‘I’d like to welcome you to Family Day!’ Standing at the front of the room, she beamed, and in the enthusiasm of that beaming, her smile somehow grew stuck. As her gaze travelled across the assembled group, she groped at the ivory fabric gathered at her neck and cleared her throat noisily. They stared at her and waited.
She flashed them her paralysed smile again. ‘I’m very happy to see the faces of so many family and friends – because to us, every one of you is both family and friend. As you know, we hold these Family Days once every three months, to allow family and residents the opportunity to gather together, here at Granda Homes.’
She was flanked on either side by uniformed staff. They stood listening, hands folded and heads pressed downwards. Dressed in pastel nurse uniforms and flat white shoes, they wore their hair neatly pinned up. As she stood there, one of them – a youngish girl with a softly wandering eye – slowly tucked back a stray lock of hair. Through the glazed doors leading to the kitchen, young girls in black waitress uniforms could be seen, plating dishes and arranging garnishes. A peaked chef’s hat was briefly visible, bobbing in the foreground. A muffled voice cried out, ‘Pork chops coming! Come on, come on, move it! Pork chops coming!’
The manager jerked her head towards the doors in a reflex of agitation. She cleared her throat for a second time. Her smile grew wider, showing the bright-flossed cleanness of her teeth. She began again. ‘Family Day is an opportunity for families to get a sense of what daily life is like here. But it is also a cause for gathering and celebration.’
The children seated before her nodded politely; the parents stared impassively. One of them leaned towards her daughter. ‘What’s she saying now?’ she asked loudly. Turning their heads, the other children stared at the daughter.
‘Shh, Mother. Please,’ the daughter hushed. The mother snorted, then refolded her hands in her lap. The daughter smiled and continued to nod politely as she blushed. The manager observed them with a severe eye before continuing.
‘And because today is a special day, the head chef of the Granda Care Homes Franchise is here to cook our lunch banquet.’ The mother–daughter altercation appeared to have restored her buoyancy; she seemed visibly to hit a groove. Smiling, she clapped her hands together. Confused, a couple of children began applauding energetically. The parents maintained their blank stares. The manager nodded complacently, and then motioned for silence.
‘Here at the Granda Care Homes, we have a rotating list of chefs, who weekly move from residence to residence. They each specialize in different cuisines, and with this programme of constant rotation we ensure that our meals never get dull. These highly trained chefs specialize in creating delicious, nutritious food for the residents, and work under the direction of our Head Chef, Asano Fumiko. Chef Asano is here today, cooking your lunch, and I believe –’ she turned her head slightly – ‘that he would like to say a few words to you.’
She stepped aside and looked towards the kitchen doors expectantly. The windowed doors remained still. A voice shouted out, ‘Where’s the white sauce? Where is it?’ followed by a loud clattering of pans. ‘Shit!’ the voice cried.
Blinking, the manager leaned towards one of her staff, a young woman in a pastel-yellow overall. The young woman ducked through the swinging doors and disappeared into the kitchen. Several moments passed. Apprehensively, the manager glanced at the assembled families. The children looked back, wide-eyed. The parents were either dozing or muttering to themselves. The manager laughed, gesturing in the air meaninglessly, then swallowed hard.
A tall, bearded man in cook’s whites appeared, hastily wiping his hands on his apron. He bowed apologetically to the manager, who looked at him askance, then turned to bow several times to the group, hands still caught up in the folds of his apron. The children gaped at him. The manager coughed, loudly. Sheepishly, he smoothed his apron down and began.
‘I – well, let’s see. I’m the Head Chef for the Granda chain.’ Staring at the floor, he came to a long and unnatural pause, as if puzzled by the nature of the statement he had just made. The manager coughed. Reluctantly, he roused himself and continued.
‘I oversee the menus and the production of meals for your parents – for the residents, I mean.’ He looked nervously towards the manager. She stared straight ahead. He looked at the group. ‘We’ve cooked a meal for you,’ he added in a hopeful tone. He gazed back in the direction of the manager. Looking down, she carefully plucked an invisible hair from her sleeve.
He looked around despairingly. ‘Thank you…very much?’
The manager broke into strident applause, nodding her head approvingly. Bowing awkwardly, the chef rushed back into the kitchen. The young woman in yellow reappeared. The manager stepped forward again, smiling broadly.
‘I’d now like to invite you to enjoy your lunch. We’ll ask you to step up to the buffet, table by table. Drinks are here –’ gesturing to a table covered with pitchers of tea, water and juice. ‘Please enjoy yourself. And if you need anything–anything at all–don’t hesitate to ask me, or any one of my staff. We are here to help.’
Bowing, she stepped aside and motioned for her staff to gather. As she gave them vigorous instructions, gesturing towards tables and pointing emphatically, the swinging doors opened and the uniformed waitresses appeared, carrying platters and chafing dishes. A low murmur of stilted conversation ran round the room, and the children rose from their seats to fetch drinks for their parents.
‘Well!’ my grandmother said cheerily. She leaned conspiratorially towards the lady seated beside her. The lady was a very pretty old lady. Small as a child, she was dressed in girlish yellows and pinks and her hair was neatly curled. Her cheeks were rosy and, behind delicate gold spectacles, her eyes were bright and inquisitive. Beside her sat a middle-aged man with glasses and thinning hair; family resemblance marked him as her son.
‘Well!’ my grandmother said again. The tiny lady looked up at her.
‘They give us nice food today,’ the tiny lady commented. ‘Not like usual.’
‘Do they, now?’ my grandmother said. She smiled cheerfully.
‘Yes, they give us nice food today,’ the tiny lady repeated. ‘Not like usual – not like usual at all,’ she repeated, giving her son a pointed look. Rolling his eyes, he tried and failed to suppress a sigh. He recrossed his legs, mouth set stoically.
‘Well!’ my grandmother said again. She looked at the tiny lady and laughed. Her eyes wandered over the room. ‘So many people gathered here for the party,’ she sighed happily. She smiled at me, and then at my mom. She turned to the tiny lady.
‘Have I introduced you to my daughter and my granddaughter?’ she asked.
‘We’ve met already, Mother,’ my mom said. The middle-aged man shot her a look of vague sympathy. The tiny lady nodded politely.
‘Ah, and this is my son.’ She gestured to the man beside her. He nodded, and my grandmother bowed, giggling. The tiny lady elbowed him ferociously. ‘Say hello,’ she hissed.
‘Mother, you’ve introduced us three times already.’
‘Nonsense,’ she said fiercely. He shrugged.
‘Nice to meet you,’ my mom said, bowing from across the table.
‘Nice to meet you, for the fourth time now.’ He sighed, and then bowed.
‘Look at Fujiwara-san,’ the tiny lady said suddenly. She was peering across the room from over the top of her spectacles. ‘She’s far too old to be wearing that shade of red.’ She jostled my grandmother by the arm. ‘Look – look. Look at Fujiwara-san.’ She picked up a fork and pointed across the room vigorously.
My grandmother gazed in the direction of the fork and clucked sympathetically. ‘So many people gathered here! It’s just like a party!’
‘Did you hear me? I said, look at Fujiwara-san. Look at that red.’ She shook her head, trembling with anger. ‘She is far too old to be wearing that shade of red.’
‘Mother, really,’ the son said.
‘What’s that?’ the tiny lady said. She cast a sharp glance at her son. ‘Did you say something?’
‘Just – calm down a bit, will you?’
‘Calm down? Calm down? Do I look excited? Do I look like I need to calm down? I can barely move, how much more can I be expected to calm down?’ Her son shrugged, and the tiny lady fell into a sullen silence, hand still clutching tightly at her fork.
My grandmother leaned towards my mom. ‘See that table over there?’ she whispered.
My mom turned to look at the table set diagonally opposite ours, where three geriatric widows were seated. Two of them were in wheelchairs; beside the chair of the third, an oversized walker was propped against the table. The frost-white hair on all three had thinned into stray patches, through which flaky, scalded scalp was visible. Exuding an extreme ill humour, they glared at the visitors and shouted obscenities at the residents they recognized. Their voices were surprisingly low and harsh. One of them pounded inanely at a bun with her spoon. Another slurped at her tea before spitting it out violently. A splash of dull-coloured grime flew across the table; it landed, shivering, on the cheek of the third widow. She looked up fiercely.
‘They always sit at that table. They won’t let anybody else sit there.’ My grandmother gasped slightly as she spoke. ‘Even though there’s always an extra space, nobody else is allowed to sit with them.’ As we watched, the most decrepit of the trio shouted to a cluster of staff members, one of whom trotted over immediately. The widow beside her sat slumped in her wheelchair, glaring abstractedly at the wall. She growled in a low tone, and it occurred to me that she might be a man, stripped and denatured by age.
‘I said, look at Fujiwara-san!’ the tiny lady insisted. Exasperated, the son threw up his hands. The tiny lady pounded on the table with a fist. The glasses and cutlery leapt up brokenly. My mom looked alarmed, my grandmother turned towards the tiny lady and nodded sympathetically. Shaking his head, the son took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. My mom gave him a look of polite commiseration. One of the uniformed staff looked in our direction, then hurried over.
