Summer, 2000 The Secret
At 8:15 A.M. on August 6, 1945, at the end of a world war that had lasted six years, the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.
Obaachan was there. She was fifteen years old. She’d moved from Kyoto to Hiroshima with her mother only a month before, after her father died in the war. They ran a small tea shop, two tables on the street in front of their house, and sold sweets they had made on their stove.
For weeks, Obaachan had dreamed of piles of sticks, of burning rubbish, and a snowstorm made of ash. The whine of a mosquito became, in dreams, the buzz of a plane. Thunder sounded like a bomb.
Still, when it happened, she was unprepared, washing clothes in the Kyobashi River like it was any other day. A boy she liked had stolen her mother’s dress from the water and was dancing with it, holding it against him, just out of her reach. She was grabbing for it and hollering at him that he’d better give it back.
She didn’t remember hearing anything, just a silence more quiet than prayer. Then the light.
“What did it look like?” I ask.
“Like the sun had crashed into the earth and exploded into flames. Like a volcano erupting in the sky. A building in the distance became a skeleton of ash. Birds and objects rained from the sky. My mother’s dress floated away from me on the river. I knew then that she was gone. The dream I’d had didn’t help prevent anything.”
My great-grandmother. “She died?”
“Yes.”
“What happened to the boy?”
“I don’t know. He was there and then not, like our lives. That’s what they called it.”
“What?”
“The bomb. They called it Little Boy. And years later, when I knew I was having a child, I prayed that it would be a girl, so I wouldn’t have to think those words.”
“But why did it happen?”
“In war, there is never any reason; there is only attachment and ego and power. That is the cause of war and of all suffering.”
She tells me this on August 14, a day commemorating the surrender of the Japanese following the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We are walking by the river, where on summer weekends lit fires float in the water.
I have waited two years for her to explain. She tells me now because I am old enough to understand the circular path of history, the dark and light side of human beings like the very cycle of night and day. She tells me because I have read Sally’s history textbook and learned about other fires in the same war: ovens that whole families were forced into because of their religion.
And Obaachan talks about her life with my grandfather and my mother in Tokyo, how Mom didn’t want to hear about the war, or about the emperor, who was thought to be God, but whose voice when he conceded defeat to the United States sounded as frail as rice paper. Mom wanted only to learn about the Americans, and how instead of “slaughtering everyone,” as Obaachan had been told they would, they had driven through the streets of Japan in their tanks, tossing candy to children. They delivered boxes of food from the same planes that had once dropped bombs.
Mom wanted to learn English and travel.
She wanted to be American.
She sang songs by Elvis Presley and wore her skirt too short. After Mom married my dad and moved to America, Obaachan could still hear “Love Me Tender” in the shower, and “Jailhouse Rock” in the hall. She could smell the chemical scent of European perfume on the sheets and pillows, like flowers dipped in formaldehyde.
The trees are rustling their leaves. Shadows flicker on the sidewalk. The sky is the kind of blue that Dad says you can only see in New England, clear as the purest water.
And in that sky, I do see it all: the flames, the river, my great-grandmother’s dress floating away, my Obaachan a fifteen-year-old girl, wandering the streets alone through burning houses and bodies.
Then I know something about time, that it, too, is a river. That it surrounds like water.
And I wade into it.