A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding (4 page)

A blast had punched holes through the main building and fire had taken hold of what was left. Little of the smashed outhouses remained. The playground was littered with children who must have fallen as they played. I looked upon these blackened forms and thought Hideo surely to be dead then. Other people, parents presumably, searched with me. None of the bodies seemed alive, but perhaps I made a mistake? I don't remember a boy with a burnt face; I'm sure I don't. I shouted Hideo's name and I thought maybe he had run to one of the shelters the teachers had been building. I walked beside the rice fields and came across another charred lump and beside those remains was a magnifying glass, warped by heat, and then what looked like a necklace dipped in fire. Identity tags. I rubbed clear the black grime with my fingers. His name. Hideo Watanabe. My grandson. This happened. This I did not imagine. Deranged with hope I thought just for a moment he too had survived. I screamed into air-raid shelters already full of those who had crawled there to die, but no one answered to his name. I ran back to the schoolyard and knew I could not leave. To go would mean he was gone. A boy dressed in the uniform of the Student Patriotic Corps asked if I needed help. What can a grandmother do when she knows her grandchild to
be dead? She does what she must do: she believes that he is still alive.

‘I can't find my grandson.'

He pulled out a notepad. ‘What's his name? I'll put him on the list. We're looking for survivors.'

‘Hideo Watanabe. He's seven.' I watched the boy write on paper smeared with dust and blood. How could this one young boy find my lost one? When would Hideo be looked for? Where could he have gone? Desperation made me hope that Yuko had decided not to meet me but had stayed at work. ‘The medical college hospital?' ‘Gone,' he said. ‘Try Michinoo train station. They're taking the injured there.' I started to head off. ‘Mitsubishi?' He didn't know. Some of the factories had tunnels and if Kenzo had made it to them, he might be safe. I knew if he had survived, he would also be looking.

On the ruined streets that led to the station more wounded, so many, were making their way along the tracks to the station office. Some had wrapped crude bandages around their cuts and burns and broken limbs. The more seriously injured were carried in sheets, or on planks or carts. Despite the numbers, after the roar of the bomb and the screams of its victims, all was quiet. Footsteps, cartwheels, babies made no sound. The sky turned an impossible colour, a morning light or the shadows of dusk, I could not tell. I looked for the birds that soar above the city but there were none. Where had they gone? And then I understood the sky must have swallowed them. Later I saw a black kite alive on the ground, its feathers burned away, scalded wings flapping as it tried to take flight.

At the station, noise returned. People begged the defence corps troops or medics who passed them, ‘Take my son, help my wife, save me.' They grabbed at the too few doctors as they tried to tend the wounded. Nurses tore strips of cloth and smeared castor oil on exposed burns. One young woman, her uniform wet with blood, stood up, turned away and fainted. I wished death on some of the people I saw to end their suffering. I could not tell if they were man or woman; I could not make out eyes from ears or mouths; so many cried out for water until their moans of pain became whimpers followed by nothing. At some point, there was a screech of iron and a train arrived, its carriage doors flung open. The doctors began to point to people to load up first, presumably the ones more likely to survive. I don't know how long I searched, but when I could no longer stand the sight of all those bodies I made my way back through the streets, past those too injured to move from the spreading fires, until I reached home. I sat in our kitchen and waited, hoping someone, anyone, would walk through the door.

Darkness had fallen when I heard the crunch of gravel on our garden path. I waited, my blood racing, and a ghost walked into the room. Kenzo was white from head to foot. His hair and suit were covered in plaster dust, his eyes bruised, his fingernails were bleeding as if he had been scraping away at the walls. I ran to him. ‘It's you?' He nodded and held me in his arms. He checked me over. ‘You're safe? Are you hurt?' I told him I was unharmed. He glanced to the shadows of the rest of our house. ‘Are they asleep?' I could not speak, I could not
say the words. He slumped against the sink, his back to me, his hands grasping the stone rim.

I touched his shoulder, felt the warmth of him. ‘Did you go to the school?' He said nothing. ‘Yuko was at the cathedral. I was on my way to meet her.' He gripped the sink tighter. ‘What do we do now?'

He closed his eyes, defeated by the question. ‘We need to rest. We'll look again when it's light.'

‘I'm sorry, Kenzo.'

He turned his head to look at me. ‘Why?'

‘I should have gone back for him.' I shook my head. ‘The air-raid warning, I thought it was a false alarm, I decided he would be safe with his teachers.'

He pulled me toward him. ‘This isn't your fault, Ama.'

I tried to stop them but the tears came then. My heart felt crushed by the kindness of his words. ‘Tell me he's somewhere safe, Kenzo. Tell me he's not scared, tell me he's still alive.'

