Waiting for Daisy

by Peggy Orenstein

  Eventually the schools closed and everyone over twelve was forced to work for the war effort. Yamaoka was walking to her job at the phone company, clutching her lunch of two sweet potatoes in her hands, when the Bomb fell. She was fifteen. Knocked unconscious, she came to pinned under a boulder, the heat and crackle of fire approaching her. She screamed until her voice gave out, until she felt her mother touch her leg and cry “Michiko!” Then, in one of those legendary feats of maternal strength that are said to rise in crisis, Akino lifted the rock and dug her daughter out.

  The girl was unrecognizable. Her face had inflated, the skin taut and cherry red. Strips of flesh hung from her arms. Over the next few months mother and daughter were shunted among several makeshift infirmaries, none of which had doctors or medicine. Akino tended to Michiko the best she could, dressing her wounds with cooking oil when it was available, urine when it wasn’t. At one point Akino tried to smother her daughter with a pillow to spare her further suffering. How to comprehend a despair so bottomless that to a mother murder felt like mercy? Another time, Yamaoka tried to drown herself. “I couldn’t do it,” she said solemnly, switching back to English. “I couldn’t leave my mother.”

  Once Yamaoka could walk, the women returned to Hiroshima, squatting in a makeshift shack and scavenging metal to survive. Whenever she went outdoors, Yamaoka wore long sleeves, gloves, and a scarf pulled forward to hide her face. It didn’t matter. Adults shouted at her on the streets to keep a distance. Children threw rocks and taunted her, calling her a monster. “I often sobbed to my mother that Japan took my face,” she said. “Japan should give me my face back.”

  I fingered a picture of Yamaoka in 1955 squatting between two white children with toothy grins—a boy with his hair slicked back and a girl with curly pigtails and a plaid skirt. They were part of the family that hosted her in Connecticut while she was a Maiden. I tried to imagine her, a twenty-five-year-old who’d glimpsed hell but never seen the world, who hated leaving the house yet traveled to a country she still considered the enemy. What was it like to see the size of American homes, the surfeit of food, a washing machine, a refrigerator, an indoor toilet? To encounter forks and knives? “We had been taught table manners,” she recalled. “Also how to take a Western-style bath, things like that. Even so, one girl washed her clothing in the toilet.”

  She returned to Hiroshima bolstered by American optimism and a scholarship to a trade school for seamstresses, but she never did pull herself and her mother out of poverty. Nor did she achieve the dream of the Maidens program: Yamaoka never married, never had a daughter of her own. She had a romance once, she confided, with a gentleman who lived in Tokyo. He wanted to wed, but she wouldn’t leave her ailing mother. “I loved him,” she said. “But I loved my mother more.”

  Chisa Tanimoto was warm-eyed, frail, and unable to answer many of my questions. I didn’t care, because the instant I stepped into her living room, I was riveted by the infant boy lying swaddled in a teddy-bear-covered blanket. “Keriyi-desu,” Mrs. Tanimoto said, pointing at the baby. This is Kenji.

  I asked if I could hold him. “Konichiwa, Ken-chan,” I said, sliding a hand under his head. “Ogenki desu ka?” Hi, little Kenji. How are you? I shifted the baby to the crook of my arm, touched his pillow cheek, stroked his Sid Vicious hairdo. I gazed into his eyes, so dark that pupil and iris merged. How could I have missed the chance to be this child’s mother? How could I have gotten here just weeks too late?

  Perhaps sensing my desperation, Mrs. Tanimoto politely extricated Kenji and led me to a stack of scrapbooks about the Maidens. I leafed through, but kept one eye on the baby. I could do this, I thought, I really could. I could adopt a Tanimoto orphan. I didn’t care where Kenji came from, who his father might be, or why his mother gave him up. I didn’t care about his past. I wanted to be his future.

  “You should’ve seen this baby,” I said to Steven that afternoon on the phone. “He was so cute. I think you should write to Koko, too. She’s impressed by you, it will look like we’re more serious. And call Kent Nagano. See what he can do.”

  “That might be a good idea,” Steven said, but his voice was guarded.

  “What?” I asked. “What is it?”

  “Nothing. But I’m not going to just say yes to all of this on the phone. We have to talk it through, decide if this is right for us.”

  “I think it is,” I said. “I really do.”

  “And I’m not against it. But, Peg, you just had a miscarriage last week. And now you want to adopt? Doesn’t that seem a little sudden?”

