All of the men knew something was going to happen, but I had a pretty good idea of what it really was. There was mist on the ocean, and we were waiting. We’d been told to wait. That was the day they dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.
The papers seem endless, interspersed with articles cut from magazines, about the effects of radiation poisoning. Gradually, I realize that the decades of documentation span the period from his time in the desert to his involvement in a long court case against the American government. He and other soldiers tried to sue for compensation, but the government denied responsibility. Is this why Dad is so worried about me? He’s been reading what radiation did to his father, a lifetime of small cancers, night sweats, endless health problems.
It is almost 4:00 a.m. I have to go to school soon. He and Mom will wake up. But I can only sit here, staring at the papers. I’m no longer afraid. If he catches me, I’ll tell him that I have the right to know. He is asking me to decide. I have to see for myself.
Normally, math is my best subject, but the numbers jumble on the blackboard. I haven’t slept. After I left Dad’s study, I read online about the Daiichi reactor, the release of radioactive cesium that loses half its charge in thirty years. If you breathe or ingest it, it enters the blood, then the cells. Mistaken for potassium, it remains, pulsing with energy.
As the teacher lectures, my mouth becomes dry. My stomach gurgles and rumbles. Kids glance at me, but Miho doesn’t. She sits perfectly focused, as always.
During recess, she and I walk as clouds press in from the horizon, the wind buffeting us, whipping her hair against her cheeks.
“Is your family planning on doing anything because of the radiation?” I ask.
“What do you mean?” she says, very softly, lowering her head and tilting it to look at my eyes, as if shielding her face from the gusts.
“The . . . the radiation,” I tell her, “it’s dangerous. It’s really bad, right?”
She nods once and gazes straight ahead. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
“So . . . so is your family thinking about leaving Japan?”
“Leaving,” she says softly. “Where would we go? This is our home.”
I begin to insist on my question but hesitate. Her face is expressionless, its skin a hard, cold mask, and I realize—with a suddenness like the moment you gasp after holding your breath beneath water—what I hadn’t understood. All this time I have done everything to fit in, but I can leave. I have that choice. My father has told me how difficult and expensive it is to move to a country, to learn a language, to get residency and a job. Not everyone can do this, even if they want to.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her, softly, but she stares straight ahead, wind blowing against her hair, and she says nothing.
Sometimes, in the mirror, I see the black hair and eyes, the neat features of Mom’s family; at others, it’s the American, the faint curls, the open gaze and fleshiness of Dad’s face. And sometimes, at soccer practice, when boys joke, I don’t get it and feel that I’m missing something. Other days, when I make my own joke and they say nothing, I have the sense that there’s too much of me. If I stay here or move to America, how long before the traces of the other half fade and I no longer have to try so hard?
“Dad,” I ask as he drives me to soccer club, “did you move to Japan only to get away from Grandpa?”
He sighs. “I guess so. He couldn’t believe it. For him, the Japanese were still the enemy. He didn’t take it lightly that I decided to make my life here.”
“Are you happy here?” I ask, wondering if that’s why he likes outer space. He wanted to leave the planet Earth, but Japan was as far from home as he could get.
“Until now,” he says. “It’s not an easy country to fit in, but I’ve found my place. It’s been good to me. The people I know who aren’t happy in Japan are the ones who want to be totally accepted. The Japanese are a kind people. They’ll leave you alone. But I don’t know if they ever really accept foreigners. We’ll never fit in the way they do. They have a harmony that’s hard for us to understand.”
His words echo my thoughts. It’s what I’m beginning to see. I’ve always sensed the unity of my classmates, even if I didn’t fully grasp it. I understood that to live within it was like learning to swim in the ocean, to merge with the waves, to forget who you are and move with all that surrounds you.
But talking to Miho, I saw how different I am. The shock felt physical, as if I’d driven the ball to the goal and been knocked down. I want to go home and sleep, to forget that I’m not fully one of them, that maybe I’m like those particles that slip into a place that belongs to something else. Then, gradually, a thought comes to me. What will Mom be in the United States? Are Americans so different? Dad has been here over twenty years. I was born here. If he and I struggle, will she ever feel at home? I don’t know why this hasn’t occurred to me until now.
