Hiroshima in the Morning (10 page)

There is a boat. Three good guys getting into it. There is a demon brandishing his sword. Before I started dozing, all the dancers moved in precise, sometimes barely perceptible motions, so obscured by their costumes that I could see only a flick of toes, a wave of fan, so tight and tall and lost in their many collars that they could be puppets, but this demon stomps and jerks and runs about in jagged lines, which brings the audience and the whole stage to life. It might be the three drums, and the flute, and the chorus that suddenly seems to be singing full blast in a unison chant that shakes the floor of the theater. It might be the demon, so explosive and the antithesis of everything we have seen so far, who brings the other dancers’ art into sharper focus. The long, slow day has lulled me away from my questions, and with my barriers unwittingly, sleepily down, the play has become a tableau that resonates. It seems that, if I can hold the urge for understanding at bay, then I can enjoy what’s around me. But more than that, when I’m not trying to make sense of it, it somehow makes sense to me.

I COULD SAY, again,
it makes no sense
, but that has been deemed beside the point. It makes no sense that now, after owning the building we’ve lived in equally for thirteen years, the couple who live downstairs wants to negate our contract and increase their share of the house while I am in Japan. It makes no sense that Brian is under siege, racing from the front door of the building up the stairs in the middle of the night to avoid the woman who used to be our friend, whose uncanny ability to be in the hallway whenever he comes home would seem to be tied to a homing beacon on his car.

This is an issue Brian would normally leave to me to negotiate. It would have been my role, my logic we called on, but my attempts to respond by email have only made the hostility worse.
Thirteen years . . . can’t they wait six months?
I think, but I know better than to speak—everything I’ve said so far has just made Brian angry. He is the one who can’t find peace in his own house; I am having a great time in Japan—not even doing any work by my own account—and here’s yet another thing he has to deal with. I know Brian is the kind of person who absorbs anxiety, which may be the reason why our neighbors are pushing. When he told this woman he couldn’t make any of these decisions without . . . me, she responded:

“Well, then, she’s just going to have to come home.”

IT’S NOT HIS DECLARATION, but he’s reported it, which means that he wants me to hear it. If it was his statement, directly, I could respond: I’m not allowed to leave Japan; more than seven days out of country and my fellowship will be revoked. The choice could be spoken: my writing, my life, this chance for me that we agreed on versus someone else’s fabricated urgency.

Time is different for me here. The time I have is short, immediate. Our house, on the other hand, does not have to be dealt with now, nor should it be; it is someone else’s anxiety. I’m surprised at how obvious this is to me, and how settled I must be here to reject my role outright. If I were still living in the pressure of New York life, I might feel differently. If so, it’s a fringe benefit that I don’t get caught up. These are the things I tell myself without seeing how foreign their lives are from my perspective. How, even when I steel myself almost nightly to have this conversation, I am always somewhat surprised that the issue is still there.

Brian wants it to go away. He wants me to make it go away. This is more than his mantra; I can feel it. It crosses continents with a high whine, not the kind you can hear, or protest. Even though I’ve tried and failed, even though we both know I can do nothing long distance, we rehash the situation nightly, with me offering the kind of logic I would present to these people if only anyone would hear me, while Brian fumes on his bed sandwiched between our sons who are supposed to be watching twenty minutes of a relaxing children’s video.

How can they be relaxed when he is yelling? How can
they then fall asleep? Why would they want to talk to me when my tiny voice is competing with Barney, and when it’s that same tiny voice Daddy is yelling at? I’ve asked Brian if there isn’t some way to restage the scene to encourage the boys to talk to me, but in his current frame of mind, the time difference is my problem.

I can hear the prodding in the background as Brian waves the phone.
Talk to your mother. She’s on the phone now. Just say hello. Talk to your mother.
I can hear them negotiate: my older son wins, so my younger son gets on first.

Hey, sweetheart, it’s Mommy
.

He is fine. Nothing is new. This is his report, adorned with a lot of silent nodding. If it falls short of my hopes, of my expectation that I might chat with them, hear their stories of the day, I know this boy is three years old, and I would not have expected to chat with him if I was home. But still—and now I am the one wanting—there’s a part of me that wishes that one of them could think up a just a single piece of news. I try to describe the food I’ve been eating, to see if I can gross him out, but he knows nothing of chicken liver on a stick. I tell him about the dog in the fisherman’s boat on the river in front of my apartment, and the birds that perch on my small balcony, waiting for him. I’ve told him these things before, but he likes animals and it seems that is all we have in common. Repetition, I decide, can’t be too bad.

Don’t forget I love you
, I remind him as he passes the phone to his brother. As I ready myself again to speak of the dog and the boat.

I AM A BAD MOTHER: this is what I’m being told. Or rather, my mother-in-law has adopted a recurring email sign off—
Your family needs you—
and Brian doesn’t understand how I’m not miserable so far away. There’s no question that I’m temporarily absent; no question that I’m less of a mother in Japan than I could be in New York. But in the growing gap between my notion of good motherhood and everyone else’s, there is a question rising: what is a mother supposed to be?

Brian was the one who wanted to have children. He had endless strategies for teaching boys to throw a baseball, despite the fact that he didn’t know if he would have boys, and that he didn’t own a baseball. Still, I didn’t know; I wasn’t sure; it wasn’t me, and when I tried to picture myself as a mother, I disappeared. I told him about my nightmares, about my failures as a babysitter, and the truth that I didn’t think I even liked kids. We went back and forth and back again, with me unable to commit, until Brian removed every obstacle I could think up: he would do it all. He would be the primary caretaker if I would just have them. If I would agree to help him out sometimes, if he needed help.

