A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding (22 page)

Kaze: The wind as well as the rain has been more than a mere natural phenomenon with the Japanese. There was an ancient belief that the wind was caused by the comings and goings of invisible gods. With ancient people, therefore, all winds except ill and nasty winds were literally kamikaze (divine winds).

Hideo ran his finger down his glass and used the condensation to draw a circle on the wooden bar. Two eyes and a mouth. A smiling face. He glanced up and we looked at each other across the divides of time. I was the past; he was the future. By tomorrow night, he would be on a plane to Nagasaki. We had so few hours left to glue dead leaves to an infected family tree. What could I tell him? What parts of Sato's letters should I reveal? In his one from 1971, the kanji and hiragana had been whispery across the page, the writing of an ill man. Sato wrote he had hoped that the older he grew the more certain he would become of his life, the choices made, the mistakes, the few small triumphs. He had assumed they would all solidify into some kinder version of the past. Old age had tormented him with a harsher understanding. The years had made the pain of regret grow not lessen.

Who knew my body would rail so much against the dying of the light? Now I think I am nearing my destination,
I remain plagued by this thought that I should have fought harder for you, Yuko. Or maybe I should have never gone near you. Did you think of me in those final seconds with love, or anger, or at all? Increasingly, I play a dark fantasy game in the hours when my medication cannot kill the pain. I try to rewrite our last meeting together so that you did not leave for Urakami Cathedral that day. I ask myself what I would have said to have kept you from going. I had been ruled by the orders of your mother for one final, catastrophic time. Together we put you in the path of pikadon. Our love for you drove you to the cathedral. How has she lived with this knowledge all these years?

I will confess that I have, more than once, thought about ending my life. Such an act seemed not an indulgence but the only honourable step to take. What stopped me? An injured boy we brought into our home called Hideo. He was reason to continue. He was reason to fight to be a better man. Was I wrong for wanting all those years ago to believe that the scarred child we found in the orphanage was your son? We had expected his memory to come back and when it did not I began to give him the small facts I did know. Natsu warned me against giving him a label. What good was it being Hideo Watanabe? she asked. But I had wanted to give him a sense of self, of history, a line of ancestors from which to draw. His face can tell nothing other than that day of August 9, 1945. I wanted to give him more than one day. Was that cruel of me? And maybe, just maybe, I am right. Amaterasu will know whether he is your son. Maybe it is not too late to find her.
Can I let her near my boy? Will this be my last act of contrition?

Sato would have been too ill to look for Kenzo and me anew. No, Natsu had led the search. She had been the most selfless of all of us. That is why she had written the introductory letter. The lies, the tangled affairs, the hurt and losses; in the end, none of them mattered. She was concerned with only one element of our shared past: Hideo. In that dark bar, I smiled at her son, the pikadon boy. Was this my grandson? Or had my Hideo always been among the 75,000 dead?

I reached for his hand and caressed his scars. ‘Tell me, if you can. What do you remember about that last morning?'

He shook his head. ‘I don't think it will help.'

I squeezed his fingers. ‘Try.'

He nodded but he could not look at me as he spoke. ‘I was playing with some other children. We liked to use our magnifying glasses to set alight weeds or ants and we were waiting for the sun to burn through the clouds. Teachers were working in the rice paddy or on the school air-raid shelters. I don't remember the sound of an aircraft above but suddenly someone shouted to run to the shelter. I ran as fast as I could, my friends were behind me. I managed to reach the shelter when some force propelled me forward to the back wall. I blacked out, I don't know for how long, and awoke in the darkness. I called out for my friends but they did not reply. As I crawled my way to the entrance, creatures appeared out of the gloom. They must have been human beings but they had no skin.
They could not speak. They just made a terrible croaking noise. I was too scared to stay in the shelter with them.