Dad clears his throat, and I realize that he’s waiting for an answer. The shock has worn off. Yes, after all of the effort with which I’ve learned to live in Japan, I feel that I’m on the outside. But I’m not special. Is it possible that I have the least to lose?
That afternoon into evening, I stay in my room and work through everything I know. The Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear reactor isn’t close to Tokyo, and though it might be like Los Alamos to those living there, for me, how dangerous is it really? And how can Father be so angry at Japan when the American government behaved no differently?
I read online that over forty million people live in the region around Tokyo. We can’t all leave, and I wonder if Dad is easily frightened. He came here to get away from Grandpa, so maybe for him leaving is the obvious solution. But this is where I’ve wanted to belong, studying others, doing everything to be one of them. And I have been, I realize, most of the time, except now, when I’m thinking about this.
I open my laptop and type into google, “how to lie to your parents.” Though I have made my decision, it’s hard not to have doubts, and I don’t want them to show. I get up and leave my room, and go into the kitchen. Dinner is almost ready, Mom finishing up, her movements brisk and precise, her eyes calm. It’s impossible to know, from seeing her, that she might be on the verge of the biggest change in her life.
“I’ve made up my mind,” I say when Dad sits down. “I don’t want to leave. I guess I just don’t want to change schools. All of my friends are here.”
He shakes his head. “That’s not a good reason,” he tells me, his voice so low and breathy I can barely make out his words.
“I don’t want to go,” I insist, keeping my tone even.
Mom says nothing. She glances from Dad to me, lets her gaze linger, then looks down and nods once.
“Okay,” he says and swallows. “But you’re certain?”
“I’m certain,” I tell him. I don’t say that everything will be perfect. That’s too much of a lie. But they’ll be together, and with time, we’ll all find our harmony again.
Kazoku
Aftershocks
by Ann Tashi Slater
If you want to know a few facts about me, here they are: I’m a teenage girl living in Tokyo with my parents, in a two-story house next to a graveyard. My dad’s Japanese and my mom’s American, from California. He’s a mystery writer and she’s an editor. They met on the old streetcar that goes to Waseda when they were each on their way to a dinner date, exchanged numbers, and a year later I was born at my grandparents’ house in western Japan. I want to be an architect, I make amazing miso soup, and yes, we were here for the big one on March 11th. I think we survived it, though I can’t say for sure.
March is never a good month in Tokyo. It’s cold and rainy and long. The cherry blossoms are pretty nice when they start blooming at the end of the month, but it’s usually, you know, still cold and rainy. And anyway, this year people aren’t having their usual hanami cherry blossom parties in the neighborhood park. No one really wants to after the earthquake and all.
I heard my parents argu
ing over our hanami one evening about a week after the disaster, when school was closed and I was lying on the landing in the dark with our dachshund, Momo. I’d considered going for a run in case the track meet that got canceled because of the quake was rescheduled, but didn’t feel like it. I didn’t even feel like checking Facebook—I was sick of all the stuff about the earthquake, everyone here posting about how they’re taking off for a while to Singapore or Hawaii because of the radiation, my relatives in the States asking fifty times a day what’s happening, how dangerous are the aftershocks, aren’t we thinking about leaving. So I was just lying there with Momo, listening to my parents’ voices float up from the kitchen.
“We should have our hanami,” my dad was saying. “Invite people in the neighborhood, as a show of community. Joshiki da yo.” Which sort of freaked me out—he’s pretty American, because he lived in Ohio for about ten years when his dad was transferred there; he usually only says things to my mom in Japanese when he’s about to go off the deep end. To tell the truth, ever since March 11th he’s been kind of a head case: he keeps humming “La vie en rose,” which means “Life in Pink” and is a super-romantic French song with lyrics like It’s you for me, me for you, in this life . . . , and a couple nights ago I heard noises at two a.m. and found him downstairs typing in the living room, his face like a ghost’s in the pale glow of the computer screen. I asked him what he was working on and he said it was his latest mystery, but I could have sworn he’d already sent that off to the publisher.