That was our deal. And if, in the early days, I was needed constantly, it became both habit and comfortable. I turned out to have very definite ideas about the merits of homemade baby food, limitations on television, and whether boys should be encouraged to hate pink. I became a mother—that creature I couldn’t visualize. And there was so much to mothering that Brian and I actually believed, for the entire
first year of Dylan’s life, that it was physically impossible for one parent to look after two children alone.

No one questioned that I loved my children then. In fact, those who knew me, and knew of our deal, marveled at my abrupt domesticity. But now that I’m in Japan, people around Brian seem dubious. When he tells me of the most recent friend or work colleague who called him a “saint” for taking care of his children, I add that person to his list, because, what else can I do? I can’t assure him that he is, or remind him that that’s what he said he’d do; I can’t consider the underlying issues because opening myself to them is not harmless. I can already feel the soft silt of guilt that will come through that door.

I remember the space I floundered in when I first got to Japan, the writhing umbilical cord in my gut that said he was the only person in the world I could turn to; this is his version, then—of missing me. I’ve been in Japan a month, and it’s all going according to plan, this is what I must remember. If I can convince him to ignore the house problem, find a way to help him view it through my perspective, the tension between us will ease. We once talked about him coming out for three months to spend time with me, so perhaps it won’t be too long until they are here.

THIS IS THE WORLD of the umbrella. When I first got to Tokyo, it rained almost every day, and everywhere I looked, a stream of brightly colored domes: flowing out of the train stations, flooding the streets, trickling along the iris garden at the Meiji shrine in Harajuku. Here in Hiroshima, where it is getting quite hot and sticky, the streets are filled with sun umbrellas, and most of them are black. There must be a secret to explain this, but it’s not coming through in translation. I can’t help but recall that, when the atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima, the people wearing white clothes were protected, but any dark-colored design, especially black, was incinerated, and left deep burns in patterns on the skin.

In the black umbrella, protection and target are one and the same.

 

I IMAGINE THE
hibakusha
everywhere. Of course, they are here—even with the immediate deaths and the lingering cancers, they are around me. But, with a past like Hiroshima’s, I didn’t expect this curious silence. It seems original: the descriptions I have read of the burning city emphasize it—babies with long shards of glass sticking out of their heads who do not even whimper; people with skin literally dripping from their bodies who move like ghosts. And even in those accounts that describe pain and panic, there’s a
quality of distance so great that it’s as if someone turned off the sound and rubbed out all the color. The most compelling picture of Hiroshima is the one that has no voice: the reverse shadow that was burned into the stone step when the person sitting there was incinerated.

It is shadows I am thinking of. The past should cast a shadow on who we are now. If there is a puzzle, then here’s another piece of it: my mother, who forgot that she was interned long before she began truly forgetting; my family, who never mentioned it, who hid the photographs, for whom to heal was to forget. I am the descendant of a group of people who built a wall down the center of their lives, between the internment and their future, and thrived on the disconnect. That silence came partly from embarrassment. They were interned, and released, and the experience wasn’t terrible enough to complain about, especially in contrast to the other atrocities of the war. But there was something else too: they were asked to prove their American-ness. And so my cousins are all only half Japanese, like I am. All of us English-speaking, all of us pizza-eating, melting pot Americans.

If the internment wasn’t terrible “enough,” it was still shot with shame and difference. The only way to escape, to be safe, was to be what someone else wanted you to be. In the case of Hiroshima, this need to scour the face that we show the outside world, to clean up the city so that healing, not keloids, walks among us, has become a municipal obsession. I’m reminded of the Maiden I spoke with: even if the
hibakusha
are being eaten by cancer, they—we, none of us—
don’t have to play the victim. It’s not a question of optimism or pessimism, of strength or of vision. It is identity. Choice. If we don’t want to appear wounded, then all we need to do is to present ourselves as untouched.

Now that I am in Japan, I’m beginning to sense this mechanism in myself: there is a distance, a small gap, between the neat labels I present on the outside, and the more turbulent urges I’m finding inside. This is nothing special, not the consequence of some hidden trauma, it’s simply easy: the external persona quiets the questions. It’s polite.

But in this sea of black umbrellas, there is something in me, a possibility teasing the edges of my thoughts, that wonders if this adaptation—this ability to reshape one’s persona—isn’t both a blessing and a curse? My own Japanese American family is proof that you can transform yourself so thoroughly you become the thing you appear to be. If you choose the wrong persona, though, who are you, and what are you left with then? If Brian’s vision of me is not quite my own vision, is that just a simple misunderstanding born of the fact that we’re apart? Am I changing, or was I never that person in the first place?

“I AM SORRY they are dead,” the director of the Peace Museum tells me, as if he himself killed the women I’m looking for. “But have you heard of a woman named Lily Onofrio? She was also in the internment camps and she’s a
hibakusha
. We have some relics from her family in the museum.”

“Lily Onofrio is in Hiroshima?”

“Her family used to live here. Her address is in California. But she comes back to Japan sometimes for treatment.”

Lily didn’t want to go to Japan, isn’t that what the story was? Or she changed her mind at the last minute. Lily’s mother-in-law died in the camps, I remember. Her mother-in-law in the box.

I remember the anthology where I first read Lily’s story, how her chapter was bisected by photographs. Lily was a young mother—her infant was sickly, almost died. She was separated from her husband and then sent, after the war, to Japan against her will. Lily’s story was very much the story of Tule Lake, the camp for “traitors,” and the internees who were labeled dissidents and moved there. It was about the tortures and the stockades and the shootings—the worst of the internment. My first book was about a different camp, one of the most peaceful ones. Was Hiroshima in the version
of Lily’s story I read so long ago? Did I gloss over it then too?

I have the book somewhere, back in Brooklyn. I can read it again, find out how much I’ve forgotten, how much I must remember in some unconscious stream in my brain.