A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding (11 page)

Danson-johi: While Amaterasu-omikami, the chief deity in Japanese mythology, is a goddess, Japan has been an androcentric country throughout recorded history. The imported religions justified male-dominated social institutions. Women were regarded as inferior and their subjection to men was considered a matter of course. As an old proverb implies, women could have no will of their own, for they had to obey their parents in their childhood, their husbands when married, and their sons in old age.

Sato had agreed to our ultimatum; he had promised Kenzo, but he would not go. The conditions were simple: never see or speak to Yuko again, never talk of the affair and leave Nagasaki. There was no confusion to be had with these terms. We knew he would be resistant to the last demand but what could he do? Were he not to leave, we told him, we would tell his wife, the hospital, our mutual companions. He would be ruined, if not personally, at least professionally. We reiterated that this was no hysterical threat. We were determined that the doctor could no longer remain in the city. When I say we told him this, I mean Kenzo. I dared not face Sato, fuelled as I was by wild fantasies of the violence I might do to him. I wanted to hurt him physically for the pain he had inflicted on Yuko, and if that wasn't possible, I wanted to be free of him for good.

As the weeks passed and the air began to carry the first fragrance of spring, I realised that I should not have left the matter to my husband. Kenzo must have faltered, or hesitated, or implied something that allowed the doctor to doubt our words. Our city was a small one, and the circles of the wealthy were claustrophobic. His continued presence was easy enough to establish. Nothing had changed for Sato except Yuko was no longer available to him. He had not been punished. I watched Yuko as she helped me plant amaryllis bulbs in the garden. Later she planned to meet Watanabe. We had expected more resistance to the engineer, and while we had not pressed her on marriage, we dared to be quietly hopeful. Her diary proved we had not been wrong, I read with relief.

‘I met Shige for lunch today at an udon restaurant. We sat side by side on a bench. He had tickets for a concert next week and wondered if I might like to go. I found to my surprise, and pleasure, I did, and not just for the music. The waitress brought us two steaming bowls of soup and I asked about his workday. He said he was bored with office work; he wanted to be out in the field. He said he might be posted to one of the nearby islands. “But it would just be for a few months,” he said quickly and then he blushed, as if he had betrayed himself by admitting he had thought about how his future might affect me. He slurped up a noodle and asked, “What about you, Yuko? What do you plan to do with your life? Do you want to work?” I felt a surge of gratitude at his question. I told him I used to want to
be an artist, now I was thinking about nursing. Shige drank some
water and nodded. “That seems a fine ambition to me.” We smiled at one
another, and for the first time in weeks, I realised I hadn't looked
around the room for Jomei's face as soon as I walked into a new place. The relief of being free of him, if only for a moment. Will it last?'

When they left the restaurant, they stood next to a store selling incense, little trays of fragrant wood lined on a table as sandalwood smoke rose up from a burner. A leaflet fluttered by them and Shige stooped to pick it up, some workers' literature denouncing capitalism, corrupt politicians, the suppression of labour unions, the occupation of Manchuria. The country had boiled with violence for years. Prime ministers assassinated, public figures murdered, Marxists rounded up, the military police on patrol at home and in territories abroad. Nagasaki was far from Tokyo but the politics travelled across the growing network of roads, rail and ferry routes.

Shige crunched the paper into a ball. ‘These ambitions abroad . . .' He shook the paper in his hand. ‘They don't seem to be about assimilating other cultures but using the sword to brand them with our own. I hear about these sacrifices we must make to build this great empire of ours, but what about you, me, ordinary people? What about an individual's responsibility to himself, to his family? Aren't these more important than our blood debt to Japan?' She had not expected political debate. Yuko told him that her father said we were uplifting our brothers and sisters in Asia and that we must do all we could for Japan. A strong military builds a modern nation. He sighed. ‘Maybe. Sometimes I fear there is a fine line between liberating a country and invading it. Where will it end? Could you imagine sending a son to war, Yuko?' Before she could answer Mrs Kogi appeared from the cake shop where they had left her and they began to walk
. ‘I allowed myself to imagine a child with this man and I was surprised to find that while the thought did not frighten me, the future for that child did. I stopped
and turned to him. “You make it sound as if war is inevitable.” He told me that he hoped not. “I don't want a child born into that kind of world, Shige.” He nodded at this. “Neither do I, Yuko.”'