‘Outside the sky was purple. I looked for my friends, for the teachers, but they were gone. More people were heading to the shelter, naked, moaning, their torsos bloated. I ran away from them. I did not want to hear their cries. In the playground, the sandbox was full of bodies and the school was on fire. All I could hear was the blaze. I had never realised how loud fire is. Beneath the roar, I heard another noise, a voice in the fire, crying out for help. I knew I had to be brave. I can't remember how I got into the school, how I found her, but I did. A girl was cowering under a desk. I must have told her to come with me but she wouldn't move. Perhaps I begged her as the fire came closer, but she just cried out for her mother. I couldn't make her come with me, so I left her. I don't remember flames on my skin.' He held up his hand. ‘But there must have been contact. My next memory is being in a hospital.' He stopped for a moment, his voice unsteady. ‘The school had nearly 1,600 students before pikadon, three hundred survived. You heard such terrible tales in the months that followed, orphans foraging for food, searching for their parents' cremated ashes in the ground, the injuries that would not heal, the suicides. Children killing themselves. Can you imagine?' He took a drink. ‘People feel sorry for me . . . but I'm the lucky one.'

He had described exactly the scene that had confronted me at Yamazato school. ‘I remember a school building on fire. You must have been rescued by then, taken away. It is a miracle you survived. Truly.'

‘The air-raid shelter saved me. Not God.'

Why could I not accept my own miracle of a grandson returned from the dead? Why could I not hold him to me and say, yes, I believe you now. I know I didn't deserve such joy. Was this why I hesitated? Guilt? If he knew what I had done, who I was, how could he not push me away? How could I bear that ending? And yet I couldn't leave us in this limbo. He needed to know one way or the other. I scrabbled for confirmation again.

‘Do you remember the question I asked you when you first came to my door the first morning?' He cocked his head. ‘About what we saw in the garden that last day?' I waited, hopeful, but he could only shake his head, apologise. I checked the clock behind the bar. His train was due. Next to the clock postcards from around the world had been pinned alongside a rainbow of foreign banknotes. I even spotted a one thousand yen among the francs, sterling and Deutschmarks. As I looked at that crumpled piece of paper, I knew there was one way to resolve who this man truly was.

‘Hideo, I know you've been waiting for me to tell you whether you are my grandson. Thank you for your patience. But before I answer, I have one final request. I'm afraid it's rather a big one.'

Itako: These women are divinely inspired and supernaturally possessed. They are supposed to be able to bring forth messages of ancestors to their descendants, mediate between the spirits of the dead and living persons, and divine the fate of a family or an individual. Before these women become independent practitioners, they live with experienced masters of these magic acts.

An overlay of maple trees hung above our heads as we travelled in a taxi from the airport to the city. They must have looked glorious in summer, a lime covering of sunspots and dazzled leaves, but that day the stripped branches bounced above the road in eddies of air. I lowered the window to hear them creak in the wind but the car's engine masked their aria. The low sun lit the underside of birds' wings on the dive. I breathed in the air of Japan. Like no other. So ripe with possibility. So cleansing. How I had missed it. Hideo was sitting next to the driver and was wearing beige trousers and a matching sweater. I was disguised as an old woman, navy-blue crinoline pants, synthetic purple jacket, floral scarf. We drove past the outskirts of Nagasaki toward its beating heart and I clutched the door handle to steady myself as the streets rolled by.

What to say of a city you haven't seen for nearly forty years? The two peaks, the harbour, Chinatown and the
Dutch Slope were still there but modernity had left its mark. Pachinko parlours were everywhere, with their neon lights and beeping machines and silver balls. Newly built offices of metal and glass and concrete rose up above our heads, and the centre had been taken over by a covered central shopping mall. Despite those curiosities, I had come home. How to explain the feeling? Do you remember waking on a summer morning as a child, when you opened the window and the promise of that day flooded into your room? That was Nagasaki for me, a shocking sensation of hope. I had robbed Kenzo of that unexpected feeling of return, but I tried to tell myself I could not have come back any sooner. America was a place to heal as best we could. I had needed those four decades to find the strength to revisit the ghosts and the places where they hid.

Hideo's home was situated in one of the steepest parts of the city. You could only access the two-storey house by walking up flights and flights of concrete steps, or by finding your way to the top of the hill and then walking down. I had grown too used to the flat, uniform streets of my American home, with every address labelled and known. Here, houses and apartments were crammed one against the other, all different sizes and shapes linked by warrens of paths. Their home was a side of grey pebble-dash and a roof of red tiles, built against a moss-stained stone wall beside a river that ran past a medley of corrugated-iron shacks, wooden lean-tos and tarpaulin flapping against brick huts.