‘Can I help you get some drinks, perhaps?’ she said. She massaged the tiny lady’s back in small, soothing circles. ‘Yamamoto-san, would you like some tea? Or juice?’ She looked at my grandmother. ‘Tea?’
‘I’ll get it,’ I said. ‘What would you like?’
‘Just get a few glasses of juice and a few cups of tea,’ my mom said wearily. I nodded and joined the queue at the drinks table. I returned a few minutes later carrying a tray with glasses of lurid orange juice and cups of hot tea.
‘Yamamoto-san, some juice? Or tea?’ my mom asked politely. The tiny lady glared at her suspiciously, and then, relenting, said, ‘Some juice, please.’ My mom placed a glass of juice before her, then looked question-ingly towards the son.
‘Tea, if you don’t mind. That’s very kind,’ he said as my mom slid a cup of tea towards him.
‘Mother – some tea, or juice?’
‘Juice, please.’ I handed my grandmother a glass. ‘Thank you!’ she said, carefully taking hold of the glass with both hands. She held it up in a toast, smiling, then sipped at the juice.
There was a glass of juice and a cup of tea left. ‘Do you mind if I take the tea?’ my mom asked.
‘No, go ahead.’
My mom removed the juice and tea from the tray, and I stood up to return it. When I came back to the table, my mom was talking to the son.
‘Well, unfortunately we don’t live in the area. But still, I do try to come as often as I can.’ She took a sip of tea.
‘That’s nice.’
‘And you? Do you live near by?’
‘Oh, yes, I do. But even so, it’s difficult.’ My mom nodded. ‘My wife works too, and then our kids are preparing for college entrance examinations, so things are a bit hectic in our household.’
‘I think we all do the best we can.’ A pause fell, and she sipped at her tea again. My grandmother had drunk all her juice.
‘Grandma, do you want more juice?’ She looked up, smiling. ‘Here, take mine. I’ll go and get some more.’
‘No, no, drink it. You’re still growing.’ She looked across the table at me, setting down her empty glass.
‘So tell me.’ She lowered her voice and leaned towards me. ‘Have you found yourself a special somebody yet?’
I cleared my throat. ‘Well, the thing is –’
I looked up. She had leaned back into her seat and was shaking her head sadly. ‘Too much studying. Too many degrees. Nobody will want to marry you now.’
From across the table, my mom sighed. ‘I wonder when it will be our turn to go up and get food.’
The son looked around. ‘I think our table is next, actually.’ As he spoke, a uniformed staff member came up to our table.
‘If you’d like to help yourselves –’ She gestured towards the buffet table. ‘There are plates there.’
My grandmother and the tiny lady were deep in conversation. My mom looked towards them. She said hesitantly, ‘I guess I’ll just put a plate together for you, Mother?’ My grandmother didn’t respond. Snatches of their conversation, entirely asynchronous, floated up towards us.
‘…but my son, who lives in Tokyo…’
‘…I went only the other day and…’
‘…it’s very difficult, though, with the telephones…’
‘…the pavement has turned grey…’
The son shook his head slightly and then stood up. The three of us walked to the buffet table.
Food lay prostrate across the table. Merely looking at it induced digestive exhaustion, and my stomach churned restlessly. Starting at one end with a diverse array of cold appetizers (a radial tomato and mozzarella salad, braised endive with cream, a terrine with sliced breads, foie gras with chestnuts, even slices of pale pink salmon garnished with onion and capers), it continued on in a regiment of portly black pots holding soups and stews, shining double rows of chafing dishes with hot pasta, braised meats, grilled fish, steamed vegetables with sauce, potato gratin and quiche. Mixed odours drifted on the steam that rose above the table. At the tail end of the party were appended plates of Chinese and Japanese noodles, dumplings, sushi, some rice porridge. I reached for a plate.
A stifled cooing drifted towards us. I paused, plate in hand.
‘What’s that sound?’
‘What sound?’
‘That sound. It’s like – pigeons or something.’
My mom turned her head. At a nearby table, an elderly woman was quietly crying to herself. Long, unminded tears coursed down her face, and the high neck of her sweater was stained with a growing spot of accumulated dampness. Her sobs drifted into a low moaning, then into hiccupping sniffles. The other residents at the table were blithely chatting away as they ploughed through great mouthfuls of food, insensible to the sound of her crying. The elderly man seated next to the weeping lady peered at her untouched plate through bottle-thick glasses, then reached over and forked up a pork cutlet.
The sobbing grew into a more protracted bleating, and the woman’s chest heaved expressively. One of the staff members turned her head. In a despairing gesture, the elderly lady covered her face with her hands and the sound withdrew, muffled.
My mom turned her attention back to the food. ‘She cries all the time,’ she explained calmly. ‘She cries at every meal, she cries during the recreational activities, she cries during her daily walk. She can’t stop.’
‘Why?’
She shrugged.
We returned to the table, our plates laden with food. ‘Here you go, Grandma,’ I said, handing her a full plate.
She took the plate, and looked at it wonderingly. ‘Where did this come from?’
‘From the buffet.’ She looked at me blankly. I pointed over my shoulder. ‘You know – the buffet, over there?’
‘Oh!’ She looked down at the plate.
‘Is it OK?’ I asked, still standing. ‘I can go back and get something else, if you like.’
‘No, no, it looks delicious.’
The tiny lady chortled triumphantly. ‘What did I tell you?’ She looked up at us and nodded sagely. ‘They give us nice food today. Not like the usual food.’
My grandmother nodded back and started eating. The food on her plate disappeared with prodigious rapidity. She ate without speaking, pausing only occasionally to wash the food down with long sips of orange drink. My mom watched, a small hardness setting in around her mouth. The food on her own plate remained untouched.
A waitress stopped at our table and took orders for tea and coffee; the manager followed close behind.
‘Hello!’ she said, swooping upon our table. ‘I trust you found the lunch satisfactory? A modest spread, I know, but we do our best…’
My mom and the son made polite sounds of protest, which quickly died away into silence. The manager hovered over the table, her figure casting an obstreperous shadow.
Her eye fell upon my grandmother. ‘Still eating?’ She patted my grandmother’s shoulder in a brisk display of professional affection. My grandmother paused, and lowered her chopsticks politely. The manager’s hand lingered on her shoulder.
My grandmother turned to my mom. ‘Who is she?’ she whispered. ‘Do I know her?’
Abruptly, the manager removed her hand from my grandmother’s shoulder. The tiny lady snorted, and muttered something indistinct. The manager said hurriedly, ‘If you’ll excuse me, there are a few things I need to attend to –’ My mom and the son nodded their thanks, and with a swish of grey suit the manager moved on to the next table.
‘Beast,’ the tiny lady muttered. ‘Beast.’
‘Honestly, Mother,’ the son said, teeth clenched. ‘You get ruder by the minute.’
‘I? Rude?’ She looked at us in disbelief. ‘So this is old age. My own son – my very own son – telling me I’m rude!’ She pointed at him accusingly, then turned to us for support.
‘We should be going,’ my mom said hastily. She looked at my grandmother. ‘Are you just about finished, Mother?’
My grandmother stood up slowly, leaning with her hands against the table.
‘Here,’ my mom said. ‘We can take your dessert with you.’ She reached over and picked up a plate of petits fours. ‘Such a pleasure,’ she murmured, bowing to the tiny lady and her son as she rose. Holding my grandmother by the elbow, she led her away from the table. As we headed towards the exit, my grandmother shuffling confusedly, we saw the manager start up towards us. Grimly, my mom quickened our pace.
We walked towards my grandmother’s room. The care home was lavishly appointed throughout. Gilt mirrors hung from the walls and reflected nothing; plush carpeting ran underfoot, silencing the heaviest tread; in the sitting areas, mahogany armchairs were arranged in ghostly conversational positions. Everything looked new and unused, and although the place seemed empty, it was full to capacity. People appreciated that the Granda residences little resembled traditional care homes, though it was hard to know whether the luxury of the place was aimed at the comfort of its residents, or towards palliating the consciences of the children who had checked them in. The first week after she moved in, my grandmother called my mom every night to tell her she was staying in a hotel, but didn’t know why.
‘Wait, let me show you,’ my grandmother said. She took me by the wrist and pulled me towards a balcony that backed off one of the sitting rooms. Tired, my mom sat down in an armchair and watched us.
My grandmother slid the glass door open and we stepped out.
‘Beautiful, right?’ She spoke in a tone of triumph.
The care home was tucked amidst the hills, high enough for the remainder of the town to recede into abstract, shadowy shapes. The hills were submerged in the lushness of a barely contained verdure, and a sea saltiness was tangible in the air.
‘Do you see those apartment buildings over there?’ My grandmother pointed towards a dark building not far off, spread low across the green of the hills. No lights seemed to be visible in the place, and its dark wooden walls were dank and rotting. I hadn’t spotted it at first, so much did it ebb away into the dimness of the surrounding area.
I nodded.
‘That used to be new,’ she explained. ‘But then they built newer apartments and everybody moved out of them.’
I waited, but there seemed to be no further point to her story. Sighing, she retreated back inside. I closed the sliding door behind us. My mom was watching us.
‘Oof, I’m tired,’ my grandmother said, suddenly.