I knew nothing of her endorsement of Watanabe. She tolerated me but any closeness we once shared had been destroyed after Chinatown. Not knowing that she had feelings for Shige, I still believed Sato had to be eliminated. He hovered round the edges of our lives, a menace too easily within reach. What if their paths crossed down the years? The city was not big enough to be lost in. Sato had given me enough ammunition over the years to make him go. All I needed to do was send him a note. ‘
Meet me at Kyogamine Cemetery, tomorrow at noon, Amaterasu.
'

I dressed carefully on the day. I chose a navy-blue kimono, embroidered with herons in flight, and held my hair high with a pearl clasp. To anchor myself to my life with Kenzo, I wore the gold oyster-shell pendant he'd given me not long after we married. Before I left our home, I checked in the bedroom mirror for the lines and shadows that had crept onto my face. I concealed what I could with powder. Then I took a taxi to the cemetery.

One of the advantages of the spot was its proximity to the hospital and its relative seclusion. Sato could meet me there unseen. The place felt abandoned, as if no one had visited or thought of it for years. To reach the graveyard, one passed through an iron gate, orange with rust, and followed a dried mud path under a black locust tree. A collapsed wall marked the boundary of the graveyard, and within, pomegranate trees lent shade to the sandstone crosses and marble headstones. The city gravediggers brought the Christians here, but no burials had taken
place for a long time. The names of Portuguese and Dutch traders could still be read on the crumbling graves. The path continued through the trees to the base of the hill at the far corner of the cemetery and climbed up to tombs carved into the soil in higher and higher layers.

Kyogamine bled into Hiagashi Cemetery. Here, Christian bones gave way to the remains of Japanese merchants and nobles. At the summit, a slab of another fallen grave, warm under the sun's rays, was my seat and I sat upon its flat surface and looked down on Nagasaki, the city growing like a giant metal insect across the land. I knew the doctor had arrived when a turtle dove beat its wings and rose from a branch. My heart pounded as I turned around and watched him approach. We had not seen each other for nearly seventeen years. The passage of time had been good to him, age had settled well on his face. He had kept lean and walked with that same slow swagger. My desire was still there too. How ashamed I would be if he realised this. I clenched my fists and placed my hands on the grave to steady myself. I must be unreadable to him. He lowered himself next to me. We sat in silence and then he placed his palm over my fingers. He looked at me but said nothing. I pulled my hand away; he could not soften me that easily. I readied for the fight as he lit a cigarette. I knew how to purge Sato from our lives. We do terrible things because we can, and only sometimes because we must.

‘When are you leaving Nagasaki, Jomei?'

He laughed at this. ‘I'm not. I had a change of heart.'

I watched him smoke. ‘Kenzo made our requirements clear.'

He stretched his back. ‘A little extreme, wouldn't you say?'

‘Why would you do this to us? I'm not talking about me. Why do this to Kenzo?'

He sighed. ‘It wasn't planned.'

‘She's a child.'

He stubbed the cigarette out on the grave. ‘She's a woman. She knew what she was doing. Who she was had no relevance. It was unfortunate, the connection, that's all.'

‘Unfortunate? Have you no idea what you've done? We'll tell Natsu.'

He leaned back, a portrait of calm. ‘That's your choice.'

‘You don't believe us?'

‘I do, but I won't leave Nagasaki.'

‘Must I repeat it? We will tell Natsu, your boss. How would either feel about you bedding a young patient? You do remember your wedding and professional vows?'

He laughed. ‘If only you were as clever as you think you are. I admire you, Amaterasu, I do. You've worked so hard, left that past of yours behind, and look where you are now, an engineer's wife with wealth and a home and status among our city's rich. I'm happy for you. You got what you wanted. It's admirable, but I wonder what those wives would think if they knew how far you had come. Would they be as impressed as I am, do you think? I could ask them.'

I mimicked his insouciance. ‘I didn't think you'd stoop to blackmail, Jomei.'

‘Well, I could say the same. Let's not call it blackmail. Persuasion, perhaps.'

The sun was low, his profile merging with the light. ‘I see. So why did you come today? What was the point?'

‘Curiosity . . . and I wanted to apologise. Not about Yuko.' He cleared his throat and turned to face me. ‘I wanted to tell you that I'm sorry for what happened. I never got the chance to say so at the time.'

I touched my necklace. ‘That was long ago, Jomei. I hold no grudges, I promise you.'

‘Amaterasu, has it occurred to you that Yuko and I are in love?'

I clenched my fists once more. ‘Don't be ridiculous. How can you say such a thing?'

