ON AUGUST 31, 1946, a little over a year after the first atomic bomb was dropped on my city, The New Yorker published a piece by John Hersey in which he presented the stories of six survivors about what the bomb had done to the city and to the flesh of its citizens. I was too young at that point and hardly knew English yet, so it wasn’t until several years later—maybe ten, give or take a few—that I could actually read the text. When I finally did read it, I became obsessed with victims’ testimonies, whether anonymous accounts or the ones recorded in documentaries. That’s how I first realized that the recurring image I frequently went back to, of unrecognizable lumps of flesh forced to say their name in order to be identified, wasn’t something I had made up on my own. The sharpest, most powerful images, those that I thought were strictly my own, in fact appeared again and again in other people’s testimonies. I tried to explain it in the most logical terms possible. I thought perhaps the survivors were led to share the most effective expressions precisely because of how indescribable it all was, so in this way they forged a new syntax for horror: a brand-new language that was—unlike the ones passed down over the generations from parents to children—learned in one fell swoop and passed instead from one eyewitness to another. In this language, then, “a lump whose head is swollen to three times its size” can be expressed only as “a lump whose head is swollen to three times its size.” There are no equivalent expressions. It’s a language without synonyms.
I was able to glean information from the material published in North American reports about what happened on the plane that dropped the bomb while I was waiting at my desk for the teacher, and in the same way I now hoped to use the other testimonies to help fill in that empty space before I opened my eyes in the hospital. I needed to know what had been going on while I was unconscious. By gathering testimony of the fact that life had continued to move forward, I might recover the days I had spent unconscious—which is to say, dead. All the testimonies seemed to be speaking for me. Once I heard a woman describe how the wounded would wander among the dead asking their forgiveness. That’s how I was brought up, feeling ashamed for having survived. The printing presses and newspapers removed the ideograms for atomic bomb and radioactivity, and the government avoided the use of the word survivor, it said, as a show of respect for the more than two hundred thousand fatalities. In Hersey’s text I read that hibakusha means “explosion-affected persons.” That’s exactly what it meant, a term that skirted not only the pain but also the miracle of having survived. A three-letter word could have made all the difference: “persons affected by the explosion,” not “persons affected by an explosion,” as if it were any old garden-variety bang, like the tempura batter that splatters when the oil’s too hot, or a birthday-party firecracker that explodes in a careless hand. That bomb was no accident. Hiroshima was THE explosion. In my head I conjured up some words that included the definite article the, which could better define what others call hibakusha. I decided that if forced to choose a name for us all, I would prefer “we who carry the bomb inside,” because the morning that a B-29 bomber dropped Little Boy over Hiroshima was only the beginning of the detonation. Ninety percent of the wounds the survivors suffered would come in doses of radiation, minute by minute, month by month, year by year, impregnating us with this evil that could be aborted only if we obliviate ourselves with it. I imagined a backward big bang, where every hour on the hour another little piece of the universe shrunk (shrinks?) into my body, so that on any given day, who knows when, it will finally rupture once and for all.
* * *
The Japanese never respected the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war signed on July 27, 1929. It’s not so unusual as history would like us to believe. It’s true that for the Japanese, who exalt suicide over surrender, the value of a prisoner who would want to remain alive was below that of a street rat. But the states that actually respected the convention, despite having signed it, were the exception. Surely you must be perfectly aware of that already. I didn’t yet know when Jim explained the conditions he endured as a prisoner of war that destiny would tug me along by way of a string of fake international organizations to reach the crucial element for concluding this story. As the nursery rhyme goes, these treaties are like a spider’s web on which an elephant balances precariously, and when that elephant sees how it holds up, he asks another elephant to join him until finally the web breaks for the weight of so many overfed, irresponsible elephants/states.
Before arriving in Manila to be boarded on the Oryoku Maru, Jim had already been the victim of noncompliance with the Geneva Convention. He was one of the Allied prisoners of war the Japanese used to build the Burma Railway, which like the Oryoku Maru boasted a well-earned moniker: Death Railway. On June 22, 1942, construction was begun with slave labor: some 190,000 Asian workers and 55,000 Allied POWs. The British had already contemplated a Thailand–Burma railway when they governed Burma, but the terrain was so hard going that it had never gotten under way. When the Japanese invaded Burma in 1942, they decided to tackle this project to strengthen their presence there, meaning they had to secure the supply of matériel, which by sea was extremely dangerous, since it exposed them to Allied submarine attacks. On the other hand, the sheer numbers of Chinese and Allied POWs obliged them to find new ways to keep them under control, and what better solution than to use them as slave labor in this colossal undertaking.
The first 1,414 POWs died in record time, coinciding with the construction of 258 miles of tracks and eight steel bridges. This period was called the Speedo, though I’m not sure whether that was because of how fast the railway was built or how quickly those constructing it died. I have to check some of these statistics against the notes I took, as a faithful lover of one of those prisoners. But most of that data has somehow remained seared in my memory. I suppose it’s just one more contradiction the war triggered in me, that I could never memorize a telephone number but the sinister statistics of fallen ranks were somehow burned right into my brain. I don’t think my memory betrays me here. Not a single death more, not a single death less, the excruciating exactitude of my memory thanks to the bomb. The scrupulous mathematics of one corpse atop another.