‘Let’s go back to your room and have a rest,’ my mom said, standing up. My grandmother nodded and began walking down the corridor. We followed close behind.
‘What’s that building over there?’ I asked my mom in a whisper.
‘What building?’
‘That apartment building close by. It seems to bother her.’
‘Oh yes.’ My mom sighed. ‘She’s obsessed by that building. It’s not an apartment building. It used to be a care home, like this one. I think it’s gone out of business.’
‘Oh.’
‘I don’t know how she found out. From one of the other residents, maybe.’
We arrived at my grandmother’s room. ‘Here we are,’ she said. She sounded exhausted. She slid her shoes off and stepped into a pair of slippers before staggering forward towards her bed. She lay down, curled up on one side. She looked very small. ‘I’m just going to have a little rest,’ she said, eyes closing. ‘Just a little tired,’ she murmured.
I looked around the room. It was large, by Japanese standards. There was a corridor leading from the door-way into the main room; to the right of the corridor was a bathroom with safety-equipped toilet and bath; to the left a small kitchen with a sink and refrigerator. Inside the main room my grandmother’s bed was pushed into one corner, and a low table rested in the centre. Several framed pictures of my grandfather hung on the wall, and a small altar rested on a lacquer cabinet.
My mom knelt down by the table.
‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ I asked. She nodded wearily.
When I returned from the kitchen, she was resting her chin in one hand and staring off into space. ‘You OK?’ I asked as I set the cup before her.
‘I’m OK,’ she said. ‘Thanks.’ She took a sip of tea.
I looked towards the bed. My grandmother was sleeping soundly, her breathing regular and even.
‘Do you think she’s getting worse?’ I ventured to ask.
My mom paused before replying. ‘Hard to tell. She seemed fine at lunch, I thought. But then she’s good in social situations. She pulls herself together. I mean, you might even think, if you met her for the first time, that she just had a case of mild senility.’
‘Right.’
‘But still, she’s deteriorating, bit by bit. She’s started to not recognize people and, depending on how tired she is, she’ll forget things that happened an hour ago, half an hour ago – ten minutes even. When she wakes up, for example, she won’t remember the Family Day lunch, or even that she’s eaten.’
She set the teacup down and sighed. ‘But really, I think it’s all pretty standard. Right on schedule, you might say.’ She gave a wry grimace, then fell silent.
On the bed, my grandmother was snoring, her breathing regular. Then she stirred very slightly, opening her eyes. She sat up slowly, dangling her legs over the end of the bed. She looked at us. Her eyes grew wide.
‘You came to visit me!’ Her voice was happy. ‘When did you get here?’ She struggled to rise from the bed, her stockinged feet flopping and fumbling for her slippers. ‘I hope you weren’t waiting long. What time is it? Are you hungry? We could go and get some lunch, what do you think?’
My mom turned towards her.
Of all plausible scenarios, this might perhaps be best – a repeat of past events, a composite drawn from former visits. In its very familiarity it will speak, however deceitfully, of a holding pattern, and we will be able to believe that after all not much has changed in the several months since our last visit over the summer.
If we find ourselves here longing for the inanity of repetition, it is because any departure from past events can only be negative. There is always the chance that this time she will not recognize us; that will have to happen one day, and then she will turn to me and, worse, to my mother, with the face she has spent these eighty years turning to strangers. There are many such possibilities that increasingly have to be countenanced, but also kept at bay with a long, hard arm, that they do not come rushing towards us precipitately and with too much determination. And so we are both, my mom and I, contemplating this perilous balance as we ride the bullet train bound for Hiroshima. We will spend several days there, visiting my grandmother, and then we will return to Osaka on New Year’s Day, remaining there until I fly back to London.
It is a weekend, and the peak of holiday season at that, and so as the train burrows further west – for as it turns out, I am perpetually moving west, from Tokyo to Osaka and now to Hiroshima – its passengers mirror each other in negatives, one part solitary businessmen working overtime hours, one part families without their fathers. Across the aisle an elderly couple, grandmother and grandfather to the young woman and children travelling with them, sit facing towards me in a four-person seat.
The young mother is tired. There is brusqueness in her voice as she says a few brief words to the elderly woman, who nods, then leans over slowly to retrieve her bag, a fallen toy. From that abruptness, which speaks loudest in the young woman’s voice, but then finds its echo in the lines gathering round her mouth and the tension in her eyebrows, my unstretched mind reaches for the lazy conclusion that she is their daughter. But as I look longer, eye sharpening, the lack of synchronicity (of gesture, of physical likeness, of philosophy and of affection) running loud between them indicates instead that the young woman has married into that abruptness.
Neither the blood familiarity of the in-law relationship nor its fracturing terseness is a surprise or rarity in this country, where it is common for three generations of life to grow up and old together. But that structure of ageing is growing strained. In 2003 the elderly population in Japan reached a record high. There were more than 24 million people over 65 in Japan, accounting for 19 per cent of the population. It is currently predicted that by 2050, the aged population will account for over 35 per cent. The key working population – aged 25 to 50 – is dwindling; meanwhile, the population figures for the next generation are at an abysmal low. It is expected that the total Japanese population will peak in the year 2006, before entering a state of permanent decline. It is not clear to anyone exactly who will be doing the working, come the future, and it is not clear who will be caring for Japan’s rapidly growing, rapidly ageing, population.
Japan has become a country for old people – a country of the retired, the prematurely senile, a country of aching joints. That country is evident even in a quick perusal of the train carriage. When I turn to look down the narrowed aisle running through the carriages, I see a collection of elderly men and women swaying to the motion of the train, their eyes bespectacled and their backs bent double. Outside, set above the blurring country landscape, a tower building darts towards the skyline: a work in progress, a newly built care home opening some time in the new year. Inside the carriage a large placard uses supersized font to advertise the national transport system’s Silver Discount passes for senior citizens. This is, it seems, no country for young people.
Japan is ageing too fast. That is what all the reports, all the statistics, unanimously declare. That is what the constant worry over social security and medical care declares. They are not philosophical, the facts and figures; they do not believe in doubt or ambiguity, but dwell in absolutes. Japan is ageing faster than any other country in the world. All the speed that is stored within the Japanese system, all the hurrying and all the great efficiency, has had its most stringent effect on the population itself.
This is a country for the aged – and yet there is no place for the elderly in the society’s chosen self-image. They have slowly been discounted. And though they know the toll of a century’s worth of wars and depressions, though they hold a collective experience indistinguishable from the idea of the nation’s legacy – despite all this, as disease and senility creep into the memory receptors of their brains, the ability to remember is crumbling to pieces. The retrieval mechanism breaks down, the filing system collapses, and they cannot retrieve the truth of their past lives.
When my grandmother was diagnosed with Stage II Alzheimer’s (the precision of the diagnosis so unambiguous, and so irreversible), memory finally lost its fixity to me. Until then, I had thought of memory as something that subsisted in the banks of permanence; I had thought, even, that permanence was itself the purpose of memory. But as I witnessed the black holes that daily gnawed away at my grandmother’s ability to remember, memory became mortal. Beyond its mere vagaries, its routine unreliability and its habits of lying, I suddenly recognized memory as something that would, with time, pass away.
And increasingly, the question that presents itself is this: what does she remember? My grandmother’s memory is a mystery to me. There seems to be no rhyme or reason for what she remembers, and what she will forget; there is no consistency that can be traced or clung to. Even among the many brutalities of this disease, the failure of memory and recollection seems the cruellest. I do not know if she knows that she is forgetting, I do not know if she knows the truth of what is happening to her in that forgetting, and I cannot fathom how she makes sense of a world that is, increasingly, painted out with black gaps. Nor can I imagine the fate of these memories, lately grown extinct, the shape they take and the place to which they vanish.
And as I now consider and count those memories not yet claimed from her, memories of war, of country, of past and present – the memories of fleeing Korea with her parents, an ethnic Japanese born in the wrong country and under the wrong national conscience; the memories of her brother the kamikaze pilot, whose final mission chimed in time with the calamitous news of Japan’s surrender (his plane was grounded at the last possible moment, and in that halting he found himself, having resolved upon a heroic death, the victim of a historical salvation fallen upon him from on high) – as I number those things that mark her generation from my mother’s, and then from my own, the very personal nature of her disease subtly shifts, until it finds itself roving alongside, keeping loose company with, the parallel passage of history.
And it is in this way that I find myself now stumbling over, now circling round, the question of how a country remembers, wondering what the collective memory of a country can resemble when every day another memory falls to pieces, unreclaimed and unobserved; what its mottled shades and its peculiar textures, what its capacity for longing, its thirst for retribution or forgiveness. And as I sit in silence on this westbound train, I wonder also what claims I can have to the reading of that memory, when so many of my own memories of Japan are themselves forgotten (lost memories of the many days and weeks and months spent here as a child; memories of a childish fluency in the Japanese tongue that faded as quickly as that extinguished facility; misplaced knowledge of my grandmother and my grandfather now dead), bartered for the continuity of my American childhood, for that longing to fit in that is so strong among children, and then so senseless in retrospect.