Kenzo held my face in his hands, made me look in his eyes. ‘He's alive until we know he's dead. They both are. Yes?' How could I tell him otherwise? He took my silence as agreement. ‘We'll check in the morning. I'll go to the medical college again, visit the shelters. It's too late tonight. The fires are still burning. But I promise you, Amaterasu, I won't give up until I find them. I promise you that.' He took my hand and led me through to the living area. We sat on the floor and listened to the radio in the dark. A newscaster spoke of the Russian invasion of Manchuria. The USSR had struck only hours before the bomb fell. Japan was at war with another enemy.

‘Turn it off,' I said and the voice crackled away to nothing. ‘Why Urakami? The schools and houses?'

‘The factories.' Kenzo began to pull off his jacket. ‘The ordnance works are gone, the steelworks and arms plant are badly damaged.'

‘But you survived?' One sharp nod and then he put his head in his hands, ashamed by his tears. We embraced, my body too small to soak up the sobs that made his shudder. The shipbuilder and his wife saved, the city's children and their mothers gone.

We woke before dawn, ate sour millet, looked for photographs of Hideo and Yuko to take with us to Urakami Dai-Ichi Hospital. We thought survivors might have been taken there. I tied bedsheets to my back and we made our way through roads scattered with bricks, metal beams and chunks of plaster. Shards of buildings smouldered across the flattened landscape; skeletal girders and the odd chimney stack twisted up into the sky. People were picking through rubble, some on their hands and knees, and when an elderly woman picked up a blackened skull, I realised they were searching for bones. The cremations had begun for the bodies not yet consumed by flames. Volunteers loaded corpses onto carts or piles of wood. A woman near them was gathering ashes in her hands and placing them into an empty can of powdered baby milk.

When we arrived at the hospital only its exterior red-brick wall remained but doctors had set up a ward outside in the yard. Some canvas shelters had been raised to protect patients from the sun but others lay on soiled blankets or the bare ground as the morning heat took
hold. We handed over the bedsheets to a nurse too pale with lack of sleep and asked if we might search for our missing among the patients. She took my hand, her voice gentle. ‘Some of them are very badly hurt, do you understand?' I nodded and she turned to Kenzo. ‘I'm afraid we're having to dispose of the bodies as quickly as possible.' She patted the sheets in her arms. ‘This is most kind.' We checked as best we could and then wrote Hideo and Yuko's names on a list that had been pinned to the entrance sign of the hospital. Others had left their own messages: ‘
Have you seen my parents, Aito and Nana Narita? Last seen in Urakami
', ‘
If Goro Saito sees this, please go to your uncle's home in Shimabara
' and ‘
Lost: two children aged eight and six, called Yoshi and Akatsuki Yamada. Please contact Shinzo Yamada at Omura Naval Hospital
.'

We left the hospital and walked toward the stump of the cathedral. Kenzo squeezed my fingers. ‘Should we check?' The stone entrance and some of the circular windows on the facade had survived the blast but the rest was rubble. I turned away. ‘There's no point.' Instead we walked for hours past more attempts at first-aid stations, more pockets of fires, until late in the afternoon when Kenzo stopped beside a child's body, a girl maybe, covered his eyes with his hands and began to weep. I stood on tiptoes to place my cheek against his own. ‘Let's go home, we're tired. We should eat.' He shook his head. ‘I need to go to the factory. You rest. I'll keep looking.'

And he did. We both did. We went to the makeshift hospitals, stood in never-ending queues to register our missing, checked the piles of bodies stacked as if sandbags for cremation. Who knows how long we hunted for them?
Hours, days, weeks? Time was as broken as the land. Every body we passed, every burnt or bleeding patient we saw, we hoped that it might be Yuko or Hideo, but we never saw their faces again.

Konjo: This is a key word in understanding Japanese stoicism, which has been practised by the male population since feudal times. A man who possesses konjo is highly praised for he would stop at nothing in the course of duty, willingly subjecting himself to unbearable circumstances in the process. Thus konjo is a symbol of masculine spirit.

Days before pikadon, I arrived unannounced at Yuko's home. She was writing in a book with such intensity that she could not have heard me come through the door. I called out to her and she snapped the cover shut before she looked up to greet me. I saw in her face an expression of guilt and frustration at the interruption. ‘I was just sending Shige some news.' Maybe I believed her, but during those first nights after August 9, I lingered over the memory of her sitting at her desk. What had she written and why? Had she confessed secrets to Shige that no longer needed to be revealed? Maybe she had not sent the letter, maybe it could be retrieved and erased if the contents proved harmful? I could allow my daughter and my son-in-law this kindness.

