A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding (3 page)

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In the bedroom, I went to Kenzo's side of the wardrobe, opened the door and eased myself to my knees. We were forty-four and fifty-one years old when we left Japan in 1946, too old for a new life but too broken to remain in the one we had known. We took two trunks stuffed with pictures, documents and the rags we called clothes, most dyed khaki, the National Defence Colour. Smuggled inside those cases were other mementoes that I stored away without Kenzo's knowledge. When he died, I moved these few small items to my husband's side of the cupboard, so he could share them at last. Beneath his clothes, ties and sweaters, I reached into the recesses and pulled out a shoebox, placed Natsu's letter inside and slid the box to the back wall. I picked up another container, slowly rose to my feet and sat on the edge of the bed. The weight of the contents was heavy on my lap. I ran my hands over the lid, sticky with age, and removed the top. One thought hammered in my mind: why should I trust the wife of Jomei Sato, the man I also blamed for my daughter's death?

En: The term is derived from the Buddhist belief that there is a cause to all things. The medium through which a cause brings about an effect is en. Any social relationship starts with and changes with en. It is en that realises the relationship between man and woman, and that between neighbours or business partners.
Thus, en creates opportunities and occasions for forming relation
ships. It very often enables people to carry things on smoothly.

Nagasaki still feels more real to me than this old Victorian house. The nights spent alone in my bed take me back to our home on the hill with its view of the city growing inland from the narrow entrance of the harbour. Our house stood in a garden of chinaberry, purple maple and blue beech. Two floors of black wood rose up to a triangular roof topped with slate tiles. A carved trim ran down the eaves, and each beam was decorated with metalwork of dragons and ships coated in verdigris. The god of war straddled a wild boar over the main entrance. Inside, the family room was first on the left, lined with tatami mats, the woven rice straw bordered in green and gold silk. Black lacquer chests ran along one side of the room and a square table and four cushions sat in the middle. Scrolls of calligraphy hung on the walls and to the left was the long window overlooking the garden and to the right the alcove that contained the family shrine: a small Buddha,
a candlestick, an incense burner, a bell and a mallet. Typical, yes, but ours.

When I think of our home, I see Yuko sitting in this room, bathed in the glow of rape myrtles, oleanders and canna. She seems a trick of the light, a chimera created by a weak sun on wood panels. I see her pick up a cream tea bowl with her right hand. She turns the bowl clockwise in her outstretched palm. Next she pours hot water from the teapot over the green powdered tea and picks up the bamboo whisk. She stirs until the liquid froths and bubbles like spittlebug foam on grass and then she passes the bowl to me. She is dressed in a kimono the shade of young winter cherries, or camellia, but always red, the colour of happiness, of life, of the womb.

All I had left of her had been reduced to the contents of a few shoeboxes. As I sat on the bed, the damp of the cardboard nipped my nostrils. I held her notebook in my hand. The green leather binding had disintegrated, and crumbs of paper dust glittered on my fingers. On the inside cover she had written her name in careful script.
Yuko Takahashi
. Later her surname would be replaced with
Watanabe
. My daughter's diaries. I saw her sitting at her desk, writing. I saw the indent of the pen against her middle finger, the delicate kanji of hers on the page. Kenzo had wept with defeat when he found a shopping list she had left on her kitchen table after we went to her home in the days following the bomb.
Flour,
needle, soap
. Three words. Imagine thousands of them. I closed the diary, held the solidity of it to my chest for a moment, and then put it back in the box. Neither of us was ready for the intrusion.

Next, I opened a folded square of paper. The lines of
charcoal were faded but clear enough. The perspective was fine but there was something awkward in the composition, as if the artist had been trying to cram too much detail into the space. On the bottom right of the sketch, Yuko had written the place and date:
Iō
j
ima, August 22, 1936
.

The summer had been a fierce one. The humidity stained everyone's clothes as if it was rain and the air burnt deep into lungs. I could feel that heat as I looked at the contours of the face before me, the high cheekbones, the neat moustache, that mole. I could see the charcoal smudged between Yuko's fingertips; I could picture the sheen of sweat as she worked; I could feel her longing. His expression was as unfathomable as it had always been. I placed the sketch face down. I did not want to think of Jomei Sato. I did not want to remember him, or that brutal summer, or that last morning all those years later.