The loss of those memories strikes me harder now, during this present visit, perhaps because I am forced to recognize that what passes between my grandmother and me has, in a sense, become past history, beyond editing or recuperation. (And here I recall the number of times my grandmother, on the telephone or at the end of a too brief visit, gently entreated me to improve upon my Japanese, knowing then what I am only beginning to realize now, that I was not seeing her as she wished me to see her and, conversely, that she could not be seeing me the way I would wish her to see me, and that time’s allocation was running short.) Nor can I, banked between my grandmother’s present condition and my father’s past cancer, ignore the fact that Japan is the country where my own parents will grow old. And so if those memories are important, then that is because it is through them that I will one day understand in what language and in what tones, in what tenor of voice, this place spoke to my parents, what claim it lay upon them that it so strongly drew them back to what they would, finally and irretrievably, call home.
The young woman with the children has disappeared to the dining car in search of food. The elderly couple attempt to engage the children. The boy is preoccupied with a portable gameplayer, and is impervious to their attempts to charm. When they ply him with bubble gum, with cookies and sweets, he whines, moving his head in an irritated motion before returning his attention to his game.
The younger girl is more willing. She accepts the bubble gum, the chocolates, with an eager, sticky palm. The grandfather roots about inside a rucksack, then pulls out a colourful plastic toy. Eyes brightening, the young girl reaches out to seize it. She wraps her fingers round the neck of the toy; the grandparents smile happily, and something in their smile reminds me of my dad, perhaps because the quality of the smile that we give to our kin is universal. Slowly, the haziness of the invocation grows more specific, until it locates itself inside the specificity of a singular recollection. A recent memory, only two weeks old, couched within the context of this present journey; but like all memories, it contains within it pockets of earlier times.
A group of scientists were huddled together in what appeared to be an enormous sandpit. Villagers in rough kimonos and sandals gathered around the edge and peered anxiously at the men. One of the scientists kneeled and cautiously plunged an instrument into the loosened soil in the pit. The apparatus emitted a short wail of warning; the arrow on the instrument’s dial spun round violently.
The scientist stood up abruptly. ‘This soil is contaminated!’ he declared. He turned to the villagers. ‘Get back!’ he barked. ‘Get back! This soil is contaminated!’ They stared at him blankly and huddled closer together.
The head of the research group, an elderly man with greying hair and moustache and a weary air of pre-eminence, stared at the ground moodily. An entourage of younger scientists stood by and watched him respectfully. He moved several paces. He stopped, hands in pockets. He looked around him at the sandpit. A long moment passed before he declared, ‘This is the footprint of a living creature!’ The scientists around him gasped; in terror, the villagers wheeled away from the edge of the footprint and disappeared into the bushes.
The elderly pre-eminent scientist continued to move within the footprint, then kneeled down to retrieve a fossilized fragment from the soil. ‘Sir, don’t touch that!’ warned the scientist with the instrument. ‘That’s contaminated! This soil is contaminated!’ he repeated with conviction. The elderly scientist nodded, then leaned towards his young and attractive daughter, a member of the research team. ‘This is a fossil from millions of years ago. How could it have ended up here?’ They looked at each other. The mutual thought ran through their heads: what kind of creature left radioactive footprints and million-year-old fossils casually strewn in its wake?
A bell rang out across the island. The villagers looked up sharply, then began running towards elevated land. They appeared, armed with rifles and sticks, clutching at children and moving hastily along winding paths. The scientists watched them for a moment, then abandoned the sunken footprint and followed suit.
A distinct boom was heard. The villagers halted mid-stride.
Another boom.
The earth trembled. An animal scream erupted, somewhere in the distance.
The scientists came to a staggering stop beside the villagers. Their mouths gaped, and their faces were frozen in horror.
Slowly, the head of Godzilla appeared over a grassy hill. He peered cross-eyed at the villagers. They ran screaming down the slope.
‘God, I love this movie!’ my dad exclaimed, clapping his hands. ‘Don’t you just love it?’
If ever there was a mascot for Japan, if ever there was a character that occupied the collective imagination of a culture and a country, then it was Godzilla. Little children had been cheering Godzilla on since his debut in the 1954 film classic, which went on to spur over a dozen sequels, millions of Godzilla T-shirts, stuffed animals, action toys, plastic watches, bedding, patterned rice bowls, chopsticks, toothbrushes and, in 1998, a swish Hollywood makeover. In the twentieth century America had Mickey Mouse, a talking rodent with big ears and a squeaky voice; Japan had a radioactive, 400-foot, fire-breathing, ambiguously amphibious monster with little or no acting skills. But it didn’t matter. Japanese children adored Godzilla (or gojira, according to the more Japanese pronunciation) in the same way chubby-cheeked, all-American children loved Mickey Mouse.
On our newly purchased wide-screen television – an early Christmas gift to ourselves – two star-crossed lovers held each other in amorous panic. The elderly scientist was standing to one side, holding his hat in both hands and staring into space. The villagers bounced in and out of the frame, running and screaming energetically. From behind the grassy knoll Godzilla approached a bit closer, so that his truncated arms, as well as his head, were visible. He howled in abstract anguish, revealing multiple rows of sharp-looking teeth. Then, he turned and disappeared in a storm of renewed booming.
‘Don’t you love this movie?’ my dad demanded. He was getting repetitive in his enthusiasm. He leaned over to pick up his tea; in the agitation of his delight, he spilled some over the cup’s edge. It trickled down between his fingers. ‘Shoot!’ he said, reaching for a napkin. Wiping the cup, he leaned over and jogged my knee with one hand. ‘Aren’t you excited?’
My dad was a first-generation Godzilla fan. When the original film was released, he clocked in at an impressionable age five; it was in all respects a fateful encounter. Godzilla stalked his way through the mind’s-eye of my dad’s childhood, leaving a lifelong imprint from which his imagination never quite recovered. He continued, even as an adult, to harbour considerable interest in the giant monster. He faithfully supported the Godzilla industry by purchasing Godzilla models, mementoes, souvenir books and videotapes; he loyally watched the scurrilous sequels. But his favourite Godzilla film remained the original movie – The One That Started It All, as he liked to call it. And so when the new de luxe television/VHS player/DVD player arrived, it was natural that Godzilla, analogue special effects and all, should be called upon for the road test.
The scientists peered over the edge of a cliff. The camera panned to reveal a pattern of enormous footprints. They lined the beach in a loose S-shape, dragging back into the sea. My dad gazed dozily at the television screen, eyes enraptured. The camera cut to reveal a crowded boardroom. Journalists were pressed round its edges, scrawling notes and snapping photographs; a gaggle of panicked civilians attempted to force its way in, before being pushed out by security guards. Calm amidst this deft montage of chaos, the elderly scientist rose and approached the podium at the front of the room.
‘Ah,’ my dad said, nodding his head sagely. He leaned forward expectantly.
The old man looked out at the crowd, over which a hushed silence had fallen. Speaking in mild tones, he explained the team’s findings before expounding upon his own conjectures regarding the origins of Godzilla. Using a nifty projector screen and terms like ‘Jurassic Age’ and ‘Intermediary Species’, he described Godzilla as a 400-foot Tyrannosaurus Rex with swimming capabilities (physiologically speaking, this seemed improbable, considering Godzilla’s landlubber’s thighs and decidedly non-amphibious physique, but nobody seemed to offer protest). He paused.
An image of Godzilla appeared on the projector screen. He was peeking out from behind a hill, and wore an expression of improbable coyness. His eyes had uncrossed themselves for the photograph, and on the whole, he was surprisingly photogenic. The assembled crowd murmured appreciatively.
‘The question is,’ the elderly scientist said solemnly, ‘how does this animal reappear after so many centuries, and so close to the coast of Japan?’ An animated hum ran through the room, and several frantic journalists waved their hands in the air.
My dad tilted his head to one side as he considered the picture of Godzilla. From out of the projector screen, a frozen Godzilla peered back, chin drawn down demurely. His truncated arms were modestly crossed over the edge of the slope, in the style favoured by shopping mall photography studios (a blue-sponged backdrop, a small, squirming child with pigtails, a teddy bear prop – Fabulous Fotos, Instant Images). My dad scratched his head, puzzled.
He looked at me plaintively. ‘He never looks like that in the movie. How did they get that picture?’
‘I don’t know – a good press photographer?’
‘Humph.’ He looked at me reproachfully, then returned his attention to the television.
‘It is my belief,’ the scientist continued, ‘that Godzilla was resurrected due to the repeated experiments of H-bombs.’ The journalists scrawled furiously in their notebooks. A civilian bystander shrieked in dismay, and then collapsed. The scientist stared straight ahead, eyes bleak and mouth set.
In the swish Hollywood remake, the resurrected monster attacked New York rather than Tokyo – a shameless, if rather ironic, piece of revision. The original Godzilla was steeped in its own more relevant historicity; it was a film about the Second World War and the dropping of the nuclear bomb, about Hiroshima and Nagasaki as much as it was about monsters and inconveniently resurrected dinosaurs. Godzilla himself was always secondary to the havoc he caused, and the central character in the film was not, perhaps, the 400-foot monster, but rather the burnt and hollowed city of Tokyo.
