An increasing number of working women enter, often unaccompanied, and seat themselves near him. He is intrigued to see them so absorbed in their own affairs, confident of their own space, so different from the young women in his day. He exchanges fleeting smiles with them (his somewhat intimidated, theirs a shade granddaughterly), and they begin to chew over their respective lives.
Unless there is a major disruption (of which the earthquake has doubtless been the most grueling), he spends a couple of hours in the Somewhere Jazz Bar, one of a cluster of establishments crowding the Golden Gai district. Almost impossible to find amid the profusion of signs, it is hidden in one of the few alleyways that still remind him of the postwar city he used to walk through, before the roads were widened everywhere.
After dinner, Mr. Watanabe is accustomed to having one or two—let’s say three—drinks at the Somewhere. (If he goes there during the day, he is careful to order tea first: in his opinion, to get drunk before nightfall is the height of bad taste.) Its cramped quarters, with seating for only half a dozen customers, plus the few stoics who stand at the bar, make for a perfect cocktail of intimacy and mistrust. If the venue is full, he waits as long as necessary. He doesn’t want just a bar. He wants his bar.
One of his fellow patrons is Ryu Murakami: the author of novels he would like to read; the director of a laconic sadomasochistic film, in which Watanabe vaguely remembers a series of dildos, anxieties, and mirrors; and the TV host of a program about the economy, which he occasionally watches.
Murakami is from Sasebo, in the prefecture of Nagasaki, less than a hundred kilometers from the town where Watanabe was born. That small town was destroyed during the war and was on the list of targets for the atom bomb. The victorious military forces occupied it, and as far as Watanabe knows, it is still a U.S. base. Both men have briefly exchanged their memories of the Kyūshū region, long before the new bullet trains, and their respective apprenticeships in America. Never in too much depth, of course; neither likes to poke his nose into someone else’s drink.
Murakami has told him that, although he is currently living in Yokohama, he spends several nights a week at a hotel in Tokyo, where he keeps a secret office and writes. Murakami seems like a man striving to prove his uniqueness, as if he were fed up with being mistaken for the other Murakami. More than once, Watanabe has seen him sign a book by his namesake, perhaps to avoid the tedious explanation he has been repeating half his life.
Among the regulars at the Somewhere Jazz Bar is also a young German translator who speaks with a disconcerting accent in remarkably fluent Japanese, and whom Watanabe usually finds taking notes or discussing politics. The translator always turns up in an old-fashioned hat that looks like a costume. A few strands of hair escape from it, which Watanabe—especially after his second drink—is convinced belong to a wig. The young German is the owner of a small black-haired dog with triangular ears, which waits for him obediently by the door.
Barmen who cater to so few customers become not so much passing conversationalists as established confidants: what they serve up is their ear. The barman on the late-afternoon shift at the Somewhere (whom Watanabe has gotten to know better, perhaps because the tempo in the afternoons is slower and more meditative) insists on being called John, despite being born in a small town to the south of Nagoya. Watanabe hasn’t asked his real name, for which John seems grateful.
As he serves a drink, John will spin the glass on the counter. Sometimes he does it with an astral slowness. At other times with Olympian verve, as if his gesture were being awarded an official score. For Mr. Watanabe, it is a ritual warning before starting to drink: anyone entering a bar knows that verticality is an art. If a customer happens to halt the spinning glass, fearing a possible spillage that has never occurred, John takes offense in a silent, irreversible manner.
On his right, when his hands aren’t darting hither and thither as in a game of Ping-Pong, he keeps a board on which he plays himself at shogi. Dividing his attention between serving some customers and chatting with others, John keeps an eye on his most dreaded opponent’s moves. At nightfall, when he finishes his shift, he changes his shirt, leans on the other side of the bar to drink a Scotch, and won’t allow anyone to interrupt him.