  Perhaps my enthusiasm was just a hormonally driven illusion, I wasn’t sure. But I was thirty-nine. We’d been trying to get pregnant for over three years. How much more was I willing to put myself through, my marriage through, to try to have a biological child? I thought about Kenji and, softer than the tuft of hair on his head, felt something rise in me once again—something close to hope.

  Perhaps the Buddhists were on to something with the idea of en, or maybe we create omens, connect dots when we need to. Whatever the case, on this trip—my fourth to Hiroshima—I was inundated by stories of orphans. For years I’d been trying to talk to someone whose parents had died in the bombing, but the stigma proved impenetrable. Like my cab driver in Osaka, my interpreter in Hiroshima would nod when I asked her to set up meetings with orphans.

  “Muzukashi,” she would tell me. “It is difficult.”

  “I understand," I’d answer, “but please try.” Instead, she would drag me to yet another appointment with a well-known storyteller from the Peace Museum. It took several visits before I realized that in Japan “It is difficult" actually means “When hell freezes over.”

  This time, after a number of false starts and subtle negotiations, my interpreter had found someone: a man, also named Yamaoka (no relation to Michiko), who owned a minshuku, a kind of family-run inn, about an hour outside of town. I asked my friend Yumi to join me—we could make a weekend out of it—but she politely declined. “I think this is something you should do yourself," she said, looking a little vague.

  Again, I neglected to think like a Japanese. What she meant was, minshukus are for students and backpackers. They can be as cobwebbed and ooky as the Addams Family mansion. This one was dim and musty with a squinty-eyed stuffed boar mounted in the living room (Yamaoka had struck it with his car one night on the highway). My tatami mat room had neither furniture, heat, nor running water. There was an outhouse with a cold-water spigot across a breezeway, where the temperature was quickly sinking toward freezing. Some other time, or perhaps with Steven, this would’ve felt like an adventure. Right now it just felt primitive.

  I joined Yamaoka, his wife, and an interpreter in the dining room. Yamaoka had prepared sukiyaki in a traditional cauldron that swung on a chain over a brick fire pit cut into the floor. I knelt beside him as he dished out a generous portion. The beef was thin-sliced and tender, the vegetables still slightly crunchy, the sauce fragrant. As the chill eased out of my body, my misgivings thawed, too. So did Yamaoka’s. He was impressed that a gaijin wasn’t afraid to eat sukiyaki the Japanese way, dipping each bite into a bowl of raw, beaten egg. By the time his wife brought our tea, he was laughing and making playful jokes at my expense. The light left his eyes, though, when he began the story that he’d never told a soul, that he’d kept inside for a half century.

  Yamaoka was three when the Bomb killed his parents. A wealthy family took in his older sister, but didn’t want a little boy. He moved in with his grandparents, aunts, and cousins in their ancestral home. “As long as my grandfather was alive it was fine,” he recalled. “We were all treated equally. But when he died, the others began treating me like a servant. They made me live in a leaky shed in the backyard. I wasn’t allowed to eat at the dinner table. My meals were their leftover bones and a yam. No rice. Then I washed their dishes outside in cold water. I was so malnourished that my belly distended. I had chilblains. And if I disobeyed, my grandmother whipped me. My teacher tri
ed to convince them to let me go to an orphanage—it would’ve been better than what I endured—but that would’ve humiliated my grandmother, so she wouldn’t do it.

  “When I was ten, I tried to drown myself in the river, but before I could, a man grabbed me. ‘Stop this foolish thing,’ he said. ‘If you kill yourself, who will take care of your parents’ graves?’ He’d been a soldier during the war and came back to find his whole family dead. He had his own problems, yet he worried about me. That kindness touched me.”

  I wish I could say that stories of cruelty at the hands of relatives were the exception among hibakusha, but they weren’t. Children were abused or cast out. Wives who were left infertile because of the Bomb or malnutrition were tormented by their husbands’ families. One survivor told me about her best friend, whose mother-in-law would rant, “You useless, sterile hibakusha. You’ve ruined my son’s life. Why don’t you kill yourself?” Eventually she did. Another survivor bore healthy sons, but her own radiation-induced infirmity became the source of harassment. A third gave birth to a disabled child, a birth trauma having nothing to do with the Bomb. That’s not how her mother-in-law saw it. She harangued the young woman until she fled, leaving her two-year-old daughter behind.

  Those stories shook me. I’m the wife of an only son of an only son from a Japanese American family. Steven is the last male to bear his surname. I’d had cancer and two miscarriages. But my mother-in-law cried with me, cried for me.