The Japanese were never exactly vociferous about the fact that they were the only nation on earth qualified to attest to the real-life devastation of nuclear warfare. The film therefore contained only the barest sprinkling of a universally relevant cautionary wisdom (with the scientists strenuously repeating that they were ‘afraid not just for Japan, but for the whole world’); for the most part these examples of moral advocacy were firmly tamped down, appearing only occasionally in what seemed to be uncalculated and irrepressible spurts. But it was a certain kind of cultural environment that produced a leviathan inexplicably wakened by H-bomb testing. It was one of the century’s strangest ironies that, the world over, Godzilla was more instantly recognizable than the memorial cenotaph at Hiroshima. But perhaps this was always the point. In Godzilla the filmmakers had created a legend that would endure the most arid of cultural imaginations.
‘What a great movie,’ my dad murmured.
‘I propose,’ the elderly scientist said, ‘that we send a group to do further research, but the main—’
‘Ha!’ my dad exclaimed. ‘That is so Japanese! They’re always forming research groups!’
‘But he’s saying—’
‘National disaster, and they’re organizing research groups!’
‘— something else…’
‘Japan will never progress so long as it continues to organize research groups!’
‘Dad, wait.’ Long pause. ‘I think you’ve got it wrong. He just said they’re going to use underwater missiles to get him.’
‘Oh boy.’ My dad took a deep breath, then exhaled noisily. ‘Now he gets angry.’
‘What?’
‘Shh. Watch.’
Godzilla didn’t have a particularly wide emotional range; in fact, the only emotion he did seem to possess was rage. Godzilla stomping across the city, knocking down buildings; Godzilla chewing on a lamppost; Godzilla knocking over a bridge; Godzilla tilting his head back and opening his jaws in a rage-filled scream. Godzilla spent much of the movie angry. It was impossible to know quite what he was so angry about (apart, of course, from the numerous underwater missiles and military hardware that bombarded him throughout the course of the movie). His anger was more abstracted. It was all emotion. But we anticipated his rage. We couldn’t wait for him to get angry, because it was his anger that set off the action of the film.
Scene: the streets of Tokyo, hours after the deployment of the underwater missiles. Victory was assumed. Crowds ran cheering, brandishing flags. A couple embraced enthusiastically. Children streamed through the street, waving their arms excitedly. Men toasted each other, laughing.
‘God, it’s just like V-Day, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah,’ my dad said absently.
‘It’s like the V-Day Japan never had.’
‘Shh.’
A cruiser boat, lined with lanterns, floated in Tokyo Harbour. The fair lights of Tokyo twinkled in the distance, but the painted backdrop of murky sunset was ominously still. On the main deck of the cruiser, young couples danced and swirled to celebratory music. A young girl, wearing her escort’s suit jacket, leaned against the railings of the boat. Her boyfriend moved close to lean a cheek against her hair. An older woman in a low-cut dress laughed drunkenly. Two men crowded up against her and she tossed her head back, revealing the long length of her throat. A young woman shuffled by, dancing with her mother.
Mixed in among the gay music came a distant Boom.
‘Here we go.’
The crowd continued to laugh and dance. Boom. The musicians faltered, and the scene fell silent. The crowd stopped its dancing and turned dread-filled faces towards the open sea. Godzilla emerged from the water, mouth open and roaring.
‘He’s covered in slime!’
‘Radioactive slime –’
‘Or is that just water? I can’t tell with this black and white picture.’
‘See, I told you he’d be pissed off.’
Pushing through the water of Tokyo Harbour, Godzilla emerged to his full height. He wore the expression of a sleeper prematurely roused from post-prandial slumber and grumpy with indigestion. Movements jerky and leaden, an outraged scowl fixed upon his face, he boomed his way towards Tokyo. He moved with grim inelegance, like an overweight matron emerging from a public wading pool; he held his weight with supreme awkwardness, waving his little arms ineffectually for balance.
‘Why does he move like that?’ I asked. ‘It’s like he got confused and thinks he’s in a George Romero zombie movie.’
‘He’s supposed to move like that,’ my dad said in hurt tones.
‘Why is he “supposed” to move like that?’
‘Because.’
‘Because what?’
My dad sighed loudly. He paused for a moment, then waved the remote control at the TV with an air of resignation. The screen froze; Godzilla paused mid-roar, water droplet hanging from nostril. My dad turned to face me and adjusted his glasses professorially.
‘Now, there are many things we love about the original Godzilla. The antique special effects. The clunky dialogue. But what we—’
‘Who’s we?’
‘— appreciate most of all is this: possibly the greatest uncredited performance in movie history. People forget about the man who plays Godzilla; they forget the man in the Godzilla costume, stomping around a miniature set of Tokyo and knocking everything down. And yet, you see, he plays the role very carefully, accommodates the necessary binaries of the film. When you watch his performance, you see Godzilla, but you also see the man in the Godzilla suit. Now, that human aspect is central to the emotional integrity of the film. The man in the Godzilla suit allows the human aspect of the monster to come through, while simultaneously maintaining the fictional apparatus of the film. It’s an example fully meriting the use of what is generally an overextended term: the bravura performance.’ He paused. ‘Right. Now observe, and try to appreciate.’
Picking up the remote control, he turned back to face the screen. Godzilla jolted into action, snarling. The water droplet flew off into oblivion.
I had a sudden image of my father as a child, tramping through the house in shorts and T-shirt. He emitted a roar and pounced on his mother at the kitchen stove. She let out a faint scream, a pan of peas tumbled to the floor. Catching her breath, she ordered him to clear up the peas and retire to his bedroom until dinnertime. Sulking, he kneeled on the floor and pretended he was Godzilla, picking off individual, pea-shaped civilians.
Godzilla appeared against a backdrop of telephone wires. As he roared, people ran screaming down the streets. A train shot by. He placed a scaly foot in the path of the train; the conductor winced in consternation; with a horrible screech, it crumpled like an accordion. Arms flailing, Godzilla bent over. When he straightened up, he had a train carriage clenched between his teeth. He chewed on it discontentedly for several seconds before spitting it out in disgust. He knocked over a few more bridges and batted at a few more telephone wires before disappearing into the harbour. The scientists watched thoughtfully.
The city was hastily evacuated. In a last-ditch effort to protect Tokyo, the military erected a 300,000-volt barrier around the city. Nightfall arrived. Brief but haunting shots of empty, evacuated streets. We were told that Tokyo was on ‘watch and wait’ status. Searchlights fanned across the water of Tokyo Harbour as Godzilla emerged again, splashing at the water with his arms. He lumbered awkwardly towards the shore. We got another good look at his costume, at the Godzilla suit.
‘See, look at that,’ my dad said. ‘You can practically see the fabric they used to make the costume.’ Thickly padded and shapeless, Godzilla was an abstraction of plastic and foam. He stared cross-eyed into the camera.
‘You think that’s intentional?’
‘Of course it’s intentional.’
Godzilla stopped to consider the 300,000-volt barrier, tilting his head in a distinctly human gesture of consideration. Guns and tanks shot at him; he roared irritatedly and was goaded into striking the barrier. Sparks flew off in various directions. Godzilla tangled with the wires, still roaring. Moments later, he had cleared the barrier and was newly equipped with fire-breathing properties. He stomped through the cityscape, exhaling fire (the fire was actually a thin, evanescent steam, due to understandable constraints within the special effects department) and setting the landscape alight with flames. Buildings were ablaze; bridges collapsed. A fire engine emitted a tinny whine as it wheeled ineffectually down a deserted side street.
The camera settled on a landscape of burning buildings, debris and rubble. The image was disturbingly realistic. In the centre stood Godzilla, in profile and in triumph. In a kind of appreciative slow-motion tribute, the camera showed Godzilla contemplating the city before turning his head and moving on. ‘Godzilla has turned the heart of Tokyo into a sea of fire,’ a journalist declared. ‘Beneath the flames, thousands lie dead or dying.’ Godzilla returned to the harbour, then disappeared into the ocean. Tokyo lay smouldering, a fire-ravaged ruin.
Looking closer at the screen, it became obvious that Tokyo looked, in fact, much as it looked following the American firebomb raids of the Second World War – one of the war’s many mutual, many wanton, acts of killing that was not much remarked upon, nor much remembered. The mythic dimensions of Godzilla boiled down to the fact that he represented, with his foam and plastic costume and his steam-for-fire breath, the conflux of confused emotions following Japan’s destruction and defeat in the war. Towering over that devastated landscape, he was a creature of contradiction and muddled allegory, confusedly trespassing upon matters as grave as those of nationalism, nuclear warfare, human brutality, guilt and shame.
In this way, what began as an overly simplistic allegory (in which Godzilla clearly represented the devastation of Japan in the final days of the Second World War) grew a little confused as the film progressed. The identifications of the story became muddled, the narrative reasoning crumbled. Central to the trajectory of the story’s emotional logic was the sympathy the audience was meant to feel for Godzilla, what my dad called ‘the human aspect’ to the monster. As the sympathetic elderly scientist declared, ‘We shouldn’t be killing him. We should be studying him.’ Godzilla was unmistakably the story’s (eponymous) hero, so much so that it was not too much to declare that Godzilla was not American or Allied after all, but intrinsically Japanese; that from his seeming indestructibility to his final, devastating end (which amounted to something of a cheap shot on the part of the government, entailing the desperate use of a scientific technology that had results disturbingly akin to those of the atomic bomb), Godzilla represented Japan’s experience during the war; and that in this character, much beleaguered and misunderstood and finally brought down, Japan saw some resemblance, however faint or distorted, to itself.