He stood up, put his hands in his trouser pockets. ‘I am married to Natsu, yes. I know my responsibilities, but I will always be here for Yuko if she needs me. I want you to know that. Tell Natsu, if you must, and I will tell the coven of witches you call friends, if I must. So be it.'

How dare he think he could dictate what we would do. ‘Jomei, Jomei.' I forced a smile, tipped my head, as if in pity. ‘Don't you see what's happening here?' I kept my voice low but strong. ‘I won't only tell Natsu about Yuko. I'll tell Yuko about what happened when I was not much older than she was. I'll tell her everything . . .
everything
.' I walked up to him. ‘I wonder how she would react to that news?'

His face contorted in anger as he took his hands from his pockets. He grabbed me by the shoulders. ‘You would do that to your own child?'

‘Gladly.' He let go, as if contaminated. ‘Now, when did you say you were leaving Nagasaki?'

I can still see him standing by that fallen grave, defeated
by his own cowardice. We had all been taken in, and let down, by him: Kenzo, Yuko, Natsu and, yes, even me. He and Kenzo had been the closest of friends, for many years. Remnants of that bond surely remained? Who would seduce a friend's daughter with no care or shame? Sato talked of love but he was a foolish man who had exploited Yuko. He was more than double her age; he had no right to sour her young life with all those extra years of experience, regret and cynicism. And lastly: I too felt betrayed. I sent the doctor away not just for Yuko, but for myself. This was the maggot that burrowed into my own rotten heart.

Sasshi: Loosely this can be translated as ‘understanding', ‘sensi
bility', ‘consideration'. It is an important idea in interpersonal relationships in Japan. According to the concept of modesty and sincerity that Japanese people esteem, direct self-expression is frowned upon. People are expected to guess what others intend to say. If they are not perceptive enough and dare to ask for information left unsaid, then they are branded as rude.

The sky was still dark when I rose and wrapped one of Kenzo's brown woollen cardigans over my crumpled clothes. A mug of coffee steamed in the cold air as I went through to the living room. The lamp had been left on all night, a comfort in the dark. The world outside seemed blurred, coated in frost. These four walls, the twelve black frames, the brown package were all that mattered. When the man had left the night before I had stared at that envelope as I finished the bottle, but I knew even through the stew of alcohol that a clear head would be needed. My hands shook as I broke the seal. Inside someone had bundled letters together and secured them with elastic bands. I pulled one batch out and checked the seals. Each one had been marked with a red hanko: Jomei Sato. I sat back, sickened and confused. The doctor would not write to me. We had left no possibility for further communication.

I picked up the first envelope from the pile, the glue so old the seal came apart with the lightest of effort. A date,
August 9, 1946
and her name:
Yuko.
I cried out in that empty room. What was this? Why would Sato write to my daughter a year after her death? He knew she had been killed. I had told him. I opened more of the letters, my hands shaking. Every year on August 9 he had written her a letter. Why torment me with this fantasy correspondence? Why now when I no longer had the strength to fight him? And what was Natsu's involvement in this? I hated that he was in control again but what could I do other than pick up that first letter. The doctor's voice echoed through the years and the room filled with his low, assured delivery.

So you want to know what I did during the days after the bomb? Surely the answer is obvious. I looked for you, whenever I could, but there were so many injured people that needed what little help I could offer. I was posted to Fukuya; the department store had been turned into a makeshift hospital, its floor slippery with blood. The rooms filled up with creatures barely human, their skin black as charcoal, metal, glass and wood embedded so deep into flesh, the shards rattled in lungs. I felt more like a mortician than a doctor, administering morphine to the dying only when it could be spared. I could not bear to think you were among the wounded. I went to the relief centres: Urakami First Hospital, Shinkozen school and Ibinokuchi police station, hoping, like me, you were tending patients. Nothing. I went to the temporary town hall again and again to see if there had been
reports of you, but always there was nothing. Photographs and addresses had been posted across walls and fences. I scoured them for information but you had vanished. I searched your home. I even spoke to your mother. That's how desperate I was. She said you and Hideo were dead. I told her I did not believe her. She said why should you be saved with so many others lost? The world did not owe you sanctuary. She said I had killed you; I had placed you in the path of pikadon. I refused to believe you were dead, even though the city was all the evidence anyone needed. So many places gone: the municipal office, the district court, the prison, the water building, the medical college hospital, but I could not let the possibility of you go. If I had survived, why not you? This made no sense to me.