Work in an environment like the Burmese jungle was gruesome. The Death Railway can be considered World War II’s largest concentration camp, the tracks of which basically cut across the entire country. A very long, skinny concentration camp, one that destroyed over two hundred thousand lives, superseded in its destructive power only by Auschwitz. The jungle conditions were nearly as awful as the treatment by the Japanese officers. Sixteen-to twenty-hour days in sweltering heat and humidity and monsoon rains; suffering from tropical ulcers and incurable diseases, plagued by mosquitoes, snakes, and fleas; enduring dysentery, malnutrition, torture, and cholera. The jungle versus man, a conflict to see which could be more lethal. There were also numerous casualties due to airstrikes by Allied forces who couldn’t distinguish the camps where their own people were interned. But at times the jungle and man came together to form alliances in which the jungle offered trees and men the idea of crucifixion. One of the few rites the Japanese took from Western tradition; as in Roman times, crucifixion became a habitual form of torture. A few crucified prisoners, Jim told me, held out as long as fourteen days because the Japanese kept giving them just enough water and food to prolong their suffering. The torture extended to the other workers, who were forced to listen to their companion screaming in agony.
THE PEACE THAT CAME after Hiroshima’s destruction brought a sense of hope and promise. Surely you understand that I was a gullible adolescent then, and that’s what I wanted to believe. How far I’ve come from that credulity, that youthful ability not only to forgive but to forget. I imagine resentment is a gene that comes into play like a survival instinct, the same as other necessary mechanisms such as the desire for copulation. A gene that activates over time and only under specific circumstances. Yet animals live resentment-free. Our capacity for annihilation ha
s become so great that it has planted a sentiment in us that is meant to keep us from falling prey to ourselves: our ability to exterminate. I’m not privy to the mysteries of genetics. But at some point along the way humans have become absurd creatures. Our genome is made of negative genes melded with positive ones. Before we’ve spent even two decades on earth, that contaminated information becomes rooted and can never be changed. It’s all fused together inside and we can’t separate the good from the bad.
As I said, the youngest of us were able to rustle up a new sense of hope. Twenty-five girls were chosen after the war to travel to the United States for reconstructive plastic surgery, in an attempt to mitigate the disfiguring effects of the bomb. They were called the Hiroshima Maidens. I was jealous of them. I followed their every move on television, I watched them exit the airplane, demurely, heads lowered, welcomed with bouquets of flowers in a country that was trying to return the smiles it had just ripped off their faces. I wanted them to choose me, though they would never have admitted me. Yet the images of those twenty-five maidens encouraged me to start saving my money. So I salted away all the money I was given, and once I reached employment age, I worked as many hours as I could, thinking of all the operations I would eventually pay for myself. A few basic facial touch-ups, but more significant, the reconstruction of my genitals.
Many years later, I still bear some of those scars. You’ll see them when I turn myself in. Without makeup. Like the gummy red keloid scar on my cheek in the shape of Africa. The bomb branded Africa onto my face. Who would ever have thought that a continent I’d thought so little about in my life, a place so radically different from where I was born, would become the place of Jim’s hopes and mine for such a long time. Africa was on my face, yes, and I was enclosed within its contours and tucked away in this borrowed cabin while I write this, my last testament.
The scar, being so visible, was a constant source of problems at first. For a long time such scars were unmistakable in Japan. Because of them, and because people were afraid of radiation sickness, survivors became outcasts. Nobody would hire us, and the marriage agencies, which arranged many matches back then, rejected survivors looking for a husband or wife because everyone took it for granted that our children would be born with defects. I remember when my cousin was pregnant. Instead of swelling, her belly began to shrink in her sixth month. It was as if her womb decided to rethink the whole thing and started taking steps backward from fetus to sperm and finally that much-longed-for flatness prior to gestation.
AT FIFTEEN, I was adopted by a family and finally landed in the occupying country, as if the bomb and I were two arms of the same boomerang on its way back to the hand that had thrown it. My new friends at school wanted to be football players, astronauts, and teachers. All I wanted was to be a grandmother, but the doctors told me the effects of radiation would eventually manifest themselves, likely sooner rather than later. Besides the elective surgical procedures, I underwent others that were life-and-death, and even today I still come down with new illnesses. I’ve learned how to let them in the door silently, cup of tea in hand, as serene as if each one were the last. I welcomed all illnesses except one: infertility, the absence that took my womb like a presence. A loss as real as the iron purged from my body with every menstruation, periods that ceased only to come back a few years later with no medical explanation one way or the other. Loss, the negated child, showed up between my legs; in panties that for months or years showed not a trace of blood, or the opposite, a red, saturated sanitary napkin flushed down the stygian drain into which the dead and the unborn disappear in equal measure.