And it was maybe his quality of rage that made Godzilla so much an emblem of post-war Japan. The important thing about him was that the sympathy and identification we attached to him came about not despite, but rather because of, his anger. In the unlikely character of a radioactive monster, post-war Japanese society found an outlet for the anger that was not permissible elsewhere, the rage that could not be expressed in any more formal a conduit of culture than that of a monster movie. And thus a key contradiction was at the core of the relationship between Godzilla and the cultural imagination that bred him: Godzilla was at once the source of the unimaginable destruction that fell upon Japan during the war, and also the mouthpiece for the anger the Japanese felt during and after this destruction, an anger mostly half-silenced in its expression.
It was only a monster movie – and moreover one that, as much as it courted allegory, had not bothered to work out the totality of its inner logic. But that confusion, that narrative wreckage, was itself the symptom of a traumatized culture. And ultimately it was maybe in that fractured uncertainty, even more than in its topical inclinations, that the film became genuinely representative of Japan’s post-war moral environment. Ambiguity was at the heart of post-war Japan. And as much as he maybe expressed the devastation of the bomb and Japan’s latent outrage, Godzilla, in the double guise of perpetrator and victim, also represented the impossible guilt that scarred the Japanese psyche in the wake of the war – the guilt that was supreme cause and declaration of Japan’s lasting wound.
Following their catastrophic defeat (two nuclear bombs, a Russian invasion, the Emperor’s broadcast renunciation of the long-cherished myth of monarchical divinity, all crowded into a handful of days) and in the midst of an atmosphere thick with shame, many Japanese declared that their country was itself responsible for the dropping of the bomb, as a final consequence of its brutal aggression in the war. The accusation was first whispered, and then spoken and then ratified, and as the Japanese people grew obsessed with seeking out the measure of their own responsibility in the alien cataclysm that overcame their country, guilt overtook shame to become the chief indicator of the country’s low morale.
In the figure of Godzilla, Japan’s recent history was articulated as travesty and tragedy but above all as a somehow self-inflicted catastrophe, the final outcome in a long course of self-destruction. It was perhaps in this last layering of significance that Godzilla attained his total, symbolic meaning. After all, he did not turn to foreign soil, but headed instead for native land. And if Godzilla was expressionless and lumbering, then that was because no amount of expression was going to capture the conflict of an intractable, shameful guilt that could not be reasoned with or hidden away. In the end, my dad was right – the lumbering, the awkwardness, all of that had to be seen as nothing less than intentional.
When he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994, Kenzaburo Oe gave a speech entitled ‘Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself’. The title was his adaptation of Yasunari Kawabata’s own 1968 Nobel acceptance speech, ‘Japan, the Beautiful, and Myself’, and it has an awkwardness entirely symptomatic of Oe’s own probing relationship to language. As a writer, both in his themes and in his prose, Oe has perhaps always sacrificed the Beautiful in favour of the Ambiguous. And it is maybe the nature of this barter that has so much made him the foremost chronicler of the Japanese postwar experience. Across the varied body of his work, Kenzaburo Oe has written the consciousness of contemporary Japan, in all of its awkwardness and ambiguity.
The ambiguity chequered through Oe’s prose, the jarring discontinuities and uncertainties of style, are resolutely laced and tied back to the historical consciousness of the nation, which is perhaps the transfiguring mechanism at work in his fiction. That sacrifice of the Beautiful for the Ambiguous is not simply a matter of stylistics, but is instead a forfeit deeply knit into the reality of contemporary Japan. In his award speech Oe declared, ‘as someone living in present-day Japan…I cannot join Kawabata in saying “Japan, the Beautiful, and Myself”…it is only in terms of “Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself” that I can talk about myself.’ Oe specified the ambiguity that characterizes contemporary Japan as a tugging, historical polarization:
Japan is split between two opposite poles of ambiguity. This ambiguity, which is so powerful and penetrating that it divides both the state and its people, and affects me as a writer like a deep-felt scar, is evident in various ways. The modernization of Japan was oriented toward learning from and imitating the West, yet the country is situated in Asia and has firmly maintained its traditional culture…even in the West, to which its culture was supposedly quite open, it has long remained inscrutable or only partially understood.
In identifying that ambiguity as a polarization ‘powerful and penetrating’, as a ‘deep-felt scar’ and a force dividing ‘both the state and its people’, Oe identifies the chief trauma of Japan in the twentieth century, one that marks all the living generations: the onslaught of an unrelenting modernity that was imposed from without and unresolved within. Oe traces the effect of that trauma from its original imposition in the ‘opening up’ of the country to the West, through to Japan’s brutal aggression in the war and onward to the dropping of the two atomic bombs. It is the context and the framing for the atomic aftermath.
That trauma is also the chief cause behind the failure of Japan’s collective memory, and the dark spots of amnesia that crowd through it. It is in relation to that essentially traumatized, densely fractured memory that Oe best understands what it means to be Japanese; he describes himself as ‘a citizen of a nation that in the recent past was stampeded into “insanity in enthusiasm for destruction” both on its own soil and on that of neighboring nations’; he describes the status of being Japanese as ‘sharing bitter memories of the past’. Those memories are unsorted, essentially unreadable. They are beyond paper history or stone monument. The bomb – the gross manifestation of a foreign culture – and the war that preceded it perhaps represent the apex of the trauma Oe speaks of. But they also extended the lifespan of that trauma by reducing the country’s memories into barely legible fragments; it is the legacy of those broken memories that today continues to dictate the providence of the nation, producing the shape of apologies still unsaid, and recompenses not yet fully made.
Oe has often written in praise of those who ‘acknowledge clearly that Japan and the Japanese were aggressors in the Pacific War that brought on the atomic bombings’. If narrative – the ability to piece together and make sense of illegible fragments, the ability to tell stories of oneself, to oneself – promises a recovery from trauma, then Oe’s chosen narrative of healing is, inevitably and unchangeably, that of guilt. Guilt is the story he follows, confession the healing he envisages. It is, after all, towards the task of facing up to and even elongating this feeling of guilt that much of Oe’s writing is directed. The body of his literature, and in particular his fictional works (those great novels of abandonment and neglect, doubt and uncertainty, A Quiet Life or A Personal Matter), is deeply marked by the furrows of guilt, and it is in that marking that its historical context is shown. The lasting enigma of Hiroshima was the guilt it brought showering down upon all involved, the guilt from which even its victims could not be exempt.
After the outrage, the rancour and the bitterness and the sheer impossibility of the events that ended the war, it was the ambiguity and the guilt that remained. Guilt was the lasting residue of the infamous black rain that fell across Japan in the final days of the Second World War, and the story of Japan’s guilt was the story told to and by a country that was broken beyond repair, and had little hope of healing. But the narrative of guilt that replicated itself across Japan, in hushed conversations and low-hung heads, in letters and in essays, in monuments and in the changing of a moral guard, was perhaps itself a result of the bipolar split Oe speaks of – itself a consequence of Japan’s torn and uncertain moral alliances, its tugging polarization between East and West. And if that guilt was a symptom of Japan’s chronic ambiguity, the enduring question that would have to be considered was whether symptom can ever also function as cure.
Sure enough, as the event of the bombings receded into the past, the disjunction between the proposed recovery and its actual reality grew more pronounced, and the matter of healing became more complicated. At first and in the interim, when healing seemed a thing of hopefulness and peace a matter of willingness, guilt seemed the only thing of certainty. In 1952, at the heart of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park (the naming was significant – those two words at the centre, ‘peace’ and ‘memorial’, couched in so close together and speaking of a passing of peace that became permanent on 6 August 1945), a stone coffin containing a list of the 100,000 then known victims of the A-bomb was placed under the sheltering arc of a memorial cenotaph. On the coffin, the following words were inscribed:
Let all the souls here rest in peace;
For we shall not repeat the evil.
The inscription was a memorial of mourning, but more than that it was a penance and a definite proclamation of guilt, for only a country wholly persuaded in the matter of its own culpability would couch the count of its dead in the swathing of a self-professed guilt. Perhaps that apparent conviction was brokered by the hope that in proclaiming their guilt and their loud resolution never to ‘repeat the evil’, they could somehow prevent catastrophe from blackening their skies again; perhaps it was not the fact or truth of guilt, but rather the gesture of confession and repentance that was the more important. For all these many reasons and in all these many ways, there seemed to be a safety and healing in the repeated declaration of a guilt literally set in stone. And it was in this way that guilt overcame outrage, as sorrow’s only midwife.
Eventually, though, guilt became a burst dam, a faulty solution and situation, and once sorrow was fully birthed and outrage returned, that guilt had to be reconsidered. It was in the notorious ‘Inscription Dispute’ that the Japanese would formally begin to question the validity of that guilt. Key questions emerged: who was the ‘we’ implied in the inscription? Who was it that needed to claim responsibility for ‘the evil’ that was never to be repeated? The questions were nightmarish in the certainty they demanded, the ambiguity they would not allow. The problems of guilt, which had for so long lain concealed beneath Japan’s ambiguity, beneath the country’s confused and mottled identity, finally emerged in the fullness of their genuine complexity.
