Hiroshima in the Morning (17 page)

“No one,” she says, and her voice is shaking, “should have the power to make another person—
any
other person—bury his three-year-old son.”

The sun is setting, catching us in pink and gold; the tips of the trees are flaming; the rising night is calling the stars out; people are gathering their families and going home. In the last drops of the day, an occasional carp floats out of the depths of the water. Orange and white, appearing and disappearing.

What did I see when I went to the Peace Museum? How could I have missed a story like Shin’s?

I remember my anger, my impatience. I was looking for proof, for missing pieces, perfectly formed to fit into my puzzle. I wanted answers but I didn’t want to answer. And in my anger at my own great capacity to ignore what was in front of me, I managed to blind myself with my own self-absorption. It was the young woman from my book who I wanted and her only: it was her face. If I could restore her identity, if I could see her, then I could finally see beyond her, to history as it was, to my mother, and even to myself.

But what did I
see
?

“Parents who lose a child,” Ami says in the quiet, “they have no purpose. That’s why I care. There are so many stories
about the
hibakusha
—too many to absorb. But there is always one story that will stay with you. Always.

“You just have to find it.”

EIGHT A.M. Kimiko calls and wakes me up to say that the war has begun. The United States bombed Afghanistan last night.

MINI SKIRT, waist length hair—who is this woman with the sidelong smile? The parted lips, the secret, hovering?

My mother.

The last time I was in Hawaii, my father charged me with getting rid of the evidence. Too much had accumulated, too much that they would never need. I was put to work: the tosser of mildewed shoes and half-used bottles of foundation. I was also to be the repository of my mother’s lost proficiencies: of her cookbooks, now that my father had taken over the meals; the novels she could no longer stick with; clothes she could no longer wear. My mother followed me around, wanting to try on everything, turning the books over in her hands to declare they looked so interesting! On one of those days, when I was going through the cupboards, I found the stacks of old photo albums and put them aside for later. I knew what was in them; I wanted to revisit them alone.

It was not the time to ask my father, even had he been beside me, how old my mother was in this photograph. She seemed so young, but when I did the fashion math it was clear that, unless she was a true visionary and trendsetter, she was already married in these photographs, and more than that, I was already born. This, then, not “my mother before,” but my mother.

Who is “mother” separately from the rest of us?

My mother cannot answer. But I can ask her anyway.

It has occurred to me that I am losing my mind, a grown woman dreaming of her mother. In the absence of Brian, or perhaps in our estrangement, or maybe in the nascent presence of my unconscious self, I feel unaccountably fragile—me, the formerly sturdy daughter. There are days when I see my mother in the crowd and imagine she is here, in Japan. I imagine her dead, and that this is where the dead go, that this may be the next place for her as she moves through many lives; this is the place that will make up for all the things she didn’t get to do in the life when she belonged to me. I know it’s ridiculous, yet, in those moments, I want to chase her, push past the strangers, to speak. But I don’t have the words.

Maybe the words would be about the go-go boots. The clicking heels, the extra inches, the center of the world thrown forward with her hips. The life I wasn’t aware of as a child, the textures—leather and the feathers woven into the tunic sweater in the photo—that she must have felt against her cheek but can’t remember. When would she have worn these? How, in a life that always seemed defined by all she didn’t do, could my mother have also been a woman? And what kind? How can it be only now, at age thirty-seven, that I am learning that a mother is also a woman? A female adult, with her own name?

This is my problem, my challenge. And if that sentence keeps recurring, if my personal narrative has become the litany of problems I never knew I had, of assumptions that have constricted my vision so completely I don’t even know
where opinions end and axioms begin, it is still true, a fact: every minute of my life has been lived within relationship. Defined by relationship. Child for the first half, then wife. This is the beginning of blindness—the ease of that track, the impossibility of wandering off the path—this is how attention begins to atrophy. Before coming to Japan, I never thought of myself as auxiliary, nor did I think of my mother that way . . . but of course I must have felt it because I did not want to be a mother; I did not want to give up the independence I had, at least in my imagination, only to find myself buried so deep beneath the needs of others I could no longer breathe. I must have noticed I was missing definition because I am here, in Japan, following a small group of people who, after having obeyed every rule and requirement of citizenship, found themselves abandoned in the rubble of the end of the world.

And more than just a definition: an instinct, a feeling.

