ON THE AFTERNOON HE LANDED in New York for the first time in his life, Mr. Watanabe recalls that he made his way to his hotel in the Financial District with a company representative, who eyed him warily, as one scrutinizes a superior of the same age.
During the journey from the airport—which at the time, unimaginably, everyone still called Idlewild rather than Kennedy—he at last made out the silhouette of that city which for him had been only a collection of myths, photographs, and preconceptions. This collection of prepossessed images made him feel that the city somehow already belonged to his past, even before he’d seen it. Contrary to what he’d imagined, the real New York made him feel as though he were dreaming; it seemed more fictional than what he’d seen in any movie.
As he took in the East River through the car window, mesmerized, his host murmured, in an unmistakably southern Japanese accent: Yes, it’s awful, but you get used to it.
His arrival at the hotel, the name of which he has forgotten, was far from glorious. Due to some mix-up with the reservation, they weren’t expecting him until the next day. And as the hotel was fully booked—terribly sorry, sincerest apologies, and so on—they wouldn’t be able to offer him a room that night. Flushed with embarrassment, the representative from Me fell over himself to apologize to the branch’s new marketing director. Perhaps, Watanabe thinks, the man was also secretly pleased.
After finding another hotel nearby and taking leave of his vexatious host with the excuse that he felt tired (which was actually true), he decided to go for a short walk and have dinner at the first place that caught his eye. Then, in a momentary fit of madness, as he wandered through the SoHo neighborhood, Watanabe stopped at all the hotels he came across, and reserved a room in each of them. At every reception desk, in his as-yet-faltering English, he gave alternative versions of his arrival, adopting a different identity and profession. Each time, he finished by assuring the receptionist that he would return straightaway with his luggage to make the payment and complete the other formalities.
In doing so—as he remembers with a smile—he felt he was a number of different travelers in the same city, numerous guests on the same night, always a new arrival.
Once settled in New York, Watanabe went through a phase of conflicted fascination. Despite his serious misgivings, he couldn’t help feeling a frisson of admiration when faced with the emblems of this nation that had devastated his own. He walked around gazing up at the sky. He felt that he expanded in the wide avenues. He took up jogging on Sundays in Central Park. He grew dizzy at the top of the Empire State Building. He dined at every jazz club recommended to him. And he crossed the Brooklyn Bridge in the evenings, feeling that it was injecting the night into Manhattan island.
Yet, as if it were a final inner bastion, he refused to visit the Statue of Liberty.
Watanabe had hoped that working in the country that had bombed his people would have a liberating effect. He saw himself as a child, petrified of the monsters in his room until suddenly, he looks below the bed and wriggles underneath. New York was a city as young and expectant as he was, full of strangers who made him feel at home. In the circles he started to move in, he was always meeting people who claimed they were horrified by the memory of the bombs, and who considered it their duty to take their own country to task. This was so typical—he reflects now—quaint, even, of American liberals.
These individuals, often introduced to him by Lorrie, treated him with an obsequiousness that at first he found comforting, and then, as time went on, humiliating. In their eyes he was, forcibly, a victim. A perpetual casualty of war, whose status was only emphasized by reassuring pats on the back from those who did not share the same burden. And who, thanks to their solidarity with victims like himself, were subtly exonerated.
Mr. Watanabe realized that most of his acquaintances, including those with the best intentions, needed to identify good and evil as mutually exclusive. Rather than a debate, they wanted a painkiller. They seemed content once they had clearly determined the heroes and villains, victims and executioners, regardless of who was what to whom (the Nazis, the fascists, the Japanese, the communists, the traitors, the American bombers).
As he began to adjust to his new environment, his anger became tinged with confusion. He rejected the version of the story his American friends had learned about the genbaku, yet he couldn’t help but understand; the Japanese hadn’t received an impartial education, either. Lorrie’s conservative brother, who would eventually earn his respect, had taught him more about the country’s sensibilities than those liberal journalists whom she so proudly introduced to him.
The idea that seemed to predominate in the media, schools, and families of the country that had welcomed him so warmly was a kind of self-justification, elevated to the point of military conviction: the attacks had been terrible but necessary. In addition to ending the worst of wars, the bombs had dissolved forever the possibility of such a conflict ever being repeated. This was what they told themselves, and this was what the majority of people there sincerely believed. Which is why living among his former enemies, Watanabe reflects, taught him that memory is more than just the effort to not forget. One should also remember the way in which one remembers.
Possibly the biggest shock he had in New York was bumping into Yukio Yamamoto, his former classmate and rival from his school in Nagasaki. Over lunch on the Lower East Side with executives and investors from the Japanese community, Mr. Watanabe was forced to take in too many things at once: that Yukio had survived; that he also worked in the audiovisual technology business; that he had grown into an athletic thirtysomething guy with slicked-back hair and stylish glasses; that he had recently moved to New York City and was working for one of Me’s competitors. Sometimes, he thinks, our lives seem contrived by a satirical scriptwriter.
