Hiroshima in the Morning (23 page)

DAY FIVE, KYOTO, and I am surrounded by the wail of spirits trapped, a sound that is jarring, not so much in its dissonance, as in its sorrow. I am alone in our room at the
ryokan
for one more precious hour, drinking
maccha
with my walk-man playing. I have returned early from my reading and
am compulsive in my need for this thick, powdered tea used in the tea ceremony, which I have only tasted once before, and the squeal of the
shō
—the harmonic, multitiered mouth organ that strikes like a fistful of knives, carving loss into my head until my mouth waters. If I am forcing this experience, if I am looking to Japan itself to soothe me—its eccentricities and traditions, its instruments and tea—it doesn’t matter. I can still forget, for the moment, that the shower doesn’t work and see only the
shoji
doors and the enclosed balcony onto the inner courtyard. The seats out there are too rickety to sit on, and the balcony floor is plastic tile, but the low table where I am sitting is very much like the one I have in Hiroshima. There is a Noh mask, and a simple
tokonoma
altar, and a kabuki doll in a glass box resting on the safe that doesn’t seem to work. In the mid-afternoon, there is nowhere to walk. When Brian and the boys left the
ryokan
to explore Kyoto while I was working, they left three futons and all the bedding all over the floor. If I fold them, it will be a rebuke, but I am too tired to care.

I can’t write. I am trying, in this sudden solitude, but there’s nothing on the page.

 

AFTER FIVE DAYS HERE, the boys still think Japan is not so different from New York. It’s just the same, they tell me, except New York has no temples. New York also has no shrine weddings, no
yukata
s, squat toilets, tatami floors, futon beds, pillows stuffed with beans, hand held shower “rooms,” toilets in a separate cubicle, no-shoes rules, rice and soup for breakfast,
senbei
stores, fresh red bean
anko
cakes,
yakitori
everywhere in the streets,
taiko
drums . . . This is the world I have been living in—my new world; these are the experiences I’ve tried to cram into their first week. This is my gift—my eyes, my vision culled from my full five months in Japan—and the pain I feel when they toss it aside is startling. How can they not love what I love? How can they not even see it?

Brian points out that the buildings here are not as big as the ones in New York, and that, here, the taxis aren’t yellow.

This is the culture shock: fragmented, lodged in the skin. We keep knocking against our differences—Brian sees them before I do; he draws the conclusions. I am rejecting him when I try to keep the boys from treating the
shinkansen
like an amusement park; when I feel the stiff backs of the quiet Japanese families and the unprecedented sight of passengers leaving their assigned seats to move to another car on the train; when I connect it to the fact that my children are singing the soundtrack of
Shrek
at the top of their lungs. It is true that I’m so aware of our perpetual uproar: our huge bags in the streets, our need for something sweet in the morning and for a toilet in our room. They look askance at the foods I reach for; they wait, bouncing, for the world to move in those moments when I would wait for time to spin down. I feel as if I’m floating, and I don’t know if I was floating before they came, when I was living a life where I was doing “nothing” as Brian points out, or if I am hovering now because I haven’t yet found a hook on their lives to attach to. It’s as if we have lost a common field of vision:
when we reach out to the place where we think we see each other, there is only air.

I can do no right—not yet. Not when I’m with them, not when I must leave them, which I did on our second night together, after a long day of sightseeing, when they were hungry but too tired to sit in a restaurant. Dylan was sniffling, too jetlagged to open his eyes; we had only
sembe
in our hotel room—puffed air wrapped in seaweed—and Brian cannot speak the language so it was left to me to bring home dinner for my brood.