“It’s not common sense!” my mother insisted. “If we have a party, it’ll look as if we don’t care about what’s happened.”
Then they just kept on arguing, the way you quarrel over who forgot to put the milk away when it’s really about some other minor thing like I have terminal cancer or I’m leaving you. Not that they never used to argue, but since the quake they fight all the time and never make up; they’re two galaxies speeding away from each other in deep space.
I knew what my mom was doing while they were fighting: she was tidying up, her red hair loose around her shoulders, her mascara smudged and her blue eyes tired. She’s always been laissez-faire about domestic things, but since March 11th, the house has been so clean I wouldn’t be surprised if she started scrubbing the roof tiles. When she arrived home from her office the day of the disaster, after walking for five hours from Yokohama because the trains were out of service—not that five hours is such a big deal; some people walked like ten, and even though the bus ride back from our international school is normally forty-five minutes, it took me seven hours—she and my dad got to work putting away all the books and stuff that had been thrown from the shelves. And she just hasn’t stopped. Yesterday I saw her taking down the living room curtains to wash them.
The other thing is that even though she hates grocery shopping and always gets our stuff online, she’s started going to the store every day. And twice when I’ve been out walking Momo, I’ve seen her in front of the supermarket talking to this man. I want to ask her who he is but get the feeling I shouldn’t.
“What’s he like?” Hana asks, her ponytail swinging as she looks up from playing Tetris on her phone.
A couple of weeks since the quake and we’re at the Harajuku Starbucks having our usual mocha lattes. That’s usual, but the rest is freaky: the streets are deserted, like we’re on an abandoned movie set, and shops and restaurants are dim because the power plants have been damaged and now everyone has to save energy.
“Twentyish, Japanese, jeans.”
Hana considers. “Is he hot? Maybe your mom’s seeing someone. You know, a cougar kind of thing.”
We burst out laughing. I can imagine my dad having an affair since, being a mystery writer and all, he probably has secrets. But my mom’s the straightest arrow on the planet.
“Still, you never know,” Hana says and then starts telling me all these things about people we’re friends with at school, people whose parents everyone thought were happily married. Like Alessandro, a Japanese-Italian guy in our history class. After the radiation started, Alessandro’s mom picked up and moved back to her hometown in Italy with the younger brother. And this Japanese-American girl named Risa, who went with her parents to Texas, where her mom’s from, right after the quake and since her mom doesn’t want to return, her dad just took Risa and flew back to Tokyo. Her mom can’t do anything about it because the law here sides with whichever parent is Japanese.
I push away my mocha latte and Hana and I stare out the window at the moon floating over the huddled buildings. Fat drops of rain splatter against the window, then trickle down the glass in a hundred rivers. And even though dogs in Tokyo are always on a leash, a black terrier emerges alone from one of the side streets and trots past, all perky ears and jaunty tail, like it hasn’t heard the news about real life.
The next evening, my dad and I are on the back veranda eating takeout ramen because even though my mom’s always home to make dinner, she called to say she’d be working late.
“Itsu made tsuzuku no?” I ask my dad. Is this ever going to be over? Snatches of a broadcast on the rising radiation levels drift from the TV in my parents’ bedroom.
He glances at me, chopsticks in midair, eyes bloodshot. “Eh? Nan no koto?”
I can’t believe he’s asking what I’m talking about. “When are they going to get things under control?”
“Don’t worry. Everything is okay.” He goes back to slurping his ramen. Then, trying to change the subject, he says, “Why haven’t you been running, Katie? The track meet will be rescheduled.”
I shrug. “Even if it is, I might not run in it.”
“Why?”
“I just might not.” The truth is, I don’t feel like doing anything.
