Hiroshima in the Morning (29 page)

We walk, with great deliberation, down the middle of the gamut of “any things” for sale. The streets between the
pier and the famous Itsukushima Shrine are lined with post-cards, painted fans, key chains, and plastic trucks. Wooden
shakushi
of every size painted with various kanji; wooden bowls; wooden plates. Oyster bars with windows displaying lengths of shell-encrusted ropes from the Seto Inland Sea; open barbeques with fresh oysters on the grill. And, of course, the ubiquitous
momiji manju,
the maple leaf-shaped sponge cakes filled with red bean paste that are the specialty of the island. We watch the assembly-line machines pour the batter, scoop the filling, and bake them before our eyes. And we stop—today being what it is; my boys being creatures who need fuel, who look on anything sweet, not as a taste, but as something to be consumed in multiples. These will hold us while we walk through the arcade, still strolling for the shrine.

I am trying not to get caught in the aimless currents of shopping. Even if there’s no hurry, even if I’m moving as if my space boots are all that keep me from floating away, I have pinned my future on this performance. It’s a symbol of what I’ve given my old life up for, and a gauge of what I’m moving toward. This is my boys’ first chance to step onto the wooden walkway of the shrine that floods when it storms; their first wild shake of the white paper wands over their heads to cleanse themselves at the shrine entrance. We are here at last, but the stages are empty. The boys drag Brian toward the narrow pier that fronts the shrine and point to the floating torii—they have found open ground, and they each have a hand—and their momentum allows me to wave them off and see if I can find out what’s going on.

The boys are beginning to flip over the low railing that encloses the stage. Three
shimai
performances are scheduled before the
bugaku
we have come for; each is a half an hour long. These dances are simple—there are no masks or elaborate costumes—and the stage is placed right in the middle of a milling crowd in a tent, and so, even though many people stop to see what’s going on, they aren’t exactly rapt. Attention is good for five minutes, and then, since the small gaijin boys cannot drift toward the sake with the others, they twist and whine and wiggle and talk.

I could shush them, make them watch. I could measure the distance between how bored they are and how much I would love this with any one of the Japanese friends I have made here, and use it as proof that I can’t be a mother, but today, I will not. Three performances is long enough to do something else before the
bugaku
, and on this island, not too far from here, is the temple where I went firewalking. I stoop to pull them to me, hold them still and close to me on either side as I tell them about the long steps, the room of
jizo
s at the top, and the ceremony of fire.
You walked on fire, on the flames? And you weren’t burned, really?
They are captivated, ready to race ahead and then they do, checking back at every branch in the path, leaving Brian and me to walk together. He is sad and settled; I don’t know what he’s thinking. I’ve lived here long enough to know that an answer is not correct just because it is timely, so I don’t press him. Bad news comes when it comes.

“You should do what you want from now on,” he told
me last night. “Finish your interviews. Your time here is your own.”

All this time, I was waiting for love to save us. I was waiting for the truth to present itself, for the happy ending.
You never wanted to come home
, he’d said, and it seemed important to let that stand. It was true. I have to own that. I have to feel it, because it is how he feels. He had something that disappeared, and who am I to say that he shouldn’t want it? It was his, was what he loved, and he was who he was because of it. We all have the right to imagine ourselves as we want to be, and to try to make that real.

There will come another night when we will write our own metaphor. It will be summertime, in New York, after months of him asking for parameters and definitions, and me not being able to say. We built a treehouse, he will say to me, and it was perfect. And I will imagine a boat, one that could take us anywhere; I will describe it, and how we could build it, and I will ask him to join me in it.

But I like the treehouse.
I can still hear his voice.
I want the treehouse.

For some reason, I will place this exchange on our futon, in our room as it was last night, as we looked out over the river. That’s how memory is: imperfect. That’s how the future embeds in the past. But it may also be that I place it here because last night, I made a decision. Though he did not leave Japan early as he threatened to, I will stay here after he leaves. There’s an end I haven’t reached yet. I will postpone my trip home for another two weeks.

