Hiroshima in the Morning (21 page)

Behind me, the famous torii, huge and vermillion, floating more than one hundred yards offshore, the gate to the entire, sacred island. The tourist arcade of
momiji manju
and wooden rice paddles; the Heian-era Itsukushima Shrine; ornate pagodas; ancient timber halls. At the base of the stairs to Daisho-in, the Buddhist temple, on the first of hundreds of wide granite slabs, I’d put my hand out to brush the running golden handrail, to roll my fingers over each of the vertical spinning cylinders within it, each inscribed with kanji; they are a chant, more than one, and spinning them is the spiritual equivalent of prayer. I’d passed between the squat bald
jizos
sitting on either side of each stair, each gazing toward his balancing partner through my running feet. I am making the most of my last days of freedom,
partaking in a ritual that has captivated me ever since I first heard of it.

Walking through fire.

In front of me, then: a wide clearing of dirt amid a quadrangle of temple buildings. It’s hard to see through the heads, six or seven deep, of Japanese tourists, but there is an altar on one end of the clearing, and in the center, a square pyre, stacked like open lattice Lincoln logs and stuffed with pine needles. There are eight monks preparing for the ceremony, robed in gold and white and heavily beaded; thick, black plastic cups strapped onto their foreheads on their closely shaven heads. Partially, intermittently, I can see they are arranging wishes on the end furthest from the altar.

One thousand yen for a wish, and I have made one. On this crisp, unscheduled day, I dropped my money in a box, accepted a bit of pine plank and a Sharpie, and wrote down my name, birth year, address, and my wish. If it’s meant to be, I’m told, it will come true. Thousands of planks have been filled out and are waiting in the boxes. I don’t know what they’re waiting for; I don’t know what is meant to be, or appropriate to ask for, but I know what I want. I want to experience the world around me fully, without blocking, or organizing, or rehearsing my way on a map. I don’t want to be capable, or well-defined.

I want to feel.

My latest leap of faith taken—that Buddha can read English—I hand in my wish just as several men appear on the
engawa
that wraps the main temple and climb up
onto the saddle of a large taiko drum. One drummer stands before the face, shouting, using his entire body to whip a baton against it. The blows get caught in the cleft of the hills and sharpen around us as the echoes of each are exactly superimposed. As I tiptoe to see, a few of the older people around me begin chanting softly.

In the space, the monks have begun to purify each corner, first with fistfuls of rock salt that spray into my hair, then with water, then with wands of white paper chains, the kind I have seen visitors shake over each others’ shoulders when they enter the shrine. The monks are also chanting, but the ritual is oddly casual: in the highly stylized world of Japan, they act more like fast-food workers in America—muttering, gesturing, checking stock, moving boxes—as they complete their assigned tasks. The ceremony coheres bit by bit: by the time the paper wands come out, the chant is rapid and organized; once the monks grab their weapons, their movements are composed. I am no devotee of religious ceremonies, but this is my first opportunity to watch black-cupped human unicorns wield swords, or chop heart shapes into the air with cookie-cutter axes, or pull back a bow and shoot arrows into the crowd. The arrows arc in all the corners except mine, where one flies straight up and then straight down directly over our heads, leaving me to duck to avoid the lunging old people who are trying to catch it for luck. There is a brief mêlée, which ends with a stunned, grey-haired gentleman lying on the ground. I watch his body bounce, watch him get his senses and then his bearings, before he dusts himself off and joins the chant again.

Two of the monks have picked up small broom-like torches and lit them on the flames on either side of the altar; my gaze leaves the man in time to see them plunged into the pyre. Smoke stirs softly: a puff, but very quickly it begins to boil with the same wild power I have seen rising off the ocean when lava hits the shoreline. It is a living creature in the center, stretching into screens and strands as it awakens. When the wind grabs it, the contour scatters and spreads, but the center continues to churn, animated, like the cumulus clouds in Hiroshima’s summer sky. Which means, not only does it have urgency, it also has edges, and shadows, and light.

It’s over me, and I feel blessed. It’s high enough that I have no trouble breathing—I can feel the heat and watch the smoke dissolve, like sea spray, into droplets. There are, like there is in the summer sky, too many formations. But these surround me; they swallow me, I expect them to fall on my skin like rain.

My mother is standing in the darkened hallway, the light from her bedroom room illuminating part of her face
. Her eyes are still bright. If I hadn’t worked so hard to shut down my own terror, we might have created a different memory. This is what I want now. The courage to reach out to hold her. To linger, even in the pain, if it means getting my mother back.

The fire has become a furnace, blazing thirty feet into the air, rippling the monks out of shape. People are coughing; eyes are stinging; the chant is growing with the sheets of blowing flame. Each monk has a box—more than one—of
our wishes. And their job, at the four corner stations, is to glance at each wish and then to throw them in bunches into the fire.

Eight monks. Forty-five minutes. Ten dollar wishes flung in fistfuls into the pyre so they will burn, cool, turn to ash. This is what we will walk on: our hopes, private needs, and impossible fantasies, all of them absorbed through the soles of our feet. Every image is vivid, every person, every smell. My wish is in the smoke, and on the path before me: I am more porous. I am standing in line, inching closer as the pilgrims in front of me step forward in twos, bits of each of us clinging to them, to the others, our hopes for the future working their ways into someone else’s heart.

Into our own.

I FOUND IT AT LAST. The shadow.

It’s in his tears, his insistence on running through his story—not for me, not in answer to my questions—but for himself. He starts where he wants to, and finishes in the same place. He lost his sister in the bombing, and he still has her clothes.

