Hiroshima in the Morning (9 page)

It is 1955. Twenty-five young girls, bomb victims, “monstrous reptiles” as one will describe herself, are flown to Mount Sinai Hospital in New York for plastic surgery to reconstruct their faces, their fused fingers, to remove the thick, keloid growths that make it difficult for them to eat
and sleep. These are the Hiroshima Maidens, the
gembaku otome
. The first girl to undergo surgery will die almost immediately on the table from complications from the anesthesia, the others will have multiple surgeries—twenty, thirty—which will take more than a year to complete. While they’re in America, they’ll visit many different places with the friends who are sponsoring them. They will go to Berkeley, heart of peace activism, where Aunt Molly lives.

 

Who are they?

 

THEY ARE THE GIRLS who were put away in a box for changing, for being in the wrong place at the wrong time and daring to survive. Who did they become once the bomb had fallen? Were they different on the inside or just a new face on an old body? Were they different again after they had been surgically reconstructed, or still the same—just with a new skin? I am preoccupied with this change. Does it go deep or is it all my imagination? Perhaps it’s just a reflection of us, looking from the outside: of our compulsion to recognize, and our own fears.

 

TODAY, I SPOKE WITH one of these famous Maidens. She was fifteen years old when the bomb was dropped, and she remembers it like yesterday, she says. She tells me that her mother saved her life: first, by pulling her out of the wreckage only moments before the fires began; second, by foiling her repeated attempts at suicide; and finally, by exhorting her to live from her deathbed. Her story is very sure and
complete, even though she waited thirty years, until her mother died, to begin telling it.

Yet it is the same story I read before I met her. I found many versions on the internet, but they all started in the same place, and varied mostly in how much or little the woman chose to emphasize her work for peace. I could see it unfolding, the three of us sitting for ninety minutes to transfer translated information that I already know.

People have told me I came too late, that I should have been here fifteen years ago when more of the
hibakusha
were still alive. All they have left to offer is an echo of what they said last week, last year; an echo of the first thing they recalled when they began to talk. Where is the anger? I asked Ami after our last interview.
How can they feel so little about what happened to them?

I equate feeling with honesty. But this time, there are things I will not ask. What did this woman look like before the surgery? What couldn’t she do? How did it feel? I don’t want to be a voyeur. As much as I long to feel what they are feeling, I’m not convinced I need this information, and I know this woman doesn’t want to be an object of pity.

She wants to be a savior.

So instead, I ask this Maiden something else—more polite, but still different—to draw her out of the usual form she inhabits, the codes she is used to, to discover something about her that she does not often present. I ask her how the mind remembers.

“Tell me about your mother,” I say, smiling encouragement. “You said she saved you. What was she like?”

THERE IS A WOMAN I wish I could talk to, dead now from breast cancer, only two years before I found her, needed her, before I stumbled onto her story in a book and thought,
yes, I need this life.
Irene Saeki was in her late teens and early twenties during the war; she and her younger sister Meg were Americans who went to live with their grandparents in Hiroshima toward the end of the 1930s for health reasons. When Pearl Harbor was attacked, she and Meg were separated from their parents and siblings in the United States, and so, as history picks and shuffles its cards, they were not sent to the internment camps with the rest of their family, but instead were in Hiroshima when the bomb fell.

Here is Irene. She speaks English. She is sitting in a top secret room, in a mansion in the Sentai gardens where the Japanese military is headquartered. She is one of about thirty American girls who have been forced to transcribe shortwave radio broadcasts from the allies for the Japanese army. It’s not the kind of job a young girl talks about, so very few people have ever heard of this unit of “girl monitors,” and no one seems to know who they were, or what the room looked like, or exactly what they were asked to do. But we know that there are three shifts of ten girls, and that on August 5, Irene is on the night shift, so she begins walking home an hour before the bomb instantly kills every girl on duty and also many of the girls who were on the
night shift and had lingered in the building. She searches for her sister Meg in the rubble of the city, and in doing so, is exposed to high levels of radiation. Despite the bomb, despite the internment, she chooses to return to America as soon as possible. She, the most beautiful of the sisters, the one who always strived to be the best.

Here is Meg, the schoolgirl. The seventeen year old who was forced to work as a mobilized student about a mile away from the blast. She was knocked unconscious; helped, fainting, out of the building; she ran through the fires in river-soaked pants; she wanted to die when her hair fell out, when it felt like her very life was draining out of her ears, when, a year later, covered with scars, she couldn’t bear to go outside. Two weeks after the explosion, when Meg was finally brought home by bicycle, her face and body were so swollen no one recognized her. She also left Japan, returned to America on her own as soon as she could travel.

In the meantime, their family in America had returned to Hiroshima. And the next youngest sister, the one who was in middle school in Fresno, the one who was sent to an internment camp in a swamp in Arkansas—plagued by sewage backups and malaria and home to four species of the deadliest snakes in the country—to keep America safe from spies and other potential enemy infiltration, is still here. She is, by stunning coincidence casually discovered just moments ago, the woman I am slurping udon with.

Jane Osada. The ex-boss of my mother-in-law’s friend.