We stood outside his home and he told me not to be nervous but, of course, I was. He rang the doorbell and
there was a clatter of feet and shouts of ‘Daddy'. The door opened and Benji and Hanako ran into their father's arms. He held them tight. ‘My little devils. How I've missed you. Have you been good for Mummy?' Angela stepped into the hallway, drying her hands on a dishcloth. She reached down and tickled Benji. ‘They've been perfect monsters.' The children laughed and gave me curious glances. Angela took a step forward and kissed Hideo. She spoke in English, ‘Hey, baby, glad you're home.' She smiled and kissed him again, switching back to Japanese. ‘And you must be Amaterasu. We're so thrilled you could visit. Come in, come in. Where's your bag? The children have made you a cake, haven't you, kids? Go bring it into the living room.' They ran off, shouting, ‘Cake, cake, cake.'

‘Apologies, the kids are wild. Let me take your coat. The oil heater is on. You'll be freezing and exhausted. It's quite a flight.' In the living room we sat on beige sofas surrounded by bookcases crammed with books and walls covered in pictures drawn by the kids. A large glass door opened to a small courtyard. The children returned and placed a chocolate cake on the coffee table. Round red candies had been pressed into the brown icing. Hanako looked at me shyly. ‘It's a ladybug.' I smiled. ‘My favourite.' Benji knelt down next to me as Angela cut thick slices. Hideo told his family about his trip, while his daughter clung to him.

I looked at the children, greedy for signs of Yuko in them. Hanako's dark hair fell down her back and she was dressed in maroon corduroys and a grey jumper. She fiddled with a scab on her chin as she ate her cake. Benji had a rash of freckles and a fringe that fell in a heavy
layer over his eyes. He wore a baseball shirt and denims that threatened to fall off his thin hips. His lips were coated in brown frosting. He whispered to his mother, who replied, ‘Why don't you ask her?' He turned to me. ‘Want to see your room?' Hanako stood up and reached for my hand. ‘This way.' She held my fingers lightly, as if she was worried she might crush my bones.

First they took me to their small yard, next to a waterfall that trickled over rocks black with slime. They threw a ball back and forth while they asked me where I had come from and did I like America and had I seen
The A-Team
? The inquisition over, they led me to a door that opened to a small room, little more than a cupboard. We peered inside. A round hole had been cut into a raised wooden platform. Benji sneaked past me and looked down the open sewer. ‘This is the toilet,' he explained, laughing as he revealed that during the monsoon season Hideo had to nail a board over the seat to stop the water shooting up into the house. Next they took me to the kitchen and Hanako scuffed one foot back and forth along the tiles as she told me in the summer the floor was overrun with slugs. She shuddered when she said this. I had imagined a modern home for them. Sato's wealth and Hideo's job as a teacher surely would have bought them a more comfortable property but the chaos of the ramshackle house suited the family.

Back in the hall, Benji warned me the stray cats liked to congregate outside their front step at night and I must not be worried by all their howling. We took the stairs and they waited patiently for me to climb each step. They showed me where they slept and then slid open a paper
door to reveal a square room, with tatami floors and a futon, already made up. ‘This is where you're going to sleep.' I was thrilled by the prospect of sleeping on a futon again, even if my body was not. Hanako pointed to some plastic daisies in a vase. ‘These are for you.' I thanked her and she shrugged but seemed pleased. ‘We'll get your bag.' She ran out and Benji followed her but before he closed the door, he said, ‘Let's play sumo wrestlers later, OK?' I smiled. ‘OK.'

In the evening, while we sat in the living room before dinner, the children came running in, giggling. They had stripped down to their version of a sumo wrestler's mawashi fashioned out of their father's white T-shirts tied in knots. Hideo laughed. ‘What have we here? Our own sumo match?' Benji nodded and ran to a clean pile of laundry and started pulling out socks to make the outline of the ring. Hanako came up and tapped me on the knee. ‘You're the judge. You decide who wins.'