As the contagion spread, we thought we were dealing with dysentery. We ran crude experiments on how to contain the sickness. Every day I checked the arrivals to see whether you were among them. I tried my best for them because I thought that one day you might be there. And so when I injected them with glucose or calcium chloride, or gave them vitamins or fresh blood, I did so for you. I watched them and learned the signs of coming death: the hair, the black spots, the bleeding gums, the convulsions, and I feared that somewhere this might be happening to you.

I haven't found you but I haven't given up on you either. Know that. I am always searching and hoping that you might return. Even now, when I catch sight of a certain woman in the street, I find myself following her, waiting until she turns around so that I can see your
face again. No human bones to find, no tombstone to visit, nothing to prove you are dead but the constancy of your absence and my love.

I thought I could smell jasmine. I lifted the letter to my nose but the scent was just a vapour of memory. There had been a vase of flowers in my room the day Sato came to our home. Kenzo was out looking for Hideo and Yuko. I was too unwell to go with him. My husband called me his miracle. So many taken, not by the executioners' flames, but by the sickness carried in the air. I must have caught something of the poison but not enough. Misaki had pulled my soiled nightdress off me to wash my body. I was too sickly to be embarrassed by my nakedness. She was running a wet, cool compress down my arm when she stopped, alerted by some noise. She stood up and called out, ‘Mr Takahashi?' but there was no reply. She pulled up a bedsheet so that I was covered. ‘Who's there?' Footsteps came fast up the stairs and along the hall landing and by the time she reached the open doorway, Sato was pushing past her. She clung onto his arm. ‘Out, how dare you, out.' He was still wearing his doctor's coat. He looked at me, eyes pleading. His voice caught when he said, ‘Please tell me she is alive.' Misaki turned to me. ‘I'll go and get help.' I looked at his face, pale and unshaven, with dark shadows carved below his eyes, and I told her I was fine. ‘Sato, I'll tell you what I know but will you give me a minute before we talk?' He seemed paralysed for a few seconds but then left the room. Misaki helped me pull on a fresh nightdress before disappearing downstairs. I watched him enter the room, dazed with fever
and his presence. I hated that he would see me this weak. How dare he bring his grief to our house uninvited. Who was he to mourn her here? Given our last words spoken before pikadon, he must have been wretched to seek me out.

He sat on the window seat and rested his head in his hands. ‘Tell me she's alive and then I'll go.' Maybe I felt a tremor of sympathy for him then. To soothe his pain would ease my own, but he had asked the impossible, the one confirmation I could not give him. I told him the small nails of facts I held, hammered each one into a coffin we would never need and she would never be contained by. Yuko had gone to the cathedral where we had planned to meet. I had been delayed. She never returned home. Neither did Hideo. What more was there to tell him? The doctor had seen the city, the air so thick with the dead you could taste the dust of them. But Sato rejected what he could not bear to be true. He said Yuko couldn't be gone; she would be helping survivors, or maybe she was sick in some medical centre, or maybe she had been taken out of the city. He offered so many possibilities. I had thought of them all. How could I tell him I knew she was dead because I felt the void of her, a vacuum inside me where a mother carries the soul of her offspring? Sometimes I would feel her, like a ghost limb that causes pain despite its amputation, but I knew this was a trick of the mind. She was dead, and so was her son.

August 9, 1947.
In the next letter Sato wrote that the December before he had taken up a position at the Holy Mother of Immaculate Conception Order Convalescent
Centre for Children of the A-bomb on Fukue Island, sixty miles from Nagasaki. The home was opened six months after pikadon and filled with eighty orphans and children who could not be reunited with their families. Church collections mostly paid for its upkeep, along with a generous donation from the women of the Church of First Friendship Institutional Baptists in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The centre was overseen by the Knights of the Holy Mother and Sato had taken the job for at least a year. He planned to visit the orphanage for extended visits while continuing research work in Nagasaki.

He wrote that his first approach to the house would have appealed to Yuko's artistic eye with ‘
its bare trees coated
in hoarfrost, tips tinged orange by the winter sun
'. A gravel walkway led past a fountain of leaping carp frozen in white marble and the path then cut the lawn into halves, which were bordered with frost-ravaged rose bushes, their brown flowers rotten on the stem. Built in the European tradition, the building had three floors, topped with a slate roof. Someone had begun to repaint the timber frame, which was covered in peeling, grey paint save for this square of white underneath one of the ground-floor windows. A veranda ran the length of the front and a trellis of ivy covered most of the right-hand side of the house.