Two nights after the bomb, while Kenzo continued the search, I stood in her garden. The blossom on the azalea bush looked too orange, the ash tree too large, the blood grass too alive for this shattered city. I opened the
unlocked main door and stepped into the house. Laughter, tantrums and tears had once filled these rooms now so empty and silent. How quickly a home can become a mausoleum. A burnt incense stick lay on the table in the living room. In the kitchen, there was a vase of wilting red carnations. Hideo's shirt hung on a peg near the range. Upstairs in Yuko's bedroom I lifted back the drape of the mosquito net and lay on the unmade futon. I closed my eyes and smelled the sweetness of her on the sheets, a hint of lavender and the mustier odour of the summer damp that invaded their home. I sat up and looked around the room to the walnut cupboards and matching chest, the trunk beneath the window and the cabinet next to the door. Where would Yuko conceal a secret? I began to open drawers. I lifted up the folded cotton tops, thin sweaters and grey silks. I looked inside the cupboard and ran my hands over one of her nurse's uniforms. I lifted the lid of the trunk and felt beneath winter blankets until my fingers touched something hard. A book. A diary.
Yuko Watanabe
. Beneath this one were several more, all the way back to
Yuko Takahashi
. I had expected to find a letter and instead uncovered a life. I collected them up, took them home and found a new hiding place.

I guessed why Yuko kept a journal. She was like a photographer trying to capture the sunset before the last rays disappeared. We all need proof that certain things happened as we imagined they did, but those books were a dangerous indulgence. Leave no proof of transgressions, store them only in your mind. I had learned that lesson young. Some stories are best taken to the grave. Yuko had not written that diary for public record but for private
comfort. No one would read my daughter's confessions. Not me, not Kenzo, and not, as I feared then, Shige when he returned. We had no way of contacting him. We thought he was stationed somewhere in the Pacific, Saipan maybe, or Burma, perhaps New Guinea. But even if we had an address, we would not have told him about Hideo and Yuko. We believed such news should be heard not read.

Kenzo was sure Japan couldn't last out much longer, not with the Russians razing our troops in Manchuria, not with the Americans in Okinawa, not with young boys barely old enough to have girlfriends trying to steer planes into enemy ships. In the aftermath of pikadon, my own anger coursed through me but I could not say out loud the dark thoughts that I had carried. Kenzo had helped build those ships to carry our men away. Those factories by the harbour had brought the bomb to our city. Yes, he had done his duty, we all had, but look at the cost. The nation had two options: surrender or suicide, Kenzo said. The war was lost but its end was meaningless to me.

Six days after pikadon, Misaki was taking tea with me in the living room after I had spent the morning in Urakami. I found myself drawn back to that blasted plain as if one day, I would just happen to see Yuko sitting by some ruin. I imagined her calling out to me, ‘There you are, I've been waiting for you.' Misaki's family had been spared. Her daughter had been sent to work in a canning factory in a nearby village, her husband worked nights and had been asleep safe in their home, her son was stationed at a coal mine outside the city. I could feel her
embarrassment that she had been so protected from the bomb when we had been so exposed. But I was glad for her. How could I not be? She was more a friend than a housekeeper, perhaps my only friend. Kenzo had employed her before we were married. More than twenty-five years had passed since we first met. Misaki was a little older than me, her hair was already shot through with grey, unruly in a bun. I looked at her hands resting in her lap, her chewed nails, the red, inflamed skin, the slight tremor in her fingers. I wanted to tell her that she need not feel such peculiar shame; I wanted to say that her companionship was succour to me, but instead I took hold of her hand, clammy in my own. Kenzo had phoned earlier to tell me to turn the radio on at noon when he said, his voice incredulous, Emperor Showa would address the nation. We listened to the announcer introduce the recorded message.

Misaki stared at me in amazement. ‘I've never heard his voice.'

He spoke in classical Japanese as whines and crackles cut into his speech. We listened as one might to a god.

‘To our good and loyal subjects, after pondering deeply the general trends of the world and the actual conditions obtaining in our empire today, we have decided to effect a settlement of the present situation . . .'

Misaki looked at me. ‘I can't understand, what's he saying?' I gestured for her to be quiet.

‘
The enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll
of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, not only would
it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the
Japanese nation,
but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilisation . . .'

‘Is he talking about us?'

I nodded, but I was not sure.

‘
Such being the case, how are we to save the millions of our subjects, or to atone ourselves before the hallowed spirits of our imperial ancestors? This is the reason why we have ordered the acceptance of the provisions of the Joint Declaration . . .'

He spoke of hardships and sufferings, of paving the way to a grand peace by enduring the unendurable. Misaki sighed. ‘Why can't he speak plainly? Is the war over?'