Take-out seemed an obvious choice, though I don’t know who suggested it. That is, until I found myself alone in an unfamiliar town, learning the hard lesson that Japanese restaurants don’t generally have disposable containers, until I found myself searching farther and farther from the hotel, stretching time past the breaking point until I finally walked into a small eating place, so flustered by then—so aware of my failures that I couldn’t make myself understood, all those words I thought I’d learned, where were they when I needed them?—that the cook abandoned his kitchen, asked his diners for their patience, and escorted me down the street and right, then left, then pointed me to a distant food stand. There, where the owner was about to close down, I could buy a stewed fish head and stewed
gobo
and some other items, like seaweed salad, that my children have never eaten. It was food, the only food I had found in the last forty minutes, and they were starving. I tried to imagine them in our hotel room—soft and hard, small and large and always warm, and hungry—and so ill-equipped to pick up
a fish head and suck on it. Could they do it? Would they? Might they accept that I had done my best, that this was Japan, and eat the only thing I could offer? As the woman stacked the most innocuous items into two bags for me, why was it that the only image I could conjure was of my two sons climbing on their father, curled up against, around and under, their faces pressed into his skin and so far away from me? I used all the money I had left in my wallet after a day of endless spending on the family and took a different route back to the hotel. There it was, a block away: 7-Eleven. The chain where I have bought half of my meals in Hiroshima, a place my stunned brain had entirely forgotten.

 

THEY WILL BE BACK SOON, back from the train museum where they spent their time during my reading—too boring for the boys to attend in Brian’s judgment. That their day went well is more important than the result of my own. Last night, with the boys laid out on futons and the two of us huddled in the corner of the hotel room with only the shower stall to retreat to, Brian protested—frustrated and frazzled—at the prospect of having the boys on his own again.
Why do you have to do this reading?
he asked.
What are we supposed to do alone in Kyoto?

How fast this happens.

I didn’t come here to babysit
.

I knew he didn’t come here to babysit. Of course he didn’t. They have been without me for 150 days. Why would they want to be alone for one minute longer? How can they navigate Japan, a place even I’m finding more difficult than
I thought it was? I gave them an English map of Kyoto, took them to the English tourist bureau; I circled the sights, explained the buses. I gave Brian my guidebook, dog-eared on all the pages he would want to read, but I could feel his resistance every time I flipped one: not wanting to embrace my interests, not ready yet to find his own.

I have amends to make. For 150 days, he sacrificed and now it’s my turn. That’s why I made the promise. This reading will be my last official bit of work. If it is faith we are missing, I have offered something to hold onto: I will put my book aside, let Japan be our playground. All of us together as a family, after this reading, which I have just finished, never alone.

MY SON IS CRAWLING on the floor.

Not in our hotel, on our tatami, quietly toward the door so his father won’t wake up. Not in the otherwise-childless
izakayas
, the pubs in which we have to weave our way past drinking patrons to go to the bathroom for the third time.

No, he is crawling in the castle, the jam-packed World Heritage Nijo castle in Kyoto, four hundred years old, former home to the Shoguns, an estate that was once so grand the rocks themselves were oriented to provide the most
pleasing view. It is a paranoid’s dream of moats and towers and high walls and secret rooms—much of which is closed to the public—but the main palace is a playground for my children, both of whom are crawling, and slithering under the “no entry” ropes, perilously close to the sliding shoji doors that protect the lord’s inner chambers and the priceless, gilded paintings of tigers, animals, waterfalls, and other natural beauty deemed too delicate for a photo flash.

If I could pretend the boys weren’t mine, I might try, but although we are three of thousands of tourists—this is the height of the fall foliage, and
kinrou kansha no hi
, a vacation that has been described to me as “thanks for your labor, now go out and commune with the trees,” which every Japanese citizen must have decided to do in the Kansai region because it was hell getting a room in Kyoto during the week and tomorrow there is no room at any inn in Kyoto, Nara, or Osaka, nothing as far west as Okayama, so tomorrow we have to go home to Hiroshima earlier than I planned—still, today, in this castle, we are the only white people here. The boys could never get lost; tens, even hundreds, of helpful Japanese would immediately usher them to join me wherever I disappeared to, but that is not why I’m stuck to them. I’m stuck to them by the knowledge that they are
fast
. Fast enough to be past the sliding doors and grubbily fingering the painted tigers if I so much as turn around. And there is no refuge in Brian either, since I owe him five months of downtime and he’s spending only his first morning of it now while I try to cope with these nightingale floors. All morning, my children have been fine—decently behaved
if a little vigorous—but coming up on midday these floors, which were built deliberately to squeak so no assassin could sneak up on the Shogun, have turned them into samurai. It is an undeniable challenge for two dark blond boys in red down coats who like to shriek, and laugh, and who are now dragging themselves on their hands. It’s an unimaginable challenge for me that Dylan has just become some strange creature named Jonal while I get a guilty glimpse into how hard Brian’s world has been, and he is contemplating the peace of a golden temple I have never seen.