At the far end of the Somewhere are a couple of triangular boards. They slide apart and lead to a cellar where merchandise is stored. Every so often, John disappears into that opening. Watanabe imagines a catacomb concealing unmentionable stories. And yet he suspects that were he able to descend and satisfy his curiosity, he’d be seriously disappointed.
WHEN HE REFLECTS ON his ties with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Mr. Watanabe feels as if he has died twice and been born three times. Depending on the day, he feels like the most fortunate or unfortunate man in the world. Generally speaking, he dislikes being told he has been lucky. Fukushima means precisely that, “good luck island.” And at Fukushima, there has been something more than just bad luck.
Luck itself is relative and depends on where you are. He always believed that yellow brought good fortune. The color of the sun, of gold, of the wall that protected him from the atomic blast. Until he discovered that many other countries consider it an ill omen. The color of disease, of treachery, and of sensationalism.
Theories about destiny also strike him as superstitious, as though suspended from some religious angle. If he were forced to say what he did believe, he might choose contradiction. He doubts there is a greater truth. In hindsight, his entire life has been a plan and an accident. A path and its detours. A gift with its burdens.
His twin survivals (the first in spite of being there, the second because he wasn’t) somehow cause him guilt and shame. Because he did nothing remarkable in order to be spared, or for those who weren’t. It’s similar to what he felt on his last day at school: instead of being proud at having reached the finish line, he thought of how his sisters had hardly been able to start, and he felt like a usurper.
When the war ended, he forced himself to construct his life (literally construct it: living seemed to him an arduous chore) as normally as possible. To keep on breathing, walking, talking, touching things. And yet he realized that the texture, the volume, the weight of all things had changed. It was an alteration of the world’s consistency.
Mr. Watanabe recalls how as a child, after both genbaku were dropped, he secretly suspected he was immortal. If no one among the living was an expert at dying, why did everybody seem so sure that they would die? And what if he were an exception, a mistake, an oversight of nature? During that time, he even questioned that poem by master Hakuin which, of the many his father had taught him, had become one of his favorites:
O young folk—
if you fear death,
die now!
For if you die once,
you’ll never need to die again.
As a child, he had interpreted these lines as bellicose: brave youths should on no account fear death. As a teenager, he read it as more ironic. With defiant humor, the old master was urging his disciples to abandon their youthful impatience. Once Watanabe reached adulthood, however, he was convinced the poem alluded to death in a figurative sense: all young people should explore and live their lives while being conscious of their own finiteness. In other words, those verses were saying that there’s no coming back from the awareness of mortality.
For a long time, Watanabe expected he would fall seriously ill, or suffer aftereffects similar to those others had experienced. When he realized this didn’t seem to be happening, his sense of unreality grew. He is amazed now to have reached old age, as if he hasn’t quite managed to refute that immortal child. He has become the perplexed spectator of his body’s durability. After all, the oldest man in the world is a survivor of Auschwitz. Perhaps that man, thinks Watanabe, has lost his ability to die.
Deep down, he doesn’t see himself as a genuine hibakusha. He feels something different than they do, more tangentially painful. And yet, he wonders, do victims always see themselves as v
ictims? Is self-identifying as a victim a spontaneous response or an awkward process?
If for him the true hibakusha are the people who became fatally ill, then he is not one of them, for in his case the damage is mostly invisible. Perhaps that’s why he never added his name to the register of victims. Or demanded compensation from the state, which, financially speaking, he could afford to refuse. A little more money, he argued, wouldn’t give him back his family, and in a sense it would have placed a monetary value on them. The deaths of his loved ones were unique. They didn’t deserve to be jumbled up with others in an administrative procedure, to be swamped by the numbers on an endless list. At least this had always been his reasoning. And so he preferred to keep moving. To forget the unforgettable.
Now, toward the end of his life, he wonders if all of his travels weren’t the quest for a shifting goal. Like a sprinter pushing the finish line with the tips of his toes.
