Hiroshima in the Morning (11 page)

Brian can send it to me.

“Yes, I’ve heard of Lily,” I tell him. “I would be so grateful for her address.”

IT IS TOO LATE for my mother to join me here. I can’t shake that knowledge, the sense that I should have done this years ago so my mother could see Japan. It’s not just that my writing is attached to her history, or that this country is the home of her first language. My impulse has always been to expand my mother’s horizons, because her life in tiny town Hawaii seemed so small.

My mother took care of the children.

It was my self-appointed responsibility to do what she hadn’t. To live the life that could be claimed vicariously; even when I knew my mother worried about some of the things I did, I also knew that she marveled when I accomplished them, when I was safe another day. That was my greatest success—to be alive and well somewhere else—and
there were calls in the middle of the night to double check, every time the evening news reported that someone somewhere in another New York borough had been mugged. My parents managed to stretch an uneventful 1950s existence into a lifetime. They raised me in a place where children could spend an afternoon without adults, diving beneath the lips of underwater caverns, because somehow, in the lazy shelter of this barefoot world, it was not ever possible to be harmed. Crime was rare, because anonymity did not exist, and besides, it wasn’t practical. Stolen cars turned up in a field of sugar cane once the tank was empty, because it was an island after all.

If it was odd that a woman who was so safe would worry so obsessively about her daughter, I imagined it was, in fact, the placid nature of my mother’s life that left her unequipped to deal with even the possibility of danger. When I was in college, my parents used to come to the big city every summer to visit me, and I would show them around, showing off, completely forgetting that my father lived in Greenwich Village when he was in college, and that the first time I ever visited New York, as a young teenager, my parents took me there, and my mother and I buckled our purses onto the epaulets of our raincoats so we wouldn’t be robbed. My parents, too, ignored the past and allowed me to be the worldly one.

In response, I honored my mother’s fear.

For all my plucky posture, I lived in New York very carefully, triple checking whether or not I had my keys, was heading in the right direction on the subway; I bought a lock
that featured a steel bar that went all the way into a hole in the floor when Brian and I moved into our first apartment so there was no way to force the door. If my mother’s fear had no root, it had branches, and I lived with her scenarios in my head: being knocked over by a bicyclist, picked off in a drive-by shooting, cornered by a gang of boys. It was Brian who chose New York. I followed him because it was where he went to college; I stayed because it was where he got a job. When we were together, it was exciting, but alone, I was easily exhausted. I narrowed my parameters: became the kind of person who always took the same route because that was what I knew, what worked, and there was a comfort in knowing it intimately, down to the length of each traffic light and the name of the vendor selling stale donuts on the third corner. In that way, I survived.

Japan, and especially Hiroshima, is a place without threat. My mother could have moved here by herself, discovered her history on her own. There is no protection to organize, no peace to make, no responsibilities.

She would have loved it.

Time moves, Ami told me, from present to past. That’s what the Buddha said. Here, I have time on my hands to remember, so it should be no surprise that I am moving into the past to linger there. My past is still the place where my mother is always there when I need her. When I think of my mother—a woman who never did something for herself instead of for me, who spent her life driving me to the store, sewing my prom dress, hugging me when I did something wrong—I can still feel how I demanded that; how I
resented it; how I loved my mother entirely. Though I never brought myself to admit it, in all those years when I didn’t want to be a mother, it was partly because I didn’t want to be
my
mother. And yet, I’ve also always known I wouldn’t have wanted her to be any other way.

I REMEMBER A TIME—we were sitting together on my sofa in New York, me and Mom. We used to spend hours hanging out, “solving the world’s problems” she used to call it, so it makes sense that it was just the two of us.

She was talking about children. Again. How her children were the joy of her life. She did more of that as I got older. She didn’t say,
You’re thirty now, you’re getting old
, but she did say things like,
I would hate to see you lose your opportunity
.