New unanswered fears gripped me. How had Hideo survived? Kenzo and I looked for him; we were sure pikadon took him. How to face the possibility that he might have been alive all those years since? And if that were true, how had the doctor and his wife managed to adopt him? This could be no coincidence. Perhaps the man on my doorstep was another victim of the doctor's, or an accomplice. How pathetic of Sato to wait this long to take revenge. No punishment could match all the years lived since that summer, that morning, that minute.

Kodakara: As an eighth-century Japanese poet says, there is no treasure more precious than children. According to Japanese folk beliefs, children are Heaven's gifts, and those under seven years of age deserve special attention. These beliefs have had a deep influence on child-rearing, resulting in a close contact between mother and child.

That last morning the mist hung low over the two valleys and a spur of mountain poked through the clouds. Kenzo had collected Hideo from school the previous afternoon and brought him to our house so that Yuko could work an early shift at the hospital. She had agreed to meet me at Urakami Cathedral during her break. I knew this meant she had reached her decision, and I worried about what I might have to do to ensure it was the right one.

I went to the bedroom where she had slept as a child. Hideo was lying beneath the yellow butterflies Yuko had drawn on the wall when she was not much older than him. They flew from the ground up to the window. His mouth was open, his arms wide, as if crucified. He seemed so at peace, all the worries of an absent father, air raids, hunger and the closeness of the war kept at bay in that moment before waking. A bamboo box was open by the side of his mattress. He had filled it with his identity tag, address and blood type, a knife, a magnifying glass and
cotton bandages. I knelt by his futon and stroked his hair the way I had done when Yuko was a child until he woke up, an anxious smile on his face. I kissed him on the forehead as a wave of pure love washed over me for this boy, so small, so precious, so vulnerable. Awake he carried that shy, self-conscious bearing of Shige's. I watched him get dressed in his school uniform, frayed and faded. Yuko had insisted on keeping her clothing rations for an emergency. I made his breakfast of rice and tea, recycled from dried leaves, and we left the house. Cicadas throbbed through the undergrowth in the garden. Next to a chinaberry sapling, plump figs were beginning to darken and the air carried their summer scent. As we neared the gate Hideo spotted a green praying mantis on a bird table and we watched it eat a white moth, which was trapped in its spiked legs. Hideo glanced at me. ‘Is the moth in pain? Can we save it?' I told him this was nature's way. There were hunters and prey but we were top of the food chain and he should not worry. I remembered something I had been told. ‘Do you know that the female praying mantis sometimes eats the male after they have mated?'

He looked confused. ‘What does mated mean?'

I blushed. ‘Never mind, we should get going. We don't want to be late for school.'

Hideo smiled, hopeful. ‘Can we keep her? As a pet.'

‘She's better out here, free, don't you think?'

He considered this and then took my hand in his own.

Our journey was no different to the others we had made during those days of ‘wartime emergency'. We passed the soba store as the owner laid out his meagre daily supply on bamboo racks. The tempura shop next door had been
turned into a collection point for any remaining metal we could forage from our homes. Kenzo had long ago sold what gold we had to the government and donated gardening tools, ceremonial swords, copper pots, buttons from our clothes, even the grate of our hearth. Outside the shop the women's association had left a box of cloth strips, which would be sent to our soldiers abroad. Each one had the word ‘strength' printed on them one thousand times. Kenzo would watch me at night as I worked on my own contributions and shake his head. ‘Trust me, those will do no good.' He would never admit so outside our home, but he believed the war was lost. Still he went to work, still I made my senninriki, still I believed somehow our family would be fine.

Hideo and I waited for a street car and then pushed our way onto the crammed carriage next to young women dressed in their loose-fitting monpe trousers and white shirts. They would be heading to the locomotive depots, the railroad stations, shipping companies and the munitions factories. Kenzo had admired their hard work but when students in the last year of elementary school were recruited to help at similar labour units, he asked in despair, ‘When will this stop?'