He is leaving me. In my head, I try out this configuration of words. They sound strange but just as right as the switch of the pronouns: I am leaving him.

Is this how divorce happens? I wonder. You wake up to a day when pronouns do not matter? When it’s no longer surprising that the one you loved doesn’t want you anymore?

Right now, today, I am still surprised. There will be plenty of time ahead to become used to the idea. I will try until I cannot anymore because that is who I am, and he will never be the one who would step out the door, which has always been him. The death of a marriage is a long course toward exhaustion. The last breath may not even be remembered.

The boys are ahead of us, stopped on a long promenade of steps lined on either side with engraved stone pickets that record the donations to the temple. They have been worried about their parents, linking us in a chain for most of the day as if they knew we were about to fly apart, but this place has liberated them. First they crouch down beside the tiny statues, then spin gold through their fingers as they zigzag up the stairs. Now they are reading kanji. Just a few. They are checking each donation marker—there are hundreds on each side—for my name, the “Mommy character,” an older and uncommon kanji; they are looking for
ko
, which means child; for
kawa
, the three lines that look like a river;
ta
the box with the cross through it that signals a rice field. They are looking for themselves in Japan: Ian methodical in his search; Dylan running up and down the walk, racing backward,
leaping, always about to fall. This is a day, that’s all it is; it doesn’t have to be an omen. It doesn’t have to be the end of something, or the first sign of what’s to come.

 

WE ARE SITTING on a bench in the cold, eating fried and frittered food. Our visit to the temple has restored us somewhat, and the plentitude of French fries seems to be finishing the job. Dylan is entirely focused on his chicken fingers and I’m enjoying my octopus balls; we’ve each chosen what we wanted, and our delight in finding it overshadows the fragile fact that our choices are entirely different. This small allowance in the seams of our life allows us to breathe, so when the snow begins to fall again and Brian spots a crowd gathering around the stage at the shrine behind us, we leave our food behind and take off together. The music has begun, but the stage holds only snow, and there’s a place for four in the front in the center as the bugaku begins.

There are four dancers on the small, raised platform. They’re surrounded by a low, orange railing, flanked by the copper lanterns, backed by the smaller lantern and the
torii
. They are older, stern-looking men—not lithe or beautiful, not breathtaking in their movements. What they are is a perfect fit in their setting. Their costumes are principally green and gold and orange—in traditional Japanese fashion, they are multilayered, thick and cozy, the prints overlap and do not quite match, the final drape is diagonal so that their sleeves, when they bring them together, are different colors. Their robes have long trains and their shoes are odd and elfin; their hats are helmets of brocade and gold
with knobs and points and curls and feathers. The shoes are simple fabric creations in white with a center seam and a silhouette that suggests leprechauns, or maybe the comb of a rooster. The music, of course, is eerie and sad and somewhat screeching and clashing, and it doesn’t follow the dance, which is very simple and repetitive. The dance circles; arms sweep back and forth and hold; there is some stomping and heel work—it looks like a cross between hula, mime, and clogging.

It is otherworldly, and exactly what we came for.

There are only two dances. But I am standing with my family when my baby, my Daddy’s boy who has not come to me once in Japan if his father was also an option, climbs into my arms. The trains on the dancers’ robes are tracing tracks on the stage and the world beyond the torii has faded into white, much as the islands on the edge of the Seto Inland Sea drop out of view in the late day’s haze, and the
shō
is lifting into the air, when my son pats my head with one hand and dangles the other down from his perch to hold my hand. In the empty space beside me, I imagine my mother beside us, just a memory of her, and I know that I will finish what I started here, that there is not only one, unyielding choice. Life is both, not one or the other. Not opposites. And there is something more—born of my new self or allowed because of it, or perhaps always there but never seen until I reached this perspective—my joy in encountering my children. As my fairytale marriage enters the woods, there are breadcrumbs: my trust in the small fingers that are melting the snow in my hair.