‘Beware most strictly of any outbursts of emotion . . . Unite your total strength . . . Cultivate the ways of rectitude, foster nobility of spirit, and work with resolution – so that you may enhance the innate glory of the imperial state and keep pace with the progress of the world.'

We waited for the announcer to tell us what we did not understand: Japan had surrendered. We did not hug each other with joy or relief, we did not weep, we were not sure how to greet this news. ‘What will become of us?' Misaki asked. I thought immediately of Shige. He would come home now surely? What joy, what sadness, too. Later when Kenzo returned from the shipyard, he and I stood under our ginkyo tree. We looked at the stars as I took a sip of the sake we had kept to mark the end of the war. ‘Why now? Why this day? Is our city the reason?'

He held his glass up to the moonlight. ‘Don't ask that question, wife.'

‘Were Yuko and Hideo taken for a reason, so that the war might end?' I insisted.

‘They died because our enemy had bigger bombs, they
died because America wanted to teach the world a lesson, they died because they do not matter.'

‘They mattered to us.'

He downed his drink, grimacing. ‘We don't matter either, Amaterasu, don't you see?'

We waited a month to hold the memorial. We would have delayed the day longer but we had heard nothing from Shige. The news from overseas was one of chaos following Japan's surrender. But I clung to the belief he was still alive, somehow. He had to be. We couldn't lose all three of them.

His parents came to the city and we gathered at Oura Church, too numb to comprehend the size and depth of our grief. We were just one of thousands of families to mourn lost ones but these were our dead. Following the service, we invited guests to our home. What food we could find was served by a weeping Misaki. Some of our guests had lost relatives of their own. One of the wives told me that they were thinking of starting up a group for bereaved survivors so that they might draw support from one another. The thought of sitting in some cold hall or a stranger's home appalled me, and maybe my face for once betrayed my true feelings. The woman's husband took me to the side of our living room. He gripped my elbow as he spoke. ‘This life is often beyond reasoning. We will never make sense of this but neither must we allow it to defeat us. We owe such fortitude to those no longer with us.' I tipped my head to the side as if I understood, but no kind words could heal the wounds inside me.

The day after the memorial Kenzo and I accompanied
Shige's parents to our children's home to start clearing away possessions. With so many people in need, we had decided to give clothes to the homeless and much of the furniture and kitchen utensils would go to shelters. Kenzo pretended to busy himself outside and Shige's father sat in the day room drinking what was left of the sake while his wife and I began to pack away belongings. Too quickly the proof of their lives would disappear. They would be reduced to photograph albums and token mementoes and tricks of our memory. Shige's mother and I started in Hideo's room, the black air-raid curtains drawn back, the sun hot on our faces. I was folding up what few clothes he had as I knelt beside his futon. Sonoko had opened a wooden chest under the window. Colouring books, beanbags and a straw hat with a crease in the rim were piled next to her. She picked up a wooden cup attached by string to a ball. The toy was striped red and black, crude in its finish. She sat back and her mouth contorted in a way that made me realise she did not want to cry. Not here, not yet. ‘I gave this to him, two summers ago, when he came to Iōjima. My neighbour, Toshi, made it. Hideo found it annoying, he could never get the ball in the cup.' She wrapped the string around the handle. ‘Do you mind if I keep this?'

‘Please. Take what you must.'

She thanked me and next she pulled out a piece of paper from the chest and smiled. ‘Here, I think this is for you.' She handed me a drawing, which consisted of little more than circles for the bodies and heads and sticks for arms. Underneath, he had written ‘Grandmother and Grandfather'.

I felt embarrassed. ‘It could be either of us.'

She looked inside the chest. ‘You were lucky to spend more time with him.'

The truth made me blush. ‘We will keep looking for them.'

‘They are gone, Amaterasu. I think we must accept this. I think we already have.'

I managed to look in her eyes. ‘What will you do?'

She picked up one of the sweaters I had folded and held it to her face, breathing in the memory. ‘Carry on, endure, live. What else can we do?' She ran her hands over the brown wool. ‘And you?'

The words were even more hollow when repeated. ‘Carry on, endure, live.'

And so I had, for nearly forty years, I carried on, I accepted Hideo was gone. Now the idea of him was back, not a boy, but a man, and every time I thought about him I saw pikadon and that empty home and that drawing.
Grandmother and Grandfather
. I returned to the bedroom and retrieved the sketch, the writing almost illegible, despite no sunlight to blanch the ink. In the kitchen I placed it next to Yuko's diary.

I had kept my promise. I had never read her journals. While I told myself I was doing a honourable deed by preserving her privacy, in reality, I was just a coward. I had turned away from what I could not face, but Yuko could sift the truth from the lies. She could bring Hideo truly back to life. Only my daughter would make me believe that this mutilated man was her son.