A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding

by Jackie Copleton

  I thanked her and we slipped off our shoes and I looked around the hallway. The grandfather clock was gone but the shafts of light bounced off the same corners and hit the same spot by the living area. Their own family shrine stood where ours had, our black furniture replaced with beech wood and rose cotton curtains, the tatami mats refreshed with yellow straw and red silk borders. Despite the differences, the sense of times past flooded the room: the laughter, the tears, those confrontations with Yuko, the matchmaker with her kohl eyebrows, Misaki and I gossiping in the kitchen as we prepared meals. These memories all formed before me in a blizzard of images that left me first joyous, next fearful and finally agonised in a swirling mix of high then low. Izumi excused herself and urged us to look around. I showed Hideo the office where Shige had asked for Yuko’s hand in marriage and where we had been sitting when we learned of his death. Upstairs in Yuko’s room we found bunk beds surrounded by an assault course of building blocks, stuffed animals and toy cars. I doubted there would be anything left of our existence but I knelt beside the window and ran my hands down the wall to the floor. I smiled at my treasure. Just the faintest image remained beneath the cream paint.

  ‘Hideo, come here.’ I touched the outline of a butterfly. ‘Yuko drew that when she was a child. She painted them all up the wall. I was so angry with her but then I realised how beautiful they were, a flutter of butterflies flying out the window and away.’ Hideo traced the wings with his scarred fingers and grew still for a long moment.

  When we had finished exploring, we took tea with Izumi, who was full of questions about the area and the city ‘back in my day’. She diplomatically did not mention pikadon and I was grateful for that courtesy. We thanked her profusely as we left and walked back through the garden. I stopped by the chinaberry and turned my face to the hint of sun and its promise of the coming spring. I pointed at the tree. ‘Look, do you see those branches? The shape of a dragon’s head, there on the right?’ He shielded his eyes to look and nodded. ‘Yuko would watch those bouncing twigs for hours. She was convinced the dragon was talking to her.’ I smiled, awkward with my next disclosure. ‘I’m glad you turned up at my doorstep, I am. What a thought that we might never have met.’ And then I did something that shocked both of us: I kissed him on the cheek.

  He squeezed my shoulder. ‘I’m happy you’re here too.’

  I shook my head in surprised delight. ‘It really is good to be home.’

  And it was true. I lifted off the shroud I had placed over Nagasaki. This living, breathing, flawed, wonderful city had shaped me in ways that astounded and terrified me, even as my own fire burned down to embers. For so many years I had believed home was the hardest place to be when now I understood, finally, that Nagasaki wasn’t just pikadon: it was a ladybug cake made with red candies and chocolate frosting, a sumo wrestler ring made out of children’s socks, a child leaning against you while she draws, a young kiss on your old cheek. These were the memories on which to linger.

  Hideo looked around the shrubs, yellow in winter. ‘It’s funny. These past few days, I’ve been thinking a lot about that question you asked when we first met. I don’t know, coming back here, maybe it’s triggered a memory, just a faint one. I’m not sure.’ He bowed his head and shrugged his shoulders. ‘It’s probably nothing. I see a snake, bright green, lying coiled on a rock, sunning itself in a garden, much like this one. Why wouldn’t I remember that any sooner? You’d remember a snake in a garden, wouldn’t you? That’s something a child would remember.’

  We looked at one another, both seeking confirmation. I stared at this man, a stranger at my door only a few weeks ago. This boy had been raised by a man who had caused me great pain but why let that misery stop me reaching out for this ballast of flesh, bone and blood that stood in front of me? He had risen from the flames and he was extraordinary. He was forgiveness and peace. He was the best of Nagasaki, not how it was but how it is. I imagined the million illuminated pulses of the city: the houses, the restaurants, the bars, the brothels, the pachinko parlours, the hospitals, the temples, the shrines, the churches, the street lights, that anchor us to who we are, what we desire, what we believe, what we love, what our lives will be or will not be. Those roads and buildings hold our past, and our future, loved ones and friends we are yet to meet, apparitions of our dead and those we lose too soon, echoes and whispers and draglines through our personal and joint history. Hideo’s life had been changed by another kind of light, so brief but indelible in its power. He had forgiven pikadon, even if it had blinded him to who he might be or would have been. Is the source of us important? He had thought so, and I am glad of the journey he took to find me.