“But the team needs—”
“Why don’t we get on a plane and fly away somewhere? Half my friends are already gone.” I watch a crow swoop down onto the stone wall of the house next door.
He raises his eyebrows. “Where do you want to go?”
“Anywhere but here.”
“We should not leave your mother.” His face is distorted in the shadowy light, like in a funhouse mirror.
“Who said anything about leaving Mom?” The ramen is heavy and oily in my stomach, and this thing starts cartwheeling through my mind: Maybe my dad isn’t working on his book in the middle of the night. Maybe he’s going to pull something like Risa’s dad and is making a plan for just the two of us to go away.
He coughs. “What I’m saying is, there’s nothing to worry about. The reactors are 150 miles from Tokyo, the aftershocks are going down—”
“Like you guys are really getting used to them.” Every time one hits, he screams at me to get under a table and my mom runs and grabs the earthquake kit from the entryway, as if that little backpack filled with rope and band-aids can save us.
“We live here,” he says. “We can’t just leave.”
The blooms on the jasmine vines along the railing look blue and cold in the twilight. “But they said on the news that a really big quake could hit Tokyo.”
“That’s always been true. It’s not news.”
“What if there’s a nuclear meltdown?”
“If that happens, we’ll have time to evacuate.” He’s drumming his fingers on his leg, like when he’s about to blow. “Papa ni makasenasai.”
“Leave it to you? Which means we’re just going to stay here and wait for the next aftershock to crush us?” I brace myself for the explosion, but something much worse happens: he only rubs his forehead and stares at the floor. His shoulders are slumped and his shaggy hair is more gray than I’ve ever seen it.
What’s going on? I feel like shouting. He always knows what to do—why doesn’t he do something?
Cats start yowling from the alley next to the house and a siren whines somewhere close by. My dad stands up and goes inside.
That night, I lie in bed with Momo, staring at the bamboo drawn by moonlight on the shoji screens over my win
dows. The leaves and budding shoots and branches are all tangled up in a design so complicated it’s exhausting.
I try to stay awake because I’ve been having nightmares. Last night I dreamed of a big wave, like in Hiroshige’s woodblock prints, or in a sculpture I saw a couple of years ago at the Rodin museum when we took a trip to Paris for my parents’ fifteenth wedding anniversary. In the sculpture, there’s this huge green wave about to crash down on three people. In the dream, I was watching the wave crest over me and I could feel the tug of the ocean, the salt spray on my face. I heard the ocean breathing, like when you hold a shell to your ear, and it sounded like the sighs of all those people in Tohoku as their bodies were washed out to sea and their spirits went right to heaven.
Now I hear what sounds like someone crying in the kitchen. I sneak down, holding Momo so her toenails on the stairs won’t give us away, but no one’s there. Just the fridge humming, the sink so clean it sparkles in the moonlight, the dish towels folded neatly on the counter.
Back upstairs, I take out the photo of me and my parents in Montmartre that I stuck under my mattress when the glass in the frame broke in the quake. It’s a sunny day and we’re standing in front of Sacré Cœur, the white church on top of a hill looking out over Paris. Behind us you can see couples kissing and staring all lovey-dovey into each other’s eyes (PDA is big in Paris). I look at my parents’ smiling faces, their arms around one another, me in the middle with my arms around them. If I look long enough the three of us will turn to shapes and colors, and then, like these special papers in a spy kit I used to have, the shapes and colors will turn into a secret code. If only this photo held a message for me from the universe, some answer or clue to how my parents could be so happy then and not now.
School finally opens again the first week of April. Some students still aren’t back—and some have left for good—but most of us are here. Every day we bring in canned food, diapers, towels, and blankets for Tohoku. And we’re making a thousand origami cranes to send to students at one of the high schools—like that will help them. Getting more OCD by the day, my mom forces me to carry an emergency kit that takes up my whole backpack: a copy of my passport, water, chocolate, a radio. I’m surprised she hasn’t thrown in a tent, just in case.
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