My grandson's palm was clasped in mine and his school shirt was damp with sweat. The day would be another hot, humid one. I pointed at the window. We watched members of the Nagasaki Fortress Defence Unit march alongside the tram tracks in uniforms that hung from them. Many no longer drilled with guns but bamboo poles. Their weapons had been sent to those on the front lines. A couple of nights earlier my women's association
had organised a national defence evening where similar spears were handed out. We wrapped sashes across our chests and tied hachimaki to our heads. Then we picked up our weapons and ran toward life-size effigies of Roosevelt and Churchill as we shouted, ‘Annihilate America! Annihilate England!' The sight was ludicrous, but I could not speak such treachery. We had to be seen to be loyal among those who still were. Days earlier, as I sat in the cinema, I watched police arrest a man in the theatre for not taking his hat off when the Emperor appeared on the screen. Better to be obedient and wary.

We got off the tram and walked toward Yamazato school. Down by the river, some boys older than Hideo crouched in the shallows and searched for eels. They prised stones from the riverbed and looked for their catch. A few yards farther on, where the river was deeper, another boy, stripped to the waist, threw a rock tied with string into the water. Two of his friends dived down. They came up gasping and one of them held the rock aloft in his hand. We arrived at the school gates and I handed Hideo his lunch box of buckwheat and okra which I had managed to grow in the garden. He loved to bite into the green vegetables to the white hollows of flesh inside, hold them up and declare, ‘Look, a star.' He reached up and pressed hot fingers against my cheek. I told him, ‘Work hard, Hideo-chan.' I put my hand over his and we smiled at one another and leaned forward until our foreheads touched. ‘I promise, Grandmother.' Our morning ritual. ‘I'll collect you later. Dried cod for dinner tonight.' He made a sour face. ‘Or whale ham if I can find some.' He smiled at this. I watched him walk through the school
gates. I did not say goodbye, I did not say I loved him, but I hope he knew how loved he was, how loved he has always been. This is Hideo Watanabe. This is my grandson.

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I was nearing the tram stop when the air-raid sirens began. The city had been spared the air raids experienced in Tokyo, the incendiary bombing so dense even the rivers were ablaze, but the week before fifty bombers had targeted the Mitsubishi shipyard, steelworks and the medical college hospital. Thankfully Yuko had not been working there at the time and Kenzo had laughed off the danger at his workplace. A woman, with her baby strapped to her back, glanced up at the sky. I did the same but could see no planes. She asked, ‘What do you think?' I thought just for a moment that I should go back to get Hideo but I reasoned the teachers would take the children to a shelter if the sirens continued. ‘We'll be safe,' I told her and she nodded her agreement. As I took a tram back up the hill the all-clear rang out across the rooftops. I was due to help collect empty charcoal bags, which would then be delivered to City Hall for recycling. I calculated if I worked for two hours, I would have plenty of time to get a street car back down to Urakami to meet Yuko.

Two incidents made me late for her. I wonder now if I meant to be? I was terrified by what she might say and how I would respond. These thoughts distracted me as I worked with a young widow, Tukiko. She pulled a wooden cart while I knocked on doors calling out for the bags. We had designed the route so we would finish close to my home. Tukiko would then head on to our neighbourhood association to make her delivery. When we were
done I noticed my hands and shirt were stained with soot so at 10.30 a.m. I ran back to my house to change my clothes and wash off the dirt. By the time I closed our garden gate, it was probably 10.45 a.m. As I turned on to the main road, I saw the tram about fifty yards in front of me coming to a standstill. By the time I reached the stop, the street car was halfway down the hill. I checked my watch. It was 10.50 a.m. Yuko may already have been inside the cathedral. She had come to follow Shige's Catholic faith and would often go there on her work break. The next tram would be along in fifteen minutes. I knew I would be late but also that she would wait for me. I remember I turned and saw a sign advertising tinned fruit in the window of the grocery store behind me. I wanted to buy some for Hideo and checked my ration book before heading into the shop. And so I was paying for a tin of mandarin oranges when a new light flooded our world. Those who dare to ask me how I survived pikadon are rewarded with the same answer: a sweet tooth. My humour unnerves them. The truth is less glib. Nagasaki saved me; its geography contained the power of the explosion to a third of the city, mostly the Urakami district and part of downtown. The harbour, the historic area and the centre were shielded by the higher ground around the river. While those beautiful hills, thick with green trees, nesting kites and outlying villages narrowed the bomb's range, they also intensified its force. Although I was too high up, too far away, too sheltered within that dark grocery store, I was close enough to know what the end of existence sounds like.