  Here was a man to admire, with his heart and his hope and his compassion. No matter the size of the injury, from the aftershocks of loss in this once graveyard city, to the tremors of the lies we tell one another, Hideo had found a way to live alongside all indignities, minor or grave, calculated or thoughtless. He had more than survived, he had thrived. He was our beacon of light. Here, standing under my daughter’s talking dragon tree, I allowed myself to believe in this miracle, I allowed myself this gift nurtured by Sato and returned to me by Natsu. Maybe I did not deserve a grandson like him, maybe he deserved a grandmother better than me, but we were the only ones left alive; we were the only ones who could tell the tale of those taken too soon. I held my hand up to the furrows of his cheek and he placed his hand over mine. I smiled and love radiated through my body. I pushed all doubts away. ‘Hideo-chan, how clever of you to remember.’

  We lowered our foreheads until they touched, just for a moment, the way we had done that last day outside the school. He held me to him in the garden where as a seven-year-old boy he had looked at a praying mantis, or a green snake, it was not important now. His existence was all that mattered to me. I took his hands, rough with scars, and held them in mine, stiff with age, and I said a word that had gone unspoken for so many years, and this word was gentle on my lips and kind on my tongue and true to me.

  ‘Grandson,’ I said, smiling.

  ‘Grandmother,’ he replied. And even though I could not see it in his face, I knew he was smiling too.

  We repeated those words, treasured and for so long lost, and when the tears came so too did the laughter, and in that moment of joy we no longer mourned our dead but celebrated them.

  Acknowledgments

  This book took a while to arrive. The inspiration began when I worked as a teacher in Japan as a university graduate, the story germinated while completing a writing course at Glasgow University, the first chapters were written in the Middle East and the final ones completed in the North East of England. The only reason I managed to get to ‘The End’ is thanks to the encouragement from family, friends and colleagues along the way. Please know, every generous word spurred me on.

  My huge gratitude for their wise, patient and kind counsel must go to Jocasta Hamilton and the team at Hutchinson, Tara Singh Carlson at Penguin Group USA, and Mark Stanton, my agent at Jenny Brown Associates. I couldn’t have asked for better people to help me negotiate the path to publication. I’m also thankful to Jane McCarthy for her compassionate support and guidance through the edits. Thank you to Tim Pedley and Lucy Janes for offering their professional expertise. It is deeply appreciated.

  While the story is a work of fiction, the novel’s cultural and historical context has been drawn from several sources including the following publications: Nagasaki: Japan at War: An Oral History, Haruko Taya Cook & Theodore F. Cook; The Bells of Nagasaki, Takashi Nagai; and Nagasaki Peace Trail: Mutual Understanding for Peace Nagasaki Handbook. I owe particular thanks to Bates Hoffer and Nobuyuki Honna, editors of An English Dictionary of Japanese Culture (1986), for kindly allowing me to use excerpts from the book.

  The book is in part about parenthood, both its joy and pain. I am lucky to have had parents who have taught me about fortitude, love and courage. Thank you to Roberta and William Copleto
n, and to my brother, Chris, for inspiring me every day. I’d also like to pay tribute to two men I never had a chance to meet, my grandfathers who fought in the Second World War. This book is dedicated to them.

  Some unfinished version of this novel would have blinked at me from my computer screen for many years more, I suspect, if it hadn’t been for my husband. As he said, ‘There’s no point writing a book if you don’t show it to someone.’ Indeed. Neil, I am so happy you were my first reader.

  And finally, A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding is my profound thanks to the people of Nagasaki, for the kindness and generosity they showed me, for their compassion and dignity in the face of unimaginable tragedy, and for the message of peace they continue to send out to the world. Never again.

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