He paints the
pikadon
in watercolors every day.

Here is a man who was eaten by anger. His speeches so full of rage that Ami spent three months searching for a go-between to ask if he would talk to us. He has traveled the world, scolding and condemning. I wanted to feel this, to hear what he has to say.

But my role today is not to interview. It is to sit while he relives it, while he tries to make sense of it, while he releases the pressure that will rebuild in him too soon. With his first words, I realize he has let go of the anger he was famous for. And now, in his outpouring, there is no space between him and his story. No wall to protect him from his anguish—only terrible healing.

His sister’s face is as clear for him as it was that day; her cries; his mother’s grief, his mother’s refusal to leave the veranda, to give up, to allow that the war might have taken her child. He brings them with him, to this rented room in a community center where he must sit in a chair because of his pain. He is feeling ill, he always feels ill, this day is
worse than others but not as bad as some, yet he insists he will speak; he has even brought a folder with pages of proof. Of life before the bombing, and after, of his family as they existed in his mind. He has his
pikadon
s, and he wants me to have one.

He is ready.

And for an hour, his sister Moto will come home. His mother will smile, his friends rise from the dirt, the skies will not tremble. He will get on the train to deliver the miso paste to his oldest sister instead of being knocked to the ground. He will not see the
pikadon
, a grain of rice, tinged with yellow and growing, or the fireball he has put in my hands: red as blood, speckled orange, small as a flame, a blossoming flower, with the heart of an angry rainbow, edged in black as it grows. For an hour—if he allows himself to feel it—joy will come back with the sorrow, and his wishes too; he can have his own heart back, beating with the knowledge that someone else
knows
.

They did not die in vain. They did not disappear. Another person sees, and maybe that will make a difference.

He needs me as much as I need him. He builds his safety one person at a time. One image at a time. Each painting, each new mushroom cloud, a new instant and still too many to purge. Both in anger and in sorrow, he is trying to make witnesses, witnesses who have never seen that moment that’s too strange to capture—in words, with paint—but who can recognize it nonetheless, who will not be caught like a dumb animal but who can see the future, change it, who can see the past. I have yet to see a realistic image of
the bombings or the aftermath, and his art is no exception. Yet it’s the
pikadon
in my hands that makes me realize that it has never been their lack of words, or any failing in my interpreters, that holds me separate from the
hibakusha
. It is
a
lack of words.

But the tears will tell me.

The tattered fabric in Tokita-san’s fingers. His dead sister’s clothes.

WHAT IF THE ANSWER is not in words, but not in silences either? If it is not in labels, nor facts, nor lies?

What if the answer is in the pictures?

The
hibakusha
’s pictures are children’s pictures. They are scratches, squiggles; they look nothing like what must have been real. The adult mind tries to block the nightmare so it’s the children within the
hibakusha
who must keep trying to tell the story, the mewling finger-painter who has learned to never temper pain. When Tokita-san paints the mushroom cloud in endless series, each one is different. Each one, if you put words to it, is orange, roughly the same shape and size, each a poor copy of the previous and an even poorer representation of the day. But what if the point is
not
to copy?

When I ask the
hibakusha
to describe the explosion, they
tell me:
It was red; It was black; Everything was grey; I couldn’t see a thing. It was like a rainbow, so many swirling colors; I only saw the smoke later; It was the most beautiful sight anyone will ever see.
I have assumed all these answers are true, factual, that they can be mapped somehow, snapshots arranged according to age or location or timing. But Tokita-san’s artwork points to many visions and interpretations, even within the same heart. He points, not to the facts, but to the feeling.

 

IN THE MONTHS BEFORE I left Brooklyn, I remember I spent a morning at Ian’s primary school. The children were drawing, and they were so proud of their pictures; they would point to each scribble and tell me what it was. They had an impulse to create, and need to share, and if it looked nothing like a dog, nothing like what is “real,” it didn’t matter because they were young enough to believe in their own visions. I remember asking—“Where are his eyes?” “Is this his tail?” “How many legs does your dog have?”—telling them that the goal of art, of drawing, is to replicate as closely as possible what we all agree we see. Now, the voice in my head is Ian’s, repeating what I never fully understood: “
Mommy, if you give me a pen, I will show you what the inside of my imagination looks like.
”

The inside of us, and what it looks like. This is what I overlooked, even as I have always understood that I can conjure the truest stories with my own imagination. My imaginary narratives, their imaginary pictures—these are what move us, unedited, this is the experience that is “mine.”

I know now what I was hearing before September 11: it was the story from a distance, a chorus of what “we” did, and also “he” and “she” and “they.” It was nicely digested, put away. But it was fragile. In the face of a global trauma, an “I” emerged. If I go back, circle the pronouns, even in translation, I can trace the shift. Each individual found himself standing inside his own narrative, opened, once again, to his own experiences. As the man who finally gave up his famous anger showed me:

“
If I try to talk about it, to put it another way, the flash and the absolutely terrible . . . to try to convey it in a single word, our experience of the war as children, it was a poor . . . hard . . . scary . . . life.
”

How we tell our stories makes all the difference. They are where we store our tears, where the eventual healing lies. If “we” are talking, then we are safe in our group perspective; we do not have to own our experience alone, nor do we have to feel it. What September 11 gave to the
hibakusha
, and what they gave in turn to me, is a way to re-enter memory. As scary, and painful, as it is to claim our pronouns, “we” cannot inhabit our own lives until “I” begins to speak.