They crawl; they run; they’ve been in Japan a week now and I’ve never seen them walk, not even to the shower. They favor the castles for the “keep out” ropes they try to swing on; in the gardens, they will kiss me and hug me and tell me they love me and then duck the barriers and try to jump into the ponds. I am thanking the Japanese Tourist Bureau for closing three quarters of this compound to the public. To say that I’m not used to ages three and five is the world’s most pathetic understatement. Three and five year olds do not sightsee; they do not even see sights unless it is the sight of all the small pebbles they can lob at each other, which hit the bent-over
obaasans
between them each time they miss. My “mother shock” is characterized by my complete inability to keep old ladies safe from my children.

I’m not Ian, I’m Ash.

And I’m Brock, Dylan declares. And you’re Misty.

If Pokemon characters are not national treasures, at least they are Japanese.

Ian yells for “roll call,” which apparently requires each of us to answer to our Pokenames, and for the last to say: “All present and accounted for.” They want me to tell them how to say this in Japanese.

I don’t know.

Maybe. Possibly. It’s the best I can do, and I can’t tell whether people are staring because we are mangling Japanese at a refresh rate of once every ten seconds, because our dragging sneakers are writing illiterate but complex political treaties in accidental kanji in the dust, or simply so the pebbles won’t hit them between their shoulder blades again. Castles, temples, shrines, pagodas—all of these are crowded out of my day’s itinerary by two thoughts. The first one is that under no circumstances do I want to risk assault charges by retracing my steps back into the castle even for a forgotten fleece hat, and the second is: ducks. The boys love ducks and there must be a park somewhere. We still have three, unimaginably long hours before we are supposed to meet Brian at the
ryokan
.

We’ll walk, I decide, to tire them out.

We walk, and keep walking. We are looking for a bus, but I am navigating Kyoto with a map that’s entirely out of scale, and, by the time we cram ourselves into the rear door of one and try to figure out the idiosyncrasies of how to pay the fare, my body is as weary as my shell-shocked mind. We dump ourselves off at a park, where I can’t find the promised ducks. Ian and Dylan are scrambling in the gravel path in front of me, and, whatever their game is, it is turning
into a fight. Something about Captain Hook—Dylan doesn’t want to be Captain Hook—and when I tell Ian to stop bugging his brother, he calls me a fish face. I couldn’t care less about being a fish face, but Dylan doesn’t like this at all—being a fish face is a bad thing, unacceptable especially for his mother, and since he is three and correspondingly powerless, he is crying. The tears provoke more of a “sing” in the song of “fish face,” which Dylan meets with screams of
No!
and some stamping. Any minute he’s going to throw himself into the gravel in my defense. I am beyond nurture, beyond compassion and reason. I need a diversion, so even though I know I shouldn’t reward bad behavior, I pull a box of chocolate-covered Pockys out of my backpack and rediscover one of the golden rules of maternal sanity: Feed the children.

No wonder their behavior has fallen off so impossibly. It is two p.m., and I have completely forgotten lunch.

I DREAM HER RUNNING. Footsteps on the stairs below.

I am standing in a stairwell, in a building I have never seen: barren, shattered walls. A relic, or under construction; there is a sky here. A blue sky. It’s my mother on the stairs, ascending. Something in the sound I recognize: she is rushing
toward me and I’m waiting to catch her in my arms. Because it is a dream, I can know this is why I’m here. It’s up to me to scoop her out of the stream she is caught in. She cannot stop.