This absence was the perfect ground for a maternal instinct to flourish once I met Jim, and the search for his daughter substituted for the absence of my son. I seized on his daughter as if she were my own. I absorbed every detail Jim gave me of her story and retained it in my memory as if I had lived it out myself. So even though I may not have experienced it, I still remembered it, and that memory was like a suction cup on my brain’s wall. It held up the memory of Jim’s daughter—my daughter—and maintained it firmly, the way the pads of a lizard’s feet fasten onto the wall so it doesn’t fall off into the void. That was all I had for a long time. The void.
Second Month: 1963
Death Forgot My Hour
I convinced Jim to take the search for his daughter to Japan, a country I’d been back to only twice, a country he’d never wanted to return to, and where—he said—he didn’t expect to receive any help with our research. But I had a hard time understanding why he hadn’t begun his research at what I assumed was the beginning.
We took a direct flight to Tokyo, the city where Yoro had been delivered into his care by American occupation forces on May 7, 1950, though according to her birth certificate she had been born sixteen days earlier, on April 22. The provisional military hospital where they’d done the exchange was closed down eleven years later, and by the time we arrived, it had become a wing of the Tsukiji Fish Market, Tokyo’s biggest. The demand for nourishment on the part of the living had imposed itself, though not without the customary forgiveness the Japanese always beg of the dead. So a sort of respect governed all movement, all sounds in the market, as if a death cult were imbuing the fish’s blood with sacred significance in the last few seconds of its life.
Having grown accustomed to my adopted country, I could appreciate some of the differences between how Jim’s mind worked and my own in the way the produce in the Japanese market was presented. The fish in Tsukiji were arranged into sections according to species. On one side, the sayori, or halfbeak, and on the other, salmon. There were great green areas with countless varieties of seaweed. Occasionally a whale loaded on a truck would pass by. The way the produce was arranged in the Tokyo market made it seem like a museum, while American markets are arranged more like bazaars. And the distinctive ways of sorting content seemed to mirror the ways in which Jim and I were so different. I remember an English tourist who approached us once to ask Jim a question, obviously because he looked Western. Before walking away, he mentioned he’d overheard us speaking and congratulated Jim on his Japanese. It wasn’t the first time someone had made a comment like that, and it always made me laugh because Jim and I communicated in a sort of pidgin. What the tourist heard wasn’t really Japanese, but a sort of mangled language that nevertheless allowed Jim to communicate, more for the worse than for the better, in both English and Japanese. But I quit laughing when I realized how this in-between language had become a reflection of the mental limbo that both of us lived in sometimes.
At the outset, we simply didn’t understand each other. Not that we didn’t get along just fine. It had nothing to do with cultural differences; it was more as if our brains shared the same evolutionary stratum, but from two different planets. What might have led me into a grilling of or an argument with someone else, with Jim became a hesitation, a respectful deferral to another form of intelligence, and I would resign myself to that detachment, which I could stand for one vital reason: despite everything, we understood each other in bed from the get-go, because as you’ll soon come to see, my experiences in bed are always foreshadowed by a despite everything.
I finger through one of my notebooks from that time. These notebooks are the only things that have followed me everywhere. My memory. I pasted a photo of an Edo period painting on the cover. It’s a whale hunt. The water must be red. But the reddened sea fades out gracefully; otherwise it would overwhelm the ocher tones of the coast. Seeing this painting reminds me of something Jim always used to say: in Japan the beauty of varnish conceals the rotten wood they use to build the homes. I granted him that, even from the hybrid state that is my identity. But I’m not glossed over with varnish. My face, all my scars, they show exactly what I am. Nothing can match the bomb for candor. The shade of the color of the kill in the Edo period painting was softened so as to temper the contrasts, but the bomb acted naturally. It revealed the hues of the whale’s blood in a red-stained sea as if to sa
y: I am the true paintbrush, the one with uranium bristles.
The rest of the notebooks on the table have gray covers. There’s something else that distinguishes Hiroshima survivors. It’s a sound I hear every time I see this particular shade of gray, a sort of synesthetic effect. It’s in the voice, that distinctive voice of the hibakushas. While not every survivor bears the marks of the explosion on his or her skin, all of them have it in their voice. We all sound alike: we speak in a kind of cropped tone, jagged and with stretch marks, as if some dead person were clawing at a white sheet trying to rip through it to be born again. I think it’s why I associate the voice of survivors with the color gray, the hue of white skin that goes ashen, the shade of inert dust advancing toward life. Something that’s neither white nor black, neither dead nor alive.
I remember people telling me about those first days after the bomb, when I lay in the ruins of what had been the hospital, how people could be seen shuffling around with outstretched arms. They’d been blinded and were trying not to stumble over other survivors, though even the ones who could still see held their scorched and gummy arms out to keep them from sticking to their bodies. They weren’t the living dead, but the living dying. They used canola oil, the kind used for cooking, to alleviate the burns. When that was gone, the survivors with enough strength would make their way to the train station to milk the cars like cows for the black motor oil, thick and pasty; they’d plaster it all over their faces or bodies, blackening the red blisters and the black of their charred skin.
The Story of H Page 4