The thrill of petrified information, of Irene’s world rising from the dead, is dashed when Jane tells me that her sisters
never talked to her about what happened. Their experiences were too much to share, too full of the possibility of resentment, the unbearable specters of who was lucky and who was not. Meg is still alive in California, but neither she nor Jane know much about Irene’s world during the war. Jane has never heard of the book from which I learned about her sisters’ lives; in fact, I know more about her sisters’ stories than she does. She can tell me only, ultimately, about herself.

So here is Jane: the lucky one. Sixteen, living in the wreckage of a country where she has so little command over the language she is not accepted into high school and is advised to go out and find work instead. She gets a job with an entertainment group that organizes tours across Japan for the Allied soldiers. It’s a huge amount of responsibility for a teenage girl, and a freer and more exciting life than most Japanese women could imagine. She travels around the country with the entertainers, she marries and has children, and she then separates from her husband in a vague circumstance that my reeling mind does not probe. At some point, she sends her children to live with her parents while she works to support them all.

The visions, the versions, are splintering. Three now, with other, equally fascinating sisters, one who went on to create parts for rockets, still to come. I am grappling with their stories—the way they have been told, the way I imagine them. How could I have let so many stories vanish? So many lives that are essential for me to know?

What, I wonder, is the right question? What is the locus on which all these stories spin? Jane is Japanese American,
someone who experienced both the camps, and on some level, the bombing. She is the second of these rare creatures I have found. Jane is available, and unlike Aunt Molly she remembers; she will tell me anything she
can
tell me. It’s up to me to figure out what I need to know.

Why did you stay here in Japan?
I ask at last.
Why did they return to America?
This is the crux of my novel: how do you choose who to be?

I wait while Jane considers her noodles. She takes her time. And then, at last, she gives me a small smile in apology.

“I don’t know. Like I said, we never talked about it; we didn’t want to dwell on the experience. It seemed like fate that one was here, and not the other.

“Where we were when the war began, that changed everything. It changed who we were. I didn’t think about it, though, and I don’t think they did either. I didn’t plan to stay. It just happened that way.”

THE SOUND, when I close my eyes, has no Western consonance, tone, or rhythm—these are sounds that, if it’s possible to describe them at all, are a kind of deciduous yodeling with random drum beats. Eyes open, I am watching men
dressed in female masks and clothes sing in the bass register and dance with fans, flicking their toes up in the air when they move. I have never seen anything like this. But I have it on good authority that it’s supposed to be beautiful.

I am spending four hours this afternoon watching a Noh performance. I don’t know anything about it, and Ami doesn’t either, though her father has been practicing it for fourteen years.

Here is a play that is unconcerned with narrative. There is very little language in the presentation, and even Ami, who has a copy of the text in her hand, says it’s difficult for the average Japanese listener to understand since the words are at least five hundred years old and many are obsolete. Meaning may also be obscured by the delivery, which seems designed to mimic two people in scuba gear trying to have a conversation in eighty feet of water.

The stage is square and wooden—an open-air pavilion in our enclosed stadium-sized theater—with a fairly simple, traditional Japanese-style roof, and a long, covered walkway to the left where the actors enter and leave through an ornate, draped curtain and a burst of drumming. There are three pine trees painted on the back wall. I don’t know what they are supposed to represent—perhaps just pine trees, but every prop is so stylized that I can’t be sure. There’s a column in the front corner of the stage, holding up the roof, which keeps getting in the way of my view.

 

NOH IS . . . perhaps it resembles a Greek tragedy the most. There is a chorus, the
utai
singers, all of them men, in black
silk kimono and grey
hakama
, who sit on their knees in
seiza
along the side of the stage looking sleepy for hours at a time; there are the musicians, one with a small drum in front of him, a second with a small drum, like a trussed hour glass, on his shoulder, the third with a sideways flute; there is a narrator who also acts in the story; and then there are between one and three other elaborately costumed characters who sway toward the audience and say a few incomprehensible things before dancing in a small circle with a fan when called upon. The costumes are draped and pinched and heavily layered. They include kimono and
hakama
and robe; hats, masks, belts, robes, socks. There is a young boy on stage whose robe flies off his shoulders like bird wings. The breast of his kimono is plump, the legs of his
hakama
propped out, beginning at the thigh in a sort of hoop skirt arrangement. He is wearing a tall, two dimensional black hat that looks like a fish fin. To keep him properly assembled, men periodically appear from a small door in the back left wall of the stage, fiddle with his clothing and then leave. He and they and every element on the Noh stage are not meant to exist in real space. Everything is symbolic.

People sleep through Noh; when the performance had barely begun, a woman beside me began snoring with quite a bit of gusto. Ami assures me that you’re supposed to sleep during Noh, that that is, in fact, how the sound is designed. I accept that statement politely, but I don’t believe a performance would be given as a sleeping aid. As far as understanding, I am still struggling, quite deeply into the day-long program, to identify some unique element or sound I can
follow in lieu of a narrative, and to make descriptive analogies (“the flute sounds like . . . ,” “the yodel reminds me of . . . ”) that will reformat this experience into one my brain can read. It’s my New York nature, I know—my list-making—and I know from experience here that it’s useless. I am no closer to understanding, and perhaps farther away.

Somewhere around three p.m., I begin to nod off.