The inside of the home was all dark halls and low lamps that led to eight bedrooms, several living rooms and serving quarters. The nuns lived on the upper floor, with the older children. The second floor was for the younger charges, and the two teachers resided in the summer house next to a pond, suffocated with red algal
bloom. Many of the children had been injured by the bomb and their needs were such that the scullery in the basement functioned as a medical ward. That was where Sato could be found. He arrived at lunchtime and the Mother Superior took him to the refectory. The children sat in silent rows, eating overcooked udon from chipped bowls. One boy in particular had caught his attention, or rather, his burns had.

I have seen severe injuries before, but his are not for the faint of heart. The nuns call him Ko. An optimistic name for the boy: how can he represent happiness, light and peace? He has not spoken since his arrival. His muteness is not a physical impediment, I am sure. Pikadon has left its mark, not just in broken limbs and burnt flesh, but hidden in bones and muscles and fibres and young minds. I suspect I have a lifetime's work of observations and medical studies to undertake. And you, Yuko, are the one who drives me on. I still cannot believe you are gone. If I had seen your body or held you one last time, or I could say here is where my Yuko is buried, would that have helped? The love remains; it never dies. It still grows until some nights I wonder if I can stand the pain. So many questions that can never be reconciled but this is the one that plagues me most: why would your god take you and leave me in this world?

I folded the letter up and placed it back in its envelope. Sato was doing what so many of us had done; he was mourning a loss that could never be regained, but his was a more dangerous kind of grief; he was trying to keep
Yuko alive, somehow, in these letters. Wishful thinking alone cannot resurrect the dead. Neither can medicine. Flesh decays or burns in an instant; either way, we are no more. Why would Yuko be the exception?

His years after the war were marked by study and experiments, analysis and conjecture. The Sato I had known had not been so dedicated to his profession. He had worn the uniform of a doctor lightly when we first met. Pikadon had sharpened his focus, honed the skills he had acquired too easily in his youth. Twenty-four of the children required ongoing medical care, mostly for burns and compression wounds that had not healed satisfactorily. In 1948, he wrote:

The job is lonely. I imagine us working together. I imagine you sitting beside me, annotating notes or differentiating between contact and flame burns. I see us mapping out the fissures of damaged skin to explain the topography of the bomb. I have pinned a map of Nagasaki on the wall of my sleeping quarters. My information is crude and unconfirmed, half-guessed statistics, but I record them on paper and add them to my lists.

Estimates of the casualty numbers had been logged somewhere but Sato had no access to them. The closest he came was a visit from a group of American doctors, engineers and scientists who came to the hospital where he worked that first September. They shook his hand, walked around the beds of those yet to die, took notes and photographs, asked to see medical records while interpreters translated what they read. When Sato asked
if these experts from the West had a cure for the sickness they had unleashed, they said nothing. The precious cargo of information they took with them was censored by the American authorities, sent to government departments and stored away in files. Sato had written to the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission for help accessing official statistics and heard nothing back. He tried to recall the stories of the dying patients in their hospital beds, and the clues they provided. He saw first-hand how radiation destroyed the body's defensive mechanism and its legions of cells and how this correlated to the prevalence of infection, the poor repair, the high mortality rates.

When he called the children into his ward, while he tended healing wounds or checked old scars, he was looking for signs of long-term contamination, of diseases yet to be detected but carried in arteries and bones. The nuns did not know but he tested for cancers in the lungs, thyroid and blood. He was trying to chart the course of this sickness through the evidence it left behind. Two toddlers abandoned by their families were crucial: Izumi and Kasumi, aged thirty-two and thirty-six months. He measured their heads and limbs; he checked their muscle tone and their facial features, the slope of their forehead, the distance between their eyes; he took pictures of their limbs and their faces. His observations, he believed, suggested that both girls showed signs of abnormal growth of the brain. Those two babies were not the only ones to be poisoned in their mothers' bellies that day. He was not compiling a report for where pikadon had been but where it might take us. This was what kept Sato on the island; he was looking for things that could not
always be seen. He told Yuko he had begun to write a book, which he said would chart the medical conditions of foetuses contaminated by radiation in the womb.

Come 1949, the routine of his life was ‘
reassuringly uneventful
'. He rose early most mornings and walked through the grounds, past a patch of trees where dolls made by the children hung from creaking branches. These dolls were little more than balls wrapped in squares of cotton with faded outlines of faces swinging in the breeze, ‘
as the trees scratch out a morning lullaby. See what a poet you still make me?
' He would continue down to the shore to watch the sun rise and seep colour back into the island before he returned for morning surgery. In the afternoon, he worked on his research and after an evening meal, while the nuns fell to their knees in contemplation, he wrote up more notes in his room.