Hiroshima in the Morning (25 page)

Dr. Yamada has a lot to say. So does his friend, Dr. Yoshida. So does Dr. Suzuki, the sister of another colleague who they call to join the interview about an hour into my visit. My translator is gamely trying to follow all three of them, sometimes in two overlapping conversations, when yet another of their friends drops by and she is a
hibakusha
too. The new arrival has brought fresh bread, which allows me a break to call and check on Ian (he seems okay, sitting up, holding down a bit of water but no food). I am an hour overdue, and Ami has to leave, but again, this is no problem, she will just take the boys to Kimiko’s house.

Kimiko knows they are sick and doesn’t care. She wants to have a pizza party.

It’s a balancing act, but it seems to be working. The tape is rolling, and the discussion is still going in the other room. It’s difficult to follow the simultaneous conversations, to decide which one to participate in and try to direct, and I’m not even sure who’s saying what since it’s all being channeled through my translator.

The windows were smashed, so they hung straw mats over the holes to try to keep out the flies. There were patients everywhere: on the floor, even on the ground outside without a futon to lie on, but it was so hot it didn’t matter. Everyone was hurt, doctors and patients alike. I can see Dr. Yamada extracting glass fragments from his own body without anesthesia, but the image is gone before I can ask how many, from where, and whether it hurt. I can’t smell the cremation, because no one else could—they are numb to most sensory input within days—but Dr. Yoshida is digging pits and piling bodies, and there’s a bonfire of burning flesh just outside the building day and night.

The stories are flooding in from every direction, and I am catching what I can, absorbing what I can, trusting the tape recorder to catch the overflow: there is a clerk directing patients like traffic—he wears a headband and carries
a sword, but was he a clerk at the hospital or somewhere else—and why the sword? A family heirloom saved from a falling building? Protection because the war is not yet over? Insanity? We are moving in and out of time and detail in a whirl that I have missed so much: the beds were iron frame; even before the bombing, hospitals had no emergency admission system, so people who were suddenly ill or injured had to be taken to the doctor in a two-wheeled, hand drawn cart. If only I had more time, or I could speak to each of them separately, then I could exhaust each story, but I am out of practice and this is the greatest challenge I have faced. I can feel their narratives fragmenting, shattering into a million points of view. I can’t keep up, and yet, I am transcending, being restored: they are spinning the story back to life, painting the rainbow of visions and interpretations that remind me that the truth is somewhere, not in the details but in the heart of it, if I can just blur my focus and feel. They are returning my novel to me, and I am just so happy to be here.

After four hours, I can’t stay any longer, although we’re eating bread and cake and no one is moving to leave. I have to excuse myself due to a sick child. Dr. Suzuki is a pediatrician, and very concerned to hear about Ian since there’s a severe flu going around and she has been hospitalizing children for dehydration. It’s just as well that I didn’t know about the severe flu; just as well I found out from a pediatrician who has offered free medication if I follow her to her clinic. So into the streets we go on two bicycles to get suppositories for the boys because of course, when kids are
puking, they can’t hold medicine in their stomachs so it has to go the other way. It means another twenty minutes, and it’s just as well I don’t know Ian has assured Kimiko that he can eat pizza, is in the process of eating three pieces as I ride, and is preparing to throw up in a spectacular manner in her
genkan
when I arrive.

I am a bad mother. I am a sloppy researcher. But at least I have been to the doctor.

WE ARE ON THE ROAD, on my first trip away from Hiroshima that has nothing to do with my novel. We have planned it for Brian, to add to the growing bag of film that he started in the fishing village and ease his displeasure that I left my sick son alone with a babysitter while he was gone. At some unrecorded mile marker on the Seto Ohashi Bridge, we entered uncharted territory, and I crossed the blessed threshold between tour guide and tourist. We are now on the northeast corner of the island of Shikoku,
sanuki udon
country, land of thick noodles and thatched roofs and vine bridges; it’s the first place we have visited that I’ve never seen and, therefore, am in no way responsible for. Here, where there are no longer any expectations, and none of the ideals I’ve been scrambling to meet, we can start over and encounter Japan on equal footing. We are heading into the heart of the island, toward Kompira-san, a shrine that sits eight hundred steps above the sleepy, traditional village of Kotohira.

Faith is returning, fueled from unexpected sources. At the
ryokan
in Kotohira, my Japanese is not as spotty as it seems: our hostess shows us the
furo
with no long explanation about how we are supposed to wash before getting into it; her husband smiles and helps us find some palatable medicine when Dylan throws up without warning on his shoes. All of this without the panic I first encountered
in the J-phone shop when I got to Hiroshima, without the panic I felt walking into the
okonomiyaki
building to find I was unable to order a meal. Now, I can tell our host we would like the usual Japanese breakfast and he believes me. A bit of rice and sweet rolled omelet for the boys (plus a leftover doughnut from the car), but this is Brian’s first
wa choshoku
. He is game. We’re the only foreigners in their dining room; the boys chime
itadakimasu
before eating, and Brian lifts a cradled cup in his palm to be served tea. The boys seem to view the deliberate array of food on the trays in front of them as a game, not as weird purple and yellow things. Everything goes down—rice, soup, pickled vegetables, sweet beans,
umeboshi
—from Brian’s tray and the kids’. Brian even eats the stewed fish, and if he passes the little fermented ones my way, I still breathe a little deeper and smile more broadly at each bite. Had I asked him what he wanted for breakfast, or did I, as in my memory I will imagine it, make the decision and hope? The boys challenge their father, pointing to tiny fingerlets of dried fish on their own trays and he feigns impatience—who do they think he is that he would turn up his nose at a bit of fish skin?—but with his own smile, and I love him for it.