HERE IS THE PRIEST with the map. Here are the yards of paper I first encountered on my trip with Ami to her family’s graveyard during Obon, and hundreds of photographs. If Ami urged me to look at Japan in context, here is one: the ruined past of the town that used to thrive on the point of land directly under the hypocenter. Nakajima.

It was a bustling place, Toshiro Ogura tells me, his fingers wandering down the missing streets, pointing out buildings and landscape. In the Meiji and Taisho eras, there were movie theaters, cafes, billiard saloons, and lots of shopping on the main streets. It was a port: “Nakajima-cho” means the town in the middle of an island. Lumber, rice, and other crops were carried here by boat down the Otagawa. Also, from the islands in the Seto Inland Sea, fruits and vegetables arrived. Here, he shows me, the banks were lined with special steps that worked as wharfs. This is where the goods arrived. It was a living town, a busy mercantile, and business center, full of wholesalers and retailers.

There were ten temples in the not-so-big town of Nakajima.

This one, Joho-ji, near the bridge where the main street curves, about ten meters from where the memorial cenotaph is now, was his father’s.

This is me,
he points out, going through the photographs,
the sixteenth generation of my family. This is my family, and
this is me again . . . in thirteenth year of Showa (1938). This is Grandmother in front of the temple. This is Father, Mother, and this is my sister Reiko.

In the rippling black and whites, the mother sits, the girl at her feet, her husband in Western clothes and a fedora. A family pose so familiar I feel I have seen these people before. Here, again, are the lily of the valley arches, the ladies in kimonos in better times. And over there, against the ubiquitous backdrop of wooden gates, a grandmother: small, and decorated, with careful hair. It is not that I know her. It’s that I know this search through memory.

Ogura-san takes out another, newer map and points to the overlaps: the bridges that stand in both eras, the contours of the river banks; he superimposes the Peace Park, where the monuments hover over the past. He’s concerned that the city wants to pull down the Rest House, the only building left standing in the park, so that it can put up something clean and modern. He’s worried the government is trying to get rid of the few “dirty and old parts of the city” that are left. The old parts are our witness to the past, he says, and I understand. I’ve been in the basement of the Rest House, once a small kimono fabric store built in 1929, where almost no one goes. Above ground: the tourists and the brochures and the booth that will put your picture on stickers. Below: me in a hard hat, in a wet concrete ruin, where the shadow of Hiroshima lies.

Ogura-san is talking about the restoration. He’s afraid that visitors to the Peace Park cannot feel what happened there, but instead are relieved that the hypocenter was quite
near to a park so there were not many people affected. He is talking about now, about the future, but in the pictures he is flipping, the past is unrelenting. The family.

He is the only survivor. Everyone in his family was killed. One hundred and seventy of the two hundred people in his father’s parish also died. Almost no one in the bustling town of Nakajima survived. His context, then: he is an orphan. His fifteen-year-old sister, forced to make weapons parts in a munitions factory in Tenma-cho, was injured and suffered for a day before she died. He was bounced around between cousins while he was growing up. I think of Tokita-san and wonder why this man isn’t filled with anger.
Looking back,
he says, off hand,
I have something I feel strange about. No one around me spoke ill of the United States.

As if blame was too inconsequential for the vast emptiness that was there.

And sadness, too. In the newspaper articles I read about this man, the relative who finally came to get him after the war says he was a stoic boy who didn’t cry when he heard the news of the deaths of his parents and his sister, but instead tried to comfort her. I ask him about this, but he doesn’t remember what he was thinking. He remembers seeing Hiroshima again:
I was overwhelmed. I was shocked. I felt hollow, and looked around.
He struggled, he tells me that, and I think of him, a young boy, alone. Struggle is good, he says. Sometimes, you have to go on alone.