Two opposing camps formed: the Inscription Correction Society, and the Inscription Defending Society. The Inscription Correction Society held that the cenotaph inscription, with the guilt it declared and the deference towards the West it implied, was ‘blasphemous’ to the memory of those listed on the register of the dead; the Inscription Defending Society insisted that the inscription simply protested against the revival of militaristic nationalism, and the renewed onslaught of war. It was the polarization between innocence and guilt, chaos and certainty, and the issue at the heart of that dispute was the nature of the bomb’s totality itself. It was a question of whether the bomb, with its capacity for complete eradication, absolved the Japanese of the history of their former war crimes, or showered the country in a guilt so complete it could not be avoided or undone. The dispute was never wholly resolved, and instead represented a permanent blind spot in the memory of the nation, a growing chasm that was like a discreet revolution turned upon Oe’s ‘two opposite poles of ambiguity’.
Ten years after the dropping of the bomb, America was in turn seeking out its own narrative of guilt and expiation, and then suddenly these matters were no longer solely Japan’s to debate. There is always this alternate history to be evoked: the possibility that in that first painful admission of guilt, a real loss of American innocence might have occurred, and the country experienced something like a tardy coming of age. But as it was, guilt’s darkness was quickly cleared (waiting, perhaps, for other events that were still to come, trials that were still in the making), and the fundamental buoyancy of American innocence reasserted. America’s quest for guilt was, then, particularly American, and it reached its epitome when mid-century America stumbled and then seized upon a most unlikely hero. It was through this dubious idol that the American conscience would learn the recompenses of guilt, and also those of expiation.
In the course of those turbulent mid-century years, Texan pilot Claude Eatherly grew famous for a clear morning sky – the sky over Japan on 6 August 1945. There are never very many clouds over Japan in August, but the clear sky over Hiroshima on that day was a clear sky full of fateful, monumental importance. At sunrise on that day, Eatherly’s plane Straight Flush reached the edges of open air over Hiroshima. It was closely followed by the Enola Gay, the plane carrying the atom bomb. The Straight Flush made a simulated bomb run over Hiroshima, taking note of visibility, before radioing back to headquarters the following message: ‘Cloud cover less than 3/10ths at all altitudes. Advice: Bomb Primary.’ Approximately fifty minutes later, the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.
It was maybe the deadliest weather report in history. But what immortalized Claude Eatherly as the Hiroshima Pilot was not the fatal accuracy of his report or its terrifyingly reticent advice, but rather the way Eatherly himself became at once a symbol for mass guilt, a cathartic cipher of jumbled signals and signs, a fraud, a hero, an icon and a petty criminal. In a decade of tumultuous announcements and events – the suicide of Hitler, the birth of the United Nations, the rise of McCarthyism – Eatherly’s much contested declaration that he had been drawn to a life of petty crime because he was seeking ‘punishment’ for his involvement in Hiroshima seemed as incredible, and as significant, as the rest.
After being dismissed by the Air Force and seeing his marriage fail, Eatherly took to a life of swash-buckling petty crime: a binge of forgery and fraud in New Orleans, theatrical hold-ups in Texas that were almost comical in their lack of palpable intent, brief bouts in prison. In all this Eatherly seemed just another battle-torn war vet, unable to adjust to civilian life and civilian expectation. He was checked in and out of mental institutions, and diagnosed with, variously, battle fatigue, schizophrenia, and finally, more than ten years after Hiroshima, a classic guilt complex.
It was in this last diagnosis that the symbolic character of Claude Eatherly finally became legible to the world. The real mystery of Claude Eatherly – the illegibility of the pilot nicknamed ‘Poker Face’, the question of his meaningless crimes, his mental instability, his recklessness and the catastrophic failure of his dreams – was dispelled once and for all when the lexicon of guilt was laid over the disparate tangles of his life. Over radio telegrams and newspapers that ran several times round the globe, the world grew to understand that Eatherly’s spiral into mental instability and a capricious life of crime was in fact a longing to draw justice from a system that refused to penalize him for what he perceived to be his great, capital crime: his involvement in the bombing of Hiroshima.
The legends grew apace with the myth – that Claude Eatherly had attempted suicide upon hearing President Truman’s order to continue development of the hydrogen bomb, that he refused to touch his pension from the Air Force, declaring that it was ‘blood money’, that he sent money every month to the victims of Hiroshima, with hand-written notes reading ‘Forgive me’. That Claude Eatherly was a political prisoner, the American Dreyfus, confined to a lunatic asylum by a malevolent government conspiracy. The real Claude Eatherly disappeared into the ultimate cause célèbre that even Bertrand Russell couldn’t resist endorsing. The truths and the facts of Claude Eatherly became irrelevant as he ceased his ordinary human existence as a man built up of history and fact, and began his almost divine existence as a creation of public need.
Claude Eatherly was never much more than a chimera, summoned forth to address the national need for a symbol of guilt and the collective longing for expiation. He was the marker of a movement, tracking as he did the way guilt finally spread its way West, and the historical moment when the world as a whole was at last prepared to confront the matter of its guilt. But he also recorded the poverty of insight that was brought to that confrontation, and reflected the way its complexities were imagined and then reduced to the simpler terms of catharsis. It was the obliterating extremity of Eatherly’s feeling that was to endure as his most meaningful characteristic. He may have fraudulently represented the truth behind his life of petty crime. But in the end, the only important truth was that the public at large caught hold of Eatherly because they too were seeking the forgetfulness of total atonement.
In the heyday of his celebrity, his advocates insisted that Eatherly was a ‘Hiroshima victim too’. In retrospect, that identification outrages all sense of proportion and propriety. The case of Claude Eatherly, with its many revelations and stunning reversals, became a spectacular example of a misguided hysteria of emotion. It became an example of the convenience that can be cloaked in guilt, the disappointment and selfishness that can be concealed in penance; it reminded us that one half of catharsis is in the forgetting. In Claude Eatherly, the code of catharsis and the mantra of guilt were finally jammed, and then fell away into illegibility.
It was thus, in the passageways of guilt, that we, both in America and Japan, forgot how to remember Hiroshima, and lost sight of the atomic aftermath that continues, even today.
We disembark from the train and enter into the last days of what will be remembered as the year of the tsunami, the year of the long, sleepless war, the year of women murdered in their last term and children kidnapped while sleeping, the year of the most important election of our lifetime and the worst election of our lifetime. Rarely has a year been so ready to end, and when it does finally reach its end, we find that we too are exhausted, for these brief days with my grandmother have been more taxing than we can allow ourselves to admit. On the last day of that exhausted year a heavy snow falls across Western Japan. It starts in the afternoon; from our hotel window I watch first a light sprinkling that could be mistaken for rain, then repeated flurries of heavy flakes that accumulate on the pavement, on the roads and on the low sloping eaves of the houses.
In the morning of the New Year, the snow is there still, and everything is quiet. On a triangular patch of snow-coated land, apex bordered by a low and reluctant river, the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park is deserted, nothing more than unbroken yards of an approximate white, falling into the peaks and troughs of quiet monuments. At the southern end of the park the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and Conference Centre is closed; the shops and restaurants near by are shut up. The trains run irregularly if at all, the streetcars rattle by empty, and there is, it seems, no reason to be here.
In the cold, the statues and cenotaphs wear their abandonment lightly. Shapes and figures shrouded in a slow-melting whiteness, they have the modesty of ancient ruins. From the northern tip of the park and across the river, the real, the literal, remnants of Hiroshima’s ruins are visible: the tall skeleton of a dome, snow slipping down its ribs, piles of crumbled brick and stone half concealed. A tacked-up sign: ‘No Entry’.
I look at it from a distance, from across this river that bore the bloated bodies of the dead; never have ruins seemed still so close to the moment of their destruction. Broken abutments, fallen staircases and blown-out walls, the immaculately preserved fragments of an inarticulate past, frozen into a permanence that is quietly, trenchantly, deceitful. Past that quietness emerges the truth: that this seeming historicity is maybe the most deceptive thing about the memorials scattered through the park; the most deceptive thing about the museum, with the uncontained count of its atomic rubble (a wristwatch shattered and stopped at 8:15, a bit of twisted wire and a popped out lens, a scorched shirt scarred by black rain); about the cenotaph, with its hidden list of growing names. However much buried in stone and monument and inscription, the day’s past power finds a rupture into the present. The past cannot contain it; it breaks out, it escapes, until it is all around the park, almost sixty years later and on a cold New Year’s Day.
There is nothing safe about this place. There is nothing peaceful about this place that, sixty years ago, sat at the epicentre of history’s most destructive man-made explosion.
Breathing in coldness, I continue to look out at the ruined building with its burnt-out dome. The Hiro-shima Industrial Promotion Hall, now known as the A-bomb Dome, is in a sense the chief material witness to the destructiveness of the atomic bomb. An incontrovertible record of the absolute physical levelling that was meted out upon the city, it is a building that bears witness, in its torn and wrecked limbs, in the measure of its half-life. Built in 1915, it was, in its original incarnation, a symbol of Western modernism. Designed by a renowned Czech architect, the hall was, with its proud dome of coppery-green, its solid walls and its multiple staircases, an emblem of modern industry. Then the bomb dropped, leaving behind a pale wreckage banked against empty spaces, and the Industrial Promotion Hall began its second life as the A-bomb Dome.