 

THERE ARE EIGHTY-EIGHT temples in Shikoku, or at least there is an eighty-eight temple walk, which takes two months and is supposed to bestow on the pilgrims who make the journey the ability to overcome the eighty-eight evil human passions defined in Buddhist doctrine. These days, the pilgrims often go by bus. Kompira-san is one of these
sites, and the wide, granite steps to the top of Mt. Zozu are peopled with chipper folks equipped with hats and walking sticks; if you didn’t bring your own, the souvenir shops and udon factories have stands full of them outside their doors—they are free loaners, and an incentive to stop on the way down to purchase
omiyage
or eat lunch. The shops step up with the stairs for nearly half the climb: it is a terraced mall where masks and snacks begin to run together. The path breaks into occasional plateaus; for all the talk of an arduous climb—and if 785 steps is not enough, there are actually more than five hundred more to get to the true end of the path at the inner shrine—there are so many levels with temples and halls and even a stable with horses, that no one breaks a sweat.

We meander. Our day flows into the gaps; buildings with no sign of life outside them are magnets for Brian. This is how we end up at the entrance to a museum, where the docent comes out personally to invite us to remove our shoes. Shoes have been another challenge since the family arrived, heavily outfitted in laces, but Brian and the boys want to see it, so I follow them up a sloping tatami floor in stocking feet to a table where we pay a thousand yen and get a brochure with reproductions of paintings of two tigers drinking and a beautiful series of cranes.

The museum reminds me of the castles and retreats we visited in Kyoto: wooden, with wide
engawa—
the sheltered wraparound porches and walkways—and tatami rooms with sliding paper doors that stand open so the paintings can be viewed without actually having to step inside. The
boys like the tigers, but they are thrilled when our guide steps off the
engawa
and pulls a couple of leaves off a bush. He scratches a word into the leaf with a rock and within a minute, the leaf blackens around the cut and the word shows up clearly. Each boy gets to pick a leaf for his own name, and of course, Dylan wants to be the one who jumps into the garden to yank them off the bush. He is too young to write his name—he will oversee Ian’s careful letters, but once he’s sure the word is there, that he’s part of the family of leaves, he is drawn to greater interests. He wants to dance in stocking feet on the ground and play with the rocks. There is a peace in the sound of the insects around him, buffeting his simple pleasure. I am still full of hope, full of our best morning yet in Japan and our unity as a family.

This feels like a place that my mother would love, a place where, if my boys were not so bustling, she might join me, her eyes closed, breathing deep, listening to the soundtrack of tinkling water. I have come to expect her now. She has been with me in Japan almost daily, even in a passing thought that feels like a brush of her hand or a kiss on my forehead. It’s not until then that I realize I’ve been living with my mother, and also that I haven’t felt her once since my own children arrived.

She is missing.

“Mom? Are you okay?”

I can feel my eyes burning, become aware that they’re closed. I can feel myself gasp, convulse really. Ian’s voice brings me back. This is grief. I have to hold it inside me—it can’t be too hard, I don’t even know where it came from.
Maybe it’s the stairs—I dreamed of my mother running up some stairs—but I don’t know. I open my eyes; Ian has gone to get his father.

There is a family of leaves on the plank floor of the
engawa
. I imagine another one, written in childish letters, but would it say
Grandma
? Would Ian write her name? I consider these questions as if they were important, as if I was considering her signature on a contract. One that might say:
I will always be there
. I am listening for her, and suddenly so tired. I don’t want to look up, don’t want to go forward, I want my mother to return, to reassure me that she’s still here, but of course, she is not and our visit is over: the docent is trying to corral Dylan in the garden as he hops from rock to rock, and Ian is tugging his father along.

Brian is watching me; I can feel him. I don’t look up until I actually do feel him, moving forward to brush my shoulder, as if to ask,
Are you okay?
I don’t know what Ian told him, but if Brian was frustrated before, if that was the expression I didn’t want to see, now he looks as if he thinks I might truly be losing my mind.

 

WE WALK THE STEPS. For long stretches, we pretend we’re a train, with a walking stick on either side sandwiching us into a line. Taking turns—who is the engine, who is the caboose, who gets to make the “whoo whoo” noise—and I can’t even hear the birds. We march through the plazas, past the temples that I would have lingered on, to breathe. We swing around the corners, snapping the back end of the train as we pivot. I am going along; giving up, giving in. I feel so heavy,
and so alone, but they don’t seem to notice, except that I am lagging too much, not sounding loud enough.

I don’t want to be the train. I don’t want to be the mother. I don’t want to be the zookeeper, either, the responsible one who has already spent too much of their visit saying: “Don’t pee in the
furo
. Don’t run on the
shinkansen
. Don’t jump up and down on the neighbors’ ceiling. Don’t touch.” I did it to myself, I know: I am the one who pitted one against the other, put my family in opposition to my work. I am the one who offered not to do the interviews, never to leave my family alone.

But at this moment, childish as it is and selfish, I want some quiet. My mother is lost, and I am the mother now. I am not the woman she was, a mother who could make her child feel like there was nothing she would rather be doing than being with me, being my mother. No, I am a mother of peanut butter nightmares, unable to cope, unsure of when I began to feel so much and fall apart so easily.

The “whoo whoo” noise is pressing into my head. I want to stop. Turn around. Take the next five hundred steps and disappear. I want to freeze the boys in time so I can figure out what I’m supposed to do now. How do I take care of these needs when I have so many of my own?