Who was my mother alone? She went from her parents’ house to her husband’s at the tender age of nineteen, in much the same way I did at seventeen, though with more legal formality. She’d protested that I was too young to live with a boy,
Oh, honey, you have your whole life ahead of you, don’t rush into anything. If it is meant to be you will find each other . . . later . . . when you are older.
The fact that Brian could change the light bulbs, “take care of things,” these quieted her but did not change her mind. At the time, I was surprised because my mother liked Brian, because she was the one I counted on to approve domesticity, her daughter settled, happy. Now, with this new perspective—perhaps no
truer than any other?—she is, differently, but still, surprising. She wanted me to have my youth.

Did she also miss out on her own youth? I wonder now: a woman whose children had all left home by the time she was my age; a woman who was free again at an age when I can still feel in my body what youth is, maybe now more than ever; who had less than two decades of that freedom before she began to lose her mind? Only the girl in the go-go boots can answer that question.

I can ask her now.

NOON IS TEN P.M. in New York and my oldest son is crying because he misses me.

Noon is Lance Murikawa over coffee at the International House in Tokyo, third interview in eighteen hours, my second of the day, with a tape that does not roll in the first thirty minutes. Noon before, I was on the
shinkansen
where
keitaidenwa
are not allowed. I am living on the other side of time, always inconvenient when I call home; I am speeding through the time I have here, shuffling the top cards that Tokyo has to offer—people, books, resources I can’t find in Hiroshima—all of these and the latest bits of news too. Today, I will look at the articles my father has sent on the percentages of Americans who want Arabs to be put into internment camps in the wake of the terrorist attacks, and about the escort system that has been put into place in my own Brooklyn neighborhood by a Japanese American child of the internment to help the Muslim women get back and forth safely to the grocery stores. Tonight, I am giving a lecture.

It’s been a month since the attacks and the world is still shifting, uneasy. Brian and I call regularly, but we don’t talk. We have no reports to make, no days to share, and it may be my imagination but every time our conversation has run its course from little to nothing, I can feel Brian smirk: the thing he was waiting for did not happen, whatever unnamed “thing” that is, and he takes satisfaction in
knowing that I failed once again just as he predicted—in ticking it off the list.

I have not spoken to my boys in days. They don’t ask for me. Not until this night strikes New York and Ian is gasping for air amid his tears because he misses me; when he suddenly needs to hear my voice and he is trying to leave a message on my voicemail, trying to say words, make sounds, when my five-year-old son is trying to reach me but I don’t hear it—not until the tape is over and lunch is finished, long after he has turned over into restless sleep.

This is what I don’t know until it happens: how hard it is to breathe.

Is he sleeping?

 

WHEN I FIRST FELL IN LOVE with Ian, his eyes were closed. It was two weeks after he was born. I had spent those two weeks recovering from an emergency cesarean surgery, barely able to hold him, existing in a stunned shell that didn’t even look like me, a relic who’d survived the gauntlet to the operating room naked, puking and on her knees, who had been overtaken by scalpels and morphine and was now defined by cracked, throbbing nipples, sodden shirts, and a baffling but pervasive despair. When I could finally walk up the stairs on my own, my parents returned home, leaving me and my new family in my hands. And in that moment I remember, Brian had run downstairs to perform the time-honored New York task of moving the parked car from one side of the street to the other. Ian was nursing, and it was suddenly—a new experience—only him and me.

How could I ever forget the quiet in the living room? I felt as if I was floating. Alone with my child, in this unfamiliar, unanchored sense of being—as I watched his small lips purse and pulse at my breast, as I dissolved into the tears of encountering a real, breathing person in my arms for the first time—I could have only one, peculiar thought. They are words that make no sense, and yet they’re the ones that come back to me now. Commitment. A promise to guide him through:
Someday, my love, you will be a man
.

 

BUT NOW, IT IS THREE A.M. and he is not a man. He is a boy who doesn’t think about time zones or his parents’ struggles, who doesn’t count the number of times I’ve called this week before he decides whether to feel sad. He is asleep at last and I am in Japan—with a useless phone, and an incomprehensibly sad voice message, and the sense of doom that arises from the knowledge that there is more than a small boy who needs me in my house in New York, there is a father enraged. Brian’s voice precedes Ian’s message, a voice of fists, of trembling. He doesn’t know where I am, though I told him on the phone last night when I got to Tokyo. He doesn’t think about how I cannot take a call in the middle of an interview; that it is a limitation with consequences, but also one that is real. He wants me to answer. He wants this to be over. This whole thing, this whole life that has happened since June 19, he is waiting for it to be over, for everything to be the way it was before. He wants me to make everything better, and there is nothing I would like to do more. But I am stuck. No matter how many times
I do the arithmetic, I keep getting the same sum: because of the time difference, I will be in the middle of my lecture tonight when they wake up, eat breakfast, and go to school. During the only window when I can reach my children, my cell phone will once again be off.