It was a time in my life when things were going well. Brian and I had had some problems, but we were working them out—we were both working really hard—and I was finally exactly who I wanted to be. I’d quit my job and, for the first time since I was a teenager, I was writing. I was whitewater rafting. I was in love with my husband. I was happy.

This memory is real, if anything can be called real anymore. I didn’t know how to explain myself to her. The life
she lived, the family connections, the caretaking that she found important—I didn’t want that. It was messy, too easy for me to get derailed. So I just told her. I told her what I had: there I was, thirty years old, finally an adult, finally empowered. I was building an identity for myself as a writer, adding a little strength, a little daring; my new life was set up exactly right. This is what I’d been looking for, what I worked toward. This is what I possessed, and I was going to keep it.

She looked confused at first, and then amused. “But sweetheart,” she said, “your life isn’t over. It’s going to change. That’s what life is. You can’t hold onto things the way they are, even if you want it. It’s always going to be different.”

ON THE EDGE of the Otagawa, some three feet below me, smooth stones embedded in a concrete bank slide into the river. I am sitting just north of the Aioibashi, the T-shaped bridge that rests on the crown of the Peace Park, which is said to have been the target for the atomic bomb. Over my head, tens of thousands of cellophane ties have been strung on long ropes across the river. There are hundreds of ropes, beginning from one point on the opposite bank and extending
into the tops of the building on this side. In outline, they suggest a sail, though in practice, the cellophane merely traces the wind rather than catching it. I’ve been riding by them daily on my borrowed bicycle, watching them multiply over the last two weeks as the anniversary of the bombing approached, but now that the day is here, I still don’t know what they mean.

It is perhaps ten o’clock at night on August 6, the anniversary of the atomic bombing. And these ties are flying up and away from me in the darkness, sometimes grey ghosts and sometimes glinting silver when the wind pulls them into the lights from the buildings and the full moon. On the flat black river in front of me is a flotilla of sampans and luxury boats, and of course, the kaleidoscopic paper lanterns.

They are small, square bags of brightly colored papers, maybe eight inches in diameter. They float on thin wooden crosses, lit with small wicks. Some ten thousand lanterns: yellow, purple, blue, red, pink, orange, green.

I arrived in the early evening, when the banks around the main launching platform resembled something of a carnival, with lines of people four deep and hours long. I floated with the crowds, watching the people around me break away to buy a lantern at any one of the many stalls on the banks; I watched them write their wishes on the paper, and the names of the people they wanted to remember, and then take them down to the water to be lit and sent on their way. I’ve been told that the lanterns are peculiar to this area of Japan, and are designed to console the souls of the dead, but I don’t understand exactly how they are consoled. I’ve
asked myself: Do the lanterns call these souls back from wherever they are to spend a day among the living? Or is the anniversary a time when the souls will roam anyway, and the lanterns offer reassurance and remembrance that allows them to rest for another year? And what of the light itself—does the flame stand for memory, or love, or is it a safe place for the souls to inhabit while they are visiting?

The questions will not let me rest.
Are we calling the souls to us, or tucking them back into bed? Is the ceremony for them, or is it for us?

This being Japan, of course, there is never an answer.
What do the cellophane ties stand for? What’s going on onstage? What was your mother like?
No matter how simple the information I am asking for is, or how I phrase any question; whether I give a slew of choices to select from or offer none at all, the response is invariably, “I don’t know.”

Tonight, I must ask: What if there is no answer? What if there is no lapse between cultures or problem with translation, but simply no key that unlocks the meaning behind all these “I don’t knows”? I spent the evening with the peace activists at their lantern ceremony, the purpose of which I couldn’t quite figure out. We were south of the main launching spot for the lanterns, and the tide was running north for the first time in sixty years because of the full moon and so the lanterns did not flow by our chosen spot, but it didn’t seem to matter to anyone else. We put up our banner anyway. We ate
musubis
and drank green tea. I found out that Kimiko herself is a
hibakusha
; she was eight when the bomb was dropped, and she will tell me that story,
sometime, when
you are ready.
Meet this Czech reporter, she said to me, and then I lost her. A guest from French Polynesia played Eric Clapton songs on a borrowed guitar as I waited to understand what I was just told, waited for the evening’s agenda, and was finally forced to confront the possibility that that moment might be all there was.