* * *
As he went through high school, he was overwhelmed by a feeling of claustrophobia. He needed to get away, although he wasn’t exactly sure from what, and even less where to. Mr. Watanabe remembers clearly the first time he felt the need to travel abroad. He was on his way to school on the train. The carriage moved silently through the city, which had reached the final stages of its reconstruction. New buildings resistant to earthquakes, fires, and other disasters rose from their preceding ashes. Once again, Tokyo was reborn. As though, emulating the interiors of its dwellings, the entire country was movable. Detachable matter.
In his opinion, the successful restoration of Tokyo betrayed, in a sense, the spirit of kintsugi: it was done without leaving any trace of the bombings. However vast the destruction of the capital city, which encompassed forty percent of its surface, the damages were limited in space, and above all in time. Tokyoites understood what had happened to them. And therefore, at least in theory, they were able to leave it behind.
Yoshie was on his way to school on the train. The carriage moved silently through the city. The passengers were busy pretending to be asleep so as not to open their eyes, not opening their eyes so as not to look, not looking so as not to bother anyone. All at once, among the many heads facing the floor oblivious to the truncated shapes filing past the windows, Yoshie saw a raised head observing the landscape. It belonged to the only foreigner in the carriage. His gaze was fixed on the rows of half-finished buildings. Yoshie focused on that gaze, and through it reclaimed his own. He sensed what he wanted to do in the future: to learn to look out of the window like that.
The second time Watanabe remembers feeling the need to go abroad was when communist troops from North Korea, armed by the Soviets and the Chinese, crossed the dreaded thirty-eighth parallel, and the U.S. forces, which had remained on Japanese soil, responded by mobilizing in South Korea.
There was no way he could forget the climate of fear leading up to that moment. Just as now, news came in the form of public leaks, seeping through the roofs of every dwelling. No one was safe. There was no more uchi and soto. The Cold War escalated, and the Soviets boasted that they had built their first bomb.
As the year crawled toward Christmas, President Truman—in a press conference that Yoshie’s aunt and uncle managed to tune in to on a neighbor’s radio—threatened to use atomic weapons in Korea. When the broadcast had finished, their hosts turned off the radio, smiled at their guests, and silently went about preparing seaweed salad and hot miso soup.
That same night, Aunt Ineko lost her voice: her own way of emitting and omitting her opinion. Even Uncle Shiro, a man known for his self-control, went through a period of anxiety. Overnight, or so Watanabe remembers it, things that had never before worried his uncle made him fearful. If Yoshie went out on his own. If he didn’t say exactly where he was going. If he didn’t tell them his friends’ names. If he came home after dark.
Yoshie attributed his uncle’s anxiety to his own development: ceasing to be a child is the cruelest thing you can do to a guardian. As he grew up, he began to connect it to Uncle Shiro’s aging. After all, everything seems more fragile when we ourselves become fragile. Now, however, Mr. Watanabe believes it was another aftereffect of the war. Uncle Shiro was terrified that this new one might reach Tokyo. And, above all, that his teenage nephew could end up being conscripted. The invisible scars definitely last much longer. No one can cure something that officially doesn’t seem to exist.
As the battlefront extended across the Korean peninsula, on his way to school Yoshie would watch the nervous proliferation of buildings, the compulsion to construct in every corner of the city, as if urbanism were anticipating its own destruction.
He has wondered countless times which is more bloodthirsty, the swiftness of the automatic or the persistence of the manual. When he first started thinking about this, thousands of U.S. troops had already died in Korea, almost always in a grueling way. Freezing to death, hand-to-hand combat, bayonets in the night. The Chinese soldiers didn’t have radio transmitters and would terrify the enemy by attacking as they slept to the blare of bugles. Traditional or technological. Patient or fast. Northern or southern. Communist or capitalist. Attackers and attacked. All afraid, all dead.