The A-bomb Dome, like all ruins, is on the one hand a statement partially made and half-destroyed, on the other a statement that attains its total meaning only through its fractured, incomplete state, as a symbol of the fallout from Japan’s historical polarization. However emblematic of the Second World War and the dropping of the atomic bomb, the A-bomb Dome also represents, with its historical association of industry and progress, Japan’s experience since the onslaught of a too abrupt modernity that one day slammed into the landscape of the country, carving its space out in hard and bumpy ridges. It is by the lines of this historical continuity that these ruins represent the stalled building projects of the Japanese Nineties, the physical detritus of the Bubble era, the muted apathy of a youth generation that bears its scars on the inside. They will continue to bear this significance until the time when that ambiguity and that polarization are somehow resolved, or laid to uneasy rest.
I turn away from the Dome, and walk southwards towards the centre of the park. In the acute silence, in the grey light that renders everything washed and worn, the park has the look of a place already fading out from the front rows of history and the relevance of memory. Along the riverbank a woman spins across the paved road, bicycle wheels whirring gently. With a sputtering of wings, a pair of fat black crows sail across the park and settle on the embankment, heads bobbing.
A few minutes later I pass an elderly man. His head is down, but there is an energetic purposefulness to his gait, a muted air of physical health that suddenly converts the park into an ordinary place. In the rhythm of his stride the Memorial Park becomes simply one aspect, one portion, of the Hiroshima that did not flare into being in the early morning hours of 6 August 1945, but that existed for centuries preceding that infamous date, and that has continued its existence in the face of impossible horror for the many decades that followed. A city cannot always be remembering, the man’s posture seems to say as he moves by, edging carefully past pockets of slick snow; a city has a right, not to forget or to move on, but at least to continue.
The man and I take opposing routes, parting ways without having kept company, and I arrive at the Memorial Cenotaph by way of one of the park’s central paths. The coffin, and its inscription, is tucked sheltering beneath the low arc of the monument; protected, hidden away, its dimensions easily measured. And it occurs to me that what is crucial here is not what is revealed, but what is concealed. A formal register of the dead, a listing of names so extensive that it could not be witnessed, but instead had to be closed away, the ritual of listing itself a symptom as old and battered as the trauma it bore testament to. If it is impossible to find the story of Hiroshima, then that is because it is in so many ways a place beyond story or narrative.
And that is the paradox of the Memorial Park, and of all those who visit or seek it. It cannot serve its function, without desecrating its purpose. We come here to remember, and find that we can remember nothing; we find that even the conjectures and hypotheses of imagining are impossible. Memory, guilt, healing and recovery – the clichés of the imagination do not function here; they lack ballast in a place that is drained of all those elements that give narrative its density and function. In the end, it is not the clichés that persist, but the unexpected blankness of a place so thickly written, so thronged with association. It is the shock of a blankness that is, after so many years, still so unmitigated.
There is, it seems, nothing to be said. Blankness and incomprehension are as simple as a monument covered in snow, a raw patch of dirt and dead grass, a continued coldness in the air. I have no real idea what I am doing here.
A little later, riding the train back to Osaka, sitting with my head against the velour seat, mind wandering and eyes looking out across a landscape slowly colouring from white to green, I stumble upon two memories of the time I spent in Japan as a child, forgotten fragments now unexpectedly returned. They are matched, in the timing of their arrival, against the vast monument of the past so recently stood before me, but clothed in a contrasting intimacy and warmth. And though there is thus no real proximity of thought or validity of association, that disparate pairing is somehow made, gaining in substance, growing concrete, and then, through those mysterious and unknown means, finally setting fast.
The shutter flashes open. I am with my mother at my grandparents’ house, which is also confusingly my uncle’s house and the house where my cousins live, so that there is always a great frenzy of people present – my three cousins, my uncle who looks like my mother, except that all the features of his face are slightly more slack, his jowls loosening into soft folds of skin and his eyes disappearing into the wrinkles of his smile. His wife, always smiling, stares serenely as her children run shrieking around her, jumping over tables and brandishing expensive toys carelessly.
My mother is seated with her sister (she has a lively face that is the opposite of my uncle’s, all the features resolving into an overall impression of tidiness, from the bright round eyes and the small pursed mouth to the economical movements of her head, so that together my mother and her siblings represent three separate gradients of the same face) at a low table in the middle of the room. I remember this room exactly. The altar for the ancestors in one corner of the room, with its candles and its crumbling incense ashes and its tiny carved stands for offerings of sweets and fruits. The small brass vase for flowers, the photographs of my great-grandparents and their greatgrandparents, propped up and peering at us out of strangely familiar faces. The impassive row of cabinets, a sheath of gleaming black lacquer casting shadows that no amount of electric light can dispel. But I cannot remember anything else about the house, not the stairs that must have taken us to that room, which I know distinctly to be on the second floor, not the rooms upstairs, nor the street outside – nothing.
My mother reaches a hand forward for her cup of tea, moving her arm carefully around my head, which is resting along her hip, my fingers grasping childish handfuls of skirt. My auntie tilts her head and murmurs something to me, her voice rising up into a gentle interrogation point. My mother strokes my hair and says something in reply. My eyes are closed in drowsiness, and I am almost entirely asleep when my cousins troop in and look at me with eyes that are not hostile, nor uninterested, but simply unfriendly. They look at me and I look at them through heavy lids and for a long moment we regard each other. Then they retreat to the banks of leather sofas, shouting meaninglessly as they bounce from cushion to cushion, claw at an armrest, jump up and down, until at last my aunt turns to them and reprimands them sharply.
The door swings open and in comes my grandfather. He is tall, and on the frame of his broad shoulders and narrow waist he wears a deftly tailored suit. He is very handsome (family pictures examined later in life corroborate this first memory, which is like a first impression despite the fact that he has a time-worn familiarity as he comes into the room). But it is not simply the strong and regular features of his face, the bright eyes and the thick hair and the determined chin; it is not just the easy movements of his body as he strides forward. Rather there is a vitality to him that expresses itself as a good-natured charisma, an overriding optimism that no amount of material success can match or artificially produce.
It is an isolated memory, and so I am not entirely sure how it is that I know he is my grandfather, but I do. And I am awed and enchanted by his magic. He stands there, fiddling with one hand through the change in his pockets and doing nothing at all beyond looking, and yet it seems impossible to recognize that he is a blood relation, that we are related not simply by the hazards of situation but by the stronger, more durable links of kin.
Both my mother and aunt bridle in his presence, yet smile despite themselves, and my cousins subdue their raucousness. But he is preoccupied with something, busy on his way elsewhere. As his eyes travel over the disparate array of his brood, they pass fleetingly over me. He blinks his eyes once, as if in surprise. Then it is only one moment more before he is gone again, taking with him that tremendous sense of organized vitality.
The shutter opens again. A train carriage slices through an unidentified landscape. The clock is set too fast and the tempo of everything, from the birds that fly from post to post to the whirring of the bicycles as they tumble down the roads, moves a touch too quickly. Laundry is hung out to dry over balcony railings, limp with assumed despair. Faces flash up: an old lady laughing with the postman, a young girl jiggling an ankle nervously as a boy leans closer. Then, gradually, the frame slows until it resolves into the picture of some anonymous bit of city, unremarked beyond its placid tenacity.
I cannot locate the place. Where is it – in Tokyo? Where my mother’s parents live? Or in Osaka, maybe, where my father is from? Either way, the landscape is utterly anonymous, but also decidedly Japanese in a way that has nothing to do with the foreign characters that dot the signs, nothing to do with the raven hair and the pale skin that uniformly unites the collected figures in the street. In that instant of dislocation, my mind springs forwards twenty years and then back-wards two weeks, to the train at the start of my journey, the train running from Narita Airport to Tokyo. And as I remember that past act of gazing out the window and wondering at the way everything – not just the signs and the architecture, but the trees, the quality of the light, the formation of the clouds – all pointed to the nature of place in the same way, the two moments cross over into one, like delicate transparencies laid one upon the other, two separate images overlapping to create a single image, the purposeful image.
The carriage is drenched in the kind of light that is so harsh as to be pure white, and I remember squinting in its brilliance. It splashes across the walls of the carriage, down onto the floor. All the colours in the train seem to fade out into the whiteness of that brighter summer’s day. For a moment the passengers’ clothing dulls into a discoloured palette, and the forest-green of the train seats fades into a candy-mint colour. Beside me, by some strange trick of light, my mother’s hair appears almost white, and she closes her eyes to the light.
Nothing else. A final flash of light, and then the shutter closes. And that is all. As the train rattles away from Hiroshima and on towards Osaka, a mechanical voice announces the next destination. I settle further into my seat. A young woman in a grey ruffled apron pushes a cart through the aisles, hawking wares of ice cream and canned coffee. As she exits the carriage a flurry of air sweeps through the doors, touched with the smell of snow outside, the train’s slow and unexpected creaking; the dense trampling of feet on pavement, of passengers climbing on board, faces muffled in jackets and scarves.