It was just a song.

I came to Japan to ask questions, but the longer I stay, the more inappropriate that feels. It’s not that my friends don’t want to answer, it’s more that it’s never occurred to them to break an idea or an object down. When I try to analyze, it brings the moment to a halt and I’m left with nothing—no explanation, and no experience either. It’s a bizarre world where questions obscure the answers, where they stymie forward motion rather than opening up a path, but that’s the world where I’ve found myself. An “
ichigo ichi e
” world, as one of Ami’s friends tried to explain to me. One time, one chance. Or,
it is what it is, and it might be important.
I must accept the moment I’m living in, embrace it entirely, then let it go so there’s room for the next moment. Living in this way, the meaning of everything will become clear.

Or it won’t.

 

MY MOTHER IS STANDING in the darkened hallway, one hand on the frame of the door to her bedroom, the light from that room illuminating part of her face. And on that face, tears, and terrible anger. Which day is this, and who was it who said the words that hang in the air and caused the explosion?
I told you three times already! Why can’t you remember such a
simple thing?
She knows she should remember, and that she does not, and she’s terrified. But the outburst is terror too, and a plea, a hope against hope that this not remembering is stress, exhaustion, that she’s being lazy and if she could just pay attention we would all be restored. No one wants what is happening. No one can bear it. It’s a pain that cannot be borne. So we rush through it, through recrimination and apology; we rush to restore ignoring. My mother will come to lose that fear, and those will be days of greater harmony and also greater sorrow. She will come to a point of complacency, where she does not remember what she lost.

But in the half-light of the hallway and of memory, my mother’s eyes are still bright.

 

THIS LATE, only a thin parade of lanterns meanders down the center of the river. From this distance, they are principally red and green and yellow, though I saw many different shades of blue being painted earlier; there’s one group, all red, nestled together in a float. The water is still now, so the soft lights serve mostly as a setting for the sampans, which putter by, dark and full of unlighted lanterns that they have scooped out of the river in their cleaning sweep. In one cluster, a lantern has begun to burn.

What if I stop trying to define for a moment—if I let the ties be just ties, if the lanterns are only paper sacks? If I give up my questions and just sit, what do I see? The lights of Hiroshima, undulating in long lines along black water—a mirror, and maybe the inspiration for the flying ties overhead. The street car running across the T-bridge—a piece
of the real world where people still need to get somewhere, a reminder of the trams and the people on them who turned into perfect charcoal statues on “that day.” If I walked toward the bridge and out of the shelter of cellophane feathers, I would emerge from the darkness by the A-bomb Dome, which sits like a half-forgotten nightmare across from the Peace Park. It is the dome itself—the skeleton of the dome, a helmet, spiked and dangerous, that makes it an icon. Tonight, with the lighting from the ground, it will be a beacon. In the morning, it will shrink—after all, much of the building is missing—and sink into its embrace of enormous trees.

At this moment, the tide is beginning to turn.

I have slipped away from my friends’ celebration to sit on the riverbank alone. I’ve moved from the discomfort of feeling I have too much space to actively seeking solitude—as much of it as possible. If I was asked—how do you define yourself?—I would have to think for a while. Once I would have said my identity is solid, settled somewhere half way across the world, and if I am finding it increasingly difficult to access at the moment, that doesn’t mean it’s disappeared.

And yet, every night, when I sit down to write, my laptop is hot and heavy, and there is obligation in my keyboard. Brian has a list of friends and family who complain about how bad I am at answering their emails. How is the food? they ask. Seen any temples? In fact, my correspondence is not so deplorable. If I wish Brian was more interested in my experiences, there are still a few friends who respond to my reports, who hear my thoughts and answer with their own,
who comment on my mission, which is increasingly important to me, of finding history in the stones.