After the two men exchanged bows and insincere words of affection, Watanabe felt the old enmity resurface, disturbingly intact. And so he discovered that hatred—possibly more than love—is born with the will to survive. It would be interesting, he reflects now, completely distracted from the record he is playing, to examine to what extent that influences the cycles of war. Yukio Yamamoto appeared to be more or less informed about his life, and behaved in a suspiciously casual manner. Whereas he was unable to disguise his own facial tics or the tremor in his voice.
Obliged for professional reasons to attend the same events and receptions, both men began to develop an unhealthy watchfulness, yet they expressed their mutual aversion in very different ways. As he had at school, Yukio Yamamoto was apt to mock him and underestimate his virtues. Mr. Watanabe preferred to humiliate him by being overly polite. He trusted that while in the short term Yamamoto’s attacks might harm his image in the eyes of some of their colleagues, such a crude strategy would end up working against his rival. Watanabe admits that this wasn’t at all the attitude of a pacifist. He earnestly, desperately hoped that his good manners would slowly destroy his enemy.
As he was to discover during professional social gatherings, Yukio Yamamoto seemed to have built part of his personal success on his status as a hibakusha, using it to his advantage with supreme skill, appealing to the guilty conscience of the Yankees as a way of doing business. Watanabe cannot now recall a single occasion (including a couple of cocktail parties he went to with Lorrie) when Yukio didn’t make some oblique reference to his experiences during the war. Only to then declare, once he had the attention and admiration of those present, that he preferred not to talk about it out of respect for the peace between both countries.
If he himself hadn’t resorted to such subterfuges, Watanabe wonders, abruptly switching off the music, was it out of so-called good taste? Or because he was afraid of being stigmatized? Out of consideration for those victims who hadn’t been fortunate enough to rebuild their lives? Or possibly because, by remaining silent, he prevented the damaged memories from creeping into his new reality?
During that period, he began to develop an increasingly complicated relationship with the figure of his father. Tsutomu had been the victim of a massacre, but he’d also been employed by a company that produced the armaments for the war that had killed him. Many years later, because of something his aunt Ineko had let slip, he discovered that his father had had friends among the officers of the imperial army. His father’s collusion with those who made life-or-death decisions had been greater than Mr. Watanabe had first believed. He swore to himself that this family secret would die with him.
The mixture of veneration and reproach he feels toward his father reminds him, notwithstanding the obvious differences, of the legacy of the writer Masuji Ibuse. Before producing one of the most important books ever written about the victims of Hiroshima, the prefecture in which he grew up, Ibuse had worked in the propaganda department at the Ministry of War. In other words, he’d composed pamphlets to encourage people to continue supporting what would lead to their own annihilation. Japan was heading for surrender, but without the intense work of that department, who knows whether it might not have done so earlier. Possibly earlier enough to avoid the bombings. For this reason, he interprets Ibuse’s great novel as the reverse and the atonement for those pamphlets. The alternative writing of the war.
Watanabe has always found it difficult to visit Kokura, the town of his birth, spared both atomic bombs only by chance. Toward the end of the war, the U.S. military faced a strategic dilemma. Conventional explosives had successfully razed the enemy’s largest cities. This rendered them useless as targets for the culmination of the Manhattan Project, which had to be put into practice to justify the gargantuan amount of money and research poured into it.
Where, then, could they test this new weapon, which reports claimed would revolutionize the history of war? They carried out a detailed study of the few cities left standing. On August 6, several reconnaissance aircraft checked visibility conditions around Hiroshima. According to a record of alternative plans, had the sky been cloudy that morning, the bomb would have been dropped on Watanabe’s hometown instead.
Three days later, the arsenal at Kokura was the priority target. However, the second bomber flew into fog, thick cloud cover, and plumes of smoke from neighboring Yawata. After circling the city for as long as its fuel levels allowed, the bomber made a detour and ended up destroying the nearest industrial town, Nagasaki, where the Mitsubishi arms factory was located, killing the remainder of his family.
It was the weather that had dictated the final decision. The mood of the sky. It seems inconceivable, muses Watanabe, that such an elaborately planned destruction should leave this essential decision—what to destroy—in the hands of fate. In that sense, or defying any sense, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not only targets of annihilation, but also of a lethal form of arbitrariness.
Perhaps he, himself, resembles Kokura too closely. He, too, has been both spared and not spared. Caught unawares on the map. Nobody remembers Kokura, because Nagasaki had the misfortune to supplant it. His memory has the shape of a passed-over city.
Mr. Watanabe feels that inside him is a simmering pot of contradictory emotions; he is randomly exposed to its churning contents. How this affects his inability to settle in one place, or to take a firm stand on the issues about which he feels most intensely, remains a mystery to him. Ironically, this lack of definition defines his character.
Men who lack definition are excluded from the epic. Their only battle is with tension: the impossibility of trusting what they know. Maybe the doubters, Watanabe tells himself, are less useful to the state. Absolute certainty usually leads to destruction of one kind or another. And what if his peripatetic behavior were a ruse, so that in the event of disaster at least one of his lives might survive?