Toward the end of high school, Yoshie learned of the suicide of Tamiki Hara, who on the day of the bomb had returned to Hiroshima to scatter his wife’s ashes. Hara, one of the few authors able to foil the censorship of the American General Headquarters, had written: “Inside me there is always a sound of something exploding.” Six years after surviving the explosion, he’d thrown himself onto the train tracks near his house in Tokyo.
A couple of years later, Yoshie started college and underlined the following passage from one of Hara’s books: “I envy people capable of instantly taking charge of their lives. And yet those who appear before me are the ones gazing despondently at the tracks. Broken people who, although they writhe and struggle, have already been tossed into a pit from which they will never escape. Perhaps my shadow wishes to vanish soon?” Mr. Watanabe often wonders whether that August, on the banks of the Ōta, he might have walked right by Hara without recognizing him.
* * *
Yoshie secretly hoped that when he started college, being in a more like-minded, stimulating environment would help him overcome his unease. But all it did was fill him with theories and opinions. At Waseda University, he did a year of French, his favorite and idealized language, but he failed to find the remedy for the suffocation dogging him. The clamor of his hormones didn’t help, either. Apart from his frequent visits to the bathroom, his only relief existed in the labyrinth of a foreign grammar, in the garden of its phonetics, in the treasure of a different vocabulary.
Halfway through that first year at university, the U.S. Army carried out its biggest-ever nuclear test, on Bikini Atoll, causing a subterranean blast a thousand times more powerful (a thousand, Watanabe repeats to himself) than the Hiroshima bomb. Dawn had just broken, and according to people on the neighboring islands, it resembled the rising of a second sun. The bomb was named Bravo, as if it were a curtain call. It was March, once again March. Thanks to some of his better-informed classmates, Yoshie learned that since the end of the war, the superpowers had tested at least twenty devices in that area. This discovery astonished him almost as much as not having known about it.
Just before he finished his first year of French, taking advantage of his good grades, Yoshie informed his aunt and uncle that he intended to continue his studies in Paris, the city of his dreams, about which he knew absolutely nothing. At first, his aunt and uncle were firmly opposed to the idea: There wasn’t enough money and no good reason for him to do such a thing. They had too many hopes pinned on him to risk it all on a whim.
Faced with Yoshie’s entreaties (which included kneeling solemnly in imitation of his mother; a bout of depression that was somewhat premeditated; and an attempted hunger strike), Ineko adopted the role of mediator. Once Shiro had recovered from the blow, he agreed to pay for his nephew’s studies in Paris, on the strict
condition that he would pursue a degree not in language and literature, but in a serious subject that promised a future. His uncle spoke a great deal about the future. And so Mr. Watanabe chose, or rather was forced to choose, economics.
By the end of that summer, Yoshie was already wandering around Paris, contemplating the boulevards with delight and the cost of lodgings with horror. During that time of initial confusion, he would have found it hard to believe that on those very streets, he would meet the first love of his nomadic life.
* * *
Nearly ten years later, one overcast morning while perusing L’Humanité in a café on Rue Pascal, he came across a headline that startled him. The paper fell, covering both cups. Violet’s eyes peered at him over her book, like two notes on a staff. She asked him if everything was okay. He smiled and stared into the distance.
According to the article, a young reporter called Ōe had traveled to Hiroshima to cover the international conference against nuclear weapons. The event had almost been canceled due to political differences. While the disagreements between local and national advisers, socialist and communist delegates, Chinese and Soviet representatives grew increasingly heated, people gathered for the Peace March. Another on-the-spot reporter described the situation as a war between pacifists. Weary of speeches and meetings, Ōe instead decided to collect testimonies from the forgotten victims of August 6, 1945. He was no longer interested in the official events of the conference. All that mattered to him were those people’s stories.
Watanabe had been born in the same year as Ōe, in a neighboring region, just one prefecture away. They were both from towns close to Hiroshima, brought up under a militaristic nationalism, but had opposite approaches to dealing with the past.
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