I had never heard such a noise before. It felt as if the world's heart had exploded. Some would later describe it as a bang, but this was more than a door slamming on its hinges, or an oil truck thudding into a car. There can be no word for what we heard that day. There must never be. To give this sound a name might mean it could happen again. What word can capture the roar of every thunderstorm you might have heard, every avalanche and volcano and tsunami that you might have seen tear across the land, every city consumed by flames and waves and winds? Never find the language for such an agony of noise and the silence that followed.

I was thrown backwards into a pile of wooden crates, a small window above the door shattered and sprayed shards across the shop, cracks ripped across the wall as if it were ice tapped by a hammer. The shopkeeper emerged from behind his counter, blood running from a gash above his eye. We stared at one another, too scared for some seconds to leave the sanctuary of the store. He held out his hand and I reached for him. We picked our way through the upended shelves and crates and those tins of fruit. We emerged into a cloud of red haze and heat, blinking in the dust that filled the air. This was pikadon: flash and bang. A new word for the new world that greeted us. The sky seemed to be on fire. A group of people had gathered at a clearing next to the laundryman's shop. We joined them and looked down to what we could see of the city below, too confused to speak in those first moments. We must have known it to be a bomb, or bombs, but how could man alone do this? How could that be possible? A black fog
clung to the ground but through breaks in its cover we saw an unimaginable sight. Urakami to the east of the river looked as if some god had stamped down on it, over and over again, kicked the debris away into the air and then moved on.

What survivors saw differs in the telling. To some, the explosion was like a giant pulsating chrysanthemum, a thousand boiling clouds of purple and cream and pink, or it was a giant tree ablaze, shooting high into the sky, or yes, it was shaped like a mushroom, collapsing into itself and then rising away. I can't tell you what I saw. I was looking to where the cathedral should have been. I could see the terraced hills behind where farmers had sliced into the land, but nothing else. When did I decide Yuko was dead? In that moment. At 11.03 or 11.04 a.m. I looked to Hideo's school, about a mile away from the cathedral, and tried to make out the U-shape of the building. I turned to the shopkeeper and said, ‘My daughter and grandson are down there.' His silence felt like an executioner's blade wet from the kill. Eventually he said, ‘You should go home, wait for them.' How could I go home? How could I wait for them not to return? I was a mile away from the edge of the bomb's reach. ‘If I walk, I can get to the school in under an hour.' The shopkeeper looked at me, suspicious. ‘There's nothing you can do. Don't go.' I shook my head, refusing to accept his judgement. Instead I ran down the hill toward Urakami. At first the world seemed normal; the buildings, the banks, the street stalls, they were familiar. But then I entered a landscape so alien my nightmares could not have dreamed such terror.

Should I speak of the horrors that I saw? They still seem so unreal to me. The tombs of the city's cemeteries had been blown open and the dead walked among us. Shards of glass carpeted the ground and barefoot children ran over these splinters, their feet shredded and bleeding. Some had strange patterns etched on their exposed skin. There was a man with a broken jaw held in a silent scream. I passed a woman who was sitting on the ground trying to breastfeed her baby. The woman held the bloody rags covering her child up to me. ‘Help my son, he won't feed.' All hope was lost for the child. Rain started to fall, gritty and black. Much later I would learn this was what made my gums bleed and clumps of hair fall out in the days that followed. An old man stumbled out of a house and held a broom aloft. ‘Crush the enemy,' he shouted over and over again. The nearer I drew to the school the less human the creatures left alive became. Their flesh was black or red raw, like the skin of a ripe pomegranate, their feet were bare. Shoes had melted into the asphalt, still hot underfoot. A woman ran past, naked to the waist, her skin dragging behind her like a cape. Faces were swollen horribly by burns. The smell of burnt flesh and charcoal choked my nostrils. Other wounded people lay where they had fallen. One girl, about five years old, sat in the dirt, her left foot gone. ‘Water,' she called out, but to my shame I did not stop.

Everything seemed to be burning or burnt. The hemp trees were alight and a charred body hung from one of the electricity poles. The heat from some of the fires was so fierce, I had to find other routes, doubling back, trying to find a way through the flames. What to say of the
baked street car, the tram tracks twisted up into the sky, the charcoal statues inside? The carcass of a horse lay on the ground, as delicate as a burnt log. Yet more bodies were floating on the surface of the river. They must have run there to cool their scorched skin. I felt as if the world had been turned inside out. This had to be hell. Finally, I reached the gates of the school.