Later still, Hanako sat next to me on the low couch with a sketch pad. She chewed a pencil in her mouth. ‘What shall I draw?' I thought for a moment and suggested a horse. She leaned against me as she drew and I marvelled at the ease of children in new company. Angela smiled as she played cards with her son. I put my arm around Hanako and rested the side of my head on top of hers. I smelled the fresh air caught in her hair and the sweet milk scent of her skin. Closing my eyes, I imagined Yuko nestled in my arm, the weight of her, all those hours we had passed this way. When Hanako was finished, she looked up to me, a slight furrow in her brow. ‘Do you like it?'

‘It's perfect.'

She held the picture at arm's length, admiring her work. ‘I'm quite good at drawing.' She showed the sketch to her father, who pinned it to the wall and then ordered them both to bed. They hugged their parents and suddenly I felt a stranger again. ‘Give Amaterasu a kiss,' Angela said. Before I could say there was no need they ran up and took turns to kiss me on the cheek, wet lips soft on my skin.

During those first few days, Angela and Hideo fizzed around me, hovering and anxious. I told them to go about their business as normal. I wanted to be left to explore the city, ease back to the point where I had left Nagasaki. I needed time to reacquaint myself with all that I had left behind. One morning I rose early and wrote a note to say I would return before dinner time. I took the tram past Hamaguchi-machi and got off near the post office. I walked five slow blocks to Sanno shrine, reconstructed after the bomb. To reach it, I passed through a torii gate, one leg blown away, the other upright. It had been left that way after pikadon as a memorial. I crossed flagstones and found one of the camphor trees that had survived all those fires that had raged across the city. I ran my hand down the blackened bark and felt our shared past in the cracks and charcoal fissures. We were still here, one growing, the other stunted, but both alive. I could not face going to Urakami Cathedral and Yamazato Primary, where new buildings had replaced those lost. Instead I went to the Peace Park. A statue of a man sitting in vigil stood at the head of the open square. Kenzo had shown me a picture in the newspaper after the site had been built in 1955. He had called it an affront, so ugly, but as
I sat on a stone bench and looked up at this muscular naked man, with his flowing hair and loincloth, I took comfort from his presence. We had a watchman for the city at last. His green bronze right hand pointed to the sky, the left horizontal across Nagasaki, his eyes closed in prayer. Paper cranes – red, yellow, white, orange, purple – lined fences and posts and benches. Schoolchildren, so neat in their sailor outfits, walked up to tourists and handed them postcards with handwritten messages of peace. One ran up to me and gave me a card and I looked at it for a long time before I walked down to the circular stone fountain, where jets of white spray shot up into the air. Here was the water the dying had begged for. A leaflet flipped by in the breeze and I stooped to retrieve it. There was a map of atomic bomb landmarks, the cover dominated by the cathedral. This new version built in 1959 was so red, so substantial. Here was the great solid entrance returned, those two towers rising tall once more. Only the original belfry remained, lying on the riverbank, blown thirty yards away by pikadon. ‘
Urakami had been a distinct Christian district since the second half of 1500. Under the suppression of Christianity from 1613, Christians continued to practise their religion by organising secret groups. The villagers managed to come back to Urakami in 1873. When they built the cathedral, it took almost 30 years to complete. The cathedral was also exposed to the atomic bomb and was destroyed. Around 8,500 of the 12,000 Christians living in the area were killed by the blast
.'

I read that last sentence and thought of Yuko, just one among all those thousands. Where had all the shattered bricks been taken? Where had they been buried? Where had she gone? Was she buried with those bricks? Could
I dig down into soil and unearth the black embers of her? I did not follow her faith but I was drawn to the stories of burning pits and boiling cauldrons and crucifixions. These were stories of pain and of loss that I could understand. The twenty-six martyrs of 1597, the 37,000 peasants massacred forty years later, the thousands arrested in the city and exiled not so long ago, those thousands more who lived and worked in the shadow of Urakami Cathedral; I admired the sacrifices made by them all to this religion, but no, I was not a believer. I looked again at the photograph, ran my fingers over a line of worshippers walking toward the great oak door. Those Christians who survived, how could they worship in that new building, how could they cross its entrance and not wonder: Why did we live? Why were they taken? Why did my god allow this?