. In my mind only he and I exist. I begin to count the hours until I see him again.’