  Yamaoka talked for hours, long after his wife went to bed. He seemed grateful for the opportunity and I was honored to listen. When I finally returned to the room I’d so carelessly dismissed, I reconsidered it through his eyes—how palatial, how secure it must feel. I unrolled my futon and changed, shivering, into my pajamas. In the old days, a neighbor would pace the streets about this time clapping two wooden blocks together, chanting, “Hi no yo-jin”—beware of fire—to remind everyone to put out their wood stoves. A peddler might wheel by with his udon soup cart crooning a melancholy tune, luring sleepy customers to have a last warm snack before turning in. Those small, comforting customs are all but gone. The locals accept that; it is only gaijin like me who wax nostalgic, who feel gypped out of something we wish we could have had.

  In the morning, after a typical breakfast of miso soup and fish, Yamaoka drove me to the station, stopping to show me his town’s main attraction: a hillside covered with thousands of irises, each in full bloom. We strolled along zigzagging paths, stopping to snap each other’s picture. He came into my viewfinder’s focus smiling proudly, arms swung wide, gesturing to the flowers, to the abundance of new life. This, too, was Hiroshima.

  The only thing I could understand on the Japanese nightly newscast was the progress of the cherry blossoms, or sakura. Each evening, starting in mid-March, the weatherman pointed to a map showing where the blooms had already opened and forecasted where they would next appear. Sakura are considered the essence of Japan; tracking them was a near-hallowed task. The weatherman’s voice was as earnest as if he were reporting on a tsunami.

  This year sakura season felt like a personal affront. The delicate clouds of blossoms burst forth for a few fleeting days, a reminder to savor the present, to live in the now. The notion is called wabi-sabi: life, like the cherry blossom, is beautiful because of its impermanence, not in spite of it, more exquisite for the inevitability of loss. Well, I thought bitterly, that and eight hundred yen would buy me a cup of green tea.

  A couple of hundred centuries ago, watching the blooms was the sacred pastime of nobility. Now ubiquitous ohanami, or blossom viewings, are mostly an excuse to par-tay. The hot ohanami spot in Hiroshima was the Peace Park, a greenway built beneath the hypocenter of the explosion, filled with memorial shrines, a museum, and a burial mound. Despite its gravitas, it was a cheerful spot for an outing, with a canopy of pink and white blossoms lining the riverbanks. Junior executives staked their claims early in the morning, standing guard all day over blue plastic tarps. The rest of their groups would arrive at dusk, neatly removing their shoes before stepping on the mat and sitting in a perfect circle as if around an invisible table. They hibachi-grilled oysters, chicken, or hot dogs and snacked on mochi mixed with pink sakura petals and filled with sweet bean paste. Through it all, the sake and the beer flowed until revelers cut loose and began singing and dancing under the flowers. (Japanese drink more than anyone I have ever seen—women and men both. It’s acceptable to go home blotto, puking in the streets and onto the subway tracks. My girlfriends in Tokyo considered my two-glass limit priggish. To them, drinking was a mark of modernity.)

  My daytime schedule may have been jammed, but the evenings stretched out before me, long and blank. Mostly I wandered through a covered mall in the center of town, stopping to watch teenage boys with peroxide-streaked hair spin with joyless precision to an arcade game called Dance Dance Revolution. The night the sakura peaked, I broke that routine to shop for souvenirs at the baseball stadium where the Hiroshima Carp play. I strolled back through the park past the Peace Dome, the eerie, arcing skeleton of an exhibition hall that survived the bombing. I rambled along the river, checking out the festivities, listening to the laughter and the morale-boosting company cheers. No one noticed me. I felt formless, ectoplasmic, so unmoored that someone could have walked right through me, that I could have easily floated away. And it was a relief, a relief to drift untethered through a life that wasn’t mine.

  Back in my room, I wrote e-mails to friends telling them about the miscarriage. Given the stories of the hibakusha I’d heard all day, my own sorrows seemed trifling, a luxury of the fortunate. I wished that knowledge eased my pain. But if the hibakusha had taught me anything, it wasn’t the irrelevance of grief, but indomitability despite it: they affirmed life in all of its horror and all of its beauty. That’s what drew me back to Hiroshima over and over—admiration for the heroism of their humanity, for their cherry blossom hearts.

  I opened an e-mail from Steven. He had phoned my parents to talk about the miscarriage and to tell them how much their support meant to us. They had begun to cry, though at first my dad tried to hold back. “When I got off the phone, I went out on the deck and wept like I should have when I was with you,” he wrote. The letter depressed me: Steven was sitting alone under a cedar tree in Northern California, I was lying on a hotel bed in Hiroshima, both of us were crying. We hadn’t shed a single mutual tear during his ten days in Tokyo. Were we so estranged that we could only mourn alone, that we could no longer cry together?

  My window overlooked the panorama of the Peace Park. I could hear the corporate cheers slurring into slushy pop ballads at the ohanami gatherings below. Beyond them, I could make out the shadowy monuments to the dead: to the students of a girls’ elementary school, to postal workers, to a neighborhood that had disappeared in an instant. The Peace Park was testament to the importance of remembering. Maybe that was the other reason I had returned here. I respected the need to make meaning out of life’s randomness, out of its misfortunes big and small. As a writer, as a human being, I’d devoted my life to the power of story. I believed—for them, for me—that part of healing was in the telling. My own dilemma now was this: how could I memorialize someone who never really existed? Should I try to forget these babies, these nonbabies, that I’d lost? Could I, even if I wanted to?

  8

  JIZO SAVES

  I heard the bells before I saw them, following the sound across the courtyard of Zojo-ji, a Buddhist temple in central Tokyo. There they were, lining a shady path: dozens of small figures of infants, each wearing a red crocheted cap and a red cloth bib, each with a bright-colored pinwheel spinning merrily in the breeze. Some had stone vases beside them filled with flowers or smoking sticks of incense. A few were surrounded by juice boxes or candy. A cap had slipped off one tiny head. Before replacing it, I stroked the bald stone skull, which felt surprisingly like a newborns.

  The statues were offerings to Jizo, a bodhisattva, or enlightened being, who (among other tasks)
watches over miscarried and aborted fetuses as well as dead children. With their hands clasped in prayer, their closed eyes, and serene faces, they are both child and monk, both human and deity. I had seen Jizo shrines many times before. They’re all over Japan, festive and not a little creepy. But this was different. I hadn’t come as a tourist. I was here as a supplicant, my purse filled with toys, to make an offering on behalf of my own lost dream.

  Just as I’d feared, my reentry to Tokyo had been bumpy. I kept up with my interviews, had dinner with friends, but my movements felt mechanical, my voice muffled. I tried to convince myself that getting pregnant again at all had been a victory. If I could do it twice, maybe I could do it a third time and it would finally stick. That was, however, an awfully tarnished silver lining to the miasma in my head.

  I had never before considered that there was no ritual acknowledging miscarriage in Western culture, no Hallmark card to “celebrate the moment.” There was certainly nothing in traditional Judaism, despite its scrupulous attention to the details of daily life. (My religion was mum on most matters of pregnancy and childbirth until, at least in the Reform and Conservative movements, female rabbis forced a change.) Christianity, too, has largely ignored the subject.

  Without form, there is no content. So even in this era of compulsive confession, women don’t speak openly of their losses. It was only now that I’d become one of them, that I’d begun to hear the stories, spoken in confidence, almost whispered. There were so many. My aunt. My grandmother. My sister-in-law. My friends. My editors. Women I’d known for years—sometimes my whole life—who had had this happen, sometimes over and over and over again but felt they couldn’t, or shouldn’t, mention it.

  My shock and despair were, in part, a function of improved technology and medical care. In my mother’s era a woman waited until she’d skipped at least two periods before visiting the doctor for a pregnancy test. If she didn’t make it that long, she figured she was simply “late.” It was less tempting, then, to inflate budding suspicions into full-blown fantasies—women often didn’t even tell their husbands the news until the proverbial rabbit had died. Now prenatal care begins well prior to conception—for years I’d watched every milligram of caffeine, every glass of wine, every morsel of food, and forced down that daily horse pill of a prenatal vitamin. If I’d been in the United States, I could’ve peed on one of the new drugstore kit sticks and found out I was pregnant three days before I’d missed my period. As it was, at a tenuous five weeks gestation I’d already calculated my due date on a Web site, ogled pictures of “my baby’s” development, and joined an Expecting Club on iVillage for November Mommies-to-Be. If the second IVF had taken, I would’ve taped that photograph of fertilized cells to the fridge. All of this encourages a mother-to-be to see the fetus as a person, at least in the psychological sense, at an ever-earlier stage. You tell friends. Names are bandied about. The baby feels real. Yet, if the pregnancy goes amiss, that personhood is abruptly revoked and you’re supposed to act like nothing ever happened.